Cheerful Abundance

The kids have a four day weekend, thanks to President’s day, and they are having fun! Yesterday, their dad took them sledding for the first time, thanks to a lovely family who also has twins, and who knew of a secret sledding hill gentle enough for little kids, but steep enough to be a little scary. The girls had fun on their sledding playdate, and I got some quiet time to clean in, and I guess that is win-win? Not sure what sick path my life took that having the opportunity to clean house in peace became a fist-pumping moment of win, but there you go.

So I cleaned, in peace, and very slowly, because last week was rough. Thank G-d we could replicate last year’s valentines easily. Tuesday was the ’100 day’ celebration, and Thursday was the kids’ valentine’s parties, and Wednesday, my schedule looked like this: 3 hour IEP meeting at the school, 2 hour Good Works Meeting, evening funeral, then come home and finish valentines. You might think that day couldn’t get worse, and you would be wrong, because after I left my afternoon meeting to go home and make dinner and get dressed for the funeral, I was in a car accident. So, that day sucked. I am fine, I guess, and the other guy is fine, and it was 100% not my fault, and he was very apologetic, but damn, everything hurt for a few days. I had to call my husband at a meeting, though, and get him to do school pick-up, and tell him his car was smacked up, and that wasn’t fun. Then I called the police, and then I dropped my phone on the concrete, which triggered the music folder and made my phone start playing Lady Gaga’s Born This Way on full volume. The screen was black, I couldn’t turn it down or off, and so for a few minutes the guy that crashed into me and I stood awkwardly next to my car while Gaga belted out her best Madonna imitation. Finally, I got the bright idea to chuck it in my car and close the door, but we could still hear Gaga’s slightly racist lyrics and thumping base line. Here is a sentence nobody is every going to say about me: “She carried it off with aplomb”.

The kids are off sledding again today, because after a month of being stuck inside we are desperate for them to get some fresh air and have some fun. This polar vortex has made it impossible to just play outside, and it also meant no recess for a month, and everybody’s nerves are frayed at this point. And I am cleaning again, instead of lounging around or reading a good book, so obviously I don’t learn from my mistakes.

Christmas creep, that delightful phenomenon that has the holiday starting earlier and earlier each year, is turning me into a bit of a Grinch, what with the Xmas-themed turn my Pinterest dashboard took, oh, about last JULY, and the obsessive need for people who weren’t hugged enough as children to start Elf-on-a-Shelf-ing in Mid-November. I love Christmas, but it doesn’t have to start this early. December 7th is a good day for it to start this year, in case you were wondering.

I don’t like Christmas creep because, like most normal people, I want to enjoy the holiday that comes before it, Thanksgiving. Like many moms, I made a pretty good 3-day action plan for my time this week, so that I could have a great long weekend with my kids, 16 lbs of turkey, and enough carbohydrate-based food products to induce a coma. I had a cleaning the house plan, and a prepping the meal in advance plan, all designed so that Wednesday night I could enjoy a cocktail and a movie in an immaculate house, knowing the next day would be an easy bit of cooking and a huge amount of eating. The 3 day action plan was based, of course, on my kids being in school this week.

But this plan was thwarted when I realized that the school calendar that I have, the one the Board of Education gave me, had been sneakily updated after (a dirty trick, indeed, and not the first time this year it has happened) it was distributed, to reflect that tomorrow is, in fact, a day off for the kids, and my 3-day action plan had to be crammed into 2 days, a fact made even more difficult by the fact that I wasted most of Monday having to tell my husband how wrong he was about something, a snippy little marital moment that took all day and left me searching the kitchen for hidden chocolate. And for the record? He was so, so wrong, but every holiday season starts, for us, with the traditional Yelling At My Husband About Our Goddamned Christmas Cards For Chrissakes Already I asked You To Handle This Last July. That is a fight that falls in familiar territory, one so well-fought for so many years that we could probably switch places mid-fight and keep going without missing a beat.

So that was Monday, and then I had one day – today – to get everything ready for Thanksgiving, but also to get the house ready for the Xmas season, which apparently starts on December 1st (or mid-November, if you follow the Pinterest-ers that I do), and I cannot get my act together today. Mostly because I would rather play a little CIV V and eat cookies instead of cleaning out my fridge and vacuuming the dust bunnies underneath the furniture. I love my kids, but I NEED that Wednesday back, an extra day of an empty house, to get it all ready so that I can have a few moments of tranquility on the holidays, too.

