Hack

Today was a Very Productive Day. Does anyone else notice a correlation between the cleanliness of their house and their productivity level? When my house is a disaster it's paralyzing. When it's spotless, I feel like I could move the earth.

No actual earth-moving happened today, although we did watch a bunch of guys out digging the street up. (Barak was entranced, so of course we had to stop and watch. I asked one of them if they minded the audience and he said, cheerily, "Nope! It'll make him want to go to college!") I did, however, go to the dry cleaner and pick up the tremendous amount of stuff we had there (and convey it home by way of the already-loaded double stroller, no mean feat), go to the grocery store and the fruit and vegetable store, get the last boxes of the kind of cereal my husband likes before the kosher grocery goes Pesachdik, go to the drugstore for diapers and diaper cream (waaaay too cold for the hike to Target), go to the bank, return all the horrifically overdue library books, and, um, get a haircut.

I didn't quite intend for that last one--I meant to take Barak for a haircut. But then I saw that the Assyrian haircutting place had a sign out for five-dollar haircuts, and it transpires that they have a "privacy room" for women who cover their hair. Barak had passed out in the stroller, so I went in and got a haircut with Iyyar in my lap. I had intended to lose a couple of inches, but then I looked at it and realized that there was plenty there to donate if I just cut it a little shorter. So I did. It's shoulder-length now, shorter than it's been since I was, um, five. I showed my husband and he was too shocked to say anything other than, "Wow. I'll have to get used to that." I think he was a little relieved when I put my hat back on.

Iyyar, he is being absurdly cute. Today I gave him alphabet noodles for the first time, and that went over fairly well. I found out today that he knows what is inside a yogurt container; I took the big tub of whole-milk Stonyfield out of the fridge and he went berserk, bouncing up and down in his high chair (I'd been feeding him corn) and screeching. As an aside, why does anyone pay money for baby food in jars? I did it with Barak because he was in daycare, but it is just so easy to take a ladleful of whatever you're eating and run it through the blender. I have a hand blender now, so I use that. He eats what we eat now, and it's just so much better--as well as orders of magnitude cheaper--than buying Things in Jars. I can buy a pound of frozen organic vegetables for the price of two little jars of organic baby food.

And do all babies have a tzitzit fetish? At least, do all babies with access to tzitzit have a tzitzit fetish? I came into the living room tonight to find my husband sitting on the floor reading a boo, Iyyar lying on the floor next to him with a mouthful of tzitzit and a totally blissed-out look on his face.

What was it Kirk said in the Tribbles episode? Well, there's no accounting for taste.

Iyyar updates

You might think from my blog that all I do is hang out with Barak all day, leaving the poor little baby all alone in a playpen in an empty room somewhere (chas v'shalom!) The truth is that he spends most of the day glued to my hip, which is getting a bit more difficult as he gets chunkier and chunkier.

He's not crawling yet, although he has seemed perilously close for a couple of weeks now. But just a few days ago he started pulling up with confidence, and now all you have to do is put him down anywhere near a laundry basket and you will have a standing-up baby in no time at all. All he wants to do is stand--if you keep him sitting in your lap for too long (he's very cuddly, so sometimes it happens, what can I say...) he'll start this frantic-sounding annoyed-baby gurgling noise way back in his throat. "I need to stand up! I need to stand up now!" And as soon as you let him stand up, he's all smiles and so so proud of himself. Look at me, Imma! Look at me, I'm standing! He'll take a few steps if you hold his hands, but that's still very wobbly. He's not really comfortable moving his feet much when holding on to something and standing, so I think even cruising is not quite around the corner.

He's also just started clapping. Well, actually he's been doing that for a week or so, but today did it for the first time in front of our babysitter, who has been trying in vain to get him to do it for a while. I so love the very early stages of clapping, where sometimes the hands miss each other...

And Iyyar has the weirdest teeth ever. He's got the bottom two, in the normal baby pattern. And he's got one top tooth. But it's not one of the two front teeth--it's one tooth, off to the side. I cannot describe in words how intensely odd that looks. If he had a matched pair, he'd look like a baby vampire.

Sleeping is getting much better, B"H. The usual these days is in bed around 7, up for a snack sometime between 10 and 1, and then breakfast around 5, with a post-breakfast nap of a couple of hours to follow. I can live with that, yes indeed I can. And usually one nap in the morning of an hour or two, plus a shortish nap late in the afternoon. This afternoon he was napping when Barak woke up from his nap. "Barak, shh, okay? The baby's shluffing." "Baby shluffing? Hafta be quiet. Hafta go 'shhh' like that." It didn't help--Iyyar knows when his big brother is up and fun things are about to happen.

He's still got a yucky cold, which is making it hard for him to nurse. He keeps having to open his mouth to breathe, with lets loose a payload of milk that gushes warmly down my side. We've been spending a lot of time hanging out in their room with the humidifier blasting, which seems to help some.

All right, off to work. Iyyar is asleep, Barak is in the kitchen enjoying his post-poop ice cream, and the speeches call.

Barak's first Purim

What's that, you say? Barak's first Purim? Isn't he... almost three?

True, true. But this is the first Purim that he has experienced not as a baby, but as a kid. This was, as my friend put it this morning while we watched his realization dawn, his "welcome to Purim, kid."

For the record, Barak was a fireman. Iyyar had a turtle costume, but I never put it on him--he's got a cold and is not feeling well, so I wasn't going to inflict a turtle costume on him just so I could enjoy watching him be cuter than usual for the five seconds before it would have made him cry. Barak's costume consisted of a fireman coat, a fireman hat, and a Hatzalah vest, because he saw it in the costume bag and it was sooo silver and shiny. I'm so sure there are Hatzalah guys who are also firemen. Stands to reason, right?

Anyway...

