Awake Too Late

This reentry week has been difficult in many ways. The transition from the roar of the ocean to the roar of children arguing has made me squint and yell. I’ve been ignoring the increasing soreness in my throat. I can’t seem to keep the dishes all washed and the kitchen clean for even thirty minutes at a time.

Tonight, I am up too late, watching Olympic figure skating and cringing when Sasha Cohen fell on a couple of her jumps. She won the silver, but still. How devastating.

My daughter has been wearing old swimsuits for the past three days. She’s even wearing one to bed at night and switching into different ones throughout the day. I cannot understand this. Yesterday, she played in the backyard in this crazy outfit–a swimsuit and sneakers–no jacket, no coat, no hat in the nippy February air.

Oh! Tonight, my son told me he was a fun boy. I said, “Are you one hundred percent fun?” and he said, “No. Seventy-five percent.” Yesterday, when I begged him not to grow up (his 8th birthday is Sunday), he said, “Mom, it’s the law of physics!”

So it goes. The kids keep growing up and I can’t stand to lose them and I can’t wait to push them out the door.

Weekend Update

If I wait until I have a leisurely moment to write, I will never write again. So, I’m going to begin this, even though my daughter is whining because “Max & Ruby” ended and she wants to make cherry juice, just like Ruby, and my sons are making noodles for lunch and the dryer buzzer sounded long ago and in fifteen minutes the 15-month old baby will return from his lunch with his mommy.

* * *

So, now it’s 2:30 p.m. The boys finally finished their history assessments (on the Constitution) and math problems (Probability and Statistics, which they don’t get “get”). My daughter is upstairs “napping,” which mainly consists of watching PBS instead of sleeping and the 15-month old sleeps soundly, despite the boy noise coming through up the heating vents.

Last Friday, a huge, unexpected windstorm blew through our area. I was about to drag myself out of bed at 7:45 a.m. when the electricity shut off at 7:40 a.m. I drowsily thought I ought to get dressed, just in case a tree fell on our house (I’m often an alarmist), but first, I called my husband to see if he had power at the church. He did not. (As it turned out, some 50,000 customers were without power, some for days.) I joked, “I am going to be so mad if a tree falls on our house and ruins my trip!”

A few minutes later, after I dressed and ambled downstairs, I heard a noise outside, a noise besides the howling wind. I peeked out an upstairs window and saw a firetruck with lights flashing near the cul-de-sac, so I put on a jacket and went out to see what happened.

My next door neighbor was huddled with the middle-of-the-cul-de-sac neighbor (and friend) and her 7-year old and 5-year old. She clutched the leash to her dog in her free hand. The children had only socks on. I said, “Do you want to come to my house?” and they did, leaving behind their van with one door open and a large tree covering it. We put the dog in our fenced backyard because their fence was demolished.

This is what happened. First, a big tree uprooted and fell onto another neighbor’s house, actually sheering off a corner of the house and narrowly missing the home’s occupants who were in their car in the driveway. After that, my friend rushed her children out to their van so they could leave their home. She worried that another tree might fall on their house. (We have a lot of trees in our neighborhood, giant, stately Douglas Firs.) She put the kids in the van and as she stood in the driveway, about to climb in, she heard a terrifying sound and looked up to see an enormous tree falling toward the van. She didn’t know what to do. The kids were in the van. So, she got in, too.

The roof of the two-story house broke the fall of the tree and literally broke the tree, too, so only half the tree landed on the van, smashing the roof a little and breaking the back window. The repair will take six weeks.

So, I spent my Friday morning with my neighbor while her kids played with mine in our powerless house. Her husband eventually arrived and they made calls and before we knew it, guys with chainsaws were cutting up the fallen trees. The roof of the house was caved in a little, but all things considered, the damage is minor. You can still see into the bedroom of the other house through the lopped off corner. The neighbors departed about noon, I guess, and the power finally came on at 1:45 p.m., so I was able to shower. At that point, the temperature had dipped to sixty degrees in the house.

By 5:00 p.m., my friends arrived to pick me up. By 6:00 p.m., we were eating in the bar of a local restaurant, sharing appetizers and eating big salads. By 9:30 p.m., we’d arrived at the ocean cottage. By 10:30 p.m., our Hostess with the Mostess had figured out how to get the gas fireplace burning . . . she followed all the steps, yet the flame stayed small until her dad told her (via cell phone held in the driveway where she found a tenuous connection) to smack the thermostat on the wall. Of course! Forget logic and following directions and just give the thing a whack!

