It’s 2008 and I’m so relieved. I’ve been thinking it was 2008 since about June. For some reason the even numbered years just don’t sit well with me. For the first half of 2007 I thought it was 2006. Then one day around the longest day of the year, it suddenly felt like 2008 and I’ve been crossing out and rewriting the date ever since. I should be content writing 2-0-0-8 for a good 18 months.
Save Me From Myself
Raise Your Hand
I do not have the mental or physical energy, nor do I smell good enough to write anything tonight. My one true deodorant for the past 4 years suddenly stopped working a few days ago. The first day I couldn’t remember if I’d worn any or not. The second day I was in denial. Today my testimony of Dove clearance-priced smells-slightly-better-than-B.O-flavored moisturizing deodorant is shaky at best.
I’m ready to try something new. Astound me with your fabulousness. Tell me what you use to stop the stink in its tracks. I will leave my personal hygiene up to a vote by people who live on the internet. The voting starts now. What should I be wearing folks?
This weekend I plan to drive down with your donations and I’ll have stories and updates when I get back… after I sleep some… and smell better than this.
Herod and I — We’re Jerks
We’re trying to fight the media-oric power of Santa’s publicity machine and teach Laylee and Magoo that Christmas is actually a religious holiday with fun attached as a festive bonus. Some days we win and sometimes the kids get all “Manger, what? Maybe I’ll care if you tell me it was full of liquid sugar.”
So tonight for family night I asked Laylee to tell us all the Christmas Story minus the reindeer, elves and abominable snow people. She asked me for a refresher and using the Little People as props, I took her through the basics.
When we got to the sinister part where Herod told the wise guys to come and tell him when they’d found Jesus because he wanted to worship him too, Laylee went into full panic mode. “I don’t like this part. I hate this story. He wanted to hurt the baby! I don’t like this part. I don’t want to tell it.”
She completely lost control and started shaking and bawling. Holding her in my arms trying to comfort her fear, I told her it was okay because he didn’t get to harm the baby. God protected Jesus and told the wise men what Herod had up his sleeve. She didn’t care if the baby got hurt or not. It was enough to know that someone was evil enough to want to do it. It was too scary.
We’ve talked about this story a bazillion times before and she’s never been bothered by it. When we get to the Herod part, she usually flinches, gives little smile and shakes with pretend fear and a look that says, “Phew! That was close.”
What was different today?
Adult things. I’ve been talking about hairy scary adult things for days, flooding, sadness, homelessness, despair, destruction, death and loss. To her I explained the disaster in a way a 4-year-old could understand. I gave her the Bambi version. “Bambi. Your mother can’t be with you anymore.”
Then I proceeded to watch news footage, talk on the phone with friends and family and cry about what I’d seen. “Bambi. Your mother can’t be with you anymore.
“Hey Thumper, don’t tell Bambi that his mom was brutally murdered by a faceless thug with a shotgun. They’re everywhere these days. It makes me cry just thinking about it. Bambi will likely be the next to go but don’t tell him. It may stress him out.
“Like I told you B, your mom’s gone on a long vacation but everything is juuuust peachy.”
I got her calmed down with sugar cookies, something I never thought I’d hear myself say, and I now pledge to be more protective of her innocence. She’s a baby in a world that wants her to grow up way too fast and she’s not deaf and I am not equipped with a soundproof telephone booth in which to cry and muse about the horrors and tragedies of this world in her presence.
She seemed to bounce back quickly, although her mental state is altered to the point that she’s now convinced she’s a feline and will only answer to sentences that begin with the word “Meow.” But then I’m not sure that particular disorder has anything to do with me, floods or evil biblical kings. She may just be four.
Your Face is Made for Washing
If on the journey from the sink to your bed you forget whether or not you’ve washed your face, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to go back and wash it again… or for the first time, just to be on the safe side. You could also rub it briskly and thoroughly on the wrong side of your pillow case. If your sheets are less than 200 thread count, you’ll get some nice exfoliating action that way as well.
