From Russia with Love

Fontessa arrived from Moscow for a six week visit! I spent the better part of the day cleaning and straightening up, as anyone could predict. I sent the squirmy guy for a day at preschool so he can spend tomorrow morning with Baba. Naturally, I wanted to get him excited over the visit so I showed him some old pictures of Fontessa and chanted, "Baba is coming! Baba is coming!!!" End result? At 9:00 this evening he was jumping up and down in his crib yelling, "Ba-Ba! Ba-Ba! Ba-Baaaa!" Little Maniac!

Another ice storm is predicted for tonight, although it won't hit till 2am or so. I fretfully checked the weather and flight status info until I got the "We're on our way home" call from Tennisfiend. Poor Fontessa arrived with no luggage, since her flight was delayed in Moscow and her bags didn't make the connecting flight in Zurich. Although TF told me this on the phone, I didn't think to fetch her some clothing untill after she'd been here for a half an hour.  I frantically searched through my stuff for something for her to wear that wasn't to monstrously huge. I'm a sturdy,  tall woman and Fontessa's as petite and slight as a bird. I found some lounge wear, but was sort of like Stimpy dressing Renn in his worn sweats.

WE SOLD THE HOUSE!!!!!

It's been almost a year to the day since we put our house on the market, but we finally sold our house! The deal was congealing just as we were coping with the ice storm and power outage here. With our basement flooding and no power, the last thing we were thinking of was our sweet old place in New Mexico!! Sure, we've had more than a few "buyers" who were "very interested," but nothing ever came of it. So when our realtor called to say we had buyers, we said, "Sure" and went back to airing out our sodden quilts. Our new buyers loved our little home and took it at the listed price, minus a few repairs. Yay!!! It feels so unreal. What a huge relief it is to not worry about extra bills, maintenance, the pool freezing or tornadoes!
 
  

We won't see any money for a few weeks but we have plans to fund a little project in the basement anyway. After the flooding that floated twenty cardboard boxes, three wooden book shelves and several boxes of clothes around in circles in the basement, we decided to move wooden furniture upstairs into my "office" (my office being the partially finished and very cold room above the garage) and everything else onto shelves or waterproof boxes. Yay, Rubbermaid! It would be nice to have a mini-Ikea shopping spree and replace some of our sad Closet-maid storage that has been doubling for furnishings, but it might not work out that way. I think we'll finish painting the kitchen and living room first! Yay!!!

Farwell Mustard Yellow!!!

Yay!!! We are closing in on our kitchen project! I can't tell you how nice it is to cover up all that yellow! We are hoping to get everything painted before Tennisfiend's mom arrives on the 5th!

Merry Christmas!!!!

For the first time since we've been married, Tennisfiend and I celebrated Christmas on it's American day! Usually we exchange presents on New Year's Eve like they do in Russia and acknowledge Russain Christmas in January. But with Tyoma attending preschool and a neighborhood that actually interacts with you, we've joined the crowd!

Minus 5!!!

Holy Crap! This morning it was minus five degrees!!! I don't think I have ever experienced such cold! When I dropped Tyoma off at preschool today I could feel my nose hairs freezing. The air felt dry, brittle.  My jacket crinkled and crunched when I stepped outside. Lord.

Brrrr! Spent the rest of the morning shopping at Sam's and Market Basket (NH's Albertson's, but with better prices and service). Wrapped Tyoma's Christmas presents: Moonsand, play dough, plastic letters and numbers. E and I already exchanged gifts: I got him a generator and firewood. He bought me a dozen D batteries, two flashlights, twelve canisters of propane and 50 feet of extension cord. How romantic!!!! For our anniversary we plan to gift each other with voltage inverter and car batteries. :)

Dramatic Weather!

Check out this eeire pic I snapped from our front window! That's the pond across the street from us! The snow has been falling so heavily, it's unbelievable to a Southern New Mexico native. Snow sounds like tiny fingernails rapping on the windows. I love this cold and dramatic weather!



I also took a picture overlooking our back porch. Do you see that snow accumulation? All of it in a day! That's almost 14 inches! Cool!

And Happy 28 months, Tyoma!

