WONKESS

Best Intentions...

Now that Loo's *sniff* all grown up and saving China (wait, no, that's Mulan)... off to kindergarten *sniff*, we've started to put her through some classic "what to do if..." training.  You know the drill: she now knows what to do if she is separated from her parents and/or lost, what to do if we get separated at a train stop (i.e., someone fails to get on/off the train), what to do if noone shows up at school pickup time...

As part of her emergency-preparedness-training, I've slowly helped her memorize my cell phone number.  It took about 3 months of prodding because my Loo is a seriously lazy girl.  She couldn't be bothered.  The number was too long, too hard, and why couldn't I just write it on a paper and put it in her sneakers?  (She learned that from a book we read together.)

She finally memorized the number a week ago.  And learned how to dial it on our home telephone.   All by herself.

So now, from about 4pm until I head home, my work day is puntuated by calls like these:

"Mommy, I'm hungry."

"When are you coming home, mommy?"

"Mommy, Kali's scribbling on my homework!"

"Mommy, Kali is taking over the piano!!!"

*sigh*

A Perfect Moment...

Sunday was bright and beautiful.  Windy, and chilly enough that going sweater-less meant goose bumps, but the sun was warm and awakening.

After a morning full of sand and fast food, Loo decided that she wanted to ride her bicycle (with training wheels) around the duck pond.  Loo is decidedly small for her age, in the bottom quartile, and so she's been slow to take to physical activities that involve equipment.  She owned her bicycle for a good half a year before she was able to ride it steadily for a hundred meters, and even now, she needs a bit of a push to get started, and lots of help to ascend slight hills.

She's never biked around the duck pond before, which is a good 1/4 mile in circumference.  I was a bit concerned, but thought, what the heck.  It was too beautiful a day to deny my spunktious daughter anything.

So we set out, with her father and little Kali following, on her pushable big wheel trike.  Before long, we had left J and Kali far behind, and they ultimately decided to turn around and head home without attempting the full walk.  But Loo was steady and confident, easily guiding her princess bicycle around the duck pond.  When we were half way around the pond, we came upon a garage sale, well in progress.  The only items left were some ceramic mugs and holiday tsotchke and a lot of used clothing.  Not of much use to a non-holiday-heathen like myself.

But the enterprising children of the garage sale proprietors had also set up a lemonade/girl scout cookie stand by the roadside, and Loo immediately stated that she was thirsty.  Loo has only recently been introduced to the world of lemonade, since she is much more sweet than sour, so I wasn't sure she would be amenable to the stand's offerings.  But she insisted that she was and we exchanged a dollar for two plastic cups full of what can only be called fluorescent-yellow-from-a-mix goodness.

We sat by the duck pond, on a curb, our legs stretched out in front of us, drinking the more sweet than sour faux-monade. 

I've never seen my little girl drink so heartily, in such complete and utter satisfaction of some deep thirst.  And her face simply beamed with contentment - satisfaction with the feeling of the sun on her face, the warm ache in her thighs, being able to spend alone time with a parent who has had very little alone time to give recently.

She is so not a baby anymore.

FOUR!

Leeloo - you turned four this weekend.  Wow.  You are 1-2-3-4.  Happy birthday, my almost Halloween-baby.

Things that you like:

• anything pink, sparkly, princess-y, or twirly
• ballet
• any little tiny tsotchke you can get your hands on, which you will then name and carry around until you inevitably break it, and then your heart will be broken for 2 minutes, and then you move on
• your baby sister ("baby gnocchi")
• TV (oops)
• sweets (double oops, but I totally blame your dad for this)

Things that you don't like:

• commercials
• leafy green vegetables (but you tolerate it for mama)
• apparently, kindergarten (you've been saying you don't want to go to kindergarten for weeks now, despite the fact that I continue to tell you that you won't be going for another year yet)
• people paying too much attention to you
• people not paying enough attention to you

You are a little big person now.  And when I see you, suddenly all limbs and cheekbones, I wonder what happened to the toddler who used to waddle next to me, clutching my fingers with all your chubby might.  My favorite memories of you are still of when it was just you and me, driving home (me after school, you after pre-school) every day in the orange light.  You in the toddler seat that is now too small for you, playing peekaboo with me through the rear-view mirror.  Or looking out for yellow school buses.

