Inventory

We just had the Berkeleyest Saturday (where “Berkeley” means “SF Bay Area” and is less cumbersome), and when I put it all together in one long sentence it feels kind of ridiculous. This sort of thing just doesn’t happen where I’m from. So: After declaring it a Stay Home and Take Care of House Shit weekend (the house looks like a team of ne’er-do-wells broke in, rummaged through all our stuff, and then left a bunch of extra junk on every available flat surface), we ended up having a bagel brunch with friends, going to a school fundraiser rummage sale, racing downtown to the library for a slideshow presentation and lecture for a book I edited earlier this year (this is the author who was working remotely from tiny mountainside villages in Laos; I met him for the first time in person on Saturday, and if we weren’t both incredibly awkward, there would have been hugging), and then we raced home to have dinner while waiting for someone from Craigslist to relieve us of some musical equipment, and THEN we rushed off to a party celebrating the engagement of two lovely women who have found lovely lovey-love in each other’s arms during what we politely call their “golden years.” Right before dinner we also managed to squeeze in a few games of Twister on our new Twister board, bought for four shiny quarters at the fundraiser that morning.  We’re busy and I’m exhausted and also a little sore from holding right-hand-green/left-hand-blue/right-foot-yellow for a bit too long, but I guess that’s what comes of putting the three-year-old in charge of the spinner.

This week is going to be a little scary. Actually, this week will be the first in a series of scary weeks that will probably last until both kids are in elementary school or maybe college.  I’m still on maternity leave from my day job, but I’ve been taking small freelance gigs when I find them, and then last week I secured a new book editing project and picked up more web-writing work, and then of course I regretted it all as soon as I had to cloister myself upstairs for two hours on Sunday to write while the baby screamed because how dare Daddy try to feed him with a bottle. Wombat meanwhile flitted about the house saying bizarro things like “You never can tell with humans!” and “I must be off!” and “Well I never!” and as for me, I was doing a poor job of ignoring them and a really stellar job of feeling doubly sad about it all–once for missing cherished family togetherness activities and then again for not having time to write it all down in my online journal weblog site.

But oh, misty watercolored mem’ries do not the mortgage bills pay, and so I must soldier on with faith that Wombat will continue to be delightfully weird and Fox will, with practice, eventually take a bottle like all the other babies because HE IS A BABY TOO DAMMIT. (After thirty minutes of patient coaxing, I did get him to down two ounces from a bottle, and seriously, if I didn’t know so many women who have suffered crushed spirits (and nipples) in the battle to breastfeed, I’d swear bottle feeding was the harder option. (Just SUCK IT, for crying out loud!) (I think perhaps one part of the problem is that we need faster-flow bottle nipples and the other part of the problem is that I’m one of those soapy-milk ladies that needs to scald her milk lest the child react to being fed the way Ralphie reacts to biting down on a bar of Life Buoy. (I just finished Olive Kittredge and started In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, which is the book that inspired A Christmas Story. Life may be hectic, but I’m reading for pleasure again and it’s awesome.) END PARENTHESIS!)

I do want to update you (and future me) on preschool, now that we’re two weeks in, but for the moment all I can muster is this inventory:

• one (1) skinned knee
• two (2) scraped hands
• one (1) black eye (!)
• one (1) barf after a particularly enthusiastic session on the tire swing
• minus seven (-7) naps (UNACCEPTABLE)
• one (1) crush (“Mom, she has blue eyes!”)
• a gaggle (a gaggle) of new friends

Life is a pinch on the cheek.