I've often been told that I have "one of those faces." The kind of face that makes people feel free to tell me their innermost secrets. Once, while sitting on a wall in Boston Common reading a book, a man sat next to me and began to tell me how he was there for a parole hearing for his brother and that he really didn't know if he thought he should get paroled but thought his mom would want him to tell the parole people what they wanted to hear, etc. Another time, I had a woman tell me on the subway in excrutiating detail about her various surgeries. In my effort to be polite, I have been privvy to way too much information.
Last night, when Jeff got home from work, I was about one "Mommy, can I?" away from shot putting Maggie across the room. Jeff gently suggested that I leave the house, telling me that sometimes it's more fun to be around the kids when I'm not there. Never one to let pride get in the way of an escape route, I bolted some dinner and got the hell out of Dodge. Not really having a plan, I went to Kohls. I was just kind of wandering around aimlessly looking at housewares and dreaming of a day when I will have breakable things on end tables, when an employee noticed my slow progress through the aisle.
"Can I help you find something?" she asked.
"No, I'm just enjoying wandering around." I said, "I don't have any kids with me so I'm taking my time." In hindsight, I know that this was my mistake. Giving any additional information is seen as in invitation by crazy people to talk.
"How old are your kids?" she asks. I told her about my circus of kids and predictably, she tells me that I'm going to miss the days when my kids were small. "I know I will." I respond. "But right now, missing my kids sounds like fun." She then tells me that her son is 26 and she misses when he was little. Foolishly, I say, "That's a great age though, I think that's when you start to appreciate your parents." I tried to walk away, but this was the opening she had been waiting for.
"All my son wants to do is get wasted as fast as he can!" she tells me. I looked longingly for an escape route, but shifted my feet and got comfy. Cause there's really no polite way to get out of this conversation. I mean, "Sorry that your son is a wastoid, but could you tell me how much this fingerbowl costs during Kohls PowerHours?" doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. My new friend tells me about how her son was the sweetest five year old who was such a great sharer and a caring boy and now he doesn't care about anything. Her fridge was covered in his artwork. She went on and on and I tried to maintain a neutral look on my face while trying to figure out what I could say to end this conversation and get to the 70% off rack I could see out of the corner of my eye. "Maybe this is the year that he'll pull it together." I say, backing away now. She followed, hanging on my words hopefully. "I know I learned a lot more in my late 20s than I did in my early 20s." Still backing. Finally I hit the hard tile of the main aisle. "Good night, and good luck!" I say waving goodbye.
I guess I could have just not engaged with her at all. The smart thing to do would have been to just say "No" when she asked if I wanted help and then went on. But maybe, our little conversation helped her feel better about something that was obviously bothering her. I hope that I was able to at least make her night go faster. I guess I have one of those faces cause I figure that spending five minutes with a stranger isn't a total waste of time. You never know what people are going to tell you and that's kind of fun, it's like an adventure every time. I come by it honestly, my mom is the same way. Mom struck up a conversation with a man in a bar in Dewey Beach once and it turned out that it was Captain Lou Albano. But that's a whole other blog!
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Thoughts on the first days...
I have several friends who have recently had their first babies. Thinking about them with their new little baby in their house has really brought back a whole flood of memories of bringing baby Ellie home and what it was like to have our first baby.
When leaving the hospital, first Jeff had to take all the crap we'd brought with us out to the car. I can remember thinking that the nurses must have thought we were such assholes. We had a laptop, movies, CDs, books, two suitcases, and all the stuff that you steal from the hospital. I don't know why we had so much stuff, but it was as if we'd been at the hospital for a month, rather than 2 days. Jeff wheeled me and Ellie down and we all got in the car. It was raining, and warmish for January, and as we drove past the other cars on the road, my kept thinking how strange it was, our whole world had shifted on it's axis and these other people driving by had no idea. I wanted to shout at people, "Don't you know I had a baby?!?!?!"
We arrived at our townhouse and went in to introduce the dogs to Ellie. Like most childless dog owners, we had treated our pups as our kids and we were nervous about their reaction to the baby. My parents took one of Ellie's hats home from the hospital so the dogs could sniff it and get used to her smell. We had watched "Baby Story" on TLC with the dogs in the room to help them get used to the sound of a baby. We carefully planned our arrival home so that Jeff would walk in without the baby and greet the dogs, so that they wouldn't feel "replaced." In a nutshell, we forgot while treating our dogs as children that they are, in fact, dogs and they really don't give a crap about a new baby in the house unless it affects mealtime.
I remember arriving home, putting the carrier on a chair and wondering, "okay, now what?" My mother was staying with us and had already been at the house for a couple days, so it was in pristine condition - every surface cleaned within an inch of it's life, every scrap of clothing washed, folded and put away. The house felt foreign, felt like I was visiting my house after someone else had moved in. I was a stranger in a strange land, a parent in a house that had been childless.
I'm sure we ate something and then made some phone calls to friends and family. What I do remember more clearly was that first night. Oh holy night. Our perfect baby had been a wonderful sleeper in the hospital and I know that I secretly thought it was my natural parenting ability. That first night, and the next day, a Friday, will forever be called "Cryday" in the Lacey lexicon. No one, not the nurses, not the doctors, not our friends with kids, had warned us about day three, when Ellie got hungry and my milk hadn't come in.
