Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

Sydney and Katherine are, for the most part, packed and ready to go to Nova Scotia tomorrow morning.  As part of the craziness that accompanies travel, we had a few things pop up:

– Katherine dropped the bathtub plug down the crack into the depths of the water heater cupboard, so Sydney had to do some manoeuvring to bathe late this evening.

– In the process of loading photos from our camera, I somehow managed to freeze Sydney’s computer, which is apparently quite a feat for a computer running on Linux.  So, with many apologies, I left him to set things to rights while I made dinner.  Oops.

– Katherine has been very resistant to returning to English time this past week, since that means going to bed earlier than it feels like she should.  She has no problem going west and staying up, but east is a very different thing.  Nathaniel, meanwhile, was off his clock, too, so we think we had four different internal clocks going on in our house this past week.  When Sydney and Katherine return from Nova Scotia in August, we’ll have two weeks to get her not only back to English time, but to get her rising earlier than she’s used to, so that we can get her to nursery by 8am.

Speaking of nursery, in my attempts to wear her out a bit in preparation for tomorrow’s flight, I took the kids out and had Katherine scooter with me toward the parks.  On an impulse, I decided to take her all the way to the nursery, so that I could remind her of the school she’ll be attending in the fall.  She scootered all of the 1.8 miles there, and walked and scootered the entire way back.  Nathaniel, clearly wanting his bed, was happy to ride and watch.

As of tomorrow morning, this is going to be my constant, sole companion for the next month:

Not too shabby, eh?  But you should see him empty all the kitchen drawers in two minutes flat.

Erin

When we were in Mississippi we made use of the miles of sidewalks on the Ole Miss campus to stretch Katherine’s legs and enjoy the pristine environment.  They keep things tidy at Ole Miss, which was particularly jarring since this time we were coming from the “ancient” city of Oxford, and a house in which no surfaces are level.

The weather was a bit iffy in the South, with thunderstorms every time we thought of swimming or taking Katherine outside.  But it also kept things a bit cooler than we had feared, so we were grateful.  Katherine got to spend lots of time coloring and trying out her new scissors and markers, and I’m not sure whether she or Grandma and Grandpa Birdsong enjoyed it more.

Erin

Katherine and I arrived safely in Oxford, England, early this morning, so the Penners are together again for a few days.  Katherine was, unfortunately, much less compliant this trip (a bee in her bonnet?), but the trip was also less arduous.  My parents drove us to Memphis, we took a hop flight to Newark, waded through security there, and then took an overnight flight to London and a final bus home.

My clock is still off (which is why I’m composing this post in the wee hours of the morning), and I’m a bit worried that my body has given up on sleep altogether, after a week in which I skipped two nights entirely and cut the remaining ones quite short.  My conference days were 12-hour days, and then, of course, you go home to tuck your kid in bed, catch up on email, do a bit of presentation preparation, and get things in order for the next day.  Oh yes, and check in with your parents, who have driven all this way so that they could be on child duty all day.  I think grandparents must all be a bit crazy, given the lengths they go to to see the little ones.

My husband deserves a medal.  He took a look at us when we arrived and realized that Katherine and I both needed some serious sleep before we did anything else.  So he let me take a nice nap this afternoon and wake Katherine up just as I headed out the door for a choir concert this evening.  Yes, a choir concert both Friday and Saturday nights.  So, after three hours of singing and dancing (this is gospel, after all, and we had a band playing with us), I arrived home to a tired but endlessly patient husband.  Both kids have woken up repeatedly already this night, so we may have a bit of a quiet day tomorrow.  Nice as it is to be together again, we’re seeing once again how much better the kids play when apart at this age (she doesn’t revert to baby-isms, and he gets left alone to do his own thing), so it may be a good thing that they’ll get to spend time away from one another for a month.  We’ll have to see what we can do to help them after that.

