Six Minutes

Better Than Fun

2011-12-16T11:00:00.000-08:00

Adam Carolla once said something that stuck with me about what it's like to have kids. Someone asked him if it was fun having kids. He paused, thought for a minute and said, "No, it's not fun. It's better than fun."

He meant that being a parent requires so much work, commitment, and emotional resources that it's not really fun. It's fulfilling and meaningful and satisfying and worthwhile ... but fun doesn't even come close to describing the experience.

On Saturday I participated in the final competition of the three-series Next Level Invitational CrossFit competition. The first of these events was in September. My performance was pretty much a disaster, but I learned a tremendous amount. The second event, on November 12, went really well. I had a strict training schedule that included a month of double workouts two or three times a week, I got a really good night's sleep the night before, and the events were primarily strength based, something I'm fairly good at. I got sixth place in the Intermediate Women's division -- out of about 75 competitors.

The final competition, which took place on December 10, came less than a month after the previous one. With Thanksgiving break, then a week of half days at Rosemary's school due to parent-teacher conferences, and a bunch of work that hit all at once, I wasn't able to train as much as usual. And, to be honest, I didn't really want to. I was a little burnt out.

The whole thing started off badly when couldn't sleep at all Friday night. Like the other two, this competition was in Costa Mesa, about an hour and 20 minute drive from San Diego. I had stayed at my mom's house in Long Beach for the previous two competitions, but for this one I decided it would be easier just to stay at home and get up at 4:30am to be there in time for registration. As soon as I was done competing I had to rush off to Dave's holiday party for work. The location of the party, Carlsbad, was between Costa Mesa and San Diego. So I either had to drive all the way home, get showered and dressed, and backtrack north, or drive to my mom's house (20 minutes north of Costa Mesa), get showered and dressed, and backtrack south. Either way I would be late and rushed--two things I despise.

Also on my mind was the fact that the final workout of this event involved double-unders and pull-ups--the movements that caused me so much trouble in the first competition. Sure, I had improved quite a bit on each since September, but I was unsure of my ability to perform under pressure.

In the middle of the night, after trying and failing to sleep for hours, I thought about just not going. I couldn't imagine working out all day, and then going to a social function for Dave's work, all on a few hour's sleep. I let myself feel the relief of that decision, and how much easier it would be. Then I thought about how it would feel knowing that everyone else was there, working hard and doing their best, and I knew it would be worse to stay home.

After about two hour's sleep I got up and grimly drove to Costa Mesa. The first event was a 2.7 mile run. I wasn't too nervous because I knew I just had to run, and not worry about technique. After the tension and anticipation of the previous week, it felt great to get out there and run as fast as I could. We weren't timed--we were scored based on our place in the pack--and I came in 23rd. Not amazing, but not horrible, and strangely enough I enjoyed myself.

(The guys from my gym who were also competing that day didn't hear their heat being called for the run and they all started on the course nine minutes late. Since the run wasn't timed, the organizers couldn't start the clock for them, and they all finished about last. Extremely disappointing, as a few of them were looking at top five finishes.)

Next came the 1 rep max hang snatch. We had four minutes to find our one rep max in the hang snatch, then a one-minute break, then a 1,000 meter pedal on a stationary bike. The snatch is an extremely difficult lift, and unfortunately when the nerves hit my technique goes out the window. I hit my previous 1 rep max, 95 lbs., easily in the warmup, but everything fell apart when the clock started. There were not enough weights stacked up in the competition area for the athletes, so we had to rush around looking for the weights we needed. I know this started me off on the wrong foot. I made it up to 90 lbs but failed 95 again and again. The time ran out and then it was on to the bike, and I completed the 1,000 meters in 1:26, which is fine -- not outstanding, but fine.

Then came a five and a half hour break until I had to do the last workout, the one that started and ended with 75 double-unders. After the adrenaline from the two morning workouts faded, I started to feel the lack of sleep. I walked off to my car and took a short 20-minute nap, and then wandered back to the asphalt lot where we had our beach chairs set up under a pop-up tent.

I was telling one of the guys about how I had to rush off to Dave's holiday party, and that I was worried about being late. He looked at me and said, "Just go. If you're not having fun ... just go."

Just like the night before, I allowed myself to imagine what it would feel like to walk out of there and blow off the last workout. I know I would be relieved beyond belief, but that wouldn't last. I looked around me. The guys who missed the start of the last run were here. The asphalt lot was full of people who probably had a lot of very good reasons to just pack it up and go home.

And that's when I thought about Adam Carolla's line. "Better than fun." No, my experience with my first three CrossFit competitions had not been fun. I was not having any fun at all, sitting around for five hours, exhausted after two workouts and very little sleep. But I knew that the whole experience was better than fun. It was fulfilling and meaningful and ultimately satisfying, but not fun.

So I stayed. And you know what? I did much better than the first competition in September. I managed to string together ten or 20 double-unders, finishing slowly but steadily. In September I had trouble getting my chin over the bar for the pull-ups, but this time I had no trouble getting over the bar every time. Due to my top-ten placing in the previous competition I was in a fairly competitive heat, so I was the last one in my heat to finish. As is typical in CrossFit competitions, my fellow athletes gathered around to cheer me on, willing me to finish the last set of 75 double unders before the 17-minute time cap. And I did.

I came in 21st overall for all three events, and I'm glad I did it, but I'm relieved to spend some time doing things that are just plain fun. But next time something better than fun comes around, I'll be ready.

Gratitude -- Thanksgiving 2011

2011-11-23T15:41:00.000-08:00

1. Of course, I'm thankful for my two sweet kids. I know I complain a lot about the amount of work they require, and the fighting, and just the all-around "I need it NOW" intensity of small children, but I'm also just as often overwhelmed with love for their round cheeks and blue eyes and wild enthusiasm. I'll look at them when they are sleeping, or when their heads are bent together over a book, and I'll think, "I'm so lucky. If they are healthy and happy, not much else is wrong in my life."

2. We've known each other a long, long time, but Dave still makes me laugh, still makes me think. He loves to play loud music and dance around with the kids (even if it's usually right before bedtime) and always listens when I talk.

3. Through CrossFit I have found confidence, an escape, friends, inspiration, and work that I love. It seems really strange to be thankful for what is essentially exercise, but CrossFit is just exercise like literature is just a bunch of words.

When two becomes one

2011-10-14T11:13:00.000-07:00

There's this theater company that travels around to schools around the country and works with the kids to put on a performance in a week. Tryouts are on Monday, rehearsal is all week, and the performance is on Saturday.

This year, Rosemary tried out and she got a part. The play is The Jungle Book, and as Rosemary says, "Mom, I'm Kaa the python's tail!" (They split the part of Kaa into five or six kids to divide up the lines. Pretty clever.)

In order to make this happen, the cast rehearses after school all week. On Wednesday Rosemary rehearsed until 5pm, last night until 7pm, and tonight until 7pm.

This means that I have had LOTS of one-on-one time with Gabriel, and while it's been delightful, it made me realize: the kid does not like to play by himself.

Although Rosemary and Gabriel do fight a fair amount, and Gabriel seems to take great pleasure in tormenting his sister, they also play together. They come up with elaborate scenarios where Rosemary is the mom/teacher/queen/princess/all-around person in charge and Gabriel is the baby/bad guy/Batman.

They create entire worlds together, using a blanket, a box, and a few stuffed animals. I sometimes get too focused on the weight of their needs and don't appreciate how much they love and entertain each other.

Yesterday I picked up Gabriel from preschool around 3:30 and said, "Okay. We can go to the library, bike to the beach, or go to the coffee shop. What do you want to do?"

"Library!" he said.

We went to the library and I read him every Halloween book on display. We wandered through the stacks and and I picked out some books I knew he'd love.

I looked at my watch. It was only 4:15.

"Okay, Gabriel, let's take these books to the coffee shop, and we can read them there!"

We drove to Java Earth Cafe (formerly Cappy's, formerly Java Jones). I got Gabriel a chocolate milk and an iced latte for myself. We watched a toddler pick up an old apple off the sidewalk. We talked about the cars driving by. Gabriel asked me (probably for the fifth time that day) if police officers carry guns and do they shoot bad guys?

We read the books from the library. We finished our drinks. It was 4:50 pm.

"Okay, let's go home, Gabriel!" I said. I had about an hour to get dinner ready and get dressed for a networking event that night. Dave would be home around 6:30, I'd hand off Gabriel, and then he and Gabriel would pick up Rosemary at 7:00pm.

All of that hinged on Gabriel being able to entertain himself for at least 20 or 30 minutes, which normally is not a problem. Normally, though, Rosemary is around.

We got home and I announced to Gabriel I had to cook dinner and that since we had just spent a wonderful few hours together, he could play on his own for a bit.

He wandered off and colored for five minutes and then reappeared in the kitchen with an expectant look on his face. "Mommy, can you read me a book? Want to play baseball?"

"Why don't you look at this?" I said, handing him a toy catalog that had just arrived in the mail.

Rosemary would have wandered off and spent at least 20 minutes staring dreamily at each page. Gabriel planted himself in the middle of the kitchen floor, pointed to each toy and said, "Mommy, what is that? Can I have that? Can Santa bring me that? Mommy, what's that?"

Somehow, I got dinner made, admired and discussed every toy in the catalog, and made myself somewhat presentable.

Rosemary, we miss you! Things are weird without you around.

Freedom of failure

2011-09-19T09:53:00.000-07:00

Ever tried.

Ever failed.

No matter.

Try again.

Fail again.

Fail better.

-Samuel Beckett

Here's something I didn't know in my 20s. (Other than the fact that daily shampooing is NOT the way to awesome hair.) There is opportunity in failure and disappointment. Not in a hokey, motivational speaker kind of way, but in a practical sense that being at the bottom forces you to claw your way up. The fear of failure is gone--it already happened--so the only thing left to do is try.

When Dave and I both got laid off from our jobs in 2009, with an infant and a toddler and a mortgage, at the absolute depth of the financial crisis, we hit the phones, hustled, and each landed in a better situation than before. So what if we failed? We didn't have jobs to lose, so almost anything would be a step up.

Two weekends ago I competed in my first CrossFit competition. I never expected or hoped to win, or place in the top 10 or even the top 20, but I did want to feel good about my performance. I wanted to go out there, do my best. I wanted to do better than I thought I could.

We found out the three workouts about a week in advance, and two of them involved two of my weaknesses: pull ups and double unders (when the jump rope passes under your feet two times for every one jump). I had been working on double unders, so I wasn't as nervous about those, but my pull ups were in bad shape.

The more I practiced them, the worse the pull ups seemed to get. I watched instructional videos, I visualized, I fretted, and when I got on the pull up bar I felt heavy and creaky.

The week started out with rare 90 plus temperatures and humidity. It made everything uncomfortable and sweaty. Then things got surreal when San Diego (and Mexico and Arizona) experienced a massive, hours-long blackout. I was knocked back by a low-grade cold and mysterious stomach ailment that made me feel ill every time I ate.

By the time Friday came around I was a mess. I had an aching stomach, frayed nerves, and deep regret that I had ever agreed to do this competition in the first place.

The competition was on Saturday in Costa Mesa, about an hour and a half from San Diego, so I stayed at my mom's empty house the night before, and then drove to the Orange County Fairgrounds, the site of the competition.

The weather had cooled considerably by that morning; enough that everyone stood around shivering in their shorts and T-shirts at 7am. The sky clouded over, and someone said, "Wow, I hope it doesn't rain."

Cue thunder. Then lightning. Then rain. Then HAIL. As my friend Fiona and I huddled in the bathrooms, pea-sized hail accumulated on the ground, and the vendors scrambled to protect their t-shirts and headbands.

The competition was delayed. Then the workouts were changed -- no pull ups!

The first workout was changed to a burpee and double under combination -- 15 burpees, 30 double unders, as many rounds as you can do in 10 minutes. This meant the workout relied almost entirely on your speed and grace at the double unders. I practiced double unders during the earlier heats, and they were fine. I could put together 15 or 20 in a row. I was nervous, but still keeping it together.

I even managed a smile when they walked us out to our spots. I met my judge, they began the countdown, and I hit the still-wet ground on my stomach and began doing burpees. Then I moved onto the rope, and it immediately caught under my feet. I took a deep breath, and tried again. I managed to string a few together, and eventually got all 30 done, but it wasn't pretty. The rest of the workout went that way. I put together a few sets of 10 double unders in a row, but messed up far more than I completed. A workout that would have been no big deal in the gym left me gasping for air, unable to calm myself and focus.

Still, when it was over I was happy that it was done. I rested for about an hour and then did the strength workout, which we could complete whenever we wanted. I had to deadlift 135 lbs as many times as I could in four minutes (a deadlift is picking up a barbell from the ground to a standing position, arms straight). The deadlift is one of my strengths, and 135 lbs is a very light weight. I had a plan -- 2 sets of 20, then as many as I could do until the time ran out.

For once, everything went according to plan. I rested for a few seconds in between sets of 20 to give my grip a break, and ended up lifting the barbell 82 times. I found out later I got 6th place (out of about 83 women) in the workout.

A few hours later, as I was discussing a strategy on the final workout of push ups and air squats, someone rushed over and said, "They changed the workout again! It's 10 pull ups and 20 air squats!"

My stomach dropped. I had spent the entire day feeling relieved I didn't have to do pull ups, and now I just had about an hour to wrap my head around the fact that they were back on. Some of the women where trying out the pull up bar, so I walked over, put my hands on the bar. I didn't even manage to clear the bar with my chin even once.

And then, I'll admit, I panicked. I became convinced that my hands were too slippery, so I set about taping up my hands, trying to improve my grip. A huge mistake, as I'd later realize -- I never do pull ups with tape on my hands, and why did I think I needed that now?

Time dragged as I waited for my heat. My mind felt cluttered and blank at the same time. I had no plan, no strategy. I just wanted the 7-minute workout to go as quickly as possible.

Just like in the first workout, once the clock started, everything seemed to fall apart. I got through the first 10 pull ups, but they felt slow and awkward. After the 10 air squats, I got back on the bar and, that's when my progress stopped. I couldn't get my chin over the bar, and I failed again and again. Women around me were moving through their rounds, and I was stuck in the same place. I finally managed to get through the 10 pull ups, and decided to take the tape off my hands for the next round.

Without the tape, my grip was much better, and I was able to move through the pull ups a bit faster. As the 7 minutes came to an end, the pull ups got easier. The judge laughed and said, "Hey, where did those come from?"

The time ended, I left the competition area, and I spent a moment feeling frustrated and angry with myself, then took a deep breath and thought, "That's over. It went badly -- worse than I thought -- but it's over."

For the rest of the day I cheered on people from my gym, watching them do amazing work, and in between cringing at the memory of how truly awful the experience had been, I started to feel a new emotion.

At first I couldn't put my finger on it. It was a light, airy feeling, like the first day of summer vacation. Driving home that night I finally realized that I felt freedom. Yes, I had a lot of work to do. Yes, I needed to put in the time to work on my pull ups and figure out the rhythm. But I could really only get better. Just like when Dave and I both lost our jobs, the only direction was up.

The next Tuesday the workout involved pull ups. I focused on relaxing, loosening up, but they still weren't feeling right. Then, one of the trainers shouted, "Don't stop yourself as you come down; let yourself swing forward." I'm sure people have told me this many times before, but for some reason it clicked this time. I pulled my chin up over the bar, then let myself swing forward.

I felt my feet swing up behind me, and then rode the momentum back into another pull up. And then another. I managed to do 55 pull ups in sets of 5, something I have never been able to do. Usually I try to muscle through them, and I could only do one or two by the end. By relaxing and focusing on the swing, I did them faster and without tiring as quickly.

I have another competition in November. I'm not sure I'll be able to approach it with a zen-like calm, but I'm no longer terrified. I still have a lot of work to do, and need to keep practicing pull ups and double unders, but the fear is gone. I already did horribly. The only way is up.

The Games

2011-08-17T14:58:00.000-07:00

The last weekend of July I traveled up to the Home Depot Center in Carson, California to write about the CrossFit Games. Or, more accurately, the 2011 Reebok CrossFit Games. That's right, it's big time now, with a high-profile sponsorship and everything.

CrossFit is a really weird sport, because most people have never heard of it, yet it's popular enough to fill the Home Depot Center three days in a row and attract a Reebok sponsorship. If you're into CrossFit, the CrossFit Games are a BIG deal. It's the Superbowl, the Olympics, and the World Series of the sport.

The competition included people from around the world, who first qualified to compete in their area's regional competition, then earned one of the few spots from their region to compete at the Games.

Early this year I started writing for the CrossFit Journal, and about a month ago my editor asked if I wanted to cover the Games. I had planned to go anyway, so I agreed. Initially, I was just going to get ideas for features I would write later.

Then, a week or two before the Games, my editor emailed and said they needed some day-of updates for the Games site.

It all seemed pretty manageable until I showed up, got my green "media" shirt and free pair of Reeboks, and set up in the press box, with this view.

Crap.

My first assignment was to watch the eight different Masters age groups compete in the first event, come up with a story angle, quotes, and interesting details, then rush back to the press box and write it up in about 20 minutes. For someone like me who likes to refine, revise, and deliberate, it seemed like an impossible task.

But guess what? I had no choice, so I went out and watched the incredible Masters athletes do what many would think was impossible for a 45, 55, or even 65-year old. I listened to young girls in the audience yell, "Go Grandma," while they watched their gray-haired grandmother lift a heavy barbell overhead.

I ran back to the press box halfway through and wrote notes, then went back to the Masters area to watch some more. When the first heat was over I rushed back to my laptop and finished the first update in about ten minutes. It went up on the Games site about 20 minutes later.

I took a deep breath, thought, "Well, I guess I can do that," and went out to watch the second Masters event. After I turned in the second update, I got pulled in to write about the individual events.

My day had started at 6:30 that morning, and at 7:30 pm my eyes were glued to stadium floor, watching some of the fittest people in the world scurry up ropes and jump increasingly heavy barbells overhead, again and again. We worked out a system where one of the media team waited in the area under the stadium, poised to get quotes from the athletes as they finished. I'd write up some of the details, and another person sat in the stands to get the up-close view. Then they'd call me with the quotes or information, and I'd weave the additional information into the article.

The competition ended at around 9:00 pm that night, and I tap-tapped on my computer for about 20 minutes, emailed the article to my editor -- who was sitting next to me in the press box -- then it appeared on the site a few minutes later. After finally tracking down something to eat, I stumbled into my hotel room around 10:30 pm, stared at my book for a few minutes, then set the alarm for 5:30 am, to do it all over again.

The next two days went in much the same way as the first, although I managed to get a few breaks and watch the competition. I watched people swing across a giant cage of monkey bars, push and then pull a 300-plus pound sled across the stadium floor, and do handstand pushups with graceful ease.

I sat in the press box and chatted with people who had encyclopedic knowledge of the sport and the athletes, trying not to saying anything too stupid, trying to learn as much as I could.

I typed until my hands cramped and my back tightened, listened to the DJ play the same Ke$ha song every few hours, and drank cold coffee.

By the time I drove home Sunday night I was wrung out. Long days, little sleep, and my mind working in overdrive tipped me toward exhaustion. Rosemary was in Montana with my mom, sister, and brother-in-law, so after I dropped off Gabriel at preschool on Monday I stared helplessly at the computer for an hour, then crawled back into bed and took a nap. I woke up, made a feeble attempt at working out, then crawled back into bed for my second nap of the day.

I'm now just finishing up the longer features about the Games that I'm writing for the Journal. I'm back in my wheelhouse of longer form, deliberate writing, but every now and then I think back about that weekend. It was grueling and exhausting, but also exhilarating. Yep, I'm gonna say it -- just like CrossFit.

A Little Every Day

2011-07-12T20:51:00.000-07:00

Every now and then, I experience a moment when adulthood is just as awesome as it seemed it would be when I was a kid. Driving on a sunny day with the window open, listening to a forgotten, perfect song on the radio. A margarita on a Friday afternoon. Going to the store and buying exactly what I want, and not sharing it with anyone. Eating chocolate just because I feel like it.

Of course the fine print is that these are just brief moments in time. Driving is mostly a boring, tedious chore. I rarely have time for a margarita on a Friday, and if I want one, I have to make it. I often can't afford to buy exactly what I want. And we all know what happens when you eat chocolate all the time. Because, let's face it, I pretty much always feel like eating chocolate.

That's one of the toughest thing about becoming an adult, realizing that this is it. Good or bad, this is the way things are. The key is to enjoy those perfect moments, and not get dragged down by the rest.

**********

Dave's 40th birthday party was great -- we had close to 100 people, including over 30 kids, and everyone seemed to find a place to chat or run around eating candy, depending on their age. The rest of the weekend was filled with parades and parties, and by Tuesday morning I was completely over-socialized, eager to return to the click-clack of my keyboard.

Rosemary is in theater camp this week, and they gave her a fairly substantial part, which requires her to memorize lines. She was thrilled when I picked her up on Monday afternoon, but once she got home her mood darkened. She picked fights with her friend. When I was cooking dinner I put on the Mary Poppins soundtrack to entertain Rosemary and Gabriel, but Rosemary refused to say a word to Gabriel because she insisted on singing along to every single word. When I asked her to take a moment and answer her brother's question, she acted outraged, then wounded, then grew hysterical over some idea that I wasn't treating her fairly. I sent both of them to their rooms because they wouldn't stop fighting, when Rosemary erupted in another bout of hysteria over a lost pencil.

She calmed down a bit, but then another small slight set her off and she sat on the chair outside, muttering to herself angrily. I looked at her and thought, "This is not the girl I know. Something is wrong."

I told her to come inside, sat her on my lap and said, "I know you're worried about learning all those lines, but I'll help you. You'll get it."

Rosemary burst into sobs and wailed, "I can't memorize those lines! Why did they give me that part??"

Sometimes, I get it right. It's not hard for me to recognize someone freaking out about a task they are afraid they can't handle.

I calmed her down, and now, today, she's well on her way toward memorizing the lines. "We'll do a little every day," I told her.

Chairs

2011-06-26T11:42:00.000-07:00

This is in no way a lifestyle blog, and I rarely attempt any crafty-type projects because I lack both skill and patience in that area.

However, for years I have been meaning to repaint our Adirondack chairs and table. My sister in law gave them to us as a housewarming present when we bought our first house, which was ten years ago. I stained them when we first got them, but we'd led them fall into disrepair and they were so dirty and beat-up that nobody wanted to sit on them. They hung around on the edges of our new house, taking up space and looking dirty and abandoned. Every time I looked at them I'd feel guilty and overwhelmed. Guilty that I hadn't managed to paint them, and overwhelmed because I wasn't sure if I would have to sand off all of the old stain, and it sounded like an irritating, endless task.

In March I found this picture in Sunset magazine and tore it out, pinning it to the bulletin board near my desk:

I love combination of turquoise and black and white. Then, once we decided to have a party for Dave's 40th birthday, I had the motivation I needed to finally fix up the chairs. Rosemary and I dragged the table into our local paint store, and I asked one of the employees what kind of prep I would need to do to repaint the set. "Just lightly sand them and give them two coats," he said. "Don't sand too much -- you just need to knock off the dirt."

Rosemary and I sanded and sprayed the chairs and table with the hose, let them dry in the sun, and then started painting. I let the kids help me with much of the work, which probably took ten years off of my life, but they loved. Once they were painted I went first to Ikea and then Target looking for black and white outdoor cushions. I didn't find exactly what I wanted, but what I did find at Target was on clearance. The whole thing (the paint and the cushions) cost me less than $100. I'm ridiculously pleased.

38

2011-06-09T09:41:00.000-07:00

Today, I'm 38. Gabriel turned three on Saturday, which he pronounces "free," and on our drive up to Yosemite he kept asking me, "Mama, when are you going to be free?"

"Free, what do you mean? Free of what?"

"I'm going to be free in Yosemite, when are you going to be free?"

"Oh!" I said. "My birthday is on Thursday, and I'm going to be 38, not three."

His eyes got big. "Wow," he said.

It's never far from my mind how lucky I am. Healthy kids, great husband, house within walking distance of the beach, my dream job -- there's a lot of good in my life. Losing my dad too soon -- he was not-quite 60, I was 29 -- has given me perspective on everything in my life. Whatever life hands me, it's not as awful as losing a close family member. And no matter how wonderful my fortune, there's still a hole.

I'm excited to see what 38 holds. Yesterday I interviewed a CrossFit competitor who, at age 42, is outperforming men in their twenties. There's no reason to slow down -- I'm just getting started.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

2011-05-26T11:35:00.000-07:00

Five years ago, when Rosemary was just a baby, I was working as a full-time, in-house writer in a very corporate environment. There were many wonderful things about the job, but it offered no flexibility and I was getting bored. I sat in a windowless, gray cubicle and wrote about the same things, over and over again. I grew panicky about the fact that I only saw Rosemary for an hour or two each day, and I felt trapped in a cycle where I was always struggling to keep up with laundry, grocery shopping, errands, and sleep.

I dreamed of working as a freelance writer. I bought a bunch of books on how to become a freelance writer, including Freelance Writing for Dummies, which is sort of embarrassing. Wheee, look at me! I'm a dummy! I want to write!

One of the books said to make a list of your interests and hobbies, and then search out publications that cater to those things. For example, if you loved beading, you might pitch an article to a beading magazine. I remember sitting in the backyard in a beach chair on a Saturday while Rosemary napped, trying to make a list of my interests. The exercise ended in tears, because as a full-time working mom of a new baby, my interests and hobbies were contained within the covers of What to Expect the First Year.

