mamajoan

(Insert the usual astonished/embarrassed sentence about how long it has been since my last post, here.)

So, a lot to post about, but let's start with: We got a new kitty. It was my big Hanukkah present to the kids (and myself).

( all about our new cat )

Anyway, so aside from those minor, uh "logistical" issues, we just love our new kitty. Oh, and this would be where I post pictures, right? Well, if you're my Facebook friend and you somehow managed to miss them, some of the pix are here. And here are a couple more -





(In that first one you can see a bit of her belly which was still naked from being spayed. It has taken a long time for that fur to grow back!)

The other day I hit a new parenting milestone: I pulled my first tooth! It was Isaac's fifth loose tooth and the first time he ever managed to get up the nerve to ask me to pull it out, so I felt that I needed to "woman up" and overcome my native squeamishness about loose teeth.

( the gory details ;) )

In other Isaac news, he has become very interested in geography and the U.S. States. It all started a few months ago when he became aware that each state has its own license plate(s) and that we can see a lot of different states' license plates as we go about our daily lives. It became a game/challenge to see how many far-away states we could find on the cars in our area. Pretty soon he (and I) became expert at recognizing the most common states (i.e., the ones nearest to us) from a distance, just by their color schemes. Toward the end of the summer, as we were going out to our family's summer cottage (an hour's drive) almost every weekend, I started printing out lists of the states, and Isaac would spend the entire drive using tally marks to keep track of how many plates he saw from each state. (I also put the Canadian provinces on the list, since we do occasionally see one of those.) When we went to NYC, he made many jokes about the fact that there were New York license plates everywhere ;) and he was very excited whenever we spotted a Massachusetts plate in New York. :)

Then he became aware that each state has its own design on a quarter, so now he's constantly wanting to look at the quarters in my pocket. Grandma got him a placemat for the kitchen table that has a map of the US, which I think she intended for him to use to learn the states and capitals ;) but of course he decided to pile the quarters onto it, each quarter on its state, which of course doesn't work too well for some of the smaller states. ;) So then grandma gave us a quarter display folio thingie that she bought back when the state quarters were first introduced -- a map of the US with cut-out spaces for you to put the quarters in. Isaac is very pleased.

Meanwhile I also introduced him to the Place The State game, which he is greatly enjoying. And (shh! don't tell him!) he might even be learning a thing or two from it! ;)

Isaac has also developed an interest in football. He enjoyed watching the past two Super Bowls with grandma, but then this summer/fall he started getting more into it. At first I thought it was just a substitute for baseball when that season ended, but it's clear that he actually enjoys football too. It turns out that they have a football simulation game (Madden) on the PSP at his summer camp/afterschool, so he has been playing that and has actually learned a fair bit about the game and the teams and the players from it. (For a while there I was a bit displeased with the amount of time he was spending on the Playstation at afterschool, but the administrator seems to have realized that it was excessive and has put in much firmer limits on it.) Now he wants to watch the Patriots game every weekend, and when there isn't a Patriots game on, he wants to watch whatever other football game happens to be on. ;) I'm actually starting to get moderately interested in it as well -- for years I couldn't at all figure out the game; it honestly just looked to me like they stood around for a while, then they formed up, and then they all jumped on top of each other and the fans cheered. LOL. ;) But now I'm starting to pick up on the basics of how the game works, and it's fun to watch sometimes -- especially when my second-grader has to explain what happened to me. ;) heh.

Don't tell Isaac (shh!) but I'm pondering the idea of getting him the Madden game for the Wii as a winter-holiday present. I keep waffling back and forth on whether this is a great idea or a completely terrible idea. ;)

I could write a lot more about Isaac, but then I'd never get this posted.... ;)

Isaac's birthday party was on Sunday but I'll get to that in a moment. First I have to post about the tooth drama.

On Friday, his actual 7th birthday, I took him to the Red Sox game. We were fortunate that one of Isaac's friends' parents had tickets to the game that day and when they found out it was his birthday, they gave the tix to us. Wasn't that nice of them?? :)

( Alas, drama ensued and we missed most of the game because of a loose tooth. )

So the game was a bust, alas. :( The Sox won, but we barely saw any of it. Oh well.

The tooth remained in Isaac's mouth, extremely loose, all through Saturday. Isaac barely ate all day because he was too nervous about jiggling it. So then he was hungry and cranky. *Eyeroll* He managed to figure out how to eat by the end of the day, though -- just in time to lick the beaters after I baked his cake. ;) Speaking of which, more on the cake later.

