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May I please have a personal assistant?  I'm not going to go so far as to say I NEED a personal assistant, but pshew, it'd be nice.

I'm not as busy as a lot of moms, true.  I don't have an "outside the home job."  But, I'm crazier than a lot of moms, and lemme tell you, that leaves a lot of slack to be picked up.

Here is my ad:

NEEDED.  PERSONAL ASST.  SALARY SAME AS BOSS!  HRS FLEXIBLE (ANYTIME, 24/7)

• make phone calls to physicians, utilities, contractors that I'm too neurotic to make
• remind me of my schedule.  Do not be fooled by the fact that I have 2 planners and a wall calendar.  I have no idea what the hell is going on.
• force me to exercise.  I WILL play Bejeweled for hours on end, just to say "I didn't have time today."
• plan meal calendars
• set aside "me" time
• organize paperwork
• make to do lists of reasonable length and content.  None of this "re-line all drawers with scented paper" crap that's never gonna happen
• hide the cookies
• prepare correspondence for regular post.  I'll dictate, your handwriting is neater
• schedule nap times, screen calls during naps, maximize my nap efficiency
• remind family members of any upcoming responsibility so they complain to you
• deal with unwanted interactions
• refill my meds

All other errands and responsibilities will be gladly handled by me, your empathetic boss.  I will cook your planned meals, chauffeur to appropriate activities, and do all housework.  I require excellent time management skills.  Forceful, but kind personality required.  Smart asses need not apply.

This post rated G for Gross

A couple of weeks ago, we had to take S back to the gastroenterologist for his bi-annual check up. And the whole thing is a clustercuss.

For one thing, the pediatrics specialty offices affiliated with the university are located in an old hospital. So, upon walking in, everything seems kind of normal, if labyrinthine, but soon everything gets kinda weird.

The reception desk is the old nurses' station. It's a giant counter. The waiting room is two old hospital rooms combined. And the actual patient rooms are hospital rooms. So, they are relatively huge compared to normal clinic rooms. They all have bathrooms. Plus, they're under-furnished. Big, old, tiled hospital rooms with one little exam table, a series of cubbies with GI information, and a hard wooden chair to wait in. The whole effect is something like Cuckoo's Nest meets The Shining.

Which really starts to mean something when I tell you we wait at this doctor's office forever. Every time. This time it was an hour and 45 minutes. And then we really start to feel like we're Jack Nicholson.

So, the doctor is asking me all these questions about S's eating habits, pooping habits, growth, etc. etc. We go through the same questions every time. Every time, I remind the doctor that with the exception of my mother, my family are tall. I would be tall if not for spinal surgery. M's brother is crazy tall. S's brother is crazy tall. Tall is something we do. Except for S. So, his 12th percentile is really more significant than at first blush, since the rest of us are in the 75 or above.

So, we go over all of this again, and he gives S a cursory physical examination. He palpates some poop. Reminds me to go back to giving S Miralax daily. Urgh.

After a couple of days on the Miralax, I feel bad for poor S. He's gone from Jack Johnson, all Sittin' Waitin' Wishin' to Paul McCartney, a Man on the Run, as it were. And we're supposed to be checking the evidence and keeping mental notes of how it all, um, comes out.

A couple of notes about that: we have issues with the boys forgetting to flush. So, telling S to wait and not flush is counter intuitive to the goals of a sanitary house. Second, I am not a connoisseur of pooh. It all looks like pooh. And I have no burning desire to inspect it. I leave the pooh inspection to labs on walks and techs in labs.

But, hilariously, we have a chart to measure the pooh. And all I can think of is that stupid pooh character from a really dumb Canadian animated show about Terrence and Phillip, or was it South Park? I dunno. Here's the chart, anyway, in case you need/want to check your pooh:

You need to strive for #4, if you're wondering. And, Bristol, wherever you are now: Thank you for your AMAZING contribution to medicine. Without this chart, all would be lost.

Pooh Inspection has worn thin on me, so I have taken to shouting at S when I hear him race off to the potty:

Are you in the potty?

