Stork's Nest

Slow Cooker

When I was single, you could find three things in my fridge: Weight Watchers pizzas, Diet Coke and grapes. Oh, and some milk for my tea. My microwave was my best friend and my oven was for storage.  This may sound boring to some, but to me eating a pizza every night was just fine. But I have accepted that this doesn’t quite work with kids, let alone a husband.

Now, I could blame my lack of culinary skills on my mother, as predictable as that might be. But truth be told, although she was often accused of making “sawdust chicken” and “hockey puck hamburgers,” she still makes a mean spaghetti sauce, albeit based on a few different types of Ragu. But she did cook for us every night and it never seemed to stress her out.

I, on the other hand, am a basket case in the kitchen. First off, I really hate dealing with raw meat. It just feels wiggly, icky, gross and any other word you might have heard your five-year-old use to describe why he wouldn’t eat their dinner last night. Plus, I have no innate confidence as a cook.  I am going to tell you this right now: I do not know what it means to sear meat. I am not quite sure how to boil an egg.  I can only make pancakes by making one big one in the oven. Recently, I thought I could use my whisk to make yogurt turn into fluffy ice cream (I missed the part of the recipe that said that you put it in the freezer to solidify it.) I also didn’t know how to use a manual can opener until about three years ago. And sometimes I still struggle with it a bit. OK, I struggle with it a lot.

This is all not to say that I am not trying to learn. Inspired by my friend Emma’s awesome blog (http://emmapeel.typepad.com/emmas_mumblings/ ), I have tried to plan meals out the week before, have tried to make interesting things with healthy ingredients. But I have yet to find a recipe that pleases everyone in the house. Annie even turns her head at green bean casserole (or “beans with crunchies” as we call it). My husband tends to be the only one to love the Jessica Seinfeld recipes. The kids like roast beef and vegetables, but Dan finds that bland.  Baby Jay rejects purees that I make him but loves jarred food. And frankly I’d be happy with a bowl of rice with soy sauce.

I tell you all this because it is Wednesday and I am out of food for dinner tonight. I have enough left-overs to squeak out a dinner for the kids, but I have no idea what Dan and I will eat. On Sunday, the week was all planned out. Yesterday I was going to make my friend Heather’s BBQ pork recipe in my crock pot and we’d have leftovers tonight. Thursday was going to be a meatloaf recipe from a free pamphlet from Safeway.  But then my BBQ pork kind of got delayed. Why? In addition to receiving a fantastic curry from my babysitter, I was also at a bit of a stand-still in Heather’s recipe. My problem: my pork loin was so long that it wouldn’t fit into the crock pot.

So, why, you ask , why did you not just cut the pork in half? I have no idea. Because Heather didn’t mention this in her recipe?  Because I started to wonder why pork was so long? Anyways,  I just stared at it every day, thought about cutting it and then did what I always do. I put it back in the freezer.

Frankly, I don’t know why I feel the pressure to be a great cook . I work all day, take care of the kids, and I do feed them, which is more than I can say for the plants withering all about my house. And, in case you are wondering,  I have never given my kids a Weight Watchers pizza.

I think the problem is that as a STORK, your proximity to the kitchen during work hours somehow makes you feel like you must be June Cleaver between conference calls.  And frankly DORKS (what I lovingly call the husbands of STORKS) do expect a meal at night. They may not admit it, not even to themselves, but, just like they expect you to get their dry cleaning during the day, a little part of them is not 100 percent sure that you really work as hard as they do all day. I mean, on an intellectual level they know it. But when they come home in a suit and you’re in old sweats and then the kids mention that you took them to the park, well , you can just imagine what they are thinking. And it isn’t that your trip to the park was the equivalent to their lunch out with their co-workers. My co-workers just happen to be five and under.

Now, before you DORKs get all hot and bothered about this, I want to be clear that, as I am sure you have all heard before, it’s not you, it’s me. I somehow have this idea that to be the best mother in the world I need to be hitting on all cylinders at all times, doing crafts, doing laundry, and making meals. I almost feel like I have to hide from my kids that fact that I am also getting work done.

The funny thing is that the other day Danny had a friend over to play. His friend was about to come into my office to ask me something when Danny stopped him. “You can’t go in there right now,” Danny said. “Mommy is working. And I think she is on a conference call.” And you know what the crazy thing is, he said that with the same pride he takes when describing  his art work or bike riding skills.

So I think everyone is OK with things they way they are. In fact, I think maybe the only person who cares I can’t cook around here is me.

Dan, get ready to order up some take-out tonight and to make a huge batch of sauce to last us all next week come Sunday. I am going to concentrate on other ways to improve my motherhood. Like my Lenten sacrifice this year: not talking negatively about anyone at all in any circumstance. I have to admit that I chose this because I just couldn’t bear to give up my beloved candy this year.

