Random Notes From Vacation.

We've been on vacation this past week -- three nights out of town, and the rest just enjoying ourselves around here. Tomorrow our week of fun and family will wind down, and it will be back to the grind Monday morning. But boy, has it been fun. I'm too overwhelmed by the thought of recounting chronological details of our vacation, so I think I'll settle for some random notes.

• Traveling with two small children is easier than I thought it would be. The hotel stay wasn't bad at all. True, at 9:30 the first night, my daughter was still standing up in the hotel crib with the sheet wrapped around her head, a panda bear in one hand and a stuffed bird in the other, dancing to entertain my son. But by 10:00, soon after I decided to get in bed with my son and fake sleep, everyone was sound asleep. Naps and bedtime got much better after that first night. And okay, sure, the car trips weren't always easy, what with the wild screaming fit with intentional vomiting, and the fifteen minute whining fit about the itchy butt, but all in all, it was better than I expected.
• Today is our sixth anniversary. I can't say enough how much I love my husband. I have loved having him around during his vacation. I love it when he, the kids, and I can all goof around together all day. He is a fabulous father and a terrific husband. I am quite lucky. And I'm going to miss him terribly when he heads off to work Monday morning.
• Since we got home Thursday afternoon, I've dreaded setting foot in the kitchen. It's just terrible to go from eating delicious food that I don't have to prepare, to having to cook mediocre food. My husband understood this and said, "Why don't we ease back into this cooking thing bit by bit? For now, let's just get stuff for sandwiches, and we'll eat off paper plates." Whew. Did I mention I love my husband?
• We spent the very last of our vacation money at a yard sale across the street. We bought two cups of lemonade (hey, who can pass up a lemonade stand with adorable little salespeople?) and a toddler bed for our daughter. The bed, which we spied as we drove past, was our reason for going to the sale. It was a good deal, and although we hadn't planned on moving her to a toddler bed for a couple more months, today just turned out to be the day. We carried the bed home, and my son was so excited about it that my daughter became interested in it, too. And then at nap time, we just put her in the bed, and she went right to sleep. Can it really be this easy?!?!?! With my son, it was not. He was very excited about his bed -- so excited, in fact, that as he watched us put it together, he began to claw the skin from his face. His face was bleeding by the time we were done. And then he just wanted to get in and out of the bed over and over and over and over and over and over again. It took a couple days before he slept in it as well as our daughter is sleeping in her bed now. And it took weeks for his scratching tic to stop. Okay, actually, for the record, the pediatrician was hesitant to call it a tic. But whatever it is, it still comes back once in a great while in moments of great anxiety.
• My son is afraid of heights. I had suspected this for some time but knew without a doubt a few days ago when we got on a Ferris Wheel. He hated it. He was so afraid that I began to feel afraid, too, although I didn't let him know that. I sang to him and talked about all sorts of things to keep his mind off how high up we were. "Mommy," he said through tears, "does Dora the Explorer ride the Ferris Wheel?" "Yes, she rides it with Boots on one of your DVDs, doesn't she?" I replied. "Why?!" he asked. My son also dislikes the Tilt-a-Whirl. He screamed for his daddy the whole time we were on it. As he wiped his little tear-stained face after the ride was over, a woman asked him, "Did you have fun?" "Yeah," he said. A few seconds later, he said, "Mommy, what's 'fun'?"

Things I Hate

I've stolen yet another idea from Meredith. What can I say? I'm a thief -- but an honest one.

I Hate:

1. Menstrual Cramps. They're not so bad lately, but before my kids were born, before I had a laparoscopy to diagnosis endometriosis and remove some adhesions, my period was the worst. If I didn't take way more Aleve than the directions on the bottle said, I could not function. Now, I make it through most months without so much as one Motrin, but when the cramps are just bad enough to remind me what it used to feel like, boy oh boy, do I hate them.

2. The Feeling of Being "Dismissed," when the person with whom I am speaking ignores me or brushes me off. This used to happen especially with a very macho male boss I had, but it happens from time to time in other situations. I would wait fifteen minutes to speak to him about something important, and then when it was my turn, he didn't seem to notice I was there. He would half listen to me until another male, or occasionally a very attractive female, happened by, at which point I would be "dismissed" with a casual turn of the head. Nothing pisses me off more.

