Hormones

Theo started speech therapy today. It’s been a long road - about six months of phone interviews and paperwork and evaluations just to get my almost four-year-old to make a “k” sound. Still, it’s convenient - takes place at B’s school, in a converted bathroom (ah, LAUSD at its finest), and the therapist was very nice. Oh, and it’s free, and hopefully will get Theo enunciating properly (his issue is he is “fronting” - saying T and D for G and K sounds) and easier to understand going forward. He could outgrow this on his own, but the extra help doesn’t hurt. I’m grateful for it. 

We had a pretty horrendous parenting week last week. The kids just never seemed to recover from their chaotic weekend in the mountains, and by a week later were so out of control with the whining and competing and complaining that I snapped and started yelling and throwing things. Which then left me feeling horribly guilty for days, long after the kids forgot all about it (I hope). 

In my defense, they were awful. And I gave them a big speech about no more racing or trying to be first all the time to the point that it ends up in fights and crying (this is about 99% Bobby’s issue, I might add). I laid down the law and they seem to be getting it. But I also noticed, as I’ve noticed for months now, that without fail the day after I ovulate I want to strangle every male that lives with me. I think what happens is I suffer such an intense hormone drop all at once that it’s really unbearable - it doesn’t make me anxious or depressed; it makes me fly into rages. Which is not good. I am currently looking into medication - of the newly legalized variety - to help chill me the fuck out in the few days a month that I become impossible to live with. Not sure how that’ll go but I’m doing some research. I have to do something because I can’t go on like this. Peri menopause is a bitch. 

Snow daze

Last weekend was my much anticipated weekend in Lake Arrowhead with two other families - eight kids in total. Unfortunately the oldest boy of the family of six got sick the first night and so the family went home; we got another family with two kids to come up the next day. I knocked wood that whatever made the boy sick would not touch any of us and that it was just a fluke. 

There was no snow, so we were mostly just cold and a little bored the first of our three days up in the mountains. We walked around, cooked, ate...walked around...went to a shitty arcade in which Bobby played a bunch of broken games and we let Theo think he was playing games...walked around.

Our final night my luck ran out and I woke up sick in the middle of the night. I was on my 10th frantic trip to the bathroom when, as the dawn’s cold fingers crept into the cabin, I heard the patter of six children jumping out of bed and joyously exclaiming, “Snow! Snow!!!” 

“Fuck!!!” I thought, as ungodly amounts of foul liquid spilled from my anus.

The BF and I got the kids bundled up and then I collapsed back into bed while he took over. Ah, the ecstatic sound of six California kids enjoying their first snowfall...it was almost enough to cover the sound of my retching from the one (of course) centrally located bathroom. 

I was miserable, but like a good mommy, still delighted the kids were having fun. And yes, these are precisely the moments you thank god there’s another adult present. Being sick as a single parent is a fucking nightmare. I don’t know how I would have managed the day - especially the packing up and long drive down the mountain home, in that state, by myself. But hey, I’m sure I would have just muscled through, as you do!

I learned a lot on my first family trip to share a cabin with other families. On a trip such as this, where you’re off your schedule and there’s no structure and too much excitement and strange food and chaos, your small children may experience any of the following:

Pants wetting

Pants pooping

Unexplained fits and tears

Over-explained fits and tears

Focused whining and complaining

Unfocused whining and complaining

Night terrors

Unbrushed teeth

Toy hoarding

Cruelty to younger sibling(s)

Irrationality (more than usual)

You may experience:

Dizziness

Vomiting

Anal leakage

Aren’t family trips the best?!? Actually, we had a really good time and I would totally do it again. As of this date, I’m the only one who got sick. Lucky me!

Plans, long and short term

Money is currently showing up as “pending” in my bank account, but it is included in my balance, and Stripe is not withholding anything. See? Sometimes it pays to wait a minute before going all aggro. Like I used to tell myself when I was pregnant, there’s nothing to worry about until there’s something to worry about.

The hurdle of opening night behind me has freed me up to think about the future. I’ve started asking myself if, various contingencies aside, I might actually be able to sell this place and have a kick-ass house in my golden years. I always sort of imagined I would die here; and I may still. But at the moment I’m on track to pay the house off in eight years. A couple more years after that and my old Katrina debt could be paid off. If I saved some for a couple of years after that, the kids would be grown and I could sell this place and buy an awesome place in the hills behind me with no mortgage (or hardly any). And I wouldn’t even be 60 yet. I had thought this would be impossible due to property taxes, but a friend told me here in CA as long as you are 55 or older you can keep your old property tax rates in a newly bought home. That was a huge game changer. So I may just get that dream home in the hills after all!

Of course, this is all dependent on many things. That I continue to make this kind of money. That I don’t get sued, nobody gets sick or injured or addicted, don’t end up in a spiteful divorce, or, most likely, end up on the hook for kids’ higher education costs. There are so many things that have to go right for this to work. But it’s nice to have a dream, even if it never comes true (or gets delayed).

