What's in a name

This is a sad excuse for a blog entry, but what with this week's events (a move to Salt Lake, and my parents' move to Jerusalem, and 15 cleaning checks to conduct and 20 contracts to get signed, and one pair of very tight compression hose), it's easy to feel a little overwhelmed.

The other day I was at Target, waiting in line to return something, when I started shamelessly eavesdropping on a conversation between an employee and a little lost boy. The boy, who looked about 6-years-old, only seemed mildly concerned about his parentless state. The employee tried to illicit some answers from the lad to enhance her loudspeaker announcement of "We have a lost boy wearing a blue shirt at Customer Service."

"Do you know your mom's name?"
"No."
"Do you remember what she was wearing?"
"No."

The employee assured him that his mother would probably show up soon, and then tried to turn his attention away from his predicament. She started questioning him about the packet of birthday invitations he held in his hand. Suddenly, having received some mysterious clue from thinking about his party, the boy's face lit up and he said, "Actually, my mom is waiting in the car for me."

The employee looked surprised at this revelation and asked, "Well, do you know what kind of car your mom drives?"

Without hesitation, the boy replied, "A silver Lexus."


If my children ever know what kind of car I drive, and can't remember my name, I'm quitting my day job.

But on the other hand, the next time I'm at an auto shop, and they ask for the year, make, and model of my car, instead of hanging my head and mumbling, "Uh...it's the green one with the carseats parked right over there..." I'll say proudly, "I don't know, but my mom's name is Linda."

Black shorts are forever

They say painful memories fade or dull with time. I have observed that my most embarrassing (and thus painful) memories are rather resistant to this fading/dulling phenomenon. In fact, according to my scientific calculations, my most embarrassing memories have a half-life of around 30 years. This means that in about 15 more years, I may be able to talk about my little 5^th grade obsession with “Saved by the Bell.” And 30 years later, I may laugh about it. Maybe.

In the meantime, I figure a little confession to the world wide web might not hurt, and perhaps even hasten, the decay of one particular memory that dates back to 2^nd grade…

It was the age of lycra. Or at least I thought it was. And since lycra was cheap, and my mom was a darn good seamstress, I had multiple pairs (and colors) of lycra shorts.

The pair I remember most clearly were the bright blue and hot pink ones, maybe because I also had a swimsuit made from the same material (which turned my entire body blue the first day I wore it to the beach in CA). While I adored my pink and blue spandex shorts, those were clearly only a once a week outfit, as I only had one hot pink and bright blue shirt (which, obviously, was the only acceptable match).

On the other hand, I was also the proud owner of a great pair of homemade black spandex shorts. Just imagine the versatility of black spandex shorts; they matched every shirt I owned, and were less noticeable their hot pink and blue counterpart. So I wore the black shorts the other 4 school days of the week, and probably underneath my dresses to church, if the truth be known. My drawers were surely full of other treasures, but between my two pairs of spandex shorts, I considered myself covered, and couldn’t be happier.

A sad day came along, probably a year or two into my spandex routine, when (gasp) someone noticed my limited wardrobe. It happened in second grade. One of my classmates, a boy who I didn’t know very well, stopped me and asked, “Do you have more than one pair of those black shorts?”

Not being very bright, I didn’t realize what he was getting at. “No,” I quickly defended myself. Or so I thought.

“So you wear that same pair every day?” was his pointed follow-up question.

“Not every day!” I said indignantly, though I couldn’t actually remember the last day I hadn’t. This little conversation planted a tiny seed of doubt in me with respect to what I considered to be a perfectly acceptable wardrobe. I don’t know how long it took me to wean off my black spandex. The damage to my self-esteem had been done, though.

For years I buried this painful little memory illuminating my terrible sense of “fashion.” But today, I realized, with surprise, that maybe nothing has really changed since 2^nd grade. It's been almost two decades and I find myself pregnant (that part has changed, I admit) in the dead of summer, in a house with no A/C. Although I put on one of my cute maternity outfits each morning, by 10am I’m so hot I inevitably change into one of my two [count them!] pairs of black basketball shorts and a t-shirt, which usually remains on until bedtime. Even though it's a proven fact that men's basketball shorts look ridiculous on pregnant women.

Some habits die hard, I guess.