First, a little background. I grew up in an environment of very regimented food. I was never allowed to take anything without asking, and unauthorized removal of any food item from its storage place was regarded as theft. Candy, especially, was strictly rationed. There was, however, one day a year on which we were allowed to eat all the candy we wanted. That day was Halloween. Whatever we had left over after Halloween went into the candy jar and we got a piece a day until it was gone; but on the day itself, we could eat ourselves sick. It was more or less the highlight of the year. All the candy you could eat. Olam haba, right here on planet Earth.

We don't do Halloween, but I still think that there is merit in the idea of relaxing the rules like that one day a year. That's what the adults do on Purim (it is the one day of the year when it is considered acceptable to drink), and the kids should get to do it too (enjoy themselves, not get drunk!) So I had already decided that within limits (he's still two, after all) I was going to let Barak have a blast.

For those who don't know, Purim is a lot like Halloween in that the kids dress up and there is candy everywhere; however, instead of knocking on people's doors demanding candy, we knock on people's doors distributing it. Not candy, necessarily, but little packages of goodies, referred to as shaloch manos or, if you are tzioni, mishloach manot. A good system, no? Most of the time you also get something when you drop something off, unless the recipients are not home, in which case you slide your package behind the storm door, comforted by the knowledge that when you go back to your own home, there will be a line of little packages sitting there waiting. People do different things for shaloch manos; because the mitzvah is supposed to be sending cooked food, not candy, I always send brown paper bags packed with lunch. This year I did peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a juice box, a cheese stick, two homemade chocolate chip cookies, and a box of raisins.

When Barak woke up this morning, he could already tell that something was up; instead of his usual breakfast options of plain yogurt with granola or cheerios and milk, Abba gave him a Shabbos yogurt (one of the little flavored Stonyfield yogurts, sweet, way too expensive for every day and therefore a Shabbos treat). Hmmm.

"Barak, is today Purim?"

"Yeah." But Barak still didn't quite get what Purim was.

I went off to hear megilla and when I came back, after putting the baby down for a nap, I started packing the things in the shaloch manos that I hadn't wanted to leave out overnight. I started by taking the 36 string cheese sticks out of the fridge and asking Barak to separate the perforations. What toddler doesn't love tearing things that are perforated?

"C'I have it? I wanna eat it!"

Cheese sticks, like the little yogurts, are a rationed (expensive) item--chalav yisroel cheese ain't cheap, and those little sticks are never less than fifty cents each. Ordinarily he gets one a day in his lunch. At home, he gets cheese, but not the little wrapped string cheese sticks.

"Sure."

The eyebrows went up. I opened his cheese stick and he ate it. He looked at his empty wrapper. He considered. It never hurts to ask, right?

"C'I have other one please?" Sweet, winning, and hopeful, but fully expecting to be shot down.

"Sure. Today's Purim. You can have another one." I handed him another one. Better to start him out with a stomach full of cheese, right?

Barak looked at me thoughtfully. This was, indeed, very odd.

"Today Shabbos?"

"No, today's not Shabbos. Yesterday was Shabbos. Today's Purim."

"Oh." I don't know what that is, he seemed to be thinking, but I'm pretty sure I like it.

While I was making the sandwiches--it takes time to make 36 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches--Barak decided he was done with his (third) cheese stick and got down from his chair. And then the doorbell rang. It was the family of one of my husband's former students, who live down the street from us.

"Purim sameach!"

"Purim sameach!"

I handed Barak a bag and told him to be my shaliach. He gave it to our friends, and took the proffered bag. Yellow, shiny, with tissue paper and ribbons and containing... oh-ho. What's this?

"C'I hold it?"

"Sure, you can hold it."

Pause while Barak stares at me thoughtfully and contemplates just how far he is going to push his luck.

"C'I open it?"

"Yeah, you can open it."

Barak sits down and opens bag. Oh my. There are cookies. There are raisins. There is fruit leather. There are Hershey's kisses. There are gumdrops...

"C'I eat it?''

"Yeah, you can eat it."

Barak's jaw literally dropped. You could just about see him thinking, Who is this person, and where is my Imma? and then, Oh, well, I won't worry about her. Whoever this person is, I like her better.

The morning went by, and more shaloch manos was exchanged. Barak got used to the idea that when the doorbell rang, he grabbed a bag off the kitchen table and went running for the door, then sat down on the kitchen floor to investigate the contents of what had just arrived. He got a granola bar. He got a fruit roll. He got a juice box. He got a cupcake. He got two Sunkist gems. Two!

We went to friends' for the Purim seuda, dropping off and getting more shaloch manos along the way. "I wanna hold it please." "Okay." He ate a cookie on the way, and just held the other one lovingly, a sort of beatific look of toddler heaven settled on his face. It was freezing cold and windy, and I closed the stroller cover. (Iyyar, as I may have mentioned, has a cold.) Two minutes before we got there, they both fell asleep. When they woke up, maybe forty minutes later--how did they sleep through all of it, in the double stroller parkedW in the living room in the middle of a Purim seuhda? When they woke up, they both just sat and stared. Adults, dressed up rather strangely. Kids, dressed up even more strangely, running around with all. that. candy. All that food. All those goodies. Everybody singing. Loudly. Men in dark suits... and funny hats...

Barak came out, and got in my lap, and watched the proceedings for a while, interested but overwhelmed. After a while, he remembered the precedent of the morning.

"C'I have a treat please?" he asked, hesitatantly, because ordinarily treats do not just fall out of the sky. "Sure," I said. "It's Purim. Should we look in the stroller and see what's there?"

He got another fruit roll, and a Twizzler. "Want another one. Want another one red stick please." "I don't think we have another one of those. Should we go look?" "Yeah! Go look please." We went outside to check out what was in the stroller basket, and I picked out what wasn't milchig. And gave it to him.

