Five Things

Stephany over at Stephany Writes posted about five things she misses, doesn’t miss, and feels grateful for during this pandemic. What a good way to summarize our current feelings about these past strange months!

Five Things I Miss…

1. My barre classes. Man, do I miss these. This has been my favorite type of exercise over the past year or so and I really miss a) moving my body and b) having a full hour where ALL I thought about was moving my body. It’s also hard to imagine ever feeling comfortable going back to barre class – the rooms were often packed pretty full of women, and that seems like something that will make me feel pretty anxious for a long time.
2. A quiet house. In the Before Times, I was alone in my house almost every week day from 8:00 to 2:45. I could work out, I could write, I could think. All without interruption. I think back on that silence with wistful nostalgia. Now, I am never not alone. Well. Except on the panic-ridden drive to the grocery store every two weeks or so. Even when I am “alone” – in my room, for instance – there’s a constant stream of noise. Carla singing the fifty nifty United States song at the top of her lungs. Her robotic tiger growling and meowing. A podcast playing on our Amazon Echo. A displaced dog barking its displeasure from the yard next door. The murmur of my husband talking to patients in his office. The sound of Carla’s teachers and classmates from their Zoom meeting. Right now as I am typing this, Carla is in the next room working on her writing assignment. She is humming “Into the Unknown” from Frozen II. Every few minutes, she asks me for help spelling a word or pops into my room to have me read a page of the story she’s working on. And we work in 15 minute blocks, so even during her most focused studying, I only have 15 minutes to myself.
3. Popping to the store for a forgotten item. I have always been a meal planner, so I’m accustomed to doing a single shopping trip for a week’s worth of meals. But if I underestimated the amount of lettuce we had or forgot to get a key ingredient or had a last-minute urge for fresh raspberries, I could just pop over to the store – any store! – and get what I needed. I will never take this for granted again. Now, I plot out every item I need with the rigid focus of a general planning out a siege.
4. My housecleaner. I miss her every single day.
5. Alone time with my husband. We didn’t go on date nights super frequently, but we did try to make a point to have a date every four to six weeks. And I really miss that time alone with him. Now, it’s the three of us all day every day. And poor Carla – she’s so lonely and starved for attention that she needs ALL our attention as often as we can give it. My husband and I can hardly have a conversation because she keeps interrupting. Obviously, from an etiquette/respect perspective, we are working on the don’t interrupt issue. But I also feel so bad for her. She is a very social kid and she is SO isolated from her peers. She is desperate for interaction. My husband and I are also both introverts, and we’re both struggling with all of this being together all the time. So often, after dinner, we split up instead of spending time just the two of us. We just need an hour or so ALONE, so I will watch Veronica Mars while he plays video games. And then it’s time for bed. I really miss having dedicated time that’s just for US, but right now, we are prioritizing time with Carla and then time by ourselves. Believe me – it’s important for our collective sanity.

Five Things I Do NOT Miss…

1. The morning rush to get out of the house. Okay, so we are still doing it – sort of – to get Carla to her morning meeting on time. But the mornings start later, are more leisurely, and have way less pressure on them.
2. All of Carla’s activities. Man, I am so relieved to not have to shuttle Carla around to ballet and swimming and everything else she does. Our packed Wednesday schedule, in particular, is something I am glad to have left behind.
3. Birthday parties. Okay, so we have attended one birthday parade for a classmate of Carla’s during the pandemic. But that’s WAY less pressure/stress than spending two hours attending a child’s birthday, mingling with parents, and feeling incredibly awkward the whole time.
4. Keto. While I am aware that I am developing some VERY bad eating habits (it is going to be really difficult to give up my nightly chips-and-cheese-dip), I am really, really delighted to have an excuse to give up my diet. (Yes, yes, I know dieting is completely voluntary. And there’s absolutely nothing WRONG with a nightly chips-and-cheese-dip.)
5. Having to wear Real Clothes. Leggings 4-Eva, baby! I may never wear a real bra again.

Five Things I’m Grateful For (that are obviously above and beyond our health and that of our loved ones)…

1. Having my husband around more often. Okay, setting aside the stressful fact that he’s not working as much, it has been SO NICE to have my husband home more regularly. Right now, his patient load means that he’s home around three o’clock most afternoons. But there have been many days when he’s been able to work from home – and a few days where he’s had no patients at all. And he’s been able to help supervise Carla with her schoolwork… and he’s been able to go bike riding with her, and wrestle with her, and play in the backyard, and play video games with her, and spend all sorts of really great time with her. She absolutely adores him, and it’s been SO GREAT that they have had this extra time together.
2. Carla’s teachers. These women have been working SO HARD to adapt their lesson plans to an online platform. They are doing everything they can to engage the kids and educate them. To provide enough work to challenge the kids, but not so much that it will overwhelm them (or the parents). To offer flexibility in assignments and scheduling so that the kids aren’t feeling stressed out or pressured. To give the kids opportunities to connect with them and with one another. Carla has been increasingly frustrated and despondent with schoolwork, and has been needing more one-on-one time with her teachers… and they’ve been so generous with their time, and so gentle and loving with her. I overhear them talking with her and they are so kind to her – offering her praise and encouragement, empathizing with her about missing school and about how hard distance learning is, showing her their cats and puppies when she asks — that I am nearly always teary when she ends their meetings. They are magical women and I adore them and I am so sad that we won’t get to see them again and give them a proper goodbye.
3. Extra time with Carla. Sure, we want to murder each other on the daily. But outside of that, this extra time together is such a blessing. I am trying to soak it up. I am getting an intimate understanding of Carla’s strengths and limitations when it comes to school. I am getting ample opportunities to cuddle with her and read to her and play with her. I am constantly testing my ability to be more patient, more loving, more understanding. And she is rapidly approaching age seven, which, as well all know, is basically Adult Ready to Leave Home for Good, so I am deeply grateful that I get to spend this time with her while she’s still little.
4. The internet’s vast array of recipes. It’s been fun to try some new recipes during this period of isolation. You have too many overripe bananas? The internet has a solution. Want to make naan to go with your homemade Indian-style food? The internet’s got you. Need something delicious to appease your sweet tooth? The internet will offer up all sorts of options. I have been taking FULL advantage of the internet’s wealth of food blogs with pretty good success.
5. Unique ways of getting together with friends. My husband and I are not all that social, but we have been taking advantage of Zoom and HouseParty and FaceTime to get together with friends. It’s been WAY less stressful for me – no need to clean the house or even put on makeup! no need to make dinner or anything beyond my own cocktail! – and it’s been a surprisingly satisfying way to spend time together. I would say we’ve been more social than we are normally, simply because it’s so easy and low-pressure.

