pookiellama

all good things must come to an end

2007-09-17T08:56:00.001-04:00

and hopefully, despite highly sporadic posting, pookiellama has been a good thing.

but it's time for me to pull the plug.

i've been putting this off for a while now. i really had all intentions of fulfilling the promise i made in my last post, and going out in a blaze of glory. but it seems that instead i'm destined to go out in a smolder of procrastination. oh well—less dramatic, more fitting.

why am i signing off, you ask? has the stress of wile-raising finally worn me down? nah. you may remember a while back that i mentioned that i finally had an inkling of what i wanted to do when i grew up? well, that inkling has become more and more real, and i need to give it all of my free time and brain cells.

if you're so inclined, you can find out more about it and follow it's progress here.

thanks for reading, y'all.

p.s. wile says bye too—and to check in with him at his site.

dress + promise + awesome

2007-07-31T18:18:00.000-04:00

here's a new refashion.

and i owe a big old post telling you what i've been doing for the past few weeks since i obviously haven't been spending a lot of time posting here. it will include thrilling tales of ozzie dogs, naked backhoeing, ice cream, king diamond cover bands, and toddler beer pong.

in the meantime, here's this:

pass the kleenex

2007-07-23T17:35:00.000-04:00

i have spent the last three days crying.

saturday and sunday, i was consumed by the new h.p., and basically wept right through it. but that's not a spoiler! it wasn't all sad crying—some of it was happy crying, and most of it was just "dear god i've known these people for almost 10 years i can't take any more ups and downs and highs and lows and i am emotionally drained !" (i'm halfway through my second reading now, much less crying.)

then this afternoon wile and i had to cry together for a little while. he's still not napping yet still really needing the nap, and sometimes the afternoons get a little hairy. today gwen was here for a few hours, which was mostly fantastic. they laughed their heads off at everything, and were really sweet with each other—gwen patted wile's head when he bonked his knee, he always asked her if she was okay when she fell down. they also invented a new game, when wile was naked after he escaped me mid-diaper change, in which gwen would chase him around the house then tackle him onto his bed and tickle him in his happy zone, which she told me was called "tic tac toe penis." i cannot make this shit up.

anyway, the highest highs are, of course, ususally followed by the lowest lows, so by the time mona came to get gwen, wile was teetering on the brink of meltdown, and then jumped right over the edge. he wanted to read a book, but didn't want gwen touching it, which he told us all about very very loudly. so i told him we would wait till they left, but that wasn't the right answer. so i left him on the couch screeching while i said goodbye to mona and gwen, then had him yell for at least ten minutes about how he did not want me to say goodbye to them, how i should never do that again. i tried to take him upstairs to calm down, but he couldn't. and that's what he told me: "i can't stop crying!" that's when i started crying. partially because we were on minute 30 of screaming crying now and it was wearing on my nerves, and partially because i know all too well the feeling of not being able to stop crying from my intense pms days, and it's fairly awful, and hard enough to deal with when you're 20, but must be even harder and scary when you're 3. so i suggested we lie down, but no. then he bit his tongue and insisted that i put boo-boo cream on it. i told him that we didn't have any boo-boo cream that could go in his mouth. he told me we did, and that if i'd carry him into the bathroom he'd show it to me. okay. so when i opened the bathroom cabinet and he didn't find what he had imagined might be there, it took the crying to a new level.

finally he quieted down to the point where i could suggest food, and thankfully he said yes to that. then he wanted a bun. okay. i took one out of the freezer, and he started crying again. he didn't want it cold. could i put it in the microwave? no. toaster? no. what he wanted, and i quote, was "a bun from the warm frigerator!" the what now? apparently he would like us to have a refrigerator that keeps food warm, not cold. because he doesn't want food cold. he wants food warm. we spent a good 10 minutes on that one. i'm still not sure that i have him convinced that there's no such thing as a "warm refrigerator", but i think i at least convinced him that we don't own one.

he let me microwave-defrost the bun, ate it, then told me that he wanted to go upstairs and lie down. alright, then! we went up, he got into his bed. he asked me for his train to play with, i gave it to him but told him he had to stay in bed. he said fine. i told him to call me if he needed anything, and walked out of his room. he called, "see you later, mama!" half an hour later, around 5, he was asleep. here's hoping he doesn't wake up till morning.

i think i should be done crying for the week, though. the only thing i have on my schedule for the next few days is a few mets games, and as we all know.....

the way life should be

2007-07-10T23:22:00.000-04:00

so as all parents know, vacation with a toddler isn't really a relaxing break. it's kinda like life lived in extremes. you get the very very good—seeing best friends! going to the beach! lobster and steamers and whoopie pie! four square! fun wedding!—alongside the very very bad—off schedule! sleeping in odd places! subsequent screaming fits!

i have to give the litle man credit, he really mostly kicked ass. there was just one really bad day with much wailing and lamenting. and unfortunately with me, this day landed on the day that we were spending with my in-laws. sigh.

i'm kinda braindead from the 95˚ and the hunidity, so i'll just hit you with the highlights:

going electric

ocean with jess

fried clams

lobsters

the world's biggest lobster bib

naked in echo lake

digging (what, you thought there'd be no digging?)

brunch

acadia

and, we're done.

another old shirt rescued!

2007-06-30T17:55:00.000-04:00

the permalink to my latest post on wardrobe refashion is all fuckered up for some reason, so in a departure from my usual refashion m.o., to save you from having to scroll through wardrobe refashion looking for my post, i'm just posting it here:

this was part of my college uniform:

not only is it ridiculously big (as all of my clothes were back then), it has developed some issues in the back....

.....and so has since been relegated to the pajama drawer (or, more accurately, one of the pajama drawers. i have a few pajama/loungewear drawers. some of my friends find this odd). but i never wore it, because i was afraid it was just going to keep ripping and fall apart. so, clearly, it was time to take it apart myself.

i started by removing the sleeves, then cutting across the back at the spot of the enourmous gaping hole, leaving me with this:

then i cut down the sides, making two pieces, and slit the part of the back that was attached to the front down the middle, comme ca:

i decided that those two pieces coming off the top of the front piece would become straps, so i trimmed them a bit to make them slimmer and hemmed the edges. i also turned the neckband under in the front and stitched it down to make a uniform hem all around.

then i put it all together: pinned the side seams (which, since i don't have a dress form yet, involved pinning the front piece of the shirt to my bra to keep it still while i held the back piece in place) and sewed them up, hemmed the top of the back piece, attached the straps to the back, and hemmed the front piece— which had ended up longer than the back—at the bottom. and this is what i got:

putting it on, i realized that the part where i had hemmed under the existing neckband stuck out....

...and i was going to fix it by turning it under one more time and re-hemming, but then i realized that i liked it the way it was.

the finished product definitely retained some of the pinholes and frayed edges of the original shirt, and i'm glad it did.

off to maine on vacation, more when i return!

it is unwise to get only 5 hours of sleep before taking a 2-year old and an 8-year old to the natural history museum because

2007-06-28T21:28:00.000-04:00

maybe you'll not have the energy or mental stamina for the "i don't want to wear paaaaaaaants" argument the preceeds leaving the house and end up stuffing the 2-year old in the shorts and carrying his screaming ass to the subway station.

maybe you'll give a total parker-posey-in-dazed-and-confused bitchface to the 12-year old who snottily tells you that the reason the bell rang in the elevator was because you were holding down the "door open" button for too long.

maybe you'll give a slight hip-check to the pushy tourist who tries to bustle past you on your way out of the elevator.

maybe you'll not-so-silently curse out the stupid euro-tourists who walk up the stairways like they had specially reserved them for their own private use instead of staying to the goddamn right, goddamn it.

maybe you'll need to go to bed at 9:30. good night.

more refashioning

2007-06-22T08:03:00.000-04:00

here.

a dark day

2007-06-21T09:20:00.000-04:00

today, wile said "little".

new refasion post

2007-06-16T07:36:00.000-04:00

is up.

not really grasping the concept

2007-06-13T21:47:00.000-04:00

"mama, you pick out my clothes."

"really?"

"yeah!"

"okay. [walk to dresser. choose shirt and pants] here you —"

"no! not pick those pants! pick the other ones!"

why i love ebay

2007-06-07T22:12:00.001-04:00

i just bought this for $4.99:

will you look at that? those shorts!! vintage 1985. it's a size 6 months, so obviously not for wile. first met fan to have a baby gets it.

naaaaaaaap!

2007-06-06T17:12:00.000-04:00

that's right, two days straight. yes, i would like a high-five. thank you. ow, not so hard.

during the glorious time of the sleeping baby, i put a new post up on wardrobe refashion.

naaaaaaaaaaap!

sorry, i'm a little delerious.

here, have a picture of wile and gwen eating lunch at the queens farm museum earlier today:

and the insane-o rooster we saw:

what is this "flow" i'm supposed to be going with?

2007-06-05T15:10:00.000-04:00

all of this non-napping sleep insanity has made me realize how far i've come in terms of dealing with the two-year-old behavior ("behavior" is a nicer word that "bullshit", right?). i can roll with whatever he throws at me now. and i can look back at the past few months and see how hard it has been for me to deal with this transition to the 2-y.o. state of being. which is totally understandable—i mean, how would you like it if 50% of everything you said was met with a resounding "no!"?? plus the whining. oh my god the whining. and as i've mentioned before, the constant negotiation. and the iron-clad refusal to give in to reality. example, from bedtime last night:

"wile, you always fall asleep by yourself"

"no! i dooooon't! i don't!"

it has taken me a few months to learn to just say "okay! but tonight you are."

so the fact that i have been able to deal with this whole not-napping-totally-unpredictable- schedule-that-leads-to-frequent-decents-into-inconsolability-and-insanity development without losing my shit or just walking out of the house and telling trucky and lulu to call me if anything bad happens makes me feel....pretty damn good. i've reached a place of toddler-parent zen. you know, not every second of every day, but most of the time. and this is fairly amazing not only in itself but also as a component of my personality as a whole. i am not very zen about anything. i like—okay, fine, honesty: need—to control things. the fact that i can let go a little and adapt to a wholly new set of variables every day is unprecedented.

so what has he been throwing at us lately? let's see:

thursday, aunt susie was visiting. around 2:30, we were on our way into the backyard to dig and he told me he was tired. i asked did he want to nap now? no, soon. okay, soon. around 2:45, i told him 5 minutes to play. "no no no mama i want to dig more!" it was too hot to fight. i told him now or never. the answer was never. so in my new zen state, i decided not to force the square peg into the round hole and just said fine, no nap! onward! so we dug, then went to the park. headed home around 5:45, started making dinner. he said he was hungry, and took his place at at the table and asked me what was for dinner.i told him fish. "what kind fish?" tilapia! thus began the battle cry: "no, i want salmon! i want salmon!" repeated at varying degrees of whining, wheedling, pleading, and desperation until he literally sat back in his chair, closed his eyes, and nearly fell asleep, all "i want salmmmmmzxxxzz". i scooped him up and took him to bed. he was nearly asleep when he asked for pajamas. i got him some ones he hadn't ever worn before, with appliqued gators on the shirt. "mama, look—there a yellow one, a blue one, and a gray one." i say: "actually that's more like tan than gray." what the hell was i thinking? shut up, pantone girl! the chin started wobbling, the eyes welled up with tears: "i not like that color! mama, take that bottom gator off! take it off!!" ten minutes later, i was coloring in the f-ing grey/tan gator with a red sharpie. then he said "where that gator's face? mama, i not want the gator's face at that side! i want it over here!" something in my tone thankfully convinced him that i didn't have a magic sharpie in my bag that was going to make that happen. i sang no songs (the tradeoff for the sharpie), he fell asleep. at 7 o'clock. that's an hour and a hlf earlier than normal.

that was definitely the worst day lately. saturady he went to the mets game with stephen and iden + luella and jake and pulled another marathon session—fell asleep in the car on the way home from the game around 4 and slept till 6am. sunday there was no nap, and bedtime was peaceful because our friend courtney (hi courtney!) was visiting from colorado and wile was too excited to have her here to have any freakouts. but yesterday he woke up in a hellacious mood. thankfully, he asked for some ba-boo around 10, so i gave him some and he passed out till 11:45.

and today? today we had a long talk about naps and school and how at school you have to participate in naptime and how naps make you feel good and happy and then we have more fun together and blah blah throwing every sales tactic in the book at him and, though his mouth was still forming the words "i don't want to take a nap" as his head hit the pillow, he! is! asleep! asleeeeeeeeeeeeep!

wanna take bets on whether he'll wake up in two hours or tomorrow morning?

home runs off the wall

2007-06-02T23:16:00.000-04:00

he can't poop in the potty, but he can do this....

on my honor...

2007-05-31T22:31:00.000-04:00

"i pledge that i shall abstain from the purchase of 'new' manufactured items of clothing for the period of 6 months. i pledge that i shall refashion, renovate, recycle preloved items for myself with my own hands in fabric, yarn, or other medium for the term of my contract. i pledge that i will share the love and post a photo of my refashioned, renovated, recycled, crafted, or created item of clothing on the wardobe refashion blog, so that others may share the joy!"
signed, hey mama.

i'll be posting on that there blog once a week, and i'll post the links to those posts here. oh look, here's the first one now! i think i babble a little bit....

right back where we started from

2007-05-29T21:43:00.000-04:00

maybe you recall, if you've been with us here at pookiellama since the beginning, that i used to talk about wile's sleeping a lot? specifically, that he really didn't like to do it? for the first year and a half, it was the defining issue of our lives. but we've been in such a good place with the sleeping for so long now that even though it hasn't been perfect—some early mornings, some ridiculously drawn-out good-night sessions in which i get called back in to the room to fix his blanket, put mets bear's hat back on, turn on the ceiling fan, find his water, take a booger off the tip of his finger, or some other important task—it hasn't been anywhere near traumatic enough to write about.

but now we've hit the next phase of sleep issues, and it's not pretty.

let me start at the very beginning (a very good place....). about two months ago, we found out that wile got in to our preschool of choice for the fall. which is totally exciting for many reasons, but that's another post. the thing about preschool that applies here and now is: it runs from 8:30 to 3:30. which means that they have naptime. and i will not be dropping by each day at that time to hit him with some ba-boo.

as i've mentioned, i've been afraid that the napping and the nursing were so tightly intertwined that if i tried to take away the nursing, the napping would follow, and that was a truly petrifying idea. but now, with preschool shimmering on the horizon, the time had come. so we started slow: we talked about school, and how awesome school is going to be, and that in order to take part in the awesomeness, he needed to get used to napping without falling asleep on the ba-boo. so we would sit up (instead of lying down) in bed and nurse for a short time, then i would lie down with him and we would snuggle* until he fell asleep.

and it worked! not only would he go down for a nap with me this way (after just 2 or 3 times with a little crying/lamenting the loss of the ba-boo), but both stephen and his mom were able to put him down with just snuggling! and then....oh my holy crap, and then.....he stopped asking for the ba-boo, and i could put him down with just snuggling. and he was still sleeping well at night, if waking up a little earlier than usual. it was a golden age, those two weeks or so.

then, of course, the crash. two weeks ago, we went up for nap, happy happy, changed the diaper, smile smile, and then: "mama, i not want to take a nap." oh no no no no no no no. no. i call bullshit. he insisted no. i insisted yes. he cried. i cried. i had to leave the room. i came back. he cried more. we snuggled. he finally went down.

we followed that pattern for 3 or 4 naptimes, until the day that he just wouldn't go down. no way, no how. less crying, more standing up and walking around the room. and what the hell was i going to do, stap him to the bed? so, no naps. and the night sleeping was definitely affected, with him giving us the same "i not want to sleep!" nonsense at bedtime, and waking up between 5 and 5:30, wide-eyed and clamoring for toast.

this non-napping has had some interesting side effects (aside from, you know, the gradual deterioration of my sanity). on friday we headed out to the met to see the paul poiret exhibit. at around 2, he told me he was ready to go home. i said okay, looked down two minutes later, and he was alseep in the stroller. he hasn't slept in the stroller in over a year, easy—he slept for 2 hours. then on saturday, he went down for a nap in his bed—unwillingly, unhappily, but he did it—at 3. he woke up at 9:15, ate a piece of toast, drank some water, and went back to sleep around 10 until around 6am. ooooookay! last night, he went down normal time (8:30) and slept until 8:15am. today there was no nap again, and by 6:30 he was definitely tired and cranky, and i whisked him through a quick dinner and had him alseep by 8.

so, clearly it's not that he no longer needs the naps. he just doesn't want them. still, i can't accept that we'll never nap again. because, dude. i can't hack it. for serious. what i've done in the last two days, after we've lay down and it becomes clear that the nap ain't going to happen, is insisted on "quiet time", in which he's allowed to play in his room, in a calm and orderly and independent fashion, while i semi-nap on the bed. so i've been able to catch up on a little rest, but haven't been able to get anything done or gotten any time to myself. which is going to wear reeeeeeealy thin after a few days.

actually i did get some time to myself today, between 7—when i woke up and couldn't believe that he wasn't up yet—and 8:15. and, granted, he was asleep by 8 tonight, which means that i have a couple of hours to get some things done now before exhaustion sets in and i'm too braindead to do anything but watch blake lewis videos on youtube. and i could handle this schedule, if i thought it would last. but, i don't. i'm too shell-shocked by all the recent 5am wake-ups. plus, it really cuts into our social life if we have to be home for dinner at 6:30 for bedtime at 7:15—in the summer, we're usually just wandering out of the park at 7!

so, sadly, i think this all proves my theory about the napping and the nursing. and i definitely felt, in the past few months, that by giving him the ba-boo at naptime i was kinda....drugging him. so what we're dealing with here, i guess, is withdrawl?

but i'm just as addicted to the nap, yo! i can make do with the early bed/late rise methadone, but really, i want the hard stuff.

*i have to describe wile's conception of "snuggling": he starts by burrowing in close to you, very sweet. then he takes his forehead and presses it against yours, also very sweet. for about 30 seconds. until he keeps pressing, harder. and harder, until it feels like he is trying to phase through you to the other side of the bed, if he....only....had.....the....power....

yay! boo!

2007-05-17T14:00:00.000-04:00

good job, nbc!!

bad job, america!

btietw

2007-05-16T21:30:00.000-04:00

i am currently the kind of tired where my eye sockets are burning. wile was up at 5 this morning, carrying on, and we ended up downstairs making toast at 5:30. he, with that wise toddler intuition, asked to watch bob the builder after he ate his toast, so i got some sleep on the couch for a couple of hours (two bob episodes, one firetruck dvd, and some playing with his wooden food that i only know about because i woke up with wooden carrots and bread and apple slices strewn about my head), but it wasn't the good kind of sleep, it was the kind of sleep where i woke up feeling more exhausted than when i started. and now wile is napping, and i should be too, but i can't fall alseep. so, let's talk about food.

my favorite meal this week was the one i made on sunday night. yes, i made dinner on mother's day. the horror! except not, because 1) i like to cook, 2) stephen took wile into the yard to play baseball so i got to cook alone, which is a rare and beautiful thing these days, 3) stephen did the dishes, 4) i knew what i wanted and if stephen had insisted on making it just because "it's mother's day and mothers don't cook on mother's day" or some such nonsense, he would have had to ask me questions and checked in with me a bunch of times and it would have been not at all the "break" for me that it would seem, and 5) we had gone out to a great dinner the night before.

i made pork chops and a salad, which sounds pretty boring, no? except. i've discovered, thanks to cook's illustrated, the perfect way to cook pork chops. it's a little wacky, but you really honestly do end up with the juiciest pork chops ever. here's the deal:

take your pork chops (bone-in or bone-out, but bone-in is better; either way, try to get them at least 1" thick) and rub them all over with some vegetable oil, then salt and pepper them. on one side, sprinkle with a pinch of sugar. if there's a lot of fat on one edge, make a couple of cuts into it, just down to the meat, so that the chop doesn't curl up in the pan. then grab a non-stick pan and put it onto a cold burner. yes, cold. take the chops and put them in the pan sugar-side down, pressing them into the pan. (i've used two kinds of pans for this technique, a calphalon and a cast iron pan. with the calphalon, i found that i needed to put a little bit of oil into the pan, in addition to the oil that i rubbed on the chops, to keep then from sticking totally. with the cast iron pan, not so much. so, see how it goes with your pan.) turn the heat on under the pan to medium high, and don't go far away. the chops should start sizzling within 2 minutes; if they don't, turn the heat up. let them cook for somewhere between 2-1/2 and 7 minutes, until they're browned on the one side (that's why you put the sugar on, to help with the browning). then turn them over, turn the heat down to low, cover the pan, and find your meat thermometer. i usually start checking them after about 3 minutes, 2 minutes if they're on the thinner side—you want them to come up to 140˚ in the center. this could take up to 10 minutes, depending on your pan, what "low" means on your stove, the meat itself, etc etc. when they've reached temp, take them out and throw them on a plate, tented with aluminum foil.

then make a sauce in the pan. my favorite thing to do is saute some shallots in the residual pork fat, then throw in some brandy, let it cook down, and finish it with a tablespoon or so of butter. i've also made a good one with just a 1/2 cup of vegetable broth and a couple of teaspoons of mustard, boiled down a little bit. last night i wanted the brandy sauce but we were out of brandy and shallots, so i used some slices of garlic and medium-dry sherry instead, and it was delicious. when the sauce is made, turn off the heat and throw the chops back in the pan for a second the coat with the sauce and warm them up, and serve.

and for our salad, we had some baby swiss chard that i got from the crazy hydroponic organic people at the farmer's market. it was really tender but a little bit bitter, so i made a honey vinaigrette (1t honey, 1t mustard, 1t white vinegar, 1/3 cup walnut oil) to go with it. it was a great salad, much more interesting than any lettuce, but the best thing about it, and the reason that this was my favorite meal of last week, was that wile ate 7 helpings of it. he went to bed 45 minutes late becaue he kept asking for more salad, and there was no way in hell i was going to say no.

ps - one of my tag-ees has risen to the challenge.

meme

2007-05-14T21:00:00.000-04:00

i've been tagged. it's a blog thing.

here's the rules:

1. List 7 random facts about yourself on your blog
2. Tag 7 more blogs , making sure to let them know.

and away we go....

1) i have no spleen. or gall bladder. but i do have a lovely 18" scar on my abdomen, shaped like this: ^.

2) i hate bananas. but i love banana bread.

3) when i was in 8th grade, the popular girls (who were my best friends the year before) organized our entire class against me. they came up with a lovely nickname that i......nope, still can't talk about it. thought maybe i could, but no. it'll go to the grave. and when they "apologized", i was too shell-shocked to even tell them to eat shit and die. however: one of them got knocked up our senior year, one of them ended up married to the loser local cop who used to bust us for doing donuts in the school parking lot, and one of them got in a car accident and screwed up her throat in some such way that she can't speak above a whisper. lesson? don't fuck with me. hee. just kidding. maybe.

