System breakdown

I'm slammed with the flu and a head cold. I feel like ten sacks of shit in a three pound bag right now.
For the last month, it's been one thing after another. Family visits. Disagreements with M about Boy. Husband laying down the law about household spending but going out to buy a new expensive toy for himself and not cashing checks. So it's not wonder that Boy's cold jumped to a new ship and mutated.
My in laws came for a visit - the usual one exact week visit they do. God love 'em but they really come to sit and read in a different environment. They watch Boy for a couple of hours one night so Husband and I can have a meal in peace but for the most part, I'm chasing Boy around. My Father in law is happiest with the various things that have fallen apart in our house that he can fix. They didn't bother to watch the Weather Channel or check online to see the weather forecast which would have helped them pack reasonably. They packed for cool weather. It was ragingly hot. So they had to buy some short sleeved shirts and shorts which they left behind. More stuff that I have no space for in my house.
A cousin came to visit for a day from out of state. She and her husband were staying at a hotel closer to the City which meant one less thing that I had to think about but I had expected them to come by after lunch. They arrived at ten am. Our landlord had come over to fix some odd things in the house with his son and they left to pick up more supplies. What should have been a half hour took them three hours blocking my car in the driveway to I couldn't take my cousin out to lunch (since I had nothing to prepare for them since I had planned only to make dinner). My landlord sounded annoyed that I called asking him to quickly return to move his car out of his driveway.
We have orientation at Boy's new school next week. Hallalujah. If I'm lucky and can get Boy potty trained by August, Boy can start school without a problem. If I'm not successful, I have a new list of places that won't be a rip off to take Boy to. Boy needs an environment that will help him take his energy and channel it correctly. That will continue to intrigue his brain which clearly isn't happening anymore at M's school.
I've been running on adrenalin for the last three weeks. Dealing with Husband deciding to buy a new toy for himself that meant that I had to rethink buying ahead for Christmas (I see something interesting on sale, I buy it and hide it so that I can give it later). Boy needed a new car seat so $300 later, we were even further in debt. And don't start with me about the taxes.
So my system, a few days after the in laws left, decided to collapse. Husband was on a plane overseas and I just barely was able to keep up with Boy. Thank God I've got my Mom a couple hours drive away who can help me out.

Mother's Day is over - get back to work!

I almost had an entire night of uninterrupted sleep. Boy came into the guest room where I was dead to the world after he couldn't rouse his Daddy from the marital bed.
"Mommy."
I dragged myself out of bed, followed the little striped body back to his room and hoisted him back into his Big Boy Bed. He snuggled beneath his comforter and into his pillows, clutching his sippy cup of water. As usual, I checked to see the status of his diaper. A little pee, nothing to drag myself out of bed to get a fresh diaper for. He sucked down his water and then fell to slumbers, his small feel shoved into my rolls of fat for warmth. After a couple of minutes, I got up, went to the kitchen to get him another half cup of water to put in his room before going back to bed.
Around six am, he came in, found my back to him then went in search of Daddy. He apparently crawled into bed with Husband and snuggled into him. Then after a few minutes of conversation, went to sleep until about 730am when he announced to Husband, "Wet." Not just "my diaper is wet, Daddy, please rectify the situation" wet but "my diaper is hypersaturated and your bed is now wet, Daddy." Boy didn't exactly scamper off his soggy place but lay there for a few more minutes before clambering off the bed with Husband feeling the grim truth.
I heard them awaken, Boy asking plaintively for more soy milk and Thomas the Tank Engine with Husband saying, "Shhhh, Mommy is still asleep" and closing the door to the guest room. Even though Husband for some reason will close the hall door when I'm asleep in the master bedroom or Boy's room (which share a common wall with the living room so I hear everything anyhow), he doesn't when I am slumbering in the guest room. So hearing Boy shout "Thom-US!" at the top of his tremble voice echoes down the hall and through the hollow core door the room.
Half asleep and half awake, I managed to get to quarter to ten before rousing myself to get ready for the day. In 45 minutes, Husband and I managed to get clean and fresh plus getting Boy into some nice clothes before heading out the door to join some friends for an impromptu Mother's Day brunch at a restaurant. Afterwards, I headed home to drop my boys off and headed off to the movies so I could do what I love best: lose myself in someone else's world.
In a former life, I went to the movies frequently. I worked retail so I could go during the bargain matinee shows and embrace the world on film. Living in LA is surreal in the fact you can be watching a Woody Allen flick on DVD (or at the time I lived there, on VHS) and the next day, be asking Diane Keaten if she would like to have her purchase wrapped. After awhile, you learned to just treat the people you just paid $6 to see on the screen (this was a long time ago) like the ten other people who you helped before them.
The theatre was holding 20 people for the movie (in the top ten ranked this weekend so it wasn't a stinker flick) when the lights went down. For two hours, I enjoyed myself immensely. The reviews for the movie weren't great but it was one I had been wanting to see for awhile. It's one we'll own on DVD simply because I really enjoyed it. Sorry, Mick Lasalle, I know you didn't like it but I did. We agree to disagree.
Afterwards, I picked up groceries at Safeway then headed home. Husband took us out to dinner at a burger restaurant where Boy managed to run off a few times making dinner as usual a challenge. We came home and life went back to its usual Sunday night rituals:
I gathered all the recycling in the house and put it on the curb in its green box.
I shredded documents and got all the brown paper bags of recycling to the curb.
I got the yard waste in the big green rolling bin to the curb.
And I gathered all the trash and dirty diapers and put it in the trash can. And rolled them to the curb.
That's when Husband asked if I needed any help.
As he does every week.
When I was eight months pregnant, I waddled out the door every Sunday afternoon, taking all the recycling and trash to the curb to the astonishment of my neighbours. They couldn't believe that this pregnant woman was doing all this without her husband's help. Of course, Husband was with a company that sent his ass out of town every week so most of the time, he wasn't home. And when he was, it wasn't something he really thought about or was thorough about. (We'd end up with full bags of trash in the house and the following week, he'd gripe about how our trash can was too full - duh.) I think the one time he took trash out during my pregnancy was the day before I went in for my C section.
So as much as the holiday gets the Hallmark moment gloss of being a day where Mom is queen, life isn't that way at all. There are not a lot of breakfasts in bed and dinners out. Most of us get an awkward brunch with our Mom and Mother in law as they try to decide who is the better Grandparent. While they decide where your kid's propensity for flicking mashed potatoes at them is from, you're wondering what to make for dinner that night. And you are making dinner that night. It's not your husband throwing a filet mignon on the barbeque and baked potatoes with sour cream and chives, it's you figuring out if you made lemon chicken Friday or was it the week before?
Mother's Day is over. I'm back to work.

