Did You Smell That?

I smelled fall in the air two nights ago. We were swimming at the pool and I smelled a chill in the air and knew in an instant that autumn would be rushing in before we’d even finished getting acquainted with summer. I was right, too. This afternoon, Babygirl and I were in the backyard, bailing water from the sandbox, and I heard the tiny sounds of sprinkling snowflakes–only it wasn’t snowflakes. It was needles from the neighbor’s big trees with inconsiderate branches. They hang over into my yard, littering it with billions of sharp, prickly needles.

I’ve never been much of a tree-hugger (have you ever tried to get sap off your hands?)–aside from a stint in my youth when I read my stepmother’s “Mother Earth Magazines” from cover to cover and became a vegetarian for two years and thought seriously about joining a commune. Other than that, I’ve never been a tree-hugging kind of girl and now I’d vote without hesitation to have those trees whacked down. Stupid trees.

I noticed later when I drove the kids to Wendy’s for a delicious meal of fast-food that some trees have actually begun to change colors and lose their leaves.

Summer is slipping away.

My husband left for Houston very early this morning. I think he left by 5 a.m. I didn’t hear a thing. I didn’t have DaycareKid today, so I slept in until 8 a.m. when Babygirl’s hollers woke me. Then I spent as much time as I could finishing my reorganizing, purging and cleaning project. The storage room looks decent now and I rearranged the boys’ room and set up desks and lights for them so they can take their assessments for http://www.k12.com. The twins will both be schooling at home this year–which is kind of a cross between homeschooling and public-schooling. I have high hopes for them.

Babygirl has suddenly been narrating her life. The other night, we stopped our car, I rolled down the window and said hello to a friend. Babygirl said, “Who-zat?” And I said, “That was Kelly.” She said, “Kelly in da white car.”

I couldn’t believe it. Kelly was driving a white car and Babygirl noticed the color of the car. I didn’t even know she knew it. Babygirl has started talking as much as the big kids. I’m not sure whether to be thrilled or scared.

Babygirl has developed an obsession with holding things. She’ll gaze into the sky and cup her hands toward the airplane say, “Hold it?” She sees a dog on television, reaches her hands in supplication and says, “Hold it?” Tonight, right before bed, she looked through a book, spotted a picture of a newborn baby and scooped her hand toward it and said, “Hold it?”

Then she cried. She cried and cried and cried. “Hold it! Hold it! Hold it!” I kept saying, “That’s a pretty picture. You can’t hold the baby. It’s just a picture.” Her heart was broken, though, because she couldn’t “hold it.”

I want to hold stuff, too, sometimes, stuff that just can’t be held. I want to hold the summer, I want to hold Babygirl’s babyhood, I want to hold the sweet moments in life. But all you can do sometimes is gaze and memorize and, occasionally, cry.

If you can, though, hold it. Hold on tight. You never know when summer will leave without even saying good-bye.

Home Improvement

Tonight found me in the aisles of the local home improvement store. I went in search of bee-killing spray, paint for my living room, and hair-clog removing chemicals. While wandering around with glassy eyes and sticky contact lenses, I remembered my drippy faucets (two different bathrooms) and asked a man in the plumbing section, “Excuse me, do you know about faucets?”

He straightened up and said, “Uh, no, not really.”

I said, “Oh. Well, I figured that you had to know since you are a man.” Was that insulting? Sexist? I don’t know, but he did lead me to the section where I would buy the replacement part, if only I knew exactly which replacement part it needed. So, he did know. He was just holding out on me. Turns out, though, that I need to disassemble the faucet to find the faulty part before I can replace it. Like that’s going to be a priority.

I walked miles back and forth, looking for these little pegs that hold shelves up in my five-by-six foot shelving unit. The boys knocked a shelf down and the peg went flying out, so now the shelf balances on three pegs, rather than four, which is simply unacceptable.

