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I’m probably the only person in the world for whom sleeping in a hotel with my kids really isn’t a hard thing – they’re both so used to cosleeping with me that it’s just a matter of getting a king bed and laying perpendicular to the headboard. A couple well-placed pillows on nightstands and a chair or two to block them from rolling off, and we’re good to go.
So, the Sea World report: in spite of Maine-esque weather (high 50′s and either cloudy skies ir a steady drizzle pretty much the whole time we were at the park), a good time was had by all. Both girls loved the park, the animals and the hotel. Bean referred to the hotel as “our apartment”, and was crushed to learn we were headed home to “our real house” on Sunday – she wanted to stay in the hotel longer. Both nights, she crashed within a few minutes of her head hitting the pillow and slept straight through the night. Miss O did her usual 20-30 minutes of frolicking, then she, too, was out for the night.
Anyone expecting a Zen-like experience at the Hill Country Resort’s spa was likely no fan of the kids this weekend, but I take perverse pleasure in seeing people get pissed off at my kids enjoying themselves. There’s just something so … schadenfreude-y … about annoying someone who’s wound so tight that a couple of joyous shrieks and loud kid chatter puts their panties in a wad.
We arrived at Sea World early enough to feed the dolphins on Saturday morning, but Bean’s excitement at the prospect was nipped in the bud when one of the popoises opened wide and exposed a mouth full of teeth; at that point, the tray o’ anchovies or whatever they feed them was all mine {insert eveil muahahaha laugh and hand-rubbing here}. Miss O was beside herself, and likely would have crawled into the pool with them.
To my Cirque de SoGay hating self, the fact that Bean’s favorite part of the day was the “Viva!” show with high divers and synchronized swimming was a bit of a blow. But she loved “all the acrobats and dolphins and the mommy and baby Beluga whales!” And, being the good mommy that I am, I totally went along with it and encouraged her. Viva! even bumped the Clydesdales from the top of the favorites list; probably because there were no baby horses 
She and her friend C love-love-loved the “Cannery Row Caper” show, too, with the sea lions and the otter. The silly and slapstick-rich story had them in stitches. (Nice alliteration, huh?) And going to feed the seals and sea lions afterward was a HUGE hit. After the guide there explained the differences between seals and sea lions, I passed a couple nuggets on to my budding zoologist and she kept them straight for the rest of the trip. She and C would have cheerfully fed the pinnipeds all. day. long.
Saturday was the cloudy and cool day, so the kiddos got to play a little at Shamu’s Happy Harbor and dig in the sand in between shows. The sun actually came out around 2:00 or so, tho at that point the kiddos had about had it and we headed back to play at the hotel. Lots of sand and playscape time, and a good bit of ‘running around the lobby like a crazy person’ time, along with ‘bang on the piano’ time
Sunday was just cold and wet all day, so it was a lot of indoor activities at Sea World (the aquarium and penguin exhibits were perfect for this). But Bean got to ride the little Shamu roller coaster (and did put her hands up with me) and a small ferris wheel in spite of the wet. We caught one last Cannery Row Caper and headed home around 3:00.
I’ll definitely go back; with both girls and even a just mommy-and-Bean getaway a few times a year. She travels so well in the car, and if it’s just she and I all day, I imagine the park will be a piece of cake. Maybe we’ll see if Julia wants to take C and make a whole mommy-big-girl day of it one time too.
But now I need to get back to sleep and bid a reluctant farewell to my long weekend with the kiddos. I tweeted that sometimes I really miss being “just” a SAHM – this long weekend, tho trying at times, made me long for more quality time with them than just a few weekends a month. I’m sure I’d change my tune within a month or two, but man, I really miss doing things with them ….
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What a great way to wrap up a fun weekend – an email from Julia (and C) asking us to join them at the pool. An hour or so at a great pool, followed by BBQ and play at her place was a fab ending to a weekend of fun for the girls and I.
I was off on Friday, and the girls’ school was open, so I took advantage of a slacktastic day and had lunch with Shirley before picking the girls up. Saturday was an early day (ugh), so we stayed in jammies and hung around the house to ensure they got naps. Would have loved one myself, but by the time I got Miss O to sleep, Bean was waking up.
My parents came over later in the afternoon and we headed out to the girls school – they offered free parking and hot dogs/burgers for families that had kids there, and since the school is right across the street from the big fireworks park, it was a no-brainer. We walked over and checked out the vendors and stuff to do in the park, and the girls played on the playground for awhile. We went back to the school to hang out and play there, on the well-shaded playground, since it was, after all, *July in Texas*.
