Week 14: Baby, It’s COLD Outside!

Monday morning. We are all pooped out from the long, fun weekend. Mac wakes me with a cheerful, “Good morning, Mommy!” and then we all fall back asleep. It’s 8:20 when the boys get up and 8:42 when I follow. Good thing we don’t have to be at gymnastics at 9:15 today. I am not yet out of the bathroom when Mac, sitting outside the open bathroom door (Mommy never gets any “pry-cy”), laments when I tell him his dad isn’t coming until Thursday this week. “I want him to see my bear,” Mac begins. He is quite taken with his new Build-A-Bear, Love Bear. “But we’re leaving on vacation on Thursday,” he continues, covering his disappointment well. “We’re going up to Mexico.”

“Down?” I ask.
“Yes, down.”

Sailor walks by and sees Mac’s feet playing in the laundry basket that I have asked him to fill with last night’s pre-bath laundry, which is still on the hall floor outside the bathroom. “You going with a basket?” he asks, “Can I come too?”

“No.”
“I want go!”

I beckon Sailor forward and whisper in his ear that Mac is just pretending.

“Mac, you pretending?” Sailor asks. That’s right, son, don’t ever trust a word your mama says. Not!

“No.”
“I want go!”

So do I. By myself. With the door closed!

I give each boy his two gummy vitamins with breakfast. Last Thursday’s brunch with GrandDad is taking us quite far – the boys finish up my hash browns and French toast this morning. I walk out of the kitchen for a moment. And when I return Mac asks if he can have gum, meaning the gumball vitamins, which he does not know are vitamins. “No, I gave you gummies,” I remind him.
“I didn’t want them so I gave them to Sailor.”
Oh jeez!
I dial my best friend from college, whose boys are 8 and 5 and just enough older than mine to have done all the things mine are doing but not too long ago for her to have forgotten how to fix them. We discuss this at length and she determines nothing bad will happen to Sailor. I then confess to the boys that the fun gum and gummies I dole out each morning are actually vitamins. They take the news well. I explain the importance of not only taking their own so they can be strong and healthy, but of not taking the other guy’s so they don’t get sick. Last week I confiscated the gum ball vitamins anyway. I found artificial colors in them. I called the company. They did not believe they were doing my children any harm. I begged to differ and sent them the following letter:

29 November 2006

Vitaball
American Nutrition
166 Highland Park Dr.
Bloomfield, CT 06002

Dear Vitaball,

Thank you for having one of your representatives return my call earlier this week. Per that phone call, enclosed please find the package and one of each color of the Vitaballs in question.

While I understand that the amount of artificial colors and flavors you use in this product is both negligible and approved by the FDA, I think the point your company is missing is that while trace amounts of these artificial ingredients will do little or no harm over the course of a lifetime, the fact that so many products contain them mean that consumers are ingesting more than just trace amounts over the course of a day, week, month, year, lifetime, thus leading to the nation’s epidemic of cancer and other drastic illnesses.

You are producing a vitamin meant for children and I find it negligent and irresponsible that you feel that it’s ok to add artificial ingredients to a product meant to help children grow and stay healthy. The natural food stores are able to make palatable vitamins without these offensive ingredients. I think it would be appropriate for you to work with moms like me who care what we put into our children’s bodies, and make an all-new natural and safe product for our nation’s children.

In the meantime, I would appreciate a refund for the Vitaballs I purchased. Thank you.

SingleMommy
Concerned consumer and mom!

Hmph!

As predicted we are running late and I have to call Mac’s talking doctor to push our appointment forward 15 minutes. Which is relatively pointless as we arrive at 11:15 and wait an extra 10 minutes for her to appear. Sailor has a cold and sits quietly answering questions to Blues Clues, blaring on the television. It’s cute to watch him interact. Because of the timing and the fact that we were running inexplicably late this morning, I have no choice but to proceed through the golden arches to get lunch into Mac. I am loathe to do this. But I have to make a choice between feeding him garbage or sending him to school hungry. I wish I had remembered the left-over pizza in the fridge!
He is still eating his cheeseburger when he jumps out of the car to join his classmates and teacher at school. I dial my parents and tell them I have a flat tire, which I’d suspected all morning and had confirmed by a man in a van whom I believe followed me into the Micky D’s drive thru to inform me. I ask them to please call their road side service provider and get a guy over to change my tire. When we get home, Mom tells me the tire guy should be here in 55 minutes or less. At 2:00 the phone rings and an automated program asks me to tell whether or not I am satisfied by the roadside service I have received. A live woman comes to the line and tells me the driver should be here in 20 minutes. At 2:30 I call the driver’s number. “I’ve got one more call ahead of yours, but I’ll be there in 20 minutes,” he promises, but then tells me he is in a suburb that he could only reach my neighborhood in 20 minutes from at 2:00 in the morning or if he had a helicopter. I explain that I am home with my sick 3-year-old and that it’s 17 degrees outside and I do not want to walk with him outside to get Mac from school, which I will have to leave to do in 20 minutes. He says he’ll be here.

