Tell me, what is it you plan to do...

In case you hadn't noticed...

2012-01-10T22:58:00.000-05:00

I gave up on this blog.

Based on Google Analytics, I think most of you have already found my new blog. If not, it's here.

This week, I loved... (9/19/11-9/25/11)

2011-09-25T21:41:00.000-04:00

This week, I loved:

- the return of DWTS date nights.

- watching one of Nancy Grace's 3-year-olds pick her nose on national television. I'm totally juvenile, but I laughed for, like, five minutes.

- hanging out with my friend S, chatting, and watching Glee. It was kind of like college all over again.

- a few afternoons at the office while P watched the kids. Balance in life is so good.

- apple picking with the fam - one of my favorite fall traditions.

- baking with the fam to use up those apples!

- spending time with friends at our friends' son's birthday party.

This week, I loved... (9/12/11-9/18/11)

2011-09-18T20:37:00.000-04:00

This week, I loved:

- an exhilarating run on a beautiful night.

- guilty pleasures on my iPod.

- time to actually sit and talk with my husband.

- a day on my old campus with other smart, interesting women - a nice break from normal life for me, even if it did involve too much PowerPoint.

- actually doing all of my scheduled workouts for the week, for once. MAJOR sense of accomplishment with that.

- getting ice cream with the family one last time before the shop closes for the season.

- the precociousness of both of my cutie pie kiddos.

Random in-the-moment thought of the day

2011-09-12T20:23:00.002-04:00

Exercise makes me feel better. I don't know why I don't do it more often.

This week, I loved... (9/5/11-9/11/11)

2011-09-11T20:52:00.000-04:00

This week, I loved:

- much-needed girl time with my friend S.

- successfully cooking eggplant parmigiana for the first time.

- breaking out the fall-themed scented candles.

- Isaac giggling like a maniac while I built castles out of blocks for him to knock down.

- Nora begging for "just a few more minutes, Mom, pleeeeeease" of looking out the window at the moon.

- wandering around Philly with my adorable family.

- acquiring $85 in Amazon gift cards from a bank rewards program we didn't realize until this weekend that we were enrolled in.

We Will Write, Prompt #8: A Moment of Silence

2011-09-11T00:00:00.001-04:00

This week's prompt was "a moment of silence." How fitting.

A Moment of Silence

September 11, 2001 was the second day of classes of my senior year of college. My college had a P.E. requirement that I desperately needed to complete, so I had signed up for a fencing class. I was just getting out of the shower, wandering down the hall of my dorm with bare feet, wrapped in a towel, when my friend Anjali came barreling through the back door of the dorm. Tossing her backpack in the hallway near our rooms, she breathlessly asked me, "Have you seen the news yet?"

"What news?" I responded, clueless.

"You need to turn the TV on right now. A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center. It's on fire."

"What?" I was dumbfounded as I opened the door to my room and switched on the television. "Holy shit."

With the TV on in the background and my eyes glued to the screen, I got dressed. Nobody really understood what had happened at that point. Shaken up, but knowing that I needed the P.E. credits and couldn't risk getting bumped from my fencing class, I left my dorm and walked across campus to the gym.

As I walked in the door of the gym, the first tower fell. I stood there, along with everyone else in the gym, staring at the little black-and-white screen behind the front desk. All of our mouths were hanging open. No one was talking.

When class was about to start, I rushed into the gym and told the instructor that I wanted to hold my space in the class, but I needed to leave. I ran back to my room.

I had spent the summer that had just ended living in NYC. My apartment had been in the East Village and the non-profit for which I had interned was in the West Village. My boss's office, where I had worked for much of the summer while she traveled, had a clear and direct view of the towers. I was terrified for all of my co-workers and former neighbors. Images of people I knew from my daily life were flashing through my head. The guy that sang every morning in the West 4th Street subway station. The man who had operated the X-ray machine when we'd visited the towers over the summer. Street vendors I'd seen everyday on my way to work.

Like the rest of the country, I spent pretty much all day in front of the news. I have a very vivid memory of sitting in the center room of my friends' suite, listening to the newscasters pinpoint "Islamic terrorists" as the culprits. "Oh my fucking God," I groaned. "Bush is going to bomb Afghanistan, the entire Middle East is going to hate us, there are going to be more attacks, and we're going to end up in a never-ending war with half the Arab world."

That night, there was a gathering in a garden on campus. We all brought our lanterns. We sang. I remember singing "Imagine" by John Lennon. People told stories and asked for thoughts and prayers for family members and friends that they hadn't been able to reach.

The worst moment - the defining moment of that day, for me - was a woman who received a call in the middle of the gathering, informing her that her father had been killed. I will never, for the rest of my life, forget the way she screamed "nooooooo" - loud enough to stop the singing and redirect everyone's focus in her direction as she collapsed in a heap on the ground. Her friends were trying to hug her, but even their hugs couldn't hold her up. Until that point in my life, I had never seen pain and grief so raw.

And now here it is - the 10th anniversary of all of that. The 10th anniversary of all of us never forgetting where we were that day. The 10th anniversary of all of us remembering too many little details that we wish we'd never had reason to see or hear in the first place.

And all I really have to to say is this:

Dona nobis pacem,
pacem.
Dona nobis pacem.

Dona nobis pacem.
Dona nobis pacem.

Dona nobis pacem.
Dona nobis pacem.

Grant us peace.

Closet organization

2011-09-07T14:38:00.001-04:00

Yes, I can acknowledge that writing this post makes me the world's most boring person. Nevertheless...

I cleaned out my closet last week! I finally came to terms with reality and put away all of the pre-pregnancy clothes that aren't going to fit again anytime soon. I donated ugly crap and stuff that was too big, threw away stained and ripped stuff, and actually folded and hung up the rest. It went from a disaster area to a... slightly cramped but less-disastrous area.

Before:

After:

It looks much better now, yes? (Just ignore the plastic bag. It's full of socks that need to be matched up, but I ran out of steam before getting to that. It'll be done soon).

Nora sorted all of the clothes that don't fit into two bins - the "pretty" bin and the "not really pretty" bin. Can you guess which is which? Hint: I think she has something against neutrals.

We Will Write, Prompt #7: Did It Turn Out How You Expected?

2011-09-04T22:26:00.000-04:00

This week's prompt was "did it turn out how you expected?" This prompt seemed like a good opportunity to make some edits to an old poem about the effects of seemingly innocuous cultural influences on young girls. I'm still not thrilled with it, but it's better than it was before the edits.

Sassy

She’s addicted to evil—

your basic chain-smoking

drug-snorting

fast-moving beauty queen,

Always the supermodel—

the sophisticated

five-foot-nine

ninety-six pound

suburban princess,

Ten men on her twelve-year-old arm—

stiletto heels

short leather skirt

smudged eyeliner

red lipstick bleeding into cracked lips

A mold of herself—

the bad girl

the sex goddess

the fake-it-til-you-make it girl...

The girl every magazine she’s ever read

Has taught her to be.

This week, I loved... (8/29/11-9/4/11)

2011-09-04T22:03:00.000-04:00

This week, I loved:

- having my big kid home from school for the week (her summer session ended and the new school year hasn't started yet). Both kids are going through really fun stages right now and I'm really enjoying hanging out with them and watching them play together.

- a few hours at my office, getting some work done in peace and quiet. (And yes, I know that seems antithetical to my previous point, but it's all about balance).

- finally cleaning out my closet - a much-needed and long-overdue project. Pictures (probably) to come, if I manage to get them off the camera sometime this century.

- homemade raspberry jam. Yum!

We Will Write, Prompt #6: Worst Thing That Happened to You As a Child

2011-09-02T22:58:00.000-04:00

I'm a little behind - this is a poem based on last week's prompt. The prompt was "the worst thing that happened to you as a child."

Muse

I see you on the F train
in the New York summer.
The heat pulses through the crowd
like a dull heartbeat
and my movements are stifled
by the sweaty, visible air.

There you stand, slumped against a pole,
your shirt against the greasy silver,
and your hair, brown and damp,
sticking to your forehead,
half covering one eye.
The other end of the car, but too close.

At twenty-one,
my body is five years older,
stronger, louder,
but still recovering from your use of it.
Half a decade ago,
but like yesterday.

You don’t see me
crying and shaking,
although half the souls on this train stare,
wondering.
I am on stage, but invisible too.
I always was invisible to you.

I am frozen there,
on the hottest summer day -
my mind and tears racing,
a scream stuck in my throat,
my heart thumping
louder than the rumbling train.

The doors open
and the smells of the city seep in -
sweat, urine, gas, perfume.
You unslump and depart,
the doors close,
and I swallow hard.

You are gone,
until next time,
but I am not relieved.

No,
I am not relieved
because I know that I will see you again,
someday, somewhere.

I know that I will see you again
and all I will be able to do
is scream
and cry
and write another poem.

You are my muse.
You inspire my words
each time you take them away.

You are my muse,
but these are not the kinds of poems
that I want to write.

This week, I loved... (8/22/11-8/28/11)

2011-08-28T22:28:00.000-04:00

This week, I loved:

- two kids with huge smiles swinging on their swings in the backyard. I love the everyday moments of parenthood and family.

- beautiful, temperate weather - at least in the first part of the week!

- a husband that did NOT have to go to rotations for once.

- a cuddlebug toddler

- a wonderful 4-year-old that actually understood and was sweet about me being out of commission for a few days due to illness.

- cozying up with my family for a few days with no outside obligations or expectations. There are some advantages to lousy weather!

We Will Write, Prompt #5: Body Part

2011-08-21T22:23:00.000-04:00

This week's prompt was to pick a part of your body and write about it. After the week I had, I wasn't in the mood to try to be literary, so I just wrote free-form this time - because 'tis better to ramble on about a topic than to skip writing about the topic at, fall behind on the challenge, and give up on it completely. And I know myself - if I skip a week, I'll make all kinds of excuses for skipping future weeks as well.

So...

Hair

When I was a little girl, I always wanted long hair, but what I had was curly, thin, "dirty blonde" hair that wouldn't grow no matter how hard I tried to grow it. My mother used to tell me that cutting it would make it healthier and help it grow longer, but it never worked. I was so jealous of my best friend, whose straight brown hair went almost all the way down her back.

My hair got darker when I hit puberty. It also magically started to get longer. I loved finally having long hair so much that I refused to cut it at all. It became a shapeless mess, the bottom half corkscrew-curly, the top half almost straight from the weight of all that length.

The first time I got pregnant - and yes, this was in high school - I lost most of my curls. My hair relaxed into gentle waves with just the slightest curl underneath. As far as I was concerned, the somewhat-straighter hair was the only redeeming part of that situation.

My high school/early college boyfriend loved my long hair. He constantly begged me not to cut it. When we broke up, I marched over to my friend's dorm room and demanded that she chop my hair off. I ended up with a glorified buzz cut, which was exactly what I needed at the time. The lack of hair felt like power to me. I went into the city with another friend and got my nose pierced to round out the look.

I kept my hair short for a little while, but when P and I started dating several months later, I started letting it grow again. That was fine for a while... but one day, after a particularly lousy law school class, when I was feeling frustrated and out of control, I chopped it off again. In my apartment. By myself. It looked horrible, but it still felt powerful - just like it had the previous time.

