ingrid

It is suppose to rain…. a lot…. this week.  The weather report icons line up in a nice, uniform row.  Each one shows a cloud and rain.  For fun, they threw in some lightening bolts.  I hope we get some lightening and thunder.  That would mix things up.

After making it through one day of solid rain though, I wonder how I am going to “exercise” the kids.  I know this is silly, but I am fairly convinced that children need a good solid run each day to keep them from freaking out…or maybe that is just me.  Yes, I do think of them like dogs.  Yes, I do like to “exercise the baby” just in case.

Thinking that rain is not a big deal, I took Zephyr and Inez on a shortish walk to a local bakery (about a mile).  By the time we made it there, we were pants-soaking, thigh-chilling wet.  It sucked.  We’re going to have to come up with some way to get out of the house this week without getting drowned.  Wish me luck.

All smiles at the beginning of the walk.

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Nothing makes me resent motherhood so much as “Mommy & Me” events.  And God bless them, preschool teachers love stuff like this.  They work hard even for these events, but I always seem to end them tired, impatient, hungry and angry.  Let’s work through my list of woes.  First of all, the kids make you “lunch”, which is usually in the hotdog family.  They wait on your table which takes forever.  They serve you punch in a tiny paper cup that they then masticate into a soggy mess.  The cup gives up under the pressure of even the tiny sip of punch that you might have had.  You are thirsty and full of hotdog wrapped in pillsbury puff dough.  All the salt and preservatives are causing your head to pound.  And you are hungry.  And these kids don’t like mustard so your dough-dog is dry in your mouth.  After a slow, slow lunch, when everyone is really tired and ready to go home, the craft project is dragged out.

I jealously look at the other “mommies” who mostly have one tired kid, not two to juggle.  Today my dear middle child actually melted down mid-girlscout cookie over a dusty old balloon that Inez found in the corner.  ”I want a balloon!” he screamed, no matter how many times I told him that there weren’t more balloons, that she had found someone’s old, limp one that just happened to have been left there.  Zephyr has this obnoxious way of collapsing when you reach out to grab his arm or take him by the shoulder.  He flops like a fish, smashing his head into whatever surface is available.  Of course he did this there and went careening into the table, falling down and pulling half the table cloth with him.  It looks for the world like I have just given him a roundhouse.  We were midway through the “craft” at this point, which was going painstakingly slow as the printer malfunctioned, the glue containers were in short supply, and the beads rolled off the table.  Inez had absconded with a string of plastic beads and was swinging them at other preschoolers and generally being annoying.  With two kids crying and whining, I grabbed our popsicle stick craft and began the march out of there.  Of course it got rained on and my head smeared.  This is about how I feel right now.  Fucking Mommy and Me.

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One of the hardest things about living in the city is just getting rid of things properly.

A lot of things have changed drastically about my life in the last few years.  First of all, I have these kids and people in their misguided kindness want to give them cheap, plastic crap.  Plastic is truly an amazing invention, and there are wonderful uses for this miracle invention.  Unfortunately, those wonderful inventions usually do not come from the Dollar Store or have “MADE IN CHINA” written on the bottom of them.  This stuff flows into my life at an alarming rate, especially considering that I don’t buy any of it.  It is prizes at school, presents from kid friends, stuff strangers give my children in stores because they were particularly cute that day.  The end result is all the same though.  I trip over it, pull it out of Inez’s mouth, pick it up from the yard or the bathroom floor one too many times and it is banned to the Salvation Army box.  Once there, I must covertly smuggle it out of the house and trundle it into the trunk of the car.  It has to be in a box WITH a lid on it, not viewable by child eyes, as the minute they see it they wail, “But I LOOOOOOVE this!”.  Love my ass.  I just found it in the toilet.

Once in the box, in the trunk of the car, the job is still not done.  First of all, my husband is fighting me every step of the way because he doesn’t want stuff in the trunk.  He takes it out, I put it in, he takes it out, I put it in, he takes it out….  Once it goes in, I really need to get to a donation site quickly to make sure that it doesn’t end up in the front foyer again, but this is hard considering my daily schedule.  I also have to get the box to the proper donation site without kids looking in or seeing a donation receiving person looking in.  ”But I loooooooved that!” will ensue if this rule is breached, and even worse, the person receiving the donation has been known to take out the PIECE of GOD DAMN PLASTIC and give it back to my child!

