i really don't want to say much about the election, primarily because i am so sick of it.

however, i will say this: i am so sick and tired of the tax debate being framed in the context of 'communist/socialist' vs 'non-communist/non-socialist' polarity. when exactly is the country going to get over the red scare? isn't it practically comical to call someone a communist at this point? does the right really think the left is getting ready to buddy up with castro and start us all on a 5-year plan?

fankly, it does a huge disservice to everyone, because it stifles creative thinking and prevents new solutions fom emerging--because all of the ideas have to go through the "is it communist or is it not" litmus test, and thus we are forcing ideas that are not on either side of that particular division into categories that they don't fit into, and then they become casualties in the debate instead of innovations.

when are we going to get a bit more sophisticated and start recognizing that practicaly the whole world recognizes that communism is not viable, and that the questions that are being dealt with are not whether or not there is a red menace, but rather how exactly is the government going to obtain money, and how should it be spent? not to mention the awfully nice living standards in many many "socialist" countries. i think it is so funny that the right uses europe as a scary example of where we might end up. oooooooooooooohhhhhh nooooooo! not sweden! aaaaaahhhh belgium...noooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!! OMG! the netherlands! we might end up like amsterdam! our world is collapsing around us!! please, just no art or culture or universal health care that is FREE. and above all, never ever let us actually enjoy local, sustainable food or *gasp* PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION. ew.

sorry. i guess it is getting late.

tootsie roll does not source its ingredients in china. though their PR representative could have been a little more verbose--to quote her answer to my query:

"no, and thank you for asking."

can't fault that, but geez. she needs to see the wrigley's response for a lesson in coporate communications!

ok. food from china. tainted with melamine. candy, pretzels, etc etc. not going to go on a long rant. but--first everyone should be aware that cheap candy is likely to have ingredients from china, even if it is "made in the USA" -- and that those ingredients may/may not be tainted with god knows what.

(gold foil covered coins DEFINITELY have melamine in them--they were recalled in canada, however, not in the USA -- not sure why, other than the amount is considered minimal

anyway, given that halloween is coming, and the relative level of control i will have over what is gien to my children is low, i emailed a bunch of candy companies to ask where their products and ingredients were made/sourced. i have heard from one so far: wrigleys. kudos to them, they source all of their ingredients for their US and canada distributed products in the USA and canada.

who knows where they get things for their international products, but for now, wrigley's is safe. it appears that smarties and dum dums lollipops are safe too.

'the candyman', our local chocolatier, is looking pretty darn wonderful right now...

there are so many things that we have done in the past week or so that i have wanted to write about, things each kids has said, and on and on, but ava's mysterious symptoms have kept me from any of that. plus just keeping up with everyday life. which i am not doing with grace, that is for sure.

so, in order not to forget--but decidedly not very literary--here is one of those lists...

we went to high falls gorge: very cool, local geological attraction--700 feet of waterfalls--lots of fun, perfect after-school activity (outside, refreshing, stealth-science opportunity, no squablles, no begging for tv or sugar), BUT total tourist trap. a must-see for people who visit, or live here, but unfortunately the entrance price makes it prohibitive for repeat visits. i asked if there was a season pass or a local's rate and they looked at me like i was insane, so that's too bad.

then we went to "portland taiko" -- a drumming show at the lake placid center for the arts -- taiko is a japanese drum/type of drumming and these guys were INCREDIBLE. they travel (obviously--portland oregon is not exactly next door) so if they visit, see them. the kids loved it--it was a late night, and the last 45 minutes were sort of a wash, but it was worth it. their favorite was the big huge drum, about 3' in diameter and up on a huge pedestal, and the drummers just beat it mercilessly. very loud.

the next day we went to the corn maze. much easier this year--the corn was all brown and thinning out, so it was easier to find the mailboxes hidden in the maze. then we went to the pumpkin patch (we now have, oh, 10 pumpkins from all of our pumpkin patch visits) via wagon, and finally home. but not before noting the snack bar at the entrance to the corn maze. now the farm that the corn maze is on is very very into the locally grown organic movement. they supply many of the local restaurants, and are just generally into that. but what was the snack bar stocked with? doritos, candy of every variety, slush puppies, chips, cookies, hostess cakes etc etc. it was like a mini-mini-mart. and i could not help but wonder what the owners made of all these corn maze people sitting around in their yard consuming high fructose corn syrup fabricated into 'food' in some factory thousands of miles away. i found it to be pretty interesting.

the rest of the week was taken up with school, skating, swim lessons, and ava's disconcerting exhaustion and headaches. nearly every day of the week she complained of a heaache and crawled into bed before anyone else was close to being ready and fell asleep as the chaos of the household swirled around her (except wednesday, which served to create a false sense of relief, throwing me off the track and ensuring that i did not call the doctor before the end of the week). over the weekend it got progressively worse, to the point where i was ready to take her to the ER in burlington for an MRI. on sunday the headaches abated a bit, but not the fatigue, and today we went to the doctor. of course, today she was healthier than she has been in days, but she still was bnormally tired at the end of the day.

