Schloka

I'm finally on my mommy-cation.  I completed 6 months of pottery orders in 3, and my body almost gave out.  I'm a full-time mom now.  I'm still having weird hip, knee, ankle problems; my left wrist is out of whack.  I'm also having withdrawals from NPR.  Working in the studio for 15 hours a day meant 15 hours a day of NPR.  I actually have a case of NPR PTSD.  The fund drive in April was so traumatic for me that 2 months later when there's a pause in programming, I think that someone is going to come on and start bantering about how I need to become a member and how insightful Marty Moss-Coane is.  My stomach jumps in fear; it's ridiculous.

Another ridiculous thing is that my hips were hurting so much that the 10 block drive home was painful for me because I'd have to keep my right foot on the gas pedal; cycling was agony.   It took me 20 years to think to switch the pedal on my wheel from the right to the left side.  What other obvious solutions are out there in my life that I'm ignoring?

I have to be careful describing anything as agony.  Spending time at my mom's is great although watching both my mom and Dick deal with his disease (ALS) is upsetting.  Curt's kids, Toby and Jack Peter handle Dick's illness blithely.  Steel does not.  She peers at his breathing machines with her worried little face.  She and I were in mom and Dick's bathroom, and she said quietly, "Mom, are those ALL Grandpa Dick's medicines?"  I said, "Yes they all are."  She paused and said, "Why aren't they working?"  It broke my heart.

My kids love the house I grew up in.  There's outdoor space; it's lush and green, and there are animals.  Jack Peter was walking around the expansive porch the morning after our arrival on our Memorial Day visit.  He came running in to my mom at the breakfast table shouting, "Grandma Susie!  GREAT NEWS!!!! Misty (the cat) has killed something and left it on the porch!"  It was a dead bunny.  Susie dealt with that as Dick came down.  I went to make him an omelette and stepped on a suspiciously damp braided rug by the stove.  Holly, Dick's dog is angry that he's not been well, so she indiscriminately pees and shits in my mom's house because it's obviously Susie's fault.  Susie is so overwhelmed; peed-on rugs are low on the priority list.  I took the rug outside to hose it down and stepped on a dead mouse as I flopped it over the railing.  I'm not sure which I prefer: human feces in the ghetto or dead mice in the country-at least in the ghetto I wouldn't think of walking around barefoot.

We later trekked across the woods to the neighbors' house to say, "hello."  As we walked in, I said to a  butt-wiggling, potty-training Toby, "Toby, do you need to pee in the potty?"  Penny, our beloved neighbor shouted, "I JUST HAD THE CARPETS CLEANED!  DON'T LET HER PEE ON ANY OF THEM!"  It's an extremely unbalanced world on Spy Rock Hill Road when some people have pee on their carpets and are willing to ignore it and others have the potential for a few drips, and they go berserk.

An important part of any trip to my mom's is going to Captain Dusty's ice cream parlor.  Keeping 3 kiddie cones from dripping over little fat hands is actually challenging.  They hand me their "on the edge of disaster" cone and expect it back in round perfection within a matter of seconds.  If I ever need a job, I think I'll put proficient at tidying up to 3 ice cream cones in a timely manner at the bottom of my resume where people put random things about themselves.  My friend, Sarah, put fluent in fake Chinese on the bottom of hers.

Another important part of my pilgrimages home is my drinking a little too much at one or all of the evening meals.  I think it's a stress-release for me because I've been attempting all day to get my kids to act with some decorum in front of my mom and Dick.  Drunkenly entertaining the kids while eating dinner, I was using a bean to act out,

You must pay the rent (bean as mustache)

I can't pay the rent (bean as bow on the head)

You must (mustache)

I can't! (bow)

I'll pay the rent! (bean as bow tie)

My HERO! (bean as bow)

The My Hero! line was so upsetting to the latent feminist in me, I changed it to, I'll pay my OWN rent, you STUPID JERK!  Great Job, Liz!  My kids spent the rest of the weekend running around the house screaming, "I'll pay my own rent, you stupid jerk!" at the top of their little lungs.

I get my thrifty New England ways from my mom.  If the kids were truly annoying her over the weekend, she got her revenge.  She'd been storing a bag of bubble wrap for me for months knowing that I use it to pack and ship pottery.  The kids shrieked with joy as they saw the bag going into the car.  I'd gladly rebirth all three again than listen to them popping bubble wrap and fighting over the size of their sheets for the first hour of the trip.

Speaking of the car, Heidi Hybrid has gone to Toyota heaven.  In May, Tim's mom and her 3 friends went to Brussels.  At short notice, Heidi Hybrid was enlisted to take them all to the airport.    The kid car seats were dumped into the yard and off she went driven by Pat's girlfriend, Chelsea.  The state of Heidi's interior underneath the absent car seats was so revolting to the traveling foursome that they lined all of the upholstery with beach towels, so they didn't have to spend a trans-atlantic flight picking dried cranberries off of their asses.  Heidi, despite her tender age of 6, was ready to move on, and she hooked me up with a whole bunch of beach towels before she went.  I'm just annoyed that I totaled her right after filling her tank with gas.  (At least I 'd procrastinated getting the new set of tires Tim had urged me to get.) 

The sad thing is that I also totaled my friend Karen's Honda Odyssey.  We were driving in tandem to an old estate in Richmond, Virginia.  She had also just filled her tank with gas and was thinking to herself that she'd finally met a more grandmotherly driver than herself...me.  I followed her everywhere for a week as no vehicle would fit both of us and our 7 kids.  Invariably I would leave too much room in between our two cars, and someone would cut in.  On accident day, a car stopped dead in front of her and made a quick left turn and took off.  She stopped dead to miss the car.  Despite the 5 car-lengths I left between her car and mine, I stopped dead (probably after turning to yell at the kids about something) and didn't miss her car.  The airbags went.  My first trauma was seeing the round, head-shaped indent in the shattered windshield.  Hope, my god daughter was in the passenger seat.  I stared at her, trying to figure out how she seemed OK while her head had smashed the windshield.  It was the air bag that had made the shattered dent.  The kids were hysterical.  5 cops came on motorcycles.  Green pink and yellow stuff was flowing out of the car.  The cops started to sing and dance to entertain the kids while I was on the phone with AAA.  It was all relatively fine until I told the kids to say good-bye to Heidi as she was strapped onto the tow truck.  They wept hysterically for 30 minutes after that comment.  oops...