The Ice Storm Narrative, Part One

My narrative starts on Thursday night, the night our power went out.

 

After being sick (again) during the long Thanksgiving weekend, Tennisfiend and I were looking forward to a three day weekend and some rest. He was exhausted by the deadlines he’d had to make plus being sick. I still recovering from the flu (the real thing!) I got last week. Rest and relaxation was all we talked about Thursday evening.  Heh. Thursday night was less than restful.

 

Staggering home from work regular time, Tennisfiend was dazzled by the storm. He related how his car had become encased in ice prior to leaving work and how the wind and ice pellets bombarded him on the way home. I don’t even recall our dinner or bedtime, but the air felt electric. It was a dreadful night for sleeping, with thundering wind and rolling power outages. This in itself was not so bad, but the battery back up on the computer would screech every time power dropped off, jolting us awake. After the third power drop off, I drug myself into the computer room to switch off the power outage alarm. Twenty minutes later I was back again, since I managed to press a wrong button first time.

 

Sometime around 2am, the power went off for real. We were alerted to the situation by Tyoma’s squalls. He woke without his nightlight, panicked and wailed. I took stock of our power outage supplies: we had two flashlights, and no candles. One flashlight had no batteries and we had no replacements. Talk about being unprepared.

 

However, we did have a bit of luck. I wanted candeliers for the windows to make our house festive for the holidays, but I was too cheap to drop $65 for nine “electric candles”. Instead, I bought a bunch of battery powered candeliers for $16. Let me tell you, being cheap was propitious. We used the heck out of those candles! They were perfect nightlights for Tyoma and a quite suitable tiny flashlight for walking around. 

 

Anyway, back to our drama. At 3:00 a.m., a quantity of our six smoke alarms started chirping. Although they are directly wired into the house’s electricity, these things blast a piercing tone every three to five minutes when their back up battery is low. The only way to quiet them is to replace or remove the battery. I was puzzled. Why were they chirping now? And which ones were chirping? With a candelier in one hand and a battery in another , I stood on a kitchen chair under an alarm waiting for it to chirp only to hear one chirp somewhere else. I spent fifteen minutes chasing detector beeps before I could locate a chirping detector, since they chirped at different times and the acoustics of the house obscured locations. Confounding the situation, I also had a limited number (3!) of fresh batteries. This was fine, except the damn detectors chirped even without a battery--something that didn’t happen when the power was on! So, between educated guesses and trial and error, I managed to quiet all of the offending smoke detectors and went back to sleep.

 

If you could call it sleep. It was a strange half-awake sensation, hypnogogic. Did I dream the barrage of crackles, hisses and pops or were the walls beneath us splintering and collapsing? I lapsed into one of those eternal falling dreams, where the terror of the fall thrusts you in and out of sleep; you wake to the safety of your bedroom and slip back into the falling house nightmare only to wake again. It seemed like no sleep at all.

 

We stumbled out of bed at six thirty. I turned up the hot water heater and lamented not replenishing our supplies of propane for our camp stove or lantern. A morning without tea! Horrors! Tennisfiend noticed that a small tree fell in the back went outside to investigate. I called the power company. In retrospect, it was amazing that the phones were still working. After a brief hold, a recorded voice informed me that “damage was widespread” and that we could be without power “for several days.” I was in too much shock to be alarmed. E returned from outside, a few small trees fell and a multitude of sizable branches were strewn about. I quickly dressed and headed out to the store. I was uncertain if anything was open, but if the power was out for a few days, a single flashlight and a handful of candeliers was not going to make it.

 

The roads were icy, but passable. However, the fallen trees made driving tricky. I counted three trees down on the way to our closest store, which, miraculously, was open. I was soooo happy to see the brave folks at our local Shaw’s fueling generators and running their store. My heart soared! If they were open, Home Depot would be open too.  I just might be able to buy some propane canisters! I swiftly scooped up a horde of D and AA batteries. I didn’t even look at the prices! Dura logs, overpriced firewood, butane lighters, and a smattering of canned goods rounded out my purchases.