Second thing that is hard about city living is living without a farm truck.  I don’t have one.  I don’t know anyone who has one.  Every other week we have a 33 gallon container of yard debris that we can put out, but moving into a largely unkempt house on an unkempt lot, there has been a ton of weeding and pruning and yard work to execute.  There is bamboo, which is a plant from the devil.  You cut it, it grows, you cut it, it grows,  you…. anyway, I think you understand.  Throughout the last few years, I have created way more than 33 gallons every other week of yard debris.  I compost, (two different bins!), I cut it up, I mulch as much as I can, but still I have too much and no way to haul it away.  When it does start to overwhelm the yard, I can rent a pick up ($35 for 3 hours), and haul the stuff to a yard debris place (between $10 and $20 a load).  If I got a babysitter while doing this job, that is $11 an hour.  As you can imagine, it adds up and it wasn’t much fun in the first place.

The third thing that is hard to get rid of is just plain old wood waste.  It isn’t legal to fire up a big old bon fire like we used to do in Sheridan.  Around here you have to haul stuff away to a specific facility (see above).  Currently I am trying to get rid of our old chicken coop.  Rather than sawzall it up and hope that my Dad would haul it off when he comes to visit, I thought I would Craigslist it for free.  Poor choice.  Although I found a taker, and waited for her all day, she never showed up.  It turned out she didn’t have a pick up.  So the old coop sits in my front yard, waiting for a taker… hopefully with an F-10.

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I have had a bunch of people comment on how I am not writing.  Well, yes, remember how I said that I would not be writing?  All my creative powers (and non-existent time) is being poured into one effort— to finish classes for my continuing license renewal in order to stay employable.  And yet, I have still heard, “Wow.  I remember that you said you would not be writing, but you are really not writing… like at all!”.  It is true.  But now I am pleased to tell you that I am almost there.

I’m referring to the end of the madness… my classes are almost done.  I fully intend to send the last project off tomorrow, and then I can be a somewhat free woman again—look onward to a brighter tomorrow and all that.

Meanwhile, things still need to happen around here whether or not classes are finished.  Laundry still needs to be done.  That damn dishwasher still does not load nor unload itself once or twice a day.  I hate that thing.  Our refrigerator “fill yourself” option seems to be broken.  No matter how many times I check, it is still lacking the basic ingredients that every household needs.  And the kids.  They need all sorts of help doing things— (So helpless!  So needy!  I tell you, don’t have kids.  They can’t do anything for themselves these days.  Even the baby is useless, useless, useless!).  And get this— the worse thing is that we seem to be invaded by mice.  Just because I can’t get the food off the floor (those kids again!), they think it was left out for them.  Au Contraire raton!  That is for the shark to clean up, which I plug in faithfully each night, but he still seems to be in the same spot each morning as though he went nowhere.

Sigh.  A brighter tomorrow.  And better appliances, please.

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Hi friends,

It is so nice that you have been regularly reading my silly little posts here.  I do so appreciate that.  I thought I might let you know though that I am turning the screws (on myself).  It is time to focus in on finishing my classes in order to retain my teaching license.

Let me take a break for a second to bitch about something.  Let’s say that you are a marketing executive.  You have been one for many years, successfully even.  If you decide to stay home for a few years and take care of children, does the American Association of Bankers make you go and take 9 credits of graduate level classes just to make sure that your head is still in the game?  And if you are a plumber, does a guy in a grey jumper charge you $1000 and make you take a class on installing a wax seal under a toilet? Hmmm.  I didn’t think so.  I got the master’s degree that was required, for God’s sake!  I spent the money.  Now let me just live in peace!