as expected, she had blood drawn. to be fair, the doctor said that she would be comfortable waiting for 2 more weeks to see if this resolved, but i said "but she has been living on tylenol for over 2 weeks now--i am not sure that i want to give that to her for another 2 weeks" and of course, my anxiety was also pretty palpable, so she said "let's just do the blood test."

in thinking it over, i think she recognized that i was struggling with the decision--blood test or no blood test, and bless her soul, she saw that i needed an executive decision made. yes, there is the chance that ava will be better within the next 2 weeks, but i was there because she has been unwell for many many weeks already. i was not sure that another 2 weeks was something that was to anyone's benefit. it sure would have driven me over the edge.

and then, she pulled out the lidocaine. good lord, what a brilliant idea--put a dollop of lidocaine on the kid's arm, let it sit while you run errands/get lunch, then return to the hospital for a virtually pain-free blood draw. i don't know if it has drawbacks or not, but i can say it was a wonderful little trick for us. ava barely registered the event. her only comment was that the sight of the needle scared her a little.

we get results in a few days. the obvious concern is mono, but she does not have all of the symptoms. notably, her spleen is not enlarged.

we'll see.

i am officially going insane. i cannot keep this up. last night, ava woke up at 2. she blew her nose and coughed for 2 hours. i never went back to sleep.

i will get a nap today, but this is just not a sustainable way to do things.

the good news: she woke up rested and feeling better. then she used the neti pot and blew the most amazing accumulation of bacterial debris out of her nose. both of us were so astonished, we just stared at it before one of us said "that's really gross."

please please please, i need a peaceful night tonight.

ok, so i take it all back.

she slept until 4:30 am. then coughed until 6:30. (today was a very difficult day to survive, since i did not go to bed at 6:15 when she did...). she was sort of ok today, did not cough that much, acted a bit tired, a little cranky, but generally fine and managed to do a whole bunch of things, including taking carter to skating lessons.

aside--he did really well. amazing what 6 months of childhood development will do for a kid's core strength and balance.

then she got home, and since she was acting very sick, i took her temperature. it was normal. while we were waiting for dinner, she asked to get in a hot tub. she claimed she was cold. first clue something was not right--this is the child who swims in the lakes when the ice has not yet gone out. moreover, the fact that she asked to get in the tub is really weird too. then she would not eat dinner, and insisted she was still cold. so, assuming she was actually getting a fever, i checked again. normal. then she begged to go to bed. it didn't take much begging for me to tuck her in, with 3 blankets (unheard of), and within minutes she was asleep. another oddity--she usually takes about an hour to settle down. a half hour later, i checked her temperature: 101.5.

ah HA!

but on the other hand, what the heck is the deal? a week of misery to finally get a temperature?

hopefully this will burn whatever these germs are into oblivion.

it is so weird. she is so strong in many ways, and is pretty much a healthy kid (i.e. one ear infection--of course, it was a doozy!), but she has this weird susceptibility to these colds.

there are many things that i have loved about school for ava, but one of the things that i dread is the near constant rotation of cold viruses. it seems that the minute school starts, she gets sick, and stays sick for months, and it seems that spring brings us the same issue...

(are you seeing a pattern?)

so, i have always just grumbled about the problem of confining a bunch of small children and their germs in one room together, slathered vicks on ava's chest, and hoped for a reasonably cough-free night. usually, that does not happen. often, we are up for HOURS (not concurrent) while she hacks up a lung.

a confounding factor in this is that i tend to get fall and spring colds.

but today, after listening to ava cough for 24 hours (no joke--though it has never been that bad)straight, despite dextromethorphan, vicks vapor rub, the neti pot, propping her up on 3 pillows then wedging her into a corner, and countless tissues , i thought...hmmm....allergies?

should i try benadryl? dare i rechallenge with the purple liquid that sent her into 2 hours of hyperactivity a few years ago?

now, it seems like an idiotic thing not to consider allergies for this long, and i sort of agree, but in my defense, she was diagnosed with allergies when she was almost 2, and then the following year she did not have any reaction to anything, and so i figured, hey, her immune system caught up, and we're good. then, when she did get sick the folowing year, it tended to coincide with 1. my colds, 2. some honest to goodness infections (fever, green goo, etc), and 3. there was that nasty incident with benadryl where i thought i would go insane trying to cope with the fact that she had gone insane. (it was after that incident that my mother told me that i myself had had a similar paradoxical reaction to cold medication as a kid...good to know).

anyway, we came home from the corn maze (nothing like really giving her immune system a run for its money), and after we settled in, i dug out the benadryl. she was so desperate for relief, since nothing had worked until this point, i thought she was going to tear the cap off with her teeth.

an hour later, i realized that i had not heard her cough recently. i did not say anything, then another hour passed. when i finally did say something, of course she coughed, but then she begged to go to bed--the benadryl was not revving her up, rather it seemed to be working, and making her remarkably drowsy. she has been asleep for 2 hours now, and has not coughed once.

obviously a daily dose of benadryl is not an option, but perhaps a visit to the doctor after the long weekend is a good idea.

