On Emergent Molars: A Conversation with Meepo

"It's cutting me, mommy. It feels like snakes."

"I'm sorry that it hurts, but I'm glad that you can describe it like that. You're very articulate."

"NO! Don't tickle it!"

When it floods, it... floods.

The dishwasher is leaking.

Story Problem

If the bathroom sink flows at a rate of 1/2 cup per second, and is left running for 1 hr. 20 min., how much water will be on the floor?

Neither Here nor There

We're officially gone from California, but we have yet to set foot on Texas soil. In the mean time we're hanging out in my parent's home in Arizona. (Thanks, Mom and Dad!) The limbo is a little strange in some ways (no library cards for residents of nowhere), but for the most part we're having a blast. Mom and Dad aren't here right now, but my sister is, and we're having fun together.

And, oh my goodness, the HOUSE! I'd sort of forgotten what it's like to live in a HOUSE. With a YARD. Suddenly, my life is not consummed with preventing my children from doing developmentally appropriate and important things that just so happen to be very much destructive in the small space. Now if they're being destructive or just plain in the way, it's a simple matter to direct them toward another equally attractive activity--preferably outside in that lovely back yard.

Speaking of the back yard, it's been a matter of contention in the Palmer family for a very long time. You see, my mom, sister and I really really wanted a nice lawn and pretty garden. My dad wanted to cover the whole thing over with gravel. We prevailed, and preserved our precious lawn. Or, at least, the closest thing possible when you live in Arizona, and are gone for well over half the year. Year after year, the ratios of grass to weeds fluctuated, but at least we had something green, and we always prevented Daddy from covering it in gravel.

Until this past year. I'm not quite sure what happened, but somehow an agreement was struck, and Daddy had his way. The back yard is now covered in gravel.

And it's gorgeous. I should have known that Daddy's plan wasn't for a hideous, unbroken expanse of gravel. Daddy may not have lots of time for lawn maintainance, but he does have a superb eye for proportion and good composition, a strong aesthetic sense, and good taste. They now have an attractively ordered desert landscape, with pampas grass and yucca and mesquite and honeysuckle and mint. Most of these are local plants that volunteered--and since they are in their proper environment, they thrive quite nicely with minimal care. It's a lovely, restful place, alive with birdsong, joyous and vibrant and peaceful.

I can't believe we fought him for so long.

And I think that surely there must be a lesson somewhere in there.

We are alive.

I've always thought of myself as a girl of the desert.

Now I realize that it is not the desert I love, it is the oasis. The clear blue stream overflowing with life, the droplets splashing on the hot, windcarved sand.

From the shade of a cottonwood tree, I love to gaze upon the cactus and the redrocks.

But the true desert... the endless expanse is cruel and wicked. Its desire is to bleach my bones and the bones of my children, like the bones of so many coyotes before, creatures made of much sterner stuff than we.

But we are alive.

The desert has not bleached our bones, and we are safe in this familiar and lovely oasis... I'd forgotten just how beautiful the Verde Valley is. It is good to be home.

To whom it may concern:

I have a strong distaste for moving.

But I do like nice people who take my children to the park.

That is all.

Great opportunity for nursing moms

The International Breast Milk Donation Project is an incredibly good thing on so many different levels.

First off, I'm sure that you know that between AIDS and famine, there are a lot of orphaned babies in Africa. But did you know that those babies are six times more likely to survive if they receive donor breast milk, as opposed to formula? Six times.

So a few years ago, some women started expressing their extra milk, and shipping it to Africa on dry ice. I've actually known about this part of the story for some time, and to be perfectly honest, I wasn't all that interested. I mean, that's really wonderful, but how is it even remotely sustainable?

Well, now it's actually sustainable through a unique partnership with a for-profit corporation called Prolacta Bioscience. Prolacta uses donated breast milk to develop medical products that save the lives of preemies here in the US. Their biggest thing is human milk fortifier--that's what they added to my expressed milk before they put it in Nathan and Isaiah's feeding tubes, to add calories and protein so that they could catch up on all that growing that should have happened in utero. The stuff my twins received was based on cow's milk, but now Prolacta has developed a human milk fortifier that is actually made from human milk. Which is much better for these fragile babies. It's also pretty big business. Even the cow based stuff runs $100 per day per infant.