Breastfeeding hadn't been going well since jumpstreet. Starting all the way back at our breastfeeding class, the lactation consultant teaching the class completely freaked me out. She made it sound like every doctor, nurse, orderly and quite possibly total strangers, would be trying to sneak my baby formula in a bottle, thereby ensuring "nipple confusion" and the failure of my ability to breastfeed. I tend to be dramatic when pregnant. In the hospital, the nurse, an angry woman with bad breath and unfortunate facial hair, had basically grabbed my breast and shoved it in poor Ellie's face. Now, I'm a pretty self conscious person, and not really into having strangers touch me while naked. Ellie screamed, I cringed... it was bad all over. After several attempts, the nurse told me that she had to eat before midnight or else I HAD to give her a bottle of formula. The minutes ticked by, I kept trying, but she kept refusing. Midnight came and the nurse brought us the little "ready to feed" bottle and told us she'd be back to check on us. I don't know what came over me, but I got out of my bed, took the bottle and poured most of it down the sink drain. Ellie wasn't born until 4:30 PM, and something just told me that this nurse was checking a box off, not really thinking about our situation. When the nurse came back, I smiled at her and pointed at the bottle. Score one for the boob nazis. Sure enough, about an hour later, Ellie threw up an astonishing quantity of brown gunk, amniotic fluid as it turned out. About an hour after that, she nursed and all was right with the world.
However, that was day one and this was day four, and oh what a difference a few days made. Ellie was up all night. She'd scream, I'd nurse, and she'd sleep for 10 minutes. She'd scream, I'd nurse, and she'd sleep for 10 minutes. And so on, until my poor boobs felt like I'd been nursing a bench grinder. Finally, sometime around dawn, when Jeff went to give her to me again to nurse, I had a little freak out - "There has to be something wrong with her besides being hungry!" I yelled. Then I demanded he open the pack of pacifiers that we had, but hadn't given to her for fear of "nipple confusion". I nursed and then ever so carefully took myself out and slipped the pacifier in, a slight of hand I'd get very good at in the next months.
Sleep deprived and disheveled, we took Ellie to her first doctor appointment. In the car, the silence overwhelmed us... for the first time in hours, Ellie wasn't crying. I called my mom and informed her that we would be driving to Mexico and back. At the doctors, I cried silently the entire time. The doctor assured Jeff that this was totally normal, and to expect frequent outbursts of crying from me for no good reason. Ellie was a little jaundiced and had lost more weight than the doctor liked, so we were sent to get labs and with an appointment for a weight check in a couple more days.
More crying from both Ellie and me. Finally, my mom was on the phone with my Aunt Barb, who gave me the following advice: Drink a beer. Now, that's Aunt Barb's advice in pretty much any given situation, but this time she had the old wives behind her. It's an old wives tale that beer will bring in your milk. Well, never one to question good advice, we went to a mexican place and got take out and picked up a 6 pack of Coronas. Lo and behold, sometime in the night, I was visited by the milk fairy and spent the next two weeks drowning poor Ellie in milk as my supply worked itself out.
That first week, my mother didn't do a lot of things... she didn't offer unsolicited advice, she didn't hold the baby endlessly, she didn't try to manage our baby for us. What she did do, I can never repay her for. Meals showed up on the table, clothes continued to get washed and put away, and the poor dogs, who fell from their pedestals faster than Oprah gains and loses weight, still managed to get fed and watered. She was truly the hero of the week. I hope that my kids think I'm 1/100th the mom that my mom is. After Ellie was older, she did tell me that the first night, she stood inside the guest room, which was next door to the nursery, hand on the door knob and talked herself out of coming to help us. I would have welcomed her help that night, but I'm sure that it was better in the long run that we did it ourselves.
After Mom left, and I stopped crying over nothing, there was a night where I looked at Jeff and said, "there's still another person in the house." It was the moment that I really understood that parenthood fundamentally changes everything in your life in a way you can't grasp until you've experienced it. Everything around me was the same, the thing that had changed was me.
When leaving the hospital, first Jeff had to take all the crap we'd brought with us out to the car. I can remember thinking that the nurses must have thought we were such assholes. We had a laptop, movies, CDs, books, two suitcases, and all the stuff that you steal from the hospital. I don't know why we had so much stuff, but it was as if we'd been at the hospital for a month, rather than 2 days. Jeff wheeled me and Ellie down and we all got in the car. It was raining, and warmish for January, and as we drove past the other cars on the road, my kept thinking how strange it was, our whole world had shifted on it's axis and these other people driving by had no idea. I wanted to shout at people, "Don't you know I had a baby?!?!?!"
We arrived at our townhouse and went in to introduce the dogs to Ellie. Like most childless dog owners, we had treated our pups as our kids and we were nervous about their reaction to the baby. My parents took one of Ellie's hats home from the hospital so the dogs could sniff it and get used to her smell. We had watched "Baby Story" on TLC with the dogs in the room to help them get used to the sound of a baby. We carefully planned our arrival home so that Jeff would walk in without the baby and greet the dogs, so that they wouldn't feel "replaced." In a nutshell, we forgot while treating our dogs as children that they are, in fact, dogs and they really don't give a crap about a new baby in the house unless it affects mealtime.
