er-hem

I'm a messy desk keeper.

Who me? I am here. I know, barely. But I've been here all along. Lurking around. Checking in every few months. Pretending this blog didn't exist for weeks at a time. I was doing a really good job at it.

But I set goals, too, you know. And this here blog, this here blog that's seven years old (a second grader!), its a goal of mine this year. Call it a resolution, if you must, but I'm working hard at getting back to the things that make me happy, and if I need to be strategic about it, so be it.

So. This year (2013. And my birthday? 2/13. I'm calling it kismet. I'm calling it a sign. I'm calling it the Age of Aquarius. And I'm calling it, right now, do you hear me? MINE.) is going to be all about these things:

1. Good jobs that make me feel fulfilled and happy and invested in my neighborhood.
2. Lady Mentors.
3. My backyard.
4. Best friends, near and far.
5. The best boys (they are mine, sorry).
6. Photographs (iphone and camera+ count).
7. Words.
8. Only good tv.
9. Working hard, and making it look (and feel) like the other way around.

xo

What works...

So. We've been experimenting, adapting, rolling with punches. Some things work. Some don't. What seems to be working well enough that we stick with it:

• Five minute warnings. Two minute warnings. Count to ten (twenty when we're feeling generous) countdowns.
• Asking (sometimes repeatedly against resistance) "Would you like to walk, or do I need to carry you?" 
• When the above doesn't work, suggesting, "Well, you're showing me that you need to be carried."
• Presenting two choices at pajama time. 
• Explaining that we all have "chores." Daddy works outside. Mama is a laundry maid. Arlo puts away train tracks. 
• We have some non-negotiable "rules." Most of them involve not inflicting bodily harm, or moving one's body or things in a manner that could possibly inflict bodily harm, on other people. We do a lot of reminding (and "a lot" can often mean five times in thirty minutes).
• But what's working most of all: predictability. Not just a routine, but a rhythm. And not just implied, but collectively decided upon, and stated implicitly.
  
  Enter The Day Chart. 

Now, you should know that this stems from me, a person who manages two day planners and a phone calendar. I have a sickness. Like President Bartlet, I need to know "What's next?"  But I was noticing daily breakdowns around what we were doing. What day it was. Do we visit with friends today, or go to the park? Does Mama have to work today, or do we go to Toddle Tunes? And why oh why do we have to eat lunch now? We do manage to keep our days simple, at least we try to, but still we ran up against walls.

I had noticed that having a simple conversation was helping, but still naptime would wipe all memory away. I had an idea to get a board like they have in preschools, but that royal blue pocketed thing I found at Lakeshore was ugly and not something I wanted in my house.

Enter Target and their dorm collection. This green board is really a magnetized white dry erase board. Only, I wasn't so excited about the smelly dry erase markers. But the board was on sale at Target, so even though I wasn't quite sure what to do next, it was less than $8, so in the cart it went.

Andy helped me with the next bit. I was obsessing over where to find magnet paper (do they even make such a thing?), when he pointed out all of the magnet advertisements we had stuck to the side of our fridge. Old veterinarians, calendars from a nearby plumber, etc. Then we found some index cards. Andy helped me peel the laminate off of the magnets, like so.

And then we trimmed the index cards to fit the trimmed magnets.

Lastly, after having drawn the activity on the card, we glued them to the magnet. 

All told, we made a handful. Months, Weather, and about twelve activities. I bought the days of the week (also at Target), before Andy had his great idea. So they don't match the rest of it, but it was still a good idea: it took me way too long to finish all of these, and by the time I was done, I was way over it. I didn't have seven days left in me.

Every night, after dinner, we take them all out and make up the next day's chart. Its the third thing he asks for every morning (Lincoln and Milk being the first two).