 

How about you? What have been the stand-outs for you, during this pandemic? Things you long for, things you are grateful to leave behind in The Time Before, things you find yourself feeling thankful for on the regular?

Read Full Post »

Gratitude Tree

I mentioned the other day that I am forcing my family to share something we are grateful for at the end of each day. It’s supposed to be something specific to that day – big or small. One day I was grateful that my husband and daughter left me alone for several hours to just read in bed. It was so luxurious, to be ALONE for a decent stretch of time. One day I was grateful for tacos. As one is.

I write down our answers on pieces of construction paper I have cut to look (loosely) like leaves or flowers, and then I attach them to a big construction-paper tree trunk that I have masking-taped to our kitchen wall.

This was not my idea; I am doing this because a therapist suggested it. It is supposed to be something good that grows out of this period of self-isolation. There are plenty of things to be grateful for, and at the end of this – whenever that is – we’ll have something beautiful to look at and feel proud of. Not necessarily the tree itself, but the dozens of memories we’ve made, the dozens of little moments of gratitude to look back on.

I know of other families who are doing similar things: Writing down a Good Thing from that day and putting it into a jar, then reading all of the week’s Good Things at dinner on Friday. Going around the table at mealtimes to give thanks for something that happened that day. Purposefully doing random acts of kindness for someone throughout the day or week.

Much like the Good Things, I don’t know if this is working. It feels false, right now. (And Carla and her dad either grudgingly go along with it or actively complain about it.) But I am choosing to believe this is a good example of Fake It Til You Make It, and that it will feel lovely and right at some point in the future. I don’t know. I suppose if it becomes Just Another Thing to add to the list of work and housework and remote learning and stress reduction and meal planning and grocery planning and general anxiety, then maybe I’ll quit. But right now, I’m faking it.

And I’m kind of liking the result.

 

 

Read Full Post »

Crabby and Ungrateful

I am very crabby and ungrateful this morning, and irritated at myself for feeling this way because I have so much that is good in my life. What a ridiculous way to start out the week, with fresh complaints. Well, nonetheless, I am feeling this way and maybe I can write my way out of it.

Perhaps I should list the (many) things in my life to be grateful for. That can be a soothing and mood-lifting strategy. However, being TOLD to count my blessings, even by my own brain, often has the effect of further entrenching the ingratitude. Stubborn thing, crankiness.

Or perhaps I can list the ways that things could be WORSE. Well. That can sometimes provide much-needed perspective, but it can also open the door to despair.

So, instead, let’s list some of the primary sources of the grouchiness and see if a good ol’ venting session helps ease the mind.

1. The neighborhood deer seem to view our yard as some sort of nature preserve that has been designated to them and them alone. Each morning when I wake up, it seems as though the deer have multiplied in the dark. They are absolutely devastating the arborvitae that borders our yard. They have been using Carla’s swingset as an itching post. They have upset the table and chairs in the corner of the yard (to be fair to the deer, although why should I be fair to these pests that I hate, it could have been the wind in this particular case). And they are MUSSING the beautiful carpet of snow in unmentionable ways. The lovely fresh white of a new snowfall is the only really pleasant thing about winter and they are TAKING IT AWAY. These deer are completely resistant to threats. We have tried banging on the windows, yelling at them, throwing sticks and snow in their general direction, and have even played wolf sounds at them (Carla’s idea; it worked once and then never again). They merely regard you with baleful disdain and continue on with their tree-munching and snow-soiling behavior.

(Yes I KNOW they have no place else to go. Yes I KNOW humans have encroached on their land. Yes I KNOW it is sad and unfair and that we need to share the limited space we have. And yet they STILL make me cranky.)

2. I have to accompany Carla on a field trip. Let us put aside the fact that I volunteered to do this. And let us also put aside the fact that Carla is DELIGHTED that I will be with her. Instead, let us consider being on a bus for thirty minutes with a million first graders and trying not to get carsick and/or worry too hard about a million first graders getting carsick. Field trips in general make my stomach hurt; I don’t like the idea of Carla a) traveling on a bus driven by someone I don’t know or b) wandering around a crowded Public Attraction in our enormous and frightening mid-sized city. I imagine all sorts of catastrophes, from bus crashes to kidnappings and every day she goes on a field trip is a day I spend in fretful suspense. You would think the best solution to all this anxiety would be to join her, and yet THAT just adds new worries to the mix. Especially because other parents have noted that the teachers assign groups of kids to each volunteer and I am deeply anxious about being responsible for OTHER CHILDREN, my GOD what if something happens ON MY WATCH?

 

2. Each week, I dread Wednesday. It’s the busiest day, with – as I’ve whined before – back-to-back activities in the afternoon. Two of the other moms at our Thursday activity last week were commiserating about how busy they are with after-school activities, and each of them has THREE school-age children, so I really can’t complain. But I AM complaining, because Wednesdays are very stressful. And I’m irritated with myself for worrying about Wednesdays pre-emptively, because they are bad enough on the day. Why EXTEND the dread? Such is the wonder and delight of my particular brain.

