Phantom Cries

I'm sure this is typical parent-conscience stuff: you put the kid(s) to bed, retreat to whatever you were doing, sometimes on another floor of the house, and then...

you hear them.  Or you think you do.

You sort of stop what you're doing for a moment, and... no more peeps.  You go back to whatever you were doing.  Or, you weren't crazy, someone's crying, and you go make sure that all the backs are rubbed and no one's fuzzy ladybug has fallen out of the crib again.

Lately, though, I'm hearing those little peeps a lot.  It's unnerving.  It happens mainly at night, but the phantom cries might happen in the middle of the day, too, at nap time.  I try to keep the house buzzing during the day so that my little guy, the lighter sleeper of the two, learns how to sleep through noise (and he's getting better at it).  So if the dishwasher or washing machine is humming, the radio's on, or I'm on the phone, it's likely that I'll hear a high-pitched squeak that may have come from an appliance, but sort of doesn't sound like any appliance, and totally could be my imagination.  But it turns the pit of my stomach in a weird way.

Yes, we have a monitor.  We have two kinds, actually.  Neither of them are great, one because it sounds like a static-y walkie-talkie even when no one's stirring, and the other, because the battery needs recharging after about 15 minutes of use.  So I tend to let my ears do the work.

This weekend, we had our kids stay with my mom for a night while we attended Heath's annual office party.  It was the first time in 20 weeks we'd planned on getting a full-night's sleep, with all the benefits of being able to lounge in bed, and we were psyched--I really hadn't slept well in nine months + 20 weeks, so I was doubly psyched.  And don'tcha know, I woke up every couple of hours because--you guessed it--I thought I heard something.

These phantom cries are mysterious to me.  Are they in my psyche?  It doesn't help that during the office party dinner, the folks at our table somehow got on the topic of real-life ghost stories.  One woman told us all about the little boy (a ghost) who was hanging around her house because, as her medium-friend told her, he was lost, confused, and lonely.  So this woman explained that she could just sense the boy, thought she'd seen him peeking around corners at her when she watched t.v. and so on.  I was totally freaked out by the time we came home, and tried not to look in any corners.  Especially the corner where a balloon that Dev brought home from a restaurant yesterday seems to like to... play.

The scientific explanation for why some of us hear these cries is here.

The not-so-scientific explanation is here.

As I type this, I hear the little croaky wail that heralds Sol's waking.  It's his wake-up time, so I know it's really him.  I'm going to try to ignore the balloon that keeps bobbing up and down in that corner of the living room.

Relics

My daughter insisted tonight that we read Library Lion for the 30th time this week.  It's a little long for her, so she's identified the pages with the most writing on them and thumbs to the next page for me.  One page she likes to look at has an illustration of the lion sniffing around a library card catalogue.  It occurred to me that the mere mention of a card catalogue renders this beautiful book a dated classic.  Like the mention of penny candy or chocolate egg creams.

We have a card catalogue in our house that we use as a stuff/crap-organizer (paper, pens, scissors, coupons, etc.).  We also have a 1930-something Royal typewriter that my parents found for me when I was in college.  (I used it to write love notes to some of the guys I crushed on, including two T.A.'s in the philosophy department.  The typeset was a nice touch.  It worked for me.)  Another relic in the house is the amp I keep in a closet--I think it's from the '50's, but got it for $20 at an antique store in Maine with a beat-up electric guitar I later swapped with a friend for her beat-up acoustic.  

We have an old grain cutter in our attic.  When Heath saw it at a yard sale in our neighborhood, his love for cool-looking old stuff flared up and suddenly, there he was, dragging it down our street, like a hunter with a deer slung over his shoulders, into the house.  It's kind of a nice piece of furniture until you realize it can't do much but support a few picture frames and take up space.  It has a scythe-like apparatus that scares the shit out of me, even though it's probably dull from not having been used since... um, whenever people used to cut grain with this thing.

Relics don't hold the same cache as antiques.  Antiques are precious, maybe worth something, have sentimental value--like my grandfather's mandolin he somehow managed to bring from Europe, along with his family and what few possessions he had, in 1948.  I think of him every time I look at it.  The grain cutter: I think about when we might have our next yard sale.  Relics take up space unless you can put them to good use, like creative recycling.  Antiques are things you'd save from a fire.  My grandmother's solid, wood, hand-made nursing chair: an antique.  A wooden beverage crate in our basement: relic.  We have many things like these in our house.

Which is probably what separates our house from those that look really put-together and all adult-like.  Our relics/antiques take up space without purpose, at least for now, until our bright ideas hit.  Or until we're really out of space because the kids' toys are taking over.  At the end of the day, Heath and I are people who love innovation and appreciate the skill and artistry of what went into making stuff.  (Note: we fell in love with our house for it's 1902 charm; only later did we learn none of the windows opened.)  Now it's up to Heath to figure out what to do with the grain cutter, and me, what to do with that old wood and glass medicine cabinet I found last summer that's sitting around in the foyer.

I know the day will come when I show our kids the record player and record collection, play something for them so that they can really hear and feel the lick of the needle on the vinyl, tell them how important the sound of that was/is, that digital recording can't quite capture it.  And I know that the real relic in the house will be me.

Wordless Wednesday: Anatomy of a Birdhouse

Scary Things Around the House

Things you don't want to see while you're cleaning up the kitchen alone.

Dev just drops her "babies" all over the house in weird positions.  At a glance, it looks like a crime scene. Eek.
And I HATE clowns.  I don't know who drew this one--it couldn't have been my two-year-old.  Please note how the paper is cleverly tucked behind the placemat, so that it looks like the clown is just WAITING to jump out at me.  I may have to burn this.

Let's Get It Started

I got some thoughtful and insightful feedback from one of my favorite bloggers recently, and so I thought it might be time to change direction.  I'll keep Writing the Open Road around for travelogue, and here, at Aprons and Blazers, I'll be writing more about adventures in mommy-dom.  


Some posts here will be works-in-progress, shitty first drafts, and revisions of former posts.  Deal with it.


Hope to see you here often!  As always, thanks for reading.