4) my favorite book is anne of green gables.

5) i didn't learn to ride a bike till i was 10 years old.

6) trucky has a recurring zit under his right armpit, and once a month or so, i squeeze it for him .

7) in 6th grade, for our "yearbook", we had to write an essay about what our lives would be like when we grew up. mine said that i would be living in a brownstone in new york city with my husband and some cats and that i would be an artist. yes, yes, yes, and working on it.

okay, so but as far as rule 2? i don't think i can hit 7. i'll do 3. i'll let you know if they comply...

hello amoxicillin my old friend

2007-05-10T15:00:00.000-04:00

so, it's strep throat. which, now that the worst of the illness seems to be over, is actually good news, since i've got the meds and hopefully i'll be back to normal by next week. i went to the walk-in clinic this morning and the doctor took one look at my throat and said "oh honey, i don't even need to swab you. you've got it." i have the kind of strep throat you can see from space.

the worst part, now that i can swallow without feeling like my saliva is made of crushed glass, is keeping up with wile, poor thing. i can't pitch. i can't dig. i'm no good in the joint. he's had it with me, and i don't blame him.

i'm going to go take a nap now, while he naps, but i'll leave you with this bit of entertainment: when we were up at aunt peg's house, wile got a rake and a hoe for his gardening work. which means i now get to hear him say, "mama, where my ho?"

and if you don't find that funny, we can't be friends.

uuuuuuugh

2007-05-07T15:18:00.000-04:00

have been out of town for a couple of weeks.

have returned.

have come down with some sort of lovely illness that constists of a headache, body ache, chills, and the feeling that i have been stabbed in the throat.

hope you're all better than that!

back soon.....

crunch crunch

2007-04-19T23:50:00.000-04:00

[i've been putting this post together for about a week now, and just realized that sunday is earth day.... i really wasn't trying to be so cheesily timely. oh well. read on!]

so in the midst of all of my other life-adjusting activities, i've also been making adjustments that will (hopefully) have consequences for the world beyond me and the people in my line of fire: i'm becoming more...what's that trendy word?....oh, right, "green".

it's been a long and troubled road for me and the green thing. i tried to join the environmental club in college, but it didn't take. it seemed to me that to really belong with the other members i should like things like camping and hiking and mountain biking, which, no. not going to happen. also, everybody was getting all psyched about discovering seitan and tofu and whole wheat pasta and i was like, dude, whatever, the moosewood cookbook was my stepmom's bible. i took organic puffed-rice-and-rice-syrup "krispies" in my lunch in 7th grade. sorry, but i can't share in your wide-eyed tempeh evangelism. plus, the enviro-kids were just so....earnest. i was much more into cynical and ironic.

also, in my youth (or childhood) i was much more prone, as most teenagers and college-age-type people can be, to absolutism. black and white. right and wrong. more specifically, i'm right, and if you don't agree with me, you're wrong. and it just pissed me off so much that so many people could be so wrong!! i mean, what's the point of doing anything to help the environment if so many other (stupid fucking) people weren't going to do anything! it's all hopeless. screw it. pass the bong. and i also applied this to myself, as in: why bother being a vegetarian if i'm not going to go whole hog and be vegan and stop wearing leather? wouldn't that just be hypocritical? and why bother making an effort to conserve energy and shit if i don't want to go live totally off the grid with, like, some goats?

so that whole attitude eventually (mostly) wore off somewhere in my mid-twenties, but i still didn't jump into any big eco-activity. i don't know why. i mean, i am certainly on the hippie end of the spectrum, with my cloth diapers and herbal remedies and so on. but as far as doing more, i think mainly i didn't know where to start—and i still, subconsciously, felt like making a difference meant doing something on a grand scale, or doing things like going to rallies and marches and such, which didn't really appeal. but in the past couple of years—and more so even in the past few months—i've found ways to connect to the whole green thing on a personal, small scale that really make sense to me, and that reinforce ideas i've already had. and since i've started making these changes, i can honestly say, with no snark or sarcasm, that i feel more peaceful. and that's not a natural state for me. so i thought, at the risk of sounding preachy, that i'd write about what i've been doing. if this isn't your thing, you can just stop reading now. you know, if you hate the earth and don't care about our children!! ahem. sorry. the old absolutist rage bubbles up now and again. on with the show!

in general terms, i've been trying to be much more conscious of: how much stuff we put in the garbage, how much energy we use, and what we're putting down the drains and therefore back into the dirt and water.

more specifically, that breaks down like this:

cleaning (the house): when wile started crawling around and touching everything and then shoving his hands in his (and my) mouth, i started thinking about all of the nasty cleaning products we use and how i really didn't want them in my mouth, thanks. so i threw out our fantastic and bleach and scrubbing bubbles and replacing them with stuff that doesn't come with a poison control number on the side of the bottle. partially this has meant switching to method products, which are totally non-toxic and smell lovely. but as i'm diving deeper into this green thing, i'm moving away from even that into using things that are even less toxic and have less packaging. like baking soda. now i use it as a gentle abrasive, for scrubbing the stovetop, the pots, the tub, the shower, the countertops if they need it. and i'm going to replace my grapefruit all-pupose cleaner with a reusable spray bottle filled with diluted(1 teaspoon : 3/4 cup water) dr.bronner's , which comes in nice big recycleable gallon jugs and is super non-toxic, organic, fair-trade, and comes in a just-as-good-as-grapefruit lavendar scent. for the floors, i'll continue to use apple cider vinegar, which also comes in nice big recycleable jugs. vinegar actually has tons of uses, which i'm going to start to try out. i also just ordered some laundry detergent from charlie's soap, which is all eco-excellent and recommended for wile's diapers and a small company. supposedly you can use it in the dishwasher too. we shall see.... and i'm amassing a collection of cloth rags (from old clothes, towels, etc) in a quest to never use another paper towel.

cleaning (me): again, i came to the realization that i didn't want to put anything on my body that i wouldn't put in my mouth.... plus, my history with beauty products is an unhappy one.

i've fought a long with shampoo/conditioner. the day i washed my hair, no matter how well i conditioned, my hair looked and felt like crap. it would be okay the next day, good the next, perfect the next, then all of the sudden super greasy and gross the next, and i'd start the dance all over again. so i figured i had nothing to lose by trying this natural method i read about: you wash/massage your scalp with a baking soda paste, and then rinse with diluted apple cider vinegar. yes, i'm cleaning my hair with the same stuff i use to clean my stove and my floor. not kidding. and i l-o-v-e the end result. this is a good description of the whole process. it did take a little perserverence, i'm not going to lie—everything i read about it warned that you'd have "yucky" hair for a couple of weeks as you weaned your hair off shampoo, because your scalp would continue to overproduce oil, as it had been doing to compensate for all the oils that the shampoo stripped away. i could never get a more precise description than "yucky", but now that i've lived through it i can give you one: my hair felt like it was coated in a mixture of wax and motor oil. by day 13, i was getting a little cranky, and tired of bandanas. but then like magic, on day 14, after i did my new "wash" again, my hair was perfect and soft and glossy. no joke. i'm still getting my proportions down—like, today i used too much baking soda and my hair's a little dry. but i just threw a yodi tiny bit of rosemary oil on it and it's fine. and no, i don't smell like a big pickle.

my (combination) skin has always been tempermental and blotchy and responded exactly the same whether i used some shmancy wash from keihl's, or some organic wash from weleda, or cetaphil from the drugstore, or just water. so for a long time i went with just water, especially after i read some article about milla jovovitch (katinka!) that talked about how she only used warm water to wash her face because that's what her skin/beauty guru person told her. sold! but as i'm getting on in years and seeing more wrinkles, and since my beloved city doesn't have the most pristine air quality, and since i don't like the idea of the sunscreen that i use on my face in the summer hanging around on my skin any longer than it has to, i figured it was time i found a wash/moisturizer that i liked and that was chemical-free. so i did: olive oil. again, not kidding. i'm not going to type out the whole process, as it has already been done so well here. and here. my skin looks good and feels awesome. i still get zits every now and then, but that's hormonal. but the flaky dryness with the oily spots next to the red blotches? gone. amazing. i've also been using the almighty baking soda to exfoliate—make a very watery paste of it in your hand and then use it like you'd use any scrub.

recycling my own clothes: a couple months back i was reading casey's blog and discovered wardrobe refashion. yes!! ecology via clothing! now that truly, like nothing else, spoke to me. i've always preferred vintage/thrifted clothes. and i've always hated getting rid of clothes. so i'm signing on for the next round, and i'm psyched. i've got big plans for my favorite shirt from 5th grade. and i've jumped the gun and already done one project, which you can see in the pic of wile chowing on the hot dog up there. the mets shirt he has on? i cut the mets symbol out of a mets shirt that i got at shea on some promotional date that i was never going to wear because it was a size xxxxxxxxxl, but i hadn't gotten rid of because it had a mets symbol on it. so i chopped it up, donated the copius scraps to the aforementioned rag pile, and sewed the symbol on to an old stained t-shirt of wile's. i even managed to use the zig-zag stitch on my new sewing machine and only mess up in a couple of places! not bad for a first effort, yeah? oh and i crocheted a hat that i thought was for me but ended up being for wile. you'll see all of this and more once i take my refashioning pledge....

screwing con-ed: most simply, doing what my parents told me to do a million times and turning off the lights as i leave a room.... but also trying not to turn on the lights at all during the day, and just opening the window shades when it's dim, which is double-good because it saves energy plus natural light is good for your mental health. next, i'm going to replace all of our lightbulbs with flourescents. no, our home will not be all yellow-blinky-buzzy-light-y. they make good flourescents now.

and i'm trying to ignore the fact that we have a dryer. we put up a clothesline in the backyard when wile was born to hang his diapers on, since they last longer that way, and the sunlight bleaches out the poop stains. and at the end of last summer, i found myself hanging more and more non-diaper items on the line. so even though it's been too cold for the line, i've been trying to hang more things to dry on my indoor racks. and now that spring (knock on wood) seems to be here, finally, and the line can go back into use, i'm going to hang everything. no dryer. and i'm going to buy some more racks and keep it up even when it gets cold again.

and speaking of coned, they now allow you to get your power from a windmills and stuff. i'm looking into it....

eating: as i've documented here, i'm in love with our farmer's market. and at this point, i'd say we do about 80% of our food shopping there. cheese, butter, milk, fish, vegetables, honey, poultry, beef, pork, smoked trout, jam, eggs, bread, turkey sausage, pickles—really, there's not much more we need. and i like eating only what's there—i like waiting till the peaches are in season to have a peach. and i'm even liking finding creative things to do with the slim pickings of the winter. most out-of-season fruit tastes like it's been shipped from halfway across the planet. of course, there are some fruits i won't give up, even though they're never going to grow on a farm within driving distance of my farmer's market in any season: lemons, limes, grapefruit, pomegranates. and some things—oils, vinegars, beans, rice, pasta—that they just don't sell there. so for those things that i do go to the store for, i've been buying organic, and shopping at the little health food store, when i can.

also: i'm not a vegetarian, nor am i going to be. obviously. i asked for beef-cheek ravioli for my birthday. and stephen is planning a pig roast in our backyard for sometime this summer. but there's no need to eat as much meat as we had been. i know it would be better to not eat meat at all; we've all heard about how land being used for animals to graze could be about 20x more productive if it were used for growing soybeans or grains, and how the waste from factory farms is polluting everything, and about the scary hormones they're giving the animals, etc. but i'm not ready to completely step away from the meats. so, as i said, we're buying all our meat from the farmer's market, from a small organic family farm. and i'm trying to make a few non-meat meals every week, which, as i mentioned, i have a lot of experience with....

trash: another cool thing about our farmer's market is that they have compost bins at the entrance. i would always watch people dumping their compostable trash into the bins and think "wow, that's great that people do that." it only took, oh, i don't know, about a year for that thought to progress to "wow, it would be great if i did that." i'm a little slow. but finally i took the plunge. we put all of our food scraps into a variety of old chinese delivery tupperware and haul them off to the market every saturday. and if we need to do a mid-week dump, there's a compst heap....right in the back of the playground i take wile to. so convenient. it took a little getting used to at home, but now i don't even think about it.

i'm also trying to exorcise plastic bags. they're inevitable sometimes—and useful to have around for things like toting home wile's dirty diapers from a day out of the house—but they're like gremlins, they just seem to multiply, and all of the sudden there's 50 of them under the sink. so i'm trying trying trying to remember to bring a tote bag with me whenever i go shopping for anything. and to ignore the looks of amusement/confusion/annoyance from some of the baggers at our local supermarkets.

so, that's my story. it's not perfect; i could definitely do more, and maybe next year i will. hey, i haven't even seen an inconvenient truth yet! who knows what i'll do then!

some other good links, if you're so inclined:
worldchanging
treehugger
no-impact man

the stars looked aligned, dammit

2007-04-18T23:22:00.000-04:00

the rangers swept.

sanjaya was voted off.

i really, honestly thought it could be finally, finally be our night.

*sigh*. 7171 games and counting.....

p.s. screw you, mark beuhrle

btietw

2007-04-17T22:03:00.000-04:00

as you already know if you live on the east coast, it rained on sunday. no, i'm sorry, that's wrong—it motherfucking rained on sunday. as stephen said, "i've seen it rain harder, and i've seen it rain longer, but i've never seen it rain this hard for this long." pouring, pounding rain for at least 12 hours straight. so i decided that it was the perfect day to cook up the short ribs that i bought at the farmer's market a couple of weeks ago and that had been lingering in the freezer ever since.

i'd never cooked short ribs before, but i was prety sure i should just braise them. i looked on the interweb, and got confirmation of my hunch, plus some hot tips. so here's what i did:

1) browned the ribs. which is absolutely necessary when braising any kind of meat, but a pain in the ass, what with the spattering oil and the entire house ending up smelling like fried. but i found a new method, from james beard, via jeremiah tower, by way of regina shrambling. throw them in the broiler! so much freakin easier! just brush or spray the meat with some olive oil, salt + pepper it, put it in the broiler, and turn it turn it turn it so that each side gets some flame. granted, i had to clean the greasy broiler pan, but i think if i had used heavy duty foil i wouldn't have even had to do that. so. much. better.

2) put them in a deep ovenproof pot/pan/dutch oven along with a quart or so of beef stock (enough to cover them almost entirely), a sliced-up onion, some fresh herbs (thyme, sage, rosemary), and a couple of splashes of sherry vinegar. then i stuck it in a 300˚ oven for about 3 hours.

3) made a sauce. i took the meat and bones (which the meat had fallen off, yum) out of the pot and set them aside. then i de-greased the stock, which could have been a much easier process if we owned a dang baster and i could have just sucked the layer of grease off the top. as it was, i had to pour the stock through a strainer (to weed out the onions and branches of herbs) into a gravy separator, then pour it back out into a different pot (because i had to do it in batches, since there was about 4 cups of stock and the gravy separator holds about a cup and a half). which was a whole lot of effort, and a whole lot of implements that needed to be washed. don't let this happen to you! go forth, procure a baster! also, tie up your herbs with twine or wrap them in cheesecloth so that you can just pluck them out in one fell swoop.

anyway, once it was all de-greased, i threw it back in the original pot, threw the bones back in, and put it on the stove on high heat to reduce. i also splashed in a litle more sherry vinegar, like the internet had told me to do. which, when i tasted the sauce a little later, i thought was a big mistake; it was really vinegary. but once it went on the meat, it was perfect. the meat is so rich, it really needs a sauce with bite to balance it out. then i made a quick faux-roux, by melting a couple of tablespoons of butter in the microwave and whisking in a couple of tablespoons of flour, which i whisked in to the stock when it was just about reduced as far as i wanted it. it's right when it will coat a spoon like cough medicine. then i took out the bones, turned off the heat, and put the meat back in for a couple of minutes to warm back up.

all done! it was warm and delicious and just the right thing for a rainy, gross day.

oh, and i made some swiss chard to go with it, which was delicious. i used to go through a totally annoying blanch-then-saute song and dance with greens like swiss card and spinach, becuase somewhere along the way some cookbook or food show or something told me that you couldn't just saute the greens without blanching them first or they would get too oily by the time they were done. or too soggy. or something. i don't even remember anymore. i just did it, like looking in the bathroom mirror while i brush my teeth, another unnecessary habit of mine that i have absolutely no good reason or justification for. anyway, when i was down in sunny port st. lucie, my mom just threw her spinach in the pan with a little olive oil, sauteed it for a couple of minutes, and it was perfect. huh. so i did that with the chard, sprinkling in a little water and salt too, and it was the best chard i've ever cooked or eaten.

thanks, but no thanks. but, thanks!

2007-04-13T16:10:00.000-04:00

so when i laid out the life-changing aspects of my time in florida, i didn't tell you the whole truth. i know! the deception has been eating at me inside since i posted it! but it's a longer story than i felt like telling at the time, and i just wanted to get those digging pictures up. the world could not wait for those digging pictures.

i'm starting this post on tuesday, but it could be days before you see it. cause like i said, it's a long story. and i'm still processing it as i'm writing it, so i'll probably rewrite it at least five times. and naptime, she only lasts so long, and i can't be on the "puter" when wile's awake anymore, because then he wants to "type emu", and you'd get a post that would look like this:

weweil5dhhh

crane car sarah GWEN 0
BAACKHOE

weilh5 j

WEILH

WEILH5

WEHIL

WEILHWEILHW

WEiLH FOOTBALL WEILH

WEILH WILE

anyway: it all began well before we even got on the plane. somewhere around the middle of february, to be vaguely precise, i realized that i was not, as they say, in a good place. that the past couple of months had been a kind of a low point in my mothering career and career as a person.

i felt like my brain was turning to mush, and i was really just bored with....everything. i had all these things i should be doing, some fun (learning to use my new sewing machines, plotting out my world domination, posting on this here and that there blog), some not so fun, but necessary (cleaning out the front room downstairs, hanging up pictures in wile's room, weeding out the toys that wile hadn't glanced at in months), but i couldn't pull myself out of my torpor to do them. i was down in the doldrums with milo, and i didn't have tock to pull me out. combine that with some rough weeks here and there, in which i had some horrifyingly yell-y, guilt-inducing incidents with my poor defenseless young man, and i was left just plain unhappy.

thankfully i wasn't so far gone that i couldn't recognize it, and start to think about how to pull myself out of it. and i decided that i what i needed to do was start doing some work outside the house again. not full time or anything wacky like that, but some freelance editing, like i used to do. before calling my former place of employ (who i have freelanced for in the past), i jumped on mediabistro to see if they had any interesting freelance ads up. and what i found was an ad for a part-time job.

it was at a small company, very similar to the first place i worked at in publishing and loved, before it was acquired by a larger company and i ended up sitting in a cubicle and ran screaming for the exit. i was intrigued. i knew i could do this job, and do it really well. and it seemed like this was the solution to my problems, staring up at me from my computer screen. yes! i would completely overhaul my life! make a dramatic gesture! if freelance work would be good for me, a part-time job would be great! it would wake me up, give me purpose, balance my life! w! o! r! k! wooooo!

so i emailed in my resume. about a week and a half later, i got a call. i went in for an interview the day before i left for florida. i thought it went well, but really i had no f-ing idea. i've never done an interview before. for serious. well, i guess i technically had an interview with the crazy italian chef/owner at the italian restaurant where i apprentice-chef-ed, but all i can remember from that is following him around the restaurant saying "uh-huh" while he talked a mile a minute, and then he made me put a bunch of corks in a saute pan and flip them, and i thought i did a crappy job because i only got 5 out of 9 to say in the pan, but later found out that the reason he hired me was because of the cork-flipping, since he thought that he wouldn't have been able to do as well. so, but, anyway, i'd never had an interview before that required actual speaking.

but apparently i did just fine, because i got a call when i was at my mom's house asking me to do a second interview over the phone, and a couple days after that, a call offering me the job.

and pretty much just like that, i didn't want it.

there were a few technical factors—the hours were really much closer to full time than part time, and the money would never be more than just okay—but mostly, it came down to this:

> there might be hours, days, even weeks when i wish someone besides me was dealing with the whining, the arguments over wanting to wear shirts that are currently in the washing machine and how even asking really nice won't make them dry, the constant asking of "why?", the endless games of backhoe and catch, the total immersion and suppression of self that is being home with a baby or toddler. but when it came down to it, when i was faced with the real choice of making a few calls and putting wile in someone else's care for a few days a week, i didn't want to do it. and that made me realize that:

> i have a job. i'm bringing up my baby boy. but my current gig, the mom gig, had become both stale and more challenging (hello, twos!) , and in applying for this other job i was essentially trying to switch careers. and this was the wrong solution. i didn't need to change jobs, i needed to change my relationship to the job that i have.

and.....i'm actually following through on it! i did some self-diagnosis, and am working on my shit.

so what did i figure out? that i'm a prime example of what newton was talking about. when i slip in to a pattern of being lazy, i tend to stay there. so here i am, home with the kid, no real obligations, no one telling me what to do, no one watching.....and i slipped. i mean, wile and i certainly didn't lie around the house in our pajamas all day watching lifetime movies and eating bon bons. we went to playgroup, playdates, the park, music class, waldorf school, etc etc. but when he napped? i was much more likely to watch something on the dvr than read one of the issues of the new yorker glaring at me from the endtable or anything else constructive. once he went to bed? back on the couch. eating too many crappy snacks.

also, i had decided, sometime around the holidays, that i should just let go of the need to have the dishes done i went to bed, and wile's toys cleaned up, and the clutter in neat piles. that if i just chilled out about the (not so awful, really) messiness, it would decrease my stress. this was an epically bad idea. piles of undone dishes stress me out. i should not deny this. i have to embrace it. plus, once i told myself that it was okay not to do the dishes after dinner, it became a million times harder to force myslef to do them anytime. so it only fed in to my general state of inertia.

but of course the second half of newton's law is that if you start moving, you keep moving. and the whole job search/interview process/offer/refusal got me moving. and i've kept moving. trying to be a lot more conscious of myself. to force myself to go down and put the laundry in the dryer before i go to bed instead of telling myself that i can do it in the morning. to not look at the stack of unread books on my bedside table and say "jesus, i'll never catch up", but to just pick one up and start reading it. to create projects for myself, and actually do them. to be ambitious but not unrealistic in thinking about what i want to get done in a day/week/month. to turn off the tv. to eat better. to exercise. and to ask stephen for help when i need it. and to not kick myself in the ass if i do backslide for a day or two. to grow the hell up.

it's not easy, yo. i've never had to be my own boss before. and that's what being a stay-at-home mom, essentially, is. so i'm trying to be a better, more motivational boss, and i'm doing alright so far—even without the kitten poster. and it's made me a better mama: if i'm happy, i'm much more patient with wile, much less likely to be beaten down by the horrors of the twos.

but none of this is going to make any kind of difference in the long run, none of this is going to stick, unless i deal with my other issue. and i want and need it to stick. so i'm dealing with it, finally.

the issue is this: i've always had bad pms, or whatever you want to call it. "bad" doesn't even express how bad. crying fits, intense mood swings, total lack of rationality, hair-trigger temper (the temper is always bad, but when i'm hormonal it's off the charts).... all of which is toxic enough. but couple it with intense depression, and it's just debilitating. so for most of my adult life, i've been way-less-than-functional a significant percentage of the time.

i don't exactly know why i've never addressed it before. probably mainly because i have trouble asking for help. plus, pms isn't a constant state of being, so when i would come back to normal i'd be so relieved to be out of the woods that i just didn't want to think about it anymore. but it's time. if next month's hormonal joyride free-falls me back into a black hole, i won't have a job or school—things that have pulled me out of my body-at-rest state in the past—to help me out. i'll still be my own boss. and even after wile moves on to the wonderful world of s-c-h-o-o-l, i'd like to continue being my own boss, by starting up my own business. but if i don't do something about the pms, it will never ever happen. because for 2/3 of the time it seems absolutely acheivable, exciting (if just a little bit terrifying). but the other 1/3 of the time, when everything seems hopeless and folding the laundry feels unattainable, creating and sustaining an enterprise seems monumentally, preposterously unattainable.

and also, and especially, i have to face it for wile. though i obviously don't feel good about it, i can handle snapping at/bitching at other people. but to have wile bear the brunt of my problem? unacceptable.

i've found an ob-gyn who specializes in pms disorders, and i'm keeping a log of my daily crazy levels so that when i see her in may, i can hopefully help her figure out what i need to do to not have this happen every month.

so, ironically, not taking the job did what i thought taking the job would do, way back 17 paragraphs ago.... actually, it did more.

once more, and then i'll leave you alone. till fall.

