Pleased to Meet You...

Hope you get my name... (hee hee hee... I've always loved that Rolling Stones song...)

Anyway, the older kids are gone, the toddler is bored silly but it's 103 degrees outside, so we're sort of limited as to options... (we've done the wading pool... the wading pool is done...) and the baby is too young to put sunblock on and too fair to even venture into anything resembling sunshine without it...

Looks like a good Saturday to blog.

This time 'round I thought I'd introduce the people in my solar system... (when I only had two kids, they were the twin suns around which my world revolved, but now that I have four I've had to revamp my figurative cosmos as it were.) This would also be a good time to get my mate to teach me how to import photos so you could see their stunning beauty and greatness for yourselves. (Okay...for the record...I've now tried three times to post pictures...there will eventually be pictures, but this entry is not it...you will have the honor of being bored with bad pictures of my children later...my apologies...)

Now as I've said before, if you read my books the names of my kids on the back are not really their names. I did this for a couple of reasons--the primary one being my own bizarre sense of fun. If I was going to have a pen name, then they were too. The secondary one related to frightening and half-formed visions of my children being persecuted by the religious right should any of them care to read my books, but since it's likely that not only will only a few people ever read my books but that even fewer will actually read this blog I figure they're safe from the religious right, and I'd really like to brag a little.

My oldest is Trystan--I'm sure there will be a photo somewhere by the time this is published. Trystan, known as Arthur on the back of the book, is also known as T or Big T. This stems from a moment in Kindergarten--T was born with a communication handicap which I'm sure people will get tired of reading about, but since communication is the basis of percieving personality, much of figuring out who my son is has needed to be filtered through his handicap. Anyway, he couldn't say his own name, and his teacher (bless her heart, wonderful lady!) asked that we figure out some sort of signifier for him--Trystan had too many consonant clusters, thank you very much. My first thought was 'Pooh', as in Winne-the, but his teacher (rightly) thought that maybe he'd be stuck with this for a while...'Ms. Mac', she said gravely, 'He can't be Pooh forever.' A very wise thought, since now that T is nearing 6' tall at the ripe old age of 13, I am very grateful we didn't subject him to the indignity of being called 'Pooh' in middleschool. It's bad enough that he's a sagitarius and thinks he's funny. (It's hard to be funny when you have no sense of wordplay and 'pun' is right out of your whole cognitive sphere...his most recent joke "What kind of drugs do frogs take?" "Croak-aine." Has tickled him so much that I just haven't even wanted to tackle that whole inappropriate thing...by golly, he's thought of something funny and we're not going to take that from him.) Anyway, a stand-up comedian he's not--but he's got a heart as big as the world, and as far as keeping your karma pure, nothing ranks higher in my book than being kind to my good boy.

His sister, Bryar Rose, is a whole other kettle of fish. To begin with, be careful what you name your children. If Trystan Bard means (roughly) sorrowful singer, and hello, communication handicap, then naming your child 'prickly flower' is going to get you a personality set that you maybe didn't bargain for. My daughter is beautiful, sturdy, bright, and extremely passive/aggressive. Middle school has not been kind to Bryar, and she's developing the sense of humor that will start leveling her enemies at any moment--my fault there, it was the only thing I could pass down to her of any value-- the freckles and the weight problem just don't help at all in American education, wordplay was the best I could do. But on the upside, she's kind, creative, funny, and loves her little brother and sister with so much passion and pride that she frequently brings me to tears. The picture I didn't take but will be cemented in my mind forever is the one of her measuring her little brother against the wall, because I forgot to do it, and she wanted a reminder of when he was this small. She's often so determined to be mature that I forget that she's 11 and I get all surprised when she rolls her eyes at me and gets a 'tude... then it hits me...13/14 is just around the corner and it's going to suck HUGE!!!

Now for the toddler... Does anybody remember that part in Fellowship of the Ring when our heroes are trapped in the mines of Moria and the orcs are rushing in? Boromir (played by the ever appealing bad guy, Sean Bean) risks a glance outside and says, "They have a cave troll..." and his voice is dry and disgusted--here they are, completely outnumbered, and doesn't this giant force of blind destruction feel just a teeny bit like overkill? Yeah...we call the toddler "the cave troll." My beloved and I were feeling outnumbered as it was... kids, cat, dog, obligatory children's animals that die... (rats, fish, cannabalistic mice, that sort of thing...) and then we had Kewyn. (His name on the back of my books is 'Gawain'--Kewyn is a variation thereof...) Kewyn means hawk, his middle name, Tor, means prince...remember that whole 'watch what you name your children' thing? Yeah... he rules the roost...he's an adorable dynamo of foot pattering destruction, a walking disaster, a demolition man...he's a toddler with an attitude and we knew we were in trouble when we realized that his ripping-metal shrieking sound as he played was his way of bitching at inanimate objects for not positioning themselves exactly where he deigned them to be. He talks--when he wants to--and it's funny that the commands I have the most trouble getting him to obey are the first things out of his mouth. When I hug him too tight because I'm trying to balance nursing the baby with snuggling the cave troll? He tells me to "Be Nice." When I'm washing his hair (he's a scorpio...he doesn't get along with water unless he's had a long introduction period...) he tells me to "Stop that." When I offer him food he doesn't want he says, "Don't want it." When I tell him, "Say Please." He looks at me with a smug little smile that's the toddler equivalent of "I'm sorry, I don't speak your language strange lady, now give me a bottle of chocolate milk before I make the neighbors call CPS."

He's our cave troll, our grace note, our BBQ, our little prince...our lives would be bleak and sterile if he had never deigned to bless us with his sturdy little presence.

And now for baby-to-be-named later... see, the problem with having a nine year gap between Bryar and Kewyn is that my spouse and I developed the idea that if we were going to have another baby, it would take another nine years...and since we planned to close the entire works down at the age of 40 (only a year and something away) well, we didn't have to worry about getting pregnant between 36 (when the cave troll was born) and 40. Can you believe we both have college degrees? For the love of crap, I teach HIGH SCHOOL for sweet wool's sake...and it's not like we don't know what causes the little goombahs to go squirting out like watermelon seeds... we'd DONE THIS BEFORE!!! But as brain damaged as we seem to have been, I couldn't be happier to be stupid. She's only three months old, but Arwyn Star is delightful, beautiful, and addicted to chewing on her fat little fists. On a good day, she can shove both of them in her mouth at once, and we couldn't be prouder. She is the only one of our babies to have blue eyes, and her hair was red at birth...so far, her only problem is that we're both terrified to take her out in the sun... I would imagine that with more than fifteen seconds or so exposure, she might explode. Our little Ladybug thinks the cave troll is the best and most interesting interactive video a baby could have...some things never change.

And that's it...my children. To my reader they will be cute, badly taken photographs, amusing anecdotes, prisms through whom life's broad light is reflected. To me they are the sun and the moon and the sweet bright stars, dawn, daybreak, twilight and dark. They're my world, and it's huge and delightful and amazing... may all you who read them and send them good will through this blog be blessed.