Author Archives: Naptimewriting

Telemarketers of the world: unite!

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The funniest part of this CNN article on the affadavit about improprieties between Senator Burris and the allegedly despicable and allegedly Napoleanic Illinois governor is that CNN called Blago’s house for a comment and “a woman answering the telephone at [his] home told CNN he was not available and hung up.”

Um, two things. One, get caller id. Or screen your calls with one of those newfangled answering machines. Or something, seriously, so you don’t have to answer the phone three hundred times a day just to get to the one call from grandma Sue wishing you Happy VD.

Two, the Blagojevich household is clearly an ideal target for all those of you who make your living calling us with surveys, telemarketing deals, and polls. Please call these people instead. They are answering their phones even though it’s freaking tapped by the FBI, so they’re clearly desperate to talk to someone in the outside world. They just can’t talk about federal indictments. So call them and offer them two for one on something, ask them their opinion about fuel economy, offer to send them the latest and greatest from Ronco, or call to ask whom they are voting for in 2012. Because this household is a telemarketer’s dream. I’ll betchya if you promise not to talk about the Senate or gross impropriety, they’ll talk to you for hours.

Stress fracture whine

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It’s time for my stress fracture whine. This isn’t going to be pretty, so turn away if you’re squeamish around self-absorbed melodrama. If you find a petty lack of perspective nauseous*, then do not read any further.

[*that’s right. something that makes you feel like puking is nauseous. if you feel like puking you are nauseated. people who say or write that they’re nauseous are actually saying that they nauseate others. and that is funny to me.]

So here begins the whine. I’ve been on crutches and unable to carry Peanut for three months. And it’ll probably be another two months because I made the mistake, seemingly harmless, of sitting cross-legged on the floor to do a puzzle with my son. Without thinking I put the bad foot under my right leg while we were sitting, and the pain returned. The rest of the week has increased the pain and I now feel it all the time again.

That means at least six more weeks, if not more.

We’re a sling family–we cuddle and carry everywhere. We don’t own a stroller. He likes to be in our arms a lot. And we like that, too. I like to carry him, to cuddle him, and to tell him things on our walks, during our errands, and around the house. Because of my fracture I can’t carry my kid, and I’m sad. He’s sad. He doesn’t want to go for walks because he knows when he gets tired in the middle, I can’t help him. He doesn’t want to go to the playground because I can’t climb with him. Peanut is a timid guy in new places and around crowds, but he’s had to run through an airport pretty much by himself twice, and will again this month, because I can’t carry him. (He won’t use the mei tai. I could use crutches and the mei tai, but he refuses to try.)

I’m tired of crutches. I’m tired of being non-weight-bearing but extra-weight-bearing, if you know what I mean. I’m tired of the  inability to run, the inability to hold my kid while he brushes his teeth or carry him to his room after a bath, the need to hop on one foot with our lunch plates, the pain of accidentally putting my foot down while washing dishes. I’m tired of holdng hands while I crutch down the street, four fingers held tightly by a little boy who feels sad and alone that he’s so far from me.

I’m tired of stress fractures that won’t heal. I’m tired of expecting to be fully functioning because the reality of my human body is that I probably will be less and less wel functioning for the rest of my days. So I’m tired.

And whiny.

[And this section is for all the people who seem to Google “stress fractures that won’t heal”. Today, and for at least the next six weeks, they’re my peeps.

During our move from the icky part of the state to the better part of the state, I somehow cracked a bone in my foot. I have a history of stress fractures from running, and this time I was just barely increasing mileage and frequency from a paltry ten miles a week to about fifteen miles a week (always following the 10% rule because I’ve been here before and don’t like rehab or PT or water running or crutches). And I got the familiar sense of needing to crack my foot for three weeks straight. Sure enough, my old sports med guy said third or fourth metatarsal stress fracture. Bone scan points to fourth met. (First fracture was ischial tuberosity, second was femoral neck, third was femur on other side, fourth was calcaneal. Now I’m the proud owner of a cracked fourth met.)

So I got an air cast and crutches. Doc tells me I can walk in the air cast. I do. For 6 weeks. Fracture gets worse. So I go non-weight-bearing for 3 more weeks. The cast makes it worse (it’s too heavy, and makes me rest my foot often, which hurts it).  So I ditch the cast and go completely non-weight-bearing for 3 more weeks, and after two weeks of painfree hypercarefulness, the pain is back. Know why? I sat cross legged on the floor to do a puzzle with my son. Sitting on the floor with the bad foot tucked under me set me back another six weeks. After 12 weeks of care and 15 weeks from the first pain. Even with an ultrasound bone-stimulator contraption that cost us two weeks’ rent. (Insurance paid half. Gee, thanks. Otherwise it would have been a full month’s rent. When do Americans get to have health care instead of health insurance?) That means I’m at square one, and need at least six weeks, completely non-weightbearing to heal this thing. That’ll be at least 18 weeks. If all goes well.]

