School was, without a doubt, pretty damned challenging.  It wasn’t the course work per se, but the balancing act of school/work/kids/rheumatoid arthritis/house/making jam/sleep/The Unpleasantness.  You’ve probably seen one of those acts where a person spins a bunch of plates set on sticks – sometimes even stacking the plates and sticks precariously on top of one another.  That has been my life for the past few months.  This last month has been downright awful and I could barely sleep with all the work I had to do to keep the plates spinning and all the anxiety I had that they might fall down.

I am not quite ready to write about everything that has happened, but if my life were a movie you’d be hearing the music start to change tempo about right now.  Everything is coming to a head.  I know we are in for some big changes but I can’t yet see what the end result is going to be.  I do miss writing.  I keep going to bed at night feeling as if I have missed an undefinable something.  So tonight I shall start to write again.

I had two New Years Resolutions this year; neither of which I, quite purposefully, wrote about.  The first relates to The Unpleasantness.  Enough said for now.  The second, resolution was much less grand; quite simple really and yet it sometimes it seems laughably ambitious given the constant state of motion that my life is in.  It was quite simply that

I shall not purchase any bread in 2013

I didn’t write about it because I wasn’t sure it was possible.  But I baked my way through January and February.  Then in March all five of us succumbed to a bout of the flu (yes, despite all dutifully getting our flu shots this past fall).  I thought the virus might be the end of my resolution, but, in a fit of baking I had filled the freezer with loaves of rich, buttery white bread and earthy, comforting wheat bread.  We went though seven loaves of bread over the week of sickness.  It seemed that all anyone could stand to eat was toast.  But as I pulled the last loaf out of the freezer, I felt well enough to start another batch of dough and we made it through.  I have found the key to keeping us in bread to be baking in large batches of four to eight loaves at a time and then freezing all but one loaf.  If you’ve never tried it, well wrapped bread freezes beautifully.  Nothing beats bread still warm from the oven but my frozen bread certainly beats any store bought bread into crumbs.  Now, four months and change into the year, I have still somehow managed not to buy any bread.

I realize that it is just bread.  Lots of people aroud the world never buy any bread.  I doubt Ma Ingalls ever bought any either.  I know it probably won’t say on my tombstone:  “Here lies Gina.  She baked all her own bread”.  But I am, my friends, a control freak.  And right now my world is very out of control.  So I’ve taken a bread knife and carved out one tiny, flour dusted, corner of my universe and made it something I can control.  And it feels damned good.  Let’s see if I can make it all the way to 2014.

]]> http://www.mendolo.com/2013/05/08/breaking-radio-silence-and-baking-bread/feed/ 2 http://www.mendolo.com/2013/03/11/pacific-damned-time/ http://www.mendolo.com/2013/03/11/pacific-damned-time/#comments Tue, 12 Mar 2013 06:10:50 +0000 Gina http://www.mendolo.com/?p=3217 I do not understand how the time change works.

Of course, I understand that at the appointed hour we all set our clocks one hour forward and for the next seven months of our lives donate an hour to the gods of daylight savings time only to get that hour back this fall.  I think such shenaniganas are rather antiquated, but whatever; there are lots of things that still exist that should be banished to the history books (checks, phone books).  I will deal.

It is my children that are incapable of dealing and I do not understand how a one hour change can work to wreak such havoc with their sleep.  Logic dictates that if my children are usually asleep by 8:00 pm (Pacific Standard Time), then given the recent “spring forward” in time they should be asleep by 9:00 pm (Pacific Daylight Time).  Well, my children are nothing if not illogical.  Annie was utterly incapable of falling asleep last night without heroic measures.  Then after waking up three or four times she decided she was AWAKE from 12:00 am to 2:00 am nattering on in her baby speak and randomly signing “cookie” and “dog”.  She was happy; looking quite pleased with herself actually, as I lay next to her doing the tired math of “When do I have to get up in the morning minus what time is it now?”  She finally acquiesced to sleep only by sleeping on my neck.  As you might suspect I did not exactly find such sleep restful.  Then Theodore was up with the sun and decided not to take a nap today.   Thomas didn’t fall asleep until after 10:00 pm last night, was up and cranky this morning for school.  I expected him to fall into bed like a log tonight but no such luck.  It is currently 11:02 pm and I can hear him singing in his room.  He is going to be most unpleasant in the morning.   The worst part of it this whole affair is that Thomas’ wakefullness is making me postpone my nightly ice cream sundae.  Thomas keeps getting out of bed to inform me that he “is having a hard time falling asleep” and I can only imagine how indignant (and awake) it would make Thomas to see me chowing down on a giant bowl of ice cream.  It would totally ruin my lie to him that all we do after he goes to bed is clean up the house.  Little does he know that we eat dessert, order takeout, watch movies, read books, and once I even built a space shuttle out of his Legos after he was in bed.  (Of course, I also do dishes, study, fold laundry, prep meals, clean up, and pack lunches).

Of course, Jeff has no such issues with daylight savings time – he is currently curled up on half of the couch with me – sound asleep.