Even more unacceptable is the fact that the little replacement peg-thing-a-ma-jigs are not in stock at the home improvement store. I asked the man in Lighting about them and he made a phone call and then directed me to Kitchen Cabinets, where I found two young men building a whole set of cabinets in a pretend kitchen for the imaginary family who’ll be frying up invisible bacon and putting away invisible dishes overnight. One of them with a scarred-up face said, “Oh, I have my own stash,” and he disappeared and reappeared with a handful of various pegs. He said, “Here, put these in your pocket and take them home and try them out.” I was ever grateful and only felt a teeny-tiny bit like I’d just completed a drug transaction. I kept fingering the goods in my pocket as I finished shopping.

The other night, the boys’ shelf had fallen down again. I keep their shorts and shirts neatly folded and piled on these shelves, rather than in a dresser because I am occasionally a frugal type and we are making do with what we have rather than buying stuff that isn’t absolutely necessary. My husband thinks it’s unconscionable that the boys don’t have a dresser, but if they have shelves, what’s the difference? At least for now, anyway. Well, the missing peg led to the unstable shelf, which collapsed, leaving all the clothes in a big jumble. This happened two or three times in as many days, so this particular night, as the boys were stretched out in bed, I went in to say good-night and found the mound of formerly-folded clothes and said in a fit of frustration, “I bet this doesn’t happen at ___________’s house!”

And TwinBoyA said, “No, because they have a walk-in closet.” (Of course they do. They have a view, too, and a hot tub outside of their French doors. Their family home is being remodeled to the tune of $200,000. Their addition costs more than my entire home.)

Well, aren’t I just the worst parent possible? Pardon me for not providing you with a walk-in closet!

I have to say, I do hate that I cannot provide everything for my kids–I mean everything. I wish they had grandparents living across the block and their own rooms. I wish we took vacations by airplane every year and furthermore, I wish we had a vacation home by the ocean. I wish I could purchase their clothes without making sure they have a “clearance” sticker on the price tag. I wish we had a brand new vehicle big enough so one of the kids didn’t have to sit between my husband and me in the front seat. I wish we had college funds for them and I wish they could go to summer camp and have a season’s pass to Wild Waves. I wish they each had their own walk-in closet and their own bathroom and their own balcony and–why not?–their own butler who could do their homework for them before driving them to school in their own SUVs.

But, that’s not how things work here in our humble home. And I hope they don’t resent it and compare their lives and find our family lacking. At least here they are free to dig a creek in the back yard and to eat popsicles in their dresser-free bedroom. And they have me to yell at them, not a nanny who makes $10 an hour.

Anyway, back at the home improvement store, the paint guy mixed me some eggshell paint, Caramel Honey, which sounds like a cross between an adult film actress and dip for Granny Smith apples. I may or may not paint while my husband is away for a week. I actually like painting once I get started. It’s the getting started part that I hate–the cleaning the walls and the taping.

I lost track of time in the home improvement store, dreaming of shelving units and brand new carpet and lighting–oh my, the lighting. My dad was a handy guy and instilled in me the belief–okay, the delusion–that I could do anything at all if I could read. Then I married a man whose idea of home maintenance is to ask a friend to “help” him. Then he holds the hammer and cracks jokes while his friend does all the work. That in itself is a skill, but it won’t get me any track-lighting installed.

Alive!

I will never die because I just have too much to do.

My husband is going out of town again–this time to his 25th High School Class Reunion. He leaves on Friday and returns the following Thursday. Before he leaves, I’m trying to prepare myself so I don’t have to take the children into Target to buy laundry detergent or to the grocery store for milk and bread. It’s such an ordeal to take four kids shopping–especially boys who hate to shop–and it’s so much more expensive.

So, tonight, I went to Target in search of spray to kill the bees that have taken up residence in the corner of my back yard. This has been a particularly bad year for bees and their cousins, the wasps. I did not find bee killing spray, but I did buy enough M&Ms to get us through the week. And I bought three white shelves on clearance for $2.97 each and a Captain Feathersword feathersword on sale for $3.97 (for Babygirl for Christmas) and ninety large trashbags. I hope to paint my living room while my husband is gone and I want to throw away a lot of trash and I want to bag up even more stuff for the church rummage sale.

