Week 20 February – The Coldest Weather in 11 Years

It is cold outside. Not just cold like, wear a scarf, but cold like, stay home at all costs. But Mac has his talking doctor appointment this morning and I figure by the time we are all up she is probably heading into the office already. If she can get there we should be able to as well. Except it is COLD outside, and our car is parked uncharacteristically around the corner. Despite the extra glove I have on under my heavy duty mitten, my fingers are in pain by the time both boys are strapped safely into their car seats. I contemplate getting out of the car and taking the boys back to the house.

We park in the lot and I am just amazed that the stairwell to get down and out is COLDER than it is outside. Luckily we are parked on 2, not 4, today. It is COLD. We head into the building and Mac has his appointment. Sailor is happy to watch Teletubbies on tv while sitting in my lap and eating apple slices and snowman noses (a.k.a. baby carrots). I tell him I will snuggle him forever. Even when he is an old man. I try to picture myself, an old lady, holding a little old man Sailor. Which is when it dawns on me that when he is 70 years old, which I don’t consider ancient, I will be 105. I plan to live that long, but who knows if I actually will or not. So I start thinking about how old I would be when my own father would be 105, an age I sincerely doubt he wants to see for himself. I would be only 65. The math starts to hurt and I make a frantic attempt to refocus on the Teletubbies.

Mac emerges in what seems like little more than ½ an hour and I have a brief chat with the therapist and then we head to the next building to have our parking pass validated. On the way down the elevator the boys get into a tussle and throw the switch to turn the elevator off and then Sailor gets tossed to the wall. I am reprimanding when two passengers climb onto the now broken elevator.

We climb back up the ice box of a stairwell and look for our car. On the way out we see there is no one to take our ticket and the gate is up. So much for the time we wasted validating. I assume the attendant was too cold to remain in the little booth.

I don’t want to come out again. I want to go home and stay home. Which means Mac gets a day off. We drive to Trader Joe’s and park in the indoor lot (I love their indoor lot!). Each boy gets his own cart and fills it with all sorts of fun goodies. Cereal, “guller bars,” shortbread cookies, whole wheat pretzels, yogurt, milk, risotto, and for Mama, a bottle of Chianti. I don’t know how long this cold snap is set to last but I don’t want to go out again until it is over.

In the car we discuss Sailor’s need for a nap when we get home. “I don’t want a nap!” he protests once, twice, three times. And then he is asleep. I put the groceries in the front stairwell and then find a parking space. There are plenty but I want one right out front. Sailor is way too heavy to carry in full cold weather attire. But carry him I do. He is HEAVY. Did I mention that? I am puffing when I get to the top of the 2nd flight. I try not to drop him onto the sofa.
Mac and I spend the afternoon doing his workbook, writing a very nice letter S, and having a French lesson. Nothing missed by ditching school today. Except he is missed by the school, who has left a message. I call back immediately thanking them profusely for calling me to check on his whereabouts. The secretary thinks I am a little bit crazy as I repeat, “Thank you thank you thank you for calling! That is so awesome of you!” She tells me she has to be sure he wasn’t dropped off and then didn’t make it in the building. I am grateful and I also now understand that it is not an optional courtesy to call when Mac will be absent, but rather it is my responsibility.

We play a finding shapes and colors game in the play room, and Mac thinks he is supposed to be putting away the items he finds. I almost slip and tell him otherwise, but catch myself. The play room is cleaned up by the time we are done playing. I let them watch an educational video and Sailor comes to tell me, “Stop and Shop, Mama.” He has heard a rhyme.

I make a very healthful dinner of tofu, broccoli, brown rice and your choice of sauce. Mac eats 2 ½ bowls full. There is not much else to do with our day. We head to bed early. Sailor brings his box of cereal. “This is just mine?” he wants to know. We eat it as if it’s popcorn. Then I turn out the lights. They are restless. We didn’t do enough today.

I don’t want to go out tomorrow. Taking both boys to school means going out three times. No way! I do not want to do that again.

Sailor has told me he likes it when I say he’s cute. He is so cute. And now he says, “In order to me sleep, will you give me a kiss?”

I hate thinking that someday they will be old men. I want us all to stay as we are now. They are so cute and little. But they are growing so much all of a sudden. Sailor, who finally finished wearing size 2T in November is now outgrowing 3T. And Mac is just getting so tall. I am not tall enough to have tall children.

Me, I still detest this masculine, messy haircut I got on my birthday. And I feel as if I have gained 5 pounds suddenly and I feel as if I look like crap. Winter? Or just my brand new age?