 

4. Girl Scout Cookie sales. This is the part of Girl Scouts that I hate with every fiber of my being. And it is kind of a key part of being a Girl Scout. Carla is good at selling cookies when she gets out and does it. But I have to do so much prodding and cajoling to get her out the door and I just hate it. I also hate lurking a few feet away as she asks our neighbors to buy cookies. I hate asking people to spend money. I hate tromping around our neighborhood in the raw wet cold. I hate our troop leader’s cheery emails with cheery reminders that we are way behind in our sales from last year.

 

5. Making phone calls on my husband’s behalf. Yes, I KNOW he is at work and cannot make the calls himself. Yes I KNOW that he hates making phone calls even MORE than I do, so I am Doing a Kindness when I make calls for him. But I hate them. Especially when they are calls about things I have not been involved in. Right now, the call I have to make is to one of the credit reporting companies. I forget which one. You get one free credit report from each of the big credit report companies each year, so my husband has a system where, every four months, he reaches out to one of the companies and checks our credit report. He went online to get a credit report yesterday and got some sort of error message. And then when he tried it again, later, the company claimed he had already gotten the report, and so would have to pay to get another one or wait four months to get the next free one. SO ANNOYING. And of course there is no easy way to contact this company, so I have to research it and then call and persuade someone to give us the report that we never actually got in the first place. And I don’t know what he was doing or when or why the report failed to come through, because I wasn’t the one doing it, so I will have to explain things I have no knowledge of and that makes me edgy and uncomfortable. I am crabby that the computer system didn’t work. And I am crabby that there is no easy way to correct the mistake. I am crabby that * I * am the one who has to figure it out. And I am crabby that identity thieves make it necessary to do this period credit reporting. A domino effect of crabbiness!

 

6. I have to go BACK to an out-of-the-way store to pick up picture frames. Here is another domino effect of crabbiness, but a dumber one: We got a gift card to West Elm for Christmas. We are going to use it to buy two picture frames that will then go on the gallery wall that is still not yet up. We went online to buy the picture frames and, lo and behold, our purchase was $1 under the threshold for free shipping. That annoys me on principle. So we tried to do the Pick Up In Store option, but there was some sort of glitch: the website kept saying there were two frames in stock until we put them in our cart and then typed in all our credit card and gift card information and then would say “Items not in stock.” Fine. This was weeks ago. Yesterday, we were in the area and went into the store and – voila! – two of the very frames we wanted. But – DAMMIT – we didn’t have the gift card with us. (We hadn’t planned on going to the store, we just ended up in the neighborhood.) So I put the frames on hold and now have to go back to the store to pick them up. The store is COMPLETELY out of the way and will require a special trip AND I have to go today because the frames are on sale through today only.

 

7. There are so very many things to worry about. All of my gripes are so small and insignificant compared to the horror and loss and fear that SO MANY are suffering right now. All the worldly awfulness – plane crashes and spreading diseases and devastating fires and political unrest and and and – is a constant painful throbbing in my chest. I feel like I should be Cherishing Every Moment more vigorously than ever right now, and yet all the worry makes it impossible to do so. AND I am safe and shielded from many of these horrors and should be GRATEFUL and not whining about stupid deer pooping all over my snowy yard.

 

There. I am leaving all of my ungrateful and petty grouchiness right here and taking none of it with me. HEAR THAT, CRABBINESS? You are locked here in this blog post and may not escape. Feel free to lock up your own complaints as well.

Read Full Post »

Rules That Are Ridiculous

You may have surmised from my last post that I am a little on edge lately. Which means that it is very easy for me to go from pleasant to full-on CRAB in about six seconds. And nothing pushes me right over the edge into crab-infested waters than rules that are absolutely stupid.

Listen, I LOVE rules! I am a Rule Follower! Rules are presumably there for a reason, and exist because someone took a careful, thoughtful look at a given situation and decided there needed to be some sort of boundary or regulation. Hopefully to PROTECT people or property or freedom or whatever it is the rules are serving. Rules are generally good, and I like to do what I’m told and I get panicky when I accidentally break a rule and I get very indignant indeed if someone else breaks a rule. Go, rules! That is my motto.

AND YET.

Some rules are stupid.

We took out a loan a few years ago. The lending bank required us to set up a special account they would use as collateral against the loan. We cannot access this account – it is our money, sitting there, waiting for us to pay off the loan. (Or, I guess, default on the loan, in which case it would belong to the bank.) (We have no intention of defaulting on the loan.) We have no checks for this account. We have no debit or credit card associated with this account. We can check on the balance of the account online, but we can neither add to nor subtract from the account. It’s just money, in limbo, for the life of the loan. Other relevant information: The bank itself is in a part of town neither my husband nor I ever visit. We do not have other accounts through this bank. And its other branches are in cities at least a thirty minute drive away from our home.

Each year, around this time, we get a statement from the bank that says we are being charged an inactive fee.

Of course the account is inactive. It is, by its very nature, supposed to be inactive. And yet we get charged for it.

This is an example of a stupid rule.

This year, as I have the previous two years, I called the bank. This year, as I have the previous two years, I explained the situation and asked if there was anything they could do about it. Could they rename/reframe the account, so that the inactive fee would no longer come up? Could they put a note on our account, saying we are exempt from the inactive fee, and have someone manually remove it? Could they have a bank manager put a standing item on her calendar to remove the inactive fee next time it pops up?

No, is the blanket answer. The ONLY WAY to avoid the inactive fee is to go into the bank, in person, and deposit something. Even $5 or $10 would do it, they say, as though this helps.

That is ridiculous, say I. I do not want to ADD money to this money that we cannot access. Why would I do that? If I put $5 into the account, I will not see it for several years, until the end of the loan. Yes, it is only $5, but for tightwad’s sake, it is still $5!