Tomorrow night, then, I’ll buy paint. Thursday night, I will grocery shop. Depending on the weather, I may take the kids to Mt. Rainier Saturday or Sunday.

Oh, I finished another book–“Left Behind” by Tim LaHaye and . . . uh, I can’t remember the other guy. Jerry Jenkins? At any rate, it was less horrible than I expected. That’s the best recommendation I can give. I’ve read it. Now I can feel free to never read another one. I’m not a big fan of “Christian fiction.” What is that, anyway? Why the big divide between the secular and the sacred? That has always bugged me. At any rate, it was a quick read, fairly entertaining and I can see why it was a best-seller. That’s all I’m saying.

Mr. Snowman Blows a Fuse

Saturday morning means donuts at our house. My husband usually heads to the hole-in-the-wall donut shop and brings home a dozen warm donuts, which our kids then pounce upon. Babygirl ate the frosting off three of them this morning. Sometimes, there are a few left over for breakfast on Sunday morning.

This morning, my husband delivered the donuts, then went to the church for a pre-marital counseling appointment. I decided–what in the world was I thinking??–to sort through the storage room (10 x 10 feet of stuff) to find cast-offs I could donate to the church rummage sale, which takes place in two weeks.

Anyone with children understands the freakish nature of clutter. You have a child–or twins–and then suddenly, your garage is full of carseats and booster seats and outgrown toys and boxes of baby clothes and random wire hangers and ten thousand boxes of junk you can’t quite figure out how to handle. Not to mention four years’ worth of Martha Stewart “Living” magazines.

My parents saved everything–which explains why my mom has a stash of about ten boxes of worthless junk in my storage room. She lived with us for almost two years and left a trail of her belongings when she went. When my dad died, I held the Mother of All Garage Sales to get rid of the accumulated jetsam and flotsam of his forty-seven years of life. He was a ham radio operator and a computer fanatic from way back in 1977, when he built a computer from a kit. In those days, he actually programmed the thing using cassette tapes. He died before The Internet became what it is today, which is unjust. He would have loved The Internet more than anyone alive. He’d just been accepted into a program to study writing technical manuals at the University of Washington. Anyway. Apparently, I have become sidetracked.

Junk, clutter, stuff. It’s everywhere now that we have kids. This is particularly troubling to my husband because his idea of perfect interior design is a dorm room. And not a fancy-schmancy dorm room with a built-in loft. No. He’d love nothing more than to live in a room with bookshelves, a bed, a refrigerator (for his beloved Dr. Pepper and rootbeer popsicles) and a television. All this other stuff–the stuff that keeps us afloat, like winter coats and toys for the children and a bike rack for the car we keep just because some day we might actually take the bicycles somewhere and ride them, the mostly used buckets of interior paint–all this he considers worthless junk. He wants to live in austere simplicity.

But we have kids. And we have kids’ stuff. And we have a house. And Christmas decorations.

I do my best to weed through the excess now and then. This is the first time we’ve actually lived in a house longer than four years, so I haven’t had the built-in pressure to throw dead weight overboard so we can sail to another port. This time, I just have to fling open the closets and toss stuff into black garbage bags and ditch it before the kids notice.

Which brings me back to the storage room. I thought Babygirl might be distracted enough and cheerful enough that I might accomplish sorting through at least the surface layer of debris in that room. I started–and handed her a bin of Fisher-Price Little People, the old kind that are choking hazards. She busied herself and I plowed forward, throwing stuff into a bag. Then she returned the bin to me and I found a play-toolbox for her to look at. That bought me another few minutes.

Then she saw Mr. Snowman.

Mr. Snowman is a plastic Christmas decoration that stands about four feet high. It plugs in. I figured she wouldn’t remember about the plug since she hadn’t seen Mr. Snowman since Christmas-time. She wanted him, so I carried him to the family room and plunked him on the floor, plug-side in, out of sight.

Next thing I know, TwinBoyA has plugged him in. Babygirl is thrilled and I peek in to see her hugging Mr. Snowman. I hurry back to the storage room, sort through eight-hundred Play-doh related toys, then hear shouting. Mr. Snowman is broken.

