You know that old joke, about the fearful child who says he/she wants God with skin on?

I am so lonely for a friend with skin on.  I have so many friends across the country, blog-related and other, but no one here with skin on.  I am in such desperate need for a long girlfriend conversation, the kind where you have to take a bathroom break halfway through to pee because you’ve had so much coffee or Diet Coke.  I want to be able to speak freely, without reservation, without wondering if my words will be used to judge me or hurt me or gossip about me.

It was a lot easier making friends in high school and college.  Now?  Now it seems like everyone is rushing around the track in their own lanes and there’s no time, no way, no how.

The difference between having infants and having teenagers is that if you leave your carpets unvacuumed, no one is likely to choke to death on a rogue dime.  And if your teenagers are awake all night, you can go to sleep anyway.  Plus, if teenagers are stinky, all you can do is suggest a shower and some deodorant, but it’s really out of your hands. However, infants don’t sass and they are usually delighted to see you.

After another day here in the house, working, while kids play and bicker, that’s all I’ve got.  The snow has melted, but has been replaced by wind and rain and the kids are inside, playing video games, annoying each other and eating all the tortilla chips and nacho cheese they can find.  I can’t catch up on laundry even though I’m constantly carting dirty laundry to the laundry room and carrying clean laundry upstairs.  When I’m not working, I scheme to get out of the house instead of staying put and cleaning out cupboards and the storage room.

For it’s that time of the year when I want to purge, to dig out the casserole dishes I haven’t seen since I shoved them into the cupboard a year or two ago.  I want to clear the floor of the storage room but in order to do that, I need to ditch the toys I stashed there.  I need to figure out why I have nothing to wear and yet my closet is stuffed.  I should organize the spices.  But I don’t want to do any of that if there is a chance I can run away from home.

Truth is, I feel a little gloomy.  I recognize it as a low-grade depression or maybe just melancholy typical to my personality, but I don’t want to do much of anything.  I have to work.  I have to take care of the children.  I have to function, but all I really want to do is sleep and read and eat and go to the movies.

*yawn*

By the way, I read The Tale of Despereaux last night.  It was so much different from the movie and, of course, so much better.  I’m also reading Ninety Minutes in Heaven because it was co-written by Cec Murphey, whom I’ve become acquainted with this year.  (Barely–we’re on a Yahoo group, but he is Someone and I am not.)   Before that, I read Child of My Heart (Alice McDermott) and The Reader (Bernhard Schlink).

What are you reading?  Do you recommend it?  I think I’m going to read Elizabeth Berg or Anne Tyler next.

The snow is melting and so my mother-daughter day in Seattle did not involve dying in a car accident.  Instead, we arrived at a conveniently located parking garage at 11:20 a.m., gazed at the Seattle Center comatose fountain, scurried into the Seattle Center building (such a shadow of its former tacky self), examined the life-sized snow-globe and then rode the Monorail to Westlake Center for a quick shopping expedition at Children’s Place (new hat, gloves, sweatshirt, matching pants and three stuffed animals).  Then, at her insistence, we ascended and descended and ascended the escalators before returning on the Monorail to the Seattle Center where we dined at Quincy’s.  (My daughter ate five mini-corndogs, asked for more and threw away most of her fries.  What a weird kid.)

But all that was the prelude to our real purpose for being in Seattle on a Friday afternoon.

My six-year old and I attended the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “Nutcracker” performance.  She, of course, has never been to the ballet and I hadn’t been since I went with the International Club in high school.  We had amazing seats–why go at all if you can’t see?

Tonight, I asked her what the best part was–she said it was when the Mouse-King bit the girl–and then, I said, no, I mean the best part of the whole day and she snuggled against me and said, “Spending the whole day with you.”  I hope she still thinks that in ten years.  My boys would much rather hang out in their cave with their friends and an unbeaten video game than with their mother–which is as it should be.

