Both of my grandfathers were veterans of World War II.

My Grandpa Terlouw, my mom's dad, was a plane mechanic in England. He got sick (pneumonia, I think?) and was hospitalized during his service. I've wondered if this illness (coupled of course with his years of smoking) didn't weaken his lungs and contribute to his eventual death from lung cancer. He died in February 1996, during my senior year of high school. The day of his funeral was unseasonably warm, and I remember thinking grandpa, who loved gardening, would have probably started puttering around outside a little on such a beautiful day, planning that year's veggie patch.

My Grandpa Deur, my dad's dad, served in the Pacific. His job was to set up radio communications on the various islands. For years I didn't know what this meant--in fact, I thought it was kind of a cushy, non-combative job. But apparently this meant that grandpa was one of the first people going into some of these locations. He was entering into the unknown. Grandpa Deur died April 2007, and at his funeral they played a clip of a presentation he did for a grade school class about his service in the war. He revealed details to these fifth graders that he had never openly shared with his own kids, details that revealed how terrifying the experience was for a fresh, untested 20-year-old farm boy from Iowa, and how closely he connected those experiences to his growing faith and love of his family.

When I think of Veteran's Day now, I don't just think about those who served, but those who were left at home. I think of my Grandma Deur, who found her courtship with my grandpa extended from three years to seven because of his deployment, who went out to Penneys for her wedding dress that she would wear in a blizzard just days after grandpa arrived back in Iowa. My Grandpa and Grandma Terlouw hadn't met when he was in the war, but I sometimes think of the conversations they must have had about his service after they were married, and whether she wondered about this part of his past that she had no access to but that must have shaped who he was in some indefinable way.

I think of Jeff's Grandma Beukema, who lost a baby on the day he was born while her husband was serving in Italy. I think of that letter or telegram, and that horrible aching and longing to be together that must have doubled, tripled at the news. I can't imagine.

I also think of my friend Kristin, my masters program buddy, whose husband, Nathan, was in Afghanistan while she was studying for her MA in Ohio. That was the closest I've ever been to someone who had a loved one serving in a war, and I can tell you with complete assurance that it sucked. Now Kristin (who is also in the military...yay, Cap'n Loyd!) and Nathan live in Colorado...together.

And I think of my sister-in-law, Katy, whose brother Rich is in Afghanistan now. His emails home are riddled with military terms and jargon I don't get, but they are also full of insight, intensity, and experiences that I will never understand.

But even if I can't comprehend the experience, the motivation, the reality of service, I can be thankful for those who have served, who have come out the other side unscathed, or with invisible scars that have shaped who they are.

Three links: Kate at Sweetsalty has written a moving account of her grandpa's war experience here.

The always-awesome Julie at alittlepregnant linked to a post from a couple years back.

And this one: Dogs welcoming home soldiers. Get the tissues ready.

Today was a big improvement. Charlotte was much more stable, less whiny and prone to crying fits and stomping "NO" and other awful three-year-old behavior. She was her usual witty, fun, inventive, sensitive little self.

I think it's the 5:45 p.m. bedtime, personally.

And speaking of that bedtime, we're still suffering under the 6 a.m. wake-up call, so I'm going to click "publish" and call it a night.

Coming soon: video of the kids!

I always feel a little down the day after my birthday, anniversary, or a major holiday. I love the anticipation that goes into preparing for the big event, whatever it might be. The celebration itself always contains a little disappointment, too, of course--does the reality ever live up to our big expectations? But the day after is especially depressing. The detritus of the day before (in this case, the dirty dishes from cupcake baking, the remnants of frosting stuck to the countertops) is a visible reminder that this day isn't special.

So today was a downer day anyway, and then it turned out to be one of Charlotte's worst days ever. EVER. Do things improve after 3 1/2? Because if they continue to get worse, I don't know how we'll get through. I have had days in the past few weeks where, after Charlotte goes to bed, I try to think about one thing about her that I liked that day, and I can't come up with anything. There are days, in other words, when she's a first-class brat, a real three year old. And today was one of those. She was so uncooperative, so deliberately stubborn and obstinate and sulky and talking in that horrible whiny baby voice she does now and refusing to cooperate with anything and ARGH. She went to bed at 5:45 p.m. and I really think we could have put her to bed an hour earlier. She was obviously tired and not coping well with her own emotions. It just sucked, frankly.

So, 3 1/2 = not my favorite age.

Sam, on the other hand, is in one of my favorite ages. Plus, he sleeps great, so he's already getting a grander portion of my vast estate in my will. I feel bad liking Sam's baby shenanigans so much when I dislike Charlotte's behavior just as much, like I'm betraying Charlotte, but it goes without saying that of course I love them both equally. Sam's needs are just simpler to understand, his demands fewer. Charlotte is tapping into a part of my brain that is unused. Reasoning with a willful young child is stretching out areas of my cerebellum in a way that is at times just painful. But it can be enlightening, too, and my hope is this stretching will lead to flexibility.

Hello, internet! Would you like a cupcake? It's delicious--I made them myself.

Is it lame that I made my own birthday cupcakes? I hope not.

