The twins were supposed to get their 5-year portraits done this afternoon, but Edward got SIX mosquito bites on his forehead a few days ago and they still look bad today so I called and canceled. My late mother-in-law used to tell over and over again (seriously, EVERY VISIT) a story of when Preschooler Paul had a huge forehead scrape/lump but her pinehole husband wouldn’t let her reschedule the portrait, saying in his Superior Pinehole Voice “That’s what he looks like today. That is what he looks like today.” She told this story ADMIRINGLY, often ending with, “And he was right! That WAS what he looked like that day!”

Well, YES, but I am not trying to CAPTURE THE MOMENT here, I am trying to capture a YEAR, and he did NOT have an enormous forehead situation ALL YEAR! If he HAD had it all year, I would GLADLY have it photographed! But I am not trying to document “The Mosquito-Bite Forehead of June 14-17, 2010” in this session. It is “Age Five” I am trying to document. AGE FIVE.

And I wonder why his forehead would be so particularly delicious to mosquitoes? Although actually, he says it’s SPIDER bites, and if he’s right I don’t want to know, I really don’t. I am just going to keep saying MOSQUITO BITES, and I’m not going over to the part of the yard they’ve been playing in. And if you think I’m going to Google “spider bites” to see what they look like, you’ve gone slap out of your mind.

So! Speaking of this morning, our neighbor was mowing the lawn at 7:15. This shouldn’t annoy me, since we’re all up by then and so it doesn’t affect me at all. But our neighbor doesn’t know that, and so it annoys me IN THEORY. Do you have stuff like this, where you’re NOT annoyed and yet you also ARE annoyed because you COULD BE legitimately annoyed, even though as it happens you’re NOT? I seem to always be talking myself through these things. “We can’t even HEAR the loud party from this side of our house AND it’s not waking up any of the kids, so there is NO REASON to be annoyed.” “I don’t even really need to get in touch with him so it’s no big deal that I can’t.”

I’m lying awake fretting about things and re-arguing arguments that happened years ago, and that’s not very productive. So I will get up and put all those things HERE, because THAT will be…oh.

1. You remember my new blue-green leather chair? A cat has been scratching it. There are scratch marks, and there is a small RIP. I feel like patching the leather with someone’s furry PELT. Why do we let ANIMALS live in our HOUSE?

2. It makes me mad when people say they don’t mind what was said, they just mind the WAY it was said—when you know it’s that they actually mind what was said, and that there was NO way it could have been said that would have pleased them. Related point: I had a friend in high school who used to say horrible hurtful things (mostly to her family) and then “apologize” by saying she didn’t regret what she’d said, she just regretted the WAY she’d said it. And I was always listening to these stories appalled, thinking, “Oh dear no, I think you’d also better regret what you said, because ACK.”

3. Or when people say “hurt” when what they actually mean is “mad.” Example: Jen in MI and I had a college roommate who once told us she was “hurt” that we didn’t do our share of cleaning the bathroom on a particular occasion. She was red-faced with fury. (And lest you think we were cleaning slackers ((we had a cleaning CHART)), it was a misunderstanding: I suppose we should have said, “Rather than stand here watching you do your share while we wait to do our share, we’ll go do some studying at the library and then come back and do our share later.”)

4. The claim that every opinion/viewpoint is equally valid and deserves respect. I DO get how/why people can think so, but I think there are certain opinions (racism being the one that springs to mind as most obvious/clear for this example) that don’t deserve respect. That doesn’t mean I get to express my disrespect by burning down someone’s house or whatever, but there is such a thing as appropriate disrespect—and if I’m disrespectful of a point of view, it is with careful and extensive thought, not just “Anyone who doesn’t see it my way is crazy and stupid!” in the manner of my late mother-in-law. I get, though, that it’s pretty much impossible to draw the line between “everyone’s opinion on this issue is equally valid” and “well, only within a certain range of options,” and also that the line is dramatically affected by time and place, and also that it’s impossible to apply this THEORY to widespread PRACTICE (“Here is a list of invalid opinions:”), and that that’s why it’s important to be careful and not go around setting fire to things willy-nilly.