It's a girl!

AVA CAN READ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

she did it tonight. genuine, truly, reading. obviously, it is the very start, but she figured it out! we read 4 pages of little bear together.

she is very very very proud of herself.

i knew it would happen this way--she sat down with a field guide to north american gamebirds (of all things), and started trying to figure out some of the easier words while i put carter down. after i convinced her to switch to little bear, she was just on a roll. it is hard to explain the difference between being able to sound out a word slowly as she has been able to do for a while, and actually reading, but there is a difference. there is something that she just gets and the words make sense to her.

10/08/08 --easy to remember.

Today at the grocery store, Carter said (in a reasonably loud, articulate voice): "Hey Mom! Let's talk about chicken poop!"

I had so many competing reactions: "SHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!" was one, "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA" was another, and "Honey, we don't like to talk about poop in the grocery store" was a third, and "Gosh, I don't know where he learns these things..." was yet another.

You know, Ava has presented me with her share of challenges, but Carter seems to be uniquely suited (unlike his sister) to mortifying me. He is the child in those magazine vignettes who talks loudly about his observations of other people, as if a soundproof vapor shield is around him. And he has no ability to ameliorate his observations. If a woman is tall, he refers to her as "HUGE!" --now, technically, it is a word that could be applied, particularly relative to his height, but how to explain that there are some far preferable choices?

and of course, my capacity to distract shuts down at exactly those moments, so we always seem to be heard, loud and clear.

well, this is just great:

http://www.zrecommends.com/detail/carters-responds-to-zrecs-inquiry/

i just cannot bring myself to comment.

ok, update: he returned to making noodles, and has dropped the spark plug effort. noodles apparently remain more fun, no matter what your gender.

as he was making noodles, he started asking again about god and jesus and mary, and who takes care of them, who loves them, etc etc. in response to a question (the specifics of which i don't remember as most were pretty much the same), i said "well, they are just filled with love..." and then he looked at me and he said "but why are we bad sometimes?" and THEN he asked "mommy, why do people forget god and mary and jesus sometimes?"

i looked at him and said nothing for a long time. i was trying to remember if i had ever used that expression in the past, and i am fairly certain i did not. i do not do a lot of talking about god et al, preferring to answer the questions as they come, so this one just stunned me. i can say with certainty that i did not provide carter with a clear answer. (see previous posts).

though, had i returned to st agnes and run into the very nice, very devout older woman that was there the day carter and i poked our heads in, i am sure she could have provided him with a very clear answer. this, apparently is one of the perks of faith, particularly one in which a governing body has been mulling over the official answers to complicated questions for about 2000-odd years (as opposed to a tired mom who does it on the fly). the morning we peeked in, i told her that he had wanted to see the church, and she went off on a long and very enthusiastic lesson in what this church was (god's house), and you come here to talk to him (so far, so good), and then she explained to carter that god was in that teeny tiny box way up there on the altar (quizzical look from carter), and that when he was old enough, there would be a special day when god would come to him as a little piece of bread and that he would be allowed to eat it and have god inside of him...

this, i can assure you, makes virtually no sense to a 3-year-old. and bless him, he said nothing embarassing, but the look on his face pretty much translated to "you have GOT to be kidding me."

on a more grounded, mundane topic--we had a slow start this morning. ava woke up coughing at 4:30, and never went back to sleep until 6:30, at which point carter woke up. i am pretty much catatonic, but i let ava sleep in and we went to school late.

but she was very anxious to get to school, so that was good.

so far, our school experience has been very interesting. it is amazing how much the other students and teacher act as a motivator. she came home and said "autumn taught me how to color in the lines mom!" i was flabbergasted. if i had DARED to suggest that there was a way in which she could "improve" her coloring, she would have had my head. not that i thought she needed to improve anything, but she has definitely absorbed the aesthetic principles of her peers. personally, i like her iconoclastic artistic efforts. i guess it will have a positive impact on her writing skills too.

that and she is suddenly determined to conquer some of the "academic" skills she has only shown a peripheral interest in until now, and of those things that she has been interested in she just pursues with even more intensity.

she keeps track of all of the kids in her class, what their skills are, who is better at what than she is, who is not well behaved, who earned the teacher's praise and why...as a matter of fact, she does this for a lot of kids that are not in her class too (the whole school gets together for lunch and recess), constantly evaluating her position. i don't think she is competing with the other kids per se, but instead she is trying to figure out if she should be competing with herself. given that she yells at her feet when she makes a mistake ice-skating, this is not surprising.

however, i could do without the songs etc that she learns at recess...they aren't technically "bad" but they are annoying.

an example of how i am in over my head with carter: he is currently playing with play-doh, and for a few minutes, he made noodles--this i can relate to. then out of the blue, he just announced "i made spark plugs mommy!!!"

oh? huh. gee...they look just like spark plugs to me, good job!

ugh. i really don't relish learning about engines. i love learning, and will rally, but of all things to pick, this is not in my top 10, i'll tell you that.