The Kiddie Cocktail

Lessons learned

This is what I learned this weekend:

1) Do not, under any circumstances, give a small child a rather large cup of fantastic, intensely flavored, delicious, double dark chocolate gelato in the time between dinner and bedtime. You will regret it and want to call in an exorcist. Because what you might have forgotten about chocolate is that it has caffeine in it. I am sure that the lovely, intense dark chocolate gelato had, ah, more than the usual amount of caffeine than regular old chocolate ice cream. Your child weighs 27 pounds soaking wet. There could be some math involved here with grams of caffeine per pound of body weight, but it is not necessary, because res ipsa loquitor: the thing speaks for itself. Specifically, the thing ran almost all of the half mile home from the gelato shop. Then, when the thing was put to bed, it yelled, wailed, howled, begged, screeched, pleaded, thrashed, and kicked to be let out of bed. For an hour and a half. And then the thing also woke up at 1:00. 4:00 and 5:30 am, until the thing was hauled into Mama and Papa's bed in the faint hope of everyone getting more sleep.

The answer to this is obviously to administer the chocolate gelato at breakfast, when there is ample time for its effects to wear off before bed.

2) When hiding child bribery/Halloween candy, put it in a safe hiding place, where your children and husband will not find it. However, do not put it in so safe a place so that you completely out-think your own dumb-ass self, and then you cannot find the candy when it is desperately needed for life-saving bribery purposes. The same thing goes for hiding precious jewelry when going out of town. Popular places to hide such jewelry from the odd house thief are in a shoe box, or the toe of a winter boot.

The candy finally turned up stashed inside the corner cabinet tucked inside the salad spinner. The pearl necklace has not made a reappearance. I'm wondering if there are things like truffle pigs that could sniff out pearls?

3) Apples in your house are approximately 837 times larger and more numerous than they appear on the farm. Pick-your-own fruit places are fun weekend family outings. You get to be outdoors, where city children can run around a farm, pick apples, and see that they really do grow on trees and Mama was not making that crazy shit up. You're issued a basket, and you can take a wheelbarrow if you like, which is handy for hauling apple baskets, small children, etc. up and down the rows of apple trees. The sky is blue, the sun is shining, you're with good friends, the children have got the hang of this apple picking thing and are happily putting apples into baskets, and eating one here and there. You go up and down the rows, just getting a few of each kind that you want to try: Fuji, Honeycrisp, Jonagold. Your bucket doesn't look that full. You pet the farm animals, have a picnic, bag up your apples, and pay $12 for the privilege of hauling them home. You plan to make an apple pie for tonight, and imagine that will take care of a good number of the apples. When you carry the bag of apples inside, it seems much larger than it did on the farm or in the trunk of the car. The apples seem to have multiplied. Exponentially. You pick out six good looking pie candidates, and make your pie. The pie crust barely fits over the pile of apple slices in the pie pan. You wrestle the top crust into place, put it in the oven, and go back to inspect the sack of apples. It does not appear smaller since you removed six for the pie. You suspect it is actually larger. You realize that you also already had apples in the fridge, from the farmer's market, and that you are supposed to get more apples on Tuesday from your CSA.

You slice up an apple to accompany dinner. The small child refuses both the apple and the apple pie. You sigh, look up recipes for applesauce, store the apples in a cool, dark corner of the basement, and wonder if apples would go as fast as doughnuts if you put them in the kitchen at your office.

Dialogue

"OK, get your shoes on. It's time to go to gymnastics so you can show Grandma all your tricks! Where are your Crocs?"

"I don't want Gwamma to come. I want Papa to come."

***

"Will she get upset if I come?"

"She doesn't get to make all the choices. She needs to know that she has no choice in some things. Come if you want to come. Don't come if you don't want to come. I can't make decisions for any more people."

"Well, you let her choose a lot of other things."

"What are you saying? What does that mean? Are you saying we spoil her? Because I really don't think we do."

"I'm just saying you give her a lot of choices."

***

"I think my visiting has just caused more stress for you."

"This is the way my life is. All the time. It doesn't matter. I would be exhausted and sick and stressed if you weren't here, This is just the way it is."

***

"You need to take care of yourself. Or you're going to get really sick, something serious."

"How? There is no time. There is nothing else that I can do. I'm fine. Just leave me alone. You don't understand."

***

"It doesn't cause me more stress for you to be here. I want you to come. I want you to visit. I want Helene to know you.  I hope you'll come back for her birthday."

"We'll see."

***

"We're going home to eat lunch. Papa should be back from the airport."

"And Gwamma. I want to eat lunch with Papa and Gwamma."

2.5 - postscript

After all that enraptured mother-child stuff yesterday, I thought I'd better round out the picture some more.

1. I woke up this morning with a wad of pink Mardi Gras beads digging into my back. I have no idea how they got in my bed.

2. When I tell the Olive things like "it's bathtime!" or "it's time to get into bed," she just says "no, it's not." Somehow, I find myself going back and forth with her several times -  "yes, it is," "no, it's not" - before I come to my senses, recall that I'M THE ADULT HERE AND BIGGER THAN YOU, and simply pick all 27 pounds of her up and put her where she is supposed to go. I don't even know where she learned this "no, it's not" business. I blame the other children. All of them.

