Mrs. Chapman goes to Washington

Hear that? That’s the sound of our copy desk chief weeping over that incredibly hackneyed blog post title. And, hear that other noise? That’s me, trying very, very hard to care (sorry Brian). You know why? Because I’m going on vacation tomorrow. Oh yeah, baby.

Do you all have any idea how long it’s been since we went on vacation? I mean, we’ve gone on trips for weddings or to visit family, but the last time we went somewhere purely for its own sake and just to have fun was…um…well, our honeymoon. Seven years ago. It was a year after our wedding, and we drove down to New Orleans for a week of great beer, great food, great music, and great attractions. We love that city so much we very nearly named Baby Girl Nola (well, it would have been a better tribute than naming her Liza Jane, ’cause that girl is kind of sketchy).

So anyway, miracle of miracles, we managed to scrounge up the time and cash for a five-day foray to Washington, D.C. Not that there’s much cash involved: pretty much everything is free in D.C., we’re driving up there in the Prius (one tank of gas up, one tank back, $80. Bonus: no crappy biscotti and layover in Denver), and we’re staying with my brother’s mother-in-law. We’re hoping to do the whole trip for less than $300. Maybe $350 if you count all the guilt-ridden souvenirs I’ll probably buy for the Sprog.

He was morose about the vacation last night and clung to me at bedtime. “I don’t want you to go leave when it’s Wednesday, Mama,” he whispered into my shoulder. “Don’t go on vacation.” GUILT BOMB: TARGET ACQUIRED. So of course I promised to bring him back a bunch of loot if he kept a stiff upper lip. He brightened up instantly, and started begging for Speed Racer paraphernalia. I counter-offered with dinosaur stuff from the Natural History museum. He accepted, and has been excited about the trip ever since. I’m so glad we could come to detente on this.

So yes, the kids are staying at my parents’ house for the week (and let’s pour out a forty for them, bless their souls), so it’s just me and the hubby. Romantic? Oh yes. A week of free museum-hopping is hot, sweaty nerd fantasy right there. There’s so much to do in DC, I can’t imagine we’ll even get in half of the cool stuff on our itinerary. But we will go for the gold, and if they find us dead of exhaustion on a Red Line train after a marathon Smithsonian junket, well, just know we went out on a high note.

My $12,000 toaster

I swear, Mom, it just followed me home! But it’s so cute, and it’ll pay for itself, and, and…well, just look at it:

Isn’t it cute? It is totally cute. Especially the gas gauge. That is far and away the cutest part of the whole thing.

So, yeah, we bought a new car? SUV? wagon? vehicle on Tuesday. Our homely old 97 Jeep Cherokee wasn’t getting any younger, and it guzzles gas like a barfly swilling PBR. The only reason we kept it so long is that it’s paid for (no small thing), and it has the storage capacity to haul my husband’s drums. Finding a vehicle that’s gas efficient, fairly inexpensive, and able to haul Slingerlands was a pipe dream until a few weeks ago when I read up on Scion xB’s. Imagine my elation when I read that they get 30-35 mpg, have tons of storage space, and are not too expensive (for a newish car).

Some people are not so keen on the way they look—and let’s be honest, it looks like the love child of a Volvo and a Borg cube—but I don’t mind so much because I’m too busy nuzzling the gas gauge. My husband, on the other hand, loves the way it looks. When he first saw it, he was jumping around it and hooting like one of those chimps in 2001: A Space Odyssey when they first encounter the Very Unsettling Monolith.

Because they get such good gas mileage, they’re selling like crazy right now, but I was able to get a really good deal on mine. And I didn’t just get a good deal on any ordinary Scion, oh no (inserting tongue into cheek now). The dealership decided to spruce up the Toaster before putting it out on the lot, so it’s all tricked out with fancy racing headlights and other such frippery. Actually, the only reason I know that is because a guy in my husband’s band patiently pointed out to us the plethora of after-market goodies that has apparently been invested in the Toaster. One thing I did notice, though, and this cracks me up to no end: I got rims, yo. Big, ginormous aluminum rims. With scorpions on them.

