March 23, 2006

it’s almost time to break out the booze pool

After months–MONTHS!–of spring-like weather, we awoke this morning to snow. Yes, snow! Fortunately, school was NOT cancelled, thus freeing me to spend my entire two and a half kid-free hours meeting with the pediatric neurodevelopmental consultant (that’s code for SPECIALIST WHO CHARGES YOU $250.00 THAT MAY OR MAY NOT BE COVERED BY YOUR INSURANCE TO LISTEN TO YOU YAMMER ON ABOUT HOW WEIRD YOUR KID IS). Fortunately, I loved the guy, and I think he can really help us, and YES, he talked with me for TWO HOURS can you believe that? I definitely got my money’s worth. In fact, it was hard not to hug the man as I was leaving, he was that terrific. Isn’t that nice?

(Soon I will write about everything that is new on the Henry front, but right now I’m very very tired from all the talking and thinking and planning and scheduling and driving because NOTHING is near us, these specialists and their offices are all over town and I have had to use Google’s MapQuest every day this week to find some new place, and now I just want to talk about fun things. But! All is well, really. Better than well–fantastic. And expensive, what with the specialists and the price of gas. But fantastic! Yes.)

So, the snow–it’s gone now. And by Saturday, it’s supposed to be back in the 60s, which is pretty spring-like. And in honor of summer, which is right around the corner somewhere (hiding behind at least one more snow storm, I’m sure) I have this slushie recipe for you, compliments of my friend Ramblin’ Educat. She wanted me to be clear that NO CHILDREN WERE HARMED OR INTOXICATED IN THE MAKING OF THESE SLUSHIES (click the link and read her entry, it makes sense).

Ms. Educat’s Margarita Slushies

1. Gallon ziploc bag with ice and kosher salt.
2. Small bag with kool aid, juice, or tequila, triple sec, and margarita mix. Squeeze out all air.
3. Small bag inside big one. Squish and squish and do some more.
4. Soon there is slushie!

I’ll be serving these at the booze pool this summer–and I may be making a few this weekend, to get me through. We’ll have to see. I may also put my espadrilles on while I’m sipping. Just to get in the mood.

Bottoms up!

March 22, 2006

advertising, of various types

So remember how crazy busy I said I was? Go here. Read. This is one thing that’s keeping me busy.

Then come back and tell me what you think.

because you asked

I am having a crazy busy week, with meetings and appointments and projects and whatnot, so instead of a proper post, I’m going to catch up on Things You Nice People Have Been Pestering Me Asking About. Let me know if I have missed anything.

my NCAA brackets

So far, I’ve not done too too badly in my tournament pool, although as Matthew points out, this is the best I’m going to do, as as THREE of my Final Four teams have lost. And it kills me–KILLS ME–that my one remaining team is Duke. No, I’m not one of those people who hate Duke on principle–I have a lot of respect for Coach K, if only because his players GRADUATE–no, it’s just such a cliche, to pick Duke in the Final Four. I’m feeling a little better that I didn’t pick them to win, but it’s a pretty weak moral victory as I picked Ohio State to win, and they’re out. In general, I went for unpredictable teams in the Final Four (Michigan State, Ohio State, Kansas) and they all lost. That’ll learn me.

(Actually, I have no system whatsoever for picking these things. Henry could probably have filled in my brackets and done better. In fact, he predicted–CORRECTLY–that #7 Witchita State would upset #2 Tennessee. Remind me of that next year.)

Finally, as a result of various things around my house (like MY CHILDREN and their complete lack of interest in college hoops) I have only seen ONE complete game (OU’s tragic loss to Wisconsin-Milwaukee). On the other hand, I have seen Springtime with Roo three dozen times in the past week.

medicate me, baby

Henry and Charlie are both doing just fine; a big thanks to everyone who has e-mailed to ask. Henry hasn’t been kicked out of school yet, and he was able to stay ALL DAY on Monday (whew). He had his first session with the speech pathologist this morning and it went well, although I had to take Charlie with me, which was less than ideal. So now I’m shopping for a babysitter, for Wednesday mornings from about 9:30 until, oh, say, 2:00 or so. If you know of anyone, let me know! And quickly, as Henry has to go back to the speech path next week!

Charlie is fine, too–he loves his pink medicine and has been reminding us that he needs to take it. In fact, he’s been trying to get MORE–he will ask me to give him his dose and then claim to Wade that he hasn’t had any, or vice versa. He has also been begging for Tylenol (”Grape medicine! Can I have the grape medicine, too?”) but has not yet stooped to faking symptoms to get that. But so far we haven’t od’ed him, and he seems to be on the mend.