It grew back, of course, and it's been in limbo between long and medium-length pretty much ever since. I doubt I'll ever chop it all off on my own again, now that I'm an adult with work and board meetings and a professional image to uphold, but there are days when I would kill to be able to do so.

Not because I think it looks good buzzed short (it doesn't).

Not because I want to fade into the woodwork (I don't).

No, the temptation comes from the huge "I don't give a fuck what anyone thinks" feeling that's necessary to defy all of the common conventions of womanhood and propriety and make oneself androgynous. It's been a long time since I've been in a position to say "fuck you" to society at large. I miss it.

That, and blow-drying and flat-ironing is a colossal pain in the ass.

This week, I loved... (8/15/11-8/21/11)

2011-08-21T21:18:00.000-04:00

What a lousy week. It was hard to find much of anything good to focus on this week, but it also made me glad that I force myself to do this exercise - I really needed to keep perspective to keep from losing my mind.

So, this week, I loved:

- adorable, dorky Ames on Bachelor Pad.

- Isaac's running commentary on the guy mowing the lawn across the street: "A lawnmower there. Shirt off. On a hill. Off a hill. Down a hill. A lawnmower there! Shirt..."

- Nora responding to me calling her a kangaroo (while she was hopping around) by saying, "I'm not a kangaroo. Kangaroos don't wear shoes!"

- learning that P is on track to finish his degree in September 2012 (instead of the previously-estimated March 2013). This is good for many reasons (his mental health, increased family time, etc.), but both of us were excited first and foremost because it means that we can slightly push up our planned baby-making schedule. And let's just say that we're both very eager to push up our baby-making schedule. There's baby fever all over this house.

- a Sunday morning hike with the family.

The dog shit that broke the camel's back

2011-08-19T14:17:00.000-04:00

There is a pile of dog shit on my front lawn right now. It's way far away from the curb - close to our front door, in fact - which means that some idiot either let their dog off-leash or some other idiot allowed their leashed dog to shit on our lawn (and then neglected to clean it up, natch). Just the other day I snapped at a woman letting her dog piss in the middle of our yard instead of on or near the curb, and she was kind of a bitch about it, so I have my suspicions about which it is. Let's just say that if I find any more dog shit in our yard, I'll be tempted to empty my son's diaper onto her lawn in retaliation.

The sad fact, of course, is that I'm blogging about dog shit because I can't currently muster the energy to clean it up. And frankly, the dog shit is a fairly poignant symbol of how my week has gone, so it seems somewhat appropriate to leave it there for now. I'll have to force myself to clean it before I can let the kids play outside, of course, but until then...

This week has been bad. Horrible. Awful. Allow me to share the sordid tale:

Once upon a time (read: the end of June), I entered into an office-sharing arrangement with a very anal, type-A lawyer.

- Relevant fact #1: The office is owned by my father-in-law, so this was a way for him to give me an office (which I wouldn't otherwise be able to afford) without having to give up the entire space for free.

- Relevant point #2: I was given a "choice" about whether to enter into this arrangement in name only. Obviously, no one could force me to take the office space, but the reality is that my in-laws have been helping us out financially while I grow my business and felt pretty strongly that continuing to work exclusively from home would grow the practice too slowly. I had extreme reservations about sharing an office with a woman with such a domineering personality, but deferred to my in-laws' wishes out of necessity.

- Relevant point #3: Because the other lawyer had incorporated her practice, and because my father-in-law didn't want two separate leases for the same property, we agreed that she would be the lessee (for tax purposes) and I would be the sub-lessee; however, her lease would be contingent upon granting me a sub-let of 50% of the office space and utilities.

Leases and sub-leases were drafted and revised and redrafted, and eventually we started moving in. She was quicker about moving in than I was, and before I'd moved in so much as a single book or stapler, she had chosen her office (without consulting me), filled the main room with glorified patio furniture (without consulting me), and started setting up the utilities (without consulting me). I'm a nice person, so even though I griped about it in private, I let it go and didn't say a word about any of it to her face.

Two weeks ago, I went into the office and she happened to be there. I mentioned to her that I had decided that I needed a separate phone line for my office, so I would need her to call the phone company to add a line for my use, which I would then pay for (remember, she set up the utilities without consulting me, so the accounts are all in her name). She asked why I'd want to add a line when she already ordered three phone lines. I pointed out that our sub-lease provided that she would have full use of the telephone service because I had originally intended to forward calls from my existing business line to my cell phone. She said that she had no use for three lines and that I could take the third line for my own use and just pay her for 1/3 of the phone bundle costs instead of the full cost of another line. I asked if she was sure and she said yes. She then called the phone company in my presence and asked them to come and redo the wiring so that the third line would ring to my office.

We proceeded with our businesses, including preparations for ordering a joint sign for the corner of the property to advertise our two practices. The number given to the sign company for my half of the sign was the number she had given me to use. We went through several revisions of the design proof for the sign because she had issues with little things (size, graphics, etc.). Then, one day last week, I got an email - in our email chain about the sign - saying that we needed to change the numbers on the sign because she'd decided that she wanted all three lines, so I'd have to order another line for myself. She had not previously expressed any reservation about her decision to give me the number.

I wrote her back and said that I was a bit confused by her email, in light of our verbal agreement that I would be using the third line. I also expressed - nicely - that I was surprised by her flippant tone about the issue and the fact that she just assumed without asking that I'd be fine with it, when in fact she'd already contacted the phone company about switching the lines and I'd been working on setting up other aspects of my practice (stationery, advertising, etc.) with the assumption that I'd be using that line. I asked if we could discuss the issue over the phone.

She flipped the fuck out. She sent me an email calling me argumentative and demanding to speak on the phone immediately. I responded, ignoring the "argumentative" nonsense entirely, telling her that I couldn't talk on the phone at that exact moment but would be happy to schedule a call, and stating that I didn't wish for our relationship to be acrimonious and hoped that we could work it out so that we could share the office space harmoniously.

She called my father-in-law complaining to him that I started a sentence in my email to her with the word "listen" (which, in fact, I did. It said, "Listen: I don't want to have an acrimonious relationship with you," then etc. etc. as described above. It was not remotely bitchy, and was in fact an attempt to get her to chill the fuck out). She sent me a 10-paragraph, 760-word tome about how I was "interfering with her law practice" in all kinds of ways that had nothing to do with me (my favorite of the list: because she hadn't had use of her office for two days because of electrical wiring being done after the commencement of the lease term - electrical work that she had requested of our landlord (my father-in-law) to deal with the power set-up in her office. It was an issue that could not have had less to do with me). Somewhere within this missive, she also said that she didn't want to share a sign with me anymore, that I had no right to her phone lines, and that I should arrange for separate phone and internet service.

I exercised tremendous restraint in responding to her. I ignored all of the hysteria except by vaguest reference ("I don't believe your previous email was written in a good frame of mind, so I'm going to refrain from responding to most of it"). I then said that we should just abide by the original terms of our sub-lease - that I was disappointed and frustrated by her failure to honor our verbal agreement, but whatever, she could have the phone line (except I wrote it more professionally then that). I reminded her that our sub-lease specifically granted me a 50% interest in internet access and told her that I would be happy to arrange separate phone service, but not separate internet access. She responded that she had called the phone company to disconnect my phone and internet. I emailed her and left her a voicemail telling her that disconnecting my internet access was a direct violation of our sub-lease, that I expected it to be reconnected immediately, and that I would be in the office the next day to confirm that it was working. I also said that because it would be impossible for me to do my job without internet access, I would be withholding a proportionate amount of my payment to her for the other utilities for each day that her actions rendered my office unusable.

The next day, she went to my father-in-law again, complaining that I was being rude to her (not even a little), that Prakash had threatened her (what?), and that she wasn't sure she wanted to continue the lease. I explained the whole sequence of events to my father-in-law, who said that he wanted nothing to do with it. After confirming that internet access was working in my office (but noting that she had broken my desk when she moved it to fuck around with the wires), I emailed her yet again to reiterate that I didn't want to fight with her and that there was no reason that we shouldn't be able to communicate like civilized adults. I told her that my father-in-law didn't want to be involved, noted that I had checked the internet connection and that it was working (and that I expected it to continue to work), informed her that I would be proceeding with ordering a sign for the corner of the property, and told her that if she wanted to be share the corner spot, I was still willing to add her onto the sign. This email was much too nice in light of how she was acting, but I had made it my mission to remain civilized. I'm not a huge fan of confrontation.

Nevertheless, she sent me a long email threatening me with all kinds of things if I dared to access the internet, sit on her chairs in the main room, enter her office, bring my husband into thte office, etc. etc. etc. She yammered on and on for pages, claiming that our sub-lease required me to pay 50% of the cost of internet but did not require her to provide access to it (a creative rendering which I'd LOVE to see her try to argue to a judge with a straight face), that she had tried everything in her power to help me set up my practice (note: I have never asked her to set up a thing for me, nor has she), that I'm rude and unprofessional (which I took great care never to be and was not, not even once, although she was certainly rude and unprofessional throughout the entire situation)... you get the idea. Page upon page upon page of crazy.

And then she signed her tome with "[Firstname Lastname], Esquire." And all of a sudden, I lost it. LOST IT. She is such a fucking egomaniac, and with one "Esquire" tacked onto the end of her name, I was DONE trying to be nice to her. Only asshole lawyers refer to themselves as "Esquire," and it was so clearly an effort to try to "put me in my place" (even though, of course, I'm technically an "Esquire" too) that I absolutely lost any desire to be cordial.

I sent her a very thorough, very bitch-slappy, section-by-section response to her screeds of crazy. I kept my tone professional throughout the whole thing. I made it very clear to her that I wasn't going to bow to her crazy demands, that I had never asked nor received a thing from her other than to honor her verbal commitments, that she's to stay out of my office and away from my stuff, that I would be deducting the difference in cost of separate vs. shared internet from my monthly utility payments to her because there's no way that I would be bearing the cost of her decision to violate the sub-lease, that she would need to confine her furniture in the reception area to the half of the room closest to her office and find a way to delineate the separate waiting rooms if she didn't want to risk one of my clients inadvertently sitting on it one of her chairs, etc. etc. I kept it insanely professional, signed it professionally, and CCed it to my father-in-law.

And I added at the end, "P.S. Esquire is an honorific that should never be used to refer to oneself."

And then I faxed it to her and went to bed.

She bitched some more to my father-in-law the next day, but I haven't heard from her again myself, except for a brief fax demanding that I fax stuff to her at a different number than the one I used. According to my father-in-law, she wants to rewrite the sub-lease. She can go ahead and do that if she likes. Any efforts to do so, however, will be met with a one-line fax reading only, "I will not be signing this or any other document which attempts to interfere with my contractual rights without sufficient consideration."

Because she's a bitch. And she's 100% in the wrong here. And I. Am. Done.

And the part that really pisses me off is that my father-in-law believes her lies. She went on and on to him about all of the business she has allegedly referred to me and he thinks I should kowtow to her because of all of the money I've earned as a result of her. Imaginary money from imaginary clients, because the truth is that she has not referred me one single case. But because she's Indian and I'm not, he automatically assumes that she's telling the truth. So much for "treating [me] just like [his] own daughter," which is what he has claimed to be doing ever since our marriage. It's clear that his pre-marriage opinion of me still stands.