Sunday morning, Isaac was horsing around on my bed with Ruthie when something happened to loosen the tooth even further. It was hanging down -- I truly see what people mean when they say "hanging by a thread" -- I couldn't believe it was still managing to hang on. It was ridiculous. Isaac was whining and complaining about it, but he still wouldn't let me pull it out nor would he pull it out himself. He just sat drooling into a cup and complained that it was "not fair" that Ruthie got to lick a beater of the frosting and he didn't. *Massive Mega-Eyeroll*

The trouble is that I'm pretty squeamish about loose teeth (was even when I was a kid) so I wasn't particularly motivated to force the issue. Luckily, I knew that I didn't have to, because my mom was coming over to help get ready for the party. ;) Sure enough, as soon as grandma arrived, she pulled the tooth out (which took almost no effort at all, so loose it was) and then all was well. Huzzah!!

( Picture of Isaac with the big gap in his mouth where that tooth used to be )

Then it was time for Isaac's party, and a good party it was. Like every year, I fretted and fretted about the weather -- it looked like rain for sure, so I tried to plan a bunch of indoor activities and hoped like hell that the kids wouldn't destroy my apartment ;) -- but just like every year, I got incredibly lucky and the weather held. It was cloudy and on the cool side, but not actually raining so we spent basically the whole party outside in our back yard. Yay!!!

Isaac and his friends did get a little wild, but it was okay. There were six 7-year-olds and two 4-year-olds (Ruthie and cousin Baz) which was a good number.

We tie-dyed t-shirts for the party activity. I had wanted to do that last year but wasn't sure the kids were up for it -- this year I decided to go for it. Big thanks to my friend Julie (pedrosmom) for all the tips and info. It went really well. I had everything prepped and ready, and the kids seemed to really enjoy it. Of course, the sad part is that the shirts have to sit in the dye for 24 hours, so I didn't get to see what any of the other ones looked like, other than Isaac's and Ruthie's. I hope the other parents will send me some pix.

( Picture of Isaac and Ruthie in the tie-dye shirts that they made )

For the party, I made again the rainbow cake, which I had made for Ruthie's birthday as well. Oops, I just went back and looked and I see that I never posted the pix of Ruthie's cake here. Well, to recap, the basic idea comes from here and what you basically do is mix up the batter for a white cake, divide the batter into six portions, color each portion a color of the rainbow (and you HAVE to use the gel food coloring -- it gets the colors so bright and vivid not like the liquid stuff), then you sploop each color into the pan one at a time, in order (and yes "sploop" is the technical term used by professional bakers), and it bakes up into a rainbow. It looks so cool, as you'll see in a moment. In fact, it looks a lot like tie-dye, so we should really call it tie-dye cake given that we tie-dyed at the party! :) But it's really neat-looking and what the kids really like about it is that you frost it, and it looks just like an ordinary cake, and then you cut it and all your friends go "Wow!"

Anyway, Isaac decided that he wanted white frosting on his cake, not chocolate frosting like Ruthie had. So I was mixing up the frosting and then I thought that it might look kind of boring just all white, so I thought maybe I could use some of the leftover food coloring to make decorations; but as it turned out, the frosting recipe made just exactly enough to cover the cake, so there was none left for getting creative with. ;) But then I was looking at it, and I thought, gee, it's round and white. What's round and white and the object of a deep abiding obsession for Isaac? Duh, a baseball of course!!

So I used chocolate chips and red sprinkles (which I laboriously picked out of the container of multicolored sprinkles) to turn the cake into a baseball cake. I'm very proud of it. :) It came out great!

( Pix of my awesome cake )

Phew!!! I could go on and on, but this post is long enough already. ;)

Oh life is just so busy and I want to post here but I don't and then I fall so far behind. augh.

So much has been happening! I shall attempt some bullet points.

* Mom had her last chemo treatment two weeks ago. This weekend we're having a party to celebrate. It's great to have chemo behind us, but now we have to wait and worry and wonder whether the cancer is going to come back. I'm staying positive though. I think everything will be fine.

* I bought a new fridge!! w00t!! I am loving it. I got the kind with the freezer on the bottom, which is great. I love not having to bend over to look for stuff in there. It has only been here a couple of weeks so it's still all nice and clean and shiny-looking. That won't last. ;)

* Isaac started Little League and is loving it. I'm discovering how erratic things can be when you have an all-volunteer organization. *roll eyes* Isaac's coach is not entirely dedicated to the task, shall we say, but a few of the other parents on the team have been stepping up, so it's going okay.

* Ruthie is toilet-trained!!! I am so freaking excited. No more diapers in our house! Well, we still have pull-ups for nighttime, but that doesn't count.

* Ruthie is also starting to read! I spelled some words on the fridge with letter magnets and was very surprised at how easily she sounded them out. This sentence shall serve as a placeholder for a lengthier musing on how different are the learning paths of the first vs. second child, based on parental involvement/attention level. ;)

* Maybe you heard that we had a water emergency here in the Boston area. A pipe burst and we weren't supposed to drink (or wash hands with, or cook with) the tap water for several days. It was an adventure. It made me think deep thinky thoughts about privilege, luxuries, assumptions, all that good stuff.

