entering the whirlpool

I just updated my website! (er, to include the story that came out two months ago...) But this means that after more than a year, I finally have an FTP program that works on my computer again, so theoretically I can post pictures here as well as on twitter. (For those who are looking for Megatherium pictures & effluvia, it's here) I also rediscovered a set of notes for a thinky post I was going to post months ago, which I might even still be able to reconstruct. (This is still not that post.)

We have achieved potty trained!!! I eventually had to resort to saying that children who pooped in their underwear didn't get read books, which lasted for about three days and then once she actually used the potty I could do the positive reinforcement thing. (And then we had three days of peeing where she stood before I managed to get across that this was not ok either, but we got there, thank goodness.) She's rocking the boy underwear-- we got two day-of-the-week sets with tools on them, which are grand, fit pretty well, and are sturdy enough that she can pull them up by herself. We have our toddler-included preschool orientation night next week, and then jump on in the day after Labor Day. Other people keep expecting the Megatherium to be nervous about it for some reason, but she is quite excited. Other children!! Yay!! One of them lives right down the street from us and was born 4 days after she was, but we haven't caught them at home since we got the class list.

We weathered Pennsic-- first week mainly, as grauwulf's amazing moving work trip to Germany finally settled on the week we were supposed to be on vacation. Her Megatheriosity had a blast after she figured out about tent pegs the hard way and had her eyebrow glued back together. (Fortunately we were camped two blocks from the EMS station, & she's a very good patient-- she spent the rest of the war reminding us that "there's where the water is, and the misting tent, and that's where we went to get my boo-boo fixed." (She named it her boo-boo; the terminology was not adult imposed)) The new camp (Ravenstreet) is full of cooks, which confuses me; I am used to wandering about & buying snacky things or ice cream for lunch, and they have 3 meals a day in camp, but no firepit. Anyway, we're already planning on going for both weeks next year. Though, there was also talk about the Helsinki Worldcon, so we'll see.

We have been escaping the heat (kind of) by visiting mall playgrounds so the Megatherium has something to climb on that isn't me-- she bonded with a slightly-larger boy last week & they played self-initiated hide-and-seek and some run around & jumping games before his adults took him elsewhere; we came out of the mall & she announced that she "wants a boyfriend who lives right down the street from us." (I mentioned child-in-her-preschool-class, but we still haven't met him yet.)

Meanwhile I have been reading Greta Eagan's Wear No Evil-- in the mall, no less, for extra irony. On the whole I like the concept of eco-fashion, but like so many of these things I am not quite the target audience. About half her fashion needs just don't apply to my life, and her basic wardrobe evaluation techniques don't take into account the possibility of making one's own. So my closet is about 90% "eco-fashionable" already, since that's how much of it is either secondhand or made by me (or both, or in a few cases made for me as a gift, or made in USA by independent crafters.) My dresser is mostly split between thrifted and 100% problematic cotton things. So, I guess less buying cheap t-shirts is about where I go from here. Or investigating organic or low-impact dyestuff sewing fabrics. (tho, mostly not buying more fabric for the next year is on my goal list. Gotta sew some of it first!)

I also tore through rereading Rose Daughter the other day and am now wishing that McKinley would write something pastoral with sisters in. All this beast and ancient sorcerer's battles nonsense was getting in the way of the family gossip! (Also, did anyone else find the marriage bit kind of tacked on? I don't think it's explained why this solves anything...) And then I started reading Binti which was very much Not That. Yeah.

Green fashion leads to green beauty stuff, & I've been poking at where to find what (and what beauty products I'm actually interested in, which is mostly not a lot, but it's in the interesting kitchen chemistry sort of field, and maybe when the Megatherium & friends grow into starting to experiment we can do make & take parties?) and also fancy mocktail drinks. Toddler cocktail parties!! (I mean, this is really for me, since I don't like alcohol, but hey, excuses to dress up and stab appetizers with tiny forks! What's not to love?) I got vanilla stevia on someone's pinterest recommendation and while I like having a liquid sweetener where I can dose a whole giant mug of limeade with about 5 drops, I then go and add a teaspoon of vanilla as well. Plus usually using the chilled sun tea in the fridge instead of water. And I'm squeezing my own limes, very glamorous, and nobody else in the family is actually that interested. Whatever. I also got Republic of Tea's vanilla dandelion tea which I quite like.