Dog shit, all of it.

We Will Write, Prompt #4: Fabric

2011-08-14T20:37:00.001-04:00

For this week's prompt - "fabric" - I wrote a poem composed of multiple haikus put together into a larger piece. Like the rest of what I've written so far, it's rough... but I figure if I have two or three usable first drafts at the end of these 52 weeks, it will have been worth it and I can pretend that all of these other rough weeks never happened. The point is for it to get me writing, and at least it's doing that. So, without further ado...

Fabric

Cotton and linen
dresses swaying in the last
vestiges of summer
breeze - sticky, soupy,
greasy - but four weeks from now,
denim, corduroy
will stiffly cover
chilly legs and thighs and hips
longing for lightness.

That strange transition
from sweaty, gritty comfort
to cold, thick darkness;
from ocean swimming
and strolling in the sunshine
to picking pumpkins
and brewing cider;
shocks my soul every year.

And every year,
at least once or twice,
flip-flops paired with cable-knit
carry me to fall.

This week, I loved... (8/8/11-8/14/11)

2011-08-14T19:56:00.000-04:00

This week, I loved:

- collecting colored leaves at the park with Nora while Isaac gleefully went down the slide over and over again. The fact that it was GORGEOUS outside didn't hurt!

- my adorable husband trying valiantly to understand my bad TV addiction, even though he's much too high-brow to really get it.

- visiting my gorgeous alma mater with M, toddlers in tow, and enjoying the sunshine.

- Nora's much-anticipated play date with a friend from school. I haven't seen her that happy in a LONG time.

- splurging on new makeup. SO worth it.

- a nice birthday get-together with friends.

- a lazy, rainy Sunday.

We Will Write, Prompt #3: Transforming the world's worst opening sentence

2011-08-07T23:31:00.001-04:00

This week's assignment was to write a poem, short story, or other creative writing piece based on one of the winners of the Bulwer-Lytton contest for the world's worst opening sentence.

If you think this sounds easy, you should try it! I was excited about this, but it was really hard to finally get something on paper. (Note that this entry is being posted at 11:30 PM on the last day of the week).

Enjoy!

The Alarm Clock

Beep, beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep.

"Tom."

Beep, beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep.

"Tom!"

Beep, beep, beep.

Angela reached over and shook her husband's shoulder. "Tom! Turn it off!"

Beep, beep, beep.

She climbed across the bed and smacked the snooze button.

"Huh?" Tom muttered. "Why'd you hit me?"

"I didn't hit you," Angela replied. "I hit your clock. It's been beeping for like five minutes."

"You elbowed me in the face," Tom protested.

"Are you seriously going to pick a fight right now? Seriously? I didn't elbow you anywhere." Angela rolled over and pulled the pillow over her head.

Beep, beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep.

"TOM!"

Beep, beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep.

"Oh, for fuck's sake. Tom. TOM. If you're not going to get up, will you please turn off the fucking alarm?"

Beep, beep, beep.

"Tom!"

"What? I'm getting up," Tom mumbled.

Beep, beep, beep. Tom was snoring.

Angela leaned over and fumbled with the clock, searching for the off switch. At last, the obnoxious beeping stopped. Angela took a deep breath and made her way back to her side of the bed, carefully elbowing Tom in the face - gently - on the way.

"Ow!"

On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bump in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.

This week, I loved... (8/1/11-8/7/11)

2011-08-07T19:41:00.000-04:00

This week, I loved:

- birthday cake.

- a nice dinner out with my family.

- awesome birthday presents.

- hugs from my sweet kids.

- yummy garden delights - delicious tomatoes from my in-laws' garden, beans to freeze for the fall and winter, and a few more cucumbers harvested from our own garden.

- this video of Matt Damon defending teachers.

- getting myself a pretty new journal from Borders's liquidation sale. I like blogging, but there's nothing quite like pen and paper.

- enjoying being sans kids for a few hours (even if it was just for a board meeting).

- an awesome family night at the mall, browsing around and just enjoying hanging out together.

- a super anniversary with the love of my life - including our first time out without the kids since April and our first time out ALONE since October 2010! (Yes, we need more couple time. Desperately. But it was nice to get even an hour and a half!).

- watching our wedding video in the dark with two up-much-too-late kids cuddled on our laps, marveling at how much things have changed in the last six years.

- sleeping until noon on Sunday (my slightly-delayed birthday sleep-in). It was divine.

This week, I loved... (7/25/11-7/31/11)

2011-07-31T22:38:00.000-04:00

This week, I loved:

- Isaac's ever-increasing language skills (yes, still).

- getting 12 hours of sleep after suffering all day with an allergy attack. Medicine sleep or not, it was desperately needed and I'm grateful to P for letting me get it.

- taking advantage of the one benefit of P's clinical days - his getting home earlier - to go on a rare weeknight family outing.

- watching Nora run gleefully across a field while a fire truck sprayed water on all of the kids (at the Touch a Truck event we went to this weekend).

- Isaac trying to tell a knock knock joke.

- a lazy Sunday with nice family time, but also a little bit of time for myself.

We Will Write, Prompt #2: Where I'm From

2011-07-29T22:44:00.001-04:00

This week's prompt was HARD. The task was to write a poem inspired by this one, using these prompts - Mad Libs for poetry-writing! I was really excited by the idea at first, but I found it really constraining and nearly impossible to find my own voice. I grappled with it for days before finally putting something down on paper. The end result was Very Bad, but I promised to share everything I write for this project, so... blargh. Please don't judge too harshly.

Where I'm From

I am from blue jeans,
from Chevrolet, sulfur-scented well water,
gasoline.
I am from the boxy picture window covered by beige drapes
(within it, I could see out to the world, but my parents couldn't see me).

I am from freshly-mowed grass, summer feet stained green,
crisp, cold blades crunching between autumn toes,
heels browned by the muddy lawns of spring.

I'm from sherbet punch and sunburns,
from Elizabeth, William, Frank,
and three women all named some variation of Mary.

I'm from the passive-aggressives
and the aggressively-passives,
from go play outside and don't try so hard.
I am from Easter dinner and Christmas Mass,
from kind-of Catholics who devoutly believe
that we're all guilty of something
but I am the guiltiest of all.

I'm from the Collar City and the Emerald Isle,
from corn on the cob, mashed potatoes, and black coffee.
From the orphanage where my grandmother did dishes,
nuns tapping their rulers,
from her three (living) children smoking cigarettes in plaid uniforms,
nuns averting their eyes.

I am from wooden cabinets crammed thick with albums,
torn, crinkly plastic covers,
yellowed binding,
faces that I need my mother's help to recall.

I am from this history, this heritage,
that I have run from but never escaped.

(Holy fucking god, this is horrible. I can't believe I'm letting other people read this. Alright, alright... I'm going to hit "publish" before I chicken out).

This week, I loved... (7/18/11-7/24/11)

2011-07-24T21:37:00.000-04:00

This week, I loved:

- dinner with friends, including one that I haven't seen in a long time.

- watching Nora play school. Her stuffed animals were her students and she was teaching them phonics and Chinese. It was the cutest thing ever.

- getting a snazzy new haircut.

- flirting with my hottie husband.

- actually making it to yoga class.

- evenings spent in the pool, floating and swimming in the warm water.

- a cucumber in our garden! I was even more excited about this than I was about last week's beans.

- getting my office painted! (Thanks, Kashi...)

- a Sunday afternoon party with friends.

We Will Write, Prompt #1: Worst. Meal. Ever.

2011-07-24T00:11:00.000-04:00

This is my first effort for the We Will Write project. It's... not great. Not even good, really. I opted to go memoir-style for this prompt - the creative writing style closest to blogging, which is the only kind of writing I've done for the last many years. I have to start somewhere, right?

Please don't snark too hard on this one. It's a first draft that has undergone no revision whatsoever. Even if the writing is awful, you'll get an amusing story out of reading it, so... enjoy. *gulp*

Note: All names have been changed in this story, except for mine and P's. I've attempted to faithfully recreate conversations and the timeline of the event being described, but this took place more than five years ago, so... you know. Some of it might be slightly imprecise.

---
Worst. Meal. Ever.

It was about eight months after I started working at the firm that my inbox dinged and I saw the invitation. I groaned reading it, simultaneously trying to think of an excuse to decline and knowing that I had no choice but to accept. I emailed P and told him the bad news: "There's a dinner party at Grover's house. He's only invited about a dozen lawyers, but I'm one of them. We have to go."

Grover was the head of the firm's litigation department and universally thought to be at the top of the list of candidates to someday replace the firm's chairman. He was the stereotypical big firm partner - a workaholic with a big ego, a love of golf and fine wine, and a storied history of office-based infidelity. I knew when I accepted the invitation that I would be in for a night of awkward small talk, fake laughter, and feeling horribly out of place. But what choice did I have, really? You can't say no to the future chairman and expect to keep your job.

The dreaded evening arrived. Directions in hand and a pit in my stomach, we headed off in search of Grover's estate. It took a while to find because the estate had a name rather than a street number; it was also completely invisible from the road. By the time we eventually located it, we were 30 minutes late - not an auspicious start. We parked our Scion tC between a BMW and a Lexus and rushed inside.

The inside of the house looked like a museum, full of freshly-waxed floors, oriental carpets, antique furniture, and framed artwork. We didn't even make it to the living room before a maitre d' came over to take our drink orders. I kept a death grip on my glass as we continued inside to say hello to Grover. I was terrified of accidentally shattering glass all over his perfect furniture and spotless floors.

"You don't want a drink?" Grover asked, almost immediately.

Holding up my glass, I replied, "I have water, thank you."

"Water's not a real drink." He moved his glass back and forth as he spoke. "You know what's in water, right? All kinds of microbes and bacteria." He took a sip. "No microbes in scotch!"

I laughed politely, reiterating that I was fine with my water. He continued to push, so I finally made up a lie about being on antibiotics. He was clearly concerned about my lack of alcohol consumption, but I certainly wasn't about to tell him that I had been trying to get pregnant and didn't want to drink until I knew for sure that I wasn't carrying around an embryo. (As it turned out later, I was in fact very slightly pregnant during this party - and indeed, when I announced my pregnancy to one of the other associates, she informed me that everyone had been speculating that I was pregnant because I didn't drink at Grover's house. Only in BigLaw can so much be made of someone not accepting a drink!).

We finally managed to extract ourselves from Grover's alcohol-pushing, only to find ourselves in the middle of a conversation about yachts. Various partners were telling boating stories and comparing the sizes of their respective boats. Men who weren't there were mocked for the small size of their boats and their boats' lack of sufficient power. The absurdity of a conversation like this actually happening in the real world was not lost on me. It felt like something out of a really bad movie. They might as well have been comparing penis size. P and I just looked at each other. We had nothing of substance to contribute to that conversation.

We slowly inched our way over to a different crowd. The topic of conversation there? The personal stylings of lawyers from the firm who weren't at the party. "I always know it's Mark when I see those cheap shoes coming. He looks like a salesman," joked one of the partners.

"And that greasy, awful hair," laughed another. "It's like he gets his hair cut at Super Cuts."