3. Putting Away Clean Laundry. I don't mind carrying it downstairs to wash it. I don't mind sorting it. I don't mind washing it or drying it or even folding it. I don't mind carrying it back upstairs. But I HATE putting it away.

4. Spiders. (shudder)

5. Centipedes. (double shudder) They're faster than spiders, and more of a surprise. Ick, ick, ick. We used to get them in our basement every now and again at our old house. Fortunately, the house we live in now seems to be centipede-free.

6. Oversimplified/Partisan/Either-Or Politics. I am overwhelmed by the complexity of many tough political issues. When the issue is too big, it's easy to point fingers. I understand why the blame game happens, but I still think it's a cop-out when people say, "It's the Republicans' fault," or, "It's the Democrats' fault." Getting to the heart of the issue, and finding real solutions, on the other hand, is much more complicated.

7. Diet Plans Aimed at Children and Adolescents. I dislike most diet plans, and the entire misguided War on Fat. But when children are encouraged to lose weight (rather than choose a variety of nutritious foods and find some fun ways to be active), I nearly blow my top.

8. Children's Books That Try Too Hard to Rhyme. Look, it doesn't have to rhyme to be a good children's book. Leave the rhyming to Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein already. Prose can be rhythmic and beautiful. And maybe, just maybe, if these authors quit trying to rhyme, their books might start to develop something like, oh , I don't know, plot.

9. Meat That Looks Like the Animal It Came From. I really should be a vegetarian. It would be much less hypocritical of me. I don't have it in me, under non-starvation conditions anyway, to kill a creature for food. Even a fish. If I see where it comes from, I don't want to eat it. Chicken with skin-bumps where feathers used to be? No thanks. Meat that's still on the bone? Gee, I already ate. Steak that runs bloody pink? Thanks, but -- (upchuck noises). Yes, I grew up on a farm. Yes, I occasionally ate a cow I had seen in the field or a chicken whose clucking had helped me develop my fabulous chicken imitation. The thought of it sickens me. Now I prefer to have no prior knowledge of my entree. Really, I prefer meatless things, and yet, I remain a half-hearted carnivore. I feel guilty. But yeah, I let someone else do the wet work, and definitely, I'll take the anonymous chicken.

10. Wallpaper. No, I don't mean I hate to see wallpaper in other people's houses. It looks really nice sometimes. I just hate wallpaper at the moment because I've had to remove so much ugly and old wallpaper from this house that I can't look at it without wanting to peel a little off to see if it's the kind that comes right off or the kind I'll have to fight for hours with a spatula and a bottle of Downy water. I have wallpaper left in the bathroom and kitchen, still, and I hate the thought of having to remove it.

Little Mommy Home

I'm posting earlier than usual today. Well, okay, so posting at all is unusual for me this week, I know, but if I had posted all those other days, it would have been later in the day than now. So why am I posting so early? Because I have no children to watch today!

That's right. My children are staying with my mother. They were there last night. Which means I slept in until 7:00, and I got up and sat on the couch for a while, and then I ate a leisurely breakfast.

Oh, sure I miss the kids. I've already called three times. My son is happy as a clam, though, and my daughter is doing pretty well, too. She did have one brief episode of sadness after my phone call last night. My mother tells me she said over and over, very sadly, "Mommy home. Mommy home. Little Mommy home."

Yes, my daughter calls me "Little Mommy" sometimes. I suppose she thinks little is a term of endearment since I cuddle her and call her my little girl. Naturally, I'm not going to correct her.

Anyway, while the kids are gone, I am doing all sorts of stuff to the house that I wanted to do before but didn't have the time. The hideous wallpaper is gone from our hallway. The hideous, hideous, HIDEOUS carpet is gone from the dining room, living room, and hallway. And the hallway walls have been painted. Wow. Is this my house?

My husband and I had been working on the carpet removal piece-meal after the kids went to bed each night. We weren't getting much sleep. Not because the removal was taking so long, but because afterwards we would just sit there for hours staring at the beautiful hardwood, saying things like, "Is this really our house?" and "Why would they have covered these floors with such ugly carpet?" and "Wow, this looks great!"