5. The children have been lying to me, which makes me angry even though I realize it’s a normal developmental stage. I remember being genuinely perplexed, even indignant, when my mom told my 4th grade self how hurt and upset she was by the lies I was telling (which, for perspective, were generally about how much candy I’d bought/eaten, as opposed to being about things such as who had been into the liquor or who had pawned the family silver). My feelings were amorphous and unfocused back then, but if I had to spell them out now I’d say they were “But what does it have to do with YOU? I am just trying to EAT MORE SWEETS.” Anyway, I read some book recently that had a section on lying children and that has helped somewhat, but it still makes me nuts when I’m asking something perfectly reasonable such as “Who peed in the bathtub?” and everyone says “Not me!” even though my follow-up would be, “Ah. Well, please use the potty instead” rather than “Ah. Well, go cut your own beatin’ switch.” I get tired of having to be so very careful with my questions to avoid spooking them into lying to me. “Wow,” I say admiringly, spinning my sticky web. “That sure is a big puddle of pee in the bathtub!”

6. It bugs me that the elementary school nags and nags and nags—and does it EVEN-HANDEDLY, so that EVERYONE gets nagged every few weeks about KEEPING YOUR CHILDREN’S LUNCH ACCOUNT BALANCES IN THE POSITIVE ZONE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY. My kids now have over $100 each in their lunch accounts, because I keep thinking “What if they mean ME???” And—AND—there is no way to check your child’s balance unless you call the cafeteria and have them look it up for you! No wonder people lose track! (Well, okay, and some people are EXASPERATING FLAKERDOODLES who are MILKING THE SYSTEM. But not EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US needs the flakerdoodle treatment.)

7. Still on the subject of the elementary school, it further bugs me that when I sign up to donate stuff for a bake sale, there are a dozen bulk-email requests and reminders but there’s no bulk-email thank you afterward. I LIKE donating to the bake sale! I LIKE it! But begging and nagging without thanking is ineffective, in terms of morale.

8. I made the children help me clean for awhile this afternoon, and not only was it like herding cats, one of them said, “It’ll just get messy again.” OH RLY. I wonder why THAT will be? In that case, let’s start a daily group cleaning regimen, Mr. Logic!!

All right. I do feel better. I think people who keep diaries are probably people whose mental filing systems need some manual help.

This is Henry’s 3-year-old portrait, and I’m so, so, so happy with it. It’s from JCPenney. Studios vary so much depending on the photographers, but ours has at least three photographers who are EXCELLENT. Like, there’s this fleeting half-second smile in the middle of a tantrum, and they CATCH it.

(Which is not to imply that THIS picture involved such a catch.)
(It totally did.)

I don’t think you’d need to be a parent to figure out that it’s a good idea to bring the child’s portrait shirt with you to put on at the last minute, or that it’s a bad idea to go for a ketchuppy lunch right before the photo. But something it’s taken me awhile to learn is DO THE PORTRAIT FIRST. The appointment is often at an awkward time, like 10:30 in the morning, and so I think to myself, “Oh! I will go earlier and I will spend the time before the appointment browsing in Target!” No. Whatever time the appointment is, it is best to arrive for the appointment and not try to do anything beforehand. I have an anecdote to illustrate one of the reasons for the wisdom of this policy.

Yesterday my mom and I brought Henry to the mall to have his portrait done, and like the pros we are we did the photo session FIRST. It was a grueling session: Henry was PERFECT for the first photo (the standing one, above), but then he burst into tears and yelled “I WANT TO GO HOME!!!!” and continued yelling it, pausing only to say “NO!” to anything the photographer suggested. He wouldn’t stay put in the photo area and kept flinging himself into my lap. When he DID stay in the photo area, he wouldn’t show his face. I felt so sorry for the photographer, and I had no idea what to do about Henry.

