You know that only a child could get away with running around the house wearing nothing but a cape, a mask and a pair of mismatched high heels, shouting “I’m Batman!”
When my youngest daughter does it, it’s so dang cute. But if I did that, I’d be locked away for good. Why do kids always get to have all the fun?
Cassie went on a field trip to an apple orchard earlier this week and came back with one small red and green apple.
“Mama! Let’s make pie!”
How do you explain to a five-year-old that one small apple will not make a whole pie? You don’t. You figure out how to make pie instead.
We have a couple of kids’ cook books at home, so we dug through them until I found a recipe for jam tarts. We used the basic recipe for the crust and rolled and cut out two crusts about 6 inches across. These went into two of the cups of an extra large muffin tin I have.
“Mama, that’s not a pie plate!”
“No, it’s a mini-pie plate. If we had more apples, we’d make more crusts and fill up the other four cups. But we have one apple so we’re only making two mini-pies.”
I crossed my fingers and watched the cogs turn in her brain as she mulled that over.
“Okay. I like mini-pies!”
Then we chopped up the one small apple and added it to a mix of brown sugar, butter, dried cranberries and walnuts. I figured if we used plenty of dried cranberries and walnuts, we could get away with just one apple.
“Mama, how come we’re adding so much stuff to the apple?”
“It’ll add extra flavor and make the pie taste more yummy.”
“Okay. I like yummy pies!”
Once we had the pies filled, we still had some leftover scraps of pastry so I pulled out some cookie cutters and we made decorative tops for the pies. This went over very well, especially since we have fairy, star, dragonfly and bumble bee cookie cutters.
“Yeah! We made fairy pies!”
“Yes we did, sweetie.”
The pies went into the over for about 25 minutes and came out looking scrumptious. I let Cassie pull out some livid pink decorator icing and we added that to the pie crusts. Then Sam woke up from her nap and Michael came and we all headed out to the elementary school for open house. All evening, Cassie talked about how much she wanted pie.
“Well, sweetie, when we get home, we’ll all have some pie. You and Sam can share one pie and Daddy and I will share the other.”
Only that wasn’t what happened. Cassie decided she had to have a pie all to herself, and then Sam decided she had to have a pie all to herself and that just left this one teeny-tiny jam tart I had made with the final leftover scraps of pastry and some orang marmalade. The jam tart was good, but the smell of those pies was just killing me. I had to wait until after both girls ate the tops of the pies and then abandoned them before I could steal a bite.
So that’s how you make two pies and one teeny-tiny jam tart from one apple and you better make sure you make that little jam tart because if you have two little girls, there’s no way in hell you will get a slice of pie.
Here’s some pictures of the pies:
The mini-pies before decoration.
The mini-pies after decoration.
The world’s smallest jam tart (shown larger than actual size).
Chef Cassie prepares to decorate the pies.
Sam offers her opinion (“Okay, I’ll eat it. No Mama, you can’t have any!”).
If there was an Olympic event for making mountains out of mole hills, I think I would have won a gold medal this week. Or maybe not. Maybe my intuition about certain recent events is right on target. It’s hard to say because I’m rather biased about this particular topic. And that topic is…
Popularity. As in, who’s cool in school and who gets treated like crap. You’d think that at the age of 39 I’d have gotten past all that by now. Well, think again. Ever since Cassie started kindergarten a few weeks ago, this particular issue has hit me like a ton of bricks.
Let me explain. Twice last week, Cass came home from school in a very unhappy state. The first time, she came off the bus sobbing because, as she put it, “So-and-so was mean to me!” The second time, she waited until we were at home before disintegrating into tears. When I finally got her calmed down enough to ask what was wrong, I got the same answer as before. Some kids at school were mean to her.
What does that mean, the kids are being mean to her? In the course of the past week it has meant: other kids pulling and hitting on Cassie’s backpack while she’s standing in line; one child scratching Cassie’s hand while trying to get her to turn around and sit forward on the bus (was it horseplay? accidental? deliberate?); name calling; being played with and then abruptly ignored; and other minor events.
I know enough about kids at this point to know that I’m not getting the entire story from Cass. I’ve e-mailed her teacher and talked with her to confirm that Cassie has not become the class pariah. The backpack incident was horseplay and Cassie wasn’t the only target that afternoon. I’ve also talked with the mother of the child who scratched Cassie’s hand, to try and ascertain what happened that day. We’re both chalking it up to personality differences and a misunderstanding at this point.
So there may or may not be a problem. At the school open house tonight, Cassie seemed to have a lot of fun playing with a few of her classmates (I gave my number to the moms in question in hopes of setting up play dates). And Cassie’s teacher says Cass has a great time in school. But then I keep thinking about the two days Cass came home crying last week, followed by mornings where she did not want to go the the bus stop and see the girl who scratched her, and I can’t help but worry. You see, I was one of the most unpopular kids in my school. It started in first grade and it only got worse as I grew up. Name calling, snubbing, a little outright hazing and plenty of rumor mongering. At age seven the popular girls liked to pretend I didn’t exist even though we sat at the same table and were assigned to work on projects together. By fourth grade, one little twit started a rumor that I was stuffing my bra even though I didn’t own a fucking bra yet. In seventh grade, at my first dance, one of the most popular girls in school threw a soda in my face just because I showed up and it pissed her off. Mary remembers that night. She grabbed my right arm to keep me from punching that girl’s lights out. So I hit the bitch with a left hook instead.
