Truth in Advertising

I am so excited about the new Mr. Clean Magic Eraser! The toddler got hold of an unauthorized crayon during naptime the other day. I went in after her nap to see blue crayon everywhere. She'd done a great job, in fact, of permanently altering the color of the window frame as high up as she could reach.

I've been trying since then to get the crayon up, with limited success. If I scrub hard enough I can get about 90% of it off, but there was that last little shadow of color that just wouldn't come up. So, I bought a Magic Eraser while I was out getting the last of my Thanksgiving menu last night.

Wow, oh wow, oh wow! I love this thing! I can't believe how effective, and easy to use, it is. It took that crayon off like it had never been there, with hardly any effort on my part. I got the whole wall, and the window frame cleaned in just minutes. Then I decided to try it out in the hall on this green streak from a permanent marker. That mark has been there for years. My stepson made it when he was tiny. Nothing I have ever tried has made the slightest impression. Now it's 95% gone. There's just a little bit of green here and there and I think if I go at it again with the Magic Eraser I'll get rid of the last of it.

For once, I tried a new cleaning product and it really was as good as advertised. Wahoo!

Fun with laundry

Running behind on your laundry? Did you just realize your husband (who is running late) has no clean shirts? Here's a helpful hint! Grab a shirt from the hamper, making sure it's dry and tolerably clean (no food spatters, baby vomit, etc.). Spray the shirt first with Febreze, then Downy Wrinkle Releaser. Assure your husband it has been washed and send him off to work, happily ignorant.

Yes, I am indeed Martha Stewart's evil twin. No, I have no comment on that whole Betty Crocker incident.

I've been procrastinating doing something all week. Tomorrow is my last day to get it done. So, this morning I was thinking about how I had to get it done, and, feeling defensive, started justifying the delay to myself.

"After all," I thought, "how can I get anything done with a new baby and an active toddler? How can anyone expect me to get anything done beyond simple survival? I'm not sleeping, I'm spending huge amounts of time sitting on the couch and nursing the little one, half the time I have both of them crying at the same time, and when they're not they're about to start crying!"

But then I stopped myself. I had to admit, that I probably would have procrastinated this even before I had children. Or would I? I had to stop and think about it. What was I like before I had children? Had I already forgotten?

It's unnerving to realize that I don't recall what I was like exactly, before becoming a mother. I was childless for 34 years. How could I forget so quickly what I would have done then? How could I lose that part of myself?

It only took a little bit of thought to confirm to myself that yes, I was as much, if not more, of a procrastinator back then as I am now (I just have a nice convenient excuse now,) but it left me feeling unsettled. It's the first time since my oldest was born that I've felt like I'm losing myself. I'm not, not really. I've just moved on to a different stage of my life, a very good stage. I've no more lost that old me than a butterfly has lost the caterpillar it used to be, no more than I've lost any other part of me. And yet, outgrowing my childhood self hasn't disturbed me the way this has. I'll have to think about this. I guess it's harder adjusting to dramatic adulthood changes than childhood and adolescent changes.

Flylady, save me! I managed to get a whole 90 minutes of sleep last night before the baby woke up again, this time for good. I was up at 3:30 with the baby, my husband got up at 5 a.m., the toddler got up at 5:30. The husbandleft for work an hour early, doubtless to get away from the children, who were both wailing and sobbing.

(Why is it my toddler cannot seem to wake up in a good mood? It doesn't matter if she wakes on her own, or if we wake her up, a good 90% of the time she emerges from her room sobbing and winds up on the floor of the living room, curled up into a fetal position, crying as if her heart were breaking. It's enough to make me want to run away.)

I finally persuaded the baby to nurse, and the toddler to watch Caillou. We settled down into relative peace and quiet, quiet enough at least to let Mommy fall asleep. Yep, there I was, sitting on the couch, baby in my arms, trying hard to stay awake, and I fell asleep anyway. Luckily I had pillows and a Boppy propping her up and keeping her from falling out of my arms.

I woke up an hour later. The baby was fast asleep, very happy to be using Mommy's chest as a pillow. The toddler, on the other hand, had taken advantage of the fact that Mommy was completely out of it to destroy the living room. There are papers everywhere, clothes from both the hamper and her dresser strewn about like a second carpet, and the diapers (both sizes) are out of their bags and filling in the holes in the clothes.

Can I go bang my head against a wall for awhile? If I go back to sleep, will this all go away? I need a fairy godmother!

Addendum: While picking up the clothing, I found most of the contents of the silverware drawer. She's figured out how to get around the childproofing!

