Irish Daisy

Today, the fifth day of summer vacation, I’m making my girls clean their rooms. Three of them...together. Cleaning. There’s been yelling, slammed doors, shouting, thrown toys, hysterical weeping. It’s awesome. Yet, all I can sit here and think is how lucky I am. In my nice house in a nice, safe city, in a safe, prosperous county, in a state with the 5 th largest economy in the world, in the richest country in the world…I’m so lucky I have the opportunity to sit here and listen to my kids battle their way to a clean room. I’m not walking across a desert, or hiding from murderous gangs, or fleeing a home buried in violence or mud. I am not begging my rich neighbor to let me in so I can scrub their floors, tend their nice houses and lawns, pick their crops, make their food, or wash their dishes, so I can feed my children and keep them safe. I’m not sitting in a chain-link cage wondering where my babies are – the babies I suffered and struggled to get to saf...

This is Circle. Isn’t it cute? It’s not just another cute, little gadget though – it’s my little helper, my partner in crime, the engine of my evil plot. Seriously though, this thing is awesome, and I really recommend all parents get one. Unless you live in the wilds of Sweden with no computers, internet or WiFi – in that case feel free to skip it. If you don’t live in the wilds of Sweden, and you have kids in your house, sit down for a minute and let me tell you all about my little buddy. But First A couple of things: I've been researching kids and internet safety since my oldest was born (so, 13 years now), I've found lots of resources and followed too many terrifying rabbit holes (never do a Google image search for "Fluffy Unicorn" without parental controls...just sayin') I was horrified to discover Chromebooks, which the kids' school uses for classwork and recommends for homework, do not support any kind of parental controls or internet ...

It all started with a rejected dinner, and it was a darn good dinner too – one of the kid’s favorites which is why the rejection of said dinner was so strange. Half-way through, Quokka dropped half her sandwich and said, “it’s good mom, I just can’t tonight.” Tomato-basil soup and a tuna melt, mmmm Coming from Quokka, this is a major thing. The girl has never met a dinner she didn’t eat – even when it was my disastrous attempt to make brussels sprouts – she will do her womanly best to choke it down. She took her uneasy stomach to bed and was an immobile lump in the blankets within minutes. Then, Badger, who is still small enough to make middle of the night visits horror-movie-levels of creepy, woke me up at 2:00 am to tell me she didn’t feel well. After I peeled myself off the ceiling, I told her to try a sip of water and see if that would settle her tummy. Water running  Slurping noises Pad, pad, padding little feet across the hall and the creak of her bed frame A few...

With everything going on in the world right now, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about where we are and what we have. The whole concept of Thanksgiving has never been more apt, or more poignant. With bombs and guns and dead children washing up on strange shores, and petty arguments dominating our headlines at home...and we’re going to pause for a moment to gorge ourselves on food, accompanied by shitty debates with our, um, difficult family members, followed by gorging ourselves on the ugliest orgy of retail excess you can imagine, as we gouge each other in the eye to get to the last super-discounted game system in the store. It's all fairly depressing, really. Thankful for Autumn decorations & the house to put them in I’ve been watching the news – the worrisome, tragic and trivial – and I’ve been looking around. We have so much to be thankful for. So much with which we are blessed. So many riches we forget to see or appreciate or pause to really be grateful for. ...

When I started out having kids I knew I wanted to have more than one – my original plan was to have an even two and stop there. I also wanted to have those kids fairly close together. I grew up with a sister who was only 16 months older than me and we had the best time getting into all sorts of trouble together, and I wanted my kids to have the opportunity to have that close playmate and partner in crime. Bonus to having kids close together – that built- in playmate is ready to rock sooner rather than later. I didn’t feel quite up to meeting my mom’s timeline of getting pregnant when the first kid was only seven months old, but I knocked out the second kid right around when I was aiming for, and my two even kids were an even two years and two months apart. Then we got frisky, and a teeny bit nuts, and decided what we really wanted was another child. The two girls were great – really they were. We had felt for years that our family was complete and we were good. But then we just ...

My neighbor stopped by to chat about the surprise third baby she will be having in early December, and the addition they will be building on their two-bedroom house to accommodate their soon-to-be five-person family. We laughed and congratulated and reminisced about having Badger. We commiserated about the challenge of going back to diapers and highchairs. We joked about birthdays and kid spacing (both Athena and Badger were born in September...apparently the holidays are really joyous around here), and we offered help if they ever need it because three can be challenging. Hanging with baby Badger I really wanted to say so much more, and maybe even scream a few warnings, but why scare the poor woman while she’s six months pregnant? Badger was very on-purpose (we worked to have that kid, if you call working having lots of sex at the right time of the month), but we had no idea at all what we were getting ourselves into - not a clue about how much more difficult it would be to ma...