There is nothing we can do, the bank says.

You can at least refund the inactive fees that have already been charged against my account, I say.

Okay, they agree, we will do that.

I know this is not YOUR fault, I tell the person I am speaking to. I try a laugh. But you must understand how frustrating this is. WHY is this a rule?

Well, maybe there is a federal regulation that requires it? they say. They don’t KNOW, they are just guessing. (Which means that maybe if they dig a little, they could find a solution.) Or maybe it is because we want to maintain a relationship with our customers, you know, just make sure everything is okay?

WHAT ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP WHERE WE PAY BACK THE LOAN EVERY MONTH?

Do you know where our nearest branch is? they ask.

Yes, I say. But it is nowhere near where we work, live, or shop. It is completely out of the way. It would be very inconvenient to have to reroute our lives to go to this bank for this incredibly ridiculous reason.

Perhaps you don’t know about our other branches? They are in [location 30 minutes away] and [location 45 minutes away].

Infinite screaming.

Listen. LISTEN. I get that this is a very silly problem. Very. Silly. So what if the bank is not conveniently located. I should be able to get myself over there once a year and deposit $5 into this stupid account.

But the rule is STUPID. The blood pressure propelling kind of stupid. The kind of rule that probably fits 99.9% of all cases… but needs an exception for that teeny percentage of cases where it makes absolutely no sense.

Speaking of exceptions.

Another thing that really herbs my seafood is when there are rules… but they are followed arbitrarily! (Arbitrarily, as opposed to for a reasonable reason.)

This weekend, a checker at Target double charged me for toilet paper. (Side gripe: The reason I did not notice that I was overcharged while I was at the STORE is that my Target has made it nearly impossible to watch the computer as your items are scanned. The computer faces the checker, not the customer. So you have to stand way back away from the credit card machine, by the conveyor belt, and watch the computer to make sure you’re getting the correct prices. This is not always easy to do, Internet! Especially when Carla thinks she is “helping” by putting items on the belt that may have already been scanned. Plus, it means that I am blocking the way for the next customer to put their items on the conveyor belt. And if I forget to stand there and watch the computer from my belt-blocking vantage point, and go up to the credit card machine, I am out of luck! Who knows what I bought at what prices. (And you KNOW there are mistakes. There’s almost always an instance of something having a for-sale sticker on the floor and then ringing up at $0.25 more. If my eyes aren’t glued to the screen, I will miss out on that whole quarter!) (WORSE YET: the credit card machine does not even display the amount you are being asked to pay!!!!!! The checker has to say it to you, in a loud and clear enough voice for you to hear over your bored and gum-requesting and dangling-precariously-off-the-handle-of-the-shopping-cart six-year-old. THIS IS MADNESS!!!!!!)

Usually, if I get home and see that I’ve been overcharged, I am annoyed but feel like, okay, whatever, it probably all evens out at some point. But this was a $12.99 mistake in Target’s favor, and Target seems to be getting on just fine, and $12.99 is NOT insignificant.

So I called Target and told them about the error and asked if there was anything they could do. The person on the phone said yes, I had to come back to the store and someone would review my purchase. (I assume that means someone would look at my receipt against video of my actual transaction, which makes me feel really squicked out, but whatever, we are all being tracked at all times anyway.) It was worth it to me to drive back to Target for $12.99 (plus, of course, we had forgotten three things at Target so I needed to buy those anyway), so I drove to Target, stood in the Customer Service line, and told the checker my problem and what the phone person had said.

And the checker said, in a very this-is-your-own-damn-fault kind of tone, “Well, usually we would just refund you. But since you called and they said you needed to have it reviewed, I’ll have to find my manager and get someone to review it.” The checker’s tone and body language and facial expression were all conveying that a) it was hugely inconvenient to have to get his manager and b) I was being really dumb for going through some whole big rigamarole instead of just getting the refund, as though I knew I had a choice.

But… what? Either you review a mistake like the one on my receipt or you don’t, right? It shouldn’t be at the WHIM of the person I spoke to about the mistake.

I had come in prepared to have someone review my purchase, so that’s what I did. I stood there near the carts and waited patiently as the checker found a manager and the manager asked me what was going on and then took my receipt to the security office and then came back and asked me which item was double charged and then left again. I waited for twenty or so minutes, and as the time ticked down, I ticked off because it SOUNDED LIKE I could have simply brought my receipt in, gotten an immediate refund of the double charge, and then gone home (well, after procuring my three forgotten items, of course) instead of standing around in a busy Target trying to look pleasant and not sketchy or increasingly irritated by the long and seemingly unnecessary wait.

My husband very reasonably said that it’s in Target’s best interests to make it at least a little bit difficult to claim an error on a receipt. I agree; of course I do. If you could just go in and say, “I bought one giant television set but was charged for two” and get your $300 refund right away with no double checking that you actually did buy only one giant TV… well, I can see how that could put Target in a tricky position. So perhaps the rule makes sense. Especially for large claims.

But… WHY is there a rule if you are only going to follow it sometimes? Yes, yes, yes, I understand that there are always going to be exceptions! But those should be, you know, the exception, and not a regular bending of a rule. If a rule can be bent that often, IT SHOULD NOT BE A RULE.

Maybe the checker who was so cavalier about refunds is unaware of a price threshold for correcting mistakes. That would make sense. Maybe anything under $10 is just an immediate refund, but anything over $10 has to be backed up by video proof. I don’t know. I recognize that I may be annoyed for NO REASON, or annoyed simply because of the APPEARANCE of arbitrary rule following, and yet I. Am. Still. Annoyed.

I am feeling riled up enough that I may need to take it out via Strongly Worded Letter.

