the pieces of my life

Doodles is in that in-between stage. He’s well beyond little kid. But he’s not yet fully a big kid. And his room reflects this shambles. Books teeter precariously on his bedside shelf. Robotic pieces pile on the table, next to a motorized dog and his now-neglected Bakugan. His closet is still brimming with dress-up clothes but his magic set and Star Wars figures are in frequent rotation. I decided his room needed help. We had to organize. To start, he needs a bookshelf. A real bookshelf.

Adam: Shall we go to Ikea and get one?

Me: Those are crap. They fall apart so quickly. He needs a quality shelf that will last him a while.

Adam does some research. He finds a place nearby that has nice quality unfinished bookshelves.

Adam: What size should we get him?

Me: I dunno. What will work.

Adam measures the space. He jots down notes. He looks at the space again.

Adam: Do you want to get him a six foot one or a five foot one?

Me: Six feet seems too big. Will a five foot fit? I think we should do that.

Adam: Yeah, that will fit.

Me: Are you sure? Five feet seems really big.

Adam: No, it’ll be fine.

Me: I dunno. Maybe measure again?

Adam: It’ll fit. I promise you, it’ll work.

Me: Okay. Go for it.

Adam calls. The five foot one is not available. They’ll order it. It’ll take five long weeks. When I get my head wrapped around a project, I want it to happen now. But now is not possible. But this is one of the many reasons I’m in therapy so I agree to wait the five weeks.

Finally, it arrives at the store!

Me: How will you get it home?

Adam: In the van.

Me: It won’t fit in the van.

Adam: Of course it’ll fit in the van.

Beetle was nearby. I say to her: Adam thinks it’s going to fit in the van.

Beetle: Oh, it totally will. You won’t believe how much will fit in those things.

Adam and the kids go to pick up the bookshelf. He comes home. With the bookshelf on top of the van.

Adam: It didn’t fit.

My cousins come to town. I have my strapping young seventeen-year-old cousin help Adam carry the bookshelf up the stairs. Up our narrow stairs. Up our not-up-to-code unbelievably tight stairs. Because Doodles’s room is upstairs.

I’m not saying a word. Not a peep. I won’t mention a thing. But I will mention that our expensive, not-Ikea bookshelf looks highly okay in the basement. And Adam is now supposed to be researching bookshelves. Narrow bookshelves. And the books in Doodles’s room are still teetering.

In the battle of iPhone vs. the toilet, the good news is the iPhone won. The even better news is that it appears my iPhone isn’t holding a charge for very long, which means it will last me just fine until June 11. And that’s all I need, to get to June 11.

What? Why would I get a new iPhone when the one I have is still in mostly working condition?

Because as much as he’d like to deny it, as much as he wishes it weren’t true, I’m married to a man who is a slave to technology. It took all of his willpower to not buy the absolutely useless iPad. “We could use it in the kitchen! It’d be great. We’d use it for all sorts of things in the kitchen!” I told him to at least wait a couple of generations.

So while most people would at least pretend to be annoyed that a phone fell in the toilet, I think Adam was secretly pleased. ‘Cause he’s waiting for June 11, too.

Some days just don’t go as planned. Today is one of them.

The weekend was good but hectic with lots of running running running to get to places on time. Doodles and Pie had their last morning of hockey. Hockey ended at 10:30. Pie had a birthday party to attend at 10:30. Run run run. On Sunday, Doodles had Hebrew School at 9. Pie had an introduction to Hebrew school at 9. So Adam took them because I had a 5k race at 11, a baby shower at 11:30, and, as it turned out, Cub Scouts at 3. Run run run.

I promised a friend to run this 5k with her, to make sure she got over the finish line, which she did in fabulous style. She ran faster than I think she had anticipated and it was great. And wet. Very wet. We’ve got a Nor’easter going on here with, if I may, wicked winds and rain. Oy, the rain. We were soaked before we even got into the car, never mind the race. But let me tell you, the St. Paddy’s Day crowd in Somerville is a dedicated one and the race was packed. And the lines for the pubs after were insane. Not that I went. Because I ran to the baby shower.

Show up at the shower, run upstairs to change my clothes. Only… I forgot a dry pair of shoes and a dry bra. So I put my lovely shirt on over my jog bra (which had been under both my shirt and my jacket), but as it was soaking wet, I soon sported what looked like two lovely milk leaks. Fun times! I spent the whole party with my hands crossed over my chest, a la a junior high girl with new breasts, until I got teased one too many times so I flipped my shirt backwards.

I got home with a whole half hour to dry off, greet my family, change my clothes and then get the boy to Scouts.

