jools (also a beloved child) – Page 17

Category: jools (also a beloved child)

the plague

Posted on June 3, 2007 by wrekehavoc

meet strep #1 and strep #2. yep. both kids were swabbed on friday and came up positive for strep. (i already was on antibiotics, so here’s hoping that i don’t create a super-breed of strep in the process.) so BC missed her softball picnic yesterday, and all of us didn’t go to friends’ for dinner. it was a major bummer. adding to the bummer, the softball coach was out, so BS had to coach softball anyway AND then work the grill in the hot sun from 12-1. (he has a major burn.)

the bright spot in the day was a surprise visit from nylonthread and her wonderful daughter. sure, my kids were still in pajamas and i looked like hell. but none of that mattered. the kids were so delighted to have another kid (also on antibiotics with a brother with strep) in the mix!

thanks so much for coming by! hope the state of the house didn’t make you sick, too!

happy birthday, julian pie

Posted on May 30, 2007 by wrekehavoc

our neighbor has season tix to see the (cough cough) nationals. i happened to be returning from grocery shopping in the 90 degree heat when he stopped me and asked me if i wanted his tickets for 5/30 since he was about to hop a plane for a business trip in an hour. (in that case, the ice cream can melt, thankyouverymuch.) oh, and did he mention i could have his parking pass, too? oh, and the seats — right behind home plate in the 300 level. “does your family like baseball?” he asked. ha. enough that it was a negotiation point before we got married 😉

so for julian’s birthday, we went to see the nats get clobbered by the dodgers (well, they only lost 5-0 this time. the night before was worse.) but how often do you get amazing seats — and a parking pass — for free? throw in the racing presidents and you’ve got some fine entertainment, even if the kids don’t quite understand why RFK doesn’t have a playground like Philly or Bowie. of course, my kids and husband wore their phillies phinest. fortunately, no one lynched them.

thank you, mr. p. and happy birthday, julian pie.

top of the pops. at least, in our house.

Posted on May 27, 2007 by wrekehavoc

someone asked julian to sing a song the other day. i forget who it was and why. i do recall thinking they expected him to break into a nursery rhyme or something.

he started to sing this.

this is currently the song that both kids request in the car. just something catchy about singing: take it to the bridge/throw it overboard/see if it can swim/back into the shore.

kicks london bridge is falling down in the ass anyday.

best. toy. ever.

Posted on May 21, 2007 by wrekehavoc

BC was home sick from school today. she’s been barking like a seal, her throat is a mess, and she hasn’t been eating a whole lot due to nausea. we hit the doctor’s office, where she was swabbed and pronounced initially strep-free, but she now has a five-day course of steroids to help her lung inflammation go down. so she feels relatively ok (well enough to cajole me into buying her brittney spears-like purple sunglasses while waiting at eckerd for her meds. yeah, well, i guess the girl needed sunglasses, and they DO provide 100% UV protection… right?) she painted and bejeweled a little musical jewelry box for fun. and then?

the SWIFFER!

BC loveloveloves the swiffer. she swiffered the upstairs bathroom, she swiffered the kitchen, the dining area — why, she swiffered the dust bunnies under BS’s and my bed [motto: jimmy hoffa was here, but now he’s gone.] i thought i’d achieved nirvana when jools got a toy dirt devil for chrismakah, but was sadly disappointed when the damn thing kept falling apart and didn’t really pick up a lot of dirt (don’t judge me — a girl can dream, right?) so the day i bought the swiffer was a banner day around here.

BC has asked to swiffer aplenty ever since. i’m paying her a little for her efforts, but i’m thrilled that she actually likes doing this.

pity she won’t do windows…

thank you

Posted on May 19, 2007 by wrekehavoc

recently, i had a bizarre brain fart. i discovered the rockabye lullaby series of CDs. some brilliant person decided that people in our generation go insane over listening to children’s lullabye pap. so, instead, they’ve started covering songs by everyone from the Ramones to Green Day to Pink Floyd to Radiohead, adapting them into gentle nighttime treats. (although i will admit i was a bit creeped-out when i heard the lullabye version of Mother.)

i was always the mom who made mix CDs for her babies. next week, BC will do her book report on rock and roll stars she read about in a book; and with the CD playing that we burned together, she will proudly, among other things, tell her classmates that this is the song her mama sang to her every night, alternating between the joni mitchell version and the CNSY one. so i broke down and bought two CDs, one for BC (the Cure lullabyes) and one for jools (led zeppelin lullabyes).

so tonight, we broke open the zeppelin CD, me and my boy. stairway to heaven sounded so mournful as a lullabye, but he liked it. i started to sing along to it. eventually, he told me, “please stop singing, mama.” so i complied. we talked about his trip to the natural history museum and the scary moment when he saw a T-Rex fighting a triceratops. then, the song thank you came on, a zeppelin song i’ve always thought intensely beautiful.

