About Me

I realized recently that my blog lacks an About Me section.

The problem is, my personal IT support technician/spouse is away on a business trip, so I’m unable to alter the site’s, uh, complex architecture singlehandedly. (Besides, it makes Mark feel so needed when I let him do these things for me.)

While I await his return, here’s my first take on how I might describe myself:

I’m a mother of two from Oakland, CA who hates mushrooms. My ears aren’t pierced. Well, they were once, but those holes closed up decades ago. My mother died of pancreatic cancer. Women who’ve had natural childbirth are my heroes. I’ve never seen Star Wars. I’ve been a VP, toy reviewer, CNN producer, and state park employee. My favorite holiday is July 4th. I love surprises, resist change, and can’t tolerate wimpyness. I adore old women. I’ve had migraines that have put my right eye out of commission for weeks at a time. I once ate a 24-course meal. I’ve never competed in the Olympics. I went to cooking school to become a pastry chef, then decided against it. I’ve chatted with Mick Jagger. I loved high school and was unimpressed with college. My father’s name is Ferdinand. Altogether I’ve taken 13 years of French. I’ve never had a perm. I’ve lived in Rhode Island, Ohio, Massachusetts, D.C., New York, Georgia, California, France, and England. In a life riddled with happiness, motherhood has brought me supreme contentment. Some people think I have nice hands. I once spent a raucous night out with the White House Secret Service. Sometimes I want to eat my children. I don’t know how to follow a football game. My husband spent the better part of his career at Sports Illustrated. If I were President, liking coconut-flavored rum wouldn’t be uncool. I pronounce ‘aunt’ AHHHnt and ‘apricot’ with a short ‘a.’ Cats scare me. I have a terrible memory. The greatest compliment I’ve ever gotten is that my daughter Kate looks like me. I can dish it out but I can’t take it. Math Game Day in fourth grade always gave me a stomachache. My father is afraid of heights and peach fuzz. A psychic once told me I was a famous ballerina in a past life. I skipped having a first marriage and got a brilliant trophy husband at age 37. I’ve never had braces. For a made-for-TV movie I once played a woman who choked while eating in a restaurant. Parades often make me cry with joy. If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning. The love I have for my husband and daughters can best be described as rabid. I’m an obsessive yard saler and recovering packrat. My super powers are the ability to sleep anywhere and parallel parking. I’m the youngest of four girls. I disagree with the way the word ‘segue’ is spelled. I didn’t make a million dollars before turning 30. I look dead in both yellow and light gray. I once stuck a pussy willow up my nose. Seeing a person carrying a box of hot pizza always delights me. I think people who put lines through their sevens are pretentious. If it’s not too much to ask, I’d like a high school marching band to play at my funeral. I know how to say the following things in Polish: ‘underwear,’ ‘Grandma,’ ‘ass,’ and ‘I’m going to throw up.’ I’m a wannabe Jew. If it weren’t for house cleaners, I’d get around to changing my sheets about as often as frat boys do. My best piece of financial advice is to pay for babysitting now instead of marriage counseling later. I’m an avid recycler. My greatest life’s work has been ridding myself of any trace of a Rhode Island accent. It wasn’t until my mother was gone and I had children of my own that I realized I’d inherited her brilliance for tackling tough laundry challenges. I can’t be inside on sunny days. I felt betrayed my senior year of college when the hippies cut their hair short to get jobs at investment banks. I’m not even a little bit country. My last meal would include a Del’s Lemonade.

How much room do they give you in those blog templates for the About Me section anyway?

Well, this will have to do for starters.

What’s *Your* Husband Doing Right Now?

Mine is shaving his legs.

Sure, cyclocross season starts on Saturday. Something he’s been training for, obsessing over, reading and blogging about since, well, since I was too pregnant with Paigey to even remember what my own legs looked like. (And trust me, it was better that way.)

Call me naive about the nuances of bike racing–and you’d be absolutely correct–but I was under the impression that the leg-shaving thing had to do with reducing wind resistance of some sort. I mean, he’s got a fairly bushy gam, but how much could that really slow him down? Turns out that the leg shaving has nothing to do with speed. It’s just that the other boys who race prefer soft smooth legs. No, actually it’s because it makes tending to injuries easier when there’s no nasty leg hair messed up in the carnage. Ew!

It also makes his legs look much sleeker in his new denim skort.

Of course, I have to make this all about me. I mean, first I have to deal with his having a better butt than mine. Now he’s practicing more diligence in the depilatory arts too.

