appetite for destruction

What has happened to my darling, docile daughter? She has mastered walking and morphed, seemingly overnight, into a stubborn she-devil. It’s crazy to see how radically her personality has changed now that she can get into everything. She naps less, she wakes early, every waking moment must be spent exploring. Maybe all those months that I thought she was so sweet natured and calm she was just watching, biding her time for this moment when she could toddle into all the big no’s of the house. The cabinet under the sink where all the cleaning supplies are, most are earth friendly but they could still do a number on Oona. When I put a pressure gate up to block the kitchen off Oona falls on the floor wailing for a while before calming rising and teething on the gate in protest. Stairs? I must climb them. Electrical outlet? My fingers need to go there. The tv cabinet? You can’t shut all those wonderful buttons and knobs away from me. Oh, what else... The kitty litter, the kitties water bowl, basically anything kitty related. For that matter, anything put just out of her reach. She will lean, stretch, kick, grunt, scream in protest. She’ll do her darnedest to reach the object placed in the ‘no Oona zone’. She loves to knock at the gate leg table in our living room, trying to shake it hard enough to topple the light sitting on top. But her absolute favorite activity these days is to pull books off our bookcases in the living room. Toby thinks it’s wonderful. He’s convinced that she’s a bibliophile at 14 months and will be reading before she’s two. He fails to notice the look of glee when she tears a book off the shelf and throws it on the ground. She’s just looking to destroy any sense of order in the house (currently there isn’t much) the same way she loves to ransack anything that Owen is involved with – legos, blocks, game, it doesn’t matter she’s reached the destruction milestone. My day is spent two steps behind her hunched over and ready to turn her towards safety, relishing those calm moments when she wants to smother me in kisses. I don’t remember Owen being so headstrong. Oh God, when does this end or is this just the beginning of a whole new reality?

Well, I've received my first negative comment for one of the posts I put up, regarding the craft show I participated in - you can check it out here. I had written a long post, which was a response to this anonymous commenter, but then thought better of it and just placed it in the comments section of that post. We'll see if anonymous, which I think is a pretty weak thing to do, if you're going to criticize someone have the nerve to put your name down, checks back on the post. Honestly, now that craft show has come and gone I don't think it's worth spending any more time on it. I had a bad day, I wrote, It's over! But since it's my blog I get to have the last word or, in the case of blogs, comment.

our thankgiving surprise

About a month after Lily died I started thinking about getting a new cat and discovered the British shorthair online. I thought they were so cute with their plush coat, full cheeks and their mouth looks as though they're smiling. Toby had no problem with us getting one as long as they were under $500, which I thought they would be. After contacting a breeder in New York, there are none in Pennsylvania, I found out they cost $1,000, which seems very pricey for any sort of domestic pet especially when so many animals need homes. So I put off getting a cat and appreciated the little things, there were no longer trace bits of litter and cat hair everywhere. I no longer found thrown up hairballs on the floor.

Well, that reprieve was short-lived. Toby’s parents live out on what ostensibly could be called a farm, they have close to 200 acres all to themselves (I’ll save my tirade about being out in the middle of nowhere with the closest rural hospital, that surely is behind in medical advances, being twenty minutes away for another post). They have a regular cattery out there because Toby’s Dad can’t turn away a stray cat and he won’t kill them, which is what many out in that area do when confronted with stray cats. In fact he offers them plentiful food and a couple nice shelters for the cats to stay warm in during the winter months. So we wound up with two of the stray kitties, tentatively named Frodo (the dark grey one) and Sam (the light grey tabby) but we still have to find out what sex kitties we have – pretty sure that Frodo is a boy but Sam might be a girl. Yes, I took in two cats and named them after Lord of the Rings characters, Owen was pushing for naming them both Princess Kitty so Frodo and Sam seemed pretty good names by comparison. I’m explaining this impulsive decision on the fact that I threw my back out on Tuesday and have been pretty doped up on muscle relaxants since then so my judgment was obviously impaired. I’m sure once I get the bill for all their shots and getting them fixed/spayed I’ll be brought back to reality, but they are so cute, fuzzy & lovable. We have yet to get our digital camera back from being repaired so I have to rely on the photo booth on our computer for poor quality pictures.

