• Ever have one of those days where you take your kid to a cookout and the people there compliment you on having a well-behaved child and the best response you can manage is hollow laughter?
• Related: The Whining. 
• See also: The Interrupting.
• The friend who hosted the cookout came over to our house for dinner the next day brandishing a specimen jar with a dead bug in it. After the cookout ended, he decided to sleep outside under the stars and was awakened at 3 a.m by a bug crawling into his ear. It got stuck and spent a good half hour in there, and I quote, “screaming.” He poured hot water into his ear to kill it. Which worked. But then he REALLY couldn’t get it out. The ER doctor eventually tweezered it out for him. Would anyone else like to join me for therapy? It’s the description of the screaming that does it for me.
• Amazingly, after he shared all of this, we still fed him dinner.
• After she finished her meal, Eliza asked to be excused, left the porch, and went back to her favorite outdoor activity of late: digging up worms and bugs. She then clambered back onto the porch to show off her “worm farm,” which was a bucket of same, mixed with mulch. Even in light of the previous critter-related gross-out, I find this adorable. There is something about a grubby child who got that way because she is happily digging up worms that redeems even the whining/interrupting. 
• Also redeeming was our trip to Target to buy new, bigger-size underpants. She wanted car ones, and I was trying to figure out how I was going to finesse an explanation of gender roles in our patriarchal society when she spotted girl Madagascar underpants and decided she wanted those instead. Scornfully rejected, by the way: Princess and fairy underpants.
• My dear husband was sharing his early misadventures in the arena of romance with me and recounted a failed plan to woo a girl with Rush tickets. I gave him the Eyebrow of ‘Dude, That Right There Is Your Problem’ and explained to him that late-70s and early-80s prog-rock is an exclusively male-appreciated genre. He pressed his point with a, “What do you mean you’ve never seen Rush live??!” and I said, “Yes. Because I’m a GIRL.” 
• Somewhat later, he was sitting in the office noodling on his guitar and I said something complimentary to him about how I like having a cute boy who noodles around on his guitar sitting next to me. He gave me the Eyebrow of ‘Dude, You’re Full of Shit’ and pointed out that I do not like any of the bands whose songs he usually plays, which I felt was irrelevant because Pete Townshend is not a cute wuffly-haired boy sitting on the ottoman in my office noodling about on his guitar, but he and his eyebrow were not swayed. 
• He then played me a riff by some band and challenged me to ID the band in question. After I admitted that a. it was kind of pretty and b. I had no clue what the hell band wrote the song, he triumphantly informed me that it was by Yes, among the worst prog rock offenders. Then, he went on this big Youtube bender, showing me multiple clips of their concerts. “This was the best show of 1985!” he enthused, while I tried not to fall asleep. He once again expressed incredulity over my inability to be properly impressed by the guitar noodling of Rush, Yes, et al. “That’s because I have a vagina!” I said, and this mention of girl-parts finally had the desired effect of putting an end to the discussion. 
• Then we watched some more Friday Night Lights. We cannot stop, and we totally yell at the screen. It is worse than The Wire addiction. 
• Finally, I appear to have convinced Jim that it is OK not to buzz-cut his damn hair every 3 weeks. It’s like a reverse Delilah situation; he treats it like it’s a crime and it’s so much more flattering when he lets it get a little longer. I don’t know who gave that man fashion advice but I would like a word, please.

 Because Jim’s home throughout the day now, we’ve shifted our schedule around. I work long days Monday-Thursday so that I can have Fridays free. The long works hours are usually followed by karate classes on several of those days and so it is that several times a week, I see Eliza for about an hour before work and an hour or two before her bedtime.

I am here to admit to you that it is fantastic. 

I do not have to feed her (except breakfast, sometimes, but that’s always cereal). I do not have to dress her. I do not have to bathe her, convince her to use the toilet, brush her hair, wash her hair or any of the myriad other activities that make her screamy.

No. I am the fun parent. I come home and I play with her, help her get ready for bed, snuggle, and turn the lights off. She chatters about her busy day, I give her about a million kisses and read a story with silly voices, and I am a rock star. 

