Pile-Up

Getting this working/mothering balance right is tough stuff.

I felt like a genius for being a freelancer on Thursday when I was home with both kids (our boy had a day off for teacher conferences) making a few work phone calls in the AM while still in my workout clothes from a pre-dawn basement weight training session. We had a leisurely lunchtime playdate with some friends who were also not working or in school that day, and then I came home and made soup from scratch for dinner. From scratch! Even the broth!

Then came Friday, which started off in my the same idyllic manner. A coffee date with a friend/writing colleague and her baby, lunch with my beloved and the kids, a little work wedged in for good measure while my boy played a computer game. We were headed to our church to watch a movie that evening when it hit me: I had a story due in a week, I hadn't heard from two of the sources I had calls out to, and Thanksgiving would gobble up half of my workdays between now and my deadline.

In work, as in mothering, focus is critical. And in work, as in mothering, it's generally hard to come by, at least if you want to accomplish everything you aim to complete. I've visualized this with piles of blocks. My beloved, God bless him, earns more than 80 percent of all our money. He goes to work, spends nine or so hours a day there, does his thing, and comes home. Yes, he helps out with the kids and household tasks, but he's definitely the sous homemaker. He has a tall, tall column of "work blocks" with just a handful on the home heap.

I, on the other hand, have a wide swath of block piles, several of which are similar in height. There's work, mothering, homekeeping, and church life management, among others. No one pile is dominant; my life, rather than a bar graph, is a scatter plot of disparate activities. Like now, for instance, when I'm trying to put a coherent thought together, and our 4-year-old is climbing on me, chanting "Mommy" over and over in my ear because it's snowing outside and she wants help putting on her tights (she loves tights more than life itself) under her jeans so she can go outside and play.

It's a tough, wonderful, mixed-up, bountiful life.

Remarkable

I learned something important today. Food coloring may indelibly stain skin (the Smurf-blue fingertip I used to scrub at an offending spot proves it), but with a little Zout and an All/Oxi-Clean cocktail, even the meanest-looking stains wash out of clothes.

Laugh-In

Since we hadn't yet gotten around to putting the furniture back after having the carpets cleaned, there were some wide-open spaces in our house that weren't usually wide open. One such space was the landing outside the kids' bedrooms, where we handle bedtime business like flossing teeth and reading books.

The four of us were hanging out there--something we can't generally do for lack of square footage--sort of lolling around. Then I got us arranged in a "laugh chain" like I had done in Brownies once: you lay your head on someone's belly, and someone else lays their head on yours, and so on. Then you tell jokes, and everyone's heads bob up and down, which leads to more laughing. It's a good time.

With our boy left out ("Why isn't my head on anyone's tummy, Mommy?"), we decided to make a laugh circle so everyone could fully participate. Then came the jokes.

The funniest was from my beloved, who asked, "How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" The answer: "Two--one to get the giraffe and one to fill the bathtub with brightly colored power tools."

Of course, the kids didn't appreciate his humor, so we had to listen to their jokes, too. And since one of the cherubs is four, that meant not all the jokes made sense.

There was one from our boy, which he'd read in Highlights: "What's a dectective's favorite dance?" Answer: "Evi-dance."

Yuk yuk. Then came a series from our girl, all of which involved either bunnies or objects that were within her line of sight. An example (shared haltingly as she made it up in her head): "Why...did the spider...go on the lightswitch?" The punchline: "Because it was his food!"

Inspired, her brother piped in with, "What did the bunny say to the carrot man?" What other than, "Hey, Mr. Carrot Man, give me a carrot!"

To that one, our girl responded, "Hey, I know that joke. It's one of mine!"

Patience Is a Virtue

On those days when I'm feeling less than patient with my children, I'm going to look back at this grocery list, which I painstakingly dictated to my 4-year-old transcriptionist before a trip to the store. (Click on the object for a larger version.) Letter by letter, baby. It was a miraculous act of tolerance.