cool beans

So, being at home is a lot more work than my husband believed it would be. So NEENER on him.

At school this week we’re having a Scholastic Book Fair and I called and set the dates and handled the preparation so I think I’m kind of in charge of it because they’re asking me questions and ACK! I don’t know! I’ve had several panic attacks in the last week. It’s a learning experience and I’m having fun, so it’s not all bad. I’m getting to spend some time with the other parent volunteers and get to know them better. I’m also starting to put kids and parents together. I know the kid, I recognize the parents but I’m just starting to match them up.

Need any books? Lemme know, k?

My son is struggling. He has not adjusted to this school as we’d hoped. We have this idea that private is better - it just has to be! But it’s not working for him. I’d made up my mind that this way is the best way and the only way, and then I found out it isn’t. It’s hard to let that go. It is a good school. But it’s not a good school for our son.

My daughter, who is a middle child and is very good at entertaining herself so you never hear about her, is loving her class and enjoying this school very much. So it’s a good school for her.

My little guy is getting used to being at home. We had to decompress a little and I have pretty much let him do what he wants the last two weeks. That means he’s watched a lot of television and played a lot of Xbox. Today, I turned off the television and put the remote control up high. He.was.not.happy. I got out a little game I keep on a shelf he can’t reach and he played with that for while. Now he’s playing with an old box.

The above was written this morning, before I went to church and lunch and school and the book fair and made dinner and cleaned the kitchen. I am very tired. So tired my bones ache. It’s 7:45 in the evening and I think I’m going to bed right now.

During the first two weeks of my unemployment, I did a couple tasks my husband used to do while I was at work. First, I shoveled a lot of really heavy snow uphill both ways with my arms tied behind my back while someone chucked rocks at my head, and then I started doing the grocery shopping.

I know! He’s so mean to make me do the grocery shopping myself!

Having flexed my home management muscle, I sat down with the checkbook one day and made sure we’d entered all the transactions even though that’s “his job”. And then, two nights ago, I did something monumentally stupid.

I did all the math for the checkbook while he was looking. Actually, I told him I did it. Because I’m a show off. And a bit of an idiot. Look what I can do!

Today, I get the following in an email from my dearest, darling husband:

If you would like to try doing the bills sometime this is how I do it. (long list of blah blah blah blah followed)

Oh my goodness. Isn’t he adorable?

I’m thinking taking on this responsibility would be good because it would make me feel in charge of something and give me an opportunity to hide Starbucks trips. But instead of just paying the bills as they come in and hoping there is some leftover, I want to do this up right and stick to a budget and see where all our money is really going. So I’m looking for something not as powerful as Quicken but more structured than a blank Excel spreadsheet.

So far I’ve found My Budget Planner. I think I’m going to give it a shot. Unless someone stops me. (Anyone?) Just know that I am not plugging formulas into Excel by myself unless you pay me a fair hourly wage and offer health insurance, sickleave and vacation. And high speed internet service. And food days. We have to have food days.

For the past few months I’ve been taking something at night to help me sleep. Sometimes I didn’t need it to help me sleep as much as I needed it to keep me from remembering my dreams. Last night I was up late and was very tired by the time I went to bed. I didn’t take the Magic Pill of Sleep. For the first time in months, I was happy to remember dreaming.

I came home from work for lunch and could see that all the houses had wayward livestock in them - again. Driving by one house, I could see through the picture window through the sliding glass door and onto the deck, where a cow stood guard. Other houses’ garage doors were up, and I could see the animals moving past windows. There was even a baby elephant peeking out one neighbor’s window.

I was furious! The neighborhood landlady - because neighborhoods of single family residences have landladies, you know - knew about this problem and was obviously doing nothing about it even though we’d all complained in the past. So I marched down the street to the neighborhood manager, who is the assistant to the landlady. Of course. She opened the door, cigarette in hand and barked at us. I complained, “The animals are in the houses again! You were supposed to tell her to take care of this! Why is this still happening?” She said she’d told the landlady and the landlady said she’d done all she could, she couldn’t control the animals. It was out of their hands.

So I went home. To my grandmother’s house. Mountains of laundry sat every where. The entire house was chaos. My sister was there and I ranted to her about the animals and the mismanagement of the neighborhood and the lack of security. “We can’t just have cattle coming into our houses! It is dangerous.”

I fumed, “Do you know how sad it is to see a baby elephant just sitting in the window!”

Because who can live with themselves knowing they’ve allowed such a thing?