* * *

Christmas Day was a rousing success, if I do say so myself.  Saying so seems self-congratulatory because, face it, without me, there would be no Christmas.  I mean, without Baby Jesus there would be no Christmas.  But without me there would be no homemade fudge.

We told the kids they could look in their stockings but that their dad and I would not be down before 9 a.m.  We were and it was all over by 10 a.m.–well, unless you are me, and then there is cooking to do.  We have a hearty meal, but one that’s easy to prepare, and one of my teenagers likes to cook.  By 3 p.m. we were cleaning up and my husband–God bless him!–suggested that I go to a movie.  So I did.  I saw “Doubt” with Meryl Streep and, uh, that guy whose name slips my mind, but he was fantastic.  I said to the ticket-taker guy, “Hey, what are those people waiting for?” and he said, “The Marley movie,” and he said, “Doubt?  What’s that?”  And I said, “You know, the nun movie?” because, really, did I want an existential conversation with a ticket-taker guy who doesn’t even know the basic plots of the movies showing at his theater?

Well.

I can see why “Doubt” has received rave reviews.  I really liked it.  (More than “Seven Pounds” which is hardly a fair comparison, but that movie, “Seven Pounds” has a basic premise that I do not accept.)

My family room is a wreck at the moment–I just looked over searching in vain for a good ending sentence for this blog.  I guess it’s a sign that the kids here are living it up, enjoying life in my house.  That’s fine, as long as no one spills anything sticky.  The carpets were cleaned recently and wouldn’t it be nice if no one spills Kool-aid for awhile?

Another holiday over and done.  Check it off the list.  Let’s move along.

We’ve had ghastly weather for over a week, but this morning when I opened the front door, I heard the glorious sound: drip-drip-drip.

So, at noon, my daughter and I raced to the grocery store so she could buy her brothers a present.  (She hadn’t remembered until today, apparently.  She’s six years old.)  Of course, I need important things like sour cream and black olives.

We have two vans–a normal mini-van and a Chevy cargo van which is 13 years old.  My husband drives the newer van to work, leaving the gigantic old van for me to motor around town.  I can finally park it between the white lines in a parking lot–a skill which took me a couple of years to master.  (That’s just pulling in straight.  I could never ever parallel park this behemoth.)

The last time I drove the big van was when it had started snowing a week ago.  It took me six tries to get backed out of my sloping driveway and then I slid all over my unplowed road.  Truly, driving this van on the snow is like trying to steer a living room on wheels–without brakes or steering wheel.  Or like motoring a boat on a stormy sea . . . with no rudder or oars.  Kinda scary.

I was confident today, though, because of the drip-drip-drip.  I had my teenagers shovel the snow from behind the van.  The funny thing was that they didn’t shovel as much as they raked and “broomed.”  Whatever.  As long as I didn’t have to contend with a snowbank before I even hit the road.

Our road was slippery, but once I hit the main road all was well. Hooray!

The parking lot at the grocery store was another story.  A bad story.  I had to park way out in the parking lot because it’s not easy to park an enormous van in a slushy snowy parking lot packed with a million last minute grocery shoppers.  Awesome, though, because I was out in the world and not at home without sour cream.  Then I stepped out of the van and into a deep puddle of melty slushy snow.  Pretty.

But we shopped.  We paid.  Then, back to the out in no-man’s-land.  I couldn’t push the cart to the van because of the icy slushy snow pack.  Instead, I carried the bags from the cart which sat pretty much in the middle of the parking lot.  I hurried, though, then returned to the cart and waited for an opening in traffic and backed out.

Only when I backed out, I couldn’t pull forward because I was stuck.  And a car was waiting for my parking spot.  I had to pull forward and try again.  But another car stopped to wait for me . . . and when I backed out, my tires spun, unable to get traction and I couldn’t move.  So I pulled forward again, gunned it, hoped to not hit the car behind me. . . and got stuck again.