Afterward we went for a ketchuppy lunch, which was delicious. And at the end of it, Henry started crying and saying he needed to use the potty, and it turned out it was Too Late. And furthermore, it was the kind of Too Late that necessitated throwing his underpants in the trash can and putting his pants in a plastic bag. (Best thing in my diaper bag: empty Target bags. I have used them for all sorts of mishaps.) (It wouldn’t have to be a Target one, of course. That’s the kind I happen to have the most of. Plus, they’re sturdier than some other kinds. Sturdy is good for mishaps.)

I got him cleaned up and put a too-small diaper on him because I didn’t have any replacement undies for him (I haven’t needed diapers in the diaper bag for so long I was lucky to have the two too-small ones), and then I wrapped his lower half in his blankie for modesty and warmth. We went to Target and I looked at the clearance racks for a pair of pants for him. There was a cute pair on clearance for $5, and even though he’s still in 2T pants (like me, he’s tall but has short legs) I bought the 3T ones so I could feel like it was a wise purchase for future wearing, accident or no accident. I went through the line, then sat on the bench right there and took off the tags and put the pants on him, and they were really cute pants. I will confess that I felt pretty awesome, like I had totally handled a tricky problem in a way that was happy for everyone. And do you remember what goeth before a fall? Yes.

We continued shopping, and Henry was in his stroller. It is a brand-new stroller, because the stroller I bought for toddler Rob ten years ago finally broke unfixably, and even though I felt dim buying a stroller at THIS point in the child-rearing process, I really did get my money’s worth out of that first one, and I DID need one still, and so there it is. In short: he was in his new stroller, and this was the third time we’d used it, and I was still feeling happy about how fun it was to have NEW baby equipment, looking NEW!

And he started crying and saying he needed to go potty. And I looked down and it was Too Late. Here is the kind of Too Late it was: 20 minutes later, I emerged sweaty and dazed from the crowded Target bathroom with a child who was wearing only a too-small diaper, shoes, and socks, and who was sitting on several layers of paper towels in a wet stroller I’d cleaned the best I could. I was out of wipes, and I had with me a knotted Target bag containing unthinkable laundry for later.

At these times it is useful to think to oneself, “No one REALLY CARES what anyone else is doing.” As I strolled my enormous, diaper-and-shoes-and-nothing-else-wearing 3-year-old through the baby clothes department, we attracted some Looks but I thought to myself, “No one REALLY CARES. Try to act nonchalant.”

I remembered that we had the shirt he’d been wearing before I changed him into his Portrait Shirt, so we only needed pants. I looked for the 2T pants I hadn’t chosen earlier, but they were gone, and there were no more 3T pants either. Finally I chose some orange shorts, which was a little disheartening because he has so many handmedown shorts I already need to get rid of some. But at least he didn’t yet have any cute orange ones. I also got a package of wipes. I found my mom, got my purse, put the t-shirt on him (the t-shirt had been stuffed in my purse), went through the checkout and bought the shorts and wipes, and this time I felt less Awesome than I’d felt the first time.

Isn’t it nice we did the portraits FIRST?

Tonight I re-watched Agnes of God. Boy, that Jane Fonda isn’t much of an actress, is she? She seems to be of the “You can tell I’m acting because I’m SMOKING and I’m TALKING LOUDER” method, which is what I remember of my college boyfriend’s theater group.

I’m a little surprised I watched this movie as a CHILD, but actually it was probably totally okay because I realize on re-watching it I didn’t understand ONE SINGLE THING that was going on. For one thing, I didn’t realize the first time that Meg Tilly (Agnes) was supposed to be young. Nor did I understand she was supposed to be crazy, so, uh. I guess the blood might have upset me, but I don’t remember it. This time around it upset me more that there is a HUGE CHUNK left out of the solution to the mystery. As a child I thought I just didn’t understand it, but NO.