Do not use the same pillowcase for your teeth as you use for your face.
Shelfari is LIKE a Virus
Lately I’ve received a few invites to join the social networking site Shelfari and share my book preferences with friends. So tonight I decided to sign up. It sounded fun. I went to the page and it asked me for access to my email account so it could farm addresses to send comparison invites to. I gave it access to my personal email account, not the one I use for blogging. It showed me my entire address book and told me to click on the contacts I wished to send invites to. I picked THREE people I wanted to compare books with.
The Safari website proceeded to send email invitations to EVERYONE IN MY ADDRESS BOOK — TWICE!!!!! This includes business contacts, filmmaking contacts, former college professors, friends, church leaders, people who’ve done work on our house, EVERYONE!
One of Dan’s coworkers emailed him to ask if I had a virus because he’d just received 2 emails from me. Ummm… yeah. I think I have a virus. It’s called Shelfari and I’m mortified. If you got one of those emails from me, please do not follow the link. I’m sorry for wasting your time.
I want to go back and delete my account or complain to the administrator but I’m afraid to log on to their buggy site again.
***Updated – see comment from Shelfari employee below. I’m glad to hear that there’s no malicious intent with the company, but I still want to steer clear. With bugs like they apparently have, I’m really wary of using their service or giving them any of my personal information.***
I Just Stepped on a Slug in My Bare Feet
Last night I got 3.5 hours of sleep. Everything seems worse than it probably really is. I wonder if I get more sleep tonight, will the slug guts be automatically cleansed from my foot?
Here are some reasons my day ate rocks because I only had 3.5 hours of sleep last night:
1. I decided to try potty-training Magoo today. We’re still at the stage where I ask him hundreds of times whether his McQueen pants are wet or dry, he says dry, we high-five, then he looks down perplexedly at the puddle gathering around his feet. Where did all that yellow water come from? Hrm…
2. My right hip is sort of frozen so it hurts to unload the dishwasher. My physical therapist says it’s good if the pain is localized, rather than shooting up my spine and down my leg so I guess this is a good thing and should not be on my list of reasons why my day ate rocks because I only had 3.5 hours of sleep last night.
3. I JUST MESSED UP MY LIST OF REASONS my day ate rocks because I only had 3.5 hours of sleep last night and now I have to start over:
1. I got a call from my 7-month-pregnant friend this afternoon. I was still groggy from a nap that made me feel worse than I had beforehand. She was waiting for me because I was supposed to meet her at another friend’s house. The other friend was not there to meet her. I was not there to meet her. Her car had a flat tire so she had walked her pregnant belly to our meeting spot so she wouldn’t let us down. Neither of us were there to meet her because… um… I feel like a piece of unreliable cheese.
2. The trash bag ripped open and rancid peach juice spilled everywhere.
3. Dan’s working a bazillion hours of overtime this week. I like Dan.
4. I think I owe email to about 50 people.
5. I just found out that the main character in my book club book received a prophecy that she would die by falling off a tall cliff and now she’s living at the top of a tall cliff.
6. My blue flannel pajama pants with the little white clouds all over them are dirty and so are all my other clothes.
7. Yarn and houseplants were on sale today at Fred Meyer. Hencely and thus, my entire grocery budget for the week is shot and I believe it’s only Tuesday.
8. Does your house ever get so covered in junk that you feel silly calling it messy because it’s such a ridiculous understatement but you don’t know that you’ll ever have the time or the desire in the foreseeable future to shovel it clean? Mine does.
9. My writing feels less not incoherent than usual.
10. Did I mention I stepped on a slug with my bare feet?
I Done Been Shaped
I headed to the nail salon on my way out of town for a pre-BlogHer manicure. It’s like the pre-prom manicure. For one day a year it’s nice to pay $20 to your Korean fairy godmother and pretend that you are a dainty specimen of femininity who always has perfectly painted pink fingernails and has never heard of a cuticle.