I never opened those books again, but soon I found a part-time job as a writer for a nonprofit. This freed me up to take on additional freelance projects. One day, after listening to our neighbors play beer pong all afternoon, I pitched an article to the online parenting magazine, Babble.com, about raising kids in a neighborhood surrounded by single twenty-somethings. They accepted it immediately.

Then, after talking to my old boxing trainer about the gym where he was working, I sold an article to Pacific San Diego Magazine about reviewing all the San Diego boxing gyms that focused on female boxers. These ideas were not the result of a torturous list-making session. They came to me quickly and I dashed off a pitch letter. Some paid better than others -- one magazine paid me in restaurant coupons, which took us a year to use -- but I kept at it.

After I started CrossFit, I noticed there was an online publication associated with the sport, The CrossFit Journal. I stored that away in my mind until one of the owners of the gym, Anders, told me he was going to run a half-marathon without doing any running in advance -- he would just prepare using CrossFit, to prove the broad-based applicability of the sport. I thought, "That would make a great article." I pitched it to The CrossFit Journal, and they loved the idea. It will appear on the site in June.

A little while later, Anders suggested I write an article about one of the athletes who had knee surgery in the middle of the CrossFit Open and ended up in 40th place in his region, qualifying for regionals. The Journal liked that article so much they rushed it through production, and now I'm going to be profiling some of the athletes at the regional competition.

Sometimes I want to pinch myself when it occurs to me that I'm actually doing what I thought was an impossible dream just five years ago. Not all of my projects are as fun as writing articles about CrossFit athletes, but I love that I have the freedom to follow my interests, wherever they lead.

My dad used to say, "You make your own luck." Where I am today is the result of many years of hard work and focus, but I feel so, incredibly lucky.

Postscript

2011-05-02T14:22:00.000-07:00

I tried to put the whole chest to bar pull up failure behind me on Thursday. I told myself that CrossFit is a hobby, that I shouldn't care about this so much, that in a week or two I wouldn't even remember what had happened.

But of course it's not about CrossFit. Or chest to bar pull ups. Or the competition. It's about that voice inside that tells you to stop, that you can't do it, that you're not good enough or strong enough. It reminded me of a lot of failures in my life. Of times I've tried my hardest but still fell short.

I went to the gym on Thursday and did a regular workout, trying to avoid even looking at the pull up bar. I thought about putting a score of four next to name. I thought about standing next to the bar again for seven minutes.

On Friday morning I knew I had to try it again, so I watched videos of people executing perfect chest to bar pullups, repeating to myself, "Head through the arms, feet back knees and legs up." I spent twenty minutes reading inspiration quotes about athletic failure, and they all pretty much seemed to say the same thing. Keep trying. Don't give up.

The thing is, I know that it takes me a long, slow time to learn new athletic skills. I rarely get them in a rush, especially under pressure. I told myself I'd go and practice a few pull ups, and if it seemed like they were going well I'd give the workout another shot.

I showed up to the gym half an hour early and stepped up to the bar. I visualized what I needed to do, and started swinging. It didn't happen. I tried it a few more times, and still didn't get up high enough. I took a deep breath and stared at the ground, unsure what to do.

One of the trainers, Jenn, came up and said, "Can you do a chin-up, with your palms facing you, instead of away from you?"

"I think so," I said.

"Try it."

I grabbed the bar with my palms facing me, pulled, and immediately touched my chest to the bar.

"Can I do the workout that way?" I asked.

"Why not?" she said. "It's harder, but at least you can get more than one rep in."

Suddenly I felt giddy. I could do three of those. If I could do three, then I could move on to six thrusters, and my score would be at least 12. I did a few more, touching my chest to the bar each time.

"If you're going to do the workout you'd better stop," she said with a laugh.

I told everyone I was going to try it again, then sat and watched another woman do the workout, making it look easy, which I know it's not.

Then it was my turn. The clocked beeped to start the seven minutes and I did the three thrusters. Then I put my hands on the bar and did a chest to bar pull up. One. Then another. Two. Then another. Three.

After I finished the third I started laughing. The relief of having gotten over that hurdle was so overwhelming I could have stopped then. I wasn't doing them the best way, but I wasn't walking away, either. I did six thrusters, then moved back to the bar and did six more pull ups. Then back to the bar for nine thrusters.

At this point I had to do one pull up then wait thirty seconds, then try another one. I managed to get through five more this way before the seven minutes was up, leaving me with a score of 32.

Then I sat down and burst into tears.

-----------------------------------------------------------

So now the competition is over. I improved the form on my overhead squats immensely, I got better at pull ups, but still somehow I am not any better at double unders. I learned that I'm happier when I'm competing against myself, but that I should learn how to handle competition better. But I also learned that I will not give up, and that I will find a way -- however awkward and difficult -- to get it done.

Seven minutes

2011-04-27T17:36:00.000-07:00

The last time I cried in the shower was after my first -- and only -- match at the USA Amateur Boxing Championships in Florida. It wasn't just that I lost, and that it was single elimination, which meant that I had traveled from San Diego to Florida to get knocked out of the competition in one match. It was that I knew from the moment my opponent threw her first punch that this was not going to go well. It was that feeling of sinking deeper and deeper, of falling farther and farther behind. Of trying so hard, and failing.

I never gave up, but I never really stood a chance. I went out there, round after round, trying to make contact, trying to avoid her hammer-like punches, trying to figure out a way to turn the tide. I later found out that my opponent was 27 - 0 in the junior division, and had spent her life doing martial arts and boxing. Her ambition was to be a stunt woman. (Yes, I did a little Googling after the match.)

Her ring experience far outclassed mine. This was my sixth amateur fight. Ever. I held my own during the six-minute match (the length of a boxing match, and how my blog got its name), and I'm proud of the fact that they never stopped the fight, which is common in amateur boxing when one of the fighters is getting punished. However, the feeling of failure stung, and it took me a long time to shake it.

I cried again in the shower this afternoon. Today I attempted the final workout in the CrossFit Games Open Competition. It's a six-week, worldwide competition to determine the top 60 men and women and top 30 teams in each region who will go on to compete in regionals. From there, the top 30 men and women will compete in the CrossFit Games.

Every week for the past six weeks I've done a workout with someone keeping track of my repetitions and then entered my score into the website. I'm certainly not doing all that well -- I'm somewhere in the middle of the pack for my region -- but it's been okay. I've turned in respectable scores that at least aren't at the bottom.

Until today. The workout was a combination of 65-pound thrusters, which means you take barbell, pull it up to your chest, go into a squat with the bar on your chest, then stand up, thrusting the bar overhead and chest to bar pull ups. With a chest to bar pull up you have to touch your chest, anywhere below your clavicle, to the bar. We were supposed to do three thrusters, then three pull ups. Then six thrusters, then six pull ups. On and on by increments of three until seven minutes is over.

Thrusters, no problem. It's a light weight for me. I knew would get heavy over time, but it's something I can do. Chest to bar pull ups are different. Regular pull ups have always been a weak spot for me. Until Monday I had never even done one chest to bar pull up. I practiced on Monday and got about four or five of them. I came in on Tuesday and practiced again, getting just one.

I came in today, warmed up, and did some weightlifting. There was a big crowd doing the workout; so big we had to do it in two heats. I decided to go first, to get it out of the way.

The bell rang to start the clock, and I easily did three thrusters. I jumped up to the bar and got in one chest to bar pull up. Then I tried again -- and only touched the bar to my neck. I tried again. Neck again. Everyone around me was cycling through the pull ups and thrusters, and I stayed at the bar. I tried it again. Up to my neck. People shouted advice. "Swing your legs!" "Put your head through your arms, then kick."

I stopped, took a breath, and tried to relax. I lengthened my arms and swung my legs. Neck. Again and again and again. I looked at the clock. Only three minutes had gone by. People were yelling my name, shouting encouragement. I put my hands on the bar again. And again. And again.

I stayed up there for seven minutes and only managed to get one legitimate chest to bar pull up. My score was 4. Compared to 60, 70, or 80 that most other people completed.

The seven minutes were up and I ran out of the gym and the tears of frustration and anger and embarrassment poured down my cheeks. I took a walk around the block to collect myself. My daughter was with me, and for some reason I didn't want her to see me crying. I didn't want her to see me defeated.

The owners of the gym came out to give me a hug, and the tears started again. They told me I was doing better pull ups than I ever have done, but I just wasn't quite making it up high enough.

I pulled myself together and cheered on the next heat of people, watching them and trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.

I thought I had gotten over it until I got home and took a shower. It all came back. The feeling of falling farther and farther behind. I thought about that boxing match eight years ago. I never won a match after that. I had two more fights and lost both, and then I got pregnant with my daughter and hung up my gloves.

I can do the workout again. I have until Sunday at 5 pm to submit my final score. The question is -- do I want to go through that again? I know that over time this is something I will get, but I'm not sure it will be this week.

Hypocrite

2011-04-14T09:46:00.000-07:00

Instructions to my kids that I don't follow:

1. Pick up your clothes off the floor.

2. Don't say can't. Just try.

3. Don't shout at your brother.

4. Finish your chores first, then you can play.

5. Don't spill food on your clothes.

6. It's okay to come in last.

Good things

2011-04-05T20:38:00.000-07:00

I've been feeling somewhat anxious and unsettled lately, and I was struck with a vicious cold last week that still won't go away, so I think it's time to regroup and focus on the good things. In list form, because I don't have much time.

1. On Saturday when Gabriel woke up from his nap he wouldn't leave my arms. My in-laws are in town, and Dave's cousin and his girlfriend were visiting, so I held Gabriel in my lap while I chatted with the guests. He rested his warm, blond head on my chest and curled his legs and arms in tight. He sat that way for almost half an hour, and I sat still and thought about how warm and soft he felt, and how I needed to store away this memory for when he's too big and busy to sit in my arms, staring into space, breathing.

2. I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but both kids will now pretty much eat 80 - 90% of what I serve for dinner. They're trying new things, eating things have have been (horror!) mixed together, and overall making dinnertime a thousand times more pleasant as I watch them shove salad, salmon, and kale in their mouths.

3. This blog post, which my sister posted on Facebook. The author is so encouraging about being creative, and full of so many practical tips, that it's got me thinking about doing something big, creatively. Not sure what that is yet, but I find myself reading this over and over again and thinking ... maybe.

4. Kids dressed up and shiny-faced.

5. Packing limes, triple sec, tequila, and a new bathing suit for a long weekend trip to Palm Springs with the family and some friends. (Also packing diapers, wipes, and crackers ... not really that glamorous, but I'll take it.)

There is a limit

2011-03-23T20:21:00.000-07:00

I pushed myself in my workouts this week, probably so I could feel some sense of success after the frustration of the CrossFit Games competition workout last week. I wanted to go as hard as I could and not save anything, even though I knew we'd be doing the competition workout again on Wednesday.

I woke up this morning feeling more sore than I've felt in a while. I decided to push ahead, thinking that maybe being so wiped out would somehow help me in the competition. I also decided not to care about the results, to see what would happen if I invested nothing of myself in the outcome.

Guess what? There is a reason athletes have a rest day. There's a reason the thrill of competition inspires greatness. The workout was awful. It was so awkward and slow and frustrating that I gave up a minute before the bell rang. I knew I couldn't beat my last score, and my body just wasn't moving the way I wanted it to.

It turns out I have to care. And that I can't push myself endlessly. Tomorrow I'm staying out of the gym. I'll do some work, get my hair done, and take a breather.

Clothes and competition

2011-03-20T07:03:00.000-07:00

I prompted a lively debate on Facebook a few weeks ago asking if I should trade some editing work for a closet consultation with a stylist. A potential client, a wedding coordinator and stylist, proposed that in exchange for me editing and revising her memoir, she would go through my closet, tell me what to keep and what to give away, put together outfits with my existing clothes, and take pictures for my own personal look book. She said she'd recommend a few pieces that I would want to purchase, but the goal would be to use what I already have.

A lot of people told me to take money, don't do the trade. Many people kindly said, "You look great -- you don't need it!" But, as my friend Carmen pointed out, the stylist helps you wear what you already have and make better use of the clothes hanging in your closet.

The truth is I really wanted to do it, but I felt a bit frivolous turning down money for fashion. It would be something just for me. Nothing practical or responsible about it.

I decided to give her some parameters. I set a cap on the amount of work I would do, so I wouldn't be putting in hours and hours of my time, and we agreed on the trade.

The first appointment was on Tuesday and it was awesome. It felt sort of like getting a massage combined with a session with a therapist. Having someone lay outfits on the floor, complete with jewelry and shoes, and tell me, "Get rid of that, have that tailored, wear that with a pencil skirt," seemed so decadent. She combined patterns and colors I never would have considered -- but they worked -- and hauled out my old suit jackets and pants and dressed them down so I can now wear them in my office-less life.

She came back again today to take more pictures of my outfits, and she'll drop off my look book next week. I have a look book! That's really the fanciest thing that's ever happened to me.

A few tips she passed along to me. First, wear slips under your dresses and skirts. It will instantly make them look more expensive and they'll hang better. The secret to putting together a stylish outfit is to have a "third thing." She said, "Look at the people who work at Nordstrom. They always wear pants, a shirt, and a vest. Or a skirt, a top, and a scarf." Layers add interest. When combining patterns, look at the dominant color in the pattern, and treat it as that color. For example, if you have a brown plaid skirt, treat it like it's brown, not plaid, and you can match it with a striped shirt, if the colors in the shirt go with brown.

So now I have some awesome outfits ... to wear dropping the kids off at school. I do have the occasional business meeting, and I sometimes go out, but most of the people I see during the week are at the gym, and I don't care how versatile my black blazer is, I'm not wearing it to CrossFit. But I love clothes, and sometimes getting dressed in a great outfit is what motivates me to sit and my desk and write. And maybe I'll start going out more and setting up meetings now that I have all of these amazing outfits.

The other thing that's been occupying a ridiculous amount of my headspace this week is the CrossFit Games. The 2011 Games are not until July, but this year to qualify for regionals, you need to compete in a six-week CrossFit Games Open Qualifiers. Every week they will post a workout on their website, and you have a week to complete it. The top 30 teams and the top 60 competitors in each region will go on to the regionals.

I have no delusions about competing in the CrossFit Games -- those are the top 60 men and women in the world -- but show me a competition and I'll do my best to get all weird and anxious and overly-invested in it. The scores are constantly updated online, so I've spent the week watching my rank drop further and further down as more people posted their scores.

The first workout was brutal. It seemed easy on paper. In ten minutes, do as many rounds of 30 double unders (the jump rope must go under your feet two times in one jump) and 15, 55-pound power snatches (taking a 55-pound barbell and fling it over your head, arms fully extended). I'm not very good at double unders, but I've improved a lot in the last few months, so I thought it wouldn't be too tough.

My opinion changed soon after the clock started. First of all, for me to do double unders well, I must be completely relaxed, and almost turn off my brain. I was so nervous starting out, that I could only manage one double under at a time before the rope caught on my feet. It took me so long to get through the 30 double unders that I was completely discouraged by the time I put my hands on the barbell. Add to that the fact that both of these movements sent my heart rate and breathing soaring, so I couldn't calm down and concentrate on my rhythm.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the workout ended. I got through three rounds, plus 4 double unders. Not a score I was proud of. The competition rules allow you to keep trying the workout until the deadline, but the thought of enduring those painful, frustrating ten minutes again filled me with anxiety.

I tried to put it out of my mind Friday night, but I kept picturing the rope and the barbell, and the red numbers of the clock slowly moving toward ten minutes.

Saturday morning I headed down to the gym again. Again I floundered. My shoes came untied. The rope caught on my feet. I felt like it would never end. In the end I improved my score slightly -- I made it up to 3 rounds plus 19 double unders -- but I felt the same sense of frustration and exhaustion. After I caught my breath, the first words out of my mouth were, "Well, I don't have to do that awful workout again."

Ten minutes later, Bryan, one of the owners of the gym, announced, "Big news! They extended the deadline of this workout because of the technical problems this week. We have another week to submit our times!"

My stomach dropped. That damn workout again. I really, really don't want to do it. But I really, probably should, right?

You're Good Enough, Smart Enough ...

2011-02-28T20:42:00.000-08:00

I read an article in the New York Times today that gave me a chill of recognition up my spine. It was so eerily spot-on to the battle I'm currently waging inside my head, I began to get a little weirded out. Titled, "Go Easy on Yourself, a New Wave of Research Urges," here are some highlights:

"People who find it easy to be supportive and understanding to others, it turns out, often score surprisingly low on self-compassion tests, berating themselves for perceived failures like being overweight or not exercising.

"The research suggests that giving ourselves a break and accepting our imperfections may be the first step toward better health. People who score high on tests of self-compassion have less depression and anxiety, and tend to be happier and more optimistic.

"'The biggest reason people aren’t more self-compassionate is that they are afraid they’ll become self-indulgent,' said Dr. Neff, an associate professor of human development at the University of Texas at Austin. 'They believe self-criticism is what keeps them in line. Most people have gotten it wrong because our culture says being hard on yourself is the way to be.'"

My issue isn't being overweight or not exercising, but substitute "berating themselves for perceived failures like not doing ten perfect pull-ups in a row or only being able to squat 175 pounds," and it's about right.

------------------------------------------------

On Sunday I joined some people from my CrossFit gym and participated in the American Lung Association's Fight for Lung Climb. It was a fundraiser for lung disease, and we all raised money and then climbed up the 31 flights (over 500 steps) of the Omni Hotel in downtown San Diego.

CrossFitters from all over San Diego met at CrossFit East Village for a group workout, which thankfully wasn't too brutal and focused on the arms ... saving our legs for the vertical to come. Here's our team.

Then we headed over to the Omni Hotel where we got our bibs and chip timers. Our team was in the first heat, so we got to enjoy the strange sight of the elite stair climbers taking this very seriously. The first of the three elite stairclimbers -- identifiable by their black T-shirts with "National Stair Climbing Competition" written on the back -- had on gloves and headphones jammed in his ears. It must have been a very short song, because he ended up completing the climb in under three minutes.

They staggered us by ten seconds, and it was an eerie experience, charging up the metal stairs completely alone. I heard the pounding of feet above and below me, but other than the poor volunteers stationed in the stairwells offering water, I didn't see anyone the entire time. I sprinted up the first ten flights, and then my hamstrings seized up, so I took three stairs at a time for a few flights, then went back to running. The whole thing was over almost before it began, but we all had a searing pain in our lungs that was caused by either the rapid breathing, the cold air, or the dust stirred up in the seldom-used service stairs.

After everyone in our heat finished, we headed next door, where CrossFit headquarters was hosting a CrossFit gathering with a keg of Stone Brewing Company's Pale Ale and a taco bar. I sat in the sun, talking with friends and meeting new people, reveling in the fact that I was neither 1. working 2. cooking 3. cleaning or 4. taking care of small, demanding children.

Not only did we have our own little private party with free food and beer, but we got our own little awards ceremony as well. Lulled into a stupor by the sun and beer, I had almost forgotten about the stair climb. Our team did extremely well -- my girl Erin got 2nd overall and 2nd in the 20 - 29 age group -- and I was astonished to find I placed 1st in my age group (30 - 39), and 3rd overall with a time of 4:15. I even got a medal!

As we head into a week of setting our new one rep max numbers in a variety of weightlifting feats, I'm trying to hold onto that feeling of sitting in the sun, holding a beer, with a medal around my neck.

Elsewhere -- The Mind of an Athlete

2011-02-21T16:55:00.000-08:00

I had a bit of an epiphany about my athletic progress:

The Mind of an Athlete

(I wrote it last week. Today was another dismal pull-up day. Sigh.)

Comparisons

2011-02-18T14:20:00.000-08:00

It's potentially damaging but irresistible to compare your children, if you have more than one. Sometimes, though, noticing the differences can make you appreciate something you had taken for granted about one child. It lets you see them with new eyes.

I suppose I knew, but didn't truly appreciate, how obedient Rosemary is. She treats rules as permanently binding edicts from above. Don't get me wrong--her behavior is far from perfect, and she finds other ways to assert herself--but she doesn't tend to break rules. For example, she got in her head early on that she was not allowed out of her bed unless given permission. From the time we moved her out of her crib, the only thing that gets her out of her bed is if she has to go to the bathroom, or if she hears one of us moving around the house in the morning. Sometimes this is annoying. If she wakes up in the middle of the night with a nightmare or a stomach ache, she bellows "Mom! Mooooom! Moooooooom!" across the dark, silent house until I stumble into her room.

Gabriel, on the other hand is a rule tester. I have never once used the backseat window locks in my car until this week, when I noticed the window by Gabriel's seat was halfway down. "Hmm," I thought, "I don't remember lowering that." I raised it up, only to hear the wind whistling in a few minutes later. Gabriel ignored me when I told him to stop--the lure of the button was too strong.

Last night, after we put both the kids to bed, I heard a door creak, then a sound of little feet. I walked into Gabriel's room to see him jump into his bed. I looked at him. "What did you just do?"

"I was bringing her a book," he said, unconcerned. I stared at him for a minute, thrown off by the fact that it's pretty sweet that he wanted to bring his sister a book, and also because I just don't know what to do in the face of disobedience. Earlier that night we got locked into a battle with Gabriel about the fact that he wanted to take off his jeans just before we sat down to dinner and put on sweatpants. I told him no, that he would just get food on his pants, and it was the end of the day, and that he should just keep his jeans on. He insisted, and after a few minutes of back and forth, I said, "Okay, if you take off your pants, no story before bed."

This is normally enough to stop him in his tracks. It's the worst punishment either of the kids can endure. Gabriel looked at me and shouted, "No story!" then retreated to his room.

He came out a few minutes later, still angry, and said, "Help me take off my pants!" He was stopped not by his fear of punishment, but by the snap on his jeans. We managed to distract him and he kept on the pants, but these little episodes make me afraid. Very afraid.

Adventure

2011-02-07T10:54:00.000-08:00

I approach parenting much the way I do everything else in my life -- with much preparation, forethought, planning, and a little sprinkle of anxiety. If I'm forced to say something nice, also with enthusiasm, empathy, and a sense of humor. (Is it possible to somehow not bring your personality into your parenting? I suppose you can make an effort to suppress the undesirable parts, but it's going to come out eventually.)

This need to prepare, combined with all the inconvenient things little kids require (naps, diapers, constant entertainment, frequent snacks), has kept us from embarking on many family adventures. We have friends with kids the same age as ours who will decide to go camping on a Wednesday and head out on a Friday night like it's no big thing. I require a few days to get used to the idea, a day or two to panic about it, and then at least two days to prepare.

So it was sort of a big deal for us that we decided to take the train up and back to Los Angeles in the same day for my sister's 40th birthday party. Not that this was a last-minute thing -- I had plenty of time to prepare and fret -- but given that Gabriel still naps in the middle of the day, we don't often venture very far from home. The plan was to take the 11 am train up and then the 7:15pm train back. "They'll sleep on the train on the way home," I pronounced.

There was much excitement about this trip.

The train arrived, we settled into our seats, and immediately got to work snacking and staring out the window.

We played with Dave's new iPad, chatted, watched the ocean, and had many discussions about whether we would or would not go through a tunnel. Gabriel got a little bored toward the end...

... but all in all it was a wonderful trip. Once we arrived in Union Station, we took the metro to Highland Park, and my sister and brother-in-law met us at the station, and we walked to their house. Gabriel immediately took at nap, lured by the promise that if was very still, the cats might come into the bed and sleep with him.

The party was lovely, I chatted with my sister's wonderful friends, the kids ate their weight in chips and cookies, and I had so much fun I forgot to take any pictures. Then it was time to head out to the train.

Our enthusiasm flagged a little bit -- we we all tired, the train was hot, the party was over -- but Dave cheered everyone up with some 60's-era Batman:

We had been traveling for about twenty minutes when the train came to a sudden stop and I smelled a smoky, burning tire odor. The engineer (is that what they still call driver of the train?) came on the loudspeaker and said, "We had to stop. The mechanics are looking into it. We'll update you in a few minutes." Ominously vague.

Then, a few minutes later, the loudspeaker crackled again, "Okay, some upstanding citizen decided to put a shopping cart on the tracks, and we ran it over. When this happens the cart gets crumpled into a ball and drags under the train, which can rip out the hoses. The mechanics are looking into, and we should be moving shortly."

Then the lights all went out.

We sat in the dark for a few minutes answering questions like, "Why did the lights go out? When are the lights going to turn on? Why aren't we moving? Are they fixing the train? What are they doing? Why was their a shopping cart on the tracks? Who put it there?"

After a few minutes lights came back on, and then twenty minutes later we were moving again.

At this point it was getting close to 9pm, and the magic family togetherness time had turned into, "Please go to sleep because you are seriously getting on my nerves" time.

After much whining and resisting, Rosemary fell asleep. I looked over at Gabriel and saw an evil glint in his eye that said, "Just TRY and make me sleep on this train, woman."

I tried. He refused.

We arrived into Solana Beach at 9:40 pm, and I breathed a sigh of relief as Gabriel fell asleep in the car. Dave and I smiled at each other, and he said, "Hey, this was pretty adventurous of us! And it worked really well. Maybe we can start doing more things like this with the kids."

When we arrived home we brought the sleeping children into the house, tucked them in, and had just collapsed on the couch when Gabriel started screaming. I peeked into his room, and he was angrily kneeling on his bed, throwing everything -- pillows, stuffed animals, blankets -- onto the floor. He had passed over from tired to exhausted, and his entire system was staging a rebellion. He missed the magic sleep window, and it was as if his body forgot what it was supposed to do. He spent the next hour issuing demands and screaming. At one point I turned to Dave and hissed, "See! This is what happens when you disrupt their schedule!"