Despite having the start of school marked on my calendar for the past six months, and despite having all sorts of Pinterest-driven resolutions regarding bento-box lunches, cute first-day outfits, and this insane idea that I would somehow start the school year with an immaculate home, I still managed to put every single thing that needed doing off until yesterday, which made the weekend a bit of a mad scramble.

Witchcraft!

I had this great idea a few weeks ago to make friendship bracelets for each of them, in their new school colours, and maybe to make one for my husband and I to wear as well. A talisman, of sorts, a reminder that, although they might be alone in a new classroom, with new kids and a new teacher and a new school, that we were always with them in spirit. Feel free to make fun of me now. Actually, wait, because the next part will give you more ammunition.

Three weeks ago I picked up the embroidery floss to make these bracelets. I haven’t made them in years, so I hunted down some internet instructions, and watch a YouTube video, and …. then the bag sat in my kitchen until last night, around 7PM. That’s right – all that big talk about making the kids a talisman to remind them of Mommy, and three weeks of looking at that bag sitting on the kitchen table as I made dinners and breakfasts and snacks, and I never made the bracelets, in part because I vaguely remembered that they didn’t take very long, a memory that turned out to be a giant fat lie, because I got one inch of one done last night, and my husband, who is making the second one, got about three rows in. I don’t get it. My friends and I used to make these in college, when we were drunk as sailors, and I swear it took us no time at all.

Feel free to commence making fun of me now.

Despite my failure as a mom to provide the kind of first day of school, PerfectMommy, Social Media friendly experience required to be a good blogger, my husband and I muddled through, packing lunches and spare clothes, and snacks, and iced-up water bottles. I also gave them a pep talk about not hitting people, doing what their teachers ask of them, and being brave. I talked to them about how they have so much experience with being in a classroom because they went to PreK, and how other kids might not know what to do, and that it was their job to help their classmates, and we talked about what to do if a classmate was crying or looked sad. I got them to brainstorm ideas on that last one. One of my daughters said she would, “tell that kid that it was okay to be sad, and we would be brave together” and the other said she would introduce herself, and “ask that kid to be my friend.” And then I had to excuse myself to the ladies room and dab at my eyes for a moment, because I was so proud of them. And because it makes me laugh that they refer to all other children as ‘that kid’ all the time. No names. Just ‘that kid’.

I let the kids pick out their first day outfits, but it isn’t an accident that they picked exactly what I wanted them to wear. I don’t know what I am going to do when they figure out how completely sneaky and manipulative I am, but hopefully that doesn’t happen until after they graduate from university. Hopefully! I am not quite a monster, though – they really love the shorts they wore, and the shirts are pretty plain, because both girls are adamant that they don’t wear anything pink, sparkly, dresses, skirts, or girl clothes. So I make them wear stuff that mostly doesn’t fall on that list, but that I personally find charming, that is very comfortable, and that does not impede monkey-bar swinging, and other shenanigans.

Starting tomorrow, they ride a bus, but today we both drove them to school, and stood in line with a lot of other parents and their children. We each took a girl to her classroom, got her situated, and then swapped so that we could each hug and kiss them before leaving. One of my girls had a moment of anger and frustration in the hallway, I think because it was so crowded and chaotic, but I pulled her out of the worst of it, and then she whispered to me that she was going to change her attitude, and she did, cheerfully hanging her stuff in her locker, and putting her lunch in the right bin, and finding her seat right away. She has been very nervous about Kindergarten, and I asked her if she felt okay, and she gave the  thumb’s up and said she was great, so I went to see her sister, down the hall, and she was fine, too. They were really fine with it all.

I did see a number of Dads with suspiciously red eyes, in the classroom, but only one child openly crying. A good start to the year! We went to the PTA coffee  afterward, held in what I like to refer to as ‘the crying room’, because of all the weepy Dads, and a woman came over and introduced herself. Turns out, she lives across the street from me, and we have kids in the same class. She and her husband seem like interesting, fun people, and I am looking forward to getting to know them better. This whole ‘making new friends’ thing is on my to-do list, and has been ever since we moved here. Hopefully, this is a start.

I have big plans to clean the kitchen today, and clear away the end of the summer mess that seems to have settled in every room. The school hasn’t called me yet, to tell me that one of my girls punched someone else’s kid, so that seems like a good omen. And those friendship bracelets, I decided, I will finish up tonight, and they can be ‘first day of riding the school bus’ bracelets, for tomorrow. They will be just as magic tomorrow.

