Ring, Ring... Ring, Ring...

Most pregnant women report that they are the victim of insanely vivid dreams throughout pregnancy.  I am no different.  Some of my dreams have been amusing, some sad, and some terrifying.

Last night's dream left me feeling very frustrated for no particular reason other than I was frustrated in the dream.  I hate waking up in an emotional state that is incongruous to how the day actually starts.

I dreamed that the phone was ringing, ringing, ringing and going repeatedly to voice mail as I was helping Violet in the bathroom.  Scott was apparently standing right next to the phone and refusing to answer it.  For some reason, the voice mail was piped through an amazing network of speakers run through my house, so I could hear the callers leaving messages.

First, it was my OB, saying "Please call the office."

Then it was my mother-in-law calling to say, "Your OB called and needs you to call her office."

Then the OB called back, again asking me to "Call the office."

Then my mother called to tell me, "Your OB called and wants you to call her office."

Finally, the OB called one last time.  As she was leaving the message, I was begging, crying, pleading with Scott to answer the phone because it was IMPORTANT!  And he still didn't. 

At that point, Milo stirred us from sleep for the day.  I don't know what the OB was calling about and I was vaguely resentful of my hubby for not answering the phone in my dream.  Poor guy, I'm just glad I realized that dream frustration doesn't equal real life crazy-hormonal nastiness on my part.

But, seriously, how hard is it to answer the phone for your pregnant wife??

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream...

In the time shortly before my alarm went off, I took a most unusual journey in the land of nod.

I dreamt that I was out shopping with the kids, who were mostly behaving.  Our final stop was a certain chain store known for selling bedroom and bathroom accessories and beyond, too -- just how does a store sell beyond?

In my dream, the kids were trailing behind my me as I pushed a cart through the aisles, craning my neck to see the merchandise waaaay up there -- I guess I didn't have binoculars handy. The store seemed endless, but as we approached the corner where the bedding was on display, I was completely overcome by sleepiness.

My feet were dragging and I was leaning on the cart.  I stumbled to the nearest display, one of those with a partial bed set up so you can see how the sheets, comforters and ridiculously expensive pillows coordinate.  Of course, you can't really tell exactly how that stuff is going to look in your home, unless your home is a big box store with fluorescent lighting and a gleaming white floor. 

I zombied right up to the display, lifted the coverlet, and crawled in.  Yes, in my dream I took a nap in a busy store with my children skipping all around me.  My dream nap lasted about an hour, at which point I startled myself awake (in the dream) and gasped, "Where are my children?"

I started calling and each child appeared from a different aisle completely unharmed.  They looked happy to see me and were ready to go home.  I slid out of the bed (display) and took them each by a hand, asking Milo, "Did mommy fall asleep?"

"Yes.  But we stayed close by.  The other kids played tag with us and the man-ja-jer (manager) said not to wake you."

I looked around to discover that I wasn't the only mommy to snooze in a display -- the other three beds were occupied by slumbering mothers whose children were left to fend for themselves in the store, apparently playing tag with my babes.  I sheepishly herded the kids out the door, slinking by the smiling manager, a grandmotherly woman who wished me, "I hope you had a great nap!"

When I woke this morning (for real, no pinching necessary), I was so shocked by my dream behavior.  Am I seriously so tired that I dream about sleeping?  Who dreams that they abandon their children in a store, neglecting their very safety for a nap?  Did I eat bad pizza last night?  How many licks DOES it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?

The world will never know...

Little House on the Prairie

If you are visiting from the Ultimate Blog Party 2010, click here for my post!

I have always, always, always, thought myself to be an urban chick.  I totally dig the city vibe, love the city sounds, the culture, the ability to get good sushi in minutes.  That kind of stuff.  I pictured myself taking public transportation to work, stopping in for yoga on my lunch break, and getting the chance to see limited-release films in a theater when they open and not through my Netflix cue.  Well, I probably imagined seeing those films on VHS because Netflix wasn't around 20 years ago.

But I find myself captivated by my life right now.  I can't wait to get home and shove my children out the door so that we can explore our yard, our world.  Our own little bit of Earth.  Maybe it stems from my girlhood adoration of the "Little House" books.  Maybe it is the push for Community Supported Agriculture.  I'm not sure, but I am awakening.

I have lived in Iowa nearly all of my life.  I have been surrounded by agriculture for 30 years.  It always felt like a backdrop, like the scenery for a play.  This is my life, it is set in Iowa and we know that because there are cornfields.  And livestock.  And tractors rumbling up the gravel road.  But the action of my life has always taken place indoors -- in a theatre, in a classroom, in my home.

I am suddenly so very excited to look into my summer -- to see my huge vegetable garden spreading wide, reaching deep into the earth to find nutrients, sucking them from the soil into their ripe flesh.  I hear the chickens clucking as Scott plucks their brown eggs from their nest boxes.  Serving venison stew from the deer that he and his brothers hunted.  I imagine entire meals cooked from ingredients we raised -- the vegetables, the starch, the fruit, the protein are all from our own hands.

Suddenly, it occurred to me that if I am not buying produce, chicken, stew meat or eggs, I can afford the fancy, organic, non-hormon-ed or antibiotic-ed socially responsible milk and cheese for my kids.  I don't have to walk by the organic whole-grain pasta staring longingly at it any more.  I wonder about what it would cost to buy a side of organic free-range beef or pork.  I think I'll research that tonight...  I imagine churning butter from organic cream -- I have left cream whipping in the mixer for just long enough that I accidentally made butter, what if I could do it on purpose?  Maybe there's someone who would barter milk for eggs?  Homemade ice cream with lusty red raspberries bouncing in the bowl.

