Working for the weekend

What a week.

Spouse started his new job on Monday. He’s working in a town ~35 minutes away, and his daily schedule is 8-5. This has implications for the second new thing this week…

Nuala started daycare on Tuesday. I’m on pick-up and drop-off duty for the foreseeable future, excepting those days on which Spouse is able to work through lunch and arrive late or leave early. The extra complications to my daily schedule are miniscule compared to the difficulty of getting her used to the idea of not being at home with Daddy all day every day. Tuesday morning, she was fine. They have new toys and a playground, after all, and what’s not to like about that? Wednesday morning, she was absolutely pitiful: fine until we got there, at which point she looked at me with terror in her eyes, let a single tear roll down her cheek, and said in the smallest, saddest voice, “Hold me, Mommy.” By the time I left, we were both crying, and she wouldn’t even look at me when I left her classroom. Thursday morning, the crying began before we left the house and continued after I left her classroom. Today, however, when she began whining at home that she didn’t want to go to school, I ignored it and went about our business. “Time to put on your jacket!” “Do you have your blanket?” “Do you want another drink of juice before we leave? Okay, let’s go!” She walked into the building on her own, started taking off her jacket on her own, got a little frightened-looking and asked me to hold her, but I knelt down, asked her if she wanted to go sit down with the other kids (she didn’t), and her teacher took her blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders like little old ladies wear fur stoles. Nuala smiled, I asked for a hug and kiss (and got both), and off I went. Thank God.

In terms of household management, the adjustment has been tough. We have been spoiled for so long with flexible schedules, and now we have to fit all the cooking and cleaning and running and leisure time that we used to do on demand into a strict daily schedule, plus weekends. I plan to learn lots about crock-pot cooking in the next few weeks. At least I’m a 10-minute walk from home and can begin dinner prep on my lunch break.

Speaking of running, kind of, I had the satisfaction of hitting a 12-mile threshold and then…ugh. I did a tempo run (3 miles a little under race pace) on the treadmill a week and a half ago and discovered afterwards that my left IT band didn’t like me anymore.  I’m trying to rest, but I feel like a slug when I’m not running regularly. Lots of very painful massage and less painful stretching plus less running has me feeling fairly good right now–I did a few miles on the treadmill this morning–but my marathon-training schedule has been put off kilter. I guess it’s a good thing I got started early and have four-plus months to go. Here’s hoping I feel good enough to do an easy 6+ this weekend.

Building project #2

In the mornings, Nuala calls out from her crib not so we can pick her up out of it, but so we can bring her stacks of books that she can then peruse at her leisure. We thought it would be nice if she could wake up, retrieve her own books, and spend that first half hour of the day doing something else besides depositing books into her crib. Maybe sleeping a little longer. So I went on over to Ana White’s site, searched for toddler bed plans (I am very lucky that she has a preschooler of her own), and came up with this one.

I’m learning an awful lot about building stuff.

First, it is possible to fit a 3×4″ panel of plywood beadboard into the trunk of a Toyota Corolla, along with several 8′ boards (1×3 and 2×2) and a couple 6′ boards (1×6). The key is that the 8′ boards must be narrow.

Second, carpentry requires blood sacrifice. Okay, to be totally accurate, there wasn’t much blood, but there was quite a bit of pain. A splinter that punctures 3/4 the length of the nail bed of your thumb isn’t messing around, people. I had to grip the little bit under my nail with tweezers as tightly as I could, remind myself how terrible the pains of labor were, and say out loud, “This doesn’t hurt. This doesn’t hurt. This doesn’t hurt.” It hurt. Thank God it came out without a trip to the ER. And if I can’t really use my thumb for a day or two, so what? Look at that bed!

Third, whenever I build something, it is going to rock my daughter’s world. Do your kids ever just tell you, totally unprompted, things like, “Good job, Mom! I like my new bed! Dad, Mommy built this for me!” Is this something that kids do? I have known a lot of incredible, wonderful 2-year-olds, but this one knocks my socks off, people.

The good news about the bed is that she loves it. The bad thing is that she is so very mobile for 11 hours, most of which we would like to spend sleeping. I don’t know what we were thinking.

