Tag Archives: Parenting

Three Reasons I Have the Best Kid Ever

Posted on August 2, 2011 | 5 comments

I don’t talk a lot about the reasons why Emily is the best kid ever.  (And before you convince yourself that I am already screwing up the new kid in-utero, know that we have addressed this.  Em will be the “best kid ever” and Baby D, as Mike as dubbed him/her will be “the best baby ever.”)  But damn that kid slays me daily.

I have found myself, at sixteen weeks pregnant, smack dab in the midst of “no longer first semester crippling tired” but still exhausted.   Definitely pregnant looking, not just fat as hell, but not yet  comfortable with the emerging pregnant body that I had somehow managed to totally forget was going to appear. And so hormonally driven to the point that when I got home from work yesterday evening and MQD was making dinner and  turned to switch his ipod over to The Gravy Boys, playing Happy, a song we danced to at our wedding I pulled my hands back from him (hands he’d taken in his, lovingly, presumably to dance with me) screeching “I have BANANA on my hands, I can smell it!  It’s disgusting.”  I’m a peach recently.  (And incapable of linear thought, evidently, but stay with me. )

So, that’s me the last few days. I sing the praises of the Husband on the regular, like a proper newlywed, but back to Emily.  That kid has kept my cranky at bay quite a bit lately.  Last night, amidst my grumpiness, we snuggled up on the couch the three,  (four, no five, cats and dogs love sharks, who knew!) to watch some Shark Week.  I promptly fell in to a catatonic sleep.  I could hear Em & MQD go upstairs to read a book and get her tucked in to bed.  I could hear MQD come back downstairs and go in the kitchen.  I was willing myself up off the couch to deliver my kiss goodnight and failing miserably when I heard her little feet coming down the stairs.

Anyone with children knows they sound like a herd of elephants when they walk around the house (pitter patter of little feet, my ass) unless they are returning downstairs after being put to bed.  Then they are quiet as mice.  The magic of being a parent allows me to sleep through being stepped on by the dog, sat on by my 40 pound kid and Shark Week “turned up to 11” and still sit upright when I hear the little lady has popped out of bed and is sneaking down the stairs.  Just as I started to say “Em, go back to bed, I am coming right up” I see her face. Something about her eyes stops me and I don’t say a word.  She puts her arms around my neck and said “You’re so tired, mama, just go to bed.  I came down here to get my hug and kiss.  See you in the morning, now you get some sleep.”

Determined to stay grumpy I stumbled towards the bedroom.  As soon as I lay down, however, I smiled.  That kid.  She is kinder than I even aspire to be.

In keeping with the spirit of my Bad Mood That Will Not Cease I developed a crippling hangover style headache about five minutes after I went to bed last night.  So, I got up, grabbed an ice pack and hit the couch.  MQD had (again, lovingly, dammit this family is making me look like an asshole!) joined me in bed to hold my hand, asking me “Is there anything I can do?” moments before falling promptly to sleep.  He can fall asleep in record time.  Quite possibly even faster than Fisher.  There is nothing more irritating than being tired, incapable of falling asleep and surrounded by slumbering loved ones.  And besides, only when everyone is asleep can I watch truly shitty television in secrecy.  And eat ice cream from the container.

All of that to say when I woke up this morning I wasn’t thrilled to be awake.  After just  a handful of hours of fitful sleep I pried my eyes open to say goodbye to MQD before he left for work.  “Is Em up?” I asked  “Yep.  I brushed her hair.  She is putting away her laundry.”  Music to my ears!!

Not only do I have the kindest child on earth, I also seem to have spawned a kid that loves to organize.  When she was overtired after a trip to Disney and a a few long days on vacation, what did she do?  Retire to her room to organize her suitcase.  When she is cranky from a long day at the pool and no nap where does she run off to?  Her room, to organize her markers.  While some parents might awake on a Saturday to the sound of silence, bolt out of bed and run to find their kid, dreading the disaster they will most surely find, I wake up late on a Saturday to find her cleaning her room.

I popped my head in to her room before jumping in the shower to see her smiling, organizing her socks.  “This top drawer gets so messy.  Before I put away my laundry it needs to be more organized.”

She is kind.  She is tidy.  Reasons one and two Em is the best kid ever.    Reason number three is short and sweet.  That kid is funny.

