Saturday, July 28, 2007

What size shoes do you wear?


My saintly friend took my big boys for the weekend, and my mother watched the twins, so my husband and I were left to our own devices for the first time since...holy, maybe our honeymoon? Anyway, a long time. Being wild and crazy, we decided to use the freedom to shop for clothes for my husband to wear to work. His current wardrobe consists of tatters formerly known as clothes. And by formerly, I mean in the 80s, so even if they weren't threadbare and full of holes, they wouldn't exactly be fashionable. So it may not seem like the most romantic of outings, but it was necessary, and it turned out to be way more fun than you might expect.

The really amusing part of our shopping trip came after all the clothes were selected and purchased, and we decided to stop by the shoe department to see if we could also replace the block-shaped scuffed shoes my husband currently wears to work every day. We picked out a few styles for him to try on (our selection process consisted of me rejecting all of his efforts to classify Sketchers and work boots as "business appropriate" footwear, and him rejecting all shoes with any style or flair at all). While we waited for the poor sales clerk to get his shoes, which we requested in a size 10, my husband stepped into one of those metal foot-measuring things just to check his size. Imagine our surprise when the scale clearly said that he wears a size 7. Possibly a 7.5.

My husband's reaction was denial. He literally refused to even consider for a moment that our dispassionate metal witness might be correct, and that he was the one who had not, for reasons passing understanding, known his own shoe size for 20 years. So I enlisted the assistance of the now-amused sales clerk, who confirmed with her professional expertise that my husband does, in fact, have the dainty pretty feet of a 10 year old girl. I mean, is a size 7.

Surely, faced with the mounting evidence, a reasonable person would cave and work toward acceptance of the new, small-footed world order. My husband is not a reasonable person. I next requested that the sales clerk bring out a pair of shoes, any shoes, in a 7.5. She did, and my husband executed a perfect OJ Simpson impression, wedging his foot into the shoe with a great display of grunting and straining and pained expression. But, and here is the key point, his foot did fit inside the shoe. By this point, I was gasping for breath, the neighboring crowd was starting to chuckle, and the sales clerk was beginning to look like maybe selling shoes wasn't quite as suck-ass as she thought it would be. My husband, rather than admit defeat, decided that he simply couldn't purchase shoes without his special work socks present (and they must be special indeed, to enlarge his feet by 2.5 sizes), and decided to come back later and try again.

All the way home in the car, I tried to convince my husband that the fact that he OWNS size 9, 9.5, and 10 shoes does not mean that his FEET are size 9, 9.5, or 10. He expressed his opinion that feet need a "buffer" between toes and end of shoe. He insisted that the wear pattern on his work shoes, which I now realize indicates that his toes reach the MIDDLE OF HIS SHOES, is completely normal. Doesn't everyone have quarter-sized wear spots right in the middle of their shoes? From their big toes?

The situation deteriorated further when we got home, and my husband held up his foot and said, "look at this, it's about 14 inches, right?" OMG, I'm snorting just typing it. 14 inches! He is in for such a world of disillusionment when this thought process reaches its logical next step. He couldn't find a tape measure, so he got out a piece of paper and held his foot against it, determining that his foot was about an inch shorter than the paper and therefore 10" long. "So," he said, "I wear a size 10! See?!" I explained, through tears of mirth, that shoe sizes do not correlate to foot length, and as proof of my premise, I reminded him that men and women's sizes are different. His response? "I thought...the centimeter."

Seriously, there's no way this is as funny written out as it has been in person, but this is one hell of a funny day. Couples without children must just have fun all the livelong day.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Yet another swimming pool PSA

This time of year, there are constant warnings in the media and in whispered anecdotes and in mothers' secret hearts of fears about the dangers of swimming pools. Just last week, for example, my boy twin proved once and for all that I DO have too many children when he escaped for 30 seconds (I thought he was on the blanket right in front of me, but it was his 3 year old brother acting as accomplice by somehow impersonating him) and was standing up in the kiddie pool, fully clothed and quite pleased with himself, by the time we noticed his absence. That boy is going to make me revise my position on child leashes, but that's another story.

