Tags: farmers market, photo, Wordless Wednesday
So sad when you have a bad day and are irritable with little children deserving of more patience, and one of them looks at you sadly, then walks away, murmuring, “You used to be so good.”
Tags: sad
The baby ate a slice of jalapeño off of the floor last week. I saw him do it, but thought it was a blueberry, so I let him. (Disturbing subtexts of this post that I will not be touching on: 1. There are both jalapeños and blueberries available on my kitchen floor. 2. I do not stop my baby from eating what he finds on said floor.)
Hot Fireshot (REALLY Hot Fireshot in this case) just barely put the jalapeño slice into his mouth before spitting it out and screaming holy hell. Whatever reaction I might have imagined that a baby would have upon tasting a jalapeño was nothing compared to the reaction he actually had. I gave him water and ice bits, then I gave him a plum to suck on and I nursed him. I desperately ripped off his pajamas to see if there was a rash, and considered calling 911 because I was sure I read in the newspaper that a baby was badly hurt from eating a jalapeño. Then, suddenly, he stopped crying, grinned at me, threw his arms up in the air and said, “Touchdown!”
Tags: blueberry, Hot Fireshot, jalapeño, kitchen floor, mess
Tags: alpaca, photo, Wordless Wednesday
“She LOST her daughter’s shoes!”
“NO! HOW do you LOSE your child’s SHOES?”
“I KNOW!”
Then, much head-shaking and eye-rolling and tongue-clucking from the two women conversing, and some squirming and glaring from me. I didn’t feel like getting into this conversation, particularly to explain that I lose shoes, my own and my children’s, fairly regularly.
I also kept quiet because this conversation was fascinating me.
Two women I had just met, both with small children, were discussing their “friend,” a mother of three children, from infant to elementary age. Their “friend” had just gone back to work, and she was struggling. Sounds like a good time for someone to swoop in and help her out–OR, tear her to shreds in front of strangers at a cocktail party.
There’s more:
“And my neighbor babysits for her, and she actually had to call her mother to find out how to start the dishwasher because it was so full of dirty dishes that she couldn’t even find a plate to give the kids their snack! And she has TWO dishwashers! BOTH full of dirty dishes!”
(They are horrified at dirty dishes; I am horrified that a teenaged babysitter cannot figure out how to wash a dish.)
“And the other night she had the kids up at 8:00 pm making cookies because she feels all guilty for missing out on stuff with them and they didn’t even do their HOMEWORK!”
“And she keeps leaving work early to try to see them before their bed time!”
After a night of meeting lovely new people (and finding out later that some of them hated each other because some people’s brothers had affairs with other people’s sisters while married to someone else’s twin or something like that-also fascinating), the night was over, and I grabbed my baby, who was stashed behind a couch, asleep in his car seat, and went out to my car.
As I was driving away, I fervently hoped that somewhere in this city that woman was making cookies with her children at an inappropriately late hour, while crumpled, undone homework sat in the corner amid some lost shoes and both dishwashers were full . . . but she didn’t care because the cookie-making was just what she needed.
Tags: babies, baking, children, family, friends, mean people, mothers, parties, work
I am trying to upgrade the wordpress thing, otherwise known as breaking my web site because I don’t know what I’m doing and whoever thought doing my own domain and all the weird stuff that goes with it was a good idea for a techno-idiot like me is not too clever, either…
I learned something new today:
If you upgrade something and you export your stuff to your desktop first, but the export file says something about “PART,” then that means only “PART” of it exported, and the rest is gone. But if you have a clever, computer-y person to help you, then you can piece the missing PARTS together from said person’s Google reader and from cached pages in sort of a haphazard, taped-together way that’s better than nothing and will lead to you staying up all night and very annoyed yet thankful you’ve barely written on your blog lately because the PARTS you missed are not terribly extensive and you feel in such a rush to get the missing parts found that you don’t have time to write in real sentences, just run-on ones . . .
