Local Radio

We have a local radio station, 92.5 the River, based out of the next city over. They've become kind of a big Boston area station. And I've been listening incessantly for the last week to the morning program to win admission to a brunch with The Wallflowers.

Normally, the River is a good station. They were the first station to play Barenaked Ladies in the Boston area on a regular basis, and even had their studio taken over one afternoon by Ed and Steve in what was probably the funniest on-air entertainment I've ever heard. They also have some decent local folk musicians like Peter Mulvey and Ellis Paul in their common rotation when new albums come out. I've submitted a lunchtime "select a set" that I hope they play someday. A couple songs in there are specific to my sister, and it would be great to hear them on the radio because no one plays them.

But, sometimes it is a grown up easy rock listening station. They keep playing a lot of Sheryl Crow, and you know I dislike her. I went to their website to get some details on this Wallflowers thing (by the way, the last opportunity to win admission to the brunch just went past, and I didn't get through, of course. All morning I got through but was like the second or third caller when they wanted the seventh or tenth).

On their website, they have a java script box showing what song is currently playing, and of course, they were playing Sheryl Crow's "Steve McQueen" song because they play it like every frigging hour. The funny thing was... this is how it appears on the website:

You can see that the form box cuts off at a certain point. I highlighted the funny part. Now, whenever I hear that song I'm going to sing "Like Steve McQueer..." in my head. Bwa. ha ha ha. By the way, I in no way shape or form dislike gay people or call them queers, unless they tell me they like being called queer. I actually love the word "queer." It has such a great sound when you say it... and I'm sorry that it is a slander against a lot of people. But I'll stop. I just thought it was funny to see the n at the end of McQueen get cut off like that.

Another thing about this particular radio station that annoys me is they are pushing this horrid remake, and boy howdy do I mean HORRID, remake of Aerosmith's "Dream On," by some chick called Fisher. It makes my skin crawl. She's headlining their CD release party at the House of Blues in Cambridge in mid November, and I'm thinking of leaving the country because she'll be too close to my house and I may spontaneously combust. Go to the website and read the bio information... I laughed. I'm sure she is a nice person. But honestly. I never want to hear another song from them because of this particular horrid remake. She sounds like a wet cat singing this song, not that Stephen Tyler doesn't, be she does even more so. I'm not a huge Aerosmith fan, but honestly -- there are some things you just don't mess with. And Dream On is one of them. This particular remake sounds like something they would do on American Idol. Poorly. I'm forever adverse to this band. No one can convince me otherwise. All their other songs could be , masterpieces, orgasmic epiphanies of musical genius, but I will never hear that. I've been sullied. Meh!

By the way, their website is the single most boring musician website I've ever seen.

How's that for me being opinionated on something. I'm sure I'll get "Why do you hate Fisher so much, they're awesome" emails the way I get "Why do you hate Derek Jeter so much, he rules!" emails. But that's alright. The beauty of the internet is I can say what I want about what I think and bite me if you disagree.

I also hate Chris Isaac, but that's an entry for another day.

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I'm chaperoning a trip for Geoff's class next Wednesday. Huzzah. What am I thinking. Yesterday the pancake breakfast resulted in all the children at my table telling me that they still want me to come work there. These are the same kids who gave me career advice back in January, to either work in a barn or come to the school and be a mommy teacher. I appreciated their love for me, but told them I didn't think it was a good idea if I were ever a teacher, because I'm too much fun and kids don't take me at all seriously. I then put carrot eyebrows on my face.

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I think the verdict is in -- I believe my baby sister is planning to move back to NY. She's been giving it a go in Florida, but it just isn't working out for her. She can't find a good job, which pays well. She can't find a job where she isn't miserable. She feels that she's imposing on her friends who have been putting her up. The homesickness is debilitating for her, and I know how she feels. When Doug and I moved to Atlanta, I felt exactly the same way. I feel horrible for her but totally understand.

She talked to her former boss, and asked if there was any way she could come back to the company where she was working. Her boss told her that it looks good but she has to talk to the head cheese. While it isn't the greatest place in the universe to work, she was good at what she did and had friends there. She isn't making any friends in Florida... she's finding that people say things like "I've lived here 20 years and haven't met anyone to be friends with..." or that people are just plain assholes. It sounds to me like she's living in New Jersey with Palm Trees.

The bummer thing is she's heading back to NY and she should be out on her own forging ahead and doing the grown up thing. But the great thing is if she goes back, we can do more Gayle photoshop stuff. Mwa ha ha ha.

