Sir Monkeypants and I just discovered FreeRice, a site that claims to donate rice to third world nations with each vocabulary-related multiple-choice question you answer correctly. It sets your vocab at a certain level, based on what kind of words you’ve been able to identify in the past, and we’ve become a little obsessed with upping our score. We’re often able to bring it up to a 40 but if we really screw up, we drop back down to 36 or 37. We’re not even cheating, either.

This site fits in perfectly with the book I just finished reading, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx And Crake. It’s set in the near future, and the main character is obsessed with words that have drifted out of the English language — words that, within the last couple of decades, have become extinct. Every so often, when he’s stressed and trying to comfort himself, he rhymes off a list of such words, usually somewhere between 4 and 8 to a list. And on a typical list in the book, I knew one, maybe two of the words.

The others were so strange, so obscure, that I thought for sure that Atwood had made them up to emphasise the fact that they didn’t seem to belong in the language. But I just spent about ten minutes looking up a handful of them online, and it appears that they are all legit. It’s crazy how many words are out there in the language that I literally have never heard before. I’ve done a lot of reading and I usually do better than average (although not outstanding) at vocab tests, but now I feel really humbled.

Here’s the list that I just looked up — all valid words availble for use if you want to dazzle or confuse your friends:
frass
purblind
quarto
subfusc
grutch
fungible
pullulate
pistic
cerements
trull
prattlement
opsimath
woad

And there’s dozens more like it in the novel. Fabulous, fabulous book by the way — definitely highly recommended.

Edited to add: All but four of the above words were rejected by Firefox’s spell checker. I guess I’m not the only one who has never heard of them!

Captain Jelly Belly:

“Mommy, my freezie is so freezing! Why do they call it a freezie?”

Sigh.

I’ve got a crush on Ken Jennings. I’ve been reading his blog, and he’s funny, and clever, and generally adorable. He’s making this amazing mural in his daughter’s room. He likes word puzzles. He used his Grand Slam trophy to eat Fruit Loops out of. He’s just so cool.

It’s not like I want him to be my boyfriend or anything. Instead, I like to fantasize that he and his family come over for a weekend BBQ. While his kids and my kids play happily in the backyard, Sir Monkeypants and I sit with Ken and his wife on our fabulous, currently non-existent patio (a large portion of this fantasy is devoted to designing the ideal patio locale).

Then, while we wait for the veggie burgers to cook, Ken and I engage in a competition to see who can come up with the most obscure factoid, occasionally running inside to check things on the internet when there is debate. Meanwhile, Sir Monkeypants and Mrs. Jennings exchange eye-rolls in an unsung duet of, “Jesus, not this again.”

Over dinner we’ll all work together to complete the New York Times crossword puzzle, and we’ll crack each other up by trying to restrict the dinner conversation exclusively to movie quotes. Later we’ll have out-loud readings from the books of Ellen Raskin, before putting the kids to bed.

Then it’s time for some Cranium, or maybe an everyone-versus-Ken edition of Trivial Pursuit. Over chocolate chip cookies, of course.

Sigh. Even my dream life is hopelessly geeky.

Today would have been my grandparents’ 65th wedding anniversary, except sadly, my grandfather passed away almost two years ago. My Nana and Papa were the rock of our family, holding everything together, and providing a life-long example for us all to follow. I miss him.

My Papa’s mother died when he was 12, and that was basically the end of his formal education. He got a job cleaning up in a sock and stocking factory, and when his shift ended, he’d hang around and watch everyone else work, because he didn’t really have anything else to do. That way, he learned how to fix all the machines in the factory, and was soon promoted to do that kind of work.

Years later, after he was married, he went to work at the Canadian General Tower, a plastics development firm in Cambridge, working on their machines. There, he was lucky enough to get a personality assessment, which showed that he was incredibly intelligent and quick to learn. The company decided to send him to the States for two years of further education, so that he could become a development engineer — which left my Nana at home with two little girls.

My Nana was pretty plucky herself, and while Papa was away, she decided she needed to be able to use the family car. So she put my three-year-old mother in the back seat, and put my baby Aunt Karen in a bassinet on the floor of the front seat. Then, having never driven before in her life, she took the car downtown, took her driver’s test, and won herself a driver’s license. That’s some spunk, right there.

When my Papa came home, he went to work as a plastics engineer (ironically, my other grandfather also worked at CGT as an engineer at the same time, but they only met once before their kids decided to get married many years later). After a few years he and two other men decided to start their own business, Aclo Compounders.

Aclo was a company that specialised in taking colourless plastic pellets and adding custom-mixed dyes to create coloured pellets. Other companies then used these coloured pellets to create plastic parts, like car dashboards or toy dump trucks. The dye mixtures were their chief intellectual property and the scientific work went in there. After many years — I was a teenager at this time — the original three founders decided to sell the company.

My Papa was immensely popular at the company and has many, many stories about times that he helped out a family, or took care of one of his employees, or made everyone laugh with his jokes. When he was leaving the workers in the plant all got together to get him a farewell gift.

They had some of the pellets from the company custom pressed into a toilet seat.