He is not. My parents come home to watch Sailor and I run to school. It’s cold outside! When Mac and I are walking I ask him what he learned in French class today. “Stuff I already knew,” is our standard answer. And I fear it will remain such at least through the 3rd grade.

We come home and eat cookies and drink chocolate milk. Sailor is asleep downstairs. Mac wants to help me wrap Christmas gifts. He wants to do the tape. This is going to be a long project.

At 4:30 I call and I am given an estimated arrival time of 20 minutes. I have conversations with the dispatcher.

Mac and I run out the door at 2 minutes til 5:00 for his 5:00 tap class.

At 5:50 I call home. Will I make it to Old Orchard by 7:00, I wonder. I am meeting my best friend for coffee and girl time. I am home by 6:10 and my tire is still flat. I call my best friend to reschedule our coffee date. I call the dispatcher again. She relays a story about a driver who went home early due to a death in the family and another who had his brakes go out. I explain how many people have been inconvenienced today. She apologizes and tells me a driver should be here in – you guessed it – 20 minutes. She gives me the number of her supervisor. He is barely sympathetic, though he tries to pretend to be. At 7:30 I call the roadside assistance line and I think I have reached India. I explain that I have been waiting for 7 hours. “It’s freezing cold outside! What if I’d been stranded with my kids?! We’d be out of gas by now! We’d be frozen to death by now!” I recommend they fire the towing company and she offers to file a complaint. Meanwhile, she will call another company and send them out right away. The driver will be there within 1 hour and 10 minutes, she promises. And true to her word, he is. On the dot. It’s 9:00 p.m.

I have read Mac 2 chapters of his new Geronimo Stilton book. I read Sailor a Curious George book. I am being a bit silly and I read, “This is Seymore.” He is momentarily confused by the word. “What?” Then he gets me. “No, George!” he says. Instead of “monkey” I call George a chicken. “He not a chicken!” Sailor says, full of giggles. “He’s Curious George!”
“But what animal is he?” I ask.
My smarty boy answers, “Chimp!” And indeed he is. For as we all know, monkeys have tails and Curious George does not.
I call the Man with the Yellow Hat the Man with the Purple Hat. Try as he might, Sailor cannot say “Yellow,” but instead says, “Lellow,” which I imitate. He is giggling like crazy and trying so hard to articulate this difficult word. He hears that I am saying it incorrectly but cannot get it right himself. I don’t want to help him because I like the way he says it. “Lellow.”

He comes into Mac’s room later and says even with lying up on two pillows he can’t sniff. Something about the sofa works like magic and so he sleeps there.

Tuesday after school the first thing Mac says to me is, “Hi, Mom. I had a little talk with the principal today.” As if this were an every day occurrence. “Really?” I ask. “What about?” “About picking up snow.” I probe for details. He tells me Miss H took him, just him, to see the principal during library time, and the principal told him not to pick up snow outside. "When were you picking up snow?" I did not see him do this. It’s so cold out today I only let him out of the about 90 seconds before the bell rang. “I was trying to throw some snow at the wall but I hit Victor in the head by accident.” I see. I am upset that Mac didn’t remember being told yesterday not to throw snow that has turned to ice. I am upset that the teacher took it straight to the big guy without first talking to me. And I am slightly upset that Mac doesn’t seem upset at all. “Is there a note in your folder about this?” I ask. “No.” I will have to follow up. Ridiculous, I think. My 5 ½-year-old kindergartener in the principal’s office for throwing snow!

We play at the French family’s house after school and the kids fill up on French cookies, grapes and Clemetines and I learn that computers from France have different keyboards than ours. Strange. I only realize this when I can’t find M. It’s in the wrong place.

I have rescheduled my plans from last night to tonight and run the kids home at 6:00. I get stuck in traffic and I’m starving. It’s 7:00 when I make it to Toys R Us in the ‘burbs. My best friend shows up a few minutes later, dressed all in black topped with a baseball cap and I am reminded of her very short hair days in the late 1990s when people assumed she and I were a lesbian couple. We tour the toy store several times, eating KitKats and searching in vain for particular StarWars toys that Santa is expected to bring to my boys.