-yes

Are you going poop?

-yes

Is it regular?

-yes

Did it hurt?

And, my son, bless him, even he has a shred of privacy and doesn't shout everything through the rooms of our house for all to hear, screams back:

STOP ASKING ME POOP JEOPARDY QUESTIONS!!

Ooh. Soorry. The correct answer should be phrased as a question.

Motherhood, formerly known as Your Life

I accidentally got into a Facebook discussion thread that turned all argumentative and political.

Wait, I got into a Facebook discussion thread that accidentally turned all argumentative and political.

At least, I thought it was accidental. I hate it when this happens. But the thing is, this thread looked stable--there was no Sarah Palin, no Glenn Beck, no outlandish stakes or claims--nothing nuclear incendiary about it.

But, no.

The thread was borne from a newspaper Dear Abby type clipping: childless woman is miffed that her child-having friends never have time and always claim to be exhausted blah blah blah.

So, discussion begins as follows:
Poster: Is having children REALLY that hard for us childless people to imagine?

Me: Yes. It is a thankless, hellish, never-ending task that sucks the life force directly from your veins.

Third Poster: Only because you allow it to. We make these choices, we could not be weighed down by guilt and exhaustion.

Me: (though I shouldn't have) Something about sitting up with sick children in the middle of the night and feeling completely exhausted and isolated. Thus, parenthood is isolating and exhausting and thankless.

Third Poster: Only because you choose to be. You could wake up husband, call family for help, assume child will be fine and go back to sleep. You choose to carry your cross.

Since Facebook threads are notorious for convincing nobody of anything, I thought I would continue my argument in my own personal forum. Because, let's be honest, at cinnamon I am never wrong, and I can delete dissenters.

I want to say that I intentionally use humor and alcohol to deflect any accusations of schlepping a cross around. I don't want to be the mom who says that her children are everything and that their little lives matter more than her own. These moms eventually wind up in the full fetal when the youngest child leaves home, and have to be nursed back from their Gollum-like precious mumblings to a quasi-human existence.

I fully realize that in the hypothetical I set up that a) most children will not die of fever b) the emergency room is always open c) that I could wake my husband. Though Third Poster should realize not every one has the advantage of nearby family. It's very geo-biased of her. She should also realize that husbands and wives throughout history have an agreement: (the first example was found written on a cave wall) when it comes to babies' needs and the sun is not up, moms are responsible.

Look, I have said before that I can not imagine working outside of the home and raising kids. It seems impossible to me. Why, then, is it so hard for non-breeders to imagine that they CAN'T imagine being a parent?

Let me try to describe a day to my non-breeding friends. Shall we begin at pregnancy? Imagine you swallowed a watermelon whole. It's sitting on your bladder and occasionally kicking you in the lungs. You are in a permanent state of PMDD for 9 months. Then, like that scene from Alien, something slimy, loud and inexplicably evil erupts from your midsection as you beg to be euthanized.

So, that is how parenthood starts.

Now, you've got that little sucker home. For the first half-year of its life, the torture is like a Vietnam Vet's horror story. The enemy deprives you of sleep, leeches fluids from your body, creates lists of manual labor as its laundry/trash/dish washing/housekeeping slave, and keeps you pasty and filthy so that you rarely leave the house.

The next four years, known as the "toddler/preschooler" years are only dimly recognizable as your pre-sucker life.

First, imagine yourself as a conjoined twin. Now, imagine your conjoined twin is a sadistic maniac. Now, take your sadistic maniac twin to Target. Are you with me? Your sadistic twin doesn't want to go and whines the whole way there. In fact, she may find something in the passenger seat and throw it at you. When you get there, SCT doesn't want to walk, but wants to ride in the cart. This is tricky. When you are three-quarters of the way to the back of the store, SCT has to pee. You take SCT all the way back to the front of the store to the bathrooms, which might have been cleaned during the Nixon era. You hold your breath and enter. Meanwhile, SCT is using her hands to touch everything she can reach while she sits on the toilet. She only washes her hands reluctantly when she's done.

