The MeMe That Is Going Around…

We are using both her given Chinese names as one of her middle names. Her name is going to be Emerson Rose [CN] [R.’s Last Name]. Emerson after Ralph Waldo because R. is an American literature scholar and likes RWE a whole bunch. And we both really like the nickname that comes out of Emerson, although we’re not sure how we’re going to spell it yet–Emme or Emmy. We threw Rose in there so that we could make a cute longer nickname out of it, actually–Emme Ro. We would have just used her CN as the lone middle name without “Rose” at all, but…

okay, we interrupt this previously scheduled programming for a wee confession. If things progress smoothly with our agencies (yes, plural now) and the CCAA, then we already know who our daughter is going to be, as she is on a waiting list, and we are sending in an LOI for her. And her given Chinese names are Fu Lu. So, her full name will be Emerson Rose Fu Lu [R.’s Last Name]. We would have gone with just Emerson Fu Lu [R.’s Last Name], but then we would have had a nickname of Emme Lu. Or Emme Fu. Both of those are too close to Emmy Lou Harris for our taste. (Not that we have anything against ELH…I’m just sayin’.) Especially because R.’s last name also ends in an “is.” So, we’re using “Rose” purely as a way to create a cute nickname for her. Emme Ro.

Phew. Good grief, that was long explanation. I’m beginning to bore myself with myself.

I find absolutely no reason to cover this ground again. If you don’t know how I feel about this subject, read this post or this one or even this one.

R. has been scouting trails this week on his mountain bike that might be tame enough to take the girl on in the future.

Okay, actually another time-out confession: we call her “the bee.” Why the bee, you ask? Because one of her referral pictures has this funky, home-processing photo background that proclaims “I AM A BEE” down the side of the photo where she is standing. We have taken to saying “I am a bee” at almost every opportunity. Like, just walking around the house, we now say, “I am a bee,” in place of “good morning, honey” or whatever.

Hence…R. has been scouting trails this week that we might be able to take the bee on in the future. In one of those wee bike seats, just about right for a bee.

I see myself reading to her. A lot. I see her finger painting. And helping me bake cookies and pancakes. And hanging ornaments on the Christmas tree. And looking at bugs. And planting flowers and tomato plants together in the spring.

We have decided we are not going to stop traveling just because we are parents. We want to take her places and show her things. I want to take her to the ocean, so she can smell the salt and hear the waves and feel the tide suck on her toes.

Years ago, I had close friends who became first-time parents (biologically). I remember watching when their son was toddler age, and we would go pick him up at school: he would come zooming out of the school doors and race, wide-eyed and wild, in a bee-line for his dad’s (or his mom’s) open arms. I vowed that some day, I would feel that feeling of a child racing, haywire and helter-skelter, for my arms, as if he or she was going to burst if they didn’t get there fast enough.

I just finished Cheri Register’s Beyond Good Intentions. Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son is very affecting. Toddler Adoption: A Weaver’s Craft is coming up next on my reading list.

Sleep.

Any of the Nancy Drews for prose. Hailstones and Halibut Bones for poetry. See here for more of my faves.

I experienced a real learning curve in my attitude towards the Lifebook. I was so ready to have these things be just another excuse for a redthreadladybugchinadoll moment, that I was writing the whole idea off as a cutesy-pie crafty project. But now I have been educated a bit. I realize that the Lifebook will be very important to my daughter as she negotiates her past, her adoptive history, her Chinese heritage, her time before she came to us. It is an attempt fill in some of the missing pieces of her early life, and I hope that I can do it justice. In that sense, I am terrified of screwing it up. I ordered some books earlier this week to help me figure out how to do this: Lifebooks: Creating a Treasure for the Adopted Child and Adoption Lifebook: A Bridge to Your Child’s Beginnings.

Bird watching.

Yes, if it helps her to bond with/attach to us or feel secure early on. Whatever works for her individual needs.

I am a huge fan of the name Calum for a girl. Callie as the nickname. R. isn’t.

Catherine Zeta Jones.

Absolutely, light off. Must be pitch black.

Absolutely, experiment. I don’t mind eyeballs even. I’ll try just about anything. Raw is good too.

