8/31/2006

Boys Will Be Boys

Moms, be afraid. Be very afraid....
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8/30/2006

Bed Rest

It's not me who is on bed rest, everybody. I just wanted to say that up front, lest y'all think some kind of miracle has happened. It's my friend who is confined to her cushy prison. She is expecting twins in November, and her doctor has ordered very strict bedrest--flat on her back, basically. She can be up in a semi-reclined position for short periods of time. She can get up to pee, and, presumably, to shower. She can go to the doctor. That's it. This is a woman who used to work in a high power DC law firm. In a word, she's going bonkers. Also, she needs some help. I'm going to help her out for a few days, and I was hoping to come armed with an arsenal of activities. But, sadly, I'm not all that creative. Help, please. If you were flat on your back (or if you have been flat on your back), what would you like to do? And if you had a friend around (who does have to bring her 4 year old, by the way), what would you want to do with her? Any and all ideas are welcome.
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8/25/2006

Drinking soy milk does not make me weird

We had some friends come visit us this week. I've known them for a long, long time, and it was fun to have them in our new house, etc. But I was surprised to discover an area of life where we seem to have little in common: food. Now, I am not a food Nazi. But having PKD means that I have to watch some of the things I eat, mainly sodium and hydrogenated oil. I also can't have caffeine, or huge amounts of chocolate. What this translates into is that I prepare most of our food fresh, and our pantry is pretty bare when it comes to snack food. I also give J soy milk on occasion, just because I like the extra protein on things like oatmeal, or as a mixed beverage, half chocolate Silk, half cow's milk at breakfast or lunch. There are lots of local farms that we like to go to and pick our own stuff, like blueberries and corn and peaches. We like to frequent farmer's markets, and I love cooking from our herb garden. And, of course, we have our beautiful garden that provides us with fresh vegetables every day. My friend thinks I am a freak. She keeps asking things like, "Well, why have you put J on this diet? Do you think you can keep him from getting PKD? So, this special diet you're on. Can you have bread? Can you drink milk? Wow, what a commitment!" Hmm, a low sodium, low packaged food diet rich in fresh fruits and vegetables with an appropriate amount of protein. Not exactly a medically regimented diet. She was also unimpressed with my garden, giving it a cursory glance and a shrug. Ok, I know I talk about this a lot, but my garden TOTALLY ROCKS! I mean, how can you just shrug your shoulders at sunflowers 12 feet high and tomatoes the size of softballs? Her husband is with her on this, too. For breakfast, I offered homemade whole wheat blueberry pancakes made from scratch with blueberries we had picked, smeared with homemade raspberry jam (compliments of Tracy M, by the way. We are almost out--send more!) with a side of strawberries and bacon. He opted for Dora's Cinnamon Stars cereal. I'm surprised how strongly I feel about this. They don't eat how we eat. They don't share our passion for growing fresh vegetables. They have never even been in a Whole Foods store, and it's not because they can't afford it. None of this makes them bad people. They are in fact very pleasant people. They're just not food snobs. But we apparantly are. And it's an issue. Not a big one, not one that I would bring up in a million years, but it's there. If you would have asked me, I would have never said that food can separate people. But now, I see that it can. And a couple of times during their visit I have felt like saying, "Drinking soy milk does not make me weird!" I'm going to go have a tomato.
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8/23/2006

