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.

THREE

Lest you think I try pop culture stuff but consistently hate it, yesterday I finally got around to watching Juno, and I loved it so much I watched the whole thing in one sitting when I should have been making Henry’s birthday cake, and I sobbed so hard during the movie, and for so long AFTER the movie, that I completely soaked three handkerchiefs. I had tears FALLING OFF MY FACE. And they are welling up again as I type! (I’m sure it has nothing to do with My Baby turning THREE.)

THREE

I felt similarly about the movie Little Miss Sunshine. But I know full well there are lots of people who thought both those movies were irritatingly hipster and also way over-hyped by irritating people who like to act all hipster, so don’t feel shy if you LOVE the whole Twilight series. I think in fact that because the comments section on my too crabby to read Twilight right now post turned so amusingly anti-Twilight (did you click some of those links? HILARIOUS), we should have a private poll for people to express their pro-Twilight feelings. There, I’ll put it over to the right. WE ACCEPT ALL KINDS HERE. Irritating hipsters, Twilight fans, three-year-olds, EVERYONE.

THREE

I went to Target yesterday, and if you are experiencing Teh Crankiness (original poorly-thought-out version: The Crabs) may I suggest a similar treatment plan? There were CoverGirl lip glosses in the dollar section, the very ones I’ve wanted to try but didn’t want to risk it at $5 per color. I bought five, and I’ve tried three so far and I love all of them although really I only needed one because they pretty much all look the same: they look like lip gloss. Perfect for wearing a little bit of make-up when actual make-up seems inconsistent with the sun and sweat.

They also had a deal where if you buy two Olay products you get a $5 giftcard, and it even applied to the $3.69 face wash. And I have wanted to try that but felt sheepish spending $3.69 on it. So I bought two of them and they were only $1.19 each, and now I have something new and fun to try in the shower, which I find mood-lifting. And then after the shower, I can try either my COOL CUCUMBER or my OO-LA-LA LAVENDER deodorants, both of which were on clearance! And then the lip gloss! I realize these are small things but VERY CHEERING nevertheless.

Oh, plus! Henry has been very interested in tools lately, and I found a baby toolbench thing at 75% off, and you wouldn’t think he’d like it at his advanced age but he LOVES it and pounds the “nails” back and forth through the bench again and again and again.

THREE

I had the most boring dream ever. I was waiting for the mail. That’s it, that’s the dream. It went on and on.

I’m trying to work my way through Twilight, but OMG. If Edward isn’t scowling he’s chuckling, and if Bella isn’t mentioning her clumsiness she’s using her naughty-girl voice to make Edward scowl/chuckle. So far the only thing binding the characters is physical attraction, and I hate when a book wants me to think physical attraction = TRULUV4EVA.

Last night I had to put the book down because I was starting to make loud aggressive remarks to the room at large, and the room at large felt it was my own fault for reading the book to begin with. The room at large belongs to the school of thought that if something is very very popular, it is a mark of a person’s superiority to decline to partake. I am of the opposite point of view: if something is very very popular it’s likely that there’s a reason for it, and also at some point it transcends popularity and becomes part of the culture, and at that point I participate whether I like it or not because I don’t like missing cultural references. I don’t have to read the whole series and watch all the movies, but I’ll read the first book even if I sprain my eyeballs doing so, and I’ll watch the first movie.

Probably I should wait, though, until I’m in a better mood. I’ve been like a wounded accountant recently, snapping and peevish and snarling, swinging my mighty paws at people’s heads if they walk too close. When I read the first half of Twilight on the plane I was like, “Uh huh, well it IS young-adult fiction after all, and even the Harry Potter books sometimes had these problems,” but now I’m all “SNARL SNARL DROOL SNAP.” I’ve been avoiding social interaction because everything makes me irrationally mad. Oh, did you use the word “prescient”? That reminds me of the word president which reminds me of politics and OH GOOD LET’S FIGHT ABOUT POLITICS!!! Did you mention occupational therapy? That’s abbreviated O.T. which makes me think of the Old Testament and ARE YOU LOOKING TO FIGHT ABOUT RELIGION, THEN BRING IT ON!!! Mighty paw SLAM!

Oh, hello! Are you familiar with Photoshop? Because after looking for literally HOURS on Etsy and on various poster/art sites for a something that looked like I wanted it to, I took one of my own photos and modified it with Adobe Photoshop Elements.

But the thing is, I don’t know what anything does. So I kept changing things and changing things until I was happy, and then when I tried to do the same thing to a higher-resolution copy of the same image, I couldn’t remember what I’d done, nor could I recreate it even after more than an hour of tinkering.

So if you know what you’re doing, perhaps you could tell me what I’M doing.