* I continue to read a lot. My "read in 2010" tag on LibraryThing is up to 21 books. I just finished The Girl Who Played With Fire, the second in the Millennium series, and am on the edge of my seat waiting for the third book, which ww1614 kindly offered to send me. w00t.

* Stuff is happening at work, but I'm not talking about that right now. Oh, but I will say that I got a cost-of-living raise, which is nice. It only amounts to about 2.5% of my salary, but every little bit helps.

That's about it for now. But I'll close with ( a few funny things the kids have said lately. )

(Originally posted on Facebook Feb 1st, 2010. Posted here April 1st, 2014; backdated.)

In the car on the way home tonight, out of the clear blue sky Isaac says: "Mama, how does a man put out sperm?"

me, thinking frantically "oh crap, I haven't gotten to this chapter in the parenting manual yet!" replied: "Uh, well, it comes out of his penis."
Isaac, not to be put off by such a blatant cop-out: "Yeah, but how does it come out?"
Me: (babbles something about testicles and when a man gets to be a grownup he can touch his penis in a certain way and then the sperm comes out. OY)
Isaac: "Oh."
Ruthie: "Does Uncle B. have a penis?"
Me: "Well, he's a man, so yes. And so does Cousin B."
Ruthie: (names a bunch of her preschool classmates who are boys)
Me: (acknowledges that all of the above have penises)
Ruthie: "Do you know who else is a boy?"
Me: "Grover." [our cat]
Ruthie: "Yeah, but Grover has a vulva anyway."
Me: "Uh no, Grover has a penis. We just can't see it with all his fur."
Isaac: "You can tell by looking at a dog."
Me: "That's right, if you look at a dog you can see if it has a penis."
Isaac: "Okay, let's stop talking about our privates now."
Me: "Well, we can stop. Or we can keep talking about it if we want to. If you have any other questions, you can ask them."

(thoughtful pause)

Ruthie: "How come some toilets flush all by themselves?"

So today was Ruthie's last day at daycare, and tomorrow she starts her new preschool. I feel weird about it all. On the one hand she's been at this daycare two years, and even when you've had as much trouble with a place as I've had there, you still form attachments which are hard to leave behind. OTOH, I know that this new place is going to be great for her, and for me.

The transition will probably be difficult for a bit, but we'll get through it. Ruthie has her brand-new lunchbox and sunglasses, her trusty flip-flops and teddy bear, and her newly blue-painted toenails. She's stylin'. ;)

It has been an eventful period in Ruthie's life. The whole dog-bite thing, the change of school, and she's also in the midst of potty training. ( a bit of potty talk and wonderings on how the school transition will affect her progress in that realm )

Anyway, her last day at the old place seemed to go fine. We brought cupcakes, and it turned out that another kid brought brownies because it was his last day too, so the kids got all sugared up. ;) At pickup time, all the teachers wanted hugs from Ruthie. The director said "if it doesn't work out, give us a call" which I guess was nice of her to say, even though I think there's a snowball's chance in hell of that happening. ;)

Meanwhile Isaac is going to the YMCA summer camp this week, which is ehh. It's fine, I guess, but most of the counselors are teenagers and there's less supervision than I would hope for. It's just one week so I'm gritting my teeth and going with it. Next week we have Monday and Tuesday off (no idea WHAT we'll do!) then he starts first grade on Wednesday, school Thursday, then off Friday through Monday for the Labor Day holiday, and resume school for real the following Tuesday. Whew! So it's going to be a busy couple of weeks. And on that note I better get to bed! ;)

( Our latest adventures in dog-bite aftercare )

In other Ruthie news, yesterday she wore underwear to daycare instead of a diaper, AND she stayed dry in them all day!!! Not a single accident!! I'm so excited. I can almost see the light at the end of the diaper-changing tunnel! :) She still asks for a diaper whenever she needs to poop, but hey, it's progress. Yay!

In unrelated news, I have decided that today's excursion is going to be a test run of the commute for the job that I'm really hoping to get. I'm going to take the bus from Ruthie's soon-to-be-new preschool, to the subway station, and then the subway to my hopefully-soon-to-be-new office, and see how long it takes. Of course, it won't be rush hour, so it's not a perfect test, but at least it'll give me an idea of what the situation looks like. Also, then I'll be right near the mall, where I've been wanting to go this week anyway. I'm going to be optimistic and buy some new work clothes. Or at least try some on. ;)

So anyway, I'm off to do that now. :) More later.

Wow, Ruthie had such the meltdown at bedtime tonight. I am exhausted. These two statements are related, but perhaps not in the immediately obvious way. I think that both Ruthie and I are suffering some major sleep deprivation due to the current state of our sleeping arrangements.