I remember arriving home, putting the carrier on a chair and wondering, "okay, now what?" My mother was staying with us and had already been at the house for a couple days, so it was in pristine condition - every surface cleaned within an inch of it's life, every scrap of clothing washed, folded and put away. The house felt foreign, felt like I was visiting my house after someone else had moved in. I was a stranger in a strange land, a parent in a house that had been childless.
I'm sure we ate something and then made some phone calls to friends and family. What I do remember more clearly was that first night. Oh holy night. Our perfect baby had been a wonderful sleeper in the hospital and I know that I secretly thought it was my natural parenting ability. That first night, and the next day, a Friday, will forever be called "Cryday" in the Lacey lexicon. No one, not the nurses, not the doctors, not our friends with kids, had warned us about day three, when Ellie got hungry and my milk hadn't come in.
Breastfeeding hadn't been going well since jumpstreet. Starting all the way back at our breastfeeding class, the lactation consultant teaching the class completely freaked me out. She made it sound like every doctor, nurse, orderly and quite possibly total strangers, would be trying to sneak my baby formula in a bottle, thereby ensuring "nipple confusion" and the failure of my ability to breastfeed. I tend to be dramatic when pregnant. In the hospital, the nurse, an angry woman with bad breath and unfortunate facial hair, had basically grabbed my breast and shoved it in poor Ellie's face. Now, I'm a pretty self conscious person, and not really into having strangers touch me while naked. Ellie screamed, I cringed... it was bad all over. After several attempts, the nurse told me that she had to eat before midnight or else I HAD to give her a bottle of formula. The minutes ticked by, I kept trying, but she kept refusing. Midnight came and the nurse brought us the little "ready to feed" bottle and told us she'd be back to check on us. I don't know what came over me, but I got out of my bed, took the bottle and poured most of it down the sink drain. Ellie wasn't born until 4:30 PM, and something just told me that this nurse was checking a box off, not really thinking about our situation. When the nurse came back, I smiled at her and pointed at the bottle. Score one for the boob nazis. Sure enough, about an hour later, Ellie threw up an astonishing quantity of brown gunk, amniotic fluid as it turned out. About an hour after that, she nursed and all was right with the world.
However, that was day one and this was day four, and oh what a difference a few days made. Ellie was up all night. She'd scream, I'd nurse, and she'd sleep for 10 minutes. She'd scream, I'd nurse, and she'd sleep for 10 minutes. And so on, until my poor boobs felt like I'd been nursing a bench grinder. Finally, sometime around dawn, when Jeff went to give her to me again to nurse, I had a little freak out - "There has to be something wrong with her besides being hungry!" I yelled. Then I demanded he open the pack of pacifiers that we had, but hadn't given to her for fear of "nipple confusion". I nursed and then ever so carefully took myself out and slipped the pacifier in, a slight of hand I'd get very good at in the next months.
Sleep deprived and disheveled, we took Ellie to her first doctor appointment. In the car, the silence overwhelmed us... for the first time in hours, Ellie wasn't crying. I called my mom and informed her that we would be driving to Mexico and back. At the doctors, I cried silently the entire time. The doctor assured Jeff that this was totally normal, and to expect frequent outbursts of crying from me for no good reason. Ellie was a little jaundiced and had lost more weight than the doctor liked, so we were sent to get labs and with an appointment for a weight check in a couple more days.
More crying from both Ellie and me. Finally, my mom was on the phone with my Aunt Barb, who gave me the following advice: Drink a beer. Now, that's Aunt Barb's advice in pretty much any given situation, but this time she had the old wives behind her. It's an old wives tale that beer will bring in your milk. Well, never one to question good advice, we went to a mexican place and got take out and picked up a 6 pack of Coronas. Lo and behold, sometime in the night, I was visited by the milk fairy and spent the next two weeks drowning poor Ellie in milk as my supply worked itself out.
That first week, my mother didn't do a lot of things... she didn't offer unsolicited advice, she didn't hold the baby endlessly, she didn't try to manage our baby for us. What she did do, I can never repay her for. Meals showed up on the table, clothes continued to get washed and put away, and the poor dogs, who fell from their pedestals faster than Oprah gains and loses weight, still managed to get fed and watered. She was truly the hero of the week. I hope that my kids think I'm 1/100th the mom that my mom is. After Ellie was older, she did tell me that the first night, she stood inside the guest room, which was next door to the nursery, hand on the door knob and talked herself out of coming to help us. I would have welcomed her help that night, but I'm sure that it was better in the long run that we did it ourselves.
After Mom left, and I stopped crying over nothing, there was a night where I looked at Jeff and said, "there's still another person in the house." It was the moment that I really understood that parenthood fundamentally changes everything in your life in a way you can't grasp until you've experienced it. Everything around me was the same, the thing that had changed was me.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Getting there (and getting ready) is half the fun
In 22 days, I will be on the beach enjoying a frosty adult beverage while my children play at my feat, making sandcastles and memories at the same time. However, in 21 days, I will still be in hell, driving the second day of a 10 hour long journey to Oak Island, NC.
