Guests would have been nice….

….but sanity is so much nicer. And almost everyone we know is going away.

I present my Rosh Hashana menu, 21 hours away.

Monday night:

Apple Cinnamon Challah (c/o FunkyFrum)

Maple-Ginger Butternut Squash Soup

Chicken (preparation TBD)

Roasted New Potatoes/Baked Sweet Potatoes (Miss M, she’s all about the sweets)

Roasted Cauliflower

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies (from the freezer)

Tuesday lunch:

Baked Ziti

Vaguely southwestern bean salad

Plum cake (from the freezer)

Tuesday night:

Gazpacho (from the freezer)

Cilantro-lime steelhead

Rice

Roasted green beans

Wednesday brunch for lunch (guests who also are up at the crack of dawn):

“CSA frittata” with chard, onion, and red pepper

Pumpkin pancakes (courtesy of B and the burner we will leave on to cook them)

Green salad (conveyed by our guests)

Fruit salad

Brownies

It would be such a piece of cake to take care of everything unfinished tomorrow if Miss M, who needs my attention pretty much 1000% of the time of late, were in school. Alas. I think a trip to the library is in order first thing–for movies! movies! movies!

Can I just say that I am convinced that at least 10% of the Jewish population of NYC was at Fairway Uptown today? We even saw friends who have moved to New Jersey and Westchester! Craziness.

Shana tova u’metukah. If you need me, I will be in the kitchen, longing for my bed.

Pissy

My political rantings seem to amuse the Canadians among us, so I feel compelled to vent.

I think all the national politicians are rotten failures.

My local NY State assemblyman? Who lives in my neighborhood, works out at the Y at six in the morning, and is trying to ease some of the parking restrictions around my house? Him I like. He really understands what it means to live here, because he does. He knows the tension of where the dollars go–to the seniors, to the kids. People must respect him–he sent a mailing before the primary election to state that he was supporting a certain judge who was running for the county’s civil court. Although the turnout was paltry (that was the only race), in this neighborhood she polled at a 7:1 ratio; she won the election at 3:1 overall.

But I digress.

All those assholes in Washington? What have you done for me lately?

Everyone is so busy posing for photos and trashing the opposing side that nothing gets accomplished. I am not pissed off by the Wall Street/banking/mortgage failures. I am appalled, however, that they were allowed to happen. Where was the oversight? Where are the whistleblowers? It’s like a giant cockroach invaded the banking system and none of the thousands and thousands of people involved in it could bother to stop and call an exterminator.

Yeah, well, enjoy your unemployment Mr. Bear Stearns guy! Hope you don’t have to grovel any more this weekend Secretary Paulson! Too bad you’re not the big cheese at Goldman Sachs anymore, enjoying your fat bonus!* And now they’re talking about restricting those bonuses…you got out when the going was good!

This morning on the radio they gave the example of a loan on a $500,000 house being passed around and inflated until it was over a million dollars of fake money, essentially. How was this allowed to happen? I am not an economist, so I didn’t know it was happening. But someone should have said something!

But really, I am just so mad. Nothing about this presidential campaign seems to be serving my interests at all. It has gone on far too long, has cost way too much, and has injected a ridiculous amount of rancor into the universe. It’s exposed Washington and the political process for what it really is (mired in bullshit? anyone?), but anyone with a brain could have figured that out already. If John McCain were truly concerned about being with his Washington cohorts during this crisis, why not use his millions to move the debate to Washington? Why does this stupid debate require a huge stage set? Why can’t it just be in some auditorium somewhere? I mean, apologies to the people of Mississippi, of course, but there are lots of ways to skin a cat, you know?

