Fish Out of Water

The end of summer, and other things too

I have really not gotten used to the phenomenon of summer as an adult. I think it is unfair that kids and college students have all summer to recharge and relax, and grownups have to keep working constantly with no break. I am now kicking myself for not deciding to go into teaching as a profession. That summer off rocks. Also since I used up all my vacation time on maternity leave earlier this year, we do not have any kind of family vacation planned for this year at all. We are exhausted. I'm not sure when we're going to be able to go away next, because we are currently both looking for new jobs, so who knows what we'll get at our respective new places of employment.

This whole working-full-time-with-two-small-kids thing is sometimes harder than I expected it to be. I don't like not being able to pick up my daughter at 3pm when all the other kids are going home from school. It reminds me of how sad I was at age 6 when my mom started working full-time. Now of course I had gotten used to having her home with me for six years - my girls have never known any other way except for me working all the time - but still, it feels like a really big sacrifice. For all of us. Sometimes I curse the day that I was born in a country founded by hard-working Puritans. Why couldn't I have been born in a country where vacation is so sacred that most people get six weeks vacation - TO START. (Yeah, that's France.) Or a country where women are guaranteed three years of maternity leave and their job back afterward. (Yeah, that's Germany. Of course their economy sucks, so that might not be the best strategy for supporting growth and healthy economic development.) I do like to work hard, and I often make fun of those lazy Europeans, but you know, sometimes it seems like they have their priorities in better order than we do. I'm not saying I am sitting at work pining for my kids, wishing I could stay home, but I would like some better balance in my life. Someday. So that's why I'm looking for a new job. I need to make more money and do something I enjoy more, and I am sure everything else will follow. Somehow. Also I am in a rut and I need to get out. So that is that.

In other news, my baby girl is six and a half months old, and I've lost all but 2 and a half pounds of the baby weight. I am feeling pretty good about that! The next thing is to lose the 25 pounds I gained between having the two girls. And start running again. Too bad I'm just thinking of that now, right before it starts to get cold outside.

My mother-in-law is coming to visit for five days next week, so she'll give us some good child care before school starts (now that camp is over, we are tag-teaming for child care. OK, everyone is but me. Because I have no vacation left), and we'll get to spend some nice time with her. I know she'll be amazed by how big the baby has gotten since she visited last - the baby was only two weeks old then! Then two days after she leaves, my sister-in-law (her daughter) comes to visit for a week. So it's going to be quite a busy couple of weeks with all these houseguests. Should be fun though. And my MIL will help clean my house which is always welcome! She's really great at it too. Unlike yours truly.

I guess I am rambling a bit tonight. Oh - I finished the Harry Potter book! Very satisfying, that's all I'll say. Now I'm reading the Mary Gordon book (check out the new list I made of books I'm reading). It is weird but good so far. I've been trying to read more and watch less TV, and it's actually working.

My husband has begun curing his own meats, so the whole refrigerator smells of bacon and sausage and pate and other interesting charcuterie. He made one regular bacon that was absolutely incredible, and now he's curing one with brown sugar. I bet it's going to be YUMMY. He also has a pate de campagne working in the fridge right now that we are going to enjoy with my parents tomorrow evening for their 37th anniversary. It is the little things in life, isn't it?

The insanity that was last week

It all started with a wrong turn in New Jersey. We were driving home from my aunt's wedding, which should have taken about 7 hours including a couple of pit stops. I was driving, which I don't usually do, but my husband was tired from the wedding and his back and ankle were bothering him, so I happily took the first shift. The first wrinkle was that we hit traffic in a bunch of places and it just dragged. As dusk began to fall, we stopped for dinner at a totally gross rest stop on the NJ Turnpike and had a truly nasty meal. For the final leg, my husband took over the driving since I have terrible vision at night, and the sun was going down. The kids were asleep in the back, my grandmother was quiet back there too, and I was watching the Turnpike go by and thinking how nice it would be to be in my own bed very soon.