At 11pm he finally quieted down. I took a deep breath and said, "That was fun. We should do something like that again."

As long as I have enough time to plan.

Eye of the Tiger

2011-01-19T10:54:00.000-08:00

I barely stay caught up with everything in my life as it is, but add something new into the mix -- in this case a week-and-a-half long, part-time office gig -- and things start to slip. This blog is the first thing to go, but other parts of my life have been affected, too: exercise, cleaning, returning emails.

It's been great having the extra money, and nice to work around other people for a change, but I am relieved that I'm done with this schedule. I totally understand that anyone who works full-time in an office and also takes care of kids is gnashing their teeth in frustration at my inability to deal with a part-time job, but I think it's the deviation from the expected that gets to us. If had the structure in place to deal with this, and was used to it, then I wouldn't have minded so much.

On Saturday, Dave took the kids to swim lessons and I went to a meeting at my CrossFit gym about qualifying for the affiliate team -- the group of 4 men and 3 women from the gym who will compete in the hopes of making it to the 2011 CrossFit games. It was intimidating. They told us that we have to be able to do every crazy CrossFit exercise, and that if we're weak in some areas, we had better work on them because they most likely will come up in the competition.

As of now, it looks like there are 5 women trying for the three spots. All of them are in their 20s, except for me. When I talk about it to people, I say, breezily, "Well, worst case scenario, I train really hard, don't make it, and then am in really good shape!" But that's not how I feel. I'm of two minds. On the one had, I desperately want to make it on team. On the other hand, I am terrified. Terrified of the amount of work in front of me. Terrified of the pain. Terrified I'll fail.

I went home and made a list of the things I need to work on. There are five. Many of them seem impossible. However, this week I'll come up with a plan, and then work that plan as best I can, fitting it in amongst work and the kids and family and social obligations.

You know those training montages in movies, where a kick-ass song plays, and you watch the athlete running down the street, doing sit-ups, sweating, grimacing, and generally punishing themselves? I totally wish I could speed up these next few months and then be done with it. But, of course, easy is boring. So here goes difficult.

2010 - Year in Review

2010-12-30T20:40:00.000-08:00

This reverb10 thing has been a giant FAIL -- I underestimated the toll the holidays and two weeks home with the kids would take. (Adding in the fact that the kids have both been sick, so I haven't gotten a full night's sleep in over a week.) By the time naptime/quiet time arrives, all I can do is clean up the kitchen, check my email, and then fall into bed in a heap. I'm too exhausted/burnt out/overwhelmed to write anything interesting or meaningful.

However, I am going to see if I can get in this year's quiz, inspired by Sundry.

1. What did you do in 2010 that you've never done before?

Ran a race. Weird that after all of my boxing matches, I had never participated in any kind of race. I signed up for a 15K as a way to stay in shape over the holidays, and quickly became focused on pushing down my time. I finished it in 1 hour, 14 minutes, with a pace of 7.56 min/mile.

Moved with kids. It sucked. I hope to never do it again.

Sent Rosemary to kindergarten.

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

My resolutions for 2010:

  • Sell more articles.

I sold another piece to Babble, and started writing for La Jolla Patch. The truth is, as fun as they are, the money isn't in these articles. I did stay very busy with freelance work, however, for which I am very grateful.

• Get back into boxing.

No, but this was intentional. An old colleague of mine, who was a Golden Gloves competitor when he was younger, contacted me to say that he had just been diagnosed with Parkinson's at age 50. He told me to think carefully about voluntarily getting repeatedly hit in the head. Around this time, I noticed that a CrossFit gym had just opened in the neighborhood. I joined in July, and I haven't looked back. It's equally as terrifying as boxing, and I love that I can bike there in less than five minutes.

• Carve out some one-on-one time with each kid.

I took Rosemary to Los Angeles in January, and I have a nice amount of time with her after school, before I pick up Gabriel. I did have a lovely day with Gabriel when Dave took Rosemary to Comic-Con, and I'll spend next Monday with him, because his preschool doesn't open until Tuesday. Hey, you do what you can. I'm not going to get angsty about this one.

• Be nicer to myself.

Still working on it.

• Have more dinner parties.

Yes! And we hosted Thanksgiving! The new house lends itself much better to having people over for dinner.

• Improve my surfing.

A big fat no. I went surfing twice all year. TWICE! Pathetic.

• Take the kids on a real vacation--not to visit relatives, but someplace we choose.

Does Yosemite count? We didn't really choose it, so I guess not. The house purchase really stalled any sort of vacation plan. Maybe in 2011.

As far as making resolutions for next year, given how poorly these turned out, I'm inclined not to make any. I'm aware of what I need to work on, and what I need to accomplish. There are two things I'd like to do, though:

1. Get our affairs in order -- meaning, finally make a will.

2. Take that damn family vacation already!

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Nope, nobody close to me.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

No.

5. What countries did you visit?

None. 

6. What would you like to have in 2011 that you lacked in 2010?

Let's see, this year we got a new house, I built up my freelance career, Dave loves his job, and the kids are healthy and (mostly) happy. I would really love to have someone come clean the house every week, but our extra money is going into my CrossFit membership, and it's money very well spent.

7. What dates from 2010 will remain etched on your memory, and why?

The day we moved into our new house. Rosemary's first day of kindergarten.

8. What was your biggest achievement of they year? 

Making enough money to justify working from home as a freelance writer and editor. I was also pretty excited to come in second in the members-only CrossFit competition.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Failure is such a final, door-closing kind of word. I constantly fall behind my expectations in many things: parenting, work, fitness. I don't consider my efforts a failure, because I keep trying.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

No! Nothing notable other than torn-up hands from pull-ups.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

Our new house. Gym membership. My office desk. Our CSA share, which delivers locally-grown, organic fruits and vegetables every week.

12. Where did most of your money go?

Mortgage, daycare, groceries. Boring, everyday expenses.

13. What did you get really excited about?

It's really weird how my life has become so fitness focused. In high school and college I was a mediocre, disinterested athlete. I always exercised and competed, but I never performed particularly well. I think it's because I am fairly uncoordinated, so I have to work twice as hard as most people to pick up a sport. It wasn't until my late twenties that I finally found the determination to keep trying, to push past failure. So, this is a long-winded way of saying that I got really excited about CrossFit this year. It gets me out of the house, challenges me physically and mentally, and lets me define myself on my own terms.

14. What song will always remind you of 2010?

It came out in 2009, but Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind" was a song I listened to all year long. I still love it.

15. Compared to this time last year are you:

– happier or sadder? Happier.

– thinner or fatter? Hmm. I'm stronger but weigh more.

– richer or poorer? About the same.

16. What do you wish you'd done more of?

Travel. For sure.

17. What do you wish you'd done less off?

Fretted about nonsense. Lost patience with the kids. Stared blankly at the computer screen.

18. How did you spend Christmas?

In Long Beach, with my side of the family, with a short trip to Claremont to see the giant extended family.

19. What was your favorite TV program?

Mad Men. Community.

20. What were your favorite books of the year?

The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.

21. What was your favorite music from this year?

The Avett Brothers, Keri Hilson, The Black Keys, Band of Horses.

22. What were your favorite films from this year?

The Kids Are Alright. Nothing came close to that.

23. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I turned 37 this year. I have no idea what I did to celebrate it. I'm sure we went out to dinner...

24. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Satisfying? I don't know. It was a weirdly satisfying year. More patience, I suppose, to weather life with two small children. Time with them is both deeply fulfilling and intensely trying.

25. How would you describe your personal fashion concept for 2010?

Trying not to wear yoga pants every day. Attempting to wear more dresses and skirts, but mostly rocking shorts and jeans.

26. What kept you sane?

Family, friends, exercise, planning.

27. Tell us a valuable lesson you learned in 2010?

The best things in life involve a struggle. Easy is boring.

Two plus two is four

2010-12-22T21:52:00.000-08:00

When Gabriel takes a nap, Rosemary has "quiet time." This really should be called, "Seriously, if you ask Mommy one more question I might just lose my mind so please go in your room and talk to your Barbies time." The kids have been off of school since Friday, and it has rained almost constantly since then. By the time 1pm rolled around on Monday I was -- well, eager doesn't sound right. I was ... desperate to get them in their rooms and just have one complete thought not interrupted by, "Moooommy!"

The next two hours passed in blissful quiet. I cleaned up the kitchen, did a bit of work, and started packing for our trip to Long Beach. When Gabriel woke up, I felt recharged enough to get through the afternoon. Rosemary came out of the playroom holding a piece of paper on which she had written, very clearly:

5 + 4 = 9

I was shocked by 1. Her recreational problem solving, 2. The perfectly-written numbers, and 3. The relative complexity of the equation, given that she is five. I was so surprised that I didn't quite believe she had done it at first. "Did Daddy write that for you yesterday?" I asked. "Did you do all of that by yourself?" She insisted she did, and since she's an awful liar, I knew she was telling the truth.

Then she said, "I also tried to write six plus six, but I don't know how to write twelve." This is what she wrote:

6 + 6 = tlv

Later, when Dave came home, he said he was fascinated that she understood the concept of adding up to twelve, but didn't know the numeral. Then he said to me, while we cleared the dishes from the table and the kids munched on the chocolate from their advent calendars, "She's already ahead of you in math."

He said it in a joking, affectionate way, but my response was immediate and forceful. "Don't ever say anything like that again," I hissed. "First, it hurts my feelings, and second, I do not want Rosemary knowing about me and math."

I have this thing about math and numbers. I was fine up until about fourth or fifth grade, and then once we started in on the multiplication tables, I fell behind. The numbers wouldn't stay in my head -- they skittered around and got confused, and math got harder and harder. I developed strange techniques to cope. At one point I assigned personalities to numbers -- eight was jolly, nine was hateful -- but nothing ever worked.

By the time I got into high school I was in honors English and history but barely scraping by in the most basic math and science classes. And I tried. I paid attention. I did all the homework. My parents employed math tutors for me throughout high school, which allowed me to pass and move up to the next level. It was disconcerting, though, to sit in an English or history or even Spanish class where everything made sense, and then enter the math class where time slowed and everything grew fuzzy and strange.

I still panic when I have to calculate a tip or make change. I'll go to great lengths to avoid standing behind a cash box. Thinking about math makes me tense, but I do not want my kids to know about my hatred and fear of equations. Especially Rosemary. I'm aware that society, somehow, pushes girls away from math, and I don't want to contribute to that trend.

I know she watches me carefully, but I don't want her to see this.

Five minutes

2010-12-15T14:13:00.000-08:00

Gabriel hears his sister stirring in her bed and rushes into her room. He jumps on top of her barely-awake body, wraps his arms around her head and says, "I love you, Wosemary."

---

It's 7:30 pm in Brooklyn. I'm surrounded by three interesting, hilarious, complicated women. We've spent the day together and we've reached a groove where the jokes pile up, one after the other, and we zing from discussing old TV shows to art to whether it is depressing or awesome that the man next to us drove four hours to eat dinner by himself on his birthday.

---

We've been hiking for about two hours, making our slow descent into Yosemite Valley. A small crowd is bunched up on the trail in front of us, looking up at a tree. We follow their gaze and see three baby bears clawing their way up a tree, the mama bear lumbering behind her. Everyone is silent with awe, wonder, and fear.

Time's up!

------------------------------
This post is in response to Reverb 10 - 5 Minutes Imagine you will completely lose your memory of 2010 in five minutes. Set an alarm for five minutes and capture the things you most want to remember about 2010. (Author: Patti Digh)

Dainty vs. strong

2010-12-08T20:30:00.000-08:00

Growing up, I always wanted to be dainty. Problem is, dainty doesn't run in our family. We've got football and rugby players. We've got tough, sturdy women who live past 100. But we don't have a lot of dainty.

As a teenage girl, I found this frustrating. I couldn't see past the magazine covers and the movie stars. I wanted to get as small as possible, to slip away, to fade in the background. I didn't want to be strong or tough, so I didn't try.

It wasn't until my late twenties that I realized although it might take me twice as long as most people to learn a sport (it took me so long to learn to surf that I sobbed with relief when I finally got a wave), once I get the hang of it I surpass a lot of people in strength and determination.

As a boxer, I learned to value my strength to move around the ring, to keep my opponents away with a relentless jab, and to land a devastating right. I relied on my toughness to step into the ring, again and again, even when I knew someone bigger and more experienced than me was waiting to punch me in the head.

This weekend I participated in a members-only competition at my CrossFit gym. It was just a friendly competition, but that didn't make it any less difficult or scary.

And that didn't make it any less awesome when I got second place, complete with an impromptu awards ceremony.

Dainty, I'm not. But tough is more fun.

------------------------------
This post is in response to Reverb 10 - Day 8 prompt: Beautifully Different. Think about what makes you different and what you do that lights people up. Reflect on all the things that make you different – you’ll find they’re what make you beautiful. (Author: Karen Walrond)

Craft

2010-12-06T19:00:00.000-08:00

December 6 – Make. What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it? (Author: Gretchen Rubin)

(This is a prompt from Reverb10, a month-long project about reflecting on the past year and thinking about what's next.)

I don't consider myself a crafty person, but when someone you don't know all that well but who you really would like to know better invites you to an introductory beading class, you go.

The colors aren't coming across well (a light jade green with a darker green accent), but it's a necklace I've worn again and again, and each time I put it on I think, "I made that."

Up and over

2010-12-03T13:50:00.000-08:00

December 3 – Moment.

Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

(Author: Ali Edwards)

(This is second prompt from Reverb10, a month-long project about reflecting on the past year and thinking about what's next.)

"Five, four, three, two, one."

The countdown clock gave a loud, insistent beep. I slapped my hands on the metal bar, and swung my feet away from the wooden box.

I hung there for half-second. A instant of rest. Then began swinging my feet back and forth, getting momentum. Music blared from the tiny speakers on the floor, only slightly drowning out the panting and grunts around me.

A few months ago I had stopped using the resistance band to help me with my kipping pull-up, one of fundamentals of CrossFit, but I knew I wasn't doing the move correctly. I never felt my head clear the bar, and I had spent the last few workouts frustrated with my progress.

Before this workout began, I asked the trainer to give me a few tips. He told me to keep my legs straight, instead of bending my knees, and to pull into the bar at the top.

I was supposed to do 10 pull-ups before moving on to the next exercise. I swung my feet, concentrating on keeping my legs straight and using the momentum to pull myself over the bar. I pulled up, and once again, my chin fell just below the bar. I dropped down into another swing and tried again. Again, I ended up just below the smooth metal.

I dropped down to begin the next attempt and put full attention into my movements. I felt a brief moment of weightlessness as I swung my body back, and I pulled up and in as hard as I could.

The view suddenly changed. I felt my hands below my chin, and for a moment I looked down at the gym, at the people sweating and focused, at the white board with the day's scores, at the rings hanging empty from the ceiling.

Then it was over and I swung down to do it again.

Get up and move

2010-12-02T14:18:00.000-08:00

December 2 Writing.

What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?

(Author: Leo Babauta)

(This is second prompt from Reverb10, a month-long project about reflecting on the past year and thinking about what's next.)

A few years ago a new client asked me to write an ad campaign for a sprinkler and irrigation company. Other than helping my husband dig ditches and glue together PVC pipe when we installed irrigation in our house, I know nothing about the world of sprinkler systems. (I did used to have a friend who managed a golf course, and he taught me to call it turf, not grass. "You smoke grass," he would say. "You play golf on turf.")

The company sent me a folder full of information, and I spent a morning reviewing their background material and researching the competition. I looked at irrigation magazines. I read PDF after PDF of product descriptions. I learned everything I could about valve heads and control panels.

Ready to go, I sat down in front of the computer. And ... nothing.

I typed out a few worthless headlines, and worked on some of the product descriptions, but I couldn't think of anything I'd be willing to show my client. I kept at it, though, writing and deleting, writing and deleting. After a few hours of this, I gave up. If the day was going to be a complete waste, at least I could get some exercise. I put on my running shoes and headed for the beach.

About twenty minutes into my run, the thoughts started coming. All the research I did that morning seemed to crystallize in my head, and headlines and ad concepts started to appear. Terrified I would forget the great ideas, I repeated the best ones to myself over and over again like a mantra.

As soon as I got home I wrote them down, and in the next hour I had four solid options to present to the client.

Often, sitting at my desk hinders my writing. While I understand that an important part of writing is just sitting down and getting it done, I also need to remember the importance of movement. Something about getting up and moving -- even if it's just to get a glass of water or go to the bathroom -- lets loose the flow of ideas and propels you forward. It's worth remembering.

Move, Grow

2010-12-01T20:07:00.000-08:00

December 1 One Word.
Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?
(Author: Gwen Bell)

(This is first prompt from Reverb10, a month-long project about reflecting on the past year and thinking about what's next.)

Move. This year we moved in the most literal sense, packing up our home of nine years and moving into a house twice as big with an actual office for me and space for guests to sleep. It was stressful and anxiety-producing, but well worth it.

2010 was a year of movement in a more general sense. In January, I ran my first race, a 15K. I ran faster than I thought I could. The race made me stop and think -- what can I do next? I was determined to get back into boxing, until an old colleague, and former amateur boxer, told me of his Parkinson's diagnosis at age 50. He told me he worried about those punches to the head, and I weighed the risks and decided to hang up my gloves.

Then, in June, when driving home from Trader Joe's, I saw a new sign go up. Pacific Beach CrossFit. I had read about CrossFit and was intrigued because it sounded difficult and slightly badass. It took me a month to get my act together and walk in the door, and I've now been going for five months. Five months of pain, exhilaration, and sometimes sheer terror. I went from not being able to do one pullup (and angrily frustrated about it), to doing 90 in one workout (in groups of ten, over the course of a half hour). I've also met some fascinating, inspiring, truly good people along the way.

Grow. In 2011, I hope to grow my business with focus and intention. I'll grow stronger through CrossFit. And, luckiest of all, I'll have a front seat as the kids' cheeks become less round, their legs longer, their minds more complex and fascinating.

Excuses, excuses

2010-12-01T10:47:00.000-08:00

As I fall asleep every night, I come up with wonderful ideas for this blog. I write perfect posts in my head--funny, poignant, fascinating.

Then it's morning and I'm making breakfast for the kids, brushing their teeth, and rushing them off to school. I come back to the quiet of the house, and after pouring myself some coffee I start chipping away at my deadlines: writing, editing, researching.

At noon I go to Crossfit, then rush home and shower, hurriedly eat a lunch while finishing up work, then pick up Rosemary, then Gabriel. The rest of the day is filled with playing with the kids, making dinner, and fighting a futile battle against the black mood that descends on all three of us before dinner.

Then it's dinner, bath, teeth brushing, and stories, and ... my brain shuts off. I can read and watch TV, but any attempt at creativity usually results in me staring blankly at the computer screen. Until I try to fall asleep, which is when my brain decides it's time to write the great American novel.

------------------------

Well that was a REALLY long-winded excuse for not writing. Okay, let's do this bullet-style. It won't be pretty, but it will get done.

It was my first time hosting Thanksgiving, as I told everyone I came into contact with in the week leading up to the holiday. It's one of those things that SEEMS like it should be this big rite of passage, but it's really just a dinner party. Although every time I handled the (20 pound!) turkey, I had visions of it shooting out of my hands and onto the floor, just like in every TV show when the character hosts for the first time. But no disasters. The turkey was delicious, we had too much food, and the kids ate nothing but pie. However, I did manage to pull off a Martha Stewart-inspired table decoration that filled me with ridiculous pride.

Explaining Santa to toddlers always results in wide eyes, suspicious glances toward the fireplace, and the declaration, "I don't WANT Santa to come!" The tradition does have some creepy elements to it, especially for a kid like Gabriel, who is terrified of strange men.
I just signed up to participate in Reverb10, an initiative designed to get people reflecting on the year and what's to come. Each day of December, I have committed to respond to Reverb10's creative prompt and put something here on the blog. As evidenced by my four-paragraph-long excuse for not writing, I need a kick in the pants.

Okay, see you back here tomorrow!

Catch-up

2010-11-12T13:53:00.000-08:00

You know that feeling when you put something off for a long time, and then it becomes more and more oppressive, taking on more weight than it should?

It's been a ridiculously long time since I've written, and chronicling everything that's happened -- trip to Baltimore, Gretchen's wedding, Halloween -- is overwhelming. So first, some pictures:

We got back from Baltimore on Wednesday, and the rest of the week I spent running to catch up, just barely staying ahead of the piles of laundry and unanswered emails.

I finally caught up with things on the weekend, and I should have known something would go wrong on Sunday when I cleaned the house, we went grocery shopping for the week as a family, Dave made chili, and I got all the laundry done (including washing the kids' sheets, which is a rare occurrence), and I thought, "Well, now I feel organized and ready for the week!"

We celebrate our foresight and organization by heading out to the playground a few blocks from our house. The weather was perfect San Diego fall -- sunny with a slight chill in the air, just enough for a light sweatshirt. It was around 4:30 pm, and there was only one other family at the playground. They had a boy Gabriel's age and a girl Rosemary's age, so the kids flew through the air on the swings, slid down the slides, and chatted while Dave and I exchanged a few words with the parents.

Gabriel wandered over to the metal whale-shaped contraption on a spring. He climbed in, started rocking back and forth, and then wanted to go faster, so he asked me to push him. I walked over and began pushing him, and he swung back and forth, laughing in delight. I do remember thinking that it was probably a bad idea for him to be shooting back and forth so rapidly, but I've had similar thoughts many times, and everything always turns out fine. Not this time.

Gabriel's hands slipped from the handlebar, and I watched in horror as his face slammed against the metal bar, the impact rocketing his head immediately back. I can still see his face, now -- eyes wide open in shock, face white. Then it started. The screaming. The blood.

I reacted as I always do when a family member is injured: I panicked. I handed Gabriel to Dave, pleading with him to look at Gabriel's mouth, hoping he would say it was okay. The other family stood, frozen, horrified, as I began chanting a stream of, "Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no."

When Dave told me he thought Gabriel's teeth had gone through his skin, just under his lower lip, I took off running. Ostensibly to get some paper towels to soak up the blood that kept pouring out of Gabriel's mouth, but also because I had to get away from my screaming baby, from the feeling that I had caused this injury, from not knowing the extent of the injury and fearing the worst.

We got everyone home, Gabriel sobbing the entire way, and Dave called the nurse advice line. They told us that they rarely sew up mouth injuries, and that it would be best to just keep him at home. Gabriel cheered up enough to eat a little yogurt, we wiped off as much as the blood as we could, and then put him to bed.

It seemed bizarre to me to just sent a kid off to bed who had recently put his teeth through his face, so I checked on Gabriel about an hour after he fell asleep. As I inspected his sweet face and swollen lip, I noticed a stream of blood from his mouth, dripping onto the pillow. I wiped it off, went back in ten minutes, saw more blood.

We called the nurse again, and she said if we couldn't get the blood to stop, we were going to have to come in to the hospital. To stop the blood, she told us we had to place a piece of gauze inside Gabriel's lip and apply direct pressure for ten minutes. This would involve waking a sleeping child and pushing against his injured lip for what I knew would seem like an eternity.

Have you ever listened to someone scream for ten minutes? Someone who you are supposed to protect from pain and harm? He screamed, I sobbed and rocked him back and forth, Dave bravely applied gentle but firm pressure.

It worked, and miraculously he slept all night.

The next morning, the skin inside his lip was lumpy, red, and angry looking. Dave had already left for work before Gabriel got up, so I made the decision to take Gabriel to the doctor. I couldn't stand the fact that no medical professional had looked at his mouth, and I knew it would torment me all week.

It's too exhausting to write what ensued in detail, but the pediatrician was impressed enough with the wound to send us to the ER. Where we waited for four hours, and I burned up my iPhone trying to arrange someone to pick up and take care of Rosemary. We finally saw a doctor, and she was concerned enough about the injury to call in ANOTHER doctor. Who said, definitively, "No stitches needed. Go home."

Which we did. I washed the blood-covered sheets, fed Gabriel more applesauce, and sat in a near-catatonic state on the couch, trying to release the worry and tension of the last 24 hours.

He's fine, we're all fine, and we've moved on to happier things like school and work and his alternating delight and terror at the concept of Santa.

Tradeoffs

2010-10-20T11:44:00.000-07:00

I got lost in Times Square when I was 13. My mom and I had gone to New York, just the two of us, because she won a day on the New York Stock Exchange at an auction. The plan was that when she was on the exchange, I would go for a day-long bus tour of the city. The bus picked me up a few blocks from our hotel, which was near Times Square. My mom and went over the plan and reviewed where I would get the bus. I was excited for my adventure and looking forward to a day on my own.

The tour went well. I made friends with some young European girls, and we explored the Statue of Liberty together. We ate lunch, chatted, and the bus drove us to the tourist highlights of the city.

The problem came when the tour was over, and the bus dropped us off. Unbeknownst to either me or my mother, the dropoff was not in the same place as the pickup. It was in the same general area, but when I got off the bus I had no idea where my hotel was. I think I knew the address of the hotel, but no idea how to get there. Also, I have a notoriously horrible sense of direction. I used to get lost in malls and typically have no sense of my surrounding geography.

