Not really.

The title makes it sound like I have some sort of ideological stance, but really it is more of a combination of general laziness coupled with my upbringing.

What I’m talking about is Christmas/Hanukkah/Seasonal cards…..I don’t send them.

I have never sent them.

I am pretty sure I have never signed a card professing my holiday greetings, stuck it in an envelope, addressed it, slapped a stamp on it and put it in the mailbox.

Scrooge! You shout out to your computer screen.

Grinch!

Humbug!

But you’ve got it all wrong.  I do wish everyone a happy holiday season. If you are reading this – even if you aren’t – I hope this time of year is a sparkling, twinkly winter wonderland for you.

I really, really do.

You see,  when I was a little girl my parents did not send Christmas cards.  Generally, they would be handed out (to my classmates, Dad’s co-workers, and family taped to a small gift).  There were no cousins in distant places, my cousins were seen on a weekly basis.  My parents’ friends lived in the same small town we did and it was a small group.  Our people were not scattered about. My mother was not as busy as I am today.  Her cards numbered in the tens, they were filled out as my sisters and I slept, later placed personally in each warm hand.

Therefore, filling out Christmas cards is not a tradition for me.

Also, I’m generally lazy.

Wow, when I wrote that I could feel the eyes of several people rolling. Yes, I work full time at night after spending all day with a toddler and the seven year old, while going to school…and it’s true I do make my own soap/Halloween costumes/small gifts etc.

Basically, I say “No” to whatever I can get away with.

I can’t say “no” to work.

I don’t want to say “no” to things I enjoy doing.

To me holiday cards are extraneous at best.

I enjoy seeing them from people, and I receive them with, “Oh, that’s nice.” or in cases with photos I will both “oooh” and “ahhh” and at times actually “squee!” with delight as I look at the sweet faces of little children I have the pleasure of knowing.

But I don’t send them back. I love you, but it’s just not in my DNA.

You could call me rude…but lazy is more accurate.

I have now heard every pickup line in the world.  I have come full circle, ladies and gentlemen you may resume complimenting my eyes and requesting I name my astrological assignment.

Saturday night, I was out on the town with my ladies, minding my business and wearing my wedding ring (for the record).  I was helping to work the door for a friend’s band, marking people who paid to gain entrance to the show, so I interacted with everyone that attended.  After the performance had ended, one audience member was leaning on the stand in which I had stashed my coat and when I went to retrieve it he said and I quote:

“They have the cleanest bathrooms here.”

No, I am not kidding. This is how he opened a conversation to an unknown female.  He then asked if I had seen the men’s restroom, to which I replied, “No, only the ladies room.” whilst trying to decipher if he was attempting to investigate whether or not I had been promiscuous in the establishment previously or if I was a transvestite.

He went on to say that most bathrooms in bars are disgusting (which is true of many bars) and I said that the owner was a “classy guy” (which he is), all while I was attempting to escape politely.  He then segued into discussing trying to wash the “X” I had drawn on his hand when he came in, saying he was going to try hand sanitizer….this is where I seized my opportunity and said, “Well, let me know how that works out for ya.” while skittering off toward one of my acquaintances.

He gets points for creativity….but loses more for creepiness, not to mention the killer: he ain’t The Hubs which has taken down many a man in the race for my favor. 

Good luck to you, Bathroom-pick-up-line Man.  May you find a lady who finds that sort of thing endearing. I’m sure there’s one out there.

Funmama Deanna has recently recognized my ability to be real over on her fine blog (click the link, you know you wanna) by presenting me with The Maire Antoinette Award.  Let me just say that I adore the idea behind this. Fabulous.  But the original image left something to be desired:

It’s a lovely painting – but I thought it could use some jazzing up, thus I pulled up ye olde Paintshop and behold:

 I think it adds a little, how do you say……. ah, yes: Sass.

Now to pass this on to my recipents (also anyone who was gifted this lovely from any other blogger is welcome to use the revamped image).

In no particular order:

 Miri @ Here We Are Together - because she shows the reality and beauty of daily life with small ones.

Jill @ Keyboard Revolutionary - because she does NOT pull punches. (Which I adore)

Amy @ These are the Days - because she’s totally and completely herself.