Being positive all the time, frankly, has got to be easier than chicken mirabella. And maybe even better for my kids’ souls.  But I have some ground turkey defrosting just in case. I’ll let you know how it goes.

 

Weeks Like This

My polling place is in a local nursing home. To get to the voting booths you must cross a lobby filled with old folks sitting about, sometimes chatting, sometimes staring blindly, occasionally smiling as I lug my kids by. Sometimes there are art lectures going on in a side room, complete with the comforting whir of a slide projector. Sometimes a tea time, featuring supermarket muffins, is underway. On rare occasions, there are even dance lessons.

I am not sure how this sounds to you but, right about now, to me it sounds like heaven.

When I first returned home from voting a few months back, all excited to tell my husband about how much I loved the nursing home and how I wished I could spend a day there, he didn’t laugh for very long. He pointed out what any good STORK knows but chooses to ignore way past her breaking point: I have reached a state of utter exhaustion.

I’m kind of there this week. Not only have I longed for the nursing home, but my husband has urged me to go out to dinner with my friends and leave him with the three kids. Which has to be a sign that the apocalypse is coming. Or, worse, that I may be losing it altogether.

 It’s hard to say how weeks like this creep up on you. You are just plugging along, doing the best you can, sloughing through the work, the baths, the lunch-making, and suddenly you realize that you haven’t brushed your hair properly in three days, that you have reverted to wearing the sweat pants that you swore you would never wear again, that pretzels have once again become your major food group and that here goes another week when you won’t start your now almost three year old’s baby book (which of course only bothers you on weeks like this) . And, worst of all, you realize that even if you don’t sleep at all this week, you will still end up totally screwed and behind on work and on life in general by the time Friday comes around.

Knowing all of this, my solution is still to take the don’t sleep at all approach, which frankly doesn’t work that well for me. I end up grumpy with the kids, with my parents on the phone (sorry, Mom and Dad) and able to fall into what Dan would call a “spell” during which I might even pick a fight or two. So, you can picture how this week has been going.  

But an image has been with me since yesterday that I think might give me a solution. It’s of Annie and about eight other preschoolers “dancing” at their ballet class. They are a complete and utter mess too.

Annie loves to go to ballet. She loves to put on her pink tutu and ballet slippers. She loves to do the teddy bear dance and spin across the floor. She also loves to hang upside down from the barre, to throw herself on a stack of mats in the corner of the hall, telling everyone that her name is Cinderella. To fake falls across the floor, followed by loud requests for kisses. And she does all these things in a matter of seconds. And over and over again for thirty minutes.

Yesterday’s class was especially insane, with basically all the girls doing fake falls simultaneously, with absolutely no one doing any semblance of a chasse, and with two chubby little twins bawling every five minutes. It was a complete wreck. It was so bad that we mothers couldn’t stop laughing. It was hysterical to watch, eight little girls all trying to do their own thing, struggling against their own awkward limbs, singing off-key, often still to the last song that was on, twisting teddy bears heads askew, all in the name of love.  

All the chaos, the clumsiness, the falls, it was like watching myself in duplicate and triplicate form. Those little girls were me. And that started to stress me out.

Now, of course, I was allowing myself a bit of melodrama, as I believe a woman who enjoyed a3-5 a.m. play session with a nine month old has the right to. And there was something very different between me and the ballerinas. Despite their manic moves, their crazy singing, their absolute cluelessness, they were having fun. Sure, they don’t know what they are doing and they are making mistakes and messing up directions, but who cares. And that’s what struck me: who cares? So, I get behind this week. It has happened before, it will happen again. I’ll catch up soon. So, I may be doing things a bit awkwardly, that is OK, they will still get done and somehow or other they will get done well.

 But they aren’t getting done with any laughs right now and that is a bummer, even in a week like this. So I am going to do something crazy and cut myself some slack. As mothers, especially STORKS, we try to be everything to everyone all the time. We try and get everything done and done right. And sometimes getting everything done right can actually suck the joy right out of living. So, screw it. I am going to do some things wrong this week. And you know what, the earth will still keep spinning.  

Oh and there is another thing that those girls have that I don’t: Sleep. And I am going to get some of that now. That is, after I think about that nursing home for a few more minutes.

Three's A Charm

A lot has been said about the number three. Three is the magic number. Three’s a crowd. Three’s the charm. As a mother of three, I can say that all of these things are true on any given day.  To get to three kids, you have done a lot of living and a lot of learning. But you can still feel as clueless as that first time you rolled out of the hospital with an infant carrier on your lap.

This past week I had the opportunity to share wisdom with two close friends who are first-time moms, a species so earnest and worried at all times that it is almost hard to believe that I too, only five short years ago, thought about stimulating my child’s intellect and could tell you his base temperature, let alone bathed him every night.