Grabbed some dinner and then my folks took Miss O home and Shirley and her older daughter met Bean and I to stay for the firworks. It was my first fireworks experience with Bean, and she loved it. I was grinning from ear to ear watching and hearing her reactions.
She was a little Mayor McCheese, too, hanging out with all her school friends and hamming it up for whoever would listen. She’s such a social little thing, and she makes me more social by default … especially when I’m removing her from a picnic blanket and stopping her from sharing some random kid’s lunch!
It was close to 11:00 by the time she got to sleep, and she was up this morning at 7:00, so I mandated a nap again today if she wanted to do anything this afternoon. We had breakfast at the bagel place, did a Target run and then O fell asleep in the car, as I drove her around, I got the email from Julia, so once both girls had a short nap, we hit the pool. Neither of my girls swim, so the pool in J’s neihborhood is fab, with a great beach-type entry and splash area. One of my neighborhood pools has the zero-entry thing, too, but best I recall, it’s just the way into the pool, not an area for plating, per se. Julia’s neighborhood actually has a whole shallow ‘pool’ area that the beach entry leads to, where the water stays pretty shallow. Bean and O loved it.
I managed to hit the 7:00 bedtime I was striving for tonight, and after the hour-long struggle to get O to sleep, actually got the house cleaned up a bit, too. I’ve got a stressful week coming up at work, so I really need to get to bed myself. Send me good thoughts that I don’t butt heads too hard with the boss or the officemate
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A convo with Bean this a.m.
Bean: Do you like the Earth?
Mommy: Yes.
Bean: A lot?
Mommy: Yes.
Bean: I like the Earth all the way to the Moon and back. That’s how much I like the Earth.
My little eco-warrior in training
The girls were on TV this a.m. … tho just barely: http://bit.ly/ADJxj … if you look closely in the baby room, you can see O climbing on me instead of participating; in the gym, there are a couple quick shots of Bean. Both girls love doing yoga, in spite of what O shows the KXAN viewership. In the baby yoga room, the camera guy commented that it was like herding cats – I told him cats were easier.
Bean executed her poses not a the flow-y, leaf-on-the-wind way, but instead in a choppy, jump-to-it way. My girl is not a flow-y girl. But she really enjoys it and often breaks out my yoga mat at home. She’s dubbed my favorite pose (warrior) “star wars pose”, combining the star pose with it
I’ve been feeling kinda down about the divorce lately; a vastly improved relationship with Dave has kind of blurred my edges and made me nostalgic and a bit sad. And it seems everything I stumble upon online just does something to underscore it. I hope no-one takes it to mean that our much friendlier divorce needs to change – because I don’t want that at all. It’s just a new adjustment for me. We went through such a rough period of interaction that the return to the post-divorce relationship we said we wanted has been really nice; but because it’s so much smoother, it makes the reasons for divorce a little less clear.
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There is just nowhere in the *world* at which 4:17 is an acceptable time to begin your day. Nowhere. But as Miss O fell asleep in the car around 5:00 last night and rather than make it a brief nap, I let it just be ‘down for the night’, I anticipated an earlier-than-usual start. And would have been prepared for it were it not for that magical hour of awake-for-the-hell-of-it that occurred around 1 a.m. Bean joined O in that hour of being awake and making me want to drown myself in the bathtub, so I was hating on both kids last night with equal fervor.
I’m going to propose to Dave a new custody arrangement – he gets them at night, I get them during the day. My daytime patience is infinite, but O sleeps for crap here. I think his daytime patience is slightly more limited, judging by Bean’s repeated “I don’t like daddy because he spanks my butt!” (which, I have no doubt, is more drama-ho’ing and making a case for always being with me than it is an actual reflection of amount/intensity), but they sleep well with him. So he can do the nighttime stuff where less patience is required, and I can tap into my deeper reserves and do the daytime stuff.
Think he’ll go for it?
I took the girls to breakfast at McD’s, a cemetery, Toys-r-Us, the mall, the park and Target yesterday. Bean wanted McD’s breakfast, and it’s so cheap to feed the three of us there I have a hard time saying no, tho I do forbid the playscape. I don’t do any indoor playscapes with my kids – personally, I consider them festering pits of cooties and sickness. And I’m a mom who extends the 5-second-rule to include the unwashed, straight-from-the-container blueberries that fall on the floor at the grocery store. I’ve just seen one too many obviously ill and contagious kid at those places, and once I read Julia’s story about watching some kid slide down one and leave a poop trail, it’s a completely closed case.