Of course, the one difficulty with all this is that they are completely dependent upon breast milk, and the law does not allow them to pay their donors. And not many women get too excited about pumping so that somebody else can make a fortune off their milk. On its own, this project is about as sustainable as the idea of shipping breast milk to Africa.

Together, though, these two crazy idealistic projects actually work.

Prolacta provides all the equipment, from hospital-grade electric pumps to dry ice, and pays for overnight shipping to their laboratories. 25% of each woman's milk goes to Africa. Prolacta tests and pasteurizes the milk for free, and pays for all shipping costs.

Then Prolacta uses the rest of the donated milk in the highly profitable business of saving babies in the US. Prolacta then pays the Breast Milk Project $1 for every ounce of breast milk that stays in the States. This money goes toward the establishment of local milk banks, mobilizing local women to meet this huge need for breast milk.

So go talk to your doctor about it, and see if this would be the right thing for you!

I sure am, just as soon as I get to Texas!

Ensnared

The other thing I've been doing lately is playing with the espresso machine I got for my birthday.

I'm highly caffeinated.

Oh, the wonderful things you can do with coffee beans and milk!

Anyway, I had this wonderful post all worked up about how if you just pour the coffee over the frothy steamed milk instead of pouring the milk over the coffee, you get a consistently wonderful gorgeously layered result with minimal effort. But how it's psychologically easier to try to control everything, even when you know you'll get a better result by letting go a little and just allowing the nature of things work to your advantage. And how all this affects childbirth and parenthood, and, well, just about everything.

Oh, it was a great post.

But then I wanted to make sure that I was using all the proper coffee-snob terminology, and I just kept running across stuff like this.

I'm helpless against the temptation.

I'm on a quest for the perfect microfoam, perfectly poured.

I'm drinking way to many lattes for my own good, and all that nutritious vitamin D enriched whole milk my children drink? Steamed, every bit of it. Well, mostly, anyway. At first they were extremely excited about the "special milk." Now they're requesting "special milk" once again, but this time, they mean straight from the fridge.

I think I may be going a little overboard.

And the thing is, it never actually ends up looking or tasting nearly so good as when I just pour the espresso over the milk, and leave it at that.

I just can't stop.

Square picture: No faces, just eyes

I still blog. Really.

It's just that I'm also moving.

And trying to find a place to move to.

And reading the foundational epics of just about every major world religion and sundry works on the philosophy of education, and basking in the fact that suddenly being a good wife doesn't just involve learning how to do all the stuff I'm not particularly good at, but also involves stuff I am particularly good at. Like reading and synthesizing and and discussing, and well, all the stuff we loved doing together, the whole reason we got married in the first place.

And hanging out in downtown LA, because you just can't live in the area for 7 years and then move away without ever having spent at least one day becoming acquainted with the city itself.

Which, by the way, felt surprisingly reassuring and homelike. These years in California, I've keenly felt the lack of sky and rocks, but I never really articulated my need to look up at towering canyon walls. Had I known how downtown could feed this inarticulate need of mine, I would have spent a whole lot more time hanging out down there. Because, amazingly enough, standing in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world is approximately the same experience as standing inside a sparsely populated chasm in the middle of the desert.

Beyond the comforting sense of enclosure, that strangely freeing sense of vertigo that comes from gazing at a very high cliff, either up or down... beyond all that, each spot had specific character and location, a particular place with a particular relationship to all the other particular places. Like the canyon, the city cries out to be known in all its particulars, known in it's colors and textures and sounds, not merely known by the numbers and signs on which we must depend to find our way home in suburbia. I found myself wondering what it must be like to know the city as I know the canyon. There is a strangely deep kinship that comes from knowing a place in common. What must it be like to share that knowledge, not with a few hundred, or even a few thousand, but with hundreds of thousands? And what must it be like to be that pinata vendor, a quite ordinary person so vividly shaping the experience of everyone passing through that corner of the city?

As striking as the sense of massive intimacy was the sense of autonomy, the sense that the city did not exist for us. It simply was what it was, which strangely enough, gave us the freedom to simply be who we are. I wanted to stock up on wholesale fabric, so we wandered through the fashion district quite a bit. We never did find any fabric vendors who appeared to be open for business, but we had a lot of fun wandering through shop after shop full of imported clothing, as the owners hovered over us explaining in broken English how much of each item they had in stock, eager to haggle out a deal. It looked very much like a mildly dingy outdoor mall--except that the whole purpose of each store's inventory was entirely different. Each store did not contain a careful selection of items designed to appeal to a particular demographic, but rather a set of items from a particular place. Their goal was not to sell things that a particular group of people would most likely want to buy, but rather to sell the particular things that they had. The difference was subtle, but striking.