Maybe Wal-Mart, we think. I find pj’s for my sister and Fritos and bottled water. Bottled water is $1.29 inside the store. It’s just $0.35 outside in the vending machine. Urgh!

I find one of the toys on Santa’s list at Target. Then we do the mall. We get hot pretzels covered in butter and salt, and mediocre coffee. Back to Target. We buy more things.

Near 11:00 p.m. I realize that shopping with my best friend is one of the great pleasures of my life. We could have shopped well into the night if the stores had been pulling an all-nighter.

Wednesday morning we sleep late. It’s almost 9:00 when I get up. It’s nice. But I am tired. The kind of tired where you just want to sit in the couch and watch tv for an hour before moving on into the day. But I can’t. So I make coffee and putz around with the kids. We have hours before school starts but when it comes down to it we’re running late. How does this happen?

I spend the afternoon in Christmas card hell. My sister offers to stop by next Monday to help me. But I have made a mess of the dining room table and I want this project done and cleaned up today! I have set about making my own Christmas cards this year. I hope that someone has the memory to shoot me in the head if I try this again next year. I have to make 75 cards plus a few extras. Print the card stock, cut the card stock, copy the photos, cut and trim the photos, affix the photos to the cards, tie teeny tiny bows, hot glue on the teeny tiny bows, and make the cards fit into envelopes that are already stuffed with my holiday letter, and in some cases my CF bowl-a-thon thank you letter. I thought this would be easy. I thought this would be inexpensive. When my brand new color printer ink runs out after only 5 sheets of photos I realize I have just spent $35 on ink…. This is not a financially sound project. But when I finish up later in the evening, I am pleased with my work. Next summer I will try much harder to get a cute shot of my kids on the beach to use as my holiday card. This year I will cut corners by hand delivering at least a dozen of my cards.

My parents bring in Chinese food for us all when we get back from FTK. It’s gotten very cold out again and the warm food is nice. Mac eats relatively well and Sailor does little more than shovel a scant amount of fried rice into his mouth. We beg, plead, cajole, and even tell him he can’t have his fortune cookie or his advent calendar chocolate. He whines and cries and says he wants cookies and chocolate. At 7:00, exhausted, we head upstairs. By midnight both boys are in my bed. But Sailor isn’t asleep. He has woken up hungry. “I want yergit,” he says. “We don’t have yogurt,” I remind him. “Remember? We were all out of yogurt this morning and we didn’t go to the store for more.” “I want yergit!” This goes on for about 15 minutes. I am ready for sleep. I am not happy. I share a word or two about the importance of eating dinner when it’s served. But I can’t just go to sleep and let him be hungry despite the fact that the hunger is his own doing. Middle of the night hunger is no fun. I serve him rice krispies with bananas, two bowls full, and unload the dishwasher.

Thursday morning I wake up at 8:15. We have 30 minutes to get ready for school. I am glad I took a bath last night. My hair looks inexplicably still good. So I don’t shower. It’s too cold out to really smell anyway, and even if I do I have layered so many pieces of clothing on that any smell would be hard-pressed to escape out into the world. Sailor decides to play it cool at school time. S isn’t there and Stacy, the teacher from last year, is filling in. Sailor is uncertain. But I bolt and he is fine.

Mac and I enjoy some shopping time together. We do Trader Joe’s to ensure yogurt in the fridge. Mac manages to fill his little cart with $40 worth of food. He wants to buy me pink roses. They are $5 or $6 and I know I should let him. I feel like a real cheapskate that I don’t afford my son the chance to do well for him mama. The checkout guy makes small talk with Mac, questioning why he is not in school. He doles out stickers and Mac requests some for his little brother, which he leaves for Sailor to find in his car seat. He wants to buy Sailor more Christmas gifts. My reassurances that we have plenty don’t go over well. He wants to pick things out. So I help him choose three small gifts at World Market. We hit the Container Store and Barnes & Noble where Mac has hot chocolate. He finds a huge StarWars book and reads thru the whole thing before he lets me take him to Potbelly’s for lunch. I watch his body language and read, “I have to pee,” but when I inquire he denies. I check the price on the book and think perhaps Santa might have to drop off a copy.

