Some days are better than others

Some days I am on top of the laundry, and some days the laundry is on top of me.

Some days a blog post comes to me fully formed in the shower. Some days I have to hiccup it out like a cat barfing.

Some days I go for a run or do a whole exercise video and then saute kale for lunch. Some days I stop after five minutes and have a muffin instead.

Some days my children climb trees and run outside and I show them how to make leaf rubbings, and feed them meals that have components from each of the food groups. Some days they sit in front of the TV for too long and get a waffle and five frozen peas for dinner.*

Some days I am fired up with efficiency, and the kitchen is clean and the dentist appointments are scheduled and the new season's clothes are sorted and I am superwoman.

Some days I'm not.


I think the key is not to give up after one - or many in a row - of the off days. Just keep swimming.

*Obviously, I'm talking about Mabel here. For Dash, eating from all the food groups means a peanut-butter sandwich and a juice box.

Rat's arse

This morning it was still so humid that it was positively smelly outdoors, and I put on capris and a t-shirt and sandals again and complained loudly. Since then the deluge has reached us, the lawn (ahem) is dotted liberally with yellow leaves from the trees behind us, and everything's a lot more autumnal. I made soup for lunch. It's still humid, but getting better.

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I went to a local clothing co-op used clothes/books/toys sale at the weekend, and I had to take the kids with me because their father was out on his Saturday morning long run. I promised they could each get a toy so long as they let me look in the big room with the clothes first. I was in search of one thing: snow boots for each child. I found a perfect pair for Mabel, but the price I paid was more than the $5 I happily forked over to the nice lady at the desk, because in the toy room a disgruntled Dash found the most horrible toy in the world, and I was powerless to refuse, since it cost a mere two dollars.

It's a plastic rat. It is remote controlled, and its little red eyes light up as it whizzes around the kitchen floor. It is the embodiment of evil. And now it lives in my house.

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My body is rebelling against the computer by giving me a sore wrist. It can't really tell me any louder that I need to lay off the Facebook and go and read a book. And yet, here I still am. I'm getting better at surfing with my left hand, mind you.

Way too many things to think about

It's October tomorrow. That means I've a lot of planning to do. For instance:

Planning in further detail our trip to Ireland at the end of the month -

• what I'll wear
• what I have to buy in order to wear these things 
• how I'll masquerade as a stylish person instead of a slobby soccer mom who wears the same pair of jeans and scuffed mary-janes every single day
• if the kids need new shoes for all the walking in rain that will happen (answer: yes)

And boring stuff like

• car seats to borrow
• things for kids to do on the journey

Additionally,

• touristy-type things we might do when we're there, now that the children are a little older
• people I need to contact to see if we can pin down when we might see them
• how wet an Autumn they'll be having for those specific two weeks

Also, not to forget,

• working out our best marathon-viewing opportunities, because of course B is running the marathon. 

Then, as a subheading, we have not merely

• Halloween in Dublin: do we have to bring costumes? what costumes? where will we do the trick-or-treating? does B want to do some sort of elaborate themed family thing? (Answer: over my dead body; only if he organizes the whole thing; therefore, no.) Dash is talking about some variation on last year (Luke Skywalker) that involves a green lightsaber (very specifically) and a brown cloak and I think it's just a ploy to get a new lightsaber when it's neither his birthday nor Christmas.

but also (sigh, sunrise sunset, etc),

• Mabel's fifth birthday, in Dublin: do we have a family party? In which case, where? Can I bake a cake in our Air B'n'B rental apartment? Do we bring presents to Dublin? (No. What sort of idiot do you take me for?) But then I need to buy or order presents before we go so they're here when we get back.

And of course, planning a birthday party with her friends for the weekend after we get back, when we'll be only just over the jet lag but I'll still be expected to infuse us all with sugar some more and again and repeatedly, unless she wants a broccoli cake which sounds to me like a great idea but maybe not to her brother's taste.

Which planning will not be a trivial matter even though I can just bung an evite out there (thank the deity for evites; I love 'em) because we'll have to figure out

(a) just girls?
(b) which girls?
(c) just girls and one boy?
(d) siblings?
(e) just the one sibling of the one boy so Dash has a friend?
(f) and the one who's the twin of one of the girls?
(g) but then, what about the boy whose birthday party she's attending next week?
(h) parents?

And then we have to hammer out the decision in such a way that she doesn't decide the next day and every next day after that to change her mind in some new and unspecified direction. Which probably means just inviting feckin' everyone.

And then, there's always looking way ahead to Christmas and making a cake and planning to go to the Nutcracker for the first time and whatever other things we should do when we have Christmas here instead of in Ireland.


So you can see why planning what we're having for dinner tonight has just fallen completely by the wayside. Maybe there's something in the freezer.

