Day 8

My daughter loves to dance.  Like LOVES to dance.  All the time.  With or without music.  She's a dancing fool.  She's dancing around the living room right now to the sound of passing cars and crickets.  She's adjusting to the move fairly well, I think.  With the singular exception of sleeping.

Part of it isn't her fault.  We bought a crib for Matthew three years ago, and in our move from Massachusetts somehow all the hardware mysteriously walked away.  And in the time since we disassembled the thing, the manufacturer went out of business.  I have tried in vain to cobble together hardware to put it back together, but it's becoming clear that it is an impossible task.  

We bought a second crib a while ago, but it's at my mom's house.  We have a nanny that we love in Conway, and the commute to the hospital is better from there than it is from where we moved.  It was going to be a big enough adjustment moving, I didn't want to take her away from one more source of stability.

So the point of all that is to say that we don't have a bed for Laney at the new place.  So she's been sleeping in with us.  Except that she doesn't really sleep well with us.  She wakes up constantly and wants to cuddle or play or poke me in the eye or kick me in the spine or all the other fun things toddlers want to do to make their parents miserable in the middle of the night.

I don't really have anything to talk about this evening.  So I'll babble about cribs for a while.  And dancing.  She really does love dancing.

Day 1

It was brought to my attention that my last post could be interpreted in a way that seems to belittle people dealing with addiction.  That was absolutely not my intention.  I've never dealt with an addiction, so I'm not an expert on the subject.  I was not trying to imply that sobriety is an easy road, because I know it's not.  I've seen the affects of addiction, and I know how horrible it is.

I've been wracking my brain trying to come up with some analogy to explain the way I see it, but everything just sounds hollow and stupid.  So I'll just say that I'm sorry if I upset or offended anyone with that particular comparison.

Of course, all of this could be a massive overreaction on my part.  I mean, yes, several people did mention something about it to me, but when I'm having down days I feel like everything I do is hopelessly wrong and horrible, and that I'm a horrible person for doing/thinking/saying/feeling it.

Today was a bad day overall, and I'm not entirely sure why.  It's not like anything specifically set me off.  Maybe it was because Bug kept me up half the night.  God knows I can't function on subpar levels of sleep.  Whoever invented night terrors can go play in traffic.  It's horrible.  What in the world could make my poor 18-month-old scream and thrash around in terror like that?

I did work on completing a project today.  It's a dress for my daughter.  I still need to attach the straps, but for that I need to measure them on her.  And trying to get a toddler to stand still for measuring is about as easy as giving a jellyfish a manicure.  So we'll see how it goes.

Best laid plans

I had this great idea that for Lent I would try blogging every day.  To give myself an outlet, I guess.  Problem is that since I started working nights, my schedule is so messed up that I can't even remember which days are which.

I started working at a hospital since my last blog post.  And I had a baby girl.  Which is one of the reasons I haven't had three spare seconds to write anything of substance.  I don't know how all those Mommy bloggers do it.  I guess they write while their kiddos are napping?  But when Bug is napping, I'm usually holding her.  Or I'm napping, too.  And both of those things are more important to me than eking out time to write my particular blend of stuff and nonsense.

I've been thinking a lot about names recently.  Probably because we are rapidly approaching the second and first anniversaries of my having to bestow names upon tiny humans.  It's an incredible responsibility, and if anything, in my life I've proven time and time again that I'm not so good at being responsible.  Case in point:

This is a thing that I own.  That I paid money for.  It is a fried chicken.  Get it?  Yeah.  What responsible adult would buy something like this?  Me, that's who.


I did, however, take the naming of my children seriously.  We went back and forth for months about what our first baby's name would be.  We picked out two contenders, and decided that we'd wait until he was born to pick the right one.  But once he was born and we held him, I knew that his name was Matthew.  Matthew means 'gift from God,' and just because we didn't get to keep him doesn't mean he was any less of a gift.  The Other Half picked his middle name - Charles.  The Charles River runs through Boston, and OH wanted a name that reflected where Matthew lived.  I suppose if I ever get to the point where I can scatter his ashes, it would be fitting to do it at the river.  The Charles is a very short river, but has been pivotal in making Boston what it is today.  So, putting it all together, our Matthew Charles was a gift from God who, although he had only a brief time with us, left a permanent impression in our hearts.

I always knew that I would name my first daughter Elaine, after my grandmother.  After all, she was the woman who graced me with my love of fantastic footwear.  When it came to picking a name to go with it, OH suggested Elizabeth, which means 'the promise of God.'  Elaine means 'light.'

In the babyloss community, a rainbow baby is one born after the loss of a child.  It refers to the notion that while nothing can undo the damage left by such a loss, something beautiful can come afterward.  In the Bible, the rainbow is a symbol of God's promise to mankind never to flood the Earth again.  So putting all that together, our Elizabeth Elaine is our promise of God in light - our rainbow.

My name means 'emerald isle,' or Ireland.  But it occurs to me that the 'isle' part applies more to me than I ever realized.  I am an island - a lone mass of land in the sea.  I'm terrible at making friends - I can't count how many groups I've tried to fit in to or people I've tried to befriend.  I'm awkward and dramatic and too smart for my own good.  I was bad at it before Matthew died, and I'm worse at it now.  I don't shy away from talking about my son, and it makes some people profoundly uncomfortable.  And because of that, I am very, very lonely.

I'm not really sure where I was going with all this.  It's just one of the things I think about.