The Heathen Housewife

I’m going to tell you all about my dear friend Kippy’s visit, but first let me apologize to my internet friends. I meant to be back much sooner with this update and more, but life has once again gotten in the way. I don’t know how many times I can describe the way parenting takes over my day right now and still feel like the world can’t possibly understand how happy and sometimes miserable I am at the same time. They wake up at 7 in the morning, and this week Sophie has not been going to sleep till I do around 11 in the evening. And there really aren’t that many naps involved. Somehow, Joe managed to get Sophie down a little while ago, and hopefully she will stay asleep long enough for me to get this typed. I love my girls. I love spending my days with them. I just can’t help wishing that they would freakin’ sleep a little more often than I do. Wash, rinse, repeat. Sorry for the broken record.

Oh, and I’m coming back to add that about 30 seconds after I typed that, she woke up crying, I went to go try and soothe her, and she didn’t like that one bit. No, bucked in my arms and kept right on crying. Kept right on crying when I put her back in her crib and tried patting her back and/or holding her hand. The crying ramped right up to a full-on ear-shattering sobbing scream and stayed there for about the next fifteen minutes while I kept trying to soothe then continued while I ran down the stairs to hide from it. See, I just can’t face another evening of sitting in the living room watching her play when I know she should be sleeping and I should be writing blog entries. No, cry it out is not right, but insane mommies are even less right. Joe, on the other hand, thought better and ran up to take over where I left off. He did whatever kind of voodoo soothing he does upstairs for a few minutes, then took her down to the basement to do some other kind of voodoo for a few more minutes, and now I think he has her out in the living room. God help me if he asks me to take back over, because if I do, she’s going back in the crib. I think I finally may have come unglued.

Now, on to the fabulous visit from the dear old friend. Let’s start with a couple of pictures. This is Kippy and me back in maybe 1991. I’m pretty sure this was taken the year I was a Senior in high school, and she was a Junior. Kippy had moved away with her parents a couple years earlier, but we still saw each other at holidays and for brief visits on occasion. This picture is a great example of how hard I tried to slouch low enough to hide the fact that I towered over most of the other girls my age.

Here is Kippy and me on Saturday, right before I drove her to another friends house and headed over to the yarn store to teach a class. We are still very much the same people, just grown up and lifeworn by about fifteen years. And I finally learned to stand up fairly straight most of the time.

This visit was mainly about catching up. We chatted a lot about memories from our days growing up together. We compared memories – mostly confirming some pretty scary, sad stuff for my part, but also some happy and fun things too. We ate sushi and apologized for things said and done long ago that had already been forgiven, if not entirely forgotten. We shared experiences from the last ten years of our lives, good and bad. We’ve both been through big losses and recovered to find better versions of ourselves and truer paths. We took the kids to the Mall of America and shopped most of a day. I bought Kippy her first chai latte, which I hope is not going to become too much of an addiction. We traded notes on makeup and clothes and even a recipe or two. Perhaps best of all, I taught Kippy how to knit. Or at least gave her a good start. I think I told her about a million times to go check out the Yarn Barn when she gets home.

It was a good visit, and I’m glad she came. I did use up most of my brownie points with Joe, I’m afraid. He had to get the girls to bed Thursday night while I went out for an expensive meal, then I handed Sophie off to him on Friday night so that Kippy and I could talk some more, then Saturday he got another dose of parenting while I went to teach my class. Poor guy barely got a weekend since he spent all day Sunday doing fall chores outside. At least we managed to go out for dinner with some friends as a family on Saturday night, and everyone enjoyed some good barbecue at Cap’s. Here’s Sophie getting a kiss from our little friend Max, who is Julie’s age.

For all my ranting, the girls really are doing well. Sophie is doing new tricks left and right, which I sure hope mostly accounts for the lack of sleep. Today we ate lunch at Panera and I let her gum up a piece of my baguette.

I think she liked it. Julie wanted to walk around the mall afterwards (the small, barely-more-than-a-strip mall one near our house) and I let her climb on the kiddie rides. I refuse to put money in them, but she still likes sitting there. We love Richard Scarry books, and that worm’s name is Lowly. Julie enjoyed riding with him in his apple car.

Not much knitting is going on here. I’ve been meaning to do an update on that bavarian twist sweater for Julie, with a title something like Despair. I’d really like to do a couple of questionaires for the swap and knitalong I’m doing at the moment, but they will have to wait till my brain is a bit less fried and the baby is a bit less awake. I’d better go relieve the husband so he can do his ironing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 1:19 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.