Hey, Hoboman, Hey Dapper Dan

Did you know those were the words in the song, "You're Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile?" I just learned them this week as J has gotten into the whole "Annie" phenomenon. Yea for me. I now can sing along to the repetitive record in my head instead of just humming, "Hey, hmm hmm hmm, hey dodeedo, you both got your dumdedumdedum...." Now, not knowing the lyrics to a show tune is not usually something to blog about, but, you see, I have actually performed that song. Several times. As a kid, I was in a production of Annie, and played a ragamuffin orphan and various other ragamuffin extra parts. I was pretty young, and seriously had no clue what those words meant, regardless of the fact that I sang them, over and over. I remember my sisters and I talking about what those words could possibly mean. "Maybe they are just names of people." "Maybe a Hoboman is somebody who frowns a lot, and needs to smile." "What's a dapper?" I also didn't know what "Hey, Senator, hey, janitor" meant, either, but I probably couldn't even really pronounce those words, because I don't remember even bothering to ask their definitions. So much for clear diction on stage. But now I know! Woo-hoo! The mysteries of Annie have been unfolded to me. And this whole re-acquantiance with Annie has sparked all kinds of childhood memories. In examining the experience as an adult, I've come to this conclusion: Most of the time, kids are basically clueless. I mean that in the best sense, of course, but I think sometimes we as adults think kids get what is going on, and really, things are just way over their heads. Not a single director, choreographer, whatever bothered to wonder if the small kids singing about Main Street and Saville Row knew what the heck they were singing about (that one I did ask about, by the way), probably because a) they didn't have time to explain every little detail to all the 8 year olds on stage, and b) they probably didn't realize that those 8 year olds were, as I said before, clueless. There is, of course, the smallest, tiniest, itsy-bitsiest possibility that it was only I who was clueless, but my extensive research on the subject, which includes vital information gathering by watching the movie on repeat with my 4 year old, and then pondering my childhood memories in my pick up on my way to Home Depot, would suggest otherwise. These kinds of discoveries can be kind of fun, though. I've heard all kinds of stories about how people don't realize until adulthood that, say, the words to "I am a Child of God" do not include "And so my knees are gray." So let's remember to explain things a little better to our kids, and remember that even though they may pipe up with evidence of big ears, they are, for the most part, clueless. And 10,000 dollars goes to the first person who can tell me what a dapper really is.
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8/21/2006

Oh to be "With It"

DH once asked his sister, while I was standing right next to him,"So, what do you think of my wife?" My SIL, generous soul that she is, said, "I think she's a with it, happenin', cool kinda gal." Really, what is she supposed to say to my face? "Actually, brother, I think your wife is a total dolt, and I'm feeling rather sorry for you that you are saddled to such a bonehead for eternity." Nevertheless, her response did make me sigh, just a bit. Oh, if only I was a With It Gal. A With It Gal wouldn't spend a half an hour cleaning out her car the night before she has to drive a carpool because if she didn't, only the driver and a small child in a car seat would be able to find a seat around the junk. With It people have clean cars all the time. A With It Gal wouldn't pull out a mildly wrinkled dress to wear to church from a partially unpacked suitcase that sat unpacked from a 2 week vacation for almost a week. With It People unpack immediately. And they don't miss the sacrament because they are 15 minutes late for church. A With It Gal doesn't lose her son in an unmade bed. I know there are With It People out there, even With It moms. I've met them. I've seen their clean cars, their sparkling kitchens, their tastefully decorated bedrooms. I've borrowed clothes from their immaculately organized closets, helped them cook in their well stocked kitchens, and admired their perfectly manicured lawns. And only a small part of them are actually crazy. The rest of them are really quite pleasant. So, With It People of the world, share your secrets. I'd love to know them. I'm dying to know them, because I'm clearly at a loss here. I sometimes feel the opposite of With It. What would that be, anyway? Without It? Losing it? One Without With? I'm sure a With It Person could tell me.
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8/20/2006

Giants from my window

Ok, so they really were sunflowers after all. This is the view from my dining room window. Gotta love it.
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A little Las Vegas at the DC Temple

I'm so not a fashion queen. Trust me. One thing I like about the temple is that fashion is not a part of it. At all. Everybody wears white--how can you go wrong with that? Well, apparantly, you can. I went to the temple yesterday, and at the end of the ceremony, when I handed my little pink slip of a name to the temple worker, I was stunned at what I saw. No joke, this lady was sporting 3 inch long fingernails painted with what looked like gold glitter. There were sparkles on her temple dress, and white lace on her high heeled shoes. Ok, I was a temple worker for over a year, and I'm tellin' ya, working a 5 hour shift in those babies just looked painful. I couldn't even imagine how she could walk in those things, as the heels must have sunk down at least 4 inches into the soft carpet every step she took. She was also doing her best Tammy Faye Baker imitation. I tried not to stand too close for fear of getting smeared. The whole effect among the rest of the plainly clothed white haired gnarled knuckled gentle grandmotherly temple matrons was completely jarring. And standing there, at the end of the endowment, which is really supposed to be the spiritual culmination of the whole thing, all I could think was, "Wow. Where are the fashion police when you need them, anyway?" I'm so going to hell.
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8/18/2006

