August 31, 2006

Love Thursday

If you could see my heart, it would look just like this.

Albuquerque, September 2002

Thanks to Karen and Irene for asking us all to think about what we love, every Thursday.

August 30, 2006

no cupcakes, just tiramisu

For the second day in a row, I have pickled myself in strong strong coffee and it’s not pretty. I’m feeling a little like someone replaced my brain with tiramisu, which strangely enough I don’t really like. To gooey for me.

No, I don’t really have a point. What makes you ask?

Today was a good day, despite feeling like I had a head full of espresso-soaked madeleines. I had coffee with Christa and we saw John Paul Merrit going in to get HIS coffee, which made us giggle. I finished my Mystery Project, which is good because my ass was starting to look like the seat of our desk chair. I started laundry, which until RIGHT THIS SECOND I had completely forgotten about.

Remind me to go finish that laundry, would you? You’re a pal.

Eventually I pried my pickled ass off the desk chair and went to get the boys at school. Either I was really early or every single class at Charlie’s school was running late today; either way, I was kind of freaked out because I got to the gym and NO ONE WAS THERE, no kids, no parents, NO ONE except the Cranky Cafeteria Lady, who kept glaring at me, and I wasn’t sure what time it was because I had taken my watch off and left it at home but I just KNEW we would be late to get Henry and I hate to be late. So I was hyperventillating a little.

Just a little. Maybe it was the coffee. Or the laundry. REMIND ME TO FINISH THE LAUNDRY.

Eventually Charlie’s class came filing down the hall with their little bags, in a nice line. Every day when Charlie comes in the gym and sees me, he starts waving and waving. He has this HUGE smile on his face, and he waves and waves at me while he goes to sit down and wait to be dismissed. And then, when Mrs. H says, “Charlie, you may go,” he runs over and jumps into my arms and says, “HI, MAMA!” and starts making Cute Charlie Noises (which sound very much like a happy kitten).

It’s my favorite part of Charlie’s day.

Today, instead of just dismissing him from his seat on the floor, Mrs. H held out her hand and lead him over to where I was standing. She was walking toward me holding his little hand and he was smiling and waving and I thought oh shit he’s in trouble what did he do oh god I hope he wasn’t swearing at school dammit I bet he was swearing oh my god I think I’m going to throw up on her shoes oh my god oh my god oh my god . . .

Mrs. H walks up to me, puts her hand on my arm, looks me straight in the eye and says, “Charlie is a delight. He’s just wonderful to have in class.” She said some other nice things, but by then I was so relieved that Charlie wasn’t being expelled that I can’t really remember them. I could have kissed her.

I looked down and Charlie was hugging my legs and smiling up at me and saying, “Hi, Mama!” in his little baby voice. If he had asked for a Porsche or a pony or a life-sized R2D2 toy, right at that moment, I totally would have bought it for him. Or I would have tried, although we’re still not sure what the hell is going on with our checking account.

And now I have to go put some laundry in the dryer, before I forget. Again.

August 29, 2006

ThisNext

I love Holly for many reasons, including this:

“And after extensive experimentation, I’ve come to the conclusion that the coffee at Whole Foods is laced with crack, because every time I drink it, I scare the interns. They often have to peel me off the ceiling and quietly remove sharp objects from my desk. I wish this were true of the two-bite vanilla cupcakes at Whole Foods, because maybe then I’d stop eating them too.”

Mmm, vanilla cupcakes. I could use one of those about now.

This morning, I made the ONLY coffee in our house, the remainder of a package of pinon coffee leftover from Wade’s Christmas stocking. (I could swear I’ve written that EXACT SAME SENTENCE before, but I can’t for the life of me find it.) I like the pinon coffee, mostly as a New Mexico novelty, but this morning I was desperate and it was delicious.

It was also, apparently, laced with crack because by lunchtime, I was having that same peel-me-off-the-ceiling day Holly describes, although without the interns or the cupcakes.

Mmmm, vanilla cupcakes. So delicious.