My first bit of advice concerned a baby having a fever for too many days, which once you’ve been around the block a few times you know must spell trouble. The other golden rule I passed on involved the extremely important “make no eye contact” mantra. My friend asked how long was OK to leave a child, if happy, in a swing. As all of you experienced moms know, the answer is a day, a week, it doesn’t matter, if they are happy, leave them there as long as they don’t see you looking at them. Once they see you looking, you might as well kiss that cup of coffee goodbye.

So I entered the weekend feeling good that I could help some friends out, feeling pleased that I had learned something along the way. Fast forward to Sunday night when, as I hung coats in the closet, my two year old and almost nine month old were suspiciously quiet in the kitchen. Down the hall, I heard talk of “makeup” and “now you look pretty”. Rushing into the room, I found that Annie had found a tube of Tarmac lip balm (belonging to neither my husband or me, disgustingly enough) and had smeared it all of over both her and her baby brother’s mouths. And now Jay was happily gnawing on it.

One thing I am amazed that I haven’t learned as a third-time mom is the poison control phone number by heart.  Or that leaving a nine month old in the care of a two year old, even If she is almost three, is not that wise. It’s not like she’s completed her Red Cross babysitter course yet.

It’s amazing how the whole motherhood thing can exhilarate you and knock the wind out of you, sometimes all in one day. And it's amazing how quickly time goes by and how fragile life is. I’ve thought about that a lot this week as I grieved with a nanny I know from The Little Gym who lost her child, for no apparent reason, at 39 weeks, only a few days from becoming a mother of three.

This woman, who exudes kindness and love like no one else I know, simply had bad luck. Her baby, happy and in position, got caught on the cord only days before her escape. When I asked her how she is coping, a month later, she said that she can’t sleep, she can barely function and can only go about her days because of some powerful prescriptions. I cannot imagine her loss, I can’t imagine holding a tiny life in my hands and saying goodbye instead of hello.

That’s the thing about lessons learned. Nothing totally prepares us. And we have all had losses along the way.

My daughter, Annie, stopped breathing about a half an hour after her birth. The nurse, by chance, came to check on her one more time before leaving for the night. I had been nursing and then holding her, and was so tired that I didn’t even notice she had turned gray. In a moment a “Code Pink” was called, the room was filled with doctors and nurses asking if this was “just a drill,” and then Annie was crying. It was so hard to process, so unimaginable, that I asked my husband never to tell anyone about it. The nurse went home that St Patrick’s Day and had a huge glass of whiskey to settle her nerves. We still keep in touch. So I can’t imagine my friend’s pain now. As my mother always says, There but for the grace of God go I.

I say all this not to be maudlin, and not to dwell on sadness. It’s just that motherhood is so complicated, so rich, so fragile that it feels like it floats on those fairy tale gossamer wings. Most of us have chased it at some point or other; it is the rare person to which this has all come easy. So, we need to embrace all we have learned and accept that we will make mistakes along the way. Yes, we will mess up our kids, everybody does. But the secret, the salvation, will be in how we fix our mistakes.

These little lives grasp at you, claw at your soul, even when they are just a hope not spoken, a test taken in an office bathroom, the promise of a glider placed by a window with a view of the world.  And the ones you never meet stay with you just the same as the ones you kiss goodnight. And every day you learn more, mess up more, and just somehow get through more, all with a sense of wonder and raw survival tangled into one. Even when you are a mother of three.

The Mystery Machine

I have a habit of losing—or should I say, misplacing—things. I’d like to blame this on having kids, but this has pretty much been my norm since birth. Recently, I misplaced the keys to my vehicle somewhere between the driveway and the front door. I was worried someone would steal my car. Until I remembered. I drive a minivan.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not going to be a post filled with self-loathing or half-baked excuses. I am proud of my minivan. In fact, it is my favorite car ever. It’s black outside, leather inside, has a DVD player, seat warmers, and remote control doors. I sit high above all the other cars on the road. It is a sweet ride.

At least to me. I have a good friend who recently had her third child too. Minivans are such anathema to her that she can’t help telling me how much she hates them every time I see her. She bought some kind of Volvo SUV for herself and got all new Sunshine car seats, crammed together in the second row. But she did buy a used minivan for her nanny, which she would like to bumper sticker with “Only my nanny drives this minivan”. And she asked me, can you imagine anything worse than a used minivan?

Actually, I can. When I first moved to California, in a wicked El Nino winter, I had a rental so small that I thought I might float away in a highway puddle. I would never want that again. And I would hate any white car because I just don’t wash my cars enough (or should I say ever). I’d also not be too fond of a Vespa because no matter how cute I think they are, I would probably fall off. Helmets make me dizzy.