But mostly, I feel incredibly far removed from all of these people, their money, their ways of governance. Maybe the United States is just too big–too much land and too many people–to be represented by a tiny handful of people. And most of that handful represent he or she who raises the most money and yells the loudest. Several years ago there was a news item about a woman who was running for Congress somewhere in the South-one of the Carolinas, maybe? Anyway, she had been a single mom, had been on welfare, really knew what it meant to be a poor American, a working-class American. I am sure she would have done a fantastic job representing her constituents because she had been one of them. But, naturally, because she wasn’t part of any machine, didn’t have the connections and the cronies, she ran out of money and lost the election. I remember this all these years later because I think it is such a failure. Not her failure, but a failure of the system that didn’t allow her to go to Washington and kick some ass.

I will miss the debate tonight, naturally, but a special occasion for these guys to spew some venom at each other isn’t really necessary. It’s all the time. A lot of sound and fury, I’m afraid, signifying nothing.

* I know that he was the big cheese at GS because of my former job. I used to be full of interesting facts.

Thursday Troubles

Well, we’re past the halfway point of Taxman’s Great Southern Adventure, and it’s been fine, really.

So much easier than when the kids didn’t sleep through the night. Actually, the spare half of the bed has been kind of a revolving door–last night Miss M was in it from 2 (when she woke up to use the bathroom) to 4; AM woke me at 4 as he climbed into bed, and Miss M’s teeth grinding was going full force and hell, NO! I am not going to listen to that when there is another perfectly fine bedroom at our disposal. But these are really minor disruptions compared to years past, plus I can loll in bed until 7:00 in the morning!*

During the hardest parts of my day, 7 to 8 in the morning and 3:30 to 7 in the afternoon/evening, Taxman is rarely available to me anyway. I am fleeing to my in-laws’ for Shabbat rather than face an entire day with no respite and no PBS Kids. (Plus: Chicken soup and homemade matzah balls.)

Today’s troubles stand on their own.

We managed to get everyone out the door this morning, and I even got cooperation from Miss M when I told her to please please please put her books on the shelf so our cleaning lady could find the floor. It took her a solid 20 minutes, so I made her get dressed before breakfast. Remarkably, she threw only a minor fit and got dressed pretty quickly.

AM had a hysterical crying jag when his babysitter showed up, in a page lifted from the 2 year old’s manual It’s Never Too Early to Try to Manipulate Your Mother. Poor baby. If only he were my first child I might feel a mote of sympathy, but he’s not; I am not buying what he’s selling. At all. Good thing, too, because it’s a total sham. He was fine by the time he and the babysitter reached the elevator, a whopping 50 feet away. I could hear him turn off the tears.

Instead of working the whole time my babysitter was on duty (9:30-11:30), I went to the gym, where I proceeded to flagellate myself because this was my only chance to run between Monday and Sunday do a training run for the Race to Deliver. Excellent news: I can run for 3.75 miles at a speeds of up to 5.5 miles per hour and not die. Bad news: This race is four miles, and my training regimen will be majorly interrupted by the October onslaught of holidays.

At 2:30 I get a call from Miss M’s school. This is when caller ID is very, very bad. Those five seconds were LONG. She’s fine, BUT they had a fire drill in school today. Apparently, the very idea of a fire drill–the 10 minute warning was 10 full minutes to get hysterical–has not gotten any easier for her. Her teacher is concerned with her outright terror and her sensitivity to loud noises, and maybe we should get an OT evaluation? Sigh. It was coming from a place of love, at least, and one of the assistant teachers sat out on the playground with her, so she wasn’t in the building when the drill happened, and she drew a picture and dictated her worries on paper.

This afternoon she was bonkers, though, after mixing it up with her friend A and A’s 2 1/2 year old sister, T. Their mom is my mommy friend, and we had a 4:15 rendezvous here at Chez Tired. For some reason nobody played really well today. There was a lot of bickering and pushing and stealing of Rummikub tiles. Finally they were doing one of their skits using four little plastic chairs and pretending to go somewhere. (The chairs usually represent some sort of vehicle.) T was sitting on A’s lap; A then kind of dropped her, accidentally, and she fell. Everyone was ok. But five minutes later Miss M intentionally tipped AM’s chair (with him in it) over backwards, and he hit his head on the floor. She was looking right at me when she did it.