Over the course of the meal, he got a candy necklace, and a chocolate cupcake, and I got schnitzel, and there were grammen sung, some of them about us. It was a kollel seuda, and everyone there was calling me rebbetzin, and I had little boys on and off my lap, and despite all the chaos and the sugar and the--did I mention the chaos--nobody cried at all, at least neither of my kids. They just sat there and listened to everyone singing and singing. In the middle of the meal, I leaned over to the woman sitting next to me--a ba'alas tshuva and a friend, and said, "Do you ever look around you and think, I wonder what my non-Jewish friends would think of me if they could see me now?" She grinned. "I work with a lot of very hip black women. I think they'd be having a blast."

Chazal say that there are three things that show you what someone is really like--what they're like when they drink, how they deal with money, and what they're like when they're angry. These Israeli kollel guys, when they were drunk, they sang songs to G-d. That's what is inside of them. They sang songs about G-d, and Israel, and Torah. They're all Tzioni, all of them have been in the army. People like that are the ones who make me feel, what are we doing here, and why aren't we making aliyah already?

Anyway. Back to Purim. After a few hours of singing and sugar, I decided it was time to come back to earth. Barak, "I not gonna go home now." But a bit of persuading, and the option of holding a particularly lovely shaloch manos package, and he was in the stroller, tucked in next to his brother. Back in our own kitchen, with the sun heading downward, we talked about Purim. "Is today Purim?"

"Yeah!"

"What did we do today?"

"Eat candy!"

"And what else did we do today?"

"Eat cake! Eat Bamba! Eatta star cupcake!"

"Why did you get to eat candy?"

"'Cause iss Purim!"

"Okay, Barak, one day a year it's Purim. And when it gets dark, Purim's going to be all done. It's going to be dark very soon, so you can have one more thing. And then we're going to sing goodbye Purim, see you next year. Okay?"

"'Kay. C'I havea Bamba please?"

I let him have his Bamba.

"Gotta poop potty."

I put him on the potty, and sat down with Iyyar in the bedroom. And listened to those wonderful toddler monologues, in which Barak holds forth on whatever has happened to him that day. "Iss Purim. Weara fireman hat. Imma say, yeah can eat it! Eatta chocolate! Eatta Bamba, 'kay? 'Kay. I eatta Bamba, eatta cake. Iss Purim! Iss all done Purim. I gonna poop now. [Sound effects redacted.] I pooped! I gonna flush it now!"

And so forth.

Iyyar's asleep now, and Barak is back on the potty, a bit too hyped up on sugar (really? yeah, it surprises me too...) to actually sleep. But he had a wonderful day, and has not cried, flipped out, or thrown up once.

Yet.

Good-bye Purim, see you next year, aye nye nye...

Shaloch manos

The advantages of having an under-three sous-chef: he's free, and when it comes to baking vast quantities of chocolate chip cookies for Purim, he's very, very enthusiastic.

The disadvantage: when allowed to open the brand-new box of baking soda, he is liable to start emptying the entire box into your mixer bowl when you're not looking.

I wouldn't have minded so much if the bowl hadn't already been full of every other ingredient, including all my absurdly expensive imported Israeli chalav yisroel butter...

Is it just me?

If you are a knitter, and you have no time to knit, do you feel strong urges to buy yarn?

I know it's not rational. I mean, a) I have plenty of yarn already and b) I don't have time to knit what I've got. So why buy more? My guess is that it's a way of scratching the knitting itch when I can't actually knit.

Right now I am obsessed with this. And as certain of my friends will tell you, I don't use the word "obsessed" lightly. It is the most beautifully designed and fun-to-knit pattern I've ever seen (forty pages long!!) and I am already plotting future renditions. I finished the neck yesterday and am up to the knitting-in-the-round part of the yoke--the fun, rewarding part that comes after the brain-crunching cables. And I can't do it! Because I have to write! And cook for Shabbos! And make shaloch manos! And things for the Purim seuda!

Aaaaaaaahhhh...

Something new every day.

A little background: Barak has been told many many times that he does not give things to the baby or put things in the baby's crib without asking Imma. He has pretty much absorbed this lesson and will in fact usually ask me before handing anything to Iyyar. Sometimes we make a game of it. "Barak, can you give a crocodile to the baby?" "No! Iss very dangerous!" "Can you give a toy to the baby?" "No! Gotta ask Imma!" "Can you put a toy in the baby's crib?" "No! Gotta ask Imma!" Etc.

So. Friday night, I was setting the table for dinner. Chicken soup (the famous "kitchen soup") was on the menu, so there were soup spoons, forks, and knives. I put a spoon, fork, and knife at my place and at Abba's place. At Barak's, I just put a fork and a spoon. Barak did not like this.

"I needa knife."

"Barak, you don't need a knife. Knives are very dangerous."

"I needa knife! I be very careful." Soulful, earnest, and such big eyes. Hmm. He is usually careful when he knows I am watching...

I considered. Then I looked through my plasticware for the most innocuous plastic knife I could find--being all too aware that even the mildest-mannered knife can, if used carelessly, send one unexpectedly to the emergency room (yeah, remember the borekka incident? Me too.) I found one that looked the closest thing to safe one can find in a knife, and put it carefully and respectfully by Barak's plate.

"Okay, Barak, I gave you a knife. That's for you, but I want you to be very, very careful with it. Knives are dangerous. If I see that you're not being careful, I'm not going to count. I'm just going to take it away, and then I'm not going to give you a knife again. Okay?"

Barak could live with that. "Kay."

I mentioned earlier that his language has gotten a lot better lately. He still, though, has a totally endearing habit of struggling mightily to construct sentences that are little bit beyond him. He'll come out with a phrase, stop, purse his lips, say "hmm," and try again a few times. That's what he did after I gave him his knife. It sounded like this:

"Imma say... hmm. No can't... hmm. Iss very... hmm."