Think calming thoughts.

Points

In no particular order, to get us past this long weekend and on to the next thing:

I made chana masala and dal again last night for dinner. Delicous, economical, and much less swimming in oil than the takeaway version would be: what's not to love? I'm almost glad our local Indian closed down, if it makes me do this sort of thing. Part of the disappointment of takeout meals, to me, is that they're there and then they're gone. If you make it yourself, the coming-together time, the measuring a spoonful of red powder and a half-spoonful of yellow powder and a tincture of orange this and a grating of yellow that, and frying an onion almost to charring point, makes the whole thing so much more satisfying.

It was 72 degrees today and Mabel was barefoot outside again. She'd just got used to wearing tights and we've probably set ourselves back two weeks now. Tomorrow it will be raining with a predicted high of 55. I think we've seen the last of summer. I've said that before, but I think this is really it.

Dash keeps saying "... and so on, and so on, and so forth." Maybe I can make him say "and forsooth." (He just asked me if there's something called "so-a-hundreth".) I met with his teacher today, who said he's got a great vocabulary, he asks a lot of questions ("Oh, you've noticed that?" I said), and he never lets her get away with anything. That sounds about right, for Mr Heightened Sense of Injustice.

I finally have a lull. It seems like it's been the next thing and the next thing and forsooth (as they don't say), for months now, from starting school to October's trip to Chicago to Halloween to Mabel's birthday to our visitor last week. We don't do anything for Thanksgiving, so beyond roasting a chicken or something that's not really a blip in my planning. I think I might be at the point where I start the Christmas shopping now.

Which really means I'm looking for a new pair of boots and I need to get a haircut. Because until I've sorted myself out I can't begin to shop for other people.

Jack o'

And the fun just keeps on coming, until today, when it stopped and left us with nothing but a pile of contentious candy to give Mabel something to constantly bug me about.

By which I mean that no sooner was Sandy over than Halloween was upon us. In fact, Halloween started before Sandy arrived, because our neighborhood costume parade was last Friday. I'd found suitable underpinnings for Luke Skywalker at the eleventh hour in the thrift store, we'd been lent a Jedi cloak, and Mabel had her dress all ready and waiting.

Here they are, posing for all they're worth. Note the Skywalker furrowed brow and the Princess one-foot balance.

We walked around all the stores, collected candy, posed briefly for the judges, who were not much impressed by such lack of originality, and watched the magic show afterwards. A good time.

On Sunday we bought a family of baby pumpkins at the farmer's market for Mabel, and one large one for Dash to carve. Mabel already had one from her pumpkin patch field trip earlier in the week. As soon as we got home, before we could even make lunch, the pumpkins had to be carved. I did the dirty work (the gouging) and let Daddy do the artistic bit.

On Wednesday morning, after two days sequestered in the house due to weather events, everyone was happily (on my part anyway) dispatched to school. Mabel's school doesn't do costumes on Halloween, which may be a little disappointing for some, but I think is a great decision on the whole, given the proclivities of preschoolers to sometimes lose their tiny minds when "fun" is thrust upon them.

Dash's school does a "book parade" wherein you are required (advised? requested?) to dress as your favourite book character and bring the book to prove it. Without much forethought he was happy to do the same as last year - Peter Parker. He wore his Spider-Man costume under his regular clothes and carried a camera. It may have been a little subtle - I'm not sure many people realised he was dressed up at all. The red mask was peeking out of his jeans pocket, but even that might not have given the game away to any but the most tuned-in of observers.

The final nail in the coffin of Halloween was, of course, last night's trick-or-treating. Coming off two days of napping (and associated late bedtimes, because for every hour-long nap, she goes to bed two and a half hours late) Mabel did not, on no account, get a nap yesterday. So by 5:30, when the time came to suit up, she was a little fragile. First there was a breakdown over the fact that I was trying to get her to wear a thin fleece sweater under the princess dress, and then a total loss of sanity over the fact that Mummy wanted to stay at home with her glass of wine to hand out candy while Daddy took the kids around the houses. We compromised with a thinner long-sleeved top and a bowl of candy left on the front step beside our flickering jack o' lanterns.

One jaunt up and down the street, a lot of candy in two bags, not too much sampled as soon as they got home, and eventually, not so late as it might have been, the whole spectacle was over for one more year.

Apart from the candy, which will drag on and on and on, well into the Christmas season, one dessert at a time. This morning Mabel asked for breakfast dessert. I suspect the disappointment will be just as piquant tomorrow morning.

My drawers (fnar, fnar)

A few bad nights for Mabel meant I mostly fell off the exercise and housework wagon this week, but I'm proud to announce that our winter clothes are more or less sorted out. (Not B's; he's not included. He wears the same thing all year, minus some shorts and plus some sweaters in the winter. And if he wants them organized he can do his own.)