All the while, I was keeping my fingers crossed. Every Facebook status, it seems, of local folk, every message on the town’s Parents e-mail list, even some e-mails on the school’s PTO list, was pleading for help on how to get water out of basements. My fingers are crossed. My fingers are crossed. My fingers are crossed.

Guess what? It doesn’t work. Adam is home right now trying to concoct some Rube Goldberg-style contraption to get the water out of our basement. Of course, there’s not a sump pump to be found, so Adam asked his father who lives the next state over to scour the hardware stores there and to bring one to us. His father is currently searching. I won’t bother keeping my fingers crossed that he’ll find one. The next step is to build an ark. I swear I saw two squirrels and two raccoons waiting patiently by our back door.

But at least it’s a blessed Monday, so while Adam vacuums out the basement, I can give my novel that final read over and try to get it out the door. Oh, wait! That’s right. Pie has no school today. For some random conference. But she does have a room full of Polly Pockets and Groovy Girl dolls that she wants me to play with.

Good times, people. Good times.

Tonight we were flipping channels, and we hit upon American Idol. Normally, it’s one of the few reality shows that I don’t watch. But the contestant was singing Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Games,” so I paused.

“This is one of those songs that I can’t help but listen to, but makes me think of years that weren’t necessarily the best. This song. k. d. lang’s songs. What was that song? Constant… I know it wasn’t Constant Contact, but that’s what I keep thinking.”

Adam replied, “I dunno the song at all. I don’t know k. d. lang.”

Which of course meant I had to grab the nearest computer and do a search on k. d. lang. “Here’s the song! ‘Constant Craving.’ Here, I’ll play it for you.”

I play it for him. Doesn’t really ring a bell for him. But he does say, “Oh, great. Now Amazon is going to give me a bunch of crap in my recommendations. I like a clean search on my account”

Huh?

First of all, I didn’t use Amazon to search for the song. Second of all, he’s worried about crap in his Amazon results? Him?? Let’s look at what’s in my recommended results right this very moment at 9:43 p.m.: Kidz Bop 17. Wow. Can’t wait to hear that one. Clarice Bean, That’s Me. Think I might join a book club to discuss that one. LeapFrog Leapster Learning Game: Batman. Leaping lizards! StarStruck. Oooh! That Christopher Wilde is soooo dreamy!

That man better hide his computer at night. Because it’ll be worth it to me to wake up in the middle of the night to come do stealth searches on his computer on Amazon. I’m thinking: Selena Gomez or Martha Stewart, or, if I’m feeling particularly malicious, menstrual cups.

Clean searches. Bite me.

Now that Pie is asleep, and Doodles is steadfastly holding out till 9 p.m., I can tell you about my last trip to Whistler. All those images of Vancouver and Whistler in the coverage of the Olympic Opening Ceremonies (not the ceremonies, mind you; we’re still in the “coverage” of the opening) really make me miss the West Coast. So beautiful. I miss the mountains and the rain (yes, really, the rain) and the lack of snow (although I understand that this winter has proven Seattle to be snowy). The coverage showed the Peace Arch and I spent a lot of time, sitting in my car, looking at that Peace Arch, cursing the freakin’ traffic at the border. [Quick side note: the remake of “We Are the World” is on, and save Babs and Michael Jackson, why don’t I recognize half of the people singing?]

Anyway, I was in Whistler. I was on a date. With this guy I had just started dating. We went on a mountain biking weekend with a bunch of his friends. Advice to you guys: Don’t go on a mountain biking date with a guy you only started dating. I wasn’t sure I liked him, I wasn’t sure I liked his friends, I was pretty sure I didn’t like mountain biking.

I had never been mountain biking before, and now that I’m a sporty gal, I realize that what we did wasn’t really mountain biking. It was flying. Down a hill. On a rented two-wheel vehicle of death. The bumpy dirt path went straight down, and I rode my brakes the entire way. Not so fun. And really not so fun when my date when flying over his handlebars, lay on the ground in a bloody mess, with two chipped front teeth. We’d been dating for about three weeks. What was I supposed to do? Be the concerned girlfriend? I wasn’t sure I could call myself a girlfriend. Brush it off, like, “Hey, it’s all cool”? Did I coo? Get all worked up? Talk about stress! I decided the guy wasn’t worth the hassle. I didn’t need a bleeder. Besides, he was arrogant as all get out. At least Whistler was beautiful and the Bellinis I drank for the first (and last) time helped numb the pain of it all.

You know what? Sometimes I still think he isn’t worth the hassle. But in for a penny, in for a pound, so I guess I’ll just keep him.

(Happy Valentine’s Day, Adam!)