I had never noticed anything particularly off-putting about Mark's hair or shoes myself, but more than feeling sorry for him, I felt enraged on his behalf. Mark was an incredibly hard-working lawyer - in the office early, out late, chained to his blackberry in-between. He was Grover's go-to associate on a major case - always being assigned to travel to North Carolina or Rochester or western Pennsylvania at a moment's notice, expected to drop everything and run off for some "emergency" that wasn't really. Even if there were something wrong with his appearance, when was he supposed to fix it? Keeping up with Grover's demands probably didn't leave a lot of room for shopping or fancy haircuts at the spa.

I couldn't say any of that, obviously, so I said nothing at all.

"What time is it?" I whispered to P. He looked at his watch. It was late. We hadn't even had dinner yet. There was nothing I wanted more than to escape, but it felt like time was standing still.

Dinner time eventually arrived and we headed into the kitchen for our table assignments. There we learned that Grover had divided up all of the couples "to keep the conversations from getting boring." I clung to P as we walked through the buffet line, well aware that I was about to lose the only ally I had in the midst of all this ridiculousness. But we couldn't spend all night getting our food, so my poor husband headed to his assigned seat in the dining room and I grudgingly made me way to my seat in the breakfast nook.

In addition to myself, the breakfast nook table included Grover, senior partners Mary and Tim, a junior partner named Dan, associates Molly and Aaron, and a woman named Alexis, who was the wife of another associate. The other table included the significant others of each of the lawyers at my table, Alexis's husband, and the various un-partnered attorneys. The other table sounded like much more fun, but I put on a brave face and sat down.

My plate was sparsely topped with the only vegetarian options available - a twice-baked potato, salad, and a roll. "Is that all you're eating?" asked one of the partners.

"I'm a vegetarian," I explained, and then quickly added, "but this is plenty. It's delicious."

Dinner was interminable. I listened to story after story about Grover's many years of intra-firm hook-ups. I refused many, many offers of wine. Countless numbers of uninvited associates and partners were mocked and denigrated.

Grover, Mary, and Tim were having a blast. Dan, Molly, and Aaron were uncomfortable but faking it well. Alexis was drinking lots of wine and frequently trying to change the subject. And I was dying inside, wondering how exactly I'd ended up here.

I had gone to law school to be a sex crimes prosecutor. This was the job I had taken to pay down my loans so that I could do that. I hadn't realized until it was too late that it's nearly impossible to jump from BigLaw to government and that taking this job meant that I would never be a sex crimes prosecutor. Was I destined to spend my whole professional life suffering through miserable dinner parties? These were the thoughts racing through my head as I tried to make the three items on my plate last for an hour and a half.

When dinner finally, finally ended, I thought the night would naturally draw to a close. It did not.

The whole crowd moved back toward the living area. At the same time, Grover's son marched through the front door, decked out in pressed khaki pants, a crisp white shirt, a dark blue blazer, and a tie.

"Hello," said the child, holding out his hand and introducing himself to each guest, one at a time. "My name is John McDonald. I'm ten years old. It's a pleasure to meet you."

A few minutes later, a line had formed outside of the bathroom and John again approached us, gesturing toward the staircase. "There's another restroom upstairs," he said. "Perhaps some of you might find that one more comfortable." I stared at the ten-year-old alien in front of me. Who taught this kid to speak like that? It was creeping me out. I felt like I was in Stepford.

Shortly thereafter, in the living room, conversation was again picking up. John joined in a conversation about hobbies. "I like to ride my ATV around the property. It's not much - it's only eight acres - but I do enjoy it."

Only eight acres. Not much. His ATV. "I do enjoy it." Seriously?

Finally, people started to trickle out and I felt like we could leave without looking rude. P and I made our way over to Grover, thanked him for inviting us, and headed for the door. We extracted our car from the line of luxury vehicles and began the long drive back to reality.

We Will Write

2011-07-24T00:09:00.000-04:00

A conversation occurred recently on a message board that I frequent, lamenting how difficult it is to maintain an outside identity as the mother of young children (and especially as the stay-at-home parent of young children). Making time to keep up with hobbies, especially creative hobbies, can be really tough. When you spend all day with these little people that need so much from you, and when you devote so much brain space to making sure they're cared for and entertained and happy, mustering up the strength to do your own thing on top of that is really hard.

This conversation struck a chord with me. For the past couple of years, I've been really boring. I love my kids to pieces, but I've sucked hardcore at maintaining those things that used to make me interesting and keep me fulfilled. When I'm out with other adults, I feel like I don't have much to talk about other than parenting and my kids.

One of the other board participants - someone that really loved creative writing in her former life - decided to start a writing group as a way to combat some of these feelings. Called We Will Write, the idea is to write something, anything creative, once a week for an entire year, in response to prompts given by the group members.

Once upon a time, long ago, I considered myself a writer. Back then, poetry was my outlet of choice. I haven't written a poem in years - probably not since well before law school - and my writing in general has gotten sloppy and uncreative. I can write blog-style (casual and conversational) or lawyer-style (persuasive and formal), but creatively? Not so much.

So I decided to join the project, and since I'm nothing if not a glutton for punishment, I've decided to share all of these first drafts with you guys. You can offer constructive criticism if you want, or just snark on it behind my back... whatever. It's a way of keeping myself accountable. And hey, at least you'll get a post a week that doesn't have to do with what my kids and I did for fun that day.

Whether or not I'll go back long-term to writing as a hobby remains to be seen, but it's worth giving it a shot. And if it turns out at the end of this that I no longer love to write or no longer have any talent for it, I can move on to something else. No harm, no foul. But this is as good a re-entry point into my non-mommy identity as anything, so here we go.

This week, I loved... (7/11/11-7/17/11)

2011-07-17T22:04:00.000-04:00

Lauren voted that I keep writing these and no one else offered an opinion, so they're staying for now. If they're boring the rest of you, you should have spoken up. :-)

This week, I loved:

- running through the mist sprayer at the playground with the kids... and marveling at the rainbow that developed right in the middle of it.

- swimming with P in the pool after the kids were asleep. (Don't worry, we had the monitor with us).

- Nora cleaning up the living room without me asking her to. Have I mentioned that 4-year-olds rock? Because they really do.

- a family trip to the playground. I usually take the kids by myself, so it was nice to have P around too.

- starting to plan out how to decorate my new office.

- watching my strong girl make her way across wobbly balance disks, scale a rope course, and climb a moving fire pole.

- beans in our garden! This is the first time I've ever successfully grown anything, so I was crazy excited.

- a few good, head-clearing runs. I'm out of shape, but I'm working on it - and slowly remembering why I used to like running so much.

- Google Tracks. Because I'm nothing if not a spreadsheet nerd.

- a busy, but fun, Saturday.

- seeing two of my college friends for the first time in forever. They're still awesome.

- a trip into Philly with the family. The part where we procured chocolate-covered graham crackers from Reading Terminal Market was especially sweet.

This week, I loved... (7/4/11-7/10/11)

2011-07-10T19:47:00.000-04:00

Are these posts interesting to you guys? This is my personal live-in-the-moment / appreciate-the-good-stuff project, and I decided to do it in the blog instead of on paper so that my blog would have at least one guaranteed post per week, but I'm not sure if I'm boring everyone to tears. Thoughts? I won't be offended either way, I promise!

Anyway, this week, I loved:

- a long swim in the pool by myself while everyone else was napping.

- finally seeing 4th of July fireworks with P - for the first time in our 11-year relationship.

- Isaac getting really into the hand motions during circle time at the library. It's so cute to watch him learn how to do these kinds of things!

- getting the high chair and booster out of the kitchen (Isaac has "graduated" to regular chairs). We can finally all fit around the table without being right on top of each other and it looks much less cluttered now.

- Isaac learning a whole bunch of new words. I continue to believe that more words = more civilized children. Less screaming is always a good thing, right?

- baking brownies with Nora.

- finally landing a Google+ invite.

- a moment of feeling overwhelmingly lucky to get all this time to spend with my kids, even though me staying home was the result of something difficult and was never really part of my life plan. I don't always feel lucky, to be brutally honest (often I feel bored and ill-equipped for stay-at-home-motherhood, actually), but I cherish the moments where I feel truly present in their lives.

- family pool time.

- a lazy weekend.

This week, I loved... (6/27/11-7/3/11)

2011-07-03T22:34:00.000-04:00

This week, I loved:

- a fun trip to the park with my kiddies.

- watching Isaac try to do the hand motions - for the very first time! - to some of the rhymes at library circle time.

- a much-needed head-clearing walk in the summer breeze, Dar Williams on my iPod and the smells of flowers and grass all around.

- happening upon a preteen girl doing a handstand in the grass during that walk, watching her smile at me shyly when she realized I saw her, and being reminded of my own youthful sense of freedom and possibility.

- the finale of the Voice - so much real, actual talent for a reality TV show.

- laughing with P as we tried (and failed) to consume spaghetti Lady and the Tramp-style.

- Isaac starting to call me "mommy" instead of "mama." I much prefer "mommy."

- taking the kids on an impromptu trip into the city and having an absolute blast with them. They are such good kids, really. I'm a very lucky mommy.

- family swim time in the pool.

- dinner out for the first time in what feels like forever. Bonus: the kids were well-behaved at the restaurant during said dinner!

- some cozy sleep-in time on a Sunday morning. Ahh...

Not my story to tell, but...

2011-07-01T22:35:00.000-04:00

What I'm about to write about is not my story to tell, so it will be short on details, but it's affecting me deeply tonight and I want to talk about it a little bit.

As many of you know, P is currently doing clinical work at a hospital as part of his respiratory therapy training. Earlier today, he was called upon to do something not remotely respiratory-related, just because the situation was so dire that the hospital needed all hands on deck to deal with it. The short version of the story is that a 30-year-old woman had a baby via c-section, started bleeding profusely, had a hysterectomy to try to stop the bleeding, continued to bleed profusely, was given multiple blood transfusions and medications and lots of CPR, and ended up dying. P was in the room when she died. He saw her 3-year-old playing in the hallway, unaware that her mother had just died. He heard her newborn baby screaming in the NICU, inconsolable for 5 or 6 hours straight. Babies know their mothers, and this baby must have known something was horribly wrong. The situation was awful enough that his supervisor decided that he'd seen enough horror for one day and sent him home early. And I'm sure that P will, at some point, share more details of what happened and how they tried to respond to it and how he felt about it all, but like I said, that's not my story to tell. That's his.

I just can't believe how shaken up this makes me feel. Nora was three when Isaac was born. What if I'd kissed her goodbye that day and never come back? My heart aches, terribly, for this woman's little girl. My heart aches for the baby, who will someday realize that his birthday and his mother's date of death are one and the same and will surely feel horrible, awful, undeserved guilt. I can't imagine these kids growing up without their mom. I feel sick at the thought of the woman's family, rushing to the hospital for what was supposed to be a joyous occasion but instead turned into the worst day of their entire lives. I feel ill for the woman's husband, tasked with trying to deal with his grief, help his daughter through her grief, and bond with his new baby boy under the worst possible circumstances. That poor, poor family. All of them. I don't even know them, but I feel such deep grief for them.

And honestly, it all makes me a little scared. We're planning on a third child, eventually, and I have a history of delivery-related blood loss myself. I lost quite a lot of blood after Nora's birth and needed pitocin to contract my uterus and slow the bleeding. It was serious enough that, for Isaac's birth, the midwives insisted on a preemptive shot so that it wouldn't happen again. What if I hemorrhage next time? What if the pitocin isn't enough? After all, this woman had her first child without any severe complications... and the second time, she died. It makes me feel scared about something that it never before occurred to me to be scared of.