Super Ninja Mommy @ Two Under Two - because she is unafraid to present her life as is, the good, the bad and the toddlers.

Crow in his Nest - because he’s a straight shooter.

While I’m linking it up here, I’d like to steer you over to another blog I contribute to:  Did and Did Not.  Basically, it is a listing of things that were and were not done by the submitter, the sum is a exploration of joy, regrets, lost love and simple truth – with a dash of quotes from famous people. Check it out, submit a quote and scrawl your message across the bathroom wall that is the internet.

Conjunctivitis has come to my home for the holidays.

Amidst the jolly scuffle of erecting the carcass of an evergreen and decorating it with tinsel and  finery (like the twenty year old ornaments I was given from my mother, including my favorite: Rudolph the One-Eyed Reindeer), I glanced down into my little Bear’s face only to see a giant glob of mustard colored mucus adorning his rose-colored left eye. 

I did not point and shriek, “PIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINK EYE!” in terror, as was my first reaction.  I am very proud of myself for that. Instead I grabbed a tissue and said calmly, “Oh dear, I think you have pink eye, sweetie.”

My boy stiffened with terror. Pupils widened, fist clenched, he said with a choke, “No!” 

He has only had conjunctivitis once and he was three and a half at the time- and he remembers it vividly.  Especially the eye drops which he told me while hugging my waist “burn badly”. He was so upset that I reasoned that it might be his allergies which have caused some itching red eyes.

This happened on Friday night. 

Saturday morning we were greeted by the goopy eye monster and obliged to make a visit to the local urgent care.  One hour and $50 bucks later, there he was lying blinking in the medicine that is so awful he recalls it after four years.

Since then we walk around trying desperately not to touch our eyes, overusing hand sanitizer and tissues. 

The goop has almost cleared, yet the fear will cling desperately on for days.

My eye is itchy right now! Oh lord!

I admit it, I was smug.  I would watch as other parents bargained and reasoned with their kids to eat, or defeated fed them the 87th grilled cheese sandwich that week because they will only eat bread and cheese combination….. and I would think I would never make a separate meal for my child.  I just would offer them the food and they would eat it when they were hungry enough.

I know, I’m not proud.

You see, like many parents of one, I confused “good parenting” with “good fortune”.   I was fortunate to have a good eater.  I can count the amount of foods he has refused on my fingers.  He likes salad, his favorite food is hummus and he has never refused to eat what we are eating for dinner.  Don’t get me wrong, if he were born to a different family he may never have been exposed to couscous or eggplant- but even then I believe he would’ve eaten well because it is in his nature to be laid back about his cuisine.

I was walking pretty tall back then.

Not so much anymore.

These days, meal time is like a battle ground.  Easy- E is the opposite of his nickname when it comes to food.  He refuses even his favorite foods at times and there is never any guarantees.  He usually loves spaghetti but the other day he wouldn’t take even one bite.  We’ve tried songs, rhymes, distractions like  reading a story during mealtimes, eating earlier, eating later, allowing him to walk around and graze.  It seems like no strategy works consistently.

When he won’t eat at all, it’s awful.  Awful.

I believe Louis CK described it best when he said, “When your kid won’t eat, you go crazy, because you have a physical need to feed them, it’s an instinct. “  The range of emotions from one failed meal will go from despair (What if he doesn’t eat enough? What’s going to happen to him? He is going to starve to death before my eyes!) to anger (“just put it in your face!@#$%!) to elation (he ate one bite) to disappointment (he spit it back out and is now trying to clean the taste off of his tongue with his hands), all the while trying to remain calm, cool and collected on the outside.

It makes you a little insane when your child won’t eat.  We bargain with ourselves and suddenly a cereal bar and half a banana chased with 4 oz of Pedisure is a “good dinner”.  The difference between a good day for me and a bad one often involves whether E Baby is eating or not.

Thus far it is a fluctuating state.  Last week was horrible, we could barely get him to eat string cheese  and bread (usually his favorites).  His refusal came in the form of howls and tears at the dinner table – even when we held him – even when we let him down.

This week has began better.  Sunday he ate dinner with us (veggie pizza and bread) and had a full belly when he finished.  Yesterday he had Cream o’ Wheat, a cereal bar, two and a half bananas and some pasta.  This is amazing compared to last week when I was following him around the house offering him bites of sandwich.

