DANE: [eyeing my hair, peculiar look on his face]
ME: I know, I know, my hair is weird. I desperately need a haircut.
DANE: No, it’s just…it reminds me of…I can’t…quite…Oh! I know! It’s that woman—you know, the one? From the Harry Potter?
ME: [blink. blink.]
DANE: You know, the one. The one. She escapes from Azkaban—
ME: Bellatrix Lestrange? I look like Bellatrix Lestrange?
DANE: [triumphant] Yes! That’s the one!
ME: Wow. Um, thanks. [maybe looking a little less than thankful.]

[You think he meant this one? Or this one?]

I know many of you are reading news reports about hunger in Haiti today and feel the need to take action. Send relief funds if you are able—please do; if you need direction, Jen has rounded up links to a few relief organizations—but please also head over to Sharon’s blog, Depletion and Abundance, for her take on what else we can and should do.

Guess who was up half the night with a throwing-up kid? If you guessed ME, you WOULD NOT BE WRONG! Fortunately, it was only one throwing-up kid, and really it was only one major episode. I just chose not to ever go back to sleep so I would be ready in case of a repeat performance. Or I have insomnia issues. Maybe that.

Moving on!

There are mountains of laundry to do now, but I do not want to touch them for fear of accidentally assimilating the germs that must be hiding within.

It’s funny, when a sick kid crawls into my arms in the middle of the night, I do not freak out. I am immediately fully awake and calm and know what to do. In any crisis, really, that’s the deal. I suspect I use up all my anxiety on things like germy laundry during regular daily life, and I don’t have enough left for a panic attack in the face of actual misfortune. It’s a theory, anyway. And if I’m lucky, I won’t get to test that theory any time soon.

I decided we needed a library trip last night, even though it wasn’t library night. And even though it was raining. And even though I had a cold over the weekend, and the library may be the single germiest place we ever visit.

In the end I made a list and sent Dane all by his lonesome while I put the kids to bed. He may have had the better end of that deal, come to think of it. Our library requests were as follows:

Audrey: Charlie Parker Played Be Bop [except, of course, that she doesn’t say her r’s or l’s, so it’s more like Chah-wee Pah-keh pwayed bee-bop, bee-bop, bee-bop.]

Owen: Poem books. Don’t forget the poem books.

Me: Thinking Like Your Editor.

Abigail: I’d like a chapter book about a daring girl. Or daring girls. And their lives could be at risk. They could be investigating a crime. And the criminal could see them—or, wait, it could be criminals—the criminals could see them! And then their lives would be at risk. A chapter book like that. Actually, more than one, please.

Right…

(He checked out Lea Wait’s Stopping to Home, which had chapters but no criminals. It did have daring characters, though, and orphaned children, which are pretty much always on Abigail’s list of acceptable story elements.)

Ugh, I’m having a WEEK. I had to make some adjustments to the baby’s and toddler’s nursing situation (the explanation for which is both boring and convoluted, so I’ll spare you—they’re both still nursing, just on a different regime), and the adjustments brought about some kind of hormonal shift, leaving me—hmm, how best to put this?—not very well, in the hormone-driven mental health sort of way. I’ve had a touch of the melancholia, as they say. (Yes, I’m aware that no one has ever said that in the history of…ever. Bear with me.)

Yesterday I had a little mini-breakdown when I realized I was putting two different colored socks on Sadie. One was ribbon pink, and the other was clearly pale peony. And no, she wasn’t going to complain, but I would know. And surely nothing would ever be right with the world again. I couldn’t find either of the other pink socks, though, so we had to stick with the mismatch. Even though they might fade differently than their mates from being washed separately! Oh, the horror.

And I’ve been a great conversationalist:
DANE: Hey, the lottery’s like a gazillion dollars this week. Maybe I’ll pick up a ticket and we can imagine what we’d do with a gazillion dollars. Or even half a gazillion dollars.
ME: ARE YOU TRYING TO TELL ME YOU’RE NOT HAPPY? [Because WHO WOULDN’T BE with conversations like this?]
DANE: [blink. blink blink…]

At least I can tell that I’m being a wee bit irrational. That’s something, right?

I’m almost through it now—my sense that the world is a place of neverending gloom and despair has begun to lift—but it’s been a fun week.