So! I am back! I had a great time! I got my favorite seat on all four flights, and on three of the four flights no one was in the middle seat! On the way there I had to run between flights, but on the way home I had time for postcard-shopping AND Wendy’s.

I tried not to take too many photos out of the airplane window because those are just never as glorious as they seem like they’ll be, but I didn’t entirely resist.

Ahem.

Niestle is super-awesome, OF COURSE. She’s 14 months old and she likes to POINT.

She also likes to WALK, particularly near edges of things she could plummet from. She likes to shake her head no-no-no. She likes to ride her pink pony (the Fisher-Price, which I HIGHLY RECOMMEND after seeing Miss Cuteness playing with it for ages). She has teefies. She says “bananananana.” The hair at the nape of her neck looks like it might curl. And she looks cute in sunhats.

Notice in this picture she is smiling at the picture-taker, and the picture-taker was ME! Niestle smiled at ME! It was a huge triumph. Niestle is a girl of discriminating tastes.

Eric and Anna and Niestle and my co-aunt (Anna’s sister, who needs a pseudonym) had nothing but fun fun fun the whole time. We went on a picnic! We went sight-seeing! We went shopping! We got excellent take-out! We talked about babies, and baby names! We tried to woo Niestle into liking me more! We had a ladies’ lunch (I wore my new yellow/green/aqua flowery blouse), with mimosas and a real French waiter who said “bon” and “parfait”! We walked everywhere in the gorgeous, gorgeous weather. We came home sun-soaked and leg-sore and fresh-aired, and had wine and watched 30 Rock and ate cookies and stayed up late!

It was a wonderful vacation. You can see why it might be a little jarring to come home to trash and laundry and dishes and so forth. Sigh. I think what this situation needs is wine and cookies.

For the first 10 minutes I was back from vacation, I was all “What a refreshing and rejuvenating break!” and “It’s so good to be home!” Then there were 6 messages on the answering machine that needed dealing with, including a call from the Census Bureau who couldn’t understand their own forms and couldn’t imagine a household with more than six people in it and needed to ask if each person in the household including the children had been in prison over the past year, and several increasingly-agitated calls from the swimming lesson people saying I’d filled out the wrong forms (i.e., the ones online marked “2010 Swimming Lesson Sign-up Forms”) and needed to fill out an entirely new batch of forms (“If you go online, you can find them”) which had been newly updated to make less sense and not include spaces for necessary information. And then Rob claimed the word “delegation” wasn’t in the dictionary, and William said he owed us $1.25 and we owed him an allowance and did I have change for a dollar, and Elizabeth knocked over her book stack and needed a spider removed from her room, and all the laundry baskets are full, and there’s a huge pile of mail to go through, and bills need to be paid before the end of the month, and I have several hundred new emails, and I still need to unpack, and I haven’t had dinner yet, and really I feel like turning around and going right back out the door. It’s like that episode of The Simpsons where Marge’s hair is falling out so they get a Mary Poppins type to help out, and everything is WONDERFUL, and then the Mary Poppins character leaves and within minutes Marge’s hair is falling out.

Oh hai I’m back. I had a great time. I will feel happier in the morning!

The birdhouse toy I bought to lure the niece is a total success. She didn’t want to play with me at all, and then I took out the toy and started playing with it all casual-like, and soon she was handing me birds and I was handing her birds and the birds were going INTO and OUT OF the birdhouse, and it is actually a pretty fun toy for me too.

I love how my hair conceals my double chin. Unintentional score.

Here I am showing the bird’s cute little feet (two birds have little flappy feet and two have feet that are little knots in a cord). Do I look a little unfamiliar with hair down and glasses off (and, if you must know, wearing pajamas)? I didn’t quite recognize myself, either, when I was rooting through my brother’s photo software looking for some to steal (both photos are by my sister-in-law).

She is a great, great niece. We spend a lot of time admiring her.

We also spend a lot of time drinking wine. Great, great trip.

Tomorrow is my flight home. On the way here I got my favorite seat on both flights (even after coming off one flight to see the other flight’s status was “BOARDING” and having to run for it, and it turned out the other gate was in an entirely different wing of the airport), and I read an entire book (Speak Softly, She Can Hear, which was a fine book and I would neither recommend nor not-recommend it). This time I’m hoping to have enough of a layover to (1) not do any running, and (2) eat at the airport Wendy’s, and (3) buy postcards at the airport shop. Dream big, baby. Dream big.