Mark, me, and the trusty black shorts on our way to the hospital to have Sage (7/1/04)

Flying solo

Today is a momentous occasion. Not only am I getting a 5-day vacation from my kiddos (I love my husband and sisters for their promised babysitting services), but I am taking my first flight without kids in 6 years! You know what that means? That means I could totally pack in 30 minutes, with plenty of room to spare in my carry-on luggage. (I'm not checking anything!!! Not even one single carseat for Southwest Airlines to rip or lose.) This means I have ZERO Dora books, DVDs, diapers, wipes, fruit snacks, baggies of goldfish crackers, carseats, strollers, slings, toys and children's Tylenol. And I haven't even spent the last week offering prayers on behalf of my mental and emotional sanity and my kids' behavior and who my row partner will be and the person (sitting in front of me)'s desire to recline their seat into the child I'm holding on my lap for 3 hours.

This also means I will be bringing my own reading material (for the first time in 6 years), and I'm actually looking forward to the layover! I don't even care if I'm the last person allowed to board the plane. I plan on choosing the reddest beverage they offer, just because I won't have to worry about someone spilling it in my lap. I may fall asleep. I may stare out the window. I may just write a book. Imagine the possibilities. I've decided not to come back until Eliza's crib tent arrives, either.

And hopefully I'll be helpful to Mark's sister in Kansas, who's getting ready to move. But mostly I think we'll probably just stay up late talking and eating a disturbing quantity of baked goods.

For rent

Last week we started apartment hunting in Salt Lake. I liked it about as much as I like Eliza knowing how to climb out of her crib. And, like the crib issue, it’s going to take a while to solve.

Our first problem was that we set our budget too low. I naively thought there would be lots of people anxious to rent us a two-bedroom apartment with a fenced in backyard and patio and personal servants and built in pool for $600 a month. While that may have been true about a century ago, it was clearly not the case now.

Checking craigslist gave us a list of potential places to check out, and maps.google.com really helped out our search (like when we eliminated a “great” place from our list after noticing the close crop job on the picture hid one of the city's busiest streets running just alongside the house). Sometimes the title alone was enough to convince us. Like one that was listed as "Disgusting 2 bdrm apartment for rent." Lucky for us, it went on to spill all the disgusting details about the mold, management and neighborhood. (Why they were listing it at all, I don't know.) But there were some things that even the anti-privacy street view of Google Earth wasn't able to tell us. Let me indulge you in a quick recap. (And thank heavens for a portable DVD player and McDonald’s ice cream cones.)

Visit #1: Mark made an appointment to check out a place after work. He arrived, and found the next door managers were drunk (at 4:45pm). On his way out, he recognized the government-subsidized housing a few houses down, and was more than happy to leave that neighborhood for good when he noticed a man with his hand down his pants. Seeing as our two-year-old already has that trick figured out, I don't think we need any role models along that line. Suddenly $850 didn't seem like too much to pay for a good neighborhood.

Visit #4: We found a quiet little neighborhood close to Mark’s work that looked pretty potential. There was a grassy area between the two apartment buildings, and a garden area. Feeling hopeful, we were shown to the available apartment, just to find it occupied with the manager’s two cats. Sage (and Mark, of course) thought this was awesome. I’m not sure I want to live downstairs from the guy who keeps cats that he doesn’t like enough to want to stay in his own apartment. How long have they been living there? And what if they decide to move in with us? I can’t have a Napkins experience in my fragile pregnant state.

Visit #8: We took a tour of a cute little house that was nicely decorated and refinished. Until I checked out the bathroom, I was willing to put the words “little” and “cute” together in describing this house. What I saw, in the bathroom, was a “little” and “terrible” passageway through which my 6-month-pregnant body would have to shimmy (sideways) to pass the sink and shower in order to reach the toilet. And you know the affinity we pregnant women have for using the bathroom. Well, I just couldn’t get too excited about having to hold my stomach up and slide it along the sink countertop to be able to reach the throne twice a night and sixteen times a day for the next 4 months.

Visit #9: Nice house with attractive backyard. Big open canal of running water next to driveway. Good bye.

Visit #12: Is it unfair to judge a neighborhood by the number of lawns that are mowed? If so, I don’t know that a 50% stat is very encouraging. Mark and I debated whether it was fair to say that people who don’t take care of their lawns probably aren’t going to be very interested in promoting neighborhood beauty, safety, and goodwill. And I can’t imagine anyone bringing us homemade bread or extra home grown foot-long zucchinis to welcome us to that neighborhood. Forget it, then.

