May

Today I had the unsettling experience of discovering my flight to Korea that I thought left late Wednesday night in fact leaves late tomorrow night. Thank God I randomly mentioned my trip on Facebook and my bandleader happened to see the post and tell me I was a day off. Good Lord. All day I've had that "I almost fell off a cliff feeling", imagining lying in bed tomorrow night and getting a frantic text at 1 AM saying the flight is about to take off, where the hell am I? I shudder just thinking about it. The mistake was made because for all my trips I use an app called Trip Case in which you type your flight number, airline, and departure date - which I got wrong because the flight leaves at 1 AM - and normally the app would catch the mistake, but apparently this airline has the same flight leaving at the same time with the same fucking flight number every night. What.The.Fuck. 

Anyway, no harm, no foul - the babysitter can come a day early, I rearranged everything so I could do all the elaborate packing, laundry and grocery shopping today, and off I go tomorrow night. 

I also got Bobby squared away at a local Parks & Rec summer camp today and will try to arrange for Theo to attend their little kids' morning camp tomorrow. Our summer schedule is going to be a bit of a jigsaw puzzle, but I'll be paying a lot less than I'm paying now with two kids in preschool, and I'll get kid-free time for at least a couple of hours every day instead of just three days a week as I do right now. I so hope the kids like this program. I know almost nothing about it except that a lot of neighborhood kids (read: Bobby's future schoolmates) go there and that it's cheap. Worse comes to worst, it's only two months out of our lives. 

Bobby has just six weeks left of preschool. It's hard to believe that phase of our lives is coming to a close, but here we are. Mostly I'm psyched to move on to the next thing - and of course Theo still has two years to go - but I know I'm going to lose it at Bobby's graduation in June.

 

Science is real

Science is real. Indeed, without science my children would be impossible. The odds of my procreating with anyone - much less a skinny red headed student fifteen years my junior - were slim to none. And yet, science and progressive thought - why can't men donate their sperm so that people can anonymously conceive? - made my family possible. For that I am truly grateful. It's not hard to imagine, in the current political environment, a time in which vials of sperm are only allowed for heterosexual married couples. 

Wednesday I take B up to his new school to be properly registered (I had a mountain of paperwork to fill out, dental and doctor check ups, and fishing out birth certificates and proof of address to do first); hopefully I'll get them both settled in their summer programs before I leave for Korea next week (a reprise of last year's wonderful singing gig in Seoul). 

My friends that wanted us to join them at a Swing camp in Sweden this summer have flaked out as I half suspected they might; I took the liberty of booking a Hawaii trip similar to last years' for my birthday in July. This time it'll be Kauai and with the BF. Hopefully I can fix my Kauai Curse - the first trip that my aunt died during; the second with a new baby and toddler that was so stressful I had to cut it short and come home. As long as the BF and I manage to not break up right before it like we did last time-! We had a good laugh about that. 

I survived a chaotic birthday party of the class bully and his Trump supporting parents at the local Chuck E Cheese. God that place is awful. But at least with all the distraction of trying to help a five year old play complex arcade games I didn't get to - or have to - interact with any of the parents. It's kind of a drag we got through one child's entire preschool experience without ever getting to know anyone, but oh well. The elementary school is very parent involvement heavy, so I see that trend reversing in the near future! 

 

Yard egg hunt 2.0

Yesterday I participated in the "show us your taxes" anti-Trump march. Here is the sign the BF made for me: 

As with all marches, it was awesome. Next week is the science march. I wish I could do this every weekend. Every. Frickin. Weekend.

Unfortunately after a cold, a Friday night shouting over a loud band (our drummer's solo project), and marching Saturday and talking and shouting, I have now completely lost my voice. Have you ever tried to be a parent to two small children with no voice? It fucking sucks. Still, we survived another yard egg hunt and a long day at a national park with some aplomb. Now I would like to collapse in a pile of peanut butter cups, s'il vous plait.

 

 

 

 

Big boys

A delightful development has happened since the time change - every day after school (we get home at 6 PM), the boys insist on playing outside until dinner. It's something I always dreamed about - children frolicking in the yard, me pushing open a screen door to yell, "dinner!" and children scampering in to wash up and devour. Yes, that moment is here. I have two boys who can talk, play, and (kind of) use the potty on their own accord (after weeks of accidents, yesterday Theo started using the potty on his own without prompting).

The yard playing is not without peril. The front yard is on a steep slope and full of pointy cacti and succulents; we live on a busy street with a seemingly endless stream of homeless sauntering by to pick through our garbage. There are sharp drops into concrete stairs. The back is no better - a dirty strip of concrete next to a very climbable wall next to a pool. In short, my yards are pretty much the most non-kid friendly imaginable. However, so far so good (except that one time the kids pushed furniture up to the wall and played around the pool after I told them not to - let's just pretend that never happened). Being hyper vigilant, every time they're out there I run and check on them every two seconds. I might even re purpose my baby monitor to keep an eye on them more effectively. But, they love it, it's good for them to have little adventures in nature (or yard is teeming with native plants, humming birds, lizards, citrus fruits and trees), and I feel like this is one of those times I need to give them a little freedom. And it doesn't hurt that them expelling energy outside is way better than inside.