After four or five tries and a little Christmas jeering (MOVE ALONG, PEOPLE!) I realized I could turn the opposite way.  So, I was able to exit the parking lot.  Hooray, hooray.  It’s the small things–like being able to drive backward and forward in my living-room-on-wheels that make me happy.

Anyway, what a long story without much of a point, but hey, Merry Christmas!  I hope you have a delightful day and that no one vomits in your house.  (Huh?  Where’d that come from?)

 

 

I work until midnight and try to be sound asleep by 1:00 a.m.  I was never a morning person to begin with, but I am old now and creaky like the tin-man in the mornings.  That puts the following story into context.

5:30 a.m.:  My husband flips on the television to check the weather report.  Essentially, it said, “BAD BAD BAD SNOW SNOW SNOW ACCIDENTS DON’T GO OUT”.

6:04 a.m.:  He leaves for work.  I think to myself how strange it is that I didn’t receive a phone call from the school.  This is the first year the school has automated phone calls telling us when there is a late start or cancellation.  I pick up the phone.  “No line,” it says.  This means . . .

6:05 a.m.:  I stomp downstairs to the teenagers’ room to angrily plug the phone modem back into the wall.  Several weeks ago, I rearranged their furniture and inadvertently left the phone modem plug unguarded.  (It’s complicated.)  At least three times, our phone service has been interrupted for HOURS because the modem’s been unplugged.

6:07 a.m.:  Listen to voice mail.  Two hour school delay.  Okay than.  My kindergartener hasn’t been to school all week.  I go back to bed.

7:00 a.m.:  Phone call from husband telling me he heard on the radio that school was canceled.  I turn t.v. back on to see and it still says “2 hour delay.”  I call the school.  It’s a two hour delay.  I go back to bed.

. . . now, I can’t be sure, but I think I may have answered the phone a few more times.  I don’t know, but at 10 a.m., I came downstairs to see my son off to school.  I asked if he planned to take his display board to school so he could finish his social studies project.  He said no, he wouldn’t have time to work on it.  And off he went.

I cleaned up the kitchen, made oatmeal, watched “The View” while I ate my oatmeal, went upstairs to put away six baskets of laundry, agreed to take my daughter to her grandma’s house to visit. . . and the phone rang.  My son, asking me to bring his stuff for the project.  No problem since I’m taking my daughter to Grandma’s house anyway.  But. . . a problem because I haven’t showered, I’m not dressed, I still need to transcribe the letter written by my great-great-uncle for the project . . . and arrive at the school within 30 minutes.

My weird, leisurely morning turned into a wacky race, made treacherous by the packed snow and ice on my driveway and neighborhood loop.  However, I barely slid leaving my neighborhood and the busier roads were wet, not icy.  I dropped off the materials, dropped off my daughter, went to the grocery store for some provisions (my daughter begged for hot dogs for dinner), then returned home in time to work for four hours.

I interrupted my work shift to pick up my daughter.  Normally, it’s a three minute drive.  Today, it took me at least five minutes to back out of my driveway which was slick with newly fallen snow.  It’s only a slight incline, enough to make riding a tricycle down it quite exciting when you’re two years old.  Still.  It was scary trying to back out and I almost gave up but I pressed the pedal to the metal and vroomed my way up (after first sliding sideways and getting stuck a few times).

Then I slid my way out of to the main road which was quickly accumulating snow. I couldn’t make it up my mom’s driveway, so sort of backed up and slipped into the neighbor’s driveway, parking mostly in the dead-end road.  The three minute trip took twenty.  I was so relieved to be back at home.

I warned my husband when he called from his work thirty minutes away.  He thought maybe he’d stay at a hotel–and I thought that wasn’t a bad idea, but he drove home anyway, taking ninety minutes to drive what normally takes thirty minutes.  He will turn around and go back tomorrow at 6:00 a.m.