Speaking of Mary, my best friend and partner in crime, she and I became the school lesbians after we decided to go to ring dance together because we couldn’t get dates. (Recall back in those days that being a lesbian was a hanging offense… like it isn’t anymore, right?). Anyway, Mary was just as popular as I was all through school, but by that point, the name calling didn’t really phaze either of us anymore so we hammed it up for all we were worth and to this day people ask if we’ve eloped to California yet. Hey, they’d understand us there.
By 1987, my senior year in high school, I had quite the reputation. I was gay, a witch (because I did a research paper on the Salem witch trials), and a socio-path who enjoyed dissecting cats (that last was actually true, but the cat was dead when I got it). When the time came to vote for senior superlatives, I got ‘most artistic’ and ‘worst dressed.’ The same snarky little bitch that had accused me of stuffing my bra in the fourth grade nominated me for the later title. Mary was voted ‘most anti-social.’ Today she’s a nurse who gives people colonoscopies if they aren’t nice to her.
So I went through all that shit and survived, and when I left college (yes, I had problems with the popular crowd even in college, thanks to my fellow fuck-head ROTC cadets) I thought I had finally escaped it all. I went out into the world and became recognized as someone who was smart, competent, hard working, decisive, aggressive, and more than a little scary/crazy and not to be fucked with (and all these terms come from various job reviews and military evaluation reports I have received over the years). I was in charge wherever I went, I had my friends who had stood by me all through school, I was away from the assholes who tried to make my life miserable, and on the rare occasion when I did run into said assholes, I just pulled out that scary/crazy confident aspect of me and they backed right the fuck off.
I grew up, and I grew out of the popularity contest.
And then I had a child who started kindergarten this fall and I am right back in the middle of that shit.
Is it really a problem yet? Has my girl entered the popularity contest and been found wanting? Or am I just too fucking paranoid thanks to my own bad experiences? I so do not want to see Cassie go through what I did, and no, don’t even suggest that if I came through it a better person so will she. I’ve only highlighted a little of the endless sadism I had to endure. My kid does not need to face that to become a better, stronger person. No one does. So it raises my hackles when she comes home crying, sobbing, about how the kids at school are treating her. I fear I see the hints of what is to come. Cassie is me all over in many way, the younger me who didn’t have the razor sharp tongue and the scary-as-shit take-no-prisoners attitude. She’s a smart, sweet, goofy kid who’s just entered a world where smart, sweet, goofy kids get turned into shark bait.
What to do, what to do? I’m trying to get her out to see her friends more — her real friends like Mary’s son and the little girl down the street who’s allergic to everything under the sun and thus will probably never go to a regular school. And I’m trying to help her find new friends by reaching out to the moms of the classmates she does seem to get along with. But that one little girl, the same one who goes to Cassie’s bus stop, is in Cassie’s class, that same kid who scratched my baby and made her cry… I got a bad feeling about her. I’ve got this sense that she’s one of the sharks, and somehow, some way, I have got to prevent her from eating Cassie alive.
I was Miss Unpopularity 1987, voted ‘Worst Dressed,’ ‘Least Liked,’ and ‘Most Likely to be Spit Upon’ by my fellow classmates. That is not a title my daughter should have to inherit.
On the one hand, Michael did take the kids for most of yesterday so I could sneak off to the library for work.
But on the other hand, the house was destroyed when I got home.
But on the one hand, I did get some much needed work done, and he had the kids for four hours while I was gone and another three after I got back.
But on the other hand, it’s really, really hard to get ground in Play-doh out of the carpet.
But on the one hand, he also fixed dinner.
But on the other hand, he destroyed my kitchen in the process.
But on the one hand, it only took twenty minutes to clean up.
But on the other hand, I had already cleaned it twice yesterday, both times thanks to him and the kids.
But on the one hand, he made this really delicious Puerto Rican dish that I loved but can’t pronounce.
But on the other hand, he deep fried that dish… in a shallow pan. No matter how much I mop the kitchen, it still looks like the Exxon Valdez ran aground on our linoleum.
But on the one hand, he didn’t even complain that I came down to dinner an hour late.
But on the other hand, that dish was so deep fried I think I may drop dead of a heart attack at any moment. Does he want to kill me?!
But on the one hand, he did set up my BowFlex in the garage, so I can work out and be healthy.
But on the other hand, maybe he’s trying to tell me I’m fat and flabby…
But on the one hand, he did buy the first season of Heroes on DVD so we could watch it together.
But on the other hand, he KNOWS I need to get up at 5:30 AM, so why did he buy something that was so damned addicting to watch and yet can’t be viewed while the kiddies are up? I’m dragging today!
I dunno. Should I kill him, or jump his bones for joy? Both maybe? But in what order?