Old ideas and new options

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Hey, file this article under “I’ve been thinking inarticulately about this so thank you for putting it into words for me…”

In The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, Matt Miller purportedly offers some lucid and well researched arguments for rethinking some of our assumptions. To wit: your kids aren’t going to be more prosperous than you, forcing companies to provide health care is completely drowning them in unfair expenses, free markets are an illusion, and taxes need a total overhaul.

I’m totally putting this on my huge stack of books I’m gonna read next.

Ah, perspective.

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After getting so far in the weeds I couldn’t see the sky anymore, I grabbed my copy of Elizabeth Pantley’s The No Cry Discipline Solution.

I’m feeling much better now. A bit of perspective, a few new techniques, some reinforcement for our AP style, and a welcome reminder that all the stuff I used to do was very well grounded in child development and therefore might work again.

Sigh. Pantley brought some welcome help for our sleep issues (not a solution, by any stretch, but some help) and is now my new best friend for getting back to teaching and away from yelling. She might just be my Valentine this year.

Preschool science fiction

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It’s a scientific fact:*

A three-year-old playing by himself can methodically work through the most intricate toys and attempt the most gravity-defying physical feats if he is in his room pretending to nap during quiet time.

Yet he cannot manage more than three minutes by himself without apocalyptic levels of crying and frustration if you are in the shower.

* (in our house. your results may vary.)

Pizza and chocolate

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You want to know what my problem is? (Yeah, I know. ha ha. How funny. She made it sound as though she only has one. Ha ha. That’s funny because I have a list this—————– long and she thinks she only has one…Shut up. You’re funny, you’re right, but you’re missing the point. Now hush and listen.)

My problem is twofold. First part–we have no chocolate in the house. Haven’t for a while. No cookies, no ice cream. Nothing with nougat or marshmallow or fudge. We have nothing fun in this house. Second part? Nobody delivers chocolate. Want pizza? Someone will bring it to your house. Want flowers? We can bring those right over. Want some Thai food, Chinese food, Indian food? No problem, we deliver. Fruit? Someone’s now delivering fruit, too, in little skewered topiaries. But there is no take-out industry based around my need for sugar-laced theobromine.

So here’s my idea. Thai place? Add chocolate to your menu. Pizza joint? You, too. Chinese restaurant? This stuff is pretty shelf stable and anyone willing to have it delived can’t be too picky. Offer it next to the lychee gel and the sweet wontons.

And now that I’m thinking about it, I’ve never seen a take-out Mexican place. What gives? I’ll tip well on a burrito that you bring straight to my place while I’m working at home. Or while my kid is coughing up regurgitated green snot. Or while my newborn (hypothetical newborn—don’t slam me with emails) goes through a growth spurt and sucks me dry, chained to the rocking chair with no break between nursing sessions, even to pee. I could totally use Mexican food delivered then.

But only if you’ll bring it with chocolate. Hell, I’ll buy a vacuum from a door-to-door salesman if you show up with chocolate when I call. Those m—f—ing Girl Scouts wrote down my deepest desires and then said they might deliver by the end of the month. What the f–k kind of customer service is that? Two month turnaround on chocolate? I could get my ass out the door and to the store if given two months.

Take-out chocolate. Desserts delivered on demand. Ice cream if you need it, when you need it. Please, someone steal this idea and make it reality. Please.  Because if you don’t, I have to do that, too. And I can’t even get off my ass to go get some chocolate, so how am I gonna get off my ass to deliver your chocolate, too?

Stress fractures are the new little black dress

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Wanna feel good about your third month on crutches? Show up at the Cal all-comers track meet every other Saturday morning. Taking your fee and marking your hand will be the entire cadre of Cal on crutches, a small but gorgeous contingent of young men with stress fractures. Cutie Number One has a hairline crack in his femur. (Don’t get me started about what I could do to alleviate his pain.) Cutie Number Two has a stress fracture in this third met. Oh, really. I have one in my fourth. Maybe we could…oh, wait. You’re fit and, like, 20, and I’m not fit anymore because of the little dodgeable I chase around on my crutches. Have I mentioned my husband and three year old and weaning weight? Oh, you notices all three, eh? Yeah.

I guess we’re not meant to be.

But at least I feel a little more comfortable surrounded by other glass feet.

