have yourself a merry little christmas

Today is Christmas Eve Eve and I am sad. The Weather Forecasters with all their infinite wisdom and future-predicting capabilities are telling me that it’s going to start a “wintry mix” in about two hours, followed two hours later by “ICE” (emphasis theirs).

This will likely make it impossible for my family to attend Christmas Festivities at my grandmother’s house, three hours north of here. I have been to my grandmother’s house for Christmas exactly once in the last TEN YEARS.  But that’s a story for another day.

I know, I should be happy that I am safe and warm and healthy and have heat and all. And I am. But I didn’t realize how much I was looking forward to seeing my family for the holidays until I can’t. And no, we can’t just go a day later (Santa is coming to OUR HOUSE) or even after the holidays (we’re going to Dave’s family’s on the 26^th).

And just so you feel even MORE SORRY for me, we leave on January 2 for Miami. So we can go on a seven-day Caribbean cruise on January 3. I know. WOE.

To add insult to injury, my office, which has closed early the day before Christmas Eve EVERY YEAR FOR THE LAST FIVE YEARS, is not closing early today. Something about the office being closed for eight work days and that is enough. Whatever. When has my office ever thought anything was “enough”? We had open bar at the Christmas party. During work hours.

You want good holiday news? R went poopy in the potty last night. And she is so excited for Santa Claus and Baby Jesus. Her chief concern right now is making sure we have carrots to leave for Santa’s reindeer. And that is all she needs to worry about right now.

Today they are having her birthday party at her school, since she’ll be gone for 18 days after today. (What? I counted. The last time I was gone from work for more than five days was… maternity leave.) She was thrilled to bring cupcakes for her friends.

So while I am sad and perhaps a smidge self-pitying, I am also Glad and Excited. I hope the holiday season brings at least some joy and comfort to everyone.

 

 

 

 

Jet set

We have been living the life of the fabulous and hoi polloi, jetting all about our fair city from one child-themed event to the next. This lifestyle is also known as one adopted by people who get free tickets to a lot of stuff through work. Or one person. My lovely husband.

Wednesday night, after a stunningly nutritious frozen pizza for dinner, we spent the evening with friends at Disney On Ice. R spent the entire first half hour demanding Cinderella, then was fully unsatisfied with the five total minutes the Princess spent on the ice. Ditto The Little Mermaid. Fun was had by all, though R now points to the fact that we do not own, nor has she seen The Incredibles or Toy Story (any incarnation). She also laments the fact that we don’t have Pocahontas or Snow White or The Lion King, though at least her mean parents have put her in situations in which she could watch them at least once.

Last night, we went to an “exclusive opening” for what is being billed as an indoor amusement park. Unfortunately, very little in the area for little kids was working, and many of the games R could play (she loves the one where you shoot the coin onto the different levels of steps) were unplugged as well. But there was free food and R and I got in a couple of rousing games of air hockey. She would occasionally slide the disc into her own goal, which meant I beat her both games. But I wasn’t really trying. I also rode the mini tea cups with her, which was actually okay, despite thinking I was going to puke for the first five minutes.

Tonight is “Parents Night Out” at R’s day care, which means I’ll pick her up at 5, take her home, love on her and feed her. When Dave gets home, we’ll drop her back off at day care and have a few hours of… what? Christmas shopping? Present wrapping? Adult beverage imbibing? A peaceful meal without dropped napkins or silverware or feet caught in chair backs? Oh… the abandon of it all!

We’ll have teleporting then, right?

Sometimes, being R’s mom means I feel all warm and gushy inside, like I’m sitting in front of the fireplace in my favorite Eddie Bauer sweats, drinking raspberry hot cocoa and flipping through back issues of Cooking Light.

Sometimes, being R’s mom means I feel all frozen and tied-up inside, like one false move will snap the rubber bands that keep the anger and the tears caged up and I will spew icy contempt and bee-yotch backhands all over the world.

More often than not, it’s in between the two extremes – kinda tepid but not totally unpleasant.

Sure she pooped in her pants again three times yesterday, but none of the accidents required a total outfit revamp – just the panties. (I’m sure she’s going to love reading this someday). And sure she refuses to sit in her chair at dinner properly and is constantly getting her foot stuck in the chairback leading to tears and tantrums, but she also repeatedly enjoins me to dance with her to Hip Hop Harry, and what could be more fun than doing the Cabbage Patch and Running Man along with a giant, rapping, neon yellow bear and your 2-year-old?

The highs seem to even out the lows. We had a week of what seemed like constant defiance and aggression. But now we are in cease-fire status, with cooperation, friendliness and genuine affection the themes of the day.

