You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January, 2009.
Kate’s husband is over France right now. Going east. [He got there safely.]
Kate wonders if her husband meant to leave his BlackBerry charger at home on the bedside table. [It was my phone charger; BlackBerry's is safely with him.]
Kate further wonders if changing her actual Facebook status update to reflect the possibly-left charger will be the easiest way to reach him when he lands, because, dammit, she better be asleep at 2:30 EST/9:30 IST. Will he check Facebook? Or will he go with One Tired Ema? (Hi, honey! Have a cafe hafouch for me!) I better cover both bases. [Duh, should have sent a note to his work email.]
Kate can’t get motivated to finish the last 10% of pre-cleaning lady cleaning. Part of it involves folding fitted sheets. This is Taxman’s job because I have issues. He is, as noted, over France.
Kate’s bed is occupied by a boy with a mop of blond hair. This is not unusual.
Kate is inclined to leave said boy where he is and take Taxman’s side–for the next eight nights–because then there is far less risk of him waking up. While this might spoil the hell out of him, it might finally prove that sleeping on that crib mattress in the toddler bed is Not Good and could be the cause of the nighttime wakings. Or maybe that he, like his mother, cannot stand being in the same room with Miss M while she grinds her teeth in her sleep. So, really learning nothing beyond lazy mothering. Next!
[Guess who found me during the night, and was so distraught with the whole switching sides thing that we wound up in our usual places; me in place, him in the middle of the bed.]
Kate is feeling jittery about what Taxman hopes to achieve while away. The next Stage of Life might begin on or around February 8th. Or not.
Kate’s children’s educational institutions would like their money, please, right now, thank you, and absolutely positively will not wait beyond about February 20th.
Kate is going to start hyperventilating about Things She Cannot Control and will therefore change the subject.
Kate is too invested in Top Chef.
Kate thinks that Stefan never would have been sent home because the producers would never allow it. It seems logical that boring would trump overcooked anyway, but weirder shit has gone down on Top Chef before. (And overcooked is still around to cook another day, so…)
Kate’s laundry refuses to fold itself. Perhaps it is unhappy because I forgot a sheet of Bounce? (That is not product placement. Ooh, but wouldn’t that be clever?)
Kate’s bar for clever drops to about an inch above the floor after midnight because, at her core, she is not a night owl. Just sleep deprived.
[Kate almost overslept this morning. Thankfully there was no ice on the car, just ice all around it. I also inadvertently parked 100% illegally last night because some lines were covered by the ice and snow and stuff, and my DOT permit for 2009 isn't in place yet. Either the police weren't looking, or just having VAS plates saved my tush.]
Taxman: “So what’s this Twitter I keep hearing about? You’re not on it…are you?”
After a night/morning during which I:
a) tried to put AM to bed an hour before he really needed to go because he was acting SO obnoxious and TWO I Just Couldn’t Take It Anymore
b) was lying very still to fake sleep, in order to get him to fall asleep (it worked eventually)
c) almost fell asleep at 8:30 pm
d) changed over my laundry, checked on Miss M, and brushed my teeth (this was enough to prevent me from falling asleep for another hour)
e) thought up my next Blog Post with Content (it involves the Duggar family)
f) slept until Taxman came to bed (1:15) at which point I made him move AM, resulting in an awake, cranky child who returned to my side 20 minutes later
g) slept until 4 something and felt vaguely refreshed
h) [the reason i slept until 4 something and not until 5:45 (gym alarm) was that AM was being felled by a stomach "bug"] dealt with 2 blowout diapers, 2 nursings, and 1 vomiting episode over the next 2 hours [no gym for me]
i) worshiped at the temple of PBS Kids [still doing so]
j) served breakfast to 2 tantrumming children (one tantrum due to lack of Honey Nut Cheerios in the house; one tantrum due to being restricted to a tiny bowl of plain cereal, no soymilk)…
…Miss M turns to me, puts on her sad face, and says, “I still wish we had a baby.”
(She means an actual baby, people. Like tiny diapers and constant nursings and helplessness and all that.)
Miss M had her usual cohort here this afternoon: her brother and her best friend. The three of them managed to mostly get along. Towards dinner time things got a little nuts, with AM flopping across our child-sized table as Miss M and A pretending to eat him. (He had no objections, but it was only a matter of time until someone got hurt or upset.)
Via a small miracle (surely), I only had to ask them to clean up the crayons twice; they did so, and A scampered upstairs to her house.
I went to make my children dinner. (Avocado sandwiches.)
From the dining room I hear, “AM, stop! Stop eating me! I’m not food!”
Pause.
“Ema, AM’s eating me! Help, he’s a lion! He’s eating my clothes!”