After breakfast, where the girls entertained the masses – Bean with her antics and O with her tiny cuteness – I took Bean on her much-desired cemetery field trip. We talked about burial versus cremation, and what one can do with the powder from cremation, as well as discussing who is buried at this cemetery. This particular one is over-represented by ‘Cluck’s, so Bean ID’d all the Cluck headstones.
Then she noticed the very small headstones and graves.
Thus began a discussion about why babies and kids die. She wasn’t happy about there being kids and babies there, but didn’t seem profoundly saddened, just a little sad and thoughtful. I thought to myself then, and think now, that this will likely be a recurring discussion for a while to come.
Bean: That’s a baby’s headstone
Mommy: Actually, it is. It’s a baby that died a long time ago.
B, in her most empathetic and sad voice: Oh! That’s so sad!
M: It is. Sometimes babies are too sick to live very long, and they die very early.
B, noticing another small grave: There’s another one
M: Yes.
(We proceeded to pick wildflowers, with Bean looking at all the headstones, and stopping at any she thought were kid or baby graves. She wasn’t super sad, but seemed to get that it was sadder than adult graves)
B: Miss O, this is a baby’s headstone
I kid you not, O stopped and placed the flowers she had been holding down near the headstone.
But overall, Bean really enjoyed her trip there. When I noticed the grave of a veteran, I noted it, and explained to Bean that this weekend was a special weekend where we said thank you to the folks who have served our country. I said “you can say ‘thank you for serving our country’ because they were soldiers who protected us.” She proceeded to thank everyone, babies included, for serving our country.
When I asked her her thoughts afterward, she was focused mainly on how pretty cemeteries are, and how you bury dead people in boxes. She paused and said “when we talk to dead people, can they hear us?” I said “some people think they can, and some people think they can’t. Do you think they can hear us?” She thought for a minute and said “Yes. I think they can hear us.” So I told her “then that’s what you should believe. We’ll never know for sure, so the only thing that matters is that what you believe makes you feel good.”
Miss O dozed off in the car, so Bean and I chatted and drove around for awhile. She was complaining incessantly about her shoes with orthotics hurting her, and I recalled a sale at Stride Rite, so I planned a stop there. Miss O snagged a 45-minute nap in the car, we did some shopping, got both girls’ feet measured (O’s actually a size 5 now, Bean’s an 11), scored a new pair of sneakers for Bean, then headed home for naps. That totally didn’t pan out, so we went to a new park and then to Target. Miss O fell asleep on the way home, and now we’re full circle to my first paragraph.
I’ll leave ya with a couple conversations with Bean. The Toys-r-Us one, which is not for the easily embarrassed, occurred with someone in the stall next to us.
Bean, pointing at some scribble: Do you know what this says?
Mommy: No. What does it say?
Bean: It says ‘Loving mommy. We love you. You’re the best mama in the whole world. Thanks.’
Bean, leaning over to whisper in my ear at the park: This is *awesome*. Thanks!
Bean, at Target, to an unsuspecting mom with two kids: When we were at the cemetery today, we saw a baby’s grave. It was sad.
Mom, fixing me with a special look: I’m sorry. I bet it was sad.
Me, trying to explain: It was a field trip that she requested!
Bean, in the bathroom with me at Toys-r-Us: Mommy, why do you have hair on your butt?
Mommy, laughing in disbelief: You just asked that, didn’t you?
B: Yes I did.
M: Well, when people grow up and go through puberty they get hair in new places. And it’s not on my butt.
B: Well, why do you have hair on your bulba?
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TGI Thursday. Why Thursday? Dave has the girls tonight and my sleep-deprived self can get some sleep.
Tuesday night and Wednesday night both featured marathon, middle-of-the-night nursing sessions that kept me awake at least an hour until I had had enough, stopped Miss O and then spent 30+ minutes trying to get her to sleep. Tuesday night she woke up several times *before* the nursing session, but last night she at least slept solidly until the session. Idiot mommy stayed up until 11:00 reading, as they typically sleep until 6:45 or so nowadays. Except today, when they woke up at 5:45. Actually, Miss O was up a little before that nursing. Again. So maybe 5 hours of fractured sleep for me? Like I said – TGI Thursday.
Here’s how Bean woke up – I was laying and nursing O, and heard Bean pass gas. She sat up and said: “Mommy can you say Pootle? Poo-tle. The first letter is P and the fifth letter is T. Pootle is a funny way to say gas.”
At least I can start my day with a smile. And plenty of coffee, as I have an extra hour of pootle-around time.