Not only did Tim have to deal with all of the insurance crap, but also he had to deal with the knowledge that we were going to have to replace Heidi with a dreaded minivan.  Considering the probability that I will be driving my kids and their friends and I'm still clinging to the possibility of a 4th child, a minivan is our only option.  Karen swore by her Odyssey.  Accepting her endorsement is far preferable to doing my own research, so we traipsed off to the dealer to get a 2007 red one.  Tim spotted the 2011 on the lot, and all of a sudden the idea of a minivan wasn't so bad.  The dealer wasn't willing to give us a deal, so Tim spent the next 2 days online searching for deals on 2011 Odysseys.  A man named Ketan Rewal in North Jersey was willing to part with his for $30,000 to facilitate his return to India at the end of July.  

In a flurry I packed for 2 weeks at my mom's in 20 minutes, Tim left the worksite, we loaded the kids into the pick up truck to go.  After I'd gotten a bank check, we had 2 hours to make the 1 hour 45 minute drive.  The plan was to get the car, and get temporary NJ plates from DMV before they closed, and I would merrily drive the new mini van to New England, and Tim would drive the truck back to Philly. 

The 1 hour 45 minute drive took 4 hours.  We were behind a crane for 30 miles.  There was an accident.  It was comical.  I was driving, and Tim was screaming on the phone at the various contractors on the work site.  We met Ketan, and he wasn't willing to accept my bank check from a little-known bank in Philly that wasn't answering their phone.  Tim had the president of the bank call him.  The machinations of making the deal were painfully slow.  We were driving in tandem with the new Odyssey, the red truck, and Ketan's other car from notaries to fed ex stores, to UPS stores.  All of these trips involved sweeping miles of New Jersey turnabout loop-dee-loops just to get half a block from the original destination.  It felt like purgatory.  It was 830 pm, and I was still 5 hours away from my mom's, and there was no way the deal was final enough for me to take the new minivan to Massachusetts.  

A month ago, after spending a day with me in the studio happily doing all of the busywork jobs that I hate, my friend, Jen, volunteered to watch all 3 of my kids and her own daughter so I could stay at the studio and fire a kiln and Tim could go to a zoning meeting.  I ordered pizza for them, gave her the cash, and wished her luck.  She arrived to utter chaos.  The pizza guy called at the same time her daughter was freaking out.  Simultaneously there was some issue with the parking space out back, and to top it off, all 3 of my kids needed to shit at the same time.  I came home at 10 to Jen's quivering outside in the rain smoking.  "How do you DO it all the time?!" she wailed.

Back in Jersey, exhausted and resigned to driving a pick-up truck for the next 5+ hours to Massachusetts, we were about to leave the cheap Chinese restaurant where my family had attacked a plate of beef with broccoli and moo shoo vegetables.  Once again, all 3 of my children needed to shit at the same time.  I happily facilitated and got the cute Chinese waiters to clean and fill 3 sippy cups.  Until then, Tim and I hadn't had a break all day.  I felt completely invincible getting on 287 with 3 kids with empty bowels and full sippy cups.  My luck stretched further as my kids fell asleep almost immediately with the first love song dedication on Delilah's radio show.  I rode  a "scorpio chariot" all the way to Manchester-by-the-Sea.  By that, I mean I spent an hour talking to scorpio Karen about how much I'm going to love my Honda Odyssy, and then, my Scorpio friend, Sweet, stayed with me for the rest of the trip gabbing to keep me awake.

It turns out that Karen is the only woman who likes a minivan.  I've discovered it's the men who all covet the car.  Tim is mad for Schloka.  (We named the car after Ketan Rawal's son, Schloka.)  He is trying to figure out how to justify taking it to the worksite and leaving me with the kids and the truck.  Our friends Marc and Megan bought a mini van the same week we got Schloka.  Megan wouldn't succumb to Marc's pleas for a mini van, so he bought one for himself.  A cook, he drives it to and from his restaurants ALL BY HIMSELF.  I was talking to 2 other husbands at the beach; they'd seen my minivan parked.  They were asking me to tell them about it.  I didn't have much to say, but they kept prompting me.  "Can you control the sliding doors remotely?"  "Are they on both sides?"  I started to feel like a phone sex operator.  With every random piece of information, I'd get lusty groans from both of them: 

"The headsets in the back are all wireless"  uuugh!

"I could definitely fit the stroller and luggage for 2 weeks in the cargo area"  mmmmmph

"It has leather interior and LOTS of cup holders"  Oh yeah!!!!....

Tim caught one of the neighbor husbands lasciviously circling around Schloka in the driveway.  His wife is very cool and, for that reason alone, refuses to drive a minivan.  He wants one desperately.  I feel like I should gain 20 lb, get a really bad highlighted mommy haircut, and sprinkle some doritos on my shirt every time I drive it, but I do love those sliding doors.  

Being a full-time mom is great, but it does exacerbate some of my control-freak, mommy tendencies.  My brother's family was there too, and Jana, my sister-in-law, stepped aside to let me have my way with meals.  Their family calls me "the vegetable queen."  I also had to get all of the kids out of the house EVERY day for at least 5 hours to give Dick and Susie a break.  That was a little onerous at times.  I got a casual invite from a woman whose husband manages a little country club.  She said we should go to the pool, so I arrived with 7 kids.  The poor husband did not expect 8 people, especially when his wife and her sister didn't end up coming.  As I awkwardly thanked him for his unintended largesse, Toby was squatting and watching herself pee through the material of her bathing suit onto the hot concrete.  How is she supposed to differentiate between the beach and a pool?