Vacations are a part of my family tradition, like noxema on sunburns and corn niblits in butter sauce at every holiday meal. One of my earliest memories is of swimming in a kidney shaped pool at a hotel and being confused why anyone would shape a pool like a kidney. My brother and I jumped into that pool endlessly, while my dad would stand some appropriately scary distance away from the edge and then give us a push back to the side of the pool. I learned to dive in that pool, taught by my dad to put my hands on my head like a shark.
When I explain where we're going on vacation, people often say that we're crazy for driving so far, or that we're brave for going so far, or that they would love to go there, but it's too far to drive. When I was a kid, we would drive 625 miles from Pittsburgh, PA to Myrtle Beach, SC just about every year, until we found Oak Island in 1986. We would always take two days to get there, stopping overnight somewhere a bit more than halfway.
Vacation doesn't start with the drive though, it starts with a list. Or several lists. It moves from list to pre-packing, when my mother would begin to lay seemingly random items on the dining room table. A shirt. A book. A bottle of wine. Soon a pattern would emerge and in the last week before we left, the table was covered, the floor had stuff on it, and you couldn't wear anything you might want to take to the beach cause if it wasn't on the table, it wasn't getting packed.
The last evening before we left, the anticipation would be intense. My brother and I were sent to bed early with admonitions to go to sleep quickly cause we were getting up early in the morning. I don't know what time my mom would wake us, but I do know that it was always dark. We'd pile into the car, and I'd try to go back to sleep with my head on my pillow resting on the back window. Sometime around dawn, my parents would find us a restaurant to eat breakfast. My brother did not eat breakfast food as a kid. He always wanted a hamburger, which was hard to rustle up at 7AM. Now that I'm a parent, I have a whole new perspective on what my brother and I put my parents through. So he'd ask for a hamburger, the waitress would check, then tell us no they can't make him one, and then Mike would be grumpy. Being the near perfect child I was, I happily ate my Frosted Flakes, out of the little perforated box of course.
Back in the car with my cranky brother, the games would begin. I think you should be able to get a dividing line painted down the middle of your back seat as an option in sedans. I know that one year, we did this drive in an unairconditioned, black Camaro with leather seats, but I don't really remember it. I think I've blocked it out because the pain caused by peeling my poor young thighs off of those seats was simply too excrutiating to remember. I do vividly remember the sea foam green interior of my dad's company car, a Chevy Impala. I remember how the velour upholstery got warmed by my body heat and would never get cool. I remember how velour, though soft to the touch at first, would eventually start to hurt after sitting on it too long. I remember that Mike would draw a line in the seat by running his finger down the seat, creating a dark green line in the upholstery and then dare me to cross said line. And of course, being a younger sister, I crossed it many times.
It was the 80s, so there were no pesky car seats to tie us down. I would take the shoulder strap of the seat belt and put it behind me and then curl up in a ball on the seat to sleep, with the lap belt running from my mid chest, over my hip and behind me. Another favorite position was upside down, head on the cooler that always ended up on my side of the car, behind my dad, cause I was short. I used to look longingly at conversion vans as we drove by, thinking that those people knew how to travel.
My mom is a master of making up games. We did all the standbys... "A my name is", "In my grandma's attic I found", car bingo, license plate bingo. Over the years, other games were added. We would bring the Trivial Pursuit cards and ask each other questions. We made up a game that involved hitting the room of the car every time you saw a car with a cargo carrier and shouting "Snail!" One year, my parents rustled up a tiny black and white television with an antenna and we managed to watch snow interrupted occasionally by television programs. When we were young, there was the CB radio to keep us amused. I actually miss CBs. It's like cell phones on a party line with it's own language... breaker 1-9... what's your 20? My dad's handle was "Lieutenant" and I loved to hear my grandpa, "The Judge", call over the radio to warn him of a smokey at mile marker 129 northbound. I had no idea what it all meant, but it sounded fantastic. We made truck drivers honk their horns for us by madly pumping our arms up and down and waved at people in other cars to get them to wave back. And the scavenger hunts... oh man, that's a whole other blog's worth of entertainment!
Becuase we'd left so early, we'd always get to the hotel fairly early and we'd have the whole evening to hang out. The overnight in the hotel was always a favorite part of vacation. I mean, no where else could you walk down a hall in your PJs and get ice in a little tiny brown bucket. To this day, I love the sound of the ice machine in hotels. It's the sound of summer vacation starting. There was always a pool and that is where my story started, in the pool on the way to summer vacation.
Jeff's first year going to the beach, I prepared as my mother taught me... I made lists and began to put stuff out in a one layer think spread across the guest bed. Jeff, in his effort to be the man with the most, packed it all on Tuesday night. I spent Wednesday in a panic. I couldn't see what was in the bags, and I hadn't checked off my list. Thursday, I unpacked and repacked everything so I could check off my list. We got up and drove to Emporia, VA and spent the night at a really crappy Red Carpet Inn. It didn't have a pool, but it did have an ice machine. Now Jeff knows that the lists and the stress and the drawn out car ride are all part of vacation and he just goes with it. Cause the getting there starts in January, when we book the place to stay, continues through the year when Mom and I write the scavenger hunt, and is ending when we are getting into the car, and it's definitely half the fun!