Teachers Standards and Practices would like me to read a little Gilgamesh and Ramayana just in case I have become stupid since staying home with children.  And now, I have so much of that to do before Thanksgiving that it is consuming my life.  How much can one parent get down while caring for three young children?  Not much let me tell you.  Interestingly enough, I have a totally different relationship with time now that I am doing this.  I divide each day up into these tiny increments.  I try to put something in the microwave WHILE running to the bathroom, because God forbid that I waste time watching the microwave and THEN running to the bathroom.  I am totally wringing minutes out of each day in efforts to do what really feels impossible.  You know when you have a lump of nervousness and despair up in your throat because you are so stressed out?  I have that.

And yet, fear not!  I will triumph in the end!  I have one credit done and only 8 to go!  I won’t be posting much for a while though.  I need to work, I fear, even though writing here is more fun.  Thanks for the love.  I’ll be back soon.

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It’s freaking hot here.  So hot that you wish you could peel your skin right off and toss it by the door.  So hot that you would like to crawl in the tea bags sitting in the sun tea jar on the porch and pack your pores in camomile.  So hot that you wish you were a little green worm on the basil plants.  So hot that the dark hole under the apple tree looks like a welcome place to pop in.  So hot that you want to grab hold of one blade on the fan and just ride it around and around all day.  So hot.

I don’t tolerate the heat well.  I spend most of the day walking from room to room trying to gauge where the absolute worst and absolute best places are in the house.  I open windows in the morning and then try to close them at exactly the right moment to preserve optimal coolness.  I take showers.  I splash my face a lot.  I think about November.  I whine.

This evening the kids crashed out in the basement (the one comfortably cool place in the house), and I put Inez down to sleep in the portable crib in our room, which is considerably better than the sweat box that we call the kids’ room.  Inez fussed for a while and finally dropped off to sleep.  I thought maybe she was uncomfortable, but when I went to check on her, this is what I found:

Nice!  I felt like a big meanie putting the diaper back on when it is so freaking hot, but some things have got to be done.  Stay cool folks.

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Sorry I haven’t been much up to date on goings on around here.  The thing is that I am super crazy busy at Bible Camp….

I am doing the music portions of our church’s camp for 2-7 year olds.  There are 70 kids going crazy with art, music, story-telling, and games for 4 hours all this week….and it sort of feels like a life-time.  I did this last year, except I was a coordinator.  This year I am doing the same music-leading duties, but no organizational stuff, which truly I don’t do a great job of anyway.  I make confident decisions, but I have a hard time caring much about the woman who is stressed about the kids not washing their hands well enough, or the person who wants the chairs “RIGHT, EXACTLY, BACK WHERE THEY WERE”.  I pretend to care, but I don’t really.  I pretend like I don’t think those people are crazy, that I respect their input, but in reality, I am standing there thinking, “How long do I have to sensitively listen to this person before I can go about doing exactly what I want to?”.  I tell you, I am MEANT for leadership, eh?!

It is interesting leading music.  I am actually not “performing” for more than about 25 minutes at a time, but it is super exhausting.  I am up there with my guitar singing super loud, being hyper and trying to be animated and excited.  It is like teaching but super compressed.  I feel like I have just put on a Broadway show…. but in 25 minutes.

The other part of my duty is to pull out the kids who are falling apart (for whatever reason kids fall apart), and be nice to them and get them re-integrated to their group (except not screaming or pitching a fit).  Again, camp is for 2-7 year olds, so they fall apart for all sorts of reasons.  I tell you, I wonder about the sense of having 2 year olds.  They cry.  They whine.  They do things that 2 year olds do.  I find myself sort of disliking the whiner/criers and being so grateful that mine are not.  Of course, a great guy in the kitchen today noted that he would have been a whiner/crier, that he was a sort of nervous kid, so I really have got to stop thinking mean thoughts about the whiney/cry-ey set.  They grow up to be great people too.  Man, where is my patience?

I wish I could put some pictures up here, but as I am working with other peoples’ children, I just can’t.  Anyway, it is super fun (in a really strange way), and if I do not fall down dead of exhaustion by the end of the week, I will update stuff around here again.

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Well, not really.  In truth, I am a fairly hardy person.  I only get really depressed when I don’t get enough sleep and last night I went to bed at about 8:30pm, so I surely got enough sleep.