Visit #13: We should have known this was going to be a bust, being visit number thirteen and all. The roads got worse and worse as we entered the south side of Salt Lake proper. We bumped our way down a street that looked like an alley into a “secluded, park-like” area (their words, not mine). We weren’t able to make an appointment in advance, so Mark ran in to check out the public entryway of the apartment building. His grimace, upon returning to the car, confirmed my suspicion. “I thought I was in a third-world country.” Well, since we’ve both already lived in third world countries, we decided to leave that cultural experience for someone without kids who doesn’t mind whether or not the walls are painted or the kids are clothed or not when they run down the public hallway.

Following this delightful Saturday hunt, we decided that Mark commuting an hour each way to work may not be so terrible an option after all. But when we stopped to fill up our car with $45 of gas on the way home, we agreed to take a few more peeks at craigslist. In a week or so when we get the energy.

Lend me your earplugs

Friends, parents, lurkers, lend me your ears. And your sympathy, and your suggestions, and some dark chocolate if you have any.

I am desperate. A desperate housewife, if you will. (But without the infidelity and cleavage.)

Eliza climbed out of her crib yesterday. I always hoped my children would be advanced, but these prideful desires did NOT extend to their ability to exit the wonderful cage that is responsible for much of my sanity--their crib.

My overachieving two-year-old climbed out of her cage, I mean crib, after I put her down for a nap yesterday. I jumped a mile and almost wet my pants (darn pregnancy muscles) when she suddenly appeared beside me in the kitchen a few minutes later, looking very guilty but rather pleased with herself.

If the truth be told, for about thirty seconds, I was pleased with her, too. I took her back to her crib, and encouraged her to show me how she got out. This constituted the final happy thirty seconds I've had in the last twenty-four hours, as the truth quickly dawned on me: no more naps, and no more pre-11:00pm bedtimes for the little monkey. I am an idiot.

Due to the terrible sleep she got yesterday, Eliza went most of this morning without uttering a single phrase devoid of the introductory clause, "No, I no want ___"

After two hours of such delightful interaction, I was ready to slit my wrists. But, as a medically safer alternative, I chose to snarf the rest of the large bag of dark chocolate M+Ms that Mark bought on Saturday night. Nice. The perfect remedy for having a non-sleeping, eternally grumpy child: putting on ten pounds in a week. My OB's gonna love this move.

Please excuse me while I go feel sorry for myself and try to dig up some more chocolate, and wonder when the screaming 2-year-old in the bedroom is going to finally bite the dust. (We took out all the toys and tied the door shut...one of the advantages of never having replaced the missing doorknob. Also, we get to practice the limbo when we need to enter the bathroom...at least until I figure out how else to tie the bedroom door shut.)

Surely there must be some fellow suffering parents out there. Does anyone have any suggestions? And maybe some earplugs?

P.S.--Wall-E was cute. A little tree-huggerish for the likes of me, but cute. I'm always amazed at Pixar's ability to make strange things (like a beat-up robot) so endearing. But not endearing enough to make me want to buy this. Right now I'm saving my money for this or maybe just this.

A night at the movies

Tonight Mark and I are taking our brother-in-law (and my sister) to see Wall-E for his birthday. There are a few things I’m concerned about.

First, Wall-E appears to have received some less-than-glowing reviews. Here's one that Adam found online, written by an acclaimed movie critic whose experience is undeniable:

“wall-e was one of the worst movie i've seen in a long time.And I saw a couple movies in the past few days.And i've seen movies since I was born14 years ago. That's a lot of movies!!!” (1 star rating)

You can’t question fourteen years of experience, now, can you? I wonder if we should change our plans and rent “Stuart Little 2” instead. Because, of all the movie i’ve seen, I wouldn’t want this to be a bust, since it’s a birthday present and all.

Secondly, I’m concerned about what to do about treats for the movie. You can’t go without treats for the movie, but what with the price of movie tickets these days, not to mention the price of a few exploded corn kernels drenched in fat, I’m not sure we can afford to buy concessions—(I can guarantee my waistline can’t afford it right now.)

Speaking of waistlines, as I considered my movie treat dilemma, I had an embarrassing recollection of sneaking in treats to a movie many years ago. My family went all out in avoiding being ripped off, but still having adequate munchies. We made popcorn at home, repackaged bulk candy in smaller bags, and even filled up water bottles to sneak into the theater for the approximately annual event that going to a movie theater was for our big crowd.