Vacations are a part of my family tradition, like noxema on sunburns and corn niblits in butter sauce at every holiday meal. One of my earliest memories is of swimming in a kidney shaped pool at a hotel and being confused why anyone would shape a pool like a kidney. My brother and I jumped into that pool endlessly, while my dad would stand some appropriately scary distance away from the edge and then give us a push back to the side of the pool. I learned to dive in that pool, taught by my dad to put my hands on my head like a shark.
When I explain where we're going on vacation, people often say that we're crazy for driving so far, or that we're brave for going so far, or that they would love to go there, but it's too far to drive. When I was a kid, we would drive 625 miles from Pittsburgh, PA to Myrtle Beach, SC just about every year, until we found Oak Island in 1986. We would always take two days to get there, stopping overnight somewhere a bit more than halfway.
Vacation doesn't start with the drive though, it starts with a list. Or several lists. It moves from list to pre-packing, when my mother would begin to lay seemingly random items on the dining room table. A shirt. A book. A bottle of wine. Soon a pattern would emerge and in the last week before we left, the table was covered, the floor had stuff on it, and you couldn't wear anything you might want to take to the beach cause if it wasn't on the table, it wasn't getting packed.
The last evening before we left, the anticipation would be intense. My brother and I were sent to bed early with admonitions to go to sleep quickly cause we were getting up early in the morning. I don't know what time my mom would wake us, but I do know that it was always dark. We'd pile into the car, and I'd try to go back to sleep with my head on my pillow resting on the back window. Sometime around dawn, my parents would find us a restaurant to eat breakfast. My brother did not eat breakfast food as a kid. He always wanted a hamburger, which was hard to rustle up at 7AM. Now that I'm a parent, I have a whole new perspective on what my brother and I put my parents through. So he'd ask for a hamburger, the waitress would check, then tell us no they can't make him one, and then Mike would be grumpy. Being the near perfect child I was, I happily ate my Frosted Flakes, out of the little perforated box of course.
Back in the car with my cranky brother, the games would begin. I think you should be able to get a dividing line painted down the middle of your back seat as an option in sedans. I know that one year, we did this drive in an unairconditioned, black Camaro with leather seats, but I don't really remember it. I think I've blocked it out because the pain caused by peeling my poor young thighs off of those seats was simply too excrutiating to remember. I do vividly remember the sea foam green interior of my dad's company car, a Chevy Impala. I remember how the velour upholstery got warmed by my body heat and would never get cool. I remember how velour, though soft to the touch at first, would eventually start to hurt after sitting on it too long. I remember that Mike would draw a line in the seat by running his finger down the seat, creating a dark green line in the upholstery and then dare me to cross said line. And of course, being a younger sister, I crossed it many times.
It was the 80s, so there were no pesky car seats to tie us down. I would take the shoulder strap of the seat belt and put it behind me and then curl up in a ball on the seat to sleep, with the lap belt running from my mid chest, over my hip and behind me. Another favorite position was upside down, head on the cooler that always ended up on my side of the car, behind my dad, cause I was short. I used to look longingly at conversion vans as we drove by, thinking that those people knew how to travel.
My mom is a master of making up games. We did all the standbys... "A my name is", "In my grandma's attic I found", car bingo, license plate bingo. Over the years, other games were added. We would bring the Trivial Pursuit cards and ask each other questions. We made up a game that involved hitting the room of the car every time you saw a car with a cargo carrier and shouting "Snail!" One year, my parents rustled up a tiny black and white television with an antenna and we managed to watch snow interrupted occasionally by television programs. When we were young, there was the CB radio to keep us amused. I actually miss CBs. It's like cell phones on a party line with it's own language... breaker 1-9... what's your 20? My dad's handle was "Lieutenant" and I loved to hear my grandpa, "The Judge", call over the radio to warn him of a smokey at mile marker 129 northbound. I had no idea what it all meant, but it sounded fantastic. We made truck drivers honk their horns for us by madly pumping our arms up and down and waved at people in other cars to get them to wave back. And the scavenger hunts... oh man, that's a whole other blog's worth of entertainment!
Becuase we'd left so early, we'd always get to the hotel fairly early and we'd have the whole evening to hang out. The overnight in the hotel was always a favorite part of vacation. I mean, no where else could you walk down a hall in your PJs and get ice in a little tiny brown bucket. To this day, I love the sound of the ice machine in hotels. It's the sound of summer vacation starting. There was always a pool and that is where my story started, in the pool on the way to summer vacation.
Jeff's first year going to the beach, I prepared as my mother taught me... I made lists and began to put stuff out in a one layer think spread across the guest bed. Jeff, in his effort to be the man with the most, packed it all on Tuesday night. I spent Wednesday in a panic. I couldn't see what was in the bags, and I hadn't checked off my list. Thursday, I unpacked and repacked everything so I could check off my list. We got up and drove to Emporia, VA and spent the night at a really crappy Red Carpet Inn. It didn't have a pool, but it did have an ice machine. Now Jeff knows that the lists and the stress and the drawn out car ride are all part of vacation and he just goes with it. Cause the getting there starts in January, when we book the place to stay, continues through the year when Mom and I write the scavenger hunt, and is ending when we are getting into the car, and it's definitely half the fun!