Tim arrived in Schloka for the last 2 days of the trip.  His kidless life had been, by no means a picnic.  He'd definitely gotten a lot of work done, and gotten to eat out a lot, but he'd also spread poison ivy to his eyeball precipitating a 7-hour visit to the ER at Will's Eye Hospital.  When it came time to leave my mom's, he said, "Now YOU get to drive Schloka!"  "Are you kidding???" I replied....

"I'll  be taking the truck BY MYSELF, and YOU will take the mini van with all of the kids."  His love for Schloka had blinded him.  He actually thought he was being generous offering to let me drive it.  I'm pretty sure his vision cleared up after what turned into an 8 hour drive home with 4 kids in the car.  

Breakfast Haiku

Usually Tim doesn't wake me when he leaves at 5, but he did this morning.  Instead of going back to sleep I was lying there thinking up a Haiku to prepare myself for Monday morning breakfast. 

Sour cherry pie

will get my kids out of bed

naughty fun breakfast

They didn't love the pie, but the novelty of it got them dressed.  I've always wanted to give kids pie for breakfast.  When I was little I read on the back of my cereal box that kids in New England eat apple pie for breakfast.  I looked down at my sugar free cereal and screamed "MOM! I'm supposed to be eating apple pie for breakfast!"  It got me nowhere, but it's been on my mind for 30 years.

My favorite Haiku story involves two of my roommates from college.  They'd just moved to New York City together and were going to a classmates' birthday party.  Sarah was writing a Haiku on the card.  She read the first 2 lines out loud to Colin:

A New York birthday

should be so very heavy

Without missing a beat he shouted from the bathroom,

NOT UNLIKE YOUR LEGS!

The birthday girl did always have unusually stocky legs-not unlike Hillary Clinton's.

I've got quite a few tricks in my Tim-less school day morning arsenal.  I discovered two weeks into it that shouting doesn't work.  I recently asked Jack Peter nicely 5 or 6 times to finish his breakfast and go get dressed with no response.  I finally dumped a 1/2 pint of water on him.  It was, by far, my most effective parenting to date.  Drenched, he ran right down and got dressed after a short, indignant session of weeping.

Jack Peter is 6 now.  I think I'm entitled to expect a little more from him.  As usual, his birthday did not pass un-noticed.  He expects a wedding-size party every year for his birthday because we had an inadvertent rager for his 3rd birthday which set a bad precedent.  This year, I got a "groupon" for a bounce house this year.  You get what you pay for.  The netting on the wall of the right side was perforated with kid-size holes.  The guys came drunk at 9 am to the park to set it up.  I called them to tell them things were winding down at 2-ish.  They arrived at 6:30 to break it down.  Poor napless Toby passed out on her face in the middle of it for part of the afternoon.  I did not pass out face down despite sitting there with the dads drinking the entire time while every kid in the park had his/her way with the bounce house.  It wasn't a bad way to spend a day, and all of the dads took pity on my Tim-less self and helped me clean everything up.

We decided to have it catered by our friend, John.  He cooked for 80; 40 came.  I invited all of JP's kindergarten, and 10% RSVP'd, so I had no idea.  I was slightly self-conscious about the absurd amount of food, people and the bounce house-not to mention the 5 cases of beer I'd bought.  JP's school is 80% below the poverty line.  Apparently, my discomfort was unwarranted.  Jack Peter's friend, Ny Brie's grandmother said to me, "I like what you've done here; it's simple.  The kids can just grab food and run around!  Black people don't do it like this, they make everything so COMPLICATED!  First they'd close off the block, and then the RIBS and the COLLARD GREENS; this is nice, and I like this beer!"  Ny Brie's grandmother also pulled me aside to tell me quite graphically how handsome one of the husbands was.  She cracked me up.  I was telling the couple after the party thinking they'd get a kick out of it.  Unphased, they said, "Oh yeah...Rob can't go anywhere without a black woman hitting on him.  He even gets everything free at Home Depot if there's a black woman at the register."  Who knew?

We made capes for everyone that had the logo of GPFFJ on the back.  GPFFJ is the "secret agent website" that Jack Peter and his best friend, Caspar "work" for.  GPFFJ stands for nothing.  The cape idea didn't really take off at the party, but watching my kids "fly" around the driveway when I'd completed the first 3 prototypes was priceless.  Jack Peter wore his cape to school one day and came home telling me that Mrs. O'Brien was really jealous of his cape.  Luckily we had a blue roll of vinyl disposable tablecloth.  Vinyl disposable tablecloths are the raw material for DIY capes, and the black produces a decidedly trash-bag-ish effect that I didn't want for Mrs. O'Brien.  Jack Peter made her a "ST" medallion for the back (super-teacher)  He presented it to her the following day.

We didn't hear anything about the super teacher cape until Jack Peter's kindergarten "graduation".  It was  a ceremony at 10:30 am on a weekday.  I'd miscalculated everything.  The girls were starving.  I had to work at noon.  I kissed Jack Peter after a half an hour and headed out before the ceremony was over because the girls were ticking time bombs.  The assistant teacher ran after me to tell me I had to stay for one last part of the ceremony.  We traipsed back in, and Mrs. O'Brien announced that she'd received the best gift ever this year from one of her students.  She donned her cape saying she'd ALWAYS wanted a super teacher cape.  

I think it's safe to say that Jack Peter was one of Mrs. O'Brien's favorites.  I used to think she was too hard on one of his classmates, but after spending a full day with this kid, I had to say to her, "Mrs O'Brien, I've always had a lot of respect for you, but after spending a day with John, my respect for you has tripled."  She replied, "MULTIPLY THAT TIMES 170!"  For some reason Jack Peter had $2 from Mrs. O'Brien in his pocket when we went to a Kentucky Derby party.  Hoping for a life lesson, I asked him if he wanted to bet on a horse.  Being Jack Peter, he did, and then his horse came in second, so his $2 magically turned into $29.  Steel went so ballistic at his luck that the host of the party gave her $4.  Great, Jack Peter learned that gambling does pay, and Steel learned, yet again, that pitching a fit does get you what you want.