I was in the bathroom putting my make up on when she came up the stairs, slapping her knee and shaking her head.  When she was three or four  I taught her to say “a real knee-slapper” in response to someone’s joke. Probably around the same time I taught her to roll her eyes, when I first began to believe sarcasm was a quality to be cultivated in a child.  She still rolls her eyes, much to my chagrin.  But she also still slaps her knee, much to my delight.  So, knee slapping away, she is coming up the stairs.  “What’s so funny?”

“How many times do you think Fisher had breakfast today?”  I pause,  unsure of when the punchline is coming.  “Well… Two!  maybe even three!!  I fed him while you were in the shower.  I just saw he is eating AGAIN, so you must have fed him when you went downstairs to get dressed.   Oh man, I bet Dad fed him this morning, too…” and she strolls back into her room to finish tidying up, giggling to herself.

It was not particularly funny, the dog eating twice, possibly three times this morning.  It was her delivery.  She could give a rat’s ass if I thought it was funny.  She was amused.  She shared. But mostly it was for her.  Cracking herself up.  Just for her own entertainment.  Takes after her mother.

Em is a delightful reminder.  Be kind.  Clean up after yourself.  And most importantly, entertain yourself.  No one else is as funny as you.


Unless you live with these clowns.  These two make me happy I never get rid of the crap in my “costume box.”  Silver lamé and a fur buff make for some pretty hard core fun.

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Wish upon a star…

Posted on July 26, 2011 | 14 comments

Sometimes there is enough swirling about in the head and the heart that the only way to make sense of it is to write it all down and see what comes out.  And sometimes there aren’t really words to express what is brewing in there.

In 1976 I sat on my grandfather’s lap.

In ’79, maybe ’80 I liked to sit in his office that smelled like maraschino cherries and paper.

Somewhere around 1982 I fully understood we were not allowed to sit in his car unless we had washed our hands.  It was 1987 before I knew for sure he could not rub a penny in to his forearm and pull a dime out of my ear.  But only 1985 when I figured out how to make the “butterfly” fly away and come back again.

Pop-Pop took a spill recently, not the first of them, and I daresay if he can get himself up and at it again it will not be the last.    But as I rounded the corner at the nursing home to see him on his exercise bike I smiled.  He had an orange exercise bike in his basement office on Long Island.  It was the first exercise bike I had ever seen.  I tried to keep that smile on my face as I got the words out of my mouth “Pop-Pop, it’s Kelly…” not knowing if he’d recognize me.

He smiled at me.  And at first I thought I’d made it up that he looked a little exasperated with me for introducing myself.  But over the remainder of my visit he smirked when Mom told him I was pregnant, and “having a baby.”  As if to suggest that “of course I was pregnant with a BABY, Sherlock.”  He comes and goes, in and out.  Tired.  But in the moments that he is 100% there he is exactly the grandfather I had my whole life.  He responds to everything you say with a sly smile and a joke that makes you laugh even if you’re not positive it was not at your expense.

I wanted two things out of visiting him.  I wanted him to know that we were there and for him to meet Em.  And I wanted Em to meet him.  She dutifully showed him his own butterfly trick.  The magic trick he had taught me.  Although he had the resolve to wait until I’d figured out how he did it for the most part before he showed me.

He knew we were there.   We were leaving and he looked at Emily with those blue eyes that are as blue today as they have ever been and kinda snarled at her and laughed and suggested that she put her “dukes up”  and I laughed and said “Oh, now he wants to pick a fight with you, while we are leaving, Em!”  He smiled again before he closed his eyes and drifted back to wherever he goes when right now is too tiring, too painful, too… right now.   But before he closed his eyes she giggled.  And I knew she got to really meet him.

In the middle of our trip we did the only thing that makes sense to do.  I am sure I am not alone in the opinion that a nursing home can feel like one of the most difficult, most challenging… saddest places on earth.  So where do you go to balance things out?  Disney World, of course.

There was a moment during a show in front of Cinderella’s Castle that I turned to look at Emily.  I snapped a quick picture and I wish I had gotten one of myself.  I think I looked roughly the same.  Only I had big, fat tears rolling down my face.  Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Belle, spinning around the stage singing “Dreams really do come true…” it was too much for this sappy girl.

I haven’t written much about MQD’s and my wedding or about the overwhelming sense of joy I feel every time I am reminded that I am pregnant.  There just really aren’t any words.  Emily’s face in this moment… like she is looking at something that  is absolutely 100 % everything she dreamed it would be.  That’s how I feel every morning lately.