“Mommy! Hi! I am makin’ a ROLLERCOASTER for my animals! Come see!” she greets me at the door, grabbing my hand and tugging me toward one of her uniquely ramshackle toy constructions.

And because I’m not trying to figure out how to make her eat vegetables, or pee, or get ready for bath time, or trying to make the shopping list, I can pay attention to her and it is so much easier to play 10 games of Stop-and-Go when you aren’t thinking in the back of your mind, “Oh god, and after she goes to bed, I need to finish my take-home work, and do some laundry, and figure out dinner for tomorrow.”

For four years, I did all of these things, as well as most of the housekeeping. We had a cleaning lady, but I did most of the interim cleaning, the laundry, the vast majority of the shopping (both food and other), took Eliza to all her appointments, planned and cooked meals. I got up with her whether it was 5 or 7 a.m., made her eat her vegetables, wash her hair, etc.

I still do some of those things. I’m an early riser so I can suck it up with the morning barrage of preschooler questions. Laundry’s a free-for-all. On Friday afternoons it’s often just me and Eliza again so Jim can do fun or job-search-related things. I’ve been the one cleaning so far because my adult housemate suffers from Testosterone-Related Dirt-Blindness Syndrome, and on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, cooking dinner has become a cooperative affair. 

I no longer feel as though I am falling short if I don’t do everything, and I announced to Jim that he’ll have to wash her hair for the next 4 years before I will even entertain the thought of feeling guilty again. Kid comes home from camp filthy? NOT MY PROBLEM!

Ditto the kitchen. Plates in the sink? I used to stack them in the dishwasher right away because why the intermediate step, just put them in there already, JESUS because I only have 2 hours until I have to start cooking again, mach schnell with the washing! Now, hey, if they don’t get washed: NOT MY PROBLEM! I’m not the one who has to eat dinner off them the next day because I’m going to be at work or karate. This is requiring an exercise in letting go because he is one of those people who washes the dishes before he puts them in the dishwasher to a degree where I have accused him of deliberately *%^ing with me, but I am hopeful that he will stop once he notices the water bill has doubled. 

And then when Eliza goes to bed, I can hang out with my husband and watch TV or drink fancy drinks and enjoy his company instead of thinking, “Oh god, I have SO MUCH WORK to do.” I used to circle our house like a goddamn shark picking stuff up and putting it away, wiping down this, filing that. Now? NOT MY PROBLEM!

But why did I let it get to the point where I was doing almost everything? Because I’m stupid, that’s why, falling into that dumb trap where the mom does all the care-taking and housekeeping even if she works full-time outside the home.

When Jim urged me to just calm down with the homemaking because (whoever) was visiting never said anything about the dust when he lived by himself, I always used to get mad at him, because, no, (whoever) wouldn’t judge you, but now you have a wife and there is an expectation of higher standards. And yeah, I got the judgmental looks that prove I’m not paranoid to think that way. 

But really, why didn’t I just say, “Could you sweep the kitchen?” instead of stomping around with my damn broom muttering angrily about Testosterone-Related Dirt-Blindness Syndrome? I suspect Estrogen-Related Martyr Complex.

I suspect this situation will eventually get old (although it will take a really, really long time before I get tired of, “Oh, look, I have to go to karate now. To earn MONEY!”) And I can’t just go from everything to nothing, because that would flip the tables in a bad way.

But right now I really enjoy being the dad.

I never seem to get around to making a bucket list, which is a shame, because I’m forever doing stuff and realizing later, “Hey, that would be a great thing to have on a bucket list!” Related, of course, is that it would never occur to me to put, say, “witnessing the breaking of a world record” or “eat the world’s cutest sushi” on there in the first place.

In bold defiance of the Dropping of the Economic Sword of Damocles, we took a wee vacation this weekend. All parties appear to have enjoyed themselves, and I got to tend to my non-existent bucket list and ever so briefly meet musician/blogger the Saw Lady.

Herewith, my account.

Part A of the master plan was dropping Eliza off with her great-aunt and -uncle and cousin-once-removed (I can NEVER keep these things straight, but the young woman in question is Jim’s first cousin) for a sleepover. This, she was just fine with, because Jim had spelled out to me at breakfast before our departure, “I think they have plans to take her for I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M,” whereupon Eliza said, “Ice cream?!! Did you say ice cream, Daddy?!” 

