Various interests swirling here:

The orthodontist’s office is holding a contest. The person who comes up with the best name for the betta fish on the counter wins the fish. Rose’s entry: Kalliope. (Get it? A Greek name? Betta sounds like beta, a Greek letter?) She has high hopes of winning. This has spawned (ba dum bum) discussions on odds/probability, subjective vs objective criteria, and breeds of fish. The latter necessitated a library trip yesterday, and this morning I have been regaled with tidbits about various breeds of freshwater aquarium fish.

The orthodontist and his assistant were greatly intrigued by Rose’s account of the middle-grade graphic novel, Smile, Raina Telgemaier’s award-winning account of her personal orthodontic ordeal in junior high. This came up when Dr. G mentioned bonding as the final step in Rose’s treatment plan (two years from now), and Rose volunteered that she had learned all about that in “this really great book I read.” She continued to explain that she had been “terrified about getting braces, but after I read Smile I was reassured.” Dr. G got quite excited and had his assistant write down all the information about the book.

We’ll be spending most of July at Dr. G’s office: two of the girls are getting braces.

So: fish, orthodontia, what else?

Jane is absorbed with practicing for piano guild and Shakespeare Club. (Reminds me: we need to create a human thumb out of Sculpey.) Recent reading has included Dorothy Sayers mysteries; Musashi (a manga series); L. M. Montgomery short stories; a collection of Best American Short Stories; Betsy and the Great World (again); various Caroline Cooney novels; Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Othello, and a bit of Henry IV, with corresponding sections in Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (which we are grateful to Mental Multivitamin for bringing to our attention). Oh, also the book she got for her birthday: A User’s Guide to the Universe.

Jane and I are going to work through Memoria Press’s Classical Rhetoric course together. Readings from: Aristotle’s Rhetoric; Adler’s How to Read a Book; Cochran’s Traditional Logic; and Figures of Speech. We’re going to start in a leisurely way this summer. Both of us are excited. Looks like some excellent discussion fodder.

Scott and Jane have been doing a kind of informal Film Club in the evenings. Recent viewings include: Men in Black, In the Line of Fire, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, A Few Good Men, The Natural, The Sixth Sense.

Bean and Rose spend a lot of time scootering in circles on the back patio, narrating adventures in a long-running fantasy story they play. Then Rose will disappear to the back room to write up the latest chapter on the computer. The subject matter shifts every week or so: sometimes a Warriors-inspired cat saga; lately the dramatic doings of a pair of princesses, one an ancient Egyptian and one Japanese. A set of Dover costume coloring books have provided necessary reference material. Beanie very earnestly desires to learn Japanese. Our library used to have a partnership with Rosetta Stone, but no longer, alas. I’m sure there must be some good resources online, but I haven’t done the homework yet.

Current favorite Wii game: Spectrobes (the older girls); Mario Kart (Wonderboy and Rilla).

I haven’t spent as much time in the back yard as I usually do this time of year. I think it’s because I’m sad about the absence of Monarchs. Everything else is lovely out there, though. A zillion bees (including honeybee and native species). Mourning cloaks, goldfinches, hummingbirds. A profusion of bloom. Jasmine breezes. Tomatoes in abundance. A great many weeds needing my attention.

Wonderboy has a new watch which affords him great delight. If you need to know the exact minute everything happens, every day, every minute, he’s your man.

Rilla lost her pink parkly shoes, we thought. This was high tragedy. Yesterday, oh the joy!, a friend kindly dropped them off—they had been left in her yard at last week’s Shakespeare/choir practice. Of course they had!

This missive just in from Rose:

Mommy, can you send me information and pictures about the Rosy Red Minnow?
Thanks, and love.

Gotta run.

We’ll have to take their word for it.

Jane and I thought the sign alone—”blight or famine”?—made the trip worthwhile, but some members of the back seat brigade opined otherwise.

We all loved seeing the wind farm, though.

A ballet of giants: breathtaking.

The desert was spread with a threadbare quilt of tiny yellow flowers. Any of you know what these are called?

And as long as I’m asking for IDs, how about this skipper I spotted in the backyard? Anyone? Bueller?