If anyone wants to go down there and drive back to NY with her, email me and let me know. I'm broke, and going off unemployment due to the fact it runs out on my ass in 3 weeks, so I don't have the cash to take off down there, drive back to NY, and then fly back from NY to Manchester, NH. I don't want her driving back solo, but that may just have to happen...

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Oh, and finally -- Dan and Honey did have their baby a few weeks back. I forgot to mention it.

His name is Ben, not sure if he's actually named for our buddy Ben there, but it sounds it to me. He's a cute baby. I've not gone to see them yet, but I will do it next week when I go down for Professor MF's class, barring any unforeseen circumstances. He's saying "ooooh! My dad putts like a girl!" here.

One of Chad and Remi's boys came home from the hospital. Jacob is doing great... Jadon's still not ready to come home. Keep them in your prayers. I still can't believe I know someone with twins. It seems surreal. No one I know has them. Well. Now there's an exception.

Sleeping with the Angels

"Some flowers they never bloom,
and some flowers they just bloom dead."
--Jakob Dylan/the Wallflowers

You will recall a couple of days ago when I posted the email from Steve. To refresh memory, Ryan was born on June 16 and three days later stopped breathing.

He died Wednesday after so much effort. He made it all of ten days, following CPR, hospitalization and surgeries to help him.

The funeral is out in the Pittsburgh area, where Steve & Vicky live. My in-laws called last night to let us know they'd seen the obituary in the paper.

I feel so far away ... we haven't seen them in nine years, but kept in contact through holidays. He is a friend of Doug's, but like with all friends of my spouse I make friends with them easily and feel closer than I really should... I barely know these folks, but feel like I have known them my whole life, like Smitty or CJK. I am not so attached and glomming on them that I would jump in the car and rush out to be with, they've got a close core of college friends that they are tight with... so I know they're inundated, cushioned, hugged, loved.

And there is no way on earth I'd be picking up the phone right now to ask "what the hell happened?" But I would like to know the cause... were they able to figure it out? Was there a heart defect? SIDS? Anything? Anyone?

It isn't easy for me thinking about this. I miscarried a baby once, and that was heart wrenching enough. Imagining what it must be like to have held a healthy looking lovely baby boy, only to have him suddenly die on me. I can't even begin to fathom.

I know a lot of people who are pregnant right now... some due in a month or two, others not until winter or right after the new year. All I can say is, I look at them differently, with a little more fear. I feel like I did five years ago when Sheri and Steve lost their baby to HLHS, and there is this hopeless and empty feeling in the base of my stomach that makes me want to crawl back in bed and just sleep.

Children's hospital in Pittsburgh has set up a memorial fund for him. We contributed to the American Heart Association when Sheri's boy passed, and we'll be making another contribution for another friend here now.

And in all this, I look at my son. He is a pain in the ass, a live wire. A freak. A tornado in a trailer park. He exhausts me. He frustrates me. But I have him here to do just that. I have the best ten year old girl in history. I am the luckiest mom around.

I am more aware of my blessings and the responsibility of them.

Overwhelmed by the sense of them, the fact of them. I feel amazed that Geoff made it through being premature, and all the possibilities involved there for what his life would have been like if he'd been born November 22, 1996 instead of his birthday. I'm just so sad and so lucky all at the same time. I am shamed that when I was pregnant with Jessie it never ever crossed my mind that something like this could/would happen to me. I sailed through, had a baby, nonchalant, with ease. I got mad at her when she cried at night. It never dawned on me that she might stop crying, or sleep through a morning with me lounging in my new mother role saying 'hurrah, she's quiet, I can sleep in.'

We are on a geocache hold for today. Jessie is at a pool party, Geoff is spraying the hose. Doug is working on a list of stuff we need to secure for our trip to Maine. That's about it for today. Can't think of anything else to write

the good news, and the sad news

Good News
The first Jackie night went well. We put her in the kennel at 11pm, and she cried until... oh, midnight. I had forgotten how heartbreaking kennel training a new puppy is. We trained Missy in the kennel, and she cried a lot the first couple nights, but eventually got to the point where "go in your place" was a welcome suggestion.

Jackie woke up every two hours, like a baby. How funny is that? Well, she totally is -- a baby used to one situation who now finds herself in another one entirely. Cuddled in a puppy pile with brothers and sisters in a shared cage, she now finds herself alone.