Ph33r:

I will totally be the baddest mommy at the soccer field. *snort*

P.S. For you Battlestar Galactica fans, please know that owning a Scion xB is a BSG joke waiting to happen. We call it The Toaster because of its obvious resemblance to said appliance, but “toaster” is also the derogatory name used by humans to describe the bad guy robot Cylons in BSG. Also, the Sprog couldn’t pronounce “Scion” at first, so he kept calling it “Cylon” all day. Awesome.

A little mystery, please

I am only 29 years old, so I know that I’m not wallowing in a fog of nostalgia when I say: Who on Earth lets their daughter out of the house wearing a Prom dress like this? Seriously? The video of the news story is down below, but here’s a picture from Boing Boing just to give you an idea:

Apparently the theme at Prom this year was “Streetwalker”. Or not. Predictably, when Marche Taylor showed up to her high school prom wearing this little scrap, she was denied entrance, then arrested because she started making a big scene. Stay classy, Marche.

Whatever happened to leaving a few things to the imagination? Whatever happened to cultivating an air of mystery? Because if a modest dress = mystery, then this dress = “Chapter 1: The butler did it! In the pantry with the candlestick! THE END.”

One thing I noted while watching the news video is that the girl’s mom and dad are nowhere to be seen. Please tell me they’re at the library, checking out a parenting book.

The Lost Boys of the FLDS

It’s been just over a month since the government raid on the polygamist Yearning For Zion Ranch in Eldorado, Texas, and I continue to be amazed at the appalling spectacle of the whole thing.

Obviously, the state government has bitten off a lot more than they can chew. The raid was poorly executed, ill-advised in the first place, and possibly illegal. But if I object to the raid at all, it’s because of the sloppy handling, not because I disagree with the state’s decision to investigate. Certainly not because of the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints’ tearjerker Captive FLDS Children website and interviews featuring weeping mothers begging to see their children again.

It’s not that I’m unsympathetic—I never like to see children being taken away from their parents unless there is a darn good reason for it. And if the state felt that the children were in imminent danger of abuse, I think they should have taken the men away and left the women and children at the ranch while they investigated. But as impatient as I feel toward the Texas authorities, I confess that my pity for the FLDS parents is somewhat limited.

They’re working overtime to present themselves as law-abiding citizens who were peacefully practicing their religion before the bad old state came in and tore children and parents apart, but the FLDS was tearing families apart all by themselves long before the YFZ raid, and all in the name of their religion, too.

So, yes: go look at the pictures on their Captive FLDS Children site. Lots of mothers, most of whom were raised in the FLDS faith. Lots of children—boys and girls—also being raised in the faith. But how many FLDS men do you see? Not many, and it’s not just because of the raid.

The FLDS depends on an extremely lopsided male-to-female ratio to achieve the kind of polygamous marriages they’re known for. The YFZ Ranch is utterly typical of the sect. According to a CNN article:

Of the 463 children, 250 are girls and 213 are boys. Children 13 and younger are about evenly split — 197 girls and 196 boys — but there are only 17 boys aged 14 to 17, compared with the 53 girls in that age range.

So what do they do with the extra boys? Kick ‘em out.

It’s a well-documented practice among the FLDS: in order for older men to have their pick of young plural wives, they commonly excommunicate teenage boys—some as young as 13—for ridiculously minor infractions like listening to CDs, wearing short sleeves, or talking to girls. Hundreds of boys are being systematically exiled to a world they know nothing about, convinced they’re going to hell, and never allowed to see their mothers again. Many are so hopeless and confused that they turn to drugs, alcohol, or even self-harm. And small wonder why. Consider a passage from this article:

Abandoned by his family, faith, and community, Gideon Barlow arrived here an orphan from another world.

The freckle-faced 17-year-old said he was left to fend for himself last year after being forced out of Colorado City, Ariz., just over the [Utah] state line.

”I couldn’t see how my mom would let them do what they did to me,” he said.

When he tried to visit her on Mother’s Day, he said, she told him to stay away. When he begged to give her a present, she said she wanted nothing. ”I am dead to her now,” he said.

So, though I’m sure the FLDS women are sincere when they tell the media how badly they want their children back—what mother wouldn’t be?—I’d be a lot more sympathetic if these women were willing to go to the mat to protect their sons. Where are the mothers’ tears for those children?

