When I was in college, I did my internship with the March of Dimes, a non-profit organization that focuses on preventing/managing premature birth and birth defects. (And you know what? No one who worked there knew if it was “The March of Dimes” or “March of Dimes,” either. It was one way on some material and the other way on other material.)

They said I could have my own desk (it was a card table, but it was MINE), so I chose them over doing an internship with the human resources department of a health care facility, and that turned out to be a mistake because the March of Dimes internship had NOTHING to do with human resources (my major) and instead was a lot more like marketing (my anti-major: I could not sell a sedated duck to a hungry fox). But I got to wear cute suits, and also I didn’t end up doing anything with my major as it turned out, so no biggie that I may have chosen the wrong internship.

Plus, it’s because of my March of Dimes internship that I knew to take folic acid even before getting pregnant, and since I myself was a near-miss spina bifida baby (a deep but skin-covered indentation down to my spine), this was a super-good idea—a super-good idea my doctor didn’t talk about with me until I was 8 weeks along and it was super-too-late.

My friend Shannon of Cerebral Palsy Baby has had two preemies, and she just found out she’s expecting. She’s walking in the March for Babies, a March of Dimes fundraising event, and I’ve sponsored her, and I hope you’ll consider sponsoring her too. And I would like to say for the record that I am doing it out of the goodness of my heart, and not because I am hoping to win the prize she’s offering from her Etsy shop. Ahem.

(And if you’re reading me in an RSS reader, you should totally click over today to see how FREAKY this place looks in purple. One day only, and then it goes back to the usual aqua color.)

Well, FINE, so pretty much everyone except Paul and me knows the lyrics to Do-Re-Mi. I sure did appreciate all of you who assumed that I would have it right and Paul would have it wrong. We should get “Team Swistle” shirts printed up. And we should get those distributed before I tell you I was half wrong. Perhaps I should have mentioned earlier that it was only in the last decade that I realized it wasn’t “Fa, along the way to run.” And that it was only as I was composing the post that I realized it was “sol” not “so”.

Paul was singing, correctly, “Fa, a long long way to run.” I was singing, incorrectly but I still prefer it, “Fa, a longer way to run.”

Paul was singing, incorrectly, “Ti, I drink with jam and bread.” I was singing, correctly, “Ti, a drink with jam and bread.” Actually, I don’t think I’d like tea with jam and bread. I think I’d prefer it with an almond white-chocolate cherry scone, the kind with big-grained sugar all over the top. MMMMMmmmmmm.

It’s been awhile since we’ve had any pay-it-forward updates around here! I think a lot of them got out of our orbit. But today there’s one over at 3 Giraffes, and it is SUCH a sweet idea: not only will there be a care package as a prize, but Chris and Kim will each donate $50 to the March of Dimes on your behalf, in memory of Maddie Spohr.

Go enter

You know that song from The Sound of Music, the one that goes “Doe, a deer, a female deer”? Paul and I discovered we have different ways of singing it. WITHOUT LOOKING UP THE ACTUAL LYRICS, which of these do you say is correct?

a) Fa, a long long way to run
b) Fa, a longer way to run

a) Ti, a drink with jam and bread
b) Ti, I drink with jam and bread

I bought a package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs yesterday. I’m so conflicted: I want to eat one SO BAD, but if I open the package and start eating them, they’ll be gone and then I won’t have any more. Also: it’s still technically breakfast time.

I have this same problem with almost everything. It’s probably the borderline version of whatever inspires people to save every newspaper and magazine and piece of junk mail in huge teetering moldering piles until eventually the piles start falling and they crush the person domino-style.

If I have a little left of a “special” moisturizer or conditioner, it’s hard to use it. I end up saving it until it’s all dried out or gross or something. I must have…well, I’ll just go count and save us all the agonized guessing. Hang on. BRB. Okay, I have three—THREE—bottles of “special” conditioner with about three servings left per bottle.

(Putting “special” in quotes like that makes it look like I’m talking suggestively. NO. I just mean, like, my Aussie 3 Minute Miracle Reconstructor DEEEEP is “special,” but my Suave Professionals Color Care ‘Protects as well as Biolage’ Conditioner is “not.”)

If we’re down to the last few bags of chocolate chips, I start feeling anxious and squirrely about using them. Bags 3, 2, and 1, are THE SAME VALUE as bags 6, 5, and 4 were, and yet…I really like to buy fresh bags 3, 2, and 1, before I use the bags formerly known as 3, 2, and 1. My pantry is…generously stocked. I am a fretter, but I rarely fret about what we would do if we couldn’t leave the house for a week because of natural disaster or zombies or whatever. We’d have plenty of food. In fact, come on over, we have enough for you too.

Clearly this is a little psychological glitch. Probably therapy is unnecessary, but a little practice at home wouldn’t hurt: using the SECOND to last bag of chocolate chips before restocking, for example. …Well, THIRD to last. Rome wasn’t built in a day. I also think it would be valuable to open that package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs.

Updating the No More Babies situation is a tough call. Every time I talk about it I get a few ugly comments, and who likes that? Nobody! And also, I feel so blicky talking about how “wah, wah, I’ve only had five helpings,” when other people haven’t even had a first helping yet.

Still. This is a big thing to me, and it seems to me that “wanting a child” is a big thing to a lot of people, and so it’s worth discussing—whether a person has zero children or one child or two children or eight children or whatever. But I plan to be brief about it and just sort of sum it up, not go on and on.

The reason I’m doing such a PREAMBLE is to give you a chance to duck out if you’d rather chew tin foil than hear a woman with five children give an update about wanting another child. I’m not going to talk about anything else in this post, so it’s safe to take a pass on the whole thing.

Last chance! Last chance!