I spend so little time with her each day, I am loathe to waste it on chores like folding laundry and cooking dinner. I’d much rather play with her Sweet Streets (damn you Fisher Price for discontinuing that line!!) or care for my Farm on Facebook (she loves to harvest the fruit trees!).

Saturday was her holiday program at day care, and seeing her up there, little construction paper reindeer antlers on her head as she sang “Nine Little Reindeer” and I thought I only have 15 years left with her under my roof. And I am going to make the most of those 15 years.

Resolutions

I mentioned earlier this week that I had a birthday recently. In general, I don’t really care much about getting older. I guess I’m still young enough to not worry too much about it, though the aches and pains (and jiggles settling in my lower half) remind me more often that I am not longer in my twenties.

At the advice of a former co-worker, I like to treat my birthday each year as a “personal new year.” Of course, that means that if at all possible, I do not go to work on my birthday. After all, it is a holiday. But, probably more importantly, I also try to do a little “taking stock” of my life. In the past, I’ve been mostly happy with what I’ve tallied. I love my handsome, clever and good-to-me husband, I have a daughter who is smart and beautiful and mostly well-behaved. I’ve done well in my career.

This year, I looked a little bit deeper than those surface things, those things that anybody could tell if they looked at me. I really thought about my attitude: toward life, toward other people, toward myself. And I didn’t really like what I saw.

The older I get, the less tolerant I’ve become. I like to think of myself as a genuinely nice person, but I don’t think that’s true anymore. Five years ago, undoubtedly I was a sweetheart. But I now have less patience for … well, anything that isn’t as I want it or think it should be. I use up all of my patience with R, for she often requires a lot.

I am an angry driver. I am resentful at work. I hold people to impossibly high standards and project my own feelings of inadequacy on others – friends, family, coworkers, complete strangers on the onramp to I-65.  Even my own father has noticed that I’m not as nice as I used to be. And it’s impacting my health: My blood pressure is skyrocketing again.

I don’t like this about myself, but I’m not sure how to dial down the pissiness without letting myself get walked on. All my life, people have encouraged me to be more aggressive, more confrontational, more assertive. But now that I have become these things, I don’t like what that makes me. How do I balance these things?

Dave and I talked about this over my birthday dinner at Fogo de Chao, and he, rather dishearteningly, agreed with my self-analysis. So I’m going to try to relax, be more carefree and less controlling. I hope that taking the time to get a little perspective on things will make me a more likable person. Happy new year!

The last two weeks

·         I turned 32. We marked the occasion with a trip to “The Lion King.” R loved it, which was great, but really, the excitement she had leading up to the show was birthday gift enough for me. She was literally running in circles around the lobby at the Murat.

·         We dropped nearly a grand on repairs for Dave’s car. Always fun, especially during the holidays!

·         R pushed a little girl down as I was chatting with her mother at day care. The moms already don’t like me, and the one who is occasionally nice to me… I was at a loss. The following day, I picked her up at day care and her teacher told me she had punched a little boy in the mouth. I looked at the poor little boy and his lip was fat and accessorized with dried blood. NICE.

·         The following Monday when she went to day care, we went over the rules: “R, you’re not going to hit J or anyone else, right?” To which she replied: “As long as they don’t hit my baby doll.” Apparently that was the deed that earned poor J a knuckle sandwich. Sigh.

·         I took R up to my Mom’s for Thanksgiving, which made me very nervous because of the big-girl panty thing. But she sweetly asked when she had to go and I willingly pulled over at a rest area, a McDonald’s, what have you. We ate dinner at my step sisters (pictures here).

·         We stopped to see both sets of my grandparents in a tiny north-central Illinois town. It was a good visit, R can be quite charming if she puts her mind to it. She blew kisses and played peek-a-boo like a pro.

·         R asks to open her Christmas presents approximately 1,456,789,257 times a day, to the point where Sunday evening I spent half an hour making and putting together a green and red construction paper chain, from which she removes a link each night. And asks if she can open her Christmas presents.

·         Dave and R have turned up ill. Last time this happened, I crowed about my superior immune system and my “awesome mom-ness” making me impervious to germs. I was stricken hours later.

·         I have cleaned poop out of R’s underwear at least 6 times. Things were going well! I swear!

·         R is in a stage that makes me want to strangle her. If you have to clean her up after the fifth pants-pooping of the day, she screams as though you were wiping her butt with a razor blade. She acts as though you used acid, not shampoo, to wash her hair. If she doesn’t get what she wants when she wants it and how she wants it, a tantrum ensues. She sat on the bottom step in time out for nearly an hour because she refused to take her medicine on Sunday. This morning, she wouldn’t eat anything Dave offered her for breakfast and then refused to put on her shoes and coat when it was time to go. Good times.