 

In line I kidded a red haired fellow in line in front of me about the quantity of bagged ice he was buying.  Dressed in heavy plaid flannel, he was slight, fortyish, and furtive looking; his red beard was just starting to go gnarly. I regretted my teasing immediately.  He was one of those unusually earnest folks who don’t get jokes easily. With intense seriousness, he said that he would need it to keep his refrigerated goods cold. I made some stupid comment about ice being everywhere. He frowned, reiterated his comment and looked at me with such sobriety that it wiped the smile off my face. He could have been a dick and been rude to me, ignored me or gotten offended, instead he was dead serious—and even concerned for me. I was struck dumb. His composure and solemnity was infectious. While he focused all his grim energy onto loading ice onto the checkout carousel, I pulled out of line and started loading my cart with ice. The assemblage of other shoppers present eyed me vigilantly. I looked like an aging soccer mom, not a survivalist, so they followed suit. As I left, I heard a Shaw’s employee stating, “Sorry, this is the last of the ice.”

 

I felt quite proud of my cache, imagining that Home Depot would be a frenzy of activity. Certainly, I was the sole purchaser of the last available D batteries in New Hampshire. I even threw a blanket over my cache to hide it from jealous eyes. Dodging downed trees and inauspiciously strewn branches, I chugged the three miles to the Depot. The mostly empty parking lot surprised me. Only a few scattered shoppers were picking up supplies—power cords and the last of the electric generators. I grabbed a handful of flashlights and all but two remaining propane tanks and hustled to the check out.  While I stood in line, the power came back on. I was flooded with disappointment. A power outage, how romantic!!! I left one propane tank behind as a courtesy to the fellow at the end of line and called Tennisfiend. No, the power was not back on, yes, I would I pick up coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts.

 

The day passed swiftly from then. Frantic phone calls to my mom in Las Cruces revealed that a cold snap was coming our way and that the power outage was quite serious, might take up to a week to resolve. The house became quite cold, quite fast. Half the Dura logs were consumed during the day. A dozen tea candles would have warmed us more. With temperatures dropping to near 9 degrees at night, we moved Tyoma’s crib into our room. I taped blankets and quilts over the windows and repeatedly filled our tub with hot water to warm up our room. Despite these efforts, at seven p.m. our bedroom temperature was barely 50 degrees.

 

To make matters worse, Tennisfiend discovered that our basement was inexplicably beginning to flood. We were deluged by rains over the summer and our damn sump pump never clicked on. Now, wet fingers of concrete crept across the basement. Before turning in for the evening, I took a final paranoid trip down the basement, not really expecting anything. I was shocked to find that the oozing moisture was turning into small puddles. I charged up the stairs, alerting Tennisfiend. Warm and toasty in bed, he didn’t want to bother, but I reminded him that ten minutes of moving stuff around now was much better than doing the same in the middle of the night. ‘Cause you know one of us (me) would wake up and check.

To be continued...

 

 

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December Icestorm 2008

I imagine that this date will go down in record books for the power outages associated with it. I am legitimately writing this entry late, since our power went out for one entire week! I've got a good deal to write, and I'm trying not to get too busy or too sick to get it all online, so, I'll post in chunks. First, of course, the pictures I snapped Friday morning. I took them on a whim, not realizing the extent of the damage to New Hampshire.
 
One of the trees on our property that went down overnight. E chopped it up for firewood. It's difficult to see, but many grass blades are sheathed in ice.


Our larger trees in the backyard, ice covered and a little bit creaky. I later discovered that it only takes a half inch of ice accumulation on branches/foliage to bring down a tree. The one that wiped out our power lines was about the size of the pine tree in the middle.

  The beauty of an ice storm deceives. I always thought that storms that caused major outages required mountains of snow. Everything looked like a fairyland this morning. You'd never realize how damaging it was until you moved away from the house--branches strewn everywhere, trees bent over or snapped in half, bushes completely collapsed--many roads were impassible.

 I reget that I didn't take more pictures of the neighborhood debris. Lawns were littered with dozens of clumps of pine branches like this. We could have made a good sized Christmas tree from all the ones on our property.

 A shot of the thicket behind our house. If anyone had to crunch through this stuff to fix a line, they'd have some very hard work ahead of them.