To counteract the crack-laced pinon coffee I brewed a pot of French roast (before the crack kicked in I stopped at the grocery because HA HA I kept thinking I REALLY NEED MORE COFFEE and somehow it didn’t occur to me that if I was thinking in ALL CAPS that maybe I really DIDN’T NEED ANY MORE COFFEE). So, by lunchtime, I was all jacked up on the junk.

And I had written 2200 words (more, actually, but I had an entire paragraph that was about something ENTIRELY UNRELATED to what I was writing about)–2200 words NOT FOR THIS WEB SITE. Look at me, with a Project! No, I’m not telling you what it is.

Where’s my coffee? And WHERE ARE MY CUPCAKES???

So after two thousand words and two hundred cups of coffee, I’d had it. I spent a while IMing with Jen, which mostly consisted of typing FUCK over and over (I was telling her a story about my insurance company and my pediatrician, which fortunately ended with the bill being paid IN FULL thank you very much) and giggling when I accidentally typed TIT (because it’s funny! after 200 cups of coffee). After that was over, I was still hopping around and couldn’t write any more and I really wanted to go shopping. But that didn’t seem like a very good idea, what with the whole checking account situation and all. I seriously thought about e-mailing Holly to say CRACK! IN THE COFFEE! SEND CUPCAKES! but she’s in Vietnam and has a lot going on.

I wonder if she has any cupcakes.

But! Shopping! I spent the afternoon browsing for shoes and hair product and books and putting it all here, just for you. And over there in the left sidebar you can get a little preview of what I found and why I love it! Isn’t that fun? I did it ALL FOR YOU! You’re welcome.

And now I’m tired and I should probably sleep because tomorrow I have to finish the Project which means I will have to consume a LOT more crack coffee and probably some cupcakes.

August 28, 2006

this weekend, it was just one thing after another (but not in a good way, really)

On Friday, I decided to bite the bullet and go have a bra fitting. I’ve been whining to Christa about my flat flat chest, and she directed me to The Lingerie Store, a small chichi boutique specializing in (wait for it!) all things lingerie. She promised me that not only could they do a proper fitting, they would most CERTAINLY have a bra in my size.

Or something like that.

So on Friday afternoon, I skip on over to The Lingerie Store (hello Googlers looking for porn! not that kind of web site!) and I talk to the salesgirl. And she measures me and she makes The Face (the one where you’re thinking, hmm, I’ve never seen anything QUITE like this before and I’m not sure what to do but I don’t really want to ADMIT that I don’t know what to do so I need to think of something TO DO). Because, see, it turns out that I am NOT, as formerly assumed, a 32 A; I’m more like a 34 AAA (and no, that’s not a real bra size, in case you were wondering).

Argh.

The nice salesgirl finds two (TWO!) bras for me to try on, and I go off to the dressing room. The first bra weighs about ten pounds because it is Realistically Padded; I put it on and realize that 1) this is what it’s like to have REAL BOOBS and 2) it doesn’t fit right. The cups are TOO BIG. Which is a bummer, because OH MY GOD I wanted that big old padded bra. It made my cheapie Old Navy tank top look good. Not like this, which is what I look like in my ususal, unpadded state:

Do you SEE why I wanted that bra? I was all ready to drop $50.00 on some new boobs, except for the fact that the bra really didn’t fit. Nor did the other bra I tried on. Instead, I bought a little plastic doohicky called The Strapper, which will keep the straps of my current bras from slipping out from under those cheap tank tops.

How depressing.

I decided that since I wasn’t able to buy some boobs, I could AT LEAST get a new lip gloss, so I went three doors down to The Make-Up Bar (why don’t any of these places have web sites? WHY?) and whipped out my Bella Il Fiore lipgloss and said, “I need this!”

Guess what the salesgirl said! Discontinued. DISCONTINUED! This is where I started blaming Christa; she sent me to The Lingerie Store and she also gave me the damn lip gloss for my birthday. This is all her fault, clearly.