Yes, today is my birthday. I got flatware from my mom, and I was totally excited about it. Both of those things seem appropriate now that I am 32. Getting really worked up about new flatware is a 32-year-old thing.

I'm using my new flatware to eat a slice of this:

The lighting was so bad that I couldn't make the picture look decent in color. So enjoy my dramatic art-student black-and-white emo cake.

Charlotte really wanted me to use 32 candles on my cake. Because we don't have a fire extinguisher, I declined.

Charlotte was also very enthusiastic about helping me bake my cake, because she knows that baking = beaters to lick. As she was going to town on the first chocolate-batter-covered beater, she suddenly said, "This is better than a corndog!"

And it is.

Man, I hate to be cliched, but this DST time change is kicking our collective butts over here.

The kids just can't/won't sleep past 6:15 a.m. And somehow, we can't manage to get them in bed early enough to make that a real full night of sleep. I mean, you try putting kids to bed at 5:30 p.m.

And somehow, that extra forty-five minutes of sleep in the morning was apparently what it took to make the difference between Functional Jana and Barely-Hanging-On Jana.

And it's equally difficult to convince myself to go to bed when I should. 10 p.m. sounds like a pretend bedtime.

Plus, that was fifteen minutes ago, and I still have grading to do.

I hate you, DST.

Three weird phobias I have:

1. Claymation
2. Turbines
3. Fog

Your turn! In the comments.

Today, when I was walking from the library to my car after a couple (excruciating) hours of student conferences, I had a...moment. I saw someone out of the corner of my eye, and for a second I thought it was Jeff. But not Jeff right now--no, Jeff from 1997, when we had been dating for a few months, but were still "fresh" enough that I got butterflies every time I saw him walking around campus. It was strange. This guy, from a distance, looked exactly like 1997 Jeff: the auburn hair, the sideburns, the coat, the baggy corduroys, the brown boots. It was eerie. And for just a second, my heart jumped a little bit and my breath came a little faster, and I thought "there's my boyfriend!"

Then I was back in the present, a nearly 32-year-old mother of two headed home after some really wretched conferences with seriously underprepared students. But at least my boyfriend was at home waiting for me.

I think, knowing Jeff, he probably still has those baggy corduroys around somewhere, too.

My brother, Scott, a.k.a. Uncle Awesome, is in town. Rather than typing an entry here, I'm going back downstairs to hang out with him, no doubt so he can gross me out with more stories about making out with girls. Ewww.

Parenting is sometimes a thankless task, full of endless, repetitive drudgery, diurnal concerns, and little by way of compensation or even positive feedback.

Writing, too, is frequently unrewarding. The amount of time a poet spends carefully crafting the perfect alliteration, the right balance of tones and images, the exact word for that feeling is simply not reciprocated. The world doesn't give back equally to the hard-working poet, particularly the poet who works, as one does, in isolation.

Jeff's two jobs these days are: 1. Stay-at-home parent; and 2. Poet. Stay-at-home poet? I guess that would be accurate, too. Because he's not in a grad program or an active writers' group, he doesn't get the regular feedback and assistance of a group of like-minded peers. He often relies on my (totally unqualified) eye to look over a poem before he sends it out, with hope and faith, to a journal. And my schedule means I rarely am able to offer him the kind of attentive reading he needs and his writing deserves.

The other form of feedback a writer usually receives is in the form of reponses from literary journals and publications to which work has been submitted. Journals get a lot of submissions, and accept a really, really low number of those submissions. So if you're an active writer who is sending stuff out, trying to get published, you're going to get alot of self-addressed stamped thin envelopes back.

This is all to say that today, Jeff got a fat envelope, with an acceptance to a well-regarded literary journal. And I'm so proud of him, and happy for him, and relieved, because a guy that works this hard at such a thankless task and has such talent that is usually only appreciated (and not appreciated enough, really) by me deserves a fat envelope every once in a while.

Congratulations, Jeff. And I suggest you all buy issue 23 of this journal in 2010!

That's right, I'm doing it!

Uh, this counts as the first one, right?

One year ago, I was wearing this:

And tomorrow, I'll be trying to recreate this with some of my grad school friends:

I'll be Stacey McGill.

I could write a rather long entry on the formative role the Babysitters Club played in my upbringing, even going so far as to offer a second-year doctoral student analysis of the ways this series works to indoctrinate young girls into their socially acceptable gendered roles as caregivers while simultaneously encouraging capitalism and individual interprise. But it's 11 p.m. and I gots freshmen to teach in the a.m.

Instead, I'll leave you with: hot pink leggings WOO!

It's late, and I'm tired, and I still have a handful of student papers to grade before I can hit the sack. So I leave you with this fantastic Charlotte-ism that Jeff recorded today:

"There's so many orphans! In the Annie movie. There's like hundreds. Hundreds and hundreds. Remember at the end, there's fireworks? What was the doggy's name?"

Jeff, of course, didn't remember the doggy's name, so when I came home I was able to bust into a top-of-the-voice rendition of this song. Sam loved it. Jeff was mildly horrified.

(By the way, how fantastic is the girl who chimes in at :15?)