Halloween Envy

Listen all you crafty mamas out there...it's time to stop. Stop whipping up these elaborate outfits with your nifty little crafty magic fingers. No more homemade ladybugs, creatures from Finding Nemo (saw this one at Ethan's daycare yesterday...the kid had a light bulb coming off an antannae on his head...his parents are engineers I think), made from scratch dinosaurs or pretty princesses. There's a reason big companies manufacture Halloween costumes - so we will buy them! And right now, with the economy the way it is, we must buy buy buy our costumes! Heed the call, ladies!

OK. Yes, I admit. None of this really has anything to do with the economy. It's just that, well, I could not make a Halloween costume if my life depended on it. Crafty I am not (although i can talk like Yoda).

Every year, as Halloween looms closer, my stress level rises. I don't want to spend money on a costume, but I know that trying to make costumes is just not in the cards due to lack of time and artistic ability. Ethan's first Halloween I ran out and bought a kangaroo costume last minute and even that didn't go so well. Everyone thought he was a bear. Come on people! I thought. Do bears carry their young in pockets on their bellies??
This year, my husband took the lead and tried to save us some money by being crafty. He pulled out some old white sheets, cut them down and attempted to make some eye holes so the children could be ghosts. It was a decent attempt ( and he's quite sensitive about it so I won't go on about the lopsided eyeholes and the way the boys nearly tripped over themselves due to the length of the sheets).
But when it came time to dress up for their school's halloween party yesterday, nobody wanted to be a ghost. What then would we do? I pulled out the old costumes - the fireman, the turtle donated by our neighbors next door, the construction worker. But they refused.
"Mama, Justin's going to be a transformer," Ethan said.
I wasn't sure why he was telling me this. We were running late and I started to lose patience snapping "You have all these great costumes...now pick one out! There are chcildren all over the world who are starving for Halloween costumes!"
Ethan looked at me blankly. Then he started to cry, which made me feel awful. Which made me, during my lunch break, get crafty with my credit card, scooping up a Buzz LightYear costume and a Super Why costume at Toys R Us for Ethan to choose from.

So again, as fate will have it, there will be no homemade costumes for our family this year. And I will rave about your homemade this or that, "How did you do that? WOW"...swallowing my envy along with too many piece of candy.

Happy Halloween everyone.

Excuse me Disney, but my kids ARE genuises

Can you believe the nerve of the Disney company? They want to give me my money back for the Baby Einstein videos I purchased to turn my babies into genuises. Why are they assuming that these videos, such as Classical Baby, Baby MacDonald on the Farm, and my kids favorite,the Baby Wordsworth video "First Words around the House" with the cat puppet and Marlee Matlin doing the words in sign language, failed to turn my babies into genuises?!

Of course they worked! My children, now ages 3 1/2 and 2, are genuises thank you very much. Why just this morning, when I told Ethan, my 3 1/2 year old, that his breath was awful, he was smart enough to blow it in my face off and on for 45 minutes! How would he have known to do that had he not spent his early, most impressionable days plopped in front of the TV watching Baby Einstein videos for hours on end? And what about Jonas? Don't try to tell me that Baby Einstein had nothing to do with his ability to refer to the lines in my forehead as "train tracks?!" Pure genuis, I tell you. I'm a published writer and I could never have come up with such a perfet metaphor! But then again, I was a baby in the late sixties and seventies when there was no Baby Einstein.

For insinuating that my children are not genuises, I think Disney should not just reimburse me for their videos, but also pay my mortgage for six months and send Mickey Mouse to clean my house once a month. Otherwise when my genuises grow up and become high-powered lawyers, look out.

Are These People Trying to Tell Me Something?

This morning I went to have my eyebrows waxed. Yes, I have hairy eyebrows, but that is not what this blog post is about. The moment I laid down on the table and shut my eyes, the esthetician said, “You have a lot going on right now, don’t you?” Was she psychic or something?

“How did you know?” I said.

“It’s your energy....,” she said. “You must be tired.”

Boy, had she hit the nail on the head. I was just thinking this morning about how I’d gone and fallen in the hole again. The hole was a metaphor that Dr. K, a couple’s therapist my husband and I used to see, would use for us. It seemed we were always falling in the same holes; fighting over the same things. What we needed to do was learn to see the hole coming and step around it, something we are still trying to master.

