I'm not kidding. Can anyone tell me what any of this stuff is, and how to take care of it? Please?



It's chives, right? If not, it's good in eggs anyway.


This seems to be tulips. I brushed the leaves away. Now what?


This is the cutest thing ever. There are millions here. Any ideas?



Only partly green, and there are a multitude. Are they claws? Are they plants? Will they come for me in the night?



Technically not green, but still, it's on a bush. It has lots of friends. Please help me not kill it!
You can post your help in comments, or private message, or if you know me, come over and take care of these pretty things in person before I mistakenly do something dangerous to them. "George, the rabbits are so soft. I didn't mean to pat so hard. George, the rabbit won't wake up! George? Help!"

Our beautiful garden is starting to come to life. Wide green things are poking through the ground, and things that look like asparagus tops in several shades, buds like these in the picture there coming out of bushes, and little blossom-shaped clusters of thick green leaves in mounds -- all of them seeking the sun with optimism and enthusiasm.

The poor things, they don't know that I am a gardening moron. The previous owners of this house were genius with the garden, planting things that would come back and setting up clever landscaping. We managed to put some mulch down once we weeded last summer, but that's about it. To give you an example of my lack of knowledge, earlier this week, I was walking with some friends home from Doodlebug's school and pointed out some green leafy things coming out of the ground in big clusters in someone's garden. "Hey," I said, "I have a ton of that stuff coming up all around my garden. Should I pull it out?"

My friend looked at me kind of funny and said, "Debi, those are tulips."

I was incredulous! I didn't plant any tulips! Don't you need to plant those in the fall? Aren't they bulbs? My friend tells me now that they will come back every year. Wow. Who knew? OK, don't respond to that last question; apparently the answer is "everyone but Debi."

So, we have some work to do in order to avoid killing everything that's coming up. I've brushed the dead leaves off the shoots I can see, and I've pulled out all the big tall dead brown things in the ground. I walked around the rest of the garden and shrugged a little. That's as far as I've gotten; check back with me for Mother's Day weekend, which I've designated as official gardening time.

There are some other little things popping up around here now, too. Our Shmoo finally had that growth spurt we've been waiting for since October 2006, and my relief isn't even a bit dampened by her constant requests for snacks, all day, constantly, and everywhere.


And Doodlebug, coming off her amazing performance of the hit tune "See Saw" (lyrics: "see saw, see saw, I like to ride on my see saw") at her first fiddle recital, has made some important decisions lately. She is going to grow her hair long, marry her friend Zora, and figure out how to pick her own first grade teacher in the fall. So there!


And me? I feel sometimes like I'm being dragged in the wake of all this renewal, that I'm watching miraculous transformations all around me while I stay in my holding pattern of "doing ok." Nothing's wrong, but I'm a little bored, a little stuck, a little unsure of where to put my energy and my interests. I'm trying to invest more time in my music, and finally get those reiki attunements I've been planning for two years, and finish the darned C25K program that I've started and stopped five times in the last year (week 8 AGAIN, and holding). I've been cooking a lot from Veganomicon and other vegan cookbooks; I have some neat photos of great vegan meals, so if anyone who reads this wants to see them, post a comment and I'll blog about them. My days lately are a lot of "keep my mind busy while everyone else grows." The kids are in a constant state of growth, as kids always are, and True is searching for meaningful work, and even my parents are reinventing themselves as retired. We'll see what spring brings for me.

I made this still-art-with-music the other day. The photo is of the adirondack chairs and wooden barrels on my front porch the last week in March. It snowed fiercely that day, but the sun came up to melt it all on the next.

Those chairs and barrels sat on my parents' front porch for more than twenty years. They didn't fit with the southwestern aesthetic they're cultivating out there in the southwest, where they've retired, so we inherited them. The song playing in the background is "Like the Snow," by Kristin Andreassen. The lyrics seem to fit, somehow, with my feelings about my parents' leaving, and how I imagine they feel too.

Like the Snow
by Kristin Andreassen / Yellowcar Music, ASCAP

It was a warm love in a northern town.
It was the right time for settling down.
It was a storm brought me to your door.
I didn’t ask for your love, but I couldn’t ask for more.

I saw the sun come out yesterday.
I felt our love melting away.
Believe me when I say I’m gonna miss your face.
Walking away I wonder, do you know this place?

Between the white earth and the black night,
When a love’s going wrong but it’s still all right.
If only half of me wants to let go,
Can I go and come back like the snow?

They were good reasons I became your bride.
It’s nothing you did wrong, that’s not why I cried.
The pressure here, it’s in my own heart.
It’s beating me up, it’ll push us apart.

Because I’m not the same girl as when we met.
I know I’ll change again, and yet...
What if I come to miss your love,
All through the rainy southern winters, I’ll be dreaming of

Chorus

Does only half of you want me to go?
Can I turn and grow back like the green leaves turn yellow?
Can’t I lift and fall back like the snow.

Me: The fifteen phone calls you made from the grocery store to ask questions were not enough to get you fired from grocery shopping forever, but the fact that you bought COTTON CANDY FLAVORED YOGURT did the trick.

True: Hey! That's what she wanted!

Me: Did you also buy some Pringles-flavored canteloupe?

True: No. Too salty.

Me: How about some Cheetos-infused organic cheddar?

True: **sigh of lust** Can you imagine how good that would taste?!!?!!

I can't believe it's snowing again here in the Chicago area. It's not fair. By way of Dooce.com, I'll let a Canadian columnist say it best: What's Eating You, Mother Nature? Is It Us?

Shmoo has been home from the hospital since Thursday, and she'll be staying home all week, recuperating and eating soft foods and being told, over and over, not to jump on the couch or she'll tear a hole in her throat. If you need her, she'll be watching Dora the Explorer.