Not a great picture, so I don’t know if you can see the markings well enough to identify it. Can you see what a curious at-rest position its wings have? The top wings are perpendicular to the bottom wings. I’ve never seen that before.

Jane and I had had hopes of finding new-to-us butterflies in the desert, but sometimes you have to rely on your own backyard.

Photos by Jane, except the butterfly.

“…What are you looking for?”

“Presents. Five of them.” She explained, talking very fast, that no Ray ever came home from a visit without bringing presents. “It’s an old family custom,” she said.

“Hallelujah!” he exclaimed, shutting the book. “That’ll be fun, picking out five presents. I hope you have a brother. There’s a corking jack-knife here.”

—from Heaven to Betsy by Maud Hart Lovelace

Our “Betsy” came home from her trip yesterday with presents for everyone, in the grand Ray tradition. We tried to keep up our end of the tradition with a massive housecleaning, but I’m afraid I did not go so far as to scour the metaphorical coal scuttle. Jane’s equivalent of Willard’s Emporium was L.A.’s Little Tokyo: sky-blue chopsticks for Rose, stuffed Mario Kart mushrooms for Bean and the boys, and a pink piggy bank for Rilla. For her daddy, a Totoro keychain and a pack of Black Jack gum. And a bag of dark chocolates for me! That’s my girl.

Plus homemade cookies all around. Customized chocolate-chip cookies—extra dark chocolate in mine. I may have to send all my kids up to Kristen for cookery lessons. I hear Jane got a tutorial in baked tomato sauce. I look forward to sampling her homework.

And yes, I am giggling over equating L.A. with sleepy, one-horse Butternut Center. Then again, San Diego ain’t Deep Valley!

(Just ask Larry Humphreys.)

I thought I would be more freaked out about putting Jane on a train alone, going to Los Angeles for pity’s sake, but to my surprise I was more excited and happy for her than anything else. Maybe it’s all the time I’ve been spending in the high-school Betsy-Tacy books lately: I feel positively Mrs. Ray-ish about this trip: just tickled pink that Jane gets to have such a fun adventure. (Though of course we are missing her like crazy.)

Betsy was just Jane’s age, fourteen, when she went off to Butternut Center for a week on the farm with friends of her father’s. I was exactly Jane’s age when my parents sent me to Germany for seven weeks with a few other kids from school, to stay with some families who had known my English teacher when her husband was stationed in Kaiserslautern. Germany! With no cell phones, no internet! Mom and Dad, now that I know what it’s like, you amaze me.

It was an incredibly fun trip and I am so glad they let me go.

Jane seems to be having an incredibly fun trip, and I am so glad we let her go.

But I had to laugh at myself just now, when I checked her Facebook page for about the tenth time today and saw no new update. Yes, I am actually complaining that my teenager doesn’t spend enough time on Facebook.

We wore our new Christmas hats that my sister Merry made for us.

It was really too warm for them, but we were full of Christmas spirit.

As were the many doggies who attended the concert along with enthusiastic carol-singers.

It was all very merry and bright.

Possibly a little too bright.

Our all potential Christmas card photos turned out to be outtakes. That’s okay because I’ve already abandoned hope on sending out Christmas cards this year anyway.

The best part was when the organist invited audience members to join her onstage for the carol-singing. We didn’t know we’d get to be part of the concert! Beanie, Jane, and I were eager to sing. The rest of the gang watched from the back of the amphitheater.

We thought of our snowed-under East Coast friends when we sang White Christmas.

(Out here it’s a white T-shirt Christmas.)

The best part was the final song—an enthusiastic and somewhat ad-libbed rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus. It is still ringing in my ears.

Methinks we have ourselves a new holiday tradition.

Thanks for the hats, sis!

I mentioned the G/I doctor has ordered a bunch of tests for young Wonderboy. For some of the tests, we needed to deliver a stool sample to the Children’s Hospital—between the hours of 9 and 11:30—within one hour of, er, the sample’s production, if you know what I mean. The first hour of the day was filled with suspense. Would he or wouldn’t he? When would he?