The Naked Ovary was my first. *Blush.* Any of my ALT peeps’ blogs, I really love to read. They are such wonderful women (and a couple men, too).

Sin City

What happens in Vegas, doesn’t always stay in Vegas…

(just click on the photos to get a clear view of them…)

Day 1: The Three-Martini Night

Thanks to my wonderful hubby, we got to travel to Vegas the day before my 40th birthday in style…

I felt like Nancy Drew in her roadster. Unfortunately, fashion does not always allow for function, and–four hours of convertible later–my hair turned to a nice texture of straw with a little string thrown in for good measure.

After dinner, we went to The Lounge, high atop our hotel, to witness the neon desert in person.

We got there about 10:30, and I ordered a martini. I’m a Tanquerey girl because I like a little bite, and I love vegetation. The more olives the better. The funny thing is, I don’t drink anymore. Not since I sought help for the infertility and my witch doctor acupuncturist suggested I restrict my intake of alcohol (and caffeine, sugar, wheat, and dairy). But you can’t really turn 40 without a little help from your friends, so I managed to break every one of those restrictions this week.

Now, back to the drinking…

Several martinis later, I was waxing on to my ever-patient husband all about the road of life, and how I was seemingly forever taking exit ramps, when I happened to glance down at my cell phone:

Oh, NO. I am fucking the freak out. How did this happen??!! I am freaking through my last minute of 30-somethingness, and then

it’s over. And I’m over it. Or mostly over it. R. told me that I had the death conversation (with myself, apparently) at about 2:00 AM, but I don’t remember too much of that.

Day 2: Here Comes the Sun

On my birthday, we decided to catch some rays by the pool. We soon discovered that there are distinct arenas with distinct demographics out at “the beach” (it’s Vegas, baby, so a beach in the desert is a beach in the desert). By the wave pool, there are your single twenty-somethings in teensy eensy bikinis. There is Jessica Simpson and Fergie on the loudspeakers. There is a lot of coconut oil in the air. I’m only half-sorry to say that we didn’t stay…

we headed over to the Lazy River, a little Motown, and the waft of Coppertone, where all the women slung sarongs around their middles (like me), and most of them had kids splashing around…and I’m thinking…oh, god…this is it…this is 40…and I LIKE it. I LIKE the Lazy River. After all, there’s a current to carry you along…

which means you don’t have to work too hard, right?

That evening’s libations were more tame…well, except for the absinthe. We decided we needed a little of the Green Goddess to usher in the new decade…

even though it’s a fake version of the GG since this country does not allow the sale of wormwood-infused liquor. Even though they (”they”=the alcohol scientists, of course) now know that the wormwood in absinthe does NOT make you go insane and do harm to yourself or others. So, my best guess is that what we were really drinking was sambuca with green food dye.

But I really needed it because I was wearing these:

And, once again, fashion was NOT allowing for function. Holy crap. I thought my feet were going to fall off by the end of the night. And we still had more walking to do because hubby got tickets to see the new Cirque de Soleil show, LOVE, based on all the Beatles tunes. And we had some company. Which meant I had to do a lot of standing in line. In Those Shoes.

There were some cool stage props, but mostly this was a lot of Soleil without a lot of Cirque. R. was particularly disappointed. I believe he was mumbling something about “mocking his generation.” Or maybe there was just one too many miniskirted clowns on skates.

Days 3-4: Trade Show on a Stick

The rest of our time inVegas was taken up by the trade show for the palm tree farm and by eating.

Being Vegas, some of the companies with booths at the trade show decided they needed to Do It Up Right–so they hired one of the Cirque de Soleil performers to trapeze in the air above us. No nets. No ropes. Just flipping out.

They were selling some sort of motor for fish tank filters, I think. Who the hell knows. Who the hell cares.

We got to take the in-laws out to dinner at some schmoozy place that had their wine list completely computerized:

Ah, the wave of the future. Someday maybe we can even just take our wine in pills, like the astronauts. I wonder what that will do to toasts. Not to mention Holy Communion.