Suddenly my husband says, Oh, here's where I need to get off so we can stay on I-95 (95 does a weird thing in New Jersey involving coinciding with Turnpike sometimes and then branching off at other times - we are still not sure exactly which part is which). So he exits the Turnpike in spite of my objections (yes, I have to put in one more "I told you so" as I retell this story), and promptly gets us lost in New Jersey. We're driving down 295, not 95, and all we know is we're going south. But we don't know how far south we are, so we have no idea where we are in relation to our house. So of course we have to yell at each other a bit, and sit in grumpy silence for a while, and then eventually we see our old friend the Ben Franklin Bridge, and somehow we get home. At 10pm. After getting on the road at 12:30pm. We are exhausted.

But not before we discover that my husband's only set of car keys were locked inside his car. A little background here - his car had broken down 5 days before we were to leave for the wedding. We took it to the mechanic who said he'd get to it "as soon as I can, we're really busy here." Uh-oh....but we weren't too worried because we figured he'd do it while we were away (we rented a mini-van for the trip). So while we're away he calls to let us know it's going to be about a grand to fix everything - bad alternator, bad battery, falling-apart front tire, plus all the labor - wonderful. And he says he's going away on vacation so he'll be gone when we get home - he'll leave the car in his parking lot for us. Hubby reminds him that we don't own a spare set of keys, so please will he put the keys in the wheel well, not inside the car, so we can pick it up when we get home.

Cut to Sunday evening, 10pm, after the ridiculous scenic tour of New Jersey. It's raining, we're in the mini-van, the girls are asleep in the back and all I want is to be in my bed. Hubby pulls up at the mechanic's lot, sees the car, puts his hand into all four wheel wells, NO KEYS. We drive home. Next morning he checks again. Sure enough there are his keys, inside the car. With the as-yet-unpaid $1,000 bill for the work the guy did. And the mechanic is on vacation, nowhere to be found.

I'm at work, exhausted, trying to clean up several messes that happened while I was away, and wondering how the hell we are going to get by for a week (or however long the mechanic is away) with only one car. Triple A wouldn't come out to let us in because the car was on the mechanic's private lot, and we couldn't prove we had paid the bill (in fact, we had not paid it yet since the mechanic knows us and said he'd take payment when he got home from vacation), so they had no way of knowing that we weren't just trying to take the car after getting work done on it, and having no intention of paying for it. In the end, my husband called in a favor. He is good friends with the local bank manager, who also happens to be very cute and good friends with all the local cops. She asked one of her cop buddies to help us out, and he broke into the car for us. That was on Wednesday of last week, after my husband had been locked out of it for almost three days.

That particular day was also hard because we got no sleep that night: after getting well on her way to becoming a baby who "sleeps through the night," our 6-month-old decided to wake up at 3:30am and scream until the alarm went off at 7. That sucked! We are not used to that. Both of our kids have been great sleepers, so we were quite grumpy when we got up. Waking up to a third day of being locked out of the car after four hours of being screamed at by a 6-month-old is not fun.

But by Wednesday night we were starting to feel better since we finally had the car back, and we felt like things would start to calm down. Boy were we wrong. That evening, one of the hottest in recent memory, we had friends coming over for dinner. I was cooking - which is unusual, but I wanted to make a soup for these friends because the wife is gluten-intolerant and my soup could be made without gluten. So I'm cooking and sweating profusely in front of the stove, and my husband is in the living room with the girls, trying to cool down in the A/C. Suddenly I hear a lot of beeping from the basement. It's the smoke alarm! I didn't think my cooking was making any smoke but I turned on the downdraft just in case.

Hubby goes downstairs and says it smells like smoke. He comes up to get the fire extinguisher and goes back down to investigate. I'm starting to freak out - what if our house burns down? I keep saying we should call the fire department but that just annoys the hubby even more. Finally he determines that the issue is with the hot water heater so he turns that off. He's not sure what the problem is, but the friends will be arriving soon and he wants the smoke to stop. It does. He also wants the beeping to stop. It does.