When I finish with my leisurely lunch and leisurely blog today, I shall then do some leisurely mopping and some leisurely cleaning up. And then, and then, Little Mommy is going to take a long shower, in the middle of the afternoon.

And then I'm going to call to make sure the kids are okay.

I Am Woman -- Hear Me Snore!

Being productive is exhausting. I am quite tired, but I have gotten a lot done with the house over the last couple days. After the long process of removing a huge plastic flower pot and the downspout that the previous owners had routed through it (yeah, it was truly weird), we gained some insight into our basement leak problems. Part of the problem might require an expert to fix. But one problem we discovered is that the cement drain which a repairman patched recently has another huge crack/hole that he missed.

So, handywoman that I am, I borrowed my dad's caulking gun and just went to town Saturday evening. I mean, I caulked. I didn't literally go to town. Caulking is much like decorating a cake. And my skill at caulking is much like my skill at decorating cakes; my handiwork doesn't necessarily look great, but it tastes good -- er, it's functional. We'll see at the next rain whether my cake decorating did any good.

Then last night my husband and I ripped up the dining room carpet and removed the staples and tack strips from the hardwood. Under that hideous carpet we found one of the few pleasant surprises this house has had for us. The hardwood is really in pretty decent shape. Oh, it's not perfect, especially around the edges, but when we stand in the next room and look at it, it looks really nice. Tonight the plan is to start on the living room. We might find that the rest of the hardwood is a mess, but at least the dining room, where carpet is just not practical for us, is in good shape. If we have to re-carpet the rest of the house, then so be it. We're hoping, however, that dim lighting (which is the only kind of lighting we have in this house) and some area rugs will hide most of the problem spots.

After all my Bob Villa-ing yesterday, and after the shot glass of Benadryl I took for the cold or allergies I'm fighting, I slept great last night. So great, in fact, that for the second night in a row, I must have bitten down on my tongue for the entire night. My tongue is sore. I mean, it's really, really sore. It hurts to eat. It's too embarrassing to mention to a doctor or dentist, and I can't think of any -ectomies I could have that would take care of the problem and leave me with any kind of quality life anyway, so I'm just going to have to eat soft and bland food for a while until it heals and hope I will soon go back to my usual habit of grinding my teeth without the tongue clamp-down.

Saga of the Potty

It is 9:14 A.M. My husband left for work almost an hour and a half ago, and from the time his car disappeared down the road until just a couple minutes ago, I have been at the mercy of a potty-training three-year-old.

He spent nearly an hour sitting on the potty, trying his very best to poop. I provided him with special potty-pooping-only toys, including a little chalkboard and chalk I found in my parents' basement cleanout. He drew, he erased, he dropped the eraser into the toilet. He moved from the big toilet to his little potty and back again. He asked for privacy, he begged for company. He tried it all. And we were so close. So very close. Just one grunt away from victory, and he bailed out. He pulled up the pull-up and finished that way.

I hid my disappointment fairly well. As I changed him, I praised his effort, said we were so very close and surely one day very soon he would poop on the potty. I then calmly went about the business of cleaning up the bathroom -- sorting and putting away all the, shall we say, accoutrements de poopage -- the chalkboard, the wet eraser, the books, the Kandoo wipes, the little bits of toilet paper ripped up and tossed about like confetti. At last it was all cleaned up. With a sweet smile, I checked on the kids, who were reading a book together in my son's room, and then I logged into blogger, where I now weep bitterly into the keyboard, using all my self-restraint to keep from screaming, "JUST POOP ON THE FRICKIN' POTTY! YOU SIT, YOU POOP! HOW HARD CAN IT BE?!!?!"

Ahem. Okay, I feel better. I shall now return to a morning of kind and patient parenting.