Hey, quick! If you want to vote in California’s February 5 primary, the last day to register is TOMORROW, Tuesday, January 22. Print out this form and get it in the mail.

Also interesting: if you register as “decline to state” your party affiliation, you can still vote in the Democratic or Independent party primaries in California. (Sorry, the Republicans apparently don’t want to know whether you prefer John or Ron or Fred or Rudy. Or Mitt. Or whoever else is on the ticket.) More about primary voting for those registered “decline to state” here.

Or if you don’t want to vote in the primaries, you can register online after February 5.

(For info on registering in other states, click here.)

I am terrible at email, which you know already if we’ve ever corresponded. I can never figure out when to be done. I either send one email too many, and then fret over whether the other person thinks I came off as stalker-ish, or I walk away without replying and then worry that maybe one more response was really necessary, and the other person is going to think I’m a flake. Or rude. Or a rude flake.

But lately I’ve noticed myself pursuing a third option. I walk away from an email that doesn’t really ask me for anything, and then the not-replying gnaws at me. Gnaws and gnaws and fills me with guilt until I go back and reply to the email, what, three days later? Which is probably the worst of all possible options; now, not only do you think I’m a rude flake, but a rude flake who pops up in your inbox unexpectedly and for no good reason. Awesome.

But it relieves my angst, which is kind of nice.

Maybe I should just email everyone I know right now just to point out that I am a dork. Or I could attach a little disclaimer to my signature line: Email communication with this individual is likely to involve either more or fewer messages than are technically appropriate. Continue mail at your own risk. I don’t know, maybe that would be an improvement. At least you’d be forewarned.

I would just like to point out that we have never, not once since becoming parents, never, mixed dirty laundry in with the clean stuff.

How would such a thing even happen, you ask? Well, say a baby spits up on you. Or maybe pees out the side of their diaper all over your shirt, somehow. Say you peel off the offending item and drop it on the floor, where it accidentally gets kicked under the couch and forgotten until a week later, when one of the kids finds it and you assume it just fell out of the basket of clean laundry you should have folded hours ago you’re folding now. Maybe you even put it away and then try to wear it again a couple of days later. Theoretically.

So that? That has never happened at our house in seven and a half years of parenting. Or anyway, it hadn’t.

Sure, now it’s happened three times in the last week. But come on, I think I deserve a little credit here for all those other times when it didn’t. Right? Possibly?

I think so. I am now accepting all offers of applause (because for seven years, I could tell the difference between clean and dirty laundry!) or encouragement (because now, apparently, I cannot). Oh all right, all right, ridicule would be fine, too. Thank you.

I’m a big believer in letting my kids see me fail. I think it’s important to model making mistakes, especially should you happen to be raising a child (or two) with perfectionist tendencies. Ahem.

So I try new crafts that take several attempts to master. I paint grandiose pictures that will never look like what they’re supposed to. (“It was going to be a portrait of Martha Washington! And now it’s… an elephant! Under a blanket!”) I plant seeds that will never turn into beautifully-trimmed hedges, because my thumbs are not so much green. (And a few runner beans too, because an entirely barren garden would just be depressing.)

Today I took out the Jumping Pixies game (new! for Christmas!) to show that it could still be fun, even if I could never ever even once catapult a little pixie head into the appropriate circle. And I may have demonstrated that. I don’t really know.

But after a good dozen attempts that resulted in exactly zero points scored, Abigail pointed out in her most diplomatic, matter-of-fact voice that I was, as it turned out, the single worst Jumping Pixies player she had ever seen, possibly in the whole world, and that the game might be more fun for the rest of them if I went and did something else.

So clearly my parenting strategy is working.

Now if I could just come up with a method for teaching them not to point out my obvious shortcomings, we’d be set.

In case you find yourself in need of writing inspiration:

THINGS I’D NEVER Tell My Mother. Seeking first-person, nonfiction essays exploring actions, thoughts, or feelings you would never share with your mother. Can be from childhood, adolescence, or adulthood. Humorous to heartbreaking.

(Read the full classified at Poets & Writers.)

I have nothing to submit, really. Really. Though they do accept pseudonyms, of course. But I have nothing to write for this one.

Have I ever mentioned that my mother reads this blog? Ahem.

[Link courtesy of Coffee & Critique Writers Group.]