Ella and the Microwave

I was upstairs on a conference call when I smelled smoke. I ran downstairs to make sure that Ren had things under control. The living room was semi filled with smoke. The kitchen was almost black. I could barely see Ren, who was standing in front of the microwave. We opened doors and windows and frantically searched for the fire extinguisher – which had disappeared after our “almost burned the house down while grilling steaks incident”. I asked Ren what had happened as we fanned the clouds of smoke out to our back deck. “Evidently, Ella decided to warm up her Lunchables pizza in the microwave and set it for about 65 minutes. When Ren walked into the kitchen, the microwave was smoking and the timer was at 60 minutes. He opened the door and flames shot out at him. Thinking on his feet (Ren is excellent in high stress situations) he shut the door and allowed the flaming pizza to burn out. Ella was hiding in our bedroom waiting for us to appear. One interesting note about the situation is that while early on, we were hoping that the fire alarm didn’t go off, because it is connected to our security system and would have resulted in an immediate visit by the members of the Westlake fire department, after a while, we both became a bit concerned that the alarm hadn't gone off. With enough smoke to clearly indicate that the first floor was on fire, the alarm probably should have called for back up. Anyway, no one was harmed (other than the pizza) so we are grateful. Our house totally reeks of burned cheese, which sucks. And Ella has learned a valuable lesson -- Mommy and Daddy are idiots for allowing the microwave to be located at toddler level.

Mommy I Have to Tell You Something

We were sitting in the car waiting for my husband to come out of the local wine shop when Mattie pulled the back of my hair and said “Mommy I have to tell you something.” Any parent, teacher, aunt, grandparent, babysitter, pretty much every human who has ever spent more than a few minutes with a toddler knows that there is nothing good at the tail end of Mommy I have to tell you something. I braced myself for, I am going to puke or I just ripped the tail off of the hamster. Instead, Mattie said, last night when Luna spent the night she convinced me to stick my foot in the toilet. I turned around. “Into the clean toilet, right?” Ella made a well timed entrance into the discussion. “It had poop and pee in it. Fuck (that was the bubble coming out of out my head). “Why on earth did you stick your foot in a toilet filled with poop and pee?” She looked up at me placidly. “I sort of wanted to see how it felt on my foot.” “How poop and pee felt on your foot?” She nodded. Ella chimed back in. “I told her not too and I told her to wash it when the poop got stuck to her toes. I’m going to stop this one right here as it has clearly already gone well beyond any reasonable line of TMI. We are on our way home to bleach Mattie’s feet.

Nanny Versus Mommy

My husband is burned out. He agreed to become a stay at home parent when Alex (our nine year old) was 3 months old. I think we both assumed at the time that we would eventually hire a nanny who was as good as Mary (our first nanny) and that he would either go back to work or just enjoy his life. That was nine years ago. When we moved to Austin, we decided that it was time to find a nanny before my husband flipped out and set me on fire. Our first nanny was Patty. Patty was a little younger than our ideal nanny (24 instead of 40) but instantly connected with the twins, was deemed suitable by both Zoë and Justin and was more or less tolerated by Alex. The problem was that Patty wasn’t very smart, which left us constantly concerned that an exercise of poor judgment could put the twins at risk. Soon after we hired Patty, I became the subject of a giant wave of momgossip at school. Evidently Patty was always on her cell phone when she picked up the big kids and was causing the moms to worry that she was going to plow someone over with our SUV. A month after we hired Patty, I went to school to read in the classroom and noted that signs had been erected everywhere “Stay Off of Cell Phones During Pickup (Patty)”. Patty’s name didn’t actually appear on the signs, but we all knew who the signs were speaking to. And then there was the makeup. Let me start by saying that I don’t wear makeup. Every now and then, I will put on mascara or give eye shadow a try, but since I didn’t start wearing makeup at a young age, I never mastered the skill of makeup application and generally do a bad job of applying makeup now. Plus, I am busy and hate to spend two minutes wiping makeup off of my face at night. But Patty loved makeup, applied it beautifully and carried a makeup aisle in her purse. Every now and then, she would let the twins play with her makeup. Soon play turned into obsession as the twins began asking for makeup at the store, taking makeup out of the bathroom and applying it in my closet. They were two coats of mascara from being mini versions of Tammy Faye Baker. I hated it, but I also hate spending the time that I have with the girls fighting with them so I tried a number of alternative approaches from makeup is kind of uncomfortable, don’t you think to let’s save makeup just for special occasions to I will give you each fifty dollars if you stop wearing purple lipstick to the super market. Nothing worked. So I fired Patty and hired Virginia, a no makeup wearing, skateboard riding, sarcastic smart film student. This weekend we are going shopping for toddler skateboards and the associated braces, pads and mouth guards. I couldn’t be happier.