Now, your sister is older than you were then.  And you're taking care of her, holding her hands, finding her blanky, getting her milk.

We're not conventional, you and me.  I knew after having you that you are forever mine, but that had I been given hindsight, I would have chosen differently.  So you are for me, as your sister is for your father.  I am not THAT mother material.  But I am YOUR mother material, and I will never lie to you about the you that is you or the me that is me. 

I hate the world that is yours to inherit.  Your existence is a constant reminder to me that I have done so little, too little, to deserve the fortune that is you.  And no way to reconcile my obligations to you as a parent versus my obligations to you as a person.  To be the master of one is to be an amateur at the other.  But to choose either is to succumb to great guilt.

As you have grown from toddler to child, your interactions with the world have transformed from unreflected impulses to calculated decisions.  And so telling, as you have inherited the good and the bad.  You are a mirror of my imperfections, imperfections in miniature, yet clear, apparent, and inevitable.  It is painful to know that you are destined to repeat the mistakes I have, that my guidance will only go so far, and those imperfections will prevent them from going any further.  And unreconciled am I that I am destined to play the same role my parents played, floundering on the sidelines of a life more or less independent.

For now, I will simply savour the pitch perfect moments.  Like the fact that you will still let me envelope you in my lap.  That you still clamour for us in the evenings and first thing every morning.  That your hair smells exactly like the latest sugary confection that you've imbibed.  That you can make a song out of the word "onomatopoeia" without the slightest desire to know what the word actually means.

Buzz buzz, my little girl, my first-born, buzz buzz.

Name-O-Rama...

Until recently, my daughters have never named their things.  Now that there is just a ridiculous explosion of stuffed animals in my home (all gifts, I've only given the girls maybe 1 or 2 stuffed animals in their lives) it has made things, um, confusing.  Loo and Kali have like 6 cats, over a dozen dogs, several bears, and an assortment of other farm, wilderness and sea animals. They are all called... well, "kitty," "puppy," and "bear," etc..., respectively (you get the point).

Or so it was, until two weeks ago.  Since which time, Loo has been on a happy naming kick.  Truth is, I didn't even really notice that she was doing it until last Saturday morning, when their dad was off doing something, I was trying to catch a last few minutes of Z's and so the girls were on my bed playing with each other, while I was burrowed under the comforter trying to drown out their chatter.  Loo was feeding her sister some pretend food, specifically, avocados, salami and proscuitto.  (Srsly.  And I have no idea where she learned about proscuitto, because we've very rarely had it in our house, and Loo's never, as far as I know, had it at all.)  In my groggy, sleep-addled stupor, I would catch little snippets of their conversation:

Loo:  Here, have some avocado.
Kali:  Yum, yum, yum.... O'tay.
Loo:  No, baby gnocchi, you're not eating it right. (snatches something away)
Kali:  NOOOOOO.  Is MINE!
Loo:  Here, baby gnocchi, here's some salami.
Kali:  O'tay.

Later, once I was actually up, I asked Loo about "Baby Gnocchi".  She proceeded to tell me that Kali was baby gnocchi and that she was big girl cynthia. 

Oooookaaaay.

Fast forward a couple of days, and I bring the girls a few decorative trinkets from a baby shower that I had attended.  They were four little plastic baby prams, in pink, lavender, mint and pale blue.  They weren't really toys, but I though they might be strung on a rope and make cute charms.

Loo immediately took ownership of these trinkets, though she did generously share them with her baby sister for, like, 3 minutes.  But the best was yet to come.  The next day, after I came home from work, we were sitting on the floor and she brought out the trinkets.  She lined them up and said, very matter-of-factly:

Loo: "this one (pink) is dreamy, this one (lavender) is purry, this one (blue) is sparkle, and this one (mint) is la-la."
Me: "Wait, you mean that's their names?"
Loo: "Yup.  Dreamy, Purry, Sparkle and La-La."

And what's so great is -  she still remembers those names now, a week later. 

