cat named pig

I still have a blog. It’s still sitting here, just waiting for updates. And the weird thing is, the longer I go without updating, the harder it seems. I used to post about anything from messes my kids made to cat barf, and I never cared. Now it seems like, if I’m only going to post once a month, it better be good. Yet the content life throws at me (messes, cat barf) never seems to yield anything that would make for a “good” post.

Actually, that’s not totally true. The cat barf thing reminds me — I do have a quick story and in the interest of not over-thinking my little parenting blog, here it is:

A while back, before school ended for the summer (also known as the Good Old Days, when Siena had somewhere — somewhere free — to go each day where she was happy and entertained) we were at the bus stop and Siena’s usual bus stop buddy was not there because she was sick. Her mom had called me that morning, so I told the kids she wasn’t coming to school because she had thrown up.

(Actually, I said “barfed” because I’m all colloquial like that.)

Anyway, as soon as I said that, Elliot looked at me with wide eyes.

“Is she a CAT?”

Because in his little world, only cats barf. And they (well, ours) do so with such frequency and aplomb (loud, dramatic meowing followed by revolting gagging noises following by frantic devouring of the vomitus, because hey! bonus food! score!) that I guess it makes sense he would associate barfing with cats. Sadly.

And on that lovely note, we are heading out to go swimming. But there will be more posting soon, because I am now on break from work for the month of July and we went to Philadelphia and saw good friends get married and Siena wore fairy wings and it was all very exciting and would actually make a much better story than the above. Yet the cat barf, as so often happens, is what’s getting posted for now. Because I’m out of time and people need sunscreen.

“How’s working from home going?” you ask (well, maybe not you, reading this, but a lot of people have been asking me that question lately, and the answer varies wildly depending on the day).

Today’s answer to that question would be the following story about how I spent my morning:

I got up, got dressed in workout clothes, and threw my laptop in my bag before heading to the gym. (This was after dropping Siena off at school, because we missed the bus when she announced upon arriving at the bus stop corner that she absolutely HAD to go potty, right that minute, couldn’t wait till she got to school, etc., PANIC, etc., etc.)

So we got to the gym, I signed Elliot in to the kids’ gym, and grabbed a table to do some quick work before going upstairs to exercise. . . aaaaaand proceeded to sit there, working, for two hours. At which time I had to go get Elliot and take him home for lunch. The only muscles exercised were my fingers from typing (and from dialing the number of the Montessori program where Elliot goes one morning a week, to ask if we could add a morning because clearly this is not enough work time).

So that’s how working from home the gym is going.

Who knew? Who knew I could feel such a deep and fiery hatred for a calendar event I used to look forward to more than anything except Christmas?

If I had to illustrate the week so far in a photo essay (which I can’t, because I am too tired and just generally defeated to go look for the camera), it would be just one photo of me, head buried in my hands, weeping silently. Possibly with my kids in the background beating each other to death with the same two or three toys they won’t stop fighting over. Possibly also with my husband (let’s pretend he isn’t the one taking the picture) in the background relaxing with his laptop, scanning Tweetdeck and casually asking if I want to buy tickets to a show or get a midweek hotel deal. Clearly, Spring Break is not affecting him in the same way it is me.

Maybe that’s because I happen to be dying, slowly and miserably dying, my life’s force ebbing as I type this. . . and from what? From a cold. I mean, it’s not just any cold; it’s the Worst Cold Ever, but I almost wish it was something worse, like malaria, so you would understand the depths of my misery here. A cold is just (*shrug*) something that’s kind of a bummer, everyone gets them, etc. Malaria, on the other hand, garners some respect. Anyway, I guess it doesn’t matter what I’m dying of — the important thing to note is that this post may be my last. Whether Spring Break causes me to off myself, or whether I succumb to the Worst Cold in the History of Colds, No Seriously, No One Has Ever Been This Sick From a Stupid Cold, I may not be around much longer. . . .

I leave all my worldly belongings to the person who can make my kids stop fighting. (I assume stating my final wishes on my blog is the same as updating my will, right?) Enjoy the iPhone, MacBook, and some clothes that aren’t really in style any more.

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.

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.

In which I reveal my idiocy for your entertainment. Once again.

I realize it’s only Wednesday, so of course, there’s still plenty of time for bigger, more dramatic parenting FAILS, but the last couple days have just been a little off. Witness:

1.  Sending a whole apple to school for snack for a child with one missing tooth and one loose one.

2.  Giving same child stern lecture on need to keep better track of personal possessions (i.e. brand new mittens) while at school, only to reach into backpack and pull out missing mitten.

3.  Leaving small child’s extremely wet and messy handprint turkey at Spanish class. I am actually OK with this one, given the aforementioned wet-and-messiness, but he will be upset when he realizes it.

