cat named pig

Siena falls asleep as I’m reading our nightly chapter of Betsy Tacy. I give her a kiss and whisper, “I love you,” before getting up to leave the room. She wakes up and asks, sleepily, “Will you give me some cuddles?” I lie back down and pull her close.

As I’m lying there my mind wanders. Work, and then other things we have going on, and I find myself thinking about languages. The kids have been making great progress learning Spanish. Elliot adds vocabulary at a rate that amazes me, and his conversation is peppered with random Spanish words for shapes and colors. This morning he casually asked, “Where’s my oso polar?” We all knew he was looking for the paper polar bear he made in class on Wednesday, but I hadn’t realized he had even picked up on the Spanish name for it. Siena, for her part, corrects my pronunciation of almost any Spanish word I might try to say. Her accent, at least to my ears, sounds amazingly close to the real thing.

I remember that feeling, when I studied in Paris, of finally starting to sound like I had some business speaking French, like I wasn’t just a tourist looking for a buttery croissant and a halfway-decent free public restroom. (The former, easy to find. The latter, not so much.) I loved being able to really converse with people, asking questions not formulated by a textbook and actually understanding the answers. I loved being able to use slang without everyone chuckling, like “Oh, cute, the foreigner just said a slang word.”

When I started dreaming in French, I was hooked. I wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of my life moving from country to country, staying long enough to develop a certain level of fluency, or at least competence, in the language and culture. France, Spain, and Italy were first. Four days in Morocco gave me just enough time to learn the Arabic alphabet and start recognizing letters in street signs (it helped that all the signs were also in French and Spanish), and I wanted to stay much longer. I was fascinated by how different it seemed from Spain, just a short ferry ride away. And I have always wanted to learn Japanese. And Greek. And Portuguese — similar to the languages I’ve studied, but just different enough that I’m intrigued.

I crave travel, but not just visiting — I crave living abroad, meeting people, becoming a regular at the corner bar, fumbling around in an unfamiliar language and city until suddenly it feels less fumbley and more like regular life.

***

It’s been a little bumpy lately, with the new job(s) and reconfiguring of routines. Not all bad, necessarily, just up and down. Siena, as I’ve mentioned, told me she didn’t want me to ever get another new job again. Or words to that effect. We had a rough couple of days this past week when she was home sick and Elliot went on nap strike. I couldn’t get anything done; we were all pretty unhappy with each other. Even when Siena felt better and went back to school, she seemed extra-emotional and would fall to pieces over every little thing.

I decided she and I needed an afternoon outing, just the two of us. No work, no boys. I weighed the options — we could go out to lunch, see a movie, go to a museum/zoo/library. All fun, all worth doing. I’m not sure why I suggested instead that we go get her ears pierced. I mean, it sounds insane as I’m typing it. Who takes a child who’s tired, emotional, and recovering from a cold (and possibly seething with resentment about Mama’s new work commitments) and brings them to a crowded mall store for a procedure involving sharp objects being jabbed into soft flesh? I do, apparently.

She’s been talking about wanting pierced ears since her fifth birthday, with equal parts dread and longing. Terrified of pain, she agonizes over every doctor’s appointment where she might get a shot. I didn’t know when she’d actually want the earrings badly enough to go through with the piercing. But I know my daughter, and I know that she is as tough as she is dramatic. And she could use something to feel proud of and excited about, after the week we’d had. And she really, really loves earrings. . . .

***

We watch two other girls go first, one slightly older than Siena and one a teenager. No one cries or screams or faints, but Siena still tugs my arm and steps out of the store. I kneel down; we confer.

“I’m not sure I still want to do this.”

“You don’t have to do this. It’s your choice, but I want you think about whether you’ll be sad when we leave if you don’t do it.”

She wavers. “Can we go back in and think about it some more?” I say yes, but when we step back in, they’re ready for us. She climbs reluctantly into the chair and the Ear Piercing Specialist (this may not be her actual job title) shows her the equipment, then gives her a teddy bear to hold, a large bear with five earrings pierced into one ear. I find this both hilarious and heartbreaking — who are these mothers, taking girls young enough to still be comforted by stuffed animals to get their ears pierced? Oh, right. What am I doing? And then, suddenly furious with myself, This was a terrible idea.

