Cheryl Katz

Or, notes from the rest of yesterday.

Took my poor, injured computer to the Apple Store without an appointment and actually managed to be seen within half an hour.  Had fun with Sami on the kiddie macs in the meantime, and we tested all of the headphones on display with the tester iPhones.  And I do mean all of those headphones.  Whenever Sami didn’t like whatever song I’d picked out, we’d move on to the next iPhone.

The Genius at the Genius Bar reset my hardware settings, which resulted in a return of full iSight camera functionality – yay!  What I have since learned is that now my wifi card also works more predictably AND the problems I was having with viewing my own website on Firefox have also been resolved.  Hooray for kicking the butt of the ghost in the machine!  Maybe Google could have saved me a trip to the Apple Store, but whatever.  It was a fun outing with Sami, and cost us absolutely nothing.

The crack along the side of my computer would actually not result in the battery falling out – the magnesium inner case wasn’t damaged in the trauma, so the crack is actually purely cosmetic.  Nothing a little duct tape or Krazy Glue couldn’t fix.

After all that excitement, I made a simple black beans with wild rice dish, which was loved by all – in the end.  Sami swore up and down that she doesn’t like beans (whatever.)  She wanted rice only.

Oh, this one was so well played, it gives me glee just thinking about it.

She demanded a bowl of “just rice.”  So I got her an empty bowl, put in about 2 tbsp of rice, and told her that if she wanted more, she had to then eat from the rice/beans bowl I originally had given to her.  Inevitably she wanted more, and upon realizing that my promises are fulfilled, promptly declared herself “ALL DONE.”  I negotiated her into three bites.  By the time she was on the third bite, she’d lost count, and kept saying, “Two more, two more,” and so I of course obliged her without correcting her math.

She ate about half the bowl, into which I’d truthfully put a little too much for her, and was spared the indignity of reversing her “dislike” statement of earlier in the meal.

Well played, momma.  Sometimes I surprise myself with parental strategy.

FOR PARENTS ONLY | Anthony Bourdain.

While we no longer have live TV in our house, and so Sami has limited to nonexistent exposure to any Noggin/Nick Jr. shows any more, I couldn’t resist learning of Anthony Bourdain’s take on the regular roster.

And sadly, I have little to nothing to add to his comments – he pretty much hit on the head how I feel about Noggin shows.  (I kind of miss the Backyardigans myself.  Dora grew on me, and now is on my kid’s underpants.)

I don’t wish that Ming-Ming would get sucked into a lawnmower, though.  He’s cute even if Sami’s already too old for Wonder Pets.

It wasn’t a hundred bazillion degrees in my house today, so I also cooked a pretty awesome dinner.  I made a pan-fried salmon with chard and onions and seared polenta cake, all topped with an orange-mustard sauce.  I’m pretty modest about my cooking, but I sort of blew myself away on this one.

Most amazingly, it didn’t take all that long to make.  My one cheat was that I started with pre-cooked store bought polenta in a roll.  I spied it while I was at the market picking up fish, and since I hadn’t actually thought out my meal plan, it struck me as a simple element to finish up the salmon and chard.  Oh, but this was one of my favorite cooking experiments of late, and I was probably only actively cooking for about half an hour, plus a separate 15 minutes to decide on what to put in, and then to make, the sauce.  It wasn’t a Julia Child recipe, in that I didn’t use a recipe at all, but I’m pretty sure I did her proud.

The best thing was being able to use butter, since I was cooking fish.  I can’t use butter with meat and still be kosher.

Like I said, it was a thoroughly reasonable temperature outside today.  In fact, it was so downright comfortable that if the weather holds, I may go for a lengthy run tomorrow morning.

I am technically training for the Las Vegas Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon on December 6th, but I have some challenges.  I’m a few weeks behind where I should be in training owing to 1) having taken the month of August almost completely off and 2) trying to avoid running when it is too hot and sunny out.  Now that the temperature is taking a nose dive, I may be able to get somewhat vaguely reasonably on track.  If I get up to a 19-mile training run at least 2 weeks before the marathon, I will consider myself prepared to run it.  I’ll be able to finish, even if I don’t finish fast.  If I don’t get to 19 miles, I will scale back to the half marathon, which I already know I’d be ready for.