I guess it's fair to say that disciplining my kids and discouraging bad behavior has been challenging.  We hit an all-time low when they were mimicking me as I was trying to tell them to eat dinner.  "Eat your broccoli, Steel! Ha Ha Ha!"  All I could think was, "What the hell are they going to do when they're teenagers???"  I took away a toy from Jack Peter, and they all stood up for him and told me they were going to throw all of my stuff away and then they were going to draw on my clothes with a sharpie.  

I give them pie for breakfast justifying it to myself by writing a Haiku at 5 am, and this is how they repay me?  I want to kill them, and then I'll hear them casually humming Loretta Lynn to themselves as they open the toy chest to play.  There's not much cuter than their little voices singing, "One needs a spankin'; one needs a huggin' and ONE'S ON THE WAY!"

I rock the chubs

"I rock the chubs!"

The cleanse mentioned in a previous blog has created another way for me to fail.  Now I avoid weighing myself because I know the scale will show me a number far above the elusive 136 I hit at the end of the cleanse. I do like it that Tim is now starting his days with weird, green smoothies. As I type, I'm admiring the stalks of the broccoli he put in the blender for tomorrow morning. It's hard to push the stalks on the kids, and I wouldn't ever throw them away. Now they get whipped up into a frothy, chia seed , coconut water surprise. Another benefit, for the cheap New Englander in me, to the healthy living  is that I've kicked my 1/2 and 1/2 addiction. That's one less thing on the grocery list, AND I get to make use of the remaining milk left in the kids' sippy cups in the morning. It sounds gross, but I dump in so much milk to make it creamy; the coffee goes tepid.  I have to microwave it anyway; I might as well use every drop of that organic milk I hate paying for.

Perhaps I'm good at maintaining my swimming routine because going to the YMCA makes me feel tiny. I was swimming today during a water aerobics class. It was well-attended this morning by 15 women whose aggregate weight is well over a ton. They hold foam "weights" and jump around. Under water I watch the quietly undulating flab on their legs.  It's oddly beautiful and calming reminding me of the way fish and plants on a coral reef move back and forth rhythmically with the waves. Above the water is another story. I was listening to NPR yesterday. The last remaining knuckleball pitcher was interviewed on Fresh Air. Apparently a good knuckleball pitch is like a "butterfly in a typhoon." I feel like a butterfly in a typhoon in that pool.

It is hard to believe that the American weight problem, especially among African American women in Philly, is entirely about poor diet, education and food deserts. I was wondering, as I swam, whether maintaining such an enormous size empowers people who are traditionally disempowered. Initially all of the lap lanes were full, so I was trying to swim close to the perimeter of the 3rd lane in the "free swim" area of the pool. The ladies were doing the walkabout section of their class where they maraud around the pool with their "weights." I thought I could stick close to the lap line, and I wouldn't bother anyone. I might have been imagining it, but I felt as if they were intentionally blocking my path. They were wielding their heft with such purpose.

My friend, Sweet, always jokes about Toby's delicious chubbiness. He mimics her voice as she reaches for another pretzel saying, "You think I roll out of bed looking like this? It's about hard work and maintenance!" The Pellis family dedicated a song to Toby when she was about a year old. We sing it to this day. It's called, I rock the chubs. Those pool ladies are definitely rocking the chubs. Perhaps Michelle Obama has more to contend with in her "get healthy" initiatives than educating people about good food choices.

Speaking of rocks, now my house is filled with rocks and sticks. There are rocks in every pocket of Jack Peter's jackets and in the side pockets of his book bag and his lunch pack. There are rocks and sticks in his bed. It's frustrating. The conversations go like this:

"Jack Peter what is this?"

"It's a GPFFJ gadget."
"What's GPFFJ?"
"It's the secret agent website we work for."

"Oh."

This is what was under Jack Peter's blanket this morning.  Under the books were more rocks.  The glowing orange thing is silly puddy adhered permanently to the fitted sheet.   Yes, that is a broken brick in the middle of the pile.


Jack Peter had to draw himself enjoying a rainy day and to write about it as part of his homework last week.  He wrote, "On a rainy day I like jumping in puddles."  To me he went into detail about the fact that his umbrella was a secret agent gadget that turns into a propeller, and takes him flying away.  I told him to write about that.  He looked right and left and said furtively, "NO! it's a secret agent umbrella!  I can't write about it!"  Clearly he has more integrity at 5 than I do.  Secret Agent Jack Stalwart books are the root of the obsession. I should be happy he reads so well, but instead I'm bitching about the rock dust in his bed. His cousin, Owen, has been reading since he was three. My sister in law, Jana, was probably cursing his literacy too when he and his sister were in the shower asking for shampoo. Jana said, "We're out of kid shampoo; just use mine." Owen examined the bottle and shrieked in horror, "Mom! This is for dry and damaged hair!!!!" What do you say to that? especially when the kid has the most gorgeous curly blond hair.

Jack Peter's fellow secret agent, Caspar, came over for one of the days of spring break. Caspar is great because he's nice to the girls. Let me rephrase that: he doesn't fight back as hard as other boys do. I took the 4 kids to the Please Touch Museum. I can handle my 3 kids because the big kids are slightly OCD and controlling: they stick to a game in a single spot for an hour so they can rule; I only have to worry about the wandering of Toby. More importantly, I can bribe and threaten my own kids. 4 kids at the Please Touch was a disaster. They scattered before I'd negotiated the annoying issue with our membership at the front desk. The mock grocery store is always the worst. The kids fight other toddlers for the limited grocery carts.  They fill up the carts and then fight over the cash registers at check-out after which I spend 25 minutes trying to cajole them into returning everything to the proper shelf while another weeping child is following, desperate for the soon-to-be-empty cart. I abandoned four full grocery carts. There will probably be a poster of me in the entranceway when I go next, but I had no choice.