I don’t know if it’s because she’s anxious that Spouse was starting his new job today and would no longer be home with her during the day, because we had thunderstorms last night, because she had the beginnings of a cold yesterday, or because when she woke up in the middle of the night, she didn’t see what she normally sees from the inside of her crib and got disoriented. Long story short, we were up several times last night with a little girl who said, “I’m too nervous. I sleep with Mommy and Daddy and will feel better.” It took a couple trips back and forth between her bed and ours, but she finally settled down. We are hoping for a better night tonight, because she’s supposed to start daycare tomorrow.

 

It ain’t Hall and Oates, but the Dora music player will do in a pinch.

We created a bit of a monster. One night, Spouse and I fell prey to nostalgia and created a Hall & Oates station on Pandora. It was awesome for the first few hours of play, during which Nuala developed a taste for the best of 80s white-man pop-R&B. Now, she won’t listen to anything else, and because she’s a 2 1/2-year-old living in these times, she knows precisely how to manipulate the iPod to change it from the Public Radio app to the Pandora app and select the Hall & Oates station, then fast forward past any songs that aren’t sufficiently Hall & Oates-y enough.  Fortunately, there is also the Dora music player/book to scratch whatever itch she has for danceable music.

I can’t believe we prefer Dora to Hall & Oates, but there it is.

Plus ça change

This is a nineteenth-century illustration of a tread wheel that was used in British workhouses and prisons to grind grain or pump water into the institution. Much of the official sources speak of the tread wheel as a particularly suitable deterrent for “vagrants,” a term that encompassed an incredible variety of people including drunks, prostitutes, migrant laborers, the disabled, and orphans too old for the orphanage. The more loathsome the punishment for unemployment, the more quickly ne’er-do-wells would find employment, and the more likely they would be to behave well enough and work hard enough to stay employed.

I don’t really know how this abhorrent bill is any different.

Physical coercion and abuse of the unemployed didn’t do anything to reduce unemployment in Victorian Britain. It simply made the guys in charge feel better for doing something visibly “tough” about the thing that everyone agreed was a problem.

10.78

There are more things to report than “I ran 10.78 miles on Saturday,” but let’s start there. I ran 10.78 miles on Saturday. It felt exactly as long as it sounds. Around mile 6, my hip started whining at me. Then my left ankle. Then the ball of my right foot, which was weird because I’ve never had any pain there while running. Of course, I’ve never gone as far as .22 miles short of 11. In the end, the ball of my right foot won the shouting contest among the different achy parts, but it didn’t beat the whole of me, and as soon as I stopped running, it stopped hurting. I ran a relatively easy 5k this morning and didn’t feel any pain. I guess we’ll see if it shows back up on the next long one.

I did my long run on Saturday instead of Sunday because (a) Spouse was going out of town Saturday afternoon to Sunday afternoon and (b) I had no toddler to worry about tending, because she was staying at Grandmom and Tom-Tom’s. Friday, Grandmom had come down for what we expected to be a brief morning visit. She casually mentioned something about the farm, and Nuala leapt out of her chair, said, “I go bye-bye with Grandmom, see you later Mom, see you later Dad!” All the adults in the room looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, Spouse packed her bag, and off she went. I might bitch and moan about the layout of the city we’ve settled in, and the nonsensical blue laws that allow beer but not wine to be sold in grocery and drugstores, but all of my bitching and moaning is nothing, and I mean nothing, against the convenience of sending your toddler off to visit Grandmom and Tom-Tom (and the horseys and dogs and chickens and Cat and cousins), knowing everyone is happy about it. Finally, it looks like monthly date nights might be possible. This is potentially life-changing, people.

Also potentially life-changing: Dad sent a gift with Mom last Friday. It’s a jigsaw. There may be things I cannot cut with the varieties of saws I have now, but I don’t know what they are. I am so pumped! Kitchen sink, here we come!

Quantification is the devil

After months and months and maybe even years of going on and on about how I don’t mind what I eat, I just run more when I want to eat more, I began doing something truly stupid: counting calories. It appeals to that part of me–is it the T? Or the J?–that swoons over certainty and measurement, which just happens to be the same part that drives Spouse nuts, but that’s a whole ‘nother story. And since my friend-boss introduced me to a free app (MyFitnessPal) that keeps track of the calories you consume and the calories you burn, and alerts you to how many calories you have left each day if you want to meet your weight loss/maintenance/gain goal is so very easy to work with, I thought I’d give it a shot. You know, just out of curiosity.

