Mother. Dresser. Trixie.

Fritz was out of town on business last week. My mother flew in from New England to help keep me sane over the long President's Day weekend. Really, she did so much more than keep me sane. I was so happy to have her around. Sometimes I don't know how I manage to function at all without my mother nearby. She has a graceful, patient and insightful way of helping me in just the right way at just the right time. We also had long late night conversations, just the two of us. The boys spent lots of time playing and cooking and reading with her. We all felt completely nurtured by her presence. Ah, the art of nurturing! Sometimes I forget about it. It's both humbling and empowering to be the receipient of nurture. I always feel inspired and determined to be a better parent by my mother's visits.

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One of the little projects we attempted to accomplish while my mother was here was finding a dresser for the baby. A simple project, one would think. When Mattias was born, I got a three drawer Hemnes dresser from Ikea for him. I'm not very happy with it. At all. The bottoms of the drawers are masonite. The masonite EASILY slips out of the supporting slots and bends under the weight of not-very-many clothes. Then the drawers don't close or open. It's obnoxious. I'm testing a couple of different fixes including glue and midpoint supports (we'll see how they hold up), but on principle, I don't think I should have to fix a piece of furniture that is less than three years old. Also, I would like to buy a dresser that lasts 18 years, not 3 or 5 or even 10. In 3 or 5 or 10 years, I have OTHER things I want to spend money on. Not another dumb dresser.

So, we went shopping both in thrift stores and "new" stores. I've also been stalking craigslist for about 3 weeks.  Every single dresser in my price range that agrees with my aesthetic sensibilities is a disappointment. The newer ones are ALL masonite bottoms, although sometimes they try to fake you out by laminating the masonite with a wood veneer. And by the way, I've opened so many dresser drawers that I can HEAR the sound of masonite when I open the offending drawer. Now there's a useful skill! Almost all the older dressers we found had real wood bottoms (yay!), but they also had really crappy sliding mechanisms on the drawers. I've got two older kids; I can't really risk dressers falling over because drawers are ill-fitting or ill-pulling. I also can't eliminate the possibility that kids are going to open the drawers and try to climb them, etc.

The crappy quality of the newer dressers is really getting to me. I suppose I don't have enough to think about or I'm simply too damn picky. (Pickiness seems to be a common theme during this pregnancy.) At night I find myself obsessively dreaming about dressers, as though I can de-McKinsey the world of dresser manufacturing, if I just put enough brain hours into it.

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Noah has decided the baby's name is Trixie. Everyone asks where he got Trixie from. There are two possibilities: 1) from the character in the German language version of The Octonauts (in putting together this post, I learned her name is Tweak in the English language version) or 2) from Mo Willem's Knuffle Bunny series character. I like one possibility more than the other. Noah will cite either source without a discernible pattern, so maybe the answer is a little of both.

Fritz and I are not really keen on the name Trixie, but Noah is SOOO adamant about the name, that I've decided to honor his wishes by keeping it for this blog. Third child: Trixie, for the blog. Named by Noah.

Showered

This weekend, my friends here in Denver had a baby shower for me. It was really a great shower. I left feeling loved and fulfilled and so lucky to be surrounded by the amazing mother - friends that I have. But I was actually pretty nervous about the shower. Because, as I've mentioned many times here on this blog, I'm really scared about having a third child. I'm scared about having a girl after two boys. I'm scared about going back into infanthood with all that holding and carrying and dependency. I'm scared about not being – or not seeming – excited enough. I might be seven months pregnant, but I still feel barely prepared. When my big stomach knocks against something unexpectedly, it feels like A Metaphor for not recognizing and accepting the coming changes. I was experiencing some sort of performance anxiety at the thought of a shower.

I feel the need to explain myself. Or at least, I keep trying to understand my feelings in my own head. Do you ever have times when you can't really let go of something, and your brain just runs away trying to process it? You put your worries in this context and that context trying to understand how you arrived at this moment and these particular feelings. Maybe you need your life to feel like a coherent story, you need to make your feelings more orderly and neat in your mind? Maybe you need your feelings to be justified by something in the past in order to be at peace with them and accept them? But what? What is that key to it all making sense?

Anyway, at these times, when you are super uncomfortable with yourself, and doubting, and feeling like you can't really pull it all together and be the coherent person you mean to be (no matter what the photos say), this kind of love, attention, and support from your friends is just about the greatest gift that they can give you. I went home and cried, trying to figure out how I could thank them enough.

Messy Seque

I bet you saw this coming: the water table becomes the mud table. Gross. I hold onto my belief that one MUST allow children to play this way AND that this IS the alternative to television that our children need. Still. It's not lost on me that this is a godawful mess that *I* ultimately clean up.

Speaking of television, one of the few shows that I let the boys watch is Sendung mit dem Elefant from Germany. Honestly, such a great television show. Recently, they slowly sank a plate, or "boat," in an aquarium by dropping coins atop it to demonstrate buoyancy. On the show, it was a game: the person who sinks the "boat" loses. We had to mimic that experiment at home. In our game-experiment, Mattias was happy to lose (by sinking the "boat") and Noah was happy to let Mattias lose, thus winning himself. Everyone felt like a winner. It's unclear whether any scientific principles were actually learned, but as I alluded to, they were happy. The table was covered in water by the end. The mess was not lost on me, nor was the irony that it was inspired by watching a television show.

[photo removed, because sometimes I do that]

At least this inspiration doesn't come from a television show: legos. Is this pile not three times the size of my child? I'm brainstorming a lego organizing solution. I've spent hours sitting on the floor, or at the table, playing with legos over the past year. I think I'm getting some idea of just how the boys' brains are operating when they sit in front of this huge pile and play. That processing will be key to my organizational system. Some ideas, like, say, organizing legos by color, look pretty, but would be useless in the end, because that is NOT how one plays with legos. (In fact, I suspect organizing legos by color might actually make them more frustrating to play with.) My organizational idea is awesome so far, and I'd love to just do it. But I've got my hands pretty full cleaning up mud and water and legos. (Sigh.)