Summer's End...

I do love the fall, and despite the brief weirdness this weekend that was Tropical Storm Hannah, the city is definitely hinting at the autumn to come.  It's still warm, but the light is different, and the breezes are different.  There are acorns falling off the trees.  I'm not sure I ever noticed that before, that acorns fall at the end of summer.

Is it possible for a four year old to have nostalgia?  Loo certainly seems to be experiencing it.  She comes into our room in the morning, floops on our bed and starts remembrances of things past.  She'll say something ridiculous like, "remember when I went to Auntie P's wedding and we went to the carnival and then we had ice cream?"  Or worse, "remember last week, when I used to like Dora the Explorer?"

*rolls eyes*

Meanwhile, her baby sister is the incarnation anti-christ, in full on biting and pinching mode - Loo, the nanny and I all have the marks to prove it.  And this is not experimental biting and pinching, this is the sly glance to the side, smirky faced, how-many-times-can-I-do-it-and get-away-with-it  biting and pinching.  She is a calculating two year old torturing machine.  I've told Loo that if her sister bites or pinches her one more time, she has my consent to knock Kali on her ass.

Unfortunately, Loo really is a pussy.  She couldn't hurt Kali any more than she could hurt the cute furry puppy from next door.

J's back in school for another year of classes and whiny students and convocations and faculty events and academic committees and student advisoring and.... oh yeah, a contract review.  I guess the count down begins: we will know in about 6 months whether or not we'll stay in Boston or if it's off to another school in another state. 

Hoarders R' Us...

I use to hoard.  Places like Costcos?  Made for (the old) me.  Even now, when I'm at my mom's, or going through an unopened box in our basement storage, I will find an unopened bottle of shampoo, a brand new notebook, a box of unused pens (stationery has always been my Waterloo), half or quarter used bottles of lotion, face wash, etc...  It hasn't helped that I've lived in several countries and several states over the past  10 years.  I'm a fast packer but a far slower unpacker, there's always a stray unopened box that contains some sooner-or-later essential that I end up restocking. 

I've been trying desperately, since Kali was born, to cure myself of my frightful hoarding.  I'm now religious about purging, especially papers.  When reading a magazine, I'll take quick notes, but then it's into the recycling bin.  When I get the chance to read a book, and if it doesn't strike me as keep-worthy (a much higher standard now), it goes into the donation/swap pile, I've started to work through the boxes of unused stationery goods instead of buying new ones.  I've also been medieval with my clothing.  I've edited down what once would have filled an entire walk in closet (and then some) down to one smallish closet and one large underbed storage drawer (well, two officially, one for winter, one for summer).

But it has been an unsatisfying, sisyphean task.  Whatever gains I make on my side is constantly being neutralized by J and the girls.  J is a srsly crazy hoarder (I blame it on his Mom, who really elevates hoarding to a sport).  J only marginally hoards material goods - he hardly has any material desires - but as an academic, he hoards books, papers, magazines, papers.  He has one of those professorial offices whose number we dare not mention - you know the kind.  He literally has a small swath of floor to walk through to get from the door to his desk, outlined by stacks upon stacks upon stacks of books and papers (despite the fact that two walls of his office are lined with floor to ceiling shelves, which are, incidentally, completely full).  And whereas once, as a beginning academic, his office contained his madness, now that he's had 6/7 years of teaching under his belt, with all the incidental new purchases, new works and old hand-me-downs, his work has spilled into our home life.  For example, we have a small, unused corner in our living room, where I used to breast-feed when the Kali was a baby.  The rocker, and the entire surrounding area has now been infiltrated by folders, tons of old newspaper, stacks of books, and various other academe sundries.

It is driving me INSANE.

And I am expressly forbidden from touching any of J's "work".  Oh, and don't think that he doesn't notice.  Just yesterday, he came home and looked on our desk and noticed that a pile of his correspondence had been moved from the middle off to the left side.  Psycho.

But this post is not about J... or at least it was not meant to be.  The thing that has me so worked up is the apparently genetic incidence of hoarding.  Because Loo (not yet Kali)... well, she has taken up hoarding with a passion. 