Meanwhile Mac is hot from my laptop and Sailor’s butt hurts. Mommy duties call!

Tuesday morning Sailor wakes up and says, “I smell pee!” Alas, Mac has peed in my bed. But I am not angry. It has literally been months since the last time this happened and so I figure it’s really no big deal. And aside from the fact that I am lying in it, I am happy that he has missed both the down comforter and the top comforter. He continues to sleep in the pee while Sailor and I get up. First thing he tells me when he wakes up is, “Mommy, I peed in your bed.” “Ok,” I tell him, “now that you are up I can strip the sheets.” Nothing more needs to be said. It was an accident. I pop him in the tub and he has an uneventful bath. I, on the other hand, have not yet had a chance to change out of my slightly damp and no doubt smelly pajamas.
It seems cold out still. So I call the preschool and leave a message that Sailor will be absent. He is thrilled. Mac begs to stay home again and I tell him we’ll see. The boys play all over the house all morning. Eventually Sailor is headed for his bath. Which is also uneventful. And that is when I decide that despite the obvious waste of water and time, I will try to bathe my children separately during the week and let them have one long bath together on the weekend. This might just be another thing that saves my bath time sanity. No more water all over the floor. No more toys ending up in the trash because kids won’t keep them out of their moths. No more fighting over who gets to have his hair washed second. That said, I also tell Mac that when he turns 6, he will shower like his friends do. Of course I do not tell him that I did not give up baths for the occasional shower until I was nine.

Eventually I get my own shower in. I try to wear this ridiculously bad hair cut curly. It looks like a permed bob. You know, the ones the high school girls were wearing in the early to mid-1980s. I’m only 20-some years late!

Out the window I think I see snow. “Mac, is it snowing?” he instinctively turns toward the t.v., which is showing the weather channel, for his answer. It is indeed snowing and continues to do so for the rest of the day. I am glad, because the outfit I have chosen to wear today does not match any of my winter shoes. I can stuff the pants into my boots!

I step outside on the front steps and discover that it’s not as cold as one might have expected. Which means Mac is going to school.

We trudge along. I am carrying some heavy-ish bags and my boots are ill-fitting and no one has shoveled and the sun is in our eyes. Still, it feels good to be out, to be walking. At school I ask Miss H if I needed to have written a note excusing Mac’s absence from school on Monday. She says I do. Inside her classroom she hands me a 2”x2” piece of paper and asks, “Is this big enough?” I write a request that Mac's absence be excused because he was “under the weather.” Then I see that all the children are bagging up their snowy, wet outdoor clothes. “Lice.” Miss H mouths the word at me. Fantastic. Glad I just had Mac’s hair cut short! I offer to send in my children’s book about head lice to read to the class but she says she hasn’t told them and that when she looked at their scalps yesterday she told them she was making sure their hair was healthy. Ok. Nonetheless, I slip the book into Mac’s backpack on Wednesday.

The snow continues to fall and the temperature is holding at something reasonable. Snow pants, long johns, mittens…. The kids are probably too bundled to play. Sailor wants to wear just his “best” without a coat over it. I tell him it has to be warmer to wear just a vest. “Maybe in the spring!” he suggests.

Mac makes a terrific snow angel and Sailor does too, except his did not scrape away all the snow down to the sidewalk the way Mac’s did, so he gets mad, does not believe me that his is good, and stomps all over it. We sweep and shovel and Mac proves to be quite a strong, not to mention willing, worker. We stay out til my toes hurt.
During dinner, which neither of my children likes, my sister discovers for herself that Sailor can now say the word “favorite” correctly. “No,” she tells him, in deference to his old way of saying it, “it’s ‘fraze-it.’” Be he won’t give in and go back to his old ways. Coyly he also tells us, “I can say ‘cereal.’” NO! I love the way he’s always said “shay-o.”

Dinner is almost over and Mac is in time out in his room because he left the table to go play, causing Sailor to not want to finish his own dinner, and then giving me attitude when I asked him to please sit at the table and keep us company until we are all finished. I cannot imagine what kind of teen this boy is going to be. And this is when their father shows up for his weekly 2-hour visit. He chats with my sister and me as both boys use him as a human jungle gym. The noise level is truly outstanding.