All told, turns out Arlo is as OCD as me and President Bartlet. It works! What's next?

well.

well, oh my. so. time, as you see, has flown.

arlo turned two. then two and one month. then two and two months. and now, we are nearly at the end of july. two and three months, here we come.

here's a weird thing about toddler-dom and the state of my life: though this is very likely the most chaotic time of life yet with arlo, i somehow feel like, for the first time in over two years, that i have the hang of this. yes, its a huge ton of juggling. work for this three hours, get him to nap for those two hours, clean and tidy for those three hours. the laundry. lunches not eaten. dinners dumped. and oh! the things that are thrown (oh my god, the things that are thrown).

make no mistake: its hard, its grueling. by 10pm most nights (if i'm still awake) i about want to die. there always seem to be two bags packed: one for me to head to the office, one for arlo to head about anywhere. my showers are brief. my sleep is heavy and hard. i have learned how to walk very quietly during naptime. i have learned to appreciate geriatric speed dinner (starts at 6pm, ends by 6:30). i pray before trips to the grocery store, and have been for sure seen running out of target, arlo in tow, to give him a talking-to on the bench outside. but also: he's so funny. and can be excruciatingly sweet. and his love of pie is admirable and steadfast. so, you know, we make do. i breathe deeply, in the rare moments when i can (i have found, and this is surprising to me, that i am not often able to do that. this is probably a really big problem, i'm sure). i do a lot of eye rolling. i kvetch with my clutch of fellow moms.

but here's the weird thing: the house has really rarely been cleaner. laundry is done twice a week. i have not yet missed  a deadline for work (though the last time we got closer than i ever want to be again). between nap and nighttime, arlo is sleeping an average of 12 hours a day, he's grown three inches since february, and he can count til twenty (though sometimes not necessarily in order).

and its summer. i'll be around here more often, i hope. keep checking.

22 Months

 

You are getting bigger and bigger and the thought of it - the observance and recognition of it - freezes me sometimes. It renders me still, mouth closed, listening. It seems impossible, you this big. And then the thought, just the thought makes me roll my eyes with its predictability, with its sentiment. But still. You were once, so tiny, so tiny and lavender and rubbery and screaming. 

And now: you sit in my chair to eat lunch, and you ask me for a fork.

Last week, you began to push away from me at night time, and point down the hall. "Bed," you told me.

Yesterday, you were hard at work at your play kitchen, putting toy carrots into a toy pot and then in your toy oven. Then you pretend-washed your hands in the sink, saying "soap" repeatedly as you pretend-lathered. When you turned on the faucet, you said, "psssshhhhhh." Andy asked you if your carrots were ready. You opened the oven, checked, looked back up at him and said, "Almost."

I have had a stomach ache for a week. Not like I ate something bad. Not indigestion. Its high up there, right under my ribs, where it ached persistently the last few weeks of my pregnancy. "You've got a small torso," my Dr. told me then, shaking his head sympathetically. But its not that, either. Its the pain of the temporary. The pain that comes with the sudden realization that, no matter what it seems, this will not last. This too, will soon be over. 

You sit across from me, stabbing bits of mango with your fork. You look at me out of the corner of your eye and you laugh and laugh and laugh. Sometimes, in the middle of playing, you look up at me, and start making noises, shaking your head, gesturing into the air. Then you fall apart laughing, slapping your leg, bending at the waist. You look at me, waiting out my reaction, seeing how I fancied your story. Arlo, I love them already.

another girl, another planet*

A couple of recent conversations have been haunting me. actually, one conversation constructed, one off-the-cuff facebook post, and one weeks-long obsession.

here: a few weeks ago, i saw that an old friend of mine, Sam, who was once my roommate, and now has a 3 year old son, commented on a facebook photo book of my son. "So awesome to see pictures of you and your little one," he said. "It's the best thing, isn't it?"

Admittedly, I don't think I was having one of my "its the best thing" days. But truthfully, I probably wasn't having one of my "What on God's green earth was I thinking, having sex, ever?!" days, either. It was, likely, just a day. And the days, they are sometimes long. So I dashed off a response, not thinking much about it at all: "Sam, it's like moving to another planet."

Within minutes - MINUTES - 3 friends had liked my comment. The first, a friend since Jr. High, and one of my first friends to be a mom. She's one of my effing heroes and, since a tempestuous relationship with authority, has returned to school and is killing it in math class. The second was a friend from High School. She lists her occupation as, "Executive Bogey Chaser at Chez [redacted]." The last was a more recent friend, the wife of a dear almost-family friend of Andy's. After some hairy struggles, she and her wife finally had a beautiful Isaac six months ago. Her Facebook occupation says, "Isaac's mom at the [blank] residence." So. Obviously, these are my people. 

