California

Last week we went on a secret vacation to California. I didn’t say anything before we left because I didn’t want to advertise that our house was empty because isn’t that one of the things you’re not supposed to do on the internet? Tell all the crazy people that your house will be empty for a week? So I didn’t tell you. But now we’re back, and I can tell you ALLLL about it, which will actually just me putting a bunch of pictures up here. Modern day vacation slides.

Hey, did I ever tell you about a history teacher I had in high school who literally showed us vacation slides? He and his friend “Mel” traveled around… Europe? I think? And took a bunch of pictures of each other crouched in front of large landmarks that honestly would not have been blocked at all if they had just stood up like normal people. That guy was weird. He also got the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars mixed up when he taught them to us. Or rather, when he taught one of them to us but added details from the other one. Remember the Maine! And Tyler too! Or something!

Right. California. So last December, my college friend Dr. Lapp (not her real name) who married an adorable Argentinian named Pato but whom Nora calls “Pasta,” came home to spend Christmas with the Lapp Family. (I mention that he is Argentinian only so I can tell you that we went to their wedding in Buenos Aires, and if you ever get invited to a wedding in Buenos Aires you should go. Those people know how to throw a party. Food! Entertainment! Dancing! More food! More dancing! More food! Hey, look at that, it’s 5am!) We managed to get together for lunch during which Dr. Lapp and Pasta let slip that they recently bought a gigantic house with fifteen to twenty extra bedrooms and that we should come visit. “Really?” we said, “Because we will.” So we did.

First of all, I may have taken some creative license there, because Dr. Lapp’s and Pasta’s house is really only FIVE bedrooms. But it is gorgeous. And so well-decorated. It’s like grown-ups live there. I honestly do not understand how people know what furniture and artwork to buy so that it all GOES together like that. And they’re not really done, as they still have to furnish several of the bedrooms. I have to say, if I had several bedrooms to furnish from scratch, I think the pressure would kill me. It’s helpful to have a slew of hand-me-down stuff to start with if you are decorationally-challenged, as I am.

Since Dr. Lapp and Pasta’s 23-bedroom house is a convenient half hour away from Disneyland, we bought a three-day park hopper pass and spent Monday, Wednesday, and Friday there. I have passed the point in life where Disneyland is where I’d spend my vacation, given a choice of anywhere, but that’s if it were just me. Taking little kids to Disneyland is something else entirely, and lordy, it was fun.



























I had been worried that there wouldn’t be anything for Nora to do, but she could do almost everything! Her favorite thing was the Dumbo ride (“I rode effants!”) and her only complaint was that it was way too short, a message she conveyed by screaming and yelling when it was time to get off. Jack’s favorite thing was Splash Mountain, because I seem to have become the mother of someone old enough and tall enough to ride actual roller coasters. Please explain how that happened. Here’s what Nora did while Jack and Andrew rode Splash Mountain:



That’s Baby Minnie Mouse, who is Nora’s new favorite character, and whom she calls “Money.” Also, Minnie came with a sort of Velcro swaddling blanket that kept falling off, and Nora would say “I need help!” and then, “She’s very very very very very cold,” as we reswaddled her.

Speaking of Minnie, Nora was typical about meeting the characters. From far away, she was all about giving them hugs, but as soon as we got close she would cry. So we waited for a minute at Mickey’s house but when she lost interest, we left. She insisted upon waiting to meet Minnie, however, so I forced her to go through with the photo.



She looks thrilled, yes?

There were, all things considered, minimal tantrums or meltdowns at Disneyland, if you don’t count mine. But I was sick, so it totally doesn’t count. ANYONE would have been grumpy, trust me on this.

The days we weren’t at Disneyland we went to a local science museum, the beach, and a tiny nearby airport to eat lunch and watch the planes take off. Then we went swimming in the backyard pool of my friends’ 35-bedroom home. All told, it was a really fun, fabulous trip. And may I take this opportunity to say that we receive multiple compliments on our well-behaved children on each of the four different flights we took, so we win. (Seriously, the plane rides were easy! EASY! I don’ t know how we got so lucky.)

I’m equally familiar with the phenomenon of falling asleep during a movie

I’ve been reading The Man of Your Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld. I grabbed it at the library when I saw it because I loved Prep and I am always excited to find an author I know I like at the library since I don’t have lots of shelf-browsing time these days. And yes, I agree that I’d have better luck if I went to the library with a list of books, or, better still, requested them to be held for me, but BLAH BLAH BLAH. I didn’t.