We leave them playing StarWars in the playroom and head back to the salon to get my hideous hair-do rectified. 90 minutes later I look like a pixie on crack. My face is tired and my make-up re-do is worn off. My hair hasn’t been this short since I was in my 20s, and there is a reason for that. The back of my neck stings from the electric razor (yes, that short!). Yet it does look reasonably better and the color looks right again. And I am grateful. I count 5 months until June, the summer, when I hope my hair is at least grazing my shoulders again. The stylist tells me I look younger and I think now she is the one on crack. I look, at last, like a mommy who has given up trying to look cute or sexy or hip. I look like a mommy who just wants to wash her hair and be done with it.

So far 39 is just not looking very good.

Then, as I hand her the tip (a buck more than I might have ordinarily tipped, due to the fact that this is a free re-do, per the salon’s policy), she tells me in her dense accent, “I think you have to pay.”
“No,” I remind her, “this was a re-do. When I called for the appointment the girl on the phone specifically told me I would not have to pay.”
“No,” she smiles at me, “you have to pay. Because I give you a whole different hair cut.”
“Because I hated the first one.”
“You only get free when you have a bad haircut.”
“Right,” I am calm and feeling very stupid, “it was bad haircut.”
My sister steps in here. “Who is to judge whether a hair cut is bad or not?”
“Well,” the stylist continues, “it’s bad if it is uneven.” Believe it or not she is still smiling.
I have been going to this girl on and off since a week after Sailor was born. Suddenly I don’t like her so much anymore.
“And,” she continues, “When you left the other day you say you like it.”
“No, actually I didn’t,” I remind her. Because I didn’t like it then. What I had said was, “I’m not going to be able to make it look like this tomorrow.” In other words, great, thanks a lot for making my hair look like crap.
I hand over my credit card and tell her I don’t want to argue about it. But she goes on anyway. She says something about having not wanting to tell me before she cut my hair that I would have to pay. It would have been nice to have been given the choice!
“Fine,” I tell her, “just charge my card.” So I will have a record of this, which I can possibly cancel later. She hands back the tip, “You take this, your mother she tip me very well last week.”
“No,” I say, “you did the work, you keep the tip.” How much more humiliating does this have to get for me?
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, my sister has quietly put the corporate phone number, which is listed beneath the sign that describes the salon’s guarantee, into her cell phone.
I am in hair hell.

And the worst part about this (aside from the fact that I now have SHORT hair) is that my mother was trying to buy me a nice birthday gift by treating me to the haircut last week.

Back at home Sailor is asleep and Mac is not and their father is standing in the dining room in anticipation. He has his coat on already. He listens to me bitch for a moment, while holding someone on hold on his cell phone. He hands me an envelope with, what turns out to be, a very small check in it. He tells me he is not sure he’ll be able to hang out with us on Friday when he stops by with more moo-lah, and I tell him we have a party to go to on Friday anyway.

My sis and I chit chat about important stuff while a hungry Mac hauls cereal, milk, bowls and spoons out to the dining table and proceeds to fix us all a little late-night snack. Eventually he gains enough of our attention to tell us more about his time in heaven, before he was born.

“I lived in a house with a lot of other children. I didn’t have a mom or dad. I was an orphan. There was one lady who took care of us all.”

“Was Sailor your brother?” my sister asks.

“No.” All of his answers and dialog are quite matter-of-fact. He tells us about meeting his friend Ethan.

“Did you get to pick me to be your mom?” I ask.

“No. G-d picked you out. He picked the right choice. He picked the right family. But actually I wasn’t expecting Michael,” he says, referring to his father.

He goes on. “The Nana and GrandDad were perfect, and you [indicating his favorite Aunt M with a nod of his head]."

“What about Sailor?” my sister asks.

“G-d did it again, picked the right family for my brother.”

He reminds us (because I ask this question a lot) that he bought his gorgeous red hair at the hair store.

There was some compliment in there for me being a great mom and all around I am pretty floored.

My sister is somewhat freaked out. But I am comforted in a strange way.

My sister leaves. I put the wonder child to bed. I watch something I can now no longer remember on tv and fall asleep to the noise. My dreams are about a cruise or a trip. Maybe to England. And there is unrest in the world, making our trip very unsafe.