And then,

"No can't putta knife inna baby's crib. Iss very dangerous for the baby."

Standing

Sorry, I know it's been a while

I can't really post, because I have to churn out 1000 words tonight and it's already late. In a nutshell:

1. Iyyar pulled himself up to standing for the first time on Tuesday. He is very very excited about standing. It's hard to put him down in a sitting position--all he wants to do is stand.

2. I have one decent wool skirt that fits me. One. I bought it 60% off from LL Bean a few years ago, and it still wasn't cheap. It is long, warm, lined, comfortable, and flattering. It goes with everything. Verily it is the linchpin of my winter wardrobe--I probably wear it three times a week. While folding laundry this afternoon, I discovered it among the kids' jeans and sweatshirts. It had gone through the washing machine on hot.

3. Today I was vacuuming in Barak's room, and I stuck Iyyar standing up in his crib. When I started vacuuming, his jaw literally dropped. It was probably the most comical expression I have ever seen--baby with mouth hanging open. What is that thing??

4. This afternoon Barak was being very insistent about climbing in and out of the pack and play that Iyyar sleeps in. Finally, I said, "Barak, do you want to sleep in Iyyar's crib tonight?" He did, so I moved the pack and play into Barak's room, and put Iyyar in Barak's crib. It's really time for Barak to graduate from the crib--he'll be three IY"H Pesach--and it's also about time for Iyyar to move out of our room. So far, so good--they're both asleep. What I found amusing was hearing Barak quietly saying, "ah da da da da" while standing in Iyyar's crib, totally a la baby.

5. When I take the kids places in the double jogger, getting in and out of the house is quite a production. I have to bring the stroller into the back hall, but it's so heavy I can't do it without emptying it completely first. So usually I let Barak out, he goes up the back steps while I ferry whatever bags into the kitchen, and then I bring up Iyyar and plunk him somewhere, and then I go back down to get the stroller. A couple days ago we were coming in like that and Iyyar was very, very annoyed--he is never a big fan of the stroller and he'd really had it at that point. When I sat him down on the floor and ran back out for the stroller he started to shriek. I called back, "Barak, can you smile at the baby and make him happy please?" Behind me, I heard, "Hi, baby! Happy baby, kay? Gonna be happy, baby!" By the time I got back inside, Iyyar was positively chortling. If only everything in life were that easy...

6. On Monday Barak's language took a sudden and noticeable leap. Longer sentences, more complex, and just more... informative. He came home from school with a bruise on his forehead, and when I asked him where it came from he told me. "I jumped off the bench and I hit my head. Morah Freedman say no no, you can't do that. No can't jump off the bench." I asked him if he was going to do it again and he said, earnestly, with that rising-and-falling toddler tone, "NoooOOOoo." Not until he sees the bench again, anyway...

7. The work-at-home thing has turned into a saga. I'm still not convinced it will ever really happen, but for now the effective date is supposed to be mid-April. Stay tuned.

Scattered

The thing about working from home (NOT THAT I AM COMPLAINING) is that you do still have to work. It amazes me no end the number of people who have said, when they find out that I work at home, "wow! so you don't need a babysitter!" Like I could chase an almost-three-year-old and look after a nine-month-old and keep them both clean, calm, fed and happy all day--a feat in and of itself--while writing rousing and stirring pieces of inspirational (and deathless--let's not forget deathless) prose. On deadline. I mean, what are these people thinking? And some of them are even parents. Truly.

Because of the weather I did not even try to take Barak to playgroup today. I didn't leave the house at all, and just tried to have a nice, happy, kid-centric day. I attempted to clean, and I'm sure that the house looks better than it would have if I hadn't spend so much time cleaning, but it doesn't look anything approaching clean right now. And it's almost ten, and I haven't even thought about Shabbos, despite the fact that tomorrow I'm working a full day in the office. (That's bad, just in case you didn't know.) I need to get at least something written tonight, and what am I doing. Yup yup. I'm writing a blog post.

No, to those of you who asked, I have no idea what "assessing my workspace" entails. I know that I was asked whether I had a separate workspace, and whether I would have my children home while I worked. I think they are going to be putting in a second phone line for me, or at least that was mentioned at some point (a year ago...) I hope someone tells me what they're looking for before anyone actually comes out here. And I hope I can schedule the visit for a time that my babysitter can whisk the children off to the library...

A couple of things that bear mentioning....

Iyyar is teetering on the brink of locomotion. That wonderful baby phase where they sit and play happily and independently but can't yet get into mischief is nearing its end; he can, if he's trying to get to a toy (or dangerous implement) while sitting, lunge over and wind up on all fours. He doesn't yet realize the potential utility of this position, though. He can creep on his stomach and do a 360 like that, and move a good couple of feet before he gets annoyed and starts to cry. He can stand very well if he's holding onto something, can pull up easily on my hands, and is a hairsbreadth away from pulling up on his own--right now he can get up to his knees but that's it. And yesterday, for the first time, he got into a sitting position from his stomach. I don't think he really realizes he can do it though.

In general, Iyyar is chubby, cheerful, and talkative. He has an expansive vocabulary of consonants and vowels, but whenever he has something serious to communicate he stays with the tried-and-true. Ah da da da da, Imma. No, really, I'm serious! Da da da! Ah da, da da da, da da. And the da you rode in on, too. He is sleeping much better, though still tries to sneak in a stealth nurse sometimes at around 3 am. If I'm tired enough not to notice the time, he gets his nurse; if I see that it's between the hours of midnight and 5 am and the milk bar is closed, he gets Grumpy Man with Beard.

Today, he was not so happy. He's had a low-grade fever off and on since Monday. Every pediatrician I've ever talked to says definitively that there is no connection between teething and fevers; I've never met a mother who believed it. He got a tooth on Friday and is working up three more. The one that came in was a top tooth, but not one of the two front teeth--it's one of the ones just to the side. He looks pretty funny. He was miserable this morning, and just wanted to nurse, snuggle, and sleep. Some Tylenol helped, and even after that wore off he was still feeling better. I made butternut squash soup for dinner, and he ate mine for me--a good sign.