3. I was awakened at 2 am last night and summoned to The Child's bedroom so that she could tell me she did not, under any circumstances, want the foam basketball in her bed. This is the same foam basketball that she has insisted on having in her bed for the previous week. I removed the offending foam basketball from the bed, because apparently, THIS HAD TO BE RESOLVED AT 2AM OR ELSE. I was then informed she needed her tennis ball instead. Fortunately, the tennis ball was already in the bed (because, OMFG, if it hadn't been....I shudder), lying by her pillow, and was easily located and tucked into the crook of the Olive's arm, where she hugged it and squeezed it and called it Wilson, and went happily back to sleep. On the other hand, I laid awake for god knows how long, and then had weird dreams about hunting Nerf balls like Easter eggs.

4. I tried to find lip gloss in my purse this morning but came up with only half of a crayon. It didn't even have the courtesy to be red.

And this is what we do.

Weathered

I am obsessed with the weather. My iPhone has only enabled it. I seriously check the weather a dozen times a day. Or more. This has to do with another obsessive need, my need to be prepared, to plan. I want to be better than a Boy Scout. I hate, hate, hate being caught wearing the wrong thing, whether I am too hot or too cold or my shoe is giving me a blister, or I am wearing a cardigan when everyone else has on a suit jacket. I revel smugly in being perfectly dressed, perfectly prepared and perfectly comfortable for the weather. Or anything else that comes along.

The temperature of the house also has to be juuuust porridge-right. During the maddening spring time, I dash about the house opening and shutting windows, turning fans on and off, turning the A/C and the heat on and off, the thermostat up and down, as the temperature insists on being so fickle, vacillating from 45 to 82 and back. I hate being hot inside the house, HATE, especially at night, when I firmly believe the only way for civilized people to sleep is in a cold room under a fluffy down comforter.

And now, of course, there is The Girl. The Olive. The amount of time that I spend worrying about whether she is too hot or too cold is absurd. I strive to also dress her perfectly for the weather each day. She has lately been thwarting me in this effort, as I put a zippered sweatshirt on her to ward off the chill in the cool hours of the morning only to have her refuse to take it off for the rest of the day, even when it gets to 75 in the sun. I fruitlessly try to convince her that she is hot, that it is time to take off the sweatshirt, which is met with flailing and an eardrum-piercing shriek.

I also have to Plan, with a capital P. Can I run outside today? Will it be better in the morning or at lunchtime? If it's a non-running day, would it be better to go for a walk at lunch or run some errands in the car? Will it be nice enough to go outside with the Olive after I get home? Warm enough for the water table? Worth filling up the wading pool? Or will we have to amuse ourselves with streaming Netflix as the rain streams down our windowpanes? What will we do this weekend? Can we go outside, to a garden or park. or will it be a museum day?

Weather.com does not help. They have hour by hour, day by day, month by month weather! For anywhere! If I check in an hour, it might be different! Maybe it won't rain on Saturday, if I just look again.... And I can look at the July averages for West Tisbury, MA to plan for a bucolic week on the Vineyard, away from the stifling swamp of DC.

Oh Information Age, oh Internet, you are enabling, and I love you so for it. Now, it's going to be approximately 64 and sunny when I get home, so yoga pants and a long-sleeved t-shirt and a fleece vest should be perfect for playing in the backyard, and we should be able to have the windows open a little tonight, it should be nice and cool......

Over with

This is a 30 Days of Truth post: Day 08 → Someone who made your life hell, or treated you like shit.

This post has conspired against me and mired me down. It has been terrible to write, terrible to revisit this time. It was almost done, and with an errant keystroke, gone. I have to end it this time, fast, succint, better than I did it in life.

"Are you or have you ever been afraid of your current sexual partner?" asked the form at the Tulane University health clinic. My pen hovered for much too long over the "yes" and "no" check boxes. I wanted to check yes. I wanted to check yes so someone would ask me, so maybe someone could free me. I wanted to check yes, but instead, I checked no. I checked no, and remained captured. 

What would have happened if I had checked "yes," that day; if I had broken up with him the year before or sooner; if I had not followed him to law school? What if, what if, what if.

He was my college boyfriend. I was his "first"; he was not mine. We became quickly exclusive sometime sophomore year. I didn't always see how he was cutting me off, isolating me. Even when I did things for him that I didn't want to do, like skipping Winter Carnival senior year to go to Boston with him, ostensibly to comfort his best friend through a bad breakup. What I didn't see is what I was enabling: his neuroses, his fears, and his control over me. I thought I was being supportive, faithful, loyal. Rather, that's what I was told. I was told that if I did not do certain things, that I was unfaithful, unloyal, betraying. 

I was told that I thought things wrong, had the wrong opinions, did things wrong. I was belittled, controlled, demeaned, and made to believe he only did these things because he loved me. He isolated me from the friends that were supposed to be "our" friends. I saw him change over three years of college, saw him be very cruel to people that I loved, that were close friends, that he professed to love. But when I tried to do something, I was accused of disloyalty, unfaithfulness, un-love. And I loved him. I did. Blindly, passionately, optimistically. It got worse over three years of college, and worse yet when I succumbed to going to the same law school as him, which was not the school I really wanted to go to. Somehow, he convinced me to leave my car at his parents' house during our first year of law school, somehow he convinced me that we only needed his car, only had room for one car. It was really so he could control where I went.