Read Full Post »

An Unappetizing Topic

Three posts about food in one week? This blog really needs re-branding to reflect my All Food All the Time subject matter.

To be fair, today’s subject is more about marriage/homemaking/problem solving/I’m not sure what than about food. But it’s still food-adjacent. Food. No wonder my pants are all too tight.

You know that I have been a little… listless lately, about meal planning and cooking. If you make food for your own family on a regular basis, I am guessing that you know the feeling. It’s so relentless and so wearying… and, maybe worst of all, it’s so thankless.

I suppose I can understand, with an eyeroll and a sigh, why Carla scrunches up her face and says “ew” to some things. The child Ews a piece of chicken, so it’s not super shocking when she Ews roasted salmon or butternut squash soup, right? And it’s all part of the plan, teaching her to try new things, teaching her to be polite, teaching her basic table manners like not Ewing the food that someone lovingly or at least begrudgingly prepared.

And I can totally understand that not every meal I make is going to be a winner. We can’t have tacos and pizza all the time. Some things are going to be less exciting. And, yes, there are going to be some attempts that fall flat. Flavors that don’t work together or measuring mistakes or a miscalculation on how long to cook something, resulting in dry meat. It happens.

But Internet, these misses are becoming the rule rather than the exception. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I try something I’ve made a million times before, or something brand new, I keep flubbing them. The shrimp scampi with zucchini noodles, which is one of my favorites? I made it last week and it was AWFUL. Like, I could barely force myself to eat half of what was on my plate awful. I blame the parmesan – even though it was a brand new container and even though I sniffed it and it smelled fine and there was no visible mold, it seemed off.

And then I made my tried-and-true butternut squash soup recipe… And the soup was super thin, and my husband said it didn’t really taste like anything.

And then I made salmon with roasted veggies last night… and even though I checked the salmon’s temperature every five minutes, I managed to overcook it. Plus, my husband’s piece had pin bones in it. He found three or four before he gave up on eating his salmon. (I grew up eating salmon all the time, and my memory is that finding little bones in your salmon fillet just happens. It’s not a huge deal. To me. But my husband HATES it.) (Of courseit had to be my husband’s piece; my piece had no bones in it.) And Carla claimed that she HATES salmon, and wouldn’t eat more than a single bite.

And this is just in the past week, you guys! This kind of repeated meal failure is happening more and more often.

Have I lost my touch?

My husband is usually very supportive of my cooking. He says, every night, “Thank you so much for making dinner.” Sometimes, the dishes are things he doesn’t love – anything with shrimp in it, he could do without – but he eats the meals anyway because he knows it’s not easy to be in charge of meal planning and because he appreciates the work that went into it. And he says he doesn’t have to eat his absolute favorite meal every night.

But, man, lately, everything I make seems to have something to criticize.

I don’t want to make food he doesn’t like! (That’s different from making food he doesn’t love.) If there’s a problem with some recipe, I want to know so I can fix it!

But I also can’t keep plodding through the meal planning and preparing process if it’s met with criticism every night. It makes me want to cry.

The other thing is that… I’ve been having a lot of Down Days lately. It started when my friend got sick, back in August. But then really ramped up when she died. And there have been some other stressful unbloggable things, too – nothing serious, but things that have me feeling anxious and sad and stressed a lot of the time. When life is going great, it’s much easier to brush off some failures in the kitchen, you know? When life is not as good, those same failures feel magnified. Like… I can’t even succeed at something so simple as making dinner. It’s adding to the Down Feeling, is what I’m saying.

I am SO OVER IT. So very over it. All the pleasure has been sucked out of something that I take pride in, something that – sometimes – I really enjoy doing. I want to just throw up my hands and quit.

And yet, my family needs to eat. Every night. This is a problem I MUST solve.

The alternatives, as I see it, are as follows:

1. My husband shuts his trap and eats what I serve and pretends to like it even if it’s gross.This option makes me sad. I don’t want him to dislike eating. I don’t want him to feel like he has to lie to me. When he does have a criticism of the food I make, he is always super careful and gentle; he’s not screwing up his face and Ewing things (take notes, Carla). Plus, silly as it may be, I WANT him to think of me as a good cook. I definitely don’t want him to think of me as a BAD cook, or even a mediocre one. I am good at so few things in life, I really want to be good at this. Okay. This is not a viable option.
2. My husband takes over the meal planning and preparation.This is unlikely to happen. He’s just too busy at work. We’d never eat until ten pm. This option probably needs to come off the table.
3. We buy prepared food and/or go out to restaurants every night.This sounds less healthful than eating homemade meals, and expensive, not to mention time-consuming, so I’m going to say this is off the table as well.
4. We stick to known quantities. Spaghetti. Stir fry. Crockpot barbeque pork. Chili. Variations on protein-with-veggie. (Although, thinking about the mediocre butternut squash soup and the shrimp scampi disaster, I don’t even know if that’s safe! What if I’ve just lost my ability to cook???) I’ve written beforeabout how I would LOVE to simplify… or to emulate Nicole, and make each day of the week its own type of food (tacos, stir fries, pizzas, etc.). The main problem with this is boredom. First, my family gets tired of eating the same thing. We tried doing Taco Tuesday for a while, and it didn’t take long for my family to be SO SICK of tacos that we’ve had them maybe once or twice since? (My earliest reference to implementing a weekly Taco Tuesday was early August, and my family was sick of it by September 3.) Second, I get tired of making the same thing. I LIKE to try new things, I LIKE to experiment. This is probably the best option, though.
5. Letting everyone fend for themselves.I am very tempted by this option, I have to tell you. My husband can make himself some Bolognese or turkey chili on a weekend, and then eat that every night. And I can make my own food. (Carla, of course, will have the same rotation of foods she will eat/tolerate that she always does.)
6. Probably the real answer is some combination of the above. I wonder if I can make my husband responsible for one meal a week, at least on weeks when he isn’t on call. Maybe a weekend meal. And we already usually go out to eat one night a week. Maybe we make it A Thing. And maybe on our after-school activity nights, we do something prepared from the grocery store. And then the other three nights, we can do old standbys. That sounds possibly doable. We’ll see how it goes in practice.