I DIDN’T see Witness, but I always think I did because I get it confused with Agnes of God. For some reason. They did come out the same year, but that’s all I’ve got by way of explanation.

The most traumatic movie I can’t believe I watched as a child was Time After Time, which (spoiler from 1979!) has a scene in which a girl hides in her closet while her best friend is killed by Jack the Ripper, who thinks the best friend is the girl. There is blood EVERYWHERE afterward. What traumatized me was not so much the blood (although, !!!) but the fact that the girl KNEW Jack the Ripper was coming for her at her apartment (she saw a newspaper from the future) but DIDN’T LEAVE because she was so paralyzed and upset. She just sits there weeping, waiting to be brutally murdered. THEN, she suddenly panics when he arrives and she hides, and just then her friend arrives.

I loved the movie Oliver!, except for the scene (spoiler from 1968!) where nice, nice Nancy is BEATEN TO DEATH, which I couldn’t BELIEVE was TRUE. Like, at first I just thought her boyfriend was beating her up, but then it turned out she was DEAD?? And Oliver SAW it happen?? Horrifying! At that stage I think I was innocent of the idea that men sometimes kill women they’re romantically involved with. Really, it’s a shocking concept.

I think I would have loved E.T. if I hadn’t been so repulsed by the slimy, ugly alien. All my friends thought he was so! cute! and had E.T. dolls and t-shirts and stuff, but the look of him made me feel sick and gave me bad dreams. His heart! glowing through his translucent skin! BARF.

There! There! You see? Just as I suspected: in the Twilight poll, the Twilight enthusiasts in fact BEAT the Twilight dislikers! And yet on the post where I mentioned Twilight, the comments section had about four apologetic Twilight-liking comments and all the rest were celebrating its awfulness! I FELT those of you who didn’t want to comment in that environment! I FELT you out there!

And now I would like to know how many of us are cat people and how many are dog people. New poll over on the right. I’m a cat person, obv, and what’s odd is it seems like most of my good friends are dog people. Or cat AND dog people, which I think is probably the most awesome category. I’ve gradually developed the hypothesis that cat people and dog people are drawn to each other, despite their differences, and I’m interested to know how this hypothesis tests.

And may I vent for a moment on a very boring topic? The monthly health insurance cost for our family is now 25% more than our mortgage payment. MORE. than. our mortgage payment. And perhaps you are thinking, “Well, YEAH, you have FIVE kids!,” but NO, that’s the “family” price, for employee + spouse + child(ren), so it’s the same as we’d pay if we had one child. AND, in all our years of employment, it is the worst policy we’ve ever had, with a $1000 deductible per person per year. AND, we hardly EVER go to the doctor: the kids get physicals once a year, and there are probably 3-5 more visits TOTAL for our family per year. None of us have any medical conditions, none of us have expensive prescriptions. Which, you know, is desirable: when we buy health insurance we’re making a bet and hoping we’ll lose, and we sure will be glad to have this policy when something expensive happens, and also of course it’s necessary for everyone to pay lots in order to cover the expensive things that do happen within the group. But STILL! /vent

Poll results:

Have any of you SWITCHED temptation foods? I have always—ALWAYS—been a sweets girl, from earliest childhood until my mid-thirties, and now it’s meat and cheese. It’s not that I don’t still like sweets, but I don’t PROWL for them anymore, I don’t leave the house specifically to get them anymore, I don’t make frantic combinations out of whatever we have in the cupboards (powdered sugar! and peanut butter! and melted chocolate! and pretzels!). Ice cream can sit unbothered in the freezer for a WEEK, easy. (Did you know ice cream gets little crystals on it if it sits in the freezer too long? I DID NOT know that, but now I do.) NOW I prowl/leave for McDonald’s, and leftover pizza in the fridge won’t make it past 7:00 in the morning.