I’ve been getting grief from my father (hi, Peter!) for not blogging. I’m not completely sure why I’m not blogging, but I haven’t. Part of it is that I am writing, just not for you. I’ve been working steadily away on my novel. I’m at a rough place in it at the moment, not sure if it’s all gelling together. I need to just plug away at it. Part of it is also that I’ve lost that snark factor. Now that I have kids, I feel like I can’t let my bitch out. It’s one thing to alienate my friends; it’s something else to alienate my kids’ friends. But I go through this blogging crisis about once a year and the fact is that it’s been eight years I’ve been doing this, which is longer than I’ve done almost anything else in my life. The only thing more consistent in my life is Adam, as I’ve been with him for almost ten years. But I’ve never lived in a single place for eight years. I’ve never had a job for eight years. Eight years is something to be reckoned with, so here I am.

And right now is my writing time. I should be working on my novel. But my darling daughter pulled the old “I’m healthy but now you can’t send me to school” trick. Last night the boy was trying to get out of homework. Pie had just gotten home from a playdate and was cranky, but nothing out of the ordinary. But the boy! Oh the moaning, the groaning. “I can’t do my homework! My head hurts! I’m sick!” I feel his forehead.

“You’re fine,” I tell him.

“Nooooo! I’m sick! Take my temperature.”

Which I dutifully do. And he’s a lovely 98.4. Pie is standing there. “Shall we take your temperature, too, while I’m standing here?”

She agrees and I take her temperature. 102.5. I do a double take and take her and his temperature three more times, certain something is wrong with the thermometer. But no, she’s sick. Just doesn’t seem like it other than a cold.

So now I’m sitting on the couch as she overdoses on TV. We started with High School Musical: “The girl with the lipstick and the sparkly shirt, who’s hanging with the boy? That’s who I am. What’s her name? Gabriella? That’s who I am. I the character of her and the person of her [meaning Vanessa Hudgens].” Now we’re on to Berenstain Bears. She’s anxious to go out–because of course she’s had no fever all morning–but I can’t in these panic-y swine flu times take her anywhere where there might be children, so she’s won the TV lottery for today. Given Pie’s Law of Health, she’ll be chipper and happy all day, till about 5 p.m. when her fever is guaranteed to return.

In the meantime, I can leave you with just a few of the things that have been keeping me away from the blog:

For the first time, we built a sukkah. We have our lovely remodeled house, with an ample backyard and a place to store the sukkah in the off-season. So it was time. “What size should we get?” Adam asked me.

I looked over the Sukkah Project web site. “I think we should get the easy snap together kind.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I was told. “It has to be made with lumber. Or else you’re just cheating. What size?”

“Um, 8 by 12 should be fine.”

“No, too small.”

“Okay, 12 by 10.”

So what does he order? 12 by 16. We need a bigger table to fill it, but it was nice as we hosted Shabbat and two kid-oriented meals in the sukkah. I’d show you pictures of Adam and Doodles building the sukkah, but somehow I’ve misplaced all my September photos.

The rain finally took a long enough break to get to apple picking. We went nice and early on Columbus Day to beat the crowd. We arrive, and I go to buy the small bag to fill. “We’ll fill that in no time. We need a bigger bag,” Adam insists (are you seeing a theme here?). So we get the bigger bag. Only Pie loses interests and she and Adam wonder off leaving me to haul around a honking big heavy bag of apples that I still haven’t used up.

Recognize that player in the blue fleece? I got so confused when I saw her out there, given that last year, that was the boy’s fleece, so I kept thinking I was looking at him. But that girl really held her own and did just great. The boy is amazing, how much he’s improved since last year. Poor Adam: Doodles made the advanced beginner’s group, which meets from 8:50 to 9:30 and Pie is in the beginner’s group, which meets from 9:50 to 10:30, so he gets to spend his entire morning at the rink, while I’m off running. That’s what you get for saying, “Oh, hockey and the early, cold hours at the rink don’t bother me.”

And now, now it’s time to be a Mom again. To change the channel and make princess soup for Pie and to bake my next apple creation: Spiced Caramel Apple Upside Down Cake. Perhaps I’ll try to sneak in a bit of noveling today. You never now.

So, yes, I’m still here. At lea
st for the time being.

The end of summer comes later for our family than most–our school system has the arcane rule that school starts the Thursday after Labor Day (and the Monday after Labor Day for kindergartners). So this year, Labor Day was as late as it can possibly be, meaning the first day of school for Doodles was one week ago and Pie didn’t start start till this past Monday. (well, really Tuesday–Monday was a split session day). I actually didn’t mind having the kids home. Yes, they make me insane. But I can (generally) deal. But I hate our school’s system because everyone else is done with school at the year end almost a full month earlier. Our last day of school for the coming year is June 23… if there are no snow days.

At the beginning of the summer, I made a long list with the family of things we were going to do over the summer. I was sad that much of the list didn’t get accomplished. I wanted to go to Portland (Maine, that is). Pie wanted to go to an art museum. Doodles wanted to do science experiments. Adam had listed kayaking and napping in the backyard.

