Wallet Gone Crazy

Lots of things cross my brain every day, and not a small amount of these things revolve around, well, things. I suppose it's not a secret that us Fenway Rd. girls suffer from sporadic, albeit not disabling, depression brought on by a longing for more, well, things?

I have to say, I have discovered, and subscribe to, the notion that happiness is in the present moment. The minute you put it onto something, or ascribe meaning to an inanimate object in the manner of say, "if I could only have that Dohickety thing from Big Box #457, I would be SO HAPPY!!" or "if I had a thingamajig like Darlene, then we could be happy sharing our thingamajigs together" then you create this forever scorned scenario of chasing after this thing in order to aquire happiness. Of course, it's just ridiculous, and I spend another good portion of every day assuring my children that if they actually GET that Happy Meal, indeed, they will not necessarily BE happy. Whew! It's fairly confusing, isn't it? Imagine the undisciplined mind, what trouble it has!

I think we are, as a human race, in the midst of a shift. I think there are inklings in almost every single person's mind that all this plastic crap that's made in China is bad on just about every level. As a mother, I trip over, wash, assemble, disassemble, carry, drop, disinfect, discard, and ponder over no less than a thousand plastic things every single day. And that doesn't even count MY things.

Yesterday, my 5 year old had a birthday party. I loathe to think of myself tomorrow, trash day, lugging about 5 square feet of plastic and carboard packaging, twisties, filler, instructions, glassine "try me" windows etc. out to the curb, a full 75% of what came in to my house yesterday. The 25% that is left was made in a foreign country, by some factory worker that often probably doesn't see the light of day, either because of long work hours, or smog. The toy is then shipped on the high seas, in a container on a ship of containers filled with 100% plastic (75% which is discardable) burning fossil fuels all the way. Hundreds, if not thousands of people handle the product. Hundreds, if not thousands of gallons of fossil fuels are burnt to bring that Dohickey to my child's feet. And then 20 minutes after she's opened in in a fit of addictive aquisitional frenzy, she's dumped it under the couch, lost 5 of the 85 pieces and rendered it tangled, dirty, shodden and disheveled, a skeleton of it's perfect HDPE self. I think, good people, we are getting savvy to how bad this is...for everyone and everything.

I don't want to be the "In-my-day" type of person, but I must point out that when I was 5, my mother got me off the bus, handed me an apple, and pushed me out the back door. There were no cartoons on at 3 pm on a Tuesday. There wasn't a huge panoply of product to accompany every Disney movie. There was not an assault on my tender, youthful innocence that made me say things like "put your hands on me in my skin tight jeans, be your teenage dream tonight" from every media outlet. I have become a Virtuoso of Value. I know what things are worth and I won't pay a penny more than it is. I buy raw ingredients. I shop at thrift stores. I wear shoes until they fall apart. I get books and videos from the library. I drive an older car that's paid off and smells like my dog, which is good, because I still have her and she still smells, and if I had a new car, I'd spend too much time being mad at the dog for who she is. Why would I want to do that? I love her. She brings me joy, even though she smells.

So, the veggie garden movement, the green movement, the wind power movement, the simplicity movement, the gratitude movement, the back-to-basics movement...whatever you call it, is upon us. I doubt we will ever reverse things to contract global warming, save all the glaciers, keep the seas down, avoid skin cancer and megastorms, but I think we can all embrace that the time is now to stop buying so much crap. Make the pledge. Ask yourself if it's really worth it. Can I live without it? Will my life be better if I have it? Will I be happier?

Try to be happy one moment at a time. Not one thing at a time.

Turn-on's

It's not every day that I come to tears, but it is more often than I would like. Often, it can be linked to my menstrual cycle, but as I approaced 40, this got harder and harder to nail down. Cycles became long, then short, then disappeared, then raged back with a vengeance. I realized in the past year that now they can be linked not only to the premenstrual time slot of a week or so before, but also to the preovulation period of 3 or so days as well. Imagine my dismay!

Well, today must be one of those days.

It was my daughters' 6th birthday party. It was a cute foray into the world of Glamour with a capital G...we went to a salon called "Glitzy" and had 4 of her closest friends join us, and one little 4 year old tart, Tess, her sister. I swallowed any common sense I may have had over the fact that I am unemployed at the moment, and that as we sit here, my Master Card balance is slowly climbing, incrementally into a territory I have never been in my life. I sprang for the whole schmear...up-do's, nails, 4 different crafts to keep them occupied, a bouncy soundtrack on the system to keep them perky, and lots and lots of glitter. I made my own raging blue buttercream to mimic the sea under that pain-in-the-ass princess that won't go out of my life, Ariel. I brought waters and juice boxes and Smartfood and pretzels. I oo'd and ahh'd myself silly at every fantastical curl on every little head. I profusely thanked the two stylists even though for two hours work, they've made more moola than I have in a month of collecting unemployment.