The weight of my comment didn't really strike me until after it struck them. And then I sat there: stunned. Ohmyfuckinggod, I thought. While it would be nice to think that I've evolved, while it would be nice to think that I've matured, while it would be nice to think that some magic mommy dust fell on my head and turned me into some beatific mama goddess...none of that has happened. What happened instead belongs in some random attack of the body snatchers movie.

A few days later, I was at our weekly toddler group; a collection of women and babies that Arlo and I have known since he was just months old. Now: I have not been through a war. I have watched Saving Private Ryan, and that World War II series on HBO and the assorted Ken Burns documentary. I've read more than my share of Tim O'Brien books. But truthfully, the closest thing I've come to a foxhole, was late spring 2010, when Arlo was an infant. I was functioning on small bursts of sleep, never more than 2 hours at a time. Andy was working, both my mom and grandmother were trading flus, and here I had this teeny tiny baby that the world somehow expected me to keep alive, all while keeping myself alive, as well. I was never clean. I was losing my hair. I was literally afraid to leave the house. I was living on catnaps, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and baby smell. I sat most of the day, hunkered on the couch in milk stained clothing, holding Arlo. Some days, I never put him down. I watched horrible television. I insulted Jehovah's Witnesses. I yelled at the dogs.

These women, this small group of women and babies, somehow saw through all of that to be friends with me. Mostly because they were in their own foxholes. Maybe theirs were not made of peanut butter and jelly and Perry Masons, but they were fox holes none the less. We met each friday, under the leadership of someone who really was a beatific mama goddess. We somehow saw our way out of our holes, and we held hands, girl-scout-style, and walked out into the sun, single-file. We are still friends. We will probably, thanks be to facebook, be friends for a long while yet. Some of us still meet every week.

That week, we talked about how we were different, us mamas of toddlers, than who we were once, pre-babies.  Whoa.

Lastly, and I won't go into this too much here, because this poor woman that I don't even know is taking up, along with Downton Abbey, far too much of my headspace already. I mean, she totally deserves it, as she seems to get more amazing to me with each passing day, but still.

One of the aforementioned mamas asked me a couple of months ago, "Do you read Dear Sugar?"

"What is that?" I said. "I need to know."

I did. I did need to know. Since then, every second Thursday, during Arlo's nap, I check: http://therumpus.net/sections/dear-sugar/ And, without fail, every second Thursday, during Arlo's nap, I cry. Very rarely do the problems have anything to do with me, but this woman, this Dear Sugar, can do with words what.. I don't even know. Have you ever seen Jennifer Jason Leigh act? And each eye twitch, each minute turn of her head, how it makes you ache sometimes? That's what Dear Sugar does.

Last week, on Valentine's Day, Dear Sugar shed her anonymity. It turns out she is a writer of beautiful things, and she currently lives in Portland, and she lives in my old neighborhood and her kids go to the elementary school that my old roommate used to work at, and her son was born in late April, the year that she was 35. And she wrote this: http://www.brainchildmag.com/essays/fall2008_strayed.asp , and I read it today, in bits and pieces, small moments tucked into Arlo's nap, during lunch, around grocery shopping.... I finished it in the late afternoon.

It turns out, there are more people than I thought on this planet.

It also turns out, as is to be expected, that I have to go rescue a dear Dada, and help get a too soon to be two year old out of the bath, and pajamaed and to bed. There are some other thoughts to explore, but they will have to wait, likely to be tucked into some other surreptitious moments of my future day.

I will get to it. I will.

*a song, by the band, The Only Ones (thank you, j.a.) lyrics as follows: I always flirt with death/ I could kill, but I don't care about it / I can face your threats / Stand up tall and scream and shout about it

I think I'm on another world with you / I'm on another planet with you

You always get under my skin / I don't find it irritating / You always play to win /I don't need rehabilitating

Another girl, another planet / Another girl, another planet

Space travels in my blood / And there ain't nothing I can do about it / Long journeys wear me out / Oh God we won't live without it

Another girl is loving you now / Another planet, forever holding you down / Another planet