2007-04-10T18:18:00.000-04:00

okay, so as wile sleeps off his illin' on the couch, i've been getting in some time on the interweb, and i just watched a deleted scene from last week's episode of friday night lights and ended up bawling. this show, it just.....okay, every week i get so excited for the new episode, but then i tell myself to calm down a little, it can't be perfect and wonderful every week. but it is! every week, it totally knocks me on my ass.

and still, a second season is not entirely cemented.

so, i'm asking, one more time: check it out. you can watch all the episodes on nbc.com. or, if you don't feel like dealing with commercials, you can buy all the episodes on itunes. or you can wait till this summer when bravo will be airing at least one friday night lights marathon.

i'm doing this for your own good, i swear. watch. love. write to nbc and tell them not to cancel it.

return of the sick pic

2007-04-10T16:19:00.000-04:00

"wile, why don't i move you to the couch?"

"no!"

"alright. do you at least want a pillow for your head?"

"yeah."

this time, i think we can't blame the cheese. stephen's feeling icky too. trucky, lulu, and i are hanging tough.

for slightly more cheerful pictures, you could check out wile's website.

btietw

2007-04-03T18:23:00.000-04:00

even before i got a jewish best friend and a jewish husband, i had been to my fair share of passover seders. when i was little, my stepmom's friend judy kesselman would throw these enormous seders every year and we'd go and eat all the good food and ignore all the god talk (not that there was much; these were, after all, my stepmom's hippie jewish friends). so since my youth, i've loved me a good seder. and the best part of seder is the charoset (alternately spelled haroset, charoses, charoseth, haroses, and probably a dozen other ways).

i love it so much that in the last few years i have volunteered to make it for our seders with stephen's family so that a) i can make extra to hoard all to myself, and b) i can guarantee that it's going to be good.

so what the hell is (c)haroset(h)(ses)? ritual-wise, it's supposed to represent the mortar that the enslaved jews used to make the bricks that they built the pyramids with back when they were enslaved by the pharoah in egypt, before moses came and did his thing with the plagues and the parting of the sea and all that jazz. culinary-wise, it's a pitch-perfect mixture of grated apples, nuts, honey, wine, lemon juice, and cinnamon.

you can tweak the proportions to your taste, but the formula i follow is: about 6 cups grated apples, 1-1/2 cups finely chopped nuts, 1/3 cup honey, 1/4 cup wine, juice of two lemons, 1/2 t cinnamon. i use granny smith apples or a mix of grannies and another tart red apple like a winesap. for the wine, you want a light red, a little spicy is nice. this year i used a tinto roble. for the love of all that is holy do not use manischewitz.

i used to grate the apples by hand, but went for the food processor this year because i was making a double batch, and....well, i prefer the texture that you get when it's grated by hand, but if you're making a lot—and are looking for a way to involve a 2-yr. old—the f.p. does just fine. and if you've already got the f.p. in use, you can chop the nuts in it. then just throw all the ingredients together, and mix it all up with your hands. microwave the honey for a minute on low before mixing it in, makes it easier to disperse. then throw it in the fridge and wait.... it's better the next day, and will keep for a good long time (2 weeks? who knows. it doesn't last long in my fridge).

i've already bought more apples to make another batch....

guess who's sick again?

2007-04-03T18:07:00.000-04:00

is it the flu, or the after-effects of about 2 pounds of cheese and three bowls of matzoh ball soup? only time will tell.

spring break 07

2007-03-31T23:22:00.000-04:00

i can say in all honesty, with not that much exaggeration, that our trip to florida this year was a life-changing experience. no, really.

but i'll get to that later. first, we dig:

okay, so that last one was plant-watering, not digging. but it's still yard work. and there had been digging, right before the watering, but i didn't get to the camera in time. if you're keeping score at home, that's 7 out of 14 days that there was digging. thankfully he was fine with nana as his digging partner....

we did manage to leave the yard a few days. one day we went back to the local playground, which still has this sign, which i've mentioned before:

plus a new one!

at the playground! and i don't think they're talking about squirrels, people. we didn't see any creatures, but still. i know there's some wacky wildlife down here in southern florida, but you really can't locate the playground somewhere that alligator warning signs wouldn't be necessary?

anyway, we tried to ignore the possibility of impending doom and concentrated instead on the certainty of impending nausea:

man, i shudder just looking at that thing. i still remember feeling dizzy and wrong for the rest of the day afer taking wile down it last year. but he's a big boy now! he can go down it himself!

yay! except that he wants me to go down after him, to share in the joy! not yay! i managed to limit my involvement to one slide down. nana may have had to go down twice. as it should be.

we also made it to a few baseball games. wile was way into it, but possibly even more fun than seeing jose and david wright and paul lo duca, the catcher, in his endlessly fascinating "gear" was the wiffleball game that they had set up for the kids on the walkway into the stadium. the bat was definitely taller than wile. but he rocked it, of course.

that's a sure double. totally. thankfully there weren't any other kids who wanted to play, and the 14-year-old running the booth was amused rather than annoyed with wile, so he got to take some really long turns, much to the amusement of all the people heading up the walkway, who were literally taking bets as to whether this tiny little thing was going to be able to get any hits with the him-sized bat. they didn't know who they were dealing with....

and at the last game we went to, with dada, things got even more exciting. there was a first-ever ballpark frank....

and the thing that wile had been asking for all through the other two games came to pass: jose signed his ball.

i still can't believe it. this sets the bar just a little bit high for the rest of his baseball-viewing career. oh, you want the most popular player on the team to sign your ball? the young, cute all-star, whose autograph everyone wants? sure, no problem. here you go!

we also drove up to casselbury for a visit with uncle nate:

and, of course, when you hang with uncle nate, this is how your day ends:

not. surprising. not even one litle bit.

alright, you say, sounds like a fun trip, but what was life-changing?

first: my mother has an electric stovetop. and....i liked it. this is after decades of bad-mouthing the electric stove. (yes, decades—i've been a cook since i was 12, and a critic since i was born.) but my experience has been with those nasty exposed-metal-coil monsters. the nana has one of those snazzy glass-top numbers, and it is really f-ing awesome to cook on. the heat is so even. all the pancakes cook at exactly the same rate! and it's consistent—every time you set it to 5, it's the same heat. unlike my gas stove, where i'm forever fiddling around with the knob, trying to find the exact spot around the 2 on the dial that will give me the same "2" heat that i had the last time i used it..... and the cleaning. the cleaning! it's a smooth, continuous glass surface! i know i sound like a total geek, but man. changed my whole perspective on things.....

second: my mother watches american idol. so i watched with her. and....i liked it. i take back everything bad i've ever said about it. that is some seriously entertaining shit right there. i'm in for the long haul now. go melinda and jordin! woo!

third: i'd been noticing for a while before we left for florida that wile's hair was looking a little...how can i put this....forty-year-old alcoholic beach bum. when we got down to the sunshine state and the humidity put the curl back in to wile's hair, it became even more apparent that there was a problem:

you couldn't quite call it a mullet, but it was just as bad. there was this lovely hair—shiny, bouncy, silky ringlets—being suffocated by a layer of stringy, fried, frizzled mess. and so, the die was cast. the scissors were fetched. the hair: was cut.

wile seems happy with the result:

as stephen says, he looks like less of a wildman now. true. but instead, he looks kinda like a 14-year-old skater boy growing out his hair. can't argue with that.

fear and loathing in port st. lucie

2007-03-19T18:56:00.000-04:00

(here in florida, when you have no internet connection in your (mom's) house, there are no open wireless connections to hop on to. you have to come to barnes & noble and pay $4 for 2 hours, 1 of which you won't even use because you have to get the child home for early bedtime so that he's asleep before 24 starts. more vacation reports to come when i find somewhere with free wifi!)

there's a litle bit of bobby in all of us

2007-03-12T21:11:00.000-04:00

i feel it's time i told you all about bobby:

bobby lives way far down that block with his mama and dada.

bobby will never come to wile's house.

where bobby? bobby is in mama, in dada, in wile.

bobby has two cats.

their names are soap and sprayer.*

this is a song about bobby:

doo doo doo doo doo
bobby not share
his toys with wile
he say no
he just play with them
dig in the yaaaaaaard

(*we initially thought that wile said "slayer" which would have of course been pretty impossible because i don't think he's ever heard the word "slayer", but regardless of what was actually said, "slayer" and "soap" are so the names of our next cats.)

btietw: queens edition

2007-03-11T21:19:00.000-04:00

so, the inevitable has come to pass: the previa, she is no more. sometime last week, the alternator stopped....alternating? see, i almost sounded like i knew what i was talking about for a second there, and then the truth came shining through. anyway, the car done wouldn't start. every time stephen had to move it for alternate side parking, he had to use my dad's christmas gift. oh, and the inspection was about to be up. so when the weekend rolled around, i let any hope of getting some non-wile time go, and focused instead on finding an activity that would get us out of the house. we hit on this plan: wile and i would go to the queens zoo (pumas!) while stephen tried to find somewhere to try to answer the question: will a car that won't start independently pass inspection? and possibly test-drive some cars.

we were the only people at the zoo, since it was f-ing freezing out, but wile loved it. on the way there he kept saying he wanted to see "lions and hoshies", and i kept trying to prepare him for a letdown. but as we pulled up to the zoo, there were some big old hoshies, out in the paddock. hot damn. the hoshies were in the "farm" end of the zoo, along with really amazing hairy steer:

and the biggest white mutant rabbits i've ever seen. they might have had big fangs, i didn't get close enough to see.

over on the non-farm side of the zoo, there were a buttload of birds, hibernating bears (aka fuzzy rocks), an m.i.a. lynx, coyotes howling at a passing firetruck, and pumas who wanted to eat wile. i swear. we went down to their area and checked them out, they were walking around, everything was cool, wile liked them. then as we were walking away, i sensed a movement behind me, turned around, and saw that one of the pumas had come right up to the glass and had a bead on wile. she was watching him like he was a tenderloin with legs. the look on her face was kinda like the one on the puma on the left in this pic:

in.tent. her head followed wile's every move. i hustled us over to the aviary to see the nice birdies.

stephen returned from his errands (answer to the question: no, a car that needs outside help to start will not pass inspection, and so must be taken off the street and put out to pasture in stephen's parents' driveway....), saw a few animals with us, and we jump-started our way back on to the road. on the way in to the zoo, we had passed a couple of empanada places—one was more crowded, but looked less interesting. so we went to the less-crowded one, empanandas del parque, which i just had a feeling about.

apparently my radar was working. the menu was nothing but empanadas, your choice of corn, organic whole grain, or flour shell. corn seemed to be the right choice. i put together a meat sampler: beef, chicken, pork, shrimp, fish.

the shrimp was my favorite, with little rock shrimp that popped like caviar in the potato filling. the pork was a close second runner-up, the beef was good but too salty. the fish was the weakest, bland. they came with this fantastic housemade hot sauce that wasn't too hot, all garlic and scallions and cilantro and vinegar. delicious. and they cater with mini empanadas, hello wile's 3rd birthday party menu! i also see a sack of empanadas picked up on the way to shea in my future sometime this summer....

"look mama, i spell wile!"

2007-03-07T00:49:00.000-05:00

and don't get me started on elmo....

2007-03-04T21:30:00.000-05:00

dear people who write children's books (that would be "children's book authors", huh? leave me alone, i'm tired),

hi. listen, can you do me a favor? can you stop making books about obnoxious little animals/people who i want to smack upside the head? seriously. cause otherwise your books are going to get hidden away way back behind the extra towels on the shelf in my closet until wile learns to read and can enjoy your stories without me.

you want examples? okay, how about olivia. little pig, big ears, spoiled brat. why is this book so popular? it's not funny! it's not entertaining! why do i want to read about some ugly little pig yelling and kvetching and bossing? especially since olivia's parents give in to her whims and seem to condone her totally crappy behavior! why in the hell would anyone think that i would want to give voice to dialogue like this:

wile is getting quite proficient at the yelling, he really doesn't need any encouragement.... so, okay, olivia freaks the hell out over the missing toy, berates and apparently scares the bejeezus out of her little brother, yells at everything that moves, and then when she finds the toy, slightly mangled from the dog chewing on it, and has another screaming fit, her dad says "oh, don't worry honey, we'll get you an even better toy tomorrow", at which point she turns around and is all "oh i love you you're the best daddy ever." i....i'm at a loss. honestly.

and then there's this one:

so duck and goose spend the whole book fighting over this ball that they think is an egg, yelling at each other and being mean to each other. they finally come to a sort of unspoken truce—at least, they stop yelling at each other—only to turn around and act like a couple of little turds to this poor blue bird who comes to talk to them, trying to get their attention by kicking the ball (egg):

it's just so.....unpleasant. and do they ever apologize to the poor litle blue bird who's head they ripped off? nope! she apologizes to them for bothering them! and then they run off and play with the ball—without her. lovely.

i'm certainly not saying that all children's book characters should be perfect little models of decorum. some of our favorite books are about characters who are definitely troublemakers.

like everyone's favorite, good night gorilla.

he steals the keys, he lets all the animals loose, he follows the zookeeper home, and when he's discovered and sent back to his cage? not only is he unrepentant, he sneaks right back out again and back into bed with the zookeeper and his wife! but he never verbally abuses any of the other characters. i never have to give voice to him putting anybody down or flying off the handle. he's mischevious, but he's not a jerk.

and then there's the awesome (and amazingly illustrated) book that dexter's mom gave wile, 17 things i' not allowed to do anymore. this girl is definitely hell on wheels.

but....it's funny! (i mean really, beavers? hysterical.) and none of the things she does—doing a history report on beavers instead of george washington, walking backwards to school, showing her classmate her underwear—are mean-spirited, they're all just kinda kooky and creative and limit-testing. okay, so she staples her brother's hair to his pillow. but i can see the thought process behind that: will it really work? can staples hold hair, or would the hair just slip out? and her mom is there throughout the book, obviously telling her she's not allowed to do this stuff anymore, and getting more and more frazzled as the book goes on, which is nice to see.

but in the end, the girl is unrepentent and definitely on the path to more mischeif, and that's fine by me. look, i'm not asking for morals. i don't need for wile to learn a lesson from his picture books. and believe me, the overly-earnest books, where everyone literally or figuratively has a group hug at the end, squick me out even more.

i just want some characters who i don't mind spending time with. i have to personify these little animals. give me something better to work with than screeching pigs and huffy ducks.

go to it!
h.m.

btietw: the return!

2007-02-28T23:58:00.000-05:00

yes, it's been a long...oh my god! i didn't realize it had been that long. wow. okay. let's not waste anymore time, then.

so, but, oddly, if you read that last btietw that i just linked to there, you'll notice that i end it by asking about squash. and if you didn't read it and are too lazy to even just click on the link and skip to the last sentence, i'll tell you what i asked: how can i cook the squash so that i'll eat it? and enjoy it?

why is that odd, you ask? because the best thing i ate this week was: squash! ooo, creepy....

so apparently last week i was having the same thoughts that i was having 15 months ago when i wrote that post, which was that i need to be eating more vegetables but that the selection, in the winter months, if you're trying to eat relatively locally and therefore seasonally, is rather slim. so i just bit the bullet and got a kabocha squash and figured i'd find a way to make it palatable.

this is a kabocha squash:

it's about the size of a volleyball. (not that i ever played volleyball. well, i thought about playing volleyball, in 8th grade, when i was finally allowed to play contact sports after being sidelined for most of my childhood due to an enlarged spleen, which had finally been excavated from my abdomen the summer before 8th grade. but i went to the first volleyball meeting and asked the gym teacher/coach/drill seargent if there was going to be practice every day, since i had ballet class on thursdays, and her way of answering me was to turn to the assembled crowd of volleyball hopefuls and bark "i have just been asked if there will be practice every day and the answer is yes there will be practice every day and it will last all afternoon if you want to play volleyball for me i will need your full commitment there is no being late there is no missing practice there are no excuses!" so i walked out and never looked back, which was really the best decision, since i discovered in gym class later that semester that i am possibly the worst volleyball player in the history of the universe. i don't think wrists my size were meant to make contact with a hard leather ball.)

wait, where am i? okay, right, i bought a big ugly squash. if you're wondering, like stephen was, why i chose the kabocha (besides it's awesome name: kabocha!), it's because it was the only squash that i hadn't ever had before, so it the only one that i didn't know i didn't like. acorn, butternut, spaghetti? yuck, yuck, yuck. kobacha was a blank slate.

the first night, i just roasted it. you know, just to get to know it a bit. i got to use my big cleaver to hack it to peices, which was worth the price of the squash even if i ended up hating every bite. whack! whack! anyway, per instructions from jeremiah tower, we just ate the roasted pieces witha drizzle of white truffle oil. which was, of course......i mean, i would eat cardboard with white truffle oil on it. when i was apprentice chef-ing in the insane italian restaurant, i used to take the misto of truffle oil that we kept on the pass-through and use it like chloroseptic. yum. so, yeah, it was good with the truffle oil, but it was still too....squash-y. i needed to disguise it more. though already i could tell that i'd chosen the right squash for me: it was less sweet than the others, and it wasn't at all stringy.

next i made some squash "pizzas" on a couple of little multi-grain ciabattas. they were good, but it was almost too much disguising. wile liked them, though! and getting him to eat any vegetables is even more of a challenge than getting me to eat squash.... (though last night i made chicken and mushrooms and gave him a couple pieeces of chicken that i meticulously cleaned the mushrooms off, and what did he want? of course. he ate all of the mushrooms off stephen's plate (i'd already eaten mine).)

then, i found it. the answer. a panade! obviously!

yeah, i'd never heard of a panande before either. but if alice waters says to make it, i make it. here's the recipe i (kind of) used:

5 onions, sliced thin
olive oil or duck fat (duck fat! duck fat!)
6 cloves garlic, sliced thin
2 bay leaves
12 sprigs thyme
1 cup red wine
3 quarts chicken stock
2 lbs squash
1 lb chanterelle mushrooms
salt + pepper
10 slices stale country-style bread
approx. 3 oz. reggiano parmesan cheese

(those are the amounts if you're making enough for 8-10 people. since i wasn't, and since i only had what i thought was about 1 lb of squash, i cut it in half.)

preheat oven to 375.

stew the onions in 1/4 cup of duck fat (seriously, it is worth taking the time and effort of browning a serious number of duck legs to end up with a pint jar of duck fat, such as the one that used to live in our fridge until i finished it off with this recipe) over medium heat, adding the garlic and herbs once they've begun to soften. cook until onions just begin to brown, about 20-30 minutes. add the red wine and reduce by half. Add the stock and simmer 30 minutes.

prepare the squash: if you have pre-roasted chunks, as i did, peel them and slice them up. if you have raw squash, cut it open (whack! whack!), peel it, seed it, and slice it into 1/8"-thick pieces. meanwhile, saute the musrooms (our farmer's market only had cremini and shitake, so that's what i used instead of chanerelles, and it was just fine) in some olive oil until brown. salt and pepper them, and add to the stock mixture. then throw some duck fat into the mushroom-browning pan and toast the slices of bread in it until light brown.

assembly: cover the bottom of a casserole dish with a layer of bread. ladle in some of the stock mixture to cover (note: alice doesn't say so, but in the future i will take the thyme stalks and bay leaves out of the stock mixture at this point, rather than picking them out of my esophogus later. lazy cookbook editing....), then throw on the squash in a single layer. top with more bread, ladle on the rest of the stock mixture, then grate on the cheese. bake it for 40 minutes covered and 40 minutes uncovered (i cooked mine for less time since my squash was pre-roasted).

the recipe then says to serve it in bowls with excess broth from the casserole dish ladled around it. i was in the middle of cooking the damn thing and reading that part of the instructions for at least the fifth time when it finally dawned on me: "am i making soup here?" according to the food network, yes, i was. but i didn't want to be! so only used 3/4 as much stock as the recipe called for. the way i made it, it came out less like a stew/soup and more like a really amazing stuffing without any of the disgusting squishy raisins and celery that keep me from eating the stuffing at every thanksgiving at my in-laws' house ew ew ew gross. ahem. so, adjust the amount of broth you use according to what you're looking for, a soup or a side dish.

and this was the best thing i ate this week not only because it was totally delicious, but because it's a new preparation for me. when i can't think of a way to pull something together from what i have in loitering in the fridge, i usually fall back on a pasta-based concoction. now i can start experimenting with this panade concept. goodbye orecchiette, hello stale bread. very exciting.

r.i.p.