Sleepiness aside, I’m doing really well. It’s a bit of a mad shuffle to get the girls out the door in the morning, and fed at night, but I’m finding my groove. Clara, thanks for the crockpot suggestion – I’ll be using this kid-free weekend to look at menus and meals and do some shopping and pre-planning. I can do that and bag some frozen meals to throw in the fridge to thaw and then heat when I get home, too. I need to buy a smaller crockpot, I think. My parents very kindly gave me their hugantic one, but it’s just too big for daily meals. It cooked the ever-loving crap out of the homemade mac and cheese I attempted once, I think because it was spread so thin on the bottom.
But I really am liking being back at work. My brain is actually hitting on all cylinders most days, and I knocked out a ton of stuff yesterday. Still working on a Twitter handle for the boss, but we may be making some progress – thanks to everyone who gave me input when asked It’s so nice to be a grown-up for such a big chunk of the time now … being a single mom, I think, makes the stay-at-home part even harder as there is so very little grown-up time. And when the other parent has the kids, it’s hard to get grown-up time because that’s when all your friends are doing family things. Throwing work into the mix means 40 or so hours of guaranteed grown-up time a week, and that’s pretty cool.
The gym right by the girls’ school is running a “$9 to join, $9 a month, no contract” membership drive and I’m very tempted. I could do M/W/F pretty easily … assuming they have showers there. It’d be a pain to come all the way back home. Not impossible, but a pain. I guess I could just as easily get my lazy tookus out for a power walk/run every morning that the girls aren’t here. I just need something for my upper body …. hmmm …
A couple Beanisms for y’all before I hit the showers and get this show on the road.
Mommy: Bean, would you like some crunchy strawberries and bananas?
Bean: Well, my brain thinks it’s okay …
Bean: C had macaroni and cheese and broccoli for lunch
Mommy: mmmm. That sounds good (totally lying thru my teeth). My favorite way to eat broccoli is raw with ranch dressing.
Bean: My favorite way to eat broccoli is that nobody eats broccoli.
Bush Sr. would be so proud …
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Melissa, I like the talking head thing, so feel free to comment away But let me know if you do start blogging – I’ll definitely want to read it!
My parents have been on babysitting duty all week, and will likely finish the week as the girls’ day care providers. Sorry guys! I just sent an email to the real daycare, showing them this link from the local paper about state lab testing for H1N1. It’s entirely possible that my results will be indefinitely delayed as they work through their backlog, and if the school maintains their “we need your results” stance, who knows when the girls will be able to go back. So I suggested we just go with Monday.
I really hope they are on board … the girls need the structure of school, I think, to make sure they’re napping an eating well. My parents are doing a great job, but having a hard time with napping and getting the girls to eat; and when I’m getting home to two exhausted kids at 6:30, I can’t exactly whip up a full meal. So they’re in this cycle of carb loading and exhaustion. Miss O is sleeping for crap at night and I am just wiped out!
Miss O is one strong-willed little bugger … is it wrong that I like Bean a bajillion times more sometimes? O will sleep all night at Dave’s, and nap for an hour or more. With me, if I get her to nap on her own, the most I can hope for is 45 minutes, and she is back to waking up 4-5 times a night. And screaming when she does, partly because I’m not nursing her (mostly, by the last wake-up I just let her latch on. I don’t think she’s getting anything, but whatever). But I think part of it is just that she’s so chronically overtired.
With my folks, she won’t nap at all unless my dad walks her to sleep, then lays down with her asleep on him. Even so, they get maybe 30 minutes from her. Her one day at school, she slept on a mat for 2 stinkin’ hours. And Bean naps almost every day at school. But never at home.
Le sigh. I wish I knew where they got this pig-headedness from. Probably their dad, as I’m as flexible and easy-going as can be …
When I’m at work, I am loving being a working mommy. The evenings still suck, from a time management perspective, but I envision this as being really good for the three of us once we really have a routine down. And being a single working mommy has some real benefits, as far as after-hours work stuff goes – if I have some notice, I can just coordinate with Dave and not have the kids for the morning or evening. It’s kind of nice … you know, sometimes I think that I may never get married again …
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Ahhhh …
All is right with the world. I went to work – yes, I still have a job – and went to pick up my girls at grandma and grandpa’s afterward.
You read that right, the girls are home. I don’t think I’ve ever seen two people happier to see me than they were. Bean was ecstatic when Dave called to tell her I’d be picking her up; my mom said she screamed “my mommy’s coming to get me!!” And Miss O … she came walking over to me with this huge smile that didn’t leave her face until bedtime. Just beaming up at me, and reaching up to hug me over and over.