Until recently, I had a never-say-die attitude about this marathon, but the cloud of potential injury is hanging over my head, so I am somewhat forced to accept reality.  I’m sticking to a reasonable training program and also getting all my practical responsibilities covered, and so what will be, will be in this case.

In other miraculous news, Sami napped yesterday.  Not for super long, maybe 45 minutes, but the new leaf in this story is that I told her:  you don’t have to sleep, but you do have to rest quietly.  Every time I come in here and you are not trying to rest, I am taking a toy away.

Toy #1 she thought was a joke.  Toy #2 she stood at her door crying, “My toys… my toys!” for about 15 minutes.  Toy #3, she threw a raging tantrum, and Toy #4 resulted in actual attempts at resting quietly.  I didn’t hold my breath, but when I checked on her about 20 minutes later, she was out cold.

Huzzah!  I found my method!  I know it worked because Mel, who watched her while Ben and I went to Yom Kippur concluding services last night, told me the following story.  She asked Sami to start picking up toys from her bed and the floor to put them away.  Sami flung toys one by one onto the floor, adding dramatically, “It doesn’t matter.  I’m bad, so mommy’s going to take them away anyway.”

I was guilt-ridden for about 30 seconds before I realized… that meant it worked.

Who says an old mom can’t learn a new trick or two?

Hold the sunshine, please!  It’s 900 thousand degrees outside, so the outdoor activity segment of our day has been suspended.

But nonetheless, a good day.  I realize that from reading my blog one might think that I hate being a mom and that every day is thoroughly excruciating.  That isn’t really true, though I’m more likely to blog about the frustrations than I am to write about the normal moments.

Today we made whole-wheat orange muffins (recipe courtesy of the Tassajara Bread Book, thanks for the rec, Jess!)  I fill the measuring cups, Sami adds the ingredients to the bowl.  There’s always a little tension when it comes to the eggs, because of the way Sami likes to stick her fingers unpredictably in her mouth, having them covered in raw egg makes me nervous.  Ditto for licking the spoon after the wet ingredients are mixed.

But we get by, and total cliché though this may be, it seems like the more fun we have in the baking, the better the muffins taste.  These ones turned out really well, especially considering that they’re made with 100% whole wheat flour.  Usually it doesn’t rise very well, but these are moist and fluffy the way you’d want from a muffin.  Orange juice seems like a decent replacement for milk, and meant that I could dramatically reduce the amount of added sugar.

Sami was practically chewing the paper liner, she liked them so much.

the title would be called I Am So Not Cut Out for This and it would be filed in that section with all the truth-is-weirder/funnier/more entertaining-than-fiction female-interest novels get filed, the ones where protagonists agonize over gaining or losing 5 lbs, getting a date for the weekend, and how they’re going to become self-assured and fabulous.

But my magnum opus would be about the three weeks I’m currently in, where Sami is on school break and I am spending all day, every day keeping her entertained, running out all her energy, geting her to the potty like clockwork, and wrangling/bribing/negotiating her into a nap(-like situation) every day.

Suddenly, weekends *actually* have absolutely no meaning, as opposed to back when school was in session, when the days didn’t all blend endlessly one into another.

Suddenly, I’m awash with an entirely different set of reflections than the usual.  Now I’m thinking about how it seems like most mothers, presented with an “opportunity” to spend three whole weeks with their child, might be surrounded by happy feelings.  While at any given moment I absolutely love Sami, at any given moment I am also feeling one of a handful of feelings that are definitely not love.  How about frustration, boredom, anger, exhaustion… just to name a few.

I guess it’s normal to feel this way when days really do start bleeding into each other at the edges.  I fall into bed a lump of worn out caregiver, read for a little while until I fall into a restless, dreamless sleep, and start it all over way too early when Sami jumps on me in the morning and whisper-yelling, “ARE YOU AWAKE?”

They don’t make baby gates tall enough to stop her from climbing out, and even if they did, she’d just stand at the gate and yell, “Moooooommmmmmeeeeeeeeeeee,” over and over until I came to let her out.