Add this to the shame I suffered several months ago at the dry cleaner. I brought in some of Mark’s shirts and the nice Chinese woman pulled them over to her side of the counter, lifted one of the collars up to her face for a closer look, then grimly tore off a piece of green masking tape and stuck it next to the the ring of make-up encircling the collar. No, it wasn’t mine, or thankfully another woman’s. It was Mark’s make-up. Residue left-over from one of his TV appearances. (Yes, my husband has his own MAC pressed powder.)

I thought about trying to explain it to the woman, but then decided to just let it be. I could tell she was already silently judging me, pitying me. Whatever I would have said was bound to sound pathetic and defensive. “No, no! My husband doesn’t wear make-up! It’s really not what it looks like. I can explain.”

Ah well. Let her think what she will. Just wait ’til I bring in some of his pants with a blood stain from where he nicked his leg shaving.

Some Things You Learn in High School Really Do Apply to Life

Nothing makes me feel younger than faking sober for the babysitter at the end of an evening.
 
Back in the day I’d have to pass the gauntlet of my waited-up-for-me mother, who was typically in the kitchen working a crossword puzzle or getting herself a late-night snack. I’d make what I hoped was nonchalant (and non-slurred) small talk until it seemed a reasonable amount of time had passed and I could head up to my room to sleep with one leg dangling off the bed.

Not that this was a frequent occurrence in my youth. I wasn’t a booze-hound by any means, but I did have some nights of, uh, experimentation.

Funny how now that I’m a mother myself, I’ve had to dust this skill off. Except now I’m faking sober for a teenager instead of being one myself. It just seems so uncouth to be the boozy neighborhood mom whose kids you babysit for. I mean, I have a reputation to uphold.

Speaking of responsible winos, our friends Mike and Myra take turns being Designated Driver when they go out. But when it’s Myra’s turn to drink and she doesn’t take full advantage, Mike takes it as a sort of affront to his sense of fairness.

“Here’s Myra,” he says, winding up for a good rant. “She had one glass of wine–one!–and here I’m holding back because it’s my night to drive. I mean if I knew she didn’t want to drink anyway, she should have offered to drive! I could have been having a good time!”

Like any good conflict-averse spouse Myra’s come up with a way to get Mike off her back on this topic. She confided to me that at the end of some nights when she thinks Mike will feel she hasn’t sufficiently filled her role as Designated Drinker, she just plays drunk. You know, laughs extra loud and fumbles around a bit. Maybe slurs a word or two to ensure she’s gotten her point across.

How good is that? God, I’d love to see her act. 

Anyway, all this came to mind since it’s been a while since Mark and I have gone out on the town, leaving someone else as sentry for the sleeping kids. But today my mother-in-law, Peggy, arrived for a week-long visit. And Friday’s Mark and my fourth wedding anniversary. (What’s the gift for the fourth again? Tin foil? PVC pipe? Burlap?)

Mark booked us at an incredibly romantic, delicious, beautiful restaurant in the city called Quince. No getting up to re-supply chicken nuggets mid-meal! No ‘Please eat two more bites of broccoli’ entreaties! No ketchup present at the dinner whatsoever! All that, plus the company of my adorable smart funny husband whose company I remember really enjoying before the exhaustion of two weeks of Olympic-watching drained the life blood out of me. 

Even if we just drive to San Francisco singing songs from the radio together, it’s sure to be the best night ever. And if we do whoop it up a little, I’m not feeling any pressure to put on my sober act for Peggy. She probably wouldn’t buy it anyway.   

Toddler Recidivism

When we were up in Pawt-land a few months ago, Kate and Paige and I went on a little road trip to see a friend and her kids in Eugene. After a weekend of family fun Mark had meetings to go to, and far be it from me to sit in a hotel with two children waitin’ for my man.

As someone who A) grew up in microscopic Rhode Island, and B) had parents who opted exclusively for air travel, I haven’t logged many miles in the car. But I figured what could be more come-what-may wacky and romanticizable than a road trip? Granted with a two-year-old and a three-month-old we weren’t exactly yucking it up at campy roadside attractions, shooting pool at honkey tonk bars, or flashing truck drivers the old fried eggs. Still, it was an adventure.

Our one-night visit was brief but totally worth the travel. When our hosts headed out early the next day for work and school, it seemed wrong to hit the road without seeing a bit more of Eugene. Since one of the things I love about not 9-to-5ing is the mini-indulgence of weekday breakfasts out, I got a tip on a good local spot and made my way across town with huevos rancheros on my mind.

Now everyone has their limits for what’s reasonable to do with two kids. I certainly don’t want to count breakfast out as one of those things. Mostly because I enjoy it so much, but also because if we can’t eat at a greasy spoon full of vegan college students and bearded men, what can we do? I might as well not leave the house. And I, for one, never understood why motherhood and the hermit lifestyle seem to go hand-in-hand for some women.