Today's Barakisms were pretty good. We baked bread this morning--bread of the Activity with Toddler ilk, not the I Care What It Tastes Like variety. It turned out surprisingly good, despite the lack of sprinkles. (Only for Shabbos.) When I was about to put it in the oven, Barak was too close and I shooed him to the other side of the kitchen, as I do about fifty times a day. "Barak, go to the other side of the kitchen, please. The oven's hot."

"Stove hot. No can't touch it!"

"Right, you don't touch the stove."

"Only Imma Barak touch it stove."

"No, sweetie, only Imma touches the stove."

"No Abba touch it stove."

"Well, no, he doesn't really touch the stove, you're right."

"Abba's gonna touch it stove when he's bigger."

Barak, as you may have noticed, still has some trouble with pronouns. His usual way of asking me to him him is pleading "Imma help you!" If he wants to sit in my lap, he says, "Imma sit in my lap please!"It makes sense--he's repeating the phrases I use. Today, I was sitting in the rocker in his room, holding an unhappy Iyyar on my lap. "Imma sit in my lap please!"

"Sure, you can sit in my lap."

"Open it please!"

"What?"

"Open it sit in my lap!"

I had no idea what he wanted. He repeated himself a few times, and then, with another "Open it!" pulled one of my arms away from the baby, climbed into my lap, and wrapped my arm around himself. Open up your lap, please, and let me in.

All together, now: ohhhhh.

Stunned

The December before last--we're talking December 2005, when I was barely in my second trimester with Iyyar--I had a talk with my boss about working from home. She put in a request to have me moved offsite, for a variety of reasons that boiled down to "Uberimma can work more, better, and faster if she's home than she can here."

The weeks and months went merrily by--bedrest, baby, maternity leave. No word from the Man Upstairs. A week before my leave ended, as you may recall, the request was denied. I decided to pull a dangerous bluff and said I'd quit if I had to work in the office for all of my scheduled hours (22.5 a week, which boils down to 6 hours a day out of the house and away from my kids). My boss convinced the Man Upstairs to reconsider, and I was told I could have three days a week in the office, two at home, for three months. Iyyar's now nine and a half months old, so that request has now been extended twice.

Earlier this week, in light of all the extra hours I've been working for some very high-maintenance clients, my boss asked me if I would consider going from 3/5 time (22.5 hours) to 4/5 time (30 hours). More benefits paid, better benefits, and obviously more money. (I get paid straight for extra hours now, but it doesn't affect my standing so far as my benefits.) I said no, I couldn't. I told her I had thirty hours in a week that I could devote to my job, and I felt that that was all I could handle. 13.5 hours in the office, 4.5 commuting, and 12 at home is how it currently breaks down. I already have no time to myself and not nearly enough to sleep--more would not be manageable. We talked about the basic problem we are having, which is that we have some high-need clients who will be around for a while, and there is not really anyone else who can do the bulk of the work they will be needing. We're trying to break in a new freelancer, but there's a limit to what can really be offloaded. It's down to me, and there's more work than I can do in the time I have.

What happened today? (Nothing bad, don't worry. I didn't get fired.)

I went into the office, worked my regular day, had a couple of chats with my boss about various things (not the above issue), and came home. Played with the kids, had a nice afternoon, the usual. Around 4:30 I did my regular almost-end-of-the-workday email check, to see if there were any fires to put out. And I had a three-sentence email from my boss saying that my request to telecommute had been approved, the details were being discussed, I should still plan to come in on Friday, and someone would be coming out to my house to assess my workspace in the next couple of weeks.

Whoa.

I mean, this is great, obviously. I don't think it means that I'm now committed to formally increase my hours, or even that it's necessarily expected.

I think I'm just too shocked to be excited.

CSY.5

I know what you're thinking--what happened to CSY.4? (What, you weren't keeping track? Oh, never mind.) I made them and sent them to Grandma E a few weeks ago, and never got around to taking a picture. They were gorgeous--trust me--and she says they fit. Moving on:

Here is the pair I made for my MIL. The weird positioning is hiding the fact that I haven't grafted the toe yet. I have decided that I am a toe-up-sock kind of girl; I don't know, I just get bored knitting them top down. So sue me.

The socks:
The yarn is Meilenweit. You probably can't tell from the pictures (I know, I know, my pictures stink, I'm sorry) but there is a ribbed leg and foot, square garter-stitch heel, and expanded toe section. Once the toe gets grafted I'll try to get them in the mail, along with all the other packages I owe people.

Right now I am in the middle of a pair of socks out of Lorna's Laces (literally in the middle--I just grafted off sock #1) and have realized that as much as those Regia/Meilenweit/Opal/Fortissima printed yarns are fun to knit with, I really prefer 100% wool sock yarn. After a few washes I find that the ones with 20% nylon get a sort of plasticky look. It's something about the way they pick up the light.

Moving on...

We went on a shabbaton with MHH's school this weekend. It was fun, but exhausting. The boys were great on the car ride there (three hours) even though Iyyar left with two teeth and arrived with three. On the way back, though, there was much screaming. And whe, having gotten everyone tucked into bed and asleep, I foolishly checked my work email at 12:15 am, I discovered that Head Honcho Client Guy needed a speech in less than 36 hours that had not been written. For an important event hosted by, shall we say, a fairly significant head of state. I knew about the event, but had been misinformed about the venue, and thought that it was a week later (as had everyone else, it seemed--how this happened I do not know). I had missed the frantic emails by not being home on Friday, and my cell phone battery had mysteriously died in the car. So I got to crank out 1600 words between 12:15 am and 5 am.

