Selfless

I suffered from a vicious stomach bug this weekend. Ugh. I’ll spare you details. Because I am nice like that. :P

Drew was mostly very accomodating about the fact that I was essentially out of service for a full day. I nested in my bed, Cliff brought me the baby when he needed to eat, and I slept. Occasionally, I’d wake up to find Drew playing very quietly next to me, or find that he had left me a stuffed Darth Vader on my pillow or tucked a toy in next to me, in case I woke up and was bored.

When I woke up in the late afternoon, feeling a bit better, I saw that he was playing at the foot of my bed.

ME: How you doing, kiddo?
DREW: Mama, do you think some M an’ M’s woudl make your tummy feel better?
ME: No, sweetie. It’s nice of you to think of me, but I don’t think I want any M&M’s right now.
DREW: Well, then, maybe I could have them.


Selfless, that one.

Let's make a deal

When Cliff and I were in Morocco last year, we bought a gorgeous rug for our foyer. Because that’s what you do in Morocco. I had read up on all the places we were going, and everything I read about Morocco talked about the shopping — more to the point, the bargaining process. The price they give you is not the real price, it’s all about negotiation. I was not happy to hear that. I am not much of a bargainer. I once bought a (lovely, kitchy, delightfully tacky!) bust of Elvis from a flea market. I asked the lady the price, it seemed fair enough in comparison to how very much I wanted a bust of Elvis (having been thus far eluded by my Dream Art — an actual black velvet Elvis painting), and I wrote her a check. She about passed out on the spot to have received her first offer. But that, to me, is the way things should work. I have a Thing that I want to sell. I think it is worth X dollars. If you want to buy the Thing and think it is worth X dollars, buy it. If you think it is not worth X dollars, walk away. So nice, so tidy.

In any case, centuries of custom in Africa do not agree, and bargaining is where it’s at. I was lucky to be with Cliff, an avowed bargainer who, as a salesman, really knows the ins and outs and can drive a deal home. Yay. We got a pretty rug, and we paid more than a fair price for it.

I think, though, that now I could have procured an even better deal. If I were in Morocco today, I wager I could bring home an even nicer rug for damn near free of charge. Why my sudden increased confidence in my negotiating abilities?

I have a THREE year old. :|

My life is now nothing but a series of negotiations. He wants 40 colored Goldfishies right before dinner? How about 5? He counters with 30. I offer 10, but in his favorite bowl that I then have to wash, not in a plastic baggie. He proposes 25, and he won’t throw himself on the floor of the kitchen and lay there for a half hour, motionless and silent, in protest against my Goldfish Tyranny. We reach an agreement – a reasonable 15 Goldfishies, in a plastic baggie, with one screeching wail of “Mooooooore Goooldfishieeeeeesssss!!!!”, but no floor collapse.
 
And the deal is done.

Looks like I was right to be concerned

When Drew was first born, I was terribly terribly concerned that he was a boy. I thought “Geez, it’s cute, but what the hell am I supposed to DO with it?” Coming from a family of all girls except for Dad, I felt a little like someone who had grown up with a dog but was suddenly handed a goldfish.
In one particularly distressing moment, I was opening some mail shortly after Drew had arrived. There was a nice greeting card in a blue envelope – a congratulations card! On the front flap of the card was a little sketch of a crib, covered in blankets like a little tent with a hand drawn sign that said “No girlz alowed!”. I think I cried for a half hour. That was my greatest fear – that’s what I was terrified of. Being shut out of some all boys club, only by MY boy. Not scared I wouldn’t love him enough, but that I would love him SO, SO much, but someday he would look at me and see just a girl. Now, of course, I realize how silly that all was, that he will never see me as a girl, I will just always be Mommy. And I can’t imagine my life as anything other than a mom to my rough and tumble boys, full of match box cars and dinosaurs.

But I was in the bookstore yesterday (Ahhh………the pleasant oasis of a half hour at the bookstore!) and I stopped by the parenting section, just to browse. I noticed a large segment of books dedicated to raising boys. Bringing Up Boys. The Wonder of Boys. Raising Boys. Raising Boys To Be Like Jesus. (!?!?!?!) Raising Cain (What is with the religious theme?) Don’t Screw This Up Or He’ll Be A Serial Killer.