So, things, as advertised.

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My pregnant insomniac meets the Wild Hunt story is up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies today: Mortal Eyes, also with surprise(!) audio edition.

...I guess I need to update my website. *cough*

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So we're pre-registered for Pennsic in a grauwulf-approved camp (Ravenstreet) and I have sewing to do so that her Megatheriosity has got more than two short tunics and a cloak to her name. Also I get to break out the glorious de Gheyn pattern and swear at it some more (I hate-hate-hate working with Reconstructing History patterns; they are always badly aliased, insufficiently labeled, and full of confusing instructions. Fortunately for this one I've already done a doublet, so I can refer to that for any confusing bits of the cassock, which is what grauwulf wants.)

Meanwhile, the Megatherium continues to fight tooth and nail against potty training, which is going to be a *problem* if we don't sort it out before she's supposed to start pre-school in the fall. Of course if she does actually potty train, I'm going to have to find her some underwear that's not massively too big for her, since the smallest standard size is still too big in the leg holes. I am taking out my frustrations this week by buying books I haven't actually got time to read, all of which will probably arrive when we're out of town for my family reunion. Because of course. Grauwulf is currently asleep on the living room floor because he's done something unfortunate to his back and was convinced he wouldn't be able to sleep, & so couldn't go to bed.

And also Hancock Fabrics is closing. We made a last pilgrimage to pick over the dead whale carcass this afternoon (actually there's still rather a lot there) but I want to wander around waveing my arms and explaining that it's like Borders dying all over again. Also the Jo-Ann in Columbia is always majorly understaffed at the cutting tables.

Apparently I'm cranky. Maybe I should go to bed.

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I wandered Balticon on Saturday, and do not approve of the new venue (not that anyone asked me...) It's beautifully convenient for me in that I can take the light rail & walk over, but somewhat appalling in terms of parking, and (since I know the inner harbor decently well) I hopped over to the super secret crepe place in the Harborplace mall for lunch (and then they put canned mushrooms in my crepe, eew!, so yeah.) But the venue was slightly smaller than the old hotel, with no lounge space in the con public areas, so if you wanted to mingle either you had to go to the bar or stand around in the hallways, which made for ridiculous crowding. There *were* stairs, but they were super secret service stairs that were hard to find and very narrow between the two floors the con was on, so passing people on them was awkward to problematic, and there was a constant line for the elevators. So while I did get to chat with some people I wanted to see, there were a couple others I waved to once as they rushed by, and some I didn't manage to see at all, and the whole thing was overcrowded, poorly lit, and too loud. Woe.

Anyway, aside from sitting crossly in a hallway & penning some more of my break-up letter from the Bog Goddess to humanity (until my pen ran out of ink), it also occurred to me that I want to read more SF with xenobotany and/or terraforming. I've been doing all this naturalist stuff and learning the weird and still-new or still-being-discovered things about my biome! I'm interested in what other people do with imagined ones.

Things I've read and liked so far include Bujold-- particularly the recent bits with Sergyaran fauna; I loved the concept of investigating entirely unstudied ecosystems-- or the crazy terraforming from the second Steerswoman book. (The third one didn't work for me as well, but partly b/c the whole plot was tangential to the series plot.) I prefer non-awful main characters and to avoid horror/grimdark/dystopia and all that crap.

So far on my radar:
*Janet Kagen's Hellspark (presently sitting next to me!)
*MCA Hogarth, probably starting with Mindtouch

and suggestions from twitter today:
*Elizabeth Moon, Remnant Population
*Nicola Griffith, Ammonite
*Planetfall
*Carol Ives Gilman, Dark Orbit
*Julie Czerneda
*Joan Slonczewski

(Partly recorded here so I have a list to refer back to) Anyone else have recs that spring to mind? A little "this book (or story!) is cool/related because it has X" is also appreciated!