I'm pretty tired now. I'm sure there are cute kid things to blog about, but I can't think of any. Oh. Wait. There was one. Barak pooped in the potty, pointed at it and said, "Issa snake! Issa poop snake!"

Indeed.

Job satisfaction

So, remember my little hair-pulling episode at work a couple of weeks ago? The one where my AV got sabotaged by passive-aggressive PR nutcases?

Yeah, so.

The client involved did, I am told, a relatively spectacular job on his speech. Now, this is someone who is very, very low-key. In ordinary conversation he does not enunciate and is hard to understand. He mumbles a lot and trails off at the end of his sentences. He doesn't have any sense of drama or pacing to speak of and cannot tell a joke. At the first run-through, he sounded like he was giving a play-by-play of a very unfortunate football game. Public speaking: not his strong point. But he's very, very smart, works hard, and has an incredible memory. He was a delight to coach and, when I complimented him on how well he'd done, looked me in the eye and said, "I just did what you told me. " Have I mentioned he's also very nice?

So, anyway. Today my boss came up to me at work and told me that the head of PR had come up to her and congratulated her on--get this--"turning a forensic accountant into a world-class speaker."

Grin grin.

(I should point out here, in fairness, that I myself am an atrocious public speaker. I talk too fast, I get nervous, my throat closes up and I invariably lose my voice afterward. I know what should happen in theory, but can't put it into practice to save my life.)

Motherhood is full of surprises, part 8

1. I may have mentioned that Barak's diet has, shall we say, telescoped alarmingly in recent weeks. As of last Monday the only acceptable food items in his lunchbag or on his plate, so far as he was concerned, were--let's see--string cheese, Triscuits, bananas, raisins, milk, orange or apple juice, granola, yogurt, cereal, challah, noodles and cheese (the famous "doodles cheese"), and, of course, cookies/ice cream/sugar in any other direct delivery system. While the bulk of his diet was composed of perfectly healthful items, it was not, as you might notice, particularly well-rounded. It didn't get that limited overnight--it had been about a year of items gradually falling off the accepted list and being scorned with a summary "I don't want it. Someping else please."

So, being full of bright ideas, I decided to resort to drastic measures. As of last Monday, I decided to strike all Approved Food Items from his diet. He could have any someping else he wanted as long as it wasn't string cheese, Triscuits, bananas, raisins, etc. I bought carrot juice and apples and cucumbers and veggie baloney--all recently acceptable--and dropped the bomb.
Remember when I decided I was going to toilet train Barak by taking the diapers away with a six-week-old baby in the house? Remember that brilliant idea?

Well, this went much much better.

Before I left for work I packed him a lunchbag of all kinds of things in containers. Our babysitter (babysitter, fabulous) cheerfully offered the breakfast and lunchtime buffet to withering scorn. When I came home, he thought there would be relief. Nope. His most winning requests for cheerios, granola, yogurt and crackers were all denied.

But by dinnertime, well, he just got hungry. So he ate the cucumbers.

And then he ate the tomatoes. That was last Monday.

You will not guess what he ate for dinner tonight. No, guess.

Herb linguini with pesto. I'm serious. He did. And half a cucumber, which he asked for, and the totally wrong kind of crackers. On Shabbos he ate chicken soup and even played earnestly with his cholent. He's eating apples. And cheese that isn't stringy. And things with sauces on them. He isn't suddenly eating anything--he is still a toddler, after all, and those bean burritoes I made last night just weren't going to fly--but, well. Wow.

Weird.

2. Further to the "things we didn't really think were going to work," Iyyar slept more or less through the night last night. Yeah. Really. He did. And that's not just sleep-deprived hallucinatory imagining, either--he slept from around 8 till 4 am, then nursed and slept again till 9.

Nine!

What happened? Two nights of Abba fielding the baby from midnight till six, that's what happened. Iyyar decided that getting cuddled by a grumpy and impatient man with a beard was not worth waking up for.

So, he sleeps. And wakes up to an awful lot of milk. I know that in a few days my supply will adjust but right now he is not used to having all this milk spraying into his mouth, and he tries to get all of it. Even though it doesn't fit. And he throws up afterwards. This happened to me tonight, after Iyyar's bedtime nurse. He nursed away happily for a while, looked up at me with a big grin, opened his mouth, and then all of a sudden I was very, very warm. In a smelly, sour-milk-and-curdled-banana kind of a way.

What does this make you think of? Roman banquets? Yeah, me too.

3. In addition to sleeping, Iyyar is now eating food fairly regularly. Cheerios have become more acceptable, but mostly I just put whatever I'm eating in a bowl and go after it with the immersion blender. Last night he had zucchini and yellow squash soup and brown rice. And plain full-fat yogurt, unsweetened. I wish I'd taken pictures of the faces.

4. Since it is really really cold here right now (I'm not giving away my location, it's cold pretty much everywhere that isn't LA) I haven't taken Barak to playgroup in a while. Today was a work-at-home day and I had both boys here, which ordinarily would have meant an hour or two of writing while Barak napped, regular email checks, and serious writing after bedtime. But at 10 am the phone rang, and it was the Head Honcho Client Guy's secretary. He wanted to talk about speeches. Uh-oh.

I had a little talk with Barak. Did he want Imma to go to work? No. Did he like Imma to go to work or stay home. Stay home! Well, Imma could either go to work or talk to work on the phone. What should she do? Talk on the phone. Okay, so, that means that you're going to need to play with toys in your crib for a little while, okay? You don't have to go night-night, and you're not getting a time out. I just want you to play quietly with toys. Which toys would you like? He picked out a few puzzles, and I put him in his crib with the light on, door open, and curtains open. Not only did he not object, but he played in there quietly for forty-five minutes--the entire length of my conversation with this guy.