I personally find the trimming of the cuticle very perplexing. Why has that portion of skin been determined to be unacceptable? No one goes around trimming off the spare wrinkly skin from their elbow pit every time it grows back. We just assume that if the skin’s there, it’s supposed to be.
Every time I go in for a manicure once a year I notice various “waxing” services on the price list. I begin feeling sad about my eyebrows. They are one part of my personal grooming that seem like they should be easy to take care of but I am terrified to start plucking or allow someone else to do it.
Since it was the day before I would speak at a conference and meet hundreds of new people, it seemed like a good time to make a drastic life and beauty change. Without looking up, I mumbled to my esthetician that I’d like to get my eyebrows “done.”
“Get them done” like it was something I did every day or every 28 years.
“Sure,” she said as she skillfully applied white paint to the tips of my nails.
I started to have second thoughts. What if they did something crazy? What if I ended up looking semi-permanently deranged, angry or quizzical? I looked up at the girl who had just helped me lose 3 lbs of excess cuticle and was about to transform the whole look of my face. She had no eyebrows.
Okay. That’s an exaggeration. She had a line of hairs above each eye, outlined with a single stroke of brown liner which was thicker than the actual brow.
I started to panic.
“Um… so I just want a little off my eyebrows. Nothing drastic. I’ve never done this before and I’m really nervous. I’d rather take off too little than too much. Let’s just go easy.”
“Are you saying that because of the way my eyebrows look?”
Awkward silence.
“Because I don’t like my eyebrows either. I’ve never had eyebrows. They just grew in like this.”
And I was quiet. And she shaped me and plucked me and they actually looked quite lovely for a few days.
At first I kept up with the lawn maintenance, tweezers in hand each night, quickly snagging up any little guy that tried to make his way back into the fold. But I’ve let it go too long and now I’m afraid, afraid I’ll pull the wrong one and end up lopsided or with the apparent derangement of which I spoke previously.
I remember Amalah once talking about how eyebrows were the one thing you needed to keep up because if you had nice eyebrows but no makeup you look like you’re running late but if you have crazy overgrown brows, you look like you just don’t care.
So for about 4 weeks of my entire life, I looked like I cared and now I’m wondering if I care enough to continue to look like I do…
The Perfect Storm
I over-schedule. I want to do everything and be everything when I grow up. I want to grow my own food and bake bread and make my home a haven of educational bliss, moral perfection and impeccable scrabble playing. I want to have it all. So I plan and I scheme and carefully stagger all kinds of activities and then spend my life flying from one thing to the next until the kids beg for mercy in the form of flopping like a dead fish on the floor of the grocery store and alternately laughing and bawling for CANDY FWEEZE!!!!
Every once in a while the elements of my life combine in just the right way to create a perfect storm of domestic insanity. The latest in this series of “WHAT THE SUGAR IS MY PROBLEM?” moments came last Thursday and nobody’s heard a lot from me since.
Thursday is bread making day. I do not plant the wheat but I do buy it in impossibly large white buckets, let it sit in my garage for years, 
finally learn how to use my wheat grinder, grind it, and make my own bread. It saves money. It tastes scrumptious thanks to Sarah’s recipe. It makes me feel cool when I say, “I make my own bread,” because bread preference comes up so often in conversation.
At this point I make 4 loaves of bread each week, giving one away so that “I make my own bread” can come up in casual conversation and keep the other three so “PEANUT BUTTER SAMMMMMMITCH FWEEZE!!!” will be able to get the response it so richly deserves. All day Thursday, I’m working on the bread.
Well, a woman from church was ordering a bunch of peaches direct from a grower and asked if anyone wanted to buy some at a discount. Eve convinced me that canning peaches would be the Best Thing Ever so I put in my order and we waited. TA-DA! The peaches arrived on Wednesday, with about one day of life left on them before they would need to be canned immediately.