It's a habit of hers that I've been subconsciously aware of for a while.  For a while, I would take it upon myself to sit with their toys in the wee hours of the night to "edit" out the broken, the age-inappropriate, the mis-matched, the general "yechs".  Loo had not yet learned the fine art of categorization, so missing toys have generally gone unnoticed, until their dense excuse of a father mentions an edited toy for no apparent reason.  Alas, the time of the short memory span has come and gone.

What really brought Loo's hoarding to the forefront for me was going through her pictures on my computer last night.  That's when I noticed that in many of her pictures, she is clutching some coveted found "thing" that would ultimately wind up at home with us, in her toy box (until one of my edits).  From the pool, she's found lost balls, discarded bottles, broken necklaces, all of which she lovingly collects and obligingly brings home.  At the zoo, she found a pair of 3D glasses (one of those wear and toss kinds) that is now in our toy box.  She has a broken car that we found when watching the Memorial Day parade, a natty beach ball that was found at the beach this weekend.  And it's all documented on film!

Loo also clings, valiantly, to her possessions.  She asked for a spiderman figurine sometime last year when the latest spiderman movie came out.  Since acquiring said figurine, it has: lost its legs, its head, lost two of the three accompanying spider web accessories.  And she refuses to let me toss the sad, sad spidey torso.  With arms.  What a grotesque testament to a her possession obsession.

I am dreading the day when her little sister follows suit.

Looism of the week...

Loo found my jewelry box this weekend. There isn't much in it b/c I'm not much of a jewelry person, just my one strand of good pearls (from my mom), a set of pearl earrings (the first "real" jewelry gift from hubs) and my engagement and wedding rings (which I've not been able to wear since I've had Kali (damned "water retention").

She put the pearls on while I explained how the earrings worked, and then she slipped my engagement ring on her index finger. She was admiring herself in the mirror, commenting on how sparkly and pretty my ring is. Then she quipped…

Loo: Mommy… when you die, can I have this ring?
Me (slightly flabbergasted): uh…. Of course, everything I have is for you and Kali, and then you can give it to your daughter and we'll always have it in the family.
Loo (smiles broadly)

I'm very open about death with Loo (Kali = too young). Not because I'm particularly morbid (though I might be…. think dark&twisty) but because having lost my own father when I was relatively young, and being in a family where certain things were always, persistently, and terribly taboo (death, sex, money), I am keenly sensitive of how ill-prepared I was for reality as a young adult. I don't take a religious or moral tone when we talk about death, I just let her know that all living things die, then they decompose so that new life can survive, and that the dead never come back (unless they are reanimated or resurrected, apparently).

So it wasn't particularly surprising to me that Loo addressed my ultimate demise in such a nonchalant and off-handed manner. Rather, I'm a little nonplussed that she is already taking inventory of my belongings and calculating their ultimate distribution.

Loo-ism of the week...

It was around noon time, Sunday morning, and we had spent the morning playing at our regular playground.  After wearing the girls out, we piled into the car for the 1+ hour drive down to Providence, where we were spending the afternoon with an old college friend of mine who had just moved to the area. 

After we had been in the car for a ten or twenty minutes, Loo started whining, "Mommy, my tummy hurts."

This has been a recurring new ailment from Loo.  It has conveniently been rearing its ugly head when we are doing things that Loo finds tiresome, boring or inconvenient.  However, since I'm still working on my BS detector when it comes to things-toddler, I have generally tried a small bag of tricks to alleviate the stomach pangs: milk or water, chocolate or candy, a trip to the potty.  I tried the first, then the second, and we had no possibility of the third.  But still Loo was whining, "my tummy hurts... my tummy hurts." 

Finally, in a fit of (what I believed to be) inspiration, I thought - hey, maybe she has carsickness.  She had been looking at pictures in her newest and greatest book of fairy stories.  So J and I tried to convince her to look out the front window and to put the book down.