I want to have a tantrum, too

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You wanna know how bad last night’s tantrum was? You wanna know what made me so physically keyed up that I was shaking for about an hour after Peanut finally passed out from exhaustion?

Oh, boy.

We don’t get many tantrums here at the WaN household. (I love that acronym…never noticed writing at naptime is wan. Nice. I also like it when 20-20 calls our blog Nappy. That’s good clean fun, too, and not at all Imus.)

In fact, I have blogged the few tantrums we’ve had. I think we’re up to four in three years. (Four big ones. I am not fazed by the fifteen minute tantrums.) Not bad. They tend to last for two to three hours, but still, as two-year-olds go, we’re batting, like, whatever would be a really, really good batting average. How do they say that? Whatever.

But last night the other shoe dropped.

Started with a tough day. Some days just are and that’s okay. No nap, including a power struggle, the end of which included the statement, “Well it’s quiet time, and if you won’t let your body try to rest by closing your eyes for just ten minutes, then I’m ignoring you for an hour. You get to choose. It’s your body. But I don’t have to play with you.” Nice sign for impending doom.

It was bad enough that two hours later I made us both cocoa. That’s a big deal in our house. His first cup of cocoa was election day. He’d never had it before and I told him it was a special treat that we got because it’s so important to vote. It wasn’t a bribe because he didn’t know about it until after the voting, but it felt lovely to make a little ritual out of his outstanding behavior at the polls. He pushed the buttons on the televoting newfangled computer thing that, by the way, brings out the 80 year old Luddite in me. Where’s the paper? Well, this year there was a paper printout, so I’m all better now. Twitch, twitch.

Anyway, the second cocoa incident was thanks to a lovely gift from NM. She gave him a little tea cup, little saucer, and little tin of cocoa for Hogamany. Yay, NM. Very cute. Except that my kid thought we got to go vote again, and this time he wasn’t voting for no rules or no bosses. He was voting for himself so he could tell me what to do. He said so. I laughed. Big mistake.

Third cocoa was inauguration. Big day, y’all, and I felt it warranted cocoa. Plus, and this is a little wrong, but I figured since the whole world was gettin’ a little cocoa that day, that my kid could, too.

So yesterday things got bad enough to bring out the cocoa. And it helped. But the afternoon got worse by about 4. His body can’t handle being nap-free. He started to melt down in little bursts. Fell a lot. The usual stuff. I was lovely and comforting, for, after all, I was full to the rim with warm, chocolate-y goodness. By 5, when Spouse called, Peanut was on my lap, whimpering that he wanted to go to a playground. It was dark, it was cold, it was almost dinner. No playground.  Uh-oh.

I told Spouse on the phone it was a rare, choice, and in all other ways USDA bargain-basement, salmonella-grade day. Which the USDA is not required to tell the public, but I felt required to tell Spouse before he got home. Spouse didn’t hear me, or didn’t listen , for his arrival, later, would spin the situation out of control. What a shock. Take a delicate balance and throw a man in the middle and watch it implode.

Peanut went from whimpering to crying. He wanted to go to Longs. To buy tissues. I had offered that several times during the day to get him out of his jammies and out of the house. Nope. Not until 6pm does he want to go out. Fine. You go put on your clothes and I’ll have Daddy take you to Longs. Twenty minutes of “not Daddy, you.” Then twenty minutes of “I don’t want clothes, I’m too sad.” Then twenty minutes of “I want go Trader Joe’s.” *blink blink* Why? “I want go Trader Joe’s get mushrooms.”  Um, we don’t eat mushrooms. He won’t try them and Spouse and I pass whenever offered fungus.

“But I *need* mushrooms. I no have mushrooms long time. I need go Trader Joe’s get mushrooms.” Well, we’re not going. And therein lay the beginning of the end. As soon as he started to ask for things that defied logic, I knew I was done.

Spouse came home in a foul mood and pissed me off. I barked at Spouse. Spouse snapped at me. I asked Spouse to get dinner ready. Spouse emptied the recycling and rearranged the kitchen and complained about the overfull trash and…where’s the mother f—ing kid’s dinner, a–hole? “I’m getting to it.”

Yeah. Like *I’m* getting to a place in society that’s respected and well regarded. Right.

So I hobble into the kitchen without my crutches to make dinner and Spouse yells at me. Tells me not to walk without crutches and tells me he’s taking care of dinner. I yell back. That was fifteen minutes ago, and I could have had it all done by now. Oh yeah, you’re so perfect. Oh yeah, you’re never here. It’s all been said before, by countless others, including John and Kate. And if those mo-fos say it, it must be true.

So Peanut is still sobbing, though mostly to himself now because Spouse and I are passing him back and forth, knowing that if his feet touch the ground we’re done for.