Husbands… Feh!
I went to see Bruce Springsteen in concert last night at the Richmond Coliseum in Virginia. Let me state up front that I am not a raging Bruce Springsteen fan. That would be my darling husband, he who bought the tickets and still has the t-shirt he got from a Bruce Springsteen concert TWENTY YEARS AGO. Oy. Anyway, here are my reviews of ‘the Boss’ in concert.
First, the short review:
IT WAS VERY, VERY LOUD!!
Now the long review:
Okay, so we had just gotten back from a trip to Pennsylvania to see my cousin’s daughter get married. Honestly, I need to get up there more often, and it’s a shame I don’t because my aunt Adele is like the sweetest person in the world and she always has something ready for folks to eat whenever they come over, although we stayed in a hotel, not at her house, so we didn’t get to gnosh like we would have had we actually been the–
What? Oh right, the concert. So anyway, we got back from Pennsylvania the night before, and that was a nine-hour drive with two screaming kids in the back seat, and both Michael and I were sick with some sort of weird flu bug (yes, I know, you want to hear about the concert. Hold your horses, I’m telling a story here!) that had us hacking up our lungs like a couple of old geezers, and we didn’t get home until after 10 PM. So we were not in the best shape the next morning when we got up, and we just draaaaaaaaagged through the day until the babysitter showed up and it was time for us to leave. Now, the Richmond Coliseum is about an hour away from where we live, so that meant another road trip (joy) after the one we’d done the day before. Fortunately, we had a babysitter for the evening, which meant NO SCREAMING KIDS in the back seat. Even more fortunately, this was only an hour drive, which was good because Michael wanted to play Bruce Springsteen all the way to the concert and I did not because hey, weren’t we going to be hearing this guy in a few hours anyway? But Michael insisted so I pulled out my iPod and listened to Phil Rossi’s “Notes from the Vault” which is an awesome collection of horror stories and quite frankly Phil Rossi could read a grocery list and I’d get goose bumps. Seriously!
So where was I? Oh yeah, the Bruce Springsteen concert. Anyway, we got to Richmond and found a place to park that didn’t cost us an arm and a leg and yet still looked like we would find our car with all four wheels still attached when the concert was over. We parked and walked over the Richmond Coliseum and saw lots of people with wrist bands on milling around the place. The wrist bands apparently meant you had bought a seat on the floor. Only there were no seats on the floor. I know this for a hard cold fact, because that’s what Michael bought us — two not-seats on the floor, for the bargain price of $99 a ticket, not including those ridiculous fees that darling hubby got charged for the **convenience** of buying our tickets online. The **convenience** of buying online? What kind of assbackward idea is that? Of course it’s more convenient to buy online! Who the hell would want to stand inline for hours on end to buy a ticket from some snot-nosed rude little punk at the cashier’s window when they could simply buy the damn thing online? And yet, because we’re smart enough to buy online, we’re going to be charged **extra**? Have these people not heard of Amazon or iTunes or the rest of the frikkin’ digital age? Sheesh!
So anyway, if you had a grey armband, you paid for the privilege of standing for three hours on a hard cement floor while listening to ‘the Boss’ and his band play. And if you had a pink armband, that meant you were dumb enough to show up five or six hours earlier to stand in line so you could stand for another three hours even closer to ‘the Boss’ on the same hard cement floor. Thank god the babysitter couldn’t show up until 4PM at our place, ’cause if Michael had insisted on showing up that early to get a pink band, you’d be reading his obituary instead of this really cool review.
Which has not even gotten to the actual concert yet. I know. But I want you to fully understand what I went through last night, and if I had to suffer through all that crap, so do you. Okay, where were we?
Oh yeah, the concert. So anyway, even though we had floor non-seats, we had apparently arrived too late to get our grey wristbands, so we just sashayed over to the nearest door that did not have a line a mile long in front of it and there we waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And then a couple of people who were definitely not anybody important showed up and pushed their way to the front of the line that had formed behind us and tapped on the door and some jack-ass inside let them in, and man, you could feel the air conditioning coming out of that place, but WE who were also not important but apparently didn’t know the secret knock on the door, could not get in so we just had to stand outside and make faces at the jerks who got in ahead of us and stood there ignoring us while they enjoyed the AC.
And then one of those jerks, a woman, came in and out a few times to smoke a cigarette right in front of us and oh that was precious. Look, a bottled blonde who’s so addicted to nicotine she has to come outside every fifteen minutes to blow smoke in our faces. Or up our asses. Or whichever direction the wind blew.
And this went on for half an hour until some of the event staff came out and everybody cheered. Only the event staff didn’t come out to let us in. No, they came out to hand out grey wristbands to those poor fools who had paid $99 for a non-seat on the floor. Oh wait, that was us. Yea, I got a wristband. It was grey. How lovely. And then the event staff went back inside and locked the doors again, except to keep letting out that stupid bottled blonde who just had to have another half a cigarette every five minutes. Geez! Not even a whole cigarette, just half a cigarette and she left the rest of it smeared on the pavement!