But my closet looks like this now:

The box holds bags/purses, and the tops/sweaters are organized thus: short sleeved, 3/4 sleeved, long sleeved, wool. The chunky wool ones are on top or hanging. Three pairs of boots are to the right of the box. I don't use a lot of hanging space because it's mostly dresses, skirts, and jackets, and I don't have a lot of any of those. You can see from this that I will be wearing a palate of mostly greens and dark reds/purples this season. Just like every season, because that's what I like.

I didn't take a before picture of the closet, but this is what my pyjamas/stuff drawer still looks like, so you can extrapolate from that:

I'm not saying this is all I have: most of my days are spent in jeans (stuffed-full jeans/chinos drawer not pictured), and I have another of yoga pants and one of underwear and one of nicer clothes I might wear once in a blue moon, and a whole suitcase full of things that don't fit but I'm not ready to give up on, and some more odds and ends in an under-the-bed storage thingy; but the important part is this - this is all the stuff I'm getting rid of:

See? Even the stuff I'm getting rid of is greens and dark reds.

The trash bag holds six pairs of shoes, one of which dates from pre-emigration - that is, more than 10 years ago. The toppling pile has about twenty t-shirts, tops and sweaters, and one pair of jeans that I never liked much. This has now been joined by some summer clothes Dash and Mabel have grown out of (that aren't nice enough to pass on to friends), and a few shirts B is discarding. All this will go to the next yard sale we're involved in, or the thrift store.

I got Dash to try on about twenty pairs of trousers, took away a few, and ascertained that my six-and-a-half-year-old still has 5T-length legs, just about, though his hips have grown out of the slimmest-fitting pants. Since he also refuses to wear any shirts that come below about mid-fly (because they might look like dresses and people might think he's a girl, yaknow), he doesn't need anything new.

(No photo because his room is dark like a man-cave, and his stuff is all stashed in drawers that don't make nice pictures.)

And then, I sorted out my box of things that might fit Mabel this season and reorganized her shelves. She can't reach everything herself, but she's getting more inclined to choose her own clothes, and I'm trying hard to hold my tongue if her choice is reasonable. At least I've put away the high-summer stuff so she'll be less tempted to try to wear a sundress or short shorts on a morning when it's 49 degrees outside. (That's about 9 celcius.)

Her clothes are in IKEA dividers (like this) that are supposed to separate things within drawers. When we moved in here, I had no dresser for Mabel and wasn't using these metal shelves for anything, so we stuck them in her closet and I found the dividers handy (since her clothes were still practically baby things that took up so little space). But her clothes still don't take up much space individually, and though I'm always on the lookout for a small white chest of drawers for her room, this system works fine for now. From the top, L-R, they hold pyjamas, socks, leggings, long-sleeved tops, capris/long shorts, t-shirts, underpants, bottoms/pants, and skirts/dresses that aren't hanging up. There are some chunky sweaters in the basket at the very bottom. The top shelf is a mess of hand-me-down shoes that don't fit yet and summer clothes awaiting sorting.

I could do with another box for the tights stashed on the top left, and I should think about bringing all the upper stuff down so that she can reach it more easily. She needs more dresses, especially since she's lately become very partial to them; I'm working on that and have enlisted e-Bay. I was very disappointed to miss a really good local used-children's-clothing sale last weekend, and I'll miss our local clothing swap next weekend, so my opportunities for snagging the perfect thing are reduced to the thrift store (always there) and the nursery-school yard sale in a few more weeks' time. And the clearance racks at Old Navy, Target, and Gap, of course.

In case you were wondering, this is what the other side of Mabel's closet looks like:

I wouldn't bother showing you, except for my genius sorting system comprising those two boxes. The brown one says "Too big; next season" and now holds summer things from this year that might still fit next, and any summer age 4 stuff I have. The Pampers box says: "Too big; distant future" and contains everything else I've amassed for her that will fit at some point when she's bigger That way I don't have to re-mark the boxes every year when they're no longer holding 4s but now 5s and 6s (Mabel, fitting age 6 clothes? Inconceivable!), and so on. 

Personally, I'm just pleased that I'm the sort of person who uses a semicolon when labelling a box of clothes. I think it says something about me, don't you? Yes. Well.

Home free

It's seven forty and I'm home free.

That is, I'm home, and I'm free of children. The one is asleep, the other is on his way and doesn't need assistance, and there's a glass of red wine beside me. The payoff for early risers is early bedtimes like this, and even if they don't happen every night, it's great when they do. There's also a big basket of laundry to be folded, but I quite like laundry actually. It's one of the few housekeeping tasks I don't mind keeping up with. (I used to iron, even, but that was a long time ago.)