To me, a minivan is a thing of beauty, a thing of promise. It speaks of big families, noisy kids, road trips and baseball teams. I remember when we first got our minivan, when I was still pregnant with Jay, I would just love looking at those three car seats in the back and the way way back, imagining all the good times we’d have in what the big kids had already named “The Mystery Machine”.

I asked another minivan-hating friend over dinner tonight at a decidedly unhip pizza joint just what was so awful about minivans. She explained that minivans are just really, really dorky. And used minivans are disgusting because you just imagine all the gross things that kids have done in the minivan before you bought it. Maybe she has a point there. My minivan, not yet a year old, has already been scribbled on and peed in. There is some unidentified sticky stuff in Annie’s side pocket and Danny has already broken the top off of a compartment near him. Jay’s car seat is undoubtedly creasing the leather seat. I myself may have ground some whole wheat pretzels into the carpet.

But still I love my minivan. Maybe it is because my definition of cool has shifted so dramatically since having kids. I have to admit it: being called a soccer mom would be a compliment to me because it would mean I was pulling this whole STORK thing off, that I was both having a career and making cookies. For me, having a minivan, is not about settling or doing something out of practicality. I embrace my minivan because I embrace this big, clunky life that I have chosen. I drive it out of love.

Plus, like my husband says, if there was ever a true catastrophe, we could all live comfortably in our car. Now that, my friends, is cool.

Say Cheese

There is something about a trip to Picture People that brings out the monster in me. I become like Joan Crawford if there was something worse than a wire hanger. I am not sure what I expect of my kids given they are only 5, 2 and, as the older ones would say, 0. OK, I am lying. I do know what I expect. I expect them to suck it up and smile. 

Baby Jay is racing up on nine months and there are yet to be any pictures of the poor little guy around the house. I also started a tradition back when Danny was a baby of sending a few Valentine’s Day cards out to immediate family, so I figured that a Picture People trip was in order. I had been biding my time all January, waiting for a point when someone didn’t either have a runny nose or a huge bruise on their forehead. No luck. But, finally, today was the day. Everyone was clear skinned, bright eyed and even cowlick-free. Danny had no school and I was done with meetings by early afternoon. My babysitter could come along and help herd the kids. Perfect.

Cute outfits were laid out. Hair was brushed to gleaming. Smiles abounded as we piled into the minivan. So, why, thirty minutes later, am I alternatively bribing and threatening my children, sweating like an obese man at intro to spin? Is that really me telling Danny that if he doesn’t smile I will never buy him another special treat ever again? Is that really me jumping up and down, flapping my arms like a chicken, and saying something like “boogie boogie booger la la cachu”? Did I really just banish my older children from the studio, telling them that it was too late, that I didn’t even want to see them try to smile while I praised a little naked Jay for working it as he crawled across that giant white screen?

Yes, it was me. And I can’t even say I am surprised. Or that I haven’t done this before. I have a pathological desire to capture the perfect moment, to have the perfect smile, the perfect frame in time of my little ones, and it just makes me crazy that my kids don’t seem to feel this same urge. I think it is because they live in the now and I live in the someday.

Someday they won’t be little like this anymore. Someday I won’t be sending Valentine’s Day cards out with their silly little faces and phony smiles. Someday Jay will have more the five teeth and won’t want to nurse all night. Someday Danny won’t want to hold hands, or lie on top of my head, as I read him the Bernstein Bears. Someday I won’t be Snow White to Annie’s Cinderella. And someday all I will have is these pictures to remind me of what they once were, once we once were.

Someday, when I have more time, when I am not a STORK but an empty nester, I will want to look back at these pictures. I will want to have captured all these memories. But the problem is that because I am a STORK I think I try and put too much on every time we have together. I feel a compulsion to make the most of every second and perhaps pull out the camera and the FlipVideo too much. It is because I know I am missing something that I am so desperate to capture everything. And frankly that can turn ugly.

I love my pictures of my babies and I in fact love the pictures we took today. Despite me and a staff of disinterested teens, we have some adorable shots. But I have made a decision: No more Picture People. Because I finally realized something today. I realized that when I am that old empty nester looking back at my photos, I want to be remembering our happy, messy, imperfect times. Annie with a princess dress squeezed on over her jeans, a big fake flower in her hair, serving me “princess tea” at my desk. Danny in an apron and construction hat, doing a science “experience” in the playroom. Jay in a drooly onesie, one sock on and one in his mouth, getting stuck under the kitchen chair. Dan, me and the kids laughing at the beach, cuddling under the covers at yet another Embassy Suites, throwing newspaper on a fire. These are the times, the kids, the me I want to remember. I don’t want to be looking at a glossy smile, wondering if one of my kids is telling their therapist about the horror of Mommy and the annual picture day. I am done with Picture People.

But I will use the pictures I got today.