I'm over here!

Thank you for stopping by. As it turns out, I am finding it difficult to keep up two blogs. But please, stay here a while. Peruse. I'll be posting here on occasion. So you should keep checking back.

In the meantime, check me out here, where I'm posting four times a week about things like bitchy moms, the insidiousness of Disney, and cute hats.

It pays to sit around in your underwear blogging

The last time we met, my family and I were about to go camping and I promised some exciting news upon my return. Well, I'm back.

And here's the news: I am now a blogger for Baby Center's Momformation channel (just between us, I think "Momformation" is kind of a lame name, but the site is great). I get to do exactly what I do here, there. And they pay me for it. Which is more than I can say for you people.

I'll be there four times a week. On Fridays I'll pick some things out on Etsy and encourage you to buy them. The rest of the time I'll just be rambling on about me and my kids. But in a funny and erudite way.

I do hope you'll join me. Really. I'll even post links to all my posts there, here.

And I'll still be posting here sometimes so you should be sure to check back. We can talk about all the things we can't talk about with them. We can bitch about working for the man.

Oh, and about that camping trip. You can read all about it here. And no, the nail scissors didn't turn out to be necessary, but boy was I happy to have the alarm clock/ipod dock.

Why can't I be more like Angelina Jolie?

My kids are never sick (knock on wood, throw salt and turn around three times). Except for now. Maggie has been home with a fever all week, poor thing.

What this means, in addition to way too much screen time, multiple readings of Rainbow Fish, and yogurt for breakfast, lunch and dinner, is that I have been home all week with a sick child. Seriously, I didn't leave the house for two days. Not once. No fresh air. No clean underwear.*

Then, on the third day, I got to go to the corner grocer for some supplies and witness the astounding miracle of real adult humans moving about in public. The next day, still high on my recent exposure to the outside world, I also got a haircut and took my kids to see Toy Story 3. I paid dearly for it with much feverish whining and a serious case of popcorn bloat (me, not them).

All this is not so bad.

What's bad is when, on the fourth day, your completely delightful old friend from college comes to visit for the first time since the kids were born and you suddenly see your life in stark contrast to what could have been.

1991.

That's her on the far left. That's me, wearing pajama bottoms and pearls.

Her: Saving the world by doing important global peace-building projects with the U.N and other impressive NGOs.

Me: Trying to remember when I last administered the Children's Tylenol.

Her: Cocoa-colored linen suit with adorable flats.

Me: Ripped jeans, dirty underwear, clogs.

Her: Teaching at Columbia's graduate program in International Studies.

Me: Trying to teach my children to wipe their own butts.

Her: Hobnobbing with the rich, influential and powerful.

Me: Hobnobbing with two four-year-olds and the occasional corner grocer.

Her: Mother of one super-genius, chess-playing 7-year-old.

Me: Mother of four-year-old twins who try to impress guests by toppling the coffee table and throwing pirate hooks in the air.

I think you get the idea.

And I know that here I am supposed to write something about how worthwhile it all is and how I wouldn't trade anything for anything. But that's not true. I would trade being an unemployed stay-at-home mom (not the kids themselves, mind you; them, I like) for a career that required me to travel all over the world doing good work in a second. At this point I think I would trade it for a career that required me to get dressed in the morning and travel to downtown San Francisco.

All of which is to say that, when the time comes, I'm going to strongly suggest that my children don't major in English. Cause it's too late for me.

* having a sick kid does not preclude changing ones underwear, but really, why bother?

I'm back (and not in a Shining way)

OK, my dahlinks, I know I've been remiss. But, if it's any consolation, I have learned an important lesson about blogging: when you blog often you feel OK about writing a few cute lines of dialogue or describing your love affair with your new pink tights. But when you tell all nine of your readers that you will only be blogging once a week, well, all of a sudden you feel as if you have to have something BIG and IMPORTANT to say. And then you get all squirmy and self-critical and you're all, "No one wants to hear about my trip to the wildlife preserve in Pt. Arena," or "Maybe my children aren't quite as clever to everyone else as they are to me." Then you get sick. Then you get super into writing your novel and feel as if you are close to finishing a first draft.

This is actually not my belly

Then, I don't know, you obsess over your stomach for a while and toy with the idea of throwing in the towel and never dieting again. Then you see that Crystal Light is on sale and you buy some despite your objection to processed food and then it turns out that lemonade Crystal Light is really delicious and, God, you just go along, drinking your powdered drink mixes and examining your naked body in the full-length mirror (it's fine, right? I mean, its not perfect, but it's fine). And also, it's summer, and you feel as if you should be taking advantage of the daylight. And you bought that bench at that garage sale that you should finally just paint already so your backyard can be super cute, especially once you get a fire pit thingy.