4.  Asking child’s Spanish teacher, in Spanish, if there is a place to change diapers. Except I say “handkerchiefs” instead of “diapers.” And, as I’m asking, I reflexively use the baby sign-language sign for “change diaper handkerchief” because I think it is somehow helping me communicate. (Note to self: It’s not. And you look like an idiot.)

5.  Falling, once again, for the fallacy that sunny skies automatically equal a warm day. Failing to dress anyone adequately for leaving the house, and failing to leave enough time to scrape frost off windshield, making us almost late to the Spanish Class of Forgetfulness and Humiliation. STUPID WEATHER. You continue to mess with me.

There are more, there are always more, but the small child is awake from his nap now and I have to go try not to screw up getting his snack and changing his handkerchief diaper.

Yeah, I know. November 17th today. And not that anyone even cares about Halloween anymore at this point, but here are some pictures anyway. I would hate to deprive anyone of seeing this sad chicken:

[Only one word of the day in this here family lexicon update: humidifier. It continues to baffle (children) and amuse (me), so it gets a whole post.]

Elliot had a stuffy nose the other night, so we got out the humidifier.

OK, fine: to be totally accurate I had gotten it out a few days earlier and cleaned it with bleach to get rid of any germs/dust that might have settled on it over the summer. Because I just knew.

You see, I am cursed to go through life as a modern-day Cassandra of minor pediatric discomforts, always prophesying colds! or ear infections! yet never believed until we are handing over the co-pays and filling the prescriptions. My prophesies are often met with eye-rolling and derision, which is unfair when you consider that they are really just based on common sense. (If the month is not July, and if one or both children have been a) inside a building and b) in the presence of one or more other children, then one of them will get a cold. And if one of my children gets a cold, then he or she will develop an ear infection. Also true: if one of my children gets a cold, then the other one will also have a cold within five minutes. And within ten minutes of that, I will have a sore throat and lose all ability to perceive nuance of flavor in food and wine. After which point, why even bother drinking wine at all? Except to dull my senses as I listen to all the cold- and ear-infection-related keening, of course.)

I seem to have lost myself in a paragraph that got swallowed by the world’s longest parenthetical aside. Where was I? Oh, yes, the whole seeing-the-future thing: if you’re not prophesying colds and ear infections, you’re just not really paying attention. Ahem, Husband.

So I had the humidifier at the ready, which was convenient when Elliot came out of his room snuffling and saying he couldn’t sleep. OH YES YOU CAN. Here, have some steam.

Poor sweet Elliot had absolutely no idea what I was talking about when I said I would bring in the humidifier. He had no idea what word I was even saying.

“Fire?” he asked, looking worried as I plugged it in. “Dat FIRE in dere?”

“No, sweetie. No fire. It has water in it, and it makes steam to help you breathe.”

“Why it called FIRE?”

“It’s called a hu-MID-i-FI– Oh, never mind. There’s no fire in it. It’s OK. Now lie down.”

As I left his room I recalled how Siena, at about the same age, thought the humidifier was called “Human Fire.”

“I need some Human Fire,” she would say when she wasn’t feeling well, but also sometimes when she just felt tired. I think her mystical-sounding interpretation of its name led her to envision it misting out magical vapors of energy and good health — the Human Fire that fuels us all. I also just thought it was cute.

I kind of miss those days. Last night she told me she knew exactly what it would feel like to be in a cloud — cold and wet — because clouds are made of water vapor that condenses. OK, maybe she didn’t use the word condenses; I think she said “turns back into water” but still. Pretty impressive for a kid who thought the humidifier was magic just a few short years ago. Go kindergarten! Or go PBS Kids! Whichever. As long as she’s learning stuff.

Elliot is on a Nap Strike right now. Like, literally right now, as in, at this moment he’s supposed to be napping and I’ve put him down twice but I hear him tip-toeing not-so-quietly up the stairs to see what I am doing. And what I am doing is ignoring him and hoping the situation will resolve itself without me having to get up.

Darn it.

…..

Aaaand I’m back. He’s in bed again but still on strike. His demands are unclear: he wants cereal (”CEE-YAY-YUL”) after nap but refuses to take the nap itself. (Note: I would be more than happy to meet this demand, provided some actual napping takes place first.) His rationale for the strike is also unclear. Reasons given have included: “I too sick to nap,” “I NOT TIRED” (those two seem to contradict each other; either you’re sick and you need rest OR you’re bursting with energy, but not both), and the simple yet firmly stated “I NOT DOING THAT.”

Hard to argue with logic like that.

If this continues much longer I’m going to be forced to give up on the nap and put on WALL-E, thereby revealing my ultimate weakness as a Nap Enforcer: I don’t actually care if you sleep or not. Naptime is for dinner prep, e-mail, laundry, and Twitter — not for round after round of failed negotiations.