“No problem,” I thought, “I’ll be home all day making bread anyway. I can throw some peaches in that canner thingy while the bread’s rising. It will be perfect. I even have a book that will teach me how. Oh, and I’m also hosting a Mary Kay extravaganza for Stephanie that night so I can work on the hors d’oeuvres and desserts while the peaches are boiling.”
The book was obviously written for someone who is literate and likes to read for hours and hours in ecstatic anticipation while they watch their glorious fruit ripen, not someone who wants a quick how-to she can read while stirring the cheesecake batter as the bread kneads in the Kitchen-Aid. I tried to skim-read and pump Stephanie and Heather for information as I scraped the skin off the peaches and tried to remember what dad-gum-awful peach chores I did with my mom when I was a kid and she asked me to “do this please” and “do that please” as she created blue ribbon peaches fit for the fair.
My peaches would not win any prizes at the fair. They are brownish and sort of hairy and Laylee has sworn never to eat them. I made the last batch into peach “sauce” by taking out my aggression and smashing any peaches that were left in my kitchen to a pulp and throwing them in jars. It’s actually quite lovely.
The bread which I decided to take a risk on and make 100% whole wheat looked good but tasted nasty. The cheesecake took a tumble. The goat cheese frittata triangles were cold by the time we ate them and my stove looks like I covered it with corn syrup and then fire-blasted it with a blowtorch. My makeup, however, looked ultimate and I got a big enough discount to feel justified buying $50 worth of skin care products I probably didn’t need but would certainly enjoy.
I continued to can peaches all day the next day with Eve, went to a couple of doctor’s appointments, cleared junk out of several rooms in my house for the neighborhood garage sale I’d organized for the next day and hopped back and forth on my feet trying to rest them one at a time. Our 5 kids ran crazy like a pack of ravenous attention-starved wolves. My floors became so sticky I couldn’t hop on them anymore.
At about 9pm on Friday night we had finished all the peaches but I hadn’t hung a single sign or priced a single piece of cheap junk for the garage sale the following morning. I had no change to hand to prospective buyers who planned to hand me a $50 bill in exchange for my used toothbrush and $49.87 in change. I had not an ounce of brainpower or bodily energy left so I called off the garage sale.
My neighbor had recently told me she was worried about me. Every time she talks to me I have a new project in the works, a new hobby or responsibility. Every time she looks out her window I’m either leaving, running in the door or stopping home for 30 seconds to change clothes or pick something up on my way to the next thing. She said something that really struck me, “If your life is crammed full of so many things, you won’t have time to enjoy any of them, even if they’re all things you really love doing.”
In the end, I’d rather eat WonderBread and peaches from Costco if I’m gonna drive myself nuts in my need to say, “I MAKE MY OWN DANG STINKIN’ WHEAT BREAD!!!”
She was right. So I stayed home all day Saturday with no garage sale, slept in late, had some special time with Dan and the kids, didn’t work, didn’t clean, hired a babysitter and went on a date. It was fabulous and I felt so renewed. We had friends over for dinner Sunday and then Monday morning I headed down to Boise with the kids to “help” my friend who’s just given birth to twin boys. She already has a 2 and a 4-year-old boy. I love being with her and her totally sweet kids. I just hope I can be more help than trouble.
I thought there was a lot of truth in Jessica’s post the other day, when she talked about how sometimes things run more smoothly without all the help, regardless of how helpful you think it is.
I’m here for a week and I’m helping around the house while taking a mini-vacation and bringing baby hunger to all new levels. Dan is holding down the fort in Washington, working a bazillion hours from home and at the office. Hopefully I’ll be fresher and more Daring when I get back, with an all new minty taste.
Do you need anything from Wal Mart? They have plenty of those here… and cheap produce… and babies.