Loo: "Mommy, my tummy still hurts."
Me: "Well, honey, there isn't much else I can do if you aren't carsick.  Did your tummy start hurting when we got in the car?"
Loo gives me a blank stare
Me: "I mean, did your tummy hurt when we were playing in the park?"
Loo (whining): "Yes, mommy, it hurt in the park too."
Me: "Really?  It was hurting in the park?" (Damn, there goes the carsickness theory.)
Loo nods.
Me: "Then why didn't you tell me when we were at the park?"
Loo (incredulous): "Because I was too busy playing."

I hate it when I can hear my almost-four-year-old rolling her eyes at me.

Loo-ism of the week...

Loo has taken quite a liking to Princess Mononoke, though she always wants to skip the parts with the demons (she doesn't like it when the arrows take off the people's arms and heads). 

Her favorite scene is one where the hero Ashitaka finds two wounded men in the forbidden forest, and he carries them through the forest in order to get them home to Irontown and to medical attention.  At one point, the traverse through a pond in the middle of the forest and the forest spirit passes by.  Seeing the forest spirit renews Ashitaka's strength and seems to relieve the wounded men's pains.

One of the men, whose arm is broken says "I'm healed," while stretching his arms out, upon which point, the arm cracks menacingly, and the man grimaces and says, "no, it's still broken".

So tonight, at bed time, she was rolling around in her bed changing, "I'm healed, no, it's still broken" and laughing to herself.

She's a strange duck, my daughter.

A whole lotta nuttin' going on...

Today is going to be a list day:

(1) Loo is a huge TV addict.  Yes, it's shocking that I expose my child to TV.  But I've been long a slave to pop culture and as far as I'm concerned, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if Loo wants to be a singer/actress/director/producer/president of Pixar.  Surprisingly, Kali doesn't seem to really care that much about TV.  Partly it's because she only gets to watch what her sister wants to watch, which is on some level too sophisticated for her.  But she also gets bored with TV more easily than her sister, so she'll watch for like 10 minutes, then wander away to play on her own. 

The one movie that she loves is Lilo and Stitch.  She'll sit through that one, straight through, time after time.  I think she feels some sort of connection to Lilo, though what a 2 year old living in a big city with her intact nuclear family has in common with a 7 year old orphaned Hawaiian girl living with an alien is kinda beyond me. 

There is a scene (in the original Lilo and Stitch... Kali loves the sequel too) where, after Lilo blows the interview between her sister and the social worker overseeing Lilo's case (Mr. Cobra Bubbles - LOL), Nani (Lilo's sister) is chastizing Lilo for her behavior. 

(Nani has grabbed Lilo's hand to keep her from running off.  Lilo struggles to get away from Nani.)
Nani: Lilo! Why didn't you wait at the school? You were supposed
to wait there!
(pause)
Nani: Lilo!
(pause)
Nani: Do you not understand? Do you want to be taken away?
(pause)
Nani: Answer me!
Lilo: No!
Nani: No, you don't understand?
Lilo: No!
Nani: No, what?
Lilo: No!
(Lilo, hand still held by Nani, face plants dramatically on the floor)
Nani: You're such a pain!

Anyways, J and I think that Kali has taken this scene to heart and anytime she gets really angry at us (just grownups, not her sister), she runs away and face plants on the floor.  What a drama queen.

(2) God, work is slow.  Like watching rice cook slow.  And it's not just me. 

This is one of those really bad parts about being a lawyer at a biglaw firm.  When things are slow like this, the only work out there is probably pretty crap work.  I've done my requisite reaching out to partners to make sure they know I'm available for work, but I've not been doing everything I can possibly do to get work, like talking to the unpopular partners, for example.

Because I'm definitely in a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation.

If I don't get work, I'm (a) bored outa my friggin' mind, (b) seen as unmotivated, (c) feel lots of self-inflicted guilt, and (d) won't make my required hours to get the year end bonus.  But I know that if I get an assignment, and it will likely be of the craptastic variety, it will mean weird afterhour hours (nights and weekends) which I'm currently enjoying spending with my family.

And this is absolutely true, because the one assignment I've had in the last 3 weeks was a call at 5:30, with an emergency research assignment where the partner wanted a memo by 11am the next day.  I was here until 3am to do that.  Thankfully, it was only a one off.