After a long night I awoke yesterday morning to a chatty, happy baby (seemingly oblivious to her half dozen wake-ups during the night).  I rolled out of bed, got a bowl of cereal and popped Mary Poppins into the DVD player for Theodore, and whisked Anna off to the bathroom.   Despite the fact that Anna has the sleep skills of a 2 week old, she is rather competent at using the toilet.  She often wakes up dry and it is our routine to sit her on her wee little toilet in the morning to do her business.  After she finished I stepped a few feet away to grab some clothes for her out of the hall closet (poor third child in a two bedroom house doesn’t even have a closet).  In the few moments I was gone Anna decided that #1 wasn’t all she had in store and began to work on excrement #2.  Apparently this was not to be done on the toilet, but required a stroll out to the living room during the act.  I walked back into the bathroom to see a a trail of turds leading onto my living room rug where I found a gleeful baby pointing at her handiwork shouting “Dat dat dat!”  Theodore looked up from watching Mary Poppins and calmly observed,  “Annie pooped.  You should clean it up.”  Thanks kid.  That boy will yell for help at the top of his lungs if his blanket has even one wrinkle in it or if he can’t find the specific Lego he is looking for but when his baby sister decides to take a dump on the floor he says nothing until after the fact.  I took a deep (well, not too deep) breath and coaxed Annie over to the changing table to clean her up; her soiled sleeper billowing behind her like the cape of a tiny, very filthy, super heroine.  It quickly became clear that this was a DEFCON 1 sort of situation requiring a full bath.  I ran a shallow bubble bath for her (bubbles – I am quite nice in the face of adversity) and plopped a still delighted Anna into the cleansing waters.  I then grabbed a stack of old prefold cloth diapers, some cleaner, and went to work cleaning up the poopocalypse.  As I scrubbed the living room rug I noticed an ant, then another, then a whole trail of them marching into the living room to torment me.  It is been over a year since I last saw an ant try to invade our living room but they choose yesterday to make a stand.  I rewarded their bravery by squishing them in poopy diapers.  I was feeling like I had regained some modicum of control over the situation when I grabbed another clean diaper only to have a black spider crawl out at me; a black spider with red hourglass on its body.  My god!  Can’t a mother catch a break?  Apparently not.  I responded in the only way I reasonably could to a black widow in my living room; by screaming bloody murder and smashing the spider into oblivion.  I realized that Anna was ominously quiet in the bath and went in to to investigate.  I found that she was quiet because she had occupied herself by dumping the bathwater out onto the bathroom floor; bathwater that was full of a fresh load of crap.

At that point I called Jeff home from work to share the joy.  We cleaned up the children, the rug, and the floors.  Then Jeff took the kids to school so I could mercifully take a shower in peace; free from excrement, insects, and arachnids.  Now that, my friends, is true love.  It’s not flowers, or wine, or roses – love is the partner that will literally clean up shit with you; and laugh while you are doing it.

I’ve always liked birthdays.  My mom used to throw the best, homemade birthday parties and I love doing the same for my own children.  Sure, I feel a twinge of bittersweet, happy-sadness on the kid’s birthdays, but mostly I am just content to see how happy they are at being the center of attention for the day.  Birthdays are great; it’s the milestones that make me cry.

Thomas turned six this past summer and following in my mother’s footsteps we threw him what has become the typical Mendolo-style party at home.  I cupcakes fashioned into a snake, complete with forked licorice tongue.  Homemade paper chains festooned the doorways.  Little eyes and legs were hot glued onto individually wrapped chocolates to create “chocolate lizards”.  And much fun was had playing “pin the tail on the rattlesnake” and going on a “reptile hunt” (scavenger hunt).  It was a low-key birthday and I somehow didn’t expect Thomas’ sixth year to be all that big of a deal.

I should have known that a major developmental leap was brewing a few weeks ago when on one night Thomas devoured half an order of mozzarella cheese sticks, about a third of a large pizza, and then complaining of hunger pains before bedtime went on to polish off two apples.  As an aside, I can only imagine the massive amounts of food we are going to be going though in about a decade with two teenaged boys and one nearly teenaged girl in our house.  I mostly look forward to kids eating me out of house and home.  Finally, I will have an excuse to bake the couple dozen cookies and half a dozen loaves of bread each day that I want to!  Returning to the present, I should have known that the cheese sticks were merely the appetizers for the growth spurt that was to come.

The weekend after Thomas started eating like a teenager, Jeff decided it was time to teach Thomas how to ride a two-wheeled bicycle without training wheels.  Perhaps recalling that I had been seven years old before I had learned to ride such a bike, I expected that it would take Thomas weeks to learn; days at the very least.  Less than two hours after Jeff set out to teach Thomas how to ride I moseyed outside to say “Hi” only to see Thomas zoom, with only a slight wobble, down the sidewalk on nothing but two little wheels.  Thomas’ body was not to be satisfied by merely riding a bike, however.  The next weekend he lost his first tooth.  The weekend after that; another tooth and an announcement that he thought he was now ready for chapter books.  With that proclamation I handed Thomas a set of “Magic Treehouse” books I had snagged at the library sale and he proceeded to sit down and read.

It’s impossible not to be happy for him.; he is so proud of his new skills.  He zooms towards us on his bike in camera phone movies proclaiming “I am a super-good peddler!”  He gleefully whispers to me that he knows I am the tooth fairy (actually, Jeff has been the one on fairy duty).  He asks for more chapter books and asks if he can read “Harry Potter” yet.  I just wish life could slow down a little; I miss those days of sitting on the couch and simply nursing through growth spurts.  Maybe we could put the training wheels back on?  I am still a bit wobbly at parenting a big kid; I am pretty sure I am going to crash a few times and I don’t have a helmet.

That doesn’t seem possible though.  Thomas’ new ability to ride a bike earned him a new, bigger and faster bike.  This past weekend we took it out and he rode loops around our little street with me trailing behind him.  I couldn’t keep up with him.  He’s simply too fast.  All I can do is walk behind him, cheer, and help him up if he falls.