While I’m not on the playground getting Sami good and tired, the intricate process of determining what she wants to eat and making it, dealing with pile after endless pile of laundry and washing the infinite supply of dishes we somehow burn through… then I have a few practical committments I’ve made with my time, and then the nagging question of what do I want to do next and how am I going to do it always hovering over my head.  (Hmm, why would I be worn out?)

I think I have all the critical elements of a pretty good first-person-self-effacing truth-is-humor novel/memoir right here.

For all the relief of Friday finally coming, to be honest weekends often turn out way more stressful than weekdays.  Sure, I have a heaping helping of laundry and other mundane tasks during the week, and of course the ever-enjoyable cooking.  Those are pluses.

However, on weekends it becomes MY job to convince Sami that she wants/needs to nap, and though she still desperately NEEDS them, she’s not so sold on the “want” part.  So this becomes an entire afternoon’s stress for me.  I got lucky yesterday, and said some magical combination of words in response to which she picked up and said, “I’m putting myself to sleep,” and marched to her room directly.  She played for a while, but then quiet ruled the house for at least two hours, and I was able to get my batteries at least part-recharged in that time.

This weekend we were exceptionally busy – and we didn’t even meet all our obligations!  We thoroughly spent Sami in the sunny backyard at a friend’s baby shower, and by the time we got home she was in complete melt down.  It took a long time to get her to that desperately needed nap, and by the time we did it was already well past the start time for the 3-year-old’s birthday party we’d been supposed to attend.  Le sigh.  We can’t win them all.  Truth be told, all three of us were run down by 5 pm Saturday.

Yesterday was kind of a challenge for me in the parenting arena.  We attended an adult’s birthday party, heavily attended by children in the 3-8 year range.  It was a lovely time, and the hostess even thought to rent a jumpy castle to entertain the tykes.  All went well until at some point I thought to glance out at the kids in the jumpy and saw a fellow 3-year-old boy just whaling away on Sami.

It was about the only time, other than the diaper cream incident, when I’ve seen red, but I did manage not to fly off the handle completely.  I strode outside, stopped all the activity in the jumpy, and said to the kid that it’s NOT OK to hit other kids, and if it happened again I’d have to talk to his mom.  Sami was, naturally, unfazed.  I think the jumpy experience was rough in general, due to the complete lack of control over her own motion, so a small beating from a peer didn’t sink her spirits.

From then on the kid’s older brother monitored him, and the rest of the afternoon was spent pleasantly.

Man, I never knew I’d be the crazy mom.  I mean, I know they’re little and I know most kids grow out of it, but I also know that Sami isn’t a hitter, and doesn’t even generally make waves when other kids hit her, which when it happens is well-attended by her teachers, and usually is a single-blow incident.  This kid targeted Sami and went after her a few times, and when he did he was literally whaling on her blow after blow.  Future anger management?  Maybe. Or hopefully he’ll learn to manage his emotions and grow out of it like most of us do.

This prompted Ben and me to discuss how we should teach her to handle future such incidents.  Ben’s opinion was that she should learn early to kick hard, once, for retaliation purposes only, in sensitive areas.  You can imagine where this would be, since in our case all of the culprits have been boys.  His other suggestion was that she should tell the predators, You hit me because you mother doesn’t love you.

Naturally, I don’t like either of these tactics, but on the other hand saying, “Stop hurting me, I don’t like it,” isn’t an effective solution unless the altercation occurs in a classroom.  (OF course, the emotional tactic had to be refined, more like:  “Oh, poor thing, I know you only hit me because you don’t feel loved at home;” but that level of manipulation wouldn’t really be accessible to a three-year old, even one as verbal as ours, and also I DISAPPROVE.)

I never was the brunt of any sort of bullying – I was the nose-in-a-book sort through grade school and had a pretty healthy social life in high school, all things considered.  Kept to myself, managed to avoid trouble.  But I remember that my brother, being a boy and therefore more susceptible to physical threats, used to get picked on and pushed around on the Catholic-school playground.  And I distinctly remember my dad telling him to push back, don’t let the other kids push you around.  Push back once, show them you’re not afraid, and they’ll leave you alone.

I don’t know/remember if it worked, but I can see the logic in it.