My grandma was a gardener – that is how I think of her and how I will remember her. Gardeners are gritty people, at home in the dirt. They are often at war with the elements; battling pests and weather and nature to coax, or wrest, bounty from the earth. Not that she didn't dress up; Nana was elegant when the occasion called, with swirly skirts, high, high-heels, special jewelry and fabulous lipstick. She was classy and so gorgeous. But I remember her best in a jacket and sturdy trousers, padding carefully in slippers through the morning dew to her garden to harvest beans, tomatoes or cucumbers. She used to grow cucumbers for me, and would send pictures so that I could see how my cucumber, carefully arranged on a re-purposed Styrofoam tray, was growing. Her garden was lush and bountiful, and huge – with beans strung so tall she would disappear in the rows. Not that that was hard. Nana wasn't very tall, but she was mighty in spite of her stature – a pocket-sized dic...

My baby turned 10. My first baby – the very first tiny human that made me a mama for real is a whole decade old. This birthday was a much more earthshaking event than any “milestone” birthday I've ever celebrated for myself. When that baby was born, we were living in a second-floor condo with two dogs that needed to be walked on a leash several times a day and we only had one car with a back seat. Our other car was a pickup truck with sideways-facing jump seats – not really something you can strap a baby into. So we sold it and traded up to Big Bertha. Big Bertha was a behemoth of a truck – V8 with a crew cab that could comfortably seat five adult men and a full-length bed. The baby fit just fine in the backseat, and we could still use Bertha to have adventures camping, hauling mountain bikes, and four-wheeling through ice to snowboard. Bertha was wonderful, but really, really big. A year ago, the cost of driving and maintaining Bertha motivated us to buy a small commuter car...

I mean, I do garden, I like growing things. And the plants around my house are reasonably attractive, but that's it. I recently started planting seeds, instead of buying nursery plants, to save money. I am ridiculously excited whenever they sprout. When volunteers sprout from self-seeding flowers planted the year before…hoo-boy, the glee. Sometimes, they don’t sprout at all. Sometimes, they sprout and die before developing. And sometimes they achieve plant stasis: they sprout, they grow and then they stop somewhere between seedling and actual plant and never change at all until winter comes and they finally curl up and die. I really have no idea why any of this happens. No, stop it. Don’t give me advice. I mean it, really. Bubble flowers! Come back every year if I remember not to dig them up... I like to be good at things, really good at them. I like to succeed and I am frequently accused of being an over achiever, or type A, or a perfectionist…you get the picture. I...

I haven’t been writing much lately because I've been busy killing myself instead.  No, not really, but the 5.5 hours of sleep a night I've been clocking lately will surely do me in sooner or later. Fortunately, coffee! The massive sleep deprivation is the result of trying to fit the work of 2.5 people into a single life. How does one do this you may ask? By not sleeping, for one thing. For another, you do it by rushing from one thing to the next, doing – or pretending to do – several things at once, and by never, ever sitting down for more than 20 minutes.  Unless you're at the office, then you never get up until you're pretty sure you've developed a blood clot in your leg. Why might one do this? Well, I'm a full-time, management-level employee for a Fortune 1000 company – which takes some time if you want to do your job well, and I do. And I'm a mom of three kids – which takes some time if you want to do it well, and I really, really do. And then w...

Dear Preschool, I am writing to ask for a policy change. Though I know state licensing technically requires that all preschool children take a nap, I am imploring, pleading, begging you to exempt Badger from that requirement. You see, Badger does not nap anymore on the weekends, despite much activity and shenanigans. Badger gets up at 7:00 a.m. and goes all out until 8:30 or 9:00 pm, sometimes even later if there’s a party on, and never naps at all. The furry inch-worm emerges The two-hour nap at daycare is just extending her waking hours in the evening. Which is why it is now 11:30 at night, I've put Badger back in bed five times, and in the time-out spot twice, but instead of sleeping she is currently rockin’ the casbah in my dining room. On weekends, a bed time story, cuddle and song are enough to settle her down, and then she’s snoozing with her stuffies. Week nights, oh the week nights, when I am most desperate to finish everything and get to bed, I have a fluf...