The wall punches next to my head started senior year of college. I don't remember how much I got charged extra for dorm damage, for those holes in the plaster in my dorm room. Those holes that I covered with wall hangings and posters. The raising of his hand, then stopping just short of hitting me...that started during our first year of law school. I started to beg him to hit me, told him to just do it, because I thought it would set me free. Then there would be a strike, a bruise, a mark, something concrete, and not just the horrible, daily, hourly crushing of my spirit that happened.

He started to cheat on me with someone else in law school, claiming it was benign, that they just had things in common. I believed it even as he spent nights at her apartment. Wanted to believe it, because that's how bullied, cowed, captured I was. I still believed he was the sweet, somewhat naive, so-smart boy that I had met my freshman year of college. He went out drinking with his new friends, while I stayed home. I wasn't invited, and I had no friends of my own, because I'd been so isolated by him. We'd also only brought his car to New Orleans. He'd convinced me we only should have one, because we only had one parking space. It was really so he could control me. I tried to leave one day, to jump in that car and drive off, to a coffeehouse, to anywhere, anywhere at all, and somehow, before I could even get out of the apartment parking lot, he was there in the car, pulling me out, taking the keys, saying "where do you think you're going?" in a coldly amused voice, leading me back up to the apartment like a bad child, as I hung my head, broken, trapped, again.

Of course, he broke up with me. I slid into a dark well of depression, hanging a black sheet over the bedroom window because I never wanted to wake up. He ripped it down when he came home from his new girlfriend's house the next day. He badgered me to get over it, didn't understand why I was so upset when he was fine, because he didn't want to have to inconveniently feel guilt.

Yet he still wanted all the control. I was forbidden to tell anyone we had broken up. I was forbidden to move out, and it would have been nearly impossible to find an apartment mid-spring semester anyhow. We were visiting his parents for spring break, and he didn't want to tell them either, forcing me to play out a horrible charade that whole week. I couldn't talk to my best friends, because they were also his friends, and according to him, it would be wrong of me to talk to them about him, a betrayal of our privacy, of our relationship. I was so cowed, so broken. I couldn't win an argument with him; he just told me I was dumb, that I thought wrong, that I was wrong, or he raised his hand as if to strike me, making me duck and tremble. I obeyed.

It gets worse, so entangled a web it was. My summer position was with a law firm in Providence where his uncle was a partner. I had arranged ages ago to stay in his parents' large and lovely waterfront house near Providence, in southern Massachusetts, rent-free. They weren't there much of the time, as they worked and had other appointments and engagements in Boston, and were often at their apartment there. I should have sublet a summer apartment from a Brown student. But my wings were so clipped, I was so mired, so depressed, so paralyzed, so still under his control, that I didn't know what to do, could barely function.

He finally told his parents, before summer arrived. They were (and still are, I am sure) some of the kindest, most generous people I will ever know, and I hope I can be as kind to someone someday as they were to me that summer, and after. Their generosity made it all better and worse. I saw the life I had so long imagined in that magnificent house, with its seven fireplaces, rambling lawns, sunset views, in ruins before me. I still stupidly thought that if I said the right thing, looked the right way, had sex with him one more time, that he would come back. I still so stupidly wanted him back, Stockholm girl that I was. I was so sad, still crying all the time, pounds melting off of my body from all of the weight of the sadness and manipulation that I carried that summer. Sometimes, I thought about driving my car off the road, into a ditch, a tree, because it all hurt so much.

I toyed with transferring schools, and perhaps I should have. What would have happened? But I stayed, determined to finish what I had started. We went back to school that fall, and it still didn't get better. I still wasn't free, because somehow, I had given him a set of keys to my new apartment in New Orleans. He insisted, so he could help me, take care of me, control me, keep tabs. I was too tired, too depressed, so I allowed it. I still cried an awful lot, but I called up some classmates, tried to make new friends. Even as every glimpse I saw of him and his new girlfriend crushed me anew, squandered the self-worth I had tried to save up.

Then his parents came for a visit, part business for his father, part pleasure. I had dinner with them one night, because I still had a friendship with them, which they generously reciprocated, because they knew I needed it, and knew, as I did, that it would end in time. The next night, he burst into my apartment, uninvited, yelling at me, accusing me of making his mother cry, refusing to leave. Something in me finally snapped, and steeled. I asked for my keys, threw open my apartment door, and I asked him to leave my apartment. He refused. I raised my voice, put my hand on the phone, and asked him to leave, or I was calling the police. I also knew that my apartment had thin walls, and that my burly male med student neighbor was home, and that he wouldn't stand for any shenanigans. I picked up the phone and started to dial. He finally gave me the keys and backed out of the apartment, snarling. He left for the same reason he never actually hit me: he didn't want anything to stand in the way of his aspirations to money and power at a white shoe Boston law firm. I locked the door behind him. I should have changed the locks.

He had the gall to call me in the spring, just as our second year was almost over, ask me out for a drink. I met him, alert and wary. We sat on the tilting balcony of one of Uptown's storied and divey bars. There was small talk, and then he got to it. He accused me of cutting him off from all of our mutual friends from college, of turning them all against him, because I'd told them all such horrible things about him. I was dumbfounded. I laughed in astonishment, because I knew the truth. He hadn't talked to any of those friends in over a year, had never attempted to contact them, hadn't called them, written, e-mailed, nothing. I talked to them often. I had also told them that it was their choice; that I wouldn't tell them anything they didn't want to hear about him, and that I knew he was their friend as well. They could handle it as they liked. If he had ever bothered to even ask any of those friends, to reach out to any of them, he would have known that. I stood up. I don't think I threw my drink on him, but I probably should have. I told him to never, ever contact me again. I walked out of that bar, onto a humid, oak-shaded street of New Orleans, got in my old pickup truck, and drove away.