After another half hour of waiting, just about the time when the mob behind us started getting really ugly and talking about things like breaking down the doors and crushing everybody in front of them (like me and Michael), the event staff opened up the doors and let everybody come screaming in. Michael and I hurried inside and found our way to the non-seats on the floor and discovered that we would be spending the rest of the evening lined up behind enough people to fill a small country in Eastern Europe. And all these people were taller than us. And that meant we couldn’t even see the frikkin’ stage. So it was a good thing that there were these HUMONGOUS TV screens overhead, because otherwise we would never have seen the concert.
And Michael paid $99 a person for those tickets.
Yeah.
So anyway. We found an unoccupied spot on the floor and Michael claimed it and I went back out to find a potty (and yes, I call it a **potty** — I have two kids five and under and we’re still dealing with potty training so that’s what we call it, now go soak your head) and something to eat because we left for the concert at 4 PMish and it was now going on 7 PM and I was hungry. And while getting into the potty was no big deal — the Richmond Coliseum actually has enough stalls to deal with a mob of women all doing the potty dance — finding food was not so easy. Everything offered for consumption had a huge line going out the doors, except for…
Pretzels and Dippin’ Dots. And since I cannot eat Dippin’ Dots for religious reasons (and no, I will not explain that because if I did, we’d never get around to talking about the actual concert) I bought two pretzels and two bottles of water. The price was actually half-way decent, but for some odd reason (religious perhaps) the cashier would not let me have the tops to the water bottles. So I had to veeeeeery carefully pick my way back down to our spot on the floor without spilling two open bottles of water, which made me realize that it was not for religious reasons that they had kept the bottle tops; it was a marketing plan. Because if I dropped my water bottles, I had to go back and buy new ones. Very sneaky.
Anyway, I got back to our spot and Michael took off for the potty (yeah, he calls it a potty too), and then he came back and we ate our pretzels and drank our water and we…
Waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.
Apparently the concert was supposed to start at 7:30 PM. Not. 7:30 came and went and there was no sign of life on the stage, or at least I think there wasn’t any, because you know we couldn’t actually see the stage from our non-seats. So we kept waiting and the floor kept filling up and slooooooooowly the actual seats started to fill up. Then around 8PM I heard a guitar riff and a wild roar went up from the audience and I jumped up and down with everybody else struggling to see the stage and guess what?
I saw a roadie tuning a guitar.
And this happened about eight or nine million times. Some guy would come out, fiddle with one of the guitars, the crowd would go into a feeding frenzy, and then the guy would leave the stage.
After about two million years of waiting, I decided to make another break for the potty. I got in and out in under five minutes, which made me think that if I could move that quickly, why couldn’t Bruce? But just as I was thinking that, guess what happened?
Yep. Another roadie tuned a guitar.
Eventually, the crowd got so big I could pick up both my feet and not fall down. We were wedged that tight. And wouldn’t you know it, some jackass still found a way to shove himself through the crowd to stand right in front of us. Not “right at the very front of the part of the pit where if you only got a grey wristband but not a special pink one that was as close as you were allowed to get to Bruce,” but right there in front of us. He was big, and he was religious, and he kept making jokes about “wouldn’t it be great if he held up a sign about some weird Bible verse,” and wouldn’t you know it he brought his PARENTS with him and so he shoved around some more until he made enough room for them to stand in front of us too! Wasn’t that special. Oh, but what really made it all special was that he ended up standing right next to me and that was when I discovered that I had a new, least favorite smell and it was…
Big guy who shoves people around and smells like rotting baloney.
Oh. My. God. The odor was just strong enough that if I turned my head in this guy’s direction, I could catch a nasty whiff, but not strong enough to make me vomit on the spot which actually would have been good because maybe then this jackass would have moved someplace else! But no, the best I could do was turn my head away and ask Michael (who has NO sense of smell) to switch places with me So I turned my head turned away from him, only just as I was about to do that someone cut the lights, and I thought, “Oh my god!! We’re all gonna die, packed like rats in this place!”
And yep, there was a bit of crowd surge as finally, FINALLY, the Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, FINALLY showed up on stage.
And I would love to describe what the music was like at this point, but after the first opening chord, I was stone deaf and bleeding from both ears.
My GOD it was loud. Bruce came in and he hit hard. I mean, that music just felt like a fist to the face, and it drove me right back into Rotting Baloney Guy. Eeeeeew. And this went on for about 20 minutes straight. I can’t decide if it was just one really long song or a bunch of songs run together. The Boss just kept hammering at that guitar, and then Clarence Clemmens (or was it Clarence Thomas? I always get those two confused) kept screeching on his saxophone and some chick with big blonde hair kept shaking her maracas like there was no tomorrow, and Bruce had not one but TWO skinny bald guys on either end of the stage playing piano and keyboard, and those guys sort of reminded me of George Hrab, who is an excellent musician and songwriter and has never made my ears bleed, and you know what? I’d pay $99 for a seat, or maybe even for a non-seat, to see George Hrab (and Phil Rossi too for that matter) because I know I’d enjoy that show. But then just as I was thinking about how awesome a combined George Hrab/Phil Rossi concert would be, Bruce started doing high kicks!