Has it really been a whole week since I wrote in this? Wow. It only seemed like a few days. Busy, busy doing the mommy routine. The baby all of a sudden decided she's not going to sleep at night anymore, so I've been staying up until 4 and 5 a.m. most nights.

I've been taking advantage of the opportunity to catch up on late night TV. I haven't seen Highlander in years. I'd forgotten just how much I'd enjoyed that show, especially Adrian Paul. Talk about masculine !

Years ago I knew this guy, aptly named Gabriel, who (cliched as it sounds) had the face of an angel and the body of a Greek god. He was beautiful. I'm not talking simple attractiveness or sexiness, but truly breath-takingly beautiful. Put them side by side and Gabriel would make Adrian Paul look ugly. There was just something in the way he was put together, something in his bone structure, coloring and musculature that went beyond anything I'd ever seen before, into flawless beauty.

The great thing about Gabriel was that he had no idea at all that he was so gorgeous. Every woman I knew was dying to get his attention, and he was too shy to look up and notice. You see, all through his childhood and adolescence he'd been fat. A couple of years after moving away from his home town, though, he had this roommate who was really into weightlifting and got Gabriel started on it. It changed his body so much that by the time he moved back to his home town, no-one who'd known him in high school recognized him.

Out of all the men I've known who were seriously attractive, Gabriel is the only one who wasn't also seriously arrogant. I've often wondered who finally got his attention. I certainly wouldn't have minded having the opportunity to spend some time staring into those beautiful eyes!

My husband came home tonight with a giant Elmo for our toddler. $50. It's sitting in our closet right now, waiting for Christmas.

How sweet, how loving, how daddyish, right? Yeah, except for one thing. When the baby was a week old, my husband's boss called him in and told him that his job is going away after Christmas. They just don't need him anymore, so have a nice life, Mark, and see you around sometime.

And with this facing us he goes and gets a toy like that? I was planning on getting a small $15 version of the doll. I'm having a hard time biting my tongue over this one.

We just have different attitudes toward money. I'm a saver, who grew up poor; he's a spender who grew up, not wealthy, but with more money than my parents ever dreamed of having. As soon as he told me about the layoff I wanted to discuss ways to cut our spending. He wanted to wait until the end of the month before discussing it, which means he's trying to put it off indefinately.

The fact that I'm a sahm, without a job for the first time in my life, isn't helping me feel any better. We both agree on my being home. I truly believe there simply isn't anything more important that I could be doing right now, and he's super committed to making it work. He's put up with some miserable working conditions to make it happen, in fact. But I worry, and he doesn't, and right now I just want to wring his neck.

Don't get me wrong. He's great, and I'd marry him again in a heartbeat if not faster. This situation, however, is exactly the type of thing to highlight the differences in our spending philosophies. Translated into real life, things are tense in our house right now.

Can a saver and spender find happiness together in a tight economy? Stay tuned to find out.

So my toddler is in her room right now, screaming, "Help! Help, Mommy. Help, Daddy!" It doesn't mean anything besides the fact that she's just been laid down for her nap and doesn't want to stay in there. It's a pro forma thing, done just after climbing out of bed and before sitting down to play for an hour before falling asleep.

She's like me. I have never been able to fall asleep right away. I can remember when I was a kid, lying in bed at night for what seemed like hours, thinking about this and that, my mind turning over ideas with the consistency of a ticking clock. Sometimes I'd get myself so worked up about something that I wouldn't be able to fall asleep at all, but usually it helped to entertain me while I waited for my body to calm down enough to drop off.

So I let my daughter have her time. She'll crawl into bed and fall asleep when she's ready, an hour after I put her down (regardless of what time she goes down it always takes an hour for her to fall asleep.) She's busy and happy, Mommy gets an extra hour to herself, and if the baby stays asleep we're all going to get the chance to nap this afternoon. Hooray!

And to think of all those times I fought with my mother over taking naps ... Wow, I've gotten old!

It's 8 o'clock at night, and I'm the only person up in the house right now. The toddler and the newborn are (thankfully) sacked out, in the deep, abandoned sleep that only the very young can accomplish. My husband is asleep on the couch, looking uncomfortable; he had a myelogram today to check out some back problems he's been having and is still under the influence of the pain killer they gave him afterward for the headache.

And I'm bored, because all my friends are doing Nano this month, and I don't really have time for it since I'm nursing and therefore spending 90% of my waking hours on the couch clutching a baby and trying not to fall asleep. I was reading a friend's blog and was seized with the desire to do at least some writing, so here I am, wondering if I can really do this, or if it will just peter out after two or three entries.

What the heck. It doesn't hurt anything to try, does it?