But ANYWAY, I am sort of down about my chickens.  I think the thing is that the chickens have represented pure joy for me thus far.  I have only felt enthusiastic and excited about them and suddenly all that good feeling has been tainted by the awful egg eaters.  And it isn’t that it is gross so much, because I have gotten over that.  It is that it is such a huge waste of time and energy to feed these birds if they aren’t even going to give me eggs.

On that note, things are sort of looking up.  I am collecting eggs more often, and I put three dumby eggs in the nest.  The thought is that if they try to peck them and find that nothing happens, maybe they will give up.  I am also trying to let Agnes off her nest once a day (she is the one brooding the now EIGHT eggs).  None have disappeared since Friday, although she did seem to break one at the end of last week.  I don’t think that was purposeful though as she was still sitting on it, not eating it and it looked crushed rather than pecked.  Maybe she is trying to tell me that she can only handle 8 eggs under her.  Let’s hope we make it another two weeks!

I read somewhere that when you remove a chicken from the flock, you kick it down in the pecking order.  Wow, that sure is true.  When I take Agnes out of her brooding box once a day, Attila, the dominant hen, lines  up to peck her.  I actually have to guard Agnes and make swiping motions with my foot to keep Attila away.  Broody chickens are weird…. sort of like women in labor I think.  I take Agnes out of the box and put her in front of the water trough, but she’ll just sit there all spaced out unless I physically dunk her beak in the water.  Then she drinks like she is dying of thirst.  I have to dunk her beak several times to get her to drink up.  Attila meanwhile, is waiting to show Agnes who is boss.  That dang chicken even goosed Agnes at the water bucket while I was holding her!  I felt badly about that one.

In short, my chickens are a big old pain in the butt right now.  I am ready for them to knock it off and go back to being wonderful darlings.  I guess first I need to cure them of bad habits.

Okay, and to address that, what is the deal with “internet information”?  Some sites say that there is no way to cure egg eating, others say that chickens can be taught not to by shutting them in a dark box for a day, others say you can only cull the chickens, another that you put salt in the drinking water and they will get the minerals they need and stop, still others say it has nothing to do with nutrition and is just a behavioral thing.  Where is the real info?  Most frustratingly, most sites do a long list of the things to do to avoid egg-eating, unhelpfully mentioning that the best course of action is to avoid it ever starting.  Well thanks for nothing!  I know that and now it has started, so what do I do?

I’m going to be hopeful though and hope that it stops as soon as it started.  But now I am worried about this weekend when I had intended to go out to visit my parents.  It looks like I will just be leaving the problem to further develop as I won’t be here to collect eggs three times a day and my chickens will be penned up bored with lots of time on their hands to peck at eggs.  Man!  Frustrating!

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It is spirit week at Francis’ school and that means DRESS UP! Who is more excited about dress up: Francis or me? Definitely me around here, but once she learns that her mom can make her the WAY COOLEST kid at school, then maybe she will quit fighting me.  Why did she not want to lace leather straps all the way up her legs?  That would have been awesome!  Actual conversation on Super Hero day:

“Hey look, you can wrap these around your wrists for supersonic power bracelets!”
“Naaaw!”
Yeah, it will be so cool! Here, let me just pin those on for you!”
“Moooooommmmm!”

Another actual conversation on Nerd Day:
“Mom, what really is a nerd?”
“It’s a goofy person.”
“I’m an urn!” (Zephyr)
“But is it a stupid person or a smart person?”
“It is a smart person who is also goofy in some ways; kind of like your Dad”
“Look at me! I’m an urn!” (Zephyr)
“Oh.  What?” (totally confused).

Nerd Day? What is this? What I really wanted to say was, “This is our society’s way of exercising anti-intellectualism. The masses are afraid of you unless you are thoroughly unexceptional and unchallenging. If you are not, they will come up with some mean name to attempt to put you in your place.  They would like you to be average and unthreatening.  Luckily, the ones in charge in the end all all bitches and nerds, so all you have to do is wait it out babe!” But I didn’t say that. Instead I said, “Hey, you need striped socks and that gnome hat!”.  I’ll fill her in when she is a little older.

Urn Day

Super Something

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Once upon a time we all lived on our little farms in our little villages, or maybe we had miserable little hovels in the middle of huge medieval cities.  Anyway, we lived somewhere in contact with “our people”, and I can’t help but imagine that the world might have been a little easier in some ways.  Raising children for example.

