Ham and Cheese Corn Muffins

October 16, 2008

Recipe over at Work It, Mom!

Off the Wagon

When I fall off of the wagon, I fall off hard.

Tonight I bought a bag of Jelly Belly jellybeans. I brought it home and my daughter and I proceeded to dump out the entire bag and divide up the 30 flavors into 30 different piles so that we could decide which ones we liked best. Guess what? We like them all. And then we had to taste again just to be sure. Next time we will just mainline our sugar.

It was either that or drink an entire case bottle of wine myself. I think a wine hangover would have been preferable to the nauseous headache I have now from too much sugar.

For those of you who don’t follow me on twitter*, my three youngest children were diagnosed today with pneumonia and ear infections. DOUBLE ear infections, which just seems like showing off.

That’ll teach me to say that my children’s coughing was annoying me. Just pass the Mother of the Year award over here.

Tonight I lined up the little shot glasses of medicine and it was like a frat house. Some lucky kids had more than one shot glass in front of them. I offered to give them a lime and some salt on the back of their hand to complete the mood, but no one took me up on it.

I also dropped and broke my Blackberry today. Unless dropping it isn’t covered by warranty, then it just, uh, spontaneously broke all by itself. I have the tracking ball taped back on with the tape my oldest son uses for his finger splint. It makes it very convenient to use. And ever so attractive.

*I pretty much stink at twitter so you aren’t missing much anyway. Mir said it was like communicating with me via smoke signals.

At the Apple Orchard

October 15, 2008

Yesterday was one of those day that by noon it felt like it should be 6pm. 6pm of the following day. My 9 and 7 yr old sons were sitting at the kitchen table doing their schoolwork. They had been there forever and were more intent on goofing off than doing any of their work. I was getting annoyed. Because how long can it possibly take to do a page of cursive handwriting.

They started elbowing each other and as I looked up to reprimand them again I caught a glimpse of the sunlight shining in the picture window casting their shadows on the wall behind them. It was an epiphanal moment. Why am I torturing all of us? Do I really care if my son is making the perfect cursive H today? Why not tomorrow? Why not next week? Why do I even care at all?

So I told them they had five minutes to wrap it up and anyone that was done with their schoolwork could come apple picking. Miraculously they all finished. Except for Miles who flung himself onto the floor and screamed that he didn’t HAVE any schoolwork to do. Can’t please everyone.

Apple picking season is coming to a close here. There was only one variety of apples that were still available for picking, luckily we don’t really care. And we were the only people who showed up to pick for the entire day. The orchard owners were so pleased to see all the kids, as older people often are when I show up anywhere with my brood.

There is something about picking your own fruit, the act of laying your hands on it and seeing where it came from. Just like with gardening, it makes it all so much more real. There is such a disconnect from nature with grabbing a bag at the grocery store. I want my children to feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves.

The bumpy tractor ride is pretty fun too. I think I regurgitated a kidney somewhere on the back of the orchard.

We didn’t actually buy any of these pumpkins since it would have required me to take out a second mortgage to afford them. Maybe they are filled with liquid gold. In which case I will be kicking myself for not buying them when I had the opportunity.

I am really hoping that my daughter comes out of her shell one of these days. The poor child has no personality at all.

My oldest two children didn’t want to come apple picking with us. Teenagers certainly are lazy. Either that or they wanted to stay home and surf the internet for porn, who knows.

Autumn Day

October 14, 2008

Do you think they got the silly faces and poses out of the way now before the annual Christmas card photo? Yeah, me neither.

Remember the photo from last year?

What about the year before? I ended up having to mail out TWO photos that year since I couldn’t get everyone to co-operate for a single photo.

Or the year before…

or all the way back to the year 2000…

Yeah, not holding out much hope for this year either.

Beautiful Girl

I remember being a kid and sitting on the counter in my kitchen. For whatever reason it was always the best place to hang out and have a snack. Or to have phone conversations, because of course back then the telephone was attached to the wall by a long curly cord that I would wrap around my finger over and over again.

Now my daughter has discovered sitting on the counter. She climbs up there to talk to me while I am cooking. She tells me stories about princesses in her animated way. And tells me about all the shoes she wants to buy. She is my daughter.

She asks me questions about when I was a little girl. And I see the same look on her face that I used to have when my mother would talk about her childhood. It seemed so long ago. The photos were all so old looking pasted with black corners onto yellowing scrapbook pages. Friends that she had, that she no longer talked to. “But where are all those people now?” I wanted to know.