“this song is called thank you,” i told jools. (we’re big on please and thank you in this house, and i thought it would make him laugh. which it did.)

“mama, will you sing some of it to me?” he asked. brave boy that he is. so i looked at my boy in the eyes, and i sang.

If the sun refused to shine, I would still be loving you.

When mountains crumble to the sea, there will still be you and me.

thank you, little one, for giving this moment to me.

keeping the wolfowitz from the door

Posted on May 17, 2007 by wrekehavoc

apparently, paul wolfowitz is now negotiating the terms under which he’ll resign. must be nice. admittedly, no one has ever tried to oust me from a job (at least, not that i know of) since i’m not a morally-bankrupt ass-hat; but usually, people are permitted to create terms when they’ve decided to leave on positive terms. i don’t think there’s much that’s positive about what paul wolfowitz did; and if he didn’t have ties to the Administration (motto: Wolfowitz, Gonzalez, and Wartime Instability, too!), he’d not only be out on his ass, but he’d probably be prosecuted.

now, since i usually talk about parenthood — you know, those amusing anecdotes that help me understand my world and my role — you might wonder just what the hell paul wolfowitz has to do with my children (or me, for that matter), beyond helping to make the world incredibly unstable due to his earlier foreign policy dilettantism. the world has never been a perfect place — not when i was a child, not when my parents were children, etc. but at the risk of sounding like a nutball, right-wing moral majority member (and i won’t even start on my feelings for jerry falwell other than to say that tinky-winky would be better suited as a leader of a major movement, in my book — but what do i know, since the reverend last month pointed out that i, a jew, am damned to never enter heaven), it really, really pisses me off when public figures are rewarded for their morally-suspect actions. it results in a nation of kids who think that there shouldn’t be consequences for their actions — after all, if the people in charge aren’t held accountable, then why should they be, either? look at paris hilton. they’re cutting HER sentence down because she’s such a paragon of virtue. and all the while, she was indignantly pleading that she shouldn’t have to serve. boo fucking hoo.

so we seem to have a culture that permits famous people to act with relative impunity, as long as they have the money, fame, or connections. i was hoping that with a more transparent society, this would happen less and less. boy, i clearly don’t know shit.

as for you, paul wolfowitz, don’t let the door smack you on the ass as you go.

mothers of intervention

Posted on May 14, 2007 by wrekehavoc

i really had a lovely mother’s day. i got cards, a lovely bouquet of tulips and irises, a beaded hairband BC picked out for me from her annual “pick out a mother’s day present at the taylor fair” experience (i’ve gotten all sorts of things in previous, years, including a doll from mexico), a certificate showing i’ve adopted a prairie dog at the national zoo, and a trip to six flags (complete with a $42 lunch at chez papajohns which was truly vile. next time, we’re bringing our own food to the park.) we were going to go out to dinner saturday night, but i didn’t feel up to it. another day, perhaps. (hell, anytime we go out to dinner and i don’t have to cook is mother’s day in my book.)

we had to run home from six flags so that we could sign BC up for the swim team at our local swim club, which costs about a college fund each year to join. they gave us the wrong time, sadly, so we had to return to the swarm about an hour later for the privilege of forking over cash and paper. “have you ever seen so many blonde people?” i asked BC.

and it’s true. i think our pool club is not terribly diverse. it does, however, possess parents who are single-mindedly attempting to ensure that their children have the best of the best of the best. i’ve avoided this environment for years. i am really, really hoping this year changes my mind. see, i’ve been a member of this swim club now for about 7 years. other than another family we know from before, we have never, ever made one friend there. it’s not like we’re unfriendly. but between the very-working-mother-unfriendly schedules (that kept BC off the swim team up until this year) coupled with the very family-unfriendly schedule (sat mornings the pool is usually closed for a swim meet; every sunday morning is adult-only breakfast and swim until 1 pm), we almost never get an opportunity to actually swim in the pool much. i guess the optimal swim family consists of kids over 11 who have a nanny to take them to the pool.