It was kind of a weird gift but well fitting his sense of humour. My Nana and Papa installed it in their downstairs powder room. I loved that seat — I’d never seen anything like it, so colourful, and also so lovely and smooth on your behind.

A few years ago, when my Papa got very sick, he started to give away some of his belongings to family members who would like them. All I asked for was the toilet seat. It’s a fabulous toilet seat. But it also reminds me of my Papa — his humour, and his amazing entrepreneurial spirit.

After selling Aclo, he went on to found another plastics company, Canuck Compunders, in Cambridge. He was head of the Rotary Club for Ontario and the northern U.S., he founded CrimeStoppers, he started the Probus club for men, and another for women, in his hometown. My Nana was at his side and helped him with all these endeavours over the whole 60+ years of their marriage.

Happy anniversary, Nana. I know you miss Papa as much as we all do.

I just love it when the Wee One is really hungry, and I pick her up, and she immediately tries to nurse on the nearest available surface.

You’d think she’d have figured out by now that it doesn’t come out of my shoulder. Really.

It’s almost time to think about solids for her. These days, doctors recommend exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months, and she’s only barely four months old. But I’m really getting tired of getting stared at with a longing look every time I’m having a snack. The other day I was holding her on my lap while I drank a glass of water, and every time the glass passed by the Wee One’s head, she opened her mouth and followed it like a baby bird looking for a worm. I’ve promised her I’ll look into the rice cereal name brands next time we’re at the store, but I’m still hoping to stall her until Christmas, at least. Maybe that’s what Santa will bring her — a box of cereal.

I’m hoping the introduction of solids will help stem the tide of spit-up. My wardrobe really can’t take much more.

A couple of weeks ago, I went for my yearly physical. was still at home so I got to go all by myself. On my way out the door, I noticed I had two big splotches of spit-up on my shirt. I thought I’d try to project the image of a pulled together, free-spirited, childless woman at the doctor’s office, so I ran upstairs and changed my shirt really fast and then dashed out the door.

In the waiting room I took off my coat and found not two, but four stains in my “clean” shirt. Two from spit-up, and two from salad dressing, spilled on my shirt the last time I tried to eat with the baby on my lap. Sigh.

When I got in to see the doctor — who was running a glorious 10 minutes late, 10 full minutes of me-time, 10 minutes of reading a book without pictures — she mentioned how strange it was to see me without any kids attached. And I thought, you can still see the marks of their existence all over me.

Sweet, but boy, do I ever need a new wardrobe.

We’ve made it through all last week of being home without Sir Monkeypants, and it was a crazy, up and down week.

Some moments were so happy and fun that I felt like I had this Mom thing totally under control, and I felt sorry for for missing it.

Some moments were so horrible and frustrating that it was all I could do not to rush to the phone in tears, to beg Sir Monkeypants to come home. But I refrained.

I’ve learned that the success or failure of the day depends largely on how the Wee One naps. If I can get her to sleep on a regular schedule, then she’s happy, and I have a lot less stress. While she’s napping, I can spend time with the other two, which makes them happy too, and I can get the chores done around here that need doing to keep the house running.

When she doesn’t nap, I wind up frantically trying to rock her to sleep around 4, while I fret about the dinner that is not getting made, while a wound-up Captain and too-tired Gal (she’s been skipping her nap too much lately) are fighting and screaming and punching downstairs. Not good.

There’s hope, though. We made it through, and I feel confident that we’ll make it through this week as well. The Wee One adapted her schedule quite nicely to the kids’ school drop-offs and pick-ups, so thank heaven for that. Soon, she’ll be napping less often and will be able to hold it together better if we don’t quite get that last nap of the day in there. Each week is going to get easier and easier.

I think we’re gonna make it after all.

Captain Jelly Belly is on the cusp of being a reader. He can recognise about 15 words outright, and he is learning to sound things out. He’s really excited about this process and now he’s constantly reading signs and cereal boxes and the speedometer in the car (to Sir Monkeypants’ chagrin) and everything else around him. We’re really proud of how excited he is to be learning something new.

Each night when we’re reading his bedtime story, I point to each word as I say it. Sometimes he’ll say the word before me, if it is one that he knows; otherwise, he’ll repeat it after me and you can tell he’s trying to commit it to memory. So cool.

Last night I was reading a Thomas book and I came to the word “gone.” The Captain said, “Wait! Which one is the word ‘gone,’ again?”

So I pointed it out.

He said, “But…’gone’ ends in an ‘n’ sound. ‘Gonnnnnnnnnnnne.'”

I said, “True. But sometimes words end with an ‘e,’ and it doesn’t make any sound, it just tells you how to say the other sounds in the word. G-O-N-E is how you spell ‘gone.'”

And he rolled his eyes and looked at me like, Lady, you have NO idea what the word ‘gon’ looks like. Poor, poor Mommy.

I feel like a lot of my posts have been quite negative lately, and so I just want to say, for the record, that I am really, really happy. I look around at our little family and I feel so contented, so lucky to have three happy, healthy kids. Having the Wee One around just makes me feel, I don’t know, complete.