I see on my daughter’s face the same sort of disbelief that I could have ever been anything other than a grown-up. Anything other than what I am at this exact moment. A disbelief that the world itself could have existed without her in it.

A disbelief I share most days.

When you feel so tired, but you can’t sleep

More times a day than I can count I have the following conversation:

“Mom, are the dishes in dishwasher dirty or clean?”

“I don’t know. Do you have eyes?”

“Can you come and look? I can’t tell.”

“Well, if you can’t tell I think that they are clean enough.”

“But are the really clean?”

“Clean enough.”

“Moooooooo-ooooom.”

*******

I have been completely off of sugar for about 6 months now. Maybe even longer. Tonight on the way home from my son’s football practice I stopped to buy the kids a little candy, their bribe for behaving for the babysitter, and I bought myself a bag of Skittles. Because sometimes you just need it. Then I came home and had a cup of coffee. I should be ready to go to sleep sometime next week.

*****
Speaking of next week, I will be in Chicago. I have spent the past two weeks buying and returning clothes. I hate using the dressing room. The thing about finally getting down to your pre-baby weight (four YEARS LATER) is that nothing you own fits. So now I have some random non matching pieces of clothing. It’ll have to do.

I have been pretty ruthless getting rid of my non fitting clothes. I have discovered that I am not at all sentimental about clothes. I haven’t gotten rid of my wedding dress yet, but I do look at it in the closet and wonder why I am hanging on to it. Before anyone suggests that my daughter might want to wear it, it is a casual maternity dress. So I kind of hope not. Though it is white because I was all about looking virginal on my wedding day. Just call me Mary.

*****
English is hard.

“Whoa TMI. Let’s just keep this on the surface.”

“On the swordfish?”

“Surface.”

“Surefish?”

“Sur-face”

“Surefish?”

“Are we having a language barrier here?”

“Spell it”

“C-O-W-B-O-Y-T-A-T-T-O-O”

Like the Wizard of Oz

October 13, 2008

Somewhere along the way Miles, you learned how to pump on the swing.

I’m not sure when exactly it happened. As is typical of the last child in a big family the small things get lost. Maybe I fail to pay attention.

I never showed you how to swing yourself. That job fell to one of your siblings, I suppose.

Or maybe you just sat there on the swing so long waiting for someone to come and push you that you taught yourself. At least that is what I think when I want to up the ante on my maternal guilt.

Because sometimes the crushing weight of the normal guilt I carry isn’t enough. The feeling that doing it all is a lot of smoke and mirrors. Pull back the curtain and it would be obvious that none of it is being done very well.

*****

I watched the sunrise through my bedroom window this morning with my two feverish babies draped over and around me, effectively pinning me to the bed. They took turns coughing, their sleep fitful and fleeting. I rubbed their backs and kissed their sweaty little heads.

In my head I was running through the list of all the things I had to do for the day. The list is long, some of the things are from last week that didn’t get done. Oh heck, let’s be honest some of the things are still on the list from last month. Sick kids hanging off of me were not a part of the plan. I try not to be annoyed. Try.

We finally got out of bed after watching the squirrels in the trees, something we do every morning. This morning my shoulders and back ache from lying in one position with them on top of me.

I am sitting here now working, well RIGHT NOW I am typing this. My daughter is drawing pictures at the table next to me, narrating everything. I am half listening. Every so often I pause and make non-committal remarks. “Ohhhh, lovely.” “That is great!” “Excellent.”

My son is sitting on my lap, his head buried in my chest, arms wrapped around my body. His hands are stroking my hair which hangs in braid down my back. My yoga pants are stained with paint. The tank top I am wearing is fraying at the hem. No bra, no make-up except for whatever is left from yesterday. My second cup of coffee is growing cold next to me.

My life is nothing but glamorous.

We are rocking back and forth. Rocking my sick child while typing - I am torn as to whether this is a high point or low point in multi-tasking. I tend to think the latter.

Will he remember that I rocked him? Or will he remember that I was always typing, not fully present. Will he remember the smoke and mirrors or the reality behind the curtain?

I think of a conversation that I had with a friend recently. How middle class mothers have taken to manufacturing things to feel guilty about. Our children are fed, clothed, have all the things that money can buy for them. They are safe and loved. Our days aren’t spent toiling away at some sort of horrible job. We have choices. Choices our grandmothers didn’t have. Something that is both a blessing and a curse.