Doctors Make Me Cry
I try to make them chuckle nervously.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve cried when I’ve gone to doctor’s offices, not every time but more often than I’d like. OBGYNs are the worst, but I’ve been known to cry at the dentist too. It’s not that I’m in physical pain necessarily, usually just moderate emotional trauma.
Inherent in any trip to a medical professional is the assumption that there’s something “wrong” with you. I tend to sit and stew about just how “wrong” I really am. The longer I wait the more troubles I can drum up.
I may be at the dentist for a regular checkup but when he asks me to open my mouth wide, I’ll remember that it hurts to open my mouth wide because I have a sore jaw… because I grind my teeth at night… which keeps Dan awake… which makes me an inconsiderate wife… which, why am I blaming myself when I’m the one in pain… which what if my jaw just freezes one night and I have to eat everything through a tube… and by the way, why do I eat so much… I really need to start working out.
THERE’S JUST SO MUCH WRONG WITH ME!!! And then as the doctor approaches, a small tear will trickle down my face as my heart silently mouths… “Please fix my teeth and make me normal… please.”
Don’t even get me started with my inner pleadings for normalcy at other health venues. Let’s just say that by the time I get used to my new normal after childbirth, I’ll likely be going through the changing and the flashes of hotness.
Guilt also contributes to the tearing up.
“How active are you?” = “Do you EVER workout, you lazy slob?”
“Date of your last pregnancy?” = “When are you gonna try for another baby, huh, huh? You’ve already told the whole world you’re baby hungry, why can’t you just take the plunge? Your kids really need more friends.”
“Do you floss regularly?” = “Do you floss regularly?”
Get off my back man! May I weep into your freshly starched white jacket?
So to get over my nerves/emotions/guilt at the doctor, I do what comes naturally and try to make them laugh. I don’t know how many points you score for cracking your doctor up while he’s delivering your 10 lb. 8 oz. baby, but it’s a lot. How about exacting a giggle from your psychiatrist as you joke through chattering teeth during a post-partum panic attack?
I have scored these points and many more, keeping the docs entertained while maintaining some sort of dignity and personal reputation, even if it is a reputation as the world’s only paper-gown-clad, non-flossing stand-up comedian.
Well this weekend my back went out and I lay around icing and heating myself and taking pain killers. I cried in my own home because my back problems are a major obstacle on my way to readiness for child number 3. How can this body carry a child if it can’t even hold my noggin upright for an extended period of time?
So today I went to a new physical therapist, yet another attempt to get my body back into shape after last year’s car accident. I knew that if I’d already been crying about my back at home, I stood next to no chance of remaining calm and visibly sane during a checkup, especially if they were nice. Nice doctors are the WORST for setting me off. I needed to come up with some good material.
When I got in and started filling out paperwork, I noticed that it asked for a name and also a NICKNAME. Hmmm…. I wrote down “shmoopy.” It’s a special little something Dan likes to call me for romantical love.
I handed the paperwork to the receptionist who carried it into the back. I could hear whispering. “… filled it out… only put the blank there so we’d know what people want to be called… snicker snicker… look at this… I’m not sure… hope she was being funny… pretty embarrassing.”
From what I could hear, I got the impression that they were worried that I thought they really wanted a nickname and that little precious pet name was all I could come up with. It sounded like the whole office was called in to consult and then she called me back.
“Kathryn. We’re ready for you,” she said with a face as straight as a pin.
“Oh man. I thought you were gonna call me Shmoopy.”
She squinted her eyes a little to size me up, unsure whether I was kidding or not and explained apologetically that they had only put that line there so they would know what name people preferred to be called.
“I was just being silly.”
So after my session, she called out to me with a grin, “Do you need to schedule another appointment Shmoopy?”
“You know, I love it when you call me that!”
WE DON’T YELL IN THIS FAMILY!
Yesterday I caught myself yelling at the top of my lungs for them to just be quiet. I put Laylee in timeout. “Laylee,” I said calmly, “Do we yell in this family?”
She looked up at me with utter confusion, a look that said… [read more]