One of Martin’s favorite friends from school has a father who stays home with the two young children and their mother works at an office full-time.
The mother told me about a typical sort of day for her husband when he’s out in the world with his children. He took their daughter for a haircut, and when he asked the stylist to cut it shorter than usual, she wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t cut this little girl’s hair, she said, unless the mother gave permission.
The assumptions stacked up here–that he had a partner, that that partner was female, that there was a mother in their lives at all, that he was not authorized to make decisions–are staggering.
“Please don’t dance, Mom.”
“Why not?”
“It scares me and makes me sad.”
I walk into his room, and in a too-patronizing, obnoxious sort of voice say, “You know, Martin, it really makes me sad when you take all these clothes out of your bureau drawers and just leave them here on the–”
“You know what makes ME sad?” he interrupts. “Steve is DEAD!” He throws himself on the bed and starts to sob.
*****
It was just a beat-up videotape that started it all. One of Steve Irwin’s very first shows. Tom had it for years, and one day, popped it in the VCR for Martin, our budding nature adventurer. And just like that, Steve took over. Martin learned everything he could about him . . . and the whole Irwin family. Terri, Baby Bob, Bindi, mom Lynne, dad Bob, and best friend Wes. . . Australia is the scene of his every imaginary adventure; poachers and enemies of conservation his every imaginary villain. Hours I have spent outside, pretending that Steve is desperately calling my cell phone to give Martin instructions on rescuing a croc that a poacher has cornered. Or I’m Steve himself–”Be Steve! Be Steve!” Martin pleads. And I’m usually Terri in the car, helping Martin and Chris narrate our adventure as we drive through the Australian bush rescuing animals from (of course) the dreaded poachers.
We told him that Steve died when it happened, but he didn’t get it then. He was too little. So before he started school, we wanted to make sure he knew that Steve was dead–better he find out from us than from someone else, and it was bound to come up with as much as he talks about Steve. So, one night at bathtime when Martin asked Tom when we would be going to the Australia Zoo to see Steve, Tom gently explained why that wasn’t going to happen.
And that was just before I flounced into the room with my picky little comment about the stupid clothes on the floor.
So he knows now that Steve is dead. He asks me every so often who is going to save the animals now that Steve is gone; he says that he, Martin, cannot possibly do it without Steve’s help. Then he gets tears in his eyes and rubs them really hard because he doesn’t want to cry.
What makes our last second jaunt to Florida a bit less nutty is that my dad had heart surgery a couple of months earlier and I hadn’t seen him yet–and he hadn’t seen baby Hot Fireshot yet.
He collapsed one afternoon–in front of a notable doctor, and down the street from a renowned hospital for heart surgery. A 50-something year old guy in better shape than my weight-lifting, running, healthy-eating dad would be difficult to find. Or a 30-something year old, for that matter. But suddenly, he’s on the ground, then in a hospital, and they discover 89%-99% blockages in his arteries and rush him into quintuple bypass.
So despite my parents saying a bunch of stuff about too-far-with-baby-three-kids-we’ll-be-there-soon-too-much-trouble-for-you, etc., I remembered suddenly, “Hey, since when do I do what my parents tell me to do?!” And off we went.
I texted madly with my sister on the way, but no one else knew we were going. (We had to tell someone: “Wouldn’t it be interesting if they were flying to our house to surprise us while we were driving there to surprise them?” Tom mused on the way.) Only my sister knew we were hurtling down the highway. . . without diapers (quick stop at a store two hours into the trip) or a front left headlight (another stop three hours after that) or any idea which way to go–just unblinking faith in the lady in the GPS who narrated the journey. (She speaks, of course, with a lovely Australian accent, set that way to appease Martin’s insatiable obsession with Australia.)
So after leaving home at 2 pm, we stopped around 9 pm for the night and left early in the morning, racing toward Florida, hoping to be in time for Christmas Eve.
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