Oh my god, no Bruce, don’t do it! Don’t kick! It was terrible! It was like watching my dad trying to stomp on a possum that got into his barn and ate all the horse feed. It was like watching George Bush trying to be funny! It was painful, it was agony, he’ll never make it into the Rockettes so my god why does he keep kicking, and oh my lord did the Rotting Baloney Guy just FART?! Oh! It’s disgusting, my eyes! My nose! My ears!! Why is Bruce Springsteen trying to beat the audience to death with his music?! Oh the humanity…
But. BUT! After the first twenty minutes of all of this torture, Mr. Springsteen actually did something that I thought was rather cool.
He stopped.
And took requests.
Yep. He waded into the audience (well not actually into them, more like above them on a catwalk, and I don’t blame him because quite frankly I think those people would have eaten him alive) and picked signs from people, and each sign had a request for a song on it, usually accompanied either by the reason why that person wanted to hear that song or some weird freaky decoration to get the Boss-man’s attention. And after picking up a bunch of signs and chatting with the audience (and he really was kind of funny when he was chatting, I have to admit), he picked the first song from the pile of signs he collected, set it up in front of his mic stand, and he and his band played that song.
And it was the first song I heard that night that I actually liked, and I will probably go out and buy it if my Springsteen-obsessed husband doesn’t already own it. It was called Stand On It, and it was a really good rock-a-billy song that I could have danced to if I had had room to dance. As it was, I was still squashed up against Rotting Baloney Guy and I didn’t even have room to breath.
And so the concert went. It was a lively show, and I heard some stuff I liked and the Boss did give a very enthusiastic performance (but my god, those flat-footed high kicks! **shudder**) and the crowd absolutely loved him, and I did manage to save some of my hearing by pressing my left ear against Michael’s shoulder. I would have taken turns with my ears, putting the left one down for a song and then the right one, but anytime I put the right one down on Michael’s shoulder, I caught another whiff of Rotting Baloney Guy and that sort of killed that idea so now you know why I’m completely deaf in my right ear.
Oh, and Rotting Baloney Guy farted at least six times during the concert and I think it’s a wonder that you aren’t all reading about how everyone who attended the Bruce Springsteen concert in Richmond last night died from asphyxiation or carbon monoxide poisoning or something. Really, something crawled up inside this guy’s ass and died. But not before making a nest under his armpits, which I saw every time he raised his arms as he sang along with Bruce. Ugh.
The show lasted three hours, and by the time it was over, including the encore which was a really rollicking version of “Twist and Shout”, it was closing in on midnight. We got out of the coliseum pretty quickly, found our car with all four tires still attached, and headed home. Miracle of miracles, we did not spend hours in traffic waiting to get onto the interstate. Someone was smart enough to bring out the traffic cops to direct the exodus and so we managed to make it home by 1:30AM to wake up the babysitter and send her home.
So, in conclusion, I spent a lot of time on my feet in overpriced non-seats standing next to a guy who smelled like rotting baloney and farted a lot. And if you see me yelling at my kids this week, it’s because I AM STILL DEAF from the horrendously loud but otherwise enjoyable music. It was a good show, even for a non-fan in a non-seat, and I would do it again but only if my husband pays for real seats and I have ear plugs and nose plugs for the concert.
The End.
I actually feel like the goddess of Hell fire today. The kids and I spent all day yesterday at a beach in Kitty Hawk, NC. We went with my best friend Mary and her family. We brought sunblock and I swear we used it, yet somehow the only one of us that didn’t end up looking like a crispy critter was Sam. The blonde pixie is as brown as a little nut, but Cassie and I are toasty red. Mary’s stepson has it worse though. Poor kid is Irish – red hair, fair skin, freckles. Only now he’s got red hair, red skin, and you can’t tell his freckles from his sunburn. I swear, before yesterday, that boy would have glowed in the dark he was so white. Nice kid though. I was hunting for seashells all day to take home to photograph. Would have photographed them on the beach but Sam + Ocean = Imminent Disaster, so I couldn’t really juggle the camera and watch the kid. I could hunt for shells though, especially with everyone else in the group helping out. Mary’s stepson dove under the waves a lot and kept brining up these incredible shells. And before I left, I scooped up a bucket of sand from beneath the water. The plan is to take a glass backing dish, lay a layer of sand in the bottom, put the shells on top of that, and then add water. Then I can photograph the shells the way they’d look best – in their not-quite-natural habitat. If only I can figure out how to get the lighting just right, so that it looks like sunlight streaming through the water over the shells. You know those wriggly lines of light that play on the sand beneath the waves? That’s what I want.
That and a vat of aloe vera gel. Ouch.
Yesterday during ‘Quiet Time,’ Cassie came into my room cradling something tiny in the palm of her hand. She handed it to me with great ceremony and said, “Mommy this is a dead bug. I found it for you, because I know you like to take pictures of bugs.”
Then she handed me a dead housefly. I was so touched. I really do like to take pictures of bugs using the macro setting on my digital camera. I also take close up shots of tree bark, leaves, roots, rocks, peeling pain, rust stains, and other weird-ass things that I know will make great textures in my digital artwork.