Anyway, the salesgirl knocked herself out to find me a lip gloss. She scraped the last little bit out of my current tube and smeared it on the back of her hand; then she went around the store looking for something that matched. I was a huge help, saying really useful things like, “No, that’s too red. No, not red enough. No, too brown. No, too pink. No, not brown enough. Do you have anything browner? But not that brown.” Instead of poking my eyes out with the lip gloss wand (which I’m sure she wanted to do) she tested something like 67 lip glosses on the back of her hands, talked me into trying three or four on myself (which lead to more pronouncements of “Nope, too brown” and “Oh god, no, that’s horrible”) until we finally found a Nars lip gloss (in Stolen Kisses) that was ALMOST EXACTLY like the discontinued color.

And of course at that point, I was COMPELLED to buy it, because 67 test swatches on her hand! I owed it to the salesgirl.

The lip gloss made me feel a little better about the fact that my boobs are Unnaturally Small, for about two minutes, or at least until I got in the car and somehow (SOMEHOW!) caught the back of my shorts on the seat and broke the back button in half. Because apparently my unnaturally small boobs are balanced out by my unnaturally large ass. Really, who RIPS OFF A BUTTON getting in the car? And the best part is that this is the SECOND time this summer that I have done this.

I’m so depressed.

Of course, all that was nothing to Saturday’s realization that we had overdrawn our checking account. Yes, really! And yes, it was the lip gloss and The Strapper that put us in the red! Hooray for me! So I spent most of the weekend panicking (because OH MY GOD we’re so irresponsible!) and feeling all melodramatic (I’m a terrible parent! I can’t even keep my checking account balanced!) and psychoanalysing how we got to Overdrawn (too much retail therapy! too many lip glosses!). It was a fun weekend.

We really wound up overdrawn because we’ve been putting more in savings AND we had some big unforseen expenses this summer AND we’ve been a little careless about things like trips to Starbucks and dinner out and lip glosses. It wasn’t any ONE thing, nor was it any huge moment of stupidity, which sort of makes it better and sort of makes it worse. We spent a lot of time talking about How We Can Keep This From Happening Again, which was good, but I still feel kind of icky about it. And I’ve found myself scraping the last of the old lip gloss out of the tube, because it’s hard to enjoy the NEW lip gloss under these circumstances.

On top of ALL THAT (see what I mean? ONE THING AFTER ANOTHER!) we took Henry off his medication, just for the weekend, just to see if he would sleep better. He has been having trouble falling asleep at night; we turn the lights out at 7:30, but recently he’s been awake until after 9:00. I had been saying that I didn’t think this was NECESSARILY from the meds*; maybe he just doesn’t need to go to bed at 7:30, maybe he’s just overstimulated from school, maybe he’s worrying about Pluto’s demotion from planet to Big Chunk of Space Rock. Wade was convinced it was the meds.

Friday we stopped the meds and Henry was sound asleep at 7:45. He slept until nearly 8:00 the next morning. Same thing Saturday, same thing Sunday. Huh. Go figure.

So during the weekend, when Wade and I weren’t talking about our financial situation, we were talking about what do to about Henry and his meds (keep him on, take him off, give them only during the week, try something new . . . ) which made for some fun quality time with my husband. We sort of have a plan, but it’s a complicated and not very exciting plan where we leave Henry on the meds this week and take him off NEXT week and talk with his teachers to see if they think he can function without the meds. Because I just don’t know any more and I’m too distracted by my boobs to really make a decision.

No, not really.

*He’s taking 10 milligrams of Dexadrine, which you will remember as the drug in Dexatrim diet pills. You DO remember Dexatrim, don’t you?

August 25, 2006

I know I said I was all done talking about school, but apparently I was wrong

I went to the parent open house at Henry’s school last night, and once again found myself weeping. One day, I hope to attend a parent night at school and NOT cry. It’s a small thing, but we have to start somewhere.

I love Henry’s school. I loved Henry’s school last year, too, and I loved the school the year before THAT, but every year the love has been tinged with worry. The first year it was typical mama-worry, about how he would adjust and if he would fit in; last year it was a larger worry about how he was functioning during the day. The worry never stops, but in the past year and a half it has often overshadowed everything else.

