Friday, February 04, 2011

Martyr 101

Been a bit since we have chatted. Hope all is well. Here in the snowy-wonderfullness of Jan/Feb in Iowa, the weather continues to be a hot (pun intended) topic.


It’s the STORM OF THE CENTURTY

SNOW-POCOLYPSE

SNOW-MAGEDDON

You get the picture. The weather people in this area should get Emmy’s for hyperbole. They could give Stephen Colbert a run for his money in that arena. Regardless, in my mind while snow does in fact suck, its Iowa. Its February. Its sorta expected, so deal.

One mild venting and then on to the topic of the day. And I will caution as I prepare to unleash this. I don’t mean to sound less than grateful, and understand that there are probably only a handful of people other than me that are hoping as hard as I am to see this new business be as successful as it can, oh – and I really do understand that my husband is working his ass off right now. All those things aside…

For those of you that weren’t aware, Joe has been working on getting a restaurant open for going on a year now. Well on top of buying a new house and moving this month (or I guess technically in January) all of that finally came to a head and we are open for business as of Monday.

Check out the website here: http://www.gustopizzaco.com/ or better yet, stop in for a bite.

Advertisement over.

So what this means is that for the last 3 or 4 weeks, I have hardly seen my husband. My kids have hardly seen their dad except on their morning drive to daycare. We have conversations via text. We bump into each other in the hallways in the mornings. You get the picture. So this means I have been playing single mom to a certain degree. And by the way – mad, HUGE, GI-NORMOUS shout out to single moms/dads. I only play one on TV on occasion. I don’t know how you do it. Yikes. So while I am still working my full time (and highly stressful) job, I get the joy of coming home every night and being mom. Not that it isn’t great. Don’t mis-understand. I love my kids. More than I can explain in years and years of posts. Its just that after a long day at work, some nights you just want to be a lazy bum, and you can’t. So I am trying to keep our house together – and that’s a challenge as we still have boxes to unpack from the aforementioned move. But after working a day, spending a few hours with el-kiddos and getting them to bed, the idea of spending a couple of hours sorting and unpacking boxes pretty much blows. So if I get through 2 of them in a night, it’s a victory. So this morning, after the usual cosmic battle with the alarm clock, I am getting ready. McGirl is her usual cheering, CHATTY self. Talking to whomever will listen – and most mornings, it’s the cat. Finn is running around the upstairs, dragging his monster truck blanket (a new fav) and shouting “NEMO’s” and “TRACTORS” at the top of his voice. Which is 2-year old speak for “Mom, I would like a pack of Nemo Fruit Snacks and John Deere Tractor Fruit Snacks that I plan on shoving in my mouth and eating in one fell swoop”

Joe is getting ready and in the course of a few minutes asks me 1) where is my clean underwear 2) do I have any clean work shirts? My first response, was did you look where they are supposed to be? No. Ok, start there, otherwise, check the laundry basket. Next question, as I am frantically blowing my hair into a static-y, frizzy mess in my hurry to get out the door, is “Does Finn have any clean clothes? You didn’t do his laundry last night?” This last question had me ready to scream. No, I didn’t do his laundry, I thought he was ok. But more importantly, after dashing out the door from a hellacious day at work, barely making it to daycare before they turfed the kids to the curb, taking both kids into the grocery store for some essentials, getting them both fed, playing, putting them both to bed, taking the garbage out, emptying the dishwasher and then getting myself some dinner, I must have just OVERLOOKED the laundry situation. In short, my kid went to school today wearing jeans that he might have worn yesterday, socks that will probably make his feet stink even more than usual and a shirt that is 2 sizes to big (but is clean) and I left the house less than pleased at my husband. Yarg. I try not to play the martyr card – which is hard, as I come from a long line of accomplished martyrs. But can a girl get a break?

DEEP BREATH

Moving on….

I know that I devote way too much content here to motherhood. What can I say, it has replaced the rockstar single life I used to live as the topic du jour….Mostly, because I no longer have a rockstar single life to talk about. Oh, I am probably up at 4 AM, but for VERY different reasons. A crying baby, as opposed to a crying, drunk girlfriend or ex-boyfriend as the case may be. I used to cut off my shot intake in a night at 3 or 4 – depending on the hour and if we were going to hit an after-hours party. Now my shot discussions are around whether you should get your toddler a flu shot. So as you can see, perspective has shifted a smidge.

Thus bringing us to our ramble of the day….And today, its not so much a ramble, but a blatant self-realizing moment that needed to be shared. This morning, I was digging through my purse for my iPod. Needed some tunage (as outdated as my music collection is these days) to get through my morning. The white noise at the office is just a bit too much for me to process. So pulling things out of my purse in an attempt to find said iPod. And this dear reader is the exact inventory of my purse as of 9:07 this AM:

• Umbrella

• Package of gum

• Book of Target coupons

• An empty sunglasses case

• Wallet

• Case for digital camera – no camera, just the case.

• Case of baby wipes

• Contact solution – I don’t wear contacts.

• Broken cell phone – doubles as a toddler toy.

• 2 matchbook cars

• 2 stuffed baby rattles

• Container with baby formula – enough for two 6 oz bottles if you are curious

• Sippy cup – CARS themed

• Pair of Finn’s socks

• 4 diapers – 3 for Faolan, 1 for Finn

• 1 oversized crayon in RED.

• Chapstick

• And roughly $0.83 in change in the bottom along with a small bowl of Cheerios crumbs.

You will notice the glaring omission of the iPod.

Now, a little history as you process the above contents and mentally create a picture of how big said bag must be to hold all that….crap. My mother always carried HUGE purses. In fact, at one point, she had a purse within her purse. And I swore, that I wouldn’t go down that path. And for years, was quite successful. As the Rubbermaid bin in my closet will attest, I had purses for every occasion, style and color. But the one caveat, was that they couldn’t be big. And they weren’t. Compact, cute and stylish. Enough room for a wallet, cell phone, some make-up essentials and occasionally a camera or sunglasses. Fast forward to about two years ago (if that is possible within the time/space continuum)… and BABY. So now, you have a diaper bag for the litany of baby shit that you cart around and a purse. And for awhile, I did both.

DUMB.

So then, I moved key purse content into diaper bag. But that was short lived as inevitably, I would move stuff to diaper bag, and then promptly realize at about 11:53 AM on a Monday that my wallet wasn’t with me at work and I was going to have eat the stale granola bars in my desk drawer for lunch as I had no money with me. So what is a sorta-hip, self proclaimed small purse girl to do?

Answer: and this is one of those, unfortunate mom-moments, suck it up and accept that this, like many things you SWORE you were never going to do, is something you have to do. You get the big purse and rationalize it that carrying one big bag makes more sense than one diaper bag and a purse. And you hate it, but you do it. And then you realize why you hate it. You can NEVER, and I mean never find what you are looking for in the damn thing. I think that the dryer-gnomes that eat the one sock all the time have cousins that live in my purse and hide things that you know are supposed to be there. Yet, all I ever manage to find when I am rustling through the damn thing is receipts of stuff I bought 2 months ago, wrappers to gum and the aforementioned Cheerios crumbs. At some point, this should all get better. I mean, it has to get better. I can’t keep lugging all this crud around. Otherwise, I will end up with a left shoulder that is decidedly larger than the right.

Now Listening: The Blueprint 3 by Jay-Z