So anyway, I was enjoying the book quite a lot, despite Sittenfeld’s slightly gimmicky use of the present tense and the time-jumping style of the plot. Each chapter started a chunk of time past the end of the previous chapter, and then would become a sort of flashback to the time that was skipped. I was following it pretty well until the main character, Hannah, was talking to her cousin Fig’s boyfriend in the car while they were on the way to pick up Fig. It was all going well, but then Sittenfeld started referring to things that I could swear had not been explained, like Fig’s and Hannah’s trip to L.A., or Hannah’s dinner with her father. It seemed to fit in with the flashback-style of the book; I assumed she was planning to reveal things later. Nevertheless, I was feeling kind of grumpy about it, because it was just too jumpy. I mean, come on, Sittenfeld. Get it together.

And then, as I was approaching the end of the story, I realized that I had inadvertently skipped some of the book. Sort of a lot, actually. It turned out to be pages 48-160. I just didn’t read them. So, yeah. The plot seemed a bit jumpy. It was a lot like falling asleep in the middle of a movie, the key difference being that a movie keeps going without you, so it makes sense that you would miss a chunk. This… was different.

How did this happen? Well first of all, I usually don’t use bookmarks, I just look at the page number and try to remember it, and then flip through until I find my spot. Second of all, I can’t remember characters’ names. At least for the most part. I remembered Fig’s name, because it’s Fig. And when I “fell asleep”, Hannah was talking to Fig’s boyfriend about Fig; when I “woke up,” Hannah was talking to her OWN boyfriend about Fig. Fig’s boyfriend was named Henry, Hannah’s boyfriend was named Mike. Both fairly generic. And a particularly salient point is that Hannah had a crush on Henry, so when we skipped ahead, I just thought that Sittenfeld was planning to explain later how Hannah ended up with Henry, whose name I thought was Mike.

Does any of that make sense? It doesn’t really matter, because it’s not really an excuse, seeing as I read about 100 pages of a book without realizing that I had completely skipped the middle third of the story. Instead, I blamed the author for writing something so incoherent. I don’t really know what this says about me, but I will say that when I went back and read it in order, the plot made a whole lot more sense.

Sittenfeld, you have my apologies.

Well this is convenient

Yesterday, Jack was rooting through the silverware drawer while I prepped for dinner. (I made this crockpot breakfast casserole. I am told it was good, but I certainly couldn’t eat it. I couldn’t even go near it as I very unwisely included broccoli. Here’s a helpful tip: If you start to feel nauseated round about 3:00 most days, it is perhaps not the best idea to cook broccoli in the crockpot from 3:00-5:00. We played outside from 4:00 on or so, and when we came back inside the stench of overcooked broccoli almost killed me dead. In fact, I have to stop even typing about it right now. Blergh.)

Let’s start over: Jack was rooting through the silverware drawer and came across a baby spoon, but a particularly annoyingly shaped baby spoon that doesn’t fit in the drawer very well. We used to have two, in fact, but I think I threw one out. Jack was fascinated by it, and when I told him it was a practice spoon for babies, he said, “We should have another baby.”

Well that caught my attention. We have not yet shared our good news with Jack, but I figured this was a golden opportunity not to be wasted. “Would you really like to have another baby come live here, Jack?” I asked him.
“Yeah!” he said.

“Because they’re so cute, right?” I was concerned that he was mainly interested in seeing the baby spoon in use, so I wanted to check.

“Yeah, they are,” he replied. “We should have lots of babies.”

“How many babies do you want, Jack?”

“Oh, five or six,” he answered.

“Five or six, huh? I said. “Do want them to come all at once, or do you want to have one every couple of years?”

Jack considered this, and then said, “One every couple of years, because we only have one of these baby spoons.”

And you can’t argue with that.

Technology is out to get us

This announcement will come as a total non-shock to many of you who follow me on Twitter, as I recently inadvertently publicly tweeted what was supposed to be a direct message. I blame my phone. You see, I was replying to a DM from someone and forgot that when you reply by phone, it is a TEXT MESSAGE so it replies to TWITTER, not to the person who messaged you. You still need to type the “DM @person” unless you want to broadcast what seems like a weird sideways hint to the entire internet, like maybe a tweet referencing mysterious “home tests” that were “all negative.”

Incidentally, I learned something recently, and it is that cheap pregnancy test strips bulk ordered from Amazon apparently have a shelf life.

Yes, folks, we’re going to have another baby. Sometime in December. I’m tennish weeks along. I’d know more precisely, but I don’t have the exact date of my LMP. This makes me sound like I have a breezy/irresponsible devil-may-care attitude towards such things, but in actuality, I have charts and graphs and observations. I don’t HAVE to remember the date of my LMP because it’s on the chart. You know? The chart? The one Nora found and stole and put somewhere? Else? I’m sure I’ll find it in late December some time.