Wednesday morning as I am washing up after a batch of pancakes the boys help me make (accidentally omitting the 3 teaspoons of baking powder) I realize that my anxiety level is peaking. Probably due to last night’s convo with Mac and my ensuing dreams. As soon as I acknowledge this within myself, however, I feel a calm come over me. I wash the rest of the dishes and set about baking mini blueberry muffins for Sailor to bring to preschool tomorrow. He doesn’t want help. Neither does Mac. They both go back to their rooms, leaving the flat pancakes mostly un-eaten. Sailor comes out wearing underwear and a blanket. I can’t see if he is wearing undies or not. He shows me that he is and I see that he has pretty much outgrown his 2T/3T undies. They look like a pair of Speedos. No problem, tho, as the boy owns somewhere upwards of 40 pair of little “unnies” as he used to call them. He is getting big. He is gaining weight, as evidenced by the fact that he can no longer snap his own pants. Just the other day he said to me, “Mommy, you remember [when] I was 2?”
“Yes, I do.” Summer doesn’t seem all that long ago, despite the fact that it’s 80 degrees colder outside than an average summer day.
“I wish I was still two…” he says. Three is so bad?

The boys play in various stages of dress all morning and Sailor is really happy when I tell him that no, he does not have to take a bath today.

My new hair looks relatively decent, but damn short, when I am done with my shower. Actually it looks slightly sexy when it is wet. Too bad it’s not summer.

Around 11:30 I notice that the boys are still running back and forth thru the house, from the kitchen to the living room grabbing bites of pancakes and returning to play. And yet it’s time for lunch. In the kitchen I find a plate of syrup. Expensive, pure, only-Mommy-is-aloud-to-pour it, maple syrup. Apparently Sailor has taken it upon himself to be a big boy and pour his own syrup. Unlike the gelatinous muck of fake syrup, which is predominantly killer high fructose corn syrup, pure maple syrup is neither thick nor excessively tenacious and it runs right out of the bottle like the liquid that it is. And so Sailor has a plate full of the stuff. And it’s on the table.

“Sailor!” I am not unkind, or even particularly angry. “Did you pour syrup?” I call from the kitchen.

“Coming!”

He runs in and we have a little talk about letting Mommy be the syrup pourer. In his defense, of course, I did leave the syrup, uncapped, on the table. Gladly the bottle was nearly empty. Now it’s even more nearly empty.

And there is water all over the floor. This, I realize, is what Mac was trying to tell me about an hour ago. That there was water spilling from a bowl set too high in the pile of hand-wash-only dishes in the sink while the dishwasher was running. I didn’t realize there was that much water. I send the boys off to get dressed, describing to Mac what clothes I would like for him to wear, rather than getting them out for him. I get out the mop and clean up the mess.

Considering the vast amount of sugar my children have been ingesting over the course of the morning, I opt for vegetables, “scramma” eggs, the left-over tofu dish from the other night, and some left-over macker cheese for lunch.

My parents have both been to the dentist this morning. My father, at 79, has had a wisdom tooth pulled, and my mom has had a filling. They want to have Sailor, or as they call him, “the baby,” come down while I take Mac to school.

Both boys are giddy and silly and not paying attention. When this sugar high wears off it won’t be pretty. Mac walks in the snow, getting the bottom of his jeans wet. He is reprimanded. I even threaten that I will take him right back home if his pants are wet when we arrive at school. He splashes in every puddle he finds all the way to school. “At what age do they start to listen to their parents?” I ask one of the stay-at-home dads, whom we have caught up to, but not before I have the misfortune of watching him walk across the street leaving his small boy to trail dangerously behind him.

“Never?” the father tells me, but it is more of a question that an answer.

I run errands for the upcoming school auction on my walk home. I am soliciting donations so as to earn myself a ticket to the ball. Because, although I do not know the price of the event, I know it will be beyond my means. And I am fairly certain I may want to go. Though the more I think about it the more I realize I may in fact NOT want to go, as I will have to go stag, and I may even be required to don some sort of fancy clothes that currently reside somewhere other than my own closet. I am having fun soliciting the donations, though, and I am pretty impressed by those I have gotten so far, if I do say so myself. A free party at a bar, two free kids’ parties at a new local coffee shop, $100 in gift certs form our fave restaurant, a dentist’s services, ad space in a trendy women’s mag…. I am doing well pulling in from my “connections.”

This event is put on by the “Friends of….” the school organization. I am a member of the PTA. For which I have yet to do anything. Except have an email fight over the fact that two of my books went missing after the book fair two weeks ago. I think perhaps it’s time to switch organizations. Or maybe I will wait til the end of the year. Then next fall I can switch. Perhaps, just for the fun or it, I will switch every year! At least if I am not on the PTA I won’t have to go to the morning meeting every month.

Which reminds me that I think I am supposed to be cutting out hearts for the kindergarten class’s Valentine’s Day party next week.