This place also had a hamburger dinner on the menu that–I shit you not–cost $5,000. Don’t believe me? Here’s the beef:

It does come with a bottle of wine that I imagine makes up about $4,975 worth of the $5,000. But still. You’d have to win pretty damn big at the tables to swallow that. (By the way, we lost $80 in about 2 minutes at the slots and gave up on the gambling for this trip. Losing fast is no fun. I’m not sure why losing slowly is so much more acceptable, but it just is.)

Finally, I will leave you with what I now consider to be The Message of Turning 40 for me: A Ladybug Sighting!!!!

There she was, on my plate no less. A-plum-tomato-and-black-olive-studded LADYBUG. And I ate her right up.

Time Passages

In my little blog profile underneath the bird icon, it says that one of the main things I deal with here at The Singing Bird is “turning 40.” It’s about time to address that because, well, I’m turning 40…on Monday.

And the first thing I want people to know about me and getting older is that I love to do it. I crave birthdays–other people’s, as well as my own. Not sure why, but I am truly a celebrator of “the birthday season.” For years (until this one, actually), I even celebrated my half-birthday: March 18th. Some of my friends even sent me cards for my half-birthday because I would frekken talk about it so much. Because, being the 0.5 mark, I would get to “round up” on that day. Because I LIKED getting older.

I suppose it’s because I have hung out with people older than me for most of my adult life that I enjoyed aging. My husband is 11 years older than me, and most of our friends fall somewhere in between. I stopped coloring my hair for a while, too, because, ya know, gray was cool. And I do have a lot of gray. One of my friends calls it “salt and pepper.” But it’s back to a nice toasty-reddish-brown these days.

Because, lately, for the first time, I haven’t wanted my birthday to arrive. Dread would be the more accurate way to describe my attitude to Monday. It’s not like Monday’s going to be radically altered from Sunday or Tuesday, or 40 radically altered from 39 or 41, right? Yet the world does seem to treat it as a line in the sand. More so than 30 or 35, which I didn’t even blink at.

Part of it is the reproductive thing. For women, 40 is that moment when, magically, and for better or worse, some hormonal wand is waved over your ovaries, causing them to begin the shriveling and dessicating process. Eggs abandon ship, endocrine levels fluctuate wildly, cycles get all skewy. Not really, of course. Not right away. Or maybe, already, years ago. But the culture–and my reproductive endocrinologist–would have you believe that the day you turn 40, the uterine wars begin.

Part of it is the cliche thing. You know, the mid-life crisis. Or the beginning of The Change. Or the “We Card Under 40 Here” sign. Or the “40 Is The New 30″ line. Or the idea of becoming a wise woman, a creative woman, as opposed to a pro-creative one. And, on the phone this morning, my father repeated to me that all-time winner of a cliche, “you’re only as old as you feel.” Or maybe it was, “you’re only as old as you think you are.” Well, fuck. I don’t FEEL wise. I don’t particularly FEEL creative these days. And I apparently missed the boat on being pro-creative. So, fuck, What. Am. I. Doing. Here?

Maybe it’s the metric system. Yeah, that’s right. The Metric System. That way of measuring the world by tens that they insisted to us in elementary school we were absolutely, positively going to need to know when we grew up. So, here’s how I figure it…right now, right this minute, at the age of 39, I can reach back in my mind to my twenties pretty easily. A mere 10 years ago…29. But come Monday, my twenties will recede like a bullet train into the distant past because then, my mind will reach back 10 years and think…30. My twenties will forever be walled off from the present moment by being on The Other Side of my thirties. Not that my twenties were any big whoop. I’m just sayin’: The decade hop no longer brings me back that far.

Speaking of my dad, he has a theory about aging. At least he did a while ago, when he first told me about his theory of “the glumph.” He must have been about 65 then. The Theory of The Glumph makes a lot of sense. He maintained that, day to day, we don’t really experience getting older. We are busy, we go about our lives, we succeed, we fail, we just generally jump through our hoops. But then, on certain days, in certain years, we have a “Glumph” moment. We suddenly realize, oh, shit. I’m older. I’m quite a bit older than the last time I Glumphed. How the fuck did that happen because as far as I knew I was riding along this life train and all-of-a-sudden, Glumph, I’m at a station I don’t recognize. (Please note: this is a paraphrase of my dad. My dad would never say “fuck.” Except in 1988 when the Redskins won the Superbowl. Then I do believe I heard him say, “Fucking unbelievable!” for the first and only time. But he had had some scotch.)

