Ahoo

Some days my daughter wakes up all a-hoo. There’s no great explanation for it. Maybe she didn’t sleep well. If she were a princess I’d say an evil queen had hidden peas under her mattress. She makes this crank sound -- a sort of nasal, wrenchy, steel-bending-under-pressure-noise that goes straight into the primal reactive core of my brain stem, where panic is seated. That’s the first warning sign of danger – the crank. Her hair is tangled and her clothes are all hiding under things and not only is nothing going right this morning, nothing is going to go right for the rest of the day – and nothing could possibly ever go right for the rest of her life. Ever ever.

The other morning was just such a lovely gift of a day. She overslept for school, and it was clear I was going to go to work without mascara – this was going to take a while. Then inspiration struck. I said, “Hey, let’s start this day over.” I tucked her in bed in all of her clothes and kissed her ‘goodnight.’ In about 10 seconds I ‘woke her up’ with a kiss. She sat up and smiled, and got up, and was just fine. A complete do-over. Mommy magic.

So then, still aglow with my brilliance, I went into my son’s room to check his progress --and he was cranky, too. (Though quietly). So I said, “Why don’t we start the day over? Here, let me tuck you in and then I’ll wake you up again.” I threw the covers over him in pantomime and he looked at me with a sigh of patience tinged with pity and said, “Mom, it’s the same day.”
Hm. So not so magic.

The OverLoad

The trouble with loading my schedule past the capacity of my memory is that I never know I am overdoing it until it’s too late. I know my colleagues at work have noticed that my M.O. is either “I will do it the minute you ask me, or I will forget it completely and deny any knowledge of this conversation.” I’d make a great spy, but a lousy witness.

Take last Thursday. My sitter/housekeeper is supposed to be able to leave early on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Around 7:30, she was still puttering about, but didn’t seem wrapped up in any particular project, so I asked her why she was still there.
“I’m waiting for the laundry to come out of the dryer downstairs, mama.”
“Well I can get it when it’s done," I offered. "How much longer?”
“Twenty minutes, mama.”
“Okay, you run, don’t worry about it. I can get a load of laundry, for heaven’s sake.”
“Okay, mama. I’ll see you next week.”

But Friday is her day off and Monday we were out of town for the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, so I didn’t see her until I got home from work Tuesday night.

Into the apartment she walked with an enormous armload of laundry.
“What’s that?” I asked, wondering that she could have gotten so much done in a day.
“The laundry from last week, mama. You left it downstairs in the basement all weekend. Lucky nobody took it.”

I laughed, she laughed, but inside I was thinking, we’re doomed. If this woman ever quits, my children will starve and be naked. And of course my husband, upon hearing my story, reminded me that I had kvetched all weekend about my daughter having no underwear. “Where is it?” I had asked, in genuine wonderment.

Maybe I should start focusing on being decorative. Useful isn’t working out for me.

Sudoku Vegetables

You’ve seen the Sudoku numbers game, yes? It’s a square with 9 spaces that you fill in with the numbers 1 to 9. Easy, right? Except those 9 squares are stacked next to another set of 9 squares and sitting on top of two more squares and you can’t repeat any number either across or down in your first square or in the other four. Panting yet? Get those down pat and they expand it to 16 squares to solve simultaneously.

Sounds daunting. Unless you’re a mom, of course. If you’re a mom it’s not called Sudoku. It’s called “Making dinner.”

My son and my daughter like pasta. My daughter will eat tomato sauce – but not with meat, which is all my husband will eat. I’m fine either way, but my son only likes butter and parmesan – freshly shaved parm, of course. Got that? Let’s move on to the veggie course.

Multitask Mania Sweepstakes Winner

So Monday my daughter wakes up with about fifteen tissues worth of nose blowing and a 'sore throat' that wouldn't slow yours truly down to a trot, but she feels icky, so I yielded and said to myself, Okay what can she miss in one day of third grade?
But of course, I had to take her brother to school and get to a physical therapy session in 45 minutes, so I called the babysitter and woke her from the sleep del muerte at 7:45.
"How soon can you get here?"
"I don't know, mama, I just woke up."
"Okay, can you meet me at the Starbucks by the Boo's school and pick up the girlchild there?"
"I'll try mama."