on the road

Driving home today from running errands with Oona I came up a narrow road along the side of a big hill right before home, the way I usually do. I'm always commenting to Toby that I don't like driving the road because it is narrow and so many people cross the solid yellow line and drive in both lanes hogging the road. Well, lo and behold, I'm a quarter of the way up the hill when down comes one of those super-sized SUVs and the guy is driving in the middle of the road using up both lanes. I've slowed down waiting for him to either move back into his lane or contemplating whether I should drive into the hilly brush on my side when he looks up from punching numbers in his cell phone and swerves into his lane about 8 feet before hitting me head on. So it got me thinking about when I first learned to drive. I loved, absolutely thrilled to get in a car and drive around. My friend Christina and I did this frequently when we had all of our driver's permits, in fact I think we even snuck out a couple of times before we had permits. So, suffice it to say that I loved to drive. Even after I was involved in a nasty car accident my senior year of High School, which left me shook up a bit, I still didn't get freaked out about driving. I drove from NJ to San Diego in 4 days by myself so I didn't have a problem with speed or highways. No. The thing that started the end of the affair between me and the road was when I was driving back East from California. I drove from LA to San Francisco. Up to Crater Lake in Oregon and then Portland. From Portland to Seattle and then I finally decided to head East instead investigating British Columbia. I crossed the Cascades in Washington without chains on my Volvo when there was a ton of snow and I was skidding like crazy, still I loved the whole driving experience.

The beginning of the end was after a long day driving through Montana. It had all started out so nicely. I was staying in a bed & breakfast in Great Falls, Montana which I had visited because my ex-boyfriend, whom I was still friendly with, and I both l liked Richard Ford's 'Rock Springs' and one of the stories in the collections was 'Great Falls'. What an awesome double entendre name for a town! The woman who ran the bed & breakfast was so sweet, she had never been to either coast, I thinkshe might never have been outside Montana. But she was kind, she made me French toast and gave me a hug before leaving, saying that she would pray for me on my ride home. I had a great day driving through Montana, it was sunny and not too cold for the Northwest in November, they day really showcased all the beauty of that state. By early evening I had crossed into Wyoming and after an hour, I was thinking I'd need to stop for the night soon. I pulled into the fast lane to pass someone when before I knew it my car was sliding backwards across the highway’s lanes and down snowy hill. It all happened in a few seconds but my thinking slowed to such a point, I heard myself saying in my head 'Uh oh, I think I'm going to die.' Then the car stopped halfway down the hill, I could still hear Tom Waits singing, if you can call what he does that, in my tape deck and I popped out 'Bone Machine' and haven't really been able to appreciate Tom Waits since - just a bad connection in my head. A bunch of cars stopped and a man offered me a ride to his house at the nearest exit, this being 1992 before cell phones were big. Since it was also the Northwest? Midwest? (not sure where the delineation is) the nearest exit was about 20 minutes away. It was funny, the first thing he said when helping me up the snowy hill was 'you should have mittens on in this weather.' It was oddly touching in a way. I was 23 at the time and should have been concerned about kidnapping or rape but back then my mind didn’t worry that way. He drove me to his home where his wife was tending to their baby, called a garage for me and they were able to get my car back to the road and tow it to his house without incident. The car was in perfect shape.

I stayed in a hotel in town overnight, not nearly as nice as the bed & breakfast of last night, a small paneled room with thin walls, so I could hear the next door ‘neighbors’ talking about hunting in the morning, and a black and white tv with awful reception. I got up early and started out on the road a little wary but after a couple hours I was feeling my driving confidence returning. Then wouldn’t you know it, my car did a 360 and skidded into the wide grassy median dividing traffic. How could this have happened again?! But once again I was pleasantly surprised by how many cars stopped right away to help me. By now you’re probably thinking ‘she’s a god-awful driver’ which I was thinking as well, until a trucker stopped to help me and he wiped out on stepping out of his cab. A very nice older gentleman who had been hunting that morning and had shot a deer offered me a ride to the nearest exit, this time a half an hour away, in his white truck, with the cold and bloody doe in the bed behind us. He was a retired schoolteacher and was so gracious, he invited me to his home for Thanksgiving the next day but I demurred not wanting to intrude on his family’s celebration, I wound up having chili at the hotel I stayed in. As he drove us along toward the exit his trucked almost skidded off the road a few times and when we got to the garage they said I’d have to wait awhile, since a dozen cars had gone off in the same area as me. Apparently I had hit black ice twice. Black ice is virtually undetectable on a highway and is extremely slick, apparently more slick than your typical run of the mill ice. Black ice is noted for making for extremely treacherous driving conditions. I white knuckled the rest of the trip back to New Jersey so nervous that I could feel the car skidding underneath me at the slightest wind or turn in the road. My hands would ache at the end of the day from gripping the steering wheel so tightly. Thus my love affair with driving was ending.