As arduous as the travel can be, I am really glad I went to the conference.  Faulkner doesn’t get much attention here in England, and it was wonderful to be back among scholars who share similar interests and problems.  This was my first conference as a non-graduate student, and I have to say that I like the change.  I was more confident of the material, so I was more likely to ask questions and engage others in conversation, and I just got a lot more out of the papers I heard.  I also got some nice feedback on the paper I delivered, and managed to sign myself up for a couple of related academic projects in the near future.  So, tomorrow I’ll go through my notes and see if I can follow up on all of the ideas I jotted down so that that wonderful material doesn’t get lost in the post-travel chaos.

Erin

I have Google thoroughly confused.  In this new, unnerving age of computers guessing our every whim, mine got used to tailoring its search results for Oxford, UK.  Now, however, I am insisting on search results for Oxford, Mississippi, but it’s having a hard time adjusting.

Katherine and I flew to Memphis the day after Independence Day.  When I woke Katherine early that morning, she immediately climbed out of bed and quietly got ready.  We were out the door by seven, caught the bus to London, and checked in for our flight with no problems.  Our long flight went well.  Although the white noise was too loud to encourage much mother-daughter bonding time (reading her books made me hoarse from trying to “whisper” over the engine noise), Katherine played quietly and even consented to take a nap (!) in the seat next to me.  I introduced play dough into her world, and that bought me nearly two hours of quiet play time.  Probably the best one-dollar purchase I’ve ever made!

As we waited for our second flight in Newark, I finally got tired of waiting around for a gate agent to appear and took Katherine to the next gate over so that she would have more time to play.  Unfortunately, when I got back to the gate, our flight information had disappeared.  In a panic, I approached the United representatives, who told me that my flight had left, twenty minutes earlier, from the very gate I had been haunting for the past three hours.  I don’t know whether I got the wrong “local time” information during my long flight, whether I made a mistake as I was setting my watch, or what else might have transpired, but the lady was pretty clear that forty other people managed to find that plane, and I was the only one to have missed the boat!

So, tired, and suddenly in a panic, I found that I’d been rescheduled for a different flight, leaving from a different terminal, in half an hour.  Katherine and I raced through Newark, boarded a flight to Chicago, and, once we’d landed, waited around for a delayed flight from Chicago to Memphis.  We arrived in Memphis shortly after midnight (6:30 UK time), where my long-suffering parents picked us up and drove the hour-and-a-half down to Oxford, MS.  Katherine, bless her heart, slept again on the last flight, happily chatted away when she saw her grandparents, slept all during the ride home, and was happy to be tucked in bed.  I went to bed around 4am, or 10am UK time, and we all slept until 11 that morning!  I could certainly have done without all of the extra drama, but I was really impressed by how patiently Katherine played her way through the day.  We barely even touched her books and toys; she was most interested just watching other people in the airports (though, as the day got later and nerves frayed, I was sorry that she got to witness a couple of adult temper tantrums).  She also chatted up a number of other people who were waiting, though she was reluctant to strike up conversations with other kids.

Since we woke up Friday morning, we’ve had time to make brief forays outside into the Mississippi heat to explore Ole Miss, take morning walks on campus, eat dinner at the courthouse square, and do a bit of window shopping.  We are hoping to do some swimming later today; a rainstorm cooled things off last night and kept us inside for the evening.  Tomorrow my conference begins, so the grandparents and Katherine will have plenty of time to play inside, visit playgrounds, and wander town.  Katherine loves to visit grocery stores, go shopping in town (she waited very patiently while we hit the square’s famous bookstores), and she’s eager to try swimming, so they should be all set.

Erin

Although we’ve been enjoying some time with everyone home, we’re suddenly going to be doing a bit of traveling, two at a time.  On Thursday, Katherine and I will fly to Memphis, where my parents will pick us up and drive down to Oxford, Mississippi, home of Ole Miss and the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference.  I’ll be spending most of my time at the conference, where I’ll be giving a paper, and Katherine will be spending her days with Grandma and Grandpa Birdsong.  Given the temperatures, I think our time outside will be limited to short adventures and early morning walks (I’m all for acclimating, but it’s been about 60 degrees here in England most of the spring, and Katherine’s definitely never seen 100 before!).  Although I am a little nervous about juggling family and work time while there, I am excited to see my parents, glad to be back in Oxford, and excited about the opportunity to talk to other Faulkner enthusiasts, both professional and not.