This particular time, when I was somewhere around 8^th grade, we must not have had time to pop our own popcorn, because I was assigned to smuggle in two cans of Pringles. Where do you stash two cans of Pringles, you ask? Based on my stunning 8^th grade fashion, I had a pretty easy solution for temporarily hiding the cylindrical cans. I just held my pants out, and snuggled them in between my waist and my humungous jeans. Nope, I wasn’t pregnant with an expandable waistline, and I think by then I was out of the Lycra phase that plagued my elementary years. I just recall thinking that boys’ jeans were so much cooler than girls. Apparently I wasn’t too concerned with the size and fit, as much as the intended gender of the pants. No problem, for the Pringles, though. They fit easily in, and I waltzed into the theater, unnoticed.

Nowadays with my waist more than filling the pants I’ve got on, I don’t think I can pull off The Pringle Job. And since we’re not bringing our kids (thank you to my wonderful sisters, Suzy and Kim), we don’t have the leeway of bringing in a “diaper bag.” But, on the other hand, according to one fourteen-year-old's movie review, we might not be staying long at all. Not long enough to need treats, right?

I’ll keep you posted.

Nice and naughty on the potty

Being the generous parent that I am, I decided that Sage's old potty chair would make a great birthday present for Eliza last week. Eliza was thrilled at her one present from her loving parents.

Apparently it was an inspired gift, because today, while Mark was changing her diaper, Eliza escaped, no doubt chanting, "I'm nakies!" and rushed into the bathroom, where she made her first liquid deposit in the birthday chair while wearing her birthday suit. Who was that mocking our great 2-year-old present? Not laughing anymore, are you?

Mark brought her into my bedroom to share the good news. "Eliza did pee-pee's." I had no idea why he thought this was special, until I took a look at Eliza's face. She was beaming. Oh! In a very exaggerated questioning voice I asked, "Where did you do pee-pee's, Eliza?" And the proud two-year-old grabbed her bottom with both hands and exclaimed, "Right here!"

Even though we'd all just stuffed ourselves with family home evening brownies, Sage and I paraded Eliza around the kitchen, ending at the treat cupboard, where I produced the grand reward of four mini chocolate chips. Heaven for a two-year-old. The four-year-old assistant earned a few herself...as a bribe for future encouragement.

We're not killing the fatted calf or breaking out the undies quite yet, but I am going to stock up on mini chocolate chips and buy a year's supply of Lysol disinfecting spray next time I'm at Sam's Club.

And, in case you're feeling jealous of our success, and want to stop reading my blog because I'm such a bragger with such advanced children, and you're worried I'm going to start into how amazing their APGAR scores were, I should probably confess that my four-year-old got so mad at the public library today that she wet her pants. We've obviously got a lot of work ahead of us. On various issues. But at least we'll be well equipped with mini chocolate chips.

Birthday excess

Tonight as I tucked Sage in for bed, I asked her what the best part about her 4^th-birthday was. She thought for the briefest of moments and said, “Choosing people to say the prayers.” This is a little tradition my family always had on birthdays; today Mark followed suit and let Sage choose the two prayers that occurred after he got home. Apparently it was the hugest (and possibly only) highlight of the day. Were all the other traditional birthday activities unnecessary?

Like boating with her best friend, Connor? (This picture is of Sage watching the minutes tick away on the timer that I set for her marking the time she had to wait until she could go check and see if Connor and Addisyn were awake. We set the timer three times.)

And her joint birthday party with Eliza and friends?

And her presents? (Thanks Grandpa Williams and Amy/David!)

And her cake which Suzy cut into a heart shape, and helped her decorate with an 'S' in M+M's? (When Suzy turned her back on Sage and the sprinkles, and the cake mysteriously turned from white to red. Luckily the birthday girl didn't mind when we found Eliza licking it.)

Now that I understand better how a 4-year-old mind works, I am ready to make next July 1^st a day of total bliss for Sage. We’re skipping presents, parties, and cake, and I’m declaring an official day of prayer (hourly prayers, perhaps), in which Sage will be able to choose the prayer giver. Why complicate things?

P.S. Thanks for all the moral support about "Lily." I've posted this picture on the desktop in hopes of sending not-so-subliminal messages to Mark about the beauty of the name and its namesake.

Oops. I mean these ones.