Little Boy Lost, Or How Momma Almost Called 911

This post does have a happy ending. It could have had a bad ending, and it came awfully close to being likethis story, but, thankfully, everything was ok. I just want to say that at the outset, because the last time I told somebody a suspenseful story about my son, she yelled at me for stopping her heart in her youth. Ok, so lately, I've been REALLY tired. A friend and I have formed a running group, and we have been running every day and lifting weights. I actually am now a fan of working out with somebody, because nothing gets you out of bed to abuse your body like somebody else's good opinion of you. But one of the women in our group has to work out early, and when I say early, I mean before dawn. Yeah, I didn't really know that 5:30 comes twice a day. Now I know. So I parked my kid in front of a video yesterday afternoon so I could collapse for a few minutes (um, or hours, however you care to look at it). He sort of bounced around my bed, made noises, you know, doing the soundtrack of a mother's life. Somehow as a mom you can actually sleep through all of this. I was doing just fine, and fell asleep for I'm not really sure how long. It was the silence rather than the noise that woke me up. I groggily poked my head over the edge of the bed to see if I could see J, and I called his name. No answer. I threw the covers off of me, and starting looking for him in earnest, still calling his name. Again, no answer. I searched the house, searched the backyard, and even knocked on the neighbor's door to see if he had wandered over there. Again, nothing. Now, I should mention that J is not a wanderer. I used to keep a childlock thingie on all my doors, and he USED to try to get out when he was younger, but he has been conditioned to stay in the house since then. You know, like the elephant who gets chained by a strong chain and then can be kept in by a little chain because he doesn't try the chain again. And that's just yet another example of how circus life resembles motherhood. Anyway, at this point, it has been a nearly 15 minute search, and still, nothing. I pick up the phone to call DH, just to try and think through everything, and my heart stopped. The phone was dead. Ok, maybe I was still a little groggy from my nap, but suddenly all kinds of wacky scenarios are running through my head, and when I heard the ice-cream man outside, I knew I had the solution: The ice-cream man had snuck into my house while I was asleep, cut my phone lines, and had STOLEN my baby! I was just trying to figure out how I could get a police detective to believe me as I got in my car to start to try and comb the neighborhood. One of my neighbors was out on the street, and I told her that I couldn't find J. She deployed her pre-teens on bikes to check all the ditches in the neighborhood, and they took to their Mission Impossible like Tom Cruise himself. She said she would station herself at the entrance to our development, just in case she saw J leave or come back. I was ready to enlist the help of other neighbors, but thought I should check the house just one more time. Maybe he was just playing a REALLY good game of hide and seek. Time from startled awakening to silence: 25 minutes. Mommy panic was seriously setting in. I carefully looked in every closet, and under every piece of furniture, thinking maybe he was stuck, or had suffocated somewhere. I even checked an old trunk where he HAS gotten stuck before, and then went to check under my bed. I pulled the covers off the bed to look under it, and breathed a HUGE sigh of relief. There, on TOP of my bed, was my child. Asleep. Breathing peacefully, perfectly in tact, snuggled up with a toy, his head close to the pillow I had been using, looking like the angel that he is. His body had been hidden by the covers that I had thrown off of my own body when I had gotten out of bed a half an hour before, and he was clearly so deeply asleep he had not been disturbed by my shouting his name. I offered a quick prayer of gratitude, tucked him in a little better, and went to tell my neighbor to call off the search. And I have to say, her little re-con team actually looked slightly disappointed. Looking for a kid who could be dead in a ditch was WAY more exciting than selling lemonade. I have to admit, I did tell a little white lie. I told her he had been hiding in the house, in my room. I just did not have to heart to tell her that the whole time he had been asleep. In my bed. Next to me. What a lame mom. Good thing I didn't call 911. I'm sure they would have been largely unimpressed by my story, my mothering skills, and, of course, my housekeeping skills. Maybe it was a good thing that a construction crew had accidentally cut our neighborhood phone lines. And it looks like the ice-cream man was not, after all, a crazed child molester who likes to kidnap little boys. He's clearly just a guy trying to make a buck off of our children's sugar addictions. Go figure. So, let's be grateful for safe children, and, um, make your beds, ladies. Otherwise you could lose a person in there.
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8/14/2006