"You have no power over me."

       -Sarah, Labyrinth

I have never seen him since that day, except at a distance. I have occasionally had a vague awareness of where he might be, through friends and classmates. I never look him up online. I don't want to know.

If this is 20 months, I may not survive the next two years

I'm just haunted by myself last night. I lost it, just lost it for no good reason. The Olive is in a sort of schizo phase where she wants everything she sees. She will play with something for only a minute or two before flitting to or demanding the next thing. It's exhausting and trying, to go from crayons to trains to books to upstairs! to downstairs! to stroller! to dolly to outside! all in the span of three minutes. The same thing happens with food. She wants watermelon, peach, rice, cheese, cottage cheese, eggs, noodles all at the same time, but she doesn't really want any of them. She's just cataloguing them, naming them, and maybe seeing if we will bring them to her. If she has crackers at the playground, she's happy with them until another kid has Cheerios, and then she asks for Cheerios. She was inconsolable when I was so thoughtless as to bring apple slices and not cheese as a snack the other day. She's trying out how the world works.

And maybe I shouldn't have started this, but I put the Olive up on the kitchen counter sometimes when I am cooking. It started with the coffee maker in the mornings. She helps me put the filter in, scoop the beans into the grinder, and she gets to press the button to make the coffee. It's become a fun morning ritual. (Except for the phase where she wanted to play with the coffee maker parts ENDLESSLY FOR WHAT SEEMED LIKE AN ETERNITY and I was almost in tears, just begging her, begging her to put the filter in and press the button, because Mama is going to die right here if she does not get coffee. There is just nothing like being at the mercy of someone who is twenty months old.)

 

 The problem is that now she is demanding to get up on the counters ALL.THE.TIME. And we are trying to make her understand that it can't be all the time. She can't just be put up on the counter to ransack the nuts and dried fruit and cereal any old time. I want her to be up there cooking with me. She's been stirring empty bowls and dried beans, pretending to make eggs, even stirring some pancake batter, and tasting things with me. I want her to love doing those things, the way I loved doing them with my mom. But there have to be reasonable limits. And twenty-month olds are not reasonable or limited. As much as she flits from one thing to another during playtime, she can be the utter opposite, getting an idea in her head and sticking with it no matter how many times she is told no, we're not doing that right now, or how many distractions are offered.

And then there is the hitting and the kicking and the clawing/kneading. She tries to smack us and head-butt us when we are holding her. I've started just putting her down on the floor the second she does it, because she sometimes really hurts me when she does this. If you tell her no, you don't hit Mama, she just laughs and smiles, the most infuriating little incorrigible demon-child laugh and bared pointy teeth. She is not fazed at all by "NO" in this context. She kicks me when I'm changing her diaper. Not just kicking out. Trying to KICK ME. And when I'm cuddling her before bed or in the morning, she has this finger-kneading/clawing thing she does where she digs her nails into the crook of my elbow or under my chin, and kneads, claws. I keep cutting her nails. I try to tell her to be gentle. She stops for a moment, then starts again.

She only does these things to me. She'll whack Seth occasionally, but not like she does me.

She kicked me on the changing table last night, and I lost it. I yelled. I threw a tube of diaper cream. I said NO! and STOP IT! in the worst most horrible, awful, abusive yelling voice. I made her cry. I scared her. I stupidly or meanly tried to give her liquid vitamins in the middle of this, trying to get the task done. I made her cry more, and choke. I thought she was going to throw up from the gasping. I told her that maybe she'd listen to me now, that I mean NO, when I say it. Actually, I yelled that. Seth came upstairs to read to her. I left him with her for at least 10 minutes, while I went downstairs to just clean, do something productive, shaking with unreasonable anger, mad at her, mad at Seth, mad at me.

Because the thing is, just a second after I yelled, and scared her, and made her cry and gasp and choke, she turned to me, ME, to be comforted. She still wanted me. Did she already forget that I'm the one who made her cry? She held up her arms and said, Mama!, wanting me to pick her up and hold her. And I didn't do a very good job. I was still mad. I tried to hold her, wipe the snot and drool, put her pajamas on, but I just wanted the task done. I didn't feel like comforting her. I felt like just putting her in her crib, saying night-night, and turning off the light. No bedtime stories or animal crackers or milk or snuggling.

I did put her to bed after Seth read to her, trying to shorten the nursing/snuggling/clawing time as much as possible, because I just couldn't stand it, my skin crawling. I don't know what she notices, whether she noticed anything. I laid her in bed as usual, making sure she was cuddled with Baby and Bear and Mimi the monkey, and that her cup of water was close by.

And I went downstairs, was a bad and surly wife, drank some wine, and put myself to bed early, abandoning my husband to watch True Blood alone. I tried to figure out what had so shamefully set me off. Was it the long, busy day? Spending so much time cooking for us and our friends who came over? The Olive's manic bouncing from one thing to another? My annoyance at Seth not completely cleaning up the kitchen, and for leaving the bathroom with no towels in it? Am I getting sick, accounting for the scratchy throat and tiredness that I hadn't noticed before? All of these things?