You return to your errands. You need food for you, SCT and your husband. Of course, you haven't had conjugal relations w/ your husband since SCT came around and you're wondering since he doesn't ever get up when SCT is sick, why you're feeding him anyway. SCT touches everything down every aisle, occasionally knocking very fragile things off the shelves. You can't slap her, despite every impulse in your body, because, honestly, it's frowned upon to slap conjoined twins in public.

You're halfway through the frozen food section when SCT has decided she is done. Not a little done, not sorta done, but altogether DONE. She starts screaming and making a scene (as though conjoined twins walking through Target don't make a little bit of a scene to start with). You appease her by opening a box of Fruity-ohs from the basket. Persevere. You think to yourself that the household budget is a little tight these days, mostly because of SCT's insatiable needs, but that you could really use a cute shirt. And, hey, you deserve something even if it's going to be ill fitting because it has 2 armholes and you and SCT have four arms. But you deserve something. SCT disagrees. She pitches a fit for the ages, compelling you to check out.

During check-out, it appears that SCT has completely lost all control of her limbs, and is flailing them about wildly. The ENTIRE gum display erupts into the air, and every single little impulse item is something she covets beyond reason. You bribe with popcorn and ICEE.

The bill at Target for groceries and your $10 shirt rivals the GDP of a small country. Husband will be displeased.

You buy ICEE and popcorn and head to the relative safety of home. SCT runs out into the parking lot and nearly kills you both. Apologetically, you salute the driver, and throw everything into the back of your car.

On the way home, ICEE magically finds its way on to your prized new shirt. It was blue raspberry ICEE. Unloading groceries with SCT is about as easy as you'd imagine. Legs, arms flailing some more. Total lack of cooperation from her half of your body. She's dying of hunger or exhaustion or boredom or Spongebob is on. You sit down and wonder if this is how you expected your life to be. And you realize it's already 11:30. Only 11:30. And you're ready to die.

Granted, things are less irrational during the school years, but they are nonetheless busy. And SCT was only one child. Whatever innate need people have to produce second offspring must be a pretty powerful survival instinct. Right now, I am procrastinating on no fewer than 6 things by posting this entry. The boys will be waiting in carpool before I know it. I rationalize that this is my time, but no one will be appreciating the concept of my time if there is no milk for cereal tomorrow morning. Or food for lunch, or library fines, or or or everything else I'm supposed to do today.

Yes, parenthood is a choice. Not necessarily a well-informed one, because it is not possible to anticipate what motherhood is. You can petsit, babysit, niece-sit, go to ten thousand family reunions, but that doesn't capture it.

Unlike regular jobs, this job defines you. It's impossible not to: you are forever Johnny's Mom. You are thrilled with his successes and crushed by his failures. You want everything to be perfect for him, yet understand that hardship is essential. You cringe when new studies reveal that the sippy cup he wouldn't put down for 3 years was laden with BPA and is probably going to make him sterile or stupid, or kill him when he's 36. You hope against hope that he will learn the skills to be happy. Because happiness doesn't fall in your lap--like everything else, it is earned. Will he be able to identify a career that he loves, or be equipped to be professionally satisfied without one? Will he find a person to love who loves him in turn? Can you impart to him the lessons of your failures, or is he doomed to repeat them? Did he watch too much TV today?

Of course, you can parent without being dogged by these issues. Of course, you can raise a child without karate and French class and violin lessons or soccer. But each mother I know makes decisions, all different decisions, based on a truth she honestly believes to be the best for her child.

Sometimes, even when the SCT is sleeping, those decisions leave us up and alone in the dark.

Time travel with the Beav

Note to 21st century self: tablecloths, linens, and other merchandise are available online. All the time.

Note to 18th century self: you'd make a shitty bride. You carry no dowry, you can't carry a tune, and you can't sew worth a lick.

I haven't blogged since Sunday for many reasons, but mostly because I have gotten crafty. Sadly, I don't mean Fantastic Mr. Fox crafty; I mean hunkering down and trying to make crap myself crafty.