Ok. I made the last one up. But here I had spent the first three months of Drew’s life convincing myself that all my concerns about him being a boy and my implied culpability at being to blame if he grew up to be a crazyperson were all just silly worried rantings of a post partum mind! The parenting section of the local Barnes and Noble seems to have a differing opinion. The authors of these books seem, based on breezy glances at the back covers, to believe that it IS something different to raise a boy, and that it WILL be my fault when, as a teen, he is either so absurdly hyper masculine that he joins a high school biker gang and holds up local liquor stores or conversely demands tickets to every traveling musical production that hits town and refuses to leave the house without his Little Orphan Annie wig and patent leather Mary Janes. Either way, IT’S ALL MY FAULT.

Meh. As I turned to leave, the weight of my two precious boys future perched squarely on my shoulders, I noticed they also had a similar section for girls. Relief! If I was struggling to find balance between motorcycles and Playbills, then my girl mom friends had to worry about Heidi Fleiss versus Heidi Klum. And I stopped being worried. I don’t really suppose there IS much difference, not really. I don’t need to know how to raise Boys. I need to know how to raise Drew and Zachary. And as it happens, the only experts on that are them.

Drew robot

Drew wore this box around the house all day Saturday. He told me he was Drew Robot (complete with robot voice). Drew Robot has been an off and on inhabitant of our house for some time, but it’s the first time he had an outfit. I admit to only adding the eye and arm holes after a couple of hours. I wanted to see how long he’d walk around the house, blind and armless, bumping into walls and furniture. The second time I caught the lamp (my gorgeous, tacky, gypsy beaded lamp) right before it crashed to the floor I decided the eye hole was a good idea. There were a couple of cry worthy bumps – primarily because he’d put his robot box on my bed, and then crawl into it and try to move around. The cardboard would start to slip, and he’d careen out of control off the bed into the wall or the nightstand or whatever else was in his way. Not that it slowed him down one bit – just a kiss on the booboo, a mechanical “tank yew, mommy!”, and he was back in the box. After the eye and arm holes were taken care of and a strict No Robots On Mommy’s Bed policy was enacted, it was just good times for all. I did refuse to make robot boxes for Zachary or the dog. It just seemed best.

And I have started to think about Halloween. A smaller box (the head) stacked on a larger box (the body)? Covered in tin foil? Clothes dryer ductwork for arms and legs? Hello?!?!?!?

Where being a dork in high school finally pays off. Kind of. I think.

Last night Cliff arranged a get together for my friends at a local restaurant and arcade type place for my birthday. Dinner was fun, and I got a turtle ice cream cake. Not too shabby. Once we had kids (and certainly since we had two!) time spent with friends out of the house is in short supply, and I had a really great time catching up and eating hot food, without having to get up to refill a sippy cup or grab another fork or share my plate with anyone. Even though Cliff did steal my last bite of cheese stick.

My game of choice at the ol’ arcade is trivia. I know, I know. Hello, bookworm/dork/geek/nerd/total tool. Nevertheless, I suck at everything else, and I enjoy trading my tickets for value-inflated crappy trinkets I would never, ever buy outside of that situation. As a cursory nod to maturity, I now trade them for crap I can give to my kids. Mostly because I can no longer get away with fake tattoos and glitter hair gel.

There were six slots at the trivia game. Five were full – three with some sort of family group, and a couple that was about as drunk as could possibly be seemly at 6pm on a Sunday evening. The guy was your average frat boy, plus 10 years. But still sporting the backwards baseball cap. In other words, kind of a douchebag, you could tell just by looking at him. But you knew he had played his drunken charm for all it was worth – he had that weird sense of entitlement about him. He had clearly been dominating the game up to that point, and when I took a seat, he called out to me “Are you ready to play?”

Well, yeah. I sat down didn’t I? I said “yeah, sure I am”. I thought he was just being polite and making sure I was in the game before the time limit to join in had passed. Apparently not. He leaned further forward and asked again, louder “Yeah, but are you ready to PLAY?” Oh sure, DrunkMan. It’s on.

