Lately I have been masquerading as a happy homemaker. It's in part because we have a house guest. My BIL has come to live with us for a time. Since he's been here I have been cooking a LOT more than usual. I guess I need to show that I am a good wife to his brother, definitely not the kind of person that orders takeout four nights out of five in a good week and scrapes together a halfhearted attempt at dinner on the fifth which includes many frozen items and canned soup. No sir, that person definitely does not live in this house.
Tonight in a misguided attempt to provide a nourishing meal for my family I decided that I was a TV Cooking Show Host and used 3 pots, 4 lids (one didn't fit right), two cutting boards and numerous utensils. What was I thinking? I can't remember in my postprandial exhaustion.
What I do remember is that I had a flashback to summer camp while I was wading through all of the dishes. I was a picky eater as a child. I have had many, many conversations with K. where I say, "You really don't think I'm picky???" and he says, "No, why do you keep asking me that?" in a patient tone of voice which means perhaps I should stop asking soon. But I was picky as a child and still think of myself as picky.
As a picky eater, summer camp posed many problems when it came to dining. For example, I don't really like any normal breakfast foods except for cereal, and at camp I was faced not only with pancakes and waffles but oatmeal and cream of wheat. Oh, the horror of sticky, lumpy, cold and ever thickening oatmeal that you "just have to try". And then there was the yearly serving of Spam. (It may taste somewhat like baloney, but it smells like old socks when it's cooking and that's the truth.)
But the food was not the worst of it. No, the very worst of it was that each day you had to have a different job, and one of the jobs was scraping the plates at the end of the meal. Asking a child already traumatized by the "You-Just-Have-To-Try-It" Rule and heading towards the fourth day of not enough nourishment to scrape plates, in effect causing this very child to sit neatly in front of a large pile of congealing summer camp food while not throwing up on the spot, is perhaps too much to ask. It was too much to ask of me. I would do just about ANYTHING to get out of the scraping of the plates duty, including foregoing the much anticipated trip to the camp "store" to buy candy by faking illness, losing a limb, or worse.
Tonight I was rinsing all dinner debris right down the drain into the lovely garbage disposal, with nary a thought as to whether all dinner debris was actually garbage disposal approved when the summer camp recollection popped into my head. Garbage disposals, a great mystery to me. I grew up sans garbage disposal, sans dishwasher, sans air conditioning for that matter, and always thought I was pretty well adjusted considering the privations I endured. Perhaps a quick lesson in the proper use of a garbage disposal would not go amiss, but I'm limping along here, pretending I am an accomplished homemaker, deft in the use of all kitchen appliances. It's just that I am happiest when dinner is takeout, and paper plates are appropriate.
I don't know how many of you have been in a situation where you believe yourself to be entirely innocent to the best of your knowledge but still anxiety ridden in the face of law enforcement types, but it's not a pretty scene.
This afternoon E. and I were diddling around waiting for K. to come home from work. I was just about to wander into the kitchen to start thinking about dinner when I noticed that there was the top of someone's head at my front door, and then I heard a knocking sound. "What good timing," I thought to myself in that dopey way I have when disaster is about to strike and I am worrying about whether serving chicken flavored rice with pork chops is ok, or really just too tacky, "I was just walking out to the kitchen and someone knocked at the door at precisely that moment. How often does that happen?" Psychic I am not.
So I answer the door and a man introduces himself as Special Agent Somethingorother from the United States Treasury, Internal Revenue Service and this is Special Agent OhmysweetlordIamnotregisteringwordsanymore and is K. at home because we would very much like to speak with him. And so I immediately get very, very nervous and try to act casual at the same time. Only my voice is high and squeaky and I definitely look like I am wishing that the floor would just open up and I could drop right into the termite infested crawlspace under the house because what in the heck is going on here?
You see K. and I have our own company. It's a small company with about 10 employees and we really appreciate the freedom and flexibility it gives us. We also do not cheat on our taxes. Cheating is for gainfully employed persons who will not lose everything when the IRS comes knocking. Which I thought would be never, but turned out to be today.