I sign the forms and Siena chooses her earrings. Tiny round rubies, her birth stone. Then follows a long analysis of the precise placement of the marker dots showing where the earrings will go — I’ll say this, the Ear Piercing Specialist is more meticulous about her job than I could ever be. Siena grips my hand, squeezes the bear, and click, one ear done. A handful of women in the store murmur approvingly about how great she’s doing and click, the other one is done. Siena looks shocked that it’s over for about half a second before her face explodes into smiles.

The whole way home, it’s all she can talk about: “I didn’t think I’d even be able to do it; I thought it was going to hurt sooo bad, and I did it! I feel like such a really big girl now. Like my big girl cousins. I can’t believe I can wear earrings now!”

I grin back, relieved that it went OK, thrilled to see her so excited and proud of herself. Maybe I did make the right call, after all. Maybe I do know what I’m doing.

After weeks of fumbling around, there it is: that feeling of fluency.

I love how I wrote that last post about working from home and how I more or less have it all figured out and it’s going just fine, and then today Siena is home sick and I am just now sitting down to work for the first time at 2:46 p.m., which probably means I will be up until 2:46 a.m. finishing the work that hasn’t gotten done all day. (Yeah, you’re right — technically I still have not yet sat down to work, since I felt the need to blog about it before actually doing it. I always do this — deliberately waste time on trivial stuff when I’m really busy — and knowing I’m doing it does nothing to stop me from doing it. Apparently there is some masochistic part of me that goes “Yeah, this is bad, but let’s make it a little worse and see what that’s like.” Dear Self: It is NOT exciting! It will never be exciting to be up late trying to meet a deadline! It will only ever be stressful and crappy and you will be tired and hate yourself for doing this to yourself. Just do the damn work already!)

So I guess I’ll go do some work now. And in lieu of a decent blog post, I will leave you the promise of a longer post coming soon — a story about Elliot and a medical appointment and a temper tantrum heard on Jupiter. I’ll do my best to make it entertaining, because some good, somehow, has to come out of those excruciatingly loud forty-five minutes of my life that I’ll never get back. I’m all about the silver lining.

Oh, and one more thing before I really get to work: did I mention that a mere two months into the whole working from home thing, Elliot has decided to give up napping? So I have a grumpy, tired, yet decidedly not sleeping little shadow who follows me from room to room messing up my stacks of paper and kvetching about not being tired even though GAHRR YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY TIRED OR YOU WOULDN’T BE ACTING LIKE THIS JUST GO TAKE A DAMN NAP ALREADY!

I guess we all have our self-defeating behavior patterns.

[Editor's Note: The majority of this post was written on. . . wait for it. . . February THIRD. Which I think was also the last time I remembered I had a blog. That should give you some indication of how the whole working thing is going. BUSY, is how it's going. But no dependents (human or feline) have gone unfed, and I think everyone's still wearing relatively clean clothes. It looks like a little blog neglect might be the worst side effect so far. Read on, for a rambling post three weeks in the making. . . .]

So. I have a new job. Well, a couple of new jobs actually. A combination of freelance projects and website editing that all came together in the last few weeks. Since I had made a New Year’s resolution to find work, meaning the steady kind with consistent paychecks (instead of the sporadic kind with infrequent paychecks that I’ve perfected over the last couple years), I am pretty happy about this. In fact, this may be the most resolution-keeping success I’ve ever experienced (my gym card definitely isn’t getting swiped any more often than usual, even though I make that one every year). Now “Get Job” is solidly crossed off the to-do list, and I’m trying to get the hang of having the job(s).

It’s not the working so much that’s a challenge. It’s still doing everything else we were doing before. I don’t want to spend any less time with Elliot during the days (although now we sometimes “spend time together” sitting side-by-side on the couch, me with my MacBook and him with the toy laptop the kids got for Christmas). I don’t want to do any less cooking, cleaning, laundry, or shopping for groceries. (I mean, I want to do a lot less of all that; in fact, I never want to do some of those things again, but I still want them to be done every day. And done my way with care. So we’re readjusting the division of household labor, and I’m trying to take deep breaths and not freak out that OMG THE DISHWASHER IS LOADED WRONG AND THAT WILL NEVER GET CLEAN IF YOU DON’T RINSE IT FIRST.)