2007-02-21T15:53:00.000-05:00

in the past month, wile's verbal skillz have gone through the damn roof, accelerating from one-word answers to run-on sentences that seem to stretch from here to next tuesday. and i've realized in the last week or so that he's really sharpened up his pronunciation skillz, which is making me a little sad. so i'd like to have a moment of silence, if we could, for the death of the following "words" from wile's vocab:

"hippo" is no longer "fwahtuh" (yes, i realize "fwuhtuh" sounds nothing in the slightest like "hippo").

"pancakes" are no longer "pangshee".

"stroller" is no longer "zhowzha".

"backhoe" is much less frequently "bat-bo".

thankfully, "little" is still "yodi", and "elephant" is still "en-sant", "ravioli" are still "ravi-rolly", and "popsicle" is "poptwan."

and the new word that has had the most impact on our lives is "what cause?", which has led us to many conversations much like the following:

"wile hold that cream while mama put it on?"

"sure, you can hold the tube while i'm putting the cream on you."

"wile hold it?"

"sure."

"what cause?"

"because, um, it's okay if you hold it."

"mama?"

"mama what?"

"mama hold it?"

"no, thanks."

"what cause?"

"because i thought you wanted to hold it."

"what cause?"

"because you said you wanted to hold it."

"what cause?"

"because you wanted to hold it"

"what cause?"

"i....have no idea."

off the couch....and into the fire

2007-02-16T14:59:00.000-05:00

we have recovered.

i think when i wrote that last post, i was at the absolute low point of the sick week. i pulled myself together the next day, and by yesterday he was back to normal, tearing around the house like his normal monkey-on-crack self, eating solids, and making jokes.

today....well, i think i'd have preferred another day on the couch with bob the builder.

we woke up at 9, which is insanely late, especially considering that we had to leave for playgroup at ten and seeing as i'm the one running the damn playgroup we couldn't be late. so i jumped out of bed and into the shower, which was my fatal mistake. i should have taken him, or asked stephen to take him, downstatirs right away for breakfast, since it was an hour past when he normally eats and he was probably starving. but i didn't, and i paid the price. by the time i got him downstatirs---after getting him dressed while he screamed about wanting more of my body oil on his hands, which i wouldn't give him because his hands were already covered in it (he likes to put lotion on with me in the mornings, which is usually fun, we will never repeat the body oil again, never!)---he was at a dangerous point.

he asked for cheese and tomato jam on his toast. i checked the cheese; it was moldy. i told him no cheese. he then began a cry of "mama, want cheese and mato jam on my tooooooast!" that lasted through making our breaskfast (i put butter on his toast instead, he almost threw it on the floor), downstairs to get into his coat (he had a conniption fit when i tried to put his winter coat on him, insisted he wanted to wear his vest, so ended up in two fleeces and the damn vest), over the entire walk 8-block walk to playgroup in the stroller, and finally in the snack chair at playgroup, between bites of the butter-and-tomato-jam toast that he finally did eat. by the time he finished the toast, he was fine. i, of course, was fried.

which is how we ended up where we are now.... he is curently up in his room screaming "mama, want to nurse ba-boo!!" and i am down here trying to ignore it. see, i still nurse him down for his naps. normally he nurses for about 15 minutes, nods out, and sleeps for about 2 hours. today? 45 minutes and he was still wide awake. i just could not lie there another minute.

i'm not totally confident that he'll be able to fall asleep for a nap without nursing. i think at this point, since he has been nursing down to nap for so long, he may just stop taking naps when i stop nursing him down. which is a terrifying thought. but it has kept me from trying to wean him from the nap-nurse, because i haven't been confident that it would work.

and really, i'm still not. but i am confident that i am kind of at the end of my rope after this week, and this morning, and i need a break.

i told him that we were going to do this just like bedtime: i was going to go downstairs, and he was going to lie in bed till he fell asleep, and if he didn't fall asleep right away, he could lie there quietly. well, it's been 20 minutes, and "quietly" is not the word i'd use to decsribe how he's been handling it. i think he's started to kick the wall.

could it be that he's not tired because he slept so late this morning? maybe. or that he wants to nurse so much more because he's still not quite over the sick? maybe. but if i don't get some time without him during the day, i'll be nothing but crabby and mean the rest of the day. so, what's the better alternative? give in and resent him, or let him cry some?

i'm not going up there yet. i can't. i may sit here and cry along with him, but at least i'm sitting by myself.

sick of it

2007-02-13T13:07:00.000-05:00

so, we're in day of what i thought was going to be another 24-hour stomach bug. yeah, not so much. we're on hour 89. knock on every available surface and cross all digits, stephen and i haven't been hit. yet. i'm feeling a little bit squiffy right now, but that could just be from lack of sleep and power of suggestion.

a recap of the past four days:

> another illness, another sleeping-in-odd-spot photo op:

> i think i can now recite line-for-line the four episodes of bob the builder that we have on the dvr. on the other hand, though, it's made me thankful all over again that this is the show that wile is obsessed with. it's sweet, simple, has cute otters and badgers.... it could be so so much worse. at stephen's aunt's christmas eve party, all the kids ended up upstairs, and one of the dads turned on a dora the explorer video to "entertain" them. dear sweet baby jesus. it was hands down the most awful piece of dreck i've ever seen. i mean, i understand that it's "educational", but....oy. that shit would feel condescending to a 2-week old. physically painful. thankfully, wile was completely uninterested. smart man.

> i've decided that i much prefer barf to the alternative. you know....the other end? the majority of the barf has made it into a pot or other acceptable receptacle. it's there, it's gone, it doesn't smell too bad. the diaper barf (as i've started to call it), on the other hand, smells worse than anything i can imagine, and necessitates a trip into the tub for some hosing down. not. fun.

> last night we hit the low point of the sick. bath went fine, going to bed went fine, stephen and i watched keifer fuck some shit up, then, around midnight, we got the call through the monitor... we both ended up in wile's bed, where he proceeded to lie on his back and screech "eeeeennnnhhhh! wile's tummy huuuuuurt!" for at least 40 minutes. while screeching, he wanted to have his stuffed animals balanced on his tummy, and every time one of them fell, he would have a leg-kicking, fist-pounding, hissy fit. and if stephen or i tried to help with the animals, or suggest lying a different way or drinking some tea, he punished us by trying to pierce our eardrums. by the time he calmed down, i was in tears. it was like chinese water torture: screech!....silence, silence, but you know another one is coming.....screech!! and on and on....

> did i mention that he also didn't nap yesterday? no nap! we hung out on his bed for an hour or so, but no sleeping. so i didn't get to sleep or get time by myself. result? my patience levels drop to negative infinity.

> stephen just emailed me that his head is swimmy and his stomach is funny. now i really need a nap....

would you like me to gift-wrap that for you?

2007-02-10T19:10:00.000-05:00

the freecycle hilarity continues....

i put up a post back in december offering up the crib that wile never slept in, a universal stroller that wile never rode in, and a copy of what to expect the first year. the stroller went right away, but i never got any replies about the crib or the book. i wasn't that surprised that the crib didn't get any takers—it's a 3rd generation hand-me-down, at least 15 years old, and i think people are picky about cribs meeting these safety standards that i've heard tell about.... i thought somebody would bite at the book, but after a week or so with no replies, i completely forgot about it.

then, a couple of days ago, i got this email:

Is the baby book still available ? I would be interested in reading
it, except it will be difficult for me to pick it up in this
weather, with my baby. Is there any way you could post it or drop it
off ? Thanks.

post? drop off? exsqueeze me? freecycle is the cyber equivilent of putting stuff out on your stoop for the passersby to loot. it doesn't include delivery.

so i had to ask where this crazy lady was located, since i had clearly put my neighborhood in my post, and i had to see just how nutball her request for me to "drop it off" was.... answer: "Coney Island Avenue and Avenue J, right next to Rite Aid."

oooohhhhhh! right next to the rite aid! of course! the rite aid on coney island avenue and avenue j! which is about as far from my house as, say, new jersey?

i wrote back and told that she could send me $5 and i'd drop it in the mail for her. no reply. shocking.

who's on first?

2007-02-06T21:15:00.001-05:00

"go upstairs, wile, we'll take your shoes off up there."

"where?"

"up in the room where we have music class."

"where?"

"upstairs."

"where?"

"in the room where we have music class."

"where room we have music class?"

"upstairs."

"oh!"

overheard

2007-02-05T18:00:00.000-05:00

"i would never have kids here! i could never carry the stroller up and down the subway stairs, that looks like hell! i feel so sorry for those poor women! it looks like a nightmare! like hell! oh my god! and if they're not in the stroller you have to carry them, because everyone's knocking in to you.... oh my god. i couldn't. plus, you know, it seems like the kids here are, i don't know, so oversaturated. like, too much stimulus, too much culture.... "

that's nice, dear. now go back to iowa.

licensed to ill

2007-02-01T15:26:00.000-05:00

like many new yorkers, i don't have a license.

now, when you say it like that, it sounds so normal and acceptable, right? i live in an urban center with arguably the best public transportation system on the planet, who needs a license! but. i didn't grow up here. i grew up in the burbs, and went to college in the sticks, and definitely could/should have gotten a license somewhere along the way. it's not like i've never driven a car. i had a succession of learner's permits from age 16 to 22, but never got any further. i also managed to rack up a good number of speeding tickets while i had my permit, including one in maine, driving a rented van to a phish show, that i'm pretty sure i never paid.... anyway, there were reasons that i never took the plunge.

in high school, the first time my dad took me out on the road, out of the parking lot, i hit and killed a racoon. not good for the psyche. i had to take a break from the lessons for a little while. also, i knew that i wasn't getting a car---my parents didn't have the money to buy me one, and the majority of the money i made at my weekend job was forcibly put into a college savings account. so it didn't make much sense to me to get a license if i wasn't really going to have much of an opportunity to put it to use. go through all of the studying and practicing and the freakin test and blah blah blah so that i can....drive my stepmom's car on the weekend sometimes, maybe, if she feels like lending it to me, and only before 9? uh, not.

in college, still no car. so still no burning drive (heh) to get legal.

the year after college, too stoned.

the year after that, i moved here. the idea of getting a license just fell completely off my radar.

the year after that i moved from manhattan to brooklyn and shacked up with stephen and his car, and concievably should have gotten back on the license train. but stephen loves to drive, and generally prefers that if he is in a car, he is the one driving it. so, again, no motivation....

but lately i've been feeling like i should get around to it, already. mostly becasue of wile. it just seems a little silly not to be able to drive, in case of some kind of emergency. and for other less dramatic reasons: i could take a turn driving when our mom-and-kid posse heads out to the beach in the summer. we could go out to shea for a day game without having to deal with that horrendous g-to-7 transfer. we could go shopping at fairway. i would join the co-op.

so i'm pretty much decided that i'm going to do this thing. but here's the latest thing standing in my way: right now we have a toyota previa. not a new previa, ew. no, we have an o.g. previa. which stephen loves so much that if i were the jealous type i would have possibly already taken a baseball bat to its windows or something. clipped its brake cables? yeah, that's how little about cars, i can't even come up with a good car sabotage scenario.... anyway, stephen inherited this car from his dad, and though it really is in good shape for a 15-year old car, it's still a 15-year old car. with an assload of miles on it. my feeling used to be that we wouldn't get a new car until this one spontaneously combusted, but stephen has been making some noises lately about maybe thinking about getting a new one, possibly. i'm thinking it will happen sometime in the next year or two.

my feeling is that i don't want to learn to drive while we still have the old car. stephen thinks it would be better for me to learn to drive in the old car. here are our closing arguments:

stephen: as a new driver, i will be more prone to getting into a fender-bender or two. and wouldn't it be better to mess up the old car than the new one?

me: as a new driver and someone who is completely ignorant of car stuff (though of course i'd learn), i'd rather drive something that is less likely to crap out on me. especially with wile in the car.

so, jury of my peers, what do you think?

or just look for the zits on my chin

2007-01-30T22:57:00.000-05:00

wanted: part-time nanny.

must have extremely flexible hours, becuase i will really only need you a couple of days a month, and i'm not quite sure when those days are going to be.

how will i know when i need you? when all of the sudden, with no warning or reason, the fact that wile is putting his magnetic letters into his dump truck one by one at the pace of a turtle on valium is far far far too much for me to handle and i have to ask him in an eerily calm and quiet voice to hurry. up. please. and when he asks me "what cause hurry up?" all i can say is "becauseit'stimeforbednowputthoselettersinthattrucknow", and when we go upstairs to brush his teeth it's all i can do to not rip the toothpaste out of his hands when he tells me he needs to open it himself and then spends 30 seconds turning it in the wrong direction, and then the sound of the cap bouncing across the tile floor when it inevitably drops from his hand after he finally manages to get it off makes me want to take a large hammer to the tile, the cap, and possibly the entire bathroom.

so, yeah, when this happens, you would swoop in for a couple of days while i hide my head under a pillow and try to ignore the world and the things about it that irritate me, which is every single little thing.

perhaps we could set up a bat signal of some sort. in the shape of a giant tampon, maybe? that would go over well with the neighbors, i'm sure.

references available upon request

2007-01-27T16:21:00.000-05:00

what now, geniuses??

2007-01-25T16:18:00.000-05:00

every so often i'll read an article—on line, in a magazine that i pick up somewhere—about parenting the 2-year old. most of them focus on "creative discipline", or "how not to live under the thumb of a 25-pound dictator".

one i read recently was about food issues, conquering the picky eater, how to get your kid to try new things, etc. it's thesis statement (hello, 10th grade english!) was that you shouldn't push too hard, but you shouldn't wuss out either. in practice, it said, this was carried out by always putting a little bit of what you want the kids to eat on their plate and asking them to try it. they can say no, but it has to stay on their plate.

here's how that plays out at my dining room table:

"mama, what that?"

"it's your rice and beans, and some zucchini and onions."

"i don't want keeny and onions."

"you've eaten it before and liked it, at nana's house. i'd like you to try it again. it's really yummy."

"take it off plate?"

"nope. you don't have to eat it if you don't want to, but just in case you change your mind, it's going to stay on the plate."

wile gets up from table, walks over to shelf, gets small bowl, and comes back.

"mama, not want that plate. want ricenbeans in this bowl."

(stephen's take on the situatuion was that we should be pleased, as it seems that, with his ability to spot loopholes and creative solutions, wile will have a bright future as a litigator.)

have you heard the one about....

2007-01-23T23:13:00.000-05:00

this is wile's new joke. he said that he doesn't mind if you use it, as long as you credit him.

1) point to something. anything.

2) say "that's peanut butter!!!"

3) hopefully, hopefully, your audience will, seeing that what you're pointing to is not, in fact, peanut butter, say "no it's not."

4) laugh hysterically.

5) repeat ad nauseum.

killed the cat

2007-01-19T21:46:00.000-05:00

it would be far too long and boring a post for me to list all of the things about my midwife that i had problems with. but here's one: when i was in the final push, a metal cart full of medical doodads was wheeled into the delivery room. i managed to gasp out "what are those for?", to which my midwife chuckled and answered "now, you just concentrate on pushing and let me handle the rest." i didn't make an argument out of it, what with the mind-blowing pain and all, but holy moly did that piss me off. i asked a simple question. i wanted a simple answer. i didn't want to be told not worry my pretty little head about it. i wasn't worried about what was on the cart (although i should have been, but that's another story altogether), i just wanted to know what they were. dammit.

of course, as much as i'd like to just be purely bitter at my midwife about this, considering all of her other missteps during the 24 hours that we spent together, i really can't. for 9 out of 10 people, her answer was probably the right one—9 out of 10 people, in asking what was on the cart, probably really would be just looking for a reassurance that everything was fine, and that they could put the cart out of their head. she didn't know me well enough to know that that's not really my m.o.. what would have made me feel better was knowing what was on the freaking cart. i like knowing what's going on. i want concrete answers and explanations. i'm kind of a pain in the ass that way.

i haven't thought about the cart incident in a long time, but it popped into my head the other morning when wile and i were at school. during circle time, miss diana took a white handkerchief and jimmied it around her hand in some way to make a little rabbit puppet, and was telling a story with it. all of the kids were pretty entranced (it seriously looked like a rabbit, i was impressed), except wile, who was entranced...in a different way. he got up and walked over to miss diana, looked at the puppet, then looked up at her and asked "what in there?" she told him it was snowshoe the rabbit, come down to visit. wile pretty much waved this story away and asked again, "what in there?" she tried to sell him again on the rabbit story. he looked at her, sighed, and walked back to me. he plopped down in my lap, looked up at me and asked: "mama, what in there?" i leaned over and quietly told him that it was miss diana's hand, that she had made a puppet and was pretending that it was a real rabbit. he nodded, said "oh!", and turned back and listened to the rest of the story happily.

a little antidote to barry bonds....

2007-01-12T15:15:00.000-05:00

he's an all-star. he just signed a $55 million contract. he almost won the home-run derby. he batted .311 with 20 homers last season. he has absolutely no obligation to be with the team right now. he could be home playing golf or buying more pastel shirts. but where is david wright? signing mets bears for little old ladies.

peter paul and wile

2007-01-10T21:34:00.000-05:00

(sorry you have to watch this with your head turned sideways, i recorded it vertically and can't figure out how to rotate it....)

2007-01-09T21:35:00.000-05:00

waaaaaaant.

all i want for christmas is jesus, jerry, and jesse

2007-01-08T21:43:00.000-05:00

freecycle.org is a wonderful organization that really puts in to practice the kind of recycle/reuse ethic that i admire and strive to follow.

it also gives you great opportunity to laugh your ass off at your fellow man.

i found this winner yesterday:

I WOULD SINCERELY APPRECIATE YOUR UNNEEDED COPIES OF THESE DVD MOVIES:

PASSION OF THE CHRIST

JERRY SPRINGER

SHOWGIRLS

THANK YOU. HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

oh no, happy holidays to you, my friend....

hi, i think i have a blog?

2007-01-03T21:30:00.000-05:00

so let's see, what has gone on in the past 3 weeks or so....

1) wile has become even more enamored of the phone, and now wants to call gwen all the time. to thier credit—more gwen's than wile's—they actually manage to have conversations of a sort. he says hi, she says hi, she tells him what she's been up to, he says "yeah" in the appropriate places.... aw, reminds me of my phone conversations with stephen the first couple of years we were dating!

2) my grandmother told my dad that if i didn't cut wile's hair, all of the kids were going to laugh at him on the first day of kindergarten.

3) someone peed in the vestibule under our stoop. peed! a human being! peed! essentially on my house! a while back the gate that usually closes off the vestibule rusted off the hinge that had probably been supporting it since the hoover administration, and we had been a bit slow in getting it fixed. so one day i'm in the living room and i hear diane, our neighbor from down the block, calling to me through the window. i hop outside, and she tells me that the day before she had been taking one of her walks to the corner bodega and saw a woman squatting in our vestibule! she yelled at her to get the hell out, and the woman told her it wasn't her house and to mind her own business, but diane is not someone to be reckoned with, and told the pisser that it might as well be her house, it was her block, and she best get her ass off our property. so the woman did, bellyaching the whole time, and diane made her wipe up the pee and asked her why in the hell she chose our vestibule when there were several perfectly good vacant lots, alleyways, and construction sites not a block away. the woman handed diane her sob story about getting out of rehab and not being able to make it and so on, so diane walked her back to her own house, gave her some food and a clean pair of underpants and told her never to set foot on our block again. i can't say i would have been so kind if i'd been the one to discover her....

4) wile watched shrek at aunt peggy's house ad now will not shut up about the big yellow guy and the donkey.

5) wile's infatuation with the yellow diapers has reached dangerously high levels. one morning after we managed to get him in to a red diaper, he told stephen "wile pee in red diapy, dada put on yellow diapy." soon he will learn to be less vocal about his conniving.

6) stephen started dvr-ing csi, which is in syndication on spike (the "network for men", god help us), and i just can't break free from its tractor beam. so i know much more about epithelials and gsr and blunt force trauma and marg helgenberger's hair than i ever dreamed i would. [one gigantic bonus to watching old csi episodes: seeing julie cooper as "lady heather", dominatrix.]

7) i cashed in my childhood savings bonds and got this:

wile calls it "mama's laptopooter"

and, since the loaner i had from stephen's mom was filled up with a couple of gallons of flood water, i went on ebay and got this too:

and just for good measure, this:

which, if you don't know, is a serger, a fancy kind of sewing machine.

8) we got a "kristen tree", and put up "kristen lights" on the porch. questionable pronunciation aside, wile grasped the concept of "kristen"—presents—with no problem, and took in the santa myth after only one telling. big guy in sled brings me presents? i'll buy that, no prob.

9) truck was reunited with his long lost love, the purple chenille blanket, which had been buried in the blanket basket for almost a year. i think all of wile's stuffed animals can sleep with both eyes shut again now.

10) wile now answers in the affirmative by saying "yeah, sure!"

11) the weekend before christmas wile and i were both felled by a stomach virus, thankfully not at the same time—he took the first 24 hours, i took the second, and somehow stephen escaped unscathed. it was a fairly routine barf-fest, but it did leave us with one of my favorite pictures ever. wile was sitting up on the island in the dining room drinking a cup of tea between barfs—he likes to sit on the counter and watch me while i do kitchen stuff, i think i'd been putting almond butter on my toast. he wanted to stay up there, so i sat down in a nearby chair to check my email, and when i looked up a couple of minutes later, i saw this:

dead asleep. (don't worry, i moved him to the couch after i took the picture and stopped laughing at him.)

12) i didn't feel i'd gotten my fill of barfing for the month, so i let wile eat five (five!) "hotadogs" for lunch on christmas day.

he didn't barf, but i held my breath the rest of the day.

i'm sorry, i can't stop laughing long enough to come up with a witty title

2006-12-13T00:11:00.000-05:00

i need a nap

2006-12-12T14:46:00.000-05:00

"wile, do you want some lip stuff?"

"yeah!"

"here you go."

"no! not dat kind! otha kind!"

"why don't you just have this kind, i already have it open..."

"no, not want that kind [cups hands together], want that kind [hits edges of palms together]!"

"i...don't know what kind that is. would you like cherry?"

"yup."

"okay. [procure cherry lip gloss.] here you go."

"no!"

"wile...."

"want rose!"

"oh, you mean the kind i originally offerd you?"

"yah."

"here you go."

"nooooo....."

"okay, no lip stuff."

[we make it ten feet down the sidewalk.]

"mama, want cheeeeese."

"i don't have any cheese."

"want cheese!"

"wile, i don't have any, how about--"

"please, mama, wile want cheese."

"that was very nice, but i still don't have any. here, have some apples."

"nooooooooo......."

[silence. sound of apples beign eaten.]