I was painfully aware of this all weekend.  I made it.  To the part where my  dreams come true.  And somehow I can’t stop thinking about anything but that if I don’t slow down and feel it… I’ll blink my eyes and be reaching out to hold the hand of my great grandchildren before I know it.  If I’m lucky…

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Emily Explains It All

Posted on July 18, 2011 | 12 comments

Clarissa she is not.  But Em is in the know.

There is a lot going on in her five year old life, and she is taking it all in stride. With the impending arrival of a sibling there has been plenty of talk of babies and new life.  I let her watch The Business of Being Born not too awful long ago and she ate it up.   She is curious and occasionally worried about me.  I think she is right at the age where she can grasp just enough information to make her want more but not she is not quite ready to wrap her mind around the rest.  MQD and I are perfecting the art of simply answering the question that was posed.  Not too much information, not too little. We  will be the Goldilocks of Sex Ed by the time it is all said and done.

About half of the time Em opens her mouth it starts with “Can I tell you   something?”  So yesterday in the car when she asked that very question it didn’t prepare MQD or I for what was coming.  “Did you know you will actually have to watch your wife?  Actually have a baby out her vagina?”

This is when I started furiously typing on my phone.  Typically advice that Em dispenses is good.  But the advice she gives MQD where she refers to me as “your wife” is classic.  “And this is important to know.  It is serious.  It might hurt Mom a little bit.”

And for dramatic effect she begins to get choked up… “And it will come out of her vagina like magic.  And you might be a little nervous, Dad. And a little excited.  I’m just telling you.  It is important that you know this stuff.  You might start crying.  And maybe we can at least read my baby books.  I have two baby books.  We can read them so you will know how it is.”

I had tears running down my face from laughter.  I just want to make sure I get in the right line at the midwife’s office.  I want the magical vaginal delivery, please.

Sadly, all conversation this weekend was not about Life.

I am not counting weekends between now and the middle of January yet. I don’t need to. It won’t be long before MQD has a shared Google spreadsheet “Things to Do Before Baby” with budgeted amounts of time and money in their  own columns.    But my Cook and Clean genes have been in overdrive.  And I can feel the Becky Home-Eccy in me taking over.

My keen sense of smell had me in a frenzy again on Sunday.  I woke up early, as I always do when I don’t need to actually go anywhere.  I read in bed until  7:45 when my “Take Vitamin” alarm went off on my phone.  I realized I should probably go upstairs and make sure Em was still alive.    As I ran up the stairs I had the “I smell CAT PEE” shakes.  I hoped it was the litter box with a fresh deposit.  But as I hit the top of the stairs I knew I was wrong.  As soon as I stopped at the landing and looked towards the guest room I knew.

Before the “I smell CAT PEE” frenzy took hold I did open Em’s door.  To find her naked and cleaning her room. “What are you doing?”

“Well, I woke up really early and I figured if I cleaned my whole room right away it would make you really happy.  And then we can just do fun stuff the rest of the day.”  Girl after my 0wn heart.  Her room was damn near immaculate.  But  even a total lack of legos on the floor, even all dress up clothes in the toy box, all markers in their box WITH lids was not enough to stop the CAT PEE frenzy.

A month ago it was on our bed.  Cat pee.  But maybe one of the cats got locked in the bedroom?   Last week it was cat pee on the couch.  But it was on a quilt, and easily washed, and perhaps since I had stopped nagging MQD about the  litter box it hadn’t been dumped this week?  And now it was in the guest room.

I turned to go back down the steps and stopped two steps down to open the window at the top of the stairs.   I sniffed and dropped to my knees.  And smelled CAT PEE.  On the landing. When you are pregnant and already striking the pose of a keening old woman it is tempting to throw your arms in the air and begin to wail.  I mean, in case anyone was filming a Lifetime movie about this poor woman and the CAT PEE I really ought to give them their money shot, right?   But I’d have had to bury my head in my arms.  On the cat pee carpet.  And I just couldn’t be bothered  Lifetime movie or no.

At first I was furious.  And then I thought we’d just have to bring another litter box upstairs, if Stan can’t make it down the steps.  And then I was broken-hearted.  If you’re not following along at home, it was a mish mash of  Kübler-Ross’ Stages of Grief.  The last being acceptance.  My sixteen year old cat that bites.  That has never been particularly friendly.  But that has lived with me in every home I have had since I was 20 years old.