At 2am we ignored her, she pushed the partition down between the front and back, and went back to sleep. At 4 she woke up and sounded frantic, so I went out to discover she'd pooped in the kennel. I took her outside with Kinger so he'd mark the pee places fresh for her... brought them back in, cleaned the kennel... encouraged her back in quietly. She cried for about a half hour, then fell asleep until about 6:15.

The morning has gone incredibly well. She went right out and peed and pooped outside, played ball, ran around with me, came back in, played with Geoff for a while and passed out snoring on the couch. I put her in her kennel, to show her that's where sleeping should happen, and after an hour Doug got up to find her sitting politely and quietly inside, with her tail banging on the inner walls as she recognized him.

I slept until about 10, thank God. I was exhausted! When she got up at 4, I was pretty much awake until almost 5:30. Sometimes I can't just fall back to sleep when I am woken up. She played and played outside with Doug and Geoff, chasing tennis ball, and playing with the chew toys we had in the house. Kinger has mostly just stayed near, paying attention to her and doing his usual thing... happy as usual and not at all irritated or jealous. Relief.

She took a good long nap from 11 to 12, out cold solid by my feet here at the computer. I put her in her kennel again, and she slept some more. She's asleep now again... the kids are eating so I don't want her interfering.

I think we made a good choice.

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Bad News
We got email from a friend of Doug's from back in the day named Steve. Doug and Steve were in cub scouts together, and he was one of the first people Doug introduced me to when I went out to western PA for the very first time. Steve and his wife Vicky welcomed a new baby into their lives, but there's been a snafu.

Here's the email:

This may be the toughest email I've ever written. Many of you were aware that Vicky was pregnant and due this June. She gave birth to our son Ryan at 9:05pm on June 16.

He was born a perfectly healthy baby and did fine for the first two days in the hospital. We took him home Tuesday night and were delighted to spend our first night as a family together.

On Wednesday morning Ryan stopped breathing and went into cardiac arrest. He was given CPR by me and then the paramedics before being rushed to a local hospital. After working there for two hours he was Life-Flighted to Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh.

After several hours of surgery he was succesfully placed on a heart-lung bypass machine and has been stabilized. He is in very weak condition but has showed some improvement physically. He was without oxygen for a very long time, though.

The prognosis isn't good but it is not hopeless. We have been praying for him constantly and are thankful that he has survived this long - there were many times Wednesday when we thought he would not.

Please keep Ryan in your thoughts and prayers. He is a strong baby but we would still love a miracle!

Any new parent's nightmare I must say.

This was all too fresh for me... having a friend whose son died at 8 days of age in 1997 due to Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome. I remember so much from the day of his funeral, and so much sadness. I never want another friend to go through that at all, ever. No matter what the cause. I forwarded Steve's email to my friend, Sheri, who is now the director of the Massachusetts Heart Coalition, and even with five years distance between her son's death and today, she's still touched by other families dealing with this sort of thing.

Steve asks for prayers -- well. Pray. Please. He's a super guy, flies airplanes for traffic patrol in Pittsburgh. She's a lovely woman. Their wedding is one of the finest memories I have... they deserve a slim chance at a miracle, and as much as I believe that God's plan for them may be different, I'd like to ask him to just make sure that it is that Ryan will be their baby, survive, teach them, grow with them, and not die. Sometimes surviving is worse than death when a child has been through such a trauma at first... brain damage, CP, all sorts of learning disabilities... there is a lot of negative to making it past death's threshold. All the effort though -- all the hope. I want him to make it. I hope that God sees eye to eye with his people.

Alright. That's a downer. Let's finish up.

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I forgot to give the website of the Sterling shelter, for anyone interested in learning more about what they do, or giving them support. They've got an interesting program... they are at Sterlingshelter.org so go check 'em out. Send people you know who are puppy seeking...

Raising Chloe, Raising Arizona, Washing Machines and West Shore Road Memories

Pictured is of course the lovely new addition to my extended circle of friends, apologies to Bonnie and Duncan but she's so stinkin freakin cute that I could not resist lifting the picture from the hospital nursery page and posting it.

Meet our friend Chloe.

Man is she gorgeous or what? I love that hair, and I love how babies just always have their hands up by their mouths or cheeks... I went through most of the pictures on the hospital site and all the babies were there with hands up, ready to raise the roof. Only a couple were so deep in sleep that their hands were nowhere to be seen.