The IRS guys let me squirm around for a good long time before they finally say, "K. is not in any trouble. We are from Virginia and just happen to be in the area and we just want to talk to him." Well, my parents and sister live in Virginia, and now I am slightly relieved but also panicstricken that one of my nearest and dearest is somehow in trouble with the law. More squirming from me, while we call K. and I try to sound desperately like everything is ok while the world is still falling down around me and my heart beating in my ears sounds remarkably like being in one of those stores in the mall with the Very Pronounced Fake But Realistic Nature Sounds.
K: (answering the phone in mid conversation) ...sorry I didn't call you back but I wa...
Me: (not caring in the least what he is talking about) EverthingisreallyfinehereandtherearesomeverynicemenfromtheIRSwhowanttotalktoyou (small gasp) buteverythingisfineandhereisaspecialagentpleasedontputmeorKinjail
K: What?!???!!
Me: (just managing not to cry) YouneedtotalktothisguyRIGHTNOWANDFIXTHIS
I hear Special Agent MrNiceGuy say to K that he isn't in trouble and really they are so sorry for bothering us but they really need to talk to him about J., a former client of ours.
And then my heart started beating again and the birds started singing and I felt a great affection for all mankind including the IRS who are just normal people trying to prevent fraud and all sorts of other nasty things and just doing the best they can in a country where most people loathe them on site.
The End.
Warning: Sappiness in high doses
I can't help it. I was just doing the laundry and ended up falling in love with E. all over again. Let me preface this by saying that I am a product of advertising, and good packaging can make me buy almost anything. Really.
I have to hand it to the people behind Dreft. In my book, Dreft is the most lovely, sweetest baby smell in the whole world. I adore the smell of Dreft. In fact, I may be addicted to the smell of Dreft, and poor E. will be in the high school locker room trying to look cool and not worry about the size of his package as compared with the size of the other packages but that will be extremely hard to accomplish while he smells like Dreft. Because I was just realizing today that he won't be a baby forever and probably isn't really a baby now since he will be 2 in November. So I thought perhaps I should start washing his clothes in Tide, just like his father and I. And then I almost sat right down on the floor and cried in the teeny, tiny closet that passes for a laundry room in our house at the thought of giving up his Dreft.
Why did I buy the Dreft in the first place? Because advertising told me to, that's why. How else do you explain the fact that good parents would never wash their child's clothing in normal detergent, but need special baby detergent "For A Clean You Can Trust"? A detergent which just happens to be the "#1 Choice of Pediatricians", I might add.
(I know, I know. Babies have sensitve skin and might get a rash. Just stick with me here. Rashes aren't funny. Especially when they are covering the beautiful skin of your baby.)
In this case, the packaging was not an enticement. First of all, it's pink. When you have a baby boy, you must avoid pink at all costs, and sometimes it's hard to do. My cousin was particularly apologetic at the beach this year because she had bought swimmy diapers for her grandson and had mistakenly bought the GIRL swimmy diapers, which were pinkish with GIRLY things on them like dolls and ribbons. How awful! Poor grandson sporting those GIRL swimmy diapers and just knowing there was something terribly wrong under his bathing suit.
Secondly, the packaging is in a "warm-and-fuzzy-country" motif with the pink plaid and the little bunny. My best wishes go out to all of the parents out there who are going to try and not be overtaken by the cutesies when they make purchases for their offspring. Just try to find a blanket, burp cloth, crib sheet, diaper bag, changing pad, you get the drift without adorably anthropomophic critters with big scary eyes all over the place. Go ahead, just try, I'll wait. Aha! I knew it. Very hard to accomplish, folks, very, very hard.