Iyyar, fortunately, had been napping all this time, and woke up just as I went to get Barak after I got off the phone. Barak was looking perfectly content. "I didn't getta time out. I just play in there."

5. While Iyyar was having nap #2 of the day I decided to clean out my spices, and then my whole big food cupboard. I took everything out, washed all the jars, consolidated spices, wiped down the shelves, etc. Barak thought this was lots of fun. Especially the pepper grinder, which, it transpires, he can dissassemble and reassemble. Not actually with the peppercorns intact, but, well, nobody's perfect.

grumble

When I get stressed out and cranky, I have a lot of not-so-savory impulses, like being short with my kids and getting mad at my husband and eating all the ice cream in the freezer. When this happens, I try very hard and very consciously not to get mad (the ice cream, forget it, the ice cream I just eat). I count to ten a lot. I breathe deeply. I stop and say to myself, okay, what's really more important right now--getting the dishwasher emptied or letting Barak help you? What's more important, a dishwasher that is empty Right Now or a child who knows that you want and value his help? One, two, three, four, five...

And when I get stressed out and cranky, my tolerance for disorder of any kind plummets. I do not want dishes in the sink. I do not want toys in my bed or laundry on the floor or an apple core on the kitchen table or shoes in the back hall right where I will trip over them when I come in and am holding the baby and can't see the floor. No no no. I want tidy.

We had a guest last week, a friend of my family--one of the two links I have left to my biological past. (The other one is 84 years old and in Hungary.) She's nice, she likes us, she's known me since I was seven, and when she's in town she makes a point of stopping by. I like seeing her. My husband likes her too, but every time he finds out she's coming he groans a little because he knows that after she leaves I'll get all sad and morose about the whole no-family business. And I say, no I won't! This time I won't, really!

Um. Yeah. So.

Did I mention I like the house tidy? Last week I cleaned and cleaned before she came, and then after she left I cleaned some more, and on Thursday night I went to bed with the food all made and the house SPOTLESS. It was a very nice way to go into Shabbos, but of course 25 hours later it was all gone.

Speaking of all gone, there was a whole tub of ice cream in the freezer just a couple of days ago. Haagen Dazs Caramel Cone. It vanished sometime around Shabbos afternoon. Yes, folks, I married a guy who keeps three hours and eats chalav stam. With all my worrying about my boys not getting shidduchim because I wear purple shoes, they should be in demand just because of that.

Okay, so, time for the good news. The good news is that we have been invited to visit friends for all of Pesach. Did you catch that? All of Pesach. Me, I do not need to make Pesach this year, and this, my friends, this is a mighty relief. We will be staying with friends with more than three times as many kids as we have, and in a home where we don't have to worry about what Barak breaks because, as my friend told me, "Anything that can break around here, my kids have already broken." I don't have the vacation for leaving town that long, but I am working so much overtime right now that I can take the time unpaid without any end financial hit, and my boss is okay with that. Well worth it. Right now I am trying to figure out the logistics of who we will and won't manage to see, and whether we can visit other friends for the last days, including Grandma E, without making ourselves insane with the shlepping of car seats and luggage and strollers and children through Penn Station.

So, something to look forward to.

In the meantime, I am going out grocery shopping with a friend, and this is the social high point of my week, so excuse me while I go put on makeup (ha) and find my shoes (yeah, that could be a good idea, it's cold out). I need to replace the ice cream in the freezer.

Four totally unrelated things

1. First the good part. Iyyar took his first ride in the top of a shopping cart this morning. He was favorably impressed by the experience.

2. This article, by the AP... ah, where to even begin? With this?

"Notably, it says the U.S. is one of only five countries out of 173 in the survey that does not guarantee some form of paid maternity leave; the others are Lesotho, Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea."

Or this gem, at the end?

"Traditionally, many conservatives have opposed moves for paid family leave, but there are signs of some shifts. A prominent anti-abortion leader, the Rev. Paul Schenck of the National Pro-Life Action Center, recently said he would support paid maternity leave on the premise that it might dissuade some pregnant women from having abortions."

Ya think?

3. That was just depressing and enraging because of the idiocy. This report on anti-Semitism in England--it's just depressing. And if you look at the full report, you'll see that most of the perpetrators aren't Arabs. They're white. And this is England, not mainland Europe, which traditionally and currently is much worse. When you can't go daven without having to think about this, well... it's not going to be so good for your kavanna.

4. All of which might make us remember why this is a good thing. And wonder what people like this think will happen if they get what they're asking for.

What Iyyar ate for dinner tonight

A whole wheat zucchini-cheese pancake. An entire pancake.

I think we have effectively bypassed the baby food phase here.

I'll probably regret this

But I can't resist.

This is what Iyyar thinks of Cheerios.

Waving!

Most nights, when I put Iyyar to bed, I take him into the kitchen or wherever Abba is (and Barak, if he's still up) to say goodnight. I wave his hand at everyone and say, "night-night!" And Abba and Barak wave back, and I go off to our room to put Iyyar to bed.

Tonight, Barak was already in bed and Abba was in the kitchen grading papers. I held Iyyar's hand and waved it at Abba. "Night-night, Abba!"

Abba waved back. "Night-night, Iyyar!"

I let go of Iyyar's hand and turned to go. And Iyyar waved again!

And then Abba waved. And then Iyyar waved. And then Abba, and then Iyyar. And then Iyyar started giggling wildly, because it was all just so funny, and started waving with both hands.

Eight months, almost nine. Getting so big...

Every time Barak comes out with something cute and I think "I have to remember that one," it seems that five minutes later I've forgotten it.

Sigh.

Things I want to remember about today:

1. Iyyar ate cholent again. He saw the cholent and remembered the cholent and plotzed for the cholent and I fed him cholent. This time I thought ahead and made it heavy on the barley, light on the beans.