The final straw in liking to drive was when I drove down to Austin, TX on my own and got caught in a thunderstorm that came on so sudden & fierce, apparently they call them gulley washers down there, I couldn’t see out of my car windows at all and, yes, this happened while I was driving on I-40! Remarkably, I was able to pull off the highway onto a stretch of land and wait it out and until it calmed down to a normal drizzle.

Since having children I feel so responsible for their safety I don’t even want to chance being on the road in inclement weather, which, in my mind, means anything heavier than a few drops of precipitation in the air. Any steep drop off or vertiginous expanse of road will make me blubber and plead for my life while I’m on it, as either a driver or passenger. Irresponsible drivers; the speed demons like I used to be, the people on their cell phone or blackberry, basically paying attention to anything but driving, are anathema to me. The followers of the ‘Pittsburgh left’ (essentially believing that turning left has the right of way over those going in a straight line) those that pass me on the right and speed through the red light I stopped for (another common occurrence here in Pittsburgh) I spit at their feet and wish them horrible, protracted deaths. How dare they put my precious cargo at risk?! I have violent, angry, kick-filled dreams where I exact my vengeance on these menaces to the road. The irony that I now loathe driving and there is a Nascar driver with the same, very rare, last name is not lost on me.

adding insult to injury

Well I somehow forgot to put in my craft show tirade (traumatic repression perhaps?) that all the cloche customers would put their spare bags, food and garbage on my table. They would also borrow my mirror when the cloche lady's mirror was being used, to see how they looked in their cloches. Some ladies were polite enough to at least feign interest in my jewelry before dropping a bracelet like a hot potato in order to snag a free space at the cloche table. Talk about being made to feel nonexistent! Maybe I should start a links I loathe list and put Handmade Arcade there? It's not their fault though, just a really horrible craft show experience. But I have to think positive, at least I sold something!