The Family Bed

When we had Justin, our first child, we decided that both we and he would feel much at night if he slept in our bed, and with that decision, we stepped onto a road that 18 years later had better be darn close to ending. Attachment parenting. I still believe in the fundamentals. As a young parent I felt that it was my responsibility to be educated about parenting philosophies. I had grown up in a very detached house. No breastfeeding, no cosleeping. If we decided to knock on our parents door it was only because we were either delirious with fever or had caused the toilet to clog with vomit and couldn’t fix it ourselves. That was not what I wanted for my children. I wanted them close, at the breast until they were finished nursing, in bed until they were secure enough to leave and ultimately embraced by the feeling that we would always be right there when they needed us. It all sounded so right and reasonable 18 years ago. Flash forward 15 years. I was sitting on the sofa reading a book when Mattie and Ella, who were a little over two came to join me. They were both carrying plates with hotdogs, goldfish crackers and grapes. They climbed up on my lap, lifted up my shirt, each took a bite of hot dog, chatted and took a sip of breast milk. I looked up at my husband who was standing in the kitchen and said. “Is there something about this that seems a bit . . . insane?” They are washing down hotdogs with breast milk. Maybe it’s time to wind this nursing era down. Mattie looked up from my breast and said, “No way, we love nursie.” Did I forget to mention that my children anthropomorphized my breasts around age one and took to calling them Nursie? They determined that nursie was an entity separate from me and when asked to describe Nursie generally painted a picture of a good looking young man who resembled their father. This had clearly gone completely awry, as had the family bed, which now occupied everyone, including Justin (who was 15) from time to time. Good intentions gone really bad. Of course I could complain about it forever. I had no idea how to undo any of it without undermining the lessons that I was committed to teaching them. Flash forward three more years. We live in Austin now in a house with the kids rooms upstairs and the master suite down. The kids rooms hold their desks and clothes. Everyone sleeps with us and we (Ren and I) have not had a good night of sleep in almost two decades. Last weekend we bought bunk beds for the twins, new sheets for everyone and decided that for a month, we will all sleep upstairs until everyone feels comfortable with the space on the second floor. While I would never parent the way I was parented, I certainly understand how my sixty six year old mother has stayed as beautiful and vibrant as she has. The secret wasn’t beauty products or early preventative plastic surgery. It was a locked door and knock only if the house is on fire parenting policy. It never would have worked for me, but let’s just say that I have come to understand.