It was a lot of fun, wandering through the wholesale shops, and we thought what fun it would be to be a buyer for a shop, to put together an inventory. It's rather amazing, really. It had never occurred to me just how much of my shopping is actually done for me by complete strangers.

We drove through the flower district with our windows down. The gaudy and the exquisite blended strangely, but the fragrance was glorious.

In need of a snack, we found a parking spot in the food district, and browsed through the mexican markets. I looked around for potatoes--perhaps I could spare myself the grocery stop on the way home. But none of them had potatoes, which surprised us. Potatoes are just such ordinary, basic things... doesn't everybody carry potatoes? But of course these places were not there to provide us with the things we wanted to buy, they existed to distribute the things that the vendors had to sell. And as ubiquitously salable as potatoes may be, they aren't generally imported from Mexico, so that's not what they were selling. So we bought ourselves a case of gorgeous strawberries and moved on.

The taco stand didn't look particularly interesting, or necessarily safe, so we reluctantly went across the street to McDonalds. It was a strange experience to walk through those doors and be suddenly transported back into suburbia, into that carefully crafted experience, where suddenly everything is all about you, and telling you what to want and bringing it to you. Where I ordered a large drink, not because I really wanted anything but french fries and water, but because it was there and they were selling it to me, and where they sold me a large drink, not because they had drinks to sell, but where they sold drinks because they knew I could be easily persuaded to buy one.

We drove by 6th and Hope. The Church of the Open Door is gone, and the Jesus Saves sign, but it is still in the middle of everything, right there between the enormous homeless population huddled beside crumbling buildings, filling run-down parks, and the sophisticated, powerful businessmen striding quickly and confidently down the sparklingly clean sidewalks in the shadow of glisteningly glorious monuments of glass and steel . It's a touch ironic, really. Our own church, Blessed Sacrament, got its start right in the heart of Placentia, right there on the main intersection, in the middle of it all. But as the city grew, that main intersection became an obscure little cul-de-sac, and even the city itself was swallowed up into obscurity within the urban sprawl. The church stands there still, and flourishes, right where it was planted in the first place, but that place where it was planted is very different now, a sheltered place and tucked away.

Meanwhile, the place where Biola began is still at the heart of everything, but Biola has moved to the suburbs. Sometimes I think this is sad, but sometimes I think it makes sense. It really does free up a lot of energy, to be in a place less all-consuming, a place that matters less, perhaps. It's terribly sad, but I start to understand, as I watch our family make the same decisions. We aren't moving to Houston, we're moving to Spring. To the suburbs, where everything is artificially structured around making life easy for us, because right now, we care more about fully participating in a vibrant community of thought, than in a vibrant community of location and commerce. And I think that's the right thing.

But it's still a little sad.

Quack!

"Do you guys want to go live in Texas?"

"Texas!"

"You guys will be little rangers. And Tembo will be a little Texas cowgirl."

"No, Timmo's a duck!"

"A girl duck!"

Fire Code Shmire Code

We found the perfect apartment. The housing market in Texas is so low that renting doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but we need more time to scope things out before making a commitment like that. But in the mean time, we found the perfect place for now. So perfect it just seemed like God was bringing everything together for that, just like He was bringing everything else together.

Three miles from the school where Andy will be teaching. The perfect distance. Just far enough to build a workout into his day.

1000 square feet. That's bigger than my parents house. Not the tiny cabin in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, the normal three-bedroom ranch-style suburban home.

With a playground in the complex.

And unit 811, which will be ready exactly when we need it, opens directly onto the playground.

Family friendly place, and there were lots of online reviews raving about how competent and friendly and nice the management is. In fact, the only negative comments were about how many little kids there were. That and how small the pool is, but to be perfectly honest, with three toddlers underfoot, the only thing that matters to me about the pool is that it be securely gated and far away from our apartment.

She knew we had three toddlers, and that was fine... until I mentioned my husband.

Oh.

Fire codes. You can't have five people in a two bedroom apartment.

Period.