how the craft show was like logan's run

A few of you might be privy to the fact that I participated in a craft show this past Saturday; the Handmade Arcade, of which there is a link in my 'links I love' list. My Mom even came out to help me with the craft show because I figured I could use her help. I participated in the Handmade Arcade a couple years ago and thought it might be nice to have an extra hand in case things got busy or if I needed to go the bathroom or wanted to take a look at the other vendors stuff. When I last participated in this craft show I was placed next to two women who make very cute handmade monster stuffies, friend or foe, that sold out a couple hours before the show ended. This year I was placed next to a woman who makes very sweet hats, from now on to be referred to as cloches because that's a better description of what they are, out of recycled sweaters. You can check out what I'm talking about at www.giantdwarfdesign.com. I bought one of her cloches when she was selling them a couple years ago. Well, I seem to be a good luck charm to whatever vendor is placed near me because the cloche lady was selling her stuff at such a breakneck pace you would have thought she had invented the cloche. How did I do? Well it was two hours before I sold anything, by which time I was quite morose and had already snapped at my Mom who was only trying to help me. I wound up selling 5 items for a grand total of $135, which doesn't begin to cover all the money I spent on beads, gold and sterling silver findings, however it does cover the $45 entrance fee for the show, and the money I spent on bags, boxes and stickers. My Mom, being a Mom, would say stuff under her breath like - 'the overhead for those hats must be nothing', 'she's priced them very high', 'that's something you can only really sell in the winter' and 'well, you could always make something just like that and just not use a flower'. I know she was just trying to make me feel better but I was starting to seethe with frustration over all the time and effort I put into making 60 plus pieces of jewelry and making cute little price stickers for everything and it was all for naught. Yes, the overhead on a recycled sweater cloche is probably all of $2 tops, so she was making a tidy $33 profit, although I'm overlooking her time spent making the hats. But she's found her perfect niche for craft sales. She's very hip looking with a lovely red bob that perfectly showcases her cloches and, what's more, she's great a saleswoman. She'll help place a cloche on the potential buyer to make sure it's on just so and then she deliberates with the customer over which cloche looks best - the purple with the blue flower or the fuschia with a pink flower? She has other cute items that she sells as well but the flower cloches are like the crack of the craft show - you could see people all over wearing them. The people that bought my stuff were older women, the Mom of one vendor, or men buying gifts for their mothers, so my stuff seems to appeal to the 50 plus demographic. I had Toby pick up my Mom early just because I couldn't stand to have her around while I was moping from my lack of sales. When Toby came to pick me up at 6:30 I was about ready to bawl but he refused to let me throw my own pity party. He just kept shaking his head saying 'It's not that your jewelry isn't good, this is the completely wrong market for it.' He kept writing off the craft show as a bunch of hippies and people who don't bathe, maybe a small portion of the customers. He also said that he didn't understand why I would participate in a show run by hipsters because I hate people like that anyway - I don't like snobby, elitist hipsters who won't deign to talk to non-hipsters like myself. So long post short ... I don't think I'll be participating in another Handmade Arcade since I seem to have eclipsed the vendor age and I don't think I fit the hipster/indie profile anymore, if I ever did. Hopefully Toby will be able to sell my jewelry to the women at work, who seem to love my jewelry, they bought almost everything I made last year. Yes, Toby works for the United Steelworkers, they aren't the Seventh Avenue crowd, but if they appreciate what I make I really can't complain.

so much for vanity

Okay, so I put up a picture of myself and now that I'm looking at it online I have no idea how I comfortably put my hand in that position. It now looks to me like someone else is trying to hold my chin up for me but at the time of the photo taking I swear that it was both comfortable, I'm all about comfort, and done without too much thought. Weird. So now it looks like I'm sort of benignly hovering over my blog watching what I'm writing and discreetly thinking, 'Well, if that's what you really think go ahead and knock yourself out.' I actually took this picture from our computer's 'photo booth' some freebie on our mac that has been totally addictive for everyone but Oona, just give her another year or two.

This was one of the few pictures where it wasn't too obvious how crooked my nose is. Most of you know that I got my nose fixed back in college. I never liked my nose much, I thought it was sort of wide, and when I got x-rays taken of it the doctor told me that my nose had been broken a few times. No real surprise given that I've had a basketball, football and volleyball all collide with my nose at various times in my youth. Although I was pretty athletic I don't seem to have been terribly adept when it came to sports involving balls. Overall I was happy with how my nose turned out once it was fixed. I tended to get pretty heavy nosebleeds on the side where the septum had been really messed up, I guess they had to do a lot of corrective scraping, which makes me cringe to think of it. But, nosebleeds aside, the surgery was worth it, I could breathe a lot better once my nose had been fixed. Until I had kids. I can't even count the number of times Owen and Oona have headbutted me right in the nose, okay maybe I could count the times, probably 6 or 7. The downside is my kids skulls whack my nose with such force it literally brings tears to my eyes and I've bled on more than one occasion. God only knows, if I hadn't had the surgery I'd probably resemble Jack LaMotta by now. I can't see myself going for a second nose job though, unless I go through 6 or seven more headbutts to my nose, then we'll see. For now I'll just try to avoid straight on photos.