At the restaurant, when we’re about 80% through our good but not to-die-for brekkie, I realized I should nurse Paigey in the hopes that she’d sleep on the drive back to Portland. I’ve snarfed down many a meal crouched over a breastfeeding baby, at home and in public. But for some reason that day Kate sensed my mobility vulnerability, and saw an opening for some attention-getting of her own.

At first she just got down off her seat and started walking away from the table while looking at me tauntingly. My upbeat-Mama-voiced entreaties to “Come back to the table please, Sweetie” quickly turned to “Get over here, Kate” commands hissed between clenched teeth. At which point it seemed that Kate decided: Game on.

A couple times I managed to get up while propping up a latched-on Paigey with one arm to lug Kate back to the table. But then, like all sly toddlers, she decided to up the ante. It pains me to even recollect–never mind share–this. Since it was clearly so delightful to see me lose my patience, Kate went for the big guns, and while standing a few feet away from our table, got my attention somehow then puckered up and, well, she spat at me.

I was mortified. Open up the earth and swallow me now mortified. Mortified that this diner full of breakfast-eating collegiates, hippies, and misanthropes who I didn’t know and would never see again were witnessing my daughter’s ghastly behavior–as well as my inability to make it stop.

And two disclaimers I must share. Behavior like this is, blessedly, out-of-character for Kate. And the spitting wasn’t all out loogie-level gobs–more a light spraying of spittle. But still.

In my fury I don’t even remember what happened next. (Or at least that’s what my attorney has advised me to say.) I jarred Paigey off my boob, slapped some cash on the table, scooped a soon-screeching Kate under my arm fireman style, and lugged the whole happy McClusky family to the car, vowing to Kate under my breath that she’d never enter another restaurant as long as she lived. I thought I used to be bad at walking through lodges carrying skis, but holding a howling horizontal toddler takes that to a whole new level. To any diners whom I errantly whacked upside the head with my evil child, I extend my most sincere apologies.

So here we are months later with plenty of time to have figured out what to do if a spitting-type situation like that were to arise again. I wish I could say that that lovely behavior has ceased, never to rear its ugly head again. Instead, Kate has cataloged spitting as The Ultimate Way to Piss Us Off. And frankly, she couldn’t be more right.

Not that it’s happened a ton more, thankfully, but in the rare (knock wood) times she’s busted out this move, we’ve found that denying her things that are too far removed from the situation is an utterly ineffective punishment. “That’s it! No dessert for you!” we’ll say at 10AM–child light years before dinner. We might as well threaten that she won’t attend her prom.

The we’re-not-going-to-do-what-we’re-about-to-do approach is also a wash. If she doesn’t get to go to the pool or the park or the zoo, then we don’t get to go there either, and honestly we don’t want to punish ourselves in the process. Then we all just sit home covered in spit in exceptionally bad moods.

All this talk of punishment may make it sound like we’re using the ACME Abu Ghraib Child Rearing Kit, which is hardly the case. 99% of the time Kate is a pure joy–which most every other post in this blog will attest to. We try to explain why certain of her actions are inappropriate, we don’t spank, yell, or waterboard. We’re generally pretty mellow and groovy parents. It’s just that the spitting thing is so ugly and base, we’d really love a magic bullet to make it stop. And so far the groovy tactics have fallen short.

The fact is, recidivism in the toddler set is a bitch. Just when you think you’ve gotten through to them, the bad behavior rears its head like some unkillable alien that bursts out of your stomach when you least expect it.

After something or other the other night, Mark asked Kate again and again to stop what she was doing to no avail. Finally he told her if she kept doing what she was doing he was only going to read one bedtime book to her–instead of the usual two. When moments later at bedtime Mark stuck to his guns on the book reading, it was devastating to Kate. Between sobs she tried the work-around of “But Mama read me books, Dada?”

Of course, Softie Parent that I am this killed me. I wanted to sneak in her room and read her endless books. (This is why Mark and I could never train a dog together.) And even though I know Kate was in the wrong and Mark gave her every opportunity to stop whatever she’d been doing, I was suspect about denying her books–something we love that she loves. Denying her reading time seems like telling her she can’t eat brussel sprouts or take a nap. Like, “Okay then Missy, no math homework for you!”

But the book thing ended up to be Kate’s Achilles tendon. When she woke up the next morning the first thing she said was, “I didn’t get books because I spit, Mama. Dada said no books.”

Of course it broke my heart and made me want to slug Mark, but also made me grateful he’s willing to take on the Bap Cop role. It’s both noble and no fun. And God knows I cower away from doing it.

So now that Kate knows we mean business around the ‘no book’ thing, there’ve been a couple times when we–well, Mark–has mentioned it when Kate continued to do something after we asked her to stop–like clobbering Paige in the head with a wooden toy. The thing is, the consideration of not getting her Curious George fix actually makes her stop and listen. Hey, this setting boundaries for kids thing seems to have its merits! Who knew?

