Kangatopia

The moments are streaming by.  Last night I tried hard to remember my oldest daughter at the age of 2, or even 3.  She’s 5 now, and so incredibly beautiful.  Also, a little bit of a clepto - but even while I gently assured her that taking things that don’t belong to her is wrong, I had to give her credit for stowing the bits of the teacher’s unwanted colored chalk in her tights.  When she tearfully exclaimed that she didn’t know how they arrived there, I very quietly whispered that not telling the truth will not win her very many points either.  I could not punish her.  Hopefully, she will realize and understand these things before she is truly shamed.

My youngest daughter now habitually wears a red plastic digital watch on her left arm which has a vaguely accurate display of the time.  She really has no idea if the time is correct, nor does she care about the time at all really.  She appreciates it for what it is, and loves it more because it came from a Trix cereal box and has all the branding splashed over it.  She sleeps with it.  She would shower with it, but I showed her how I remove my watch when I shower - though I don’t always remember to take it off before I go to bed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 10:41 am and is filed under Monkey Stories, Winston Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I neglected to bring my lunch to work today, so at about noon I left my overburdened desk and struggling to breathe computer and went out to buy some food. I was really looking forward to it. Lately, I haven’t really had time or energy to go out looking for food and have been very grateful to have a boyfriend who apparently not only cares if I eat, but what I eat - as he packs a compartmentalized tupperware container every day with salad fixings. Round grape tomatoes, crumbled blue cheese, spring mix salad greens, sliced jalapenos, italian croutons. I eat this with straight basalmic vinegar, and every day I think how cool it is that Shep makes this for me and how much I enjoy eating it. But, not today. We ran out of greens last week and I forgot to buy more over the weekend - plus, I think Shep is kinda pissed at me.

So, I dug my check card out of the depths of my purse and plucked my coat from the coat peg behind my office door. Then, I sat back down at my computer, wedged my things between my knees and worked for another half hour. These be busy days, and I be not very well organized at times.

Finally, I stood up and walked with determination towards the elevators. It was there that I smelled a smell I haven’t smelt in years. The smell of elementary school lunchrooms. I’ve been to Bear’s school to have lunch with him, and never have I noticed this same scent of mayonaise that leaps out of an open metal lunch box mixed with apple slices freed from plastic baggies, which mingles with the perfume of frito pie kept on a warmer and congealed milk from the earlier lunches under the tables. I stood waiting for an elevator to arrive and wondered who brought a lunch that smelled this way. What were they eating? Wasn’t it strange that I could detect this aroma even though my nasal passages are half blocked by a budding cold?

I have the same experience with the exhaust fumes of a bus. Whenever they waft by, I immediately snap back in time to the same elementary years during which I rode the bus back and forth to school. The teacher I had in first and third grade was also the bus driver. He was an incredibly nice man, and it apparently didn’t strike any of our parents as odd when years later he left his wife and moved to Kansas to live with his male lover. The bus fumes spark memories of the way he would occasionally allow children to sit between the driver’s seat and window, how wonderfully kind he was, and then also me and the other kids playing, running from and chasing each other while waiting for the bus. Little visual pictures of an almost forgotten childhood.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Just Mommy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

We’ve come up with new nicknames for the girls (though I shall continue to use the old ones here because I figure nicknames are already confusing enough.) Monkey is Kitty Cat. Practically perfect, beautiful, independent but loving.

Bear is still Bear. We haven’t come up with a nickname more fitting.

Winston is now Kitty Thoughts. I really hate the idea of describing why this fits her so perfectly, but it does. Winston is a sweet and care-free child. There isn’t much going on in her gorgeous little head except “feed me, pet me, change my pull-up, and now is the time for me to play… or sleep… or drink milk (or orange juice)”. Not unlike one of Shep’s retarded cats. So, we’ve started calling her Kitty Thoughts and she loves it.

Winston and I have this game that goes like this:

Me: “You’re a monkey!”

Her: “No, you are!”

Me: “You are”

Her: “No, I not. You are”

Me: “You’re a monkey funky.”

And now, post-Kitty Thoughts appellation it ends with Winston saying, “I not a monkey! I Kitty Thoughts!”

It’s so goddamned cute.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 1:53 pm and is filed under Winston Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Here’s a fun little game.  Instead of taking bets on when Shep and I might break up, I’m thinking of working out the odds on when we might get married.  Since every evening ends with a goodnight kiss and a discussion of the futility of us keeping our relationship going, I’m thinking these balls in the air could land anywhere.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 10:55 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Bloody Hell. It’s 2:30 and I have piles of work to half-heartedly sort through. I’m losing patience with myself and my work ethic. Sure, I need this job. I also need to be at home with my kids, or maybe just at home taking a well deserved nap.

Bear’s 3rd annual pine car derby is tonight. We didn’t know about it until about a week and a half ago. So, there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of time for Bear to build his car. My father, ever enthusiastic, got right to work when informed of the upcoming event and built a car that I don’t actually want Bear to race. Fortunately for my father, though, it became a matter of either racing his car or no car at all. We’re going to make Bear finish his own car this weekend so that he at least has the experience under his belt. Bear’s interest in the car is not the construction – ie, the shaping, sanding, mechanical bits – but in the decoration. He wants to paint it, but not showing much interest in the rest of it. I try to explain to him that most projects have tedious parts but they also have entertaining aspects and in order to finish, you have to do both.

I haven’t felt up to the task of writing. I’ve been pouring all of my energy into motherhood, work, and home – at about that order of priority. I’ve been making a push to potty train Winston, but her carefree little personality isn’t bothered by not taking this big girl rite of passage. In the mornings I will dress her and ask her to make a special effort to pee in the big potty, or better – poop in the big potty. She says, “Ok”, in this amazingly cute little way that makes you think she’s really listening. On the first day of this latest effort, I was so pleased to hear her say, “Ok”, that I put underwear on her. She crapped in them 15 minutes later. Now, I hear her say “Ok” all the time. It doesn’t mean anything, I’ve found, except that she’s learned that an adorably stated affirmative to any question will inspire the questioner to give her a happy hug and noisy smackaroo on the top of her little head.

Monkey is trying so hard these days. She’s been the last to fall asleep at night, and almost every night now she will come and knock on my door to tell me she’s scared. She wants permission to crawl into bed with Bear. I suspect that she doesn’t view Winston as much of a protector against bad dreams. I’m asking Bear to curb his natural boyish tendency to tell her frightening stories about ghosts and zombies, and instead keep it to discussions of whether she attends his elementary school for kindergarten next year, or the one that is literally next door to our new digs. Teaching her how stress, rather than fear of the supernatural, will keep her up at night is, I feel, a far more effective life lesson.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 4:07 pm and is filed under The Wild Animals & Former Prime Minister. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.