Five or six inches of snow fell from during the afternoon and tomorrow the high temperature is supposed to be 27 degrees–so we won’t be going anywhere.  The roads are a disaster.

Funny how the weather made decisions for us–we won’t be going to church on Sunday (Seattle’s bad, too) and my daughter will not get to sing on Christmas Eve at church (more snow predicted for Christmas Eve).  When it snows in this area, we are paralyzed because the hilly roads combined with inadequate plowing and treatment become impassable.

I am trying to embrace the jumbled up plans.  I baked a double-batch of Chex party mix yesterday–which is gone today.  I allow the kids to make cocoa for themselves and whatever kids appear in my house.  I am doing my best to not freak out about the constantly open doors and snow tracks on the carpet.  The kids love this, despite snowballs in the face.

And tomorrow, there will be no school.  And then for two weeks there will be no school.  But we have heat and we have some presents stashed in the closet and we have the promise of Global warming which I hope takes effect immediately.

p.s. I hate the song “Feliz Navidad.” It’s playing on Jay Leno’s show at the moment. HATE.

Did you know that Christmas is a week from Thursday? That’s my Public Service Announcement for the day. I’m terrified that my family expects to eat food on Christmas Day. The thought alarms me because I still haven’t figured out what we will be eating for dinner tomorrow.

I am just hoping that the meteorologists (that is a hard word to spell at 12:40 a.m.!) are wrong and that we are not going to get snow (a “blizzard!” my son’s friend assures us) tomorrow. At the very least, I’d like the snow to arrive at 3:00 p.m. so the children will have already put in a long, long, long day at school. My 6-year old hasn’t gone to kindergarten this week–stupid 2-hour delays–and I am losing my mind.

No, really. I kind of intended to use these last few mornings before Christmas break (NEXT WEEK) wrapping presents and doing last-minute Christmas things. This week is in shambles and it’s all due to ice on the roads.

So I hope to wake up to no snow tomorrow. And a morning free of a certain 6-year old with only one and a half eyebrows.

Tonight, I cradled my daughter in my right arm while we both stretched out on the bed. She was crying because her morning kindergarten class is canceled tomorrow because of the inclement weather (i.e. ice on the side roads). I tried to distract her by telling her that we’d do something tomorrow, only I couldn’t really come up with something fantastic. She turned her face to mine and asked if we could go shopping and it was then that I noticed her right eyebrow.

It looked weird. Her tooth looks really weird, too, since it’s beginning to come loose, but that eyebrow . . . I began to stroke it with one finger. I brushed it back and forth as she continued to chatter.

Then: “Did you cut your eyebrow?” Surely not. The idea was outlandish.

“No” she said, without conviction.

“Really? Because it looks like . . . well, it looks like you cut it. Did you?”

“No.”

“Grace, you cut your eyebrow, didn’t you?”

And she admitted that she had, indeed, cut her eyebrow. I don’t think she realized that scissoring her eyebrow would actually CUT her eyebrow.

She used the Fiskars scissors for kids and I pictured her stabbing herself in her eyeball and so I said, “Grace, do not cut your eyebrows! You might poke yourself in the eye! Don’t do that!”

She said she wouldn’t.

At least it wasn’t her hair (which she tells me she wishes were “smooth”–we curly-haired types just want straight hair). She cut her hair a couple of years ago (I couldn’t find the post I did about it) and it’s only just now grown out. Her hair grows very slowly and then boings into curly ringlets.

She’s still bummed about not going to school tomorrow. I hope her boredom doesn’t tempt her to pierce her own ears or remove her own spleen. What ever happened to just cutting the hair off of a Barbie?

A half an inch of snow fell overnight and my two youngest children could not wait to get their snow gear on at the crack of 8:30 this morning. I was not so enthusiastic.

But since I don’t want to totally rain on their parade, I wrapped myself in my old purple bathrobe and helped my 6-year old find mittens and a hat. She and her brother ran outside to make snowballs with the powdery snow. I curled into a recliner and watched a rerun of “Inside the Actors Studio” about Jay Leno and dozed.