Crossing My Fingers . . . And Opening My Larynx

In the boxes of treasure from my parents' basement I found two cassette tapes I thought we had lost forever. Both are tapes of my brother and me singing, talking, telling stories, and basically being silly. In the first of the tapes, I was two or three years old, and my brother was four or five. Tonight I forced my husband to listen with me to parts of those tapes. I had two basic reactions:

1) My brother's made-up stories and songs were always so much more entertaining than mine. Take, for example, my brother's classic song "God and Santa Claus Want You to Share Toys," and my pathetic follow-up about a mud puddle named Muddy Mud-Mud.

2) Boy, did we stutter. Both of us. My brother outgrew his stutter by second grade . . . which surprises me when I hear the severity of it on those tapes. Funny, I listened to those tapes when I was a kid and never noticed it. Wow, how did I miss it? We didn't really repeat many sounds, but the stuttering was right there under the surface. I could feel it even before it showed itself in a disfluency of some sort. It took me a few minutes to figure out what it was I was hearing, but finally I realized I was hearing the Valsalva maneuver. It was all over the place in our speech, even in the middle of otherwise perfectly fluent sentences. Our little throats closed all the time when we spoke. Weird.

I am so glad I found the tapes. Just yesterday I worried about my son's speech during a long, pause-laden story of his that seemed to take much more effort than it should have. I kept wondering, "Just how much disfluency is allowed in normal disfluency?" Now, however, I am encouraged. Yeah, sure, it took my son a while, and he threw in an uh and an um, but I didn't notice that sticky Valsalva quality in his throat. Maybe the kid will escape it yet.

House Whiff

My house has a smell. It is not a good smell. It is not necessarily a bad smell, either, but it's certainly more bad than good. When I am home all day, I don't notice it, but then when we are out somewhere, I will catch a whiff of it on our clothes. Or when I come home after having been gone for a day or two, the smell irritates the hell out of me for the hour or two it takes for my nose to grow accustomed to it again. I go around sniffing -- sniffing walls, carpets, closets, ductwork, trying to find the source. I end up feeling discouraged . . . and just a little high from all the house huffing.

The smell does not belong to us. We did not create it; we just paid for it. It should have been listed as chattel on our sales contract along with the fridge and the broken ceiling fan.

When our realtor first showed us the house, she said, "I think you'll like this one. And smell it -- it's clean!" She sniffed deeply and appeared to be in ecstasy, as if she were smelling fresh-baked bread or her lover's pheromones.

Every house has a smell, of course. My husband calls it house whiff. I don't mind house whiff in other people's houses, and I don't mind my own house whiff in my own house. Everyone should have the right to create his or her own house whiff. Living in the whiff of strangers, on the other hand, is not so fun.

Just as with pheromones, the beauty of the house whiff is in the nose of the beholder. When the realtor bragged on the smell, I made a mental note that the smell I was smelling was from cleaning supplies and could be gotten rid of with alternative cleaning supplies.

Nothing has worked, however. What we are smelling here is not the smell of clean. It is the smell of whiff. Permanent whiff.

I hold out hope that replacing the carpet will help. However, we have two very small children right now, and new carpet would be an absolutely ridiculous investment. My nose is begging me to throw that money away. "Enough is enough!" my nostrils are crying.

I am practical, though. I am frugal. And yet I am not without empathy. So I shall appease my nose with an old trick. I found out not too long ago that one cannot smell while smiling.

I am breaking out the perma-grin. No, folks, this is not a grimace. This is happiness. Pure happiness.

Current Events Shopping

Can I just say that I love shopping carts made for two kids? My kids are extra cute in them. These days there are different kinds -- the cart with the massive blue or red plastic attachment with seats, and the traditional shopping cart made wider and with not one but two seats in the place where you used to put the eggs and the bread until you became a parent. And did I mention I love these carts?

My kids are so happy while riding in them. They chatter and sing and recite their ABC's and 123's. Passersby note my children with either smiles or raised eyebrows, depending on what is coming out of their mouths at the moment. If they are singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," we get smiles. If they are shouting, "David Hasselhoff! David Hasselhoff!" we get the raised eyebrows.

I have to blame that one on my husband, who is a Simpsons fan. He says there is an episode in which Lisa Simpson is shown as a baby with a knack for speaking, and Bart teaches her to say David Hasselhoff. So my husband, testing our daughter's abilities against Lisa Simpson's in the ultimate toddler assessment, asked her to say it. And she did. And so did my son. And they both do it all the time now.