So, that's what's on my mind tonight. My kids got extra hugs this evening. I spent some extra time snuggling with my husband. I'm trying to remind myself that this pain isn't mine and I shouldn't borrow grief. But my heart hurts right now. Somewhere, a three-year-old and a newborn are motherless and a man is being called upon to guide them as he's grieving the worst loss of his life. Somewhere, a baby has never been held by his mother. Somewhere, a family is trying to make sense of losing their daughter/sister/cousin at the same time they're welcoming their grandson/nephew/second cousin.

And that, dear universe, is really fucking unfair. That should never happen. That is why I can't force myself to believe in God. Because if "God" would allow this kind of thing to happen, God is a huge asshole. And I refuse to revere or worship an asshole.

This week, I loved... (6/20/11-6/26/11)

2011-06-26T22:06:00.000-04:00

This week, I loved:

- sales at the mall that let me get several pairs of cute, cheap pajamas for the kids.

- shooting hoops in the driveway while my little ones entertained themselves in the yard.

- hanging out with a friend and our kiddos - twice! My weeks are better when I get to hang out with other adults, but it's rare for it to happen more than once in a single week.

- Isaac's glee as he ran back and forth through the mist-sprayer at the playground.

- watching Nora swim on her new noodle in the pool. She went back and forth across the pool by herself a whole bunch of times. I was so proud of her!

- New York passing the same-sex marriage bill. My home state is awesome. I wish my current state would follow suit.

- a federal court ruling that blocked Indiana's attempt to defund Planned Parenthood. Good news for progressive politics twice in one week? That never happens!

- berry picking with my awesome family.

This week, I loved... (6/13/11-6/19/11)

2011-06-19T21:55:00.001-04:00

This week, I loved:

- playing with the kids at the children's museum.

- watching Nora pull Isaac uphill in a wagon, all the while singing "it's really not very heavy" and telling me to let go when I tried to help. She made it all the way to the top of the hill - my girl is strong!

- asking Isaac where his missing apple slices had gone, hearing him answer "bus!" and then watching him push a toy ambulance topped with apple slices across the dining room with a gleeful "whee!" He was quite proud of himself for figuring out how to combine his two great loves (apples and "buses" (where a bus is anything with wheels)). He's such a cutie pie.

- the fact that I managed to avert every last one of a series of work-related crises on less than 4 hours of sleep. It was a combination of luck and skill, but mostly luck. I love good luck.

- sunny, warm, but not-too-humid weather.

- a morning at the zoo with my boy, a friend, and her boy.

- discovering Goodreads, which I should have discovered eons ago.

- soccer class with my girl, followed by a family trip to the ice cream shop.

- a family picnic in a beautiful natural setting (and the discovery that there's a hiking trail there for when it gets not-too-hot closer to fall).

- playing Mario with P.

- a wonderful, family-oriented Father's Day celebrating the man we all love.

This week, I loved... (6/6/11-6/12/11)

2011-06-12T21:20:00.000-04:00

This week, I loved:

- taking the kids to the zoo with my mom.

- a perfect afternoon at the beach, with Nora loving the waves, Isaac loving the sand, tons of smiles and giggles, and even a few minutes of peace and quiet for me.

- an equally perfect evening on the boardwalk, highlighted by a ride on the Tilt a Whirl with P on one side, me on the other, and Nora grinning from ear to ear in the middle.

- getting our house back after four days of my mom being here. I love her, but... well, you know. Four days of any house guest is exhausting and it was nice to have my space back.

- after-dinner family swim time in the pool.

- a few hours chatting with my friend, S, when she stopped by for dinner and a little bit of hang-out time.

- the giggles of my children on an otherwise dreary afternoon.

Last week, I loved... (5/30/11-6/5/11)

2011-06-08T21:40:00.000-04:00

I'm posting this late because my mom was here until this morning and she has a bad habit of looking over my shoulder while I use the computer, making it impossible to blog (unless I wanted her to know about this blog, which of course I did not).

So, LAST week, I loved:

- having P home on Monday. Holidays = awesome.

- play-bickering with P while we set up the pool. He was genuinely annoyed by the pool's existence and I was genuinely sick of working on it, but we weren't really fighting - just sort of jokingly bickering as we slid around in the water at the bottom and smoothed out the wrinkles. Am I weird for finding it kind of hot? Like, becoming so enraged at him that I wanted to drag him into a private location to, um, work out my frustration? ... Ahem. (Yes, I probably am weird. And this is probably TMI for all of you, anyway. Carry on).

- waking up to two sweet kiddos hug-bombing me and saying, "Mama!"

- reading Curdoroy to Nora - one of my favorite books from when I was little.

- falling asleep on top of P. We're not usually super-cuddly sleepers (especially when it's hot), but circumstances conspired to make us both conk out without getting uncomfortable and it was sooooooo nice.

- starting Montessori activities with Isaac. I love watching my kids concentrate while they work.

- a break from the super-hot humidity with a few days of insanely beautiful weather.

- watching my sweet girl play with her cousin at P's parents' party.

- the world's comfiest new lounge pants.

If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention

2011-06-03T12:48:00.000-04:00

Louisiana is in the process of outlawing all abortions, except those necessary to save a woman's life. This sucks for the women of Louisiana, obviously, but it sucks for the rest of us too. As Feministing so eloquently explains:

It is a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, and it is designed to provoke a lawsuit that will inevitably go all the way to the Supreme Court, which, given its current make-up, could very well overturn Roe. It’s an impossible double-bind for pro-choicers: do you let this bill stand and see abortion effectively banned in the state of Louisiana (and in the other states that, emboldened and provided with precedent, would inevitably follow suit), or do you challenge it and risk seeing abortion officially banned in all fifty states?

Yeah. Fuck you, Louisiana.

Another relevant point is that the bill makes no exception for women who become pregnant from rape or incest. According to one of the anti-choice advocates that testified at the hearing, "If you really care about a rape victim, you would want to protect her from abortion, not the baby. A baby is not the worst thing that could ever happen to a rape victim. An abortion is." Seriously?

I've been raped. I've had an abortion. I can say, unequivocally, that the rape was horrible and the abortion was... well... not. I'd even go so far as to say that the rape was one of the worst things that ever happened to me, while the abortion was one of the best (in that it allowed me to continue my life on a course that led to completing my education, meeting my husband, and having our awesome children).

My particular abortion was not the result of rape, but if I had become pregnant from rape, I'm 100% positive that it would have ended the same way. Being forced to carry a piece of your rapist inside of you every single day for nine months would be, in my opinion, like being re-raped every single day for nine months. Forcing that on a woman is immoral and disgusting. Way to go, Louisiana. I would bet every cent in my savings account that this bill, if signed into law, will result in more than one pregnant rape victim committing suicide rather than enduring nine months of feeling her rapist's spawn grow and kick inside of her.

I'm seriously so outraged by this that I want to throw up right now. I wish there were something that I could do. If this becomes law, those of us in less idiotic states really need to form a huge support network - an underground railroad, as a manner of speaking - to help fund and host the women of Louisiana that need to travel out of state to get the medical care they need. It's the only moral thing to do.

A few quick thoughts/updates

2011-06-02T13:34:00.000-04:00

... Because I'm too lazy to write a real post.

1. I think that grapes are objectively disgusting. That tough exterior with the squishy, squirty middle... blech. Isaac shoved a grape into my mouth while we were taking a walk this morning and it was all I could do not to spit it out on the sidewalk.

2. Speaking of Isaac, he has finally learned the word "no." But he doesn't say it just once; he says it a bunch of times in a row, like, "nononononono." It's cute... today. Ask me again in a week and I may feel differently.

3. I don't think I've shared here yet that I'm going to have an actual office soon. I'll be sharing space in one of P's dad's buildings with another lawyer. She'll only be there two or three days a week, so I'll probably go in on the other two or three days so that she doesn't go crazy about my kid(s) being with me (I hope to eventually be able to put Isaac in the toddler program at Nora's school for a few days a week, but I need to make more money first, so he'll continue hanging out with me for the time being).

4. P's dad took me to meet one of his lawyer friends this morning - a very nice, well-connected guy in the town where my office will be. The lawyer kept looking at me, looking at P's dad, and saying, "I can't believe he's your father-in-law." He said he wouldn't hold it against me, which I appreciated... especially when P's dad tried to slip him an envelope full of cash in what appeared to be a bribe attempt (the lawyer is also a judge in a district court here and P's dad is about to file a landlord-tenant case against one of his tenants in that court). Oy.

5. My mom is coming to visit this weekend and I don't feel like cleaning. It's beautiful outside today and being stuck inside dusting seems like a special kind of hell. Also, vacuuming is impossible lately - it's too loud to do when Isaac is asleep, but he's terrified of the vacuum, so doing it while he's awake means doing it with a clingy, crying, 20-something-pound toddler on one hip. No fun at all. I'm jealous of our neighbor's housekeeper.

This week, I loved... (5/23/11-5/29/11)

2011-05-29T21:35:00.000-04:00

This week, I loved:

- the cashier at the supermarket that not only bagged my groceries for me, but actually put all of the cold stuff together so that I only had one bag that had to be put away immediately upon getting home.

- the smell of our lentil and veggie soup simmering in the slow cooker all day on Monday. Yum, yum, yum.

- DWTS date night - the last of the season!

- the start of the Bachelorette. Yes, I love trashy reality TV. I refuse to apologize.

- Nora getting herself up and dressed on Tuesday morning, brushing her own teeth, and getting the table all set for breakfast. She can be such a pleasant child when she wants to be!

- taking the kids out for pizza and cookies while P was at the airport picking up his sister.

- a morning at the museum with my little guy. I love taking both kids out, but Isaac definitely caves to his big sister's whims when we're all together. It's nice to give him some time to explore on his own, too.

- a long walk in the sticky almost-summer night air, listening to mid-90s emo music and clearing my head.

- reading Bossypants. I heart Tina Fey.

- a fun Saturday afternoon that included lunch with my friend M, one-on-one time with Nora, and playtime with both kids and the neighborhood kids.

- diet coke being on mega-sale at the supermarket - five 12-packs for $11.99. I seriously did a happy dance in the aisle. I'm, um, easy to please.

- date night at home with P. We're slowly catching up on the movies that the rest of you have already seen! We watched Inception last week and are watching the Social Network tonight.

Feels like home

2011-05-26T22:34:00.000-04:00

P was worried about me because I took a little longer than planned on my walk tonight, so he was waiting for me outside as I returned. I walked up to him, smiling, and said, "Guess what I'm listening to? The song that was the last dance at our wedding." I put my arms around him and started to dance with him under the stars, and he took one of my ear buds and put it up to his ear.

Then he made a face. "The last song at our wedding was a country song?" he asked.

...

Moment ruined.

That's my romantic guy.

And for the record, it was folk.

This week, I loved... (5/16/11-5/22/11)

2011-05-22T22:17:00.000-04:00

Remember what I said last week about needing to find more non-kid-related joy in my life? Yeah, that didn't happen this week. At ALL. I was battling my own grumpiness all week and was so thankful for the kids' cuteness for helping to hold me reasonably together.

