Grumpy Moi

Boy am I grumpy! A kind of “Don’t talk to me, Mark, I need to go into the other room and scowl” kinda grumpy.

My frustration with the nanny has re-emerged from where I’d swept it under the carpet of my consciousness. This time it may be too big to sweep back under there again.

Today I was in the car heading home at 5PM. Well, it was actually 4:57. And I get a call from Shelly saying did I remember that today was a 5:00 day, not a 6:00 day.

And no. I’d forgotten. Got Wednesday and Thursday confused.

So I’m in the wrong, but come ON. It’s the way she talks to me:

Her: [in a stern and pissy voice] This is not good, Kristen. I am going to miss another appointment.

Me: [getting up my gumption to not be intimidated] Another one? Did you miss one before because of me?

Her: [evading my question] I have to leave at 5:00.

Me: I’m sorry. I messed up. But let me call the neighbor to see if you can drop Kate off there so you can go.

Her: No, it’s already too late.

Me: [thinking "too late" doesn't fly when it's not even 5:00 yet] No it’s not. Let me call her.

Her: [sighing with annoyance because she would clearly rather lord this over me than let me attempt to fix the situation] Okay.

I reach Jennifer, a nice human (hooray!), who says it’s no problem and Kate can come by I call Shelly back to tell her and she says, “Okay. Leaving now. Bye.” And hangs up. Soooo pleasant.

When I call Mark to rant, he comments that it’s only 5:03. Yes, this entire interaction took place before 5:03 when she was set to work until. Mark made the wise comment that she really shouldn’t be planning her post-work activities with such maniacal precision that one minute of lateness will set her schedule off kilter.

And all this when it’s not like she arrives in the morning with Swiss-clock timing. A handful of times she’s arrive 5-10 minutes late, and of course neither Mark nor I have mentioned it to her. And of course, she never mentioned it either.

God this pisses me off.

Celebrating Stupidity

So I’m walking by the local bookstore, Diesel (totally cool place that makes you want to read every book in it), and I always stop to look at their window displays. In part, Kate just loves to look at all the books and say, “Book! Book!” as if alerting the other pedestrians that an anvil was about to fall on their heads. And I too just like to look at the books, but I keep my, “Book! Book!” on the inside.

Today they had a calendar in the window, one of those daily calendars that is small and you tear a page off each day, called Stuff on My Cat. The cover shows a lounging cat covered in small yellow Post-Its. And yes, there were 363 pages with other pictures of, as billed, things on someone’s cat.

(Yes, I had to go into the store to take a closer look.)

I couldn’t help but wonder when stupid things like this became so acceptable to so many people. And I’m not saying I’m above the celebration of it all. Maybe it’s these damn internets that allow everyone to let their freak flags fly. There is so much out there for us to process, that we’ve just had to move in a totally inane direction in order for anyone to stop and pay attention.

I’m by no means a dumb-stuff connoisseur, mind you. Our friend Jamie is pretty good at digging up cyber-weirdness and delighting in it. And every once and a while I’ll come home and Mark will need to drag me to his computer to show me something that he saw at work and found outrageously funny. One time it was a website that showed what happened when you left a gummi bear in water overnight–or for some faux-scientifically significant amount of time. What happens, somewhat unsurprisingly, is it gets all bloated. Anyway, Mark found it incredibly hilarious and I think I looked at him with disdain and thought, “I’m married to a 14-year-old.”

Ah well, one person’s stuff on a cat is another person’s waterlogged candy.

Everything Old Should Stay Old

In the line at the grocery store today I saw that Luke and Laura from General Hospital are getting married. AGAIN.

This is madness. I haven’t watched that show for, God, 20 years. (Feeling old now.) And I tuned into two of their weddings way back then.

Have they continued to obsessively renew their vows in all these years that I haven’t been watching? Or did one of the actors somehow return from their trailer park in Arizona where they were living in obscurity and beg the network to give them one last go of it?

At any rate, the passage of time has at least given Luke some perspective on hairstyles. The long shaggy male perm cum mullet is blessedly gone now, and he is actually kinda cute with short hair.

Which isn’t to say I’m watching again though.