Peanut doesn’t want ravioli, he wants burrito. Make him that, he won’t eat it. Now he wants ravioli. Fine. Here you go. “I’m too tired to eat.” amen. Go to bed. “Not time bed. I want play.” No, buddy. Bed or bath are your choices. “Mmmm, Bryce.” Bryce is not a choice. Bed or bath. “Not any.” Okay, bed. “No! Bath!” Okay. get naked. “I don’t want naked.” Okay, do you want bath in your jammies? “Yes.” That’s fine, but after bath you’ll need to change to different jammies because those will be wet. “I want these jammies.” Okay, take them off and put on different jammies for the bath. “No I don’t want take these off at all.” Okay, go get in bed. “No-o-o-o-o-o-o!” This bed bath cycle repeats for half an hour.

Now, seriously, how awesome am I to offer a bath with jammies? To offer a bath with different jammies just to keep the treasured mismatch of pink polka dots and red spiders dry? Awesome. I know. And you know. But that little dude doesn’t know. Please email him and tell him. ‘Cuz this would all be easier if he knew how good he has it, given the whole powerless and overwhelmed and full of newness and exploration and hope and change and stuff. He’s got it just about as good as it gets. Minus Mommy and Daddy fighting over the trash and a burrito. But still.

And thus began another hour of sobbing and writhing and hitting (he hit us, we didn’t hit him. Who are we, Glenn Beck to announce that we beat our child? We don’t, and we don’t believe in it, but we wouldn’t announce it. Are you kidding? In a blog post with the words Obama and inauguration and cocoa? We’re already getting a Secret Service visit, I guarantee you.)

Anyway, it was three hours of sobbing and crying and sadness and wanting everything but what he can’t have. Including mushrooms and cocoa and a bath in jammies that magically dry. Nope, not good enough. We wanted to hold him down and cram him in bed. We didn’t. I wanted to lock him in his room and leave him. Spouse wouldn’t hear of it because i’ts just too dangerous. I offered to let Peanut roam the house, glassy-eyed and convulsing with sobs, and ignore him until he passed out. Spouse questioned my new ignore parenting, wondering, mostly to himself because he’s smart, if all I do all day is ignore Peanut. Remind me to yell at Spouse again later. We cuddled the lad and maintained nice voices (after we got all of our frustrations out on each other…nice role models) and he finally passed out while I was singing the alphabet in his dark room.

And I shook for an hour and drank heavily but couldn’t get even relaxed. And at 1am, 2am, and 3am he screamed from his room, crying, that he wanted stories.

Are you kidding me? Obama help me, I’m gonna be 300 pounds, all cocoa, by the time this kid goes to school. And my poor readers, all eight of them, will have forty-thousand pages of lovingly creased and earmarked pages of printed out blog pages because my only sanity lies in telling the world that my kid, and my decision to raise him with respect and love and attachment and intelligence is killing me.

What I want in the stimulus package

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So Congress is debating, as are pundits, as are my friends and neighbors, about how best to rescue the economy. (The best option, a way-back machine that returns us to pre-Reagan and puts deregulation into context, has been shelved for some bogus lack-of-technology reason.)

Obama says spend money on the things we’re gonna need anyway—roads, wind farms, education—and in so doing, put people to work. Republicans say cut taxes (since that worked so well to this point…do they somehow think that tax cuts when the government is already bringing in, like, zero dollars, is going to help anyone but gazillionaires?)

You know what I say? I say spend the money, sure. Cut taxes on the lower class. And move the tax bracket *up* for anyone who works for a failing financial institution and got a bonus. If they took bailout money and got bonuses, make them pay 100% taxes. That’s right. If you get a bonus, you give back your entire salary including bonus. Because you know what? You’re lucky to still have a job, you economy-ruining f—ers. That Merrill Lynch yahoo who said he had to give bonuses to his best performers is a jackass. If you had any best performers my entire retirement would be worth what it was in May. And yet, he’s offering us the best way out of the crisis. Sure, pay extra to those who screwed up the economy, the international banking industry, and the world in general. Give them a bonus. Then we the taxpayers get to keep it all. Every bloody penny.

Ditto executive bonuses for anyone involved in mortgage-backed securities, subprime mortgages, or other banking shenanigans. They can all make the check out the the Internal Revenue Service so we can pay for those roads.

My middle name…

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…should have been ultracrepidarian. I come from a long line of those to whom the adjective can and should be applied. And I am poster child for ultracrepidating, this month more so than I have been for years. In high school they called me Diane Chambers, and I was flattered they didn’t figure out I was Cliff Claven.

