Cousin Love

"Oh, Joe, you're such a great cousin, let me teethe on your chin!  and cheek!  heh heh heh I will drool ALL OVER YOU!!"

And after this (not immediately after, mind, but still...), Joe said to me, "I love babies.  But I really love this baby."

Yup.  I know exactly what you mean.

The End of Schizoid Taxes?

As in, I'm tired of having to live two entirely contradictory truths.

M. and I file our Massachusetts taxes as a married couple.  Our only choices are "married filing jointly" or "married filing separately".  We opt for the latter.  Why?  Because we file our federal taxes, each of us, as "single."  According to the federal government, we are not married.

So this year, I claimed all sorts of student deductions, and she claimed Asa.  I claimed commuter breaks, she claimed our rent.  Is it fair?  No, not really.  Is it kind of underhanded?  YUP.  Do I look at our taxes and think, "dang, if I were the IRS, I'd audit this one - it just doesn't look right"?  Absolutely - I mean, on the surface, it looks like I have bunches more expenses than income, and wouldn't that make you pause?  Really?

And even so, we're among the lucky ones.  (See more about the less-lucky ones here.)  M.'s work allows me to be on a family health insurance plan, despite being in RI (another place where we are not legally married).  We do live in a state where our relationship is recognized, where I don't have to worry about whether she'd be allowed to visit - or even make decisions - were I hospitalized.  We even got lucky when Asa was born - although not in MA, he was born in a state where M. and I are understood to be married, and both of our names are on his birth certificate.

And yet...

Because we are "not married", we get taxed on my portion of our health plan by both the federal government and the State of Rhode Island.

Because we are "not married", we couldn't change the names on our passports to reflect married hyphenation... even though the Social Security Administration issued us new cards with that new name, and we actually do file even our federal taxes under our married names - you know, the ones that correspond to our social security numbers.

You get the idea.  And, if you've been reading this blog for a while, this is nothing you didn't already know.  So why am I rehashing it all?  Why have I just enumerated all of these discrepancies, all of these discriminatory slights?

Because they might be ending.

Because a U.S. District Judge in Boston ruled, yesterday, in two separate cases, that a) marriage is a states'-rights issue, and b) treating a class of married couples in Massachusetts differently than it treats all other married couples, from MA and elsewhere, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

Duh.

What I absolutely love is that the States' Rights question was (and has been) precisely the one used by the opponents of same-sex marriage to deny the validity of the Interstate Commerce Clause - you know, the one in which states agree to respect one another's laws, the one that makes most people's marriage licenses valid from state to state.  It's why so many states were so quick to pass their own Defense of Marriage Acts... and why the one passed by the Federal Government is inherently flawed.  States' Rights.  Ha.

What I love even more is that, although this ruling doesn't extend beyond the cases argued - which were all specifically about Massachusetts - all of the analysis seems to agree that this sets a strong precedent.  (You hear that, CT, VT, NH, IA?  Listen up now, y'all...)  And that precedent says something that is so ridiculously obvious that it's hard not to shout it aloud:

The Federal Government has, for fourteen years, enshrined discrimination into law.  It is time for that to end, and for our government to treat all citizens with equality and justice.  Now.  No more excuses. 

Playing together

Ah, the discovery that an action on Asa's part can make Oliver pounce.  The next step in an already beautiful friendship.

Beach Bum

You don't really think we did nothing but stay in the house and work for eleven days, do you?

("It's okay, Mummy, I found my toes, they're not all gone.")

Asa: our little helper

What does one do with a ten-month-old while one is fixing up a house?  One lets him help, of course.

He could "sweep":

He could bring us the tools we needed... after a fashion...

He could check to make sure our coffee was still hot...

No, of course I didn't let him actually grab it.  

He could be excellent company:

And, of course, he provided much-needed smiles on a very regular basis.

Such a good little helper.  :)

Grampa's New House

One week after we were initially supposed to head over to Block Island (a trip delayed, I would remind you, by a lack of sufficient plumbing, a situation that would have been far more problematic to us than to Asa), Grampa called us on a Sunday morning.  "Are you coming over tomorrow?"

"Umm... I don't know.  Are we?"

"There are working toilets."

"See you tomorrow."

What a trusting soul I am.

There were, indeed, flush toilets - three of them, in fact, which is terribly exciting after years and years of a house with one bathroom and long lines.  There were walls and a roof... most of the major construction was done, and there was even paint on the walls.  Beyond that...

I didn't take "before" pictures.  I should have done.  This is from the day the old house came down, but really, the difference between this and what we saw when we arrived varied mostly in which pieces of furniture were piled where, rather than the existence of piles at all.

The dishwasher, which is the black thing under the window in the photo here, was in place, although not functional.  Ditto the dryer, without which having a washer is not terribly helpful.  The microwave wasn't even in place, so we learned to thaw baby food by leaving it on the counter hours before it would be needed.  The cardboard and paper covering the hardwood floors (see above) was still in place, as was the plastic on all the windows.  That was actually one of the first things to go, to M.'s great pleasure.

In her jammies, no less.

Aunt Jessica came over Tuesday evening and hung out, which was good fun - we even managed to get a room ready for her before she arrived!

We also had huge amounts of help from Mummy's cousin Shanon, and Asa's cousin Joe and some of his friends, Pat, Zach and Brad:

It was nice to have screens in the windows.  Even if it did mean some heart-stopping moments for me, what with my fear of heights:

Yep, that would be my Dad, standing on a stepladder that he had leaned against the wall, in a stairwell.  UGH.

The first weekend we were out there, all of Asa's godparents, plus Kohta, Aunt Jessica and Uncle Mike came to stay.  And frankly, they worked HARD, painting trim, putting up screen doors, doing up-high touch-ups (thanks, Jen!) and poking around the fridge.

But why, you ask, was Jen looking behind the fridge?

Two engineers, one icemaker.  Odds were in their favor, but no, the icemaker won.  Last I heard, it still wouldn't make ice.  It was a valiant effort, however.

Meanwhile, Uncle Mike had an appreciative audience for his painting efforts:

Ah, and do you see what's behind them?  Yes, a Living Room.  Neat, orderly, fairly clean.  Yes, by the end of eleven days (Monday to the following Thursday, inclusive) we had a house that was *almost* ready for the tenants who were due to arrive the next morning.  Joe put together the day bed, and his means of removing plastic from the mattress just underlines, I think, how punchy we all were by day 8 or 9.

I don't doubt that Grampa (probably with Joe's help) worked until very late in the day on Thursday with all the little finishing touches.  Like dusting under the couch.  But man... the difference.  Wow.

But where, you ask, was Asa in all this?  We didn't leave him at home, after all... but that really is a whole separate post... or two... or more...

Vacation, the first week...

Much thanks for your patience while we were away, and for dealing with the relative dearth of posts.  It's been a long couple of weeks, and we've done a lot more than I could possibly fit into one post.  So I'll start at the beginning, as much to give myself some time to mentally organize the past few days as to proceed chronologically.

Besides, he's grown over the past three weeks.

Initially, we were supposed to leave for Block Island on the 14th, but the new house wasn't nearly ready - no flush toilets - so we spontaneously popped out to New York to see Nonni and Poppy.  How spontaneously?  We talked to Nonni on that Tuesday morning, and were on our way by 3pm.  The only delay was that I had a meeting at 1:45.

It was a lovely few days of relaxing and hanging out - with Nonni and Poppy, of course:

(Nonni got kisses, too)

... but also with Aunt 'Chelle, who got lots of snuggles in.

And oh, the laughter that ensued...

Ah, if only we'd known how much we would need that relaxation!