With that said, this week, I loved:

- my sweet Nora letting me nap during her brother's nap when my allergies were horrible. Four-year-olds rule.

- watching Isaac make his first tenative sketches with crayons. It also amuses me that he calls coloring "eat," probably from hearing me say "we don't eat crayons" ten times a day for most of his life.

- Isaac learning to sing the EIEIO part of Old McDonald ("yah yah yah yo"). So cute I can barely stand it.

- several kids from the neighborhood congregating in our yard after dinner, swinging on the swings, playing basketball, and just hanging out. I'm glad that our kids are growing up in a neighborhood with other children around.

- Nora's excitement about the alphabet party at school. "It was the BEST PARTY EVER," she informed me at pick-up time.

- a fun family day at the zoo, followed by Nora and the 6-year-old next door playing together (read: keeping each other occupied) for the rest of the afternoon.

- P giving me a pedicure. I have a good husband.

- watching a movie with my sweetie.

- an absolutely SILENT house when Isaac, Nora, and P all decided to take a nap at the same time. You have no idea how much I loved this. Seriously. Complete silence is a very rare treat around here.

This week, I loved... (5/9/11-5/15/11)

2011-05-15T21:10:00.000-04:00

This week, I loved:

- watching my big girl slide on the zip line at the park... all by herself. When did my tiny baby grow into such a strong little girl?

- surviving my first workout in a long time. It wasn't pretty, but I did it. Hopefully this will be the start of me getting back on the track to good health.

- P reading stories in Isaac's room while both of the kids snuggled on my lap. Amazing family time - exactly the kind of moment I pictured back when we were dreaming of having kids.

- several fun afternoons/evenings outside with P and the kids. The temperate weather and sunshine have been great.

- our utility company fixing a problem that I was sure we were going to have to pay an electrician to fix.

- the swing set that my mom bought the kids a few weeks ago. Finally, there is something in our yard that entertains both of them for more than five minutes at a time! It makes outside time much more pleasant.

- taking the kids to the carnival being held at a nearby Catholic school. Nora has been asking to go ever since it opened and was so, so happy when we told her that we were going to take her. We had a lot of fun!

- hanging out with my little family at the bottom of the stairs just before bedtime, just watching the kids play and be cute and doling out hugs and kisses and snuggles. So simple, yet so awesome.

- watching Isaac jump in mud puddles in the yard.

- the smell of clean baby as I snuggled Isaac in my lap before he went to bed.

Most of these are about the kids, huh? I love them, but I think I'm a little lacking in balance right now. I need to work on that.

An uncomfortable encounter

2011-05-13T23:53:00.001-04:00

At a carnival at a school in town, I ran into a partner from my old firm. After introducing Isaac and engaging in vague awkwardness, we had the following exchange:

Smarmy partner: "Congratulations on starting your own practice. That's great. I don't have the guts to do something like that."

Me: "Neither do I, but... yeah."

Partner: "Yeah..." [uncomfortable silence]

In three years at that place, I never once saw this guy speechless. But guess what? I don't work there anymore. I don't have to kiss ass anymore. I don't have to pretend to like any of them anymore. It was liberating.

Uncomfortable, but liberating.

I win.

This week, I loved... (5/2/11-5/8/11)

2011-05-08T23:59:00.001-04:00

This week, I loved:

- taking my sweet kids to the park and watching them chase each other down the slide over and over again. Giggles galore. I love it when they play nicely together.

- DWTS date night... again!

- Isaac announcing "Gaga" when "Poker Face" came on the radio. Apparently, even without Nora to egg him on, he can recognize Lady Gaga's music. It cracks me up.

- my husband being here - healthy and alive - after a scare that had me worried he wouldn't be. I love you, Kashi.

- Isaac snuggling in my lap during library story time.

- making colorful, artsy sugar cookies with the kids with the Crayola Color Dough my mom left for them after her last visit.

- a rejuvenating play date with a friend and our boys.

- the realization that a late afternoon snack = a 150% decrease in screaming while I try to make dinner. Kids playing happily and leaving me to cook in peace? Yeah, I don't even care if the snacks ruin their appetite.

- hearing that our friends, S and J, have set a wedding date... and being asked to be a bridesmaid in their wedding!

- Nora's first play date with neighborhood kids without me there. It gave me visions of a not-too-distant future of kids playing with other kids and me reading a book in the middle of the afternoon. Someday, right?

- Nora's glee with the new swing set that my mom got the kids. She declared that she was going to swing "all night long" - so cute!

- beautiful flowers on my doorstep on Saturday afternoon - an early Mother's Day present from my kiddos (with the help of their daddy, of course).

- a wonderful Mother's Day with my amazing family, including sleeping in until close to noon, a leisurely shower, adorable cards from the kids, chocolate-covered pretzels, a spa gift certificate (which I plan to use for a much-needed facial), an afternoon at the park, and yummy gourmet pizza takeout. I love my family so much.

Gaining perspective

2011-05-04T20:14:00.000-04:00

Yesterday afternoon, I was making dinner and feeling horribly sorry for myself after a rough afternoon with the kids that had me acting like... hmm... not my best parental self. My phone rang, and when I saw that it was P, I steeled myself for the news that he was going to be late coming home from work and my rough afternoon was going to continue. Instead, he told me that he was having chest pains and felt like he should probably go to the hospital. I told him I'd get the kids ready. A minute later, he called back and said the pain was getting worse and asked me to have the kids in the car and ready to go when he got home. Another minute later, he called back and asked me to call 911 because his left arm was numb and tingling and he couldn't lift it, and he thought it would be best to go in an ambulance.

The next several minutes were a blur of me calling for the ambulance, throwing some snacks in a bag for the kids, and locking the door. P got home, the ambulance arrived, and they zipped him off to the ER. I bucked the kids into their car seats while giving the run-down on the situation to the cop that had arrived right behind the ambulance, then darted off to the hospital. I realized halfway there that I'd never turned off the stove, so I turned around to do that and then headed back again.

When we arrived at the ER and found P, he reported that his EKG had come back normal - no heart attack - and that they were taking his blood to run some tests. When they finished taking his blood, they wheeled him into a room and hooked him up to a million wires and tubes for monitoring. Nora was terrified and Isaac was getting into everything, so I started the process of trying to find someone to take them away from the hospital and take care of them so that I could stay with P. Luckily, our friend M agreed to pick them up, and got there relatively quickly. He took them to our house and I went back to be with P. P's dad also came to the hospital to be with him.

We hung out long enough to find out that all of the tests they'd run had come back clear. The pain went away and they agreed to release him, with strict instructions to take it easy and come back immediately if the pain came back. He was also told to schedule a non-stress test with a cardiologist.

We still don't know what caused the chest pain or the arm numbness, but for now, he's feeling fine and normal. I am so, so relieved. I was having such a hard time holding it together on the way to the hospital - I was terrified that he was having a heart attack and scared that he could die. A million different fears went flashing through my mind: How would I tell the kids? How would we function without him? How in the world could I live without the love of my life?

My bad afternoon, of course, was immediately put into perspective. And I also gained the realization that, important as it is to live in the present for the good times, it's equally important to keep a clear head about the harder times. Isaac screaming and clinging to my leg for an hour straight while I tried to clean the kitchen and cook dinner? Not so big of a deal compared to the possibility of my husband dying and me becoming a single mother. I want to cherish the good as it happens, but I also want learn to let go of the bad stuff and keep my cool. Because really, it could be so much worse.

I'm also relieved to have good friends that we can count on in a pinch. Thank you, M, for dropping everything to take care of the kiddos while we were going through hell. It meant the world to all of us.

This week, I loved... (4/25/11-5/1/11)

2011-05-01T21:31:00.000-04:00

This week, I loved:

- flip flop weather.

- DWTS date night (with lots of fun music).

- a day where I spent more time doing lawyer stuff than mommy stuff. I don't have those often, nor would I want them all the time, but it's nice to have them occasionally.

- getting lots of hugs and kisses from my kiddos.

- telling knock-knock jokes with Nora and having Isaac pipe up "na na! na na!" with a big, proud grin.

- a yummy dinner of stuffed shells and garlic bread that everyone - including the kids - actually ate without fuss. It was the first time in a while that we've had a drama-free dinner and it was SO NICE.

- walking out my front door, looking around, and taking in the amazing beauty all around me. Spring where I live is the season of cherry blossoms and dogwoods in bloom and, even after nearly 13 years of living here, it still takes my breath away.

- Isaac developing a real love of books and getting cutely picky about which ones we read at naptime and bedtime.

- A NIGHT OUT WITH MY HUSBAND AND OUR FRIENDS. (Yes, that warrants all caps). My last time out with P without the kids was in October. It's been way too long! It was so, so nice to be out in the world together, having conversations with each other and our friends without anyone pulling on my leg or crying to be picked up or interjecting tales about princesses and dinosaurs. Oh, how I wish we could afford a babysitter on a more regular basis.

- Maypoles, hoop racing, a May Hole, and strawberries and cream.

- our alum club event going really well, despite our doom and gloom expectations.

This week, I loved... (418/11-4/24/11)

2011-04-24T21:02:00.000-04:00

This week, I loved:

- P cleaning up the kitchen while I was at the dentist. It doesn't take much to please me these days!

- Nora using her piggy bank money to buy herself some pink, sparkly shoes. Not what I would have chosen, but she was so proud to buy them with her own money and so excited about them that I couldn't stop smiling.

- Isaac lovingly resting his hand on Nora's shoe while she was getting her teeth cleaned, watching intently. There is nothing cuter in the world than a toddler acting like his older sibling's Protector-in-Chief.

- an afternoon at the children's museum with my boy. He's at just the right age to be completely into it.

- the return of Glee! This week's episode was kind of lame, but I was still happy that it was back from hiatus and I have high hopes for next week.

- listening to Maks from DWTS describe himself as a "sex on a stick" and go on about it for a good sixty seconds. I seriously laughed harder than I have in weeks. I *heart* Maks.

- 80 degree weather! Even if it was just one day.

- watching the kiddos frolic around in their new sand box. So much fun!

- attending a CLE that was actually useful, informative, and not a complete waste of time. First one ever!

- Isaac calling the cat "Zig Zig" (one of the kitty's nicknames) and looking insanely proud of himself. So cute.

- sticking my tongue out at Isaac while I was pumping gas and watching him stick his tongue out and giggle. Also super-cute!

- playing board games with Nora during Isaac's nap.

- a much-needed Saturday morning nap for myself.

- P's appreciation when I made sweet potato gnocchi for dinner on Saturday night.

- going out for ice cream with P and the kids.

- watching the kids pillage their Easter baskets.

- the neighborhood Easter egg hunt.

- Cadbury Creme Eggs.

- taking pictures of the kids in their Easter clothes at my beautiful alma mater.

- the return of sunny, warm days, at least for the time being!

- listening to the kids' joy as they played with their new water table.

When knitting goes horribly wrong...

2011-04-20T22:14:00.000-04:00

For his 30th birthday last week, P had only one request for a present: a Jayne hat, knitted by me. He made this request several months ago, and even though I'm a novice knitter that had never before made a hat - or even knitted on circular needles! - I found a pattern and got to it. Because really, how hard could it be?

Famous last words.

