Author Archives: Natalie

Gueth What!?

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Stella has about 5 teeth at varying stages of looseness. This front one kind of twisted its way out; at one point it was practically at a 90 degree angle to the rest of her teeth. Likewise, the others are moving around in such a way as to create strange gaps and craters. Every time I look at her I end up having to do a double-take, and can’t help but wonder what her new smile will look like. Whatever the case, she stands to make a tidy profit on the whole affair.

PS: If you are wondering about that curious black blob on her right cheek you should probably ask her father. I left her alone with him for 30 minutes while I ran to Target, and came home to find her amply adorned in temporary tattoos and Porter wearing nothing but a diaper. Oh, wait, that’s right – Porter doesn’t ever wear clothes. Silly me.

stella

stella

He Screams, He Spits, He Wins!

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My son works in rage the way an artist might work in paint or clay. He has mastered it’s subtle nuances and can often bring it to a level that could only be truly achieved by someone who has years perfecting the art of losing one’s shit. Some people take a lifetime to gain this kind of mastery. My son? Yeah, he’s three. On the rare occasions that I choose to actually go to battle with him, I usually end up losing in a bloody blaze of defeat. Most days, I have learned to do my best to stay out of the way. Like right now? Um, he’s sitting at the table eating a bowl of pesto. Not pesto PASTA, just pesto. The battles I choose only tend to be engaged when someone’s life is in danger. Death by garlic breath is not one of them.

Yesterday I had the lucky opportunity of being beaned in the back of the head with a shoe that was hurled from the backseat, which was the preceding act to completely unbuckling the top half of his carseat restraints and beginning to writhe out of the bottom half. All this was over a smoothie that he said he didn’t want, then decided he did, then didn’t, then did, then didn’t. Then I put my foot down, left the drive-through and drove away. Right about the time that I realized the screaming was actually accompanied by a carseat houdini act, I had no choice but to pull over and engage on a full-on wrestling match with my screaming, spitting, firebreathing child – all within just feet of the cars breezing past me on the freeway.

So, you can imagine my joy and anticipation when Steve announced last Friday that he wanted to take both kids to the fair with him. Out of a sense of guilt duty I offered to accompany him, even though this whole fair thing has kind of been established as his own special kid-bonding experience. I knew that him, alone with both children in this overstimulated environment was a disaster in the making. But hey, maybe I was over-reacting, right?

Let’s just say that $75 and 2 hours later, we emerged from the fairgrounds dirty, sticky, tear-streaked and just barely clinging to life.

I did my best to try and take pictures of the moments when the kids were actually smiling. You know, trying to just remember the good times. After all, Isn’t that rule #1 in the parenting manual?

stella

porter

Commencement

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Last night was Stella’s official graduation from pre-school. Each of the children at the center were invited to participate in the ceremonies regardless of whether they were graduating or not. Both kids were honored for their special contributions and achievements – Stella for teaching all the new kids about the school rules, and Porter for learning circle time rules. My basic interpretation of this was, “Thank you Stella for your productive channeling of your bossiness, and thank you Porter for no longer inciting circle-time riots.” That perky eduspeak doesn’t fool me.

This being Humboldt County, the kids all wore their homemade tie-die t-shirts in lieu of graduation gowns and, with the single exception of my son, they also wore their homemade mortar boards. Upon hearing his name called to come up and receive his certificate of achievement, Porter naturally chose to bolt in the opposite direction. That is, until he saw that each of the certificate was accompanied by an ice-cream-cone-cupcake, at which point he was lured back to the podium to participate in the ceremony.

Congratulations, preschool. You now only have one Walston to contend with.

stella and porter
(click on photo to see the full set)

This is your brain on multitasking.

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I work part time. It’s a lovely thing, this part-time status. It allows me to keep my giant life-scale sort of in balance. Little work here, little home-life there, and sometimes when I’m really luck a little me-time. But this week the universe came along and dropped a giant brick on the work side of that scale and catapulted everything else off in a thousand directions. This week was the convergence of three gigantic projects all swirling in a perfect-storm-like hurricane of crazy.

It was the kind of week that pushed my usually precision-like multitasking abilities from awesome to inept. I ended up working closely with the associate dean from one of the colleges and I swear, he thinks I belong in the remediation program. It seemed like over half of our emails went something like this:

Him: Blue.
Me: Gotcha! Green it is!
Him: Um, I think we had discussed blue.
Me: Oh yeah, didn’t you know? I’m an idiot.

Which was especially ridiculous considering the logistical aspects of this project at times rivaled that of a space shuttle launch. Combine this with the 1-day institute my unit is putting together, and that the new website goes up in tandem with said Institute, I have been shown how quickly I can go from organizational maven to handicapped illiterate.

This week’s hours, by my usual standards, have been grueling and I’ll probably be hacking out content for the website throughout the course of the weekend, and with any luck, come Monday evening I just might regain some IQ points. Which will help the next time I run into the dean and can prove to him that I’m actually competent enough to be employed by the university.