This PSA is for you parents reading at home, though, not for your children, so pay attention. If you are an adult, say 5 feet tall or taller, and you are playing with your child in the shallow end of the pool, do not show them how to do a backward flip underwater. You're taller than you were the last time you did that (in the 1980s), and you WILL hit your lip and chin on the bottom of the pool. The bottom of the pool, incidentally, seems to be made of recycled sandpaper, and while I admire the recycling ethos, it does not feel good on one's face.

Consider yourselves warned.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Laziness and loathing

I'm the laziest blogger ever. I have things in my head about which I could write - Harry Potter, med school, ear-infection-prone twins, knitting, language delays, organic food, disastrous housekeeping. But my interest flickers from thing to thing faster than I can pull up Blogger, and I'm beset by some parenting malaise that prevents coherency (clearly). Because next to and under and around and through the laziness is the loathing, the annoyance, the deep-itch-irritation with my big boy.

I am a good parent in my head. I have reserves of self-confidence that I begin to suspect are not warranted, a faith in my love for my kids and the belief that I've sacrificed too much for them for it not to matter - they have to turn out well, I've paid for a good result with my time and sleep and heart and soul and body and money and whatever other currency I had at the beginning of this foolishness. And yet. My big boy tries my patience every day. Every 5 minutes, really. And it seems like my patience is never quite big enough for the task.

We're having him evaluated, for ADHD and a mood disorder, and I don't know what I'm more afraid of - that he does have some kind of problem that will affect him throughout his life, or that there's nothing wrong except my own terribly short fuse and imperfect affection. In the meantime, the summer days that were looking so promising are getting slower and longer, with all of us restless and at odds with each other.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Better living through pharmaceuticals

I'm not sure if I mentioned it here, because I'm a little sketchy about needing prescription drugs to act like a human being, but I've been on a low dose of Zoloft since May. It takes 6 to 8 weeks to reach full effectiveness, but I started feeling somewhat better right away, and my doctor doubled my dose last week to the regular starting dose (I was originally on a very low dose indeed) and now I feel....normal. Like the person I'd actually forgotten I used to be. It took me a few days of feeling this way before I realized that it wasn't a fluke, that I wasn't high, that this is regular, non-suck life. I've been enjoying my children, I've been patient and calm (mostly - I mean, it didn't turn me into someone else or anything), I've been happy. I've also been sleeping like 12 hours a day, but I figure that will level off, or else my mom and husband can just adjust to doing all the housework and child care unassisted. I'm sure they won't mind, when they contrast that with having the old, mopey, weepy, screetchy, post-partumy me back.

So, life is good and my brain seems to be returning to some kind of normal functioning. Normal for me, that is. My weird date-thing is back, where I figure out what I was doing a week ago, a month ago, a year ago, etc. Every day can be red-letter if you memorize obsessively. For example, 10 years ago today was my first day of work at the job I ended up loathing that I moved to Baltimore for. If that isn't the awkwardest sentence alive, I don't know what is, but you get my point. It's also my birthday - I'm 31 and 4 months. It's also one month since Flag Day, 3 days before the anniversary of the day in 2002 when my husband and I toured the venue we ended up choosing for our wedding, and one year since my stepson met the twins.

Boy twin just jabbed little boy in the eye with a fork. I think that's the international sign requesting parenting, so I'd better run. Happily!

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Eight things about me

These are hard to make interesting. If you're reading this, you probably already know me, so what can I say that you don't already know? Cole tagged me, though, so I'll be a good sport. Here goes...

1) I never win bets with my husband. Ever. I can be 100% certain that I am correct, and still I will lose. He got a big screen TV because of a bet about our second child's gender, and he just won a bet about an actor in a stupid movie, and I was so so sure I was right this time. Damn it.

2) My favorite book and movie are Gone with the Wind, and have been since I was about 10 years old. Scarlett has had a strong and lasting impact on my personality, I'm afraid.

3) I have mellowed with age, but still have a firm shit list of people that I irredeemably loathe that has stuck at three entries for years now. One is George Bush. My good friends know the other two. Don't anyone get paranoid, now!

4) After approximately 15 years of expecting the great body hiding within me to emerge, I'm beginning, slowly, to accept that this may just be how I look. More of me to love, baybee!

5) I know a very little bit about a lot of things and a lot about almost nothing. Most of what I DO know, I gleaned from novels, not from actual authoritative sources, so that's suspect too. To sum up - never believe any fact you get from me.