I don't know, but I never want it to happen again. And I am horrified and sick, because I know it probably will, sometime in our lifetimes. I can't stand that I made the Olive feel scared, and cry. I can't stand how I made me feel. But I also can't stand her neediness of me sometimes, and the physical, hurting things she sometimes does to me. I have to realize it is a phase. That it won't last. Realize that I am patient and gentle 99% of the time, as I softly hold her hands from hitting me, tell her to show me her "gentle touch," think of a song to sing to her on the changing table. I have to pick her up and comfort her as best I can, no matter what, and especially when I did it. I have to make amends, even if she isn't asking for them. It is the guileless little hands, reaching up to me for comfort, just seconds after I caused them upset. Those little hands are what I have to remember, that tiny voice of "Mama." Because I am still the source of All Things to my tiny girl. She still believes in me when I doubt myself, her hands twining gently around my neck, head resting on my shoulder. It won't last, and I have to grasp it while I can.

I'm a hot, neurotic, micromanaging mess

I think that just means I'm a parent. Even as Type A as I am, I don't think I realized the levels of neuroses and high-strungedness that becoming a mama would lead me to. As a new daddy friend of mine pointed out the other night, the whole Type A, micromanaging strategy has been very successful for me thus far in life, and it is really, really, really hard to let it go. Cases in point:

(1) My mother in law is wonderful, fabulous, attentive, inventive, creative, and ingenious with children. She really is. I trust her completely. I am so happy to have her in my life, and have her visit and babysit sometimes. Yet the other morning when she was going to make the Olive a scrambled egg, I went all micromanagey postal because SHE HAD A SCRAMBLED EGG YESTERDAY! SHE MUST HAVE DIVERSITY! SHE CANNOT HAVE A SCRAMBLED EGG! I DECLARE AS MOMMY OVERLORD THAT YOU MUST GIVE HER A WAFFLE! In retrospect, oh my gawd. Embarassing. WTF, lady? What is wrong with you? The baby can really have eggs two days in a row and IT WON'T KILL HER. Not even close.

(2) No. 1 is tied to my ongoing neurosis/deep dark fear that I am somehow going to raise a picky eater. I have read and re-read Ellyn Satter's books; I have also read books with titles like "My Two Year Old Eats Octopus"and "Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father's Quest To Raise an Adventurous Eater." And all of these books say pretty much the same thing. Your job is to provide a variety of healthy, tasty foods. Your kid's job is to choose what to eat and how much. Serve your children what you eat. Don't be a short-order cook. Eat with your children. The end. I know all this. I know it. I try to practice it. I buy papaya and parsnips and barley and millet and feed them all to the Olive --all foods I never ate until I was an adult. I neurotically ask Seth over and over again if I am feeding the Olive enough variety, as I season sweet potato oven fries, and stir a bechamel cheese sauce for some broccoli. My dear husband does not roll his eyes at me even when I ask this for the twelfth time in a week. He just says, "yes." Here are some of the things the Olive eats: guacamole, sesame peanut noodles, blueberries by the pound, meatballs, pesto, cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese (all kinds, every kind, so far), hummus, spinach and feta omelets, chow fun noodles (she hasn't met a noodle of any nationality that she didn't like), and fish tacos.  

The girl loves her guac.  

I know that. I know it. I know she eats all of these things! Yet, I quiver and practically burst into tears when she devours a pea and couscous dish one night, and won’t touch it another night, and when she spits out the broccoli with the delicious béchamel sauce.  I am devastated that she doesn’t like spicy-hot food yet, because I know of other toddlers who happily devour salsa.  Then I am certain that she will become one of those kids who will only eat mac & cheese from a box; who only eats four things only in nugget form, and only if those have ketchup on them; who won’t touch anything an onion even looked at.  I start counting the number of times I have served her a certain food that she‘s not crazy about, to see if I’ve gotten to the magic 15 or 20 times it may take for a child to accept a new food.  I haven’t created an Excel spreadsheet for this.  Yet.  I also feel guilty and worried when I succumb and give the Olive a “kid” food, like animal crackers, or Goldfish crackers (whole grain!) or these stupid organic Earth’s Best crackers shaped like Big Bird and Elmo.  (The last one is a double-guilt whammy – marketed “toddler” food plus licensed characters!).  I am convinced sometimes that with these seemingly innocuous snack crackers (that she loves) that I am leading her to a path of McNuggets and Doritos for every meals for the rest of her life. 

I just re-read the previous paragraph, and I know it just reads as CRAZY! CRAZY! CRAZY!  I know.  But here’s what it is: I love food.  I love to eat.  I love to cook.  It’s an adventure, a travel journal, a science experiment, a sensual experience, all in my own kitchen.  I really will eat about anything.  I’ll at least try it.  My list of weird foods eaten includes caterpillars, grasshopper and impala liver.  My husband is very lucky that I tolerate (a) his dislike of chunks of tomato in salad and (b) his lukewarm enthusiasm for sushi.  I know – I just have impossibly high standards.  I simply have no understanding or tolerance for picky eaters.  I can find redemption even in food that I don’t really like (green bell peppers - eh - but delicious on fajitas)– everyone else should be able to do that too, dammit.  I grew up in a house where everything was made from scratch, and where my parents did a remarkable job in the grocery-challenged seventies and eighties of adventurous cooking and eating.  Food was fun and delicious.  My father was the driver of adventure, trying new things (squid! artichokes!), changing recipes on the fly.  My mother was the steady arbiter of basics, teaching me to love the bitterness of Southern greens, spending mornings making cookies with me, teaching me to make scrambled eggs.  We ate some junk food too – occasional fast food, and there was always some kind of bag of chips in the house.  Even with that, there are so many things I had never eaten until I got to college.  Proscuitto.  Sushi.  Brie. Real maple syrup.  The key is that I wasn’t afraid to try them, and I’ve spent every year of my life since leaving home devouring (literally) whatever came across my path.  