anyway, this experience led to another one of my favorite things to do, which i was able to do for a short while, on mother’s day. work on my second novel 🙂

bravery

Posted on May 12, 2007 by wrekehavoc

bravery is picking a pair of your four-year-old son’s underpants off the floor and sniffing them to see whether they’re clean.

chills and thrills

Posted on May 10, 2007 by wrekehavoc

i’m ba-ack (along with Broooce, who is softly crooning New York City Serenade, one of my favorites.)

there’s something wildly off-putting about taking a medication that will help save your life but will make you so ill. i thought i had made it through okay, but about two hours after finishing my infusion, i started coming down with a fever, chills, nausea, and a feeling that my head was in a vise. i think i scared my kids, too — i was solo-parenting that night, as BS had to go to a class, and i really, really got chills when i was trying to get the kids to bed. i didn’t make anyone take a bath, and i think i barked at the kids a bit, which probably was The Big Clue that Mommy Doesn’t Feel Well. (i’m not usually the biggest barker in this house.) my kids are pretty good at picking up on such things. thankfully.

jools let me crawl under the covers with him and read stories. his one cover wasn’t working for me — i felt like i needed thousands of blankets to keep me warm. i convulsed into shakes and shivers, something i am sure was frightening to a little boy. but he was tough. he patted me and told me he loved me. i was a bit frightened myself at that point, so i really appreciated that in ways a little nearly-four-year-old will never comprehend.

then, i crawled into BC’s bed to read her stories. i was shaking so much that i couldn’t hold the book up. it was a pretty humbling moment as BC grabbed everything she could and piled it on top of me — her heavy blanket from grandma, her quilt (from me and BS), her towel, her robe — anything to keep me warm. and it worked for a time. the girl is a born empath and caregiver. she didn’t make me read any stories — we just sat and talked. i don’t even remember what we talked about, as she told me i didn’t have to talk, that i could just listen and she would talk about something. i really regret that i have no recollection of the conversation; i felt that ill.

and the only thermometer i could find was the little Dora the Explorer thermometer. (i found others, but let’s just say that i wasn’t putting them in my mouth.) my thermometer, MIA since my surgery, was gone just as i really needed it. Dora would have to do.

mercifully, BS came home from his class early. [G-d is good.] i called the doctor on call, as mi amiga Dora informed me that i was currently pushing 102F, which isn’t earthshattering in and of itself, but for someone who has a tough time battling infection, i can’t risk a whole lot. the doctor on call told me to dose myself with lots of benadryl. if my temp continued to climb, i would need to get steroids at the ER. joy.

lucky for me, the benadryl knocked me out, so i never did discover what my temp was in the middle of the night. but in the a.m., i was still at the 101.something mark. BS stayed home, along with jools. it’s half-day at all elementary schools here, so basically, BS had both kids from 1:30 on. they went to the mulch pile and put mulch on our playground; they played on BC’s playground at school with two friends; and apparently everyone survived. my fever finally broke in the evening, though my head still hurt and my nausea continued.

and so, here i am, today. my temp is relatively normal. i still have a headache. i had to force myself to eat lunch. yes. me. force. food. hard to believe, huh. and the thing i have to come to grips with is that i get to do this all over again, every six weeks, for the rest of my life. i hope it gets easier as time goes on.

Walk tall or baby don’t walk at all – Bruce Springsteen

mmmmm. chocolate and coconut

Posted on May 6, 2007 by wrekehavoc

ok. no one has to tell me that coconut is horrible for you. and no one also has to tell me that sweetened, condensed milk is like a heart-attack in a can with a side order of a diabetic coma. but this week is teacher appreciation week, and since one of the days requires a baked good of sorts, well, let’s just say i cannot resist a baking opportunity. (and what better way to say thank you to BC’s teachers than with something that might hasten their demise?

well, we pretty much *heart* BC’s teachers around here, yes indeedy do. so i looked for a recipe on cookinglight.com that at least masqueraded as health food (to soothe my besieged maternal conscience); and lo and behold, a recipe beckoned that would be easy to accomplish with BC and jools in tow: chewy chocolate-coconut macaroons. we talked about how yucky unsweetened chocolate was (no one believed me) and how equally yucky unsweetened cocoa was (once again, no one bought it). BC loves coconut; jools says, and i quote, “it’s dis-GUSTING!”) but they were easy to make, bake, and get off the paper.

of course, i find an easy recipe that 50% of my house will never eat. (BS loathes coconut, too.) so much for that.