There were other parts of the dream that were also hilarious to me. For instance, I was home for lunch, but when I got to my house, it was one o’clock in the morning. I had to be back to work by 1:30, but I was so tired I had to take a nap. I woke up from the nap with just enough time to get back to work, but I couldn’t find my shirt and then my bra went missing. I figured they’d both been abducted by the laundry piles.

I was really concerned about getting back to work so my coworkers could go to lunch. I had this whole crazy conversation with myself in the dream. “But it’s the middle of the night! They’re not even there. Holy crap! There’s no one there! I have to go back. Wait. Who is working at this hour? Why would I have to be there? What time did I used to get off work?”

I decided to forget it and just not go back. I didn’t call to inform them because 1) there wasn’t anybody there and 2) if they were there, I didn’t want to feel guilty about them not getting to go to lunch. At 2:00 a.m.

So my kids were in the dining room in my other grandmother’s house, eating blackberries and yogurt for breakfast. With my mother. I was trying to tidy up and moved some papers off the table. Beneath them were old blackberries. They were dusty blue and looked dry and hard. I was devastated, “Can’t you guys pick anything up? Why do you just leave this here? The tablecloth…ruined!” As I reached to pick up a blackberry, a maggot wriggled out of it. I was ready to evacuate and burn the house to the ground but my mother chirped, “I’ll pick them up. It’s no big deal.” She picked up one mushy, maggoty berry and a maggot squirmed on her fingertip. She held it out to me and said, “Do you want to touch it?” and laughed like it was the funniest thing ever.

Okay, so that last part doesn’t sound funny now that I’ve written it, but the rest of the dream is so wildly amusing to me it doesn’t matter. “Do you know how sad it is to see a baby elephant just sitting in the window!” Apparently, it’s pretty damn sad.

I read a lot of blogs. Most of those blogs fall into the “mommyblogger” category. Of those, I’ve noticed we kind of stop talking about our children and how we parent them after they pass the Kindergarten mark.

Is someone talking about what it’s like to parent an older child? How scary it is when you’re not sure if you’re doing this right with a kid who will have a clear memory of this moment, this decision, how you handled this particular situation? How helpless it can make you feel when you’re trying to steer your child in the right direction and they look at you and say, “But that’s not what YOU do!”

I remember standing over my babies while they slept. Holding my breath, waiting to see their chests rise and fall. Panicking if they’d slept a little longer than usual. The desperation I felt when one of them got away from me in the store and hid in a clothing rack. The terror of watching one of them dart across the yard toward a busy street and being a step too far behind.

It doesn’t go away. In fact, it gets harder. Their world expands as your reach gets shorter and you watch in agony as they struggle and cry and rage and there’s nothing you can do to fix it. You can’t snatch them up, strap them in, make it better with a kiss and a cookie. Because they have to go through this or because they don’t want your help.

It’s nice when your children can put their own shoes and coats on, when they don’t keep you up all night with croup, when they stop mashing their dinner in their hair. But then you get all this other stuff. Decisions about what they get to wear, how long they get to stay out, if you’ll allow these video games, how or when to help them with social situations. How far you can step in, when you should stand back. Do you let this go? Should there be consequences for this behavior?

What do I want out of parenthood? Happy, productive, healthy adult children. Grown-up kids who can care for themselves, who care about others, who can find a way to pick up the pieces when life gets messy. Kids who want to come home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Tuesdays. People who forgive me for the things I could have done better and love me for the things I did right.

Having a goal is good. But it’s different than other things you set out to do. Want to lose weight? Eat less, move more. Want to get a degree? Save up, take out loans, study. Getting from here to there with most things isn’t necessarily easy, but it’s simple. The steps to take are well outlined. But when it comes to parenting, having a goal is a little like having a nice pair of goggles to go swimming through muddy water. I know where I want to go, I just can’t see how to get there.

After a really long morning of volunteering, grocery shopping and fridge cleaning, I happily assembled a little pizza with an English muffin, olive oil, fresh mozzarella, tomato and basil (to be added as soon as pizzas after toasting). It was fun watching through the little window on the toaster oven as the cheese got all oozy and the muffin got crunchy. And then it was done! And it was awesome! And the knob for the timer on the toaster oven broke right off!

My husband is cranky about it, anyway. He “did not like it at all” for his Pop Tarts this morning. So it’s going back and I’m getting a regular toaster and I don’t like it. SIGH.

Whatever I get, I’m definitely not getting stainless steel. Thanks for the heads up!

