now fortified with impotent fury!risperdal

My heart clenches when I think about this weekend. The lad engineered it so I could fly up to Chicago on Friday for my mom’s birthday and take her out to Trio- I somehow managed to score Friday night reservations there after Achatz announced he was leaving. I’ll do the food entry later, it was a weekend of gustatory excess.

It’s pure and simple. I miss my mom, and she’s not getting any younger. After we (drunkenly) got home from Trio and were settling into pjs and flopping on the couches to digest like overstuffed boa constrictors, she noticed a bruised swelling on her hand, and showed me. Probably, a spider bit her and nailed right at a valve in a small vein, causing the spectacular result. But as she held her hands out to me, I realized with a start they are not the hands I remember as a child, they are not the hands that plucked me out of the pool, or shot chocolate spritz cookies out of the cookie press, or helped me pull radishes. They are browned from the sun from gardening, and thin as can be, the skin wrinkling like wadded up tissue paper, her always-prominent veins now snaking like pipe across the backs.

My mom will not be with me forever, and that makes me cry. It has taken us years to get to this point, but she is one of my best friends. Who else can I bitch about the poor casting decisions in the big screen adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (making her snarf her cappuccino at one point)? She got, immediately, why 2 days after going to one of the finest restaurants in the country I plaintively asked to go get good hot dogs for lunch. We shopped and we laughed and were utterly wicked together. She turned to me at one point and smiled, without a trace of facetiousness, and said, “I did good. You are a wonderful daughter.”

This weekend reminded me I will lose her. I don’t know how I will face that.

So Target, god bless em, has bins and bins of small tub and pool toys, including little boats. So we bought Sean a bunch. One day, Leather Pants Grrl and the Lad went off to Target and came home with a new one, grinning madly as they handed it to me. I gasped in shock.

I had been previously unaware that UNESCO was operating a ‘Booby Hauler’ operation on such a large scale, bringing perky rounded mammaries to ‘Undeveloped’ countries, the better to bring them into prosperity and qualify for the League of Jiggy Nations. And yet clearly they must be, otherwise why would Target, in addition to their carefully modelled laker ore haulers, be selling these beauties?

I’m proud to know that, thanks to the insight and care of a major retailer, my child will grow up with a better understanding of both international shipping and commerce AND the efforts of the western world to bring perky blue cachongas to all.

_____________________

Oh all right. Something more enjoyable than idiot blatherings about industrial tit haulers.

We went to Powell Gardens the other weekend, and it was hotter than hell. Thus, I black and white-d this so you cannot see 1. the sheen of sweat 2. the berry red tone of my flesh. The skanktastic hairstyle, though, can’t be helped. It’s not perspiration, it’s product My gay hairstylin boyfriend Kyan says so.

Here we have my monkeylike child. He will stand on the edge of the drawer and grab things from the countertop. He has also learned to go under the table, wriggle onto the chairs, push the chair out while on the seat of it by bracing his feet against the table, pivot, and then climn onto the table. I’m gonna be gray by next April.

But how can you be mad at a face like this?

In a word, busy. Sorry alphabytes, I both suck and blow. Right when work kicked up to the point where our ‘working document’ for the project broke the 40Mb barrier (you try emailing that fucker back and forth), where I was having at least 3 big conference calls a day, Sean learned to walk. And god help us, both of the Lad’s and my mothers’ curses of “I hope you have a child just like you!” have come true. Because, like me, Sean shows no sign whatsoever of ‘rampup’. Most kids do things that telegraph that they’re trying to master a skill. Not Sean. Happy cruising, he, only a few times, would take steps not holding onto something. He shunned the walker, never pushed furniture. Now that he’s walking, he’s shoving furniture all over the place, running pushing his toy bin. He’s also learned how to defeat one set of child locks, and will open up the drawer we leave unlocked for him, stand on the edge of it, and scrabble up the other drawer fronts to get to the kitchen counter.

He is adorable. He has a great personality. He’s going to drive me to drink (well, more than I already do). Our half time nanny goes back to school mid-August, so his start date for the daycare program has been moved up, and I am a bag of angst and salsa over this. On the one hand: YAY! on the other hand: WAH! I suppose having Aly here this summer is good because it’s like a forced step-down procedure for me. My big worry about the center is they are on a schedule, and the kids have one nap a day, but Sean takes two, and I don’t want to break him of that before he’s ready.

Read: I’m too lazy to train him to one nap. Okay, really, one of my guiding principles in parenting has been ass laziness (if you wish to consider it negatively) or complete confidence in my child’s knowledge of self (if you wish to be both positive and delusional). The Lad and I hold pretty tightly to not forcing him to do something before he’s ready, be it give up the third nap (we let him cling to that till he was almost a year old), a sippy cup (despite being told he should be off the bottle by 1 year old, he’s only now on the cup for most meals and snacks, and we’re all happier for having not pressed the issue), a spoon (which he’s not going to have mastered until college at this rate, but he uses a fork extremely well if you load it up and hand it to him. He’s got quite the flair as he stuffs it in his mouth, almost like Henry the VIII nipping a choice morsel off of knifetip.)

But I’m going through the typical ‘mom letting go’ thing, to the point where when the lad did the both wonderful and unthinkable- claimed vacation time so we could take a long weekend, dump the kid with his grandparents, and actually have a couple of days to ourselves- I completely lost my shit. Confronted with planning a vacation NOWNOWNOW coupled with the thought of fucking with Sean’s schedule and routine and handing him off to the inlaws to take to their house where GAH they have a pool and hot tub and unsecured toilets (wait, we still haven’t figured out the fucking toilet locks ourselves) and cabinets full of danger and three million ceramic and glass tschotkes and aie! iminent destruction and maiming! I totally melted down. We managed to plan the vacation in 4 hours, over IM, with a lot of misunderstanding and screaming at one another, and note to self: pick up the damn phone.

The fact is, time is moving forward. I can’t stop it. The Creative Director on the project also has a son named Sean, 19 months old, and two nights ago they moved him into a ‘big boy bed’, and I asked, stunned, how do you keep the kid sleeping through the night instead of getting up and playing with toys. (My boss’s interjection? ‘Duct tape’. Me: ‘Our Sean’s starting to climb out of the crib, but he’s too young for a toddler or twin bed. We’re thinking dog crate’. Ha ha, DCFS, just a little joke there! Already have the big boy bedding picked out! No really!) When I get stressed, I try to do and control everything, yet get strangely indecisive. Which annoys the crap out of everyone in my sphere. Right now, I am torn up about how to eventually redo Sean’s room. Robot bedding from Land of Nod, or the wizard and dragon bedding from Garnet Hill that I’ve loved for years? But then we have to paint over the murals I did, and wah! Though I could paint new murals (a thought which just occurred to me). Or do we save that redo for a few years hence, when he can appreciate it, and just get a cheap-ass toddler bed and keep everything the same, except for some shelving, and….gah.

I need a vacation. God bless my husband for forcing us to take one.