Short term, I have plotted and paid for a week long trip to the Big Island of Hawaii for the week of my birthday in July. I found an Air BnB in a crazy hippie compound in the jungle that can accommodate us and hopefully my sister and her husband and maybe another friend. It’s going to be a total adventure. I am so excited about it I can hardly stand it. The idea of watching my little sunburned boys running around wild and barefoot makes my heart sing with joy. The thought that they could grow up with memories of unfettered Hawaiian summer vacations - a luxury unthinkable in my cash-strapped family growing up - makes me almost want to cry.

Oh, but we remember their first trip to Hawaii, don’t we? ((Shudder)). We’ve come a long way from those days-!

It’s always something

So, my opening day has come and gone. And huge sigh of relief - I currently have fifty more people registered than I did at this time last year, which is tremendous. It either means: this year will be even bigger than last year, or that everyone figured out how to get in on the cheap prices and now nobody else is coming. Personally...my prediction is we’ll fall somewhere in between. I don’t know if the event will be bigger but I think it’s fairly unlikely that I’ll lose people. New kitchen, here we come...?

Opening night was not without its stressors, however. A few hours before registration went live a customer told me my website was down. After a lengthy panicked search (remember, there’s no “IT guy” - I’m it) and phonecall to my domain host, I managed to see some tiny print on my web host’s site casually mentioning that they had changed their DNS settings. And didn’t bother to notify anyone. WTF? And on the day I open registration. So the kind GoDaddy guy helped me update everything and voilà, website back. Then I just had to email everyone back that had notified me my website wasn’t loading. Fucking hell.

Then as registration started rolling, the admin guy (in Texas) and I noticed some registrations were coming up as “completed” but with $0 as the amount paid. So we emailed those people and freaked them out...when it turned out someone else had paid for them. So that was another series of corrective emails. Sigh.

I was getting a huge kick out of checking my Stripe balance and wondering how soon the money would be in my bank account where I can use it - this new reg system requires I break with my old standby PayPal and use Stripe instead - until the next day I got an email from Stripe saying, “hey, it looks like you’re running an event, which we consider high risk, so we’re going to withhold funds until you answer this lengthy questionnaire and forward us copies of all your contracts.” Oh, and also they may decide to hold back a portion of the funds to minimize their risk. Um...what? How about give me my fucking money. So, I spent that entire night answering their questions and collecting the information they wanted. I won’t freak out until they get back to me - it might be some kind of formality and then I’ll get my money. But it’s ridiculous - and extremely stressful as my bank account is currently at 0 and I need that money pronto. I mean, seriously, wtf? And the worst part is, I can threaten to take my business elsewhere, but the reality remains that I can’t because my system only accepts Stripe, and they still have my money and I don’t. Ugh.

So, I managed to change the nightmare of last year’s massive feeding frenzy and hours of damage control and bad feeling by not doing tiered pricing, and the customers are all happy, which is great. But then there’s this other stuff. It’s always something!!

Anticipation

Two more nights until opening night. I’m pretty nervous, even though I know I shouldn’t be. I guess I’m having my usual pre-event “nobody’s going to show up this year!” freak out. It’ll pass. Somebody will show up. Right??

Friday night the kids and I went to an “Astronomy Night” at B’s school. What I was picturing was a group of kids sitting nicely while someone in charge gave a lecture on astronomy and let the kids look through telescopes. What actually happened was a large group of screaming kids clambering around playground equipment in the pitch black night while socially awkward older men from the Astronomy Society tried to prevent small children from getting nose prints and peanut butter fingers on their expensive lenses. It was so exhausting managing the boys’ intense energy and chasing them around in the dark that by the time I got home and wrestled everyone into pajamas I wanted to collapse. Ah, parenting.

Earlier that day was Bobby’s first time with the after school chess club. For this I had to pick him up after school and walk him to the lunch area to meet with the group. As soon as he saw the group, which mostly consisted of much older kids, he started crying and saying he didn’t want to go. As with all parents in moments like this, I started my usual routine of begging, coddling, threatening and guilt tripping to get him to relent and go to the club. In the end, what worked? The promise of a blue frosting-covered donut afterwards. Ha ha ha! He is his mother’s son. Sure enough, when I picked him up an hour later he was totally into it and can’t wait to go back. I delivered the blue donut. We were both happy.

How do we raise violin-playing, chess-playing children in this day and age when everything is iPads and video games? Am I just a dinosaur that has pseudo-intellectual fantasies of raising pretentious Luddite children? Am I handicapping them by not allowing them to be constantly inundated by technology, like everyone else? Am I trying to teach them skills that don’t even matter anymore in this digital age? I feel like I want to protect their innocence; but what’s most likely really going on there is a projection of my own childhood obsession with being innocent and aloof (the roots of which would fill a novel). Oh, how these children suffer for our own emotional issues, don’t they? All they want is to play MineCraft, for fuck’s sake. 