In my own life, the hole I’m trying to avoid is taking on too much. But I can’t seem to help myself. Besides the regular activities of my part-time job, taking care of the kids, my writing, and trying to maintain some sanity, I recently committed myself to an online class called StilletoBootcamp, joined a community service committee in my town, and decided to start this blogging thing. Oy.

This habit is nothing new. After having my first child, I decided to try teaching for the first time. I would stay up until 3am preparing for class as I had terrible stage fright, and then the baby would wake me at oh, 4 or 4:30 am and I’d walk into my 8am freshman comp class ten minutes late, barely awake. This lasted for about two months, when I just couldn’t sustain it any more. I wrote an email to the dean, “Can you please try to find me a replacement?” I asked. They did. I chalked it up to something I’d try again later, when life was more under control.

But I’m beginning to wonder if my life will ever be under control. And do I really want it to be? Maybe I simply like all this fast pace and pressure. Although it would be nice to have a little more balance.

At the time I was teaching and juggling my new baby, I went to see a new eye doctor. The eye doctor was an elderly gentlemen, maybe in his early 70’s, with a Kennedy-esque accent. What struck me most about him, however, was his office. With its brown panelling and simple furnishings, it looked like it hadn’t been update since 1965. His demeanour struck me too; he was so calm and unlike most more doctors, he took a full hour to get to know me and do my eye exam. Although i felt ancy to get out of there because, of course, there was so much to do, I did appreciate the attention. And he made a comment to me that I always go back to:

“Simplify,” he said. “That’s what we need to do to enjoy life.”

I suppose the fact that he was my eye doctor was what infused that comment with such meaning. Believe me, I read things about simplifying all the time...open any women’s magazine and they’ll tell you the same thing. But when it comes from your eye doctor (or your eyebrow esthetician for that manner) one can’t help but think “how wise”...or at least I can’t help but think that. Eye doctors are all about perception, and vision and the way we see things. So I always go back to this: simplify, Amy.

I haven’t done it yet, of course, but I’ve heard awareness is the first step to change. Forgot who told me that one. Maybe it was my hairdresser.

Really...they get older and I'm responsible for them?

One of my most memorable new mommy group moments was when one of the new mommy's expressed her amazement that yes, her baby will keep getting older and yes, she will be taking care of him for a long, long time. Her comment floored me because, guess what? That thought never crossed my mind either. Having a baby at 36 was more of an experiment...I wanted to know what it was like to give birth, and to love a child. Well, a baby. At least that was as far as I got into thinking about it. There was so much to worry about with just taking care of a baby for the first time; how to feed, bathe, clothe, and properly hold one, for instance. Honestly, I never thought past the first six months.
But as life would have it, thankfully, my children have continued to grow and thrive. Well, sort of thrive. Today I had the pleasure of taking them to their joint three year and 18 month check up. Seems my children are a little on the small side. My three year old in particular. The way the pediatrician--a man my kids call "Dr. Penguin" because his last name sounds like penguin and not because he looks like one--put it was "About 98 percent of kids his age are bigger than him."
"Hmm," I said. "Well, he doesn't look that small."
"He's all muscle," Dr. Penguin said, "No fat."
For a 35 year old woman that's a good thing, I suppose. But for a 3 year old boy? What if it continues? Would he be picked on...an easy target?Was it my fault because I'm not much of a chef? Because i don't make us all sit down at the same time and eat dinner together? Because I sometimes go for days and forget to offer him something new? Or because I was the one who got him to try peanut butter, a milestone we were both very happy about, until he broke out in hives and had to be taken in an amublance (just a precaution) to the ER?
In the pediatrician's office, we went over what E eats, his basic menu consisting of: yogurt, blueberries, bananas, mac and cheese, cheese, the occassional cottage cheese, crackers, cookies, chocolate, and "apple doo doo."
E was the one who slipped that one out.
"What's apple doo doo?" Dr. Penguin asked.
"It's apple sweet potato," I explained. "Baby food."
"Wow, he's 3 and he's still eating baby food...huh."
Ok, now I felt stupid.
"Well, at least it's fruit and vegetable," I said. "And the doo doo just came about because he couldn't pronounce sweet potato."
Dr. Penguin smiled.
"Does he eat any meat?"
"Nope. Won't try any." I shrugged.
At that moment, Ethan asked for a snack. "I'm huuuuuuungry mommy," he said, trying to break into my backpack.
I pulled out a large sandwich bag with two rice cakes inside. Both of my boys started panting like dogs waiting for a table scrap.
"Who wants a rice cake??" I asked, only then realizing what this must look like to Dr. Penguin who immediatley commented:
"A nice, no calorie treat, huh? Rice cakes?
"Oh, yeah...well, these are actually mine," I said. "They just like them so I share."
There was a short, uncomfotable pause and then Dr. Penguin asked, "How about you? Have you lost weight? You look thinner...your face."
Well that's a weird thing for your kid's pediatrician to ask you, I thought.
"Sure, I've lost weight since I had my kids," I joked.
What was he getting at? was he trying to guage if I have an eating disorder and as a result, not feeding my children well either?
"I'm on a gluten sensitive diet," I said, as though that explained everything.
Fortunately, we moved on after that.
Tonight at dinner time, however, I came on strong trying to get E to try something new. In exchange for one bite of something new (my suggestions included such traditional kids favorite as grilled cheese or pizza), I would give him M&Ms as well as a surprise present, a toy (I had a stash of small toys in my car in preparation for potty training bribing). A lot of parenting, I'm slowly learning, revolves around bribery.
But E wouldn't have any of it. "Not even one little bite to see if you like it?" I begged. He shook his head defiantly.
I threw my hands up in frustration, as though the weight of the world, his world, was on my shoulders. How will I get him to use the potty? To give up his pacy? To eat something new? It was all too much. Too much reponsibilty for one day.
I made him his favorite Annie's Mac and Cheese with a little apple doo doo and called it a day. Maybe tomorrow I'll try again.