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Once again I seem to have managed to let not getting to the long thinky post I meant to make (and even outlined!) prevent me from posting anything else.

The Megatherium, little extrovert that she is, had a brief conversation with a slightly older girl (who happened to share a quite uncommon name with her best friend's mother) at the park today, and then loosely followed her around for the next hour, in that toddler manner of playing or veering off to do something else and then asking me, "Where is my friend?" & heading off to find her. Anyway, the other child was with a group of friends, siblings, & mothers, and so she didn't take particular note of the Megatherium until M gave her a small handful of buttercups and then wandered off again while Other Child was still telling everyone about the flowers.

Three minutes later, she passed the Megatherium again, and they had the following conversation.

Other Child: I know you! You're the one who gave me flowers!
Megatherium: Yes.
Other Child: Why did you give me flowers? [slight pause] Is it because you love me?
Megatherium: Yes! I love you.

...And this was the end of the interaction. M went back to climbing on a dinosaur, & the Other Child set her flowers down on a bench & forgot about them.

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We have also reached the stage where cause & effect *almost* makes sense, so she'll run and hide where she can't see me before chewing on things she's not supposed to.

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Part of the Megatherium's third birthday presents included refiguring her crib so that the front is open and she can get out of it by herself. (She opted to keep the crib walls, rather than swapping to a Hello Kitty plastic toddler bed, so that the absurd quantities of stuffed animals she keeps in there wouldn't fall out.) She's doing quite well with not hopping up when she's supposed to be sleeping, and has mostly been napping, too. (The new rule is that she's got to stay in bed-- realistically in her room-- for the duration of whatever CD she picks.) But yesterday morning she turned up in my bed at about 7:30 (ten minutes after grauwulf went downstairs) with Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel in tow, demanding that I wake up and read it. This morning she crawled in between us around 6:30.

Mike Mulligan is the latest CD craze; after eight or nine months of Sandra Boynton CDs, she just got an audiobook one that has Mike Mulligan twice (once with steam whistle page turn cues, one without) followed by Katy and the Big Snow, followed by the trolley one I didn't know existed before. So it's a reasonable Mommy-gets-a-break length even if she doesn't nap, but now she wants us to read her about Mike Mulligan last thing before bedtime and first thing in the morning, too. I've put holds on Katy, & the little house one, and the trolley, and something about an engine that runs off without it's train, (the first two I like better, & the second two I don't think I've read) so perhaps there will be some variety.

But in any case, my plans for 6:30 in the morning did not include being crawled over by a book-carrying toddler (and subsequently also the cat.) And then we went to the zoo, where we walked around in the windy 60-degree sun for several hours, saw all the things, and I actually sold the Megatherium on going up to another little girl and introducing herself instead of running after her and wondering why she wasn't making friends. Progress, of a sort. The other child's mother said they just got a membership, so perhaps we'll even see her again.

Meanwhile, I have been wandering around fuzzy-headed and feeling the need for better calibration as to whether I'm out of focus because I used it all, because my chemistry is out of alignment (which comes in several causal flavors), or just because I'm out of practice and need to do the "just do the thing" thing. There have been moments when I had that at least partly figured out, but this month doesn't seem to have included any of them.

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Fair warning: this post is me complaining about how modern/American/pop- culture does exercise. Also my brain is set on extra lazy/abstracted this weekend, so there may be a bit of weird shorthand.

In these enlightened days when large proportions of the workforce earn their money mostly by sitting or standing still, exercise is sold as a marketable commodity. You perform it as a duty by going to the gym (for which you pay money!) or buying a machine specifically to exercise upon... which is a pretty poor substitute intellectually for hunting or building or carrying things or just walking all day in the course of your activities. The idea that exercise is an end unto itself for which you should pay money has always seemed like a terrible idea to me. Or to put it the other way, if you're not enjoying it and you're not accomplishing anything with it, why?