But seriously, until Dr. Goodword I didn’t know exactly how to best insult those members of my family who are even more ultracrepidarian than I am.

And you know who you are.

Speaking of good words, someone please take up this logophilic blog…if you don’t I will have to, and I have enough going on right now.

Bailout nonsense

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A Senator from Missouri wants to cap executive salaries for companies accepting federal bailout money. Ya think?!! It’s only now occurring to Congress that their blank check should have had some strings attached? Democrats tried for about twelve minutes last fall to get that as part of the no-strings-attached bailout. Remember when Paulson and Bernanke said that any limits to executive compensation would make it less likely for banks to participate in the mortgage bailout? Yeah. Did anybody else, at that time think, “Fine. Have it your way. Pay your CEO millions, and go bankrupt for all I care?”

I can’t believe the belated moral outrage. And I really can’t believe Guiliani telling the press that executives *need* big bonuses, because in his world, trickle down economics is more than just a disproven Reagan-era philosophy. Because CEOs who *only* get a few million base salary won’t eat out and New York will fall apart, Guiliani claims, but if they get their share of the $18 billion in bonuses paid in 2008, they will gladly hire underpaid workers to clean their houses, serve their food, and tutor their ignored kids. Folks, trickle down is a lie. Giving the exorbitantly rich *more* in the hopes they buy more crap and hire more workers just doesn’t work. Companies hire when people are buying their goods and services. Not when their CEOs are obscenely rich.

Of course we should cap salaries at any firm getting federal bailout money. Geezus, we should also roll back Bush’s gratuitous tax breaks for the wealthy because  people who make more should pay more.  Because it’s the right thing to do. Shut up with your “they need to eat out so people can work.” They need to invest in infrastructure, and they do that by paying their freaking taxes (which they don’t actually do since they have dozens of laws written so they can out of their taxes, while I pay mine.)

Take the bailout money back. Take it back. They used it poorly, they didn’t do what makes sense for the country. Take it back. Give them a timeout and move on to fixing science and education and roads, because that’s the shit that’s gonna produce jobs and a future economy.

I’d rather you bailout cops and teachers and people trying to get by than bailout corporations who made eggregious errors in basic business principles. Let ’em rot. But since you offered them money with no strings attached, you Congresspeople should have to pay those executive bonuses out of your own Congressional salaries. Talk about CEOS and CFOs working for a dollar this year…Congress should do that, too.

You know what, World?

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You really suck today, World. Sure, it’s a gorgeous 70plus degree day. Sure, there have been some very nice people in my way today. But overall, you are a rotten and no good inhabited planet today, World.

So since you suck so much today, and you owe me some *major* kharma points for royally fucking with me when I really didn’t have it coming, please send some of your worst asspain to the following peeps:

Do me a favor and throw a pebble in the shoe of the a–holes who lied to us when they sold us the last house, the realtor who let them, and the realtor who didn’t catch the lie. Also, please, give a huge festering stye to the people ruining the planet, a labial sebacious cyst to chemical companies who get away with the slow murder of the human race because they have strong lobbyists, and a painful nasal laceration to the jerks abusing workers for a profit.

It’s the least you can do, you sucky, sucky world.

Writers’ deaths are the new nihilism

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It seems the steady cadence of writers’ bodies dropping into their coffins is the most recent lash strike with which layers of the modern world structures—the steady sense of self and reliability of at least a few things our culture used to believe in—are falling to a postmodern erosion, a whittling away in which there is no new path or understanding revealed.

Writers are leaving us, and there is no clear sense of what will be next, what will happen to our art, words, and lives. This is reality; this is postmodern nihilism. And this is what Cornel West calls the “lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness.”

Goodbye, Vonnegut. Goodbye Updike. And, postmodern reality help us, goodbye David Foster Wallace.

At the risk of sounding modernist, what comes next? I know Updike’s death today isn’t eschatological (I didn’t even like his books), but still…

(For tonight, I foresee a healthy dose of Counting Crows and Ben Folds. Morose, surreal, and evocative beauty soothes in just such a situation.)

Using your outside voice in the middle ages

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Over at outside voice, where they are barely juggling academia and parenting, we have been challenged with finding our inner Renaissance Humanist.

So? What is the medieval you up to?

If you’re feeling like me today, you are a cartographer. See? Says so right here.

You Are a Cartographer
You have a wide range of knowledge and you’re very detail oriented.
You have a photographic memory, and you remember places very well.

Like a middle ages cartographer, you’re also very adventurous and curious about the world.
In modern times, you would *hypothetically* make a good non-fiction writer or scientist. If you didn’t have so many issues.