My voice immediately found that register that is most appropriate to people being exorcised. Honestly, I’m shocked the cocker spaniel in 2B didn’t find his way over here. I started shrieking and sent her to her room so I could deal with AM, who was shocked and sobbing. I scooped him up and said “Hey, that was some excellent parenting, don’t you think?”

“I do it all the time,” she said. “Then I feel guilty all day for reacting like that.”

“I just don’t know what she’s thinking. It’s like her brain can’t conceive what an appropriate course of action is. Or isn’t.” Of course, she bought my negative attention for a low, low price. I am a dumbass. But this is well established.

Anyway, AM was a peach once I secretly slipped him a freshly baked oatmeal raisin cookie (officially: only for Shabbat or Rosh Hashana). Miss M lost her book and TV privileges for the rest of the night, plus dessert for tomorrow night. That’s going to be fun.

I desperately wanted pizza for dinner, but Miss M won’t eat it, nor anything else that has been within range of marinara sauce. Killjoy. So I made the kids French toast, heard a lot of crying during bath time (Miss M wanted to bathe alone; AM loves the bathtub and found it hard to wait), and talked Miss M down from her tree when I went to brush her hair. She didn’t want braids. I hadn’t even mentioned braids, although I always prefer them to keep her mane vaguely neat overnight, so that was a little creepy.

I got my pizza–a broccoli calzone, actually; I changed my mind–when we reversed the playdate and I reveled in a delicious 40 minutes of time alone when I went to pick up my CSA share and visited the pizza shop. Came home mere minutes before bedtime.

Really, though, what a day! Please keep your fingers crossed for me tomorrow, when I face Friday dismissal time (1:15) and a rainy afternoon.

*Lately I get up to go to the gym at 5:45 M,W,F.

Oh, yes, the blog thing.

Taxman is away for the week, learning even more about taxes and complaining about sleeping in a king-size bed without being snuggled kicked in the head even once between 11 pm and 7 am.

But he’s probably checking for updates, so “Hi, honey! Hope you don’t have a headache today. Sorry we didn’t call you this morning, but Miss M turned on the tears when I yelled at her to put on her shoes for the tenth time in three minutes and that required an overlong investment of my mental energy. (Although A was such a basket case this morning that she refused to go to school with Y and her mom had to drive her again! Vey iz mir.) We’re going to have dinner with your parents, so if you want to speak to everyone call around 6:30. If you only want to speak to me, call later, but not during Project Runway. Just kidding, that’s what the DVR is for, call anytime, I miss you!”

I give you, dear readers, snippets of cuteness brought to you by the team of people behind AM’s speech therapy and My Favorite Book of Trucks.

“Hi, backhoe loader! Hi, backhoe loader! Hi, backhoe loader! Hi, backhoe loader! Hi, backhoe loader!”

“What, you’re not going to say hi to the dump truck also?”

“Hi, dump tuck! Cayful [Be careful] backhoe loader!”

Lost: Motivation

I used to love cooking. I have a kitchen full of useful (and not so useful) gadgets, some nice knives, a well-stocked pantry, a whole shelf of cookbooks, and a husband who will try anything once.

I also used to have a job that got me home at 5:15, few other commitments, and about seven solid hours of sleep a night.

We used to spend Shabbat meals socializing with other couples. I loved to have people over Friday night, so I could make soup as an appetizer. Six or eight people was nice.

Now I have carpool (three or four times a week), speech therapy (twice), music class (once). I work for a minimum of four hours a week (when my new!babysitter! comes), but it really should be more.

I am in two book clubs. I attend La Leche League meetings, although it was with some relief that I gave up hosting the meeting (can’t ever miss if you are the host).

I do a lot of laundry; I tend to small people who cannot yet bathe themselves, have bizarre food preferences, and try to pummel the snot out of each other at least twice a day.