When we crawled into our individual beds around midnight, the sheets were so cold–and stayed cold even an hour later (I had to read before sleeping, of course). So I went to sleep huddled shivering and woke to warmth and sunshine.

I have a little anxiety–performance anxiety, you might say–and feel a little self-conscious about describing the weekend because my friend (The Hostess) raved about my blog to the other three women. And now they have the address, so “hi!” to them. Welcome to unvarnished world of Actual Unretouched Photo.

Let me just say that my worst fear came true and they were all beautiful and thin and sported lovely manicured fingernails and cute haircuts and jeans much smaller than I’ve ever worn in my life. None of this is fair, of course, but I did get more scrapbooking pages done because I do simpler layouts and they all had to be extravagantly creative and use embellishments and computer-generated fonts and digitized photos.

I walked on the shore a couple of times, soaking in the sunshine and trying to hypnotize the sun into setting slower and taking pictures which I can only hope capture a fraction of the beauty of the vast ocean. We went to “town,” where we bought more scrapbooking supplies and tacky souvenirs from a shop overflowing with kitschy junk I wouldn’t pay a dime for at a garage sale. (Well, maybe a dime.) We viewed the lighthouse up close, photographed it, posed by the chain-link fence (me thinking, if I stand behind her a little and turn sideways, I will look almost as narrow as these tall, thin women–I’ll let you know if that worked out for me).

We watched a terrible movie (Must Love Dogs.) “I saw that,” I said. “Was it good?” they said. “Uh, not really. But it should be. But it’s terrible. You’ll see.” Afterwards: “I can’t believe I watched that whole movie! It was awful!” (I only watched half of it and wandered back downstairs to scrapbook some more.)

We ate, we laughed, we talked (someone stop me, please–at least I didn’t tell the decapitated hamster story), we snipped, cropped, stuck pictures in scrapbooks, we read, we slept, we gazed at the ocean. I searched in vain for an unbroken sand dollar–I have such a fixation with them. Saturday night, I saw a bicyclist riding near the waves at low tide with a horse tethered to one hand and a dog leashed to the other. I hope that silhouette turns out.

Three nights, four days, two complete scrapbooks (almost). Good times. Our hostess encouraged us to make the best of our re-entry into the real world so our husbands would be inclined to send us away again for a long weekend.

What a glorious weekend!

And now the baby is crying, my son’s due home from school, my fingers are cold and I have to go.

Well, Blow Me Down!

I had my day completely planned, but strong winds blew my plans away! The trees fell on my neighbor’s homes (no joke) but not mine. Still, the weather disrupted everything today.

I’ll be gone for a few days, heading to Long Beach, Washington, again, with five other moms. My children have made it possible for me to not miss them one bit by being loud and messy and particularly annoying during the seven hours in which we had no electricity. Good times.

Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Be good. And if you can’t be good, be careful.

Girl Gone Wild!


While I sat here at my desk, my daughter crawled beneath it on a hunting expedition. She pulled up a plastic dolly she usually plays with in the bath, a Barbie from McDonald’s, a perfectly sharpened Ticonderoga pencil (the only brand worth buying), a piece of a wooden zucchini from the velcro set, a plastic hairbrush, my NIV Bible, a calendar, an old photograph, foil wrappers from Hershey’s kisses (how’d that get there?) and more. I really had no idea a hidden treasure trove existed under there.

My daughter started using the phrase “okey-dokey” yesterday. When I ask her or tell her something now, she sings, “Okey-dokey!” sometimes adding the rhyming “pokey” or “smokey.” I’ve been using this phrase with my kids for years and years and years and this is the first time anyone has caught on and played along.

Finally, I just remembered something from a few hours ago. My kids received Valentine cards from their out-of-town relatives. I had the boys immediately write thank-you notes because otherwise, it would never get done. I had my 3-year old daughter draw a picture of herself on her card. She scrawled a circle, added some eyes, eyeballs, legs, arms, a mess of hair and then finally, a “vul-va.”

I hope her grandparents don’t ask what “that” is. I’m not sure they’ve ever used that word out loud.