Project #1: Fix pillows. Annoyingly, I ordered custom pillows when we moved here (Aug 2007?) and they took 6 months to make (economy was better then, EVERYONE had custom pillows). Not long after I got them, the seams split. I mended them. They split again. (See memo to antique self). I finally got tired of stuffing the stuffing back in and repaired them. They're SO FLUFFY now. Check.


Project #2: Recover box valances for guest bedroom and S's room. Since I painted and redid these rooms, I thought I'd pick a more unifying fabric for the valances. Besides, S was not going to abide Lightning McQueen much longer. I found great (CHEAP!) fabrics. Unfortunately, I got a stripe for his. Do you have any idea how freaking hard it is to work with stripes? Grrr. The downstairs got a big floral with a cute trim. It's SO FLUFFY! S's went up easily with M's help and we got super cute black roller shades, that cost marginally less than the arm and the leg required for roman shades. His room turned out super. Downstairs will require husband help this weekend. It's almost transformed, that effing bedroom, from usable bedroom to flood zone to storage hellhole, to usable bedroom again. Sheesh. Check.

Project #3: cute tailored tablecloth to cover world's ugliest table. My Columbia friends might recall WUT. It was in in the living room, had a marble-ized top, and 3 fugly goldfish-tattoo-y looking things on the base. I chose a neutral burlap fabric for some texture and started out on my quest to hide the WUT.

For those of you who (wisely) do not craft or sew, here are some lessons learned.

1. Who the hell managed to invent the sewing machine like a hundred years ago? (Actually, prior to that, per Wikipedia. Howe patented his in 1845, and since he's American and that's all that really matters, I'll go with him.) Seriously? It's so freaking complicated, I can barely thread it and run it. In fact, sometimes I can't do that. Bobbin? What kind of sadistic accessory is this? It tangles, unwinds, frays, jams, and just when you think you're sewing, the mother is out of thread.

2. Sewing is tedious, detail oriented business, best reserved for people with patience.

3. Sewing requires math skills. I lack math skills.

4. A seam ripper should be purchased at the same time as any sewing machine purchase. Expected ratio is 3 rips for each seam sewed. But, as you can see from #3, that estimate might be off.

So, one day this week, 21st century me and 21st century friend, MT met for some decidedly mid-20th century activity. She brought her sewing machine, I dragged out mine, and we parked them at opposite ends of my kitchen table. She sewed on Brownie patches for her troop. I wrangled with the effing burlap. MT is incredibly neat, well-organized and patient.
I am not.
I was cursing and sweating, and MT, with the exception of slight frustration of her clear thread, had her machine humming along smoothly. I mean the woman bought CLEAR THREAD, for pete's sake. That way, she wouldn't have to change thread for each patch. Hello? They're Brownies. Use brown thread. Their den leader isn't Martha Stewart is she? Are 8 year-olds going to notice? Care? But, no. MT struggled through her frustration and had 6 or 7 neat little vests with perfectly stitched and tidily arranged little patches on them. Fittingly, all the patches represented all the crafty little skills her daughter's troop had mastered.

I wrangled with the effing burlap. I was not a Brownie.


We ordered pizza and ate and visited. MT ironed her little vests, and for a moment, I swear I was hallucinating in black and white

Annoying. I mean, I am sewing, and ripping and sewing and ripping, and cursing and sweating. And MT is sewing on patches like June Cleaver. Dammit. I nearly broke down and ordered online:

But, I thought, if a 12 year old in Malaysia can make this for $194, then I can make it for $3 a yard. As it turns out, the 12 year old Malaysian would make a hell of a 17th century wife.

Today, two days later, and lots of cursing and starting over, I finished. I'm not photographing mine. It'll have to sit right under this professional photo, and I won't subject myself to feelings of inadequacy and failure. To sum up, I approximated the results for $12 and 16 hours of my time.

MT, I salute you. You make a rockin' wife in any century. Me?



And can't sew a lick.