Celebrity eco warriors

In the last year, I've been reading more helpful comments from the celebrity eco set. For years, I've been amused with the extremes of Ed Begley Jr and Leonardo Di Caprio's Prius when he's not out with his posse scouting the chicas. But now, I have to admit that some of the soap box meanderings are getting on my nerves.
I'm usually the one who goes a little overboard with the recycling. I make sure to dig out the soap box or the shampoo bottle Husband threw in the trash to put in the recycling bins. Recently, I went to the 'net to find out who takes the deep fryer oil I have so I can make sure it gets to be biofuel (no one wants to cop to it). Lately, I try to only do my errands on days when Boy has school at the academy so that I can conserve fuel in my SUV.
But, seriously, some of the advice is contradictory and some times, not really realistic, that these eco celebrities are mouthing off in the magazines or on tv.
Some time ago, I read that Cameron Diaz believed that you should not rinse off your dishes before popping them into the dishwasher. And I'm sure that she and her staff do that. But they also probably have a much better dishwasher than I do. Because when I've missed a bit of stickiness on my dishes, it requires me an extra 15 minutes of scrubbing in the sink after I've run the dish through the dishwasher because it's now baked on. How much water is getting wasted now?
Another piece of advice I got from another mag and a celebrity Mom is that I should have a stack of a dozen dishcloths for the sole purpose of wiping up messes rather than go through the Costco sized Bounty paper towels that I buy for that purpose. So I tried that. I ended up going through all dozen in half a day and having to do an extra two loads of laundry that week. Sorry, landfill, I'm putting Boy's Huggies and the Bountys in you. Which means more water gets 'wasted' and I'm using more laundry detergent (sorry, the eco stuff doesn't do a great job of getting orange strawberry banana juice out of towels). Next?
It's sort of difficult for me to take with a straight face all the eco celebrities who spout of on the environment and what they are doing to protect it when I sort of wonder if they are really practicing what they preach. I'm sure they tell their staff to do so but what happens when Celebrity X goes off to Larry King Live to preach during April's eco awareness month? Do they come home and dig through the trash to see if their maids only used cloth to wipe up messes rather than that Costco container of Bounty like I do? Do they really send their nannies out to buy the eco friendly diapers at Whole Foods and think that the nanny is changing them all the time? Or that they use those cloth diapers religiously so that the maid can wash them? Or have the service pick them up?
Real life is a far more challenging proposition when you don't have a staff.