Dreft Update:
I have just noticed that the bottle also clearly states "For babies 0-18 months" which means I am already 2 1/2 months past my Dreft deadline with E. So is he embarrassed at Gymboree when he's with the other 20-and-a-half month olds and he still smells like Dreft and all of the other kids are smelling much more grown up?
Today when I open the door to his room, the sweet baby smell of the Dreft floats out to me. I don't know how much longer it will, but for today, he's still my baby and he still smells like one. Until he makes his thrice daily deposit in his cutesy, pastel, anthropomorphic googly-eyed critter lovin diaper, that is.
Recently on a BLOG I like to read there was an amusing story about a...well, we'll call it a "bug" for the sake of argument. (I would call it a gargantuan fiend with death-ray eyes, but that might be taking it a bit too far.) Now, being the kind of person who is more of a lurker than a commenter, I held my own amusing waterbug stories to myself. I have many, many stories from the days I lived in a very cheap apartment in the University City section of Philadelphia which were all basically the same:
However, the highlight story of my life was when I was lying in a real bed in another apartment and K., with a look of disgust, fear, and imminent panic said, "Don't move!" in a voice that meant DON'TMOVE and so I didn't move and he plucked a large (but unseen by me) waterbug OUT OF THE BED FROM RIGHT NEXT TO ME. Waterbugs in your actual bed, about to crawl into your actual ear, are just too mindboggling for contemplation.
Fast forward a few years and now we are not living in an apartment, but a house. Start out this morning a little sleepy but fairly happy. Notice absentmindedly that the cats are acting particularly happy with themselves, preening around the downstairs with all sorts of cat pride. Realize in the dark recesses of my tired brain that cats preening around the living room is usually not a good thing. Wonder, "What the heck is going on?" Get juice for E. and retire to the playroom for wake up time for us both. Hear K. fumbling around and then exclaiming, "Oh dear!" Leave the grusome discoveries to K.
Yes, the cats had left a nice little mouse laid out all pretty by the steps that go down into our living room. These are indoor cats, folks, therefore leading us all to the conclusion that the mouse must have been an indoor mouse as well, both in life and death. And I have to relate that this was no ordinary little cute field mouse. No, this mouse was bigger, uglier, and snarlier than any ordinary mouse has the right to be. I left the last rites, removal, and burial to K., because none of that is in my job description and he will do it, whereas I will run around the house shrieking.
However, the mouse was not the worst of our troubles with mother nature in our little cabin in the woods. Oh no, that prize goes to the bat. One fine, unusual day when K. had gotten up early and gone to work before either E. or I had arisen, I was again sleepy and stumbling down the hall to release E. from his crib when I noticed something on the floor that looked suspiciously like a dead mouse. Living with two cats, it never pays to make any assumptions about anything left on the floor, as they have many toys which for reasons unknown to me are made to look like anatomically correct mice. (Real note from cleaning help: "There's a 'real' dead mouse under the chest of drawers in your bedroom. When you move the laundry basket you'll see him." Which is the exact moment that I decided to never move the laundry basket again.)
However, for the purposes of this story, further examination revealed that the brown furry blob on the floor was a dead bat. Mass hysteria ensued (if one person can be the sole contributor to mass hysteria, and from my own point of view I definitely believe it's possible). Many calls to K. to determine what to do about the bat, and how best to get E. out of his room without actually touching or going within a five mile radius of said bat. Previously, a helpful neighbor of ours had thoughtfully explained that when bats go into your house they are usually rabid, so there was that.
All this to say that most places where you might like to live will share the land with living creatures that think that your house is as nifty a dwelling as you do. K. and I share a dream to be able to live in Hawaii one day. I have heard scary stories of the insects inhabiting paradise being as big as your fist or thigh or head or whatever, and just let me tell you, my personal approach is to take finslippy's advice about the Paper Mitt of Protection. Only mine will be made out of chain mail coupled with fireproof asbestos fabric. You can never be too careful.