I guess the spelling thing is over.

We packed her bikini, the top of which she decided during the car ride would also work as a hat:

We left the girl and headed city-wards and if you don’t mind sharing a bathroom European-style, you can get some shockingly good deals on nice hotel rooms, my friends. 

Nearby, we found a sushi place where I had the cutest handroll ever:

Look at it! It has a little red caviar nose and almond eyes and leaf ears! I had to eat the head last and felt a little guilty. 

Then, we went to Queens, where I had my one real I-miss-my-kid moment (not that we didn’t talk about her constantly, but mostly with a tone of “whooo, we’re vacation from the creature who wakes us at 6 and hangs off our limbs and puts tape on the cats and will only eat fruit when the moon is in the eighth house of Mars god I’m tired”). We took the train out to Citifield Stadium and as we approached, I could see the Unisphere, which would be on Eliza’s bucket list — if she were an exceptionally morbid 4-year-old, that is.

The reason for the train was that Jim scored us some cheap tickets (eBay FTW!) to see Paul McCartney, one of his long-time musical heroes. I am mostly eh about him (I know: BLASPHEMER!), but he does know how to put on a show. During Live and Let Die, the stage erupted in flashpots and fireworks, a move so grotesquely over-the-top that it came full circle to being awesome. If you watch the clips of the moment on youTube, you can actually hear people in the audience cracking up. 

The woman next to me lost her mind at this point and just screamed, “FIIIIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRR!”

We staggered back to the hotel via a greasy spoon diner. We woke up much too early the next morning, and I found a restaurant that had as its gimmick that everything was made with chocolate.

Here is all the food we had, and that photo also marks the official publication of Jim’s latest project, a full beard. He reports that it is “itchy”:

Jim had coffee and chocolate blintzes. I had white chocolate chai and “granola” and we split some bacon to take the edge off all the sugar. 

Here I am taking core samples of my granola and going, holy crap, what the hell is this?!

There was a layer of chocolate pudding, then a layer of vanilla, then some bananas, strawberries and blueberries, some praline crumbles, some candied macadamia nuts, some chocolate flakes, some rice krispies and some more praline crumbles. The whole thing was drizzled with honey. The part that made Jim laugh was that it came with a side of honey and teeny chocolate malt balls. “In case it wasn’t sweet enough?” he wondered. 

He helped me eat it, and then we but had sugar headaches and walked for about 2 hours. Very energetically.

Then we got lost for an hour under New York city due to a combination of user error (ours) and system clusterfuck (the subway) after which we were eventually disgorged onto the sidewalks of Astoria. We were there to attend the Musical Saw Festival and see, this is one of those thing that would never occur to me as an activity. I mean, until Natalia, AKA Saw Lady, started commenting on my blog last fall, I was barely aware such a thing as a musical saw even existed, but now I am On Board.

First of all, the church where it was held was PACKED. That’s why you must go to New York — there are actually enough people who are either into the musical saw, or up for something new, to fill a church.

The Saw Lady did something like triple duty, emcee-ing, organizing, and oh, yeah, performing. If you go to her site you can hear a snippet of what the saw sounds like, sort of a shivery, ghostly, wailing version of a violin, and one of the amazing things about the festival was the many genres that sound could cross. 

There were adaptations of classical pieces, as well as a band that sounded straight off the soundtrack for O Brother Where Art Thou? (We really, really liked these guys.) One of the most striking pieces was a modern piece with an opera singer. Not at ALL my usual cup of tea, but the soprano voice melding with the saw made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. 

Then somehow 53 saw players squished into the front of the church where they played, I’m guessing without rehearsal because some of them appeared to be meeting each other right there, a version of Ave Maria to break the previous world record for the number of saw players assembled and playing together at one time. It was gorgeous and spooky, and oh, yeah, very moving shutupI’mnottearingupatall.

And then it was intermission and I said hi to Natalia, who was carrying off both silver glitter eyeshadow and some serious goth pants, which means she is officially made of win:

Sadly, we had to leave the festival after intermission to go retrieve Eliza, but I like to hope we caught the best parts.