My country life is bursting and bountiful.  At lease I hope it will be.  I could run completely out of steam when I need to weed the garden yet again in July when it is 95 degrees out and my allergies are insufferable.  Or I could thrive like the plants in this Iowa soil, no longer seeing my earth as a backdrop, but as an integral part of my identity.  I have always wanted to be Laura Ingalls Wilder, maybe this is my chance.

Full

I have been having a recurring dream.

In the dream, my breasts are huge and swollen with milk, swollen like my milk has just come in after giving birth. I feel their weight, sense the skin tightening over the hardened and engorged tissue... I sense let-down's stinging path and smell the milk as it soaks my shirt. And I am overjoyed.

Then I wake in the pre-dawn calm, my hot cheek resting against the cool of my sheets. I hear my children breathing in their sleep over the monitor, feel the steadiness of Scott in bed with me. I sense my family.

As sleep falls away I awaken the realization that my breasts are not full. My arms, aching to hold a baby, squeeze my pillow as a silver tear slides from my eye. Disappointment lands like a stone tossed into an empty well, there is no splash this early in the morning, only a cold, hard thud.

If these walls could talk...

Eleven days until we close on both houses. Eleven days...

Yes, the selling part of selling a house without a realtor was actually pretty easy. Assembling the documents necessary for sale was not too taxing. Stressing about all of it has stunk like earthworms after a drenching rain.

I'm somewhat torn as the couple who has bought our house seems lovely, yet completely handy-man-helpless. As a result, we've had to make some last minute repairs and they now want to inspect the repairs. As if they would really know what was different... Some of the stuff was pretty minor -- like replacing a pane of glass in a window. They wanted to know if we'd had an estimate done to fix it. Umm... nope. The estimate is $15.00 for a sheet of glass and about an hour of Scott's time to replace the glass, re-glaze, and put a couple of coats of paint on it. Woo-hoo... But we did it as we were concerned that they would try to extract money for a $300.00 repair or something from the price of the house.

That's the part that has me a little stressed. We're not anonymous to the buyers. In fact, they know where our new house is as they, too, looked at it. Their adorable little daughters will be in school with our kids and we're bound to run into them here and there around town.

Are they gonna talk smack about us if, five years down the road one of our repairs goes bad? Are we forever going to feel like we need to hold our breaths lest a completely normal conversation contain the words, "So the deck fell in last night..." Even though the deck is actually in better shape than it was when we moved in, that kind of anxiety. We didn't sell them a lemon. We disclosed everything that we knew about the property, and then some. We completed all five of their requested repairs. We're ready to move onward and upward and north of town to our new home.

I'm sure there will be a moment of sadness as we close the door for the last time, knowing that we brought our babies home there and that our first memories as a family were created there. Thank goodness for photos! Thousands of photos documenting every step as we redid the house, scraping lath and plaster from the walls, re-wiring, re-plumbing, re-everything-ing. Images of my kids in the yard, sleeping in their beds, bathing in the tub... Snapshots of holidays and birthdays and just the joy of day-to-day life... These will always live on in my heart.

But it's time for a new family to grow in the house. And I'm not sure that the sole factor of owning the same house ties us an any way to the new family, much as they try to invite us for dinner and chit-chat as if we were friends. Maybe we will be some day? Who knows? Maybe Violet won't remember living there when she's invited over for a birthday party... I don't know. I do worry that we might get a panicked call some day, "Help! There XYZ happening and we don't have so much as a hammer! What do we do?" Will we be tied to the house as a retained handyman? Offered dinner to "Please come fix ABC!" How bizarre is it to step into a place that holds so many cherished memories, to reach for a glass and open the cabinets to find someone else's stuff? To sigh over wallpaper they stripped, not knowing how arduous the task of hanging it was -- to feel like a stranger in one's old home.

Truth be told, we never expected to be in the house for almost nine years. It is a starter home and we weren't planning to stick around the area for a decade. Our plan was to get Scott some teaching experience, then move to a larger university. But the rigors of working at a larger school, the academic pressures required to gain tenure seemed detrimental to what we wanted in life and with our family. And now we're staying put, just as surely as we thought we'd be leaving in 2005, 2006, 2007... We never intended to move back to Iowa, and now, it appears, we never intend to leave.

Sometimes I feel like I am shoehorned into a life I wasn't intended to live -- that my psychic twin is living on a coast, dining daily on sushi and living in a yoga studio and the I am the imagined twin planting my roots back into the Iowa soil where I was raised. I daydream about the places I'd like to go and the things I'd like to see and know that, for now, it's going to be a while before we can afford to travel the globe.

But then I take Milo to preschool and one of his classmates squeals, "It's Milo! Hi, Milo!" and he lights up, thrilled that his friend is glad to see him and I know that we are making the right choice for our family by living in a place that has soil rich enough to sustain our needs. Mount Vernon isn't a bad place -- it's an affluent, liberal, artsy community. I believe that it is safe, it has good schools, and we can reach nearly everything we need by driving a short distance to Iowa City or Cedar Rapids. Our community is growing, and if we were to get involved more deeply, we could have a large impact on the direction it takes as it grows. This is not a bad place to take root.

And so, little house in town, we're leaving you for a larger house on the prairie. I hope that you bring your new family as much fortune as we had while living there. Adieu...