But there was a fair amount on the list that, when I think back, we did achieve. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day we:

**went letterboxing twice–Pie really enjoyed it and the kids designed and I made their own stamps. On our second time doing it (during our camping trip–more on that later), Pie was a real trooper, dealing with missing boxes, a mom who got her lost, mosquitoes, and finally finding the box as it was beginning to get dark out.

**visited a butterfly place. True, it wasn’t the one Pie originally wanted, but we went to the butterfly garden at the Museum of Science and she was pretty happy about that. We made about three or four trips to the museum this summer.

**attended a science program (Doodles) and gymnastics camp (Pie). Doodles spent a week at Club Invention, one of the coolest camps ever. He got to take apart a machine to make a new one (he created the Stopinator 3000, a device for stopping Pie when she’s about to attack him), make up a new superhero, and work with a team to make a land sled. Pie tumbled and trampled and tally-ho’d through two weeks of gymnastics camp.

**saw some tall ships.

**write a novel (me). I’m about 3/4s of the way done. All I need is for school to start to finish.

**turned a boy into a fish (the boy swims! the boy swims!).

**picked raspberries.

**visited Storyland.

**had our annual 4th of July party and rode in the 4th of July bike parade.

**attend a baseball game (the Red Sox for Doodles and Adam; the Pawsocks for the entire family).

**tried out–and loved–camping. We went with Jasmine’s family for a single-night camping trip. Headed out to Harold Parker State Forest, which was perfect. Close, had swimming and fishing and hiking in the campground. Nice playground. Yes, a lot of rain, but I was able to completely overdose on roasted marshmallows, so really, it was fine. The only downer was that the boy’s fishing was cut short. That and the fact that Pie and I were seriously covered from head to foot with mosquito bites. The two of us scratched for two solid weeks.

**swimming time at the Res and at the pools friends invited us to, ran some races (okay, just me, but I ran about six of them), had invention time with boxes and recycled materials, bike riding time in the street, playdates and games and books and general fun.

So that’s it. Time to put summer to a close. The weather has turned distinctly fall like. On a walk this morning, Pie started picking up bright red leaves. I’m preparing for our Rosh Hashanah dinners and we’ve just received our Sukkot kit to build our very own sukkah for the first time.

Onward to fall. L’shana tova!

Let’s get something clear: Socks are an optional piece of clothing. If you need to go without them, then go without them. It’s not like pants, in which case one might find oneself arrested for going without. Socks? Eh. Who needs them?

In what case might one need to go without socks? Let’s think of one scenario:

Tuesday was a long, long day. It involved raspberry picking with one child who hates all forms of fruit. It involved a playground trip with children who suddenly decided that it was more fun to hang on mom and whine about snacks. It involved a trip to Whole Foods that was half miserable. It involved not one, but two playdates at our house. It involved a “meet the class” playground trip in which my son refused to meet a single new person. It involved children who didn’t want to get into car seats, eat dinner, and who in the process lost their shows. It involved everyone going to sleep, but being woken up at 3:45 a.m. by a false fire alarm. It involved knowing that we have one more day to get through till the big one starts first grade. It involved knowing there are still six more days to get through till the little one starts preschool. It involved Adam going to D.C. for a day trip on Wednesday with a 7:45 a.m. flight that gets back home at 10 p.

Knowing all this, at 5:34 in the morning, would you go back into the room where your wife, son, and daughter were actually sleeping to retrieve a pair of socks that you had forgotten, risking waking up the entire family just before skipping town? No. Of course not. What sane person would?

Ahem.

If someone said, “This is going to freak you out,” and then came at you with a green pepper and said, “Squeeze it. No, I mean, it squeeze it. SQUEEZE IT!” would you squeeze it? I didn’t think so.

I still don’t know what Adam wanted with that green pepper. But I’m going to have nightmares tonight.

Adam: That camp picture of Doodles is so typical.
Me: What?
Adam: The camp picture. Didn’t you see the camp picture he brought home?
Me: His bunk picture?
Adam: Yeah.
Me: Um, what about it?
Adam: Doodles is the only kid not looking at the camera.
Me: Excuse me?
Adam: Didn’t you see? Doodles is looking the other way.
Me: In the bunk picture?
Adam: Yeah. It’s classic.
Me: Um, Adam?
Adam: Yeah?
Me: Are you sure?
Adam: Didn’t you see the picture? He’s looking sideways!
Me: I saw the picture. Doodles isn’t in it.
Adam: What do you mean?
Me: We had to preorder the pictures. But Doodles was sick the day they took the bunk pictures. He’s not in it.
Adam: Oh. Huh. I thought it was him.