To free up some more time, I considered, for a minute, cutting back on the yoga classes I regularly attend. Matt strongly, STRONGLY, encouraged me not to do this. Turns out he likes me better when I consistently go to yoga. Apparently it makes me a nicer person to live with. (Less scream-y about the dishwasher loading, etc.)

So for the most part, our weekday routine of yoga/kids’ gym, home for games of UNO, lunch, dishes, laundry, etc., basically chugs along as it has since the early fall. But now work somehow takes place at the same time: a quick e-mail here, an article posted there, a muttered curse word when the phone rings just as we’re heading out to meet the school bus. Stress levels are slightly elevated (a month in an ashram, like in Eat Pray Love, wouldn’t be enough yoga to make me an ideal housemate under these circumstances) but I think we’re all adjusting.

Siena did tell me the other day that she hates my new job and that, when this job is done, she doesn’t want to hear about me getting any other jobs ever again. “If I even hear you thinking about another new job after this one, Mama, you better just turn and walk away from it and not do it.” Well. OK, then. Tell me how you really feel.

There’s more I want to say about that conversation, but it’s probably going to require a separate blog post. And a margarita.

For now, I want to talk about the best part of my new job(s), aside from the paychecks: I get to work from home. Which was probably obvious when I stated that nothing in the routine has drastically changed, except me being glued to my iPhone for non-Facebook-related reasons. Anyway, I love working from home because it means that I don’t have to go to work in an office. Or a factory. Or any place that would require me to leave my house by a certain time and dressed in a certain manner every morning.

I do have to leave the house on time to get Siena to the bus stop, but I can do it wearing whatever I want. Which mostly, this winter, turns out to be Matt’s red fleece sweatpants and huge boots. And then I can go home and take a shower like a normal person, or answer a work call and scramble around for a while before stopping to make Elliot a sandwich and then looking up to realize hey, it’s 4:00 and Siena’s home and we need snacks and dinner and wow, I should really shower before I go to bed.

Hmm. I do not seem to be painting a glamourous picture here. Do you believe me when I tell you I still find this set-up preferable to purchasing a new wardrobe of business casual separates and driving to work every day? Because I do. And not really because of what I wear.

It’s because of this:

Best officemate ever.

Matt hates how bad my hearing is. I’m constantly asking him to repeat stuff, or just plain hearing it totally wrong.

Like just now, for example, when I overheard him talking to Siena, who was watching a travel show about Paris on public television. (That’s right, my daughter chose to spend her Saturday afternoon watching a TPT travel program about Paris. And also one about Barcelona. I consider all my goals as a parent officially accomplished.)

So when the show featured a nightclub with cancan dancers, I thought I heard Matt say:

“When this is over, I’ll let you watch a movie about Paris called Moulin Rouge that has lots of singing and dancing like this.”

Needless to say, I was shocked. I flew into the room shaking my head and gesturing at Siena, who was curled up in the armchair by the TV.

“Moulin Rouge? No way — she’s WAY too young for that!”

Matt rolled his eyes and peevishly repeated what he had actually said, which was:

“WHEN YOU’RE OLDER, I’ll let you watch a movie about Paris called Moulin Rouge.”

He then glared at me until I apologized. Well, excuuuuse me for not wanting to explain to my five-year-old what a prostitute is. Or why Nicole Kidman keeps coughing blood into her handkerchief.

Coolest. Thing. Ever.

Sent to me by my mom, who is also pretty cool and who has a birthday this week. Happy birthday, Mom! I love you!

And for everyone (both of you) reading who is NOT my mom, enjoy:

Presenting. . .

Plastic Step Stool Mini-Golf! The ultimate in fun-on-a-budget! (Step stool from Target’s dollar aisle. Plastic balls from long-deceased ball-sorting toy.)