But I'm too tired to go into detail. heh.

of course, it also doesn't help that I'm fighting off a cold. And I got my period yesterday, way too early. I am very irritated about this. Just when I thought my periods were finally settling into a regular rhythm...But that's a whole other story.

It's a little hard not to laugh when a child is sobbing and blubbering out a completely incoherent "explanation" of what you did to make her cry (something to do with how I was reading the Dora book), but OTOH it's also sad to see a poor kid so, well, sad. And man oh man did she sack out like lightning when we finally lay down!

This week has been school vacation week and Isaac has been going to the "vacation camp" run by the agency that runs his afterschool program. Since vacation camp, unlike school, doesn't require you to arrive promptly at 8:10; and also since it's much closer to Ruthie's daycare, thus shortening the commute; we've thus gotten pretty lax with our mornings. And then with our evenings. All of which is a nice way of saying that I've been terrible about letting the kids stay up too late at night and take too long about waking up in the mornings. We're in for a rude awakening on Monday. I am determined to be better about bedtimes between now and then.

And on that note, I gotta get my own ass to bed soonest.

Right now I'm fighting a sensation of impending doom, brought on by the suspicion/paranoia that we're about to get hit by this horrible stomach bug that's going around. From what I understand, it tends to involve one day of vomiting followed by up to TEN DAYS of diarrhea. Augh!

I myself have been feeling mildly queasy for several days but no major symptoms. Tonight as I was tucking Isaac in, he suddenly started crying and said his tummy hurt. I ran for a bucket, but in another moment he seemed fine and went right to sleep. So, you know, it could have been a gas bubble. Who knows?

I just have a bad feeling about this, is all.

And did I mention that the washing machine is having issues such that currently we can only do a very small load at a time and then must wait several hours before we can do another? Yeah, that's going to work if I have two barfy kids. oy.

On that note, I better get to bed. I really expect to be woken up quite shortly by a barfing kid. Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong. O pessimism, you are indeed a cruel mistress!

Hello all my LJ friends! I am sorry to say that I have no idea what is going on with you. I haven't read my friends-list fully in ages. I have it as my browser homepage, and usually what ends up happening is that I open my browser and read whatever happen to be the 20 posts on the first page, and then get caught up into other stuff and never scroll back.

I feel a little weird about how out of touch I'm becoming with (what used to be) my major sources of online community, but well, that's how life is right now. I feel like there's just so much going on and I don't have enough brain to hold it all. Why do things have to keep on, like, happening?!

How am I? I am tired. Oh so tired. I find it hard to believe that I'll ever not be tired. I keep thinking that my life will be great, someday, when Ruthie learns how to sleep through the night. But so far it isn't happening. I feel I need to be doing something to help this along, but I'm too tired to figure out what, and then to commit to it. That's a whole other looonnnng post that I'll likely never write.

Isaac has been sick or "sick" a lot lately, as you may have read in my twitter posts. It has been confusing and frustrating. I'm now of the opinion that he was actually sick the first day (a week and a half ago) and since then has just been tired from school, plus is experimenting with the idea of "if I say my tummy hurts I get special attention." That's my current theory anyway. And yes, I had a talk with the afterschool people about the fact that you cannot just go "oh, he says his tummy hurts, he must be sick, let's call his mom." Dude, he's five. You need to exercise some frickin' judgment here.

Ruthie is doing well, aside from the whole not-sleeping thing. Daycare dropoffs are still iffy, but she's getting better all the time. And she's bursting with funny things to say, some of which I really hope to post here soon.

My mom is in Peru for two weeks. I am not panicking...give me a few more days. ;) Luckily we already have plans for both days of this weekend. Next weekend will be harder as it's a four-day one: Friday there's no school due to "teacher preparation day" and then Monday is Oppressing The Natives Day, oops I mean Columbus Day. ;) Luckily it seems that we already have plans for that Sunday and Monday; and our new babysitter (thanks to ww1614) will be able to watch Isaac for part of the day Friday, so hopefully we'll make it through. ;)

In case you missed it in my twitters, the other evening we came home to find Grover-kitty playing with an almost-but-not-quite-dead mouse. Yeah, that was definitely not one of my favorite moments in life. Ugh. :( On the plus side, I guess, now I know that Grover can catch a mouse. But then tonight ( kind of gross, sorry ) so now I get to fret about what to do about that. Argh!

Several family members and close family friends are having severe medical issues right now. This is definitely on my mind a lot lately.

Work is also in a very stressful and challenging (in both the good and the bad ways) phase right now. That's another post I'll probably not get a chance to write.

I guess that's about it in a nutshell. Okay, well, maybe a coconut shell. ;)