My friend Lori went through the site. She saw Chloe and swore she was the cutest baby on the page, then proceeded to rag on all the other babies! We had a good laugh making fun of names and making fun of kids that were born without the benefit of being cute like our woman up here. I feel sorry for babies when they're butt ugly. I mean, they just came down the narrowest passage of their lives, got battered, bumped and bruised, and they look like who did it and ran, and here we are picking on them. Poor things. hee hee hee. But this is one good looking kid and the respective Bonnie and Duncan clans should be right proud.

Now, I'm gushing praise and schmoopy-doos over here for this kid and one of my co-workers asked me if i wanted to have another.

Let's get one thing straight here, dear reader, unless God Himself wills it, I'm not putting myself through another labor and delivery again. The pregnancy part, okay. Those were fun. I loved feeling the babies move, each had a personality before they came to the light. Geoff always had the hiccups... on a daily basis I could count on at least a round of 20 minutes or so of him jerking like a freak. Towards the end when things got cramped in there for her, Jessica would stretch her legs, and I have a distinct memory of playing with her feet up right below my left bottom rib, and I'd push back at her, and we'd play. We'd play. I played with my kids and knew them well before I ever even laid eyes on them. Those are very special moments.

But I don't want to repeat the thing, the unspeakably painful thing, one must endure to get to the point of laying eyes on them. Shudder. Quake. Ugh. No. So for me, I'll enjoy playing with my kids now that they're on the outside and I will live vicariously through friends like Bonnie who have new ones for me to cuddle. Speaking of which, here's the segue to the next topic...

One of my favorite movies ever is 'Raising Arizona.' I love when Glen is telling H.I. that Dot wants another baby because "Thesuns is gettin' too big to cuddle." That kills me. All like 9 kids are running around wrecking stuff ("Now you take that diaper off your head and you put it back on your sister!") and writing on the walls, breaking things, and these parents are just standing around all stupid and proud of the brood and shit. And there's poor H.I., overwhelmed at what his sudden vision of parenting is. These kids can eat you alive... and Ed is suddenly overwhelmed by Dot "Hi, We got the dip.tet for him yet? We got a pediatrician???" at the responsibilities.

Having two is enough for me. But H.I. stands there with this look on his face that kills me. With his eyes huge and wide, mouth gaping open. Oh My God, what HAVE I just gotten myself into.

All parents should feel that way. Shocked. Stymied. Overwhelmed. Then you shake it off, blink a couple times, shut your gaping mouth so you don't catch any flies and get in there and do the job. Once in a while you'll feel like H.I. again, but standing around gapemawed isn't going to do any good.

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We went out last night and bought a new washing machine so that gets delivered a week from today. I'm relieved. This weekend we're going to Maine, to see Wayne and Marcia. They have a great house, and hopefully Chris and Laurel will be there too. It's been a while since we've seen them. I feel like I need a weekend of kid related fun. Where the kids entertain themselves and have fun, and I lean back and watch. I'm sure there will be some good stories out of that.

And I wanted to make a short list of stuff I remember from the House on West Shore Road. When I was little we lived in a house in NY on West Shore Road, and I think most of my clearest memories are from there. Here are a couple:

• I had an easy bake oven. It worked.
• I had white furniture, and my room was up on the third floor, there were 2 rooms up there, the back room was mine, the front room was Linda's
• I remember a tree broke one of my windows in a storm. I think there were four windows in the room, and the one that broke was on the left side of the room as you stood in the doorway.
• A cat of ours, I think it was Smokey, my mom's FAVORITE cat, had kittens in my bedroom closet and I touched them all and she killed them (not a good memory... someone correct me if that one is fictional).
• Once my cousins came down to visit from Cape Cod and Billy and I got to sleep in the same bed. My parents pushed my bed, which had a princess canopy on it, so the foot of the bed was against the closet door and Billy slept at the foot of the bed. We got yelled at a TON of times for not going to sleep and being silly.
• I used to melt crayons on the light bulb in my bedroom. I think it was a clown lamp, and I loved the smell of the crayola crayons melting on the light. Then I'd let the light bulb cool off and I'd peel the wax off. My mom caught me and I got in trouble.
• You could see the hospital from the balcony on my parents' room, and at Christmas they put this crazy "tree" of lights up there, and I remember standing looking at it for hours.

Okay, that's enough for today. I've got more, but I need to go home to my family. I also have to schlep some clothing to the laundromat because I have NOTHING to wear and I think Geoff has no more underpants... So I'll do a quickie load and then finish everything up on Saturday morning before we trek to Maine.