Below are some outtakes from a recent photo booth session with Owen, with boys it's all about the funny faces.

mrs catastrophe mom

I took Owen to a birthday party at a farm about a month ago and we went down a giant slide there. As soon as I climbed up the ladder and reached the look out deck (yes, it was that large) I got a bird's eye view of the slide and my stomach dropped. I was thinking 'oh no' visions of myself flying off the track of the Alpine Slide at Action Park in the 80's, landing scraped and bruised on the hay bale 'bumpers'. But I'm trying not to make Owen as big a chicken as myself, now that I'm older and see the potential risks in things as mundane as crossing the street. So I sat on the potato sack, put Owen between my legs, held him tightly with my whole body and shoved off. We hurtled down fast, at times lifting periously close to the outer edges of the slide, but we stayed in and got spit out on the very hard and muddy ground at the end of the slide. Trying to get up I felt all of my 37 years, my ass was instantly aching from the six foot skid across the ground. We got ourselves up, brushed off the mud and Owen looked at me, so sweet and serious. He said to me in a low voice 'I don't want to go on that slide again.' So we climbed up the hill and I reassured him that we didn't need to go on it again and that I knew how he felt. I thought nothing more of it until I saw him in profile and noticed the large, angry welt on the side of his face. Poor Owen wound up with a nasty scrape across his one cheek, I guess it was the result of a friction burn against the edge of the slide. Of course, I immediately felt guilty. Did I somehow inadvertently push poor Owen's face against the edge of the slide in order to keep us from flying out of it? Was he victimized as a result of my avoiding injury? I only had two tiny little burns on my wrist. Then I was wincing at the thought of the large screws & bold I'd noticed on the lookout deck that were used to hold the parts of the slide together. Thank God he hadn't scraped his cheek on one of those. And then I start thinking about necrotizing fasciitis (flesh eating disease), not the path most Mother's minds would take I know. But I'm recalling the story in Atul Gawande's 'Complications' about the man that DIED as a result of necrotizing fasciitis that started from a rug burn on the side of his torso. I'm sucked into the black hole of my negative thinking imagining the surgeries to try and save my son, the time in a hyperbaric chamber to and heal him but all for naught. My children seem to have afflicted me with an acute case of hypochondria by proxy. My mind loves to ruminate and torture me, no matter how hard I try to distract myself with normal thoughts, about the worst case scenario of any illness or injury that happens to my kids. When I say something to Toby and he shakes his head saying 'Honey, do you really worry about that?' I know that my thinking isn't typical. I'm not an idiot, I've known my thinking isn't the norm for quite awhile.

long lash envy

This is an creatively cropped picture of Oona and I, taken seconds before Oona swatted the camera out of my hand and the camera broke. Thank God I thought to get an extended warranty. Toby didn't think it was necessary but since I'm the eternal worrier, a pessimist who sees everything that can go wrong in the World, I opted for the year of free service. What I didn't know until I brought my camera in for repair is that it will take 6 weeks to get my camera back and it's not like they offer you a loaner camera in the interim. What am I going to do?! I arrived late to the digital camera world but as soon as I got my camera I knew I'd never be able to turn back to standard film cameras again. When you're primarily taking pictures of your children you can easily go through rolls of film in order to get a good shot. I'm even considering getting another digital camera, although I haven't told Toby this yet. I feel completely adrift and have to cull through old images for blog-worthy pics of my sweet little acorns.
I can't believe how pretty Oona is. How did she wind up with such long lashes, girls are rarely blessed with naturally thick long lashes? As you can see by my one eye I was not blessed in that way, Toby must have passed that gene along. It is so horribly vain of me but when I hold up Oona to look in the mirror I can't stand to look at myself next to her. I look old and try to place the exact date that I slipped into appearing middle aged - maybe six weeks after my son was born? When I realized that breastfeeding isn't a magic bullet for dropping the baby weight and that getting a good night's sleep is a vital part of my otherwise nonexistent beauty regimen.

zealotry & bad tv

Here's Owen getting sucked into the religous cult that is The Backyardigans and Oona trying to resist its powerful allure. Talk about shitty TV! We only have basic access cable, in order to get reception for the public networks and Owen is totally fine and content with PBS. BUT his cousin, who's all of 1, loves The Backyardigans and Owen's Aunt told his Grammy that Owen likes to watch The Backyardigans at their house so, lo and behold, come Halloween we got 'The Backyardigans - It's Geat to Be a Ghost' filled with such classic songs as 'A Pirate Says Arr'. Me being the complete bitchy Mom that I am wanted Grammy to return the DVD because I think The Backyardigans are crap and would rather Owen has a DVD of something he and I can watch together (Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Facotry - Gene Wilder version) but I seem to be the only one who thinks I'm not being completely selfish in wanting to keep this insipid animated feature out of the home.