And then we went to pick up our the kid who had spent the day on the trampoline and in the pool at another cousin’s house and was consequently experiencing serious brain-is-full syndrome but I didn’t care because I was happy to see her.

I was going to write the whole entry with wonky prepositions, but it was hard and I am lazy, and also, thinking about tortilla chips with cheese on them is taking up too much brain space to allow for that kind of linguistic trickery.

So!

Here is the promised cat picture:

Am I right or am I right about the superiority of this cat portrait? My favorite is how she focused in on Barney’s claws and Moe’s ears. So telling in regard to how she relates to each of them.

Here she is being brave of the swimming pool, modified spider monkey version pre-mid-pool excursion:

Also, I planted these on the side of our house:

What are they?

Seriously: anyone? They seem to like it here, but I threw out the seed packet and now I have no idea what they. I want to know so I can plant a bunch more next year.

Help me out. Or I will send Eliza’s Meticulously-Arranged Menacing Pony Posse to kick your butts:

Jim moved one of them out of formation last night, and I was all, “Oooooh, boyfriend, you are in tuh-ROUB-ul! I am NOT taking the fall for you!”

I was right, she totally reamed him this morning.

He played me this old Twilight Zone episode about this crazy little kid who keeps his entire town hostage with his magical power to wish the adults who make him angry (by doing things like playing the wrong music) into oblivion. It’s clear to us the writer of that particular episode had a preschooler at his house.

It’s been all-karate, all the time over here lately, and I am sparing you my treatises on the same because I am boring even myself with the center of power and the responsibility and the community and the meditative focus and the blahblahblah OMG WILLSHESHUTUPIFWEHITHEROVERTHEHEADWITHHERBELOVEDNUNCHUCKS

Also, the blatherings about how Friday Night Lights is beyond brilliant and how Kyle Chandler’s clenched-jaw delivery when he’s freaking out is just fantastically delicious and how I want to be as great a mom to my teenage daughter someday as Tami Taylor is and the muuuuuusic. I want to have moody alienated guitar noodling playing in the background while I lie about listlessly drinking beer and screwing up my life. But then I remember I’m not a 17-year-old alcoholic fullback (thank god!), so there goes that.

(Although I must note that I am adding DMX’s Lord Give Me A Sign, a giddily ludicrous fist-pumping chant, to my running playlist thanks to a scene from the episode we watched last night. Listen:

Doesn’t that song just make you want to bust through one of them big banner things onto a field at the beginning of the state football championship? Wheeee!) 

My work schedule is all over the place lately since I don’t have to get home at a set time, and I am working a couple of long days in the interest of having some shorter days/days off to spend with Jim and Eliza.

That means that, day-camp notwithstanding, Jim is now the one planning outings and adventures with Eliza and I am the one hearing about them afterward. Playdates, splash-park-ings, they’re having a lovely time.

Yesterday, they went to a friend’s house to swim and they reported with great excitement that Eliza swam in the pool. She was wearing a life jacket, and she paddled around in the middle of the pool all by herself. 

This is HUGE progress, since she is usually clamped onto one of us so tightly in the water that she makes that suction-cuppy shhhhlll-POP noise when you peel her off your body. She is flat-out freaked out about water getting on her face, and yet, she is always very excited when we take her to a pool. Anyway, so yesterday was a big breakthrough, because a life jacket is the least she’s ever worn in a pool by herself, and apparently she kept her head enough to dog-paddle in the direction she wanted to go. (There must be a fist-pumping DMX song for this, too.)

I praised her to the skies, of course, and then we talked about how’s she’s not afraid anymore.

“I used to be scared of that, but now I’m brave of it,” she said, proudly.

And then I hugged her so tight I squashed her because that is just the cutest syntactical mangling EVER.

Tomorrow Jim is going to go see a Woody Allen movie (He knows better than to even ask, because that would occasion yet another rant. Living with me is full of rant-y fun!) which means I will have blog-time tomorrow night which means I will have time to scan for you the utterly delightful picture Eliza drew for us the other day of our two cats. A sneak preview: I mistook them for a caterpillar and a bug. Luckily, she thinks I am an idiot anyway (already! I thought I had another 10 years!) and escaped the incident emotionally unscathed.