Halloween Redux and a Poke in the Eye

For anyone who ever doubted me, I did succeed at making the damn Halloween costume for Kate. I can’t say that I figured it out on my own. After my overwhelmed pattern-opening moment, I called a friend, Melissa, who is crafty with a loom, a sewing machine, and God knows what all else. Over the course of three tutorials in which I covered her house with tufts of craft fur like lava covered Pompei, she deftly guided me through the often utterly incomprehensible directions, and even made great time-saving suggestions to boot. (Don’t sew on the arms, just have her wear a black shirt underneath.)

Why is it two women who don’t even know each other super well can work during the days, take care of their toddlers through their dinners and bedtime routines, and still summon the energy to successfully–and even pleasantly–work together on a fairly complex crafty project, when a young guy can’t even teach his girlfriend how to ski without all hell breaking loose?

At any rate, the costume was adorable! Kate was a starlet–well, a skunk really, but a dazzling one! At the neighborhood Halloween parade Mark kept nudging me so I wouldn’t miss it when the other parents cooed over the cuteness of it all. (And frankly Mark being proud of my maternal craftiness was all the flattery I needed to consider going another round with this home-sewn costume concept next year.)

In a more recent turn of events, nanny Shelly informed me one evening last week that at the park Kate was playing with a baby and was so excited. “She really wants one.” Somewhere in the amazingly-good but not perfect English that Shelly speaks I misconstrued her to mean that Kate wanted a sibling, not a baby DOLL.

So once I sorted my way through an initially suprising suggestion that turned out to be a quite reasonable one, we went to Target. I resisted the urge to wait until I found the ultimate sweet and cute and not plastic-tacky doll for Kate and just get her one, since by the time she is 27 and I find one that I think is worthy of being her first doll, she probably won’t care.

What was funny was the day we went to Target I’d met Shelly and Kate at a sushi place for lunch. When I walked into the restaurant, Kate was so excited to see me she started squealing. Then squealing seemed to continue to appeal to her after she’d gotten over the fun-ness of having me there, she sqealed more and louder. So Shelly said “Shhhh, Katie.”

Well, at Target when I handed her her soon-to-be First Official Doll, the first thing she did was look at it gravely and say, “Shhhh.” Finally Kate can manage someone else’s behavior instead of being the low man on the totem pole. I’m sure that’s fun for her.

The second noteworthy thing she did upon receipt of the new doll–after the requisite hugging and kissing of it–was take both her thembs and bear down on one of its eyeballs. It had those old-school kind of eyes with lids that open and close and eyelashes. It’s one of her ways of giving the doll love: hug it, call it “Baaaaby!”, give it kisses, and gouge at its eyes.

Yesterday I went into her toy box to get some toys I’d stowed away for a while so she’d think they were all fresh and new when she got to play with them again. I found an angel doll that Mark’s stepdad’s mother had gotten Kate. I handed it to her and she grabbed it with her wild-eyed happy look. “BABY? Baaaaby!” Then she went for the eyes.

Let’s just hope that these little Equus-like episodes are all a harmless expression of a baby’s bodily exploration, and we’re not raising a little future Abu Ghraib prison guard here. Sheesh.

Talking Up a Storm Now

We seem to be in a learning, growing, changing spurt in this house. And not just Kate. It seems like there is something churning through all of us.

Mark is busy at work tackling a big feature story which at times has had him feeling frustrated, but ultimately has been a great project for him to take on. And finally it seems to be in the wrap-up final edit stages (knock wood) and so it’s nearing time to settle down and feel proud and relieved and ultimately thankful for taking on the challenge in the first place (since writing isn’t really a job requirement for him).

And I’m still on the upswing of my new-job learning curve. I’ve started to get to know the team and am feeling lucky to be part of a friendly, un-political and talented office. Sure, I’ve battled with intermittent frustrations–mainly about the client services lack-of-savvy that seems to pepper the ranks–but ultimately what I’m learning about people I’m appreciating and feeling grateful for. I’m also getting to know the clients and seem to have made some modest but real inroads in relationship-building there. I’ve tackled some challenges, crossed some things off my To Do list, and managed to have a feeling of job satisfaction minus the up-all-night stressing component that seemed to be part of the last job at least.

And our glorious little Kate. She is just shining and sweet and aglow. She is crawling and trying to stand–until she realizes she’s not holding onto something and she topples over. And she is saying words like a fiend: apple, doggie, turkey, book, ball. Most words you can make sense of. The one that’s totally off base is pumpkin. She says something that sounds like “BA-bi” for pumpkin. She’s also learning things like where her feet, teeth, hair is. She’s clearly a small sponge, and we just need to remember to keep adding information.