Elastic Post, Fully Expanded

I will be back later to expand am back! Here are the topics:

1) Valentine’s Day, what really happened;
My husband spend Valentine’s Day with another woman. Gasp! But he did come home during the day to deliver flowers, chocolate, and a teddy bear (which was immediately confiscated by my daughter, even though he brought her one, too). I said, “Uh, I have a card around here somewhere.” But his visit was unexpected and I didn’t have the card signed until today. I told you. I’m no romantic! I did stick up a bunch of Valentine window-clings, though, which my daughter said were, “Pretty! So pretty!”

My daughter and I baked pink, heart-shaped cookies and then the children and I ate a heart-shaped pepperoni pizza. My husband finally dragged in after 8:00 p.m. Oh, and that other woman? She’s in the hospital, very near to the end of her life on this earth. My heart goes out to the whole family. They’ve been very good friends to us and we hate this sad and painful good-bye.

2) Runny noses, and who has them;
My nose is past the runny stage, but currently my daughter’s nose is red, raw and runny, and so are the noses of the two babies in my care. You needed to know that, didn’t you?

3) Living in a shoe, with children;
I’ve been trying to stick close to home in the evenings, in anticipation of my upcoming weekend away. And the past two weekends have been very busy, running to and fro and back to again. I haven’t had a decent break away for a long time. In the story of the old woman who lives in a shoe, I would be currently starring as the shoe insert, down-trodden, stinky, and sick of children climbing all over me. Really, the thing that can get to you when you work at home and live with a bunch of kids of varying ages is the sheer isolation (from adults with brains)and the house-induced monotony. At least, it gets to me.

4) Sleep, and why I’m not getting enough, sleep, that is.
As mentioned in #2, my daughter has a runny nose. The past two nights, she’s screamed out my name around midnight, rousing me from sleep. Yesterday morning, at 4:44 a.m., she sobbed hysterically for me. This morning, it was 5:25 a.m., and she was determined to stay awake and watch a DVD. Fine. Watch a DVD. See if I care. I’m going back to bed. That’s what I said. (There goes that Mother of the Year Award.) By about 6:00 a.m., she crawled into bed with us and we dozed until 7:00 a.m., at which point I moaned to my husband, “If it were possible to die from exhaustion, I’d be dead right now.”

But for now, the dryer is buzzing, my eye is twitching and my house still contains four children who do not belong to me. It’s now 10:45 p.m. and I’ve just returned from the grocery store where I purchased fixings for the Sunday night meal at the ocean cottage. (Each of us are responsible for one meal during the Girls’ Weekend.) I drove a cute Kia Spectra because our car is in the shop for the second time in as many weeks. It spontaneously quit running again. Last time, the mechanic declared (“I do declare!”) that he couldn’t find anything wrong.

Stupid car. So I have a dead 1991 Chevy Astro van in my driveway and a broken car in the shop and a rental car in my driveway. It’s a veritable junkyard around here. All I need is a mean dog with yellow teeth.

Happy VD


I uncovered this in my storage-room clean-up last weekend, and so, while I type, my daughter is behind me, pressing buttons, switching from one Mozart tune to the next.

Meanwhile, one of my sons watches Cartoon Network while his twin plays on the other computer. My third son is at school for another thirty-minutes. And the two babies are sleeping. In the distance, the clothes dryer squeaks with every revolution.

My daughter keeps asking, “Can I watch the glue dry?” This morning, we cut out a red construction paper heart and wrote a message for daddy in glitter glue. She climbs onto the table to watch the glue dry from time to time. I think we’ll make heart-shaped sugar cookies soon.

I declared today an official sick day so we didn’t do any school work. My daughter woke up screaming at 4:44 a.m. She sobbed, “I am so sick!” but went back to sleep after a trip to the bathroom and a few minutes of rocking. I, however, struggled to fall back to sleep as I am suffering from cold symptoms myself.

And the two babies have snotty noses and I knew everyone would want attention and rocking. So, no school. The boys made their own Valentine hearts while I rocked with my daughter and one of the babies.

I must note that we have blue skies and sunshine today. Also, the purple crocuses and one yellow crocus are blooming. How I love the reliable surprise of spring bulbs. Oh! And while I stood at the kitchen sink, a raccoon waddled across my small back yard in plain view.