I performed in DC this weekend, the same event that marked my return to "the road" this time last year. I had a lot of anxiety around it - intimidating ballroom, big crowd, singing with our big band which I rarely do, new songs, one song with a scary high note that could have gone either way. But I got through it, met up with a blog reader friend one day and my old mommy & me friend who moved away two years ago on the next day. Damn, I miss her. She was my compatriot from when Bobby was just a baby, providing solace and commiseration and support and friendship when I needed it most. And she's really fucking cool. Sigh. Well, at least if we keep this gig going I'll get to see both of these ladies once a year!

 

Joint birthday in the bag

We celebrated Bobby and Theo's joint 3rd and 5th birthdays on Saturday. I'm not sure how much longer I can get away with joint birthdays - but boy is it convenient! I used the same indoor play space as last year, which meant a quick in and out with minimal effort other than making the cake (which this year I made from scratch using a 1930s devil's food cake recipe) and assembling the goody bags. Bobby requested a Nightmare Before Christmas theme which was a huge hit among my artsy friends' kids.

 

My sister came to visit for a few days. The boys were so excited about her visiting and the party that it was a bit like having two Tasmanian devils in the house all weekend. After we dropped her off at the airport they were a mess of torturing each other in the car - stealing toys from their car seats, crying, screaming. It was awful. Finally taking Theo to school he broke down in sobs, and I asked if he was sad because his aunt went home, and he pitifully nodded yes as tears rolled down his cheeks. Oh, these little kids. It's so easy to forget that they can't regulate their emotions yet. In my better moments I remember this and am kind and gentle; in my worse moments I bark at them to stop driving me crazy. Sigh. And so it goes. 

In other news, despite my decision not to invite any preschool friends to the party, Bobby has received an invitation...from his "frenemy", the class bully who's parents voted for Trump. What to do? Do I really want to spend the day in the presence of these a-holes and their rotten kid? No, but I must, because it's not about me, it's about Bobby, and he wants to go, and so we will. Can't say I won't wear my Uppity Women Unite pin, though. 

 

The factory is closed

It dawned on me the other day that my mother's third marriage - the only one of four I was present for - happened when she was 45, which I will be in a few months. I remember my sister and I joking with her about having another baby. She would wryly respond, "the factory is closed". Which is my current response when people ask me if I'm going to try for a third. That and the standard Californian, "yeah, no."

Lately I've had lots of occasion to talk to single mothers of one toddler about their desire for a second. All are, as I was, very apprehensive about taking on a second child. And I am far too honest a person to try to bullshit them into it with stories of adorable toddlers holding hands or amusing each other or riding seesaws together. Oh, if it were only that all of the time. But it is soooo not.

As the more jaded of my friends warned me, almost all of your time is spent refereeing fights, largely over toys and who gets to do something/have something first. To be brutally honest, I find I have fallen into the habit of just letting Bobby do things first because it's just easier - Theo doesn't seem to notice or care (probably used to it), and Bobby puts up a royal fight if it goes the other way. Often times I wonder if I created a monster by doing this - but oh my god, the sheer exhaustion of each day, adding into that arbitrary things that are going to cause my soon-to-be five year old to completely freak out, make me have to threaten and/or enact punishments, and invariably make us late for something? Fuck it. Bobby learns all about sharing and taking turns at school. He's awesome with other kids, especially little ones. So I must be doing something right. 

I was honest with the women contemplating two children and told them I'm not sure I'd do it again if I knew how hard it would be. This is the ugly truth. It doesn't mean I wish Theo away - he's amazing and lovely and awesome - but parenting two young children alone is fucking brutal and exhausting, and I say this even with preschool giving me much needed free time and at the end of a rare and delightfully illness-free winter. 

Of course, I have no idea what my life would have been like with just Bobby. Would I be full of regret that I didn't provide him with a sibling? Would whatever issues I have with him fill the space and be just as exhausting/exasperating as the issues I have with two? Would he be needier or more selfish with no brother? Would I be a different, worse parent? 

I mentioned to one friend that I had two mainly so I wouldn't regret not doing it. She made the point that maybe living in fear of regretting doing or not doing things isn't the best strategy, and I have to agree. Then again, many women have confided in me that they wouldn't have had even one baby if they'd really known how hard it is. I believe I fall into this category a lot of the time. Still...I understand the kind of emotional/social/societal/hormonal pressure I was under in the fall of 2010 when I made this grand decision. I couldn't not have done it, really. And so here we are

I once asked my bandleader friend, who was bemoaning his wife's torrid baby fever, "do you have any idea what it's like, being a woman, being absolutely compelled to do something that you know is going to fuck up your whole life?"

I still cling to the concept that children are all about long-term investment. Not much going on in the early years - a whole lot of stress and worry and exhaustion - followed by hopefully the joy of having raised fine human beings who might even bless you with some ego-satisfying grandchildren. Well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it!

 

Theo is three

What a difference a year makes, huh? This is the difference between two and three - and also, a child that's had help socializing at preschool and one who had yet to have that experience. It's going to be a rough year with my newly minted threenager, but we'll make it! Onward we go to four!