My fairy child in the hard cold world

Someone once described my youngest daughter as "like a fairy child." And there is something other-worldly and dreamy about her. Stories, pictures, voices fill her head. She writes them down on countless slips of paper that she leaves all over the house, forgets about. A day, a month, six months later, they resurface - these odd little fortunes from the quirky cookie-world of her imagination. I found one the other day that said:

"You will meet a tall, dark, handsome man and become
a hobo. Do not doubt us!"

I had no idea what it meant, but it made me laugh.

And since her head is so completely swimming with whimsies, she can be forgetful about things, things that - to other people - might seem more "real." Say, for example, anything in the physical world. She routinely puts her clothes on backwards (yes, sometimes even her pants!). And her hair would certainly go unbrushed till it became a nest for wild birds if I didn't wrangle her and it into submission occasionally.

But she doesn't have a mean bone in her body, and is so tender-hearted that she asked me, could she please give all her baby-sitting money to Haitian relief. Some might, in fact, say she's tender-hearted and sensitive to a fault; she was almost in tears when we got rid of our old living-room rug because it held "so many memories" for her. (Yeah, remember that time the dog peed on it here? and the time I spilled my coffee...) But whichever way you see it, she's a sweet, kind kid.

Somehow this strange mix that makes her so dreamy and dear, also makes her a magnet for bullies. In public school, she was verbally and eventually physically bullied. We pulled her out and put her in a tiny funky hippy school. There are less than 100 kids in the whole school, including a number of kids with ADD, Dyslexia, Aspergers, and other kinds of bully catnip. Those kids are doing fine. Nobody bugs them. But my daughter - bright, articulate, and yes, more than a little spacey - is getting bullied. Again.

Well crap.

I know that when she's older it will all be fine. She's going to go to college and blow people away (as she already does) with her perceptive, articulate, witty mind and her dreamy fey ways (that is as long as she doesn't wear her pants backwards). But that's all so far away and she has to go back to school Monday and deal. And it breaks my heart.

This conversation would not have happened when I was young and lovely

Yesterday, leaving yoga, I was explaining to a friend why full lunges are so hard for me to do. I said, "I have a really long torso, but very short arms."
"So," she said. "You're like a T-rex, doing yoga."
"Exactly," I said.

All work and no play make mom a bad girl

OK, this has officially veered off into horror. I really truly believed that worst was behind us. The husband was home, the furnace was new and waranteed, we were more or less dug out. What else could go possibly go wrong? And that just shows a complete lack of imagination on my part. Because this morning, with two kids still home from school the power went out. Which meant the the brand new furnace was off, as was the stove (electric starter!), and the phones (wireless). And my husband had taken the car and MY cell phone to a meeting which could not be interrupted.

So I'm officially done saying "It can't get any worse." What do you figure is next? Boils? Locusts? Or just flooding from the snow melting. Maybe I should start building me an ark.

I'm starting to feel like I'm trapped in the Overlook Hotel

As you may recall, when last we saw our plucky heroine, she was battling the elements with only a snow shovel and what was left of her wits after two feet of snow fell, then a tree, fell, and then the furnace died. Virtuous Miss Elizabeth thought all would be well once the furnace was replaced. Her patience was sorely tested when her husband left town for a conference. But did she kill any of her children? NO she did not! Good, brave Miss Elizabeth!

She truly thought all would be well at last - the heat was on, the children not murdered or even throttled, and the husband home from his travels. But Miss Elizabeth faces yet another trial: six more @#$%ing inches of SNOW!!!!!!!

Let's just hope our heroine doesn't REDRUM anyone.

OK, I'm better now

The elusive teenager (above) pokes her head out of her hole and predicts six more weeks of winter.


The furnace man came at 8AM this morning. A couple of hours and a couple of thousand dollars later, the heat was on and the icy gulag of our house was thawing out. To celebrate the warm inside, the kids went out and built an igloo (so that they could remember that good old icy feeling of a house without heat?). Then they came in, shedding clothes and clumps of snow all over the place (while I yelled ineffectually "Don't get snow all over the floor.......") and ran to sit on the heating vents and warm up. And, yes, I even made them hot cocoa.

Ahhhh. A functioning furnace is a very very good thing.

Hell has frozen over (emphasis on the frozen!)

1. The New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl. (The good part of the list is officially over now.)
2. Two feet of snow in twelve hours.
3. A tree in our back yard split in half under the weight of the snow.
(Thank God no one was hurt, and the clever tree managed to fall right in the five feet between our house and our neighbor's house, so neither house was damaged.)
4. Our furnace started groaning and moaning and then conked out completely this morning.
5. It's 12 degrees out right now.
6. I'm cold.
7. I don't like being cold.

There. I'm done now.

I hope to write more soon when my fingers aren't frozen!!!!!