She is unpleasant, as she has always been.  But she has never peed in the house.  I think it might be Time.

So, hours later, after the purchase of rubber gloves and oxy-clean and Spot Shot and Arm & Hammer carpet sprinkle…. I laid down on the carpet next to that damn cat.  And then I cried like an old woman at an Irish wake.

Stanley and I reminisced.  About the late nights on Mount Vernon Avenue in Williamsburg.  And the time she scared my roommate, Greg B, so badly that he actually called out in the middle of the night for someone to rescue him from her.  I reminded her about that creepy puppet I kept in a cabinet that she hated.  She’d stare at the cabinet for hours. Switching her tail back and forth.     We laughed about how she hid for almost two weeks in our master bedroom closet when we moved to the beach and how she hid again when we brought Em home from the hospital. I apologized for letting Fish chase her when he was a pup.  But it was so damn funny to watch her big, fat ass hiss at his tiny floppy puppy face.  And I apologized for the laser pointer shenanigans. Because that’s just really not a very nice game.

As we reminisced I realized that there isn’t much in the way of memories in the last few years.  She comes out from under the bed every now and again to holler at the youngins.  Hiss at Fisher.  She jumps in bed with Em on occasion.  But that is likely all the human touch she gets.  Since we don’t tend to hang out much under the guest room bed.

I assumed she came out to eat when we weren’t home.  Or rather I’d been hoping she was eating.  But lying on the floor surrounded by the Lysol cat pee smell I knew what I was looking at was the end.  And she bit me on the face.  And it made me laugh.  God damn that cat.  I never really liked her, even as a kitten, and now she was making me cry.

So, the latter half of the weekend we talked to Em about death.  She wants to have a party for Stan.  With cat treats.  And give her extra snuggles.  The strange conversation we had about how when someone is really, really old they  can die “any minute, right before your eyes”  is perhaps worth writing down.  But I can’t now.  I need to go ahead and call the vet while I am already crying about that god damn cat.

Stan, you’ve been my “god damn cat” for almost sixteen years.  You have seen a lot. Heart break, marriages, divorce, birth.  You have not consoled me on one single occasion.  But I knew you were around.  And I guess I got used to the idea.  That you’d always be around.  I kinda thought you’d just live forever.  It’s not the first time being wrong about something has made me cry.

Sitting in my lap on the floor in the guest room, Em put her arms around my neck and kissed me. “Mommy, we can get another kitty cat, another little girl cat.”

And with big fat heavy tears of sadness rolling down my face I hugged her back and said “Oh, no, honey.  Mommy hates cats.”

I’m gonna miss you Stanley Manley.

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My Special Purpose

Posted on July 14, 2011 | 3 comments

If you thought this would be a post about Sexy Time you will be sorely disappointed.  While The Jerk is my favorite movie of all time, sadly this morning I found that my special purpose is not so scintillating.

It seems from the moment I got pregnant I have been consumed with noting just how fast Em is growing up.  Perhaps it is my hormones driving me to see that my “baby” is really quite capable of taking care of herself, so that I can shed a little of the guilt that comes with imagining trying to take care of an infant without taking anything away from the baby I have loved for the last six years.

If I am lucky when I wake up in the morning Em is still asleep.  I revel in climbing in to bed with her and feeling her warm little body against mine.  So many years of co-sleeping behind me, I miss her morning face.  Her squinched up sleepy eyes as she awakes.  And most of all the face she makes when she realizes that I know she is awake and she can’t fool me with her groaning an stretching.  Occasionally I let her sleep in and she strolls in to the bathroom to chat with me while I shower.  And more occasionally she is already awake when I get upstairs.

This morning she was up, lights on, door closed.  This is a new thing for her, and one I am trying to respect. “Are you up, Em?”

“Yup, I’m getting dressed.”

Yesterday she received not one, but TWO new outfits in the mail from my mom AND a new pair of shoes.  New shoes are to Emily roughly what they are to me.  Nirvana.   I certainly understood why she was up and ready to roll so early.

When I got out of the shower I hollered in to her room again.  “Do your new shorts fit?”