So I started walking. Each step took me deeper into the heart of Times Square. And this was 1986, so Times Square was not a particularly friendly place to be. As I walked, I started seeing more and more strip clubs, bars, and shady-looking businesses. It was just around dusk, and I knew without a doubt that this would not be a good place to wander after dark. I tore at my cuticles and kept walking, looking around for something familiar.

It occurred to me, finally, that I was walking in the wrong direction. I took a deep breath and retraced my steps. I reached the place where the bus had dropped me off, continued for two blocks, and saw my hotel. I had gotten off the bus and just started walking in the wrong direction, not realizing the hotel was right behind me.

I thought of this when I was in New York last weekend, because I spent Friday by myself. My friend, Carmen, had to work all day, and I had some deadlines as well, so I thought I'd go for a run in Central Park (which she can see from her 17th-story window), explore a bit, and then work. Carmen left me with a subway pass, and told me a few places I could go, but I had a vision of hurtling underground in the wrong direction and ending up on the other side of Manhattan. My sense of direction has gotten better, but I still feel insecure about it, especially on public transportation. So I walked, got a few blisters, then came back and took a nap and worked until Carmen came home from work.

The weekend was delightful. Good food, great company, so many laughs. It was amazing to spend a day wandering with no need to worry about naps, snacks, or entertaining short people with even shorter attention spans. We headed out to Brooklyn and went into store after store, chatting and shopping. We sat and had coffee, watching the young hipsters pass by. We ate course after course at Grocery, giggled, talked about art, and just enjoyed each other's company. It was a perfect day, a perfect weekend, and I feel so lucky to have such wonderful women as friends.

The kids survived, of course, but my leaving seems to have unmoored Gabriel. I came back Sunday at 5pm, and as I was putting Gabriel to bed that night, I made the mistake of whispering, "Tomorrow you have school!"

That let to 15 minutes of sobbing and wailing about how he didn't want to go to school. It started up again in the morning. He sobbed into his cereal, as I changed his diaper, and as I put on his shoes. Finally, I said, "Hey, let's go get a hot chocolate after we drop off Rosemary. If we do that, you have to promise not to cry when I drop you off, okay?" (Awesome parenting.)

We had a lovely date at the coffee shop. I told him that I wasn't going anywhere, and that I was just going to be working at home all day. That seemed to work -- as promised, he didn't cry when I dropped him off.

However, when I picked him up right after his nap, he was seated at the little table, weeping, tears falling into his graham crackers and milk.

Last night I had to give him four time outs for various offenses, and he spend the first half of dinner and his bath defiantly screaming.

Who knows if this phase is related to my trip, but it sure seems like it. The knives of guilt stab me in the stomach every time he cries. It was great, I'm glad I did it, and it was probably good for him in the long run, but I really want my sweet, even-tempered boy back.

Jet Plane

2010-10-13T19:32:00.000-07:00

I leave tomorrow morning for New York, for four days with three of my favorite women. Well, two days will be taken up with travel, but four days away from home.

Ah, the conflicting emotions when a mom leaves home. I tend to be a little anxious pre-travel under normal circumstances, but leaving my entire family behind and traveling all the way across the country pitches me into another level. It's not that I don't want to go. It's not that I'm so looking forward to time by myself, and time with good friends. It's just that it's so hard to leave. Especially when, this morning, as I was carrying Gabriel back to our car after dropping off Rosemary at school, he twisted his hand in my ponytail and said, "Mommy, your hair is nice."

Adding to the stress is the fact that I got a super-involved, super urgent project dumped on my lap this week. I'm taking my laptop and working on the plane, and while I had dreams of flipping through magazines, it will feel good to make some progress, rather than having this hanging over my head when I return.

So, off to finish packing. I'll have stories when I return!

Odds and Ends

2010-10-05T15:08:00.000-07:00

Holy crap, last week was surreal. I have lived in Southern California my entire life, and I've never experienced heat like what we had on Monday. Because I am a slave to my routine, I went to Crossfit in the 90+ degree weather, and the workout that day involved running 400 meters five times, along with squats or thrusters or something equally horrible that I have blocked out of my memory. Our 400 meter route is one lap around the block, which takes us down the alley, past the Trader Joe's parking lot--where we dodge shoppers exiting and entering the store, who understandably aren't expecting to see sweaty people, hollow-eyed with exhaustion, go shooting by them--then down the sidewalk, where we weave in and out of strolling pedestrians.

On this sweltering day, a crew of men was resurfacing a parking lot in the alley, smoothing out the blacktop or tar or whatever it is they use. Every few minutes, four of us would go racing by them as they worked with the steaming black substance in the sun. The third time we ran past, one of the guys shouted after us, "You're making me hot!"

As I mentioned on Facebook, it's a very bad sign when you get sympathy from guys resurfacing a road.

Midway through the day, I received an email addressed to a group of moms in the neighborhood that said, "It's too hot to cook. Meet us at the beach for dinner -- bring takeout, order pizza, get out of the house!"

I picked up a precooked chicken at Henry's, got the kids, and packed up the stroller with our dinner and sand toys, all the while growing hotter and more irritated. By the time we left the house all three of us were snapping at each other, and the still, hot air pressed upon us on the walk down to the beach.

By 6pm there were probably twenty or thirty people in our group gathered at the beach. Gabriel toddled off to watch the bigger boys ride their boogie boards down the hills of sand beneath the bluff, and Rosemary found her kindergarten friends and they ran shrieking into the ocean.

I looked around at all these people chatting at the water's edge, and at the kids running in and out of the ocean, and I had one of those moments when my life felt like a scene from a movie. I'm just starting to get to know this network of families from around the neighborhood, and I feel so lucky to be included in things like impromptu beach parties. And it really was the best way to deal with the heat. Instead of staying inside, grumbling, why not treat it like a little holiday, like a special, crazy-heat day?

Now the temperature is back to normal, and I'm getting used to the routine: drop off kids, work, Crossfit, work, pick up kids, dinner, bath, stories, repeat. I've gotten a number of interesting new clients recently, and things are starting to come together in Crossfit. I was telling Dave the other day how much having a place where I can push myself physically, working with others and measuring progress, improves my mental health. I spend so much of my day up my head, thinking. The physical challenge, the support of the group, the feeling of gaining strength and new skills--it's becoming as necessary as air.

I'm off to get Rosemary, and hope to see Dave for a few minutes before he leaves for Vegas on a business trip until Friday. It's a sign of the zen place I'm in right now that the prospect of a week of solo parenting doesn't fill me with dread. I may change my tune by Friday afternoon, but for now, all is good.

The Boy

2010-09-29T13:58:00.000-07:00

I know I've written a lot about Rosemary lately, but here's a little secret. I think about Gabriel even more. I think I write about Rosemary because I feel guilty that I'm thinking so much about Gabriel.

I was going around and around on the guilt hamster wheel about this last night, when I had a sudden realization. I fixated on Rosemary this much when she was two. In fact, probably more, because I didn't have another kid to think about.

The thing is, two is such beautiful age. Every age has its charms, but age two is a delightful combination of an innocent baby and a personality-filled child. They have round baby cheeks and slightly chubby baby legs, but they can say "I love you" and wrap their arms tightly around your neck.

Gabriel, with his shockingly blue eyes and white-blond hair, is tough and sweet. When I put him to bed the other night and told him he was going to preschool the next day, he said, "Thank you, Mommy." He squeals with delight when he gets to hold his hand-me-down Thomas the Train piggy bank that we put on the changing table for safe-keeping. He wakes up in the morning singing happy birthday to his friends and reminiscing about what he did the day before. "I go fwimming. In the fwimming pool. I play baseball. I hit the ball."

Of course he has his two year old fits, but they are like fast-moving thunderstorms--arriving suddenly and leaving just as quickly. When he gets upset, he yells, "No THANK YOU, Mommy," with as much rage as his two-year-old body can muster. The combination of his fury and the polite, ineffectual language makes me smile. It always reminds me of an old-fashioned gentleman saying, "Good day. I said GOOD DAY!" I know some day it will be "I hate you, Mommy," or worse.

Before I go to bed, I check in on each of the kids, and every night I marvel at Gabriel's long eyelashes and the soft curls behind his ears. He is my last child, and I'm all too aware that these days are fleeting. When I pick him up and smell the sweet-dirt smell of his head, I try to hold on to the moment, to make it last. It's impossible, I know.

Flashback

2010-09-23T09:44:00.000-07:00

We sat in the shrunken-down chairs, our knees folded up to our chins, surrounded by neatly-lettered, laminated signs stuck to almost every surface. As Rosemary's kindergarten teacher talked to the parents about homework and discipline and the importance of teaching kids how to correctly hold a pencil, I spotted it on the wall in front of me. An oversized tooth cut out of white construction paper, next to a piece of paper titled, "Our Tooth Chart."

I flashed back 32 years, to a similar room, to a oversized tooth on the wall. I remember watching the tooth all year long as one by one, my classmates lost a tooth and got their name on the wall. As the year wore on, the tooth became cluttered with names. It seemed like every day another kid would come in with an exciting story about losing their tooth and finding money under their pillow. Rumors spread that the best way to dislodge a loose tooth was to tie one end of a string around your tooth, the other around a doorknob, and slam the door shut.

My teeth stayed firmly in my mouth. I probed them with my tongue, searching for the slightest wiggle. As June arrived, I resigned myself to the fact that I would never have my name on the tooth chart. In fact, I went the whole summer without losing a tooth, and became so obsessed with the idea that I picked the tooth fairy as my Halloween costume, with the idea that somehow that would magically cause a tooth to fall out.

----------------------------------------------

I was not prepared for how much Rosemary's entrance into kindergarten would send me hurtling down memory lane. I suppose it's the sense memory -- the sights, sounds, and smells -- that's bringing it all back. Once you leave school, you're so DONE with it. I know I pushed all those memories aside for the thoughts of the future. Job, marriage, kids, house, family. Now those questions are mostly answered, and I suppose it's time to start looking back. Now that I'm in the thick of it, I can see how it's tempting to treat your kids' time in school as a second chance. Here you are again, but you know so much! And maybe, if you help, they'll get it right. Of course, it's their journey. And as I told Rosemary the story of the tooth chart, and how it's possible she won't lose a tooth all year, I realized she'll have her own struggles and disappointments, and I can offer her advice and comfort, but it's her life, and her memories.

-------------------------------------------------

Last week at Back to School Night, I flashed back to kindergarten, but on Monday I was flooded with more recent memories. I was walking Rosemary and her friend home from school, and we ran into our neighbor. She has two boys, seven and four. The seven year old and Rosemary have .... well, they have sort of a thing going on. Rosemary is a little more invested than the boy, but he obviously likes her. They walked along, chatting and laughing, and I watched Rosemary turn her face up to his, all shining face and sparkling eyes. All of a sudden I pictured my high school, and the electric feeling of seeing whatever boy it was that I was crushing on at the time. The sensation of time stopping, of the world shrinking to just that moment. Every day Rosemary reports on whether or not she sees this boy on the playground, and how sometimes he says hi to her and sometimes he doesn't. I remember arranging my schedule to run into certain boys, joining clubs I had no interest in, going to meetings where I spent the whole time staring at the back of a particular head, dreaming in a high school daze.

Here we go, backward and forward. It's exciting, and scary, and bittersweet, but mostly just wonderful.

The First Week

2010-09-12T15:13:00.000-07:00

Rosemary started kindergarten on Tuesday, and to accommodate her new five-day-a-week school schedule, Gabriel and I changed things around as well.

Instead of working three full days and spending two days home with the kids, I'm now working every day until I have to pick up Rosemary at 2:10 (11:55 am on Wednesday -- what they call minimum day, which I remember from childhood as a strangely formal construction). Since Gabriel naps at school from 1 to 3pm, Rosemary and I now pick him up around 4pm.

In thinking about this change, I thought, "Wow, I'll have so much extra time to work! It will be great!" The reality is that 2pm comes around much quicker than I thought, especially when I go to Crossfit from 12 to 1pm. This week I've felt constantly behind on things, and had that uncomfortable feeling that I was doing a lot of things, but none of them well.

Rosemary, on the other hand, has adjusted to kindergarten with ease. Other than getting noticeably quiet the first day, she has expressed no qualms about the new school, teacher, classmates, bathrooms, or rules. She has told me a number of times that recess is very short, "Just when it starts, Mom, it's over!" and that they don't really play at all inside. It's the big time now.

I have perhaps been a little too fascinated by Rosemary's social progress, asking her every day, "So who did you play with today?" At this age, for the most part, the kids are their pure selves, not worried about how they should act or about the right thing to say. So their friendships are based on ... I'm not too sure, exactly. Proximity? Love of the monkey bars? Basic personality?

Since Rosemary is not in her best friend's kindergarten class, she started the week with no friends at all. According to her reports, she's made a friend with a girl who lives a block away. Once again, I'm impressed by Rosemary's blithe confidence in the face of uncertainty. She approaches the world with open arms and an open heart, almost as if she's saying, "I'm Rosemary! Aren't I great?"

The social transition has not been so smooth for me. There's a whole group of moms who know each other from having an older sibling already in school, and this is where I'm at my weakest, socially -- when I feel like everyone else has their established friends, and so they don't have a need for any more. So I stand there at pick up and drop off, or at the post-minimum-day pizza lunch, thinking too much and talking too little.

I'm also mourning my days home with the kids. While the time often stretched ahead of me, long and unscheduled, I loved the time with them to go to the library, the beach, or the playground. I miss holding Gabriel after his nap, when he's warm and sleepy and curls up into my neck, or reading Rosemary chapters from the Wizard of Oz series. This was also the time when I fit in household chores and errands, and so I spent part of my weekend scrubbing toilets and vacuuming.

I'm sure it will get easier. I'll try taking a page from Rosemary's book and spend more time thinking, "I'm Hilary! Aren't I great?"

Five Is ...

2010-08-30T14:14:00.000-07:00

... wanting nothing more than a man Barbie (aka Ken) for your birthday, and then being overcome with delight when he appears,

... nonchalantly reading a book to your brother while he sits in a basket,

... knowing exactly what questions to ask a princess,

... and how to pose like one.

Rosemary turned five on Friday. We celebrated with a weekend trip to Long Beach so we could go to Disneyland. It's easy to be cynical about Disneyland, and it is ridiculously expensive, but they know what they're doing. Little skits and musical numbers break out around every corner, and many of the experiences are better than they have to be. The sight of Rosemary, Gabriel, and their friend Mica dancing around a maypole with Cinderella was so sweet and joyful it brought tears to my eyes.

Happy birthday, peanut. You're a wonderful kid.

Letting go

2010-08-18T15:21:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, Dave and I got a babysitter and went to see "The Kids Are All Right," the Lisa Cholodenko movie with Julianne Moore, Annette Bening, and Mark Ruffalo.

It's a fantastic movie, and although it's ostensibly about a lesbian couple and their family, it's really about all families, and marriage, and parenthood, and letting go.

The teenage kids in the movie are an eighteen-year-old girl and a fifteen-year-old boy, and when they announced their ages it hit me: that's the exact age difference between Rosemary and Gabriel. Older girl, younger boy. Just fast forward thirteen years.

So then the movie became personal. I started envisioning the fights about shady friends and staying out late, and thinking about how teenagers are so good at shining a mirror on their parents and exposing any weakness or hypocrisy.

And then (not a spoiler, I promise) the whole family goes to drop the daughter off at college. Did I mention that Rosemary starts kindergarten in two and half weeks?

How could you not cry? As the tears trickled down my cheeks, I thought about how Rosemary and I have already started the push-pull of independence and dependence. And how when she first started wanting to dress herself in the morning I hovered over her, critiquing her choices, making suggestions.

Slowly, as I saw how she reacted to my involvement (not well), I retreated. I became okay with a red whale-print corduroy skirt paired with a pink- and green-striped shirt. I even started to admire her ... exuberant color choices.

A few weeks ago, as she was in her room getting dressed, she called out. "Mom, can you help me get dressed?"

I walked in and said, "Don't you want to pick out your outfit?"

"I can't decide what to wear. You pick."

It's something I have to remember. When you let go, they sometimes come back.

Better than bad, it's good

2010-08-12T16:12:00.000-07:00

Whew. Things got better but first they got worse.

After four trips to the repair place and $70, the phone got fixed.

Gabriel's low-grade fever spiked to 102.4 degrees Friday night, and he started throwing up. Dave had been out of town on a business trip since Tuesday morning and he was due to come home late Friday night. As I cleaned up barf from Gabriel, myself, the kitchen, and the bathroom, I thought, "It's almost over."

And it was. Gabriel woke up in the morning fever-free and bright as the sun (how do kids do that?) and we had a lovely weekend putting together the backyard playhouse, walking along the boardwalk after eating dinner at our favorite burger place, and just spending time together as a family.

I know I complain a lot here. There are two reasons for this. One, I think constantly hearing how great life is gets boring. Conflict is interesting. Two, this is a place for me to process things on my mind.

However, it is worthwhile to stop and appreciate. I know how lucky I am. I often get bogged down in the details and distractions of life, but there are things that make me stop. Like this:

And discovering new people, and a new challenge, like this:

Things are good.

Not going well

2010-08-05T15:31:00.000-07:00

Today I:

1. Dropped my iPhone in the toilet

2. Started an oven fire and filled the house with the smell of burning silicone

It all started when I decided I needed to make energy bars. I'm home with the kids today, so I told them we were going to walk to Henry's to get some things. I ran around gathering my sunglasses and wallet and directing the kids to put on their shoes. (Which they never, ever do until the fifth time I ask.) I ran to the bathroom to pee, and decided to check my email. Finished up, stood up, and I have no idea how this happened but the phone ... slipped. I stared at it for one horrified second, then fished it out and dried it off. When the kids found out they were delighted. This is when I'm at my worst as a parent. My entire mind is focused on freaking out about the issue at hand, so being bombarded with questions like, "Is there pee on the phone? Why did you drop it? Can I see?" makes me snap with frustration.

The phone seemed to be okay -- sort of. Some of the functions didn't work as they should, but it made calls and accessed the Internet, so I decided to carry on. I dragged the children to store to buy coconut oil, shredded coconut, and protein powder, along with rice for the iPhone. (I recalled, the deep recesses of my mind, that electronics that got wet could be salvaged by sticking them in rice, which absorbs the moisture.)

During the walk over to Henry's I obsessively checked my phone. It still was doing weird things with the ringer button, but overall seemed mostly okay.

Once I got the kids fed, Gabriel down for his nap, and Rosemary down for quiet time, I started in on the energy bars. I decided to use one of our silicone loaf pans, and all was going well until I sprinkled the shredded coconut on the pan and put it under the broiler to brown. Always multitasking, I took the opportunity to get on the computer and send off an invoice. I kept thinking, "I really should check on the bars, since I'm not sure how long they take to brown," but I really wanted to finish and send off the invoice.

I sent off the invoice, opened the oven, and was confronted with flames leaping out of the silicone pan and the nauseating smell of burning plastic. I threw a dish towel over the pan, doused the flames, and then looked sadly at my blackened bars. They went in the trash. The iPhone, which is now turning the ringer off over and over again, is going in the bowl of rice. I would like to go to bed.

Dizzy

2010-07-28T14:53:00.000-07:00

I doubt Wonder Woman ever found herself curled up in a ball on the couch watching the room spin around and around and around while a curious toddler plucked at her face and said, "Want to play catch? Mommy? Mommy, want to play?"

This past weekend was Comic-Con. I don't ever attend, but I play an important supporting role helping host our second-annual pre-Comic-Con nerd dinner and taking care of the kids. This year, our friend Cole came out from Vermont, and he and Dave worked together all Friday to make a delicious Indian feast. They had a great day doing whatever it is they do at Comic-Con on Saturday, and on Sunday Dave surprised Rosemary over breakfast and said, "Do you want to go to Comic-Con?" She stared at him, blank faced, waiting to see if he was kidding. When she realized he was serious, she gave a little scream of excitement and ran off to get her Batman shirt.

I had a lovely day with Gabriel, enjoying my rare one-on-one time with him. It was a relief to get a break from negotiating the often opposite needs of a five-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy, and just focus on him. I put him in the kid seat on the back of my beach cruiser and we biked down to Belmont Park to see the roller coaster (or, as he called it, the "coaster-coaster"). I asked if wanted to ride the merry-go-round, but when he shook his head firmly I knew enough to let it go.

(I'll never forget when we forced a two-year-old Rosemary to go on the thing, thinking, "Who doesn't love merry go rounds?" Apparently, her.)

Monday I had a busy day of meetings and work, and I told myself I'd go to the 6:30pm Crossfit class. Dave walked in the door at 6:15, and I just couldn't bring myself to walk out the door. I beat myself up about it all night, resolving to get up early and do a workout video, maybe try the Bosu ball (that thing in the picture below) DVD.

So I set the alarm for 5:30am, struggled into my workout clothes, and blearily put in the tape. I was feeling sluggish and clumsy, but I chalked that up to the fact that it was before 6am. After a warm-up, I followed the short-haired, muscular woman on the screen as she lay down to do some core strengthening. I lay down, propped my shoulders on the Bosu, and noticed the room starting spinning. I sat up, and immediately felt nauseous. A smart person would have stopped there, but I continued, balancing unsteadily on the Bosu and gritting my teeth during the ab workout.

Gabriel woke up when I was almost done, and I took him into the couch because I had started to feel so bad it seemed like the only sensible thing would be to lie down. Big mistake. Huge.

The second my head hit the couch cushion, the walls began to rotate. I watched the movement for a while in dumb fascination while Gabriel chirped at me about his football and pulled on my hand to get me to play.

I won't take you through the rest of the morning, which included frantic Googling (vertigo can mean MS! or a brain tumor!) and snapping at the kids as I quietly freaked out at the idea of taking care of them by myself for the entire day.

Finally, once the symptoms subsided a bit, I put on my running clothes and packed the kids in the stroller, with the idea that if I was miserable lying on the couch, perhaps standing up and moving would be an improvement.

Shockingly, it was. After I came home and showered the dizziness and seasick feeling had subsided completely, and I determined it was a run-of-the-mill case of vertigo, caused by trying to push myself. There's a lot I want to do, and I often put pressure on myself to get everything done. But until I get red boots and a golden lasso, I think maybe I should dial it back a bit.

System Error

2010-07-15T15:33:00.000-07:00

I have a thing about the mail. I love getting mail, love opening the box to see what's inside. I find it relaxing to look through catalogs, even those that are full of things I'll never buy, and I still set aside time to open and read every one of the holiday cards in my mom's mountainous basket. These are cards that are not addressed to me.

In college we were assigned a little mailbox with a combination lock. Combination locks have always made me nervous. I'm afraid I'm going to spin past the number and have to start all over again, and the whole thing always seems so needlessly complicated with all those numbers and spinning the dial left and right, trying to match up the numbers with the line at the top. I was in college in the early 90s, before email really took over, so mail was even more exciting than it was now. Each trip to the mailbox had the possibility of revealing some sort of treasure -- a letter from one of my high school friends, maybe something from a boy I had a crush on, or possibly a magazine -- Spin and Sassy were my obsessions. (I loved magazines so much then that my friends joked my major was magazine studies. Oh, how I loved those magazines.)

Mail figured so prominently in my mind that I had a recurring nightmare where I couldn't get into my little mail slot. In the dream I'd make my way down the hill to the mail center, peer into the window of my slot and see mail waiting for me, and then not be able to remember my combination. Or I'd know the combination, but something kept getting in my way of entering it correctly. I'd try again and again, frantically spinning the little dial, pulling on the little door, willing it to open. I had these dreams all throughout college. They went away once I was no longer separated from my mail by a series of numbers.

Although we are happily settled in the house and more or less unpacked, nothing about this move has gone smoothly. It started with no hot water when we moved in. Since it was Saturday of the 4th of July weekend, we had to wait until Tuesday for SDG&E to make their way out here. Our brand-new oven, installed before we moved in, will not turn off. I discovered this when I was done cooking. I frantically pushed the "off" button fifty times and the oven placidly kept a toasty 350 degrees, ignoring my panicky button-pushing. Dave finally went outside to turn off the breaker. A man came out to fix it last Friday, and said, "Yep, it's broken. You need a new control panel."

He told me that when we got it in the mail, we should call to schedule ANOTHER repair person to come out. The phone and Internet connection did not turn on as scheduled. The phone guy came on Tuesday and fixed the phone but not the Internet. An hour-long call to AT&T revealed trouble in the central control area. The Internet was finally fixed a day later. My brand-new desk in my longed-for office had a large hole punctured in the top. I called West Elm, and waited a week for the replacement. This week, the dryer -- which came with the house and seems to be a relic from the '80s -- stopped working.

Then, finally, today -- the last straw. As a planner and a person obsessed with mail, I filled out our change of address cards and delivered them in person to the post office weeks before our move. I started to get suspicious a few days after we moved in that no mail was getting forwarded from our old address. The woman at the post office said it could take 2 weeks for the mail to get forwarded, so I waited. Nervously. Finally, today, I couldn't take it anymore. I called the USPS. After the USPS computer went down a few times during our call, the man finally told me they had no record of our address change. No record! Nothing!! I took a deep breath, and asked him to transfer me to the person who could handle the change on the phone. I waited on hold, then the call went through. I gave the surly woman my old and new address and after a moment of silence she said, "I'm sorry. Our computer system is down. You will have to call back later."

I think the nightmares will return.

P.S. I don't have many pictures yet, but I took some before we moved in and the cascade of troubles began. Here's two ... I'll try for more soon.