And then there’s this:

I made the mistake of letting Siena observe me playing Tetris, which led to the mistake of letting her play Tetris, which turned out to be the parenting equivalent of letting her borrow my crack pipe, because now she’s hooked. And we’re having lots of conversations about Tetris, which all sound roughly like this:

“Maaamaaaaaaaa. . . .”

“Yes, Sweetie?”

“Can I please play that game with the shapes and you make them disappear? Please, Mama? Please? Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease?”

[Stalling as I try to finish what I'm doing on the computer, because I already know how the conversation will end.]

“Ummm. . . What game?”

“YOU know. The really awesome one that you showed me. TERTIS.”

“TET-ris?”

“Yeah, Tetris. TETRIS! YEAH! SO CAN I?? PLEASE?!? PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPL–”

“YES. Fine. But only for twenty minutes. Then I need the computer for work stuff.”

[Repeat at least every two hours, or any time it's been more than ten minutes after I wrestle the computer away from her, suffering permanent hearing loss in the process.]

I have been called out, both by readers and by my advertising network (Did you notice the ads in the sidebar? Click them and I might be able to buy a latte once a month or so!) for not updating in more than two weeks. What kind of mommyblogger doesn’t post adorable Christmas photos the minute the last gift is unwrapped? Answer: the kind that’s too busy drinking Champagne and shoveling Christmas cookies into her mouth as fast as humanly possible, that’s what kind. And I will not apologize for that prioritization, either. But I will apologize for the fact that the last thing I posted, lo these many cold winter days, was a story about cat barf. If you were checking for adorable Christmas photos and had to keep seeing that instead, I am truly sorry. And if you didn’t care either way and still don’t, well, feel free to grab a glass and join me on the couch. The Christmas cookies are all gone, but there are still a few cupcakes left from New Year’s Eve. And plenty of wine in the box.

[Side note: Matt and I are conducting a highly scientific study of Boxed Wines. This will take many evenings of research until we arrive at an acceptable house red and house white. Please leave your favorite in the comments, if you have one. Seriously. Tell us. It's for Science.]

And now, allow me to redeem myself for the cat barf story and for all this un-motherly talk of cheap wine, by FINALLY posting some Christmas photos:

I gave Siena my American Girl Samantha doll from when I was younger. We gave Elliot a book with CD, one of a series that he is absolutely obsessed with. Siena’s eyes filled with tears when she opened the doll. I don’t think I even need to tell you what that did to me.

Making the traditional Christmas Eve Pizza with Grandma. Every year my mom brings over all the ingredients, the kids “help” assemble them, and we stuff ourselves silly on the world’s most delicious pizza. This year the kids also took everyone’s orders for toppings, each with a little notebook and pen. Siena’s list said: “Shrimp, FADA, olivs” (shrimp, feta, olives) and Elliot’s list said: “O O X T E E E I” which I’m pretty sure is Robot for “plain cheese.”

Santa brought the requested magnifying glasses, as well as Wall-E’s gal pal Eve. They spend most of their time sitting on the piano and talking to each other loudly, usually when I’m trying to carry on a phone conversation. The magnifying glasses, it turns out, are the best $3.99 (each) I’ve ever spent. I mean, that Santa has ever spent. Of course. Endless “clues” are unearthed and things are examined closely wherever we go.

It snowed so much Christmas Day that we decided not to drive two hours to Matt’s parents’ house. Fortunately, my dad had  blocks to play with and he had prepared enough food for a wedding reception, so our Plan B worked out just great.

Then we got together with Matt’s family the following day. Siena got a laptop and then spent most of the day updating her Facebook status and blogging about how her mom wouldn’t stop eating cookies.

And now I’m trying to resist the urge to say something cute and wrappy-uppy like “All in all, it was a wonderful Christmas.” Instead, I think I’ll go have a cupcake.

We have the dubious distinction of owning the dumbest cat ever to breathe air. [Warning: this post NSFL (Not Safe For Lunch) -- if you're eating while you read, you might want to come back later.]

Here’s what I DON’T want to deal with before 7:00 a.m., ever again:

Pig scarfs down her breakfast, then heads to the dining table to chow on whatever the kids have left in their cereal bowls, then immediately barfs it all back up. Onto the table runner on our dining table, because OF COURSE.

