Challenges

I was not at my best this weekend.

We ended on a high note, which is great; Halloween was a total blast even if Riley refused to wear his costume. (Much to my surprise, no one asked him why he wasn't in costume or what his mismatched sweatsuit + Crocs was supposed to be.) But the less than 24 hours between Saturday afternoon and around 9 a.m. on Sunday were a study in Poor Parenting Decisions.

We went to a super birthday party on Saturday afternoon at an indoor gym. Maddie and Riley both really enjoyed it, Riley especially. When it came time to leave, Riley threw a classic tantrum that involved yelling at me, screaming, kicking and hitting me, and generally making a spectacle of himself. It's never fun for that to go down in public, but it just continued when we got to the car. He spent most of the ride home yelling at me that he didn't love me. He's been doing this a lot lately, telling me he doesn't love me. I'm sure he's testing me or acting out of some kind of fear that it perhaps *I* don't love *him*; most of the time when he tells me he doesn't love me, I get a fiendish delight in telling him that even if he doesn't love me, I still love him and always will and nothing he can say will make me stop. This is true, and it's what I told him on Saturday, but the truth is that even if I know he's testing something and pushing something, it still hurts to hear those words come out of his mouth. Hearing it nonstop for 15 minutes pushed me right over the edge and I ended up yelling at him and then marching both him and Maddie up to the house where we all cried and blustered around for a good long while. Lame. Oh, and I forgot the most ridiculous part of it all when, spent and annoyed, I took a stand about fruit leather consumption. Because THERE'S SOMETHING THAT MATTERS IN THE LONG RUN. So stupid.

This morning, Maddie and I got into a serious power struggle over her pierced ears. She wants to let them close up (she just got them pierced about three months ago) and I was, for reasons that are not clear to me, totally angry and upset about this and basically ended up holding her down to try to get a pair of earrings in her ears. Which didn't work because one ear appears to be infected and so guess what? IT TOTALLY HURT HER when I tried to jab an earring through there. Gar. Felt like a total Worst Mom of the Year/General Bitch combo when I figured out what was going on. Not to mention that her ears are just that: her ears. If she actually doesn't want them pierced right now, it's just not a big deal. The funny part is that now she has one earring in (that she refuses to take out) and one earring-less ear that she won't let me near.

I told my dad after all of this was said and done that I'm not sure why it seems to be taking me numerous painful lessons to truly understand that power struggles don't work. They are completely ineffective, and I need to choose not to engage. It's a waste of everyone's time and it reinforces negative behavior and teaches bad choices for one and all. It's just bad, bad, bad, bad news. Ugh. Maybe this was enough to drive it home.

There were plenty of great things about the weekend: having my dad in town, getting the au pair's room all set up, spending time with friends, watching football, the whole Halloween gig. But the bad stuff was really bad. My reactions were so out of proportion to the situation. I've tried to watch for patterns in my irrational reactions, and so far I've noticed that they are for sure worse (a) first thing in the morning (I really do need coffee to be functional), (b) when I'm under time pressure (trying to get out the door, trying to get to bed on time, etc.), or (c) when I'm multitasking to the nth degree and Maddie or Riley just won't let up with the questions and demands. Knowing this helps . . . I guess. Mostly it makes me aware enough to warn the kids that my fuse is short, but the awareness seems to do little to push me towards more control.

Life has been quite unstable for us for the past couple of months: the sudden school change, the loss of one nanny, the search for a temporary replacement, the loss of the replacement, the application to the au pair program, the insanity at work. Our au pair arrives on Thursday. While I know that getting her settled in will be yet another transition for us, I'm hopeful that this transition will bring stability. We could use some of that right now.

Happy Halloween. Maddie was a fairy; Riley as a "regular person" in possession of a dino costume. I'm going with two simple rules about the candy haul this year: 1. No candy until after breakfast, and 2. candy can only be eaten at the dining room table. But once the kids have had their breakfast, they can eat to their hearts' content without asking permission. I tried policing the candy scene last year and talk about power struggles. That particular instance is Lesson Learned. I wish I was always that quick of a learner.

Forward Motion

Work continues to consume me. Projects, personnel, the fall break that's no break at all when you're on staff at a college . . . some of it is good, some of it is just difficult. I feel like I'm learning a lot and being challenged in some meaningful ways, so I'm trying to focus on those positives.