Heartsick

I have so many things to blog about, but let me take a minute here and ask you all for some prayers.

My dear friends, J. and R. had their baby on Friday, and on Saturday they learned that he has a serious heart valve defect. They thought at first he might have to have immediate surgery, but at this point they think a life-long course of medication will control it.

J. sounded like he hadn’t slept in four days when I talked to him this morning. He hadn’t. R. is exhausted too, not only from the emergency C-section but from the grief of being in a different hospital than her baby, and all while watching the other happy families up and down the hallway who are cuddling their new babies.

I wish so much that their birth had been easier. Not just the baby’s—though I’m sure they rather not have had an emergency C-section—but their birth as parents. Even under the best of circumstances, a new mother and father come wailing into a new world that seems larger, colder, and scarier because there is so suddenly so much more to lose. Our hearts are wounded, too, and there is no easy pill to take for it.

So please, if you’re the praying type, say a prayer for healing and peace for this new little family. If you’re not the praying type, keep a good thought for them anyway, and all of you go home tonight and love your own family extra hard.

I am knitter, hear me roar

Remember how I said I was going to knit a cardigan to go with Baby Girl’s Easter dress? Remember how I said that only a week before Easter? So of course I only finished it two days ago, which is plenty of time to go with her Easter dress…next year.

So yes, it took me a while, mostly because of the unholy trinity of knitting obstacles: lack of time, ADD, and inexperience. Trying to find time to knit was like waiting for the planets to align. And when I did find time, I still had to unravel the tangle of unfamiliar stitches and pattern abbreviations like any other newbie knitter (do what through the back loops?). And even after I had the stitches down pat, I suffered needlessly because I would get all ADD and make the most unbelievable mistakes. You know that Bible verse that says “let not the left hand know what the right is doing?” Yeah, that.

Example: My mother-in-law was visiting a few weeks ago, and I decided to sew together the front and back at the right shoulder. I had already done the left shoulder, and seaming turned out to be super-easy. So no sweat, right? Wrong. So so so wrong.

I carefully aligned the pieces, then executed a flawless three-needle bind-off with my nose about three inches from the sweater. Then after my triumphant finish, I zoomed out and realized that the front piece was backwards. As in, purl side out, stockinette side in. I could have wept.

I grimly undid the shoulder seam and started again. This time I made sure the right side was out. Another flawless three-needle bind-off: w00t. Then I realized the shoulder seam was on the wrong side. Let me explain that more fully: sewing two pieces of knitting together makes a big huge speed bump of a seam. It’s supposed to go on the inside of the project, but mine was on the outside, perched up there on the shoulder like a fat pink woolly worm. A saner woman than I would have torched the whole thing at this point, needles and all. Instead, I undid the seam–AGAIN–and did it one more time. With a rum and coke. This time I got it right, and it was 2 a.m. at that point, so there was mercifully nobody awake to see me taunting a ball of pink alpaca yarn. Okay, so maybe that was a bit much. Probably should have left out the victory dance, anyway.

I didn’t take pictures of that particular screw-up, but I just had to snap a shot or two of my next mistake. I…well, I don’t even know how to justify this. Baby Girl had a cold this past week, so I was a bit distracted with her anyway. As I was rocking her bouncy seat with my big toe, I was attempting to sew up the side and down to the end of the sleeve while simultaneously watching Training Day. I think you know where this is going, and that it is not a good place. That it is, in fact, the crafting equivalent of a dark alley in Compton.

But let me not waste words where a picture will suffice:

See what I did there? That’s the left front sewn onto the back right side. No kidding. The front right side and sleeve are both flapping around uselessly up top. But I had not come so far, only to let that sweater defeat me now. I gritted my teeth and undid the seam, which I was getting quite good at.

By that time the knitting gods must have been done laughing at me, because I had no more mishaps and was completely done the next day. Here it is, in all its glory:

Is it not nifty? It is so nifty. And soft. And the perfect size for Baby Girl. And best of all, completely finished.

Next project: SOCK WARS!!!! What’s that? Why yes, I am a masochist, thanks for asking.