Sure, our kids are weird. But they come by it naturally.

Hey, it could be worse. Most people have heard about David Hasselhoff's recent shaving injury, so my children's bizarre shouts are at least topical.

Women Like Me

It's weird baring my soul online for all to see. After my last post, I felt exposed. I went to bed early to escape the embarrassment. It's like all those gym class stories, in a way. Except only two people who know me in real life know about this blog, and only one reads it, so the embarrassment is at least mostly anonymous. Which is why I started this thing in the first place, I guess -- to have a place where I could whine about all the things that don't make me look so great, allowing anyone who wants to roll his or her eyes or curl a lip in disgust to do so without putting a friendship in jeopardy.

I can't figure it out -- should I be embarrassed? Am I ashamed for not being one hundred percent "over" the things my father said to hurt me, or am I embarrassed that I am/was the kind of person to whom such things could be said? I suppose it's both. And since this is the place where I can write the ugly stuff, I'm writing it. Because for better or worse, I am the kind of person to whom such things were said, and I am the kind of person who is still not completely "over it" all these years later despite having moved on and found happiness.

When I was no older than ten, I was riding home from a Boy Scout outing I had tagged along on since my mother was one of my brother's troop leaders. I heard on the radio some mention of the Equal Rights Amendment. I asked my mother what it was, and she gave me a very brief explanation: an amendment that would give women the same rights that men have. That evening at dinner I tried to prove that although I was the youngest and usually in the dark about politics and the like, I was now getting pretty smart indeed.

"I think the E.R.A. is a good idea!" I said with such childish enthusiasm.

My father whipped his head around and shot me a look of fury the likes of which I had never seen before. What he said next I never forgot, mostly because it was such a mystery to me.

"There are names," he sneered, "for women like you."

My first point of confusion was what I had done to anger my father, how political talk, which happened at our dinner table all the time, could upset him so much. My second point of confusion was that I was not a woman. I was just a kid. Maybe he wasn't talking to me? True, it is possible he was speaking to my mother in a passive-aggressive way since she was surely the one who had put such an idea in my head. But the glare was in my direction, no doubt about it. I remember trying to think up one name for "women like me," one insult bad enough to match the venom in his voice. I didn't know any names that bad.

What my father and I usually butted heads about was my body -- typically my weight, but occasionally a skirt that he deemed too short or the legs he wouldn't let me shave when I was in seventh grade. I always thought it was about my being fat and/or physically disgusting: I needed to lose weight and would not be worthy until I did so, and therefore my legs were different from the skinny girls' legs and did not merit being shaved or being visible. It was all because I was fat, you see.

When I think about the E.R.A. incident, however, I have to laugh because I realize the conflict wasn't only about my body -- in fact, I would dare to say that it wasn't even mostly about my body. The problem was always that he saw in me a feminine strength that threatened him. Why else would he think of such "names for women like you" when he looked at his pre-adolescent daughter? I scared him.

Someone pointed that out to me a long time ago, but I didn't see it. It took me a long time to realize it was true, that my dad, whom I had always seen as larger than life, was fallible, that he just didn't know what to do with me.

I still scare him.

Lately I have found myself in a position of power over him from time to time. It is strange. He screws up, and the natural consequences just knock him off his feet, and I find myself standing over him, looming larger than I meant to be. I nearly always feel sorry for him. I help him up, or I turn away and let him keep his dignity as he picks himself up.

I don't want to dishonor my father. But I don't want to protect him anymore. Just as I am angry with myself for speaking of all this, I am angry with myself for keeping silent. I couldn't find the words to say no when he wanted to weigh my children -- my husband was the one who spoke up. I couldn't even find the words to tell my father he was no longer going to be left alone with my children after this incident.

I am embarrassed that I dwell on past wrongs, and I am embarrassed that my father can still say and do such cruel things. I am embarrassed that I have not protected my father more, and I am embarrassed that I have not protected my children more. I am embarrassed because I can't forgive my father, and I am embarrassed because I can.