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Damn baked goods comparison
Jeff has a guy he works with who once lifted his shirt, squeezed around his belly button and called the ensuing bulging flesh the "bagel". Today I realized that if I did the same thing, it would be more "bundt cake" than bagel. Bummer.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Amateur night
Wednesday nights are Ellie's ice skating night and Jeff always takes her. It's sort of their little daddy/daughter time. She does lessons and then they free skate together. Well this Wednesday, Jeff had a late meeting and he wasn't going to make it home in time to go to the lesson. So, it was me and four kids who hit the road Wednesday night.
Though we've lived here for almost 5 years, the route 273/route4/route 896 area of Newark remains a mystery to me. Everytime I drive in that area, I feel like I must be lost. Jeff used to say that he thinks Washington, DC employees a team of people to go around changing road signs, and I feel that way about Newark. It's like the brain, it can be studied but never fully understood. Of course, skating lessons are in that vicinity and knowing this, I googled "University of Delaware Skating Rink" and dutifully looked at the map. We left with PLENTY of time, cause I knew I had to get four kids there, out of the car, into the building, get skates on Ellie, get her on the ice, and maintain some kind of order over the other three.
Jeff had told me to make sure I dressed everyone warmly, since it is cold inside the ice rink. So Maggie's got on a hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants, Jack's in long sleeves and jeans and I have a blanket over the baby's carseat. Ellie was dressed in her typical leggings with jeans over ensemble. Keep in mind that Delaware is currently hotter than the surface of the sun. So the whole way to the rink, the kids are screaming that they're hot, and truthfully by the time we arrived at the rink they'd probably all lost weight from sweating.
Needless to say, I got lost. I tried calling Jeff, but he was not answering. I thought to myself, "C'mon Moran, you can do this, Newark's not this big. Stoned college students find their way around all the time." Suddenly I remembered that my good buddy Kristen is a UD grad, and luckily, she also answers her phone with regularity. Kristen was kind enough to not only give me directions, but to stay on the phone with me like some kind of directional 911 operator.
We found the place with moments to spare. I started herding the troops in the door and I notice something suspicious... everyone coming out of the rink is dressed in normal clothes. That's not totally accurate, the obvious skaters were wearing long sleeves and pants, but the spectators were all in shorts. Great. So lesson learned, in 100 degree heat, even the ice rink is warm and you look like an asshole if your kids are wearing sweatshirts.
Anytime I enter a building that is not specifically designed for small children, I get the same feeling I do when playing pinball and you get the "multi-ball" prize. Trying to keep my eyes on all the kids, trying to make sure that they're going the right direction and occasionally whacking one so send it the way you want it to go. I herded them all over to the bench and that's when I realized that I don't have the prepaid skate rental card. Luckily, the woman at the desk took pity on me and didn't make me take all four kids back to buy a skate rental. I grabbed the skates and ran back to where all the kids were sitting. Skates get on and that's when I realized I'd forgotten the helmet and gloves. Damn. Oh well, what's a little head injury between friends, off you go Ellie.
Ellie skated out to what I hoped was her class, since I had no idea and I take the kids over to the bleachers. To get to the bleachers, you have to pass the vending machines, and every parent knows that vending machines hold the key to happiness. Every little brightly colored package contains pure child joy. Maggie immediately started begging for M&Ms and Jack just started shouting at them in two year old garble. We found a seat and I started trying to dole out the crayons and stuff I brought to entertain the kids. My next mistake was to actually try to watch Ellie doing her lessons. I looked away, and when I looked back, Jack was gone. I could hear him calling me, so I wasn't stressing, but I didn't want to lug Will around in his carrier while chasing Jack, so instead I did that thing where I backed away from Will, still facing him, trying to get a visual on Jack. I headed towards the vending machine, thinking I would find him with his face pressed against the glass. Backing up, backing up... I can see all the machines but one and there's no Jack, and his yelling is getting more frantic. One more step and I see Jack, with his arm stuck up to his shoulder inside the vending machine.
An interesting thing happened next. The lower half of my body turned to run and free him, while the upper half turned and realized that to do that I'd have to lose sight of Maggie and Will. Then the upper half turned to save Jack while the lower half tried to go back to get Maggie and Will. So after watching me do this parental watusi, a woman sitting near the car seat offered to keep an eye on him while I saved Jack from vending machine amputation. Isn't it funny how it's completely socially acceptable to let a total stranger watch your children in a public place, but not your luggage in an airport?
So disaster averted, Jack still has the use of both arms, baby's asleep, middle children have snacks... what the hell is all over Jack???? I looked at Jack and was shocked to see that in one minute he's covered in mess. Brown and red mess. While my brain tried to process how he got so dirty so fast, he smiled at me and spit out the chewed up M&Ms he had in his mouth and smeared the results all over his shirt and pants. My first thought, I'm ashamed to admit, was "That's a Gymboree shirt, damnit!" I looked at the clock with some desperation, how much time could be left? 20 minutes. All this had happened within the first 10 minutes of her lesson. Good God.
When people see me with all four kids, and they invariably say "you have your hands full!", my standard response is "There's never a dull moment." And I mean it. Luckily, we made it through the rest of the lesson unscathed. I marched everyone back out to the car and proceeded home with the single minded thought that I would be able to turn them all over to Jeff when I got home. My hopes and dreams were crushed when I rounded the corner at Flint Hill Road and saw his car wasn't there. So I did the only thing I could think to do... I drove around the block a couple more times until I saw he was home, cause I was keeping them all strapped to car seats until I had back up.