I remembered another Valentine’s Day. On Valentine’s Day, 1996, my twin boys had chicken pox. The worst symptoms had passed, but on that day, they were pockmarked and spotted and horrific. I tried to find a picture that wasn’t already fastened into a scrapbook, but I was unsuccessful. I did, however, find a lot of unorganized photos which made my head sort of explode. I intend to spend my evening sorting and organizing pictures and wondering why I wasn’t thankful for being young when I was young.

Incidentally, I have always had a warm spot in my heart for Roseanne,yes, that Roseanne, mostly because my dad thought she was funny (way back in the stand-up days, before her show). And she was funny. I remember the line about why men think women can find things because, “Like, they think the uterus is a tracking device.” But this “Rockin’ With Roseanne” DVD made for children scares me. All that based on some clips I saw while she was making the talk-show rounds.

You know me. I like to share the judgmentalism whenever I can. It’s Valentine’s Day, after all.

Fashion Advice You Must Heed

Nordstrom sells them.

Target sells them.

My mother used to wear them.

But I will not. Ever. Never ever. No gauchos. No culottes, even if you spell it “c-o-u-l-o-t-t-e-s.”

Some fashion trends must be resisted, rejected, refused. Join me. Please.

Because if you don’t, you realize what we’ll have to wear next, don’t you?

High-waisted jeans. Then pretty soon, we’ll all be wearing leg-warmers and ripped sweatshirts and headbands, and not in a cute-Reese-Witherspoon way, and really, do you want to go there?

Sequential Saturday

Do you have one? A place where you stash your giant roasting pan, a folder full of papers from third grade and the playpen, even though you only use it for visitors and loan it out at Christmas to that lady for her grandchild? Do you keep slides from thirty years ago and clay handprints from your kids’ kindergarten class? And craft books for that day you imagine will come when you wake up bright and early with a determination to refinish and decoupage furniture? Do you run across two birdhouses from a couple of summers ago waiting for paint and rolls of Christmas wrapping paper lolling around with a music stand from those months when your son took up the flute?

Or is it just me?

We have no garage, which is fine, I suppose, considering the garage was converted into a large room which now serves as a bedroom for the twins. (We moved into this three-bedroom house with three kids, thinking we weren’t having any more.) The room is large enough for a computer desk and computer which the kids use for school and play, a piano, a second desk, and a huge shelving unit which houses the Nintendo and random boy belongings. Both the laundry room and the storage room branch off from the boys’ room, so their space is almost a common area in our house, not a private spot.

It was not my goal, as such, to clean out the storage room today, but when I peered into the future, I hoped I might get to it eventually. After all, every time I walk into that room to find a hammer or to stash a pile of stuff, I’d cringe. Last week, I cleaned up the upstairs rooms and once a week or so, I return the boys’ room to a habitable state, but the storage room fits into the category, “Out of Sight: Out of Mind.” And it drives me out of my mind when I flick on the lightswitch and stub my toe on an old printer the boys carted home from somewhere.

The boys had to go to a writing workshop today (9 a.m. to 2 p.m.!) and my husband went to a brunch and my 7-year old went to his buddy’s house, so my daughter and I were home alone. I worked and she appeared from time to time to beg me for a toy or a snack. I uncovered a few forgotten toys and she uncovered a bin full of Play-Doh toys (which she emptied in the family room, which is typical, isn’t it–I’m cleaning up one mess while a child makes an equal and opposite mess in another room).

The storage room clean-up was actually not the destination on my sequential chore road. My goal was beyond the storage room clean-up, but first, I had to clean up the kitchen. Then I had to get the laundry underway. Then I had to sweep and clean my boys’ room. Then, finally, I could tidy up the storage room. And when the storage room was clean, I could look for my photographs from the years 2002, 2003 and 2004. For you see, on Friday night, I’ll be heading to the ocean for a Girls Scrapbooking Weekend. Six of us (I think) will be spending Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights at the beach. I intend to get my scrapbooks up to date. I had been keeping up until my daughter was born and since then, my pictures sit abandoned in their envelopes rather than festively displayed in scrapbooks.

The only thing standing between me and a weekend of bliss and acid-free, lignin-free scrapbooking paper (and stickers!) is the upcoming week in which no crisis will be permitted to occur and no emergencies will be allowed to require the presence of my husband, because next weekend, he will be me, minus the compulsion to clean, and I will be me, minus four kids and a husband.