Anyway, I hear you universe.  Loud and clear.  Learned my lesson, promise.

Sincerely,

Lady in the Glass House

The internet is a place in which information is free to float where it may.  Tweet it, facebook it, put it on myspace (but no one will read it there). Pour every meandering thought down into the white rectangle and watch as it affixes itself to cyberspace, to be viewed and judged accordingly by all that see it.

Add to this the fact that friend requests are generally sent out to a plethora of people, including not only your close friends but old classmates, co-workers and distant relatives.  If you belong to one of these sites go take a gander at your friend list…I’ll wait.  I’m going to wager that there are people on it you haven’t seen in years.  There may be some people you don’t even remember.  Look there’s that girl from high school, she sat behind you in Chemistry.  Remember how it took you emailing your friend to even recall who she is before you accepted the request?

Now consider this fact.  Every single status update you have posted since becoming this person’s ”friend” has been broadcast across their main page. 

For some of us, this is no big deal.  So what?  Mindy Whosawhitz knows I like Rilke’s poetry, I got a great deal on a sweater at Target and that I recently celebrated my Grandmother’s birthday….big whoop.  Most people I know update their status with what they are doing at that moment, quotes they like, song lyrics, thoughts on sporting events, movies and books.  From reading these kinds of updates I get to keep up with people I can’t find the time to routinely connect with via another avenue (phone/email/in person) and often I am pointed in the direction of something I would enjoy ( like this).

Other people however….

Today I un-friended someone because they said something hateful about a belief that is not their own.  It is also not a belief that I ascribe to, in the strictest sense, I do not label myself in that way.

It was a short two sentence statement, but dense with hate and misinformation.  In those two lines she managed to completely mischaracterize the religion she was referring to as well as equate its followers with lazy, greedy murders.

It was vile.  I shot her a short message with a correction to her mistake (Humanists do not ”worship” humans) and a brief description of my disgust - clicked the small “X” next to her name thus banishing her to the outside of my circle.

This person wrote something completely hateful as her status, signing her name in big bold letters next to it, her smiling face beaming from her profile picture alongside.

Why would anyone do this?

Perhaps because she thought everyone would agree.

She was wrong.

We love books. Our house is covered in them, we have so many that our bookshelves can’t hold them all. Regardless of the day, you will likely come across piles of tomes shattered about, both long and short, adult and children.  We have so many we are often searching for a book that becomes lost amongst its brothers, but there is one in particular that is always around.

Dog eared, tattered, torn and taped, it is easily located by the youngest of us, who then carries it awkwardly to the nearest reader.  Mommy Loves Her Baby/Daddy Loves His Baby (by T.J. Morrow) is a simple poem, with simple paintings accompanying it, describing the love of a parent for their child through smilies comparing it with the animal kingdom. (For example, one of E-Baby’s favorite lines: “like the squirrels love the trees”").  The book is divided between a “Mommy” and a “Daddy” part, it is flipped over and read for the second part. 

The book arrived at our house about six years ago as part of a promotion for a children’s book club we were suckered into (it turned out to be much more expensive than just buying the books) they would sometimes send “free” books that we didn’t order, which in this case turned out to be fortuitous.  The Bear was instantly taken by the rhythm of the words and the pictures.  It became the go-to book for fussy times. 

And then bedtime.

And then all the time

It was amazing to watch J, realizing that he was able to have a favorite anything.  This was his first favorite book, and it was well loved.  Many tears were wiped as scotch tape surgery was performed on accidental rips. 

Everything has it season, and in time the pages were no longer turned.  The book took its place on the back of the shelf and there it remained until Easy-E came along.

My second child is every bit as enchanted as the Bear had been.  He participates, saying “Roar”, “Whooo”, “Mooo” and “Doodle Doo” at the appropriate times.  He smiles in the middle of a melt down if you bring out this book.  In a pinch, just the words (recited from memory) will calm him more quickly than any song.

For my family, this little poem has been transformed into magic words.  It’s a code, a spell, a part of our language and our imaginations – and that is what makes it a great book.