Giants in my Garden

When I planted the sunflowers, I was thinking along these lines: Or even something like this: I did not anticipate coming home to this, after a 2 week garden hiatus: Here's another picture with a shovel in it, just to give you some perspective: The Wiz says she can't even tell they are sunflowers, that they just look like big weird green things. My point exactly. I might also point out that even though the shovel doesn't give the greatest perspective, these big green weird things that are supposed to be beautiful sunflowers also happen to be about 12 feet tall. I guess caterpillars don't like sunflowers.
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8/13/2006

Knock Knock Hell

Here's some jokes I'll bet The Wiz's 6 Million Dollars you've never heard before: Knock Knock Who's there? Eye. Eye who? Eye BALL! BWAHAHAHAHAHAH Knock Knock Who's there? Chicken. Chicken Who? Chicken LITTLE! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH Knock Knock (sigh) Who's there? Chicken. Chicken who? Chicken CHICKEN! And that last one sent my son into spasmodic giggles for at least a minute. I mean, chicken CHICKEN, right after he said Chicken LITTLE? It doesn't get any better than that! Oh please, all ye older and wiser and more experienced mommies, please tell me it DOES get better than that, because if I have to spend another hour in the car listening to jokes like the above, I may just have to shoot myself. We have officially entered the "endless bad and meaningless jokes" stage of life, and I'm pleading for help. How do you teach your child that "chicken CHICKEN!" is not actually a joke? It's not that I'm a humor Nazi, not really. Ok, so I do think that fart jokes aren't actually all that amusing, but beyond that, usually I'm good. But hours of knock knock jokes while we were schlepping our son all over the country these past few weeks gets a little wearing. I suppose I could look at it as 4 year old revenge, some sort of toddler payback for forced time spent on an airplane with no liquids (yeah, that's a post in and of itself, but we just won't go there). If so, my kid could teach the government a lot about torture. In fact, I'm surprised that the CIA doesn't take more notes from parenting classes about how to inflict maximum pain. So, how do you teach humor? Are there books I should get? Shows I should watch? A spear I can impale myself on when the never-ending onslaught of "Mom, say "Knock Knock!" starts? Lemme know. Knock Knock Who's there? Mommy Mommy who? Mommy in a straight jacket WHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
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8/08/2006

Mom pockets

Yesterday I pulled from my pants pocket 2 candy wrappers, a crumpled, half-eaten Power Bar, a plastic frog, and a rock that I had been told was "very special". The other pocket had a stick (aka power sword light saber) and some sunscreen. Moms--what's in your pockets? And please note: I did not eat the other half of the Power Bar. I have no idea who consumed it, or even where it came from. I can only hope my progeny did not pick it up off the ground, lick it, let the dog have a taste, and then wipe his boogers on it before he deposited it in my clothing. But, like I said, I can only hope.
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8/07/2006

I can't wait to be a Grandma

Back from vacation with the in-laws. Whew! It was a great time, as usual, and it's always good for J to spend some time with his grandparents he doesn't see very often. But during the course of the vacation, which consisted of hanging out in a condo on a lake for a week and doing various water related activities (I know, it's hard having a life where you have to spend a week water skiiing and the like, but somebody's got to do it!), I noticed some differences between how I was spending my vacation, and how my MIL was spending hers. And I've decided I totally want to be a grandma. Check it out. Mommy spent the week sleeping on a lumpy mattress on the floor with a wiggling child who I swear grew two more legs and twelve more elbows in the middle of the night, all of which attacked me on and off for about 5 hours. I'm surprised I'm not more bruised. Grandma spent the night in a big bed, with nary a child's limb in sight. Mommy had to try and keep her child nourished and hydrated, which mostly consisted of me trotting after the child with a hopeful look, a bottle of water, and a PBJ. Grandma doled out a steady stream of M&M's. Mommy had to make sure her child, aka fairest child in the universe, doesn't get sunburned from the mountain sun and nonstop water fun, which again consisted of me trotting after him with a hopeful look and a bottle of Neutrogena sunscreen. Grandma ate popsicles with him in the shade. And, of course, in the name of water safety and keeping the overall grossness factor down, Mommy had to make sure her child wiped his bum well and showered on a fairly regular basis (read: more than once the entire week), which usually consisted of shared bathroom time all week. Grandma got to poop alone. No wonder people say being a grandparent is the reward for parenthood. I'm ready to rent some grandkids, just for the fun of it.
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