While we're on the subject of monkeys...

Did you hear about the study regarding male monkeys and toy preference by researchers in Emory University's Department of Psychology? If not, here's a bit about it:

We compared the interactions of 34 rhesus monkeys, living within a 135 monkey troop, with human wheeled toys and plush toys. Male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. Thus, the magnitude of preference for wheeled over plush toys differed significantly between males and females. The similarities to human findings demonstrate that such preferences can develop without explicit gendered socialization. We offer the hypothesis that toy preferences reflect hormonally influenced behavioral and cognitive biases which are sculpted by social processes into the sex differences seen in monkeys and humans.

This was amazing to me. I remember someone at my baby shower (for my first baby) giving me books about trucks. I knew I was having a boy, but still, my first thought was: Yuck. I mean, who wants to read a book that simply shows a picture of a truck on every page...Dump Truck, Digger, Cement Mixer? The woman who gave it to me was already the mom of two young boys and she wrote in her card, "My boys love these!" I thought: 'Well mine won't.'

I always assumed that the differences between boys and girls was more nature than nurture. That society and advertising and our parents shaped our preferences and behavior. Well, lo and behold, then I had my first boy. I was floored when, at quite a young age, he started pointing to trucks and buses on the street. I certainly wasn't getting excited about them, so he wasn't learning that behavior from me. Nope, it was 100% innate. His first word was actually truck (pronounced with a c, however,since he had not yet mastered 'tr'). Interestingly, his second word was ball, so we had a few moments where we'd be walking down the street and he'd suddenly shout out "Cock!" followed by "Ball!" But that's another story.

All and all it has opened my eyes - the way that E, without any outside influence whatsoever, has gravitated toward standard boy toys. Although he still likes trucks, tools have taken over as his toy of choice. And his little brother is following in his footsteps. I have no problem with this whatsoever, nor would I have any problem if they wanted to play with Barbie dolls. Whatever makes them happy. In fact, the thing that makes them happy right now happens to be a Minnie Mouse doll that came with a box of Rice Krispies. They fought over it so much that we had to keep buying Kellogg's cereal until we got another Minnie Mouse. Now they take their little Minnies anywhere they go, a blow to male stereotypes everywhere! Just yesterday at the doctor's office a father had to confirm with me that it was Minnie, and not Mickey, they were carrying. I smiled and said "Yep, Minnie," while thinking "You got a problem with that??"

One last thing: to the friend who bought me those truck books for my shower: Nice job, and we thank you from the bottom of our gender-neutral hearts.