Well, today in the mail I got the home study. I was really starting to believe that it would just never happen, that somehow we got stuck in Home Study limbo and were never going to get back out. I mean, when you accidentally get trapped in a black hole (you know, because you're time travelling and you take a wrong turn or something equally as disasterous) how do you get back out???
But anyway, two lovely, beautiful notarized copies of the world's most anticipated Home Study Assessment sit on my desk before me. I feel like this is a major accomplishment in my life. Yes, feel free to congratulate us, because we actually managed to Complete The Home Study, a task which seemed simple at the beginning but was much more complex than ever imagined. I will now get Very Serious about getting the various seals from the various states (only two in our case). And once the seals are in place, we just wait for word from the USCIS and get the fingerprints done and wait for our last little piece of paper. What a great day!
Thank you Joe, the mailman, for coming through for us again today. We love you, and the entire United States Postal Service, while we are at it.
The first law of motherhood is "Never Compare". At least, that should be the first law of motherhood for all mothers who don't want to go crazy with worry or get a little too excited about their child's potential for success based on the fact that they are "advanced". I have had conversations with a couple of different people who have told me that they made the same decision I did, namely to stop reading those child development books so as to get off the Milestone Merry-Go-Round.
When I was first pregnant with E., K. and I had a secret nickname for him. We called him "OLT', which stood for "Our Little Troll". You see, there may have been a few moments in time when K. and I were not exactly kind about someone else's little bundle of joy. Oh, not to their faces, you understand. It was more the kind of thing where we would get in the car and start snickering and say to each other, "Now could that child win the title of 'World's Ugliest Baby', or what?" or "Did she or did she not look just like a monkey?". I know, it wasn't nice or mature, but it was very funny. When we found out we were pregnant, we both realized that if the universe were to be fair, we would have a baby who wasn't just ugly, but was ugly and smelly to boot.
What we got was perhaps not the 'World's Most Gorgeous Baby', but the second runner up at least. He was a beautiful child from the day he was born. People would invountarily exclaim about how pretty he was, and then apologize to us for calling our son "pretty". We never minded--he was extremely pretty, and a pleasant, even tempered baby as well.
As time went on, however, it became apparent that our pretty, pleasant, even tempered son was not worried about hitting the baby milestones on target, or even close to target. He wanted to take his good old time about things, and so he did. He did not roll over early, nor crawl early, nor walk early. He has never been early for anything. As time went along, I got tired of worrying about the milestones, and so I stopped reading about them so as not to know which milestone in particular we were in the process of missing.
As I read around on some of my favorite BLOGs, it seems lately that all of the other toddler moms are having cute little toddler conversations which their children like this and this and this. Or even this. Well, I am not having conversations with E., who I will admit publicly is 21-months-old, because he doesn't talk and really doesn't have any words. Here, for the sake of posterity, is a real live conversation in our house:
Me: "Can you say Dada?"
E.: (looks at me bemusedly for one milisecond, then returns to previous activity)
Me: "E., can you say Dada?" (with more emphasis)
E.: (glances in my general direction, and then picks nose contentedly)
Me: "Please try to say Dada!"
E.: (realizes I am not going to stop, and gives me a half-hearted grunt)
Me: "Good job! Can you say Dada again?"
E.: (looks at me like I am crazy with something approaching exasperation in his eyes) "dadadadadadadadadadada"
Me: "Wow, that was really good! Can you say Dada? Just Dada?"
E.: "dada."
Me: "Those are some nice words. Mama really likes your words. Can you say Mama?" (I know I am pushing my luck, but I am obsessed by this point)
E.: "dada." (with a big, knowing smile)
And folks, there you have it. A complete toddler conversation at our house, without any real toddler participation at all.
Fortunately for all of our sanities, E. decided last week to say "uh oh" appropriately, like when he drops something or breaks something or is covered in some unmentionable, unidentifiable substance. So my jealousy declines gradually. And I await his next words and our first mother-son talk.
