Wordless Wednesday

Taking a walk with great-grandma:

...and Cheyenne.

To the fairy ring and the cornfield.

Wordless Wednesday

Sometimes you just need a cheeseburger cookie. On a beach. With friends.

Working Mom Syndrome

I'm a stay-at-home-mom in the sense that I don't leave to go to an office. I don't drop K off at daycare (though I did for a while when we had easy access to an absurdly affordable caregiver and only one mortgage to pay).  I don't have to call my boss and explain why I won't be there when K is sick, or spend money on a work wardrobe, or deal with a commute in crappy weather. I do, in fact, stay at home.

But I also work (and not in that "all mothers work" sense, valid as it is). I might be in the same room as K, able to respond to her urgent (urgent!) needs for fruit snacks and chocolate milk, but the majority of our interactions include me grumbling "not now, babe, I'm working." I offer to queue up another episode of Caillou on Netflix. I encourage her to go up to her room to play with her babies. I beg her to FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP JUMPING ON ME AND GO FINISH THE HELLO KITTY COLORING BOOK. I feel like most of the time my mothering style is of the, "hey, don't you have some TV to watch somewhere?" variety. And since I don't have set office hours, my workday can spill over into the evening, or the weekend, or --

On the days when I Absolutely Am Not Opening That Work E-mail Window, I want to make it count. I want to cram in as much quality mother-daughter-family time as I can. I want our time together to be enriching and entertaining and memory-making.

So when things like weather or unexpected crowds or illness or unplanned naps get in the way of whatever I had planned for those special, non-working times, I get a wee bit cranky. Saturday I wanted to take K to the beach and to visit her great-grandma, but she was coughing like a TB patient and I didn't think lake water or exposure to the elderly was a great idea. Sunday we were going to go to a photography exhibit, but when we got there we couldn't even find a parking spot and had to abort the mission, then en-route to our plan B it started raining, and en-route to our plan C K fell asleep in the car. We did end up making a pit stop at a playground to practice bike-riding later in the day, but it felt like a weak substitute. K didn't seem miserable, but I felt like a failure. I want to have a good, impressive answer at the ready when someone asks us what we did over the weekend. This weekend? Um. I don't know. I made some baked oatmeal for breakfast one morning. That was okay.

(Not okay for oatmeal to be the highlight. Not. Okay.)

So, mopey and discouraged, we moved on to plan D. The work-on-Sunday so I can slack off on Monday plan. I hunched over my laptop while Bob took K out for ice cream. I read a work manuscript that left me in tears (mostly in a good way) and kept me so busy that microwaving some hot dogs was about all I could do for Sunday dinner. I even skipped my Sunday night True Blood viewing!

Because Monday? Monday we were going to make up for it. Monday we were going to cram a whole weekend's worth of quality time into a short mother-daughter outing. We were going to go to the zoo, dang it.

(More to come in Working Mom Syndrome Part II, or WHERE ARE THE BEARS?)

And So We Go On.

It's Thursday.

Or it was Thursday, anyway, a few hours ago when all of this was going down.

I work really hard to make Thursday my Friday. In a perfect world, Friday would be devoted to things like lounging in the backyard with a vodka lemonade  cleaning the house (because good Lord, it takes a beating during the week when both Bob and I are working and K is being -- well, when she's being a 2 year old) and taking care of odds & ends that have already been put off too long. On Thursdays I work until dinnertime, then make/do/go out to/etc. dinner, then sink down into the couch with some wine and let Bob put K to bed while I watch me some high-quality television (The Office/Parks & Rec/30 Rock during the fall and winter, and Project Runway now!).

But then, you know, real life creeps in. It's been a busy spring and summer in the Unlikely Origins household. We planned for a wedding. We unplanned (we didn't 'unplan' the marriage itself, but we moved from a 100+ person guestlist to a private courthouse ceremony and back again before finally settling at something in between). We charged a heck of a lot to a credit card for salon services (but hey, I looked decent!). We stayed up until the wee hours of the morning the day of our wedding folding programs and tying ribbons around them. We, eventually, were married. (We're married!!!)

And life goes on. After the wave of cards in the mailbox and unpacking from the honeymoon (with toddler), we went back to work. Clients sent congratulatory e-mails but wanted to get on with things w/r/t their individual projects. I don't get paid vacation time, so -- heck *I* wanted to get on with their projects, too!

Bob returned to his office. Last week I hovered over my computer in one room while K helped out by simultaneously flooding the bathroom. (Other days this week she used a travel sized shampoo as toothpaste, poured plaque revealing gel all over the downstairs, and emptied out a whole tub of salt onto her sweaty toddler self.) Bob tried to mow the post-honeymoon wilderness yard and the riding mower started smoking. He put K to bed and then she woke up with a scary barking cough/cry five minutes before the winner/loser on Project Runway was announced. Hey, real world. How *you* doin'? (Tell me I'm not the only one who secretly still loves Joey. Right? RIGHT?)

Now it's two in the morning and I'm just now finishing up the work-work that I hoped to have done several hours ago.

And that's okay. Not, "I love everything!" okay, because, obviously, I'd rather be doing things other double crossing my T's for the week work-wise at this time on a Friday morning, but okay nonetheless. I'm not thrilled about certain aspects of the day, but yesterday my new driver's license -- with a new last name! -- came in the mail. I'm not happy that K is sick, but instead of the Project Runway interrupting barking cough, she's (thank you God) back to breathing peacefully. And tomorrow will go on, with all of us doing what needs to be done, and then we'll have the weekend. Just like always.

We're returning to life as normal in every sense of the world -- sneezing toddlers, demanding clients, and trying work commutes, and blogging ;-)

Happy Friday, everyone. I hope yours is everything you want it to be, or at least, everything it *should* be ;-)

A Bad Case of the CCABs.