Suddenly, at 8:15, there it was. Cue instant frenzy of parental activity, gathering lab slips, notating the time on the side of sample containers, barking out prepare-to-travel instructions to various children. It was downright cinematic, like the scene when the transport team flies into motion to get the liver or the heart to the desperate patient on the other side of the country. You could almost hear Ride of the Valkyries playing on the soundtrack.

I’d been given three separate vials whose tops unscrewed to reveal tiny, pointed spoons with which to scoop the precious commodity. Gross. Seriously gross. Scott put his own life at risk by saying, as he watched me maneuver a loaded (so to speak) spoon into the vial’s narrow opening, “It takes a very steady hand…”

What kind of crazy man messes with a woman armed with poo?

With astonishing rapidity I found myself in the minivan, large brown bag of samples stowed in the passenger seat (ew), boy and baby buckled in behind me. Before backing out of  the driveway, I invested thirty valuable seconds in tucking my Bluetooth into my ear and dialing Alice‘s number because, you know, we share everything.

“Houston,” I crowed, “we have liftoff!”

Alice happened to be at a Dunkin Donuts drivethrough window and I’m sure she was just really super happy to hear all about my adventures in poop-collecting. Sorry about that, sweetie. I hope you hadn’t ordered the chocolate cream-filled.

I could go on with this, but frankly the rest of the day was a bit anticlimactic. We made it to the lab with twenty minutes to spare, happily relinquished the brown bag to the care of gentle lab techs, waited in a line that materialized out of thin air at the stroke of nine for my poor boy’s turn in the bloodletting room (more tests), and returned to our happy home in plenty of time for an early lunch.

Not that I felt much like eating.

Later in the day, believe it or not, there was yet another doctor appointment (at the ped’s office this time, not the hospital), and then I braved the waiting-until-almost-the-last-minute crowd at the grocery store to buy cream for our Thanksgiving dessert (Scott’s famous grasshopper pie) and thirty or forty other small items I suddenly remembered I needed for turkey day. (On which, as it happens, we eat ham.)

Then I cooked and cooked and cleaned and cleaned (tomorrow is Shakespeare Club), and—dare I say it?—I’m pooped.

Drove to children’s hospital for Wonderboy’s appointment with our favorite specialist, the esteemed yet down-to-earth doctor of genetics. Only one of my boy’s many many physical anomalies seems to be genetic—the albinism—but Dr. J is also a dysmorphologist, which means she takes an interest any kind of birth defect or abnormality, whether its origins are chromosomal or developmental-in-utero. She’s the doctor who laughed at my possibly insulting analogy two years ago, when I said that dealing with specialists in so many different departments of the hospital was like trying to walk a bunch of dogs all pulling on their leashes in different directions.

“I’m sure it is,” she chuckled, earning my affection forevermore.

So I was looking forward to this appointment, even if it did cost Scott a day of vacation: he took the day off to ferry other children to other activities while I took the boys to see Wonderful Dr. J.

I arrived a tad bit early and found a good parking space in the garage down the street from the hospital. Our children’s hospital is a large complex with many buildings and it can be quite confusing to navigate, but I’d double-checked on the website this morning to make sure the Genetics Clinic was still where it had been last year.

(Ooh, foreshadowing.)

So into the clinic area we went, where the line was already beginning to snake, although it wasn’t yet 9 in the morning. And when we got to the front of the line, the nice check-in lady said, “Oh, I’m sorry, but the genetics clinic has moved.”

To a building approximately 714 blocks away. Or six, at least.

“You could walk,” she said doubtfully, “but you’ll probably want to move your car to the lot on Frost Street. It’s a pretty long walk.”

Since “moving the car” would have involved the whole lengthy process of unbuckling boy and baby from the double stroller and rebuckling them into carseats, I opted for the long walk.

Except it needed to be a long jog or else I’d be really late for the appointment.

I saw a shuttle bus and showed the driver my map, helpfully marked in green highlighter by the apologetic check-in lady, but he too was apologetic. “Sorry, we don’t go near that building.”