It is thus unthinkable and heartbreaking to even imagine that my baby girl will be nothing less than a miniature foodie gourmand.  She’s going to be one if it kills me.  Which it might.  Excuse me, I have to go make some dal, because she hasn’t tried that yet, and a green bean casserole because she is going to like green beans.  She is. Shut up.

 (3) After threatening to spontaneously combust from the stress of trying to do every single thing for the Olive, I delegated certain things to my sweet husband.  Except that I didn’t really.  I ask him to put her down for a nap, but then give him a detailed list of the forty-eleven things that have to be done so the baby can sleep!  White noise! Take off her shoes! She likes the WHITE blanket, not the pink one! Put the shade exactly 2/3 of the way down!  Because he’s only put her down for naps dozens of times in the past 17 months, and in fact, she goes to sleep easier for him than for me.  How can he possibly know what to do?  And I “delegated” the assembly of the Olive’s lunches for the next day to Seth.  Except again, I totally didn’t.  First, see, e.g., above CRAZY! discussion about food.  Then I quizzed him about what she can eat and how much, dictated a starch, a protein, a veggie, and two fruits, and the size that the cheese cubes need to be cut into.  Then, after he was done and had gone to watch TV, I went back into the fridge, examined what he gave her, and added a cream cheese and jelly sandwich.  Passive aggressive – a whole new level of micromanagement. 

You want to kill me now, I can tell, after reading what you just read.  Yes, I am lucky that my husband has not throttled me in my sleep. 

What is it?  What makes me this crazy?  It’s that I want the Olive to have The Best.  I want to do The Best.  The Right Thing.  Whatever all of those things are.  When what I really need to do is let the fuck go, and not worry and allow us all to sometimes eat just French fries for dinner.  It is going to be FINE.  We are all FINE.  And if I let go just a little, it isn’t the slippery slope to Certain Doom (otherwise known as the McDonald’s Happy Meal – AAUGH, the horror! The horror!), and my husband might even like me a little better if I weren’t quite so tightly wound these days.  The Best. The Right. The CRAZY!  Good grief, just pass the wine already, and tell me what it is that makes you this crazy.  Um, if anyone else could possibly be this crazy.  Thanks.

 

Because I'm just lazy

Yeah, yeah, haven't written. Not that busy. Just kind of...lazy.

The excitingly glamourous possible job detail thing I was all excited about didn't work out. These fickle cabinet members - they get appointed by the President and all and think they can just change their minds and do what they want. Anyhow. That's what happened. So, my friend had to tell me "no" after he kind of got a little smackdown from The Secretary (no, I ain't tellin' which one).

Oh well. It gave me a thinly veiled excuse to buy new shoes. Mmm, shooooes. Zappo's = so enabling.

So, I've been trying to be actually productive and all at my job, instead of refusing to work on things because I could just pawn them off on someone else when I jaunted off on my exciting detail. And well, I got all kinds of things done. And discovered that I'm not really all that busy. So, I'm embracing it and being thankful that I can always leave on time or even early to get home to play with the Olive, or go by the UPS Store to pick up my deliveries of new shoes, or take a fantastic lunchtime run on a (finally!) gorgeous 62+ degree sunny spring day like today.

Or continue in my rut of obsessively checking e-mail, Facebook, Twitter. I want to blog more, run more, take photos more, cook more. I really do. But see, e.g., rut, lazy, busy, whatever. There's work, where I sit on my butt and fill time, and rationalize that if I'm sitting at my desk, a little surfing is justified. Then there's home, where the action is nonstop, and any visible electronic device makes a certain, small monkey-child screech and clamor to have it, pound its keys, carry it around, bang it (lovingly, I am sure) against table and wood floor). Work. Home. Money. Time. Life. Balance. Argh.

But! Oh! This early implementation of Daylight Savings? LOVE. IT. I am a sun girl. All about sunlight. Raised in New Mexico with 300 days of sun a year, so I wilt and wither get a little pale and sad and depressed during the winter, when it's pitch dark as I leave my windowless office at 5:00 during December and January.

This whole MOAR SUN deal perks me right up. I played with the Olive in our backyard for awhile yesterday evening, eff it if we eat dinner late. IT'S LIGHT OUT. And the Olive can play in the back now - she can run around on the brick patio and climb the wooden stairs to the deck and try to eat rocks and yank on the plants. It's marvelous. And I need to remember to get out my camera and keep trying out the new lens that I got for my birthday, so we can get more of this:

This is my favorite recent photo. I just love the way it turned out. Her big blue eyes, the pop of the color of the orange, the off-center placement of the Olive in the photo...If I were going to spend more time on it, I'd Photoshop out the electrical outlet, so it's not so distracting. But when the heck am I going to do that? There's sun out there to play in and babies to chase and shoes to buy on the internet...so busy, so lazy.  