The Unlikely Origins house has been afflicted with a terrible case of the Can't Catch A Breaks lately.

Bob had an especially rotten week at work. (It was not made any better by sleep issues and a malfunctioning alarm clock!) My to-do list was so long that just looking at it made me want to curl up into the fetal position. I didn't get K to bed until after midnight most nights, and then there was still a pile of work manuscripts with quickly approaching deadlines staring at me. A client even offered me extra cash to "work faster," which while I would have found amusing at other times, in this case it nearly sent me over the edge.

But the winner of the CCAB perfect storm award? Ms. K, who simultaneously:

1)Is going through a growth spurt. For her, this always means sleep disruptions and major crankpants issues.
2)Is teething. Again. Hi, new molars!
3)Managed to catch strep throat (or something similar) which necessitated a trip to the doctor and some antibiotics. These antibiotics are supposed to be "orange berry caramel" flavored, and -- yep, taste just as horrible as "orange berry caramel" flavored antibiotics sound. Try selling a syringe-full of that to a cranky toddler twice a day.

By the end of the week, we were all dead tired.

On Saturday mornings I go workout -- but this week there was no class. Normally, I get home around 11 to find everyone still passed out from the night before. This weekend? My "free" weekend? K got up at 7:30. Fine, I thought. Let's make the best of it. We watched the sunrise through the kitchen window and pulled ourselves together and headed to the movie theater. (They show free kids movies on weekend mornings, and I thought it might be fun.) And it was! K loved it. She was attentive to the movie and kept her running commentary down to a moderate volume. She stayed in her seat. She smiled a lot. She inhaled her popcorn.

No, really. She must have literally inhaled her popcorn because about ten minutes before the end of the movie she turned to me with that oh-crap-there's-something-caught-in-my-throat face. The help-I-can't-breathe face that stops parents' hearts.

She did (obviously!) manage to get the offending choking hazard out of her throat, but she had coughed/gagged so hard that, uh -- well, she got *all* the popcorn out of her system. All. Of. It.

Dear Lord. There are some things that the parenting books just fail to cover. What's the protocol for when a toddler vomits in a movie theater? Do you stand up and issue an apology? Do you just discreetly wipe up as much as you can with tissues from your purse and shove them into the popcorn bucket? Do you rush out of there, avoid eye contact, and never show your face again? Do you go tell the 15 year old minimum wage worker at the concession stand that they're probably going to need a mop and some upholstery cleaner? I just . . . I don't know.

As I loaded her up in the truck, both of us with bits of "choke," as K calls it, still on our clothes -- I decided that was it. The weekend was going to get better. (It sort of had to, right?) We went home, changed, and got on with our day. It was gloomy and raining and cold, but we got some flower seeds to start indoors. We picked up a bird feeder for K to paint, and next weekend, assuming winter decides to finally pack its bags (seriously, this morning we had snow and sleet and rain and thunder! ENOUGH!) Bob will help her hang it outside where she can keep an eye on it from the picture window in the living room. We got chocolate in pretty pastel Easter wrapping. (Chocolate would still make me happy even if it were wrapped in the obituary page from the newspaper, to be honest, but all the pinks and yellows and greens of this time of year sure help make it *feel* special, you know?) We're choosing to believe that things will get better.

And if they don't? Well, K has taught us that even if you've got to suffer through the worst case of CCABs ever, you should do it with STYLE: 

Wordless Wednesday: Pseudoscorpion Edition

OK, not really wordless. I do have one word for this picture. EEEEWWW.

Snagged from Animaloid.

I found one of these charming little buggers climbing on the wall upstairs when I went to workout tonight. After a quick smush with some toilet paper (I know, I know. I don't like bugs inside. I'm trying to be a better person but --) I took it downstairs to Bob, who I looked to for confirmation that this was not, in fact, a bloodsucking monster waiting to kill us in our sleep. "What is it?" I asked. 

"I don't know," he said, innocently. 

"WHAT IS IT? FIND OUT. GET TO GOOGLING." Sometimes I am bossy. I'm also paranoid, so it's a better idea that someone else do the googling.

By the time the workout video was over, Bob had flexed his bug-identification muscles and declared that it was a "totally harmless" pseudoscorpion. Sounds nice and cuddly, right? He repeated the words "harmless" and "beneficial" about twenty times in the next ten seconds. (Have I mentioned I'm paranoid? And not a fan of BUGS IN THE HOUSE?)

Does the presence of one mean there are probably more in the house? (Yes.) Are they venomous? (Yes, but they are so tiny that they couldn't pierce human skin if they tried.) How big do they get? (Apparently in these parts they stay 3mm or less, which in my frenzied state I demanded that he translate "into American.*" I can't handle the metric system when I'm in panic mode, people!) 

(OK, this picture shows how tiny they actually are. I may be a bit prone to overreacting.) 

Snagged from this site.

Whatever. I am still Not. A. Fan. 

*I'm not really retarded, I promise. I was 97% kidding here.

Winner of THE COUNTESS Giveaway...

as selected by random.org is comment number 9, which belongs to Robin from Pink Dryer Lint! Congratulations, Robin! I'll e-mail you later on today to get your mailing address so we can get that right out to you.


 Didn't win? You should still consider checking out the novel. I finally started reading my copy yesterday, which led to a confused exchange between Bob and me:

Bob: Did you get another work manuscript? (Eyeing the manuscript box on the dresser.)
Me: No. . . why?
Bob: On the phone earlier you said you were reading. But this box doesn't look like it's been opened.
Me: Because I wasn't reading for work! I was reading an actual book!
Bob: Oh. Wow. I don't know that I've ever actually seen you do that before...

So, yeah. It was time. And the novel itself? Dark and rich and gory and beautiful. You should take a peek.