Hiatus

For various reasons, none of which I really want to talk about, I think I'm going to stop blogging for a little. I'll try to keep up Timothy's blog when I think of it, but this one is just going to hibernate for a little while, along with my Facebook account. Don't ask me why because I won't talk about it! So thanks to all you faithful readers. I hope to be back sometime in the next year...hope being the operative word. Sai wata rana.

Cute tidbits

I thought the other day, as I watched Timothy play during a break from my work, I’m going to miss so much of his development because I’m sitting at a desk in another room. I envy the moms who are active in their toddlers’ development, the ones who plan activities, art projects, trips to see museums, etc. I sometimes try to do those things, but at this point in our lives, if I don’t work, we don’t eat. Not that any mom sits and watches her little ones 24 hours a day! But maybe if I weren’t working, I’d see more things like this:

• The other day, I was cooking dinner, and Timothy came into the kitchen to play. (He really likes to be in the same room I’m in if I let him.) He climbed up onto a chair at the kitchen table, put his plastic peahen on the table facing him, and proceeded to “talk” to it. He used a high-pitched voice and jabbered away at the little peahen. He stuck his face right up into the peahen’s face (it’s about 1-1/2” high) and talked to it! I had to turn around from the stove and just watch for the duration, which was several minutes. It was priceless!
• One day last week, I was really tired and went to lie down after dinner. (This is the first time I’ve ever done that.) Timothy came to me and brought me toys and books as I lay there. He climbed up and sat with me. When he brought a book, he lay down on my chest and let me read it to him lying down. When he left the room, he came to bring me his precious Pippin-Bear. Then he gave me a kiss and went out the bedroom door. Within seconds, he was back with his Pascal-Bear. He gave me a kiss again and headed out. But before he got to the door, he turned around and came to give me another kiss! This was so reminiscent of our nighttime routine that I just had to laugh.
• Yesterday, I turned around from working at the computer to look into the living room, where Timothy was playing quietly. (Quiet is always worrisome when you have a toddler!) My little boy was sitting across the living room, facing away from me, reading a book, and he had his little hat on! I can never get him to wear the hat, but he was sitting there inside, wearing it, happy as a clam!

These are just some examples of my cutie. I hope I get lots more of these glimpses, even though I’m working. At least I get to work from home!

Dreams

My name is Saralynn, and I’m a dreamer.

Every night, I dream. It’s been this way for as long as I can remember, and I’ve never really thought about it a whole lot.

But some nights, I do think about it. I’m no psychoanalyst, but every now and then I wonder if my dreams have any meaning. They’re never profound. Sometimes they’re funny. Now that I’m married—to someone who never remembers his dreams—I realize that maybe I’m a little strange. I can remember dreams from as far back as ten years ago as if I’d dreamt them yesterday. Is that unusual?

I come from a family of dreamers, too. My dad has told me that he dreams sometimes about being at school, ready to take an exam, and suddenly realizing he’s never attended class. I haven’t had that one yet, but then I only spent four years in college.

We do have two dreams in common, though. A few years ago, I dreamt more than once within a few weeks that my teeth were falling out! When I mentioned it to Dad, he said he’d had the same dream several times.

The other dream we share is the Travel Dream. This only began for me relatively recently, but it’s a real plague. I can remember distinctly at least half a dozen of these dreams—getting to the airport and not knowing what the flight number is or when the plane is taking off; getting to the gate and discovering we’ve forgotten to check in our baggage; deplaning and realizing there’s some sort of problem in customs… Oh yes, the Travel Dream is quite fun.

But some dreams aren’t fun. I remember clearly my first nightmare as a young adult. It was the spring of my junior year of high school, and it was just awful. I can still see the images in my head and shudder. It even had a monster in it, one I never actually saw but was running from after seeing all my friends killed.

And since I’ve been married, I think I’ve had more bad dreams than ever. My analysis of that fact is simply that I have more to lose now, so more things will disturb me. Sometimes, I’ve even woken up crying and had to wake David to comfort me. Weird.