Mind you, Mark is not goose-stepping around the house trying to come up with beloved things he can take away from Miss Kate. And I’m not always sliding candy bars to her when he’s not looking. And, thankfully, she’s not getting tattoos (yet) or sneaking out her bedroom window at night–giving us many opportunities to have to come up with appropriate behavior-snuffing consequences.

Mark and I are just feeling our way along the path to mutually-acceptable parenting techniques, and hopi
ng that we’re doing a better job of it all than a pack of wolves might. Someday when Kate gets in a fight with her college boyfriend, perhaps she’ll find a better way to express her frustration than spitting in his eye.

The Blue Ball is Dead! Long Live the Blue Ball!

Peggy and Gary, Mark’s mom and stepfather, left today after a great visit packed with NorCal sightseeing, eating and drinking, and excessive granddaughter adoration. One of those visits that make you wonder why we all live so damn far away. I wasn’t at the airport this morning for the final farewell, so I don’t know exactly what took place. But even before Kate and Paige were on the scene, Peggy was known for getting teary-eyed at goodbyes, especially when she didn’t know when she’d see Mark next.

If my memory serves me, my mother and I used to cap off most visits with a rousing argument. It made parting so much easier. Even without a separation anxiety spat, my mom was hardly the crying type.

There’s actually a famous story in Mark’s family about when his mom and sister dropped him off at college for the first time. When they left to head home, Peggy was crying so hard she somehow managed to drive off the road into a corn field. (Mind you, they were in rural Minnesota where such fields are abundant, not Manhattan.)

Needless to say, Mark and Lori will never let Peggy live that down. But now that I’m a Mama myself, I can totally empathize. How in God’s name do you deposit your beloved sweet baby at college–off in another state or even a different time zone–to not see them again until Thanksgiving, if you’re lucky? I’m hoping by the time Kate turns 18 homeschooling will be a popular collegiate option. Or that she’ll insist on living at home and attending a nice local costmetology school so she can be near her Mama.

Even though the kiddies are still so young I’m finding I’m already nostalgic about things. At the park the other day there was a three week old baby I was mesmerized by. “A baby!” I thought to myself, as if it were such a novel thought–an unattainable object of desire. All this while I’m holding my own four-month-old. But, you know, Paige seems so big already. And the thought that she’s probably the last of the little McCluskys makes it that much harder to watch her mini milestones pass by.

Mark, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to share my sentimental streak. Nor does he share my on-again off-again yearning for another baby. In fact, after a long evening of bouncing Paige on the big blue yoga ball–our favorite method for getting our fussy babies to sleep–he turned to me and said, “God I’ll be happy when I never have to do this again.” And despite how my own lower back was crying out for an end to non-stop bouncing, my mind was aghast at the thought.

When that ball goes away, that means Paige will have grown up a bit. She won’t be a teeny newborn who needs the motion of her Mama’s movements replicated to soothe her. She’ll nearly be independent!

And another thing. When that ball goes away after Paige, it’s retiring. It will never be called to serve again–at least for anything other than yoga. And still for Mark there’s no looking back. I think he mentioned something about gleefully taking an ax to it…

Well, unbeknownst to him, the other day as I was vacuuming the house I lamented that that huge ball, wedged under the lip of the TV stand, was taking up too much space in our small living room. And really, we hadn’t had to use it for weeks. So I figured I’d stick it down in the basement where we could always grab it if we needed to.

The impulse to stow crap in the basement comes up often, so it wasn’t until I was walking up the stairs that I thought, “My God. We are now officially finished with the baby-bouncing segment of our lives.” May the big blue ball rest in peace.

No, no. I didn’t cry. But hey, it’s on to a new phase and goodbye (forever) to an old one.

Another thing that Mark doesn’t know–not that I’ve actively been hiding it from him–is as Paige has been outgrowing clothes I haven’t had the heart to give them away quite yet. For now I’m taking some comfort in just putting them back in the age-labeled plastic bins on the shelves downstairs. (See? The basement is my enemy and my best friend.) How can I let go of the soft froggy jacket with the satin bow that Lindelle got for Kate? Or the brown cable knit sweater-suit Mark got at his office shower?

In part, there’s just so much cute stuff. I can’t just give it to Salvation Army. But there’s also the thought that there won’t be another baby here to wear it some day–a thought I clearly haven’t gotten my head around.

And for the record, I’m not planning to do some soap opera poke-a-hole-in-the-condom move for a third child. In my rational, non-emotional moments I truly agree with all the reasons why we’re better off as a family of four. It’s just–babies are so sweet!