Moved out, not moved in

2010-07-02T15:22:00.000-07:00

Quick update to say we moved out of our old house on Sunday -- the less said about that nightmarish day the better -- and have spent the week housesitting for some friends who are out of town. Looks like we'll move in this weekend, although they won't finish the floors until the end of the day Tuesday. We don't care. We're moving in if we have to pitch a tent outside.

We told our tenant that he could start moving in on Monday, but by late Sunday night we still had three large, unwieldy items sitting in the backyard: a wheelbarrow full of shovels, rakes, and other heavy pointy things; a bike with a broken chain; and the double stroller full of a balance bike, a scooter, and two helmets. I couldn't fit all of these things in my car, and I didn't want to -- the tools and bike were really dirty.

So, on Monday morning, after dropping off the kids at school, I put on my running clothes and did what I called The Hillbilly Triathlon.

1. I ran to our old house. Got the wheelbarrow full of tools. Walked it down the sidewalk, pretending that it was completely normal to be pushing a wheelbarrow full of tools. Veered into the alley after half a block because I couldn't take the bemused looks.

2. Sprinted from our new house to our old house, got the bike with the broken chain. Tried to jog holding onto the handlebars, but kept losing control and banging the rubber grips into my ribs. Slowed to a walk. Tried to tell myself this was functional fitness, not a colossal waste of time.

3. Sprinted from our new house to our old house, got the stroller with the balance bike, scooter, and helmets. Ran to our friend's house, feeling slightly strange to be running with a kid-free stroller, but not as strange as walking with a wheelbarrow full of tools, so I stuck to the sidewalks.

Other than that the week has been strange -- we go over to the new house at the end of the day and wander around, not quite believing that this is where we'll be living.

The good and not so good

2010-06-25T13:21:00.000-07:00

As I sit here surrounded by boxes and rapidly emptying shelves, I thought I'd make a list of the things I'll miss about our house and some things ... not so much.

What I'll miss:

Being two and half blocks from the ocean. Our new house is eight blocks from the beach, so I know nobody is shedding tears on my behalf, but those five and half blocks make a difference when accompanied by the under-five set. No more running down to the park overlooking the ocean for a few minutes to watch kite surfers, chase after dogs, and steal other kids' balls.
Our windows. We had our windows replaced a few years ago and they are a thing of beauty. The windows in the new house are old, dirt-encrusted, and creaky. We'll replace them ... eventually.
The gorgeous built-in bookshelves and cabinets Dave painstakingly crafted. They housed books, stereo equipment, a record player, many LPs, a DVD player, a TV, a scanner, and a printer. It will take A LOT of furniture purchases to make up for these.
In a weird way, the size. The reason we're moving is that 1,000 square feet was feeling pretty cramped for a family of four, but the size does encourage togetherness. On one hand, there's no escape, which can suck, but on the other, there's no escape, which can sometimes be nice.

What I won't miss:

When the dishwasher is open, you can't go out the back door. Drives me INSANE.
To fit more than four people at our dinner table we have to rearrange the furniture, blocking access to the kitchen. Makes dinner parties an exercise in frustration.
Finding beer cans in the bushes every Monday morning.
Being the only family on our block.
Having no space for overnight visitors.

This has been a wonderful house. It's where we brought Rosemary as shell-shocked, mind-blown new parents. It's where she went from being a newborn to a toddler to preschooler, where she moved from a bassinet to a crib to a bunk bed. Here is where we came home with Gabriel, less shell-shocked but no less amazed. It's where the two kids whispered together at night, giggling and telling each other to go to sleep, only to start giggling all over again.

Now it's time to go, and time for me to finish packing.

Moving

2010-06-21T15:49:00.000-07:00

Last week we got the keys to our new house. We took the kids over there and they ran around and shouted, their voices echoing through the empty rooms. We're not moving in for a few weeks because we're having some work done: getting rid of the popcorn ceilings in the kitchen and living room, painting the kitchen cabinets, ripping out some cabinets and mirrored closet doors, and getting all new wood floors.

It was strange to go over there. It's not home. I know it will be -- especially once we get all of our things in there and start cooking and sleeping and living in the space -- but now it just feels odd. Plus there's all the questions that roll around in your head when you uproot and make your home somewhere else. What if we hate it? What if the neighbors are mean or strange or loud? What if that dog barks ALL THE TIME?

I'm finding that it's very different moving with kids. I know kids are extremely flexible and can make a home wherever they land, but I feel a lot of pressure to help them adjust to their new home.

So how am I dealing with these unsettled feelings? Shopping for my new home office! I just ordered this desk, and this chair (in tumeric bloom), and I'm daydreaming about moving out of my little nook into an actual office with desk space and bookshelves.

---

Along with the physical move, I'll probably be making a virtual move in the next few weeks. I started out wanting to keep this blog very separate from my professional site, but the division has me feeling splintered. I also have more to say -- I want to write about fitness and writing and lots of other things, and I think it would make sense to bring everything together. So stay tuned, and bear with me over these next two weeks. It's not easy packing up nine years of living.

37

2010-06-09T16:40:00.000-07:00

Dave had a friend in college who became obsessed with the number 37. He said if you started looking for it, the number would appear everywhere. In movies, on TV, in songs, in conversation when people are picking a number at random. Of course it probably is that case that once you start looking for something, you are bound to find it, but I recall a lot of late-night conversations about the number 37.

Today is my 37th birthday. I don't feel particularly upset or overly pleased about the number. I would prefer to be closer to 30, but I'm glad I'm not yet 40. It's a no pressure birthday, an under-the-radar birthday.

I woke up this morning and Dave had already left to bike to work, but he had taken the kids out last night to get cards for me while I was at a preschool board meeting. Rosemary, of course, picked a card with princesses on it. This is what she told Dave to write, "Happy Birthday Mommy. All your little princesses and your little prince love you so much. Love, Rosemary." Then she wrote some letters on the bottom of the card and turned them into boats and people. Gabriel picked out a card with a kitten on the front, which he petted and kissed when I took the card out of the envelope. Rosemary also told Dave what this card should say. It read, "Happy Birthday Mommy. Even though I am so small and put my handprints on the wall I still love you most of all. Love, Gabriel." And then my heart broke into a million happy little pieces. I kissed their warm heads and thought, "If this is what 37 will be like, I think I can take it."

Misery & sand

2010-05-27T20:40:00.000-07:00

Last week was miserable. Correction. I was miserable. Nothing went wrong, in fact I landed a new client and the kids were healthy and relatively well-behaved, but I couldn't get it together. Instead of looking forward to exploring and explaining on my days home with Rosemary and Gabriel, I faced Tuesday and Thursday with gritted teeth and barely-concealed irritation. In an effort to force myself out of my misery, I decided to take the kids to the zoo on Thursday. Because the zoo! Who doesn't love the zoo? Monkeys and flamingos and hippos and pigs!

Also, hordes of elementary school-age children on field trips. Everywhere. You know what elementary school-age kids like to do at the zoo? Get in your way and talk about the animal's butts. In the petting zoo, instead of watching Gabriel discover animals up close, we all watched six-year-old boys shove each other and make fun of the sheep and goats. (And yes, I realize that I will have a six year old boy eventually. And I'm sure they are very sweet at home, but I find groups of six year old boys terrifying.)

We went over to the flamingos and I kept losing sight of Gabriel among the chattering clumps of kids and having mini panic attacks while I scanned the crowds for his shock of blond hair. By the time we reached the gorillas I was already planning our escape. The San Diego Zoo is so huge and meandering that it can easily take you thirty minutes to get back to the exit, more if you have a toddler and a preschooler in tow.

Rosemary lost interest in the animals about an hour into the visit, and started a campaign to spend as much time as possible in the umbrella stroller, which I had brought for Gabriel. I'd push Gabriel up the hill to the next animal, and he'd jump out of the stroller to see the long-necked turtles, and Rosemary would shove her way in. Any other day I might have found it funny, but I just became more and more irritated. I told her I wasn't going to park the stroller in front of the glass, because other people couldn't see the animals. She whined, I persisted, and I ended up shoving the stroller as far away from the enclosure as possible, and she marched over and sat in it with her arms crossed. We repeated this for every animal until we reached the exit, and I'm sure we painted a cheerful picture, me with my mouth set in a grim line, her glaring at me from the stroller.

In an effort to save the day, I spent way to much for an ice cream sandwich (which Rosemary was surprised to discover wasn't made of bread) and split it between the kids. It helped, for a minute, but then I was sighing heavily and wiping the melting ice cream off of their sticky hands.

The cloud lifted over the weekend. I went up to Long Beach with the kids while Dave stayed at home and painted the house in preparation for the renters, and after I spent the morning snapping at the kids for such crimes as picking flowers, I gave in. I told my mom I needed a break. I had to get away from the kids, away from everybody. So I went for a run and then drove to a shopping center with a Barnes and Noble, a Starbucks, and Loehmann's. Seriously, what else do you need? I wandered around the bookstore and picked up some design books to get ideas for our new house, and then got a latte and parked myself on one of the couches in Starbucks. There, to my horror and delight, I overheard two men having a very loud, pretentious conversation about writing. One of them was talking about influential novels, and said, "Well a really good example of stream of consciousness writing is that book To the Lighthouse. Who wrote that?"

The other man, who looked to be in his 50s, said, "Hmmm, never heard of it."

Part of me wanted to scream, "Virginia Woolf, you idiots!" but I didn't want to get drawn into their conversation. So the first guy looked it up on his computer and they went on to talk about turning their novels into screenplays.

-------------

This week is much better. On Tuesday, after the kids got up from their naps, I suggested we walk down to the park overlooking the beach. Rosemary wanted to bring a ball, so I gave them each a ball to kick down the sidewalk. It turned out to be a great idea, because they forgot to get bored of walking and instead chased the ball all the way down to the beach. Gabriel saw the beach and the surfers and said in a hopeful way, "Down da beach? Go down da beach?" My first instinct was to say no, thinking about the sand and the mess and walking down all those steps and the fact that I hadn't planned on doing that, but then I thought for a minute. Who cares? Why do we live so close to the beach, anyway?

We all trooped down the stairs and the kids set themselves up a few feet away and buried the balls in the sand and I stared out at the ocean and took a big, deep breath. Gabriel came up to me first and wanted to sit on my lap.

I gathered him close and sniffed his warm, slightly sweaty, sweet-smelling head. Rosemary wandered over and asked me to take a picture of her. (I did not encourage these poses in any way. All her idea.)

The bad days are dark, but the good days are many and wonderful.

When, not if

2010-05-18T14:56:00.000-07:00

On Sunday I filled my car with three four-and five-year-old girls and their moms and we drove to the Center for Jewish Culture in La Jolla to see a production of Cinderella. Specifically, Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, the musical, performed by eerily talented seven to thirteen year olds, or "pre-high school" as the program called them, in a five hundred seat sold-out theater.

It was my friend's idea. She had taken her daughter to see The Sound of Music a few weeks earlier. Rosemary and I talked about it all week, and on Sunday afternoon she dressed in a sparkly silver dress and I put on a skirt and leopard-print shoes. We went over to our friend's house first. One of the girls was wearing her Cinderella dress-up costume and carrying a mesh bag full of fruit-scented lip gloss, which she opened up and immediately started smearing on Rosemary's cheeks and forehead.

Once everybody arrived, we installed boosters and car seats in my Mazda 5, a car I love because it fits six people in relative comfort. I had made a panicked trip to the car wash earlier that day to feed quarters into the vacuum and clean up the layer of cracker dust and trail mix that blanketed the backseat. I removed the portable high chair, the bag of stickers and coloring books I keep on hand to entertain the children at restaurants, the bag of sand toys for the playground, and the pile of reusable grocery bags on the passenger seat.

We buckled everyone in, and as I pulled out into the street the girls' chatter started to speed up and get louder and more frantic. One of the moms used some Cinderella-type blackmailing to keep a lid on the high-decibel shrieking. ("Does Cinderella yell? No, she does not.")

After we drove for a few minutes, the girl seated right behind me, who had never been in my car before, asked, "Hilary, what is that on your mirror?"

I glanced over. She had spied my two boxing glove key chains hanging from my rear view mirror.

I had forgotten they were there. They are a relic from my boxing days -- one of the gyms where I trained gave them out at some point -- but I keep them there because it would be too sad to get rid of them. Maybe it's just as sad to hang onto them.

The girl's mom said, "Those are boxing gloves. Hilary used to do a sport called boxing."

The girl was silent.

Then Rosemary, in her sparkly silver dress and shiny black shoes piped up. "Before I was born, my mommy boxed. She would get in the ring and punch people, and train with gloves on."

The girl lost interest in the subject and the three of them chattered excitedly the whole way there. We got to the theater and after a genuinely frightening fire alarm scare, where we all trooped outside while telling the girls, "It's okay, they are just testing the alarm" while exchanging worried glances over their heads, the musical began. It was incredibly professional for a youth theater. The kids all had headset mikes, the impressive scenery moved smoothly back and forth, and the young performers had clear, strong voices. Rosemary was enthralled, sitting forward in her seat and waving her arms and stomping her feet in a funny little march in time to the music.

As we left the girls twirled and sang and, in Rosemary's case, dreamed of being up on that stage.

It wasn't until I was biking home from the gym last night that I remembered the brief conversation about the boxing glove key chain.

I understand that you can't fight the princess propaganda. I know this obsession with looking fancy and fairy tales and talking in a creepy high voice and mooning over the prince is part of learning about what it means to be a girl, and eventually, a woman.

However, if all Rosemary sees are the shoes and the hair dryer and the makeup and the purses, she might think that's all there is for her. But what if, among the eyeshadow and the hairspray, she saw hand wraps and boxing gloves? Would that open up some window of her mind to a possibility that she wouldn't have considered? At the very least, I was immensely, perhaps foolishly, proud that she knew what boxing was, and that it was something a woman could do.

I want to get back into boxing for a long list of reasons, and most of them have nothing to do with Rosemary. But I think this experience has shown me that it's not if I get back to boxing, but when.

The Uptight Parent

2010-05-11T15:21:00.000-07:00

"Gabriel, if you hit Rosemary on the head again, you're getting a time out."

Bonk.

Wail.

I reluctantly get up off my comfortable seat on the couch and place Gabriel in time out, and try to convince Rosemary to stop leering at him righteously.
---------------------
"Rosemary, if you don't close your eyes and your mouth and go to sleep, you aren't getting a story tonight."

Cut to bedtime. Rosemary looks longingly at the pile of comic books and trudges off to bed.
---------------------
It's after dinner at our friend's house, and the adults are all sitting around the table finishing their drinks. The conversation is flowing and it's one of those nights when you feel like you could just sit there for hours, comparing notes, trading war stories, laughing. I look at my watch. It's 7:30. Crap. Reluctantly I stand up and go into the next room, where the kids are delightedly throwing around stuffed animals and singing silly songs.

"Okay everybody, it's getting close to bedtime, say goodbye to your friends and put your shoes on."

-------------------
In movies, the uptight parent is usually the villain. It's the freewheeling, devil-may-care parent who the audience loves, and who ends up teaching the uptight parent to just chill out and go crazy.

I'm the uptight parent. I follow nap and sleep schedules as if they were laws. My kids don't drink juice or watch TV at home. And, no matter what, if I issue a threat (time out, no story, we're going home), I follow through on it. Even though most of the time I would rather not leave, time outs are a pain, and I'd like to stay longer, too.

It's not all grim rules with me, of course -- I love running hand in hand with the kids, hearing their stories, playing Barbies and Legos, and watching them meander down the sidewalk inspecting sprinkler heads and palm fronds. But we follow rules and we don't deviate and I'm sure there will come a day when they resent me for it.

On Saturday Dave and I went out to dinner and a movie and got a babysitter we hadn't used in almost a year. She came around 5:15pm, so instead of putting the kids to bed immediately, she had a few hours to play with them.

When we came back from the movie (Babies, by the way, which was disappointing and I REALLY wanted to like it), we sat chatting with her. She was telling us what she did with the kids, and said, "Your kids are really, really polite."

I know I need to work on being more spontaneous, and some rules are meant to be broken, but sometimes being uptight pays off.

I've been quiet because ...

2010-05-03T14:27:00.000-07:00

A week-and-a-half-long grandparent visit ...

with trips to Balboa park to see a puppet show and mirrored, tiled lizards ...

a still-clingy, but ridiculously cute toddler ...

and a very serious toddler summit ...

Also a surprise influx of work. I thought I would have a bit of a lull, so I took on projects, and then work started coming from new and unexpected sources. Great for our bank account, not so great when we've got house guests and I work from home. The good news is that the apartment and the house are both rented, so now I can move on to worrying about packing up nine years of CRAP in the midst of working and taking care of kids. However, at least I have control over the packing situation, and it doesn't involve scheduling appointments with flaky house hunters. (Not that all house hunters are flaky! Most of them were nice!)

So now it's back to my 300+ page military novel while I mull over new and exciting ways to prepare mustard greens from the CSA.

Payback

2010-04-20T20:02:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago when I dropped Gabriel off at preschool, I saw another mom comforting her sobbing toddler. I kissed Gabriel, and like every morning, told him I loved him. He replied with "I jub oo Mama," which always melts my heart, then he went back to coloring. The other mom and I walked out at the same time, and I asked if her daughter always cried when she left.

"You never know," she said. "Sometimes she's fine, and sometimes she just loses it."

Later, I told the story to Dave and said, "Our kids never cry when I drop them off. I used to think it was because they both have been going there since they were infants, but that girl has been going there just as long." And then I said, "I guess our kids are just really confident and even-tempered."

I totally deserve what happened next.

Last Monday we got to school, dropped off Rosemary in her class, and Gabriel, as always, went running toward his classroom door. We were a little later than usual, so instead of going into the next room to do art, I said goodbye to Gabriel in the toddler classroom. As I started to leave, Gabriel's mouth turned down, tears sprouted in his eyes, and he ran over to me and clung to my neck in desperation. "Maybe he's just used to being dropped off in the next room," I said over his sobs.

On Wednesday morning I made sure to get him to school on time so I could drop him off in his usual spot. Gabriel was fine as I chatted with the teachers, but the moment I made a move toward the door he crumpled. I held him for a minute, but then carefully pried his hands off of my neck and left him, his wails following me down the hallway. I drove home with a pit in my stomach. (I waited an hour until I called the school and asked one of the teachers to check on him. They said he was playing happily.)

Friday morning Gabriel was the first to get up. I sat with him on the couch and he established the whereabouts of everyone in the family, "Daddy? Shower. Ro Ro? Sleeping."

Then I said, "Gabey, you're going to school today!"

He nodded happily.

"And you'll see Gina, and Abi, and Dylan, and Leo!"

Gabriel repeated all of their names, smiling.

"And then Mommy is going to say goodbye and go to work!"

At this his mouth drooped, the tears came, and he clung to me and sobbed and said, "No Mommy go. No Mommy work." You can guess how the drop-off went that day.

So now it's been a week of this. The teachers tell me he's fine a few minutes after I leave, and I know although he would prefer that I stay with him all day, he'd also prefer to eat ice cream for every meal. It's one thing to know intellectually that your child is fine, and that this may, in fact, be good for them; it's another thing entirely to be the cause of your child's tears.

The next time I'm tempted to be smug about my kids I hope I'll remember this.

Trader Joe's Recommendation for the Day

2010-04-19T12:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, in preparation for an afternoon outing at the park with friends, I was going to grab my usual Trader's Joes corn tortilla chips. Then this little red number caught my eye. That's Rice and Bean Chips with Adzuki Beans, if you can't read it. I have fond memories of adzuki beans from our trip to Hawaii -- there they put them on shave ice for a sweet/sour tang. These chips taste like a cross between a fried wonton and a tortilla chip, with a hint of cumin and salt. Delicious! I have no idea if they are more or less healthy than regular chips -- I am inept at reading nutrition labels -- but I promise they will be a hit at your next gathering.

That is all. Back to updates about Gabriel's new emotional blackmailing at school and of course the ever-thrilling house rental saga later in the week.

The Light

2010-04-14T21:38:00.000-07:00

We rented the apartment, thank GOD. As much as I fretted and whined about it here, I spent even more time stewing about it in my own mind, and I just got so sick of thinking about the whole situation. The timing of it, right as we're buying another house, led me down scary mental roads of financial ruin -- completely unrealistic, I know. Then there was the practical aspect of the whole thing. Making appointments for people to see it, praying the kids didn't do anything bizarre while they were here, waiting around for people to show, the awkward conversations you have to have while they look around .... all this repeated 3 - 4 times a day for four weeks.

The weekend was a low point. Dave got really sick, and since he didn't LOOK particularly sick I wasn't giving him much sympathy. Also -- other than with regards to my kids -- I'm not very sympathetic when people are sick. I was talking to my sister about it this weekend, and I discovered she's the same way. I think it comes from rarely being sick myself. Also, the way we were raised. If anyone in our family got sick when we were growing up, mom would say, "We don't have TIME to be sick." As if force of will and a busy schedule could keep you well. If I do get sick, it lasts a day, max. So when someone is sick for two, three, four, five days, I lose patience. It's not a nice way to be, I know.

Sunday was my grandmother's 90th birthday (in addition to being annoyingly healthy, my mom's side of the family is also really long-lived), and the celebration was in Rancho Cucamonga, a two hour drive from our house. When I saw Dave passed out on the couch Saturday afternoon, the thought entered my head, "What if he can't go?" We were doing family pictures, everyone was making a huge effort to be there, and there would be FOUR HOURS of driving with two small kids. I thought, "He'll go. He'll be fine. He'll go."

Cut to a few hours later. Dave said he didn't think he could go and I was spectacularly unsympathetic. So that led to a fight and bad feelings and I ended up in long-held-back tears -- about the apartment, about missing so much work when the kids were sick, about the new house -- really not much about him missing the birthday celebration. We grudgingly make peace, and I resigned myself to going it alone.

On Sunday I got up with the kids, fed them breakfast, then ran them around the neighborhood to get them some exercise before the car ride. People started showing up to see the apartment as I was getting ready, and I left with hope that maybe Dave would rent the apartment while I was gone.

I was armed with enough snacks for a week, a bag full of books and toys, and an iPod full of children's music, but I didn't need any of it. Gabriel fell asleep about a half hour in and slept most of the way, and Rosemary read quietly and played with her Fancy Nancy sticker book. They were so good. Instead of being stressful, the long drive through the valleys and mountains of Temecula and Riverside was somewhat relaxing.

The 90th birthday celebration was wonderful -- honoring my tenacious, eccentric, whip-smart grandmother. It was great to see my very large extended family, and to watch my kids playing with their cousins. Dave texted me to give me updates -- at one point he had three prospective tenants, but one by one they all disappeared. We started out the long drive home around 3:30pm -- and the kids did remarkably well. About 45 minutes from home boredom began to set in, and the kids started fighting and Gabriel actually began eating one of his board books. But we arrived home to find Dave well-rested and much improved.

On Monday our tenant moved out and I had the carpets cleaned and the place professionally cleaned. I think seeing it fresh and new inspired me to spruce up the ad on Craigslist, using the marketing copywriting tricks I've learned over the years.

By Tuesday night we had two people vying to rent the place -- both Navy guys from the recently arrived USS Carl Vinson. We picked the older guy with the best credit, and last night I had the best night's sleep I've had in weeks.

Easter & Earthquakes

2010-04-09T16:44:00.000-07:00

We had a lovely Easter Sunday, which we celebrated with our second-annual progressive neighborhood brunch. The brunch involved five different houses, and the kids looked for eggs in every backyard, becoming increasingly more chocolate-covered, while the adults ate fruit salad, crepes, empanadas, and Swiss pastries.

To make the whole thing even more pastoral, one of our friends has chickens, two of them have bunnies, and one even has a tortoise, so we were treated to girls in Easter hats and round-faced toddlers cradling bunnies in their arms. What a wonderful way to spend a morning -- strolling in the sun from house to house, chatting, eating, watching kids burst into each new backyard in search of more eggs and candy to fill their baskets.

We showed the apartment to four different people over the course of the weekend, and I was filled with hope that we'd have the whole thing settled by the beginning of the week. Even the earthquake that hit us Sunday afternoon couldn't dampen my spirits. I held Gabriel in my arms and stood in the doorway, and yelled at a bewildered Rosemary to come stand next to me. The earth rolled like someone shaking out a blanket, and then it was over and everyone nervously laughed and rehashed the experience.

Monday started out well. I dropped the kids off at school, came back to the house to clean up a bit and get organized, and then walked to a new (to me) coffee shop, filled with purpose. Gabriel was home sick from school on Friday, so I was behind on my editing project. I ordered a latte and found a perfect table; big enough for me to spread out my papers, at the back of the room so I could people-watch. I was expecting a call from one of the people who seemed most interested in the apartment -- she and her boyfriend spent almost an hour looking at the place, so I was sure she would be the one. I sipped the latte and opened my files on the computer. The latte was delicious. Okay, page one.

My phone buzzed and I looked down. The preschool. Shit. SHIT. Never, ever a good sign. I sighed, went outside, and as I stood in the drizzle I listened to the preschool director tell me how Gabriel had been crying the entire morning. He didn't have a fever, but he only wanted to be held, and the teacher had other toddlers to look after. And, I'm not proud of this, but I found myself arguing with the director a bit.

"He was fine all weekend. He slept so well. He was so happy this morning."

But there's nothing you can do. When the preschool calls, and you work from home, you have to respond. I trudged home through the rain, and while I was walking home the woman who was so interested in the apartment called to say that she didn't want the place. By the time I was home I was in tears -- frustrated that I was losing another day of work, irritated about the apartment situation, and just worn down by things not under my control. Of course when I got to Gabriel's classroom he looked perfectly fine, but I took him home anyway. I walked him around the block while he pushed a little toy shopping cart, and I counted the hours until naptime.