I have tried not to worry this week. I have tried to take at face value Henry’s claims that he likes his new school, his teacher’s assurance that he is very bright, the fact that he has not once said he doesn’t want to go to school. I have cleaned counters and cooked and done laundry in order to halt the worrying. But I have worried.

Henry says, “I’m doing my HOMEWORK!”

Last night, the headmaster described the school’s mission, which is specifically designed to reach out to quirky kids like my son. Henry’s teacher talked about how his class spends their day, about the reading and writing workshop approach they are using, about how they are teaching math, about how children are encouraged to work at their own pace and are able to work ahead if they are ready.

I learned that Henry’s schedule is the same every day. I learned that he has three (THREE!) recesses and PE every day. I learned that the kindergarten class (all nine of them) and the first grade class (all SIX of them) are together for a large part of every day. I learned that in this multi-grade, multi-age class, children are grouped by ability rather than by the abstracts of age and grade, and that they work together in small groups every day.

I learned that Henry is a special group of kids who need help with their pencil grip, and that they are using a program called Handwriting Without Tears. I learned that there are five kids in this group and that they are practicing drawing circles and lines. I learned that golf pencils will help encourage Henry to hold a pencil correctly, as will breaking his crayons in half.

Every time I start to feel like I have a handle on being Henry’s mommy, every time I start to feel like I have stretched myself as far as I can go and I just can’t do this any more (and I bounce between those two feelings, of success and failure, on an almost daily basis) I have a moment where I am reminded of how much I don’t know and how much help we need to raise this child. Unfortunately, for the past six years, Wade and I have been the experts, the ones who know what Henry needs. Except we don’t, really, in the larger sense; we are not experts on nonverbal learning disability or ADHD or Asperger’s or sensory integration. We’re just his parents and it has been exhausting to try to learn everything.

I love Henry’s school because they really ARE experts; they have strategies and tools and facilities and specialists right there on the campus, for Henry to take advantage of. But more than that, I love this school because they don’t have any sense of drama or catastrophe, or any notion that there is something “wrong” with kids like Henry. The headmaster talked about how much the faculty love the kids, “more so on some days than on others,” he joked. I like a school with a sense of humor.

Maybe they can help me get mine back, so that the next parent open house won’t end with me weeping.

August 24, 2006

busy busy mommies

While I’m frittering away all my kid-free days, some of my favorite women are getting stuff done! Daring Young Mom’s Kathryn has a new home AND a new gig with Parenting Magazine. Go smooch her pretty floating head. The very funny Melissa has a thought-provoking and beautiful essay about childbirth at Mothers Movement Online this week. Finally, Jenn (of Mommy Needs Coffee and Mommybloggers and Club Mom AND BlogHer) is breaking new mommyblogging ground AGAIN with her gaming blog.

And what have I been doing? Well, this summer I read Catherine Lloyd Burns’ memoir It Hit Me Like A Ton of Bricks and today I finally got around to writing about it. Despite living a life that is the polar opposite of mine, Burns has managed to perfectly encapsulate my feelings about motherhood:

Olive loves life. Every morning I come to get her and she is standing in her crib, smiling, arms out, ready. “Wake up, do things,” she tells me as I pick her up and kiss her everywhere. It is a beautiful way to be. My attitude, on the other hand, has stunk for as long as I can remember. I want to be fascinated by a string bean and delighted with a paper towel. I also want to know what I am supposed to do about not having a viable escape plan and a survival kit in place for the next terrorist attack; global warming; the fact that many species of frogs are becoming extinct and some species of female fish are mutating into male fish, not to mention a million other environmental horror stories; being a citizen of a country where people can’t bear to make a sacrifice, driving Hummers as though oil is not a commodity they need to worry about, turning up the air-conditioning every summer, not understanding that something’s got to give or there will be yet another blackout, going on about their consumer business as though people’s children are not dying in a war we have no business fighting; being American, which in my lifetime has gone from something to be envied all over the world to something shameful. Not to mention preschool, which I am not signed up for, and couldn’t afford even if I was. Of course I am up nights. Of course I have a bad attitude. (134)

Amen, sister.