When the lottery goes over 100 million, I buy a few tickets. I know, I know, ‘tax on the poor’, etc, but honestly, the profit goes to education in my state, and also, I don’t drink nearly as much as I should, and that money isn’t going to burn a hole in my wallet all by itself. This weekend, the Powerball jackpot was huge, and my husband was going to the grocery store anyway, so I texted him some numbers and asked him to buy a ticket. Which he did.

Like most people, I have a set of lucky numbers, so I texted those, plus a second set of numbers, then asked him to pick a third row, and he brought this ticket home, and then the fun (well, my fun) began.

“Do you know why I texted you those specific numbers?” I asked him, and, holding the ticket in his hand, he scanned the first row, and came up with the significance of each number: birthdays, ages, anniversaries. I praised him, as a disarming tool, and then smiled and said, “but what about the next line of numbers? What do they mean?” And then I waited, and watched.

Here are things he guessed: the date we sent our dossier to Ethiopia, the date we first met, how old my now long-dead dog would be if she was still alive, date we closed on our house, our siblings’ ages, number of years I have been in school, the age I pretend I am when I am lying about my age, the age I was when we got married, the age he was when we got married, and the date we came home from Ethiopia. He was wrong on all accounts.

He was wrong on all accounts! And like a good wife, I afixed him with the stank-eye of doom, and suggested that he go walk the dog and think about those numbers some more. Which he did, and then he came back, appropriately humbled, but I stank-eyed him some more, to make sure he got the message.You best know the dates that matter. You best know the anniversaries of all the little victories in life. Forgetting is not an option. But he wasn’t willing to admit he didn’t know – he just had to keep guessing.

Finally, he let it drop (without guessing one correctly), and we watched some TV. But he never answered my question correctly. What was the significance of the next line of numbers? Were they birthdays and anniversaries that he had forgotten, lucky numbers, jersey numbers, team numbers? No. I didn’t ask him why the numbers were significant to us, personally, just asked why they might be significant. And they are significant. They are the most drawn Powerball numbers over the past five years.

But he still doesn’t know that, because he didn’t ask, and he wouldn’t admit defeat. So until he reads this blog post (likely, 4 months from now, if ever), he is never going to know the answer. It’s good to keep them on their toes, in marriage. Keeps things from getting stale.

One of my girls is home sick from camp this week, alternating her time between sleeping in Mummy’s bed and allowing us to bribe her with chocolate and Pepsi to take her medication. But her sister is taking one for the team, going to summer camp all by herself, and, I suspect, having a really good time being a singleton twin.

To be honest? I am having a good time, too, mostly because the one who stayed behind isn’t that sick. All this one-on-one time, all the cuddling without someone else’s needs being equally important, all the quiet conversations that are possible when there aren’t two of them, vying for my attention.

My husband and I have a running joke, not a funny joke to other people, but hilarious to us, although we were about a year into sleep deprivation when we thought it up. We like to look at people who only have one child, and arch an eyebrow at each other, and smugly whisper, “Lazy”. Lazy parents of only one child, do you have any idea how easy you have it? When you put the baby to bed, you are done at one. When you feed the baby, the other baby isn’t sitting next to you, crying herself sick of a broken heart. When you can only find one Spiderman t-shirt in the clean laundry, there is only one kid who wants to wear it. The last Popsicle isn’t a crisis of United Nations negotiating, your kid can wear any of the clean clothes they want without a battle, and when your big kid doesn’t feel well and wants to crawl on your lap and cuddle like a toddler, your other big kid isn’t standing in front of you, lip stuck out and ready to catch a bird, stomping her little foot and fuming so hard you that you can see the atomized particles of anger swirling out of her.

So today was kind of fun. We played endless games of Candyland, watched Spongebob, and snuggled up for a nap. Now I am off to see if spaghetti will tempt her fragile appetite, and after she falls asleep again, to see if her sister wants to play a little Candyland with me, too.

Now that my kids are making the leap from preschoolers to actual people-like children, I find myself trying to figure out what to teach them next, and how. It sounds weird, but everything from 0-4 is mostly ‘how to stay alive’ skills, like holding your head up so that you don’t overbalance and smack it into the hardwood floor – again, mixed with practical lessons on how to not poop in your pants. But now, as we approach the magic age of five, the age at which your little preschooler transforms into just a kid, the lessons are bigger, less self-centric, harder to figure out.