Collage

We're not quite certain how much help Tyoma had with this, but I was quite pleasantly surprised when I found it in his "OUT" box at preschool. We plan to enroll him in the Dada School of Abstract Art for Squirmy Toddlers next session.

Somebody Help Me!

Behavior Log

The past two weeks I’ve been keeping a log to identify problem behaviors and triggers that interfere with Tyoma’s speech therapy and joint attention activities. These observations, along with a retrospective of my journals gave me a “top ten” list of activities that cause distress; i.e. “tuning out” or becoming hyperactive. These situations invariably cause behavior problems. They follow, in order of most intense (serious, continuous or intense meltdowns) to least (fussiness, running away to avoid activity).

Activity	Behavior	Cause?	Solution
Hair washing	Red faced screaming, shaking, hysteria	Doesn’t like water poured on head	Nothing has ever helped.
Trips to the beach	Series of meltdowns when movements restricted	Overwhelming, too many new things. He loves the ocean/beach.	Hard to work with.
Putting on hats.	Cries, pulls off hat. Wails/fights if forced to wear hat.	Always hated anything restrictive on head.	If it’s very cold he’ll wear the hood on his jacket.
Cleaning ears.	Fights/screams	Sensory	Work quickly & distract.
Haircuts.	Fusses, twists about.	Hates water sprayed near face/ hair touched by stranger	The right stylist makes the difference.
Speech Therapy/ Dr. Appointments	He runs off, becomes “hyper.”	Overstimulation?	Still working on it!
Serious Conversations	Hyper, gets into stuff.	Sensitive to tone of voice.  (not volume)	Give attention, talk elsewhere.
Wal-Mart.	He fusses and tries to get out of the cart	Sensitive to noise from TV/loudspeakers	Redirect attention, rock cart.
Bookstores	Fusses, tries to get out of stroller.	Distracted by print? Does not have trouble at toy stores.	Be quick, rock stroller.
10:50 and 4:10 Madness	Hyper, gets into stuff.	Hungry, needs to burn off energy.	Intense play, snack

Behavior is communication. I’m not sure if I identified all the causes of Tyoma’s challenging behavior, nor am I certain that I am using the best solutions. But I am certain that by sharing this with you that we can develop a plan to help make his therapy sessions more productive.
Let me add a bit more about Tyoma’s behavior. His baseline is sweet, affectionate, and compliant with just a touch of mischievousness.  His remoteness and hyperactivity are not predominate or persistent.  They occur in specific situations and usually have specific triggers.

Remoteness

Tyoma can tune the world out. When he does, he will rarely respond to prompts or look at you. This frequently happens when he is deeply focused on a favorite task (attentiveness will return after he’s finished). I am not troubled by this type of self-absorption—I consider it to be willful ignoring and his Papa and Grandpa are masters of it. What concerns me is the other type of “spaciness” where he is truly in his own world. 

I’ve noticed that this aloofness is often connected to his health. At home, the aloofness goes hand in hand with fevers, blue circles under his eyes, cold symptoms and fussiness. Tylenol and cuddling make the difference.  I’d estimate that 70% of his remoteness in our home is associated with him not feeling well. This is unfortunate, since preschool floods our house with new viruses every other week.

His remaining remoteness I ascribe to some sort of mental overload. New activities, uncertainty of expectations and too many distractions contribute to Tyoma shutting down. He won’t answer questions, participate in activities or even look at you. This reaction goes hand in hand with hyperactivity.

Hyperactivity

Tyoma sometimes transforms from the sweet well mannered boy I know into the hyper-monster.  He runs about, gets into stuff and tests limits. A part of this behavior is the need to burn off some physical energy. I can predict when he needs a break by the time of day. Break given=energy spent, his focus and attention return. Being overtired or hungry also brings out the hyper-monster. I suspect that this behavior is fairly normal and that most toddler boys need to run around, eat when they’re hungry and sleep well.

This hyperactivity becomes demanding when it interferes with play, speech therapy and conversations with other adults. Tyoma probably has some sensory issues that contribute to this problem. The novelty factor is a major influence. And I am all out of time! I’ll finish this up for you later!