And now renting is suddenly totally out of reach, because only the very poshest of complexes have three bedroom apartments, the only houses for rent are far from the school, and I have no idea what we're going to do.

This is the point where I'd probably fall into despair, except that this is what God's been doing with us all along. Corrie ten Boom said that when God closes a door, he opens a window. Well, God's been opening windows for us, just far enough to light our path to the open door.

And so I'm just hanging on for ride, immensely curious as to what in the world God is up to. That and scouring the internet.

Toward Balance

A little while back, my back started hurting. Bad. I was having a grand old time playing my flute, while Nathan banged away at the piano.... and then, suddenly, I heard a little click in my shoulder, and it hurt even to breathe.

So I went to a chiropractor, who scanned my back with all sorts of fancy sensors, and announced that the whole problem is that I'm right-handed. Really, really right-handed. And right-footed, and right-armed, and right-everything-ed.

Which is kinda funny, because I've always thought of myself as the sort of person you'd expect to be a lefty. You know, artsy and intuitive and creative and musical. A big thing for me lately has been learning to trust the more logical, practical side of myself. I feel a bit like some of Andy's students who are quite convinced that they can't possibly do math, since they're "literature people," not "math people," and who, when informed that the number 1 indicator of mathematical success is reading ability, instantly rise to the top of the class. We all build our identities around a certain set of skills and interests, and it can be strangely intimidating to move beyond them. If I have other strengths, too... well then, who am I, anyway? So it was a bit surreal to discover just how (absurdly, painfully) right-side-dominant I am.

But back to my back. The right side of my body is much stronger than the left, and so I use it more. Thus the right side gets stronger and stronger, while the left side atrophies, and so on and so forth, until finally my back was so lopsided and out of whack that I couldn't even breathe.

Anyway, I'm supposed to try to do everything with my left hand. Which is easier said than done. Most of my daily tasks are actually two-handed, and the way I coordinate my hands is completely subconscious. It sounds silly, but it's taken me more than a month just to figure out how to go about trying to do things left-handedly.

Every time I get an adjustment, I come away feeling lopsided. My spine feels relaxed and flexible and wonderfully painless... and in a decidedly odd location. This last time, though, I experienced my muscles as lopsided. After she straightened me out, I could feel that my spine was straight and symmetrical, but that I had moderately competent muscles on the right side of my body, and nothing on the left. It's very strange. I'd never noticed it before, but for the past week I've been constantly aware of the lopsidedness of my body. Everything I do, I'm aware of the need to strengthen my left side. And oh my, now that I'm using my left hand, life is one great big workout. Stirring a pot of soup, I feel the burn... and not because I splashed, either. Just opening a door is quite a feat. Add in a childproof knob, and I'm about ready to collapse. But oh, it feels good. Because I'm finally beginning to experience just how much better it is to be balanced and strong, than to be able to easily understand and pigeonhole myself.

It's a Girl!

September makes proper use of the possessive suffix.

The twins don't even do that yet.

Works for Me Wednesday: Mess-free Cake

I grew up on wacky cake. It's a breeze to make, and it only requires the most basic of ingredients--which is an especially big deal if you happen to live in a tiny village at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. And if a flood comes through and destroys your oven... well, with this recipe you can make a very yummy birthday cake in a toaster oven, or crock pot, or microwave. My mother is the queen of flexibility in the kitchen. Until I had a family of my own to feed, I never fully appreciated the tremendous feats of creativity and organization involved in getting yummy nutritious meals on the table every day when you only have access to a supermarket every few months or so, and your fridge is about the size of a medium-sized microwave, with an inset freezer hardly big enough for an ice cream tray. All this is hard enough when you're surrounded by all the resources of a major city, but somehow my mother managed, and managed well.

Anyway, the weird thing about wacky cake is that not only is it really, really simple, but I actually think it comes out tasting better than the sort of cake that involves creaming the butter and the sugar, and beating the eggs over one double boiler while you melt the chocolate over another. Okay, so wedding cakes are better, but ours at least was made from a heavily guarded secret recipe, and it supposedly took three weeks to make anyway. So really, for all intents and purposes, the yummiest, moistest cake I can possibly make also happens to be the easiest cake recipe around. Something of a no-brainer.