I want my kids to start to see the world around them for what it is, and their place in making it better. I doubt this is an easy lesson for any parent to teach, but for us, it is a bit of a minefield, in part because my kids are from an area of the world in which good people routinely starve to death for no good reason, and where life isn’t something you get to take for granted on a daily basis. We are starting with hunger, because it is the easiest concept for little kids to understand, I think – we have all felt it, but not everyone can alleviate it as easily as we can. We talked about it last night, as a family, and the kids decorated Stamp Out Hunger bags to fill with food. My husband and I did a run to a grocery store yesterday afternoon, so that the kids could ‘shop’ from a selection of healthy foods laid out on the kitchen table. Healthy, and then some junk/comfort food – chocolate pudding, and Kraft Dinner. We let them each fill a bag, picking what they thought would be good for a person who didn’t have any food of their own, and they really went to town, carefully packing and repacking their bags.

I am not sure they fully understand it, yet, but it is a start. At the very least, they were pretty proud of being able to pick the food that went in their bags.

It got me thinking though, of how much of our lives are partitioned off from our children, hidden from their eyes. I have a tradition of giving a little bit to charity every month – random charities, sponsoring people at work for ‘-athons’, stuffing a $20 in the boot of a fireman collecting from drivers stopped at red lights, etc. But my kids don’t see any of that. They don’t see me fill out the form for someone’s breast cancer walk, or send a library a book from their Amazon wish list. And because they don’t see it, they don’t know how we try to integrate giving as a value in our own lives.

So this was our start. And I have to find more ways to do this – to show the kids some of our better choices in life, and find a way to connect them more to the notion of giving.

A few weeks ago, our school held a Daddy-daughter dance, an event for which I wrestled two little girls into red velour dresses with sparkle sashes, then wrestled their father into a clean, ironed shirt. And then I tagged along, because the dance was held in the school activity center, and the (this is way too much TMI) seats in the ladies’ room there are such that my tiny-heinied snowflakes can’t use them without a spotter. So yes, I crashed the daddy/daughter event, paying $10 for the privilege of taking my kids to the bathroom all evening. There should be some country music lyrics for that.

At the dance was a raffle table, mostly filled with the kind of sparkly crap that little girls love. My husband bought the girls tickets, and let them choose what items they wanted to place their tickets on, which I thought unbearably sweet, because they were choosing things like ‘porcelain unicorn’ and ‘world’s largest (glass paperweight) DIAMOND!’ but passing up the few Dad-friendly raffle items, like major-league baseball tickets, a grill set, and fancy BBQ rubs. I commented to the mom running the raffle table about what he was doing, and how he wouldn’t enter anything for himself, and then I bought a few tickets in his name from her, and dropped them in the major-league baseball raffle drawing.  I wouldn’t dare suggest that the fix was in for Daddy Charming, but he did indeed win the major league baseball game tickets.

I don’t like to call myself a hero, but …

He was pretty excited, in his usual “I show no emotion,” Ron Swanson sort of way, and immediately offered to take me as his ‘plus one’, but in a fit of Awesome Wifeness, I told him he should take a guy friend, make a day of it, have some horrible stadium food, watch our team lose, and just man it up for an afternoon, sans famille. Take a little vacation from family life and overpay for beer. Which he did yesterday, and judging by the ridiculous texts and photos they sent me, was a good time.

I don’t like to call myself a hero, but … there was an awesome mani/pedi gift card on that table, too, and I really need a pedicure, stat, yet I did not use any of my raffle tickets on prizes that might meet my own needs. I don’t want to be one of those bloggers that complains about the weather, but it snowed here on Saturday, and you can’t get a pedicure if you have to stuff your freshly-painted feet into a pair of snowboots afterwards. A winter of Sorrells, and my feet are feeling a little hoof-like. I need help! Isn’t that the prettiest colour over there? In The Cabana, by Essie. I am just craving a good pedicure, topped off with this gorgeous blue. Blue! The entirety of my midlife crisis is catalogued by the ridiculous colours I started to wear on my toenails last year. Last year, I was all black, black, black, but right now, I just want this summery colour on my feet.

And I don’t feel guilty at all about booking a pedicure this week. After all, my husband spent a whole day at a major sporting event. Without me! So he owes me one.

Carefully stacked to avoid breakage.