Which was a rather emphatic demurral, don’t you think? We don’t go near it? How far away could it be, if the shuttle bus  doesn’t go near it? Or is it perhaps radioactive? Should I don a hazmat suit before approaching the site?

At any rate, it was clear my options had dwindled to: jog. I lasted about two blocks before my jog muscle cried uncle. And here I thought I was getting into shape with all the exercise-bike-riding I’ve been doing at the gym since we joined the Y. I guess the difference is the exercise bike doesn’t involve pushing a stroller containing a scrawny five-year-old and a nine-month-old the size of a side of beef.

(You could hide pennies under those chins.)

So I walked and pushed and jogged and pushed, and there was a hill with a great deal more on the going-up side than the rolling-down side, and finally I saw a sign for the building that holds the fancy new clinic, and with much huffing and puffing, I delivered Wonderboy and his brother, the exceptionally cute side of beef, to the reception area.

The check-in lady at this clinic was embarrassed about the wrong directions on the website. I’m not the first parent to have been misdirected, it seems. “We keep calling them about it…” We—the embarrassed check-in lady and I—agreed that They (whoever they are) should have to make the walk themselves, once for every time a family arrives late and sweaty as a result of having put their trust in the website directions.

And eventually we got to have our appointment with Wonderful Dr. J. Who is, like every other doctor we’ve seen in buildings all over that sprawling medical complex and elsewhere, utterly baffled by our most pressing and persistent Wonderboy-related question, which has to do with his being the opposite of a side of beef (despite a hearty appetite). He’s been tested for everything the docs can think of, from cystic fibrosis to allergies to celiac disease to pancreatic something-or-other. But that’s a saga for another day. The topic of today’s anecdote is not My Child Is a Medical Mystery; it’s I Had to Take a Long Walk with My Two Adorable Sons in the Beautiful San Diego Weather, Poor Poor Me.

And the sequel, They Wouldn’t Validate My Parking in the New Clinic, So I Had to Go All the Way Back to the Old Clinic to Get My Ticket Stamped, O Woe.

What, you aren’t reduced to tears of overwhelming pity by this tale? Hmph. Um, um, well, I also had a dentist appointment in the afternoon. There. Now I’ve got you.

Oh, fine. It was actually quite a nice day. Okay? Are you satisfied? The girls got extra daddy time, and (for some) a trip to Jiffy Lube where there was an arcade machine containing all the best games of the 80s. The Jiffy Lube Man said kids played free and gave them a stack of quarters. And Scott bought them donuts. Two days after Halloween, with the candy still flowing freely: this was a very good day for my daughters. Jane wasn’t part of the video/donuts funstravaganza, but her science lab is moving into a chemistry unit and she came home radiant with excitement. Chemistry is Jane’s thiiiiing, to quote Little Bill’s father.

(We quote members of Little Bill’s family quite a lot around here. Especially Alice the Great. That Alice the Great is one of the best characters on television. Wise, twinkling, mellow, kind, observant, gentle, shrewd. And comfortable in her pink sweater and sneakers. I love her. This is going to sound ridiculous, but I have actually thought more than once, Gosh, she’s getting old. I hope she doesn’t die. And then I remember she’s a cartoon.)

Later in the day there was a long stretch of singing folk songs on the couch with the four youngest children, Bonny Doon and Loch Lomond and all my Scottish favorites, and also Down in the Valley which I still remember my grandma singing in her kitchen with two skillets sizzling on the stove and a spatula in her hand, and the smell of fried chicken livers filling the room, best smell in the world, and a plate of fried okra steaming on the counter, grease soaking into a paper towel, hear the wind blow, dear, hear the wind blow.

I bet Alice the Great makes good fried okra.

Our little singalong was underscored by a fair amount of kid-squabbling, the usual “I wanna sit next to Mom” scuffles, but that’s just the percussion section of life, keeping the tempo lively. I just sing “You take the high road” a little more loudly, arching an eyebrow at the oldest child in the squabble. This is probably not nearly as amusing to the intended recipient of my wit as it is to me.

Much like this post. What can I say? Writing long, nonsensical posts for my own amusement is my thiiiing.