Is this how my brother-in-law’s parents ended up with 15 kids? Perhaps.

Maybe I just need to reflect more on my neighbor’s deadbeat 37-year-old son who’s just moved back home. Oy! Imagine finally being back in the swing of what life was like without kids, then being tossed into telling your grown son to pick his socks up off the floor. Even for a crazy love-addicted Mama like me, that just seems wrong.

I’ll have to remember that when I’m veering off into a corn field 16 years from now.

Rollin’ Laverne & Shirley Style

I have an older aunt and uncle who share a bedroom but have separate twin beds. It’s what I like to call the Laverne and Shirley bedroom configuration.

I’ve always thought that it’s so crazy when couples do that. I mean, how can you expect to get a decent night’s sleep in a twin bed?

Last night after an epic bout of wretched coughing Mark removed himself from our room to sleep on the couch. Even The World’s Heaviest Sleeper, for which I hold the title, can’t sleep through all that irregular loud hacking.

Sure I felt bad that he was collegiately couch-sleepin’, but my time alone in the bed was glorious. I tossed and turned to my heart’s content. I slept at an indulgent diagonal across the bad. And I selfishly gathered the whole duvet around my body like a huge fluffy cocoon. Aside from wishing he was in the same room so I could have the drowsy contentment of knowing my spouse was nearby, it was bliss.

Clearly the ideal bed configuration is two beds in the same room, but–duh!–queen beds. And to be clear, I’m no prude. There would be times when it would be appropriate for Mark to come to over to my bed or for me to go to his. Everyone likes a little snuggling sometimes.

Of course, this set-up doesn’t account for the disturbance of middle-of-the-night coughs, snoring, and nose-blowing. But I guess that’s what the couch is for.

Can She Do It?

Guess what? I made dinner tonight like a big girl!

It’s true. My dirty little secret is that Mark is our dinner-maker night after night. I know. I’m not working and there is really no excuse for this. Though the story that I have constructed around the situation is that “Mark likes to cook dinner” and “it helps him unwind after work” and “comparatively my food sucks.” The reality is that really only that last statement is consistently true.

After hearing me say “Mark likes the in-the-trenches daily dinner prep and I much prefer cooking for dinner parties (when I also don’t have children to tend to)”–hearing me say this perhaps a zillion times in different social situations where some small indication of our domestic set-up was revealed to someone–well, it’s really a wonder that I’m still here typing today and that Mark hasn’t strangled me.

I can’t believe it took him as long as it did to finally set the record straight over pillow talk one night and say, “Uh, I don’t always LOVE cooking dinner every night, you know. Sometimes I’d like to just come home and relax too. I mean, if you wanted to do it some time that would be great.”

At least, that’s what I think he said. I was too busy sticking my fingers in my ears and repeating “la la la la” loudly.

Sure one of my wedding vows was to always appreciate Mark’s dinner-cookin’. And I think I’ve upheld that, and without much effort or prodding. I do appreciate having a personal chef as I often refer to him. (My God, it’s a wonder I’m still alive.) I mean, my level of appreciation can’t rival my brother-in-law Roland’s who between bites nearly moans with grateful gastronomic delight. Me, I lick my fingertips, sop up gravy off my plate with my bread, and say at least once per meal how awesome the [INSERT ONE] [pork tenderloin with peach salsa] [pasta with homemade meat sauce] [chicken parm] [flank steak and baked potatoes] [chicken and corn chowder] [ziti bake] or myriad other meals are.

And he’s not only about dinner. At lunchtime Mark makes a world-class tuna salad, a mean grilled cheese (with tomato soup, bien sur), and other fabulous sandwiches, quesadillas and left-over reincarnations with a twist.

I won’t bore you with his mouth-watering breakfast and brunch offerings, mostly just because I don’t want to run the risk of someone breaking into our house to steal him. Suffice it to say his skills in the kitchen have little to no boundaries.

So last night, after preparing another knock-out meal for childhood friend Sydney and hubbie Tere, we cleaned up, hung out, went to bed, and halfway through the night when Paige woke up to nurse Mark could not manage to get back to sleep. Just kinda tossed and turned and watched the hours on the clock tick by until of course he fell fast asleep mere minutes before needing to wake up.

Inspired by his measly 4-hours of shut-eye, I went to the grocery store with a fierce determination to do right by my man and to wrangle us up some dinner tonight.

For the record, it’s not that I can’t cook. I mean, I used to have a somewhat limited but solid repertoire. But somewhere between us dating, moving in together, and getting hitched those skills, well, atrophied. I can bake with the best of them, but always found savory foods more challenging. First there’s timing everything to finish all at once, then there’s the nasty handling raw chicken or having your fingertips smell like garlic the next day. (I’m such a princess.)