Yeah, so about five weeks ago I went to the doctor to find out what in the holy hell was wrong with me, because something was not right. Not right at all. And the home tests! Were negative! In fact, I think I deserve some kudos for restraining myself and not googling “early menopause.” Unless maybe I did. Yeah, I probably did. The doctor’s office spends a bit more on test kits, however, so everything was cleared right up. Things were still kind of terrible for a while, though, because the stuff that was not right? Was in my brain. It was like I had post-partum depression early. Partum depression, I guess. So while it was somewhat helpful to know that there was a simple biological explanation and I had only gone mad temporarily, I was still in the midst of it sitting there in the doctor’s office, and the news did not exactly make me jump up with joy. There’s not a lot of jumping for joy when everything about life is totally awful.

I remained in the midst of it until about a week ago, and I have to tell you it feels so good to be ME again. I no longer storm around the house every morning, slamming cabinets and resenting the entire world for not sending in someone ELSE to clean the bathroom for a change and do you think that another person in this house could deign to sweep the goddamn floor once in a while? It was awful. And the worst part of that was how my kids could not even look cross-eyed at me without my taking it as a personal attack on my sanity. They could do nothing right. It felt like they were just pick-pick-picking at me every second of the day. I was just so angry, all the time.

To name one specific example, in the throes of this depression I took the kids to my niece’s birthday party, and I had some trouble finding the location. It was in a play center in an office park, and there was a sign at the entrance to the lot, but no second sign pointing the way to the waaaay back of the lot. I drove around that stupid lot for about five minutes and could not find the place to save my life. I had to call my brother, who directed me back out onto the main road – a BUSY road that I now had to take a LEFT TURN onto – around the corner and back IN to the stupid office park where I found that had I only kept going straight to the back in the FIRST place I would have FOUND the stupid playspace FIVE MINUTES AGO.

I seethed about that for at least thirty minutes. I seethed at the people who decided to put something like that at the BACK of the lot, I seethed at whoever was in charge of signage for not including a second sign, I seethed at the traffic on the busy road, and I seethed at my brother for making me take a LEFT TURN onto a BUSY ROAD. It was an extremely rational and reasonable response to a few minutes of inconvenience, obviously.

When I wasn’t angry at everyone and everything, I was crying from sadness or loneliness or guilty feelings over being a hateful person or a combination of all three. Or else I was dry heaving, and feeling sad and angry and resentful about it. I was pure joy to live with, believe me.

I did consider antidepressants, but I was trying to give my hormones a few weeks to settle down a bit. My doctor and I discussed it, and had I not been feeling better by twelve weeks I would have tried them, because nine months is a helluva long time to feel like that. But the fog lifted during the past week, and I have been in a good mood even though the weather is dark and rainy and cold, I still have to clean the bathroom and sweep the floor, and I continue to spend a lot of quality time dry heaving over the toilet. On the upside, I clean the toilet much more often seeing as I have to stare into it several times a day. (To clarify, the upside there is not that I clean the toilet much more often, it’s that we more often have a clean toilet.)

Best of all, I am once again enjoying my kids. My kids who are not, as it turns out, evilly conspiring to drive me crazy. In fact, they’re actually pretty cute. I kind of like them. Another one seems like a great idea to me.

STRAWBERRIES?

This week is a freezer-meal week because my freezer is completely stocked, so I only bought perishables at the grocery store. When I got home, Nora did an inventory on my purchases. She peeked into one bag and gasped in audible delight. "Strawbrees? Oh my GOSH! STRAWBREES!" She could not have been more excited or surprised.

Oh my GOSH!

Home Decluttering: Attic Edition

I am sure that all of you are on the edges of your seats wondering how The Great Attic Clean Out of 2011 went down. Pretty well, as it turns out. I highly recommend you have Andrew around to be in charge of projects like this, because while I become paralyzed by the sheer amount of tasks to accomplish in this sort of situation, Andrew just... does the tasks. And they get accomplished.

So first, Andrew started bringing stuff down from the attic. I naturally forgot to take a “before” picture before we started, but I think the following series should give you the basic idea of what we were dealing with; which is to say, 1400 square feet of disorganized junk and trash. (I know I said 1800 square feet before, but I was wrong. It is a mere 1400.)


These are our holiday decorations and wrapping supplies. They used to be piled up in a little alcove right at the top of the attic stairs. If we wanted to get at the boxes on the bottom, we had to move all the other boxes first. And a lot of this is just trash.