It’s been this way for months and months, so maybe it’s a new stage of life? The Chicken Nugget Years? The only other time of my life I’ve felt this way has been in the first trimester of pregnancy, and so I keep freaking myself out and taking pregnancy tests, but gradually the conclusion is seeping into my dimly-lit brain that perhaps all this is a result of some OTHER hormonal situation, NOT pregnancy but affecting me as that hormonal change affects me, and DEAR TARGET LET IT NOT BE PRE-MENOPAUSE, NOT YET! Maybe it’s just my Pill, but I’ve been on that for ages without this side effect, so who knows. The point is, I have a tip for you, and it is this: If you are planning to eat fast food in a sly and secretive manner, it is easy to dispose of a fast food bag/cup, but hard to dispose of a pizza box. Free advice.

(BTW, I just found this fun chart, which says that when my body is telling me it craves salt, fat, chocolate, and alcohol, what it’s REALLY trying to say is that I want raw goat milk, turnip greens, raw nuts, and potato peel broth! Huh! Well, I’ll try it, but if it works I’m going to be pretty cheesed off at my body for communicating so poorly!)

********

Yesterday we went to Walmart and I bought a purple beanbag chair for $15. I hate to see my money going to support Satan’s Gift Shop ‘n’ Bargain Emporium BLESSED BLESSED WALMART WHO WANTS ONLY THE BEST FOR US AND AGAINST WHOM NOT A WORD MUST BE SPOKEN LEST WE SEEM UNGRATEFUL FOR THE WONDERFUL MINIMUM-WAGE JOBS AND LOW LOW PRICES THEY GIVE OUR UNDESERVING COMMUNITIES OUT OF THE PURE GOODNESS OF THEIR FAMILY-ORIENTED HEARTS, but Target doesn’t have packs of men’s handkerchiefs anymore and Walmart does. And Target doesn’t carry Baby Magic soap anymore and Walmart does. And I looked at Target and in THREE pet stores AND at vet’s office for one of those cat-happying pheromone collars, but apparently only Walmart has them. And also we were running low on giant bottles of Tabasco sauce. And there was a cute brown broomstick maxi-skirt in their plus-size women’s department for only $16! And little boy organic cotton 2-piece short-sleeved dinosaur pajamas marked down to $3! Well, and obviously it was essential that we own a $15 purple beanbag chair, OBVIOUSLY.

I had a little tantrum yesterday. I don’t know quite what led up to it, but the total-straws-minus-one were already piled on the camel’s back, or rather MY back, when I switched on the television and it happened to be on a channel showing one of those motivational speakers working an audience, and she was saying, “In the last two generations, consumption of The Food Product Currently Playing the Role of Satan has increased by TEN THOUSAND TIMES!!!” and it showed her audience nodding and shaking their heads as if this were shocking, just shocking.

You’ll be glad to know I didn’t throw the remote across the room while yelling “That is because that’s when The Current Incarnation of Satan was INVENTED!!! Why not go for broke and say it’s an INFINITE increase, you ignorance-encouraging, fear-mongering, statistics-misusing BITCH???”

Er, no, actually I did.

The problem clearly goes beyond me reaching my lifetime limit for crowd manipulators. There is, I think, a need for me to find a way to handle 4:00-7:00 p.m. with less suffering. I do fine all day, but by Hour Eleven I am DONE and there are still three more hours to get through before the little kids go to bed.

A cocktail is pretty much exactly the ticket, and so I tried a daily 4:00 cocktail regimen, but I found it works better for me if it’s, like, once or twice a week and not every day. So I’ll put “alcohol” on the Friday and Saturday slots, and maybe we can find something else for the other days.