We order sandwiches and Mac runs back and forth. “I have to go pee! I have to go pee!” Sigh. There’s absolutely no point in explaining to him why he ought to have gone at the bookstore, not wait until we are in line for food to speak up. But I try anyway. Not that it makes him not have to pee! The sandwich girl is not paying attention and Mac is wiggling so I push him off in the direction of the ladies’ room. Which is occupied. I open up the men’s and let him in. I wait outside. He takes forever to pee, pull up his pants (long johns hamper the event) and wash his hands. I don’t know what has become of our sandwiches. I am fatigued. And I have to go to the bathroom now too. But the ladies’ room is still occupied.

We have about 6 minutes to eat before heading off to get Sailor. I don’t even open my sandwich. Sailor wants to know if we got “yergit” and is displeased when he learns that the yergit we bought is not the Scooby Doo tube yogurt. I tell him we can go to the store after we drop Mac at school. But we are early for kindergarten and the kids unbuckle their car seat straps and turn the back of the car into their own personal gym. Sailor reaches forward and puts a bottle of water into my seat. The cap is not on tightly. I feel something cold and wet. I turn around to see a big puddle of water forming under my butt. I yell. I strap everyone back in their seats. I make a mental note that I cannot drive to the store for Scooby Doo yogurt with a puddle of water in my seat. I am rewarded by Sailor having forgotten about it altogether. I tell Sailor he will not have water in an open-top bottle again in the car. It is not far from memory that Sailor spilled, or should I correctly say “poured,” a bottle of water on the back seat floor much earlier this year, resulting in a bumper crop of mold on the back seat’s floor mats. My butt is wet. It’s 4 degrees outside.

I have more phone calls to catch up with than I have time for. Which puts me in a motherhood/small business owner dilemma. If I blow off these calls and play with Sailor, I feel as if I am not taking my business responsibilities seriously and might lose a lot of money this afternoon. If I let Sailor play alone and catch up on these calls I feel as if my “stay-at-home mother” title is a joke. Sigh. There is no right answer here. So I make a round of calls and then help Sailor pull each bone out of the Operation game. “I’m trying to get the bone but he keeps saying ‘BZZZZZ,’ and why he have a fat tummy, Mommy?”

Sailor is obsessed with fat tummies. My mother tells me Mac was the same way at this age, but I cannot recall, and so I worry that I have a little anorexic-in-the-making on my hands. “Why Santa is fat, Mommy?” he wants to know. I explain about the quantities of cookies and milk the jolly old elf is required to consume on December 24th. “Then we give him three cookies,” Sailor suggests. I have tried hard to place the emphasis on exercise, or lack thereof, when answering Sailor’s questions about why this person or that person has a fat tummy. The stock, “Because he ate too much food,” has led him to not wanting to eat because he doesn’t want a fat tummy, too. Maybe I better call Oprah!

Nana’s fat tummy has been a topic of conversation on and off over the years. As she diets it is becoming less of an issue, less of a topic. But our healthy eating in general remains an issue. Mac knows his Nana uses artificial sweetener in her coffee. He likes to take a few for her whenever we are at a restaurant. But recently, in perfect Mommy tone, I hear him say, “Nana likes this kind of sugar. But it’s bad for her. It’s chemicals.” That’s my boy!

It’s very cold out. I can barely get the garbage cans out and later in the day I nearly fall down the stairs trying to replace my parents’ can. I couldn’t get it up the stairs this morning and so pulled it to the bottom of the steps, opened it, and left the gate open. Hoping the garbage men would see it. They did. But it’s too cold to take the neighbors’ cans back after school because I can no longer feel my thumbs or my thighs. My mittens are the extra warm, totally unattractive kind. My thighs are encased in tights under my jeans. Now even my toes are cold. I am wearing Sailor’s knit cap and Mac is delighted that we are wearing matching hats.

“I’m too late to clean up my mess. I have to get my suit on to rescue!” Sailor is mostly naked and holding his Superman suit. “Who are you going to rescue?” I ask. “You!” he says and throws his arms around my waste. I suit him up, but tie the cape in the back. He is wearing a long red bib. “Not this way!” Dressed, he begins moving things from the playroom to the living room. Carrying them over his head. “I have to move this out the way. I have to take this to the dungeon. I turned in a super hero.” He is my little hero. One of two, of course.

It’s almost 6:30. Pizza? Spaghetti? Crab cakes and tomato soup? Sailor wants nothing and neither do I. But we can’t not have dinner.