Some couples who have kids know that just one is right for them, but most, I think, go on to have a second child without having to make a big decision out of it. It’s assumed that you’ll want a sibling for your first, you’ll want to replicate your own numbers on this earth, maybe you’re hoping to have one girl and one boy. But once a couple has two kids…then comes decision time. Are you really done? Are your all-too-short baby-having days actually over? Or should you venture on to a third, into that crazy land where you are forced to play zone instead of man-to-man?

We get asked all the time why we decided to have a third, by couples who are facing this very same decision. I knew pretty much as soon as we had Gal Smiley that I would like to have another baby, but Sir Monkeypants wasn’t so sure. I didn’t want to have a third unless he fully supported the idea too, so for a long time, we debated and thought about it and went back and forth and changed each others’ minds a hundred times each.

In the end, I think these were the important factors for me:

A friend of ours with three told us, “You’ll never regret having a third, but you might regret not having a third.”

The lady across the street from us, who has two daughters aged 10 and 8, told me that she has always regretting not having a third.

Sir Monkeypants’ sister, who has two boys of her own, told us that if we were even remotely thinking of having the third, we should go for it.

And lastly, when Gal Smiley was about six months old, we lent/gave all our baby stuff to my younger sister for her first baby…and I felt really, really sad about it. I wasn’t ready to let go of that stuff, and I think this was a big factor for Sir Monkeypants too. Compare to now, when I gleefully dumped several boxes of maternity wear (bye bye!!) and 0-3M clothes (see ya!!) on my sister last month. I wasn’t ready then, but I’m ready now.

So, we decided to bravely go into the abyss. And yes, it makes for a crazy life. We sometimes feel like we don’t have enough one-on-one time with each of our kids; we sometimes feel like we’ll never sleep again. We’ve given up at least, oh, five years worth of being able to travel, being able to catch a movie on any given Saturday night, being able to sleep in on Sunday mornings, even to go to the mall to shop at the same time. We’ve committed to an extra university education, an extra set of braces, a bigger house and a bigger car.

But when I look at the Wee One…I know it was the right choice for us. Her smile alone makes it all worth it.

So if you’re even remotely thinking about it…go for it.

So last night around dinnertime, Sir Monkeypants reminded me that he was going out to play poker around 8. Not usually a big deal; all the kids are in bed by then and usually it’s flake time for us anyway. But for some reason I was filled with dread; I just knew it was not going to be an easy night around here.

And I was right. Around 7:45, just as was leaving…

I heard crying. The Wee One. I spent the next hour rocking her and nursing her, finally getting her back to sleep an hour later. Then I unwound by watching 30 Rock, then it was off to bed around 9:15. Just 45 minutes later…

I heard crying. Gal Smiley. She’d had a nightmare and needed comforting. Getting up within an hour of going to bed is really, really hard, and I groggily stumbled to her room. When she asked me to lie down with her, I was like, “No problem!” I “slept” there with her for a while — she’s a very active sleeper, so it’s hard to get enough elbow room for quality sleep in her little twin bed. Around 11:30 I’d had enough and was just on my way back to my own room when…

I heard crying. Captain Jelly Belly. So I detour to his room, where he’s having a little meltdown. This happens every so often — he wakes up screaming and thrashing around with a night terror, unable to talk or communicate with us because he isn’t actually fully awake. We used to freak out about these incidents but now we know that although it seems scary, he acutally isn’t aware of what is going on and won’t remember it in the morning. The way to deal with them is to wake him up fully, calm him down, then put him back to bed, so I took care of all that, and after a half hour or so, he was ready to lie down again. He asked me to stay, and I said I would for a few minutes until he fell asleep, when…

I heard crying. The Wee One. I explained to the Captain that I couldn’t stay anymore, and thankfully he said okay, Goodnight Mom, and I headed over to nurse the baby back to sleep. She was back in bed around 12:30 and I was just on my way back to my own bed when…

I heard crying. Gal Smiley. Upset to discover that I’d left her. I calmed her down and she went back to sleep fairly quickly. I was back in my own bed around 12:45 and got a full hour of sleep before got home from poker, waking me up as he got into bed. We were both just settling down for sleep when…

We heard crying. Captain Jelly Belly, having an unprecidented second freak-out of the night. Since was going to be lucky to get 4 hours of sleep, and I was awake anyway, I took this one and started the whole wake up/calm down routine again. There’s only so long a parent can listen to their kid scream, though, so after a few minutes got up to help out, and once we soothed the Captain, offered to stay with him for better sleep for all. Back to bed for me around 2:15, and then at 3…

I heard crying. The Wee One. Time for another nursing/rocking cycle. I was back to bed around 3:30, and as sometimes happens when I’ve had really interrupted sleep, I couldn’t settle down myself. I think I finally fell asleep around 4, and got to sleep until 6, when…

I heard crying. The Wee One. Time for our last nursing/rocking cycle. And just as she went back to bed at 6:30…

I heard someone calling, “Mommy!” Gal Smiley was up for the day, and so was I. Six total hours of sleep in interrupted blocks of no longer than two hours each.

I think that this is really as bad as it can possibly get. It’s all uphill from here.

Plus, tonight, I’m playing poker. If I can stay awake for it.

I really really want one of these t-shirts.