I go to bed late and wake up early. I have a favorite treadmill at the gym.

The friends with whom we socialized back in the day have, with one or two notable exceptions, moved to the suburbs. Nobody goes out Friday night anymore; the kids have bedtimes. (Except in the dead of winter, when Shabbat starts at 4:11, we don’t go out Fridays either.) I have spent many years inviting people we meet through one channel or another over for a meal, couples without kids on Friday nights (soup!), families with kids for Shabbat lunch. Only rarely are these invitations reciprocated. It makes me, by turns, furious, sad, and paranoid. We are nice people, our kids are pretty well behaved, and returning invitations is polite.

All of this makes it difficult to get myself back on the cooking bandwagon.

Rosh Hashana, which is kind of the Thanksgiving of the Jewish holidays, is in a little over a week. A lot of people go to their parents’ or in-laws’.  We stay at home. We used to have a cadre of friends who were raised far away or did not grow up religious; they also stayed around. So we’d spend a meal at home, with company, and the rest out with friends. No longer. Now it’s a week to go and I haven’t planned a thing. Taxman would like to have company, but most people have probably had plans for weeks. I guess we’ll eat alone and get to bed early.

Cooking seems so much more taxing and expensive. Kosher cheese costs twice as much as regular cheese. Kosher chicken never goes on sale. Buying organic, while good for our health and the planet and all that, costs a lot. Kosher organic is crazy expensive. Plus: Standing up in the kitchen, hot pots on the stove, with small people foraging in the fridge for “nack”? Not my idea of a relaxing fun time. Creating dirty dishes seems like so much trouble. Couldn’t we just eat cold cereal and tuna fish and call it a day?

The drudgery of it all makes me depressed, but worst of all is the loss of something I used to love. Just no joy in it any more.

If you have a recipe for something you think would help to start pulling me out of my funk, please pass it on.

I am now Keeper of Non-existent Snack

I have no idea how this happened.

My kids are pretty big eaters, when it comes to things they like, and I have to have a pretty full stable of snacks to keep the chowhounds happy. I dole them out in reasonable portions, insist on a lot of fruit and veggies, and try to get a well balanced meal into them at least once a day.

I always joke that “I am Ema, Keeper of Snack,” because I get snack requests from the second we get somewhere, even if it’s only been 20 minutes since breakfast, even if we’re going to the backyard, a stressful jaunt of maybe three minutes.

Now, however, my kids are inventing things. Hallucinating really. Like yesterday at Costco. Taxman called in sick so I could spend the morning holding my pounding head and wishing for death, but by the afternoon I felt ok. We had a long list–and they did not have Cheerios! At some point, to prevent AM from licking the cart (ew, ew, ew!), I handed him the list. He pretended to read from it in his cute little voice. “Seeweal, canbehrees, mihk.” Then he shot me a look, “Appuhl juice!”

“Apple juice?” I asked. We almost never have apple juice in the house. It is, after all, toddler crack, and there are much better things to drink: water, milk, or AM’s new infatuation, soymilk. 

He nodded, “Appuhl juice!”

“Let me see the list,” I joked. “Where do you see apple juice?”

“He-yah.” He pointed to somewhere between diapers and paper towels.

“Sorry,” I said, “no juice today.” But really, extra points for Teh Cute.

Then this morning I drove carpool. Miss M and her bestest pal A were in the third row of the van, when I hear, “A, do you want to come over after school for doughnuts?” 

“Miss M,” I called back, “we don’t have doughnuts! A is welcome to come over after school, but there are no doughnuts.”

“But I like doughnuts,” she explained.

“I know,” I said. “But we don’t have them all the time. They are for special occasions, like last Sunday when Ema ran her race.*”

And then AM piped up, “Doughnuts, me? Me doughnuts!”

“AM, I’m sorry. We don’t have any. Your sister is hallucinating.”

Then the light turned green and everyone, thankfully, was distracted by the heavy construction equipment tearing up the street and slowing our way to school.