Rosemary had been complaining that her ears hurt, so I made a double appointment for them on Tuesday. They had matching ear infections, which explained the crying and why Gabriel was up every hour the previous night. Dave was home sick, too, and even though he was too tired to help with the kids, it was nice to have an adult to talk to during the long, long days of 6:30am - 6:30pm childcare.

So here we are, Friday. The kids have been in school, and I've made good progress on my work project. The apartment is still not rented, but we keep showing it. Our tenant leaves on Monday, and perhaps when the single-guy smell has dissipated it will be more appealing. I think I might fill it with fresh flowers and start baking cookies up there. Whatever works.

In the moment

2010-03-30T15:25:00.000-07:00

I would like to say that I've relaxed about the apartment not being rented and become very Zen about the whole thing, but that would be a lie -- a big, fat lie. In fact, right now my life seems to be dominated by two things: 30 Day Shred and fretting about and/or showing the apartment. I had no idea an extra 27 minutes would make a big difference in my schedule -- and it doesn't really, once I get down to doing it -- but figuring out when to fit it in and motivating to drag out the weights and the exercise mat are a daily challenge. The good news is that halfway through I'm seeing a difference. I haven't changed my eating habits, and the stupid scale has not budged, but my stomach seems to be getting leaner and more muscular. And if I had to nominate one body part that I would like to improve, it's my stomach. So that's good.

I thought we had a breakthrough on the apartment when I finally convinced Dave that we should put "For Rent" signs up in front of the house. An hour after we put it up, we got a call from a tenant in the condo next door. An hour later a guy across the street called. I was euphoric -- sure one of these would pan out. The guy across the street never showed up at his appointed time, and the guy next door was interested but his girlfriend has to rent the condo she owns first, and they really aren't in a position to move anytime soon.

Today, after another person called about the apartment, came to see it, and then slunk off with a, "Okay, we'll call you," I had a little fit of anger and frustration. It didn't help that Gabriel was following me around saying, "Beach? Shovel? Bucket? Beach? Beach?" It was 11:45am -- way too late to manage a trip to the beach before lunch and naptime -- but I gave each of the kids a shovel and bucket and we walked down to the beach.

For about ten minutes they merrily dug and flung sand around, and then Gabriel saw some kids getting in the ocean with a body board. He said, "Boy, surfing."
I said, "Yes, he's surfing, he's body boarding."
"Gabey surfing"
"Yes, this summer Gabey will surf, and Ro Ro will surf and mommy and daddy will surf."
"Mommy surf. Gabey surf," he said happily.
I though how wonderful it was he was excited about surfing, and thought ahead to the summer when we'd get them both out on boards in the whitewater. I forgot that toddlers have very little concept of the future. Their world is now, this moment, rightnowrightnowrightnow.
He said, a little more urgently, "Gabey surf. Ocean. Gabey! Ocean! Surf!"
Slowly it dawned on me. "Oh, we're not going right now. We'll go another time."
"Gabey surf! Ocean!" he wailed.
Of course at this point it was 12:15, and Gabriel was tired and hungry, and unable to deal with his thwarted desire. We trudged up the hill toward home, with Gabriel yelling, "Down hill! Surf! Ocean!" I picked him up and he sobbed and wailed and buried his head in my neck.
I guess living in the moment isn't always a good thing.

Trying not to panic

2010-03-22T20:46:00.000-07:00

If you were shopping for an apartment, would you call someone up at 5pm and tell them how much you loved the place, how you wanted it sight unseen from San Francisco, how you would FedEx a cashier's check, and then not answer the phone when the potential landlord called you back the next day, and then never return the message? Would you, after looking at the place, call at 2:45pm and say, "I'd like to see it again; can I come over at 3pm?" and then never show up, never call, and not answer the phone or return the message?

This is what has been happening over the last two days with the apartment. Flagrant, pointless flakiness. I understand if someone changes their mind, but why wouldn't they just tell me that? And what happened in those fifteen minutes to that guy that made him decide, "Eh, I'm going to blow off the appointment and not tell that nice lady waiting around for me"?

I don't know what it is about this process of renting the apartment that gets to me, but it throws me into a tailspin of anxiety every time. It's a combination of the waiting-for-the-phone-to-ring nervousness of dating combined with the financial anxiety of a job search. Also, a personal quirk of mine is that I can't stand unfinished tasks, unclosed loops. That's great for meeting deadlines but horrible for things that, out of necessity, require a little uncertainty. Plus, since I'm the one home most of the time, I have deal with all of these people on the phone and then show them around the apartment. The apartment which our tenant, the Marine, has decorated with a full-sized American flag with blood splattered in the upper right corner. He recently returned from Iraq, so I'm sure this has great personal significance, but it doesn't really make people see this place as their future home. The logical part of my brain says, "We've had it listed for four days. Last time it took two weeks to rent." The irrational side, which seems to have drowned out the logical side, says, "We'll neeeeever rent it! Nobody wants it? What are we going to dooooo???"

Saturday night we went out to an early dinner with friends at the wonderful Linkery -- homemade sausages, grilled snow peas with soy sauce and ginger, incredible beer, everything made in house and sourced from local farms. Amazing. Great friends, great conversation. They wanted to see Alice in Wonderland, so we waited around for the 9pm showing to see it in 3D. Oh, man. Not a good movie. I felt the hours ticking by, knowing it would be close midnight before I'd get to sleep, knowing we were paying more and more to our babysitter as the movie stretched on, knowing Gabriel would most likely be up before six. It was probably a result of all of these happy thoughts that I went to bed with a stomachache. I was awakened at 3:30am by Rosemary calling out (softly, to her credit, so she wouldn't wake Gabriel), "Mama, Mama, Mama." She had forgotten to put on her pullup, and wet her bed. We did the middle-of-the-night rinse off in the bath, changed her sheets, got her back to bed. Then, what seemed like minutes later, Gabriel woke up at 5:45am.

This let to a miserable Sunday, in which those people in San Francisco who said they definitely wanted the place didn't even answer their phone, and Dave and I bickered about nonsense, our nerves frayed by the lack of sleep. I grumped through the day until I went for a short interval run and then did 30 Day Shred, and that cheered me up for the rest of the day until I fell asleep on the couch at 8pm after a glass of wine.

Today, as I worked, I tried to push down the anxiety, but it kept bubbling up, and my mind jumped from unhappy thought to unhappy thought. Tomorrow, I'm home with the kids, and I hope the immediacy of their needs--the diaper changes, the snacks, the books that must be read and Barbies that must be dressed--will distract me from bigger issues, problems I can't solve with milk and graham crackers.

Bullet Friday

2010-03-19T14:37:00.000-07:00

It's a list-y, bullet-y kind of day. So here you have it:

Due to a previously planned trip, I realized last week I can't do the Rock 'n Roll half marathon in June. That left me without a semi-pointless exercise goal, so on my long run on Saturday I thought, "What if I did the 30 Day Shred as it was meant to be done? Every day for 30 days? On top of my normal routine?" The idea made me nervous and I immediately thought of reasons why I couldn't do it, which tells me it's a good challenge. The workout is not much of a time commitment or in itself all that difficult -- although it an intense 26 minutes -- the difficulty is doing it EVERY DAY. On top of my morning run with the kids or my hour-long class at the gym. So we'll see. At times I find myself slacking off a bit in my other workouts, thinking, "Well, I did already work out ..." However, I do know that it's good to shake up your fitness routines so that you're always pushing and challenging your body.
We just found out our tenant is getting sent to Afghanistan in mid-April, so the hunt for a new tenant is on. Oh, how I despise this process.
We had the inspection for our possible new house on Thursday. There are some big things that need to be fixed -- not deal breakers, but we'll need to get estimates and might need to renegotiate. The whole thing seems so far away and not-quite-real to me, so I'm just going along for the ride at this point, not getting too attached either way.
Gabriel has discovered a new-to-him book, Good Night, Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann. He's now constantly trying to get people to read it to him. "Sit. Mama. Read," he says with authority. He calls it "Good Nigh Go-li-li-la." This led to perhaps the cutest thing I've ever seen in my entire life: Rosemary reading the book to Gabriel, both kids in their pajamas, with bed-disheveled hair. Gabriel was like a mini, blonde, Flavor Flav, repeating select works enthusiastically. "Win-dow! Gir-affe! Hyena!" I caught in on video, because the one thing I've learned with the second kid is that you think you'll never forget and you do, you always do.
Finally, Victoria had the idea to take the girls ice skating on Thursday morning. It was really more like ice-standing, because they spent the whole time figuring out how not to have their feet come flying out from under them when they let go of the instructor. But they loved it.

Negotiations

2010-03-14T20:57:00.000-07:00

We bought this house, our first house, in April, 2001. We had spent the previous three years renting a cheap duplex in the southern part of Pacific Beach, putting all of my salary into savings. Our realtor was a friend of my boss at the time, and the house we ended up with was the first one we looked at. It's funny how everything is a matter of perspective, because I fell in love with this rundown, weed-choked, almost-abandoned beach bungalow. It was a mess, but it was better than any of our previous apartments. I loved its proximity to the beach, the huge backyard, the garage, and the hardwood floors. I ignored the turtle carcasses in the backyard, the outdoor washer and dryer, and the stained, peeling linoleum in the kitchen. It was just the two of us, so two bedrooms and two bathrooms seemed kingly. The housing market was on its way up, and when it was time to make an offer we made a feeble attempt at negotiation and ended up paying full price. It was such a seller's market that when we asked as a condition of sale that the owners either find or replace the missing kitchen drawer, they refused. They said they didn't know where it was. We lived with a gaping hole in the kitchen cabinets until we had a drawer made a few years later. (We later found out the house had been abandoned in the 80s, so we imagined that a hobo used it for firewood one cold night.)

Over the past nine years we've weeded and demolished and painted and upgraded so that the house -- while small -- is funky and cute instead of creepy and decrepit. But it's getting small. We'd like for the kids to have their own rooms, to actually be able to sit more than four people at the dinner table, and for overnight guests to have a place to sleep.

We've been keeping track of the MLS listings and have kept our eye on a house in the same neighborhood, just a few blocks away, with three bedrooms plus an extra room that would be perfect for guests, or my office, or a playroom, or maybe all three. Last week, after looking at the house three times, we made an offer.

Our realtor this time is one of the most masterful negotiators I've seen. She advised us to start off with an offer well under their asking price, and when they came back with counteroffers that were still miles apart from our offer, she held the line, inching our offer up in the smallest of increments. She spent much of her time telling us what a fool the other realtor was -- and seemed to spend just as much time telling him what a fool he was. We went back and forth for a week and a half, and every time we sent off an offer way under their asking price I became gripped with panic. What if they tell us to go to hell? What if there's another buyer? What if we're wrong, and this house isn't overpriced? At a certain point I told Dave when he asked my opinion, "Just don't listen to me. Whatever I say about negotiating on this house, just ignore me." Then after we sent off another counteroffer and they hadn't responded in a few days I'd wander around the house wringing my hands thinking that perhaps we truly had screwed up this time.

Friday we found out they accepted our final offer. We settled on an amount way under the asking price -- all a function of the terrible housing market and our hard-nosed realtor. We won't move in until late summer, because the current owners are remodeling their new house. That will give us time to finish fixing up our house. We'll rent it out, because along with the apartment we built over the garage, it will throw off some income each month.

So life won't change for the near future -- other than the scramble to get the house inspected and the loan finished. Now I'm daydreaming about paint colors and furniture arrangement, and instead of wasting time on gossip and fashion websites I'm trolling for home design inspiration. Know of any good ones? I've got some bedrooms to decorate ...

The good ones

2010-03-09T14:30:00.000-08:00

I mentioned before I have never had hordes of friends -- always just a few close ones who when I finally decide that yes, I guess they do actually like me, I hang on to for a long time.

One of my oldest and best friends came down for a night over the weekend.

We didn't actually do very much. She read to the kids in a very convincing Cookie Monster voice, we ate dinner, and then we put the kids to bed and sat around and talked, listened to music, and ate granola covered vanilla ice cream. I can't imagine a better night. It had me dreaming about a trip to New York to visit some of the other good ones.

Promises of puppies and Disneyland

2010-03-01T15:53:00.001-08:00

According to the local news, this past weekend marks the fifth weekend out of the last eight when rain has fallen -- and it's supposed to rain again this coming weekend. I understand that I have NO BUSINESS complaining about our small amount of rain, and actually, I'm not complaining. We installed gutters, fixed our fireplace, and built a stone path to the front door this fall, so everything is very cozy and comfortable when the rain is hitting the windows with the strength of someone spraying it with a hose. I also much prefer the rain to fall on the weekend, because I have Dave to help with the childcare and don't feel so desperately trapped inside with the kids. Other than Rosemary's epic tantrum over the fact that I brought her the wrong sweatshirt and refused to get the the one she wanted (and she refused to get down off her chair and get it herself), the weekend was pleasant. We finally made it back to the farmer's market on Sunday and spent way too much on Fuji apples, oranges, chard, golden beets, broccoli, bread, and free-range eggs. We then swung by Homegrown Meats--they sell meat from grass fed cows on nearby Palomar Mountain--and got some stew beef for chili, flank steak, and ground turkey that will make some sort of appearance this week.

There were Nap Issues that I will not describe further due to how ridiculous it is that I get SO UPSET when naps don't go as planned, but then we had a lovely afternoon and evening with a family from our preschool.

Actually it's a bigger deal than that. It was Rosemary's first coed playdate. Which isn't that big of a deal at age four, I understand, but Rosemary has been a little obsessed with this boy. She has been asking for him to come over and play for weeks, and when I mentioned it to his dad a few weeks ago, I was taken aback to when the dad said, "Yeah, I talked to him about it, and he isn't sure about the idea."

Ouch. I left it alone and tried to change the subject whenever Rosemary brought up the idea that he should come over, but four year olds are not so good at letting things go. I heard about how handsome he is (!) how he is her boyfriend (!!!) and how he told her he wanted to come over.

Finally, last week, I ran into the boy's mom and she said he had changed his mind -- he wanted to come over now. Then she leaned toward me and whispered, "I have some stories for you!"

Uh oh.

So they came over Sunday afternoon. The family also has a two-year-old girl, and after the initial awkwardness, the kids all ran around the house happily pulling all of our toys onto the floor. Gabriel was delighted to see two older kids from school in his house. He would shout their names every now and then as if to say, "Do you see who is here? How great is this?"

Once the kids were safely in the other room, the boy's parents told us that Rosemary has been waging a very effective campaign to get him to come over. Apparently she promised both a puppy and a trip to Disneyland if he consented to a playdate. Dude. That girl doesn't play around. We all wondered if the boy would hold out his hand as he left for the puppy and/or Disneyland tickets, but thankfully he seemed to have forgotten about the blackmail.

We all had such a great time they stayed for dinner and we had Dave's wonderful chili. Thankfully for us, Rosemary's crush has really cool parents.

Hippos & Introverts

2010-02-23T21:07:00.000-08:00

Gabriel has become very interested in hippos lately -- or "hee-poe" as he says -- and I inadvertently turned it into a full-blown obsession when I showed him a YouTube video about a couple in South Africa who have a hippo as a pet. The hippo's name is Jessica and they treat her like their daughter, even giving her a nightly back rub while she rests her head on a pink pillow and they cover her up with a very large pink blanket. It sounds wacky but it's actually adorable, and it's easy to see why so many children's books feature hippos. Despite the fact that they are dangerous animals (which is what makes the Jessica thing so remarkable), they look so squishy and lovable and sort of silly. So now, if anyone happens to sit down in front of the computer, Gabriel screeches urgently, "Hee-poe! Hee-poe!!" Sometimes, when he's in the middle of playing he'll just say "hee-poe" quietly to himself and smile.

His language is exploding. Today he astonished me by peeking through the slats of the chair and saying, "I see you." It sounded more like, "Ahsee ewe," but I got the idea. He's gone from one word nouns to three-word sentences fairly rapidly, and it's so much fun to see his delight when he's able to communicate.

I've been thinking a lot about introverts versus extroverts. I got my hair done on Saturday and I was talking to the stylist about the classic definition of the two: extroverts recharge and get energy from other people, and introverts need to be by themselves to refuel. Then I read a post on Finslippy.com where she talks about becoming overwhelmed at a conference, and many of the comments talked about introverts versus extroverts. One person mentioned a book called The Introvert Advantage. I Googled it and found the author's website, and then took the self assessment there and scored HIGH on the introvert scale. Which doesn't surprise me at all -- I get itchy when I don't get enough time by myself, and I much prefer gatherings of a few people rather than huge social events. The thing I didn't realize was a characteristic of introverts is not considering casual acquaintances as friends. Although I've often wished I was different -- I'm envious of people who have huge, wide-ranging groups of friends -- I've always had just a few close friends. It takes me a long time to reach out and then get to know someone, but once I do it's hard to get rid of me. I'm slowly learning to stop fighting this and stop trying to change, and instead learning to accept and work within my essential crabby, hermit-like nature. (Okay, fine, celebrate my self-reflective independence.)

Judgment

2010-02-16T14:44:00.000-08:00

The very loooong President's Day holiday is over (the kids' school was closed Friday and Monday) and it was actually quite enjoyable thanks to my mom coming down to watch the kids on Thursday, meeting a friend and her kids at a beachside playground on Friday, a babysitter Saturday night for a pre-Valentine's Day sushi dinner, and a babysitter for three hours Monday morning so I could work. We also spent Sunday morning at our friend's house eating pancakes and homemade croissants, and then we staggered into their backyard and sat in the sun while the girls put on bathing suits and ran around us in circles and the toddlers cooked imaginary meals in the plastic kitchen.

When I was at the playground on Friday I overheard a dad chatting with a mom while their toddlers wandered around the playground eating sand. They exchanged pleasantries about one another's kids, and the woman must have complimented the other toddler's speaking skills, because the dad immediately began gushing about how he had been teaching his child to read using the Your Baby Can Read system. He explained that there's a window between birth and age four when the child's brain creates connections at an astonishing rate, and that if you capitalize on it your baby will speak earlier, and yes, even learn to read.

I had an immediate, visceral response to this which was, "That's idiotic. This guy is kidding himself if he thinks showing his ten-month-old flash cards is going to make any difference in her intelligence or success. The kid is benefitting from a parent's attention and focus, but the same thing can be achieved with books, not some crazy early language development system that is probably ridiculously overpriced and makes people think they're raising baby geniuses."

I was distracted from my mental tirade because the woman's toddler approached Rosemary and Gabriel and poured sand in their little cups of trail mix; which, weirdly, didn't upset my kids at all. They just shook out the sand and kept munching.

Later in the afternoon, when the kids were napping, I found myself thinking about this father again. I started to get agitated about how deluded he was when I stopped short. Why did I care? I often say, as many mothers do these days, "Hey, whatever you want to do is fine. As long as it works for you, that's great!" Why couldn't I do the same with this dad? It's wonderful if he wants to spend time teaching his daughter to read, and if he spends money on some kind of magic system, that's his business, isn't it?

The truth is it's extremely hard not to judge, especially about a subject as important and all-encompassing as child-rearing. It's one thing to walk around saying, "Hey, I don't judge," when it's something that you don't actually care about. (Like if you formula feed or breast feed. I nursed my kids for a time and gave them formula for a time, so it honestly does not matter to me either way what others do. Whatever gets you through that exhilarating and exhausting first year.)

I caught myself in full-on judgment, and it wasn't pretty. It's easy not to be judgmental about something you already agree with -- it's much harder to put aside your opinions and prejudices and shrug your shoulders and say, "Hey, whatever works for you."

----------------

Gabriel had a nightmare this week, and it was both the saddest and cutest thing I've ever seen. I was woken up at 3 am by the sound of him calling out. At first I thought he was saying, "No, Daddy!" but when I got into the kids' room I saw him standing up in his crib and realized he was yelling, "No doggy! No doggy!" I settled him down and patted his back, and as he sighed himself to sleep I smiled at the sweetness of a toddler nightmare.

This morning Rosemary bounded out of bed and said, "Guess what I dreamed about! Gum!"

I said, "Really? What about gum?"

"There was gum in ice cream!"

"Wow -- then what happened?"

"Oh, that's it."

Keeping House

2010-02-09T21:50:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I read an interview with Maggie Gyllenhaal in New York magazine, and she mentioned she was reading the book Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, because there were so many basic things about cleaning, food storage, laundry care, and general house keeping upitude that she didn't know. (I still have a hard time believing that she can't hire out all of these tasks, but perhaps she's more DIY than I thought.) I kept thinking about the book--the idea that there was a science to cleaning house rather than just barely (or not at all) keeping ahead of the mess and clutter and chaos was appealing. We got rid of our every-two week house-cleaner in the great Jobs Loss of 2009, and since my freelance work can sometimes ebb and flow, I thought I could fit in cleaning the house here and there. I've been consistently busy for the past few months and I have been putting off cleaning until it gets so depressing and grimy I don't even want to start.

I need help, I thought. I need a system. I ordered the book and started reading it this weekend. Dude, this woman is SERIOUS about housework. It's tempting to write her off as some crazed obsessive compulsive housewife, but she's a lawyer and obviously really smart and she makes a good point that keeping an organized and clean house will flow into other areas of your life. It's true -- when the house is clean my mind is clearer and I feel more efficient and even happier. But keeping it that way -- in a one thousand square foot house with two small children -- is an ongoing, uphill battle.

They author, Cheryl Mendelson, says at the beginning that this is a guide and you should adapt it to fit your household. But damn, have I ever been doing it wrong. I mostly do the things she says you should do every day (dirty clothes in hamper, clean up after meals, make beds), but it hadn't occurred to me to change the kitchen towels every day. Clean sinks and tubs after use? Not going to happen. Clean (sweep and mop) kitchen floor? Okay, maybe if I use a Swiffer for the mopping. The really frightening list, however, is her suggested weekly chores:

Change sheets & bathroom towels
Vacuum rugs, floors, upholstered furniture (!!), lampshades (!!!!!)
Wash floors
Dust -- pictures mirrors, light fixtures, light bulbs
Wipe fingerprints from doorknobs, woodwork, phone, keyboard
Wash bathroom (toilet, sink, tub, etc)
Wash combs and brushes (WTF, Cheryl?)
Clean entire kitchen (sigh)
Wash out and sanitize garbage cans

Holy crap do I have a lot of work to do. I have gotten as far as writing the list on a piece of paper and carrying it from room to room, hoping that it will somehow become less daunting over time. It hasn't. But weirdly I feel a little bit like she's looking over my shoulder as I walk through the house, so to quiet her up a bit I washed our comforter cover AND the shower curtain liner. The combs and brushes remain UNWASHED.

Bits & Pieces

2010-02-05T12:20:00.000-08:00

Well. That was a fun way to start the morning. I woke up feeling a little nauseous, then felt so bad all I could do was curl up on the couch and moan. Luckily Dave didn't bike today so he could help get the kids dressed and make their lunches. Then -- and well there's no nice way to say this -- I threw up and instantly felt like a new woman. (And NO, I'm NOT pregnant. 100% sure. I'm not.)

I sent Dave off to work and got the kids in the car to take them to school, armed with a plastic bag in case things went south. Everything went fine, I've kept down tea and toast, and I seem to be okay. Weird.

I guess it's part of getting older, but I feel like before I had kids I NEVER, EVER got sick. Now here I am with what I think is a sinus infection (achy teeth, congestion that won't go away) and mysterious vomiting. Prior to having kids I never got sinus infections, but I seem to get them a few times a year now. This all makes me think of something our friend the brilliant evolutionary biologist said. I'm paraphrasing, and probably completely getting it wrong, but he said he's seeing a lot of science to support the idea that our bodies are geared to reproduce, and then after that start falling apart. How depressing! Some days it sure feels like that -- but of course it may just be the fact that I'm getting older.

---------

So after the last depressing post I feel that I have to add caveats. I LOVE to hold my kids. I love to inhale their sweet smell, and pull them close. It's just that when I get tired and overwhelmed, I notice that I shut down a bit physically. A solution that works for me is to get in lots of hugs when I'm feeling rested and refreshed. That way everyone wins.

---------

Yesterday I was home with the kids, and most of it was just lovely. We went for our run on the boardwalk, where I was stopped by a dad and his seventeen-year-old kid because he saw my Middlebury shirt. He pointed to his Williams hat, and we reminisced about our colleges for a moment. He was visiting San Diego with his son for his 50th birthday, and they were going to take a surf lesson and do some kind of Crossfit certification. I did that thing where I became extremely concerned that they would have a good time and think positively about San Diego, hoping they didn't notice the homeless on the boardwalk or run into any drunk twentysomethings. Why do I care? I don't know.

After I showered, we attempted to go to storytime at the La Jolla library, but found when we arrived that the library was closed for staff training. Rosemary: "Mommy, what's staff training? Who teaches the librarians? What do they teach them?"

No worries, we just carried on down the road to the excellent playground at the La Jolla Rec Center. The kids were so well-behaved it was a little eerie. I watched Gabriel playing in the sand with a little boy who looked to be about two, and I smiled as they carefully took turns with a shovel they had found. Gabriel would scoop up sand, put it in the little spinny dish thing, and then seriously hand it over to his new friend. All of this without language, and amazingly without any fighting. I'm not sure if he's learning it from Rosemary, from preschool, or if it's just his nature, but the boy has a wonderful generous streak. (We of course have our fair share of ear-piercing shrieks of "miiiiiine" "miiiiine," but yesterday he seemed to be all about the sharing.)