Last night, I dreamt that Matthew McConaughey sent a car in reverse through a wall just to get someone killed. In the dream, it was someone I knew, and I was screaming, “Michael! Michael!” and scrambling to pull away the plaster and rubble. Then, when I arrived at the car, it was my baby boy, Timothy! He was badly hurt but still conscious, and I tried to get him talking to see if he still had any idea who or where he was. (This of course is dumb because he can’t even talk yet, except for a few words.) I ran all around the accident scene, trying to figure out how to call 911 and wondering how we would pay for the medical bill—all the while crying because Timothy was hurt.

Oy! What a dream! After something like that, I’m almost afraid to shut my eyes tonight. What will I dream of next?

Tammy’s stars

Last night I discovered that there are glow-in-the-dark stars all over the ceiling in our bedroom. I’d known there were a few clustered over our bedside lamp, but I hardly ever use the ceiling light (mostly because we have no curtains!), so I’d had no idea the stars were all over!

So many emotions went through my mind as I lay there in the dark, gazing up at my starry sky. One thought led to another, and I ended up crying myself to sleep…

…But I want to tell you the first thought I had. Actually, it was a memory more than a thought. I had the very distinct memory of sitting out under the stars with Tammy when I was 12.

We were at the seventh grade camp-out, and I’d just returned from a year on furlough in Los Angeles. It had been a difficult year for me, full of pain and loneliness, plus the normal grief of entering puberty. It had been, quite frankly, a hellish year for me. My poor parents tried to help me, but they had their own worries, and there was little they could do for me.

So I’d returned to Nigeria with such excitement and anticipation. I was coming home at last—to my friends, my school, my house, even my cat.

When I got back, though, I discovered that everything had changed. Everything. I had missed a year in the lives of people who had kept living without me. While I’d spent every day agonizing over my far-away friends and not fitting in at school or church in L.A., my friends had gone on with middle school as usual. The world didn’t stop turning when I left Nigeria. And of course, at 12, I thought it should have! I was devastated to return to a place that no longer had a niche for me.

On the seventh grade camp-out, we had some fun, and then the girls all started singing songs around the campfire—songs they’d learned in choir while I was gone. I couldn’t take it anymore. I walked quietly to the lake, sat on a rock, watched the stars, and cried. I couldn’t help it. I was just so disappointed. I needed to fit in, to feel as though I belonged. If I didn’t belong here in Nigeria, where did I belong? Certainly not in L.A.!

And after a few minutes, Tammy came down to sit beside me. I don’t remember if we said anything; I don’t think so. I think she just sat with me while I cried.

Finally, I’d had my nice cry and tried to laugh it all off. We looked at the stars together, and I told her that we’d rename the stars in Orion’s belt. One would be Reuben, one would be Monique (Tammy’s brother and sister), and the middle one would be Tamara. Those would be my special stars.

And I’ve hung onto that memory for the past 14 years. It’s one of my hardest and sweetest memories of all.

[From that point on, Tammy and I actually went our separate ways and hung out n two different crowds at school, but I learned to adjust as the years went by. And we’d had our magical moment.]

Our new home!

We moved! I spent all day yesterday and all morning today unpacking and arranging. We still have a sore lack of furniture for the amount of space we have, but we don’t actually need much.

So let me give you the grand tour, showing you each room (as much as I took pictures, at least) in its different stages.

Here’s the master bedroom. 

And the finished product! Notice the giraffe on the dresser. This piece of furniture has been in our family since my dad was a kid and perhaps even one generation before that!

This is the second bedroom, which we’re using as an office for now:

The living room:

The blue bathroom, which we actually liked blue:

We didn’t paint the kitchen, just cleaned it. But it still looks a lot better than it did!

And last but not least, the third bedroom, which is now Timothy’s room:

So that’s our little cozy home. We like it a whole lot! It will get nice and hot in the coming summer, but we’ll survive with our swamp cooler and ceiling fans. We’re just glad to be moved in and all set up! Now for some bookshelves…

And the funniest part is that now that I have all these microwave recipes, since we didn’t have gas for over a week in March-April, we now have no microwave! Ha!