March on!

I marched on Saturday. It was a really good experience - the organizers really had their act together this year; lots of extra staff in the subways, lots of toilets. I thought for sure there’d be way less people and the right wingers would have a good laugh at our expense - I was kind of obsessed with this fear, actually, as in the days leading up to the march it seemed like all of my friends one by one decided they were going to skip it this year. However, the march ended up being huge and very inspiring. I decided to wear a witch hat and cape in homage to the feminists of the 70s who would dress as witches during demonstrations. I had such a blast wearing it and got such good feedback that I decided my new women’s march persona is going to be Resistance Witch.

I’m oddly hopeful about our future - the blue wave coming in November, not to mention the countless pissed-off women who’ve been inspired to run for office. Once this whole Drumpf nightmare is over, is it possible we’ll actually be better off than we would have been? Anger can be a spectacular motivator.

The boys are doing well - I’ve planned their joint birthday at a bounce house/trampoline place where we attended a birthday party a few months ago. I feel like at 6 Bobby has outgrown the little kid playplace we’ve been using, and since I’ll be inviting all of his kindergarten class, I need to be prepared for any number of kids. Luckily this year Bobby’s birthday falls on a Saturday (March 24) so we’ll have it then. 

In three weeks we go join two other couples and six more kids at a cabin in the mountains. It’s been such a dry year that I’m worried there won’t be any snow, but I’m sure it’ll be a crazy good time. I’m also trying to plot out a family trip to Hawaii this summer, using the free flights we got from delays last summer. It will be the first time traveling with two kids since that disastrous trip when Theo was a baby. I can only hope travel with a six-year-old and four-year-old (not to mention another adult) will be dramatically different. 

But everything depends on how my event goes this year. I open for registration in just a week. My money has nearly run out. This year is a total wild card - the year after a big anniversary year; who the hell knows? I estimate I’ll lose 200-300 people to be back where I was the year before; but I could lose more, or I could keep my numbers up, which would be amazing. No plans can be made until after the 1st. 

I so hope I have a good opening night. Resistance Witch has bills to pay!

Edit: was able to add a picture!

Resolutions and such

It’s a new year. I’m pretty heartened to see the general attitude on Facebook about it is “let’s grab this year by the balls!” instead of last year’s fear and defeatism. Hey, we survived a whole year with an incompetent lunatic in the White House. I’m furious he’s still there - but we’re still alive and functioning. That’s something, right? And it’s all about those mid-terms. I can’t frigging WAIT for November.

As usual I’ve assembled myself a list of resolutions. I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep any of them. I’m still in Little Kid Mode - I’m still responsible for the every need of three people (sometimes four). It’s a lot, and I am always exhausted, no matter how much time off or rest I get. I figure this will continue at least until Theo is in kindergarten, which is still almost two years away. So just surviving the year is my number one resolution.

Secondary is learning piano (I have a cheap intro lesson with B’s violin teacher next Saturday) and resuming yoga finally (tentative plans to check out a local studio on Tuesday). I would also like to not buy any new clothes for myself for an entire year (except underwear and socks), sticking with second-hand clothes only. Being a seasoned vintage clothes shopper, this should not be an issue. But there is some comfort in just waltzing into a Target or an Old Navy and pulling things your size off the rack and getting in and out fast. Vintage clothes (even modern vintage) takes a lot more digging and time (and creativity). But somehow I got the bug up my butt that I really don’t want to contribute to the fast fashion industry anymore, so I’d like to at least try that. 

I would also like to take off the 5-7 pounds I packed on since the summer. I know this is laughable to some, and I’m pretty annoyed with myself that I even care about such a paltry amount of weight. But I know that not caring is exactly how you wake up and find yourself 20, 30, 40 lbs overweight one day and wonder how it happened. Being vigilant is how you stay slim. But oh, it’s so exhausting, and hard, and it’s so tempting to just say “fuck it” and let yourself slip into middle aged spread. To say I have a complicated relationship with weight at this stage in my life would be an understatement. 

What I would like for my life this year is this: try to get through the final full year of schlepping Theo between preschools and lots of childcare time with some grace; continue to have thriving, healthy kids; continue to be in a loving relationship; have another successful event that benefits from the many changes I’m making this year and makes enough to renovate my kitchen; continue to work on my mental health and not let intrusive thoughts ruin my serenity; be able to have those rare, elusive moments of just sitting in the moment and feeling grateful and proud of all I’ve accomplished. 

But mostly, be kind to myself. I do a lot, and I’m not perfect, and striving for perfection is a fool’s game. People always say, “everyone does the best they can,” but that’s total bullshit. I don’t always do the best I can; I assume this is true for everyone else, too. Sometimes you fuck up and you know you’re fucking up and you just don’t care. Welcome to being human. I know 2018 will have many of those moments of not being my best. Let’s hope I can have the grace to shrug my shoulders, chuckle to myself, and try to do better tomorrow (maybe).