Laughter At Women Who Do Too Much

You should be laughing at me. I’ve had one of those, well, fortnights. Mike has been out of town periodically, in town momentarily. Sophia has finally caught the stomach bug that took Maeve a week to boot for good. Happy Mothers Day!

We had a block-wide yard sale during the first round of stomach bug and Mike travel. I had a modest success—probably not worth my time in the end, but it was fun to chat with the neighbors. All the extras got tossed into the van and headed over to Salvation Army.

Did I mention that the yard sale, stomach bug, and Mike travel were also on the day of the parish picnic? I worked briefly at the food booth after the sale (I’d been up for a long time by that point, but at least I wasn’t drunk like last year’s volunteer effort). Came home, Mary Helen dropped off the girls, and we went BACK to Pius so that Sophia could give me a heart attack on the ferris wheel. I didn’t let her ride the swings, the ones that fly up in the air and go round in a circle. Funny—when I was a kid, those would have been tame.

After the picnic, which also involved the eating of funnel cake and spring rolls, and a couple of silly games for Sophia to play, we came back to the house, and then walked right across the street for, yes, the Kentucky Derby Party.

Mint Juleps are officially the first drink I have encountered that I would prefer never to encounter again.

The yard sale served as a catalyst to get my house clean. It feels lighter. I repainted the front stair treads (meaning the flat part of my front staircase) where the blue paint had worn down to wood. I wish my staircase wasn’t painted. But expedience is the better part of valor when your kid has lead poisoning. As it turned out, ironically, there’s no lead on the staircase. But panic is the better part of the latex paint industry and so we have a blue and green front stairs. It draws from our stairwell stained glass window. It isn’t bad, and now that it’s repainted and touched up, I like it again.

Bleys update: he’s just a little bastard. The world is his litter box. Ah well. The cats are currently on parole from the basement. We’ll see how long the pee-free rug lasts.

In other news:
*I have another tutoring student, back from college, who is going to take some time. Finite math, which, apropos, is the final math course she will ever take.

*The other tutoring student will be done with me until the fall in a mere 3 weeks.

*I’m writing a book. It’s non-fiction, about Friedrich Froebel. Fascinating stuff. How I never heard of this before I will never understand.

*Every weekend from here until the Fifth of Never is booked, booked, booked. Fun stuff, like Rock Eddy over Memorial Day weekend, and a wedding shower, a graduation party, and our priest’s going away celebration. But crowded. I am about at the point that it’s time to hire a nanny until June 25th. But I’m not the sort of gal who would do well with a personal staff.

*I’ve lost 16 pounds in the past 5 weeks. Of course, I probably packed it all back on just with yesterday’s noshing. Who knows how this works? Not me. It’s magic, I tell you.

*My present for Bevin’s graduation is almost complete. I can’t say what it is because she occasionally reads this, and her roommate Colleen (umm, that would be the youngest sister) might spill the beans as well. Working my fingers to the bone on this one, though. No, it is not a knit mortarboard.

*Sophia just did a wet paper watercolor painting of a cardinal (the bird not the hierarchy), two trees, and the blue sky. Moments like that, or when I was watching Maeve grin at me while she fell asleep in her carseat yesterday on the way home from Sappington Market, are why I am still a mom.

*Sitting at Hartford Coffee yesterday, watching Maeve play, I was listening to two new moms with slings talk about breastfeeding and babywearing and all those other things I’m old hat at. It made me poignantly miss the presence of someone to have coffee with. I’m saying that wrong—I have coffee with people all the time. What I mean is someone, who 4 ½ years ago, would have had coffee with me while I held Sophia and she held Ben or Vivian or Amos or whomever. I was seriously alone that first year—I had friends without kids, I had acquaintances with kids, mostly much older than mine, but there wasn’t anyone in that spot. So of course I interjected my opinions into their conversation, bragged about how long it took my period to come back, and then buried myself in the Get Out section of the Post.

My neighbor Amanda just brought over a yummy loaf of pumpkin raisin bread. I promptly had two slices (they were small. But still). Crabby Sophia is eating, Maeve is awake and needing some work in the diaper department. Alas.

(Insert witty ending thought here).