My first mistake was convincing myself I was just doing it out of curiosity. I gained a few pounds when I moved back in Kentucky, probably because my dear mother loves to bake and if there are sweets in the house, I’m probably eating them. It was literally only a few pounds, but those pants I’d bought to fit my post-baby, post-thyroid problem figure were getting pretty tight, and that little bit of pudge above my hips had come back and was starting to jiggle when I ran. That’s just uncomfortable on so many levels. So when I put my data into the app, I reported that I wanted to lose 5 pounds. It gave me a daily allowance of ~1300 calories. Granted, you can “buy” more by exercising more, but people: 1300 calories is a price I’m not willing to pay for anything. This is my conclusion after four days of using the thing.

Unwilling to subject myself to such cruelty, I’m back to reckoning that if I only gained 5 pounds over two months while eating lots of sweets at Mom and Dad’s and running approximately 1/4 of the miles I’m doing now on a weekly basis, I’m probably okay. The pudge has already started to dissipate, anyway, and I suspect as I move up past 10 miles on those weekend long runs, I’ll be back in fine form.

Of course, I did learn as much as the last time I devoted some attention to counting calories: some foods are the devil. Some foods love you and want to be eaten all the time so they can be nicer to you. I can never order a chocolate chunk cookie from Jimmy John’s again, because the damned thing has more calories than the sandwich itself. I can, however, have a heapin’ helpin’ of what Spouse calls “fancy beans ‘n weenies,” or a delicious sloppy mixture of black beans, smoked sausage and tomatoes, with an equally large salad on the side. It’s nice to check in and readjust once in a while…and then get back on the road so you can have two cookies tomorrow.

I don’t mean to brag, but…

I made this:

With my own two hands and my abbreviated version of a workshop:

The key item here is that little wooden box on the bottom shelf that contains a pocket-hole jig (thanks, Dad). I started out trying to do the hammer and nail thing, but that’s crap, man. Pocket holes are where it’s at…as long as you remember to keep the spare battery pack for the drill charged.

The oven door is functional, and even though it doesn’t close as beautifully or symmetrically as you would expect from nice cabinetry, it works. I also wasn’t careful about selecting my 1×12 boards and got a warped one, hence the bowed shelves. No biggie, they still do what they’re supposed to:

Bake cakes and provide storage for all those play dishes Nuala got for Christmas.

You might notice the 1×2 strip along the edge of the top. It’s not in the plans, but it does feature here because I didn’t buy a long enough 1×12 board to make the 16″ wide top, I didn’t want to go back out to Lowe’s, and I was impatient. Instead, I cut 1x2s to match the width, then glued and clamped them. It works, even if it does mean that the sides slope down a touch. Many lessons learned this time around…

I was thinking of drawing oven racks on the shelves, but after gluing, priming, and painting underused CDs for the burners and drilling holes and painting toy wheels and axle dowels, I kind of ran out of steam.

CDs turned out to be the perfect size for Nuala’s cookware (it lights up and makes sizzling and teakettle-whistle noises!). She loves it all, and who wouldn’t?

I know I won’t have time to dedicate to building additional pieces of Ana White’s Play Kitchen Collection until spring break, but this was a great project to begin with!

Prodigy

Our child reads at 2 1/2 years of age.

Ok, of course she doesn’t read, but she does do a fair job of following along with her new favorite story about Pete the Cat (thanks to The O’Zee for introducing us to Pete the Cat, and thanks to Mamaw for the books!). I love this kid.

Month 31

Hey, Nuala,

Sorry for skipping right over that 30th month. We were busy going back and forth between families for Thanksgiving, and I was a few days away from defending my dissertation and becoming a real live doctor (of philosophy). Excuses, excuses, I know.