And frankly I just don’t seem to have the basics of seasoning and discerning meat done-ness down pat. I’m a dyed in the wool recipe follower, which is why the precision of baking suits me to a T. To me hearing that you cook something “until it’s done” and not for, say, 11 minutes, is arcane and maddening. My brain doesn’t understand what to do with that directive, so before it short circuits I tend to flee and ask Mark to take over.

And that did happen a little bit tonight too, but I think I still get 98% credit for cooking this:

• Roasted chicken
• Oven roasted potatoes and carrots
• Corn on the cob
• Sippy cup of milk or beer (age dependent)

Not bad, eh? And the thing was, it WASN’T bad! Mark complimented me on it, though at this rate he’s likely choking down raw chicken just to reinforce this behavior in me.

Kate even said twice, “Thanks for cooking this, Mama!” (Though maybe it was Mark throwing his voice.) She asked for more chicken a few times too, but did turn her nose at the roasted carrots in lieu of “crunchy baby carrots.” The roasted carrots had “brown on them.”

At any rate, the culinary merit of the meal aside, the whole dinner experience was, as Mark and I would say, exceedingly pleasant. I gave Kate a refresher course on table-setting, served everything up hot not long after Mark got home, and we all talked about our days like a nice little nuclear family as we ate. For her part, Paige happily did judo kicks in her bouncy seat while waiting for my breasts to be freed up for her dining pleasure.

So here’s the thing. Even if I can’t dice mirepoix in perfectly symmetrical micro cubes like Mark, and wouldn’t likely take on anything that required mirepoix in the first place, I decided tonight I want to humbly try to bang out some dinners around here. Five nights in a row of me-cooked dinners is my self-imposed challenge. At the end of the week I’ll either determine that I can contribute more regularly to our dinner-makin’, take it over altogether (not my hypothesis), or just really amp up on my appreciation of all Mark’s hard work.

No promises of gastronomic rapture. The goal is to make some healthy balanced meals that both Mark and Kate would be willing to eat. And that don’t use Hamburger Helper.

Can I do it? Tune in to hear tomorrow’s menu, and Mark and Kate’s review.

Turns out, we have a baby

It was bound to happen. Four months into her existence with us, it finally feels like we have a baby. Which is to say, we’re incredibly sleep deprived.

Today I took off Paige’s socks and put them in the diaper pail. (God knows where the dirty diaper will turn up.) And in the car this morning I had to do a panicked check to make sure both girls were there and strapped in, not forgotten on the sidewalk. I’m not sure, but I think I brushed my teeth.

This afternoon when Kate cruelly refused to nap, I had her play the “Mama is your baby who you have to put to sleep in your bed” game. Hey, it wasn’t what I’d call a legitimate nap, but it did afford me a few horizontal minutes, even if the blankets were wrenched off repeatedly to rearrange the teddy bear that Mama-Kate wedged under my arm.

I’m amazed that Mark is functioning intelligently at his office. I can only hope that he’s locked himself in a bathroom stall to catch a few Zs.

Speaking of which, I hereby award the Co-Parenting Merit Badge to my charming and sleepy husband. In some dumb show we were watching last night a woman said. “Marry someone who loves you a little more than you love them.” Poppycock. Marry someone who is willing to do his share of middle-of-the-night baby soothing when he could be tucked in complaining that he needs his sleep for work, and pointing out that he’s not lactating anyway. (Don’t get any big ideas, sweetheart.)

Of course, I brought this all upon myself when I was in the midst of one of my Hallmark Moments of Parental Gratitude yesterday. Something or other made me express to Mark how thankful I am that the girls are happy and healthy. And I think I might have foolishly tacked onto that something about “I’ll take all the sleep deprivation in the world as long as yadda yadda yadda…” I don’t even want to type the sentiment for fear it will reinforce it.

Who knew I could be so powerful that by mere mention I could bring something on?

I intend to spend the remainer of the day–assuming I’m coherent enough to do so–chanting incantations that pair “healthy happy children” with “good sleepers.”

Wish me luck. Or at least a good long stretch of sleep tonight.

Living in the Lap of Product Testing

Last night Mark came home from work and said, “I got a new car.” I looked out the window to see an $80,000 BMW SUV.

No, this isn’t where I wake up and realize that JR getting shot was all just a dream. It really happened! What’s more, when I was all excited and said I wanted to go for a ride he said, “Okay, but I need to take the TV out of the back of it first.”

The TV being a 42″ schmancy plasma flat-screen HD-type one. No joke!

Oh yeah, that’s how we roll around here at the McCluskys. A magazine editor and a stay-at-home mom just wallowing in the lap of luxury. At least until Mark has to return everything. Truth is, it’s all stuff he’s testing for the magazine.