Are there ideas I’m missing? Have you ever had a cooking slump like this before? And, if yes, how did you climb out of it? Do you and your spouse divide cooking duty, and, if so, how?

Read Full Post »

SIX! and Rainbow Leopard Birthday Success (Despite the Usual Bumps Along the Way)

You guys, I think I am going to LOVE age six.

I somehow managed to sidestep most of my Annual Mooning About My BAYYYYBEEEE Getting Older. I’m not going to lie – there were some tears, and some general stomping around that I attributed directly to said mooning. But it seemed less severe than in years past? Maybe because I was so busy?

Do you remember when I briefly fretted about Carla’s birthday a few months ago? I carried through with the rainbow leopard theme. (Cut to my perplexed mother-in-law, “Is ‘rainbow leopard’ a TV character?”) Making this theme work was Not Easy. Despite the fact that both rainbows and leopards are SUPER popular right now, I had the hardest time finding anything that combined the two. It was even tricky to find much that was leopard print!

BUT I SUCCEEDED.

Invitations

The invitations I wanted were too expensive (about $40 for 20 invitations, because of course you can only buy them in batches of 15 or 20, and we invited 16 girls) (and that $40 doesn’t include shipping [$7.99] or postage [$8.00]). Sigh.

Around here, people do e-vites for just about everything, so I started looking on e-vite sites and found these lovelies. But my husband refused to pay money to send an e-vite, so I GRUDGINGLY admitted that probably not a single parent would even remember the theme of our e-vite and sent a free one that was about painting (Carla had a painting party at one of those places geared toward women who want to drink wine and paint sunsets.). I was NOT PLEASED because I like things to match all the way through, but OH WELL.

Paper Goods and Other Decor

After you all kindly recommended against spending $60 on rainbow leopard print paper plates and napkins on Zazzle, I came to my senses. (I mean, I wasn’t REALLY going to do it anyway.) (Was I?) I started looking for alternatives.

Lots of places had rainbow options – Party City has an especially large selection. (Side note: Only one place I looked – was it Party City? I can’t remember – had an array of plain napkins/plates in all the colors of the rainbow. I would have gone with that a long time ago, but it was one of the last places I looked.) But man did I want rainbow leopard ones! I kept googling and searching Amazon and Target. And then one day the clouds parted and a little lightbulb appeared over my head and it said, “Walmart!” So I went to the Walmart website and voila! There were the EXACT PLATES AND NAPKINS I had been dreaming of! And GOLD leopard print candles, to boot! AND the plates and napkins were something like $2 a package! I spent $12 total. A STEAL.

(Photos from walmart.com. The cake is there only to illustrate the leopard print candles, which is difficult to glean from the photo alone.)

Of course, they were only available in the store, and the store in question was 45 minutes away. But I drove that 45 minutes, I’ll tell you! I haven’t been in a Walmart in years and I don’t feel any urge to go back again soon, but it really came through for me in a pinch.

Before I found the magical Walmart plates, I was planning on using plain plates in rainbow colors. So I bought some rainbow leopard print cupcake wrappers, excuse me, baking cups, so that there would be some rainbow leopard flair on the plain plates. I ended up using them anyway, despite the overabundance of rainbow leopard print. They were very cute and, even though there were 36 in the package, I wish I had bought more of them.

Amazon had balloons that matched the baking cups, so I bought two of those. Even though our local balloon place claims they can’t guarantee balloons you buy outside of their store, I have had good luck bringing in my own balloons. And the rainbow leopard balloons lasted much longer than the regular latex balloons (in rainbow colors) I ordered from the balloon place.

This balloon would still be hanging around if I had not finally popped it like I did all the other ones. My child goes NUTS for balloons, which is very cute but also prevents her from doing things in a timely fashion like brushing her teeth or going to bed.

By the way, did you know there is a helium shortage?!?! There IS! So the balloon place only allowed you to get, like, ten balloons. (I certainly did not need more than ten balloons.) And that number was lower if you had mylar balloons. It was wild.

Party Favors

The whole reason I went with this rainbow leopard theme in the first place is because I found the perfect party favor.

 

 I am cute and cuddly and also a Rainbow Mother Effin’ Leopard.

Photo from amazon.com

Listen, kids LOVE the favor bags they get at parties – the ones with little jars of bubbles and tattoos and pencils and bracelets and tiny containers of slime. They go bonkers for that stuff. My kid sure does. But I am a Mean Mom and I do not like that stuff in my house. It ends up on the floor or in a drawer and heaven forbid I try to throw it away because it is SO PRECIOUS.

So I fight this trend in my own way, by spending what I would have spent on tchotchkes on a single gift. Last year I did a unicorn search-and-find book. The year before, when Carla had a pizza party, I gave the kids a Curious George and the Pizza Party book. This year, I had my eye on a rainbow leopard plushy, which I knew Carla would go NUTS for (she loves stuffed animals) and which was $5 apiece at Party City. (Michael’s later had a sale on the very same leopards, but the sale was only applicable in-store, and I didn’t feel like running around to all the Michael’s stores in the region to track down 16 leopards, if they even existed in such a quantity. Plus I found the sale something like four days before Carla’s party, so I was already panicked about OTHER things.)

So I got 16 leopards and my mother-in-law and I wrapped them in plastic favor bags and tied each bag with a rainbow of ribbon colors. The girls loved them.

I also got Carla a bigger version, for $8 from Amazon, and a little keychain version from Claire’s for $3. She loves having a mommy and a baby leopard, too. And now I have three rainbow leopards of varying sizes in my house, but it’s still better than a bag of tchotchkes.

