reap what you sow

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

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

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

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