The next night... I sent Jeff to Maggie's gymnastics lesson with all four kids and had a glass of wine while getting my hair done. Ahhhhh.......
Though we've lived here for almost 5 years, the route 273/route4/route 896 area of Newark remains a mystery to me. Everytime I drive in that area, I feel like I must be lost. Jeff used to say that he thinks Washington, DC employees a team of people to go around changing road signs, and I feel that way about Newark. It's like the brain, it can be studied but never fully understood. Of course, skating lessons are in that vicinity and knowing this, I googled "University of Delaware Skating Rink" and dutifully looked at the map. We left with PLENTY of time, cause I knew I had to get four kids there, out of the car, into the building, get skates on Ellie, get her on the ice, and maintain some kind of order over the other three.
Jeff had told me to make sure I dressed everyone warmly, since it is cold inside the ice rink. So Maggie's got on a hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants, Jack's in long sleeves and jeans and I have a blanket over the baby's carseat. Ellie was dressed in her typical leggings with jeans over ensemble. Keep in mind that Delaware is currently hotter than the surface of the sun. So the whole way to the rink, the kids are screaming that they're hot, and truthfully by the time we arrived at the rink they'd probably all lost weight from sweating.
Needless to say, I got lost. I tried calling Jeff, but he was not answering. I thought to myself, "C'mon Moran, you can do this, Newark's not this big. Stoned college students find their way around all the time." Suddenly I remembered that my good buddy Kristen is a UD grad, and luckily, she also answers her phone with regularity. Kristen was kind enough to not only give me directions, but to stay on the phone with me like some kind of directional 911 operator.
We found the place with moments to spare. I started herding the troops in the door and I notice something suspicious... everyone coming out of the rink is dressed in normal clothes. That's not totally accurate, the obvious skaters were wearing long sleeves and pants, but the spectators were all in shorts. Great. So lesson learned, in 100 degree heat, even the ice rink is warm and you look like an asshole if your kids are wearing sweatshirts.
Anytime I enter a building that is not specifically designed for small children, I get the same feeling I do when playing pinball and you get the "multi-ball" prize. Trying to keep my eyes on all the kids, trying to make sure that they're going the right direction and occasionally whacking one so send it the way you want it to go. I herded them all over to the bench and that's when I realized that I don't have the prepaid skate rental card. Luckily, the woman at the desk took pity on me and didn't make me take all four kids back to buy a skate rental. I grabbed the skates and ran back to where all the kids were sitting. Skates get on and that's when I realized I'd forgotten the helmet and gloves. Damn. Oh well, what's a little head injury between friends, off you go Ellie.
Ellie skated out to what I hoped was her class, since I had no idea and I take the kids over to the bleachers. To get to the bleachers, you have to pass the vending machines, and every parent knows that vending machines hold the key to happiness. Every little brightly colored package contains pure child joy. Maggie immediately started begging for M&Ms and Jack just started shouting at them in two year old garble. We found a seat and I started trying to dole out the crayons and stuff I brought to entertain the kids. My next mistake was to actually try to watch Ellie doing her lessons. I looked away, and when I looked back, Jack was gone. I could hear him calling me, so I wasn't stressing, but I didn't want to lug Will around in his carrier while chasing Jack, so instead I did that thing where I backed away from Will, still facing him, trying to get a visual on Jack. I headed towards the vending machine, thinking I would find him with his face pressed against the glass. Backing up, backing up... I can see all the machines but one and there's no Jack, and his yelling is getting more frantic. One more step and I see Jack, with his arm stuck up to his shoulder inside the vending machine.
An interesting thing happened next. The lower half of my body turned to run and free him, while the upper half turned and realized that to do that I'd have to lose sight of Maggie and Will. Then the upper half turned to save Jack while the lower half tried to go back to get Maggie and Will. So after watching me do this parental watusi, a woman sitting near the car seat offered to keep an eye on him while I saved Jack from vending machine amputation. Isn't it funny how it's completely socially acceptable to let a total stranger watch your children in a public place, but not your luggage in an airport?
So disaster averted, Jack still has the use of both arms, baby's asleep, middle children have snacks... what the hell is all over Jack???? I looked at Jack and was shocked to see that in one minute he's covered in mess. Brown and red mess. While my brain tried to process how he got so dirty so fast, he smiled at me and spit out the chewed up M&Ms he had in his mouth and smeared the results all over his shirt and pants. My first thought, I'm ashamed to admit, was "That's a Gymboree shirt, damnit!" I looked at the clock with some desperation, how much time could be left? 20 minutes. All this had happened within the first 10 minutes of her lesson. Good God.
When people see me with all four kids, and they invariably say "you have your hands full!", my standard response is "There's never a dull moment." And I mean it. Luckily, we made it through the rest of the lesson unscathed. I marched everyone back out to the car and proceeded home with the single minded thought that I would be able to turn them all over to Jeff when I got home. My hopes and dreams were crushed when I rounded the corner at Flint Hill Road and saw his car wasn't there. So I did the only thing I could think to do... I drove around the block a couple more times until I saw he was home, cause I was keeping them all strapped to car seats until I had back up.