We don’t have many valid worries and so we manufacture them. We worry about plastic water bottles, excessive high fructose corn syrup consumption, toys made in China, their fragile little psyches. And crafts… we should be doing more goddamn crafts. At least that is what all those parenting magazines tell us. We worry about being perfect. When probably, hopefully, in the end none of it is really going to matter.

At least that is what I am telling myself this morning.

Cowboy Tattoos Are Funny

October 11, 2008

Albert Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. That would sum up this little football team and its coaches perfectly. They lost 35ish - 0. I lost count after a while, because does it really matter?

Did my mother just tell me to kick some one’s ass?

Yes, son, I did. I don’t know what has come over me. I have turned into one of those parents. Also, I apologize for handing you your winter weight underarmour and long socks this morning and telling you it was cold. At 6am when I got up, it was cold. I forgot about that bright shiny thing that would rise in the sky a few hours later.

Random things from today:

1) I had to drop my 13 yr old off early this morning at the football field for practice. When I left the house, my daughter was in the shower and the other kids were getting ready to go to my 9 yr old son’s away game. I came home to discover my 9 yr old had brushed his sister’s hair and put it in a ponytail. Why that makes my heart sing so much I am not sure. He also made her scrambled eggs for breakfast. Yes, I will be taking applications to have your daughter marry him.

2) After the game the kids got food at the concession stand and were sitting at tables eating. A cheerleader from the opposing team went up to one of my son’s friends and asked him if he wanted to go sit under the bleachers with her. He was appropriately horrified by the question. But seriously, what the hell? These are nine year old little boys and girls. It also made me sad for the little girl because where is she getting that from and what if she asks that of the wrong kid?

3) A cold virus has been going through our house. My house is a cacophony of coughing. And you want to know something? Coughing drives me bat shit crazy. I wish I had more patience when my kids are hacking up their lungs, but I do not. I put out carrot sticks and hummus for a snack when we got home this afternoon and the amount of coughing over the food caused me to go and eat my own NON COMMUNAL FOOD standing at the counter completely on the other side of the kitchen. And still I was annoyed.

4) This is photographic evidence of how much my daughter loves going to football games:

Every week I assure her that there will not be any dancing unicorns or candy falling from the sky, and yet she still wants to go. Just so she can ask me every five minutes if the game is almost over. And I can promise to never bring her again.

6) The opposing team had a girl on it. And as enlightened as I like to think that I am, it really bothered me to hear the coaches shouting things like, “Hit her!” “Get her!” “Knock her down!”

7) Someone today told me that they were getting cowboy tattoos. Thankfully, I misheard. Because I burst out laughing.

The Teen Years Just Got Easier

October 10, 2008

Threatening to whip out this little photo for future dates has assured me a smooth ride through those teen years.

Liz wrote yesterday about her daughter wanting to wear play make-up and her uneasiness with it all, an uneasiness I think that most of us raised to be good feminists share. Where is the line between over sexualization of little girls and playing dress up? I don’t have an answer. Like Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart said when talking about pornography, I know it when I see it, but can’t easily define it.

I wasn’t allowed to wear make-up until high school. I wasn’t allowed to get my ears pierced until I was 13, though I finally begged and pleaded enough to get it down to 12. I couldn’t shave my legs until junior high, and trust me my people need to shave their legs. I also wasn’t allowed to wear colored nail polish. Combine all of this with a school uniform that consisted of a plaid skirt that came below the knee and knee socks and you can see why the boys were beating down my door.

“Just hold still, Miles. It isn’t going to hurt.”

I am just beginning to navigate these waters with my daughter. She already got her ears pierced. She is allowed to paint her nails whatever color she likes. She has a little make-up case, filled mostly with chapsticks, glitter lip gloss, and samples I got and rejected. I guess you could make the argument that I allow her to wear ugly make-up.

My line in the sand has more to do with clothing choices. My daughter will dress like a little girl, dammit, not a Bratz doll. And I will say it right here, right now, my daughter will never wear a pair of short shorts that says “Juicy” across the ass.

“I don’t wike dat stuff on my wips.”

Also, I figure that as long as my daughter and son are wearing the same make-up that we are still firmly in the playing dress-up camp.

Fried Green Tomatoes

October 9, 2008

This recipe makes me think of turning lemons into lemonade. Taking the green tomatoes that haven’t had time to turn red because OMG SUMMER IS OVER AND HOW DEPRESSING IS THAT and making them into something yummy.

Turning this:

Into this:

Over at Work It, Mom! today.