I’ll have the ribs, please

Wade is leaving tomorrow for Albuquerque; he will be home on Saturday. Henry has his first soccer game on Saturday morning, and Charlie has been declaring that he DOES NOT want to go to the game. Last night, when I mentioned this to Wade, he said, “I’ll go to the game and you take Charlie out for coffee.”

“That would be terrific,” I told him, “except for two things.”

“What?”

“I’m COACHING Henry’s team, so I HAVE to be at the game.”

“So I’ll take Charlie.”

“The game is at 10:30.”

“Okay.”

“Your flight doesn’t get in until 3:00.”

“Oh yeah . . . “

But it was nice of him to offer.

In the meantime, he will be eating barbeque (at the Quarter’s on Wyoming, Kathryn!) and watching basketball with my dad. I will be eating mediocre Johnnie’s takeout with the boys (AGAIN!). But it’s all good, right?

because I earned it

I did some shopping this week–I picked up a very cute pair of yellow eyelet espadrilles, which are looking very pretty and springy in my closet (I would show them to you, but the Payless server is down–remind me later). Of course, it is FINALLY winter here, after weeks of nearly-90 degree weather, and it’s raining, so I’m wearing my LLBean boots, which are so NOT pretty. But warm! and waterproof! which is good, because I took the boys to the park today (36 degrees! yes!) so they wouldn’t tear my house apart. But the shoes! They’re so cute!

I bought other stuff, too, but right now I have to go do the three million things on my To Do list, like make the beds and unload the dishwasher, and I need to do it before Springtime with Roo is over.

Real post tomorrow, I promise. And let me know if I forgot anything.

March 20, 2006

I said what I meant and I meant what I said

Over the weekend, I heard from Jennifer James McCollum, who left a comment on my original response to her essay in the Daily Oklahoman (you can find her comment here, at the very bottom of the page). I appreciate that she made the effort to find me and to respond to my post. And I have been thinking, long and hard, about how to respond to her comment, and what I want to say is this:

Jennifer, I stand by everything I have written about the “Mommy wars“–about Judith Warner and Linda Hirschman and your piece in the Daily Oklahoman. The ‘Mommy wars’ are about media ratings, not about helping actual mothers–or fathers–parent their children. The real issues facing parents today–substandard health care, failing schools, rising costs of living–are rarely talked about. Fathers are completely overlooked (that is, until someone like Leslie Morgan Steiner tells us how incapable and uninterested they are). Women who have no real CHOICE about working or staying home are left out of the discussion entirely. Instead, media outlets like Good Morning America and the Today show pit working mothers against stay-home mothers in a contest to see who is doing the better job, who is sacrificing the most, who is making the better moral decision, not in order to help any of these women be better parents but solely to raise their own ratings.

What frustrates me the most, though, is the rhetoric of the “Mommy wars,” the bitter, divisive, us-against-them language that gets used to talk about women and their choices. To call this a “war” implies that there is an ideology worth dying for; I don’t think anyone believes strongly enough in her choice to say that. To refer to women with children explicitly as “mommies” reduces us to a uterus and a diaper bag and demeans any other work we might be doing. And to insist, as Steiner does, that working mothers and stay-home mothers “misunderstand and envy each other in the corrosive, fake-smiling way we women have perfected over the eons” insults both our intelligence and our humanity. But it is precisely this kind of language that imparts the ‘”Mommy wars” with their pretend urgency, because it plays so strongly on the concerns and fears that many women have about their own parenting decisions and about their social and cultural status as the “mommy.” Over and over, I hear women say that they have never experienced the kind of “corrosive fake-smiling” behavior that Steiner describes, but according to the media, it is precisely how we think and talk about each other.

Jennifer, I realize that you did not engage in this kind of extremist language in your essay; however, you did chose to deploy the rhetoric of ‘us’ against ‘them’ in your discussion of what working mothers do. I realize, too, that the Daily Oklahoman is not the New York Times, nor is a five-hundred-word essay the equivalent of a book. But this is all the same conversation, and the tone was what I objected to. If the “Mommy wars” are all about divisive rhetoric, then yes, you absolutely are part of this conversation. And because the media will not back down–because Leslie Morgan Steiner sells books and Linda Hirschman attracts viewers–it is up to the rest of us to change the tone of this conversation, to turn it into a REAL conversation instead of a pretend war. Hirschman and Steiner make a living off their extremist rhetoric; the rest of us, frankly, have no excuse for buying into this.

Jennifer, I meant every word I said, both here at Friday Playdate and in the Daily Oklahoman. Being a stay home mother is no harder or easier than being a working mother; it is simply different. That is all. It is being a parent that is hard, and I wish we could talk more about that and less about who is working harder or sacrificing more.

Thank you for taking the time to comment.

March 19, 2006

let’s play doctor!

