lists, kids, dream

Lists

What I left the house with: underwear, shirt, crocs, phone, Quentin. (Josh also carried: laptops, Juniper.)

What someone got out for us so I could leave with the kids: carseat, diaper bag.

What I bought the first day: Junie's favorite foods. Junie's shampoo. Toothbrushes. (message: normal life still goes on.) Also: a star turtle to replace starbug. (message: there will be continuity but also change.)

What I bought today: a better toothbrush. A lunch box. Vitamins. A respirator and a moon suit. Garbage bags.

Kids

The big trauma in Junie's life is still that she has to nap in the blue room at school (the bigger-kids class).

Quentin is of course totally fine, except when we left him at a friend's house for three hours so we could go work on the house, he wasn't thrilled with that.

Dream

Sometimes I have the packing dream, where I have to move out of my dorm room (or whatever) and am trying to frantically sort and pack everything I own.

Going through my closet in the dark, making ruthless split-second decisions about whether to toss every article of clothing or pay to have it cleaned, while Josh cranked the hand-cranked flashlight because we forgot to bring the good flashlight, was actually more surreal than any of those dreams.

famous for pantslessness

That's me in this news article "sitting in the driveway in her underclothes with her baby".

I would just like to say for the record that I was very pleased to be wearing underpants at all. I don't have a lot of body modesty, underpants aren't really very different from a swimsuit, and the only reason the neighbors hadn't been regularly spotting me in my driveway without pants for the past seven years doing things like taking out the trash or running out to my car for things I left in there is my understanding that people find it concerning when clothing norms get violated and it's not clear why. (Whereas I was confident that everyone there could construct a non-threatening narrative connecting my lack of pants and the fact that my house was on fire.) However it really would have been embarrassing to not have the underpants. So, yay underpants!

help request: book recs for Junie

When Grammie died, we read "Nana Upstairs, Nana Downstairs" over and over. (Thanks again to allecto for the recommendation.) I went to the library today and browsed the "trauma shelf" (you know, Mommy's cancer, Grandpa's Alzheimers, Dad's restraining order, etc) but couldn't find anything that seemed appropriate. There are plenty of books about *moving*, which all assume that you have been lovingly preparing your child for this event for weeks or even months, your child is nervous, and now it's the big day and don't worry all your stuff got packed up into boxes and it's coming with you! Which honestly sort of made me want to hit something. There were books about living in a shelter or being homeless, but despite news reports we're not exactly homeless either. There were books about fire *safety* but that sort of seems like giving a book on contraception to a kid with a new sibling. I asked a librarian* for help and she found me a book in the regular children's section called "It's Moving Day" by Pamela Hickman about various animals finding new homes, some of them unexpectedly because they had to flee predators, which seems like a great place to start, but Junie is just three, she's very literal, something that really specifically told the story of a family who had a fire at their house would probably be more meaningful for her.

So: librarians, educators, people who just like doing research: please find me a suggestion for a book for Junie.

*The awesome librarian helping me was the info desk librarian; just as we were wrapping up the children's librarian came along - my past experience with her is that she's kind of ancient and not altogether with it and I try to avoid asking her anything, but the info desk librarian seemed very hopeful that she might know the collection better, so I asked. She was very puzzled. "Moving? and fires? Together? What? What do you mean all the moving books are about intentional moves? Of course they are..." One of those "this poor person is going to feel bad in thirty seconds when she puts it together" moments, but I may have snapped at her slightly when I said that if I came up with anything good I would buy the library a copy. Sigh.