Heather and her mom had come with Heather's 2 girls to meet us, and we hadn't crossed paths until I spotted them on their way to lunch. My adult/child ratio improved drastically as they helped me corral the 4 kids, so I left the carts. My 4 were the only kids in the lunch area who climbed from the lunch table, onto a radiator to eat on a 6-foot-high window ledge.  I had succumbed to the dietary needs of Caspar and made only pbj, watermelon slices, and juice boxes, so they didn't have to climb to get away from the broccoli and asparagus I normally put in the lunch box.  Perhaps they were putting on a show, so Heather's mom could witness my lack of control.

Ever the optimist, I was hoping after the 4th permutation of groups going to the bathroom that the worst part of my day was over.  Heather and her mom left, so I told Caspar to pick the last place we would visit before going home. He picked the Alice in Wonderland section. I didn't give it a lot of thought until we got there...a maze and a labyrinth complete with faux doors and lots of mirrors. I can't imagine that Abu Ghraib was worse than trying to keep track of all of them and dealing with the security guard who kept telling me they aren't supposed to climb on the maze.

I did make it home and got the girls down for a nap. Caspar and Jack Peter played quietly, and I thought I'd recuperated. We went to the park when everyone woke up.  They were all climbing in a cherry tree.  Steel started screaming at the top of her lungs from the tree.  I ignored it.  Finally she came down sobbing and holding up her hand.  Caspar's shoe tread was embedded into her index finger.  "He was stepping on my finger for a LONG TIME, and HE WOULDN'T GET OFF!!!!"  "Well, Steelie, do you know why he wouldn't get off?"  "Why?" she sniffed.  "Because you scream at the top of your lungs and cry so often that he didn't know anything was truly wrong!"

Toby, like her sister, is fond of drama.  Her favorite part of the Please Touch Museum is the toddler-sized stretcher in the little ambulance...

Aside from the cherry tree incident, everything was fine for over an hour until Caspar started complaining to me, "IT WASN'T FAIR! YOU DIDN'T GET ME CHOCOLATE MILK AT THE PLEASE TOUCH!!!" Caspar is a head taller than Jack Peter and outweighs him by 20 lb. He eats nothing but peanut butter and jelly, Fruitables (juice boxes,) candy, and chocolate milk. I bellowed at him, "You want to know what isn't fair, Caspar????? It's not fair that I spend half of my life shoving healthy food down Jack Peter's throat-making lamb chops for his lunch box and shelling edamame, while you eat nothing good for you, and YOU'RE HUGE!!! That's not fair, OK?!"

Maybe I was still a little pissed about the Alice in Wonderland thing...

Sanity Assessments

GODDAMNIT!  I got passed over again this year for the "People Magazine 100 Most Beautiful Women" list.  Can you believe that???  This is a glamour shot of me in my studio from a couple of weeks ago.  I'd just spent the weekend with Karen and her family.  She told me a harrowing story about a mom friend who wacked her head on the hatchback door when she was unloading the groceries.  The friend hasn't been the same since, to the point that she can't drive.  I got into my studio Monday evening to fire my kiln all night.  Something was caught in one of the burners, so I bent over to dislodge it.  My head hit the side of the kiln.  I immediately got the egg, and it was bleeding.  Because of Karen's story, I completely freaked out.  I texted this image to Tim and told him to call me before he went to sleep to make sure I was lucid.  As if he'd be able to go to sleep after that...  The problem is that my mom doesn't have a smart phone.  Had I sent this image to her, she'd have responded, "It's not fatal! You'll be fine!  Just keep putting ice on it!"

My sister-in-law, Jana,  aspires to what she calls, Susie's "laissez faire parenting methods."  Jana was proud that she waited 2 days for the cheaper non-weekend x-ray window to take my niece in with her most recent arm injury.  Like my mom, I don't think I'd go to the doctor unless a child lost the arm.  Smart phone healthcare is my method.  I text our pediatrician images of the kids' goopy pinkeyes or write descriptions of their ailments, and he invariably writes back "bring them in at the end of the week if they have a prolonged fever..."

The really crappy thing is that my mom's partner, Dick, IS dying.  After 6 months of her saying, "It's not fatal; it's allergies!" or "You just need to get back into shape!" They got a horrid diagnosis of ALS.  My mom's and Dick's ability to switch gears and accept that has been an inspiration.  I didn't inherit the "coping with things that suck but are out of my control" gene.  I think about it while I'm throwing pots and start crying.  I had a ridiculous moment of solace the other day.  Terry Gross was interviewing Hugh Laurie, the man who plays Doctor House.  Dick absolutely adores House.  They were discussing the fact that the series is about to end, and all I could think was, "Thank God!  Dick won't miss any House episodes."

I know I regularly put my craziness on display in this blog and in my everyday conversation.  I think I'm doing it with a detached irony that lets people know that I really am sane, but it's not working.  I got a call from a gallery the other day.  The first message was cryptic, "Liz, I need to talk to you about the special order from last week."    The second message was, "Liz, we really need to talk about what you sent to the store."  I'd taken a special order for a serving bowl, but I'd sent a vase for a previous order.  I laughed when I got ahold of him.  "Steve!  I didn't confuse the special order!  I haven't made it yet.  That vase was from an order you made in March."  He responded, "OH!  Wow, I had a speech all prepared about how you might be taking too much on."  I told him to save the speech.  He might need it later on.  I did spend the rest of the afternoon wondering exactly how crazy he thinks I am.

I had another recent brush with someone else's assessment of my sanity.  I had a disastrous night out with Lisa and Heather.  I was going to take them out for their birthdays.  Lisa who is a wedding planner at Loew's Hotel said, "Just come here; I can comp dinner."  Stingy as I am, I accepted.  Unfortunately, Heather had been out for a spa day with her friend Fiona.  Heather's mother in law had given Fiona a credit card and told her and Heather to make a day of it.  A lot of wine was involved, so they arrived at Loew's, 2 barely-standing puddles.  Lisa and I tried to shove carbs into them during dinner, but that didn't stop Fiona from hitting on the waiters (Lisa's co-workers) and throwing a drink over her shoulder onto the floor.  The birthday night turned into a group therapy session for Fiona whose marriage is not so great and who is, apparently, harrowed by apparitions of dead people.