Digging out

In case you didn't hear, DC was buried in snow for awhile:

We've shoveled and shoveled and SHOVELED and had cabin fever and forced vacations from work because no one could get nowhere in our fair city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency, and the Metro was shut down, and it's finally about melted, and now we twitch and get pretty anxious at any mere mention of more snow.  

I used to love snow. I grew up in the mountains, in New Mexico. I sledded, skied, made elaborate snowmen, participated in epic snowball battles, and hovered by the radio in my long johns hoping, hoping, hoping for a school closure. But northern New Mexico knew how to deal. Everyone had 4WD and shovels or snowblowers, and everyone knew how to drive in the stuff. We had a Datsun 510 station wagon that wasn't 4WD, wasn't even front wheel drive, and that thing never got stuck. We drove it everywhere.

DC does not know how to deal. The city doesn't have enough snowplows. Or a real plan for disposing of 55 inches of snow falling in 4 days. People don't have shovels. I have seen people using dustpans and CD jewel cases to try to dig out their cars. No one knows how to drive in the stuff, so you get things like this:

 

The guy is stuck pointing vaguely the wrong way on a one-way street, and protruding into the street. Idiot. 

Tons of snow with a newly walking Energizer battery toddler is a whole different ballgame. We did take her outside as much as possible and let her play in it. But her feet got cold and she didn't like the snow hitting her face, and it was hard for her to walk, and she's just too little to sled or build snowmen, or any of the good stuff. So, back indoors we went, trying to make her run around the basement playroom as much as possible. We tried. Sigh. Thankfully, we did get some breaks by going over to friends' houses, hiking in the streets because half the sidewalks weren't shoveled, the Olive strapped to my back. I don't know how my friends in northerly climes do it. I guess they're more prepared for the snow, the weather, and it is a short time that they're too little to like it. But man, am I ready for warmer weather like I have never been ready before.

Finally back at work, embarassingly relieved at turning over the toddler to someone else for the day, and being suddenly offered a surprising opportunity from a friend and former colleague who is now in a high political place. A six-month detail, so I wouldn't have to quit my current job. A lot of responsibility. A lot of diversity. Potential for many new connections. Hobnobbing with Congresspeople and high level politicals at my agency. Potential for lots of things. I almost said no, because there could be one day of travel (a day flight to New York) once a week. But Seth said yes, we could handle it. He and the Olive could handle it.

I've had to say no to even applying for or considering a number of job opportunities since getting pregnant. Mostly, the hours were too unreliable, and I wasn't a swinging single anymore who could get home from work at nine, have a dinner of popcorn, an apple and a beer, and do it all again the next day. I needed the certainty of my current job, where I knew what to expect, where it was the same old, same old, with certain hours, where I could walk out the door at five, always. And I wished I didn't have to say no, because an ambitious part of me hungered for something new, for my career trajectory to rise, to change. But the Olive is now always and first. Always.

But this opportunity, this one. Busy, but manageable. I wouldn't have to leave her overnight (which I can't do yet. Just can't.) I sat in my office one day last week, and realized how very bored I was. Yes, I can do this job standing on my head, I have lots of time to take care of personal business, get in a workout at the office gym....but I'm just bored. And it would probably be healthy for me to spend less time obsessively compulsively checking Facebook and e-mail and Twitter, and waiting for something exciting to happen or for it to be five o'clock.

And my friend had especially selected me. Me. He knows a lot of people, after seven years on the Hill. He could have called up a lot of folks. But he called me. He wants me. He thinks I can do what needs to be done. I am awed and flattered that he sees me that way, and think that the work I have done has been noticed more than I thought.

So I said yes, and started the political wheels moving, and told my bosses what was up. And now I'm waiting, and hoping this is the right thing. And trying to get all of my "necessary" internet shopping done before the new thing starts. Next stop: Zappo's, because new shoes are always required for the first day, just like school.  
 

Crybaby

Or, Yet Another Example of How the Best Snappy Reply Is Always Thought of Five Minutes Too Late.

Scene: Last Tuesday night. Packed-full airliner, taking off. Chicago O'Hare to Boise, Idaho. It's taking off about an hour late.

Background: We thought it would be nice to visit my mom, a.k.a. Grandma Wanda for Christmas. The holidays in DC are quiet and a bit depressing, since so few people are actually from here. The city is deserted, which is kind of peaceful, but just doesn't have the same holiday que viva that I grew up with in Santa Fe, where everyone comes home, and the season is warm and glowing with farolitos and cider and fires of pinon wood. Now that we have the Olive, a.k.a. the preshus grandchild, it is more important to have her see my mom, and to do the holidays up right. So, we cashed in some United miles and got ourselves two tickets (plus one lap child) to Boise, Idaho for Christmas. As the date approached, I got more and more apprehensive about entertaining a very active 13-month old on a cross-country flying odyssey at the holidays. And we were going to arrive in Boise pretty late - close to midnight - due to the limited availability of frequent flier seats. But hadn't we flown to Australia with her just fine in April? Except that she was 4 months old and didn't even roll over then. Ohhh crap. Suggestions in response to my panicked Facebook postings about how to entertain a 1-year old ranged from "Benadryl" to "bourbon."