Maybe there’s really something to this 40 thing. Something special. Something remarkable. A reason why the fashion magazines delineate the clothing spreads into “What to Wear in Your 20-30s” versus “What to Wear in Your 40s” that stands apart from the commercial hype. As I try to adjust my attitude a bit in anticipation of the inevitable, I’ve been thinking about the number 40. It does have some mystical associations in our culture. But I found another blogger who says it much, much better than I was going to, so–with her blessing–I’m going to quote her instead. She has a blog called 1,167, which refers to the number of days she has left until she turns 40. In her welcome post, she explains it this way:

I know, at face value forty is just a number, not inherently any more or less significant than 39 or 41. But it is a number charged with meaning all the same. In the story of the Great Flood, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. The Israelites wandered 40 years in the desert. Christ spent 40 days in the wilderness. In the Judeo-Christian culture, anyway, forty seems to mark the end of soujourn, a time of deliverance and re-emergence. It is the number of retrospection, and of looking ahead to the next epoch. A time to collect oneself.

It seems to be a liminal number. Like the bordertime between day and night, the turn of a season, or the edge of the woods. One of the thin places. Look at all the nervous energy it provokes in people. “Lordy, lordy, look who’s forty!” We sense the magic in the number, the sheerness of it. We bring to the occasion the same air of mockery and bravado with which we approach Halloween, another of the bordertimes.

She is also a poet. Poets like to think about time, like to think of it in metaphorical terms. After all, time–more than any other single construct–makes us human. Even more than language itself. The idea of 40 as a “thin place,” a place of sheerness, a border, appeals to me as a poet. I thought of my thirties (very unromantically) as a garage. A place to work on myself, a place of overhaul. I prefer this idea of 40, as a time to collect oneself. Is that ass-backwards? Probably.

And, despite likening one’s 40th birthday to encountering a thin place, I’ll be spending my birthday in one of the thickest places I can think of: Vegas. Not exactly fodder for retrospection and sheerness, unless you count what the Folies are wearing. However, R. has a trade show for the palm tree farm there next week, and so we’re combining the two events. I probably won’t post again until we get back.

But I will be looking at the moon on Sunday-Monday, as the Chinese Moon Festival, which falls every year on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, falls this year on the eve of my 40th birthday. And maybe my daughter-of-the-future will be over there somewhere looking at the moon on Sunday night. So, I will be too.

You say tomayto, I say tomahto…

The garden gods have been good to us this year…

Anybody wanna come over for a BLT?

Good Housekeeping?

A recent salvo in the gender wars occurred a few weeks back when Forbes.com published a column by editor Michael Noer suggesting that men should never marry career women. Here’s a taste: “the more successful she is, the more likely she is to grow dissatisfied with you.” WTF? He’s ascribing marital dissatisfaction to the fact that a woman works? Maybe, Mr. Noer, it has something to do with the marriage itself.

This sort of attitude hurts SAHMs as much as it does working moms and women in general.

It reminded me of this column from the 1950s, which appeared in Housekeeping Monthly magazine. I’m letting this get really big so you all can read it. That is, if you can scrape your eyeballs off the ceiling since that’s where they may end up after you get an inkling of what our mothers had to put up with:

The underlines and other assorted marginalia come courtesy of my good friend, T., who sent this article to me in horror.

Crossing Borders

Sometimes life serves you up a set of circumstances that causes you to challenge yourself in ways you never thought you would, to learn things about the world and yourself you never thought you would have to learn, and to do things you never thought you would have to do.

So it was that I found myself two mornings ago sitting underneath the umbrelled tables in front of the McDonalds at seven-thirty in the morning in Nogales, Arizona. In a few minutes, I would be picked up by a doctor I had never met before and driven across the international border to his clinic in Nogales, Mexico, a walk-up room above an unassuming street littered with store-front dentists and vendors selling fake Gucci sunglasses and, well, just generally littered.