Anyhow, before you know it, its been a month (well, 25 days, really) and you have not written anything and you assume that all nine of your readers have moved on (people are busy, after all) and you start to think about Decorno and how she just signed off one day, but you don't want to give up your blog, you don't. You just can't think of anything BIG and IMPORTANT to write. But then, two people write you in one day to say why aren't you blogging and it turns out that's all you needed. Just a little shout out from the anonymous buzzing molecules of data that are the Internet. And you're off again, happy as can be. Not in an every day kind of way, but more often. Often enough so that if it comes up, you feel pretty OK about blogging about socks. I mean, if they are especially cute.

Special bonus video starring moi about a novel that I LOVE and that I totally think you should read this summer:

I am not the Biggest Loser. I am only a medium loser.

I'm HERE today. The new gig requires that I sit on the couch for two hours every Tuesday night watching reality TV and taking notes. The eating chocolate pudding* while I do it part is entirely my own idea.

*If you comment on the TV.com site, chocolate pudding will appear in your life within 24 hours. Do NOT pass up this opportunity. Comment now!

What I needs is a secretary

I am not the only one parked at Ocean Beach, sitting in my car and watching the wild Pacific through the windshield. The old Chinese man in the car to my right is napping, mouth wide open. The suburban-looking man two cars away in the silver highlander is smoking a cigarette, (I'm thinking his family still thinks he quit for good back in 2001). On my way in, I passed two old ladies sitting in a Civic, arguing.

Me? I’m blogging, catching the last 27 minutes before it’s time to pick up the kids from the hula-hooping babysitter and make dinner. And really, I can’t complain about the office space. I mean, I have a minivan, and as work carrels go, it’s pretty spacious.

This is what my time is like these days, little snatched moments that I try to stuff with something productive (I have a productivity disease and can only feel happy if I can list some worthwhile accomplishments for the day; this isn’t as hard as it sounds since I sometimes allow myself to count showering among my achievements.). Today my patchwork went like this: two hours on the couch while the kids were at school, then three more hours at Peet’s until I got kicked off the Wi-Fi. Now it’s Ocean Beach, with surfers tumbling in the white water right in front of me and the crazies sticking yet more old seagull feathers in their dreadlocks.

And in the killing-two-birds-with-one-stone category, I’m pretty sure the sun baking me through the windshield is good for my cold.

I don’t mean to whine, but IKEA only serves Pepsi

I’ve been kind of down in the dumps lately (I know, just what people want to read about after a long day in the trenches, but bear with me).  It’s hard to explain why, but it has to do with some curdling mix of trying to write a novel, and reading Mountains Beyond Mountains and feeling as though doing anything that is not in the service of others is shallow and meaningless.  There are so many people out there who are fucked unto the Lord, as Anne Lamott would say, and here I am trying to write amusing sentences about a twelve-year-old girl.  And, like, who needs me when the world has Michael Chabon and Lorrie Moore and Richard Yates?  

Mixed in to this existential crisis is the fact that my kids have learned the word “hate,” and the little scraps of patience I was sometimes able to muster have mutinied and fled. Then there’s my inability to be skinny, and my irritation with myself for still believing, after all the evidence to the contrary, that skinniness equals happiness. 

Furthermore, it looks as though my trip to Italy may not materialize. I’ve decided I do not like writing workshops. Our chickens are constantly shitting in their water, considerably adding to my stress levels.  I have disconcerting joint pain.  My house feels small and cluttered and there is juice on the floor that has been there a week. I wore out my expensive shoes and now they look bad.  Oh, and I’m losing my job but I don’t know when.

Guess if eating alone in the IKEA cafeteria this afternoon helped my mood. 

 

A thing I like

First of all, I forgot to update you on the completely successful neighborhood potluck I had in my backyard after the weird run-in with my icky neighbor.  It was great, really.  All these people I didn’t know came and signed up and ate chips and drank beer and, I don’t know, it was a little glimmer of hope in my otherwise shitty week.  So, there’s that—the fact that a lot of people (or at least 10 people) want to make our neighborhood a better place.

Then there’s this, which starts tonight and is a big reason why summer is my favorite season.

See? It’s not all bad.