The next night... I sent Jeff to Maggie's gymnastics lesson with all four kids and had a glass of wine while getting my hair done. Ahhhhh.......
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Breaking the Law
So my girlfriends and I were chatting about our upcoming family vacations and we all agreed that we are much more stressed out in the car since having children. I don't mean the "my kids are screaming and I've listened to Wheels on the Bus 432 time" stressed out, I mean the irrational feeling that someone's going to rear end us at any minute, wiping out my whole family while I walk away unhurt kind of stressed out.
Before Ellie was born, I worked just inside the Capitol Beltway in lovely Largo, MD. The Capitol Beltway is the Thunderdome of commutes - it's kill or be killed out there. Before that, I drove in Boston, where the roads seems to have been laid out according to some evil Southern plot to kill as many Northerners as possible. I'm was not a timid driver. But then I got pregnant and something happened... I turned into my mother.
My mother has spent most of her life employing a passenger brake on my father's cars. They started dating in high school, and though I have no proof I'd be willing to bet that my father's "adventurous" driving probably affected her ability to stay completly upright in the passenger seat. Susan Moran, in addition to her many other talents, has the ability to completely disappear in a car. At least, if you're following my parents, you'll notice that my mom's head starts out at a normal height and as the speed increases, her head gets lower and lower in the car and eventually, somewhere around 50mph, poof! She plumb disappears.
Anyway, I've digressed, as per usual. So I was talking to some friends about this terrible anxiety I have in the car and I said that I was considering asking my doctor for a prescription for Xanax. I've never taken any anti-anxiety medication, but pretty much everyone I know has taken Xanax for some reason or another, so why not me? Trish, being the tried and true friend she is, right away offers to give me a couple of her Xanax so I wouldn't have to go to the doctor. I mean, is there a better friend than one who will share her prescriptions with you? I don't think so. During this conversation, I also remembered that I owed Trish money for something unrelated. So as we're parting ways, I tell her that I'll have her money at school pick up and she responds with "Okay, I'll bring the pills then too". Quickly, I realized that it would sound like to anyone overhearing that part of the conversation that Trish was my dealer and we would go to jail. Luckily, no one seemed to notice, and Trish sure enough did bring me a couple Xanax to "smooth the edges".
I did take one of "mommy's little helper" on the way to our family reunion in Shenandoah, and spent a while in a sort of haze... until I realized we'd gone the wrong way around the Beltway cause I was stoned and told Jeff to go east instead of south. I sobered up and started to pay attention then.
A couple days later, I was being followed by a cop and it dawned on me that the pills were still in my purse and if the nice police officer decided to pull me over and somehow got it in his head to search me, I'd be arrested for possession. So I drove very carefully, or gently since I am from Maryland, and came home and threw the pills away.
Between sounding like a druggie, screwing up the directions, and worrying about cavity searches, I decided that anti-anxiety medication makes me anxious.
Before Ellie was born, I worked just inside the Capitol Beltway in lovely Largo, MD. The Capitol Beltway is the Thunderdome of commutes - it's kill or be killed out there. Before that, I drove in Boston, where the roads seems to have been laid out according to some evil Southern plot to kill as many Northerners as possible. I'm was not a timid driver. But then I got pregnant and something happened... I turned into my mother.
My mother has spent most of her life employing a passenger brake on my father's cars. They started dating in high school, and though I have no proof I'd be willing to bet that my father's "adventurous" driving probably affected her ability to stay completly upright in the passenger seat. Susan Moran, in addition to her many other talents, has the ability to completely disappear in a car. At least, if you're following my parents, you'll notice that my mom's head starts out at a normal height and as the speed increases, her head gets lower and lower in the car and eventually, somewhere around 50mph, poof! She plumb disappears.
Anyway, I've digressed, as per usual. So I was talking to some friends about this terrible anxiety I have in the car and I said that I was considering asking my doctor for a prescription for Xanax. I've never taken any anti-anxiety medication, but pretty much everyone I know has taken Xanax for some reason or another, so why not me? Trish, being the tried and true friend she is, right away offers to give me a couple of her Xanax so I wouldn't have to go to the doctor. I mean, is there a better friend than one who will share her prescriptions with you? I don't think so. During this conversation, I also remembered that I owed Trish money for something unrelated. So as we're parting ways, I tell her that I'll have her money at school pick up and she responds with "Okay, I'll bring the pills then too". Quickly, I realized that it would sound like to anyone overhearing that part of the conversation that Trish was my dealer and we would go to jail. Luckily, no one seemed to notice, and Trish sure enough did bring me a couple Xanax to "smooth the edges".
I did take one of "mommy's little helper" on the way to our family reunion in Shenandoah, and spent a while in a sort of haze... until I realized we'd gone the wrong way around the Beltway cause I was stoned and told Jeff to go east instead of south. I sobered up and started to pay attention then.
A couple days later, I was being followed by a cop and it dawned on me that the pills were still in my purse and if the nice police officer decided to pull me over and somehow got it in his head to search me, I'd be arrested for possession. So I drove very carefully, or gently since I am from Maryland, and came home and threw the pills away.
Between sounding like a druggie, screwing up the directions, and worrying about cavity searches, I decided that anti-anxiety medication makes me anxious.
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