How about you? Does your child have a favorite magical book?

Easy- E has decided that the best animal in the world abounds in our backyard.

 

He also has his own personal buddy, Earl, who accompanies him on every important outing.

 

 

What comes next should’ve been obvious….but hindsight is always 20/20.

 

My dear friend Amy called me in on some help for her darling daughter’s preferred Halloween costume. 

 

 

That’s right , a flying squirrel.

 

Half-way through this project, I asked my husband, “Do you want to see this squirrel so far?”

 

The next noise I heard was not an answer from my old man but the stomping of small feet.

“Worl?”, he asked.

So I displayed the hoodie with ears, and he demanded, “WORL!”

So I put it on him.

He stood happily, arms straight out to the sides, drowning in a sea of brown fabric.

 

“Okay buddy, time to take it off. Mama’s still got work to do.”

“UH!”, he cried, dodging me and skittering out of reach.

 

Three attempts later, I retrieved an outgrown brown hooded fleece pullover from J’s closet and presented it to him.

“Look.  Mama will make YOU a squirrel. This squirrel is for our friend.”

He finally allowed me to remove the half-finished costume.

 

Days later, I began removing a front pocket from the fleece.  E wandered up, put one little finger on the pullover and said softly, “Worl.”

 

The result:

 

 

 

 

Hanging out with The Penguin.

 

 

 

The elusive tail.

 

 

 

 

This is my Bear, at around 17 months old, listening to music, hanging out with his mother, learning to talk and climb.

This is my son, when he was the sun, the true center of my world – the most important being in my universe.

Today he is approaching the halfway mark of his eighth year and there is a new 17 month old in our house.

Each milestone met, each word learned, I am simultaneously remembering and forgetting that first baby.  That baby that disapeared into the long limbs of childhood in a cloud of dirt and magic dust never to be seen again.  That baby that grew into a boy who reads bedtime stories to me, sings songs to his brother and recites poems.

What I wouldn’t give for one afternoon, chasing that chubby toddler through the leaves in Central Park, lifting him high above my head and kissing his plump cheeks with no thought of  possible embarrassment. No fleeting glimpses into how his teenaged years will look.  No fear that one day he will ignore my calls.

To hear his little voice and mispronounced words and feel his small body curled on my lap.  To be filled with the certainty that I know him as he was in 2003.

It’s a hard truth.  The mind is not limitless.  There is no Rolodex, no card catalog, no filing system to pull from.  It is ever changing and altering.  The more you recall something, the more likely you are to embellish it – the less true it becomes.

That’s why we need  journals and outgrown favorite t-shirts.  Scribbled crayon drawings and tiny handprints rendered in paint.  It’s why we need photographs.

They are our sign posts.  Solid proof that a baby who loved ducks and James and the Giant Peach and pretended his stuffed dog was a baby existed.  Reminders that he gave big slobbery kisses and woke us by smacking the bed next to our slumbering heads.

The sweetest things always pass too quickly.

I have been writing since I could speak in sentences, narrating my own existence, putting my day to day into a lyrical prose I could carry around in my head.  Before I could write, I would put my stories down on paper, filling pages with characters climbing up the walls of the page, desperate to extract every thought jumping inside my small head.

I have been called a “natural born” storyteller.  Which brings to mind this kind of inborn ease, a flow, a fountain of words just bursting forth. 

Sometimes it is like that.

Like I can’t contain all of the sentences.  I begin typing and once again I’m in pigtails, scribbling – frantic to set my phrases free.  The clicking of the keyboard rises up around me and it’s like floating.

But then

somebody notices.

My husband asks me “What do you want to do with your writing?”

My professor suggests submitting some pieces.

My friend emails me a list of magazines accepting freelance work.

And I freeze.

Solid.

Writers block takes hold.

I want to write a story about Appalachia, I say aloud. 

“That’s nice.” says my brain.

“Good luck.” says my imagination.

And the blank white space stares back.

plain old fear.

But of what? Success? Recognition?

Writing is like magic to me….somewhere deep down do I think that by saying these things out loud, by submitting, by even trying, the power will dissipate?

This is my battle.

This is why I’ve been absent from my blog.  This is why I’ve avoided sending anything in.

This is my dragon.