I’m still waiting for my copy of No One Cares What You Had For Lunch. I don’t have to be creative until someone tells me how to. So I’m going to write about what I bought at Walmart this morning.

I bought a toaster oven and it’s got me asking myself some questions.

1. Is a toaster oven overkill for PopTarts?
2. Is a toaster oven really as dangerous as the instructions make it out to be?
3. Will I really use the toaster oven to make open face tomato and cheese English muffin sandwiches for breakfast?
4. How awesome will leftover pizza be now that I have a toaster oven?
5. Does this toaster oven make my ass look fat?

I’m crazy, so I’m answering myself.

1. Of course it is overkill! And that is going to piss off my husband for sure. “PopTarts should not be this complicated, woman!” or, more accurately, “What the hell did you buy this thing for? What’s wrong with a regular toaster?”
2. It seems like it really might be very dangerous. But that makes it sexy. Like Colin Farrell.
3. I might use it for those breakfast sandwiches, but even if I don’t,
4. I have now committed myself to always ordering too much pizza so the toaster oven can “pay for itself”. Now I’m just talking out of my ass,
5. which doesn’t look fat because of the toaster oven, but because of the other things I purchased.

Wider-load purchases included one large box of chocolates, one small box of chocolates and four donuts. I wouldn’t have bought donuts, but I took a small child to Walmart with me and someone (his wicked father) showed him where the donuts live. Huge mistake because Small Child is demanding. Also, you don’t have to take wee one to look at the stinky fish if you wave donuts in front of him.

I bought some flowers for five bucks because they had so many flowers. You couldn’t turn a corner in that place without running over a garden. I felt obligated to take some home. They’re on the table near me and I can hear my sinuses and lungs planning a) revenge b) hostile takeover c) treason d) leprosy. You pick. It’s like a choose your own adventure book here.

The other night I was thinking to myself, “I’m in the mood for Scrabble. If we had Scrabble, I would interact with the children.” So I stopped by the toy section this morning and picked up the “travel” Scrabble set with the pop-in-place letters. How clever! You can start a game and finish it later! I planned to surprise the kids tonight by paying attention to them over a game of Scrabble. A game that will surely make me feel superior because I’m a way better speller. They get attention, I get to win, we’re all happy. I came home and hid the game in the hall closet and as I was shutting the door, I looked up and saw SCRABBLE on the shelf.

I forgot. We got that for Christmas.

I feel like my whole plan is ruined. I don’t feel like playing anymore. Sorry, kids. Go play with the toaster oven.

Also? If you’re in Walmart and you feel like buying something to make PlayDoh more interesting to your little kid so you can ignore them for longer than ten minutes, do not buy the thing that looks like a bicycle horn. It’s supposed to cut out a triangle or star and then you squeeze the bulb and POP! out shoots the PlayDoh shape! But it doesn’t always work. Most of the time, it wheezes like a toothless old man and sucks the PlayDoh back up the tube and you have to fish it out with your finger. Which is gross if you’re thinking of a wheezing, toothless old man while you’re poking around up there.

Today is the first full day of being an at-home mom. Weeks ago, I decided that when I was home full-time, I wasn’t going to overdo it at first. I was going to relax, settle in, see what kind of schedule developed naturally.

I’ve had a pretty full morning so far. I drove the kids to school and reminded them as they got out of the car, be careful, it’s slippery. Ten seconds later, I got out of the car to pick my son up off the ground. I walked in with them to report the incident and to encourage my son to keep moving while reassuring him that if something was broken, he would be unable to walk. We told the secretary he’d had a spill and she said, “He never salts that part.” She means the custodian doesn’t salt the sidewalk in front of the school. Because, you know, why would we do that?

Back home, I loaded the dishwasher. Simple, easy, no hard labor. But wait? Where’s the cleanser for the sink? Oh, it’s in the bathroom. Well. Hmm. Maybe I should spray the bathroom first. I’m already in here, I’ll just spray everything down. Okay. Now I’ll just scrub the tub… where’s the scrub brush? Oh! That’s in the basement bathroom. I’ll just let this soak and I’ll do the bathroom downstairs first! I’ll stop on my way and clean the kitchen sink.

So. I’ve cleaned both bathrooms, emptied and scrubbed the kitchen sink, ran the dishwasher and started laundry (starting with the bathroom rugs). Then I showered and made coffee while my little guy watched the toaster work its magic on some frozen waffles. I’ve checked and replied to my email. I’ve helped get Nemo past the baby clams. I’ve threatened to turn the game off if he doesn’t stop whimpering. And now I’m sitting here thinking I shouldn’t have taken a little break because I lost my momentum.