The Sweet Treats

As in previous years, I made cupcakes for the friends birthday party and a cake for the family birthday party. I used this tried-and-true cake recipe for the cake and I used boxed mix for the cupcakes. The cake recipe makes GOOD cake (and my ex-confectionary caterer mother-in-law says it has a really nice crumb), but, as I have said before, it is DENSE. The denseness was a good thing for this recipe, because it is a layer cake which requires nice sturdy cake to hold up to the all the frosting, and, frankly, the batter was nice and thick which was a desirable consistency for all the piping I had to do. But I really think I need to just go with a mix in future years. (I have said this before.) I find that it tastes just as good (and I always amp up the vanilla flavor with extra vanilla bean paste) and the texture is just so much softer, which I prefer.

(Note to Future Me: NO ONE CARES if it comes from a box! And you like it better!)

Making rainbow leopard baked goods was very time consuming. First you have to make your batter. Then you have to divide it and color it.

So many dishes.

Then you have to do the layers. Simple enough, but time consuming.

In brief: You do a thin layer of white batter. Then you draw thin concentric circles in black. Then you “trace over” the black circles in a thick layer of colored batter, varying the color order so that you don’t have a big clump of all-purple spots. Then you “trace over” the colored circles in another thin layer of black batter. Then you fill in and cover everything with a thin layer of white. Then you repeat, making sure to vary your color order every time, until your cupcake cups/cake pans are half full.

I kept forgetting which colors I’d used… and forgetting whether I’d remembered to add the top layer of black batter… And at one point I ran out of white batter and had to make a new batch. SIGH. I learned the hard way that you really have to use MORE of the colored batter circles in between your black batter circles – that seems to be the key to getting real leopard-like spots.

Cute even before you open it up!

The cake is the same thing, batter wise.

Much easier to do a thin stripe of black and a thick stripe of color because I had more batter/surface area to work with. I also used a smaller piping tip for the black batter.

And then the frosting is hard, too – you have to make it, do your crumb coat, chill your cake, divide out the rest of your batter, color it. Then you have to frost the thing. I bought myself a cake turntable (this particular one because it also came with icing tips, and I wanted more icing tips because I had so many colors to work with, and a bunch of icing bags, and a frosting scraper, AND a bunch of other useful goodies – totally worth it; would buy again), which was tremendously helpful in frosting this particular cake. You pipe on big thick strands of frosting in the color order you want, and then you hold the frosting scraper vertically against the side of the cake and turn the turntable and the frosting gets nice and smooth. We all have our particular gifts, and doing anything resembling straight lines is not one of mine, so the layers were neither even nor straight. But I still thought it came out well. For my skill set.

The top was another matter. It seems like it would be much the same thing: you pipe on big thick circles of frosting in the color order of your choice and then position the scraper so that one corner is in the middle and the other corner is at the very edge of the cake (this only worked for me, by the way, because my cakes were six-inch rounds; you’d need a much bigger icing scraper for a bigger cake) and then you gently press down while turning the turntable. Not as easy. Despite my crumb coat, some of the frosting kept un-sticking from the cake and I had to re-pipe some colors, which resulted in some color bleeding and a VERY thick top layer of frosting.

The top view is not as perfect as I’d like, but WE PUSH ON NONETHELESS.

Oh well. This is what happens when you are an amateur home baker, I guess.

I would say that both the cake and the cupcakes were successful. The cupcakes slightly moreso, both from an aesthetic and taste perspective. I did some practice cupcakes, which looked NOTHING like leopard print inside. But I think I figured out where I was going wrong, and in the end, the leopard print spots looked leopard-y enough if you squint.

Take 1: This is when I realized I needed to really amp up my use of the colored batter.

Take 2: Slightly better on the color-to-black-batter ratio, but now not enough spots.

Final take: Not perfect, but pleasingly leopard-ish. The kids LOVED these, by the way.

OH. I also was dithering about the frosting for the cupcakes. I thought about doing rainbow swirls. But instead, I found some rainbow leopard print edible toppers on Etsy (from CustomCakeImage4U). They came promptly, they were super easy to use, and I think they looked really cute. They were expensive, but I had an Etsy gift card and this seems like the perfect thing to spend it on. So the final product may be garishly overly leopard-y, but I had a theme and I WENT ALL THE WAY with it.

So charming in their little box! The cupcake toppers feel like heavy plasticky paper. You just set them on top of the frosting, kind of smooth them on, and then let them meld for a few hours.

I don’t think the cupcakes were as pretty as the unicorn cupcakes last year or as vivid as the rainbow cupcakes the year before, but I feel fairly pleased with them.

The cake was, as I said, a bit disappointing texturally. But I think the colors came out exactly right. Very Lisa Frank.

 

The lines aren’t perfect and it’s not perfectly straight but I am still pleased.

The internal spots, while definitely not as leopard-y as I wish they had been (they came out more stripe-y, I’d say), were at least leopard-y enough to give the appropriate leopard impression.

And I ended up feeling very pleased with the frosting. I did the black dot outlines (I have no idea what else to call them) by hand with black frosting (I bought special super black food coloring for the black batter and frosting so they would look truly black and not grey) and I think they turned out well.

So much frosting.

Did I mention that MY OVEN DIED? It did. I had already made the cupcakes. But I was in the middle of piping colored frosting into my cake pans when I realized I needed to preheat my oven. I turned it on… and it just never heated up. (Turns out the ignitor was dead. It is fixed now.)

I took my cake pans over to my neighbor and asked if I could use her oven, and she said yes because she is a dear, darling saint of a woman, and her oven cooked them PERFECTLY. And I had an extra excuse (besides too much baking) to eschew cooking for the weekend.