I'm just not sure where things went so wrong. When we first started the adoption process, I was slightly disappointed to learn that we would not be able to have our adoption agency complete the home study for us. The agency is about an hour and a half from where we live, but located in another state. I was momentarily perplexed. And then it was just another item on a very long list. Add: Find home study agency. Continue with: Get home study done. Submit to government.
I thought it would go kind of like this:
One of the first agencies I spoke with told me the procedure, and estimated that the home study could be completed in about 5 weeks, give or take. And so I guessed that in 7 or 8 weeks or just call it two months we would have a home study in our hot little hands. A home study that would get us that much closer to getting our daughter.
But that is not the way it has turned out. No, it appears that we have to wrest the home study from the agency. First we have to beg them to see us, schedule us, and we will gladly jump through the necessary hoops for the home study. Gladly!!! Smiling and talking in exclamation points, if necessary!! Here are our fingerprints! Here are the piles of paperwork!! Here are some photos of family life! We are happy! We are excited about our daughter! Please say nice things about us! Then we have to wait patiently, oh so patiently, while sitting on our hands and humming to ourselves while they finish their paperwork and write up the document. And then we have to storm their offices and perform intricate and laborious wrestling maneuvers to get them to give up the goods.
The last visit for the home study was June 8. JUNE 8! It is now (hold on a moment while I check to make sure) August 21. We started the home study process April 7. And still, there IS NO HOME STUDY. Oh, we've seen it, read it, and reviewed it. We have been tantalized by it. We know that it does exist. But to have it, hold it, and send it to the INS, no sir, we can't do that yet. We have been more than patient, occasionally asking for updates from the agency as to where the home study may be, if only to make sure that it hasn't been mistakenly sent to the mothership or something.
But here is the way it really is:
Oh, it's just a money thing at this point??? Please, please just send the bill so we can pay it and this process can be over. Please...
There is actually even more to the story, because when they finally sent the bill they emailed it to us and our email system at work decided that it was virus ridden or a threat to our internal networks or something even more deadly and so removed it from the email message for safety. But that's another story for another day. Suffice it to say that we should soon have a copy of the home study and will then be marching forward and making progress and singing songs of joy. Or we will be doing the Backbreaker Rack or the Fireman's Carry Gutbuster or the deadly Slingshot Catapult (I don't actually know what any of these things are, but they sound good, don't they?) and I WILL HAVE MY HOME STUDY.
We have been on vacation, spending some time with my lovely adopted nephew and niece. This week we are on our own. I have a little more time to myself, time to blog. What a treat.
This is the conversation I started having with myself on Friday night:
If you aren't careful, the Olympics can take over. It's subtle. First you watch something you are actually interested in, like tennis in my case. While you are watching tennis, they broadcast a little blurb about some athlete who has a great story and wouldn't it be great if they won the gold medal. (Which of these athletes DOESN'T have a great story?) So then you are sucked in to watching that athlete's event, perhaps an event that you really couldn't care less about, or even think is kind of silly, like synchronized diving or table tennis. But the athlete has a great story and it would be nice if now that you know the story you could see that person win the gold.
Suddenly you are up day and night, watching every event you can find. Water polo (who really wants to watch people treading water for that long?), womens trap shooting (I happen to hate guns, even if they are shooting at dayglo orange targets and not living creatures), soccer (I know the rest of the world loves it, but it is SLOW...). But who cares? The US womens water polo team has a chance to win, the US woman in trap shooting was teased about a physical challenge as a kid, and who wouldn't root for the Iranian soccer team?
Well, it's Monday, 3 days into the games and I am well and truly enraptured. Poor E. He is saddled with a mother who is a total sucker for sports events and now will get limited parenting during the entire run of the Olympics. Hopefully he will see a sport, get interested, and some day be an Olympian, thereby erasing my motherly guilt over cutting short his play time so that I can watch beach volleyball, handball (we had no idea what game they were playing), and weight lifting (voting for the Iraqi guy).
Well, it's better than soap operas... Isn't it?