Wedding woes

I have been thinking of and feeling so many things recently that I feel as if my brain had been removed, put through a blender, combined with some horseradish, and then replaced. There are so many things that I want to write about, to express, but it seems we never get to say all that we want to, so let me at least make a start with my wedding woes.

I was on Facebook last night - which has become a rather rare occurrence between work, moving house, and watching Timothy - and I saw some photos that my friend Laurie had posted of her friend’s bridal shower. It wasn’t the pictures themselves that made me pause, since I only knew Laurie and none of the other girls. Rather, it was the event itself that caused me considerable vexation. Why should a wedding shower vex me?

I realized last night as I was lying in bed that I have only been to one wedding shower (besides my own) in my 27 years, and that was for my sister. I thought further and realized that I have only been in one wedding (besides my own), and that was my sister’s.

I know I’ve completely overanalyzed this now, but it really made me think hard, and everything I thought just made me sad. Two years ago I was asked to be a bridesmaid in the wedding of my best friend and roommate, Heather (see The Missing Bridesmaid), but I was unable to go because I was in Nigeria and couldn’t afford the airfare. Now I wish I had gone. To be honest, I don’t expect to ever be asked again to be a bride’s attendant.

Two of my friends are getting married this summer. Jessica, once one of my two best friends from high school, is getting married in Texas in June. Anna, once a good friend from Wheaton, is getting married in Ohio in August. And oh! How I’d love to be at both weddings! They are both people whose weddings I always imagined I would attend.

When I was 11 or 12, I expected I’d be in all my best friends’ weddings, but somehow, that’s not how it worked out at all. I know now it was a silly dream, but I just expected that’s how it would be. If you had told me then that my friends and I would drift apart, or that we’d live on separate continents, I never would have believed it. Now all but one of my best friends from my Hillcrest days is married. A part of me has kept dreaming, kept hoping that someone would think of me as a close enough friend to ask me to be in her wedding, but the realist in me says I’ve set myself up for disappointment year after year.

The fact is that I don’t make friends easily, and I tend to cling to friendships like a drowning cat – claws extended. How can I expect anyone to want to maintain a friendship with me in such a situation of desperation? At Hillcrest, we were all forced together since our class was so small, and I think my friends were decidedly glad to have freedom after the tightness of our tiny school. It hurt when we left high school and I heard so seldom from the people I’d loved so dearly and spent every waking moment with for 9 years.

But I’d heard that in college we would make the best friends we’d ever have. So I bulldozed through the frustration, loss, and bitterness (or am still bulldozing, perhaps) and tried to make some friends. In my four years at college, I would say I only had three close girl friends and one close guy friend. Sure, I had lots of friends, and I’ve since graduation become closer to some of my classmates from Wheaton, which is just kinda weird. But in my whole four years of college, we’re talking about four (4) friends. I know without any doubt that these are friend for life, and that no matter what happens, where we go, or with whom we end up, when we get together, it will be like coming home. And one of these dear ones is already married.

It comes down to this: neither of my friends getting married this summer is one of my close friends anymore – whether or not I like it. And it’s expensive to travel all the way from California to anywhere. (This is part of why, as much as I like California, I would rather live in the Midwest.) And at weddings, the bride hardly gets to say boo to her guests unless they’re attendants or family. Is there really any point, then, in my making the pilgrimage to either wedding? I don’t want to be just another name in the guest book. I want my presence to mean something to somebody. So I guess it’s better to just save my pennies this summer, cry a little, and wait. The wedding season of my life is nearly over, but I still have four close friends who are unmarried – one from Hillcrest and three from Wheaton – so I want to make absolutely sure I don’t have to miss the weddings where my presence will mean diddly squat. So here’s to saving pennies – with disappointment, with a little residual bitterness, but most of all with hope.