Do you like lists? OH ME TOO! I have a Travel List that I print out before every trip, and it makes me feel like I won’t lose my mind with pre-travel fretting. If you are bored by lists, you can duck out now: that’s all the post is. This is what fits in one carry-on-sized suitcase and one carry-on bag:

Swistle’s Airplane Travel List

3-ounce bottles in quart-size ziploc: deodorant, shampoo, conditioner, hair gel, body wash, body lotion, face lotion, lip balm, toothpaste, hand sanitizer, Febreze

make-up: undereye concealer, powder, blush, eyebrow brush, eyeliner, lipstick, lip balm

snacks: pecans, almonds, apples, chocolate-covered cherries, pretzels, Dove almond squares

EMPTY water bottle
NO Swiss Army knife
all food wrapped

light jacket and flannel shirt
camera and spare batteries and small battery charger
travel alarm clock
cell phone and charger
Sudoku calendar and pen
wallet: license, credit card, heath insurance card, cash, change
notepad
books and magazines
earrings and rings
glasses
toothbrush and floss
ponytail holders and claw clip
comb
razor
pouf
medications including Dramamine, tylenol, allergy, eye drops
vitamins including vitamin C, zinc
prescriptions including dailies, sleep, anxiety
laundry bag
socks and wool socks
underwear
handkerchiefs
jammies
sandals and shoes
jeans and shorts
t-shirts
skirt, dressy tee, stockings, dressy black sandals, sparkly earrings
itinerary and boarding pass

Take off shoes
Take off coat
Take out bag of liquids
Take out bag of medications
Take out bag of electronics

Fill water bottle
Take Dramamine

********

Various notes on the list (because the only thing that can improve on a list is a list ABOUT the list):

The “take off/out” list is so I don’t panic in the security check. They don’t require you to take out electronic stuff (chargers, phone, camera, clock), but last time they unpacked my whole suitcase to get a closer look at my travel alarm clock so it’s easier to just chuck that stuff in the bin. I put them all in a gallon-sized ziploc and keep it in my carry-on until I go through, and then I pack it in my suitcase afterward.

The last two things on the list are for after security. (I remember to pee without putting it on the list.)

Sudoku calendar: When calendars were marked down to, like, a dollar, I bought a sudoku-a-day one. I take off a little chunk of pages to put in my travel bag. Nice and small, and cheap, and I can throw away each page as I finish it.

Glasses: New to this trip’s list: before I bought a ton of fashion glasses I was always WEARING my only glasses. Now I have many pairs and needed to remember to bring an extra pair for decorative purposes.

Wallet: I don’t like to bring a purse (it would take the place of a carry-on), so I have a wee little zippered pouch I put the essentials in.

Febreze: I found it in travel-size but in a scent I don’t like, so I dumped it out and refilled it with the lavender kind. It is so nice for spritzing on clothes at night if you find you probably should have brought an additional pair of jeans.

Lip balm: Not only is it in two different baggies, I have another in my pocket and another in the carry-on’s pocket. LET’S NOT RUN LOW ON LIP BALM.

Oh, okay, good, now I’m nervous about my trip. I leave around lunchtime on Friday, and right now it is Wednesday evening, and I’ve been having to talk myself through it. Like: “Even if one of your travel anxiety dreams came true and you forgot all about your flight until you had to leave immediately without packing, EVEN THEN, you would grab your purse and a book and you would board that plane, and when you got to Eric and Anna’s they’d take you to Target and you’d buy a package of underwear and a pair of the exact same jeans you like already, and a couple of t-shirts, and a clearance duffle bag to carry it back home with you, and some new books and snacks for the flight home and it would in fact be kind of a fun thing. SO QUIT WORRYING THAT YOUR TRAVEL-SIZE DEODORANT WILL BE TOO SMALL.”

Besides, I know perfectly well I will be happy as soon as I’m walking into the airport, my pink suitcase clicketying along behind me as I breeze past all the people waiting in line to check bags, pretending it’s because I’m such a savvy traveler rather than that I’m only going away for a few days. I love airports. Lovvvvvvvvvve airports. I will buy postcards, and maybe a doughnut to eat while I wait in the security-check line. After I go through (and I do hope I can avoid the pat-down this time, even though the security guard was very gentle and polite), I will fill my empty water bottle at a drinking fountain. I will calculate the best possible time for a Last Pee Before Boarding. I’ll be in the first boarding group (I paid the extra $10 for early check-in) and I’ll get my favorite seat (row 20, window, on the left side of the plane as you’re walking toward the back of the plane). BEST SEAT.

I will settle in and start reading a book and eating snacks, and then there will be the take-off, which I LOVE, and then I will take too many pictures out the window. And then there will be the layover and I’ll walk around ANOTHER airport, feeling all travel-wise because I! Am! Somewhere I’m usually not! More postcards. A weird-time-of-day meal at the airport Wendy’s. Onto a new plane with another take-off. And then it’s Eric and Anna and Niestle and whoooo!

Okay, now back to fretting, and to doing laundry as if everyone will run out of clothes in the four days I’m gone.