YoungestBoy has been smacking Mr. Snowman with a pillow. I told him to stop once, but he ignored me and now Mr. Snowman no longer lights up. This is a crisis for Babygirl, and how do I handle it, being the mature mother of four that I am?

That’s right. I yell. I yell things like, “Why can’t you just listen to me? Why did you have to plug in the snowman? Babygirl didn’t even know it would light up! Arg! Why didn’t you stop hitting it? Arg! I can’t get anything done around here! Arg!” (Yes, I say “arg” just like a pirate.)

Okay, fine. I call Babygirl into the storage room. She notices a package of markers–extra school supplies from last year. I have a serious addiction to school supplies and always over-buy. I say, “You already have some of those. Here, how about this?”

She will not be deterred. She wants those markers. My frustration level has reached orange now. Is that the higher level where you should look out for terrorists? That’s the level I mean.

I say, “FINE” and swoop her up, stomp into the kitchen, plop her into her high-chair, realize I can’t find paper, rip off some freezer-paper for her to use, tape it to the high-chair tray, open the drawer to get a bib so she doesn’t write all over herself and–HEY! The entire drawer front comes off in my hands.

Now I am really mad. I wonder for a second if I could be suffering from my week of PMS already. No, not possible. I am just angry because I can’t get any task finished. Babygirl is crying and rejects the marker after all that.

I take her out of her seat, comfort her and sit down with pliers and a hammer and Liquid Nails to repair the stupid drawer. This is the second drawer to break in my kitchen. I fix it, then retrieve the other broken drawer from the storage room and fix it, too. By the time I finish, I am calmer. I return to the storage room. Babygirl fixates on Mr. Snowman again.

So, I get a screwdriver and replace the bulb in Mr. Snowman. It still doesn’t work. I investigate further and conclude that Mr. Snowman has blown a fuse. As I am doing this, the boys are in the next room goofing off. I tell them to be quiet, to stop, to STOP! Moments later, YoungestBoy is crying because TwinBoyA did not stop and now he’s hit YoungestBoy in the eye with a stuffed Barney–the purple dinosaur.

Alert! Alert! I’m immediately back at Orange Level, yelling stuff that sounded to my kids like “Wahnk-wahnk-wahnk-wahnk-wahnk-wahnk” just like in a Charlier Brown special. I should be carried off to solitary confinement and have my vocal cords severed. I have blown a fuse of my own.

I give up. I fix lunch for the younger kids and the older kids make themselves something. By the time my husband returns home, I am normal, no longer frothing at the mouth and convulsing, but my kids gleefully tell him, “Mom is having a bad day.” I feel like I’m going to be sent to the Principal’s Office at any second.

That’s what I get for attempting to accomplish anything.

I managed to fill my trunk with donations for the garage sale. After I put Babygirl to bed, I delivered the bags to the church basement, then went to Target to buy more school supplies. My addiction to spiral notebooks (10 for $1.00) needs professional attention. When I returned home, we went to the pool where we met my mother and my neice and nephew. We swam until we were water-logged.

The warning level has returned to purple, or wherever it is that all you have to be concerned about is someone giving you a dirty look. Tomorrow morning, leftover donuts and then we head to church, where hopefully I can be redeemed.

Friday Five

Five things I am thankful for this Friday:

1) My Babygirl’s new soft-shoe routine, where she swings her arms together, forward and back, as she taps out a barefoot dance. Out of nowhere, she’ll break into this joy-filled routine.
2) Books. I’m reading three books at once at the moment and finished two others this week.
3) My husband’s steady presence in our home–and his sense of humor.
4) The upcoming weekend which is completely void of obligations.
5) Cooler weather!

Irony

Here is irony: reading a chapter in a book about mindful parenting while I ignore the children playing nearby and when they interrupt me, offering them distractions of television or a snack.

I do have to make note of the remarkable appearance of the moon tonight. I left the house after Babygirl went to bed (clutching dolly and her blanket) tonight. My mission: to return two videos and one Nintendo game and to stop by the grocery store.