The surgery itself was a success, I'll admit -- her tonsils and adenoids were deemed "impressive," meaning that they were absolutely blocking her airway. It's a darned good thing they came out, since the bronchoscopy the doctor did at the same time determined that her airway itself is still very much compromised. Before her big surgery in 2006, her trachea was 70% constricted. We were told that the surgery would all but eliminate the constriction, but it didn't. She is now 65% constricted. She also has signs of acid damage to her airway, an indication that her reflux is worse than it was before.

What to do with this information? The knowledge is new, but the truth is not -- and so, do we treat her differently, knowing how precarious her breathing is? Do we seek more opinions than this one, which was something of a "yeah, bummer, isn't it?" prognosis? Truly, what now?

I'm tired, and I'm feeling momentarily defeated, but the beat goes on. Shmoo's health will be something to watch closely all her life, and I can't burn myself out too quickly. In the meantime, I'm not sure how much navel-gazing I want to do. I may be quiet for a bit, here.

Well, our health trials with Little Shmoo aren't over, though we hope this next one is easier and less dramatic than the last one. Wednesday she'll go in for a tonsillectomy, adenoidectomy, and another bronchoscopy to see why her colds still make her upper airway rattle so loudly. We are hoping the "ectomies" will resolve her snoring, apparent apnea, and put an end to the constant stream of sinus infections that have plagued her this winter.

She's a little person now, no question about it, and that makes it harder and easier at the same time. For her big surgery in October 2006, she was still truly a baby, and we couldn't explain any of this to her. When we sent her into surgery then, we sent a little ball of unexpressed emotion with very little ability to participate in the world around her. Goodbye, critically ill constantly unhappy crying baby. Have a nice surgery. Hope we see you again when it's over.

This time, we're sending one of our fellow adventurers in there. She tells us she loves us. She says it, on her own, along with a lot of other things, like "I want to watch Dora" and "Mommy, I'm still coughing, I need to go to the doctor" and "We have to go to school to pick up my sister" and "Please can I have more mango?" She is proud of her big girl bed. She can put beads on a piece of lanyard. She can sing the alphabet song, and she can hop like a bunny, and she can hold on to my neck all by herself while I swim a full length at the pool. She could help me save her life, if we ever needed to. On Wednesday, we'll get to explain the basics of her surgery to her, and wait for her -- our funny little daughter, deeply beloved -- on the other side.

Wish us luck.

This has been a hard winter, physically. Life in the warmth of our house is brighter, and in the cocoons of home and school and the homes of friends, but almost every excursion outside is grey.



The snow has frozen into the alleys and unsalted sidewalks, making treks perilous and startling. Walking in the tire tracks is a recipe for disaster -- only dirty, uneven snow allows enough traction for anyone without spiked shoes.




Even deep into bushes and the branches of trees, winter has a strong grip. It's exhausting, all this grey and white. I find myself wearing the brightest things I can find, more jewelry than normal, drawn closer to the television and the computer, where colors flash provocatively if artificially.

Said simply: I've got to get out of here. We're making a break for the desert of Nevada this weekend, where recent surprising rainfall followed by bright sun has created -- oh, to see them in person! -- flowers!

I'll report back from the world of color late next week.

I have been brewing over this post for a long, long time.

In my journey with Little Shmoo, our fight to find out what was wrong with her, my arguments with doctors and others about my gut feeling, and in our final validation of my deep fears, I often asked myself what I was supposed to be learning. I spent a lot of time sitting in hospital rooms with my baby on my lap, wrapped in IV chords and monitors, staring into the green glow of the room and trying to figure out exactly what I was doing there. What was the lesson to be learned?

I had read about the concept of drawing experiences to you, spiritually, for the lessons they would bring you, and had a friend who told me, over and over, that the universe would send me answers if I would phrase the questions clearly and listen quietly. I even had a therapist who I sought in desperation, and her advice was similar: this is your path. Why are you on it?

In the end, I know that I have years of thought to process regarding these experiences, but a word keeps coming to me when I ask the universe for an answer. The word is "instinct." I had instincts regarding Little Shmoo, despite my feeling somehow disconnected from her for longer than I'd care to admit. Couched in all sorts of other terms: "a gut feeling," "a strong suspicion," "I have trouble believing that...," "I just have a sense," "something tells me..."

Something was telling me. It got louder and louder and louder. It kept me up at night. I listened to Shmoo cry and felt scraped raw inside. I said to my parents once, "What if there's something really big that we've missed? What if she has some kind of problem that we don't know about, and she's hurting?" I felt so physically ill when she cried that I began, unknown to everyone, digging my fingernails into my forearms, leaving pink crescents in them, keeping myself from screaming along with her. The universe was trying so hard to send me my answer. I just didn't know what to do with it.

For those of you who have not read the whole "Woah Baby" set of blog posts in 2006, it turns out that I was unquestionably, frighteningly correct about my instincts. Shmoo had an undiagnosed congenital heart condition, easily resolved with surgery, that likely had caused much of her sleeping trouble and almost all of her respiratory trouble. We discovered it in September of 2006, when she was just over 13 months old. I was right. I was RIGHT. I WAS RIGHT.

I WAS RIGHT.

This brings me some solace, but not a lot. What can I do with this information? What can I do to heal from the trauma of being right and ignored? It seems this is a recurring theme in my life: "you're right. so what?" I want to answer that last question. So, here's what I've been thinking...

Does anyone else out there have a story of instinct to tell? Have you ever been right when no one else could imagine it so? Would you be willing to talk to me about it? I have an idea, but I'm not ready to share details publicly yet. Let me know. Pass this on to people. You can write to me privately here via Gaia mail, or at my email address: debi at jebraweb dot com.