I saved the fly. It’s still somewhere on my desk. If I can find it among all the odds and ends, I’ll pop it into the scanner and scan it at 200%. It was in pretty good shape. Cassie did a good job finding it.
And yes, I know. We’re both freaks.
In honor of the late George Carlin, I flat out refuse to censor the title of this post, especially after what I had to deal with this afternoon.
It’s summer camp week in the Madden household. I tell you, I had a time finding a summer camp for Cassie – not too many places take pre-K kids. Technically, my girl is old enough and way smart enough for any camp, but 99% of them insist that your child be finished with kindergarten before they’ll accept them. Don’t know why; maybe they’re afraid the uncivilized little pre-K’s will eat the post-K’s alive.
So anyway, I found a camp at Virginia Living Museum and I signed Cassie up for it, completely forgetting that Cassie’s pre-school graduation was the same week, so I had to go back and cancel that. I lost ten dollars on that, but fortunately the Norfolk Botanical Gardens also has a summer camp that costs ten dollars less than VLM and they had dates available at a time when our calendar was clear, so I signed Cassie up for that and now she’s happily attending summer camp.
Unfortunately, Sam and I are attending with her. Cassie’s camp lasts from 9 AM to noon, and Norfolk Botanical Gardens is just far enough away that I can’t really justify dropping Cassie off and then going home, especially given how bad the traffic can be in that area. It has taken us anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to get to camp, and if I were to drop Cassie off and go home, chances are really good that I’d have to turn around as soon as I got back just so I could pick her up again.
Now I know I could just leave Cassie at camp and go somewhere else in Norfolk, but really, my only options are to go shopping at the local stores because three hours isn’t that much time for sight-seeing, and I don’t want to go shopping because I’m already losing enough money as it is on gas and camp fees on this venture. Sooooo, everyday this week we arrive around 9 AM at the garden, I drop Cassie off with her class, and then I grab Sam and the stroller and I take off into the garden for a three-hour tour, a three-hour tour…
Huh? Where was I? Oh year, three hours in the Norfolk Botanical Garden. It’s pretty much all outside, so you know what that means – no air conditioning. The temperatures have been in the nineties all week, and I’m thinking that between the heat and the exercise I get from lugging around Sam, her stroller and her snacks, I just might be another two pounds lighter come Friday. I know because this is just like Disney World all over again – heat + lots of walking + lugging around kids = negative weight gain. If I could patent this weight loss plan, I’d make a fortune. Oh wait, everybody already knows about the wonders of exercise, don’t they?
So we’re in the garden all day, hiking and sweating and practicing karate (which seems to only slightly scare the other visitors) because I have a review coming up tonight. Then around 11:45 I meet Cassie in the children’s garden and we walk back to the car and head home. Now I know that after three hours in that kind of heat, doing that much walking, I am exhausted. And Sam and Cassie should be too. Should be. Cassie has been nodding off at the drop of a hat all through the day, so no problems there, but Sam?
Sam. I’m gonna kill that kid.
I put her down in her crib shortly after we got back today. I know she’s tired. But did she go to sleep? No, she spent an hour or so singing in her crib. And doing other things.
Other things like pulling off her diaper and smearing herself, the crib, and all her toys with shit.
I discovered this activity when I passed by her room on the way to get myself a soda. The odor was overpowering, wafting out from under the door to permeate the hallway. I had to put Sam in the tub and scrub her from head to toe, then take all her bedding and crib toys and throw them in the washer. The room still smells like poop, which makes me wonder if I’ve missed a spot, but I searched and couldn’t find anything. My luck, I’ll step in it later tonight when I put Sam down for bed.
We have one more day of camp left, and then I’m praying that we go back to a quiet summer schedule – no more travel, no more unexpected trips, no more hours spent walking around in the heat just waiting to die. I want to stay home and work. Lord knows, I’ve got more to do than hours to do it in.
Better get crackin’, I guess.
I’m all off schedule today. I’m supposed to get up at the ungodly hour of 5:45 AM so I can work on the podcast and get other odds and ends done, but I stayed up late to work on Lydia’s obituary/eulogy and then Cassie came running into the bedroom around 2 AM and when I woke up I realized, “Hey! It’s my anniversary! Let’s sleep late and snuggle with the husband.” And you just know where that led…
So I’ve been running late all day, but I’m not too upset about it. I had quality time with my husband (and yes, I’m going to stick with that euphemism — if you want something more explicit, see my erotica website you pervert!); I managed to make it to the Y and got in 14 laps in the pool before the kiddies’ swim classes chased me out; I packed a picnic lunch and got the girls out to a play date; and I got to have a real conversation with another adult about kids, husbands, and my current allergic reaction to my kids’ hypoallergenic sunscreen lotion. Yergh.
I have no great plans for today beyond doing some writing before I quit work for the day. My romantic plans were taken care of this morning during ‘quality time’ and my present to Michael won’t show up yet for another couple of days. He’s getting the Legos Indiana Jones game. Cassie already told him what he was getting when we gave him his birthday present earlier last week. Then she told me what I was getting from Michael today – a big brown box. That’s Michael’s idea of a joke. He learned from my mistake and so all Cassie’s gotten to see of my present it the box it came in. Nyah!