I also have bread dough rising on the stove.

I wrote this on 1/26/07. I didn’t realize I’d not published it. Weird.

When our last child was born, I spent several hours crying my eyes out over having to leave him with someone else every day for eight hours. I don’t think one day of my maternity leave passed without reminding my husband I wanted to stay home with this baby. Our last baby, the one who felt so tentative in the first months of pregnancy when I felt we were connected by one thin, spotting thread. I said very dramatic and ridiculous things to try to convince him that quitting my job was The Thing to do. And none of them worked. In the end, my fear of what would happen if we did lose my income won.

I cried every time I had to leave him during those first weeks back. I was a sobbing mess behind the wheel on my way to work each morning. For over a year, I ate lunch in my car on my way to nurse him at noon and toted a breast pump between work and home. It was a ton of work. I complained about it loudly and often, but looking back, I can’t believe that I did it and I can’t believe it’s over.

One week after his fourth birthday, I will finally be home with him during the day. I’ll be home to make his lunch and take him to story time. We’ll go for walks and play together. He’ll get on my nerves and I’ll wonder why I ever thought this was a good idea.

Probably.

But I’ll know what it’s like on the other side. I’ll find out which shade of green I like better. I might find out I’m not really as excited to be with my kid as I am to spend more time with my couch. I might decide I dislike being home during those crazy after school hours. Maybe we’ll be insanely broke and have to live with my mother in law. Or, maybe it’ll work. I can’t predict any of that. I just know that being home is what I want right now. It is scary. If I’m made this bold a move before, I can’t recall.

The flu is running around like a crazy person in our area and so far, we’ve managed to avoid getting smacked by its flailing limbs. In an effort to ward off the nastiness, I have said, “Wash your hands!” more times this week than I can count. We have a lot of stress in our lives (some of it potentially very good) that is unfixable and I know stress does not do the immune system any favors. This coming week is the worst possible time for us to get sick. It’s my last week at work and I really do not want to be absent. My husband and I have an important meeting at the end of the week. My baby turns four and my oldest has a big band concert on Monday (for which he must dress in the theme of “Mexican Fiesta”. At this time we have zero (0) parts of this little get-up. I also have to take fruit for 20 people. Twenty. That translates to four hundred thousand dollars. And five people who didn’t get any fruit.)

Naturally, I noticed that The Toddler (who is no longer a toddler, so what am I supposed to call him?) sounded snotty and his face was all pink. And his hands were cold which, when combined with pink cheeks, is a good indicator that he’s running a fever. My eyes are starting to feel grainy and my throat is getting gunky. I’m trying to remain calm, but that’s tough when you are totally freaking out.

Speaking of freaking out…

I’ve mentioned blogging to my therapist a couple of times in a “I have a blog” and “I’m a member of an online community” kind of way. The last time I mentioned it she suggested I try a MOPS-ish group and perhaps maybe I might like this local conference for women. So while I was completely spaced out on my bedtime medication the other night, I emailed one of the conference organizers for more information (mixing my real name with my blog name). The brochure came today in the mail. I have reservations. Why? I’ll tell you why.

Because I would be going by myself. I can’t think of anyone I know who would do this sort of thing with me. Going by myself feels scary. Because I might cry. If I go with someone, I can be really unhealthy and make fun of people quietly with someone who will laugh. I can’t do that by my crazy self. Because then I might cry some more? I don’t know. That’s exactly how I feel about it and it makes me feel retarded.

Because I might run into people I know. I know. Weird. Why am I afraid of that?

Someone I know: “Hi, I know you!”
Me: “You can’t see me. I’m invisible now!”
Someone I know: “You are one crazy bitch.”
Me: *cries*

Because I’m a judgmental asshole. The conference brochure has a lot of exclamation points. I’d count them, but I’m afraid that’s obsessive. Why do they bother me? They are supposed to make it sound more fun! Enticing! Exciting! Excellent! Dazzling! Wonderful! Uplifting! Shoot me in the face!

What the hell is wrong with me?(!)

There is at least one session I’d really, really love to attend. And I guess it’s possible I could like the whole thing a whole bunch. Maybe I’ll be all “Girrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrl POWER!”* afterward. Plus, it’s not like I couldn’t just leave and make the five minute drive home if it gets weird. It has to be way less risky than flying to California or Chicago to hang out with a bunch of geeky drunks.** Right?

*!!!!!!!!!!!!
**Not naming names.