"mama!"

"yes?"

"dere's one apple on dis apple!"

".....ummmmm..."

"dere's one apple on dis apple, right here!"

"there's a piece of apple...on your apple?"

"no, one!"

"oh.... okay."

close encounter

2006-12-03T15:02:00.000-05:00

dear alien being who has apparently taken over wile's body,

it took me a little while to realize that my child had been possessed, or subsumed, or whatever it is you aliens call it when you enter a host body and start controlling it. but then we went out to lunch the other day, remember? and "wile" started eating the tofu out of my salad? tofu! and then he (you, whatever) asked to eat some of the "leaves". as in, the salad. the green salad. wile. the child who made his father dissect a piece of pizza to remove a microscopic shred of basil that was lurking below the cheese and ruining his entire dining experience. the child who thrusts his dumpling filling into my face and demands that i "take off!" the chives. this child asked me for lettuce. and he ate it! and asked for more! that's when i knew something was up. this was not my son.

then the next day, at playgroup, mona offerd him some ravioli with spinach. and he said yes. and he ate them. and asked for more. that sealed it. wile? was no longer with us.

so, i just wanted to acknowledge your presence, say how nice it is to have you around.

now maybe you could work on getting the host body to walk up the stairs on its own? great, thanks.

xoxo
"mama"

edited to add: photographic proof!

reap what you sow

2006-11-30T15:55:00.000-05:00

the most memorable toast given at stephen and my wedding was, i'd have to say, the one given by our best man, nate, who basically stood up there with the mic and said "these guys...are the best!" several...hundred...times. okay, maybe only like three times. but it felt like a lot more. less memorable to the general public, perhaps, but one of my favorite things about our wedding, was our best woman's toast: sarah simply said, "to kristen and stephen; may life live up to your expectations and your specifications."

so, yeah. both of us are a little...opinionated. firm in our likes and dislikes. some would say picky. some would say compulsive.

and this appears to be something that is carried in the dna.

this morning at playgroup, wile went off on gwen for holding the piece of toast that he shared with her wrong. i mean, really—you give up a piece of your toast to someone, asking nothing in return, and they have the audacity to hold it wrong? what is this world coming to? gwen, to her credit, looked at him like he was nuts as he reached over and adjusted the toast in her hand, then crammed the whole thing in her mouth. good girl.

then this evening, we had wile's friend lucas over for dinner. about halfway through the meal, wile yells, with palpable horror, "oh!! mama!!" i jump out of my seat and go to see what has befallen him, and it's, well, it's almost too horrible to show....it's.....

a piece of food! on the table! call in the professionals, i don't know if i can handle this one on my own!

you know, when wile was an infant, he would cry for an hour or two every afternoon. i assumed that it was digestive issues, but maybe i was wrong. maybe he didn't like the onesie i had picked out, or his stuffed animals were in the wrong order on the shelf, or i had been holding my teacup incorrectly.

it's the journey, not the destination

2006-11-21T21:39:00.000-05:00

wile and i were having one of our battles about the stairs. [i know i think i said that i had won the stair war, but i was only fooling myself.] he asked me to pick him up and carry him up the stairs. i said no. he cried and wailed. i walked upstairs and left him there, screaming and carrying on. i did some dishes and put some food away. he screamed. stephen came by and tried to calm him down, no dice. more screaming.

finally i went downstairs and talked him down a little bit. then i told him that i wasn't going to pick him up but that he needed to come upstairs, and i took him by the hand and "helped" him "walk" up the stairs. his feet were technically making contact with the steps, but it wasn't walking. when we finally got to the top, i led him in to the kitchen and tried to distract him with talk of snacks and cat-feeding.

i turned away from him for a second, and when i turned back he had run out of the kitchen and back into the hallway, where he proceeded to walk back down the stairs, crying and yelling for "mama pick wile up! carry up stairs!"

why yes, we are screwed, thank you for noticing.

ps - this is what my leg looks like now, post-mudslide:

highs and lows

2006-11-13T22:01:00.001-05:00

saturday started off good, got better, got bad, and ended worse.

it's always nice to be prepared for an unhappy ending, right?

so saturday morning we all got up at a decent hour and headed out to the farmer's market, my favorite weekly ritual. i shopped, wile and stephen played in the park....and then i hopped on the subway and took off for manhattan! all by my own self!

i cruised the apple store and played with the new macbooks, hopped over to uniqlo and gave in to my longings and bought myself some skinny jeans (hey, if a trend is meant for you, you have no choice but to give in), then made my way over to the real reason for my afternoon of non-mamahood: the taping of the pilot of the tv version of cringe. which was fantastic in its own right, and you must watch it when it airs on tlc, partly because it is hilarious and you'll get to see, among other things, a guy singing a song he wrote for his high school crush that contains the line "you took my heart and ate it like a ham on rye", and partly because i'm pretty sure you'll get to see me, as i was in a primo seat and the camera guy was way up in my grill. but then! it got better. because look who i met!

yes, that is who you think it is! before the taping started, my friend robin (there on the right in the photo in the black sweater), who got us the primo seat, pointed out that heather was sitting behind us and said we should go over together and ask for a picture, by which she meant we should go over together with me walking first and i should ask for a picture. which, obviously, we did, and i did, and heather was as nice as you could possibly imagine, and we only felt a little bit like dorks, and i refrained from telling her that i had emailed her about her piece on friday night lights because i didn't want to seem like a stalker, and though i look like refried butt in that photo it still makes me happy.

so, to recap so far: morning? good! afternoon? great!

then i went home.

and for a while things continued to be great, as the boys were still out (stephen having driven wile up to visit the grandparents in white plains so that he would nap in the car) and i had some home-to-myself time. but then they came home. and then stephen went down in the basement for some reason, i can't remember what, and wile and i heard him scream "FUCK!!!" because when he got to the bottom of the basement stairs he saw this:

apparently during the huge-ass rainstorm this past wednesday, our basement had flooded. which, three days later, left us with mud and many many soggy boxes of potentially ruined belongings. aaaaaaawesome.

we put wile to bed and started assessing the damage, carrying up stuff that was savable, making a big garbage pile, and generally feeling sad/angry. then at about 12:30 i was coming back down the muddy basement stairs and completely bit it. i tried to grab the wall and save myself but only succeeded in almost dislocating my left shoulder, and landed full-force on my ass anyway. i somehow got myself upstairs and out of my muddy (new!) jeans and boots and on to the couch, feeling the whole time like i was going to pass out. thus ended my basement adventures, and my day.

so, aftermath: we spent all of sunday bringing more stuff up, washing mud off stuff, reboxing stuff, throwing out all of my high school yearbooks (not entirely a bad thing....) and many of my childhood books that i was saving for wile (too sad too even think about....), etc.

at least one of us is happy about the house being full of cardboard boxes:

his first original composition

2006-11-02T21:50:00.000-05:00


"the backhoe song". with background vocals by truck and lulu....

i thought having a boy meant not having to have that talk....

2006-10-19T14:15:00.000-04:00

"that was really great that you just told me right after you pooped."

"yah!"

"but you know what would be better?"

"what?"

"if you told me before you pooped—then we could run upstairs and you could poop in the potty."

"no—wile poop in diapy, mama wipe wile's butt."

"well, yeah, that's how we do things now, but soon you're going to stop wearing diapers, and poop in the potty all the time. mama and dada don't wear diapers, right?"

"mama wear diapys!"

"no, mama uses the potty."

"no, mama wear diapys!"

"no, mama....oh. ummmmm......"

logic

2006-10-18T15:37:00.000-04:00

it's getting a little exhausting.

wile and i have had the following philisophical discussions in the last 72 hours:

1) "no, mama, put shoe on dat foot!"

"honey, i can't. that shoe won't fit on that foot. it has to go on the other foot."

"nooooo! dat shoe on dat foot! dat fooooooot!"

"no babe, that's not how shoes work—see, they're shaped different, and the zippers are on different—"

"aaaaiiiiiiiiiiii! [grabs shoe] no! no!"

time needed to get shoes on to proper feet: 20 minutes.

2) we were out on a walk, hauling a few boxes of stuff to the salvation army in our big red wagon. we get to a corner and wile points west and says "go dat way!". my life flashes in front of my eyes. i take a deep breath.

"no, sweetie, the salvation army is this way [pointing south]."

"nooooooooooo!"

we stood on that corner for 15 minutes debating the merits of going 5 blocks out of our way. and by debating, i mean screaming (well, one of us). and running away. and screaming some more. and finally having to be picked up and carried a half block. after half a block, i decided i couldn't carry him and pull the wagon, so for the rest of the journey i held his hand while he walked and screamed and tried to pry his hand out of mine and people on the street made really helpful comments like "aw, she wants to ride in the wagon! you'll get to ride in the wagon soon, honey!" yes, thank you—give him something else to be upset about. now not only am i questioning his navigational skills, but he's not riding in the f-ing wagon.

all in all though, it could have been worse—at least he walked (protesting all the way, but still). he could have gone limp in the middle of the sidewalk and i would have had to leave him there. (i kid!) when we got to the salvation army the sight of the big trucks unloading furniture made everything alright.

3) every morning we get up and i open the shade in wile's window. every morning. apparently, on monday morning wile had had enough of the shade-opening regime.

"aaaaaiiiiiiiii! no ope shade! no ope shade!"

"wile, it's okay—"

"noooooooo!"

i was too exhausted (having been at the jets game all day and up watching the mets game all night the day before) to do anything but sit back and let him get it all out. stephen tried to mediate and was basically told to stay the hell out of it, this was between him and mama. i managed to get him into our room and away from the sight of the awful, terrible open shade, and he calmed down.

now, this is one i could have negotiated on—if he had taken the volume and the pitch down a bit and asked nicely—if i had gotten more than 4 hours of sleep the night before and less than 3 vodka drinks the day before. but as things stood, i didn't have the strength to make it happen.

4) "mama get that thing for wile"

"that thing right there, 10 inches away from your foot? that thing that's right in front of where you are, sitting on the floor, but pretty far from where i am, standing up on this stool cleaning out your closet?"

"yah. mama get."

"no honey, you can get that yourself."

"no, mama get!"

"just lean forward and get it, wile. it's right there."

"no, mama get! mamaaaa!"

"......."

"nice, please, mama get?"

"that was really nice asking, wile, but i still think you should get it."

"noooooooo, mama get! [pause] noooooooo, mama get! [pause] noooooooo, mama get! [pause] noooooooo, mama get! [pause] noooooooo, mama get! [pause, bloodcurdling shreik, pause] noooooooo, mama get! [pause] noooooooo, mama get! [pause] noooooooo, mama get! [pause] noooooooo, mama get!"

by the last few reps, he was just going through the motions, and eventually he gave up, went and played with something different, and came back later and got the thing really slyly, hoping that i wouldn't see.

5) the time has come, the walrus said, to stop lugging 25 pounds of toddler up and down 2 steep flights of stairs numerous times a day.

wile thinks the walrus should go suck an egg.

we played three or four rounds of "stair standoff" in the last few days. not a fun game, if you were wondering. the first couple times, it went like this: i agreed to carry him down the first set of stairs (to the living room) if he would walk down the second set (to the office). he agreed. we got to the second set and he had absolutely no memory of saying any such crazy thing! so he stood in the middle of the stairs and screamed. i tried to talk to him, but it was so easy to be heard over the screaming. so i walked to the bottom of the stairs and let him scream and hoped that if he started to pitch forward i could catch him before he split his skull open. eventually, he came down.

then we moved on to him refusing to even make the false agreement in the first place. more standing, more screaming, more eventual walking.

but! now? not a peep. walks down the stairs like he's been doing it for years.

score one for the good guys!

not that i'm keeping score.

or think of wile as "the bad guys".

at least not at this moment.

plea

2006-10-18T14:41:00.000-04:00

i need to ask a favor.

remember when this happened?

well, i've gotten over it and found a new love. and i've fallen hard, people.

the critics love it, but the word on the street (or, i should say, on the internet) is that it's not doing so well in the ratings, and though nbc says they're committed to it, it could be on it's way to.......cancellation. nooooooo!

so, all i'm asking is this: check it out. go on. just one episode. you can even watch on line.

the problem seems to be that a lot of potential viewers (possibly like you) are saying "a show about football? not for me, thanks anyway." but this show is about football like moby dick was about a whale. stop laughing. i'm serious. it's about family and fleeting glory and the pressures of a crazy-ass small town and hot teenage boys. i've cried at least once during every episode i've watched so far.

and ladies, if you're not convinced, let me just say this. thank you, and goodnight.

edited to add: see, i'm not alone!

avast!

2006-10-15T00:39:00.000-04:00

wile wanted to look at pictures of "baby wile", and we found these. and i couldn't resist sharing.

hissy update!

2006-10-14T16:07:00.000-04:00

so i finally gave in to my urges and emailed hissy's new family to see how she's doing.

i got a really nice email back that read, in part:

"Kitty is fine. And guess what - she is a BOY! I had named her Misifu and already had gotten a pet tag and a pink collar before the vet let me know so I just left everything as is and consider him a drag queen."

whoops....

and: hee!

and: i am even more convinced that s/he went to a good home.

and i don't think a monster truck would help

2006-10-09T15:34:00.000-04:00

if you took a poll of all the moms i know, i think the consensus would be that the first 12 months with baby is the hardest. it's all-consuming. you don't sleep. you never ever ever ever have a minute to yourself (okay, you have a couple, but it feels like you don't). you have to take blind stab-in-the-dark guesses as to what the hell you should do to stop the crying, and at least 50% of the time you're wrong. and the main, overriding thing is that it's such a complete departure from your life up to that point. when you call up one of your friends who doesn't have kids and they tell you about the great day they had shopping and going out to dinner, it's all you can do not to hang up on them. right after telling them to kiss your ass.

but where we are now? at 2? hard in a totally different way.

for that first year, for the most part you're dealing with physical needs: poop in the diaper, hunger, gas, too cold, too hot, etc. but now the little muffin has turned into a person. and he doesn't only have needs, he has wants. let me rephrase that: he has WAAAAAANTS.

stephen and i were just having a little discussion about something, and the first thing that popped out of my mouth was "don't argue with me—i spend all day every day arguing."

it's true. i'm less a mom than a hostage negotiator. i listen to demands, i weigh their validity, and i give my answer. sometimes the guns are laid down; sometimes innocent victims (our afternoon, my nerves, his nap) die.

our latest standoff came about an hour ago when i was putting him down for his nap. first he laid down on his bed, on his stomach, and said "mama change diapy upside-down." he wouldn't accept that that was just not phsically possible, and screamed as a i hauled his butt up to the changing table and laid him down on his back. then i took off the diaper. "no mama wipe wile hurt butt! no mama use dat cream! no wile wear black diapy! wile wear yey-yow diapy! no, maaaa-maaaaa!" i put him back down on the bed, and he grabbed his pajamas from where they were hanging on his bed guard. "wile wear truck jamas!" no, we only wear jamas when we sleep at night, you can nap in your clothes. "no, wile wear truck jamas! wile wear! wile wear truck jams!" wile, just lie down, it's time to– "noooooo! wile wear! wile wear truck! wile wear truck jamas!" at which point, as he spiralled off into a parallel universe, a very loud, very tear-filled universe, i had to go out in the hallway for a minute and let him scream. i went back in, picked him up, he calmed down a little, i laid him down, and he went down for his nap.

now, at this point, you may be thinking, as i was, why not just let him wear the gaddamn pajamas? and believe me, i almost did. but if i give in, am i only letting myself in for exponentially more screaming fits? i don't want to live in a world where screaming and crying = getting what you want. i've lived in that world for the past two years, and it's time to start moving on. it's time to free the hostages. but it's going to be a long standoff....

hissy has left the building

2006-10-02T23:14:00.000-04:00

and i am 75% okay with that.

she left on friday morning, and i'm much better now. i still miss her and worry that her new parents aren't giving her as much love as we were. that they're not letting her sleep on their pillows at night, and that she doesn't curl up into a little ball and start purring when they pick her up like she did with me. that she had imprinted on to me as her new mama and is now feeling abandoned.

but really, we just couldn't keep her. there was too much of this:

and really, i think she went to a good place. the woman who took her said that her last cat had gotten out of their house and gotten lost and though they searched for her for a long time and even scoured the local pet shelters, they never found her. so it's not like she was going to a novice cat owner. and hissy will be growing up with the woman's son, who is 14 months. so that's nice to think about, especially since hissy suffered wile's affection really well:

but, of course, the flip side of that line of thinking is that man, wouldn't it be nice to have a kitten for wile to grow up with instead of these two grumpy old felines who he wouldn't have the strength to hoist of the ground even if they'd let him... alas, that way madness (and sadness) lies.

so farewell, sweet hissy....

a tale of three kitties

2006-09-22T00:38:00.000-04:00

this is our new houseguest:

i call her "hissy".

she has a slightly inflated sense of self....

okay, to start at the beginning:

last week, mona took in these two little hooligans:

she found them outside the elderly housing complex on her block, a notorious flophouse for stray cats. the mama was still in the picture—mona had even seen them nursing one day—but these kittens were clearly on the fast track to feralville. so even though she had reservations about dragging them away from their mama and her milk too early (always an especially touchy subject for us nursing moms), she scooped them up. she took in black kitty (they're still working on names) first, thought about giving him away, decided to keep him, decided that if she was going to take in kitties she'd rather have two, and went back for stripey. the two of them are crazy, spazzy, adorable, noisy, lovey, and okay with wile and gwen picking them up. stripey likes to climb up the leg of your pants when she wants your attention. they sleep on top of each other then wake up and play kitty death match. they are the perfect kittens.

yesterday we—me, wile, mona, and gwen—were walking past the elderly housing complex and saw hissy. she was wedged in between the glass and the exterior gate of a basement-level window, and she looked....well, we couldn't decide. was she stuck? was she sleeping? it looked like she was just sleeping, but.....maybe not? we decided she was okay and left. this morning we were walking by again (the e.h.c. is on our route to the park) and there was hissy, still all jammed up between the window and the gate. hmmm.

"if she was stuck," mona said, "she'd be crying, right?"

and right on cue, hissy started mewing.

so she went in to the complex and tried to extract hissy, who just wedged herself in furthur. we decided that there really was plenty of room between the window and the gate and that she could get out if she wanted to, and that we'd check on her on our way home from the park. when we made our way back...there was hissy. still outside, 24 hours later. and evenif she could get out, where would she go? out on the sidewalk? i went in this time, and managed, after some fancy maneuvering, to extract her. as i pulled her out, i saw her mama inside the window, which was shut tight.

we stood around deliberating for a couple minutes, then saw a resident of the e.h.c. going in through the main gate and asked him if he could get a maintenance man to come open the window and let the poor baby in to her mama. he seemed sympathetic and told us he'd take care of it. a couple minutes later a maintenance man comes out, we ask him if he can help us, and he says "oh, that's the super's window. those are his cats. he's trying to get rid of the kittens, he's got like 7 cats in there." he's trying to get rid of them by...locking them outside? grrrrr......

then out comes the resident we spoke with, another resident, and the super. we ask the super if this is his kitten. he says yes. we ask if he knew that she was outside, separated from her mother. he said that they go in and out all the time. "yeah," i say, "but it's hard to go in a closed window. can you open it so she can get to her mother?" he tells us again that they "go in and out all the time", which i took to mean "i'm not opening the window, why don't you nosy white women leave me alone." then the other resident starts talking about how they have so many cats living in the complex, cats cats everywhere, always kittens all over the place.... to which mona replies, "well, why don't you get them fixed? there are places that will help you do it." none of them appear to hear her. we end up asking the super again if he really plans on just leaving the kitten out on the streets, and he asks if we want it. we say no, we want it to get back to its mother. he says the kitten's fine and can get in to her mother anytime. we look at the closed window that no kitten i've ever met could get open. we tell him we're taking the kitten. the men all walk away, and we can hear the super saying "...don't know what they're so fucking worried about..." oh, i know. we're just overreacting. i'm sure she'd have a great life on the streets.

and so here i am, with hissy sleeping in my lap.

i still don't know if we're keeping her. she's definitely warming up to me, but not so much to trucky and lulu. she's met both of them, and had the same reaction both times: hissing and yowling and puffing up, like she's some big ol' tom cat who's going to take them down to chinatown. trucky and lulu, contrary to all of my expectations, are fairly chill—more than anything, they look really confused that this little piece of fluff is stepping up to them.

and even if they all get along, we really don't need three cats.

on the other hand, there's this:

hissy: mew! mew! mew!

me: the kitty is sad because she's just a baby, and she's not with her mama.

wile: kitty miss kitty mama?

me: yep, she misses her mama.

wile: [after a little deliberation] wile share mama kitty?

if wile wants to share me with this baby kitty, who am i to say no?

it's all in how you look at it

2006-09-21T15:14:00.000-04:00

while he hasn't started throwing big drama-queen tantrums, or hitting, or any of the other "two" behaviors, wile is getting a little bossy. okay, fine, he's always been a little bossy. but now he is extremely verbal and specific in his bossiness. with most of his commands, you can easily understand the reasoning behind them:

"mama! stop comb wile's hair!"
(the hair combing really isn't much fun)

"mama, sit righ dere and dig, big geen shuyul."
(those rocks aren't going to move themselves!)

but sometimes he seems like he's just abusing his power:

"mama, no put hand dada's seat!"
(....?)

"dada, put fork down, plate."
(....??)

when he tosses out one of these more arbitrary directives, stephen sometimes asks why he asks us to do—or not do—such random stuff.

and my answer is this: to wile, "don't hit the walls with your bat" and "don't throw your food on the ground" and "yes, you have to wear pants" probably seem lik we're just pulling shit out of our asses.... i mean, really, pants? like, every day.....??

WOOOOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!!