Exhausted from the effort

Do you ever get those days when you're just so tired from pretending that you can be superwoman but you just can't?
I'm having one of those days.
Once again, I'm left holding the bag trying to figure out Boy's future while Husband blithely goes off to work to bring home the pancetta for our little family. Our house looks like a disaster zone and I need to clean it (yes, I really am a traditional Mom - no nanny share or weekly maid service for me) before Boy's white socks turn black from the crud on the floors. And I get to start calling around to other nursery school programs to try to figure out where to send Boy if M's academy continues to vex me that will take on a child with high spirits and a lack of interest in potty training. Oh and I have to try to potty train Boy.
Keeping from breaking down is one of those things I am going to try to do. I would love to do nothing more than curling up under the duvet and crying my eyes out. But there is something vaguely self indulgent about it.
Besides, Boy just handed me his Mother's Day gift he 'made' at the academy. And he's personalizing it with a pen I left out from jotting down the names of schools I have to check out for Boy's future. Losing my grip would seem...churlish.

Cleopaetra, Queen of Denial also works at a preschool

M is Boy's nursery school director. Despite the impressive pedigree she unfurls at you at first meeting of having advanced degrees in child this and that, she seems to have lost her love of the kid. As I've told other Mommies who are at the school that I'm friendly with, I think M is phoning it in. There have been too many incidents that give me pause for thought. It's also my raison d'etre for getting Boy ready for a new preschool in the fall that I won't have to sweat Boy's happiness with.
Boy took awhile to like the school. He loves the teaching assistants (who are really just glorified babysitters since none have a degree in child development or anything) and he likes many of the students there. But he doesn't like M. She constantly tries to convince him that she loves him by grabbing him for a hug but you can see Boy is tolerating it. Sure, he's not the most articulate of the little overachievers at M's school but he's pretty easy to read.
I didn't like M from the get go but because we were unaware of the hoops we had to leap through to get Boy into a program for two days a week to ease me out of insanity, we had to settle for the one Boy's best friend was in. Valentine had put her son in the school a few months before and when we first arrived for the looksy, her youngster was wailing inconsolably. M was really ticked off that little George clung to me like ivy on a wall.
"No, no, no," she said, prying a wailing George out of my arms, "he has to get over this. He knows me. He has been around me for three months now."
I kept my tongue by not telling her that I'd known George for a few months longer and he was very comfortable with me. She was the expert.
Boy was with Husband and comfortable because he had Daddy, Mommy and his "Johge" near him. But now, this lady had taken George away from Mommy so he was agitated.
Later, as both Boy and George ran around outside, M told me the reason Boy was agitated was because I was wound up tighter than a clock. She said once he was there, he would be fine.
Fast forward three months and eventually, Boy did get used to the school. Not M.
We are seven months into Boy's tenure at the academy (as she calls it) and the more time I spend with Boy there, the more I realise that this isn't the right enviro for him. He's gotten more articulate; he knows his alphabet and numbers well but he isn't getting structure. There is a laisssez faire attitude the staff has about being there. Until the newest instructor started who lives around the corner, staff would arrive 10 minutes after school began. M would arrive some times five minutes late but mostly about 20 minutes late.
(Of course, if you're five minutes late, M chirps quickly that you owe her $10 because you were late. Because M is a really mercurial person, I pay rather than remind her that she should be paying me for all the times her staff is late and she's late. I just want her to shut up so I can leave.)
The only time M has really anything positive to say about Boy is when he's either been entirely docile (as her favourite students tend to be) or if he's managed to hurt himself pretty badly. He's an active kid so it's expected. M tells me a story of how it happened and I hear from one of the other kids about what happened to get Boy to the point where he hurt himself. When he smacked another kid in the head, I didn't get to ask what was the lead up to it. The child he smacked tends to be a bit of a whiner who spends the better part of the day curled up in M's lap making mewling noises (he's the youngest of five kids and his Mother always looks like she could use a good antidepressant with a cosmo and a gift card to Good Vibrations). M was incensed. She said that Boy should be evaluated for behaviour problems.
Sure, Boy has his issues but he's 2 1/2. They aren't exactly the souls of negotiation and patience. Boy tends to get physical when he thinks someone is a git. He was mad tonight because a pretty girl tonight he had extended his attentions to was ignoring him. He pushed her. We told him that was wrong. He glared at her Father. Even with George, who is his best friend, he has figured out how to deal with him. If George has gotten in one of his "all that I see is mine" moods, Boy will play with an item and distract George long enough to grab what he wants. If George gets petulant, Boy will mess up George's hair. Boy has shoved or hit George twice when George hit or shoved Boy.
Picking a setting for a two year old is hard. Up here in NoCal, you tend to have to choose schools that are prohibitively expensive (or as a friend puts it, the school you put your kid in because you feel guilty for not spending any time with them) or the cheaper schools that require you to just give them a check on time. Almost all require some sort of getting in line (either literally or figuratively) before they consider your kid for their school. And if you're not aware of it, you are, as my late Daddy said, SOL.
So, we have M and her interesting ways that we want to move Boy out of. Hopefully I won't have to write about anything else on her.