On the whole, if there is anyone in this house having a nervous breakdown, it’s probably Daniel. The house runner-up is me, then Helena (who is only three after all). Ed doesn’t usually get a look-in. Even B.C. (Before Children) it’s traditionally been part of my territory in this relationship. Every so often (twice daily) I throw up my hands and howl, “It’s all too much. I can’t take it! Why why why (insert current crisis here)?” and Ed will (mostly) remain quite calm and, because he is English, offer me tea.

This floor installation hoo-ha has been a mite stressful however, and Ed and I have been descending into the nether realms of emotional hell in turns. Luckily we have not both been down there at the same time or all hell really would have broken loose and overrun our pretty new floor in waves of fiery chaos. As it is, we plan to finish tonight and get all the books, toys and other detritus of living out of the kitchen so we can find the stove. We’ve been eating a lot of cold food.

It was all just a ploy to get some milk, which (if he wants some) he’s supposed to remember to ask for before we come upstairs for bath but it did lead rather nicely into this joke:

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Irish stew.
Irish stew who?
Irish stew in the name of the law.

Helena doesn’t get this joke, not surprisingly and offers her various alternative versions, like this one (plug any random word in for coffee and you’ll get the riff):

Knock knock
Who’s there?
Coffee.
Coffee who?
Coffee in the name of the law.

This is even funnier, really.

He didn’t get bedtime milk but he seemed okay with that.

The pattern is from Yarn Girls’ Kid Knits, the needles were size 17, the wool was one strand of Cascade Ecowool and one strand of Noro Big Kureyon. I think it worked. I’m not absolutely certain that the tan of the Ecowool doesn’t drown out the colors of the Noro, but it’s done.

A little instant gratification goes a loooong way.

Today, the house says that I’m on the up. Dishes are clean. Laundry is under control. Bathroom sink is visible. Boo to negative doctors. Hurray for knitting and good friends. Hurray for wine and Star Trek Voyager. Hurray for husbands making chili. Hurray for Daniel sitting under the kitchen table pretending to be an troll and demanding apple and claiming that billy goats do not frighten him one bit. Hurray for Helena wiping her bacon-greasy fingers in her hair. Life is really very, very good indeed.

Naturally, although I was as gentle as I could be, the children woke up and we started our drive with two button bright passengers. Daniel threw his conversational gear stick straight into fifth and talked almost non-stop until we were on the New Jersey turnpike. He talked about the street lights, the bridge lights, whether he would be able to see the Astronomer’s Tower like yesterday and whether it would be all lit up. He discussed whether the George Washington Bridge was the longest bridge of the three we cross between Bayside and Philadelphia or whether the Frog’s Snack (Throgs Neck) Bridge is. He mused on Cheerios, codes and the moons of Jupiter. Helena, although quiet, stared out the window with eyes wide open.

When I was a child, we often drove in the wee small hours, lured by the clear roads and the cooler night air, especially as the car had no airconditioning. Five hour drives to Concord would sail past while my sisters and I (stretched out in the backseat of a 1969 Chevrolet) would watch the street lights glimmer, the telephone wires swoop and dip and the shades of trees against the lightening sky. We’d try to guess how close we were by how the car was moving and the shape of the telephone poles. We would arrive at our aunt’s house at breakfast time and be swept into a world of laughing older cousins where there were cereals with artifical coloring and sugar, where there was Fluff to put on peanut butter sandwiches and we could pick corn, shuck it and drop it straight into the boiling water. We would have weeks when ice cream happened every night and the television stayed on and we could drive the milk truck on the farm roads, sitting on my cousin John’s lap. At the end, we’d be taken from our beds in the middle of the night again and watch the sky turn back towards home.

I still like driving towards dawn. I like how the world glows around you before slipping into full sunlight, almost without you noticing. I like watching the streetlamps lose out to the rising sun and the shrouded world around you clearing and sharpening. This morning, I wondered whether this trip was writing itself into the children’s memory, whether they too would remember the sun coming up and the night disappearing, as if we had left it behind in New York.

What they remember, however, is their secret and is part of what will make them increasingly mysterious as they age. Maybe someday one of them will mention remembering the time we gave up trying to get home one day and then drove home the next morning so early that it was still dark. And maybe I will have forgotten.

In one nook, the stage was set so you could photograph your children in true turn of the century style. Note their serious faces, intentionally adopted to imitate the terribly grim looking children in the photographs hanging around them.

(This is, she told me, her tired face. I’ll buy that.)

Tonight, although Helena had screamed her exhausted way through bath, we managed to get into the bedroom without falling completely to pieces. But I was tired, oh so tired and so sad that I had howled about the potty thing and made the children cry. So as I got Helena ready for bed, I started to weep a little. Daniel came over and said, “I am just going to give you this,” and kissed me. And Helena put her arms around my neck and whispered, “Hug,” and hugged me very tightly.

I love my children. All the way to the moon and back.

Tiny bits of filthy Jersey shore tumbled around my mouth and a visceral memory of childhood culinary experiments in the sandbox washed over me. I did eat sand. A lot. I relaxed somewhat and watched them munch.

Yes, that’s right. He wrote Miss Jennifer and Master Cris and no, I don’t know where he got that from. He also wrote the number of cans he wanted from them at the bottom: 234 cans. He is writing notes to all the neighbors, most of whom have a broader sense of humor than them next door.

Now, a few days later, his cooperative parents having acquired and drunk several cans of this and that, Daniel has almost ten cans which he carries around in a bag he has labeled 10 and color coded according to his grand plan. At least he has stopped pleading to be allowed to go through the neighborhood’s garbage cans. There’s a lot of stuff I’m cool with but garbage trawling when you’re too short to really see over the lip of the can is beyond my ability to cope.

I was telling this tale to another neighbor, one of the wonderful ones, and she looked at me for a moment and said, “Hmm. I’m beginning to see where Daniel might get his obsessiveness from,” and looked very pointedly at me. And now I’m completely obsessed with wondering if I am obsessive and why she thought I might be obsessive and what I’ve been obsessing about in company and whether this is a grand personality flaw or just an amusing quirk, and — oh damn.