2006-09-19T22:30:00.000-04:00

pillow talk

2006-09-15T00:29:00.000-04:00

last night, one a.m.

on my way to bed, hear wile crying. give him five minutes, decide to go in.

w: mama....mama.....ba-boo? ba-boo?

m: no baby, it's time to sleep.

w: ba-boo?

m: lie down and go back to sleep.

w: ba-boo?

m: no ba-boo.

w: ba-boooooooooo

m: wile?

w: aye?

m: listen to me.

w: aye.

m: it's not time for ba-boo.

w: aye.

m: it's time to sleep.

w: aye.

m: okay?

w: aye.

m: i'll lie down with you, but you have to go to sleep.

w: aye.

m: okay. [lying down]

w: ba-boo?

m: okay, i'm going. [getting up and going]

w: maaaa-maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! [repeat at constant pitch (homicidal) and volume (turned up to 11) for about 5 minutes]

m: [going back in] wile.

w: mama yie down?

m: okay, but we're just going to sleep.

w: watey?

m: you want water?

w: aye.

m: okay. [go to bathroom, fill cup, return] here you go.

w: [guzzles water] done.

m: okay, let's go to sleep.

w: aye. [lies down. all seems well.]

just as i'm drifting off i hear

w: no big cup, mets cup

m: mmmm-hmmmm.....

w: no mets...no big....no big cup, mets cup!

m: mmmmmm

w: mama, det mets cup! mama—wile—mama—wile—wile mets cup watey!

m: [sitting up] wha?

w: [now crying at full force] mama det wile watey mets cup! no big cup!

m: no.

w: no big cup!

m: wile, i'm not getting you a different cup.

w: mama, nice, please, wile mets cup?

m: no.

w: wile cup!

m: wile, i'm not getting you a different cup. i'm going back to sleep. [lying down]

w: mama!

m: wile.

w: get...wile...get...mets...watey...

m: wile, it's time to sleep.

w: [thinks about it, heaves huge sigh, lies down] mama yie right dere.

m: i am, i'm lying right next to you.

w: no, mama yie right dere.

m: i'm right here, wile.

w: no, mama! mama yie right dere! [points at spot a half-inch from where i'm lying]

m: okay. [nudges over]

w: no, mama! mama yie right dere!" [points at spot a quarter-inch from where i'm now lying]

m: okay. [nudge, nudge]

w: no, mama! mama yie right dere!" [points at spot an eighth of an inch from where i'm now lying]

m: okay. [nudge, nudge]

w: no, mama! mama yie right dere!" [points at spot an eighth of an inch from where i'm now lying]

m: wile?

w: aye?

m: i'm right there. i am.

w: aye.

m: i'm going to sleep now.

w: aye.

silence for about two minutes........

w: mama!

m: huh! wha!

w: watey?

m: yeah. [get the much blasphemed big cup, hand to wile]

w: [guzzle] done. [hands back cup. lies down. falls asleep.]

really, it's not so different from a lot of conversations i've had in the middle of the night...in college...after a night out at the bar....

5 big ones

2006-09-07T16:50:00.000-04:00

this year was anniversary #5, so stephen and i wanted to do something special. we thought perhaps per se? or maybe wd-50? after much deliberation, we decided on....

the allentown fair!

it had it all, really.

first, there was the fine dining. we began with:

(eaten too quickly to get a photo of the actual item...)

and washed it down with:

then we started searching for our main course. first we saw this:

but it just gave us bad flashbacks, so we moved on.

and oh were we glad that we did. becasue we found this:

where we got this:

mmmm-hmm. in trying to sell us the ribs, mr. pigg told us that his ribs "aren't like what you'll get at applebee's or chili's". and while i'm not qualified to verify that statement, i can say that they were porcine perfection. he dry-rubs them with a spice mix and smokes them over an applewood fire, spritzing them occasionally with apple juice, which gives them a nice glaze. and his sauce was perfect—tangy and vinegary, not too sweet and not at all smoky.

and for dessert?

which are little mini fried dough pieces tossed with powdered sugar, which leave you (or at least, me) looking like this:

of course, the fair had more to offer than food. there was shopping:

and attractions? oh, were there attractions....

personally, i would have preferred if the woman was normal-sized and had a ginormous cat, but that 's just me....

bilingual freak show!

and where there's the smallest horse, there's also, of course....

taller than bigfoot!

we rode the ferris wheel, where there is

why? are they afraid of people choking? or, possibly more likely, spitting it down on to innocent bystanders?

and, last but not least:

all that, plus:

children on leashes.

and then, why, look who we ran in to!

hi gener! hi deaner!

oh, and look! it's....

WAYNE!!! hi wayne!!!

and then we went home. the end!

it's official

2006-09-03T20:29:00.000-04:00

my status as a project runway fan can be upgraded to "obsessed": i dreamt that i was on the show.

perhaps this is because i spent the evening re-watching last week's episiode and then reading this. and this. oh and this. and this!

i have a little bit of a history of this.... example: i didn't start watching buffy until it was in it's sixth season and they were showing reruns on fx. they showed two episodes, back to back, from 6 to 8 every night. i left work at 5:15 every night for three months and didn't miss an episode.

so, if you didn't already know this about me, now you do: when i get into something, i kind of zero in on it. much like a bloodhound. or a junkie.

no wonder i scared so many boys in high school/college....

gut reaction

2006-08-28T20:46:00.000-04:00

wile loves his aunt sar and uncle perry (aka "peggy").

observe:

unfortunately, they make him barf.

exhibit a
wile is three months old, we go over to sar + perry's apartment for football sunday. wile barfs more than he'd ever barfed before and has ever barfed since, soaking me and him. i'm able to borrow cothes from sarah, but wile isn't so lucky. i'd forgetten to bring him a change of clothes (what, i'd only been a mom for 3 months!), and as sar and perry only have cats, not babies, wile ends up wearing home.....a pillowcase. this was the first and most dramatic in a string of times that wile barfed at sar + perry's apartment in his first year of life. i learned to bring lots of extra clothes.

exhibit b
a double whammy, this one was. sarah's bachelorette weekend in manhattan (which i was co-planning) and perry's bachelor weekend in vail (which stephen was co-planning) were scheduled, of course, for the same weekend in january. on the thursday before the big weekend, with stephen already en route to colorado, all hell broke loose. wile and i were both sick for only 24 hours, but stephen didn't fare as well.... maybe it was the fact that his barfing was prefaced by a long plane ride (and a trip to burger king), but he was down for almost the whole weekend. he spent the entire drive from the denver airport to the condo in vail lying on the floor in the back of perry's uncle's suburban, praying for death. he tried to get out on the mountain, but had to be brought home by ski patrol. and then, of course, it spread.... not only to the other bachelors, but to the entire state: there was a flu epidemic in colorado in mid-january. back on the east coast, wile and i between us managed to only pass the ick on to uncle conner, who had come down with my parents to stay with wile.

exhibit c
two months later, the week of the wedding rolls around. we are getting on a plane on sunday to make our way down to miami, the site of the big event. on friday, like clockwork, wile starts barfing. he barfs on saturday. he barfs once on the plane. when we get to florida, he stops barfing and i start. by the day of the wedding, we're both recovered.

exhibit d
this weekend was shmergelfest, the annual wiffleball/bbq/pool party extravaganza thrown by perry and his brother. so, of course, last wednesday wile stared barfing. he barfed wednesday night. he barfed thursday. then, thankfully, no more barfing. stephen and i weren't taken down. and we all attended schmergelfest, where wile discovered the joys of "fwhutaball". but still, there was barfing.

it's like his insides hear me say "party...sarah....perry" and start a-churning.

e-z bake

2006-08-21T22:17:00.000-04:00

as if wile hadn't brought in a big enough haul at his birthday party, this weekend stephen's parents brought him his own kitchen. it has almost as much counter space as mine. it really is a wonderful thing: stephen's dad made it for wile's aunt susie when she was little, then it got passed on to cousins marcus and julia, then back to stephen's parents, and, one fresh coat of paint later, on to wile.

wile has grasped the concept of pretend quite firmly. here you can see him preparing some lovely noodles for me:

after noodles, of course, what you'll want is some cake:

potholders? feh! potholders are for sissies!

why yes, it does look delicious

what, this isn't how you serve your cake?

and finally, one can enjoy the fruits of one's labors...

other notable news this week:

-- he's switched from wanting everything "big" to wanting everything "yodee diny" (trans: "little tiny"). we'll see how long this one lasts....

-- he has started to say okay, except it comes out "otay." i just about choke trying not to laugh every single time.

wile and the fine art of seduction

2006-08-14T11:09:00.000-04:00

scene: a tapas restaurant in the mission, lunch with our friend ted. wile spots a pretty lady at the table next to ours and tries to impress her with his skillz....

diving in

2006-08-07T22:21:00.000-04:00

for the most part i don't give too much thought to the whole "mommy wars" debate that has been running around for the past few years—you know, stay at home moms [sahms] vs. working outside the home moms [wohms], all the books and articles and sniping and blah blah blah. but then in the past week i stumbled across this and this, which begat this.

please take a moment to read or skim.

done? okay, moving on.

after reading and rereading both of these, it's been all i can think about. and i know this is unsafe territory to be walking in to. as a matter of fact, real life example: just a couple of weeks ago mona and i were sitting in a coffee shop having lunch with our friend stephanie (and all of our offspring, of course), talking mom talk, and stephanie said something like "i just can't imagine going back to work after 3 months," and the woman grabbing some straws and napkins from the bar behind us raised her eyebrows so high i thought they were going to merge with her hairline and turned to us and said "you're lucky you didn't have to!" to which stephanie replied, "i know." to which eyebrows mcgee gave us a sanctimonius smile and walked out saying "have a nice day, ladies...."

so lest you injure your eyebrows while reading this, let me start this whole thing by saying: i know. i know that i'm lucky that i didn't have to go back to work for economic reasons. i know that a large percentage of the mother who go back to work do so because they have to.

okay, so now that we're past the disclaimers, what's been stewing in my brain is this: what the hell is up with this (sometimes angry) backlash against sahms? why is working outside the home (you know, for money) seen as something that validates our existence, confirms our worth, and forms our identity, and working in the home (aka being a stay-at-home parent) so often pissed on?

the amy sohn piece that i linked to up there (on mr. nice guy's blog) has been all over the blogs (although if you try to follow the link to the original piece, on her site, you'll find it's been deleted. coward.), and while most of the comments have called her out as the ludicrous beyotch that she seems to be, there have also been a fair share of "sahm go home"–type comments. this is a response to a comment that calls sohn's essay the result of "a guilty conscience lashing out":

guilty conscience lashing out? maybe, but at least she has enough sense to be ashamed. unlike so many stay-at-home parents who've taken to parenthood without a trace of regret or doubt.

i'm sorry, i just hallucinated for a minute. what? the "sense to be ashamed" of....staying at home with her child part time? heh? and why exactly am i supposed to feel regret and/or doubt about my choice to stay home with my baby?

and sohn's essay itself, even though she starts off pissing and moaning about how sahms are "lionized", goes on to smack down the sahms, positing that staying at home with your baby makes you crazy, stupid, and a bad mother. oh and if you went to college, it makes you irresposible, because you're wasting your education by not working. which encapsulates the attitude toward sahms that i've been running into lately and that's got a bee in my bonnet: people feel that sahms are being lionized, but really they're being put down and patronized to; treated like a second choice, something you do with a heavy heart.

i feel like every time i read something about sahms, the writer is, often in the very same breath, saying how very awesome it is for women to stay at home with their babies but also how it is such a sacrifice and how by staying home you're missing out on, you know, life. example: the woman who writes the parenting column in our neighborhood paper reacted to sohm's article this week. and while she chastizes sohm for being so "nasty" towards motherhood and "putting down" sahms, she also says that she "found it exceedingly boring to be home with [her] one-year old", and only made it through because she was able to "escape" to her writers' group and therapist.

all of which, you know, is valid. you need a break from the 24/7 baby immersion, absolutely. but, as any writer knows, choice of words is powerful, and using the word "escape" makes being at home with your baby sound like a prison sentence. and, yes, life with a one-year old is definitely big on repetition and low on intellectual stimulation. but it's pretty big on emotional stimulation. and again, word choice! "exceedingly" boring? really? all the time? could you maybe mention the good parts too?

the parenting columnist called what sohn and others are spewing "mommy rage". i think a more accurate term—or maybe just a related symptom?—would be "mommy shame". in addition to her diatribe against sahms, sohn wrote a stupid article in new york magazine in which she dished about how her "goal is not to look like a mother so much as a still-young, still-cool person who just happens to have a child". like it's embarrassing to admit you like being a mom. it's like how i used to be embarassed to admit that i liked destiny's child because oh no, i don't listen to anything that's on z100, i listen to indie rock and hip hop. but you know what? i really like destiny's child. and my not admitting i like destiny's child doesn't harm destiny's child, or pop music in general. but moms being freaked out about admitting that they like being moms—or even that they are moms—is really damaging. it's like how "mommybloggers" have become a whipping post in the blog world: first off the term, which is slightly condescending, and then the attitude from other bloggers that parenting blogs are somehow less intersting/valid than other blogs, that mom blogs are just stupid women blathering on about how wonderful their kids are and woe is me how hard mothering can be and oh they should try getting out in the real world if they want to see hard. and that just pisses me off, because what it comes down to is the idea that if something isn't in the public sphere it's not valid, which is a bunch of bullshit. if only two people see a beautiful painting, is it not beautiful?

i think this is partially a failing of modern feminism (hello again, unsafe territory!). i know that the first step of second wave (60s and 70s) feminism was getting women out of the home, getting equal pay, equal opportunities, etc. but saying "staying home with the kids is for suckers! we want to be out in the world, doing important work!" made it so: staying at home with the kids was for suckers, and only work done outside the home, for money, was important.

now, before my stepmom gets in the car to come down here and smack some sense in to me, let me say: thank you, second wave feminists. we have choices. we have stay-at-home dads. we have female CEOs. we are free to be you and me. life would truly suck if the women's movement hadn't done their thing. (and i might not be such a blissed out sahm if being a sahm was a given rather than a choice, like it was back in the day, since lord knows there's nothing i hate more than being told what to do.) but! we also still have people clinging to the idea that staying at home with your child is a "sacrifice" and something to "regret".

and maybe another part of the problem is that there does exist this holier-than-thou picture of the sahm—it's better for the kids, you should love every second you spend with your children or you're a bad mom, etc. and so some women try to adhere to to the "ideal" even though they realize after a few months (weeks, whatever) that being a sahm is not for them. and then they do go kinda crazy, and get really frustrated, and, in venting their frustrations, perpertuate the idea that being a sahm is something done with many reservations. to which i say: then don't do it! go back to work! but don't slam being a sahm just cause it's not for you.

i love being home with wile. but i didn't quit or take time off from a career i adored to have my baby. i like being at home, puttering around the house. i like being by myself. i'm not all that ambitious. i've always been one for simple pleasures. but that's my story. i know it's not everyone's. but it's mine. and anyone who wants to tell me it's a bad story can fuck straight off. i hope all mothers can say the same.

essentials

2006-07-26T14:27:00.000-04:00

gwen recently got a book about saying "i love you."

since then she has been saying:

"i love mommy."

"i love daddy."

"i love wile."

"i love bacon."

yup, that about covers it.

no comment

2006-07-18T14:50:00.000-04:00

it has come to my attention that some people have been trying to comment but have been thwarted by some weird blogger glitch. while i'm happy to hear this because i was getting just a little bit sad that there had been no comments in the past month or so, i'm also pissed that blogger is being wonky. but i just tried to comment on the last post—disguised as an anonymous commenter, ha ha, take that, blogger—and it worked fine (you won't see it there now b/c it just said "testing testing" so i deleted it). so please, if you had anything at all to say in the past month, try try again.

the left coast

2006-07-13T23:18:00.000-04:00

so i finally made it out to the west coast—passing my previous westernmost point, durango, colorado, where i spent a summer cleaning rooms in a 2-bit hotel and learning to play pinball while stephen went for the world record in consecutive days spent taking bong hits and playing sega hockey; ah, youth—and it confirmed what i already knew to be true: i am an new york girl through and through.

don't get me wrong, we had an absolutely, perfectly, wouldn't-change-barely-a-thing kick-ass time. and the land (and sea) is gorgeous out there, often breathtakingly so. but here's the thing: i remember once, back when i worked in an office, looking out the window of said office with my co-worker mike. the view was of a section of lower manhattan—rooftops, etc—and the brooklyn bridge in the distance, and i commented on how beautiful it was. mike replied that he didn't think so at all, that he'd much rather look out the window and see mountains and trees. so i asked him why, then, he didn't live somewhere where there were more trees and maybe some mountains, and he shrugged and said "you'd really rather see this than mountains, trees, maybe a river?", and i replied, with no hesitation, "yes."

for the first few days of our trip, we took driving tours of san francisco every afternoon while wile napped—at $3/gallon, the most expensive naps ever, but great because we really got to get to see and know the city. (i, the most directionally challenged human on the planet, even got my bearings and was able to tell stephen that we were heading west when he thought we were heading north! amazing!) and after three days of driving around and about and through, my reaction was a firm "meh?". i didn't get it. i got that the location of the city is amazing—drive 10 minutes out of new york over the george washington bridge and you're in some crappy jersey suburb; drive 10 minutes out of san francisco over the golden gate bridge and you're at a secluded little beach cove with a redwood forest behind you. i also got that half (more than half?) of the city has been taken out by the big earthquakes, so a lot of the old buildings, the old old buildings that are what i love about new york, that are what give a city it's character, are gone. and i also get that somewhere in a city in europe, someone is laughing at me for calling buildings in new york old old, so i'm going to shut up now. my point is this: i liked san francisco—especially the food (which will get its own post), and especially when we came back in to town for a few more days at the end of our trip and i saw the wonderful wood-frame houses that perch on russian hill and the cool shops in the mission and north beach—and i loved some the other parts of cali that we checked out: the mountains and beaches in marin county, berkeley (i am, after all, of hippie/anti-establishment descent), santa cruz. but i loved them as places to visit. and i was happy to come home to my city.

yeah yeah, you say, enough about you—what did wile think? wile had such a fantastic time, it makes me really sad to think that he's too young to be able to remember it except through pictures (or possibly hypnosis). so, without further ado:

wile's california top ten:

10. his first gay pride parade

we were on our way to the ferry building to check out the sunday farmer's market (what, you don't go to farmer's markets on your vacations?) when we realized that the parade, which we thought had been the day before, was happening at that very moment. and much to wile's delight, we came out on to the parade route just in time for....

dykes on bikes! wile was enthralled. mow-ah (motorcyles) and plenty of ba-boo flying around, what more could you ask for?

9. big bah-bah

when we were in half moon bay visiting with the wrubels, friends of stephen's parents, we took a walk down to the beach by their house and came upon a fully operational construction site: two big backhoes (bah-bahs), a bulldozer, and a couple of dump trucks were working to replace a sea wall. sadly, i have no pictures.

8. 826 valencia

did you know that dave eggers has a pirate store in the mission district in san francisco? well, now you do. and if you're under 12 and you draw them a picture, you get to do this:

you get to keep one piece of treasure. i bet most people, however, don't bring their own shovels....

7. bay-beees

wile likes to tell me now that he's a big boy. this fact was confirmed when he met, and "held", a couple of babies.

noah:

and charlie:

in comparison, it is indeed easy to see that wile is no longer a bay-bee. unless he wants to be.

6. bow-die and vih-shee

our friend bradly has a very large black lab named bowie. when we were in college and bowie was in nis un-neutered prime, i wouldn't have let him in the same room as my child, god forbid i had had one at 21. but now bowie is 10 years older and has mellowed out, and was the perfect friend for wile.

wile lurved bowie. we stayed with bradly two nights, and wile spent the whole time we were there talking about bowie or playing with bowie or taking bowie out in the yard or talking about bowie pooping in the backyard or bringing bowie his toys to play with.... at one point i was in the kitchen making some bunny pasta when i heard from the living room wile yell "hoe-shee!"

good dog, bowie. good dog....

and our friends kevin and jill have a beautiful lady kitty (or, as wile would say, "maow") named vixie, who wile also tried to befriend, but with slightly less success:

thankfully, jill was able to step in and mediate a bit:

in fact, i think that part of wile's fascination with vixie had to do with his fairly obvious crush on jill....

5. steam train

as we were driving through tilden park, up in the hills of berkeley, we saw signs that read "steam trains", with an arrow. so we followed the arrow. and we found a miniature little "station", with minitaure little tracks, on which ran an authentic steam engine, only in .25 scale. it pulled three open cars filled with benches, and for $2 each—and wile was free!—we caught the last ride of the day, out into the woods, through tunnels, over little bridges, past magnificent views of the valley and town below.

before we left for this trip, i spent hours on line researching things to do in the bay area with kids. i did not read the words "awesome steam trains" anywhere. get on this, tourism people.

4. and more trains

technically, cable cars. but wile called them trains, and who am i to argue?

3. o-shee!

wile has been to the beach before, but not since he could walk. or, more importantly, run. as in, run straight into the rip tide. we first took him to ocean beach, on the west (duh) end of san fran at the end of golden gate park. he put his little toes into the damp sand and stood there for a minute, i could see him thinking "this is either awful, or the best thing ever...." then he took a tentative step forward. then he looked over his shoulder at us, grinned, and turned and ran straight for the waves. so, yeah, i guess we don't have to spend money on those baby swimming lesons to make sure he's "comfortable in the water".....

so after that we hit a beach as often as we could, in mill valley...

half moon bay...

and santa cruz, where it was too cold to go in the water but still fine weather for digging:

2. sea lions

when we were talking about what we wanted to do in san fran, before we left, i told stephen that i wanted to take wile to see the sea lions that lived on the coast. i'm pretty sure he thought that maybe i was making this up. but they're there! you have to go through hell (aka fisherman's wharf, a mall-ified series of blocks filled with overpriced crab "shacks", tchotchka stands, and crabby families toting around large cameras) to get to them, but the speechless joy that overcame wile when he saw them was worth it.

on the way to the wharf wile was getting a little impatient, so stephen kept telling him about how we were going to see the sea lions, which wile calls "auh-auh" (as in the noise that they make. obviously. and accompanied with a hand (fin) clap). part of stephen's patter was as follows: "and they're called sea lions, right? lions? and lions are big kitties, right? so sea lions are kind of like the kitties of the sea...." after which wile was silent for a few minutes, then turned to stephen and said "maow auh-auh?". and so they have been called ever since.

(i know, not the greatest picture. the maow auh-auh are those blobs on the docks.)

1. drums!

the most important reason for our trip out west, besides to see friends and for me to get my first taste of california, was for kayce and grace's wedding. it was an early-evening wedding, so wile skipped the sitter, put on a party shirt, and came along. he had a fantastic time. some highlights included giving his personal benediction to the happy couple...

listening to kevin and nate whenthey told him, "put rocks in your hair!"...

and the ultimate highlight of the wedding, and of the entire trip...