No, not like that–get your minds out of the gutter. I mean let’s play that most fun of parenting games, the one where you pre-diagnose your child and then call the doctor and announce, ‘He has a [fill in name of ailment].’ I’m pretty good at this game; this weekend I am two for two (well, more like 1.5 for two).

At 4:00 am Saturday morning, Charlie came and climbed in bed next to me. We are big on everyone sleeping in their OWN beds, but the boys know that if something is really wrong, they can come in our bed. Something was clearly wrong with Charlie; he was feverish sad and spent the next four hours sucking his thumb and moaning and poking me with his little toes. At 8:00 we took his temperature (100.7) gave him some Tylenol, and got ready to go to the pediatrician’s office (you have to love any pediatric practice that has SATURDAY office hours–when I called, the nurse said, ‘How soon can you be here?’ and I said, ‘RIGHT NOW!’). I was certain that he had an ear infection–actually, I thought he had TWO infected ears, as he was telling me that both his ears hurt–and I confidently told the nurse this. Of course, HE told her that his throat hurt, too, so she went ahead and did a throat culture.

And guess what? The boy has strep throat. Yes, AGAIN! How crazy is that?

Fortunately, he loves the amoxicillin–this morning he was dancing around in the kitchen singing, ‘Yay, pink medicine, I love pink medicine!’ And he is feeling substantially better today, and by lunch time he will no longer be contagious, which means that he can GO TO SCHOOL tomorrow, which is all I care about. Because I’m a terrible mother that way.

Speaking of liking medication, we’ve had to take Henry off of his meds. Yes, really! Just like that! Last week–while Wade was out of town, of course–I noticed that he had developed a facial tic (Henry, not Wade, although I wouldn’t be surprised if Wade developed a tic soon, too). I consulted Dr. Google, to see if this was a side effect of the meds, and he said no, not really, but orange juice may impede the absorption of Adderall (did you know that? I didn’t!). Dr, Google was, as always, very entertaining, in a scare-the-bejeebus-out-of-you kind of way, but I thought I should check with the actual doctor who treats my children, and she said yes, indeed, the tic is most likely a side effect of the meds and it is not a good one. So she recommended that we stop the meds (and by ‘recommended’ I mean ‘insisted’ in a very firm Grown Up Doctor Voice).

As of Friday, then, we are Medication Free–well, Henry is; Charlie is on ten days of antibiotics. So far, no one has had any adverse reactions to this–Charlie’s stomach seems to be fine and Henry isn’t having any withdrawal. Which is good, as they both need to GO TO SCHOOL tomorrow. For the WHOLE DAY.

Otherwise, I may need to be medicated.

March 17, 2006

spring break, day–what day is this, anyway?

Hello! No, I’m not dead although I don’t know when I’ve been this tired. But Wade just called from St. Louis to say that his flight is on time and he will be home in a mere three hours. Hooray! Have I mentioned that he’s going out of town NEXT week, too? For three days? No? Well, he is, and what’s worse is that he’s going to Albuquerque and will be hanging out with my dad when he’s not working–you know, watching basketball and eating take-out from my favorite barbeque restaurant. Doesn’t that sound fun?

Dammit.

The last two days are pretty much a blur of pee-wee soccer practice and NCAA basketball games and kids following me into the bathroom to tell me all about the pretend adventures of Dragon Fire Batman (no, I can’t explain that, sorry). If I had any booze in the house, I just might think about making my afternoon coffee Irish, both in honor of the holiday and because I’ve earned it. Unfortunately, I am liquor free, so instead I’m having a nice cup of Irish Breakfast tea. Happy St. Paddy’s Day to you all! Bottoms up!

Okay, seriously, the kids and I had a good week together; we went to the park and to Starbucks and the bookstore, and we played in the yard and read stories and played superheros (I’ve really had enough of the superheros, though–I mean it).

And there has indeed been basketball watching, although not as much as in the past (funny how you can take a day off of your PAID job and watch basketball completely uninterrupted, but those kids! they need things! all the time! like food and help with the potty and hugs when they are running full-tilt down the hallway in socks to tell you something REALLY EXCITING and they slip on the wood floor and totally wipe out just feet from you, as Charlie did yesterday). They still have no interest in watching the games with me, and yesterday I heard Charlie say to Henry, ‘Let’s play in my room, because there’s basketball on in the sitting room.’ But they have been very understanding about my wanting to watch, and have even conceeded the big TV to the games, leaving them to watch their movies on the little TV in Charlie’s room. I am positive, though, that when we get to the Final Four and the games are on after bedtime, everyone will be BEGGING to watch. And I will let them.

Now that spring break is over and I will be getting some R&R, I am ready to hear your shoe suggestions. Include links; I like to see what I’m shopping for. I also need a bag for summer, something tote-y and maybe leather. Or canvas–canvas is cool this year, yes? Help me out here, people.