One would think that Lisa and I would see the bad effects of alcohol on the girls and drink accordingly.  Our coping mechanism, instead, was to join them.  After tipping the waiters magnanimously to ensure that they not discuss Lisa's disastrous dinner guests with the Loew's higher ups, we headed off to another bar.  Finally, at Fiona's insistence on a "boogie,"  we ended up at Woody's, a gay dance club.  Lisa and I have been friends since she was born and I was 3 months old.  We are not, normally, ones to go to a club for a boogie, but dancing with Lisa and a bunch of gay guys (Tanner Kok included) was a BLAST.  We shook the visions of dead people and bad engineer husbands right off until we were retrieved by a door man to deal with an apoplectic Fiona.  Heather had fallen off of a chair and been kicked out of the club.  Unable to find Fiona, she had left with all of Fiona's belongings.

Fiona was so livid about her bag that she almost sobered up as she screamed about Heather's lack of loyalty.  I took control and told Lisa to get Fiona to our neighborhood on the train.  I'd ride my bike to Heather's house to get the bag and meet them at the station.  Fiona's husband had been expecting her home at about 3 that afternoon.  He had been in conversation all night with Heather's husband, Rene, who had held similar expectations for Heather's arrival home.  The last time I had a girls' night with Heather, she woke in the middle of the night, fell, and hit her head on a coffee table.  According to Rene, when I breathlessly arrived at his door for Fiona's bag, that was my fault as was Heather's getting kicked out of Woody's.  I was incredulous.  I screamed something about all I had done that night for his drunken wife and her drunken friend.  As I ran out with the bag to go to the train station, I sent him a succinct text for emphasis, "YOU SUCK"

When I was in boarding school and ran into some discipline problems, my mom blamed them on Jennie Engstrom.  That was as ridiculous as Rene's blaming Heather's behavior on me.  My favorite Jennie story is that she moved to Vail after college.  For years she was a ski bum.  She dated a guy from Mississippi named Gil Fancher.  Gil, too, was a ski bum.  Every time I'd go visit, they'd take care of me and all my friends.  Ski equipment and ski passes would magically appear.  Gil Fancher was the mayor of the mountain.  After they married, Gil got a little more serious about getting a real career and went into real estate.  (Their wedding was fabulous.  Jennie's super-preppy sister had all of us bridesmaids in wacky Lilly Pullitzer ensembles.  Jennie's blue blood parents, William and Mary partied down with Gil's parents, Butch and Cookie at a ranch.)  Gil Fancher was not cut out for a desk job.  One afternoon, he couldn't take it anymore.  He left his empty real estate office to go ski. On the chair lift he introduced himself to a man who was there to buy a ranch.  I believe the man ended up buying not one, but 2 multi-million dollar ranches using Gil as his realtor.  I envy Gil his immunity to the Puritan work ethic that plagues me and Tim.  His role is the Mayor of the mountain, and his job is to schmooz.

These roles are set at birth.  Steel is the craftsperson (Although she didn't get into the "week after Easter dying eggs because all of the Easter stuff at SuperFresh was on sale" project.  Tim came home to me, by myself, in the yard tie-dying Easter eggs a week after Easter Sunday.  The kids had all left me for the neighbors house because they get to play with an iPad over there.)  Toby's role has always been the Homecoming Queen waving from her float.  Last week, she came to our bed in the middle of the night and slept with us.  I woke up pissed because she lay horizontally in between Tim and me.  I thought I'd gotten the short end of that stick because she kicked me in the face all night long.  She'd been slamming her skull into Tim's head, so I actually made out well.   I lay there with Toby as she awakened.  She was waving her little outstretched fat hand muttering, "HI!  Good morning!"   I asked her who she was waving to, and she said, "The birds!"  Of course all of the birds in the back yard were there to see her!

My role has never been the bad influence friend.  I'm the hard working one parents assumed would keep things above board.  Rene has apologized twice for his accusations, but the idea that his brain chose ME as the problem is so shocking.  I joked to him when I walked in the door about his never letting his wife go out with me, and he took that ball and ran with it.  Clearly I'm no longer in a position to joke about such things.

unions and the cleanse

Why haven't I blogged? I did 2 more shows. One was a faboulous 3-day wholesale show. The other was a not-so-fabulous 9-day retail show. During all of this, Tim and I did a 21-day cleanse. Also, our kids are insane and exhausting, and we're addicted to The West Wing box set my brother and his wife lent us.

Why not blog during the cleanse? Instead of staying up to blog, we'd just go to sleep after putting the kids down. There was nothing to live for without alcohol and empty carbs. I'm also not very funny or interesting without alcohol, coffee, sugar, wheat, dairy, meat. We were "eating" things that looked like the above broccoli/beet/celery juice. Tim has actually kept off the 14 lb he lost during the cleanse. I, however, have been jamming empty carbs into my mouth since the day the cleanse ended. That "3" I saw in the middle of the 3 numbers of my weight is a distant memory. I've come up with a new drink, though. There's a line of alcohol products called Skinny Girl. The Skinny Girl Margarita is made with agave instead of sugar. My new drink is the "anorexic girl margarita." It's tequila, lime and soda water. I highly recommend it especially when you're going to accompany it with an entire bag of stale pretzels.

Jack Peter at school in his pajamas on Dr. Seuss' birthday. The fervor with which Ms. O'Brien celebrates Dr. Seuss is hilarious. She dresses as the cat in the hat for the entire day and makes them all fabricate and wear cat-in-the-hat hats.