I will go to karate class tonight, even though I don’t feel like it, because I missed class on Tuesday. That was the day I had that allergic reaction to the sunscreen. I broke out in these really horrible, itchy red welts and decided that if I didn’t take some Benadryl, I’d probably scratch myself to death. I had this screwy idea that if I took the Benadryl early enough, I’d get past the sleep inducing effect of the drug in time to go to karate class. No such luck. I was out like a light by 6:30 PM that night and didn’t wake up until around 5:30 AM the next morning. And I was STILL TIRED! And itchy.
So nothing big going on here. Maybe something big on Saturday. Michael has tickets to see Billy Joel in concert. He’s taking me, of course. If not, you’ll read his obituary on Sunday.
Now I’m off to work. I have to churn out 500 words of BDSM chick lit before I can say I’m done for the day. What a goal!
Lydia did not last the night after my last post. Sometime around midnight, she got up and tottered about a foot or so to lay outside her kitty tent which I had brought up for her, and then maybe an hour later she crawled inside it. I got up with her the first time and brought her a wet washcloth, trying to squeeze a few drops of water into her mouth. The second time I think I heard her, but by then I was too caught up in a nightmare that I can’t remember now. I vaguely recall hearing her get sick again. That was probably the last thing she did before she died.
When I woke up at 5:30 the next morning, Lydia was long gone. I let her lay where she was and went about my usual morning routine, crying the whole time. In fact, that pretty much describes this whole past week. I keep going on, doing what I would normally be doing, and then something catches me – I find her collar, I clean out the kids’ rooms and find someplace where she got sick ages ago and puked up a mess of dry food, I go looking for photos for this blog entry – and then I cry for a bit but I keep going. I can’t stop. I’m the mom and I’ve got two kids and a house to take care of. If a person had died, a human family member, I would have been expected to take time off and nobody would have questioned that, but for a beloved pet? I cry when I have the time.
When Michael woke up, I had him help me get Lydia out of her tent and into a box. She had stiffened up and wouldn’t fit into her cat carrier. I was relieved that I hadn’t had to make that final trip to the vet after all. She did go to the vet that morning, but to be cremated, not put to sleep, and I feel slightly better knowing that she died at home in some comfort with her people.
Cassie woke up next and I told her that Lydia was gone. Cass is finally old enough to cry over these things. She’ll miss Lydia. She still remembers Fritti, but Sam will probably not remember either cat. After Michael left with Cassie for preschool, I gathered up Sam. Lydia was already in the back of the car, and we drove to the vet for the final arrangements. Again, I spent the rest of the day doing my usual routine – laundry, cleaning the kitchen, heading out for a run. I managed to lock myself and Sam out of the house and had to call Michael to let us in. A sign of how upset and disoriented I was over Lydia, I guess.
You know, I never planned to have three cats. When I graduated from college, I spent a short time at home with my folks while attending OBC at Ft. Eustis. Bonnie, my mother’s Himalayan, was pregnant then and Mom promised me one of the kittens. That turned out to be Beetlejuice. When I moved back to Blacksburg and got my own apartment, I decided to get a second cat to keep BJ company while I was away during the day. I had intended to get a grey/black female kitten and name her Lydia. I was hooked on the cartoon “Beetlejuice” back then (derived from the movie of the same name) and thought it would be cute to have a Beetlejuice and Lydia running around in the apartment. However, this orange tabby charmer won my heart and I ended up coming home with Fritti.
Two cats was going to be the limit for me. My then-fiancé Michael was mildly allergic to cats. His sinuses could handle two cats, but three would be too much, so I set aside my ideas of a Lydia cat and contented myself with the two I already had. Then a friend of mine, JJ, approached me one evening and asked if I could take in a young female black and tan tabby. JJ had adopted the cat shortly after one of her own had died, but it wasn’t working out. The cat was being bullied by her other cat, and besides looked too much like the cat who had died. She needed a good home and JJ had heard I was in the market. Michael had this firm, serious “No way” look on his face, but it didn’t stand a chance against my hopeful happy face. This was my Lydia cat, I knew it. And so JJ gave me this skinny, curious black and brown tabby cat and that was that. Three was definitely the limit, Michael told me and I never argued with him.
Of the three cats, Lydia was the shyest. I think being bullied by JJ’s cat in those early days left a mark on her. She was always on the losing end of a scuffle with Fritti, who chased her from one end of the house to the other. Fortunately, she was very spry and could leap to any height to get away from him. I have fond memories of Lydia leaping to the top of the china cabinet in our dining room and roosting there, looking very much like Snoopy when he played vulture to Charlie Brown. Fritti and BJ could never get up there, but Lydia spent a lot of time in that spot. She had a tendency to vomit up her food, and quite frequently I’d find piles of dried kitty vomit up there, a gift from Lydia.