* A bribe to get the kids out of bed and convince her to get dressed before breakfast, which is not the usual ritual around here.

Explanation–and Go Me!

The new computer is a little wonky and has not let me publish all week, so here you have a week’s worth of posts in five minutes.

Anyway, today I ran the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. And it was HOT. And HUMID. OMFG. And people did not follow the rules of the race course, so it was more like running (!) through an obstacle course (!!) and I still managed to finish in about 35 minutes (!!!). And I missed Chichimama, who wanted desperately to run but was trapped under something heavy dropped a can of crushed tomatoes on her foot and, as a result, can’t wear closed shoes.

And afterwards, on our way back to the 72nd St. Transverse, I came within four feet of Cynthia Nixon, the Grand Marshal of the NYC Race for the Cure. My first celebrity sighting after all these years in NY.

I said to Taxman, “Wow, that was Cynthia Nixon!”

“Who?”

“Cynthia Nixon!”

“President Nixon’s daughter?”

“What?! NO! Cynthia Nixon! Sex and the City! [which he has seen many times] Look at her!”

“Oh. Well her hair isn’t as red in person.”

Yeah, I had no response to that either.

Did I mention that it was SO HOT and SO HUMID it is only through an act of divine intervention that I didn’t melt into a puddle of ooze in the third mile? Luckily at the end there were bottles and bottles of cold water and bananas and my husband and son and daughter clutching a bunch of Central Park weeds wildflowers just for me. Awww.

Dear Internets

Hi,

How are you? Hope you’re good.

I’m really, really, really busy. I also really, really, really need a nap. Unfortunately these two things are completely incompatible.

• After a couple of rough days at school (because, unbeknownst to me, Miss M’s new school has automatic flush toilets! top three fear!), things have settled down, and she really loves it. Yay!
• AM’s new student speech therapist is quite good. She has two kids, who are 5 and 10, so she’s familiar with all the lovely (and not so lovely) behaviors of this age.
• I got to see an old friend from my former, employed life, who now lives in Cleveland. She’s in the adorable stage of pregnancy (31 weeks, give or take), where the baby has hiccups and gives his opinion at meetings but hasn’t made her life an uncomfortable mess 24/7.
• I made dinner for above friend on Wednesday. (Veggie pot pie and brownies! Yum!) I got no shabbat cooking done on Wednesday, but rather had to leave it all for the end of the week. Under normal circumstances that would have been ok, but my brother in law is here for shabbat and so I decided to have all sorts of other company also and OMG I don’t have room in the fridge for everything and there is absolutely nothing Miss M will eat except sweet potato and corn. That and fruit and cereal should keep her until Sunday morning right? Is it my fault that the child will not eat turkey meatloaf, which, by the way, every other kid to whom I have served it loves?
• Going to bed too late. Waking up too early. But not waking up when AM clambers in next to me, which is strange because I have done that like every night for the past year.
• Eep.

The Heavens are Telling

Rejoice!

The new computer is here!

It won’t talk to my iPod and the backup external hard drive makes it crash, but no matter, it’s shiny, the internal modem works, and I can actually sit at the table while I use it.

Must hide it from the children.

I am so boring

I just deleted a whole post about my day and how frantic it was, even though Taxman worked from home and AM’s speech therapy session was cancelled. But the post was beyond boring, and as if you need to hear how tired I am? That’s the theme of the whole blog, people.

Here, smell the brownies I made this afternoon. Oh wait, we don’t have the technology for that. I will eat one and think of all of you. Do you prefer walnuts or straight up?

Oh, and Frank Rich of the New York Times totally agrees with me about Sarah Palin. But he has a column and stuff, so a lot more people read what he says:

“We still don’t know a lot about Palin except that she’s better at delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant daughter’s right to privacy even as she would have the government intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women.”

(One Tired Ema nods sagely.  Oh, wait, she might be catching a nap. No, Super Why! is over, so she had better be awake.)