“Yup, I just need to tighten the elastic.”  If you have children, in particular one built like a bean pole, you are familiar. But for the sake of the three readers that might be reading that do not have kids I will explain.  In most kid’s clothing these days there is elastic inside, with buttons, so as to tighten the waist to a particular size.  To accommodate the bean poles, the kids that get taller every year but no bigger around.  For this, I am grateful.

“You don’t need my help?”

She exits her bedroom, new outfit in place,  socks perfectly folded down, new shoes tied.  “Nope, I am going in three holes on each side.  Fits perfectly.”

“So you don’t need me at all, do you?  You’re all grown up?”

“No.  I need you. ” An almost imperceptible pause. “To make sandwiches.  And to pay.”

And there we have it.  My Special Purpose.  To make sandwiches.  And to pay.

Damn kid,  good thing she’s cute.

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When I Grow Up….

Posted on June 24, 2011 | 5 comments

I have written before about my struggle figuring out “what I wanted to be when I grow up.”  Rereading that now I can see that what started out as thinking on my issues with being insecure and with my body turned out to be just as much about my being comfortable with who and what I am today as it is about anything else.

What prompted  my thinking about what I wanted to be when I grow up again? Ironically, another email from a friend.  Facebook is a delight in that it allows you to stay in touch with the people that you genuinely enjoyed from other parts of your life. From not only your past, but from social and intellectual arenas that you no longer really belong to, but that you may very well still hold dear.

This is a roundabout way to say that I live vicariously through the lives of my friends from my youth that have pursued their dreams as Actors and Artists.  For so many, many years that was what I wanted.  I wanted to be an Artist, specifically an Actor.  Yup, with a capital letter A.   Many of my close friends have asked me when I lost the bug.  Or when I stopped thinking about it… and I don’t really know when it happened.  I know it makes me get choked up now, like thinking about falling out of love with someone.  To me there is nothing more heartbreaking than the idea of falling out of love.  And I guess there was a moment somewhere along the way that I fell out of love with Acting.

Like most things that are hard for me to talk about I have a standard response to that question.  The “when did you stop wanting to do theatre” question.  “When I realized I loved wallpaper.”  Somewhere inside me I knew that I didn’t have the “it” that makes that life a real possibility.  I didn’t want it more than anything else.  I wanted wallpaper.

Wallpaper is not permanent.  But I’d guess that anyone that has ever sworn and sweat their way through an afternoon with a steamer and a trowel knows that removing wallpaper is about as pleasant as a divorce.  It sucks.  And the whole time you are thinking “why the fuck didn’t I just paint?”

I know now that my “wallpaper” was marriage.  And a Family.  (See how Family gets an uppercase letter, just like Artist.  That makes me smile, that I think it deserves one now.  I didn’t always.)

Recently I have been feeling more and more comfortable with who and what I am.  In part because I have been so fortunate in recent years to feel more joy than sorrow, certainly.  But also because I have come to peace with the fact that this Family that I enjoy, this delicious new husband and this incredible daughter, they take work.  And sacrifice.  And love.  And sweat.  And swearing, just like wallpaper.  And just like Art.   It’s nothing to be ashamed of, this goal.  This Family.

So, when an old friend, a friend from college who has no idea that I poke my nose in to her facebook pictures and look longingly at her insanely gorgeous headshots and laugh until I cry at her youtube videos, wrote me recently and said “you are such a beautiful mommy…..honestly, i sneak peeks at you and sweet emily all the time on fbook”  I cried.  Because this woman that I admire, that I secretly wanted to be when I grew up even when we were twenty-two  years old and drinking 40 ounce beers while we water-colored our Costume Design final exams… she said she sneak peeks at me.  And what she sees is a beautiful mommy.

And it made me cry.  Because I smiled and thought “god damn right, I am.”  And I was proud.  That, my friends, is progress.

Thank you, Nina.  You just get more and more fabulous.

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I scream, you scream….

Posted on June 10, 2011 | 2 comments

Yesterday was hard.  My baby is growing up.    But when she burst in to tears because the restaurant we were in “FOR MY SPECIAL DAY” did not have pancakes … I smiled on the inside. And we got up, and we left.  And we went to Elmo’s.

Where they have pancakes.  And milkshakes.

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Day 84: Plant a seed…

Posted on June 9, 2011 | 9 comments

Today plant an apple core in a park and come back in 20 years to check on your tree.