So I don’t want to teach her that violence begets violence, exactly, but I can appreciate how giving a kid a taste of his/her own medicine can easily remedy such a situation.  We also kind of resist the idea that telling a teacher/authority is the way to go, since self reliance is important, conflict management is important, and knowing WHEN to report offenses is also a valuable skill.

Obviously we’re not coaching Sami yet in anything but Tell them you don’t like it, say STOP and then walk away.  But what would you teach your kid, in a similar situation, at age 3 or age 30?

I try not to be too much of a yeller, so to speak.  I know that volume doesn’t make my words any more likely to be heard, and more often come across as condoned tantruming.

But, dude, yesterday was a helluva challenge to my self control, and I’m here to admit that I lost it for a few minutes.

I sent Sami to the bathroom to wash her hands.  Sami + running water have in the past led to problems, but mostly minor problems like Sami deciding to wash her cup over and over in the sink with hand soap.  I try to put a stop to such things within one minute, seeing as we’re in a water crisis.

Well, I gave her the requisite one minute, and at such time that my dinner prep could be abandoned to check on the progress of her hands, I went in…

to find the entire bathroom splattered with water, her head under the sink faucet covered with – you guessed it – hand soap.  Dial, to be precise, for the curious.

I cannot tell you the lengths to which I’ve gone to explain why we shouldn’t waste water.  In one ear and out the other.  But mostly I was irritated because this pattern of slathering things on her head has in the past come to no good, and in this case could have lead to a grievous soap-in-the-eye debacle.  (Luckily for all parties, it didn’t.)

I picked her up like a football, under my arm, supported by my knee, head under the faucet so that I could thoroughly rinse out the soap. (Hey, at least her hair got REALLY REALLY CLEAN.)  When she started kicking and squirming and screaming, that’s when I lost it.  I tightened my grip, so she wouldn’t fall and break her neck nor continue kicking me in the spine, got the rest of her hair rinsed out, dried her and myself off, and (loudly) sent her packing to her bedroom for a two minute cooldown.

Through which she proceeded to scream at the top of her lungs from beginning to end.

I went back to get her, and she wouldn’t even let me get a word in edgewise – if such a phrase applies to perceived interruptions of wordless screaming.  I told her that I don’t talk to people who are screaming, left, and came back to repeat myself.  Finally I yelled it at the top of my lungs, and that’s when she seemed to finaly stop to take a breath.  Given a ten second window of silence, I managed to pick her up and get her calmed down.

Poopy diaper time!  (Man, I cannot wait until potty training moves right on along.  This is killing me.)  Well, diaper change is an Olympic sport today, and it’s all I can do to maintain potential-mess-crisis management.

Having written it out, it doesn’t sound that bad. But when I yell, I’m loud.  To me, in perspective, it now doesn’t sound so bad, but I wonder what the neighbors could have been thinking, since all our windows were open.  Sigh.

Like I said, I strive to maintain control, and I generally keep my voice low, even if it’s sometimes fraught with frustration.  Sometimes the sheer irrationality of it all gets to me.  Grrrrrr.

Of course, guilt factor is magnified when Sami calms down and tells me, hug and all, “Mommy, I don’t like it when you yell.”

She might as well have just said, “Mom, you suck.”  And no, telling myself the buttons she pushed to make me topple off my pillar of self control is no comfort.

I’m looking forward to her third birthday, when this will all magically disappear and I’ll be left with a cheery, helpful child who loves for me to read long stories to her.

A mom can dream, right?

Sami skipped naps for three days in a row over the long weekend.

That doesn’t sound cataclysmic, but take my word that it is.  There’s critical brain function in my head that won’t click off until complete silence comes from Sami’s room.  (For good reason:  remember the diaper cream incident?)  And it just hasn’t been happening.

I know, I know, this means I need to work on being able to go into relax mode even when she’s awake and playing during “rest” time.  The problem isn’t just that she doesn’t sleep, though, it’s also that she can climb over the gate on her bedroom door.  You know, the one that used to contain her for the purposes of quiet rest time for her and for me.

This means that if I allow myself into full-on rest mode, she will be playing in the middle of the street before I know it.

If a week back at school doesn’t get her back into a naptime routine, then I am in mourning, and this is my tale of woe.

It’s been a few days, but pushing myself through the dreaded 11-miler of doom has done wondersof ro my motivation and my personal investment in running.