...joining the band.

kibbitz and bits

2006-06-28T22:08:00.000-04:00

hi, we're back! in case my last mysterioso post was too mysterioso for you, the san francisco bay area is where we're back from. and we had a kick-ass time.

alas, this is not the vacation wrap-up extravaganza post. oh no no no. i'm too jet-lagged for that—we arrived home at 6am. which is 3am california time. which means yes, god help us, we flew the red-eye with a toddler. and we didn't get him his own seat, as this was our last chance for him to take advantage of the kids-under-2-fly-free rule. which means that he slept on my lap. and have i mentioned in the past that he's a crazy sleeper? a flailer and flopper and twister? at home, he always ends up sideways and upside-down in his bed. in my lap, sideways and upside-down is less of a do-able task, so he'd come to when he tried to accomplish some feat of nocturnal gymnastics. he'd only fuss for a minute then go back down, but the problem was that once he got "comfortable" (head in my armpit, butt up, left leg resting on the edge of my upright-and-locked tray table, right leg extended with my headphones dangling from his toes, left hand stuffed down my bra) i was generally not comfortable, and afraid to move lest i awaken him again. so i got about....oh....15 minutes of good sleep.

plus i'm still waiting for my approximately 1335 photos to load in to the computer.

but here's a little anecdote to hold you over:

it was our second-to-last day in san fran, staying at a british-type bed-and-breakfast/inn place that was just ducky. we had been out all day gallivanting, and were making a quick pit stop at our room before heading out for dinner with aunite tam, aunt sadie, kramer, and baby charlie. we were standing at the door to our room, getting out the keys, and laughing about something silly that wile had just done or said, when we hear a voice from the room next door say "stop laughing!" i looked at stephen for a second, then, of course, laughed. and again, the voice said "stop laughing!" i looked in the direction of the voice and asked, "are you talking to us?" the voice said, "yes!" to which, of course, i laughed again. and the voice said, "stop it! you've been out there all day making noise! stop it!" i replied, "we just got home and have been in the hallway for about 20 seconds, unlocking our door." the voice begged to differ: "i've heard you out there all day, kibbitzing! stop kibbitzing in the hallway!" kibbitzing!!! i almost fell down laughing. the voice, predictably, told me once again to "stop it!" i managed to catch my breath to say, "honestly, if you don't want to hear other people, perhaps you shouldn't be staying in a hotel." by this point stephen had gotten the door unlocked and he and wile had retreated in to our room, so i was the only one left in the hallway to hear the voice say, once more, "stop kibbitzing!" i picked up the last of our bags, said "lady, you need to get a grip," and went in to our room. and locked the door. just in case.

up! down! big hill! ocean!

2006-06-18T17:18:00.000-04:00

these are wile's new words.

can you guess where we're spending our two-week vacation?

[bonus hint for a portion of the readership: he also says vixie! and bowie!]

a moment of silence, please

2006-06-05T23:35:00.000-04:00

as we have no tivo or tivo equivilent, my television viewing is limited. what i mean more precisely is that i conciously limit it, because there's really no use getting all invested in a show if there's a decent chance that when said show airs, i will be putting someone to bed or giving someone a bath or cleaning up someone's barf or—until recently—running upstairs to put someone back to sleep. i won't name any names.

yes, i could set the vcr to tape a show i wanted to see, but that means actually remembering to set the vcr to tape the show i want to see, every time it's on. not bloody likely.

so i've basically whittled my tv time down to baseball games and two shows. okay, for a while there it was three shows, but halfway through this season i had to throw in the o.c. towel. it was somewhere around the point that marissa's sister came back from wherever they'd been hiding her, and sandy was involved with some hookers, and....yeah. i had to back away. i am a little sad that i missed marissa doing the coke. but, c'est la vie.

anyway, i was down to two shows. one was project runway, and, when that ended, top chef. but, though i love them, those are reality shows, which are the summer flings to the going steady of a network series. and just who was i going steady with? everwood. yes, everwood. yes, on the wb. look, i don't go to the tv to think. i've got npr and the new yorker for that.

last week, i kept seeing ads (during one of my baseball games, which air on the wb on the weekend) for what i thought they were saying was the season finale of everwood. but then about the fifth time i saw the ad, i realized that they were really saying series finale. series! finale! no more everwood! and this isn't like when buffy ended, when the show had gotten so mind-bogglingly bad that i was marking off the days on my calendar till the last episode (but, after 7 seasons, four of them brilliant, couldn't give up so close to the end.)

but though the quality was still there, i can't say i'm surprised that everwood got canned, since i didn't know anyone else who watched it except me. but i am sad. so a moment, if you would, to say goodbye to ephram, amy, bright, hannah, dr. brown, delia, nina, edna, rose, and the totally awesome dr. abbot. rip, little mountain town.

and so begins the search for a replacement....

doing our best to subvert the dominant baby paradigm

2006-06-01T23:43:00.000-04:00

wile, like most of his friends, boy and girl alike, has a toy stroller. granted, most of his guy friends' parents have opted for a more masculine (read: dark blue) stroller for their little men, while i opted for what was on the shelf at our corner dollar store: bright pink and purple plaid.

the other day at the park wile left his stroller in the ball pit (the fenced in area at the top of the park) while we went down to do some sliding. as we walked from one slide to the other, i saw that another little boy had gotten his paws on the stroller and was pushing it around; the woman with him saw me looking at them and asked if it was ours, i told her yes, and that they were welcome to play with it.

after wile had had enough sliding, we headed back to the ball pit, where the other little boy was still pushing the stroller. his caretaker, who turned out to be his grandmother, told him to give it back, but i said, "no, it's fine, he's more interested in his football right now, you guys can keep playing with the stroller." and i got back the standard "oh, it's a boy?" sigh. "yeah, he's a boy." "oh, i'm sorry, the hair...." "oh no, no big deal, common mistake."

so far, so typical. i have the yes-he's-a-boy-yes-his-hair-is-very-long conversation at least once a day. but then....

"oh....but this is your stroller?"

"uh-huh."

"oh.....so you also have a daughter?"

".....noooooo, that's his stroller."

"oh!"

oh, brother.

ah, young love

2006-05-30T22:47:00.000-04:00

mona: you guys left wile's sweatshirt at our place on friday.

me: oh, whoops.

mona: yeah, gwen found it and brought it to me, saying "wile? sweatshirt? wile? try? on? on?"

me: heh.

mona: so we put it on, and she kept it on all afternoon. then when it was time to go to bed i tried to take it off and she flipped out, so we left it on.

me: she wanted to sleep in his jacket?

mona: yep.

me: oh, man.

mona: yep. and it was such a warm night, she was sweating like crazy, but she screamed when i tried to unzip it. i had to peel it off her after she fell asleep.

two steps forward, one step back

2006-05-29T22:16:00.000-04:00

so, i know you're dying to know, how is the sleeping going?

the long answer is:

right after we went through the change there was an almost total reversal due to a nasty cold that kept him up at night horking and snotting, and i feared that all was lost. but once the germs left the building, we were back on track, though there was still some major heavy lifting to be done: he started waking up earlier, around 2:30 or 3:30, and asking for the ba-boo. now, when he was sleeping till 4 or 5, i was fine with giving him the ba-boo when he woke up, after which he would sleep for another couple of hours. but earlier than that? i had to just say no.

i don't think i can fairly represent the pathetic-ness of the cry of "ba-booooo? ba-boooooo?" that wile would subject me to when i went in at the earlier waking and didn't make with the boob. it was quavering and weak, yet insistent, tearful and indignant and filled with all the sorrow that the world has ever known. and i'm in a weakened state, my brain addled from being ripped from a sound sleep. let me tell you, he nearly broke me a couple of times. but i stayed firm. i found that talking to him—which all the books tell you never to do, no words, no, no, don't speak, don't speak—helped; if i calmly told him that he had already had ba-boo, and that it was time to sleep now, he calmed down a lot faster. there were several nights of this kind of negotiation, then a couple of nights where i went in, there were maybe one or two reps of "ba-booooo?" and then he was back asleep. sweeeeet!

yeah. then there were the past few nights, when i would go in when he woke up at three and he would "ba-booooo?" for 20 minutes, clawing at my shirt the whole time. then, after he finally gave up, exhausted and defeated, and flopped himself down on his pillow and fell back asleep, he'd wake up again at 6:30. not. acceptable.

but! then last night, he slept from 9 till 5:45, then till 8. it was a beautiful thing.

the going to bed alone, however, seems to be here to stay. there were a coupe of nights last week that gave me a little scare—i put him down, he was silent for about 5 minutes, then up and crying (ma-maaaa! ma-maaaa!) and needed me to come up and lay with him for a couple of minutes until he calmed down. the second night this happened, i had to go up twice. but that seems to have just been a little blip. most nights he's down no problem, and saturday night we had a sitter and he didn't give her any guff, said good night and went right down.

and then last night.... stephen and i were both in with him after bath getting his diaper and pajamas on, then he gave us both kisses and hugs, then i was about to take him from stephen to say goodnight to his things and sing and put him down when he looked at us and said "bye" and then looked at the bed and said "down!" ooookay! don't have to ask me twice! stephen put him in the bed, he lay down, and we took off. not another peep till 4:45....

so the short answer is:

meh.... but a mostly positive meh.

of course, i'm sure our upcoming trip out to california, to sleep in strange beds in a different time zone and probably not be able to keep to the nice regular schedule we follow here at home, is going to shoot any progress we've managed to make all to shit.

oh and speaking of sleeping, i found out on friday what happens to wile when he doesn't nap. in short: he loses his marbles. we took a trip in to the city to do some shopping, and of course he wouldn't nap in his stroller (which he does just fine, all the time, on the boring old relatively-quiet brooklyn streets, but not in super-exciting manhattan, apparently...). so we gave up and just plowed on to h+m, where he spent almost the entirety of our 45 minutes in the store running laps around the baby department, barefoot and pants-less, throttling two little stuffed monkeys—one in each hand—that he had grabbed from a display, shrieking and yipping like a purse dog on uppers: "yi! yi! yi! yi! yi! yi! yi! yi! yi!"

seems like only yesterday....

2006-05-23T14:28:00.000-04:00

the other day as i walked in the house from the farmers' market past the blooming columbine, with a bunch of ramps in my bag, i realized: holy crap, it've been doing this pookiellama thing for a whole year!

as is the case with most of life with baby, it feels both like no time has passed and like ten years have passed. i was actually thinking about this the other day, before i even had my blogiversary revelation: wile and i were on our way to the park, he was in his stroller eating some snack out of a little tupperware. halfway there, he held the container up to me to take away. i did, then he said "wauh", so i gave him his sippy cup of water. then i stopped dead in my tracks, because the enormity of what had just happened hit me. he was eating a snack out of a tupperware container. when he had had enough, he knew how to ask me to take it away. he was thirsty, so he asked for water. all of which seem totally commonplace and unremarkable to me now. but six months ago? six months ago, we would have been stopping every three feet so that i could hand him more crackers, because if i gave him a tupperware to hold he would have littered the sidewalk with its contents like hansel and gretel. six months ago, if he was thirsty, he would have just started crying/fussing, and i might have had to go through a whole list of options before hitting on what it was that he wanted. [i often used to feel like i was contantly living out harpua, (that's a phish song, for you non hippies/ex-hippies), where the one person is like "how about a goldfish?", and other person is all "i! don't want! a goldfiiiish!", and the other person tries again "how about a goldfish?", and the other person is still all "i! don't want! a goldfiiiish!!" and it goes on like that for a little while....] six months ago, i would have offered up a limb or two for things to be like they are now. but now that he does communicate easily? it ain't no thing. it's just...normal. which is how it will continue to go as he grows up, of course. but what made me stop in my tracks in the middle of the sidewalk was the the thought that i should take the time to notice and appreciate these things, especially as he gets older. because for now, all the things that he is learning to do and the independence that they're bringing him isn't pulling him away from me. or, if it is pulling him away a little, it's not a bad thing—it's nice to be able to, i don't know, pee without someone sitting on my lap.... but as he moves from toddler to kid to (dear god) teenager, the things he learns will pull him away more and more, and he will begin to tear apart from me. and it will hurt. i know it will. but it will also be amazing to watch, and our relationship will only get richer, and i'll be able to share more things that i love with him, and he'll discover other things on his own and share them with me. but i want to know that i've been paying close attention through the whole process.

and writing on pookiellama? helps me pay attention. so thanks for reading.

mmmm, varnished wood

2006-05-17T21:12:00.000-04:00

i was in my closet this afternoon when i heard wile in our bedroom making a weird noise, kind of like panting.

i went in and found him standing next to stephen's dresser.

"what're you doing?" i asked him.

he grinned up at me, but no explanation.

then i noticed what looked like a wet spot on the side of stephen's dresser. and another on the side of my dresser. and another on the window.

"are you.....wile, did you lick daddy's dresser?"

he grinned up at me and—there's no better word for it—cackled. and then he licked the dresser.

don't it make my white cat brown

2006-05-15T22:40:00.000-04:00

dear con ed man,

i don't mind that you show up to read the meter at 8am. other people, this might bother, but lord knows i'm up. and i don't mind having to come all the way downstairs to let you in.

however.

when i ask you to please shut the cellar door on your way out, i'd really appreciate it if you listened. otherwise, an hour after you leave, this walks in to the dining room:

and drops this at my feet:

dear god what is that thing, you might ask? i'll tell you what that is. it's the mutilated plastic exoskeleton of what was once a furry toy mouse. trucky (that's dusty mcdirty up there) likes to "play" with the mice by first sitting on them for a while like a mother hen, then gnawing on them till all of the fur comes off, then eating the fur, then gnawing on the plastic, then, and only then, batting them around like a normal cat. i'm guessing this one got batted under the cellar door a few months ago and has been festering in the basement ever since, till you came, left trucky his opening, and allowed him to retrieve it and come up and drop it at my feet with a triumphant "mmmaaaaaooooo!".

look at that thing. do you see how, if you look at it right, it has an elf face? a creepy little elf face? staring right at you?

shut the door. please. that thing is haunting my dreams.

yours,
h.m.

quick bat quick bat

2006-05-08T21:07:00.000-04:00

my mother swears up and down that if it hadn't been for the electric company, i wouldn't have learned to read as early as i did. she read to me a lot too, and did little phonics cards, but still she gives the majority of the credit to tv.

pretty much the only thing that i watch on tv during wile's waking hours is baseball. and not too often—i'm usually more than happy to listen to the game on the radio. but every once in a while i'll put the game on, or just turn it on sporadically throughout the game to catch the replay of a delgado home run or a pedro strikeout or a sweet d. wright catch (or close-up). all in all, i'd say he's watched about 7 or 8 inning total of baseball in his entire life.

but apparently, he's been paying attention.

a few weeks ago, we were in the ball pit at the playground—the fenced-in area where there are sprinklers in the summer—wile scooped up the ball, turned to me, said "pih!", then kicked up his leg a la dontrelle, cocked his arm back and held that position for a few minutes, then let one fly.

once i picked my jaw up off the concrete, i tried to remember if i had ever "pitched" the ball to him in one of our countless games of catch. i couldn't remember ever doing it. we'd talked about pitching when we'd read his baseball book, but the pictures in the book only show pitchers in their follow-through, not in their wind-up.

then last week we were in the dining room playing a rousing game of take all the empty plastic seltzer bottles out of the recycling, and, awesome game though it is, i got a little bored. so i picked up one of the bottles and the ba-ball that was lying on the ground, said "hey wile, check this out", and threw the ball up and hit it with the bottle. you could just about hear all the bells going off in his head. he broke out in a huge grin, grabbed a bottle, held it up over his right shoulder, rolled the ball to me, and said "pih! pih!" so i threw him a nice lob, and he whacked it. a clean single.

all of which leads me to two conclusions:

1. we have to really think about what we let him watch on tv. or listen to on the stereo. or listen to coming out of our mouths....

2. though we've suspected it for some time now, he truly is destined for the big leagues. obviously.

the good, the bad, and the ugly

2006-05-02T14:45:00.000-04:00

but let's do them in reverse order, so that we end up happy, not pissed off....

the ugly
we spent this past saturday night at our friends sam and gabi's house, in a little town outside of baltimore. on the way in to their place, we passed a sign outside a little restaurant/lunchonette that said "PIT BEEF". so of course on sunday morning one of the first things out of stephen's mouth is "what is pit beef and do we have to stop for it?" sam, when he stopped laughing, said that he wasn't sure what it was, so we decided we had to go find out. pit beef, it turns out, is basically roast beef cooked on an open grill, so it's got a nice smoky thing going on, and it's absolutely delicious on a roll with lettuce, tomato, onion, and mayo. add in one of the "real old-fashioned milkshakes" that were advertised on the side of the building, and it was a perfect lunch.

about an hour later, as stephen and wile and i were making our way up I95, stephen turned to me and said "did you get your purse from the back of your chair in the restaurant?" hmmm. i looked around the van, then said "nope, i guess not. call up sammy and see if he can go back and get it for us?" i could not have been more unconcerned. little lunch-counter place in a little town? surely someone had spotted it and turned it in at the counter. sam called back, no problem, he'd go get it. then sam called back again, from the restaurant: no purse. some lowlife piece of crap had stolen my bag.

two days later now, no bag. sam left his name and # at the restaurant, no dice. i called the restaurant today, they could not have been nicer, but nothing has turned up. and of course, everything was in my bag: my wallet, my phone, the camera.

stephen and i have spent the past 48 hours cancelling all of credit cards, closing our bank account and opening a new one, changing the locks on the house, etc, etc. and though that was annoying as all get-out, it's not really what's got me down.

the first part of what's got me down is all of the stupid sentimental stuff that i'll never get back, including:

> the crocheted "kitty sushi" (literally, a kitten on seaweed-wrapped rice covered in roe) keychain that sarah bought me in san francisco;

> the plastic sports radio 66 wfan new york mets keychain that has been on my keys for as long as i can remember, which i can't just go out and purchase again, since it was a promo giveaway thing;

> my favorite newspaper clipping ever: one year around christmas we were at my parents' house and in the local paper there was an ad from the aspca showing all the pets up for adoption that was set up like personals ads—each pet had a photo and a little description. and there was one that showed a cat named lulu, whose photo looked just like lulu, and whose description read something like "lonely? let this lovely lady in to your life...." or some such nonsense about how she was going to be all cuddly and sweet and not a shredder of arms and furniture alike;

> all of the pictures and movies of wile that were on the memory card of the camera.

the second part of what's got me down is that i can really only blame myself, for leaving the damn thing on the back of the chair in the first place. and there's no one it's easier for me to stay mad at than me.

and the third part of what's got me down is...well, i think the librarian at our local branch expressed it best this morning when she was commisserating with me over the whole situation while i was getting wile a new library card: "i know, honey. it's just that it's your stuff! and it's not the stuff that matters, you can get new stuff. it's that somebody else has your stuff! and they got no right! and there's not one damn thing you can do about it! makes you wonder what's wrong with some people." exactly.

the bad
on on top of that: i'm still kind of sick and hacking up phlegm; i pulled a muscle in my thumb picking up the big man the other day and am sporting an ace bandage on my right hand; and i ate some dried fruit that must have been processed in the a plant that also processes mangos, because i've got hives on my wrist, back of my knee, neck, and herpes-esque blisters on my lips.

hot, no?

the good
the reason that we went down south of the waffle house line in the first place was for bill and marie's wedding, and it was a blast. there were about 15 kids under the age of 7, and wile totally rocked the party. in fact, he can now say party: "paaaah-ee".

he spent the first couple of hours raising havoc out on the dancefloor with the other knee-biters: running back and forth at top speed, climbing up on to the dias and under the table, pulling the flower arrangements apart, flopping on to the roll-away parquet floor like beached baby whales....

then it was time for cake. wile has never shown much interest before, preferring salt to sugar (apple? cookie? no! cornichon? olive? caviar? mais oui!). i smooshed a small bite of cake and frosting on to a fork and handed it to him, expecting it to be shoved back in to my face. not so much. he stripped the fork in .5 seconds flat and demanded "moe!" and when we had finished the whole slice, he still wanted "moe!". so we went back to the cake table, but now there was a line. i got in it, set wile down next to me, and started to explain that everyone wanted cake and we needed to wait.....at which point he took off, ran past the whole long line and up to the serving table, and stuck his fork in the cake.