Add to this mix some snow in Chicago, a baby with a completely snot-riffic cold, and our plane sitting on the runway at DCA for two hours. Two. Hours. It takes less time to actually fly to Chicago. I was ready to throw open the emergency door and escape, because, hey! I live 15 minutes from here! I could be home! Seth wouldn't let me. He patiently held the baby, walked the aisles, and let her watch all the people coming back to the galley to buy drinks and snacks from the flight attendants. We finally took off, unsure if we would be able to make our connection in Chicago, and set about entertaining a rapidly tiring Olive. Really, I would have preferred being stuck in Chicago. I would have happily paid for a cab and an overpriced hotel overnight to avoid what happened next.

We make our flight in Chicago, because everything is delayed. It's past 9 pm DC time, and the baby is clearly exhausted, though she is a trooper, and keeps smiling at the airline employees who fuss and coo over her. One worker regales us with her tales of badly behaved adults that day, and grown women who actually burst into tears and threw tantrums and had hysterics because their flights were delayed or missed.

We get on the plane, and try to settle in for the three hour and forty minute flight to Idaho. We hope the Olive will just sleep, because she is so tired, because we are so tired. I soothe her to sleep, and all is well for awhile. But she just can't get comfortable, and dozes for perhaps 20 minutes or so, before waking and crying. I soothe her back to sleep as quickly as I can, and try to snooze myself. This pattern pretty much repeats through the flight. I try holding her in different positions, nursing, blankets, no blankets, snacks, water, my down vest as a pillow, singing, playing, rocking. She's having none of it. She's just beyond tired, beyond being confined, and is arching her back and wailing. But each episode doesn't last long. It's not like she was just screaming nonstop, and it's not like we were doing nothing to comfort her.

In the comforting-dozing-crying cycle, I didn't really notice that a man and his girlfriend in front of us were practically jumping out of their seats, turning around, and staring, no, glaring at us every time the Olive let out a squawk.  Finally, the man caught my bleary eyes. "Excuse me, but is there anything we can do?" I know instantly what he means. He and his girlfriend are staring me down, staring at the flailing baby in my arms. I am so tired. My temper rises. I can't stop my tongue. I am instantly on the defensive.

I whine," Don't you think if I could stop her from crying that I would?"

I should have said, "Do? About what? Oh, the baby? I would be very interested to hear any suggestions that you might have. Would you like to hold her?"

He says,"Well, I haven't been able to sleep a wink this entire flight because she's crying!"

I tiredly shake my head and blabber, "Make all the flights be on time. Have us in Boise already. That's what you can do."

I should have said: "Oh, did you think this was a sleep-guarantee flight? You should really talk to United about that." Because your fucking sleep is my problem? You and your goddam fake sympathy, about anything "we" can do. Yeah, I see you offering to hold my child and walk up and down the aisles with her, you self-centered idiot. Would you prefer the kid that's kicking the back of my seat incessantly? Perhaps a large man, overflowing his seat, snoring and falling asleep on you? Would that be better than some intermittent crying? Shall I see if I can arrange that?

He says, in the most condescending, arrogant tone,"There is such a thing as too young to fly, you know."

I burst out, "No there is not!"

I should have said: "Well, there are apparently no limits on assholes."

He sneers, "Just look at that." As the Olive wails and arches her back again, upset at my tension. Like she's this awful, reprehensible spectacle, my poor exhausted baby.

I say, "I suggest you try earplugs."

He says, "I tried that. She's just too loud."

I tuned out after that, and concentrated on slowing my pounding heart and calming the Olive down. I was reeling from the confrontation, and wishing I'd said something different, witty, instead of being so slow, sluggish, exhausted. I wanted to win, somehow with this asshole, even though there is no winning in a situation like this.

I know I'm not as bothered by crying as other people may be, now that I am a parent. But I've been on the other side. I've traveled a lot. I've been that business traveler who recoiled in horror at seeing I was surrounded by children on a long flight, and tried hastily to change my seat. I have said that there should be a child section of an airplane (I still think so, but for different reasons now. Wouldn't it be awesome to have sympathetic seat mates and even playmates in a separate section of the plane? Comfortable nursing and animal crackers for all!). But I would never, ever have been as rude as that guy was to me. Even in my carefree, jet-setting, exotic travel childless years, I had sympathy. I knew even then that children and babies just cry sometimes, no matter what you do. They're little people, after all, with their own thoughts and desires. I always felt bad for the poor parents trying to control their screaming, flailing offspring, whose ears hurt or who were tired. I sat in front of a Mennonite family on one overseas flight from Europe who, because they're Mennonites, had no toys or books or gadgets to distract their young children, who really did wail or whine for the entire seven or eight hours. The hum of the plane and the airline headphones and movies covered it up, and I honestly just felt bad for the kids. I've helped mothers on planes, and entertained children. I only have no sympathy if the parent is doing nothing at all to curb bad behavior of children who are old enough to know better. But it's all still the luck of the draw with air travel. You just have to put your earplugs in, headphone on, turn up the iPod, get engrossed in that book, and try to tune it out. In other words, be an adult about it, and just cope, because it's only for a short time, a blip in the grand scheme.

As one kinder business traveler told me several months ago, when I sat next to him with my small baby in a sling, and apologized, "I don't mind babies. They're just babies. What I do mind is adults who act like babies."

Yeah. You tell me who's the crybaby.

And for the record, as much as I dreaded the flight back, it was muuuuch better. It was during the day, the Olive wasn't exhausted, and was her usual happy self, smiling and making friends with everyone she could stare down. Still, we've decided that we're not taking any flight that is longer than two hours until that kid can sit still and be mesmerized by a DVD for a good long while.