Birthdays & Babies & (a) Brontë.

Today is my 28th birthday, which of course means that it's time to quietly contemplate my own mortality and to look back fondly on the salad days when I was blessed with the gift of youth.

Kidding.

Mostly.

Last night we were all in the living room: K was in her cow chair (yep, she has a cow chair) coloring, Bob was in his Man Chair probably using both his laptop and his ipad simultaneously, and I was on the couch alternately trying to get some work done and ogling baby things I can't afford (because I waste my time ogling instead of working, probably), when it hit me: I had three and a half hours left to achieve something truly spectacular and then, well, die, if I wanted to be immortalized in the Forever 27 club. Bob just said, "Please don't," and K kept on ignoring me.

So midnight came and went, and I continued to toil away in relative obscurity. I gave K her morning dose o' drugs for her ear infection. I checked facebook to collect the first round of birthday wall posts. I took out the trash. I did a pregnancy workout that refers to one's ass as "buncakes" and repeats "squeeeeze the buncakes" so often that K starts saying it as soon as I put the DVD in. I did some actual work in between each of these things. I made lunch then realized that all I really wanted was an unlimited supply of baked potatoes and .... ketchup. I put back the non-potato components of my lunch and made myself a second potato. I threw my work manuscript in my purse, grabbed Starbucks (calories don't count on your birthday!) and we hit the playground since it got up to 65 today and it's supposed to maybe snow tomorrow and we wanted to take advantage of the weather. I rented Jane Eyre (um, and the Pooh movie and the new Barbie movie so maaaaybe K will stay in her room watching those long enough for me to get my Brontë on). I "made dishes," as K calls it. I worked some more. I popped open a bottle of sparkling apple-grape juice that I can't get anyone else to drink with me. I spent some time playing the "gas bubbles, or baby kicks?" game. If this is what 28 looks like, you better watch out when I hit 30. Who knows what kind of mayhem I will release upon the world!

Time is moving a lot faster these days. K is three now and has a full schedule that includes preschool and swimming lessons, in addition to her usual yoga and storytime routine. My grandma turned 90 last month. I'm fifteen weeks into this pregnancy and the list of decisions we need to make before the baby gets here is not getting any shorter. We're only 46 days away from Christmas. Christmas! Didn't we just get married on a 95 degree day? How is my car 8,000 miles overdue for an oil change already?

Questions for another day, I suppose. Maybe to be pondered over a nice glass of prune juice, and the early bird special.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

We've been celebrating St. Patrick's Day via indulgent food choices for the last week! Last Thursday we kicked things off with some frosted Irish cream brownies, Saturday we tortured ourselves by popping a corned beef brisket in the slow cooker too late to actually get to enjoy for dinner that day, so after several hours of trying to will it to cook faster we gave up and ordered a pizza, then Sunday we had the real deal. We've been working our way through the leftovers ever since.

But let's go back to those brownies, shall we?

K admiring our work, sloppy as the glaze may be. 

Can I gush for a moment about these brownies, guys? They're chocolate. And booze. And sugar. And more chocolate. (And, um, baking provides a nice positive outlet for parent-child bonding? K loves to help me measure ingredients and mix everything together. And the Bailey's in the batter helps ease the transition into sleepytime...) Kidding, kidding, CPS representatives!

I wanted to stick my face finger into that pan, too.

 

That's my girl.

Seriously, blog readers: I can't think of a better way to celebrate St. Patrick's Day ANYTHING than with these brownies. Last week I hit my 100 pound weight-loss milestone (seriously!) and -- no kidding, I'm willing to backslide a pound or two for these suckers. (Also, future wedding invitees? Don't be surprised if you see these at the reception instead of wedding cake, because a) these are delicious, and b) have you priced professionally-made wedding cakes lately? Dear Lord. We could have a cake or pay the mortgage for the next couple months, but probably not both.)

Happy St. Patrick's Day, gang, and don't forget to enter our giveaway if you haven't already! (It closes tomorrow evening!)

What I Really Want for Christmas

Bob keeps harassing me to make a Christmas list. He actually started asking me for this several months ago, and here we are: nine days before Christmas (nine days!) and I'm still finding reasons to put it off. (If you had told me five years ago that I'd have trouble coming up with gifts for myself that I'd like to receive, I would have laughed. so. hard. But now? If it's not for K, I usually have huge "but there are better ways to spend that money!" guilt over it. Unless it's something that I buy on a whim at Target. My middle-class mom money guilt seems to go out the window at Target.)

But now I've figured it out. What do I really want/need for Christmas?