The anxiety over educating our kids in the city has abated somewhat. We got him into a science-based charter school that is rumored to be great. It's going to be a bad commute, but worth it. I made the questionable decision to tell Jack Peter, and he crumpled into a pile of tears wailing that he never wants to leave Kearny. The only way I could justify the school change to him was to tell him that it's a fall-back option "in case you get the teacher you don't want" (One teacher at the school is rumored to be focussed exclusively upon breaking the little spirits of her first graders.) Jack Peter was quiet for a minute, and said, "Mom, I've seen that class, and there are only brown kids in it." So much for my color blind child. He felt better when he made a graph to tally up the opinions of everyone in his life. The majority voted for Green Woods Charter School, so it's all OK, now. Writing things down helps him cope. This was one of the 5 signs he made last night...

The above-mentioned not-so-great show was The Philadelphia International Flower Show at the Convention Center. Had my adorable friend, Stephen, not flown over from Northern Ireland and abused the American love of an Irish accent to foist pottery on unsuspecting matrons, the show would have been a complete disaster. The set up for the show involved 5 union goons surrounding us as we hastily used a drill and a ladder to put the booth together. Neither of those things is allowed. If you need to use a step ladder, then you need to pay a union carpenter to do the job. We knew this going in; Tim relishes confrontations with the unions. For him to stop drilling and laddering, the show organizer had to come and tell me she was going to kick me out and I'd be out my $4000. He finished up the booth install with a manual screw driver standing on wobbly boxes of pottery saying, "I hope I fall off these boxes, so I can sue them..."

The union guys were waiting for us when we came to take the booth down at 11:30 pm on the last day of the show. I told them I never plan to do the show again, so they couldn't tattle on me to the show organizer. Instead, they tried to box in our truck with 2 fork lifts. Our neighbors moved their truck, so getting out was easy, but I was flustered. I left the 2 boxes that had all of my large pieces in it. The union guys got the last laugh as they all have their wedding gift shopping sorted out for this summer.

Jack Peter is going to be a Broadway singer or a minister because Tim and I abhor religion and show tunes. Steel is going to be a union leader. I recently took the kids to the Please Touch Museum. Steel and Ciela, the daughter of another builder friend, took over the construction site. They were precisely stacking the foam bricks in the back of a pretend dump truck. Ciela was the mason, and Steel was standing over the pile of bricks preventing any non-union child from messing with the site.

On top of the 2 boxes of pottery I forgot to bring home, I had quite a bit of breakage. My neighbor, despite the note I'd left her to PLEASE be careful while she sets up, broke 7 pieces. Another woman stood up an bashed one of my shelves with her head. It caused an avalanche of pottery. Whenever I introduced myself to other vendors for the rest of the week, I would say, "My booth was the crash." They'd look at me with horror and pity. It's almost comforting when I lose a lot of pottery. It reminds me of how much I love to make it. If I could work out a cost-effective method for making pottery and giving it away or making it and smashing it, I'd be the happiest potter on earth.

In addition to singing great Irish songs to the kids at bedtime, (Dick Darby who drowns his humpy, lumpy wife being the favorite) Irish Stephen had a "wee holiday romance" with an adorable guy named (drumroll...) Tanner Kok. All of us fell in love with Tanner, and the Kok jokes were endless. If Steel marries him, she can be Steel Kok!! and so on. The girls are still talking about Tanner, "Where is the big boy?" Toby asks at breakfast or "When is the heart boy coming?" (She heard me say that he has a heart-shaped face.) It's nice to know I'm starting them early on the fag hag path that has served me so well.

I get to make pottery for the next 3 months for all of my wholesale accounts. I will then take the summer "off" and be a full-time mom. Tim is going to be slammed with work, so I'm hoping to spend the weeks away wherever people will have us-preferably in beachy or rural places. We'll come home for urban family weekends. I've never taken more than 8 days off in a row-even to have a baby, so this will be new for me. My daughters have been especially challenging these days, so I might lose my mind.

Wholesaling

Steel refused to participate in the Dansko photoshoot. I'm taking this opportunity to post a movie of her hula-hooping. She's been hula-hooping since way before she turned 4. It's her now-not-so-hidden talent.

I wonder about the average time a Netflix envelope spends in the bottom of a bag. For me it's about 2 days, but I had one in my bag the entire time I was in New York City. If Tim had to put Netflix envelopes into the mail, and there was no such thing as streaming video, we might have gotten some sleep in the past few years because he'd NEVER remember.

I'm good at mailing things in Philly because I have my favorite mail boxes. Out in the real world I get lost. I tried to cross Central Park one night to meet a friend on the east side. I was in the park for about 1/2 hour. When I came out the other side, I asked a cop which way to get to 82nd and Lexington, north or south? He replied, "Ummm....lady, you'll have to cross the park." It would be so great to see an aerial view of my not traversing the park while walking for thirty minutes.

Sadly, Steel got my lack-of-orientation bug on top of my crafting bug. She was recently lost on the beach in Florida for 30 minutes. I'd walked her up to the edge of the beach and pointed to where Tim, Jack Peter, and Toby were sitting in the beach-side Marriott restaurant 20 feet away. In my mind she could see her dad and would be with him in a matter of 5 seconds, and he had seen us coming. I went back to hanging out with our friends.

Imagine my surprise when I saw her holding a lifeguard's hand a half hour later coming from a completely different direction. I have 2 things to be thankful for in that situation:
1. I'd finished the rum punch I was drinking at 1 in the afternoon and had put the glass down.
The life guard was pissed that I'd not gone looking for her in a half hour. Adding a rum punch to that picture might have landed me in jail.
2. I didn't know she was lost. If I'd noticed she wasn't with her dad after, say, 15 of the 30 minutes I might have killed myself.

In addition to leaving my 12 block comfort zone, every time I do a retail event it reminds me why I wholesale my work. Exposure to the general public has me sending out mental thank yous to the galleries who sell my work for me. These gallery owners allow me to be in my studio listening to Laxshmi Singh and the rest of the NPR crew all day. I make pottery; I ship it, and I make more. At night, I hang out with my kids and then cuddle with my husband on the couch watching Netflix. I'm happy.