But she doesn’t stop there. She promptly begins eating the regurgitated mess as fast as she can, because, again, OF COURSE. Who wouldn’t want to eat their own vomit? Never mind that it obviously didn’t work out so well the first time around — why not try again? You wouldn’t want to let that meal go to waste.

But here’s the best part: in her haste (excitement? Pig: “Sweet! More food!”) to re-eat her cat chow and stolen Kashi, she also eats a hole into the table runner. A baseball-sized hole. HOW DO YOU INGEST THAT MUCH FABRIC WITHOUT NOTICING? Or did she notice and just not care, because “Hey! Sweet! More food!”

Yeah. Not even for sale. You can totally just have her. For free.

Hoo boy. I think this is the longest I’ve ever gone without updating. And I’d like to say that I’ve been busy doing important, life-dream-fulfilling and community-bettering types of things with the time that I normally use to blog, but in reality, all that time has gone to vampires. Seriously, all of it.

I seem to be having a sort of mid-life (one-third-life?) crisis that makes me act like a teenager, staying up waaaaay too late reading first the Twilight series and then the Sookie Stackhouse mysteries (HBO’s TrueBlood is based on these). I made Matt reopen our long-expired Blockbuster account to rent the movie version of Twilight, because I just couldn’t wait for it to come in the mail from Netflix. (I had to watch it before I went to the theater to see New Moon, obviously.) And then all this week, we’ve also been watching the Vampire Diaries Marathon on the CW.*

Needless to say, I am not proud of any of this.

A year ago, I would have totally made fun of anyone over the age of seventeen who was this thoroughly on board the Vampire Train. But I have to admit, this stuff takes up exactly the right amount of brain space at the end of a long day of bundling Elliot in and out of his snowsuit, playing Goodnight Moon the board game (seriously, who turns a soporific bedtime story into a game, for crying out loud, and expects it to be entertaining? Yet Elliot, strange child, seems to enjoy it), and trying to peel clementines fast enough to keep up with the demand.

The holidays are definitely the Busy Season in my job as a housewife (the very funny Julia used the phrase “Housewife Midterms” a while ago and I keep thinking of it as I add yet another item to my To Do/Buy/Wrap/Clean List). But it’s fun to be busy with gifts and cookies and making the kids’ holiday decorating look less, well, less like it was done by kids. I might even mail some holiday cards as early as tomorrow, which would be a personal record. (Although, now that I wrote that, it is equally likely that I will watch TV for two hours tonight before reading Club Dead into the wee hours, willfully ignoring the pile of unaddressed envelopes until New Year’s Eve.)

So that’s what’s going on with me. What have you been up to this December?

…..

*To give you an idea of just how teenager-y I’ve become, I actually found myself complaining out loud this week because So You Think You Can Dance and The Vampire Diaries were on at the same time. This is not a problem I would have had a year ago.

Every year, we have the kids dictate letters to Santa. This year, Siena wrote her own, complete with phonetic spelling and inventive punctuation. Elliot dictated his and then signed it with a bunch of capital E’s. Because if one is good, several more are better. Kind of how I feel about chocolates, or hundred dollar bills.

Anyway, here are their letters, painstakingly tapped out with two fingers onto my iPhone (random capital letters by Elliot and extraneous hyphens and apostrophes by Siena included as seen in the originals).

Elliot:

Dear Santa,

I have a Wall-e and I want Eve. I have been a good boy. I I OOO t
E E E EVE

Siena:

Dear Santa,
I want ‘ Eve. I want my one [read: own] computer. And I also want a magniflying glass. I love- you.

Love – Siena

Yeah. I think they’re getting Wall-e’s girlfriend Eve. And I don’t think Siena’s getting her own computer, although it would be kind of nice not to be pestered about PBSKids.org while I’m doing something important. Like scanning Facebook and giving the thumb’s up to people’s pictures of kids in holiday outfits, while ignoring the fact that I still need to order our stupid holiday cards that I made back in October and even bragged about in a fit of smugness on this very blog, before ignoring their existence for six weeks and oh, crap, they’re going to be late again and WHEN will I learn? Smug never works out for me.