Now there are some legitimate things to get out of gym-style exercise: addressing particular health concerns can be worth performing a type of exercise you don't like in and of itself. Combining boring-but-personally-useful exercise with TV or audio can make two experiences that only take part of your attention into a better use of time. Specific exercises can be worth it to improve your ability to do something else you really enjoy. I'm sure there are other things I don't remember or haven't run into. But these take a particular sort of time and willpower that I'm pretty short on just now.

I've been thinking about children's games, and how many of them are effectively interval training. One of the Megatherium's favorite activities this week is to climb up on her toy box, step to the steamer trunk next to it, jump from there to the couch, and then leap off onto the exercise mat. She's made this loop probably upwards of a hundred times since she came up with it a few days ago. I remember turning on the demo mode for the electric keyboard and making a circuit of the living room furniture with my brother, leaping from chair to couch. (The music was important, I think, but not for any explicable reason.) Things like hop scotch and throwing balls around can be excellent exercise as well as fun, though some of the kid-style games age better for those in later developmental stages than others do.

But the thing is, if you're at a point of thinking it would be a good idea to get more exercise because you've been insufficiently motivated to do so thus far, a gym membership is probably not the way to go. The input energy is too great to overcome the inertia (and in my case dislike of gyms...)

So I've been contemplating what's fun; what is a thing I want to do for its own sake, that also provides better activity levels than I normally get on my own. I've got a couple categories of answers. There are toddler-enrichment things. (Go to the zoo! I will always get my 10k steps on zoo days, but it's weather dependent, and requires a mostly-free day. We also play some leaping around games at home, but they're sporadic.) There are things that require groups of people or at least partners and scheduling. (Contra dancing is fun! I've done very little of it b/c schedules & leaving the house... Fencing, rock climbing-- I miss climbing *so much* but not enough to network & schedule & drive to the (rather expensive) climbing gym.) And there are things you can do solo, or in a class group, or in a simulated group. (Yoga, Zumba, Jazzercise! Ok, I'm a little scared of jazzercise as a concept, but it looks like it could be fun?)

Someday it'll be spring-like, and then I need to get outside and muck about in the garden, which counts for applied exercise, or it'll be warm enough to go take a walk after bedtime. (Grauwulf has been doing this anyway, but it's too cold for me.)

Mostly we've been throwing balls around and playing pretend hop scotch. And I joined the Megatherium in a few of her toybox/couch jumping circuits. It was kind of fun.

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One of the interesting things about mentally decompressing from a not so helpful place* is that I'm rediscovering a lower grade of failure modes. I no longer want to sit on the kitchen floor and cry (yay!) but I feel utterly no incentive to get up in the morning. (Once I get moving, I'm fine, but the bed-gravity is strong, and not assisted by the cat lurking, ready to climb onto my lap the moment I sit up.) I'm sleeping better, but have had a couple nights of clenching my jaw in my sleep. Stuff like that. It's peculiar.

The Megatherium is bipping along, mostly unsick (finally!) but now she's going off afternoon napping and getting her NO on. (No means no except for toddlers, for whom it might mean anything; we're presently getting nos as she does the thing she's saying no about.) The house is full of imaginary friends-- half the time she's talking to someone else, who might be Cowgirl Kate (when she's not being Cowgirl Kate; it goes back and forth a lot), or Frances, or some other book character, or her hands or feet might be having a conversation. Usually they'll be arguing with each other. ("Can we come in? No! Ok, then, we'll go home. No, you can come in.") On the occasions when her silly parent butts in (there are sometimes longish pauses in the conversation where I can ask things like, "Who's going home?") she will stare blankly at me for a minute before answering. ("My left foot." [subtext: why are you asking me weird questions, Mommy?]) Although it was grauwulf who was solioquising loudly to the kitchen cabinets by way of complaining about work when she came up to him and said very seriously, "Don't do anything odd, Daddy."