So. It was mid-December when Paul and I had the big talk. It took me several weeks to be able to find any positive things to say at all, and to work out a wallowing system. I found I felt better when I shopped and when I ate yummies and when I did fun stuff, and I felt even better when I thought about my niece and about the babies THREE of my friends were/are expecting and all the babies my online friends were/are expecting: it reminded me that I can still enjoy happy anticipation and happy family expansion, even if it’s not happening in my exact household or barfing in my exact toilet.

Even so, I spent a solid two months feeling overall awful. Almost as if the sixth child already existed, and I had failed to save him/her, and now he/she was lost. Desperate.

The third month, I felt the first inklings that this might be a temporary feeling. I’m sure it had nothing to do with Henry getting full-swing into the Toddler Nutcase Era just as everyone came down with a nasty snarfing coughing cold accompanied by cough-related barfing.

And now it is almost the end of the fourth month, and I’d say I feel bad about it only 5% of the time, which is really really really good, and better than I’d been hoping for. Furthermore, I probably feel GOOD about it 5% of the time, too—also way better than I’d been hoping for. And perhaps most importantly of all, I’m spending large% of the time NOT THINKING ABOUT IT AT ALL.

Still, if you’d like to expand your family to make me feel better, please do. Very thoughtful of you.

I am for the most part what is known as a “late adopter.” Or maybe it’s “lagger”—I forget. I didn’t get a cell phone until 2001, and I only got it because I got into a VERY MINOR, INJURY-FREE, NOT-MY-FAULT accident while pregnant, and Paul kind of freaked and said it was stupid we didn’t have cell phones. So now we have them, but they don’t play games or music or anything, and Paul always leaves his at home on the counter. We still have a landline, and our phone has a cord.

And, like, we don’t have a DVR or a Blu-Ray or HDTV or a iPhone or a Kindle, and it’s not because we’re technology snobs, it’s because we’re cautious. Okay, I’M cautious: Paul is by temperament (though not by bank account) the sort who would buy every new thing the day it came out. I tend to buy things when everyone I know has already replaced it with something two generations more recent.

All this is to say that I have finally acquired the Fear of Recession everyone else picked up a few years ago. Yesterday I was in a funk all day and couldn’t even figure out why I felt so doomy. I tried to pinpoint the problem: was it marital? No. Was I worried about one of the kids? No. Was it ennui? No. Hormonal? Probably no. A fight with a friend? No. But it felt like it was SOMETHING, and finally I figured out what I was feeling was Financial Stress.

I know exactly what triggered it, too. We got a letter from Paul’s company saying they were changing our health insurance plan AGAIN (as they do EVERY YEAR), and that as usual there was no good news. Not only is our monthly contribution now MORE THAN OUR MONTHLY MORTGAGE PAYMENT (just let that sink in a minute: if we chose to wing it on the health insurance, we could OWN A SECOND HOUSE) (well, okay, we couldn’t pay the taxes or the water bill or the utilities or whatevs, but STILL) (and maybe we could rent it to a doctor in exchange for free check-ups), but now we have a $2000 annual deductible before the dubious benefits (we haven’t seen them yet, but the copays always go up and the covered services always go down) kick in.

This is difficult to accept. Health insurance, like life insurance, is a gamble you WANT to lose—but it’s still difficult. I did some quick math and found out that even if I had paid cash for all my c-sections, we would STILL have paid less for health care than we have paid for health insurance. That utterly sucks. And yet I’m too chicken to drop the health insurance: something could Happen, and THEN WHAT?

Anyway, that whole thought process made me get all squirrelly about money, and that’s when the Recession Worries finally kicked in. And yet, I am having exactly as much effect on the situation as when I WASN’T worrying about it. Yay.

One of my favorite artists, Amy Quarry, is doing a pretty amazing giveaway:

I am feeling generous with the sunny weather I am experiencing in my corner of the world, and wanted to spread some of it around. So…I am having a giveaway featuring your choice of ANY TWO ITEMS currently in my shop. You can enter this giveaway one of two ways:

1. If you have a blog, post a link back to either my shop (www.amyquarry.etsy.com) or website (www.amyquarry.ca) (feel free to use any of my pics too).

OR

2. If you don’t have a blog you can post a link to me in your Twitter or Facebook status.

(OR if you are totally not a part of the internet world, just write me a comment on this post (http://thefrontroom.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/spring-has-sprung-giveaway/) to explain, and maybe tell a friend about me for the good karma!)

Winner will be chosen via random number generator on Friday April 3, 2009 at noon pacific time. I should be able to see all the links in Technorati but if you want to make sure I get your entry you can also post a comment or send me an email at thefrontroom(at)gmail(dot)com.

Good luck everyone and happy spring!

I’m linking to it not because I’m throwing my hat into the ring to win (I ALREADY won an Amy Quarry package, if you recall, and here’s the post where Elizabeth models the dress), but because I am a GENEROUS PERSON and want YOU to win.

See my helpful sticky note on my monitor?

It is in the hope that this year for the first year ever, I will not immediately believe that (1) my radio station is switching to an all-polka format, (2) Google is offering a dating service, (3) someone is pregnant, or (4) etc.

Don’t celebrity women realize the rest of us KNOW “running around after my kids all day” is not what keeps them a size 0? If “running around after my kids all day” made people thin, wouldn’t….well, I mean, wouldn’t things be very different than the way they in fact are? Office moms would be plump. Stay-at-home moms would be lean. Moms of more children would be thinner than moms of fewer children. Nannies and babysitters and daycare workers would also be thin. Parents would be thinner than non-parents. Women would be having children—or begging to borrow their friends’ children—as part of a diet plan. There would be expensive retreats where you could go for a week for spa treatments and to babysit.

Are the celebrities perhaps LITERALLY running around after their kids? Like, jogging in place next to them all day long? And then not eating any food?