6) I used to love dogs. Really. I even raised puppies to become Seeing Eye dogs. Weird, huh?

7) Among my many failed attempts to improve myself and learn new things have been: piano lessons, Japanese classes, salsa dancing classes, two gym memberships, one creative writing class, and several gardening books. But med school will be different!

8) I hate feet.

Not sure there was anything new or revealing there, but I did it! One more small step toward becoming the kind of person who sets goals and then (here's the nutty part) works toward them.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Impatience

I feel like I'm waiting a lot lately. Little boy has a diagnosis but I'm waiting for an available language therapist. I finally took big boy to seek professional help, and I'm glad, but just the evaluation process is a many-week, multi-visit wait. I'm really set on the medical school idea, but I have to wait to apply, and I just found out I have to wait until August 10 just to interview for the volunteer position I applied for. I have house projects I want to work on, but I have to wait for the weather to cooperate.

I hate waiting.

Monday, July 09, 2007

This and That

I've been meaning to post pictures from the twins' birthday and party, but they're on my husband's computer and I never get around to it. Maybe before their next birthday. I think they had a good birthday, not that they had any idea what was going on. We had their pictures done at the Picture People and they turned out really well, and we went to dinner at Fuddruckers and gave them ice cream. What more could babies want? At their 12 month doctor's appointment on Friday, they got shots and were both diagnosed with yet another double ear infection, so that was less exciting, but they both still managed to have a lot of fun at their party on Saturday. We lucked out and had it the last day of tolerable weather before this oppressive heat moved in, and we had a wonderful group of friends here to celebrate.

What else? My big boy has been getting curiouser and curiouser (in the killed-the-cat sense, not the Alice-in-Wonderland sense, but I like the phrase) about his biological father, and asked if he could speak to him last week, so I tracked him down. Boy is very excited to have contact with these mysterious antecedents (we talked to his biological aunt, uncle, and grandmother, too), and I think some of his recent hideousness has been due to unexpressed questions. The bio-family all did really well on the phone, were excited to talk to him and made him feel very special. I know there's a big potential here for a let-down, but I think it's best to answer his questions as they come up and give him the contact as he requests it. At least I hope so.

Boy twin is walking around the room and jabbering in an alien language - he all of a sudden seems about 6 months older than his floppy little twin. She has decided to be a stereotypical girl lately and cries if we say no, however gently.

I'm still set on the idea of med school, strangely enough. I've been researching programs and applying for volunteer positions and trying to squeeze blood from the stone that is our finances.

That's about it. Not much time for contemplation lately, but I'll try to come up with something more interesting than a current events update for my next post.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Happy Fourth!

I love the 4th of July. It's my kind of holiday - a day off with food and beer and friends with no formality required. It has no religious foundation, so I can participate hypocrisy free, and I don't have to figure out presents or panic about cards or cookies or any expectations at all, really. Plus, the twins' birthday is July 5th, so the 4th is like a warmup.

I do like being American. It's almost embarassing to admit that - there's so much bad to take with the good, and the country seems so much like a well-intentioned but kind of dim fat old woman with extravagant spending habits and 32 spoiled cats. I hate that we push our collective craziness onto the rest of the world so unequally - our pollution, our bizarre holy wars, our insatiable oil hunger. I hate our complacency and stubbornness, our resolute unilinguilism, our residual racism, our wastefulness and selfishness and palpable sense of superiority.

But we're kind of kids, still, aren't we? At only 231 years old, we're really just starting out, and if we've outgrown our maturity on a rich diet of natural resources and economic luck, we're not all bad. There's definitely something to the whole freedom of speech and freedom of religion idea, however imperfectly implemented, and we do struggle closer and closer, on balance, toward some kind of equality. We make efforts at sharing, with each other and with other countries, although our spending priorities seem a bit out of whack.

I can't help feeling hopeful that we can hold this house of cards together long enough to outgrow some of this teenage angst and form a truly more perfect union. Maybe we will start looking at the almost-everything that unites us and stop hunting down opportunities for division.

To sum up - you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. See? Who needs to write, when you can quote dead people!

So, here's to America, to eating hot dogs and drinking beer and watching 1776 on TBS. Happy 4th, everyone!