I am taking a page from Persephone’s book and not getting involved in imaginary conflicts, beyond calling from the kitchen, “AM, stop eating your sister.”
But really, it’s good to know for the future:
Miss M: likes being tickled; does not like being eaten in a lion-like way.
AM: dislikes being tickled, but has no issue with being chomped upon.
“I’ll give you more snack if you tell me two things about school.”
“I made pictures today. And we played letter bingo.”
“Oooh! What’s the letter of the week?”
“Letter M!”
“Hmm…I wonder if you were able to think of any words that start with ‘m’?”
“I thought of three! Me, myself, and Miss M.”
Blah, blah, so women are supposed to be so mystifying. Sure, whatever.
But at least their clothes make sense. (To me.)
Men? Not as much.
Take, say, men’s underwear. (Wow, am I looking forward to the spam on this!)
AM’s been switching off between diapers and pull ups and underpants for a few days. He’s not really into the undies yet, but we’ll get him. To be honest, if he’s going to wear something absorbent and still tell me he has to go? Why not. We still have in the closet, and we can all be more lazy relaxed.
So, anyway, the other day I put him in this adorable pair of Hanes boxer briefs and my lovely husband (who will kill me the second he reads this post) and I had the following conversation:
Him: “Do those have a hole in them?”
Me: “You mean the little flap? Yeah. These are just mini versions of actual Hanes boxer briefs. You’re going to have to teach him how to use it. I don’t know from all the technicalities of men’s underwear.”
Him: “You don’t. You pull down your underwear.”
Me: “?!?! So what is that flap doing there?”
Him: “I don’t know. But you pull down your underpants to pee.”
Me: “So you don’t pee on yourself?”
Him: “Yeah.”
Really, in our tenth year of marriage I am still discovering things. Imagine if we hadn’t had a boy! I’d still be in the dark. No fooling.
I decided not to go. I am really sad. I have no idea if it was the right decision. The pro/con list was almost tied. My gut was asleep at the wheel.
I am exhausted from thinking about it. If I’ve harassed you in the past five days about it, I’m sorry, but that’s how I figure stuff out.
I just needed the parameters to be a little different. Less time. More options. Something. There was just no wiggle room, you know? No alternatives if things were going south on the 4th day.
That’s $3,000 we’re not spending right now. That’s good, right?
$*%&!
I am not cut out for this cold weather + kids. Miss M cries every day that she doesn’t have gym class (T/W/F) that she’s full of “ya-yas” and needs to get them out. I.e., run around. To which I reply, “No (frakking) kidding.”
The good news is that my new schedule means I can skirt having AM outside much. Speech therapy is once a week at our house instead of twice a week on the outside. Music class is once a week, but was cancelled for MLK day. When I drive carpool I often leave him upstairs with my neighbor.
But we have been productive! Because we’re hardly out of the house, he’s been spending a lot of time without pants. As I assumed, he needed some time with nothing on his tush to really hone in on the whole “I need to pee” concept. Now he’s largely got it. And though he is not ready to graduate from diapers (oddly, putting him in underpants makes him pee through them, but in a diaper he’ll tell me he needs to go), we’ve been using only 1-2 a day.
Unfortunately, we seem to have reached that lovely milestone I recall from Miss M. The “I’m afraid to poop, so I will hold it for days; I won’t do it in the potty; I won’t do it in a diaper; I will make my parents fear for my entire bowel” milestone.
Which must mean we’re due for a visit to Michaela–hope you’re digging out!
Miss M had heard a little about Martin Luther King, Jr., in school last week, and I sketched in a few details about his guiding principles, using vague, preschool-appropriate language. Then she wanted to know why he died. So we explained that some people did not like his ideas; his ideas made some people very angry, and someone got so angry that he hurt Martin Luther King.
“And he died,” she piped up.
“His ideas were very different, but so important. Even after he died, his ideas kept going. If it weren’t for him, Barack Obama probably wouldn’t be the President.”
“Oh,” she cried, “I LOVE Barack Obama.”
Sing it, sister.
Then she wanted to send MLK an email. Not sure how that would work, exactly, although she logically pointed out that he’s in the ground, so we should send it there. (Hey, if you can send the Rebbe a fax, it’s hard to argue with her.)
Now that we’ve turned the corner to 2009, Passover is once again on the horizon.
By horizon I mean close enough to plan for in a vague sense; not close enough to start hyperventilating & crying, stocking up on cleaning products, and forbidding the consumption of Cheerios and bread except for out on the terrace.