The benefits of running errands after bedtime are as follows:
1) Listening to Laura Ingraham’s radio show is hilarious and fun.
2) Shopping without children is soothing and hypnotic.
3) Occasionally, the moon makes a guest appearance in the sky and I remember the perfect October nights of my college days when I realized with a start: There will never again be an October night as beautiful and magical as this night, right now. And the melancholy of that thought–or maybe the heartbreak of homework or the loneliness of being human–made me want to cry. And I was right. That October night is long gone. So is my youth!

But tonight’s moon just made me think of a glowing stone nestled on a navy-blue velvet expanse. The moon is a little more than a half-moon tonight, and because I am a mother of a toddler, I thought to myself: Moonbear loves the moon. He loves her when she’s new. He loves her when she’s half. He loves her when she’s three-quarters. He loves her when she’s full. Moonbear loves the moon . . . all the time.

I do, too.

I apparently also love the colon tonight. I may have used my colon-allotment for the next three years. (Yeah, that would be “colon” as in the punctuation mark, not “colon” as in the digestive organ.)

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

I read a whole book today. I finished Anne Lamott’s Blue Shoe last night, so this morning I picked up the used copy of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret that I bought at Goodwill recently. I read the whole thing today between changing diapers and fixing lunch and watching babies and cleaning the kitchen and folding laundry.

When I was going into sixth grade myself, I remember my new friend, Misty Frizzell, telling me about this book. Back in the day (1976), Judy Blume’s book about a sixth-grade girl’s yearning for her menstrual cycle to begin and her search for a religious identity was scandalous. I thought it seemed very tame today, as I read it in this century as a 39-year old woman, but back then it was a book you read secretly, so your mother wouldn’t notice and ask questions.

Misty Frizzell was an exuberant new friend. I met her at the local Assembly of God church and as quick as a wink, I was spending days and nights at her house which was at the far edge of our town. Her dad, Doug, looked like Survivor’s Rupert. He had a hearty laugh and a shaggy beard and Misty told me in a stage-whisper that he had a hairy butt. She knew this because sometimes he would walk around naked. I couldn’t recall seeing my own father without his shirt and shoes on, so this bit of information scared the beejeebies out of me. Would he prance around in his birthday suit while I spent the night? I kept my eyes averted when I walked to their bathroom.

I remember they had wicker furniture in their living room. Misty had naturally platinum blond hair and a horse she kept out behind her house. Her parents were funny and played jokes on each other. I couldn’t believe my good fortune in finding a friend like Misty. I needed a dependable, fun friend to pal around with when we all went to middle school.

And then, sixth grade started and I wasn’t in the “cool” group of kids and Misty abandoned me like some kind of reptile skin she outgrew and shed. Throughout the rest of our school years, we never really spoke again. But I thought of her today when I reread Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Misty was so much like the protaganist of the story–longing to develop, longing for her period, longing to kiss boys and willing to follow the crowd. No wonder she loved the book and wondered if I did, too.

Now. I finished Blue Shoe last night and can give my hearty recommendation. Here are my favorite two lines:

“She did not mind this weather, and certainly preferred it to the tyrrany of a bright blue day, when old voices told you to get off your duff and go outside.”

“And by God, ten minutes later, Mattie was gently bathing one of Abby’s feet in a salad bowl of warm soapy water, wiping the grime off her ankle and heel and toes with a dish towel and Ivory soap, working the cat litter out of the cracks in her sole.”

Bummer.

This morning, I sat outside while Babygirl and DaycareKid played. I didn’t see it happen, but Babygirl apparently gave DaycareKid a little shove and he landed with a little splash in the small, orange wagon that contained a small puddle. When he stood up, I saw his backside was wet. I said, “Bummer!” Babygirl eyed me, surveyed DaycareKid’s soggy britches and said, “Bummer!” Then she gave an evil little chuckle and said, “It’s funny!”

“Bummer” is her newest word. “It’s funny” is her best new phrase.

