helooooooo

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 07:32:27 -0800

Um, hi. So, how’ve you been? It’s been a long time. I know, I know, I should have written sooner. It’s just, geez, I’m so BUSY! I got a promotion at work (hooray!) and now I’m 10 hours in the office and another hour working from home (boooo!). And I’m really beginning to wonder how anyone can keep this up.

It should have been a warning to me that the last woman in my new position took a vacation just to do “mom” things: take the kids to and from school, go to swim meets, read bedtime stories. And sure enough, my time with the kids has dwindled to the hurried moments before and after sleep.

And where’s the “me” time? Time for knitting, reading, writing, shopping, yoga, guitar? In the rare moment I get to read a parenting magazine, I hear about mysterious rituals like Girls Night Out, and Date Night. Are those for real? Or are they editorial concoctions created to make us feel guilty, like the super skinny waifs in $6500 crocodile thigh-highs in the magazines I used to read? I eventually stopped reading those because I realized I’ll simply never measure up, and all that coveting just made me feel bad. According to mommy magazines it seems some ladies can home-school six adorable cherubs, run six miles, brunch with their BFF, run a social-media consulting business, tweet, blog, comment and deliver hand-crocheted afgans to the orphanage all before 2 o’clock, leaving them the rest of the afternoon to soak in lavender-infused bubbles. So I’ve just gotta ask, is it real? Or have the supermodels of my twenties been replaced by the supermoms of my thirties to serve as nagging reminders to everything I haven’t gotten done today?

5

Mon, 6 Oct 2008 21:41:14 -0700

Happy Birthday to You
Happy Birthday to You
Happy Birthday Dear Shea
Happy Birthday to You!

Shea, today you are 5!!! And even though I may have called you weird recently, I think you’re amazing. Before you started kindergarten you could only write SHEA. But last night we were doing your homework and you did an incredible thing. (For your homework we are to read a book together, then you write--or draw pictures--about it. Mrs. Eichel says to encourage you to write any word you can, invented spelling OK.) We read Coyote: A Trickster Tale of the American Southwest and you wrote: KIOT. Amazing! I think you’re brilliant.

miss smelly

Mon, 6 Oct 2008 06:55:34 -0700

Kindergarteners are weird. At least, the boys are. The girls are probably sweet and brilliant and hosting lavish, civilized tea parties after trigonometry homework. Shea does not socialize with girls because they have germs (except for BFF Stella; however, her mom, Susan, apparently does have germs). He’s definitely picked up some weird boyish phrases and characteristics now that he hangs out with older boys at school.

He hops around karate chopping the air (hopefully not at school as that’s strictly against The Rules) saying things like “Shwee! Hwoh! Orooo!” Right now he is pretending to hit himself in the groin with a bag of change. “Oooo! You got me!” he says.

He loves knock-knock jokes, like this one:
Knock-knock
Who’s there?
People.
People who?
People with dinosaur head! HA HA HA!

Also hilarious: anything including the word “poo.” Doubly funny when repeated: “poo poo.” HA HA HA!

Yesterday, he demanded, “Mom, smell my armpit!”

No thanks, I said, but thought I’d teach him a lesson and suggested he smell mine instead.

“Eew! Smells like chicken!”

Chicken? Kindergarteners are weird.

monkeys on a plane

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 07:52:01 -0700

Last weekend the kids & I visited my sister Molly and her family in San Diego. Eddie couldn’t make the trip, which meant I was taking a flight with two small kids--something I’ve previously sworn never to do (I did it once with just Shea was he was 1--it was excruciating for me and everyone else on the plane). I was most worried about the trip back, which was after a full day at the Wild Animal Park and way past bedtime.

After dinner, my mom and sister and I shared a bottle (or two...) of wine at the table, so I was well heated by the time we got to the airport for our 9:00 pm flight. Unlike the flight in, that meant I was cool with the kids’ demands, happy to sprawl out on the floor and play games, and generally more patient than my usual irritable self. As we marched onto the plane, a young woman said to me, “You seem like a really great mother, the way you interact with them.” HA! Me! A Great Mother! My usual self is painfully aware of all of the things that make me a terrible mother. 1) Sometimes I turn on the TV for them so I can check email. 2) Sometimes I pretend not to hear them when they scream for milk at 2:00 am. 3) Sometimes I let them have pretzels for dinner because I’m too tired to cook. 4) Sometimes I say, “Because I said so!” 5) Sometimes I feel overwhelmed. I could go on. But there we were, in the hairiest of situations--it’s past bedtime and I’m wrangling two kids and our luggage through the airport and onto a crowded plane--and I’m turning it all into an adventure.

Turns out all I need to be A Great Mother is a bottle of wine--I mean... a little patience.

manly men must wear mustaches

Sat, 6 Sep 2008 07:20:23 -0700

If you’re a Twitter or Facebook friend you may have heard me say that Shea has started to call himself A Man now that he’s in kindergarten. So it’s no surprise that he’s fascinated by mustaches lately. Last night’s art project was supposed to be about teddy bear headbands but the paper was tossed aside in favor of tape mustaches. Here he is giving a manly speech about muscles and tools, using a deep English accent--apparently that’s how Men talk.

Not to be left out, here is his Manly sister.