That was just the start of Lydia’s acrobatics. When we lived in our condo, she liked to walk along the top of the sliding shower door, a feline tight rope walker who kept me wondering if she would fall into the shower with me and then claw me to shreds to get out (water was pure evil to Lydia). She loved doing that so much that when we moved to our house, which had no sliding shower door, she became extremely distraught and spent over a week walking around the house crying. She got over it though and learned to balance on other narrow ledges. She also discovered the joys of a walk-in closet with top shelves. On more than I few occasions, I’d go into the closet to get dressed and see Lydia take a flying leap overhead from one side of the closet to the other. It was quite a sight, sort of like Super Kitty zooming through the air.
Of course, being a small cat she also liked to hide in small places. I frequently found her tucked away in closets and boxes, content to be boxed in by sheets and blankets and towels. She got locked into the linen closet on more than a few occasions and I would spend half an hour trying to figure out where in the world all that meowing was coming from. Then one day we discovered a leak in the jets to the tub in the master bath. One of the pipes had come undone and was letting water soak through to the floor beneath, which also just happened to be the ceiling for the foyer on the first floor. Michael opened up the panel to the air jet motor to let the floor/ceiling dry out and shut the bathroom to keep the cats out. But then sometime in the night, he used the bathroom and forgot to close the door. Lydia snuck into our master bathroom and found the open panel, which led to a small dark place. Naturally, she couldn’t resist exploring that.
I woke up late the next morning to the sound of meowing, and spent the next hour trying to figure out where Lydia was. When the sound seemed to be coming from the vents, I realized what must have happened. Lydia had crawled behind the tub and gotten trapped in the walls. But I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where she was. Michael and I spent another half hour looking around when I finally spotted one tiny kitty eye glaring at me from the slot of the downstairs bathroom sliding door. We had to take a sledge hammer to the wall to get her out, poor thing.
Other fond memories of Lydia… she had a favorite toy, a boot lace tied to a small plastic Halloween pumpkin. This was something I put together back when I lived in the apartment in Blacksburg. The idea was that I would drag the pumpkin around and the cats would chase it, but nobody liked that idea so I held onto the pumpkin and they chased the bootlace end instead. Lydia was especially fond of this game and would drag that pumpkin to me constantly, meowing around the bootlace in her mouth. Problem was, she wanted me to wiggle the string, but she never wanted to pounce on it, just watch it. Michael could get her to run in circles with it, but me? She just liked to watch me wiggle it in front of her. There were times when I had to hide that damn boot lace just so I could get stuff done. We put it away on a shelf when Cassie started walking. I was afraid she’d strangle herself on it. I do recall pulling it down a few times to play with Lydia, even as recently as a month ago. I’m glad I did that.
Lydia was the most patient of the three cats. Back when we lived in the condo, we would watch the X-Files on Friday nights. Michael and I loved the X-Files, and whenever the show came on, I’d hold Lydia up beneath her front legs and make her do the ‘X-Files dance,’ which mainly consisted of me flopping her around a bit on her hind legs. She was very, very patient about that, let me tell you.
Lydia was also the cuddliest of the three cats. She was the one who always crawled into my lap whenever I cried. I could hold her and rock her like a baby, which I did a lot when I was going through the infertility treatments. She liked to curl up on my bed beside me, and when I was pregnant with Cassie, her weight alone was enough to pin me in the bed. My back was so bad during that last trimester, I couldn’t move a nine-pound cat to get out of the bed! We had to lock her and the others out of the bedroom after Cassie was born. They found other places to sleep, and Lydia never really did come back to my bed after that, even after we quit shutting the door. In the last few months, I don’t think she could have gotten into the bed. She was having problems with her back legs and my spry little kitten couldn’t get around so well any more.
Lydia drooled. A lot. Any time she got excited, she’d drool, which made petting her a messy ordeal. I’d scratch behind her ears and she’d just get to purring and then suddenly we’d have a flooding problem on our hands. I also discovered that she’d meow if I blew at her. Just puff up my cheeks and blow, real quick. I don’t know why she did that, but she did. Crazy cat.
I went looking for photos of Lydia yesterday, something to add to this entry. I found a series of pics that a friend, Mark, had taken one Halloween night of all three cats waiting at the window for Trick-or-Treaters. I’m sure I have other photos of Lydia and Frittie and BJ, but I remember this night so clearly, even though it must have been ten years ago. I went out for a run through the neighborhood that evening and came back just as the kids were ringing our doorbell. It was cool, not too cold, and we left the window up so the cats could see all the kids in their costumes. They were fascinated, and the kids were equally fascinated with them. I look at these pictures now and think, my god, how young my cats look! And look at how young I was!
But now Lydia and Fritti are gone. I picked up Lydia’s ashes today from the vet. I cried when the vet assistant handed them to me. I’m crying now. I can’t help it. My darling cat has been replaced by an acrylic box with a label on it. I can’t hug her anymore or scratch her behind the ears and watch her drool. She won’t be sitting at the fridge tomorrow morning when I get up, waiting for her morning treats. She’s gone, and my life with all its tasks and demands keeps driving me onward with no time to stop.
I miss my cat.