So here’s an epiphany.  If I can take myself from the absolute lowest morass of ill-motivation and funk, and push out not just the longest run I’ve ever done in my life, but actually beat my intended mileage by .56 miles, then why do I doubt myself?  What was the worst end I could have come to on my intended run?  I run out of steam and walk home?  I call Ben or a friend and get a ride?  I lose nothing, gain however long I made the run, and can still try again next time.

Staring up from the foot of a mountain is no excuse for not doing my best to climb it, one step at a time.  I never thought I’d run more than 5 miles in my life, if you asked me a year ago, I’d have told you the very idea was ridiculous.  And yet here I am, 11.56 miles down, then another 3.8 miles down; I’m not as thin or as fast as I thought I’d be by now, but hey, I chose to prioritize athletic ability over my weight or appearance, and I’m still not doing so shabby.

Mountains come in all shapes and sizes, and today a new one cropped into view that I never saw coming.  Sami told me she thought it was her fault that Alex died, because of the time Sami jumped onto Alex out of a chair.

I didn’t laugh at her.  She didn’t seem to think it was funny, although she also didn’t seem to feel terrible about what she’d just said.

“It was scary when you landed on her belly, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” she said. “And then her bum was broken, and she went to the doctor.”

We’d been avoiding telling her that Alex was “sick” or that she’d gone “to the doctor” because we didn’t want to create any exaggerated impressions of what those things mean.  When Alex died, we told Sami that Alex’s body got broken and no one could make her better.  We didn’t even use euphemisms for the death part, we’d just said, “She died, and we can’t see her any more.”

“But you didn’t make Alex broken.  We were scared, but everyone was ok.”  Shit.  I don’t know why she would have linked the jumping incident with Alex’s death – those were months apart.  I really didn’t know what to say.  I settled for reiterating that her jumping on Alex had nothing to do with what made Alex die.

Sami seemed satisfied, if not convinced.  She’s remembering way more than I would have expected her to, and that alone is fine.  She doesn’t seem sad or concerned about the connections she’s making, so that, also, is fine for now.  I just didn’t expect her to make connections between memories that were unrelated, and I never, never expected her to somehow assume responsibility for Alex dying.

If I could run 11 miles and make this sinking feeling go away, I absolutely would.  Haha, 11 miles in the face of tangible desire NOT to run it proves that I can do pretty much anything if it’s up to me.  I can’t change the way my kid thinks and feels, though.  And that, to say the least, is a bummer.

Necessity is the mother of invention… and in my case circumstances beyond my control compelled me to cut my daughter’s hair for the first substantial time.

Picture this:  a child at naptime.  Half hour later, loud thudding sounds issue from the room of the child, so the parent goes to check on her.  Child has painted her entire arms from fingertips to elbows and then some, her bed, sheets, pillows, frame, blankets, a book, the floor and any other miscellaneous objects she can find… with maximum viscosity DIAPER CREAM.

Believe it.  This was my reality this afternoon.  I don’t think I’ve ever “seen red” before, but I might have had a minor stroke taking in all that there was to behold in Sami’s room today.  LIVID.  Besides the obvious inconvenience of washing, oh, everything with some kind of abrasive cleansing agent, we had the additional bonus fun of throwing Sami herself in the bath to scrape the petroleum-laden goo off her limbs, body and face.

And I forgot to mention her hair.  Completely coating the bottom third of her hair.  I shampooed her whole head about 4 times, emptied the tub twice for fresh water, and had limited success (if you can call it that) getting any of the diaper cream to budge from her hair.  Combing helped minimally.

So I did what any enterprising, self-respecting mother of a totally infuriating going-on-3-year-old would do.  No, not throw her out with the bathwater.  I whipped out the hair trimming scissors and went to town.  

I’m sure it’s not professional looking, though her hair has just enough natural wave to get away with any minor inconsistencies.  I hacked at it somewhat unscientifically, and she was not a steady subject, but she wound up with a haircut shockingly similar to the pro job I wear.  (Pictures will follow when I get the rest of the residue off her head.)

Maybe I shall consider a career in children’s haircuts.  HA.

As if I don’t have more serious things to be posting about.