Scarlett says

I spent the better — or rather, the worse — part of my day dealing with a Visa dispute over a shoddy dresser purchased online through The Evil Entity Cymax. Caveat, all you emptors out there.

Megan had a colossally bad day at school that it took me the better part of an hour to talk her down from after pickup. And half an hour with her teacher, who called this evening.

I managed to soundly whack Kira in the face while spinning around to catch her before she fell off the kitchen stepladder.

The girls screeched and fought in the tub.

They fought and screeched out of the tub.

Megan remembered, five minutes AFTER our scheduled upstairs departure, that she had not one but two homework sheets to complete.

Sean had a meeting and didn’t come home.

Kira had an accident while I was soloing the bedtime routine.

And I haven’t had a workout since Sunday.

Tomorrow, I hear, will be a better day. Or at least another one.

holy bookends, Batman!

We are a bookish family. I am a Borrower; my husband is a Buyer. And we do a sizeable amount of both for the girls. Steven Levitt assures us, via Freakonomics, that our girls are likely to Perform Well on Tests (the be-all of my dreams for them, ohtobesure) due to the mere fact that we have so Freaking many books in our home, supposedly regardless of whether we read to them or not. Though most assuredly we do; I will attest that my tally on Blueberries For Sal alone is around 600, and rising.

Levitt’s book, by the way, is one of only a handful, relatively speaking, that I personally own, and reading it made me think I should have studied economics in depth somewhere along my educational path, because apart from the money aspect I think it’s absolutely fascinating stuff. (That’s not quite as antithetical as saying you’re good with Christian theology other than the dying-on-the-cross-for-my-sins part, right?)

Veering safely off religion and back to books: This morning I went on something of a Book Rampage and declared life would not begin again until every last book with a picture in it, even a tiny one at the chapter headings, was put away, stored somewhere OTHER than a bed or a chair or a table or a counter or any floor or anywhere at all in a bathroom.

I actually took photos of the tidyrrific results of the rampage but realized that no fewer than 6 allowable repositories for books = 6 photos of books in baskets and bookcases = total snore for you. However, I am grateful for photographic evidence that this state once existed, just so I can look at the pictures late at night and get all hot and bothered.

So here’s my question, because I’m coming slowly to terms with the reality that there will never be fewer than several hundred kids books in our house, and the number is likely, given BigSis’s utter fixation at a fairly tender age on the written word, to rise before it ever falls. And I don’t, not really, want to make them inaccessible in any way. But having them everywhere, EVERYWHERE, is making me just a teeny. tiny. bit. INSANE. Does anyone have a solution to this? I find myself torn between wanting order and wanting untrammeled literary freedom, damn the chaos.

Moms, dads, anyone? How do you corral the books? And let me say here that putting one book back before you get another out is a lovely, not to mention entirely sensible, notion, and I’m working toward that. But we’re pretty far, perhaps galactically so, from getting there because there is daily a LOT of looking and reading going on around here, much of it unmonitored.

So send some wisdom on over. And while we’re at it, how do you do the shelving/storage aspect? One location? Multiple locations? Do you weed arbitrarily? Shuffle?

wanna bet?

Being married to the most prudent man in the world has clear benefits. It means, for instance, that there are many things I never have to worry about. He will seldom be late. He will always call. We will never arrive at an event or a departure gate sans tickets, or at a campsite without everything needed to survive a major weather episode. He will never rack up speeding tickets (or even parking tickets), thereby undermining our insurability or our disposable income.

The list is long.

It also means that he will never, ever, make or take a bet involving facts that do not reach a level of certainty dictated by his scientifically trained brain. And at some point in my marriage I will learn this lesson.

I clearly haven’t yet, because over the course of the last seven years there have been a number of wagers between us and I have been on the losing end of Every. Single. One. Most recently this evening. (Over eggplant, I’m sorry to have to say, though I won’t go so far as to bore you with the pathetic details of my latest humiliation.)

I am not an incautious person. But I have been known to be quite entirely convinced in my own mind of the Truth of this or that fact. Some of these facts, history has shown, occasionally fail under scrutiny.

And given the years of defeat, now there’s an overriding pressure (what, me, competitive?) to actually WIN a bet with him, so I continue to throw caution and experience to the far west wind and egg him on to Lay it down, Mister. This time – THIS time – I’m getting even.

This has led to such sad spectacles as the now-infamous Paprika Bet. (Okay, do YOU know what paprika is made of? Yeah? Wanna bet?) Well now. I didn’t know what paprika was, but I was willing to take him on, because he said he thought maybe (and herein lies one of my problems, because he never says he KNOWS or he’s SURE, words I will toss around like rice at a wedding), maybe it was made of ground up sweet red peppers.

And that, my friend, that is Pure Foolishness. Come on. It’s got to be something more exotic than THAT. Right? RIGHT? I should have known when he granted me the universe of all other options as my side of the wager, but no, I just thought that made it a Solid Bet.