Par for the course lately… I accomplished day 84’s challenge, in a round about way.  I got up early this morning and took Fish out for a walk.  A typical day includes Fisher tagging along to work with me so he was flummoxed when I peeled him out of bed at 7 am.  I grabbed an apple on my way out the door.

Ordinarily I listen to a book while I take a walk but this morning I needed a minute to gather my thoughts.

I managed to juggle a dog leash (stuffed in my sports bra!  Hey, now!  My boobs nourished a child for three and a half years AND they walk my dog! Amazing!!) a cup of coffee and an apple  core.  I’d planned on planting my apple core somewhere along my walk today.  And as I knelt down next to the edge of some trees and dug a little hole with my foot I wondered if I’d be here to come check on “my tree” in twenty years as the book suggested.

And then I started to cry.  Because this was only the first seed that would  be planted today.  My little girl “graduates” from pre-school today.  She is excited.  She has practiced her song “My Future’s So Bright” complete with shades, of course. (Em is the second bobbing head from the left, in the back row!)  She has picked out an outfit.  She has expressed her malcontent with continuing to go to pre-school for the remainder of the summer “because it makes no sense, I have GRADUATED!” She is ready.

Again I am left to wonder how it is that I have prepared her for yet another transition and failed to prepare myself at all.  With each passing milestone of her childhood I am surprised all over again that it has crept up on me and yet seems to have come all but too slow for her liking.

I see in her a determination that I envy.  We have been hard at work on swimming this summer.  Our new pool requires the kids swim a length of the pool in order to go down the tube slide.  From the day we found out she has been practicing.  And rapidly, fearlessly improving.  It is not just the former swimming teacher in me that swells with pride.  She is convinced daily that “Today I will pass that test!”  and is not defeated when she climbs out of the pool to head home for dinner with the knowledge that it might take “one or two more practices.”

I know it is not unusual for a kid to be convinced of their inevitable success.  Each child at graduation this morning held up a picture of what they were going to be “when they grew up.”  Doctors, teachers, ballerinas, veterinarians, mothers, a samurai, Darth Vader and a Superman.  Not one of them said “I’m going to live in my parent’s basement and wait tables until this crappy temp job turns permanent.”  Children are hopeful by design.  But I can’t help but feel a sense of accomplishment when I see how completely convinced she is of her success and happiness.

Emily has seen more sadness in me than I ever hoped to share with her.  But when I see her so certain that it will all work out for her, I know that she has not only noted my sadness and my struggles.  She has seen me relentlessly pursue that which will bring a smile to face, even when the journey took much longer than I had hoped.  She has seen me grow in to the woman that knows she deserves nothing short of a dream come true.

I thought I would be overwhelmed with how big she seemed today.  But instead I just kept looking at her little face.  Her nose is the same as when she was born.  Her fingers, though longer, still curl around mine just as they did when she was only a few days old.  Her skin, even peppered with bug bites and scrapes, still feels brand new.

I may not return to the corner where I planted an apple seed this morning.  But I will be here to see the seed that was planted today at graduation  grow.  I knew someday I’d put my arm around her, pulling her close to me, my eyes intently focused on the camera as if the camera could make that moment last forever.    I knew someday she’d pull away, her focus on where she was headed, not where she had been… but I had no idea she would still be so very small.

 

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Posted in Family, Parenting, This Book Will Change Your Life

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So, Dad…

Posted on March 23, 2011 | 4 comments

So, Em has decided she wants to call Mike “Dad” after we get married. Daddy will stay Daddy and Mike can be Dad. It’s pretty cute. The other night I asked her if that was still her plan. She says “yup.” Mike says “You can try it out if you want, see how it sounds.” She rolls her eyes and says “Well, what would I say?” Mike says “Whatever you want…”

She pauses for dramatic effect…. “Dad, can I get a tattoo?”

I almost fell out of my chair.

He is in so much trouble.

 

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Day 79: Become an Expert on Today

Posted on March 22, 2011 | 2 comments

Today’s challenge is the kind of challenge I enjoy when I am feeling overwhelmed.   It seems like the rest of my universe has lots of Big Tasks to be completed.  Big Tasks, comprised of tiny little tasks, some of which are in my head, some of them on scraps of paper, many of them on lists on my phone, on calendars with alarms attached, some of them existing only in my heart.  Sometimes you need a simple directive.