Good enough. So I hung up and started bundling the smalls into their coats and my husband calls.
"I caught the stomach bug from the Boo's school. I'm coming home." FULL STOP. In ten years the man has never taken a day off for illness. He's worked with a 104 fever. This is a miracle.
I call the babysitter back.
"Good news! The husband is sick! Take you time!"
I parked the girlchild in front of the TV (thank you thank you whoever invented the TV! Oh marvelous electronic babysitter!) told her not to move or touch anything until her dad got home, and ran out the door to get her brother to school.
Another morning maneuver executed!
Thank god for diarrhea.

Miss Thing

Tuesday on the subway running from a meeting with the client to a meeting with my daughter’s psychologist (psychiatrist? Counselor? I probably should know that…). 2 in the afternoon, never had lunch (justifies the extra muffin), not going to get lunch, (justifies the cookies and mixto at 4:30 (mistos? How do I get through my life with this little attention to detail?)) and I’m huffing up the stairs at the 77th street station, five minutes behind schedule because the 6 is always….just….leaving… Grand Central as I flythroughtheturnstileanddownthestairsgetoutofmywaypeople…rats! And going up the stairs right in front of me is the most tight-jeaned, jherri-curled, cropped-jacket, big-earring, trendy-bag young woman that ever sauntered at a leisurely hip-swinging pace in knockoff Manolos. Everything about her screamed ‘I’m just walking because my butt looks good doing it.’ As I cut ever so Legolas-lithely around her (huff, huff) I whispered under my breath, “Excuse me, Miss Thing. But I’m Miss Things To Do.”

Never. Is never good for you?

What is this ‘later’ everyone is supposed to have? My husband just opened his Christmas iPod and I noticed the ‘podcast’ setting – so the tech-patient can download digital radio programs to listen to…’later.’ My bookkeeper/office manager has a TIVO and is always noting the programs she’s recorded (or is it ‘captured?’) to watch – later.

I have no later. My laters are all booked. As are my nows. I have about 14 books on my night table that all looked amazing and utterly necessary when I was standing in the bookstore – I’ll be happy to list them for you – later. And I suppose I’ll get to them one day, but meanwhile my mother-in-law had a copy of the new John Berendt book about the burning of the Fenice opera house in Venice. I’m an impressive 60 pages in and trying to focus on getting through it before the next New Yorker comes.
See, that’s the problem. I started reading the New Yorker, or attempting to read the New Yorker. I don’t understand people who read it every week and also claim to read the entire Sunday Times. I get through the cartoons and the occasional Andy Borowitz humor piece.I get the Times and the Wall Street Journal every day. I read the front page. On Mondays I manage to read the ‘metropolitan diary’ where people tell cute stories of what happened to them in the city. (People without blogs, that is. Nonblogs. The Blogless. The Abloglic.) Y’know it just occurred to me my neighbor has a parrot. Maybe she’d like my newspapers. I’ll have to ask her. Later.

Corduroy...the universal solvent

We drove to see my mom for a couple of days -- really just a couple of days of my family is all I can subject anyone to. We’re a lovely family, really, but as my friend Tom puts it, “There are no small personalities in your house.” So we keep visits to quiet, fastidious, seemly people like my mother to a minimum so that we leave on the near side of the cusp between terribly-entertaining and just plain terrible.
On the drive back we took a spur of the moment side trip to Williamsburg, Va. We never know how the smalls are going to take anything so we keep it last-minute and short. That way if it’s all ‘where are the hamburgers this is booooring’ we haven’t invested much energy, planning, or cash into the venture. And if they like it, we can always go back. To our nerdvahna delight, they loved it. We bought the boychild a tricorn hat he wore all day, and the girlchild a lace-trimmed bonnet (I think it’s called a tippet or a tuppet or something) that framed her face like a doll, and proceeded to walk their legs off. Before long everything was ‘ye olde.’ Ye olde silversmith, ye olde milliners, ye olde lunch break. The boychild was thrilled to walk on the same floors of the Wythe House George Washington had walked on and wanted his picture taken in the room where GW had slept. I have no idea why. I hope it’s something they’re doing at school. We saw a pair of oxen and the girlchild asked their names. Rusty and Red, as it happens, but I never would have thought of that. That’s what’s cool about kids. They really have a different view of things.
And around lunch, when the lines of tourii were snaking out the tavern doors, we hied over to the Wmsburg Inn and had a civil lunch with very minimal manner-prompting. The boychild had something on his hand his napkin wouldn’t remove, so before we could stop him, he wiped his hands on his pants. Improper, but highly effective. Who knew corduroy is the universal solvent?

So it’s New Year’s Eve, and the girlchild requested we go out to dinner more in the coming year, since she and her brother now have manners. I think we might just have to do it.