I've got a pot of butternut squash soup on the stove and an applesauce cake cooling on the counter. There's sage in the soup; the smell reminds me of my grad school boyfriend, who always had dried sage from the California desert on the dashboard of his car. The weather has turned unapologetically cool, breezy, and damp. I turned on the heat two nights ago when I started to shiver uncontrollably after a middle-of-the-night visit to the bathroom. It's pitch black when we get up in the morning and dark not long after I get home from work. All indications are that fall is here.

Our au pair arrives next week. She'll actually be in the States on Monday, but will spend three days in training with the agency who is helping with her visa and all the logistics. She's here late next Thursday night, and then a whole new phase in our lives begins. We're muddling through this transitional period with lots of help from friends and friends of friends and our own can-do attitudes. I'm grateful every day to have kids who embrace change and who enjoy new people.

We spent the weekend on the Oregon coast. It was rainy and windy. "Mama, my hair is being CRAZY!" declared a windswept Maddie on Sunday morning. We ate dinner at a delicious, delightful restaurant where the baby-faced executive chef indulged Maddie and Riley's queries as they observed his work in the open kitchen. There was pool time, lots of snacking, a bit of beach time, and even a nap. I needed that getaway.

I got Maddie and Riley's first school pictures today. They are unbearably adorable. I'm stunned by how the school photographers captured the essence of each of them: Maddie's closed-mouth smile, her sweet but sophisticated gaze; Riley's open grin and easy charm. They are so grown up!

A close friend's child sustained a serious, if not life-threatening, injury recently. Another friend has been diagnosed with cancer. Make that two other friends. My computer is DOA and my bank account has seen better days, small woes in comparison to the health and welfare of loved ones, but harsh reminders of the day-to-day that is life. It all moves forward in ways positive and negative. I feel like an observer sometimes of all of this activity, undeserving of the good and paralyzed by the bad. I can barely pick Maddie up anymore for a snuggle; when I tell her how big she's getting as I hold her, briefly, she says, "But not so big for this." For now, not so big for this. But that bittersweet day is coming as part of all these steps ahead.

The soup needs pureeing, the cake needs frosting. In a few too-short hours, another day will begin in darkness, the forward motion unrelenting, the good and bad coexisting, too much left unfinished but the necessities accounted for.

Crazeeeeeeeee

I'm here. I'm consumed by work at my job and work at home. Everything is insane at my 9–5; I'm revising/reworking/rewriting a big piece, dealing with some really ugly personnel issues between two people who report to me, and trying to keep pace with the usual demands and tasks. Home is also nonstop as we prepare for our au pair to arrive. We've had unusually busy social times, too, with visits from my brother-in-law and my dad and lots of fun family and friend events. Things feels especially relentless right now, a balance of welcome business and undue stress. As the saying goes: that's life.

In social news, it seems perhaps stating the obvious to say that a surefire way to put an end to a relationship is to blog about it. Since my last post about dating, things have fizzled out between me and the guy I was seeing. It's OK; it wasn't serious and nothing dramatic happened. We both just got too busy to find time to see each other. If we really wanted it to work, we'd find time. I find that I'm too overwhelmed to really miss him, and I think that says it all. It was nice, but it was not IT, and that's totally fine.

I'm consumed lately by thoughts of little Maddie and Riley, baby Maddie and Riley, toddler Maddie and Riley. Many of my friends have second babies who range in age from infant to two-ish, and I'm stunned at every turn by how little I remember of those first couple of years of Maddie and Riley's life. I'm awed by the sweetness and utter dependence of these tiny people, astounded that I can't recall with any real clarity that time in our lives. It's not surprising, of course. We had more going on in our lives during that time than the average middle-class American family, and the fog of sleeplessness of that period robs all parents of sharp focus around those years. In most instances, I think that works to advantage. It's human nature to recall even the most trying of times with a rosy glow. I'm sad these days about how that's not true for me when I look back on the first couple of years of the twins' lives. Yeah, I recall some good things, but I also remember a lot of drudgery and work and crying (from everyone) and stress. I remember not sleeping. I remember feeling utterly crushed by responsibility.

I remember good stuff: friends, visits from family, weekend trips and meals out. But details of Maddie and Riley? How it felt to hold them when they were small? Not so much.

Bah, this is all maudlin, not sure how I got here. Not sure what my point is. It was hard, back then. It's better now. Maybe that's it. Maybe that's all. It gets better. I've been really moved by all of the it gets better videos circulating on the Internet, offering encouragement to GLBT youth and letting them know that while they might be suffering now, better times will come. It's true: things get better, sometimes through effort, sometimes just through the passage of time. But things get better.

This post is kind of a mess. How about those Chilean miners! What a story that has been. Riveting.

On that note, I'm going to bed.