The most recent thing is a pair of little red traffic cones (probably from the little people parking garage) that she asked permission to liberate from her grandma's house yesterday, and she's been carrying them around upside down and pretending to fill them up with ice cream ever since. The box of fake pearl necklaces also recently came to light-- there was a spate of putting them on & insisting that she wanted "to dress up in high heels and nightgowns!" and have a ball. I explained the difference between a nightgown and a ball gown, at which point she gave up the adjective entirely. (I think she got the concept out of Christina Katerina and the Box, a picture book I highly recommend to anyone inclined towards that level of literature.)

We finally went to see the new Star Wars movie before grauwulf left the country, since we both managed to be free on a day my mother was up to look after the Megatherium. Egregious conservation of mass & orbital rotation issues aside,** I thought it did pretty well with appropriate Star Wars-y feel. Totally with TexAnne about wanting Maz merch. <3 the quirky old lady whose ruleset splits the difference between my grandmother and my toddler. I hope someone helped her put her temple back together. (Leia continues to be that cool lady who's about 20 years older than I am. Huh.)


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*I read an article recently that mentioned apparently the spacey/non-hyperactive (usually female & late onset-- tho not always, as my brother's had it pretty much forever) kind of ADD is pretty closely linked with depression/anxiety. Not only because apparently the popular image is of the hyperactive sort which leads to non-diagnosis. And yeah, that kind of is the crux of my problems with toddler parenting; the Megatherium is at the best of times a decision fatigue vector, and my brain burns out on that sort of thing a lot faster than many peoples' do.

**I might have leaned over and muttered, "...so they just kind of moved the sun over?"

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Well, we haven't got the cold where you don't cough up enough ick and get bronchitis or pneumonia. But we have got the one where the toddler never gives up coughing, and that was the *last* one. Mostly on the recovery side now, tho, and I even managed to shovel out a parking space for my mother to come up for grandma day without coughing my lungs out.

And now grauwulf is off to Japan (Tokyo-ish) and Hawaii (Oahu) for a week and a half. (Mostly work, several days vacation because once you're already there.)

Does anyone have recommendations for what one ought particularly to go see? He's interested in tech-geekery, history, nature/geology, and dusting off his scuba certs. Or that awesome thing that nobody thinks to ask about. Anyone? (Or, what should I ask him to bring back? A Sanrio outlet has already been located for toddler shopping.)

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I just finished rereading Diana Wynne Jones's Enchanted Glass, and continue to be a little bit "Wow, how did she get away with that?" about a couple things. It's a kid's book, with two POV protagonists, and the first one we meet is 30. The 12-year-old doesn't even get introduced for a few chapters.

I've been thinking about this for a while, partly because we go through so many picture books at the moment, and a bunch of the early-reader levels in between full-sized picture books and real no-illustrations chapter books. There are a lot of picture books about kids, or animate toys, or animals both anthropomorphized and not, but there's also a reasonable subset that's about adults. Some of it is expectation setting (here are ways to be when you grow up), some of it is adults doing silly things so the kids can feel superior, some of it is folklore retellings. But it's there; you have books where the identification character is all grown up.

The early reader books that we've had so far are a little more kid-skewed (Cowgirl Kate's parents are referred to a few times, but portrayed in one flashback illustration), but there are preschool-friendly versions of adult franchises (so far we have avoided easy reader Avengers and Star Wars, and also the girl-target equivalents, though the most grown-up of those is Barbie.) And there's Cynthia Rylant/Arthur Howard's lovely Mr Putter & Tabby series, full of mundane adventures about a stodgy old guy and his cat, and their enthusiastic new-thing-loving old lady neighbor Mrs Teaberry & her "good" dog Zeke. Also some folklore.

And then we get to mid-grade, and I can't think of anything else with adult POV. A bunch of proto-YA (Mercedes Lackey, some earlier Robin McKinley, the stuff we read in the 80s/early 90s) has teen-to-adult transitions or 20-somethings. I can think of a couple technicalities (a character who starts off identified as 15, but it turns out to be more complicated...), some older love-interests, and there's a lot I haven't read. Am I missing anything? Is this a marketing category thing, or assumed kid disinterest thing, or what? Do you have to be DWJ to get away with having a full adult main character in a kids' book?

Now I'm curious.

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