Less than a week after Katherine and I return from Mississippi, she and Sydney will fly to Nova Scotia for a month, where Sydney will get to be a farm boy again and Katherine will have her Penner grandparents and uncle all to herself.  After the past few weeks, when we’ve seen a bit more fighting between the siblings, we’re looking forward to doing some one-on-one parenting.  Katherine can read books without them being torn by her brother!  He can cuddle up with me without having a big sister jump into the mix!  I think he and I may have to have some adventures of our own, since it’s a lot easier to travel with one baby than with two in tow.  Besides, I’m happiest when hatching plans, however modest, and I know that there is a lot of England we won’t be seeing once the school year starts.

Sydney and Katherine will return just in time for us to mark our seventh wedding anniversary in the middle of August, so we can look forward to a nice reunion celebration.

Erin

The shaking is due to my moving in quickly because it looked like Nathaniel was going to jump off the changing table (where I put him to keep him from rushing the camera).

Erin

Today Sydney asked, out of the blue, how many novels Jane Austen had written.

“Six.”

“Okay, that explains things, then.”

Although it was a simple enough exchange, I suddenly got really excited because, to my knowledge, it’s the first time, in seven years, I’ve answered a “literary” question for Sydney in a way that might be called satisfactory.  (In true Sydney fashion, he rolled his eyes when I observed this and then told me I was wrong.  But I stick to my story.)  I usually stumble around for a bit before running to Google for help.  I know, quite sad.

In my defense, Sydney’s queries generally run along the lines of “Can you explain literary theorist X’s major ideas?” when I don’t know X’s work well, don’t like what I’ve seen, and know that he’s been successful partly because he’s about as clear as a brick wall.  For once, Sydney asked about a major author, rather than a theorist, one whose work I’ve read and taught.

Later this summer we’ll be celebrating our seventh anniversary, but, just as combining our libraries when we got married made the fact that we were married hit home (one bookplate at a time, through hundreds and hundreds of books), this may be my landmark for the anniversary.  Let’s hope he doesn’t ask any more questions for awhile so that I can cherish the moment.

Erin

Katherine and Nathaniel have been trying to get out of sleeping recently, but they go about it in very different ways.  Nathaniel turns on the charm, snuggling into his father’s lap, then back to his mother’s, and back to Sydney again, patting our faces gently and going through his full repertoire of animal sounds and words while gazing up with big eyes.  Clearly he doesn’t want us to put him in his crib.  I left him with Sydney (who had melted sufficiently to give the little guy a backrub to help him settle into sleep) so that I could settle Katherine in, but Sydney reported that, when I left, Nathaniel first tried calling me, “Mama, mama?” and then switched to my name, “Ewin? Ewin?”  He’s apparently been listening to Katherine, who has tried out lots of names for us.  Sydney also said that Nathaniel called out “Night, night” as Sydney left.

Katherine, meanwhile, has been talking at high volume when she is supposed to be sleeping.  Sydney finally listened closely and figured out that she is apparently talking to her grandmothers.  I’ve been calling both mothers recently, and I usually do so at high volume (Skype connection + small kid noises in the background), and Katherine has picked up on both elements.  She was apparently reporting to her grandmothers the goings-on of her day: she fell down several times because she was tired.  Yes, it is tempting to point out to her the irony of keeping yourself awake by recounting your sleep-deprivation-induced clumsiness, but I highly doubt she’d get the hint.

Erin

I get used to seeing odd things around Oxford: hordes of women in pink tutus and pink shoelaces, running to raise money for breast cancer; university students going to exams in tuxedos with carnations in their pockets (white for the first years, pink for the second, and red for the final-year students); movies filmed on the street while tourists take photos of the filmmakers; and, of course, the comedy show that is girls in formal dresses (long, short, full, and barely-there) going to balls (their footwear usually garners some commentary from the Penner household).  This morning, when I took Nathaniel out for our walk, I saw a huge banner hanging from a prison-like building:

EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY

OPEN DAY

In need of test subjects?  No, I finally remembered, they’re just opening their doors to prospective Oxford students and their families.  But, still, the looming concrete block didn’t let me quite shake my first reading.

Erin