We eat dinner, it's lovely, the soup kicks ass, and the friends go home. We put the girls to bed. I'm upstairs checking my email when I hear a very tense, "Hon, can you come down here please?" Turns out he has figured out what the smell was. Apparently some squirrels got very interested in the vent on our hot water heater and two of them got inside. One was running around the basement floor. The other was not so lucky. He was the source of the lovely smell. He roasted to death on the hot water heater. When my husband went to pull out the vent, half the squirrel - the head part - broke off, leaving scorched squirrel body attached to the heater, and dangling squirrel head on the now-removed vent. But his buddy was still running around the basement! I stood at the top of the stairs, trying not to laugh as I watched the squirrel run by, followed by my husband, shouting and waving a broom. They went by a few times: squirrel, husband, squirrel, husband, back and forth, before the squirrel was finally convinced to run outside and not come back.

The next morning, my brave sweet husband got rid of all the roasted squirrel parts and went to Home Depot to buy a new vent. In the end we only had to be without hot showers for one morning.

This week, so far, has been much less exciting. I am hoping those words will not bite me in the ass. Today we went to our older daughter's end-of-camp show which was adorable. Lots of singing 3-, 4-, 5- and 6-year-olds, and the requisite parents with digital and video cameras snapping and rolling away. Too cute. She had a blast. I can't believe her camp ends this Friday and then I have two and a half weeks before her school starts. And her sister is six months old, and almost up on all fours. She'll be crawling in no time.

Another long blogging absence

A few weeks ago I wrote a really great post and just before I clicked on Save, my stupid wireless connection crapped out and I lost the whole thing. I was so mad I yelled at my husband (there has to be some way it was his fault), stomped out of the room, huffed off to bed, and haven't posted since. That'll show it.

So now here I am again. I really wish I hadn't lost that post because it was all about some really cute stuff my older daughter has said recently, and the great things her baby sister is doing, and stuff about how our recent changes in parenting have helped a lot (they take oodles of patience, and we sometimes succeed better than others, but it's really worth it), and now I can't remember the details enough to replace the post properly.

So instead I'll tell you about the fantastic wedding we attended this past weekend. It was my aunt's wedding and I don't think I've been to a happier celebration. I suppose I always say that about the last wedding I went to, but this one was so incredibly joyous it was almost unbelievable. It was a Jewish wedding, so there was lots of dancing in a circle and cheering and unrestrained happiness. My aunt and her new husband are both really good dancers - they both jumped on the swing dancing craze when it first started and now have some serious skillz - and their first dance as husband and wife was the most amazing first dance I think I've ever seen. And then, after that, he danced with his daughter (she's in her mid-20s, from his first marriage), so rather than stand there with nothing to do, my aunt danced with my dad, who was a worthy partner! I was amazed by that too! I had seen him dance with my mom before so I knew he was no slouch, but my aunt is incredible, so I was duly impressed that he could more than hold his own with her. I tried to dance with him at my wedding and let's just say it's a shame that our generation didn't automatically learn to dance the way our parents' generation did, because I felt like a total klunk next to him.

One of the other best parts about the wedding was that my other aunt made matching dresses for my daughters out of special hydrangea fabric that matched the wedding flowers, and my four-year-old was beside herself with joy to be wearing her dress. The photographer took some portraits of her holding her baby sister, who was also decked out in the same fabric - they even both had light pink mary janes! - and I cannot wait to see those photos.

After all that excitement, and an excruciatingly long drive home yesterday, we are all pretty exhausted. Today was a stupid day at work for me - I had no energy to be there and I hardly got anything done. My husband's car broke down before we went away and then the mechanic locked us out of it, so we have lots of irritation ahead of us tomorrow, but at least for the time being, things are quiet. The girls are asleep and I'm going to go read some more of the new Harry Potter book. Good night!