We had a nice picnic lunch, then when it was time to leave I got only a brief moment of protest from Gabriel, and off we went.

After naps, I was with the kids on the couch and talking to Gabriel about how much we love Rosemary. (It's an awesome game, because she wiggles with pleasure and Gabriel is happy to take part in any conversation about his beloved Ro Ro.) He nodded agreeably and we chatted about what a great sister she is. Then I said, "Gabriel, can you kiss Ro Ro's nose?"

He said, "Yap," and leaned in gently and touched his lips to her nose.

"Gabriel, can you kiss Ro Ro's ears?"

"Yap."

This whole thing only lasted about five minutes, but it was a lovely interlude. Then I made popcorn and built them a fort with a blanket and chairs, before remembering that we had to go to the drugstore.

And this is how a perfectly lovely day can go bad. They were both grouchy in the stroller, and by the time I got them home it was past 5pm. I tried to placate them with carrots and crackers, but Gabriel had decided that he needed all of my attention RIGHT THEN. I tried to cook dinner and he stood in the kitchen and howled, and angrily slammed drawers closed like a pissed-off teenager. I felt my shoulders rise to my ears, I snapped at Rosemary to play with her brother, and frantically tried to throw together dinner while the screamed escalated in volume and fury.

By the time Dave came home the two kids were in the bath and I was trying to reclaim some patience by reading a magazine while they splashed around. I didn't truly relax until Gabriel was zipped in his pajamas, holding his milk and and his owl ("Ow-al? Ow-al!").

These days, they can go from wonderful to horrible so quickly.

True stories

2010-02-02T21:37:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading -- back to back -- Liar's Club and Lit by Mary Karr. The first, which was published in 1995 and ushered in a whole era of honest, unflinching memoirs, is about Mary's harrowing experience growing up in an East Texas refinery town. Lit, which was just published in 2009, is the story of the author becoming sober and discovering her literary voice: thus the double meaning of "lit." I wouldn't say I enjoyed reading the books, but they got me thinking. Particularly the part in Lit when Mary receives a letter responding to a first draft of her memoir (disguised as fiction) from her friend Tobias Wolff, himself a famous author known for his memoir This Boy's Life. Toby, as she calls him, felt that Mary was being too kind to herself. This is what he wrote:

"Don't approach your history as something to be shaken for its cautionary fruit ... Tell your stories, and your story will be revealed ... Don't be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else. Take no care for your dignity. Those were hard things for me to come by, and I offer them to you for what they may be worth."

I've been thinking about this a lot, and the fact that my favorite writers aren't afraid to show themselves as petty, or mean, or crazy, or shallow. I think I need to work on that in my own writing.

................................

Before I had kids, I imagined I'd always open my arms for them. That no matter what time of day or night, or whatever I was doing, I would always be available for a hug. But that's not me. I can't do it. It's not that I'm not affectionate with the kids. Especially first thing in the morning, when they're flushed and warm, and slightly dazed from sleep, I love to fold them under my arms and feel them nestle in close.

But often, as the day goes on, and the demands increase and my mind is on work, and making dinner, and crumbs on the floor and the mold in the shower, I pull away. Rosemary reaches out, and I push her off, saying, "I have to make dinner," or "Go play with your brother," or "I need to check my email." She asks me to snuggle with her and I have a million reasons why I can't. My capacity for physical affection is like an hourglass -- as the day goes on it slips away, and by the end of the day I'm rushing them off to bed so I can sit by myself, surrounded by air and silence.

Sometimes I flash forward ten or fifteen years, to when Rosemary has stopped coming to me for hugs because she knows I'll say no. I don't want to be removed, and I'm not always this way, but there are times when her need is so great and insistent I feel myself shutting down. I don't want to be cold, and I don't want to be rigid, but I know sometimes I can be both, and it's not fair to my beautiful little girl.

So I try. When I'm feeling relaxed and not worn down by the heavy details of the day, I'm making an effort to say to Rosemary, "Come here. Give me a hug." I wish I could always be this way, but now I'm going for sometimes.
..........................................

After a night of very little sleep due to Gabriel screaming, "Owie owie owie" and "Mamama" on and off for for four hours, it occurred to me -- when he woke up screaming from his nap -- that he might have an ear infection. I had been grousing and groaning about the night from hell, because his cold seemed to almost be gone and he wasn't coughing that much and WHY WOULDN'T HE SLEEP? Let's blame the sleep deprivation that it took me until 2:30pm to put the puzzle together. A week of congestion and coughing followed by unexplained middle-of-the-night pain? That's an ear infection. Dave, who was home from work with minor stomach troubles, said, "Let's see if we can get an appointment." I almost started arguing with him that of course we couldn't get an appointment this late in the day, and I had so much work to do the next day, blah blah blah, but he was already dialing the phone and had made an appointment for later that afternoon before I could even open my mouth.

The doctor confirmed it -- pus and swelling in the right ear -- so the babe is dosed up with antibiotics and ibuprofen and we all hope it can hold him together until morning.

90s Woman

2010-01-28T11:35:00.000-08:00

The editor who accepted my piece at Babble.com, Ada Calhoun, sadly left the magazine right after we started working together, but I've kept in touch with her via Facebook. She and a friend started a blog that's a conversation about music, art, culture, and feminism in 90s -- what it was like to be a 90s woman. They are whip-smart women and amazing writers, and I've loved following their meandering conversation about the decade I graduated from high school, started and finished college, moved to SD, got my first job, and got married.

They accept photos and stories from readers about their experience as a 90s woman. So I dug through a box of pictures in the garage, wrote something up, and sent it off. I was purely for my own amusement, but I'm trying to do more of that kind of thing. Thinking, reaching out, writing for fun. The pictures make me both smile and cringe.

Croup

2010-01-26T20:25:00.000-08:00

Last night, just as we were going to bed, a horrible noise came from the kids' bedroom. A barking cough from the crib, then silence, then a pitiful, "Maaamaaaa." I brought Gabriel to the couch and nestled him on my chest. His breath rattled in and out and he coughed and tried to get comfortable. Dave set up the humidifier and I tried to put Gabriel back in the crib and he immediately started wailing. I resigned myself to a night on the couch. As he lay on my chest I patted his stubby toddler legs -- at once both chubby and muscular -- and listened as his body relaxed and he fell asleep. At 11:30 I woke up to him squirming around, trying to get comfortable. I took a chance and put him in the crib, and he slept soundly until 6:30am. I, however, did not. Although I know croup is common, and not something to worry about, his labored breathing freaked me out. So I did something I haven't done since he was a newborn -- I went in at two in the morning when he was fast asleep just to make sure he was still breathing.

Gabriel was jolly today, making full use of his new ability to say his own name. He pointed to some scribbles he did at preschool and said, in his funny munchkin voice, "Gabey." If we wants something he'll point to it and then to himself and say, "Gabey!" He's adding new words every day, but shows no interest in repeating a word after you carefully enunciate whatever you're trying to get him to say. Then a day or a week later, he'll point and say, "Tree."

The new year has started off well and there are a number of exciting possibilities -- some work related, some not -- bubbling under the surface. The kids are starting to play together for longer and longer intervals, Dave's job is going well, and (despite the croup) we have made it this far through the winter without any serious illness. I know this peace and calm can't last, but it's a wonderful place to be right now.

Train, train

2010-01-20T20:26:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, Ro and I took the train from Solana Beach to Los Angeles to visit my sister and brother in law and their new kitten, Moxie. It Dave's idea initially, and in addition to being fun, I thought it would be nice to have some time with just Rosemary. Gabriel takes so much of my energy and time that I feel he has to be out of the picture for me to fully pay attention to Rosemary.

We left our car at the parking lot at Solana Beach, and as soon as Rosemary saw a train rushing by she said, "Oh! Gabriel would love this!"

We waited about twenty minutes for our 11 am train to come, and all the while Rosemary pelted me with her brand of insistent questioning. "Why isn't the train here? What's she doing? What does that sign say? Why do we have to stand behind the yellow line? When is the train coming? Can I have lunch? Why did we take an elevator down here? Look, he has shoes like Daddy!" That last comment was in reference to a man who clopped by on his clip-in cycling shoes. He chuckled.

The train arrived, and we boarded. I told Rosemary to stand in the aisle so I could take a picture. Inexplicably, she struck this pose:

And then I took one of the two of us:

Rosemary wasn't as fascinated by the train as I thought she would be. It's a mostly beautiful ride along the coast. She kept asking if we were closer to the ocean than the boardwalk by our house. At one point, in San Clemente, the train seems to be rushing along right on top of the sand. Vacation homes and beach bungalows on the right, golden sand and peeling waves on the left. It was one of those time when I'm in awe of where we live.

We made paper bag puppets, ate lunch, read a book, and I tried to convince Rosemary to look at her Supergirl book so I could read. Of course suddenly she had no interest in that, so we spent most of the trip talking.

At Union Station in LA we took the Metro to Highland Park, where my sister and her husband live. Rosemary LOVED the Metro. She called it the fast train, even though I told her the Amtrak (or, Hamtrak as she insisted on calling it) was faster. She asked questions on the quiet Metro car in a VERY LOUD VOICE until I shushed her. Then she yelled, "WHY DID YOU SAY SHHH?" Sigh.

We got to our destination, and Rosemary was immediately transfixed by the kitten. Allison taught her how to hold Moxie, much to the kitten's dismay:

We also spent some time inspecting their compost:

It was a delightful afternoon, and I enjoyed exploring more of Highland Park and spending time with my sister and brother in law. After making pizzas we put Rosemary to bed in her inflatable Winnie the Pooh bed (which was almost flat in the morning), and after some wine and conversation I went to bed happy in the knowledge that there was NO WAY Gabriel could wake me up in the morning.

The day, Rosemary played with the kitten some more, and then we boarded the train home. This time, Ro dressed for the occasion:

It was a lovely trip, but I was happy to return to the guys. Gabriel and Dave seemed to have bonded while we were gone, and everybody survived. All in all a success.

And now we hunker down in one of the worst rainstorms I've seen in Southern California, everyone trying not to panic. It's weather! And it scares us!

Careful what you wish for

2010-01-15T14:05:00.000-08:00

When I was pregnant with Rosemary, Dave and I had the time to have long, wondering conversations about what-might-be. (Seriously--I wake up each morning with a growing list of things I never had time to talk to Dave about. Real conversation is impossible when the kids are awake, and then by the time they are in bed my mind shuts down and it's all I can do to watch a full episode of "Celebrity Rehab.") Anyway, before we had kids we could talk. We'd talk about what the kid might be like, and what we hoped to be like as parents. (Imagining, of course, that we'd be wonderful. I never dreamed that I would snap at both of my children, "I don't care who did it. I don't care what happened. Just go in the other room and leave me alone!")

I actually remember saying to Dave, "I don't think I'd be able to handle it if this kid doesn't like to read. All I ask is that we have a kid who loves to read."

Ha.

HA!

So Rosemary doesn't actually read yet, but these are how our days go.

"Rosemary, would you please play with your brother while I get ready?"

"But I'm reading Supergirl!"

"Just play with him for a while."

Ten minutes later.

"Mom, can I sit on the couch and read now?"

Yesterday she chose to sit on the couch and look at her Supergirl book over playing outside with my mom, who gives Rosemary her undivided, loving attention. Last week when her friend came over for a play date, we had to tell Rosemary that she couldn't sit on the couch and read while her friend was over. We'll say, "Hey, guys, let's go for a walk!" and Rosemary will say, "Nooo, I want to read!"

So, I'd say I got my wish, wouldn't you?

9.3

2010-01-09T20:36:00.000-08:00

I got up at 5:15, drank a cup of coffee, ate a banana, drank a glass of water (big mistake), and nervously read Marie Claire. I used the bathroom again and again, because if there's anything to fret about on the day of a race, it's having to pee--or worse--while running. This is something I never confronted in boxing matches. The nervousness is worse before a boxing match--however badly I did in this 15K, nobody was going to punch me in the face--but they only last six minutes. During those six minutes you barely have time to block and punch, much less remember that you have to go to the bathroom.

At 6am, as I heard Gabriel stirring and starting to call out, "Mama, Mama," I said goodbye to Dave and headed out the door. It was still dark when I got down to Mission Bay. I found a parking space, got my bib, and then retreated to the warmth of my car where I spent several minutes trying to decide on the best place to safety-pin it to my shirt. Over my stomach? On my chest? I attached it to my chest, then moved it to my stomach. At 6:40 I hit the porta potties for a final visit, then joined the people milling around the starting line. Someone was leading everyone in pre-run calisthenics, and offered some last minute running advice, "Keep the strides short, like the Kenyans, relax your shoulders, and keep your body upright."

At 6:55 everyone started bunching around the starting line, and I realized I had to pee. I thought about the cup of coffee, and the glass of water, and eyed the porta potties. There was no way. I'll forget about it when I start running, I thought.

I hate the first ten minutes of a run--everything feels awkward. Your shorts tug, your socks feel weird in your shoes, and your breathing is erratic; it hasn't settled into an easy in-out, in-out rhythm. Everyone was bunched up, jockeying for position, with a few people darting out in front. After about fifteen minutes the crowds thinned. My Nike+ was telling me I had a 12-minute-mile pace -- which I knew was wrong -- so I switched it to the stopwatch mode to keep track of the time.

It was strange to run without music. I found myself singing the songs in my running mix to myself. Vampire Weekend's "A-Punk" was running on a loop in my head: "Johanna drove slowly into the city/The Hudson River all filled with snow/She spied a ring on His Honor's finger/Oh-oh-oh-oh." Nobody spoke. Every now and then someone would pass me, which would speed up my pace a bit, or I'd pass somebody and feel a thrill.

At the three-mile mark I clicked my Nike+ to see how far it thought I had gone. 1.97 miles. I think that thing hates me. We curved onto Fiesta Island. A buff twenty-something guy peeled off into one of the porta potties and that's when I remembered. I really had to pee. I spent the next ten minutes debating whether or not to go and finally I realized I was slowing down and losing focus. Forget it, I thought. I'm not going to think about it anymore. I can make it.

I picked up speed and passed a few people. A six-foot-tall guy in his twenties and his fifty or sixty-something running companion (perhaps his dad?) fell into step with me. After a few minutes the younger guy said to his dad, "That's a 48 10K." His dad said, "48? Wow." I looked at my watch, which read 48 minutes. I had no idea if a 48-minute 10K was good, but they seemed happy about it.

In addition to a 15K, they were also running a 10K and a 5K. It was a total mind-fuck, because we'd be moving along at a pretty good pace, and some fresh-looking person would come zooming by. The first time it happened the women next to me said, "I really hope they're running the 10K."

As we headed off Fiesta Island my pace started to slow. Six-foot-tall guy and his dad moved head of me, until his dad stopped running and started limping. As I passed him he said through his teeth, "Inner thigh injury."

I lost sight of the people in the pack just in front of me. I felt a cramp in my sternum and tried to push through it, but I felt my pace slowing. Finally I saw the 9-mile sign (6 miles in Nike+ land) and pushed as much as I could to the finish line, where I saw Dave and Rosemary holding out their hands for a high-five. I glanced at the time as I crossed the finish line -- 1 hour, 14 minutes. Just under my 1 hour 15 minute goal. At a pace of 8:11 per mile.
-- EDITED TO ADD: Okay, it's well known that my math skillz are poor. So I farmed out the job and asked Dave to calculate my pace, but he thought I said 15K was 9.03 miles. (It's actually 9.32) My friend Carmen emailed me with a bunch of calculations that make my brain hurt but that say my pace was actually 7.56. So, YAY for the sub-eight-minute pace, BOO for my inability to do math.

(Not the most attractive picture -- Dave didn't get any good ones of me crossing the finish line, but it'll do.)

So it was fun! Dave asked me if I want to run a marathon, and I really don't. What I want, really, is to get back into boxing. Running is a fun challenge, but it's isolating, and the running itself I don't find particularly interesting. However, I'm glad I did this. It's not a bad way to spend a Saturday morning.

Technology, good and bad

2010-01-04T15:32:00.000-08:00

I got some new gadgets for Christmas -- an iPhone and a Nike+, which is something you use while running to track your mileage, pace, etc. Sounds awesome, right? Especially since I have been trying to figure out my pace by mapping out routes on mapmyrun.com and then coming back and plugging in my times, which is easier said than done because I usually come back to a house full of chaos, hit full in the face with the things I've put off doing to go for an hour-long run.

After we got back to Long Beach from Massachusetts, I set up the Nike+, stuffed the little chip in my shoe (you can use it without the special Nike shoes ... shhh, don't tell Nike), and off I went. I was going at what I thought was a pretty good pace, but the device attached to my wrist showed my pace-per-mile as, "11:00, 10:20, 9:00, 7:20" and sometimes the display was blank. After running for about 30 minutes, I toggled over to my mileage. .53. .53!! Not even a mile! I kept running, and running, and running, and after 40 minutes the evil Nike+ happily told me I had run 1.03 miles. This is how much faith I have in technology -- it took me 20 minutes of punching angrily at the device and thinking about how much I suck at running to realize that perhaps it wasn't working. When I got back to my mom's house I immediately went to a nearby running store to get a little pouch that attaches to my shoelaces, in the hope that a better placement would give better readings. The guy at the store told me I should calibrate the thing -- which involves running or walking a known distance (like on a track) and then adjusting the device on the computer to make sure it's reading correctly.

Well, that never happened. I took the Nike+ with me on my runs with the kids last week, and it seemed pretty accurate, so I decided the pouch had solved the problem. So New Year's Day I set out to run the course of 15K I'm running on January 9. I glanced at the course online before going, but I didn't pay much attention, because I figured I'd just keep track of the mileage with my Nike+.

The run started off abysmally. With every step I felt the champagne, wine, and beer from the night before, the two cups of coffee from a few hours earlier, the times (three, to be exact) Gabriel woke up screaming in the night, and my persistent sore throat and cough. Despite my efforts to pick it up, my pace stayed in the 9 and 10-minute per mile range. I looked at my mileage: 2 miles. Crap. Seven to go. The more I ran the worse I did. I finished the loop that I thought would be 9 miles and looked down: 5 miles. I still had four to go. I kept running. And running. An hour and half later, and counting down every last second of the last mile, I reached 9 miles. I thought about how I had been so proud that I was closing in on an 8-minute mile, and how my technique for using mapmyrun.com to calculate my pace must be flawed. I thought about how I was fooling myself about being fast, and stewed about how miserable the 15K was going to be.

When I got home, Dave said, "There's no way you were running a 10-minute mile pace." I sat down and mapped out my route on the computer. Apparently I didn't run 9 miles. Or 10 miles. I ran more like 11 miles. I think. Who the hell knows. At this point I'm going to use the 15K to calibrate the damn Nike+ (because their mileage has to be accurate, right?), and just do the best I can.

On the other hand, the iPhone is the greatest gadget ever. This morning, instead of rushing home after dropping off the kids to wait for emails about upcoming work projects, I went to gym, and checked my email from there.

I love always having a camera, for moments like these:

And this, from our beach walk at low tide yesterday:

Year in Review

2009-12-31T20:38:00.000-08:00

My favorite blogger, Sundry, posts a New Year quiz every year. I took the quiz--it was weird how little of the small details from the year I remembered, since this will forever be the year of the dual job loss during THE RECESSION. It started horribly, but ended up just fine. 2009 was not a bad year, in the end.

1. What did you do in 2009 that you’d never done before?

I got laid off. I guess that was done TO me, but still, it was a new experience. This was the kick in the butt I needed to finally start my freelance writing and editing career-- I networked and pounded the pavement like crazy, and found enough work to keep me busy. I also made a souffle. Got my own website. Started a blog. Sent a pitch, wrote an article, and fretted about the response/lack of response/my inability to sell another article.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?  

I didn't make any last year. Dave had already lost his job, and I think we were just focused on survival.

My resolutions for 2010:

• Sell more articles.
• Get back into boxing.
• Carve out some one-on-one time with each kid.
• Be nicer to myself.
• Have more dinner parties.
• Improve my surfing.
• Take the kids on a real vacation--not to visit relatives, but someplace we choose.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?  

Dana and Dylan, to sweet Connor.

4. Did anyone close to you die?  

My grandmother. I was not close with her, but she was my dad's mom, so that brought back all the memories of his memorial service. It made me feel closer to my relatives on his side of the family, but also that the connections are fading, slowly.

5. What countries did you visit?  

Canada! We went to Victoria, BC for our ten -year anniversary trip. I think it was the quickest way to feel like we traveled far. (Other than Mexico, which seemed like a bad idea in 2009.)

6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

My mind immediately goes to money, but I'm sure I'll wish that every year. I really want more time to do things that aren't work or taking care of the children. Is it too much to hope that the kids will play together a bit more and require less supervision so I can do some gardening, finally finish Gabriel's photo album, play with iMovie a bit more, or just organize the clutter that threatens to overwhelm our tiny house every day?

7. What dates from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

The day in February I got laid off -- a month after Dave lost his job. I shut myself in my room and cried while the kids banged on the door. It was a dark, dark day, but the surprising thing is how it didn't destroy us. Dave worked like crazy looking for any and every opportunity, and in April he found a great job. He turned the crazy long commute into an athletic challenge with cycling. I made the plunge into freelancing, and not having any commute time or need to dress up for work allowed me to take over the majority of the childcare during the week while Dave drove/took the train/cycled to his job.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?  

Getting work during one of our country's biggest recessions. Maintaining hope in the face of no jobs, two kids, and that recession. Going out surfing by myself. Running eight miles at a eight-minute mile pace in preparation for the 15K on January 9.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Snapping at Rosemary instead of taking a deep breath and looking for more patience.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

I'm afraid to even say this, because even though I'm not superstitious, it seems wrong to say it out loud -- nobody in our family got really sick. Colds, yes. A low-grade fever for Gabriel. Despite all the crap that happened this year, at least we had our health. And that's a lot.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

Probably finally paying someone to do the things around the house we haven't managed to finish in seven years: the walkway, gravel on the side yard, fixing the fireplace, and HEAT. Lovely, warm, heat.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

I think Dave, who never lost hope, who never panicked, even when he lost his job, I lost my job, and the news told us our country was falling apart.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?  

Nobody I know personally, which is good. Whoever started that whole "Obama's missing birth certificate" controversy I suppose.

14. Where did most of your money go?

The mortgage, daycare, Trader Joe's, and the aforementioned household projects.

15. What did you get really excited about?

Although I signed up for the 15K just as a way to stay in shape over the holidays, I got excited about training for it, and trying to drive down my pace. I forgot how much I love training for something. I love the focus and determination it gives me.

16. What song will always remind you of 2009?

Sweet Disposition by Temper Trap or Us by Regina Spektor.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you: 

– happier or sadder? Pretty much the same. Which is a good level of happiness.
– thinner or fatter? Thinner, for sure, since Gabriel was only six months old this time last year.
– richer or poorer? I think from a bank account standard we're poorer, but from a potential standpoint we're richer.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?  

I wish I'd been more intentional about what I read. I'm never going to love nonfiction (except for memoirs about addiction or mental illness -- that I CAN'T GET ENOUGH OF), but I sort of drift along and read whatever fiction crosses my path. I would like to focus and read -- classics, modern fiction, whatever -- with purpose.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?  

Fretting about deadlines. Of course that's what helps me get things done, but I often turn down invitations from friends because I'm worried about work, and then I end up finishing ahead of schedule.

20. How did you spend Christmas?  

In Massachusetts with Dave's family, surrounding by cousins and snow.

21. Did you fall in love in 2009?

I did, with Gabriel, as he turned from a blobby infant into a sparkly eyed toddler with a wiggle in his walk. I remember this stage so well with Rosemary as their personality starts to emerge and you're astounded by their sweetness, their humor, and even their anger. (Gabriel actually throws a tantrum by lying on his stomach and pounding his feet and hands into the floor. It's as if he's following the lessons he learned in Tantrum 101.)

22. What was your favorite TV program?  

Mad Men. We loved it so much we upgraded our satellite service so we didn't have to wait for the DVD to come out YEARS from now. It's better than many movies, and the best TV series I've ever seen.

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?  

No.

24. What was the best book you read?

As I mentioned earlier, I wish I read with intention. I can't even remember the books I read. The two books I do remember, which means they must have made an impact, are Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery? 

That I love beard rock: My Morning Jacket, Band of Horses, Bon Iver, Grizzly Bear.

26. What did you want and get?

To keep my part-time schedule. For Dave to get a job. For the kids to nap at the same time.

27. What did you want and not get?

To get back into boxing. I miss the people, the challenge, even the punches to the head.

28. What was your favorite film of this year?

500 Days of Summer. Even though I loved Up in the Air, 500 Days of Summer surprised me, transported me, and moved me more.

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

This is the curse of my birthday being five days after Gabriel's -- it fades into the background. We went out to dinner with our good friends Nick and Victoria and ate great food and drank cocktails. I turned 36.

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Since I ended up not getting back into boxing, I wish I would have trained for and run in some races. That's changing, since I'm running a 15K in January. I also wish my balance of writing and editing work was heavier on the writing side.

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?

That I sort of love some of the 80s trends that have come back. Frye boots over skinny jeans. Wishing I had a reason to wear something other than yoga pants.

32. What kept you sane?  

Sending the kids to daycare and sitting down to work. Exercise. Friends and Dave.

33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Paul Rudd and Jason Bateman. I guess I love a smirk.