In the van with R. and I would be a couple from the Bay Area (as they referred to it…being from the Chesapeake Bay area originally, I thought better of pointing out to them that there might be more than one), Mark and Kathy. We were two couples from two different states coming to a foreign country at the same time for the same reason: we were infertile and needed a treatment for recurrent miscarriage that the FDA in all its wisdom has determined to be “unreliable,” but which our (American) doctor–who is the leading specialist in the extremely specialized field of reproductive immunology–tells us we must have. So it was that we gathered in another doctor’s unassuming office above the unassuming street to exchange pleasantries before the procedure that we must have but that we cannot have back in our own country, in our own towns, near our own houses.

At first I think that it is nice to have another couple there. They are like us, even though they tell us that this is their second trip to the clinic. Their first treatment didn’t raise the leukocyte antibodies that need to be raised enough, so they are back again. I feel bad that they have to do this again. I am sure that they have experienced multiple miscarriages, as I have, which is the only reason to be there, after all. I am sure they are like me. Perhaps, also, being a bit out of my element, I am looking for familiarity. I want her to be like me. Then she mentions, casually, that they had a little girl a year ago, but “of course” they want to do it again. And I realize that, in fact, they are really not like me. Not like me at all. My stomach falls a little bit.

When it is our turn to go back to the exam room, R. takes the lead. It is his blood that the nurse will extract, 10 tubes in all, as R. lies back on an obstetrical bed between the ultrasound machine and the wall. The nurse, who the doctor has introduced to us as Maribel–”the same name as Maria Compagne in Spain”–has trouble operating the levers on the bed that raise and lower it. R. bounces around. I can tell he hates being on the bed. I silently wonder how he would feel about having to stick his feet in the stirrups, which, thankfully, I don’t have to do for this treatment.

After she’s done taking his blood, he sits up, intending to help her out by just hopping off quickly. She objects and makes him lie back down until she has raised the back and lowered the front to its original position. They speak in Spanish while she fumbles with the controls. I once again regret choosing to take French in high school. The doctor collects the vials and tells us to explore the town for a couple hours and then return.

We have been to Nogales before on purely sight-seeing trips and know our way around a little bit. We find a bakery and fill a bag with pastries and buy coffee and go sit in the plaza to eat our breakfast near this cool mural:

American tourists are generally very conspicuous in Nogales. But it is still early in the morning, before the Americans come to shop for trinkets and fill their prescriptions and get their teeth cleaned, and we are generally ignored, except by the pigeons. Pigeons are the same everywhere, I think. Later we do a little shopping at my favorite store in Nogales, where I buy some milagro art to add to my collection at home:

The pink fuzzy Mary is from Sante Fe. She is one of my favorites. The ball covered with milagros is my new purchase. Milagros are small metal (!) charms that are typically found in the shape of human body parts, but can also be animals, houses, cars, etc. In some Catholic countries (Mexico, Italy, India’s Goa region), you purchase the charms and pin them to a saint’s clothing (if your church houses a dead saint) or to a saint’s picture and ask for a prayer for that particular part of the body. Hearts are very popular.

I’m not Catholic, but I began collecting milagros about five years ago. And…yes…I do have a milagro in the shape of a baby that hangs from my keychain.

After two hours, we head back to the clinic. We go into the doctor’s office, sit across his desk from him, and he brings out two syringes full of clear serum, labeled #3 and #4. (Presumably, Mark and Kathy got vials marked #1 and #2.) This clear stuff is actually R.’s white blood cells, spun down from 10 tubes of the red stuff. I spread my forearms out on the desk, and the doctor injects me four times under the skin on each arm, emptying the syringes. It burns. It burns a lot. My skin puffs up a little.

This is all good, of course. The point of the treatment is to stimulate my immune system to react against R.’s blood/DNA. When I’m pregnant, my immune system can’t tell that the growing mass of cells is a developing baby because R.’s DNA isn’t differentiated enough from mine to register the baby as not my body, not my cells, not my DNA. So, my immune system attacks the growing baby as if it is a cancerous bunch of my own cells. The treatment (called LIT–Leukocyte Injection Therapy) is supposed to teach my body to “recognize” R.’s DNA as different from mine, so that when my body encounters it as part of the growing baby, it will know it is not a growing mass of my own cancer cells, but rather a baby, with a different bunch of DNA cells–and thus not attack it. Make sense? Yeah, it took me a while too.