I totally kicked his ass. It was awesome, and I am a geek enough to admit I enjoyed each and every time I got an answer right and heard his groan of defeat. After one game, he leaned over to his ladyfriend and drunk-whispered that he wanted to leave and do something else, that he didn’t like losing. After two games, he stood up, ripped off her string of tickets*, and told me “I don’t like playing with you. You are smarter than me. Do you know how that makes me feel?” and took off. I suppose I was supposed to…………….what? Coddle his ego and lose so that he could impress his way into LadyFriends drawers? Sorry, dude. My payoff for being a total wallflower dweeb from the ages of 13 until, well…..STILL NOW while you no doubt played big man on campus and had, you know, DATES comes now. Boo-yah!

So there’s your lesson, kids. Read a bunch of books, skip those keggers, and one day in your mid thirties you, too, can kick some drunk guys ass at video trivia. Do you really need a better reason to do well in school?

*My advice to the scantily clad LadyFriend? Bail, honey. And bail fast. No dude who would reach across you and rip off your tickets and walk away with them can be any good for you. :P

My old room was.......

My old room was messy. Thats’ what everyone who ever saw my old room would say. My room now, too, for that matter. I describe my room currently as “cluttered but not dirty”. My teenager room, though……..yeah, dirty works. Piles of clothes and shoes and papers and the detrius of high school and part time jobs and drama and angst. It was a particularly noxious shade of purple, with darker, even purple-er baseboards. I loved that color. It was like being inside a marshmallow peep, and it gave my parents indigestion, which made it even more appealing. I had a drafting table as a desk, just because I thought that was cool. In reality, it was a horrible desk functionally, with no drawers or places to put things, covered in magazines and old homework and makeup. My bed was a twin (OH! the indignity! I thought at the time a full would be so much more promising, wink-wink), and generally covered with clothes that had to be shoved down to the foot of the bed when it was time to sleep. That was it for furniture. No drawers. For some reason, my family was vehemently anti-dresser drawer, or at least it seemed so to me. There was no manifesto against them or anything, but not even my parents had dressers. My sisters and I had one at one time when we shared a room, but it did not end up in my room when we separated. Cindy would have wanted the drawer, as she was unfailingly neat and organized and tidy, and I would have wanted it and been denied on the basis of doubts I was capable of putting it to good use. I can hear my mother now “you don’t put your clothes in the closet, what makes you think you will put them in a drawer?”. I am sure it sounded totally unfair at the time, but since I currently have both dresser drawers AND piles of clothes all over the room, I forgive her in retrospect. There wasn’t room in there anyway, really.

I had one window, which I never snuck out of. I snuck a boy or two in, but I never left. Somehow my thought process led me to believe that if I were caught with a boy in my room it would be Bad, no doubt, but if I was just missing and they didn’t know where I was……..well, I’d not only have to pay for whatever it was I’d been off doing and also the wrath of the worried parent. Thanks, but no thanks. I was in enough trouble for the things I really did, I was in no mood to get in trouble for all The Things That Might Have Happened. Of course, I say that with ease because I never did get caught with a boy in my room. And no, mom, I won’t tell you who.

Bag Lady

Six. A half dozen.

That’s the MINIMUM number of bags it takes me to get out of the house in the morning.
Breastpump, Drew’s daycare gear, Zachary’s daycare gear, laptop bag, my lunch, Zachary’s bottles. I stopped carrying a purse a long time ago, or it might be seven. I am not including the baby carrier (complete with baby), nor the random one off things like food for daycare parties, extra clothes for splash day, or items for show and tell. That is insane. I am loaded down like a pack mule, and I watch my husband leave for work in the morning with ………………….KEYS. And maybe a coffee. (COFFEE!?!?!?!?)

I have done all that I can to pare down what I take along, but I can genuinely say that I need every bag I have. I’d like to think that someday I will be able to shed a bag or two, but I know full well that the diaper bag will give way to a bag of cleats and shin guards for soccer practice, the breast pump will morph into the kids school bags, the kids will need their own lunches, and so on and so forth. I can do almost any job in the world one handed, and I can carry a totally unseemly number of grocery bags into the house at one time. Is it any wonder my back is killing me?

When you see commericals and talk shows that talk about the modern working mother, struggling to juggle a bunch of different balls, don’t be fooled. They aren’t balls. They are BAGS.