All this learning is leaving us all pretty tuckered out by night’s end. So Kate’s been sleeping through the night (knock wood) and Mark and I are intermittently keeping each other up by sleeping restlessly and thinking of everything we have to do, or going out like lights.

Oh, and on a totally different topic, today when the nanny left she said, “I love you, Kate,” which was very sweet.

It’s Just Too Soon

Sunday Mark and I were in Babies R Us buying some crap we probably don’t need. They were playing Christmas carols. On November 5th.

That’s just wrong.

Baby Born!

After many weeks of bad-news calls from Amelia, I answered the phone yesterday to hear her say, “I have a baby boy here!”

Yippee!!! Malcolm Francis Myrick was born on November 1st at around 1PM in Washington, DC. He weighs 5 3/4 pounds, and is 20 inches long.

Today we got to see pictures–Bismarck has already busted out some photo montages complete with music!–and he is adorable. Mark thinks he has Amelia’s eyes. Amelia thinks he has her hair. I don’t know yet what Bismarck thinks, but from the pictures it’s clear he’s one proud Papa.

We are sooo happy for Amelia and Bismarck. I know that Grandma Frances is out there somewhere smiling down on her beautiful grandson.

No no no

I remember being at a friend’s baby shower a couple years ago, long before Kate was a twinkle in my uterus. A new mom with her teeny baby was there, talking to the mom of an older kid. New Mom was seeking out all manner of advice, and at one point asked Older Kid Mom, “Do you tell him no?” And I swear I wanted to lean forward and say, “Come again?,” but I was just overhearing a conversation from across the room, so I tried to just tune my ears in more inconspicuously.

Older Kid Mom actually said no. No, that she doesn’t say no to her kid. I felt like screaming across the room, “What the hell are you talking about? Is this seriously some new parenting approach? You’ve GOT to be kidding!” But again, since this was not my conversation, I managed to stifle my incredulous reaction.

Fast forward to the McClusky house a couple years later. As you peer into the windows you see that the woman who’d been babyless at the earlier baby shower has had a child of her own. And wow! What a beauty she is.

But I digress…

So anyway, a few weeks ago Mark and I finally gave into the reality of our need do more–okay, some–babyproofing. Kate’s still not walking, but walking be damned, you can cover some serious ground on all fours it turns out. And everything not intended for infant exploration is of course infinitely enticing, like the fireplace (even sans a blazing set of logs, still not the blest place for play). Also, the stereo, which is perfectly at Kate-level and offers a wonderful variety of knobs and buttons for the pushing and the twisting.

Thanks to his natural house-handiness and some research conducted with other new parents facing the same problem, Mark managed to rig up a Plexiglas shield which he Velcroed to the front of the stereo case. The other night Kate crawled up to the stereo and even though she couldn’t get at it, she looked at it and said evenly, “No no no.” Well, it sounded more like, “Nnnnuh, nuh, nuh,” which as it turns out is exactly what I say to her.

It’s funny in an oh-that’s-what-I-do way having your admonishments tossed back at you. Turns out something you come out with in the heat of the moment is actually making an impression on that little mind! I think it’s why so many people end up freaking out when they hear themselves use the same expressions with their kids that their parents used with them. You just have some weird reflex to say something before the volume on your stereo is turned up to an eardrum-splitting decibel.

Kate has since busted out the “no no no” a couple other times. Reaching for the knob for the drain midway through her bath, she turned to me and said, “Nnnuh nuh nuh.” Crawling along the hallway and stopping to look at the electrical sockets (at long last, covered with childproof plastic plugs), she looked over her shoulder at me: “Nnnnuh nuh nuh.” It’s like she’s stored away every place in the house where I’ve ever said it to her, and says it back to me to show me she’s paying attention.

Well, I guess I’m not that far off from the Mother Who Doesn’t Say No. I guess I’m trying to soft pedal a bit on the stern “No” and heck, it seems like it just might be working.

Seems like it might finally be time to watch all our language around Miss Kate. It’s ultimately cute and funny hearing the no no no mimicry, but I’ll be less charmed hearing her repeat what I scream out when I stub my toe some day.