Parenting Pro Tip: When you are done playing with your children for the day, remember to stack them neatly in a criss-cross pattern, to avoid extra wear and tear, and to make them easier to store. #TheMoreYouKnow

Friday, my husband played nurse, going to the dentist with me and then letting me nap while he picked the kids up from school. He wrestled them into their ballet gear (not an easy task), and I rallied from my dental trauma to head out the door with them to ballet class. He pulled into the parking lot with minutes to spare, and we jumped out to unbuckle the kids and start the hustle from car to dance floor, which includes threading through a pile of other dance families, finding a spot to peel them out of the winter gear, and getting ballet slippers on them. “Got the ballet bag?” I asked my husband, who stopped and stared at me. “I thought …. you had it,” he asked back, and then we both groaned.

Ballet bag was slung over the back of a kitchen chair. In our kitchen.

Luckily, their ballet teacher is pretty cool, and she let them dance in their stocking feet, while we lurked outside the studio, kicking ourselves. But we shook it off, rationalizing that it happens, sometimes, right?

Saturday, they had basketball, and my lovely husband let me sleep in (post-dental pain) and took the kids off for their 9AM game. At 9:05, the phone rang, and it was him, sitting in the parking lot of the gym, sheepishly asking me to ‘doublecheck’ the basketball schedule posted next to our calendar. The one that, it turns out, says their game was at 10AM. I don’t envy him, entertaining them for an hour in the car while they waited. I suspect he may have taken them to a local doughnut shop, but in a successful, long-term marriage, some details are better left unknown.

Sunday, one of the kids requested home made macaroni and cheese for dinner. Neither of them eat as much as I would like them too, and both are very skinny, so when they request food, I really try to come through for them.Hoping to avoid our weekend of stupidity losing streak, I even went so far as to make my husband grate the cheese (to avoid taking a knuckle off) and had a great time cooking with one of my kids while I stirred the spices into the sauce, and dumped the noodles into the sauce and then into a pan, all ready to bake. This recipe is so, so good, people, and even if you halve it,  it is still plenty for 4 people, plus leftovers. But I digress. So there I was, feeling pretty super-mommyesque, with the homemade macaroni and cheese, when I realized that I forgot to actually add the cheese to the sauce. Genius!

Yesterday, I did two loads of laundry without adding the laundry soap. Then I tossed a load in the dryer and forgot to turn it on. My winning streak continues! I think it is the weather. I think this long, long winter, dragging through the end of March, it messes with me internally, and I am probably  vitamin-D starved at this point. Does that have anything to do with absentmindness and general dumbness? I would Google it, but we both know that Google would just tell me I have cancer.

I am about to go change the sheets on the beds. Wish me luck, that I don’t accidentally throw the pillows in the garbage, or fold up the dog currently snoring on my bed, and stash her in the linen closet.

I have now had three dental appointments over the past 10 days, and I am pretty sure I caught my dentist texting, “Honey, the kids don’t have to go to a state school now!!!” to his wife, while I was waiting for the Novocaine to take. It’s a pretty funny joke, right? But man, I posed that on Facebook and a few people got a little crazy and earnest about it. Not any actual dentists, either, although I am sure they fully understand how frustrating it is to pay so much money to be in this much pain.

But yes, that was my week. Today was the last appointment, then I am off for 2 weeks, and then back for more. I have to replace my front, crowned teeth, and before I do so, I am doing a whitening treatment, which I am weirdly excited about. My teeth have yellowed a bit with age, and coffee, and I really want a pretty smile. I don’t know why, exactly, it matters so much to me, but I haven’t ever done anything particularly cosmetically enhancing, ever, and I love the idea of white teeth. Which is why I am not even upset that the whitening kit from my dentist takes up the entirety of the butter dish in my fridge.

This all started when the dog accidentally smacked me in the face with her giant skull as I was running out the door one morning recently, and broke a crown on one of my front teeth, which later fell out 5 minutes before I had to give a talk later that day. So, that was lovely, me with my Duck Dynasty looking mouth up there, talking behind my hand. There was no other option, really – you just have to sail through with whatever life throws at you, and pretend it is no big deal. But it led to a great discussion about how tooth appearance is such a strong socio-economic indicator, and I heard some great stories afterward, which made me feel better about my low-class mouth. Then someone mentioned a condition called Hypodentia, and don’t google that, don’t do it no no no. Because I did. You? DO NOT. Not for your own sanity.

I really want to crawl into bed and feel intensely sorry for myself for a few days, because I feel like I got punched in the mouth, but there is ballet class in an hour, and the kids have a basketball game tomorrow, and then I have to get them ready for a Daddy-Daughter dance at school, which I will also be at, and …. it never ends, does it? I might be drooling, but I will be there!