One woman came into my booth and gushed about my work. I asked her what brought her to Chelsea Market. She said, "Every month I have a colonic around the corner; then I come here, to all of the amazing food and fill back up again!" I know I'm the queen of "too much information," but that was challenging at 10 am even for me. If I were any good I'd have sold her a set of dishes to make her "filling up" experiences better. There is an amazing shop called The Filling Station at Chelsea Market. It has nice oil, vinegar and beer. You bring your own bottles to fill up. If Tim follows his bliss and becomes a farmer, oil, vinegar and beer is all I'll need.

Another guy came in and commented on my new vase form. I chirped, "It's flower arranging for morons! You just cut them short and shove them in. The vase does the rest!" He responded with a completely straight face, "If I give one of them to my wife, am I telling her she's a moron?" Apparently my response, "No, you'd be telling her she's fabulous and that she deserves flowers all the time!" worked. He bought two, but it was not fun for me.

There was another problem with my being in New York. I look like a hag most of the time because I'm a potter working alone in an industrial building in a crack-filled neighborhood, and when I'm not doing that, a kid is dumping milk on me. The incentives to put myself together are few. Initially, I'm both cowed and impressed by the fashion and beauty in New York, but then it starts to upset me for 2 reasons:
1. It turns into a uniform, and I worry people aren't allowing themselves to be creative or expressive.
2. I worry about the waste that is inherent in the fashion industry. In 2009 I went to New York, and every woman I saw was wearing a pair of knee-high rubber Hunter boots. I saw none this December in late 2010. I keep picturing a massive landfill overflowing with different colored pairs of Hunter boots.

I discovered last Thursday that all of the Hunter boots are in the closets of fancy Philly moms anxiously awaiting a rainy, not-too-cold day. Thursday is Dance Academy day; Jack Peter takes theater dance. All of the ballet dancer moms were wearing Hunter boots; the black nannies and I were the only ones not wearing them. I was astonished.

We had our own footwear expedition over the weekend. The Dansko outlet was having a sale. I only wear Danskos. They are those ugly clogs that nurses and cooks wear. I have a studio pair, an everyday-not-covered-in-clay pair, and a fancy pair for going out. It was time for me to restock, so we all went out. The Stieler family came too. Jack Peter saw a bright red pair, put them on immediately, and the rest of the kids followed. 4 kids in bright red, patent leather Dansko's was just too cute. When I discovered that kids clogs weren't on sale, it was too late. It was money well spent for the girls. Jack Peter has vowed not to wear his EVER again as he got teased at school for them. Hmmm...he's tiny, way-too-smart, taking theater dance and wearing bright red patent leather clogs. I can't imagine anyone giving him a hard time. Strangely, he probably will wear them again. He talks about being teased with a somewhat-believable air of nonchalance.

We got back late from the Dansko outing. Jen's husband and Tim had taken Tim's new Mini Cooper home. Jen and I had the kids in the mom-mobile. I muttered on the way home to Jen, "Wouldn't it be funny if our husbands took the one remaining parking space behind the house and left us to find another spot with 4 tired kids and a bunch of crap in the car?" As we drove past the full parking spaces behind the house, Jack Peter whined, "AWWWW! When are we going to get our parking space back?!" Jen replied, "As soon as your fathers grow vaginas!"

nacho intifada

The 4th brother took one look at this image and asked what the hell he was doing with a dead greyhound...

The 3 Philly McDonald brothers and their significant others just treated their mom to a cooking event/dinner revolving around the previously unheralded goat. We ate goat ceviche, goat milk biscuits with goat butter, goat chops, goat curry, goat kielbasa, goat cheese and goat ice cream. While we ate 3 goats that had been killed the day before at a local farm, the head chef told us how to butcher a goat using the fourth of the unfortunate goat posse.

I couldn't help picturing the goats drawing straws:
Goat 1: No Brainer! I'll take ice cream, butter, and cheese!
Goat 2: Alright then, ceviche it is
Goat 3: I guess I'll take Kielbasa. At least I'll finally get with that hot Polish pig.
Goat 4: SHIT! I'm going to be the evisceration demo?????

There was something decadent about the whole night that made me feel slightly uneasy. Maybe it was the way the chef placed his cooked goat chops on top of the meat he had just sliced off of the 4th goat carcass. He was planning to eat the chops as soon as he finished the butchering demo.

None of this stopped me from drinking at least 2 glasses of incredible wine that was offered with each course. (of course) After the ceviche, biscuits, and soup, I asked for a to-go container and deftly deposited the remaining 3 goat courses into it. On Sunday I was glad I had. We had 3 sausage eaters: Steel, Toby, Willa. Jack Peter is not fond of sausage, so he triumphantly gnawed on the goat chops.

There are 5 people in our family, and we often have guests, so it doesn't surprise me that with every meal comes one grump. Tim doesn't like my willingness to make a separate meal for the dissatisfied customer, but Tim is gone for the next 10 days, so I'm going to do as I see fit. Tonight was a New England mom triumph. The end of the pot pie went to JP and Steel. I ate all the leftover beans and broccoli for lunch and finished the super-old red sauce and pasta for dinner. Toby had the leftover peas and an omelette. This all went down with some cukes and tomatoes and, more importantly, without drama. They had the rest of the ice cream for dessert with the rest of the stale marshmallows on top. OK, no one ate the marshmallows, but I put them in the microwave, and it was fun to watch them grow, so I still got rid of them.

I have a refrigeratorial clean slate. I am fantasizing that I will make EXACTLY the right amount of food for every meal, so that I will not have to deal with left overs for 10 days. My poor husband is in Ireland reading this and saying to himself/me, "Babe! I thought you loved leftovers! I always make extra because you're so good at taking what's in the fridge and making it into something AMAZING!" Yes, honey, I was particularly proud of my "nachos" this weekend that had shredded chicken parmesean on them as well as black beans and cheese. I was expecting a nacho intifada, but they were gobbled up without complaints. I know I'm amazing at leftovers, but I really do prefer fresh food. Just because an emergency medical technician is amazing at resuscitating heart attack victims doesn't mean he/she wants more people to have heart attacks.
xo