These two breezy paragraphs make it seem like my oven dying amid the most stressful and emotionally fraught time of year was no big deal. And it really wasn’t, in the grand scheme of things. But at the time I WAS A MESS. It was a DISASTER. Anyway, all’s well that ends well.

While I still think my rainbow cake takes the cake (heh) for being the prettiest, most professional cake I’ve ever made, I feel satisfied with this rainbow leopard cake. It’s not perfect, but it got the job done. And I don’t need to do it ever again.

The Party

The biggest birthday disappointment (for me) (moreso even than the oven dying) was the party itself. It was, as I said, held at one of those paint-while-you-drink places. They specifically offer a KIDS’ BIRTHDAY PARTY, and I specifically asked for — and was told I would get — an instructor who is good with kids, but nonetheless it was not a good fit. I could rant on for thousands of words except a) boring and b) I already sent many Very Displeased paragraphs to the company via their online feedback process (and have heard NOTHING) so I will spare you. Suffice it to say it was not a good choice.

Impromptu table scape my dear mother-in-law set up after they informed us that the party room in which our party was to be held didn’t have enough chairs or table space for all 16 girls. Wait, no, they didn’t inform us; I counted the chairs at the single table they had for us and realized there were only EIGHT. For SIXTEEN girls. Even though I’d had to tell them ahead of time how many kids were coming, and even though I’d visited in advance, and they’d shown me the room (with a different set up, so I didn’t know about the lack of space issue), and I’d planned my entire decor set up (tablecloths, snacks, etc.) based on being in that other room. I AM STILL NOT OVER IT. Thank goodness for my mother-in-law. Look how she folded the Walmart napkins so that they all say happy birthday! Look at how she used WRAPPING PAPER as a tablecloth! Genius! Savior!

Well. For ME it was not a good choice. The kids seemed to enjoy themselves. Some of the things that I hated – lack of specific, clear instructions geared toward a six-year-old, unanticipated breaks during which nothing was planned, looooong stretch of time at the end that was supposed to STILL BE PAINTING PARTY (I am not going to start; deep breaths) (this is just the tip of the complaint iceberg; deep breaths) – the girls either didn’t mind, didn’t notice, or straight-up loved those things. They each painted a painting, and their wildly diverse interpretations of the exemplar painting were super cute and they all got to take those home with them. Plus, they are all schoolmates, so they had fun together. Carla, I must point out, seemed to really have a great time. And I suppose that’s all that matters.

(Grumble, grumble, I am so glad I thought to bring packages of [rainbow] goldfish so that we had something to do when the instructor said, at 10:30 in the morning, that it was time for a break so the paint could dry and the kids could eat. The pizzas were not arriving until 11:30! No one had told me there would be a break in the middle of the morning! What the manager told me was that the party would be 90 minutes of painting and then we’d have one hour for eating and hanging out! ARRRGHHHH!)

The painting exemplar that all the kids were instructed to paint. Not a leopard, but at least it’s got the RAINBOW thing going for it.

Carla’s interpretation. I am going to frame it and hang it in our living room whenever I finally get  around to making a gallery wall. 

Anyway, it all worked out okay. (Grumble, grumble.) But I would NOT recommend this particular place for your birthday party needs. Not for six-year-olds, at least. I don’t know if it would be better for adults, but at least it’s probably easier to overlook some of the disappointing stuff if you’re sipping from a big ol’ bottle of wine.

The Newly Minted Six-Year-Old

Birthday party woes and triumphs aside: Let’s talk about the kiddo herself.

Five was a great year. But now, we are six. And six is great so far. My big kiddo (heaven help you if you call her “little”) (“I am NOT little, Mommy! I am big!”) still wakes up singing. She is the most cheerful, agreeable person I know, even as she is cheerfully, agreeably doing exactly what SHE wants instead of what you have asked her twenty-nine times to do. She is curious and enthusiastic and full of ideas. She is actually, really, truly READING now, although I think she’d still prefer it to be EASY at all times. She is still in nonstop motion from dawn until her body finally just shuts off, midthought, at a later time than one might hope. She is fun in new and unanticipated ways – participating in real conversations at dinner time, for instance. She craves responsibility and gets so visibly proud when you cheer her efforts and successes. She loves Barbie and the Wow! in the World podcast and stuffed animals and Piggie and Gerald.

I got to see, for the first time, an example of the “leader” she can be in a group setting. Her teachers have been saying this for years, that she’s a leader, that other kids are drawn to her and want to follow her lead. I thought that was code for “bossy,” to be honest. Or maybe… a kinder, more diplomatic way of reframing what we once called “bossy.” And, yes, she certainly seems to enjoy ordering people around. But at her birthday party, the staff member at the painting place was less than experienced at working with the six-year-old set. Turns out that there is some downtime during the painting experience, during which the kids do… what? No one prepared me for this, and I, too, am inexperienced with entertaining a large group of giggly first graders. He tried, at first, but his voice was too gentle and/or the game he suggested was not doing it for this crowd. When the kids were uninterested and started milling about in a vaguely pre-chaotic manner, Carla took over. She – very loudly; her voice needs no megaphone – directed everyone in a game of Three Things (where someone gives three clues and the group has to guess what the person is describing). Everyone listened to her and participated in the game until the instructor said it was time to resume painting. Later, she led the entire group in some loud chanting. And, seeing her potential, I then asked her to redirect the group into something more positive, which she did! And then, when the painting party ended a FULL HALF HOUR before it was supposed to, she led the kids in a dance party and then in a series of poses that I was able to photograph for posterity. They ALL listened to her and enthusiastically did what she ordered them to asked. It was magic.

She is such a great kid. She becomes more interesting and more kind and more fun and more challenging and more HER every year that I know her. I am so deeply grateful that she is my daughter. That I get to be her mom.

There you go, Internet. Another birthday in the books.

Read Full Post »