It is bizarre that the only job title that attempts to describe what I do AND that people seem to understand is “stay at home mom”.  It is bizarre because “staying at home” is little of what I actually do.  I wish sometimes that I could stay at home.  Staying at home would be a lot simpler than the crazy racing around that I do.  I often wish that I lived with three generations of family or had my sisters all next door (or one farm over as the case might be).  People who complain about not getting any freedom from their families don’t get a lot of sympathy from me.  I would like to move my parents or Brad’s parents right next door.  Freedom be damned…. I want help.

There is so much to be done and none of the schedules match.  Francis needs to be at school at 8:50am, Inez starts napping right around 9am.  Zephyr goes down for a nap at 1pm and would like to sleep until 3:30pm, but I need to wake him up at 2:45 to get Francis by 3pm.  There are chores, and diapers to be washed, food to be purchased and kids to put to bed.  My work day stretches to 9pm just to finish dishes, (as I have to jump up from the dinner table to put kids to bed).

Child number three really pushed me over the edge in many ways, but it also spurred some very healthy changes.  One change is that I actually take people up on what they offer.  When the neighbor says, “Well I can take Zephyr to the park if you want!” I actually let her.  If someone says, “I’ll walk Francis home from school whenever you need it”, I actually call and arrange that.  I try not to worry about seeming like I am taking advantage of others.  After all, they offered; I’m barely holding on here.  My job is to accept.  

I also try to accept people, rather than being all over-protective and paranoid.  No, I haven’t run criminal background checks on every mother who offers to walk my kid to school, but you know, my gut says it is okay.  My gut says that it is important—- essential to surviving right now.

Along with accepting though comes some complications.  Reciprocity makes life easier in many, many ways, but you have to store so much more in your brain, and my brain is fairly taxed from the demands of my normal life.  This week has been sort of hilarious.  Let me run it down for you:

• Tuesday I had to teach a class at Francis’ school, so I brought the kids to school where another mom watched them while I taught the class.  Bringing the kids involved packing a wagon about a mile high as I needed to bring 20 pounds of clay plus all the stuff that I fired last week.  I pulled the 70 pound wagon 6 blocks to school while carrying Inez on my back.  Ridiculous.
• Wednesday the neighbor walked Francis to school.  This gained me 20 minutes to prepare to drop Zephyr and Inez with the other neighbor for babysitting.  I spent my 4 hours free cleaning the house, washing diapers and doing the grocery shopping.  I picked up Zephyr and Inez at 1pm, then at 3pm, picked up Francis and brought the whole crew to church for religion class.  We were there until 4:45pm.  Luckily I had made dinner at 11am that day and wasn’t too stressed heading into the evening.
• I woke up at 5:30am to try to get some time to work on my teaching classes.  Ha!  I had the poor judgment to think that I could take a shower.  The kids woke up about 10 minutes after I started homework.  At t 8:00am, the neighbor dropped her son over here (she is substitute teaching today).  I walked everyone to school then returned, and tried to put Inez down for a nap.  Yet another neighbor’s 8 year old came over.  I am teaching him art lessons in trade for her putting my kids to bed on Gospel Choir nights.  I worked with him for an hour and a half.  15 minutes before he was to go, my sister came by and dropped her two boys off while she went to a doctor’s appointment.  My friend Angela stopped by to pick Zephyr up for a fun time.  I was to finish my art class, then take Inez plus my two nephews to Omsi to meet up with Zephyr and crew.  Now we are home for a quick breather (I have 5 minutes) and then I go pick up Francis and neighbor boy at school.  I have the neighbor until 4:15pm.
• Tomorrow morning the neighbor walks Francis to school again.  Oh thank God.  
• Next week I babysit for a family down the street in exchange for a future date.  I think this should go well.  My kids are pretty flexible so we are putting everyone down to bed at their house and then I will move mine back home.  All the mess is at her house!  Ha!  And she thinks I am doing her a favor!

I couldn’t do this without help.  I am so happy to have a community of people to work with.

Okay, five minutes are up!

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