It is a fact that paprika is comprised of… ground up sweet red peppers. And it is a fact that my husband spent several years in Sweden, and while he freely admits he never mastered more than the basic nuances of all the vowels, apparently he did learn that the Swedish word for pepper, as in the vegetable, the sweet kind, is, yes, “paprika.”

The only thing that has saved me over the years is that his basic wiring prohibits him from taking extreme advantage of me when I get my overly cocky Bring-It-On face on. He is morally incapable of pressing what he recognizes to be an unfair advantage.

Which means that tonight he’s not getting an entire night of wild abandoned sex with 22-year-old twins, but merely a thirty-minute massage from Le Wife.

Park Daze

I took Little Bit to the park today. Big Sis is at day camp all week, and I’d thought I’d do some of the things with Little Bit that I really sort of never do, like go somewhere, just us, just for fun. So we were off to the park while I mindfully ignored the piles of laundry, incipient mildew on shower curtains, overflowing inboxes, and other pending tasks. Because I wanted to Be There with her, fully engaged, on this day, the second of her summer of Being Two, with her curls riotously marking the humidity and her joy holding tight on my heart.

When we strolled up, there were 5 other kids at the park. I recognized three of them, and their mother, from our little preschool; the other two were in the care of a nanny and wearing the smocked outfits I associate with junior-league mothers, not that I think there’s anything remotely wrong with either smocking or the junior league, although I do have a teeny curiosity about sending your child to a park, as in to play outdoors, wearing an outfit that costs more than some third-world families live on for a year. But I digress.

Soon there were 7 kids at the park, plus my rather adorable 1. And soon kid #6 and kid #7 floated into my range. “She’s SO CUTE,” the girl (age 10 or so) announced. I smiled at her, a pretty brown-haired thing, vivacious. And then it started to get weird. The adults that #6 and #7 had arrived with, standing by the side of the park, began necking. The girl seemed quite uninterested in, if not outright oblivious to, both them and this activity. And she began to interact with me as if I were, oh, her mother. Or perhaps a favorite aunt. Her brother had wandered over to the courts and was watching a man return shots from an automatic tennis machine. But she persisted, touching me, tugging on me, in my face, demanding that I come over to see something, wanting to pick up Little Bit and, after twenty minutes or so of this, telling me that she lived “right over there” – gesturing vaguely past the adults, now seated and smoking. I looked, searching for anything remotely residential. “At the Ramada?” “Yeah. And we get to swim sometimes.” The male adult with whom she arrived saw her gesturing, saw me looking, gave me an odd half-salute. Idiotically, I smiled. He tossed his butt on the mulch a distance away, where I could see the smoke rising. And lifted a can of beer. I walked over to pick up the butt, and even at that distance the alcohol fumes from the pair of them clouded the air.

Oh, sweet brown-haired girl, you poor thing. I’m sorry, honey. I’m sorry I can’t take you home, be someone for you. I’m sorry for what your life is, and for what it’s likely going to be, fuckedup, pain. And I’m taking my own baby home now, because if I stay here, I think my heart will slowly shatter. This isn’t the outing I had in mind. I’m sorry.

katie, mellifluous

A recently rediscovered friend (one of those people for whom life has always been soundtracked) turned me on to Katie Melua, with a voice I couldn’t get out of my mind for days after first hearing it. Sample this and see how long it takes to stop hearing echoes of it in your head. Or this, which almost makes me want to be dating again just so I can play it during a breakup.

sweepings

I sweep my kitchen floor every single blessed day of my I’m-a-mommy-now life. Often twice. It never ceases to amaze me how much crud accumulates thereon, and for some time I’ve had the idea of archiving the contents of my daily dustpan. Andy Warhol had his Time Capsules; I’ll have this microspecimen of each day’s detritus.

Maybe it’s that I just want to have a record of the astonishing volume of STUFF that manages to find its way onto my floor. And thereby proof that my compulsion to sweep isn’t a compulsion at all, it’s just a reasonable response to the fact that if I didn’t wield my trusty Vileda daily, before long my entire family would be buried in crumbs and dust and dried up scrambled eggs and stickers off bananas.

I’m tempted by the notion of weekly pillboxes, you know, the ones with SuMTWThFSa compartments. They make some really big ones – for, one assumes, either the supplement-crazed or the heavily pharmaceutically dependent – that I’m thinking would work fine.

But then again the simplicity of Warhol’s system rather appeals: an open container to just huck the stuff in daily until it gets full; seal it up and be done. (Until it can be auctioned off for gazillions, if of course you’re Andy.)

I suppose there’s a teeny issue of assorted and unappealing decay processes. Perhaps a hermetic seal, like one of those infomercial food-saver thingies? I do think it should be a see-through container, to achieve an effect like one of those cute beach-in-a-pop-bottle things my friend has her son make every year when they go to coastal Maine, where you rotate it to see the shells and little pieces of fishing net and glass worn opaque and smooth appear out of the sand.