Sailor is not sleeping when I get back but he wants to stay with my parents anyway. Why not? It’s 24-hour t.v. fest down there and he loves it. He is as addicted to t.v. as Mac was at this age.

I go back to get Mac from school. He says he was well-behaved at school today. We walk to FTK. His snack is apples and milk. “I had apples and apple juice for snack at school today,” he says, as he tries to pry the lid off the apple container. “You had both? Whose brilliant snack idea was that?” He tells me. I take the apples away. No need for him to suffer diarrhea in the middle of his FTK class. The alternative, because I have forgotten the pretzels in a bag on the dishwasher at home, is a granola bar. More sugar, Baby!

While he is making the most if his sugar buzz and disrupting his class for 2 hours, I run in and out of stores trying to get the pain in my frozen toes to subside. I rent the new Cinderella III DVD, which just came out yesterday, because, truth be told, I want to see it. I spend over $30 on a safe lipstick and a pot of body butter at the Body Shop. Justifying this by the fact that Mac’s skin feels like sandpaper and mine is covered in scrapes, bruises and rash from all the scratching of dry skin. So what’s $17 for body lotion if it saves our skin? It’s the only skin we have! At Borders I find a Valentine’s Day Geronimo Stilton book for Mac (Cupid will leave this on the kitchen table on Valentine’s Day morning) as well as some new work books. My blood sugar bottoms out and I head for eatzies. I pick up a chicken and mango quesadilla and some veggies for dinner after my mom calls inviting us to eat with them tonight, an invitation for which I am grateful. $60 later I head back to get Mac.

I feel like I have hit the lowest low when we, and all my shopping bags, board the bus to go home. I feel like a poor person.

Mac chatters on loudly about his upcoming bus stop. When we are three stops away he mentions that we are close. When we are one stop away I instruct him to reach behind him and pull the buzzer cord. When I don’t hear the “ding” or “buzz” or whatever sound I’m supposed to hear, I pull myself. I hear a “ding.” We get up as the driver coasts thru the stop at our street.

“Hey, what happened to ---?” I name our street.
“Oh, did you want to get off there?”
“Yes!”
“You have to ring the buzzer.”
“We did!” And did you not hear my kid gabbing away for the last five minutes about the street we would be getting off at? I want to say.
“I didn’t hear it, and I didn’t see it come up on the sign.” He points to the overhead thingy that is lighting up with street names and other vital bus-riding information.
“Well I thought I heard it,” I say, and then, “I don’t ride the bus often.”
He stops the bus halfway between the stop we missed and the next stop. “Push the door,” he tells me, “and be careful when you get out.” I am grateful that he has let us off here, against the rules. Nonetheless, I am too irritated to say, “thank you,” which I usually say when departing a bus, on those rare occasions I ride one.

So much conflict in my little world.

Sailor is passed out sitting up in my dad’s big leather chair. He is adorable. He’s been asleep for about 30 minutes. Great timing. It’s 6:15. Mac and I go upstairs for dry shoes and for Mac to have some quiet time.

Dinner is ready in a few minutes so we head back down. Mom has a glass of wine poured for me. Everything on our plate is beige-ish yellow but tastes great. The spinach soufflé I picked up earlier is gross. We toss it. Sailor wakes up mid-meal and when he can’t get comfy enough to fall back asleep in my lap he allows me to feed him. He eats everything and more.

The boys and my father play a brief concert on their “kin-tars” as Sailor calls guitars. They do some ABC’s and I ask my dad to slow down his Twinkle-Twinkle-Lttle-Star-on-Speed so Sailor can keep up. No one will play any Bee Gees for me. My dad doesn’t understand why Mac can’t put his fingers in the exact same spots on the strings to play chords. Mac remembers, with only minor prompting, all the parts of the guitar, which I believe my father taught him before he was 3.

We are ready to go upstairs. Mac asks for ice cream. I say no. My mother gets out the ice cream, the ice cream scoop, 4 bowls (she is on a diet) and four spoons. I read the label. 21 grams of sugar. I say no again. My mother prompts Mac to ask for a little bit. I repeat no. “But it’s all good stuff. Just milk, and cream…” my mom tries to insist. “And sugar. 21 grams.” Mac bursts into fake tears. My father comes back in looking perplexed. My mother comforts Mac. He leaves the room and buries his face on the couch.
“Why can’t they have a little bit?” my mom asks.
“Because,” I begin, as if a mother should have to ever explain herself, and to her own mother no less, “the ice cream has 21 grams of sugar [did we miss this part?] and Mac and Sailor had a week’s worth of sugar in the maple syrup event this morning. And,” I continue, “Mac was not well-behaved at FTK this afternoon, and therefore should not get a treat.”
Perhaps I should have just said, “Because I am the mother and I said no.”