Sure We'll Take Your Frogs

Since you haven’t known me for long and don’t know me well, I will make a confession to you about a personality trait that would have become obvious a year from now. I have no ability to say no, to anything (other than to the commission of crimes and other clearly bad behaviors). Because I am in client service, that personality trait has proven to serve my clients extremely well. Because I am a mother, that personality trait has proven to serve my children extremely well. Because I am a super type A, if it isn’t perfect, just give me five minutes and I will make it perfect person, I am high strung, overextended and exhausted almost all of the time. And yet, I still cannot manage to say no when requested to do damn near anything that at the time the question is asked of me seems reasonable. When Heidi and Gregory announced that they were moving from Austin to Shreveport, Louisiana, after several days of peppering them with every swamp/gator/crawfish/jug band joke we had ever heard, we started to feel really crappy about their departure. We love Heidi and Gregory. We drink – a lot – with Heidi and Gregory and have spent most of our favorite moments in Austin in their company. And they were leaving. So what else could I do but offer to have them stay with us prior to their departure with all of their various and sundry pets. As a note, we have no pets. Shortly after the painted turtle disaster of 2002 that we arrived at the firm conclusion that we are not a pet family. There are too many of us for us to be a pet family. But as the Kallenbergs packed their car and struggled to figure out what to do with their two frogs who lived in a bowl and who were clearly not built for the open road, I heard myself say, “Would it be helpful to you guys if we kept the frogs here?” Their answer. “It would totally save our lives.” A ridiculous overstatement, but just enough to make me beam as I listened to the feeding and cleaning instructions. For the first few days the kids were genuinely interested in the frogs. They named them Lovesmile and Peacerainbow (they in this case was Ella, our resident hippie, baths are totally optional child). They argued over who would feed them and who would clean their bowl. A week later, the frogs could have jumped out of the bowl and onto their heads and I am not sure that they would have noticed. Two weeks later, the frog bowl was so dirty that you could barely make out the shape of the two frogs, who both occasionally stuck their faces above the surface, presumably due to the rapidly decreasing oxygen content of the soot colored frog water. We were sitting at the kitchen table on Saturday morning eating cereal and planning our day when Mattie looked at me and said, “Mom, it smells like frog butt in here.” I have no idea what a frog butt smells like and I am hoping that Mattie doesn’t either, but she was absolutely correct, the frogs had turned our kitchen into a swamp and it was time for them to go. It was raining so the kids weren’t that interested in going all the way down to the creek. And my husband assured them that as long as the frogs were in contact with water, they would be fine, and were perfectly capable of hopping down the steps of our back deck, over the gate and down to the creek where they would be much happier than if they were forced to continue to live in captivity. Mattie took the top off of the bowl and stepped back as the frogs sprang out and off, leaving behind a trail of frog poo and four (Justin hates animals) children who were now firmly convinced that what we really need is a hamster. That would be much more fun.

The Cutest Little Thingies

August is off to a really rough start. We returned to Texas from California leaving perfect weather for crappy weather. From the start of the day until long after sunset, you step outside into a sauna filled with cat sized mosquitoes. I went down to water our tomatoes on our first day back, spent at most five minutes hosing them down and walked back into the house with twenty seven mosquito bites. Mattie counted them. On day three of our return home, our nanny and part time housekeeper quit. On day four, our closest friends in Texas moved to Louisiana (separate story to follow). On day seven, we all got a stomach bug. On day ten, our oldest son, who fell head over heels in love this summer announced that he is not going to college but instead is planning to move back to California where he will live with a friend who we are sure is on crank and find a job that will help him find himself. On day eleven, I ran out of gin. I have described my life in my profile as too busy, which is such an understatement that mocks the word busy. Our lives are slammed with demands all the time. Not that I am complaining. I love that we have a big busy family. The problem is that when our support system (nanny, housekeeper, pediatrician) starts to fall apart – the pediatrician was on vacation when the stomach bug came through the house and we had to deal with a mean, stupid, twelve year old replacement who was covering for her – we crack pretty fast. So it is now day twenty since our return from California. Yesterday, we discovered that our septic system was on the verge of failing because someone put too many cantaloupe seeds down the drain. And the fact that I love cantaloupe has made me the prime suspect. The septic had to be dug up and flushed. The backyard now looks like a garbage dump. But even in the midst of the last four weeks, which have sucked more than any string of weeks in recent memory, I can count on the twins to make me smile through my tears as I write a check for $3,000 to Austin Septic Contractors. They were sitting at their table drawing pictures and talking about their day. A close friend of my oldest son (the one who is upstairs tying a few necessary items into a bandana which he will then fasten to a stick before hitting the road back to Cali) is babysitting for the twins this week. She is sweet and kind and the girls really like her. Ella was drawing a flower when she looked up at Mattie and said, “When Carly told us we were the cutest little thingies she has ever seen, do you think she was lying?”