In fact, the first TV Mark ever brought home to test offended my sense of decency. The thing was gargantuan, and when I sat on the couch in our modest-sized living room I felt like I had to brace myself and lean my head way back when it was on. It was like being in the front row at the movies, but times ten. I swear there was G-force coming off the thing.

Mark, of course, loved it. Thought that after struggling along with our old TV, this was the perfect size. “Perfect,” I said, “if we were sitting in Brooke’s house across the street and watching it through the picture window.”

That TV lived with us for several weeks, along with a handful of others that we’ve taken in like foster children since. I complained about it ruthlessly and was embarrassed whenever anyone walked in the door. I’d explain to them immediately why 40% of our living room was taken over by a piece of electronics so immense we were probably all being sterilized by merely being in its presence.

In the time the TV was with us the Olympics came and went. We watched a bunch of movies and several episodes of The Sopranos. We watched Food Network shows and with the HD fired up felt like we could see micro-organisms living on the food.

I continued to berate its existence, but then one day without warning Mark wrangled a huge box up the stairs from the basement and started to unplug myriad wires and cords. The TV was getting ready to leave us, and in its place Mark got out our TV where it was collecting dust by the washing machine.

He plunked it down on the TV stand and it looked like a postage stamp. The thing was dinky and pathetic. Even once the grime was cleaned off and the shades were drawn, the curved screen reflected light and shadows and seemed clouded and blurry. It looked utterly antique. We might as well have gathered around a radio to tune into The Shadow.

I was crestfallen.

Of course, I couldn’t admit it to Mark. I weakly offered up, “Now that’s more like it!” but afterwards ran to throw myself on the bed with tears in my eyes. How could we live this way?

Since then I’ve learned not to look a gift horse in the mouth. I’ve started to welcome the high-end cameras, the cherry red front-loading washing machines, the state-of-the-art vacuum cleaners, and the garbage can you don’t even need to step on to open–it just knows when you want to throw something away.

Our friends are used to seeing different gadgets gracing our home each time they come by. My favorite joke is that Kate isn’t really ours. She’s a toddler Mark’s testing, and despite how much we’ve come to love her we’ll eventually have to send her back.

It’s an ever-changing world we’re living in. Technology is evolving at a break-neck pace, and in the words of an astute German super model, “One day you’re in, and the next you’re out.”

I used to try to resist the change; to rebuff the progress. But eventually I came around. Now I actually delight in whatever it is that Mark strains to carry up the front stairs every evening.

We’re living in the lap of luxury here at the McCluskys. At least until it all has to be returned.

Project Managing the McCluskys

Turns out that my past life as a project manager has served me well for parenting. At least in terms of the schedule management. Or so I thought.

So in 11 weeks or so New Baby arrives. Got that down as a milestone. There are a few dependencies associated with that, such moving Kate’s room into what’s now the office to free up the crib for the young’un. And to do that we need to move the office downstairs into this weird little basement room, which means that Mark needs to move all his bike stuff from the weird basement room (multiple bikes, a bureau of cycling clothes, cases of Gatorade, bike tools, helmets, shoes, and a gazillion water bottles) along with tents, beach towels, and sleeping bags, into the the garage.

Mark has already started the bike stuff migration, but the office is still very much intact, and very much teeming with bookcases, books, computers, file cabinets and a bunch of musical equipment.

Every project manager worth their MS Project Plan knows that it sometimes takes completion of one task to spur on the onset of another one. And as it happens I got a flyer in the mail announcing that a huge kid-stuff store is having a furniture warehouse sale tomorrow. So Kate and I are going big girl bed shopping. A field trip which, if fruitful, will result in more urgency around the need to make way in the office for Kate’s new swingin’ big girl boudoir.

And, of course, in my manic state of nesting, I can’t wait to obsess over what all I’ll need to get and do to make Kate’s new room appealing for her, but moreover cute as the Dickens in my own eyes. The potential for endless runs to Ikea and Target to meet this objective makes me giddy with delight. This because I have already overhauled and or re-organized almost every other room in the past two months due to Crazy Lady Nesting, and it seems silly to do them all over again. I need a new outlet for this beyond-my-ability-to-control animalistic phase.

Back on my gantt chart of What Needs Happenin’ Before Bay Comes, is the issue of Kate and preschool. At one point a few months ago, in the productive early morning hours of prenatal insomnia I realized with intense clarity that what I’d need more than anything was for Kate to have a place to go (a nanny share or preschool) 2-3 mornings a week when I was tending to the new baby.

And driven Mama that I am, I somehow took that middle-of-the-night self-assigned action item and made good on it. So now Kate is in preschool. And since no sudden moves can descend on the project plan of family dynamics, we were lucky enough to get her started with plenty of time to acclimate before her little sibling started sucking parental attention away from her like a vacuum cleaner.