On the “There’s NO problem EXERCISE can’t solve!!!” theory, I tried a daily 4:00 short-fast-run regimen, but it made things way, way worse: I was sweaty and hot and irritable afterward, and it was infuriating how much planning and preparation went into such a short thing. It was like trying to take five kids to the grocery store for a single loaf of bread: not worth the trouble. Plus, we don’t need MORE things to accomplish in that 3-hour crazy time of homework and baths and dinner and tidying and bedtime routines.

I tried upbeat music and I tried soothing music, but we don’t need more noise around here either, and it was frustrating trying to hear and be heard over it, and it jangled me to be dealing with another source of distraction.

I tried a cup of coffee at around 2:30/3:00, but it made me irritable. I tried a nourishing little snack, and that helped a little but not sufficiently.

If you have a good strategy for The Hours of Suffering, do please share.

You know the “angels singing”/”heavenly beam of light” sound? Pretend the Audience Handler is holding up a sign instructing you to make that sound.

I have been looking for a chair like this for over TWELVE YEARS. After I left my daycare job, I worked for a few months as a nanny—or I suppose “babysitter” would be accurate, too, except when it’s a full-time job for a single family I think of that as “nannying.” ANYWAY, as if it matters. The point is that the kids in that family were champion nappers and would BOTH nap for THREE FULL HOURS every day after lunch. (Go ahead and make the angel sound again, because MAN.)

The house had a lot of nice comfy furniture, including a big puffy recliner and a sectional couch, but the chair I always went to was a small, short-backed swivel chair. It didn’t LOOK particularly comfy, but the arms were exactly the right height to rest my elbows on while I was reading, and I would swivel back and forth, back and forth, back and forth—very soothing. And the rounded back was just right.

Ever since, I have been on a quest to find a similar chair. I asked the mama of the family where they’d gotten it, but it was a handmedown from her parents and she said she thought they’d gotten it decades before. I found many chairs that looked similar but were uncomfortable, or were the wrong proportions, or didn’t swivel. Then, after TWELVE YEARS, I found the above-pictured chair at Home Goods and it was exactly right.

But: a color problem. Home Goods had it in white, in a light dusky blue, and in purple. And I don’t mean purple, or purple, I mean PURPLE. Jess Loolu purple. Even after I say to you that it was PURPLE, you might still be picturing an eggplant color, or maybe a deep dusky purplish grey.

PURPLE. It was PURPLE.

I liked the purple but I’d say my decor tends more toward muted light greens and golds, and then we have that wine-colored couch, and our carpet is blue, and actually I guess I should not be using the words “my decor” as if I have one. Suffice it to say I thought the light dusky blue would be the easiest to incorporate into the existing situation. But the light dusky blue one was broken and wouldn’t swivel right. I went home and fretted: should I get the purple?

Yesterday my mom and I went to the other Home Goods within easy driving distance, just to see if they might have the same chair. And they DID! In, er, purple.

(PURPLE.)

Then Henry said he needed to pee. I was taking him to the bathroom and I saw a huge square SOMETHING tipped up on its side (like an ottoman, but more like NINE ottomans) in a muted turquoise leather, and I thought, “It’s too bad I can’t find the chair in THAT color.” And do you know what? Behind the big tipped up nona-ottoman was the chair in the same muted turquoise leather. And I had to LEAVE IT BEHIND to take Henry to the bathroom. ANYONE might have bought it! Anyone!

Afterward, I brought Henry to my mom for safekeeping and I picked up the chair and carried it to the register. It was bulky and awkward, but what if I went to ask for someone to put it on one of those platform carts and in the meantime SOMEONE ELSE BOUGHT IT?? So I just hauled it. It feels very comical to go through a register line with a CHAIR. I bought it and hauled it out to the minivan and put it in (Paul had removed the third row of seats in case I did find the chair) and LOCKED THE DOORS and then I felt better, like the chair was IRREVOCABLY MINE.

I went back in and we finished shopping, and on the way out the clerk said they’d had a LIME GREEN one but it had sold. LIME GREEN! I might need a pair of these chairs.