Dining room chairs that I put in the attic to stop Nora from using them to rifle through the china closet. Also the easel. And a bunch of empty boxes and other trash.


Baby stuff, a lamp, air conditioners and fans, coats, and my wedding dresses. Yes, two of them. No, I only wore one. Oh, and look! A random plunger! And an air pump for rocket balloons. There’s probably some trash in there as well.


This is the baby/kids’ clothes area. It is pseudo-organized, but there are clearly some issues.


Andrew’s workbench.


The pool table, aka, backup workbench. (It came with the house.)


Our old futon, covered with old Christmas presents, candy canes, some baby stuff, and, naturally, trash.


View of workbench area from the other side.


This is the living room filled with the toys that were in the attic. Andrew brought this room and the holiday stuff in the kitchen downstairs in the morning, and then he had to go coach Jack’s soccer team even though Jack wasn’t actually there because the kids spent the weekend at their grandparents’ house. I spent that time sorting through it all, and actually made excellent progress. Then Andrew got home and did most of the rest of the work.

So. Is the attic much worse than you thought it would be? It probably is. It was really really bad. But we threw out many bags of trash, recycled about 150 boxes, and gave away a whole landing full of various toys, clothes, baby supplies, and the like. (Don’t tell Jack about the toys, please. I was, in fact, unable to give away his old toy tool bench because he saw it when I was trying to sneak it out and had hysterics.) I Freecycled lots of it and once the Big Brother Big Sister Foundation comes to pick up the last four boxes on June 2, the attic will be DONE. Well, except that it will probably take a few more weeks before we can get all the trash out. But whatever! It no longer makes me cry to go up there!

Here are some after shots:


Holiday decorations. Look how they are on SHELVES. So when we need the bottom bin, we can take move JUST the bottom bin. I KNOW.


Baby stuff and toys currently out of circulation. (Note Jack’s old tool bench to the left of the bassinet and how it is hopefully packed in a box. Sigh.


Baby/Kids’ clothes. There is a slight issue here, because there is no more room for more bins, and I am relatively certain that my kids are not finished outgrowing their clothes, but I think I have a different spot for the new bins.


Air conditioners, coats, wedding dresses. I will deal with the wedding dresses later.


Look at how there is plenty of space to walk around the chairs.


OK, so this isn’t actually much better, but that’s because we need to purchase or build some sort of shelving/organizational system. Andrew has a ridiculous number of tools, and a lot of them are really large. But there IS space for him to build bunk beds for Nora and Jack this month, which was kind of out of the question before we did this. We got rid of a bunch of old wood scraps that we didn’t need anymore, and it cleared out a lot of space.

So there you have it! I’m not sure the pictures adequately convey the dramatic difference in the attic. What if I put them side by side?

Before:


After:


Before:


After:


SEE?

So our next major step is to figure out where to store the circulating toys. They’re currently in plastic bins that are pretty much piled up under the window in the living room. It’s organized but not exactly aesthetically pleasing.

A Minor Annoyance

So here's a little thing. About four months ago, in a fit of decluttering the office, I brought 14 or so spent ink cartridges to Staples to recycle them. When I called to find out if the do, in fact, recycle spent ink cartridges, I was told that yes, AND I get $2 for every one, plus money off of new cartridges and paper for each one! Yay! But then when I GOT to Staples, I discovered that I had to sign up for a customer loyalty card to get the money. And they will only take 10 cartridges a month. So. OK. I gave her 10 of my 14 cartridges, signed up for the program, and paid for my new cartridges and paper. But what was this? No money off! And no money back!

No, they MAIL you the rebate at a later date, and it actually comes as "Staples Dollars" (or whatever they call it) only to be spent at Staples. So. FINE.

But here we are, four or five months later, and I do not have my Staples Dollars. I finally got around to inquiring at the store, and they said, "Oh, they must have the wrong email address." But I get the ads JUST FINE. In fact, I was inspired to write this complainy post by a Staples ad I got in my email just today! As I do every day! And there is nothing they can do at the store; I have to call Staples and complain. This is obviously a huge pain, so I didn't, and then a month went by and I lost the info, and had to inquire at the store again. I should note that at this point, I also brought back the other four cartridges, so now they owe me at least $28. Then I actually DID try to call, but it was the weekend and I have to call during normal business hours. Which I didn't, and now I've lost the phone number again.

But I will hunt down my $28, and I will complain heartily and try to get more. At least, I hope I will. I'm a lot of empty talk sometimes. But I'll try to channel A'Dell who would definitely not put up with this sort of thing.