Here is what one of my arms looks like just after the treatment:

When the doctor is done, R. hands him $600 in cash, which he pockets quickly without counting. It feels a bit like we’ve just completed a drug deal, which I guess, in a way, we have. Then we leave. We walk across the border, where we wave our passports at the Border Patrol guard who doesn’t even glance their way (probably not what you wanted to hear on September 11th), and back to our car, and back to the highway, and back to our life the way it was before. Except for these nasty-ass welts I have on my forearms. That now itch.

Challenges, it seems, often come and find you, rather than the other way around. Traveling to another country for a controversial fertility treatment that is outlawed by the FDA is not something I ever thought I’d do. When I first joined an online infertility support group last year, several of the board’s members would discuss the LIT treatments they were told by their doctor to go do. I would always skip over those postings. They didn’t apply to me: in 12 years of trying, I had never been pregnant and, therefore, had never miscarried, and I was operating on a strictly “need to know” basis. What I didn’t need to know, I wasn’t going to bother with.

But that’s the funny thing about the way things work. When push came to shove, I did need to know, and I did end up doing something I never thought I would (because I never thought I would have to).

And, frankly, adoption is the same way for me. It wasn’t something I considered seriously until I had to. Not that I did any agonizing hand-wringing about adoption when it did cross my radar screen. I was thoughtful about the complexities involved in adopting transnationally/racially, but I was immediately excited by the prospect too. I just never had thought about doing it until doing it became, potentially, my only way to parent. It was a challenge to my expectations that led me to adopt.

I think that’s often the way it goes. We get pushed into a learning experience, a growing experience. It’s not that we don’t want to be there, growing, changing, learning; it’s just that we aren’t always out there on the hunt for these sort of “teachable moments”–to borrow a colloquialism from the teaching world–because they aren’t the easiest things in the world. It isn’t easy to change. It isn’t easy to grow. That’s why it can be so wonderful.

Infertility pushed me to consider adoption. Miscarriages pushed me to consider alternative fertility treatments. This interminable wait for a referral may push me to consider a special needs adoption. And, although I know that a-parents who “switch” from non-special needs to special needs adoptions have a really bad rep in the IA community, I’d actually like to argue that their switch may be a part of their process, like choosing adoption in the first place may be a part of the process of coming to parent at all. Perhaps it’s not just a hypocritical grab at an expedited referral but, rather, a “teachable moment,” in which an impasse, a challenge to their expectations, causes them to re-think their choices. Causes them to grow.

I’ll write more about this subject of switching to a special needs adoption in the near future. Right now, I just wanted to throw it out there as something we’ve been thinking about, talking about. We were approved in our homestudy to adopt a special needs child because it’s what we wanted to do for our second adopted child from China. Now, it doesn’t look like we’ll get the chance to adopt a second time from China, given the length of the wait and our ages. So, we’re considering a new plan. Stay tuned.

And the IVF is still a go for January, if the LIT treatment and the other immunology treatments I’ve got scheduled, work. Life is certainly never dull.

Metal Mania…

and we’re not talking the hard rock kind, folks…

Walternatives and I recently had a little love-fest over on her blog concerning our metal fetishes. She is quite the metal artist, whereas I can only claim to be an admirer of metal. Here is my homage to metal, going out to Walternatives:

First, a little tickle of corrugated tin from the front porch…

I think I would line my bedroom walls with this stuff if I could get R. to agree, but this roofing is all I’ve succeeded at getting in here so far.

Next, a little in-home tour of The SBird Nest, concentrating on Weird Metal Stuff I’ve acquired…

Exhibit A:

These “metal sculptures,” as I like to think of them, are set up in my office. They serve no function other than that I like to look at them. They have cool shapes and way cool patina that I could ogle for hours (told you it was a fetish…). I found them at the Rose Bowl Flea Market, in a booth that was selling a collection of funeral parlor ware. Yep, that’s right. Their original function was to hold up the memorial wreaths around a coffin during a funeral. Way cool.

Exhibit B:

At the same booth at the Rose Bowl, I found my TV stand. Can you guess? Coffin stand. I love this thing.