A clone. Or three.

Right now, if magically gifted with a small (peaceful!) army of clones, I'd have:

-One sit down and read through the three work manuscripts I have piled up, taking diligent editorial notes and not budging until they were all read in their entirety and the client reports were delivered.
-One clean my house. Dear Baby Jesus, I don't understand how it gets so messy so quickly.
-One to tackle administrative tasks. Return e-mails, make phone calls I've been putting off, run to the post office, etc. I'd also like for them to arrange for a trash pickup service, so that we can stop piling garbage bags on the back deck. (SERIOUSLY, SELF. MAKE THAT PHONE CALL. YOU ARE LIVING LIKE AN ANIMAL.)
-One to plan out enrichment activities for K that are engaging and fun and better for her than my old standby of, "Hey, go watch TV, baby!" (*I* will still get to do the fun activities with her. I just want someone else to plan them/acquire the supplies/set up the activity station, and then, of course, clean up afterward.)
-One for general household maintenance work. Shoveling. Killing that damn mouse that's been scurrying around lately. Making the ancient furnace somehow suddenly way more efficient, because paying to heat a huge old farmhouse with a huge old furnace = bad news for the bank account.

I, naturally, will be busy playing with K out in the snow, baking cookies to warm up afterward, then snuggling on the couch watching The Office/30 Rock/Arrested Development DVDs until my loving almost-husband comes home to shower me with kisses, marvel at how nice the house looks/smells/etc, and replenish my bonbon supply.

What would you have your clone(s) do?

Happy Halloween!

I had really grand plans for Halloween. Weeks ago, things looked wonderful: I had plenty of time to put together creative Halloween-themed crafts, someday after storytime my mom friends and I would coordinate when/where we would meet to go trick-or-treating, K and I would paint lots of little pumpkins and put a few out in front of both our now-house and our new-house for decoration, and we'd send one to work with Bob to put on his desk as a cutesy reminder of how much we like him ;-). This weekend we were going to go out and let K pick a pumpkin, then set up shop at the new house and help her carve her first jack-o-lantern. At one point I had even entertained the idea of a homemade costume, like my mom used to sew for my sister and me. It was going to be awesome. 

That's not how it happened. No crafts were made that weren't planned by someone else (thank goodness for K's absurd schedule of extra-curricular toddler activities! She did make the requisite number of themed crafts thanks to her multiple library activities and yoga classes that she attends every week). My mom friends and I all got caught up in our own lives and didn't get to coordinate any Halloween meet-ups. We did, actually, paint a number of small pumpkins -- but they never made it past the top of the microwave cart where I had set them to dry. And the actual pumpkin carving? Yeah. Nope.

Instead, today after leaving Bob's house I made a 30-second pit stop at my house to frantically search for the black pants and top that went underneath K's costume, I chugged Diet Coke on the drive to my grandma's farm to stay awake (. . . it had been a long day) so we could quickly show her K's Elmo getup before heading back to town for trick-or-treating, I threw a bag of old suckers that had been in my basement for a month or two into a big mixing bowl and put it on my porch, and K and I hit the streets to go "treat-treating" by ourselves.

And it was fine. It was fun! K ended up with an almost-full plastic pumpkin bucket of candy, we got a ton of compliments on her (store-bought!) costume, we actually ran into a number of our friends while we were out anyway, and she gleefully shouted "treat-treat!" at most of our neighbors. The bowl-o-suckers that I had left on my porch wasn't emptied by the first greedy middle-schooler that came along, and when we got home almost two hours later it was still half full! (Humanity, I'm impressed and award you two points.)

I think that's one of my biggest parenting challenges: reconciling the differences between the kind of parent I want to be (organized, pro-active, something-close-ish-to-perfect?) with the kind of parent that I actually am (overwhelmed, seat-of-pants, hey-she-probably-won't-remember-anyway-so-this-is-good-enough.) The logical side of my brain knows that K is only two and it's unlikely that she'll someday end up in therapy as a result of not having carved her first pumpkin until the ripe old age of three, and that the fact that we walked around the neighborhood without an entourage of friends probably won't lead to a lifetime of social anxiety or chronic loneliness. I know that. But that annoying other side of my brain is tsktsk-ing me and saying, is "good enough" really good enough for K? Is it?

I don't know. To be honest, it's almost midnight and I'm tired and I can't even begin to think about forming an answer-answer to that question. But right now she's happy, sugar-buzzed and staying up late to watch an OnDemand Dora marathon, so we'll call this one a draw.

Happy Halloween, fellow imperfect parents of the interwebs!