Top five reasons to keep the backyardigans out of the house
1. there is a character named Uniqua in it
2. the animation is very poor for very many animators contributing to this travesty
3. the songs are annoying in that bad jingle can't get it out of your head way
4. this show is not working on a deeper level so that adults can enjoy it as well, the way all the Pixar films do brilliantly
5. did I mention the character named Uniqua?

Granted there are plenty of other shows that grate on me as well- hello! Jay Jay the Jet Plane, The Wiggles and Caillou (o mon dieu, if people want to take issue with the French I only understand it in that they gave us Caillou). I guess the thing that really bothered me with The Backyardigans was that I thought I had made my disdain for the show pretty clear on a number of occasions what with my eye rolling, groaning, and asking if we could please put something else on. Not very grown up on my part but you try sitting through a half hour of that stuff. So when this DVD was given to Owen as a gift I saw it as a passive agressive dig at me, which, hey, maybe I'm reading too much into it, it was probably unintentional but I'm sure I'm not the first one to read more into something than there is. I did keep the DVD for him. It gets played, infrequently so far, thank God,when I'm making dinner.

before the bath

Here's an edited version of a pic I had up for a short time. I was worried pervs might get off on my son naked but then thought only one person reads this blog so why worry. But then that one person lovingly suggested that maybe I should worry so I've put virtual undies on my son to make the pic less risky. The whole reason for this post was to show the size of my two kids. I just can't believe the size of Oona, she's 3 years younger and all of 1o pounds lighter? She looks like a contented elephant seal in this picture (I've put a picture of said seal for reference). This is Oona just after her bath and Owen just before his. He likes to run around naked in circles on the bed while flapping his arms and screaming 'I'm a flying pigster', don't know why it's pigster and not pig I just am glad that he's yet to fall off the bed and seriously injure himself because right now with Toby renovating the third floor, our bedroom looks like something out of Sanford and Son. He dutifully calms down and plays gently with Oona while I dry her and she just bounces her head to the rhythm that is her big brother and smiles, Owen is a superhero in her eyes.

sisyphus & dishpan hands

I love my children dearly. Really, I do. But there are times when the menial tasks that I do being a stay at home Mom take a herculean effort and I feel like I get nowhere and just want to throw a tantrum, like Owen is prone to when he's overtired, inarticulate and frustrated that I can't meet his needs. As the weather gets colder my skin gets drier and we don't have a dishwasher so I wind up doing the dishes at least four times a day and the skin on my hands, particularly the left hand or 'soaker' of the two, looks like someone took a lemon zester to my knuckles. Every knuckle is cracked and bleeding and the skin between my fingers is sloughing off like skin from a bad sunburn. I slather my hands in heavy lotion AND vaseline every night but damn if it's mending my dishpan hands. I do have rubber gloves that I could use, but it's hard for me to get a proper grip on the dishes then, everything is so slippery. My being the none too nimble one, I have broken more than one glass just moving it from the sink to the drying rack. Toby graciously helped with the dishes last night and I was very thankful but what do I do during the week, start using paper plates and plastic forks and make every meal an indoor picnic? I'd feel too much guilt over the landfill that would be accumulating my waste due to laziness and cracked hands. Unlike Sisyphus I don't have a rock to push for eternity but, until my children enter college, I have all the household mom related labor. My labor isn't in vain like Sisyphus but, at times, it can chip away at any notion of self-worth. On those bad days when you're feeling a lot less than supermom, flipping through the pages of some celebrity rag envying the artifice of the perfect starmom, until your knuckle starts bleeding again!

new wheels

We got a new 'crossover' car last week and I'm soo happy with our purchase. It took a little getting used to, after driving for years in compact cars to be so high up and in such a spacious car, I felt like I was driving a school bus the first few days. Now I absolutely love it! The Freestyle handles really well, has top safety ratings, gets good gas mileage for the type of vehichle it is (a car that seats 6, auto companies have to get with the program and make more hybrids!) and the stereo system is great (our civic had all of am/fm radio but I shouldn't knock it since it was a freebie car). Learning to parallel park this car is a challenge, but I'm up for it, given I've gotten the appropriate mix of sleep and caffeine in my system.