Anyway, I wanted something sweet last night, and so I whipped together a wacky cake. And instead of flipping through my recipe cards, I looked it up on recipezaar. And lo and behold, there's another twist to the absurd easiness of this recipe. You don't even have to grease the pan... so there's no reason to dirty a separate bowl. You can just mix the dry ingredients together right in the pan, make little wells for the vanilla, vinegar, and oil (I actually use melted butter.) Then you pour the cold water on top of it all, mix it together, and pop it in the oven.

!!!

Works for me!

Sorry for the unannounced hiatus---I'm glad you're still reading!

There are some big changes ahead for our family, and it's all so very exciting, and it's happening so very fast, I can hardly think about anything else... but of course, I can't blog about it until it's sunk in a little bit. Or at least been finalized.

And then Nathan dove out of the stroller, giving himself a concussion. It was a very exciting Mother's Day indeed, but even if I'd had a spare moment to blog about it between checking his pupils, I really couldn't properly tell the story without mentioning that all this happened the weekend that Andy was in Houston. And when your husband goes out of town, it's probably wise not to blog about it until after the fact.

Thank God, our Bug-Boy is okay, and despite driving to and from the ER all night before his flight, Andy had a wonderful time in Texas. When someone as introverted as Andy comes back glowing about how great it was to hang out with a large group of strangers about to make a decision that could quite possibly change the course of his life... well, you know the hand of God must be at work.

God's hand is so clear in all this, not only now, but in all the ways he's lead us to this place. It's one of those foot-prints-in-the-sand moments, where we finally see that God was with us all along.

It's downright euphoric.

I held the book out, sighed, and motioned for September to come sit on my lap. She was busy playing, and took no notice of me. Nathan gleefully leaped into my lap.

"My turn! My turn!"

I frowned a little, rubbing my neck. I wanted to read yet another book to Nathan, but his sister really did need a turn, and I wasn't really up to much more. I was in a lot of pain.

Nathan hopped up and announced "Mama's back hurts."

Dadders and I nodded.

Then, Nathan came back and stood beside me, placing his hand gently on my shoulder. He looked earnestly into my eyes, and tenderly said, "You need to go to the doctor."

And then he let out a long sigh, filled with all the empathy and support in the world.

That's my boy. That's my boy.

Works for Me Wednesday: Better biscuits and pastries

I love biscuits.

I don't love trans fats. Trans fats aren't food. They don't serve any nutritional purpose, except to clog up arteries, and prevent our bodies from properly absorbing the nutrients that we need. Particularly the fats that toddlers need for things like... brain development, for instance. With everything we now know about trans-fats, I just don't keep shortening in the house.

But I love biscuits. And unless you love the flavor of lard, shortening is the only way to give your biscuits the right texture. For the past few years, I've made my biscuits and pie crusts with butter, but it just isn't the same. They have a sublime flavor, but they're harder to make, and they turn out kinda heavy.

Until one day a few weeks ago, when I wanted to make a pie, but all my butter was in the freezer. And so instead of cutting the butter into the dry ingredients as usual, I simply grated the frozen block. With a cheese grater. It wasn't much hassle, and the crust turned out beautifully. Since the butter is still frozen, it stays solid long enough to let the dough bake around it a little, leaving those little puffs that give biscuits and pastry their scrumptious lightness. It's the best of both worlds. Now my biscuits and pie crusts turn out just as flaky and light as if I'd used shortening, only buttery and flavorful. And a whole lot better for my kiddos growing noggins, and for all of our arteries.

Works for me!

A Certain Unpredictability

As I loaded the kids into the van in the library parking lot, a gold sedan sedan pulled in next to us. A gracefully middle-aged woman stepped out, holding a vase full of roses in undulating shades of orange.

"Hot enough for you?"

It certainly was. I wondered why her flowers didn't droop instantly upon feeling the first blast of hot air--I certainly felt rather wilted.

"And to think it was practically winter yesterday!"

I felt a little silly, talking so much about the capricious fluctuations of the weather. This is Southern California, after all, and all our weather can pretty much be summed up as variations on a theme of nice. But there it was--last night, I got up in the middle of the night for another blanket, and by 9am I had entirely forgotten what it was like not to feel as though I was roasting alive.

With all the tornadoes and floods and droughts in other parts of the world, the little fluctuations of our relatively temperate temperatures are hardly worth mentioning at all, but mention them we must.

Somehow it's comforting to know that some things never change, and some things always change.

The weather will always surprise us.

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