I think I’ve said this before on many occasions, but it is literally impossible to keep up with all that’s new and awesome with you. You are exceedingly verbal, and even if your g’s are d’s and your c’s and k’s are t’s, and your l’s are w’s and your r’s are something unpronounceable by ad adult tongue, you’re almost perfectly intelligible. This is good, because there’s a lot of good stuff to catch. Here’s a sample:

The other morning, when you had crawled up into bed with me at Mamaw’s and said you wanted to go downstairs to see Daddy, I said I needed to change your diaper first. You said, no, your diaper was dry. I checked and of course it wasn’t dry, and told you that I would be changing your diaper regardless of whether you believed it was dry, and then you laid this one on me: “Mommy, you make me sad.” With a big sad face and everything. What the hell, man?

You are ever more comfortable with expressing your likes and dislikes, which has provided us with several golden moments. You told Grandmom, “Grandmom, I like your house,” and Mamaw, “Mamaw, I like you.” We can never be sure if she means exactly what we think she means when she says stuff like this, but man, does it warm the heart to have your wee one tell you she approves of your existence.

Christmas was a lot more fun this year than last, if only because as you get older, your toys become increasingly fun for us. Uncle W got you some Legos and new Play-doh to replace the dried-up stuff. A couple of aunts and uncles and Grandmom got you dishes and play food. I am presently cogitating on how to build a play oven and sink to go with them, but for now we get a kick out of the way you cook and compose dishes, and serve them to anyone in striking distance. We especially enjoy the running commentary, which reminds me: maybe you’ll go through a silent period later, but for now, you are a mouthy, mouthy kid, and I mean that in the best way. You chatter all day long to yourself and to us. I can’t imagine where you picked that up… Har, har.

One of the few times of day when you’re quiet is when Super Why and Dinosaur Train come on PBS. The former is a reading show that fortunately requires a good amount of audience participation–otherwise, you’d be completely zoned out on the couch for a half hour at a time. You are certainly absorbing information, though. Randomly throughout the day, you’ll raise your fist in triumph and shout, “To the book club!” or “Super Readers to the rescue!” When you get excited, you might shout, “Lala loooooo!” like whoever that pteranodon is on Dinosaur Train. You know, the goofy one.

You have boundless enthusiasm for lots of things, but also exceeding politeness. When you accidentally bump something or someone, you say, “Sorry,” and you never fail to bless someone when they sneeze. Much of the time you remember to ask for something with the addendum “pweeeease,” though you are still two, and most everything comes out as a demand.

Speaking of two-ness, your tantrums are awesome. I say this because they are just so very tantrum-y. Ever since we made fun of your ridiculous wailing growl one night, you repeat it to make sure we know that you’re having a tantrum and aren’t really, really, truly very angry or sad. You throw yourself down in the floor and everything, but it takes approximately 15 seconds to direct your attention elsewhere. I won’t say that we’re experts on tantrums per se, but we seem to be experts at dealing with your tantrums. Here’s hoping that expertise holds up over the long run.

Also speaking of two-ness, you have recently introduced two very powerful words and concepts to your vocabulary: “why?” and “because…”. “Nuala, I have to finish this and then we can play.” “Why?” “Because I need to get this in the mail before the mailman comes.” “Why?” And on and on ad infinitum. Alternatively, there’s this: “Nuala, why did you take out all your books?” “Because I want them.” “Ok, enough said.” It’s amazing how much those two little words utterly transform your relationship, even if the questions are kind of pointless and neverending and the answers are simple, random, or both. Your little brain-wheels are spinning like crazy, and it is thrilling to see.

We’ve had a great 2011 with you, and can’t wait to see what the next year brings…

Love,
Mommy

Merry Christmas!

Spouse and I are taking off in a different direction with gifts this year. Everyone in our family is lucky enough to have pretty much everything we need, and what we need and don’t have, we’re better off buying for ourselves. So we’ve substituted charitable donations for family gifts. This year, our pick is Remote Area Medical, which you may have heard about on NPR or 60 Minutes. They do medical expeditions to some of the poorest areas in the county and the world, although being centered in eastern Tennessee, they focus much of their effort on bringing free medical care to communities in Appalachia. Their operations are funded entirely through charitable donations. Because doctors, dentists, nurses, and other health professionals volunteer their time and skills to RAM, about 90% of money given is applied directly to bringing health care to those who need it.

It feels like a great way to end this incredible roller coaster of a year.