Bean announced to me: “I worked really hard and I earned you back, mommy.”
This is the email she dictated to grandma today:
Dear Mommy,Feel better soon and have me come to your house soon. And you always have to have a dog again and make sure you never forget that you will never make your dog leave. And please I really want to come to your house today and I really want you to be married to grandma and you always can stay with me all the time and stay with me overnight. And you are supposed to clean everything in your house and make sure your house stays alllll tidy and dusted up and when you make a recipe everyone can come to your house. Make sure you buy all the toys your kids want.
So when Dave sent me an email asking if I thought I could take the girls tomorrow night, I said absolutely! We went back and forth a bit about what the girls’ school would say if my test for H1N1 comes back positive and the girls are now with me, but we decided that even by the most conservative estimates (me getting H1N1 the very day I tested positive for it), today is 8 days later and the CDC says people are only contagious 7 days. So then the discussion switched to is it okay for me to have them starting tonight, do I feel like I’ve recovered fully, etc. Dude, wild horses could have trampled me nearly to death at lunch and I’d still have said “I’m fine!”
I am so, so happy to have them home. And since they’re still not “allowed” back at school (no test results for me yet), it’ll be a slightly easier transition to working mommy, because my folks are willing to come here and watch them for the next day or two.
Work went well today. My brain was actually firing on all cylinders and I had a good day. More on that after I have a few days under my belt, but so far, I think I’m going to be happy here. And I think I’m going to like being a working mommy … tho after 10 days without my kids, I’d like nothing more than to spend the day with them tomorrow. Oh well – that’s what weekends are for, right?
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At least from a preschool director perspective.
I called the girls’ school this a.m. to bring them up to speed on the girls’ health, as Miss O left early Monday because she was sick and neither of them has been back since. The school sent out a “School Flu Policy” email today, and I just wanted them to know, mostly, that the girls were still ill, but negative for Type A.
And then idiot me mentioned I tested positive for Type A.
Hand to dog, I spent 10 minutes talking to the director and the owner detailing when I was last there (5 days before I tested positive for Type A), when I tested positive, when the girls tested negative, my doctor’s contact info … only to be called back and asked to keep the girls home until I get my test results back. You know, sometime next week.
I was hoping the girls were coming back tomorrow, but now Dave is being all devil’s advocate-y and saying “well, what if you’re still contagious? That would mean this whole week of isolation was for nothing.” Well, yeah, if you’re going to go and use logic.
Gah. I miss my girls. I haven’t seen them in a week and while it was really nice while I was feeling like death, now that I feel pretty good, it’s lonely. And boring. I mean, seriously – how much HGTV can a person watch without calling upon the powers of darkness and doing tons of decoupage? Do you know I actually watched TMZ this evening? And found it funny.
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As I was preparing to leave for my interview yesterday, Bean was asking all the what and why questions she could, including what job I was interviewing for. I tried to explain the concept of a staffing company to her, but since she can’t even grasp the whole “mommy is in charge, Bean isn’t” concept, it flew a little out of her reach.
I asked Bean what she thought I would be good at. She thought, hemmed and hawed, and said: I think you are good at poopie.
No sh*t.
When I tried for something a little more impressive, I got: I think you are good at pee-pee.
It would certainly help to downplay my qualms about public speaking, huh?
I thanked her and let her know I’d mention both skills, as I hadn’t considered listing them on the first go ’round. Sure as schneike, when I got home she asked: “Did you tell them you’re good at pee-pee and poopie?”
Bet most other kids aren’t this helpful.
I assured her that I did mention it and they were most impressed; that it put me head and shoulders above the other job seekers who hadn’t mentioned their pee-pee and poopie skill sets.
She helped further by launching an impressive Bacon Double Turdburger campaign in the morning. Miss O, ever the observant understudy in her Junior Bacon Turdburger role, spent the morning trying to convince everyone that screaming and gesturing was superior to the spoken word when it comes to getting one’s point across. So when I went to the interview, it was with a feeling of optimism about my future of full-time work and children in full-time care
Staffing agency interviews are cool in some ways – you’re a little more natural, a little less worried about saying the wrong thing – it’s someone that gets paid when you find a job so if you’re a pretty employable person, they want you to succeed and they want to find you a position. But less cool is the ambiguity of ‘we’ll let you know if something comes up that fits your skill set’ stuff … But the interview went well enough and was good practice for being back in the working world.
So, hook me up with your favorite interview tips – or worst interview gaffes. Get me in the mood
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