Day 79:  Become an expert  on today. A quick trip to Wikipedia’s entry about the 22nd day of March has me feeling like I learned a fair amount.  And isn’t that what qualifies a person as an expert these days?  A quick google search on the subject?

In doing my research I got sidetracked, as one is apt to do… On March 22, 1978 Karl Wallenda of the Flying Wallendas died.  He fell from a tight-rope.

If you weren’t raised in my house you probably didn’t think about the Flying Wallendas all that often.  But we were big on the circus as kids, and even bigger on jumping out of trees in the back yard.  I know I have asked Em to get down from somewhere, asking her if she “thinks she is one of the Flying Wallendas?”

I’m going to call it a day.  If knowing that Karl Wallenda died on March 22 isn’t enough to make me an expert, then I don’t wanna be one.

On another day I might have kept reading… but I kinda feel like I have a lot of shit already figured out.  I might not really be an expert on March 22.  but I am an expert on crying.  I am emotional, wildly so, some might say.  And yesterday someone I love dearly had a moment in time where he realized, or perhaps only remembered,  the tremendous joy that one can feel in just letting those big, fat tears roll down your face.  And my heart was full and I felt like the smartest woman alive.  Because I already knew that.  It’s not fair to only let the tears escape when you can’t hold them in, when they are welling up deep from grief or despair.  The sweetest tears are those that surprise you.  The tears that come from a place of joy and of love.  It’s easy to forget that these tears exist.  And if you spend too long trying to contain your tears they are the first to elude you.

If this was handwritten there’d be big, fat splotches of tears on the page here.  Because my life changed irrevocably on March 22nd, 2010.  I don’t think it was an accident that I sat down to write this today.  MQD, Em and I spent the first night in our home together on March 22.  It was months before he proposed.  And more than  a year before we will be wed.  But to me… and I believe to him… it was the no turning back moment.  It was the day we became a family.  Granted we are no family of flying Wallendas. But I think we bring a certain something to the party.

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Posted in Family, Parenting, This Book Will Change Your Life, Wedding Planning

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The Poop Game

Posted on October 21, 2010 | Leave a comment

Today is picture day at school.  Last night Em and I were practicing her “Picture Day” smile.  She has a smile that she only does when she thinks someone is about to take her picture.  It is a smile best described by the terms smarmy and shit-eating.  In an effort to produce a picture from school that will be loved by all and not simply her grandparents I thought we’d try to come up with a system for inducing a “real smile.”

Last night after dinner we all read the entire Hammacher Schlemmer catalog.  The kind of catalog reading where you go through page by page and you all take turns  picking out what you’d buy on each page.  Somewhere along the way Em decided she’d choose an item she wanted and an item she needed.  From this I learned she has no idea what the difference is between want and need.   I also learned that MQD is apparently freezing.  If it heats up he wants it.  Heated Gloves, heated socks, heated vest, electric blanket … you name it, heat it up and MQD will pick that item. This makes me so happy.  It is important to me to try to pick out gifts for my loved ones that they’ll really appreciate.  And I am so happy to know that as we drift on towards our golden years together I will always be able to find a Christmas present in the “I have no idea what else to get you” pre-wrapped section in the front of the department store.

It was a nice evening.  I like those nights where we all sit at the table after a meal and we “chit-chat,” as Em calls it.  It makes me feel like we are doing something right.  Like we are building a family that enjoys spending time together.  So it was in this vein of feeling all “aren’t we a damn fine family” that I started the conversation with Emily about her “Picture Day” smile. Sometimes in the middle of “parenting” I accidentally forget that she will repeat everything I say. And when I said “So when the photographer says “Cheese” what face are you gonna make?  Really?  That face?  Ok, how about this when they say “Cheese” I want you to think POOP!”

And this is where it gets hairy.  I can’t exactly remember if I said “think POOP” or “yell POOP.”  I know when we were doing it last night and trying to make a serious face while the other person yelled “POOP,” taking turns cracking each other up, we were definitely not just thinking it in our heads.   And this morning when she said about four minutes after waking up “Mom, let’s play the POOP game” she did not indicate that she was going to merely “think” the word.  So, yeah… “Picture Day” might be a real gas.

For the record, that’s my kid in the class photo.  The one that yelled “POOP” after the photographer said “Cheese.”  And yup, that’s the reason every single kid in that picture is smiling.

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