(3) J and I are (sorta) trying to be more understanding? sympathetic? to each other's plight, but I will only give J 2 stars for his success rate.  J doesn't know/realize/believe it, but he is seriously passive-aggressive.  He hates my inability to control my time at the firm, and I understand his frustration, I really do, but he cannot accept that I have almost no ability to rectify the situation.  Whenever I call at 5:30 or 6 to tell him that, once again, I have to stay late at work, the chill that he sends down the line worth of comparison to the deep freeze in "The Day After Tomorrow".

Truth is, right now, J has more absolute childcare hours than I do.  He spends an extra two hours with them in the evening, pretty much every evening, because my commute into the city and my late quitting hour cuts into our family time (yup, I'm in one of those firms that demands "face time" so I can't leave before the secretaries, even when I have no work).  However, we've extended our nanny's hours, so that he's rarely alone with the kids - our nanny is around, lending a hand and, more importantly, starting dinner.  Compare that to the weekends where J has to go off on one of his conference or other academic jaunts.  I never ask the nanny to help those days and it's me and the girls, all by ourselves.

J thinks somehow, that equal means equal hours spent with the girls, and he give me no credit for the time I spend washing dishes, doing laundry, running the errands that keep the girls in diapers, clothing and miscellaneous.  He also gives me no credit for taking the girls alone, when compared with his time with them with the nanny nearby as back-up.

I'm so tired of the attitude, I don't know what to do.

(4) I know I biotch about J alot in this blog, but, not to mislead anyone, we're not actually in trouble.  And I know that there are probably those out there that wonder WTF I stay in this relationship.  I know it'll sound seriously geeky, but it's because being married to J is like being in school perpetually, which I love.

I know that some may find this hard to believe, but I was a serious fuck-up my first two years in college.  I was such a fuck-up, that I got a "D" in both semesters of a year-long intro Economics course and had to drop out of the gut "Rocks for Jocks" course because I was failing and I didn't want a failing grade.  There was also a smattering of "C"s in there for good measure.

J basically rescued me from that.  (Yes, we have been together for a very, very long time - almost 20 years.)  As a prerequisite to dating him, he made me go to the library for hours every evening to study, he made me do my readings, start my papers in advance.  And he would get really angry at me when I got bad test scores.  And I kept getting better and better at school just so I could "please" my man (ewww... I think I just threw up in my mouth a little).  I was 19/20 at the time, give me a break.

I know - how nuts is that?

He was also an econ major, and got me turned on to econ ten years after the fact.  Everything I know and blog about the economy, finance, etc... now is due to my tutelage under J.  (It certainly ain't from the friggin' 2 econ classes I had 20 years ago.) 

I owe him pretty much all my smarts, and to some extent, my law career.  Had I kept on the road I started in college, I would have had a GPA that was utterly unacceptable for any law school.  As it was, I managed to eek out a reasonable GPA that got me, by the skin of my teeth, into my Tier 2 school.

(5) Citymama has a wonderful entry about buying organic/local.  I admit, I don't do enough in this area, though I keep promising myself that I will, once I climb out of the biglaw hole.  I was great at doing the organic/local thing when I was in law school, but it has taken a back seat to my job.  I'm lucky in this respect, J is quite the skinflint but, especially now that we have children, he is strongly aboard the whole organic/local/good food/slow food band wagon.  He's willing to work with me to cut out other things in order to have the money to buy organic and buy local.

For us, it's really about the time crunch.  Our schedule is so unstable and erratic that we have a hard time planning our meals, which means that if we were to depend on a farmer's market, it would probably mean a lot of wasted food.  We also depend on our nanny a lot for shopping and cooking, so we give her a lot of free reign on the kind of groceries that make it into our home.  Luckily, she's quite a good cook, and she doesn't use much processed fauxfoodstuff.  She shops almost daily (for her, its a fun excursion with the kids) but is only comfortable at the local Stop & Shop. 

But we have a few musts: organic milk and yogurt, organic fruits and vegetables when they are available at the Stop & Shop. 

Now that I've been tracking my spending to the penny, I would say that for our family of four, we spend about $1000/month on groceries.