It didn't start off on a promising note. I had no idea what I was doing and relied mainly on YouTube knitting videos to help me figure out the circular needles. Even with video help, I must have ripped those stitches out ten times before I finally figured out how to make the ribbing work. All of that ripping got me really behind schedule and I ended up doing several marathon knitting sessions in the week before his birthday.

When I'd finally done enough knitting for it to start to resemble (the beginnings of) a hat, I tried to smooth everything out so that he could try it on. And that's when I discovered that somewhere between the ribbing and the actual hat, my stitches got twisted. P's poor "hat" was nothing more than a circular, twisted... thing.

Observe:

There was no way that I could start from scratch at that point and produce a hat by his birthday, so I had to tell my poor husband that it wasn't going to happen. He took it remarkably in stride, although he did insist that I give him the twisty mess.

Every man needs a weird, twisted, knitted neck-warmer thingamajig to wear while doing yard work, right?

I love this man for putting up with my imperfections.

Normally, this kind of massive screw-up would make me really annoyed at myself. And yeah, I was really bummed out about not being able to give him what he wanted for his birthday. But I'm trying to see this for what it was - a learning experience.

I've gotten some practice with the circular needles. I've learned a valuable lesson about checking for twisting not just for the first few rows of a project, but with each row.

And I will knit him that hat. His birthday has come and gone, but he'll have it by Christmas, come hell or high water.

... Maybe even by Halloween, if nothing else goes wrong. But I'm not making any promises.

This week, I loved... (4/11/11-4/17/11)

2011-04-17T22:55:00.000-04:00

This was NOT a good week at our house. Taking the time to focus on the good was difficult, but I'm glad I did it or else the week would have been even worse. The ability to keep some perspective through some really rough stuff is the best thing that's come from the "this week, I loved" project so far.

So, without further ado, this week, I loved:

- taking the kids to a new-to-us, big park on a warm, sunny morning and watching Nora confidently climb to the top of the giant rope web. I wish I could bottle up her self-confidence and strength and save it for her teenage years.

- getting a good result for a client at an arbitration.

- watching my husband melt when he opened his birthday card from Nora and saw that she'd written "I love you" in it, all by herself, in her own handwriting.

- digging through the dirt to clear out our garden plot. It took forever and it was really physically exhausting, but it gave me a huge and much-needed sense of accomplishment. And hopefully, we'll have yummy, fresh produce to show for it this summer!

- a pleasant evening with the kids that included a wagon ride, the park, and an impromptu play date with the other kids in our neighborhood at our neighbor's house.

- landing a new client.

- the first hint of blossoms on our Japanese cherry tree! It's not dead after all... yay!

- buying a pair of jeans that actually fit. I've been rotating between the too-big pairs and the too-small pairs for months. It'll be nice to not have to hike my pants up every 10 seconds while I work on fitting properly into the smaller size.

- snuggling up with my arms around Nora while she watched a TV show during Isaac's Saturday nap.

- gelato at the mall with P and the kids.

- Isaac filling in all of the animal sounds in Moo Baa La La La with an emphatic "BOO!" (his way of saying "moo"), followed by an impish grin.

- a much-needed Sunday nap that helped me regain perspective after a tough morning.

- both kids smiling in their picture with the Easter Bunny!

This week, I loved... (4/4/11-4/10/11)

2011-04-10T22:17:00.002-04:00

This week, I loved:

- a beautiful, warm, sunny day spent, in part, at the zoo with a good friend and our collective kiddos.

- Nora's excitement at NASA's response to her letter about Saturn. They sent her a letter, a picture of Saturn, a coloring book, a comic book, a bookmark/ruler, and a poster of other space-themed activities to try, and she could not have been more thrilled.

- an awesome family night of pizza eaten outside and a walk around the neighborhood - one of those nights that reminds me why we had kids and makes me feel so, so grateful for the wonderful little family that I have.

- Nora running up to me when I arrived to pick her up from school and handing me a picture she drew, on which she wrote "Mom" in her adorable little handwriting. My little girl is learning how to write!

- celebrating eight years since P asked me to marry him. I'm so lucky to have him and I appreciate it everyday, but especially on these types of anniversaries!

- a Wednesday full of court, a board meeting, and good news about a project that's been pending for a long time for another board. I adore my kids, but it's nice to devote some time to the non-Mommy side of me sometimes.

- arranging a babysitter (my mom) and booking tickets to a comedy show later this month in celebration of P's 30th birthday. This will be our first time out together without the kids since October and I am so, so looking forward to it.

- P finally getting a haircut! He looks like himself again, instead of like the nutty professor. Ahem. (Love you, Kashi...)

- Isaac falling asleep on top of me when he felt lousy. I didn't love that he was sick and miserable, of course, but I loved the extra cuddles that resulted from it.

- taking Nora to a birthday party on Saturday while P stayed home with Isaac. I get lots of alone time with Isaac because he's not in school yet, but it's rare for me to get a big block of time alone with Nora. I loved having three hours to focus on what an awesome little person she is. Plus, watching her play with her friends always makes me smile.

- quality hang-out time with our friends, S and J, on Saturday evening. I'm so excited for them to move back to the area at the end of the summer.

- much-needed snuggle time with P on Saturday night.

- trading off Sunday morning naps with my awesome husband.

- gardening with P and the kiddos. We still have a lot of work to do, but we at least managed to get the sunflower seeds planted.

What did you love this week?

This week, I loved... (a collection of simple pleasures, 3/28/11-4/3/11)

2011-04-03T21:25:00.001-04:00

This week, I loved:

- starting the week with all of the clean laundry folded and put away, thanks to a productive weekend. Not having to search through three baskets to find matching socks for the kids = win.

- Nora's gleeful exclamation, "This is my favorite song!" when Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me" came on the radio, and her follow-up statement that, "I wish I could hear t-shirt song [her name for the Swift song] and Lady Gaga all the time."

- listening to Nora read Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See to Isaac, then watching her "put some naptime dreams" in his crib before he went to sleep. So sweet.

- Isaac's newfound attachment to his monkey blanket. He's always liked it, but now he's asking for it even when he's not in the crib and walking around the house cuddling it. Melt.

- finishing the cleaning and decluttering of our bedroom. We finally have an adult space in this house again!

- DWTS date night with my awesome husband. We get hardly any time together since he started school on top of work, but he's made it a point to hold our weekly DWTS viewing/snarkfest sacred, and I love him for it.

- a nice long Tuesday nap from Isaac (3 hours!), giving me the chance to enjoy some much-needed downtime.

- these biscuits, which made an otherwise ho-hum soup dinner pretty yummy.

- getting PayPal set up for my law office so that people can pay me with credit cards. Whether this makes them any more likely to pay me in a timely fashion remains to be seen, but one can hope!

- the joy on Isaac's face as he went down the slide at the children's museum, over and over and over again.

- listening to Nora exuberantly recount the day's playground antics ("Jayden and Charlie were monsters and they were chasing me and it was so scary but I got away! And then...").

- P handling the litter box, even though it was supposed to be my job (thanks, sweetie!).

- our tax refund hitting our checking account and giving us a little bit of breathing room.

- throwing proper nutrition to the wind and taking the kids out for Friday afternoon milkshakes.

- finding out that the ridiculously overpriced but adorable dress that I've been eying for Nora went on sale... and buying it for her.

- a sweet celebration with my love of 11 wonderful years together.

- Hope's cookies.

- a fun family outing to the natural history museum with P and the kids.

- Nora taking a nap for the first time in ages and the resultant beautiful, beautiful silence that I was able to enjoy (Isaac and P were also napping).

- the pure joy on Nora's face when we set up her new big kid bed!

Eleven

2011-04-01T13:33:00.000-04:00

Today marks the 11th anniversary of the day that P and I started dating. In honor of the occasion, I thought I'd post 11 quirky/funny/cute things about our relationship.

1) When we first started dating, P told me that he'd like to live in Vancouver someday. I apparently responded, "Have you ever actually been to Vancouver?" He had not. Thus began our dynamic of him being a dreamer and me being the realist that stomps him down. ;-)

2) A few weeks into our relationship, I took him out with me in the middle of the night to help block off (with toilet paper) a bunch of entrances to buildings on campus as part of a disability awareness project. This was his first, but certainly not his last, encounter with my weirdo activist side.

3) The first movie we ever saw together was a very bad Jim Carrey movie called Me, Myself, and Irene. I had a horrible allergy attack that night and spent most of the movie sneezing all over him. Shockingly, he didn't break up with me on the spot. I continue to be the more disgusting member of our relationship.

4) On our first anniversary, we went to NYC to see Les Mis on Broadway. While we were there, we visited Central Park, where P spent a good hour posing me so that he could take ridiculous pictures from crazy angles. I still crack up when I look at the pictures of me "eating" a line of cabs or the picture of a statue and I engaged in some wildly inappropriate activities.

5) For Halloween in the year of the 2000 election, I insisted that he wear an Al Gore mask and accompany me, dressed in a dress and Dubya mask, to a party. I then kissed him repeatedly with the masks on. He was shockingly tolerant of my juvenile humor.

6) One of my favorite nights in our entire relationship was the night we climbed out of the window of my summer sublet and sat on the roof, eating ice cream and talking under the stars. I'm pretty sure that's the night I became 100% sure that we were going to get married someday.

7) I went on a trip to Africa during law school. When I got back, I was so jet-lagged that I locked myself out of my apartment. P drove from Delaware to DC at 10:00 at night to let me back in. He got a speeding ticket on the way and a parking ticket the next morning.

8) P was late for our wedding. Because we didn't want to see each other before the ceremony, he sent our minister to grovel for forgiveness on his behalf. It was only later that I found out he was late because he was busy sending away the limos that his parents had arranged to transport his side of the family to the ceremony (after we had specifically told them that we didn't want limos). He'd decided, correctly, that him being late would make me much less annoyed in the long run than him allowing his parents to create a complete spectacle of disregarding our wishes. Good husband.

9) I got violently ill at the end of our honeymoon and the airline wouldn't let me fly home. Instead, they sent us by ambulance to the hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Highlights included the EMT that didn't know how to take a blood pressure reading and the guy walking around the hallway wailing and carrying around his severed finger. Yeah. Don't ever get sick in Puerto Rico, y'all.

10) When we went to Paris in 2006, he was surprisingly tolerant of my search for the French in Action lips fountain. I'm now trying to teach him French using the same French in Action program and hope that he will someday fully appreciate the allure of the lips.

11) I apparently bit him, repeatedly, when I was in labor with Isaac. I have absolutely no recollection of this.

I love this man. 11 years together, 5.5 years of marriage, and I love him more than ever. Happy anniversary, sweetheart.

Sprucing up our master bedroom

2011-03-28T21:16:00.000-04:00

Long time, no blog.

There's a reason for that, actually. It has to do with my food issues and attempting to regain some control in that area of my life. But I'll save that for another post because it's complicated and... blah.

Food issues aside, I've been making progress on my "live presently and fearlessly" goal. I've been trying to tackle things that I've been putting off over the last few years of stagnation, and in the last week, I finally tackled a big one - our bedroom.

What does a bedroom have to do with living presently? A lot, actually. While we were first struggling with my job loss, we were terrified that we weren't going to be able to pay our mortgage and that we were going to lose our house. So, for many months, I did nothing in the house, trying not to let myself get any more attached than I already was just in case we had to say goodbye.