And now I am home. The dishes are done, the crafts put away, the glittery detritus at the bottom of my shopping bags dumped out. My 4 year old is yelping happily in the living room while playing with the balloons. But where is the birthday girl? Here's the weepy part. And I am not sure why, except that I think it has to do with her father, my dear husband. He came to the party. He methodically cut and manipulated several princess choker necklaces and even applied a few tattoo's. He picked up the balloons and brought the food in for me. But when the time came to leave, he seized the opportunity to take home one of the party-goers along with Brooke. I was sent home with the crying 4 year old, and felt slightly cast out as a result. I unloaded the car, and even carried in the coffee table that we brought along for craft space.

It's now 90 minutes later. I know exactly where he is. He is having a beer with the dad. Brooke and her friend are probably out at the zipline, giggling carefree as their up-do's come unraveled. Mud is under their fingers and they are really actually acting their age now. John is inside, head back, laughing about some silly anecdote, eating pretzels and thinking nothing of me waddling through the living room with a coffee table on my hip.

And when he does come home, he'll whip up a stir-fry, tell us all we are beautiful and then fall asleep on the couch. We will have exchanged about 20 sentences today, and then after we pull the covers up on ourselves at 11 pm or thereabouts, his stiffness will poke me in the thigh and I will think "eeew". He will need me too. Like the kids need me, and the dog needs me and the bills need me and my boss needs me and the school needs me and my mom needs me. Like the floor needs mopping, the car needs and oil change, the committee needs a report and the tortoise needs new bedding. And turned on, I will NOT be. Tired. Used up. Kind of sad. Wishing that simple stiff thing could rouse something in me that smacks of pleasure.

And I will give in. And he will feel better.

And after we clean up, and I put my pj's back on because I am always cold, and we embrace, I'll say "so, you wanna talk?". Kind of a joke, being that it is so late now. Kind of a test, because I just gave you what you needed, now will you give me what I need? Kind of a jab, because perhaps in a few years when he actually realizes what that means, that he will remember I asked.

That would be a turn-on.

Great minds think alike?

I decided to check my email while visiting my sister today and had to do so through the Yahoo website, where I inadvertently made it in to my Bulk mail folder. There I found an email from a very nice and strikingly similar person to me saying that she too, had a blog called Chronicles of Mommy-a, with no hyphen...her name is Catherine Mosely and she is from Roanoke Virginia and she was lucky enough to be written about in the local newspaper, where apparently , they used the hyphen when referring readers to her blog. this is a post to say...we are not the same person! :)
Of course, strangely also, we use the same Blogger template and we are the same age and a few other coincidences, but this is to clarify that if you are looking for Catherine, I am sorry to disappoint. Makes me think I oughtta change the name of my blog.
Cheers, Catherine.

the wild indoors

I am one of the more tolerant people I know when it comes to living creatures in my house that are not requiring braids or warm milk, or sex 2 nights a week minimum. I mean bugs, in particular. Right now, we are having the common summer problem of tiny ants in our kitchen. (Don't we all have those?) I seem to remember being overrun by them in my previous home, especially in the kitchen, and squirting them with my homemade peppermint soap and ammonia solution which would just slow them down. They just kept coming.

Today, after killing about 400 before 10 am, my husband angrily said "where the f--k are they coming from!!!???" Let's see, could it be the hairline crack in the window above the sink, a mere 4 inches from where we find them each day? Quite possibly, could it be that they are actually sneaky enough to climb up the wall outside and in through the 6 inch long gash in the screen that you made a few months ago when trying to install it? Is he completely serious? I do not believe in bait or renegade poisoning. Something about both just seems pointless. Bait? I want MORE ants to come? And poison is something I consider very carefully these days. I always ask myself now, where does this stuff end up? I mean, REALLY end up? Have you heard about antibiotics turning up in trace amount in drinking water? You get my point.