The weather has broken, and like flipping a switch, my brain has turned on and got busy. Or, maybe more accurately, my body. My will to do things other than flollop around complaining, at least.

We had a big storm on Saturday afternoon, and on Sunday all the oppressive heat and humidity had been scrubbed out of the air, leaving shining clear sunlight. It's almost (positively, even) chilly in the mornings, suddenly. I'm not pushing the bedcovers off my body any more. I might have to find some socks soon.

• I've baked two batches of baked goods (banana spice crumb bars and oatmeal muffins).
• I've gone running two mornings in a row. Only a mile, and I only ran half of it, and then maybe a bit more, but it's a start.
• I've started a star chart for the children, wherein they get stars for tidying up and also for using the bathroom more independently (Mabel) and practising some reading (Dash). So far they each have a lot more stars for the practising than the tidying, but I don't care. It's establishing an expectation, and I don't want to have to shell out at Target too soon.

Mabel has complained about going to school for the past two days. I've left her there anyway, stonehearted mother that I am, even though she was crying and telling me not to go. Yesterday it was all for show, and she was smiling as she played with all the dollhouse people when I looked in the window five minutes later. Today she was more tired and a little more upset, as she'd had a late night and two wakeups yesterday - not my fault if she refuses to fall asleep for her father; I was at a board meeting - but I still stood firm.

On the one hand, I don't want to set the precedent of letting her stay home, or - worse - relenting once we get there and taking her back with me. School is school, and we go unless we're sick. On the other hand, the child is three, and it's not like she's missing anything vital to the curriculum if I let her play hookie once in a blue moon. With Dash, once or twice he made a fuss and I let him off - because I know my kid, and he never did that; so when he did, I believed him and it didn't come back to bite me. But Mabel is a different child, and if you give her an inch she'll take a mile, and if I give her an inch she'll probably run off with the whole kit and kaboodle and never come back at all. So no, not doing that. School it is.

Still, I was relieved to come back from my too-short jaunt to Bethesda to see my friend's new baby (tiny! squishy! asleep on me!) to find Mabel's classmates all happily unbitten and her teachers still looking me in the eye. She'd had a bit of an episode when they wiped her nose, but she told me that she felt better after snack, and I agreed that that was often the way.

In fact, might be time for a post-prandial, laundry-folding snack over here right now.

Assimilation

One of the other mothers at school (didn't I start yesterday's update with that line too?) said to me yesterday that they had been slacking off this year on their family pumpkin-patch visits. I tried to explain how this tradition strikes non-natives.

Well, I've only been here, what, almost nine years, and we've only had kids for the last five and a half, and pumpkin patches really don't impinge on your consciousness as a child-free adult. And then there's the requisite number of years spent thinking that it's a particularly ridiculous American thing to take your small child, dress it up (preferably as a pumpkin), stick it in a pile of hay with some real pumpkins and take photos. Because that's what happens at pumpkin patches, right? So at this point we're only really starting to work past our natural Irish cynicism and embrace the autumn tradition.

Dash's first year at nursery school, he was in the youngest class, and their "field trip" to the pumpkin patch took place in the school playground, where some straw was strewn and pumpkins placed. I didn't really even notice it, except that a pumpkin appeared in his tub at the end of the day. We took it home and put it outside the front door, where it probably sat and rotted sadly until about January. His second year, the day of the field trip was our second day back after a trip to California for a marathon, so he wasn't really feeling up to school. I ended up walking him down to the lake where the patch for the "big kids" was created, and accidentally discovering that it was quite a nice thing.

2010 pumpkin patch

They bring a lot of hay and a small pumpkin for every child (and a few over) down to an area beside our local lake that's a short walk from the school. The kids walk down, find a pumpkin and have their name written on it by a teacher or parent (to avoid disputes later). Then there's playing in the hay and snacktime, and then we all walk back up, pulling the pumpkins in little wagons. Somehow, it takes most of the morning, and it's delightful. Last year I was happy to find I was scheduled to co-op on the day of the walk, and this year, with Mabel, I embraced my role as self-appointed event photographer (along with most of the other parents there) and went along just for the heck of it. They're always happy to have a few extra helpers to stop the kids from pitching into the lake or burying a classmate irretrievably in the hay.

2011, Mabel helps

So we've still never been to a real pumpkin patch, the sort where the pumpkins actually grow. I'm ashamed to admit that I bought our big pumpkin in the supermarket this year - on the other hand, it's the first year I've actually gone and purchased one to carve at all. At real pumpkin patches, there are scarecrows and hay rides, and probably farm animals to pet, and all sorts of things I can't even imagine. Maybe next year we'll assimilate a little further and do that. One step at a time.