This afternoon, the boys’ twin friends came over. All five boys immediately headed for the backyard, where they proceeded to work on their new creek. The backyard slopes a little, so my boys discovered quite by accident that if you water the flowerbed closest to the patio, the water heads downstream along the edge of the flowerbed. The boys worked with a shovel and hoe, taking turns to dig and hack at the hard dirt so the dribbling water would pool in their hole.

Periodically, one of them would spray the hole with water, which is why they all have dirt in their hair. At one point, I glanced out the kitchen window to see one of my boys dangling his feet into the “creek.”

Then YoungestBoy came rushing inside. “Mom!” He had a smear of dirt on his forehead, a scowl on his cherubic face and was drenched. “Mom! They sprayed me and now I’m going to have to take a bath!” Babygirl stopped dancing, gazed at him and said, “Bummer.”

YoungestBoy growled at us and stomped upstairs to change clothes. Babygirl resumed her crazy, whirling dance, clad only in a diaper.

Without a Microphone, Am I Invisible?

I noticed something during the week of Vacation Bible School. For the first year in quite a few years, my role was completely behind-the-scenes. I didn’t speak into a microphone even one time. I did not lead a song, I did not shush a crowd, I did not appear on stage.

And it was strange. Surprisingly, I missed it.

I am a good administrator, an excellent detail person. Yet, when I was in college, I discovered my talent for communication–especially with children. I worked as a Children’s Ministries intern for Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker at Heritage U.S.A., in Charlotte, North Carolina. My boss was a goateed man with black hair that was firmly Aqua-netted into place. His wife was a short, squat woman with matching black hair. He was a ventriloquist and a puppeteer and he was kind of forced to accept me as an intern because I had inadvertently weaseled my way past Human Resources and into a job by introducing myself to Dick Dortch, who ended up being not only an old family friend, but also Jim Bakker’s right hand man.

Boy, was the woman in Human Resources mad at me.

Anyway, instead of working on the grounds crew, I ended up working in the children’s department and that’s how I ended up on a stage in Heritage U.S.A. entertaining the passing crowds. Speaking into that microphone and performing the little skits we created and telling crazy knock-knock jokes energized me, thrilled me, gave me confidence that I didn’t even know I lacked. It’s wacky to find out that you happen to be good at captivating a crowd, especially when you are a solitary soul at heart who prefers to sit home than to mingle and make small talk.

When you speak into a microphone, people notice your work. They pat you on the back and write you thank-you notes and tell you what a great job you’ve done. When you spend hours at home with spreadsheets and registration forms and to-do lists and self-created forms, no one notices. It’s like housework: people only notice if your floors have not been mopped.  They see smudges on your mirrors, but don’t notice the absence of smudges.  If those forms had not been created, if the children had not been organized into acceptable crews, if people had not been recruited and trained and if the supplies had not been ordered, people would notice.  But a smooth-running organization is like the skeleton–invisible, unless, of course, you are Mary-Kate Olsen (sorry, anorexia joke just popped in there).

Really, though, the invisible work makes an event run smoothly and so people notice the things they are supposed to notice–the public speaker, the music, the decorations, the happy faces of children. It’s strange, though, if you are used to being noticed.

This year, we have a new youth pastor and I immediately assigned him my usual role. For the past two years, I’ve done the closing program, the twenty-five minute wrap-up at the end of the day. I wanted to pass along the burden, but also, I wanted to see how he handled the microphone and the challenge of speaking to 80 children. He did a fantastic job and I was really thrilled to hear him keep the attention of the children while teaching and entertaining them. And I am relieved to not have the job myself. But I did notice that I noticed the lack of attention.

And it’s always a little weird when you see your own foibles, when you notice the 14-year-old inside who clamors for attention.

So, to answer my question–yes, without a microphone, I am invisible. Does that make my work less valuable? No. Do I mind? Not so much. Well, okay. Maybe a teeny, tiny bit. Will I reclaim the microphone next year? No. It’s all right to be see-through. I always thought that transparency would be a cool superpower to have. Although, I’d really rather be able to fly. Or spin straw into gold. Is that a superpower?