My mom brought home her school’s white mice for the holidays. They’ve been sleeping all day but got very industrious at about ten this evening. In general I am not a fan of things that live in cages, nor things that have red eyes, but I sort of like them anyway. I’ve been experimenting with putting various things in their cage today (one of those wire and bead sculptures that you can sort of switch around into different shapes, pizza crust, various types of paper, etc) to see how they incorporate them into the vast construction project currently taking place in the cage. The wire thing has been a big hit, architecture and design-wise…some renowned experts in the field are hailing Missy Mousie and Mousie Mousie (Yes! Those are their names! Brilliant!) as the new Eames of rodent home d飯r, apparently.
This is the kind of thing I do when I’m home.
I got in late late Thursday evening and woke up yesterday feeling really sick. This used to happen to me whenever I came home from college…I’d get through exams and get on the plane and then get off a phelgmy red-eyed mess. I thought maybe it was the flu but now I think it was just from lifting weights on Tuesday. I’ve been going to the gym quite faithfully for at least three weeks now so I don’t know why I still get the Achy Muscles of Misery every single time I lift weights, but there you have it. Yesterday did not bode well for holiday happiness, I tell you. I couldn’t get comfortable and I had to take two baths and I kept burping loudly for some reason and I couldn’t sleep but then I would fall into a coma suddenly and wake up all sticky and sweaty with lifestyle magazines plastered to me under the covers and also I chose, obsessively, to listen to music that makes me cry over and over again. Plus my mom went out to a party so I was stuck alone in the house of my childhood, in the refurbished room of my childhood, which looks nothing like it did when I lived there except it still has the pink tile I snottily insisted upon after the hurricane when we lost the wood floors (along with two thirds of the rest of our stuff) and had to go to tile stores hours and hours away because nothing else was open. That’s still there. I used to have those glow in the dark star and planet stickers on my ceiling, most of which are gone, but some outlines of which I could sort of discern through my achy, feeling-sorry-for-myself haze last night. “Those are what’s left of my childhood!” I may have actually said aloud. Probably right before I fell into one of those comas again.
But then my mom came home from her party, looking very nice in her outfit (she wore the shoes I suggested, yay!) and she brought me a cold compress and pet my hair for a while and I felt much better.
I’ve also seen babies since I’ve been here…Marah’s new one and Manya’s relatively less new one. I went over to Marah’s yesterday and had to cry a little bit when she got up to hug me, still in her maternity clothes and a little sore, I imagine. Her baby is big, as babies go, but still looks impossibly tiny and new to me. I didn’t stay long and we didn’t even say much while I was there, but I just came home and bawled, you know, because of old friends and new babies and new phases of life and all that. Not sad bawling, necessarily, more along the lines of “I can’t believe this is really happening, we’re really not twelve anymore” bawling. You know the kind.
Since I was feeling much more energetic today I got to see Manya and her husband and her relatively less new baby today at the excellent Sir Pizza, which has and always will define good pizza for me. Little Landon is still pretty new to the eating solid foods thing, but I have high hopes that his first real food will be Sir Pizza, thereby initiating another generation of Key…um, Babies…into the joys and satisfactions thereof. He’s gorgeous and very funny and it was fun to hang out with him a little. I’m looking forward to the time when Jacob is big enough to sit up and get sweet potatoes all over his face as well.
So, with two such fantastic little boys around, what is the most appropriate response that an auntie could have? Knit them the world’s fantastically horrific hats, of course. I just got to the difficult part on Jacob’s hat, which caused me to call my knitting shop in emergency mode a couple of hours ago. The woman took me very seriously. “Okay, okay, just calm down now. Just tell me where you are in the pattern…WHERE ARE YOU IN THE PATTERN? Decreasing? Okay, don’t worry, we’re going to figure this out together.” She helped me out (“No, dear, there are no stupid questions”) and so I’ve switched to the double pointed needles now, you’ll be happy to know, and am now at the point where I’m remembering that knitting is all about math and that I’m not great at math. My poor mom tried to read me something out of her magazine and I actually snapped at the person who gave me birth: “Mooooooooom! Wait till I get to the end of this round, okay? Gah! You just don’t understand me!” I then rolled my eyes, stamped my feet, ran to my room and slammed the door. I think Mom’s pretty glad to know I’ve chosen to work on this new hobby while I’m home.
Anyway, the hat is looking really weird and I don’t have much hope that Landon’s hat, for which I have the yarn but haven’t started yet, will be much better. Oh well. It’s important to give children wildly ugly clothing quite early, so that they can have pictures taken of them with forced grimaces and have to send thank you notes that say “Dear Aunt Chiararaara: Thank you for the hat. It is very stripey. I wear it whenever Mom says you are going to come over so that you will think that I wear it all the time, but I don’t really. Next year, just a hint, I would like a Playstation. Love from your not-really-nephew.”
Maybe I could make little Christmas hats or scarves or vests or something for the mice? Would that be weird? I just gave them a couple of strips of yellow legal pad. They loooooooove it. Yellow legal pad is their best friend.
Yeah, this is how the entries are going to be for a couple of weeks, I’m afraid. Not a lot going on here to write about but really, it’s just what I need.