An hour later, I was bitterly cleaning up the kitchen and feeling excessively annoyed by the jumble of lids in the glasses cupboard. My husband buys mugs with lids from coffee places–though neither one of us drinks coffee–and my lid solution stopped working some time ago and now I can’t put away all the glasses because of the stupid lids littering the cupboard. It’s time to clean out my kitchen cupboards because I am tempted to cuss every time I open a cupboard door and try to retrieve something. (We have a half dozen boxes of herbal tea–and we don’t drink herbal tea. It’s ridiculous and it’s making me twitchy just thinking about it now.)

I knew then that I needed to get out of this house for the afternoon. My husband had to leave for a work-related appointment at 3 p.m., so I ended up with almost three hours. I went to Taco Time and Value Village and when I returned, I was much less likely to commit homicide.

As I was putting gas in the car on the way home (only $1.69 a gallon), the snow began to flutter again.

By the time I pulled into the driveway, the flakes were thick and fit for a made-for-television movie. The youngest kids were already outside, cavorting and rejoicing.

Then they went to the neighbor’s house and my house was quiet, but for the teenagers in their room. Eventually, more kids came over and soon, several boys were standing near the front door, hunting for gloves in the front closet. (I keep them in a clear plastic pocket organizer, the kind made for shoes that fits over the door.)

Which leads me to wonder why I am the source of all the gloves and mittens for the neighborhood? Earlier today, my daughter’s friend arrived with bare hands so we outfitted him with mittens. I stock up on mittens and gloves throughout the year because they mysteriously disappear. Right now, there is not a single pair of gloves or mittens to be found–but if you have two left hands, you’d be all set. Clearly, I need to buy more gloves. (I buy them at thrift stores in the off-season, usually.) (All my kids and two or three neighbor kids are gloved now.)

Darkness is falling now and all the kids are outdoors. I’d estimate that two inches of snow fell, maybe a little less, but they will be out until their noses fall off or until the moms all make them come inside.

Now, if school is canceled, we will all rejoice. . . until the third week of June, when we will all grumble.

I know my blog looks weird. I just don’t know why. I hope it will be fixed soon.

* * *

I have a couple of silver frames which have lost their luster. A meticulous housewife might have a schedule for polishing silver, but I do not. I am a half-baked housewife, one who often has no idea at 5 p.m. what she’s cooking for dinner, one who rearranges the ironing pile instead of ironing, one who leaves dishes in the sink overnight. I don’t do “spring cleaning” and dust only when company might be coming over (or at Christmas-time, whichever comes first).

I feel a lot like that tarnished frame these days. I do not shine, I do not reflect the light. I need a good polishing–I ought to be sent away to a shop or something for re-plating. (Do they re-plate silver?)

I’m just worn out, frayed, boring. How do other people do this?

Don’t you hate whiners? I hate whiners. I have so much to be thankful for, so many blessings, blah blah blah. But it just feels like the road goes uphill all the way, in the snow, and I am barefoot. I went from having twins, to babysitting a houseful, to giving birth–oh, and had a brief respite when it was just me and him when his brothers were in school–and then another baby and more babysitting (years of babysitting) and then, wonder of wonders, this full-time job.

It’s so much more fun to be a student with an academic schedule. Summer! Remember summer? And a two-week break at Christmas. . . and those random holidays students get all the time. Adulthood means NO MORE HOLIDAYS, just a carefully hoarded accumulation of ten days to get through the whole entire year.

I tend toward the blues. I know that. I know that’s what this is all about. I just feel down for no particular reason which means that my whole life is cast in this shadow. I’m tarnished.

But! Tomorrow morning my hair colorist is coming over and by noon, I will at least have lustrous hair once again. And that is something. Better than a sharp stick in the eye, anyhow.