And initially it seemed Kate was going to oblige us neatly with little to no transitional issues or new school trauma. But then the “outside time” at the school started to overwhelm her. The kids from her classroom and a couple others pour into the school’s playground all at once and the mayhem and unstructured time seems to throw our Little Miss for a loop.

Give her noodles to glue to a paper plate and she’s fine. But in the wilds of the outdoors she’s been coming undone.

One of the teachers has told us when Kate starts bumming out outside, she takes her in and they hang out and play in the classroom. And at the end of the day when you ask Kate about playing outside, she cheerily reports, “I cry outside,” as if she’s telling you, “We had muffins at snack time.”

Hearing about this has been heart wrenching for Mark. But, especially with the unemotional way she reports this to us, I wasn’t too concerned. By all other reports Kate seems to find preschool pretty groovy. And to be honest, it seemed to me that it wasn’t in the plan for Mark to get waylaid by this little development. It will work out! We will move on! I will buy new curtains for the basement office room and everything will be okay. See how well we are moving through our tasks?

Today the nanny is on vacation. (Selfish.) So I blasted out of the office at noon, feeling a certain amount of work-neglect guilt, to fetch Kate from school. Surprisingly for the time of day I got enmeshed in traffic and drive 15MPH for a solid 30 minutes. I realized I’d be late to get Kate. All the kids who spend the full day there would be lying down for their naps. Then the gas tank went from kinda low to the red light going on. I decided the traffic hold-up left me no time to get gas, but the longer I sat in traffic the lower the indicator needle moved to the bottom of the last white line. (It’s never a good sign when you find yourself rationalizing about where on that last line of tank emptiness you are.) Add to this my desperate need to pee.

Suffice it to say I wasn’t feeling at one with the universe when I skidded into Kate’s classroom 10 minutes late, and then saw she had a big scrape on her nose and a bloody upper lip. When I asked the teacher who was with her what happened it seemed like she was on a slow record speed responding to me. I mean, I think she just said hello to me or something before starting to tell me, but I was already in Crazy Mode and just wanted to know right away what the $^%(# happened to Kate?

The fact is, Kate was fine. Yes, she’d fallen off a log, and sure she cried for a while afterwards, but she was over it. But for me, I felt a disturbing inner lurch as I went from feeling great about our latest foray into preschool into a mode of “wait, this might not all be perfect and settled in my mind after all.” There are some things that I’m going to need to get used to here.

I’d heard that after a couple good weeks an otherwise “adjusted” preschooler may backslide into some transitional issues. But no one prepared me for the fact that that could happen to me as well.

When Kate registered my presence, she started to wimper and demanded a kiss on her owie. And the teacher, after finally sputtering out what happened, decided to launch into details of how she comforted Kate and then what they did, and this is how she was the rest of the day which was really very happy and doing well for the most part blah blah blah, which I suddenly had no interest in hearing about. I just wanted to get Kate and get out of there. (And I wanted to pee.) The thought of Kate having had a bad experience outside, which was already the Bad Place for her, just seemed unbearable. We needed to go home home home.

I struggled down the sidewalk holding the car seat Mark left me when he dropped Kate off against my big belly, and trying not to drop my keys or Kate’s sweater and extra pair of pants. Ten paces behind me Kate dawdled along, dangling her lunch box and looking like a pathetic waif with her barrettes sagging in her hair and her face scraped up and bloody. It seemed like miles to the car and worlds away from our dear sweet home, as Kate announced she wanted to walk on the “crunchy leaves” and slowed down even further. It was all I could do to not sit down on the sidewalk and bawl.

In any given project there is always the unexpected unplanned for snafu that jumps out at you, invariably when you’re also having a bad hair day. And no matter how much of a bad-ass you are, you can’t always rally on the spot and regain your firm grasp. For some project managers the lack of control is probably a fairly familiar feeling, but for others, knowing it could have been avoided devours us.

In all my transitional strategizing and well-laid plans to ensure everyone moved through all there is to do before the new baby arrives, I totally overlooked the potential for me to put a kink in the plans. Without expecting it, and certainly without wanting it, it became apparent that it was going to take me a little longer to adjust to preschool than I’d planned for. It’s not that I suddenly felt like it wasn’t a safe place for Kate to be, or that I even really had any misgivings about the place. It was just its utter newness.

Finally at the car, I heaved the car seat in and was preparing forlornly to climb in with my big belly and crouch over it to install it. My internal dialog was chanting “Home, home, home.” When I looked out at Kate to make sure she was staying safely by the car, she peered up at me and said “I don’t want to go, Mama. I want to stay preschool!”