My dad reads a superhero comic to Mac (thank G-d he likes to read those things. I cannot read them aloud!), while I read this weird little book from the dollar store to Sailor that has a button to press to hear a satanic child say, “I LOVE Christmas cookies!” strangely, I find the book more amusing than annoying.

When my father leaves, Sailor asks me to stay in his room and keep him company. I bring my laptop in. As he is about to drift off Mac appears in the doorway of the tiny room. “I’m lonely,” he whines. “Go back to your room. Wait for me and I will be there as soon as Sailor falls asleep.” Which should be any moment.

“I’ll just stay here,” Mac says, plopping himself down on the hallway floor.
“Lie down there,” I suggest.
He puts one pair of my boots on his feet and another pair on his hands. He is exhausted and it is after 8:30. “Stop playing,” I whisper loudly.
“I’m not playing.”
I invite him to lie down on Sailor’s bedroom floor. He digs through the basket of blankets. It’s a production. And then he can’t lie still. Sailor watches him. Mac has suddenly developed an irritating case of sniffles. I ask him to go blow his nose. He ignores me. I ask him to return to his room. Again he ignores me. The phone rings. I get up to answer it. 3 minutes later Sailor is standing beside me. “I’m getting lonely in there.”
I return. Sailor is again about to drift off when, inexplicably, Mac decides it is imminently important to remove the clothing from Sailor’s Cabbage Patch doll, Danny. Danny’s jacket is made of some weird, noisy, sticky, vinyl-y stuff. R-i-i-i-i-i-p. R-i-i-i-i-p. What the heck!? “Mac!” I send him back to his room. Sailor appears to be asleep but is not when I get up to go check Mac a minute later. I don’t want my big boy going to sleep crying. Even though he won’t remember in the morning. “Please, I am a good boy you take me to your bed?” Sailor sleepily asks me. “Yes,” I tell him, knowing I don’t really mean it. So then, “And if you are asleep, you can come in when you wake up,” which he will do around midnight. “I love you, Mommy.”
He is truly precious.

Mac is not crying. I sit on his bed. “I don’t think you like me anymore,” he says.
Oh boy. It’s been that kind of day and I totally saw this coming.
I do my best to reassure him. I like you…. I love you…. Until I realize what I need to say. “I’m sorry Mac. I didn’t mean to make you feel as if I don’t like you.” Of course then I do go on to explain that I am not happy with some of his behavior today, but that he is still one of my top two favorite kids. I think he feels better. He is asleep momentarily. Tomorrow is our morning together. We have a bunch of errands to run and I hope we will have some time to sit and have coffee or lunch. I can’t have my kid thinking I don’t like him. Parenting is not easy. Decisions are hard to make. But this kid knows without a doubt that he is well-loved. But just in case he doesn’t, I will continue to tell him at every opportunity, every day, for the rest of his life.

I email my parents and sister with a list of days I need my beautiful boys cared for so that I can work, socialize or both. I include, while I am at it, the dates of Mac’s bday dinner and big bday party, Sailor’s preschool graduation ceremony in which he will participate (Sailor? Yeah, right! He’ll spend the 30 minutes crying in my arms), and a question about the actual date of Yom Kippur, taking us all the way to the end of September. Today is February 7th. I would say I am organized. My mother will say, “You are thinking too much,” but then will acquiesce that she is impressed by my organizational skills. My father will say, “Sure, Babe, if we are available.” And my sister will tell me that I am absolutely nuts to be planning Mac’s birthday yet, because it is still 3 months and two weeks away. On second thought, after 5 years of experience, she probably knows by now how much time and effort I put into the yearly celebration of the birth of my 1st born and will likely know also not to say a thing about it this year.

Thursday.

Sailor is allergic to poop. So he says. After a good session of gagging. Following Mac’s bout with minor diarrhea after school today. He smells Mac’s toilet deposit, gags, and informs me, “I am allergic to poop.” He has even started gagging over his own poop.

Mac has a note in his backpack this morning informing me that the 100th day of school is coming up next week. Mac is to count out 100 small pieces of “something fun” to bring to school. Examples given are pennies, paper clips and Cheerios. Fun? In my house fun is M&Ms. Which I also think will irritate the teacher because Mac and his classmates will want to eat them. I haul out the 54 oz bag of the little chocolate buggers.