34. What political issue stirred you the most?  

Really, Dave generates so much political angst I don't feel like I have any. I just sit in the corner and read Entertainment Weekly.

35. Who did you miss?  

My girlfriends from high school and college. They all live far away, and I miss them all like crazy.

36. Who was the best new person you met?  

I met Victoria before 2009, but this is the year I really got to know her. She is generous, has a wicked sense of humor that creeps up on you, and is able to admit when her kids are driving her completely insane.

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009.  

I can't find a way to say this that isn't completely trite, but when both Dave and I lost our jobs, and I after I had a good cry and spent a few days in shock, I realized I wasn't destroyed. We still had our family, and our friends; I could still go for a run on the beach and watch a sunset. I knew it before, but it was brought home this year: I work to live, I don't live to work.

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.  

I don't love the song, but I couldn't escape it this year. From Kanye's Stronger: "N- n- now th- that don't kill me/Can only make me stronger."

Packing

2009-12-17T14:25:00.000-08:00

We're leaving for Massachusetts on Saturday, and I am now in the "throw the entire contents of my closet in my suitcase and pack enough food for an Arctic expedition in the carry on" phase of packing. I hate packing, and that leads me to over-pack. I'm such a preparer, and a planner, that I can think through fifty different scenarios where I might need that third pair of jeans. (Seriously. There's the super skinny jeans I can dress up and wear with boots and the casual jeans, but what about the nice boot-cut jeans? WHAT ABOUT THEM?) And how does one convert a San Diego wardrobe into a Masschusetts-in-the-winter wardrobe? By packing everything in the closet.

Then there's the carry on issue. I am slightly terrified of forcing Gabriel to sit in an enclosed space for six hours. So I'm packing five day's worth of snacks, in the hope that if he won't watch the DVD player, or won't read, or won't color, at least he'll eat. I know from experience that these flights always turn out better than I fear, but that doesn't stop me from fretting. It's nonstop fretting from here on out.

And in the spirit of the Great Home Improvement of 2009, we're having gutters installed on the house right now. Apparently it involves drilling into the side of the house repeatedly right during naptime. It's taking everything I have not to run outside and whisper angrily, "You're making too much noise!!"

The kids will be up soon, and I need to finish packing, so that's it for now. And probably will be it until after Christmas. Happy holidays, and safe travels if you're hitting the road. Wish me luck!

Secrets

2009-12-10T17:31:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I was sitting at the dinner table with Rosemary and Gabriel, and she was chatting to me about her day at preschool. I was only half listening, because I was still recovering from our post-school ordeal. I get the kids home from school, and they play for about 15 minutes. Then it begins. They start fighting, and then Gabriel claws at me and shrieks while Rosemary whines. Then Gabriel runs into the kitchen and attempts to pull sharp objects down onto his head. So I rush around the kitchen, my blood pressure rising, trying to cook something healthy that they will eat.

Rosemary was telling me about the present she is making for me at school and how she even wrote some of the letters of her name on it all by herself. She said, "It's a Christmas ..." and then stopped. She stared into space for a moment as if she was trying to remember something very important.
"It's a Christmas what?" I asked.
Rosemary looked at me helplessly, and then began to sob, her hair dragging in her dinner.
"Rosemary! What's wrong? Why are you crying?"
"I ... don't ... know ..." she sobbed.
"Why are you upset?"
She just looked at me, tears running down her face.
"It's okay, I still don't know what you're making me for Christmas," I told her. "It will be a surprise when you give it to me." She looked at me miserably.
Then it hit me.
"Ro, do you want to tell me what you're making me?"
She nodded.
"Did your teachers ask you not to tell me?"
She nodded again.
"You can tell me. I'll still be happy when I get it."
Rosemary wiped off her tears and said in one breath, "It's a Christmas tree, and it's an ornament, and we can hang it on our tree!" She looked hugely relieved and began eating her dinner again.
The holidays can be very stressful.

The Big Bang

2009-12-02T16:29:00.000-08:00

I never know what's going to set her off. Something hits her four year old brain the wrong way--she feels picked on, controlled, left out, or just plain grouchy--and a tantrum materializes out of nothing. Tuesday morning I intervened in a fight over a pink blanket. I gave Rosemary the pink blanket, and then I gave Gabriel a white blanket lying on the floor, while I started to explain to Rosemary that if Gabriel wants something she has, the best thing to do is to give him something else to distract him. I never finished the explanation, because Rosemary started screaming, "Nooo! Give me the blanket! I need to fold it!" Tears, drool, full-on tantrum. There ensued 30 minutes of me trying a variety of unsuccessful techniques to get her to calm down: reasoning, the calm-down chair, the "mommy is going to her room" technique ... nothing worked. It's all a blur and I can't even tell you how everything resolved itself but I do know at one point I threw the pink sundress at her, the one she wanted to wear with red tights in December. So yes, she could put on a sweatshirt, and who cares if she wears red tight with a pink and yellow sundress, but after 30 minutes of screaming I said in an angry, not-nice voice, "Fine. Just wear this. I don't care," as a threw the dress at her feet.

I took them for a run, and after we had gotten a therapeutic dose of the ocean and dogs and beach tractors hauling seaweed, the kids happily played in the backyard while I stretched.

Rosemary took out the sidewalk chalk drew the Big Bang, talking to herself as she drew, "The Big Bang is a circle with a rainbow, and it created the Pilgrims and Indians."

Then she said to me, "You were mad at me after I stopped crying."

I told her that I was, and that I was frustrated that she was crying for so long, but that I will always love her, even when I'm mad at her.

She looked at me and said happily, "You'll love me forever until the Big Bang comes again and explodes us." She picked a weirdly apocalyptic way of saying it, but it's true.

This boy

2009-11-25T16:14:00.000-08:00

[I started writing this on Monday, which is why it's about the weekend, and I just now had time to finish it. Such is my life right now--half-finished projects scattered around me.]

What a sweet, lovely weekend. I was describing why Saturday was so great to a friend, and I realized it was because I spent half of it getting my hair done. The hair salon is not always such a relaxing outing for me. I tried out a new hair stylist this weekend, after going to the same for ELEVEN YEARS. Longer than my marriage. Over the last year, I come home stressed out and irritated. And significantly poorer, because although I scrimp in many aspects of my life, I've always been totally okay with expensive hair cuts.

So I visited a place down the street from us, and crossed my fingers that it would go well. It was great. It made me realize why I was disenchanted with my current stylist. (Other than the fact that I could never get an appointment when I needed one.) Every time I would try to describe what was really bothering me about her, I would blurt out something like, "She doesn't really seem interested in me," which sounds so LAME. But I realized that she also wasn't at all interested in my hair, and dude, that's her job. This new woman took time to ask me lots of questions about my hair, and suggested some things I might try. True, a lot of them meant extra money (conditioning treatment, buying their conditioner), but it was worth it to feel like she was burning a few calories on me. This is a horrible picture of the kids, but check out the hair!

On Sunday we went to the La Jolla Farmer's Market, which is an almost-weekly tradition. We spend way too much on organic fruits and vegetables, munch on cranberry walnut rolls as we browse, and then sit and listen to whatever live music they have that week. (Although two weeks ago their "live music" was a dude playing smooth jazz on a CD player. That doesn't count, La Jolla Farmer's Market.) Here is Gabriel, stunned into momentary stillness by two women playing guitar and singing:

And, a moment when my head almost exploded from the cuteness of it all, Gabriel and a eight-week-old puppy:

Speaking of this little boy, he is killing me with his roly-poly sweetness lately. Every day he says a new word, and it seems to delight and surprise him when he manages to make the right sound. I read Goodnight Moon to him every night, and to him the dramatic climax of the book is the old lady whispering hush. He gets his hushing finger ready, and then at the proper moment raises his finger to his lips and says dramatically, "HUSH!"

Of course there is a lot of stubbornness and obstinacy at this stage too. Ask him any question, and his answer is "Nooo" in his funny little troll voice. "Miiiiiiine" runs a close second. The other night he woke up around 10pm, just as I was going to sleep. I took him out to the couch and held him as he melted, limbs going limp, into my chest. I thought, "This is the smallest he'll ever be." It was a little bit sad and also lovely, and just part of what you go through as you raise what you know is your last baby.

So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow

2009-11-10T14:47:00.000-08:00

Today I took the kids to buy a wheelbarrow.

We're having a front walkway put in (it seems weird to be at the point in our lives where we "have things done" instead of doing them ourselves, but as we can barely find time to sweep the sidewalk of leaves and clear out the Bud Light cans from the bushes, we have to "have things done" or they will not get done), and the guys doing the work need a wheelbarrow. Ours died a sad death from one too many loads of rocks and concrete, back in the days when we could do these sorts of chores.

I took the kids to the local Ace hardware store. First, I had to buy a pantry moth trap, which set off The Questioner. "What is a pantry moth? What is that? Why are you trapping them? What's this picture on the box? Is this a pantry moth? What do they eat? Why? Is this a pantry moth on the box? Why do they eat flour?" Then I looked for some rechargeable C batteries. "What's rechargeable? What's a C battery? Why don't they have them? What's rechargeable?" (Sometimes Rosemary will ask the same question two or three times if she A. Didn't hear you because she was busy formulating a new question or B. Didn't understand the answer.) And I certainly don't want to squelch my daughter's thirst for knowledge, but really? Do I really have to answer all of these questions when all I want to do is get in and out of the hardware store before Gabriel drinks lighter fluid?

Not finding the wheelbarrow section, I approached a man, who looked to be about in his 50s, and said, "I need a wheelbarrow."

The stared at me for a minute and said, "You don't look like the kind of person who would buy a wheelbarrow."

I don't? And why would that be? Is there some kind of gender requirement to buy a wheelbarrow? It's a bucket. With a wheel.

We made some jokes about how my stroller broke and I'm going to push the kids around in the thing, which would have been much more amusing to me if the dude hadn't started off our conversation with a totally sexist comment.

After watching Mad Men on Sunday, I felt bad for Betty Draper that her options were so limited her only escape from a bad marriage was with another man. I felt so great to have been born after the feminist movement, with so many choices available to me. But when people make comments like the guy in the hardware store, I realize we still have a lot farther to go.

This is the kind of parent I am

2009-11-06T16:06:00.000-08:00

This morning NPR was on in the background, and they were doing a story about the Ford Hood shooting, where a man gunned down 13 people on a military base. A woman -- it must have been a relative of one of the victims -- came on and told her story in an anguished voice. Rosemary's head shot up, and she walked into the kitchen to stand next to the radio. She stared, transfixed, and listened to this woman's grief and anger.

I just watched. I didn't turn off the radio. I didn't tell Rosemary to stop listening. I'm not sure what I should have done, or what you would have done. Rosemary is learning all about the world -- its wonders and horrors. I'm here to explain it to her, and to give her place to feel safe and loved, but I can't protect her from everything. And I don't think I should.

But what about the children?

2009-11-05T15:35:00.000-08:00

We have an apartment above our garage that we built as a source of income. It's actually completely Dave's baby, because he had the idea when I was pregnant with an actual baby and in no mood for big projects other than the one GROWING INSIDE OF ME. I remember meeting with the contractor when Rosemary was just a few weeks old. I stared at the drawings on our kitchen table in a sleep-deprived, milky haze and managed an occasional "Uh huh ... sure ..." Even after I emerged from my new-mom zombie state, I still had trouble getting fully on board with the idea. While it was certainly a practical and intriguing concept, the reality of having strangers living in our backyard was unsettling and a bit strange. I wasn't really against it, just a bit ... removed.

I had a long time to remain in an ambivalent state because the project dragged on, and on, and on. It took two and a half years for us to get the permits from the city. Long enough that we were a few months from abandoning the whole thing. Then, once it got started, our contractor was arrested for transporting automatic weapons from Arizona to California. At this point I was pregnant again, this time with Gabriel. As it happens, he was a few months old when the project was finished and finally ready to be rented. I remember showing it to prospective tenants with him asleep in a sling, Rosemary tagging behind me, waiting for the right moment to fill these new victims in on the latest preschool gossip.

We ended up renting to a wonderful young couple who have been the most delightful neighbors. They are sweet with the kids; patient as Rosemary waylays them on their way to work with strange details about her friends at preschool, and Gabriel presses his face through the small fence we put up to keep him out of their parking spots and off their stairs.

Now, after a year of renting from us, they've bought a house. So we've recently endured the awkward process of showing the apartment again. (I never know how sales-y to be with these people. Do I let the place speak for itself in order to not seem desperate? Do I point out features they may have missed? Holy crap, what if the kids do something weird and freak them out?)

In the first week we found a couple who enthusiastically asked for an application. They were newly-engaged--she was a nurse and he worked for a nonprofit. I had already pictured them as our new neighbors when the woman called me and said, "Before we return the application, I just wanted to tell you about something so you're aware of it before we move in."

She paused and my mind raced. For some reason, my first thought was, "Oh my god, what if they're swingers? Why is she telling me this??!!

Instead, she said, "Every weekend we go down to the beach and feed the homeless in an outreach associated with our church. Over the years we've become friends with some of these people and we occasionally have them over for dinner. My current neighbor is bothered by this, so I wanted to let you know in case it was a problem."

I stammered out a reply, telling her I thought it was a wonderful thing they did, but that I'd need to discuss this with Dave. Then I sat down on the bed and thought. My first instinct was, "Hell, no!" I told myself I was uncomfortable with the idea because of the children, but the kids are never in the house without us, so how would this affect them? I worried about the possibility that perhaps one of these homeless people would come back and rob one of our houses, but in talking to the couple further they told us they only invited people they had gotten to know over many months, even years.

As Dave and I talked this through with each other and our families, I started to think about what it would mean if we turned them away because of this reason. And I did what I sometimes do when making a moral decision. I thought, "If I were reading about this in a novel, what would I think about a character who turned someone away because they invite homeless people over for dinner?" Do I want to be that kind of person? While we have a responsibility to keep our family safe, that can't be our only focus. It's tempting, when you have kids, to hide behind their needs.

So we called them back and offered them the apartment. Then, a day before they were due to come over and sign the lease, I got an email from the girl. "We've been looking at our finances, and it looks like we can't afford the apartment. Thanks for being so understanding about the homeless issue."

I was irritated (we had let the ad expire on Craigslist, told everyone we had found our new tenants), and also relieved (hey, no homeless people!). I put the ad up again, and a few days later a giant guy showed up. A captain in the Marines, he had just gotten back from Iraq, and told us what a hard time he was having finding a place, since nobody wanted to rent to a single, 27-year old guy. He gave us a check for the deposit on the spot, and Dave and I looked at each other after he left. "We can't turn him down," Dave said. "He just got back from Iraq." So we checked his credit and his references, both of which are excellent.

So now we have a new neighbor, and I'm hoping I won't have to make any weighty moral decisions for a few months.

Oooh, Child

2009-10-20T21:18:00.000-07:00

Things with the kids are getting easier. (I write this with the full knowledge that with kids you can never clap your hands briskly together and say, "There! All done!" Both the good and the bad -- never last.) But at this moment, these last few weeks, in the midst of rushing around the house to get ready to go, or clean up, or make dinner, I've looked over and Rosemary and Gabriel are sitting side by side on the couch, each holding a book and either weaving a long, dramatic, and death-filled tale (Rosemary), or chirping "woo woo" at pictures of dogs and "luck luck" at chickens (Gabriel). They can play together for five, ten, sometimes fifteen minutes. Rosemary is remarkably patient with Gabriel's ineptitude, and Gabriel has dialed back his destructive tendencies.

Another milestone--we can now keep the bedroom and bathroom doors open when Gabriel is awake! A few months ago he would stomp in there and put his hand in the toilet, unroll the toilet paper, and then march into our room and try to eat my earplugs. He still has a thing for those earplugs, but now he picks them up and gives me a little smile, and when I tell him "no" he puts them down.

Rosemary still has her fits, of course. They usually take me completely by surprise. I can spend all day giving Rosemary gentle and not-so-gentle corrections ("Don't scream outside, use your fork, wash your hands after going potty") and then all of sudden she'll start blubbering and it's impossible to figure out where you went wrong. And then--and I remember this feeling from when I was a kid--she's started down a path of anger and frustration and she can't turn around. It usually culminates with her wailing, "Nobody will be my friend!" or, my favorite, "I'm just a boring girl!" At this point, punishment doesn't work. Neither does reasoning. Usually the best thing to do is give her hug, and then when her frustration comes down another notch, distract her with a story, or a bit of news about something we have planned later in the day.

Today, when I wouldn't let her go in the backyard when Dave was showing our apartment to prospective tenants (listen, I know this sounds overly-restrictive, but she seriously would stand in the backyard saying, "What are they doing? What's she doing? Why is she wearing that? Are they going to live there?" and that seems like a less-than-welcoming introduction to the living situation), she freaked out, then calmed down, then started crying again. I held her and asked her what was wrong, and she said, sadly, "I just can't stop crying."

It's so hard to be little. While there are wonderful joys and little responsibility, there is also no control and complete vulnerability. People always tell you no, and stop you from doing what you really want to do, and sometimes you just can't stop crying.

This weekend we have to leave the kids again. We're traveling to St. Paul, Minneapolis for Dave's cousin's wedding. It will be a whirlwind--we drive up to Long Beach Thursday night, fly out Friday morning, and then return Sunday afternoon. I'm reluctant to leave the kids, and our cozy little routine, but the weekend at their grandma's will be so exciting they'll hardly notice we're gone. That's my hope, anyway.

Working from home

2009-10-16T13:25:00.000-07:00

Last night on 30 Rock, Alec Baldwin's character, Jack, was talking about all the personnel cuts they had to make due to the recession. He mentioned that the payroll department was reduced to just one guy and a copier. Cut to a shot of this guy, crammed in a tiny room next to a photocopier. He turns to the copier and whispers in a creepy voice, "It's my birthday!"

I cracked up and turned to Dave and said, "That's me!" Which is to say, sometimes working from home is a wonderland of delightful freedom, and sometimes I'm awfully close to chatting with electronics.

That is all.

Return

2009-10-12T11:25:00.000-07:00

A few days before we left on our trip, I went to CVS with the kids. As I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed a gaunt-looking young woman weaving through the parking spaces, talking urgently into her cell phone. I looked at her a moment longer than I should have, because everything about her communicated stress and panic. She caught my eye as I pulled into the parking space and walked up to the car, and she started talking as soon as I rolled down the window, "I'm supposed to go to class, and my car broke down, and I'm going to be late, and I need money, just to get a bus, I just need to go to class."

Her skin was yellow and broken-out, and she had a look of pure desperation in her eyes. Nobody cares that much about missing a class. I told her I wouldn't help her, and then as I got the kids out of the car I watched her approach everyone in the parking lot.

In my crazy paranoia about leaving the kids for so long, it seemed like a weird sign right before the trip. It gave me an uneasy feeling, and I thought about this girl long after this encounter--while packing, while in the airport, while on the plane.

Nothing bad happened to the kids while we were gone, of

course, but I thought of the girl again in Victoria. We were approached twice by strangers, and instead of the usual scam or panhandling, one of the times was an elderly lady needing directions, and another was a disabled woman needing help putting a parking meter receipt in her car window.

It was that kind of city. Beautiful and civilized. We had tea at the Fairmont Empress.

We took picture after picture in Butchart Gardens, a gorgeous gardening project gone crazy on the site of a concrete quarry.

Victoria was a lovely spot that was small enough for us to feel like we saw everything, but with enough to do that we didn't get bored. As usual, it took me a while to get in the vacation groove. The first few days I couldn't get comfortable anywhere. If we were walking around, I wanted to sit and have coffee. If we were at the B&B I wanted to be in town. I was always looking one step ahead, trying to plan the next part of our day, instead of enjoying the moment. It's a strategy that works well being a mom of two kids--I'm usually anticipating meals, diapers or potty visits, or naps. It doesn't work so well on vacation.

The best day was when we rented bikes and took a leisurely 30+km loop into Oak Bay, a small neighborhood with little antique shops, up a hill through redwoods, and then through fields and forests along the Lochside trail. It felt good to get my heart rate up after a few days of two-course breakfasts and restaurant meals. Since we hadn't rented a car and our B&B was about a 30-minute walk outside of town, we were walking more than an hour each day, but I was still feeling over-full and groggy.

I loved having time to poke into little boutiques, talk over dinner, and just wander at our own pace, but every day I knew mom was home alone with the kids, I felt an anxiety on her behalf. Two of the days the kids were in daycare, but she had an entire weekend watching the kids by herself. I called her twice a day, and she was always upbeat and positive, but I could tell by the end of the weekend she was exhausted.

Halfway through the trip I told Dave I thought we had gone away too long. A bummer of a thing to say on a vacation--one to celebrate our 10-year anniversary, no less. It was a combination of missing the kids (especially Gabriel, who is just 16 months and who I couldn't talk to on the phone like I could Rosemary), and worry and guilt about my mom.

I started to relax on Monday, when I knew both the kids were in daycare, and we had a lovely, meandering day. Our last dinner was at an airy Tuscan-style restaurant with bright orange walls. They had the option to order smaller sized versions of the entrees, so we tasted our way through a starter and some local fish, and then had room for dessert. I had the sticky date toffee pudding, and Dave had the most amazing ganache with corn sorbet. It was an incredible flavor -- a distinctive corn taste, but rich and cold.

****

The first day back I was home all day with the kids. I was relaxed and patient the entire day--even during the horrifying time from 5 - 6:30, even when Rosemary pushed my buttons and Gabriel shrieked. I'm sorry I couldn't live more in the moment during the vacation, but the break did me good nonetheless. And now I'm so happy to be back in our little house, with my little blonde companions, my roly-poly little toddler and my ever-questioning little girl.

Leaving

2009-09-29T14:34:00.000-07:00

This is the curse of being a mother. When you're with your kids, you inevitably find yourself staring out the window, or at your watch, wishing for a break, for just an hour without someone asking if the ocean is man-made, or screeching "Mama mama mama mama" in your face for no apparent reason. Then, when you get a break, what's the first thing you think about? "I wonder what the kids are doing?"

I'm in limbo right now -- half of me is excited for our vacation, and the other half keeps having horrible thoughts, like, "What if I never see the kids again?" I'm normally the most level-headed person out there, and not prone to hysteria, but something about leaving the kids for a week (a week -- a WEEK) is causing me unusual fits of anxiety.

Then I think about things like the fact that our hour layover in Seattle will be an enjoyable interlude, rather than a grueling endurance test, and I can't wait. I think the thing I'm struggling with is that at Gabriel's pre-verbal state, there's no way to tell him I'm coming back. For all he knows, the person he sees every day--first thing in the morning and last thing at night--is gone.

I don't know if this will be an enduring character trait, but Gabriel is an incredibly loving toddler. Periodically throughout the day, in the midst of his marauding, he'll come up and give me a great big hug around the neck. The other day when I picked them up from school, he was happily at a table munching on crackers, and I would have guessed nothing could have gotten in between him and his snack. Then our good friend Victoria walked through the door to pick up her daughter, and Gabriel eased himself off the miniature seat and waddled over to Victoria to give her a delighted hug. Then, his social duties finished, he hurried back to the table to finish his snack.

See, this was meant to be a post about the trip, and all I can talk about is Gabriel. It's a crazy thing being a mother. Crazy wonderful, but plain old crazy, too.

Biking and Crying

2009-09-24T06:18:00.000-07:00

It's always the same. On my days home alone with the kids, I usually come face-to-face with an hour I need to fill. I come up with what seems like a genius idea. Rosemary on the bike, Gabriel on the scooter, a few times around the block, let's go!

Everyone is excited and full of enthusiasm. We start off full of hope. As the kids make their way down the sidewalk, I have thoughts like, "This was a GREAT idea;" "We should do this EVERY day;" and "This is easy, and look how much fun they're having!"

Then, usually sooner than you'd think, things start to go all wrong. Rosemary convinced me to head a few streets south, instead of just looping around the street immediately parallel to ours. What I didn't consider was that the southward direction is slightly downhill. After a few blocks, we made a left turn to a street that was slightly uphill. Gabriel kept moving along, but Rosemary, who was up ahead of us, starting emitting strange noises. We caught up with her, and I discovered that she was slowly pedaling while sobbing, "My legs hurt! I ... can't ... my ... legs ... hurt .... uphill .... can't!"

I left Gabriel to fend for himself and pushed her, shouting encouraging words, "I'll help you! You can do it! Keep going!" The push got her moving, and she was pedaling up the slight incline nicely, but some crying switch had been turned on and she continued sobbing while pedaling. Meanwhile Gabriel had gotten distracted by some rocks and was headed into someone's front yard. I ran back to collect him, but he resisted. So I picked him up and set him on my hip, grabbed the scooter, and ran to catch up with the sobbing bicyclist.

The rest of the journey home continued in this grim fashion. Me trying to hold on to a squirming, 27-pound Gabriel and the scooter while pushing Rosemary and shouting encouragement as she biked and sobbed, biked and sobbed.

We were all miserable. The outing had only lasted 10 minutes, but apparently that's enough time to go from euphoria to despair, gleeful shouting to angry sobbing. We finally got to our street and made a left turn, heading downhill. Gabriel had lost interest in his scooter, so he careened down the sidewalk on foot, and Rosemary pedaled happily ahead, all smiles now that gravity was in her favor.

Once we got in our backyard, I was exhausted. I had only burned 15, maybe 20 minutes. An ocean of time stretched until naptime. I let them loose in the backyard and as they played happily with the toy shopping cart I thought, "Hey, this is GREAT!" "Look how much fun they're having!"