[stephen also had a transporting food experience: wile and i came back from a visit to the bathroom to find stephen in the buffet room hovering over the roast with a carving knife, hands and mouth slightly greasy. he turned to me, starry-eyed, and said "i've never been left alone in a room with a cow leg before."]

after we got back in line and then got and consumed our second slice of cake, wile decided to work off the extra calories by getting down with his bad self on the dance floor. he started off with some basic moves: the butt, the deep knee bend, the march-in-place. but that was just the warm-up. the main event? breakdancing. his signature move: head and hands on the floor, downward-dog style, with butt up in the air and one leg thrust out to the side and kicking. we had video of it, but, well, yeah. not anymore. but wait, this is the "good" section! and the good is that the wedding photographer was enamored with our little breakdancer, and took about 500 pictures of him. we're going to get in touch with her, so after all we will have a record of wile's first time as a dancin' dancin' dancin', dancin' machine.

and that means that the terrorists didn't win.

proof that the germs are affecting my brain

2006-04-28T16:28:00.000-04:00

the little man and i have spent the past week in the throes of a nasty cold—hopefully the last of the season—that has featured massive amounts of snot and a rattling, rasping, vocal-cord-scraping (i sound like marge simpson) cough.

i have also spent the past week being subjected to endless endless god-why-won't-it-stop prattle about the upcoming nfl draft evey time i try to listen to sports radio or watch sportscenter. one of the players projected to be picked in the top five is a young man named d'brickashaw ferguson. yes, you read that right.

so in my slightly delerious, phlegm-addled state, every time i cough, making the lovely "ah-HUGH-a-hugh!" noise, what i hear in my head is "d'brickashaw!"

d'brickashaw! d'brickashaw!

miss townsend if you're nasty

2006-04-20T23:46:00.000-04:00

as we were walking home from playgroup the other day, mona asked me the names of the dad and two boys who had dropped in on the 'group that morning. i was able to tell her the names of the boys, but didn't know the dad's name. "you?" she said smiling, "you don't know his name?"

as i was walking to the park later that day i thought about the conversation again and laughed to myself, but then i started thinking.... i was meeting mona and gwen at the park so that we and our menfolk could all go over to the opening of the new market in our neighborhood, an expedition that i had engineered. and i had just gotten off the phone from leaving a message inviting our neighbor ken to meet us there. and i had started and actively promoted this whole playgroup thing. and just yesterday, i met a couple who had just moved to the neighborhood in the park, and when they told me they were looking for a sitter, i immediately thought of someone and got them in touch. i stopped in my tracks as i thought: oh my god. i'm social chair!

i cross my heart and swear to die that i won't lock you all in the gym and make you sing songs.

the dawning of a new age

2006-04-19T23:58:00.000-04:00

a couple of weeks ago, stephen came home from seeing sarah and perry and related to me a story that sarah had told him: one of wile's many girlfriends, nola, goes to daycare. and at this daycare, they ferberized her—without asking/telling her parents first! my initial reaction to this was mild shock and horror—the whole cry-it-out/don't-cry-it-out debate inspires such strong feelings from both sides, i felt like this was a fairly insane in the membrane thing for this daycare to do. how could they be sure that the parents would completely freak out? luckily, nola's m+d, terra and derek, didn't. but how could they have known that? i could totally see some high-strung mother suing over somthing like this. and though i wouldn't have gone so far as to involve the courts if it had been my baby, i thought that i would have been pretty mad that they took that liberty.

but when i said to stephen "oh my god, are they freaked out?", he said that no, they were psyched—post-daycare-ferberization, nola would go to bed in her crib, cry for 5 minutes, sleep for 4 hours, wake up, cry for 5 minutes, and go back to sleep for another 4 hours. i could understand being happy about that, especially considering our whole sordid sleeping history. but i still felt like it was a betrayl of trust and would make me a little wary of keeping my kid in that daycare, like, what else would they do without asking? not that they would dangle her out a window or anything, but would they would make other choices that went against my whole parenting mojo?

yes, you possibly could say i was up on a little bit of a high horse. and last week, you could say that that horse was knocked right out from under me and i landed like a sacka patatoes flat on my ass.

last thursday we went to a friend's apartment for passover seder and left the little man with neesha, a sitter who has stayed with him once before. the last time (first time) she sat with him, we were going out to a party that started around 9, so she came over early so that wile could meet her, then she did bath and pajamas with us, then i put the monkey to bed. when we got home around 12:30, she was upstairs with him and he was in full freak-out mode, not interested in going back to sleep at all, and she seemed a little rattled. but when i called her to ask if she could sit last thursday, she didn't shreik and hang up the phone or pretend that i had the wrong number, so i figured all would be well. she came over around 6, i ran down bedtime routine with her (into pajamas, say goodnight to all the things in his room, walk/rock him till he's pretty much asleep, might need to lay down with him if he won't fall asleep), and i left at 6:15 to the expected crying ("ma-MA? ma-MA?").

we got home at around midnight, and neesha was in the living room. i asked if he'd been up at all, and she said that she'd been downstatirs since 8:30. great! fantastic! i asked how it went overall, and she said "well, i let him cry a little bit." heh? "when?" i asked, "you mean when i left, or....?" "no, when i put him down for bed." oh! oh really! "yeah," she said, "bath went well, but then he started to whimper and call for you when we were getting in to pajamas, so i just put him in his bed, said good night, and left the room. he cried for 5 minutes then went to sleep. he whimpered for a few minutes after that, but has been asleep since then."

my thoughts as she was telling me this story were:
1) that takes some freaking cojones to blatently disregard the parent's instructions re: bedtime, especially when it's only your second time sitting for the kid.
2) if he had cried for longer than 5 minutes, how long would she have let him cry?
3) is she telling me the truth? did he really only cry for 5 minutes?

but what came out of my mouth was just "oh. hmm. okay." because i wasn't sure how i felt about it, mostly because i was tired and had had a few glasses of wine at seder. and really, even if i was mad/upset/suspicious, what could i have done then and there? yelled at her? (oh hell no, that might have woken up the baby.) i needed to think about it, and if i decided that it was too big a breach of trust, i just wouldn't ever call her to sit for us again.

so stephen left to drive her home, i watched a little sportscenter and then went to bed with the baby monitor.

i woke up to crying through the monitor at 4:30. that's eight hours. i let him cry for a couple minutes, but when it started to escalate rather than die down, i went in, nursed him, and he went back to sleep and slept till 7:30. it was....it was like i'd always dreamed it could be.

but of course, after the way he's slept for the first 20 months of his life, i wasn't convinced that it wasn't a fluke. so we decided to try the put-him-down-awake-and-leave-him method again on friday night, and decided that stephen would do it. so stephen took him upstairs for bath/bed and i stayed downstairs to pace. eventually i heard stephen leave wile's room and heard the cry rise up—"da-DA? da-DA?"—then stephen came down into the living room, asked me how long i thought we should let him go, i said 5 minutes, we turned on the monitor, and...silence. the child had cried for thirty seconds, then gone to sleep. and again, he slept till 4:30. maybe twice in the night he cried out, but for no more than 30 seconds and he was back asleep. saturday night: cried for 10 seconds, asleep from 9 to 5:15, then to 8. sunday night: cried for 10 seconds, asleep from 8:30 to 4:45, then to 7:30. monday night: cried for 10 seconds, asleep from 9 to 5:15, then to 7:45. last night: cried for 10 seconds, asleep from 9 to 3:30, so a little backsliding there, but he did go back to sleep until 7:15.

so, pretty great, right? but i still wasn't convinced. we hadn't passed the big test yet: i hadn't put him down. with no snuggling. no falling asleep in my arms. no boo-bah. aaaaiiiiiieeeeee!!

tonight was the night. stephen had a poker date, and bedtime was all mine. i nursed him before the bath, a nice big feed. bath was great, tons of fun—lots of water-pouring, some singing, and i stuck his little pink lion-shaped sponge to his belly and he just about fell over backwards laughing. when it was time to soap, he stood up and let me wash his butt instead of pretending that he had accidentallly sat in a puddle of super-glue. when it was time to get out, he put all the toys back in the bucket cheerfully and didn't screech like a vampire bat when i picked him up out of the tub. diapering and pajama-ing, no problemo. but as i was picking him up off the changing table: "ba-boo? ba-boo?" oh man. here we go. "honey-love," i said, "you just had boo-bah. it's time to go to bed now." a little crying, but his heart wasn't really in it. we said good night to everything, and when we finished and turned off the light: "ba-boo? bed? ma-MA?" again, i told him that he had just had a nice big heaping serving of boo-bah, and that it was time to go to sleep. i braced myself for the outraged reply, and....he put his head down on my shoulder. wow. okay. so i sang him a couple of verses of beautiful boy and rocked him in my arms, then layed him down on the bed, at which point he started crying.

"ma-MA? ma-MA?"

"it's time for bed, baby. i love you."

[sitting up] "ma-MA?! ma-MA?!"

"go to sleep, honey. i love you. i'll see you in the morning."

[standing up] "ma-MA!! ma-MA!!"

[closing the door behind me] "i love you, wile. i'll see you in the morning. time to go to sleep."

[as i go down the stairs] "ma-MAAAAAAAAA!"

[as i reach the bottom of the stairs] wile: "............." me: "you've got to be kidding"

no joke. the child cried for 5 seconds. that was 8:43. it's 10:38, and i've only heard the littlest of peeps.

i'm pretty f-ing ecstatic. this is major major major major. and not only for the fact that after 8:30 or so, i can now either a) get more than three hours of consecutive sleep, or b) do work or a project without always being on edge, waiting for the baby monitor to erupt. and that alone is awesome. but even more satisfying is knowing that i can leave him with a sitter without having to give the whole deeply apologetic speech about how yes, he's going to wake up before we get home, and no, it's not going to be pretty, and feeling like i should be paying them double.

which brings us back to the fact that this was all brought about not by some strong and decisive parenting on my and stephen's part, but by...a renegade sitter. i'm not going to lie, i definitely had to work through how i felt about that before i could be wholly and without any reservations psyched about the sleeping. at first i felt a little embarrassed, like if it was really this easy to produce the good sleeping, were we bad parents for not initiating it ourselves? just lazy, passive, slacker parents? were we on the path to raising a spoiled, undisciplined child with bad manners? sweet rollerskating jesus, were we candidates for supernanny??!!

then i stepped back and said, "no, probably not." i think what we had was a stupidly common issue: we were just too close to the problem to see what the best solution was. isn't there some saying about forests and trees? yeah. and when you add sleep-deprivation to that kind of myopia, it gets even worse. so it took input from a near-stranger to resolve an issue with our kid that we hadn't been able to successfully resolve. so what? it's resolved. and if i'm going to try to go through wile's whole upbringing all "i can do it my own self, i don't need your advice, mind your business, back it up", it's going to be a looooong 18 years. yeah, so, i would have rather neesha had asked before doing what she did. but you know what? it's 11:23 and i'm awake and writing this instead of upstairs nursing wile back to sleep. word up.

which brings me to the other inevitable question: am i feeling stupid/kicking myself for not trying this technique months ago? and after some deliberation, i have to say: no. first and most importantly, i truly truly believe that if we had tried this a few months ago, it wouldn't have worked. wile is at the point now where he understands at least the general jist of everything we say to him. so when i tell him that it's time to go to bed, and i love him, and i'll be downstairs, and i'll see him in the morning, he gets it. he understands that i'm not leaving him forever, that i'll be nearby and will come right in when he wakes up in the morning. plus, though he's showing no signs of being ready for the w-e-a-n-i-n-g, the attachment to the boo-ba is on the downslope. 75% of the time when he starts "ba-boo?"ing, i can sway him with talk of rice cakes or cheese. through the months and months of sleepless nights, my stepmom kept reassuring me: "when they're ready, they're ready." and i think he was ready. if we had tried to do this a few months ago, i think that the crying would have lasted a lot longer than 5 minutes, 30 seconds, 30 seconds, 10 seconds. and i wouldn't have been able to deal with that, and would have gone right back to the methods that we were using anyway.

of course, i could be totally wrong. this could have worked back in january. but until somebody builds that time machine i always dream about, that's a moot (court (shout out!)) point.

homonym-a-rama-llama

2006-04-12T07:17:00.000-04:00

wile's grasp of the english language is marching forward at a pretty good clip. this is of course making life easier—even if the "words" are kind of hard to understand, they're more decipherable than "eeeeeehhhhh!". i still twitch a little bit when i think of the "eeeehhhhh!".

the only time i'm really left guessing these days is when wile spits out a "word" that could be one of two (or more) words. sometimes context can help solve the confusion, but not as often as you'd think.... some examples:

"dusz" is either "shoes" or "juice". but it could be worse: in wile's friend dexter's vocabulary, "dusz" means "shoes", "juice", or "put on the dvd of the last waltz."

"yea-yea" is either "yellow", "yellow ball", or "luella". it's actually easy to tell when he means "yellow ball", because the "yea-yea" takes on a desperate, panicked tone, as in "mama i can't find the yellow ball we needtofinditnoooooow!!"

"bah" (pronounced with an a sound as in absent) is either "bath", "back", or "bad". and "back" can mean oh so so so many things: "go back to where we were", "put that back", "get it back out", "get back in the house, kitty!"....the list goes on. "bad" is used only when talking to the kitties. i'll find him standing over one of the little beasts pointing his finger at them and chanting "bah! bah!".

i'm sure there are more i'm not remembering right now. but tuesday night this whole homonym phenomenon caused a near meltdown....

we were getting mr. baby man into his pajamas after bath, talking about the normal things we talk about at this time like llamas and lambs and so on, when all of the sudden wile starts saying "moo!", emphatically and repeatedly.

wile: moo! moo! moo! moo! moo!

me: are you a little cow, wile?

wile: moo! moo! moo! moo! moo! moo! moo!

me: uuummm.....

wile: moo! moo! moo! moo! moo! moo! moo! moo!

stephen: is he gonna get stuck like this?

wile: moo! moo! moo! moo! moo! moo! moo!

me: wile baby, i don't know what....

wile: [pointing to the door] moo! moo! moo! moo! moo! moo! moo!

stephen: [opening the door] wile, there aren't any cows in the hallway, see?

wile: [still pointing to the door] MOO! MOO! MOO! MOO! MOO! MOO!

me: [picking up the baby] okay, we'll go out here and look for some cows...

wile: [now pointing down the hallway to the window in my closet] MOO! MOO! MOO!

me: oh!! you want to look out the window at the moon???

wile: MOOOOOOOO!

and in that last instance, "moo" clearly translated to "yes i want to look at the moon, don't you speak english??"

how do i love thee? let me count the ways...

2006-04-05T23:59:00.000-04:00

1 pair of tights

2 pairs of long johns

2 pairs of socks.

1 turtleneck.

1 thermal shirt.

1 wool sweater.

1 down coat.

1 scarf.

1 mets cap.

1 wool hat.

1 pair fleece gloves.

1 pair wool mittnes.

1 pair shearling-lined boots

38 degrees at shea at game time.

30 dollars spent on field-level seat, which got me not only a great view, but also a hot 16-oz hot chocolate, delivered to my seat, unlike the tepid 8-0z h.c. that you get at the stands in the upper deck, and a view of the guy sitting in the next box over from me trying to hit on the british girls sitting in front of him by offering them some of his peanuts, only to spill the beer he had tucked under his arm all over them whe he leaned forward to hand them the peanut bag, much to the amusement of me, his friends, the other group of guys sitting between us, and, finally, himself. the british girls? not so much.

at least 20 times i counted the guys sitting to my left yelling to nick johnson that he looked like ron jeremy.

4 runs scored by the mets, including a home run by xavier nady (do you have someone whose name starts with an x on your team? i didn't think so), a home run by carlos delgado, and an rbi single by david wright.

3 runs scored by the nationals before the ninth inning.

1 lead-off home run given up by billy wagner, our new closer, in the top of the ninth. oops.

0 runs scored by the mets in the bottom of the ninth.

3 death threats to billy wagner overheard.

5 runs scored by the nationals in the top of the tenth. oy.

1 run scored by the mets in the bottom of the tenth. on a balk. ouch.

0 percent chance that i would ever root for another team.

no soap, radio

2006-03-30T21:01:00.000-05:00

today, since it was finally spring-like outside, wile and i flung open the windows and did some spring cleaning. we vaccummed, which is one of his all-time favorite activities—as soon as i turn on the vaccuum, he throw his hands in the air and takes off across the room yelling at the top of his lungs, not in fear, but in pure joy. weirdo.

so we were about halfway through the vaccumming ritual, at which point he was starting to lose interest and was just wandering around playing with various toys and not toys, when he came up to me laughing and pointing in to the dining room, motioning for me to come and witness whatever hilarity was ensuing in there. i parked the vaccuum and followed him, expecting to see one of the things that usually make him crack up that much: 1) the cats, or 2) something that he has spilled/strewn all over the floor. but, no! what he led me to, the big ha-ha, was....a can of tomato paste! on the shelf! sitting there! on the shelf! oh my god, you guys, it was sooooo funny!

i guess this is preparing me for having to laugh 150 times at "orange you glad i didn't say banana?"

i'm thinking about me today, not the baby. i know! call child protective services!

2006-03-27T16:18:00.000-05:00

i had a memory pop in to my head today: freshman year of college. lounge of my dorm. somebody from career services came in and gave us one of those multiple choice tests that are supposed to tell you your perfect vocation. the only answers i remember giving were that i was artistic and would rather work alone than with a group. and based on those and 48 other answers, i was told that i should be a florist. which i remember being vaguely insulted by (granted, at 18 i was vaguely insulted by most things). but today, i started thinking: you know what? i think i'd be pretty happy being a florist! i started imagining this very style-y flower shop and all the creative designs i would do... and i thought, if society still operated the way it did back in, say, renaissance times, i would have been apprenticed to a florist around the time that i took that test, learned the ropes, and eventually struck out on my own. and then i wouldn't be bothered by the biggest, ugliest roadblock in my career path: the inability to make up my freakin' mind.

every couple of weeks someone—another mom at playgroup, my mother-in-law—will ask me when i'm going to start working again. you know, for money. and i give some vague answer that usually contains the phrases "when wile's in preschool" and "start my own business" and, sometimes, "fuck if i know". if it's someone i don't know well, that question is usually followed by the question of what kind of work i did before i got knocked up. and i'll tell them about how i was in school when the blessed event occurred, and before that i was an editor. but i could also tell them that before that, i was an apprentice chef, and before that, i got my b.a. in political science. and that though i was an editor for 5 years, it wasn't a career that i actively pursued: i moved to manhattan, was waitressing, thought i wanted to perhaps do illustration/design, a friend of my family had a publishing company, i got an internship in the design department but sucked because i didn't know quark, was shunted over to editorial by the frustrated design department, was noticed/mentored by an editor and eventually hired to run a travel book project, looked up five years later and found myself sitting in a cubicle, said "what the hizz-ell am i doing here?" and got out. even my current line of work was less a result of planning and more a result of serendipity and lackadaisical diaphragm usage.

part of my problem is that i can't definitively say no to something until i've experienced it. which is why i dated so many guys who were wrong for me, why i have to try on seven different pairs of shoes with an outfit before i can be satisfied that the first ones i took off the shelf were indeed the right ones all along, and why i have bounced all over the place in my search for a career. every time i think i settle on something, i start to think "but i also like to _____. and i'm pretty good at _____. so maybe _____ is what i should really be doing!"

you may be thinking, "but you did make up your mind! you went back to school, you chose textile design!" well, yes. yes i did. but the thing is, the program wasn't "textile design"; it was "textile and surface design". which means i took classes not only in designing for fabric, but for designing paper products, dinnerware, wallpaper, etc.. and even within textile design, there's the big choice between apparel and home decor. and how do you want to design? painting? silk screening? computer? when i first decided to go to f.i.t. i'd tell anyone who would listen that what i loved about the program was that it was "so broad" and taught "so many types of design"! oh, yay! so although the scope is narrower, there is still plenty of opportunity for indecision.

but.

i have an idea.

i don't want to talk about it yet. but it's there. and i think it's something that i can make myself stick with.

now if only all the other ideas will please stop barging in all, "but i'd be a funner thing to do! pick me! pick me!"

smells like baby spirit

2006-03-23T23:23:00.000-05:00

we are continuing our descent into the 2s here at wile's house.... the latest permuatation is a fixation on the clothing. as in, unless it's something he's picked out, it would be easier to dress lulu in a corset than get a simple t-shirt and pants combination on to wile.

the other night, when stephen offered up some red footed fleece jammies, wile said "absolutement pas!", and insisted on a thin cotton union suit that barely snaps together anymore. somehow, stephen was able to convince him that it would be super-hip to wear a fleece jacket to bed that night....

so i've been giving in, mostly, and he hasn't left the house looking too insane. yet. though there are some times when i want to pin a sign to his back that says "i dressed myself today!" as in, "my mother, if she had any power at all in this situation, wouldn't have really gone with the reindeer hat with the football jacket." when we were down in the florida, the main issue was pants: he was against them. so we mainly went without.

this morning, when we were trying to leave the house to go to the store, there was a major outerwear meltdown. wile luuurves the windbreaker (ours is turquoise) that we bought before we left for florida. we don't shop for him too often (why shop when the gifts and hand-me-downs keep flowing in like water?), but one day iden and luella rolled in to the playground sporting these windbreakers and i knew we had to have one. so we trekked over to old navy and did what we had to do. and wile really enjoyed the whole process of picking out the color, trying it on, buying it.... yes, i do fear that he liked it too much. which is why our next lesson in shopping 101 will be "thrift stores and you: perfect together." but anyway, he loves him some windbreaker. so of course he wanted to wear it today. fine and dandy---except when we came to the part where i told him that it was cold out and we had to put another coat on over it.

15 minutes later and 10 decibels quieter, i had managed to get a fleece jacket under the windbreaker and a scarf around his neck and was reasonably satisfied that he wasn't going to freeze.

what about a hat, you might ask? oh, don't worry---he had his hat on. in fact, in the past four days or so, he hasn't taken his hat off. playing in the house? hat on. at playgroup? hat on. eating dinner? hat on. taking a nap? hat on. i expect sometime in the next week to be dragged to the local coffeeshop for open mike night, so that he can perform his angst-filled songs about the alienation he feels as a toddler living in an adults' world. you know, plus some pearl jam covers.

puttin' on the foil, coach

2006-03-21T09:20:00.000-05:00

so when i told people--my dad, some moms from playgroup--that i was going to the rangers game last night (that's hockey, people) , the response i got across the board was a tight smile and a "oh, that's nice!", like the response you would have if someone came up to you and said "i'm heading out to a hare krishna revival tonight!", or "i've got a ticket to the doors reunion tour!" (or is that only me who's repulsed by "comeback" tours where they have a fill-in for the dead members?). but to them i say, "don't knock it till you try it." granted, i had never given hockey even a millimeter of space in my brain until i married a hockey fan--baseball is my game, and football is a nice distraction in the off-season. and i still don't love watching it on tv, and refuse to listen to it on the radio. but a couple of years ago stephen took me to a rangers game, and i got it. live hockey is a seriously good time.

allow me to present a few compelling arguments in favor of live hockey, rangers hockey, and hockey in general:

1. people always knock hockey (heh, "knock hockey") as being violent and blah blah blah. but do you know what the players do after they score a goal? not just sometimes, but after every single goal? they have a group hug.

2. at any given baseball game, i'd say about 75% of the crowd is there to really watch the game, and actually know who's on the field and what the infield fly rule is. the rest of the crowd is made up of a combination of people who are just there to enjoy some beers on the lovely summer afternoon, people on group outings with their office/school/organization, the ting girls in the xxx-small baby-pink jeter shirts, and other assorted people who should shut the hell up so that i can enjoy the game. but at hockey games, the crowd is serious. as awesome as madison square garden is, people don't go to hockey games just to "enjoy a nice night at the garden". everyone there is there to watch the game. once play begins, the crowd is nearly silent, so you can hear the sticks slapping the puck. don't get the wrong idea---when a goal is scored, or our goalie makes a great save, it's deafening. but you can feel how intent the crowd is on the game, and i love that.

3. every so often during the game there would be a loud, short cheer from one of the upper sections of "[unitelligible] sucks!" so about the third time it happened, i turned to stephen and asked "what sucks?", and he said, "oh, they're saying 'potvin sucks'---potvin was an old islanders (ny's other hockey team) player from like 20 years ago." awesome.

4. two words: petr prucha.

5. two more words: slap shot.

ps: big shout-out to auntie meg for making our hockey night out possible by sitting for the little man. the report from the home front was that all went well--she even washed his hair--until she had him almost asleep, after 15 minutes of walking him and then some laying next to him on the bed, and she sneezed on his head. at which point he didn't cry, just sat up and pointed up and out, like "now we begin again--recommence the walking." and after she had him almost asleep for the second time, lulu came flying through the door like a rabid bat, did a little crazy dance on the bed, and then shot back out of the room. but after all that, he slept for a good long time---around 10:45 or so i heard him wake up and make some noise. since he has mastered "mama", that's what he's been saying when he wakes up in the night, rather than the "eeehhhh!" that used to be his nocturnal battle cry. and the other night, when stephen put him to bed, when he woke up he cried out for "dada!" but when he woke up last night, what i heard through the monitor was "eeeeehhhhh? mmmuuhhh? du? um? uuhhhh.......? [rustle, rustle, trailing off to nothing]". it was like he was going "shit, what was her name again? it wasn't mama, it wasn't dada.... i know her..... oh screw it, i'm going back to sleep."