After dinner Sailor gashes the side of his foot open on a screw. Where was the screw? In Mac’s bed. Attached to a propeller for a Rescue Heroes toy. Why was this in Mac’s bed? One only knows. Now it is not in Mac’s bed. It’s in the kitchen garbage. It took two band-aids to cover the bloody boo-boo. Sailor says he doesn’t feel good and doesn’t want to walk on his broken foot. Poor thing. I am all full of sympathy. And worry. Should we be heading for Children’s to get a tetanus shot? I have to assume these shots are all up to date. I lay him gently in bed after he screams while I put on his footy pajamas. Poor thing. He talks up a storm while I put away his clean laundry. He just doesn’t stop. “Mommy, how come we didn’t get a sound in Ho Ho bear?” Sailor asks, referring to the little sound bite we could have put into his new build-a-bear teddy bear but did not. “Because it cost too much money,” I tell him. It was only $3. Times two bears. Plus the Santa hats and beards that each of my boys chose for their bears. Plus the bears themselves, clothes and accessories sold separately. “Please we buy some more money?” That’s logical. “We don’t buy money, Sweety, we earn money,” I explain. “How we earn money?” “By working.” “Please you work and earn some money and buy a sound for my bear?”

Could my heart just break right now from his sweetness?

Despite the fact that we stay home all morning on Friday, we are still late for school. Argh! I hate when we are late and there is no real excuse. After I run Mac in, I drive with Sailor over to see his friend and the baby twins. We watch the babies while their mom picks up Sailor’s friend from preschool. Sailor just loves the babies. He is so careful and gentle with them. He would make a terrific big brother.

While the kids are playing, we mommies talk about all sorts of mommy stuff. I also get distracted by a tv program about the cast of the American Pie movies! Oh, to just be able to veg out in front of the tv for an afternoon. I can’t remember the last time the tv was on during the day for anything other than weather or a kid video.

Sailor wants an escort to the bathroom. He gets a little nervous at other people’s houses. I follow him in. He starts to pee and slips on the area rug, sending pee all over the toilet rim and all down the front of him. Why is it that I no longer carry extra clothes for my boys? I sure seem to need them relatively often. We change everything but socks and undershirt into some of his friend’s clothes. “I want uppie,” he tells me. “Why?” “I’m ‘fraid [my friend] will lehw [yell] at me for wearing his clothes.”

He doesn’t want to leave when it’s time to get Mac. I chase him around a bit. Not my favorite game. He falls asleep when we get to school. I am double parked in the queue of cars waiting for children. I run out when the bell rings. A fire truck screams by and I fear Sailor has woken up and found me not in the car. I grab Mac and run back to the car. Sailor is still asleep. I lay him on my dad’s sofa so I can get the garbage cans back in, and 4 hours later we come back upstairs.

During our time downstairs, the doorbell rings. This always sends everyone into a tizzy, as our doorbell almost never rings unless we are expecting guests. It’s the UPS driver, who looks half frozen to death. He says nothing. Just indicates a large box at his feet. Sailor is nearby. “What is it?” he asks. I feign innocence. “I don’t know!” “It’s from Toys R Us!” he says. “Damn,” I say to the UPS driver, “he’s only three!” I tell Sailor it’s something for me and that I will have to wait til Christmas to see what it is. My mom comes to see what we have and asks if she heard what she thinks she heard. Yes, you did, I tell her. “How do you know this is from Toys R Us?” I ask him. “I recognize the star [on the side of the box].” Smart kid. The box actually contains the Star Wars X-Wing fighter he asked Santa for. Or so I hope. The box seems awfully light. I will open it later.

Sailor shows me his boo-boo foot while we read a few chapters of Geronimo Stilton. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.” “That’s good,” I tell him. It actually does seem to have healed quite a bit already. “Ac-shly, my elbow hurts a little,” he tells me, “so I will haf’ walk very s-l-o-w-l-y.” He puts much emphasis on “slowly.” “Your elbow hurts?” I want to clarify. “Yes, and so I haf’ walk very s-l-o-w-l-y.”

I read five short chapters. Three more than the two Mac requested. He cries and begs and whines for more. I put Sailor to bed. Mac comes out and asks me to come lie with him. I tell him I’ll be right in. Sailor comes out and says he wants to be somewhere where he can be next to me. “Well, right now, next to me is right here in the dining room,” I tell him. He edges toward my room. “I want be where you are.” He tries. “I want be somewhere that’s like where you sleep.” He’s smart. He is good at hinting. I am trying to phone chat with my sister. “I’m freezing!” he says. “That’s because you didn’t want pajama pants on.” We go to his room for pajama pants. It’s so hard to insist they do things your way, but then when you don’t you end up getting your way anyway, just delayed and when it’s no longer convenient. Within minutes both little guys are asleep and another school week is complete.