We were ultimately able to refinance the mortgage and significantly reduce our monthly payment, so the worry of losing the house eventually passed. We started working on it a bit, inside and out. But our bedroom was always the black hole - the room where we shoved things when people were coming over and we needed to clean up quickly, the place we shoved our million baskets of clean but unfolded laundry so that we could have easy access to our clothes while getting dressed in the morning, the place where our dirty laundry got dumped because all of the baskets were full of clean laundry... ahem. You get the picture. And it just got so overwhelming, so messy, so out of control that cleaning it up felt like an impossible task. So we didn't.

Recently, I was inspired by one of my favorite blogs, A Slob Comes Clean, to tackle the bedroom situation. The blog author posted about sprucing up her garage for spring and invited others to share their spring spruce-up projects. I wasn't brave enough to commit in writing to getting our bedroom under control, but I decided to quietly give it a go and see what I could accomplish.

I started about a week ago and finally finished today. The whole process took about 6 hours, including a massive 3-hour cleaning spree this afternoon.

P is going to kill me for sharing the "before" pictures with the world, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Messy room overview:

It was seriously, seriously gross:

Yuck:

But now? Now, it looks like this:

I'd prefer that P hang his robe in his closet, but I'll never win that battle. Still... so much better, right?

We've decided to declare our room an Adults Only space. That doesn't mean that the kids aren't allowed in there, but it does mean that their stuff has to leave when they do. No more stuffed animals, board books, or toys hanging around. We've also instituted a new rule that laundry only comes upstairs from the laundry room when we have time to devote to folding it. Baskets of clean clothes are the root of all chaos when it comes to our bedroom, so we're no longer allowing them in there.

We'll see how long we can keep this up, but for now it is SO AWESOME to have a nice, clean, orderly bedroom. It helps me feel like I'm back on track with my life.

Hard work

2011-03-12T22:31:00.001-05:00

Trying to live deliberately is HARD work. Today, I don't feel like I did a great job of it. I was tired, I'm PMSing something fierce (and PMS for me is synonymous with bouts of depression and an intense desire to binge on everything in sight...), and it just... bah.

I ate without paying attention to my body's signals.

I was snappish and grumpy on several occasions.

I felt lethargic and cranky.

I thought about closing this blog because ohmygodI'msuchafailureatlivinginthemoment can'tevencommitforaweek holygoddoIsuck, blah blah blah. (Well, HI, old friend, Negative Self Talk!)

I need to accept that every single moment of every single day is a new chance to embrace my life and live it on my own terms. I need to accept that I don't have to be perfect - that nobody's perfect - and that I should grant myself as much grace and forgiveness as I grant to others.

I need to stop trying so hard and start living so hard.

Learning to live again, after years of being on pause and beating myself up in my head, is very, very, very tough. But I owe it to myself to keep working on it.

Witching hours

2011-03-11T22:19:00.001-05:00

In the spirit of honesty and genuinely trying to take charge of my life, I'm going to admit something that I shouldn't admit publicly: The hours from 4-7 PM are my least favorite time of day and I routinely feel like a crap parent during that time frame.

It's a combination of things. First, it's one of my naturally lower-energy parts of the day. I'm tired during the late afternoon. Second, it's Isaac's worst time of day, behavior-wise. He's tired and hungry and cranky and clingy and doesn't want to be put down. Snacks help sometimes, but not always, and usually he just wants to be on my hip the whole time. Third, it's the time of day when Nora has tired of playing on her own and starts begging me to play very involved, intensive pretend-play games (current favorite: Little Red Riding Hood, where she and I take turns with being Little Red Riding Hood or the wolf, with very highly prescribed and directed roles for each). Not a good mix with issues 1 and 2, nor with the fourth issue, which is that these are the hours when I'm stressing about cooking and getting dinner on the table. I've been trying to make an effort to get us more variety at dinnertime, but that means more involved prep than the pasta dinners we were living on previously. Fifth and finally, and especially on days when both kids are home with me all day, my nerves are just shot by that time of day from the constant bickering and demands. I'm a total introvert and being "on" all day - especially being "on" with two kids that are in very different places developmentally - is exhausting for me. It's very hard to avoid being snappish with the kids during these hours and I don't always do a great job, which makes me feel like total crap.

I'm not really sure what to do about points 1 or 2 - I don't know how much control I have over my body's rhythms and Isaac's moods. Point 3 - Nora's begging for me to play involved games with her - could possibly be placated with more intensive periods of play with me earlier in the day, at least on the days that she's home. On preschool days... ehh. I'm not sure that much can be done about it on preschool days. Point 4 - dinner - is another thing without a great solution. I've been trying to make and freeze extra portions of dinners that are freezable with the goal of reducing prep time in the future, but to sustain that, I still need to cook sometimes. And point 5... there's no really great solution to that either, other than for the kids to get older and stop butting heads so much when, say, Nora wants to build elaborate cities out of Legos and Isaac wants to practice pulling apart Legos. I suppose I could try to arrange more structured out-of-the-house time once it gets a bit warmer - zoo trips, trips to the park, hikes, etc. - but even that feels overwhelming while Isaac is at this lovely early toddler age of lots of speed and little ability to reason (read: he runs away a lot and doesn't always listen when I tell him to come back).

So... I don't know. I'd like to fix this, but when the contributing factors can't be changed, the only real possibility is to change my attitude. I think I need to make some photocopies from my favorite preschooler parenting book, Positive Discipline for Preschoolers, and hang them in a prominent place to remind myself to keep my cool. And I need to find a good parenting book for young toddlers. I'm quickly coming to realize that my amazing ability to maintain my cool during Nora's 12-18 month period was less a result of my awesome mothering skills and more a result of working full-time outside the home five days a week. P just ordered us a copy of Nurture Shock, which isn't focused on toddlers and is more about parenting philosophy than solving particular issues, but maybe it will help me maintain a sense of zen...

Small victories

2011-03-10T22:57:00.001-05:00

I'm still working on my fear of food. It's bizarre how frightening and fraught I find eating to be. BUT...

Today I managed to talk myself out of buying the ice cream I was lusting after. I ate a cookie and a half instead, which wasn't good for me per se, but I refuse to live a life without the occasional sugary treat. :-P What I'm trying to do is learn to indulge in moderation and without losing my self-respect.

In past weeks/months/years, eating a cookie and a half when I hadn't planned to would have resulted in all kinds of self-flagellation and binging. Today? It was just a snack. It didn't lead to a binge. It didn't make me skip my workout. Something that I would have viewed as a failure a few days ago (cookie-eating), I managed to view as a success today (cookie-eating instead of ice cream eating).

Progress, not perfection.

I also took a nap today, by the way. I don't usually let myself nap during the day, but I was SO tired today and I decided to give into my need for self-care. It was awesome. I should do it more often. It made me much happier and much more productive for the rest of the day.

Things that I learned from my first day of living deliberately

2011-03-08T21:47:00.001-05:00

1. Sex is always worth it, no matter how tired I am. And I'll leave it at that. ;-)

2. Wearing work pants that fit is much more comfortable than wearing jeans that are too small, thereby making them worth wearing even if I don't have to go to work.

3. The small acts of throwing on a dab of make-up in the morning and straightening my hair make a huge difference in my attitude and confidence, even if I'm just going to be around Isaac all day.

4. I'm terrified of food. I've spent so much time struggling with my weight that eating when I'm hungry feels like a huge, scary thing. I didn't eat that much food today - a bowl of shredded wheat with skim milk for breakfast, about a cup (give or take) of shells and cheddar and half a sweet potato for lunch, a black bean burger on a bun with ketchup and a bit of corn for dinner, and four snacks (an apple and granola bar, a bowl of cereal with skim milk, a handful of goldfish, and a bag of popcorn) - but it feels like so much. And I'm still hungry, but the idea of eating feels really scary to me. I'm going to do it though, because one of my goals is to stop the yo-yo cycle, listen to my body's hunger cues, and trust that I can eat when I'm hungry without destroying my life and body. The other reason that I'm going to eat is because the alternative is my usual cycle of "failure;" i.e., to be hungry today, tomorrow, and the day after, then start binging and not be able to stop for days or weeks. No more of that. If I'm hungry, I will respect my body enough to give it food.

5. Working out for the first time in ages was beautiful, beautiful torture. I didn't like doing it while it was happening, but I felt proud of myself for doing it even as I was grunting and sweating. And afterwards? SO glad that I did it. So glad.

6. Granting myself some grace makes me a better parent. Even when the kids were being crazy today, I managed to hold it together and stay calm. I'm glad.

Living deliberately, living fearlessly

2011-03-07T22:12:00.001-05:00

I haven't been myself for a few years. I feel like I've been walking through a fog, trying to deal with the stress of not having a job, then trying to deal with the stress of starting my own law practice but not having enough business or enough money. I feel like I've been waiting, waiting, waiting for my life to go back to normal, and all this time that I've been waiting, I haven't been living.

I've been afraid to live. I've been afraid to do anything that might normalize our current financial situation, afraid to do anything that might normalize our current stresses, afraid to acknowledge that this is my real life. I think I've been feeling, to some extent, like living my life in the midst of everything that's happened would constitute an implicit acceptance of the situation. Feeling like I don't deserve to live unless and until I find a way to "fix" my employment situation and our financial situation. Feeling like allowing myself to live would be irresponsible, would look like I'm making light of the bad things, would somehow immobilize me from continuing to seek to change things.

Basically, I've spent the last 2.5 years with a pause button pressed on my life. Afraid to create memories or experiences. Trying to deny that this is my life - refusing to admit that, even if I'm not happy with the way that certain things are going, these years aren't just going to disappear from my past at some nebulous point in the future "when things are better."

And that's what it comes down to, really. These years aren't going to disappear, as much as I may want them to. Refusing to live my life isn't going to change the situation that we're in. I don't have to do penance, don't have to wear my grieving clothes, until such point (if ever) that things improve. This is the only life I have and I don't have to forgo years and years of it just because some rough things are happening.

Starting right now, I'm going to make an effort to live deliberately, live in the present, live fearlessly. I used to have so much strength and courage and confidence! I need to tap into that again. I need to remember that:

The first time I ever rode on a plane, I rode by myself. To Europe.
In college, I pierced my nose, cut off my hair, and decided not to care what anyone thought of me. It's the happiest I've ever been.
In law school, I spent a week in Africa standing up for the rights of women who weren't in a position to stand up for themselves.
I took (and passed) two bar exams a week and a half before our wedding without having a complete nervous breakdown.
I gave birth to two babies, both over 9 pounds, without an epidural.

I am not weak. I have no reason to be scared to live my life. I deserve to embrace the richness of being alive, right now.

My pledge to myself, right now, is that I'm going to start treating myself with the same gentleness and love that I shower on the other people in my life that I care about. I'm going to take care of myself - physically, mentally, and spiritually - and stop beating myself up for not being perfect. I'm going to take risks, take chances, and take control of my own happiness. I'm going to give myself permission to live.

I plan to use this blog as a way to chronicle my efforts to live deliberately and live fearlessly - the successes, the setbacks, and everything in between. I'm looking forward to sharing this with anyone that cares to read about it, but this blog is really for myself. It's my own personal record of taking back my life.

Starting... now. Let's do this.