We have quite a bevy of multi-legged creatures in this house. I have just begun to truly accept that we all coexist and to barely respond when gutteral cries from the basement playroom of "SPIDER!" and I have been know to casually watch a silverfish swerve across my desk as I write. There are some stories, however, that will forever impact how I look at certain bugs...ticks, for instance. They seem to bring on an immediate panic, as if, without warning, they will lash out at you and instantaneosly give you Lyme disease. I of course know that the ticks that give you Lyme are miniscule and need to be imbedded for 24 hours before you would contract the illness. The thought of having a bug with it's head bored into my skin is not appealing whatsoever, but I think it is the story of my friends son Henry that takes the Bug Academy Award. Picture this:

We are out for a fine day of sun and fishing on our friends boat. Grandma is home with Henry, a freakishly large, wide-eyed and sweet 9 month old son of Derek and Lulu, our hosts. As the story goes, Henry is crawling around, happily cooing at his stuffed animals and Mega Legos et cetera and Grandma is sipping Barry's tea and reading the Times and occaisionally getting down on the floor with him to coo back, or smell his diaper. At one point, she looks up at him, and his face is covered with blood...down his chin, on his chubby fingers and smeared in his hair. Fenway, the chocolate Lab, circles curiously and gives him a lick across the face. Grandma panics and picks him up. No cries, no signs of distress, no visible cut anywhere. What could this be? She curiously cleans him, slightly panicked, totally confused, when he revels from his mouth the remains of an engorged tick. Fenway appears nonplussed. Grandma is mortified. On the other end of the cellphone, somewhere off the coast of East Hampton, I am gagging not from seasickness, but from the "oh how disgusting" factor. Perhaps you are too.

So today, after I brushed a few ants off my peach and killed another spider in the playroom, I went outside and picked a few plump juicy sawfly larvae off of my hibiscus plant and fed them to the bluebirds. I squished the rest between my fingers and crushed a few Japanese beetles too, but truth be told, the bugs are always going to win. There will always be more of them than us, unless we Hiroshima them with God knows what. I am not willing to do that, so I will continue to share my peach with the ants, laugh at my husband and my neighbors for thinking they can win the battle and to think of some of the worst-case scenarios, like Henry's, and be grateful for what I have not.

Bluebird morning

Another reason I decided to start a blog is that there are members of my family who just cannot bear to get another email from me reporting the goings-on of the bluebird family in my front yard. I work at a small garden center in Mystic, and it is a lovely old orchard...open and grassy with rambling stone walls and pumpkin patches and native blueberry strands...perfect bluebird territory. I have the delight of getting to watch the bluebirds streak across the sky and chortle in the trees at work, and became fascinated by them last year.
Of course, my inner coveter kicked in.
So I asked for a bluebird box for Christmas and my sister came through.
Now, to be clear, I don't live in Mystic, and my property is far from "perfect" habitat. I am in Half Acre Hell, as my husband calls it...oaks, privacy hedges and lots of lawn, dotted with the occaisional obligatory weeping cherry and scads of azaleas. Bad landscaping decisions surround me. My employer, a very kind and well-intentioned woman about my age told me flat out "you won't get bluebirds". Now, my inner competitor kicked in. After all, she has 12 acres to fill with bluebird boxes and had nearly 4 families nesting last year. Bluebird populations are on the rise. I have seen the blue streak in my yard...granted, not often, but I know they are here. I am going to focus and visualize and concentrate on giving them all they need to have a successful brood.
So, guess what?
After months of watching, the male one day appeared on top of the box. It is in my front yard, near the curb, in the openest and sunniest part of the property...how they like it. All of April and May I watched the male fend off tree swallows and house wrens and chirp and sing away on the wire above the yard. I removed the wren's dummy nest (more on that later) and even ran running out into the yard, arms flailing more than once to scare off other interested parties. I rarely saw the female and thought perhaps the male was mateless.
But then it began...a few pieces of grass at the bottom, and the next day, a nearly complete nest. In 4 days, a perfect cup of soft grass and moss lay in the bottom of the box. I woke one morning to the delight of watching the bluebirds mate, again and again, on the wire. Holy Cow! I was going to be an aunt!
Yesterday, I returned from work and checked the box. Bluebirds do not sit on the nest during the heat of the day, but return at sundown to feed and roost. There, the bottom of the little cup of grass was one perfect egg. I was beside myself with joy. The girls, ages 3 and 5, have gotten used to watching me do "the happy dance" around the house when I have these mini-milestones with the birds. I can only hope I am creating an example of gratitude for little things. I want my girls to grow up noticing the perfectness of nature, the tiniest gestures of the Earth and to look deeper into the obvious.
Sometimes, the smallest things give us the greatest joy. Try to be grateful for something small today. For me, it's that little blue egg.

My first run

I write all the time anyway, I am telling myself. I have milk crates full of journals for no one to read. Perhaps I can turn this into something interesting. I am sure the more I write, the more I will write and the more I will have and the better it will be.
A whimpy start, but mostly want to train myself on how it looks, and works...