For every year of our marriage, with the exception of 2002 (when my in-laws were in Israel), we’ve spent the seder nights with Taxman’s parents. Oh, and then there was the complicated Give-Birth-to-AM project of 2006, wherein we spent half of the first seder in our seats, half of the first seder walking the streets of Neighborhood of Taxman’s Youth, and the second seder in the hospital–where my seder consisted of getting an epidural and Taxman quickly ran through things with some matzah, grape juice, and matzah & jelly sandwiches as his grand meal.
We don’t have a lot of experience in the Pesach department. Turning our house over instead of running from it as if it were on fire. Never hosted a seder. We have very little of the myriad things required to have a reasonable Pesach experience: a seder plate (FWIW, I am partial to anything made by Renee Vichinsky), kos shel Eliyahu, dishes, cutlery, pots and other cooking accoutrements, full time cleaning and cooking help, time that two adults need to clean and verify the unCheerioness of three bedrooms, two bathrooms, eight closets, living area, terrace, and the contents therein. Did I mention the two children? Who eat approximately six times a day? And would be home for the days leading up to the holiday because of the (seemingly boneheaded) decision (from this single vantage point) to send Miss M to a Jewish school, where all of the teachers will also need to be home preparing.
I am definitely a wimp. I admit that. People make Pesach all the time, and I’ve never really had to. (There were two years, before kids, when we turned over our house to spend the final six days of Pesach at home.) But they are most assuredly more organized than I, have more obedient children, and/or a husband who does not spend the days leading up to Pesach working 85-hour weeks. Let me give an example that reveals how scattered and idiotic I can be: My glasses frame has been bent for months. We have insurance that covers that sort of thing. I haven’t gotten an eye exam or new frames/lenses in years. Have I gotten my shit together enough to go take care of this? No.
We had tossed around, a few months ago, the idea of spending Pesach in Israel again, because Taxman’s parents now live there. It seemed like a really, really good idea. Kids get to see their grandparents, cousins, and a score of other relatives. We get to keep one day of Yom Tov.* Instead of being solely responsible for getting my house in order, I could be of assistance of my mother-in-law or sister-in-law–by making brownies or taking the kids to the park or running to get eggs or whatever. Taxman could take his computer and phone and be in touch with work.
It became clear by December that Taxman will not be able to spend so much time away from his desk in April–not going in on April 9, 10, 11, 15, and 16 will be bad enough. Naturally, I accepted this with equanimity the assistance of Trader Joe’s milk chocolate covered cranberries grace and dignity pouting. Grasping at straws a few days later, I asked how he would feel about my taking the kids and going to Israel for Pesach. “You can come for the end of Pesach. Or whenever is good for you.” Which turns out to be Not At All in the month of April, so really, I’d be on my own for the whole shebang.
“I mean, I don’t love the idea of not spending Pesach with you, but it would be nice for the kids to see my parents, and I know making Yom Tov is a huge project that I can’t help with much,” was pretty much Taxman’s take. “Of course, I have no idea if you can get flights.”
I proposed the idea to my sister-in-law. She was in complete disbelief that I would be willing to spend Pesach apart from Taxman and implied that that was Beyond the Pale of acceptable practice. But my brother-in-law (Taxman’s brother) was here all week for work and explained that was her Israeli lens talking, in that Seder Night = Thanksgiving in terms of familial importance and weight. Ah ha! “Yeah, I told her to stop making you feel bad about suggesting it. She doesn’t get that Americans don’t view leil ha-Seder the same way.”
So with that cleared up, I researched flights. Miraculously, there are seats available for travel during what is normally a very popular time to go to Israel. (Taxman’s guess is that the economy is causing people to scale back; luckily, we have my brother-in-law’s abundant frequent flyer mileage to help.)
It boils down to a) do I want to spend two weeks apart from Taxman, during a time when he will be tired, stressed, and cranky? and b) can I handle it? And by “it” I mean there are two choices: making Pesach here with the kids (turn over the house, clean, cook, deal with 3-day Yom Tov) or traveling alone to Israel with one almost-5 year-old, one 3-year-old, and one Britax carseat.** (I mention the carseat because it’s 17 pounds, hard to wrangle, and has caused me bodily injury in the past.) The last international flights did not go so well with AM, but he would be a whole year older; he has the power of speech; and he doesn’t have a paradoxical reaction to Benadryl.
It’s a stumper. Really.
* Do not use this post as a psak, AYLOR, blah blah, this message will self destruct.
** Edited to add: Clearly there are ways to manage the carseat–more than I imagined. It wasn’t going to be a dealbreaker either way.
Further: I may be putting the cart before the horse because it turns out the seats available cannot be purchased with frequent flier mileage. So either it would mean having to pony up $4,500 for 3 seats or staying for THREE weeks/keeping Miss M out of school for an entire week.