Exhibit C:

This “sculptural object” (heh) hangs in my kitchen. I sometimes refer to it as “Brunhilde’s Brassiere.” Again, I’m loving the patina on this one. It was a birthday gift from my hubby, who knows what an SBird girl likes.

Exhibit Last:

Even my office curtains bow to the all-powerful metal fetish. See all the funky metal “sculptures” in there?

There’s much more metal mania going on at The Nest, but this gives you some idea of my commitment.

Okay, so now I want to hear about your fetishes, your alternative collections, your kitsch…comments please….

I am a meme virgin, people…

Yep, this is my first meme ever. I was tagged by Jessi over at Elsie Elsewhere, so I guess I owe my deflowering to her. Here goes:

7 x 7

7 Things I Want To Do Without Dying of Embarrassment

1. Wear heels.

2. Go sleeveless.

3. Call a doctor’s office and explain my health problem to the gatekeeper who answers the phone.

4. Rock climb (the idea that the person on belay is forced to stare at my butt while I’m shimmying up a sheer rock face convinces me that I would fall).

5. Speak French when visiting Paris.

6. Play guitar.

7. Start a blog.

7 Things I Cannot Do in the Summer

1. Walk the dogs on the trails at the ranch (re: snakes).

2. Work in the flower garden (see #1). (I do all my gardening in the winter.)

3. Buy Christmas presents (I can’t buy Xmas presents until December–it just doesn’t seem festive enough.)

4. Skip shaving.

5. Wear my favorite long, black, wool coat that has a metallic thread woven through it.

6. Make yummy winter squash soups.

7. Curl up in front of the fire.

7 Things I Can Do Which Are Meaningless Unless You Are Still in Jr. High

1. Do a backflip in the swimming pool.

2. Curl my tongue (the recessive gene way).

3. Recite Miss Mary Black, Black, Black…All Down Your Back, Back, Back.

4. Lick the flavored lip gloss straight out of the tube.

5. Skateboard.

6. French braid hair.

7. Wonder if you’ll still like me if I really say what I think about something.

7 Things Which Attracted Me to My House

1. Sits at the foot of Black Mountain, an ancient volcano that looks like the Scottish highlands.

2. 20 miles from town, so we have the feeling like we’re leaving the bullshit behind.

3. Trails lead to shrines that the former owners built.

4. Room for more dogs.

5. Fireplace.

6. Swimming hole.

7. Space for gardens.

7 Things I Say Most When I’m Crying

1. This is the part in the movie I always lose it.

2. I hate this.

3. This sucks.

4. I’m sorry.

5. I’m just tired.

6. I’m such a sucker for animals.

7. [Silence]–because mostly I am trying to hide the fact I’m crying when I’m crying.

7 Children’s Books I Am Adding to My Own Collection(I don’t have children, so this list is really based on my own nostaglia)

1. any of the Nancy Drew books (I wanted to be a detective when I grew up.)

2. Hailstones and Halibut Bones (A wonderful book, in which each color is turned into a poem. The title is a line from the “white poem.” I’m sure this book has something to do with the fact that I’m a poet today.)

3. The Big Tidy-Up (I drove my mother crazy reciting this by heart. It’s now out-of-print and costs $299.95!!! Good grief!)

4. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIHM

5. The Plant Sitter (This is sort of a friendlier version of Where the Wild Things Are, or at least the dream I’d prefer to have….)

6. The Story of Sacajawea (out-of-print)

7. Free To Be You and Me (I listened to this album endlessly as a kid, although it’s also a book)

7 Children’s Movies I Can Watch for the Bazillionth Time Without Wanting to Rip My Eyes from Their Sockets

1. Charlotte’s Web (absolutely, positively, guaranteed to make me cry)

2. My Dog Skip (ditto to the comment on #1)

3. A Charlie Brown Christmas (Don’t tell me it’s a TV special, not a movie. The sad lost tree that almost doesn’t find a home is a killer.)

4. The Sound of Music

5. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the original, animated Chuck Jones/Boris Karloff TV version, not the bogus Jim Carey makeover)

6. The Wizard of Oz

7. Old Yeller

So, I nominate Snow Monkey and Walternatives as “IT.” Consider yourselves tagged.