2. Last night Barak went to sleep in his "big" (toddler mattress on floor) bed. It lasted until 1 am, when I heard a suspicious noise, went to investigate, and found him shuffling down the hall in his red feetie pajamas, blankies slung over his shoulder and a wet diaper in the other hand (?), headed toward the living room. I think he was sleepwalking, or maybe he was just barely awake. It took quite a while to get him settled again, and by the time I had Iyyar had woken up to nurse again. Iyyar is back on the nurse-every-three-hours schedule--usually around 10, 1, 4, and 7. I don't mind waking up at 1 and 7 but that 4 am nurse is killing me. Sometimes he skips it, so I'm hoping it's on its way out. And yes, I could theoretically let him cry, but if I'm lying right there next to him (there's nowhere else to put him) I'm not going to get any more sleep that way.

3. Tonight, toward the end of Shabbos, I was in the bedroom nursing the baby and Barak was with his Abba in the living room. I hadn't heard my husband calling me, and then I heard, "Are you okay?" I said I was. Next thing I knew, Barak was in my room, asking me with elaborate concern, "Are you okay, Imma? Are you okay?"

4. Barak has figured out how to open and close the lock on the back door. Uh-oh.

5. Yesterday I put away all of Iyyar's 12-month clothes and broke out Barak's old 12-18 month box. It is not too big for Iyyar at all. Wild. Barak was still wearing his 6-9 month stuff at this age (8.5 months).

6. Have I mentioned Iyyar's mohawk? Iyyar has a ridiculous mohawk. He only has hair on the top of his head and it sticks straight up. We call him Mr. I.

7. Today we went over to friends' to play a little in the afternoon. Sometimes, when I walk up stairs (they live on the third floor) I count the stairs with Barak. Today, he counted for me, but using the aleph beis. "Aleph, beis, shin, gimel, daled, tof..."

8. Has anyone else seen the Gadi Pollock aleph-beis book? It's fabulous. Beautiful, and fabulous. Barak is too little to really appreciate it but he already likes looking at it.

9. I just melted a whole lot of plastic dishes. I shoved my pareve stuff in the oven on Shabbos to wash later, and forgot about it when I turned it on to preheat. When the smoke tateckter started going beep beep, I remembered.

10. Iyyar got his first Cheerios on Friday. He thought they were... interesting. He prefers cholent.

Work

And lots of it. So many meetings in the office I have no time to write. So it's 8 pm, the kids are in bed and ostensibly asleep, and I am about to pound out some deathless prose.

The good news is that I've been in the office more than my post-leave contract states, so my boss (did I mention she rocks?) told me to work at home on Friday. Working at home on Friday means a much easier entry into Shabbos, so I'm grateful for that.

Things will get much easier after this week--we have two major crunch times and this is one of them. All the speeches are about to get given, and then we'll have a little quiet before things start to gear up for the next event, which isn't until early fall.

Okay. Prose, deathless, coming up. Think deathless thoughts, please.

Updates

1. I don't know what's up with the RSS feed. Every day I get another couple of emails telling me it's not working. I also get another couple of emails from people who can't sign in despite multiple invites (and the difficulties are not from people prone to computer issues). Anybody have any idea what's up with that?

2. The Cholent Aftermath Diaper was every bit as foul as one might expect. Thanks for asking. Honestly it makes sense that Iyyar likes the kind of food I do--he gets tastes of it in the milk, so it's more familiar than, say, rice cereal, which I haven't eaten for going on thirty-two years now.

3. Iyyar is back to wanting to nurse every three hours all night. It is really difficult to talk him out of it when I'm in the room. Ergo, he's in his crib screaming and I'm blogging at this ungodly hour and hoping he'll go back to sleep, which he usually does after a few minutes. It's not a major-distress-nobody-loves-me scream, it's a what is WRONG with you I want to NURSE snf I am TICKED kind of a scream, so I don't feel too terrible.

4. We are having guest after guest after guest for the next few weeks. And work has never ever ever been so busy, because of all the rehearsals I've been doing and the meetings I've been in and the new client I've been working with who is Japanese and can't sight-read English. I have to run through every speech with him, multiple times, teaching him to pronounce each word. Today our meeting ran three hours, hard on the heels of another meeting than had run over, and I never got to pump at all all day. Ow. Ow ow ow ow ow.

5. I gave both boys a bath together last night for the first time. General hilarity all around. Lots of splashing and laughing--very cute. For once in my life the camera was in the right place at the right time and we got a fuzzy little video clip. I need to get a better camera, one that takes movies you can see and hear.

6. I hear quiet, so I'm going back to bed now. Hope you never left yours. Good night.

Self-pity update

Okay, so my husband (who went to maariv at the shul where we were supposed to have gone to the aforementioned concert and dinner fundraiser) came home with two CDs and two pieces of yummy dessert wrapped up in a napkin. So I'm eating what I would have eaten while listening to the music I would have gotten to listen to, in my comfy clothes at home. With a can of diet coke.

Can't complain too much, I guess.

Blame the cat

We were supposed to have a Date tonight, me and my husband. The last time we had a Date was March 2, 2004, so this was fairly big news. And it was going to be a good date. Dinner and a concert. A good concert. We even had tickets. We even paid for the tickets.

Hmm, you say, she's apparently sitting at her computer. Not much of a Date, was it?

Yeah, well. We couldn't get a sitter.

Not that I didn't try. I called at least fifteen girls, most of whom also have sisters. No dice.

Do you know what I think it is? I think it's the cat. In fact for some of them I know it's the cat. The cat--the little nine-pound scared-of-her-own-tail cat--freaks these little bais yaakov girls right the heck out. I have had babysitters tell me directly that they didn't know I had a cat and they couldn't come back because of the cat. Even if the cat was locked in a room. Because she might, I don't know, claw it down or something.

Those of you who have met our cat will know how entertaining this is. Those of you who have been in our house dozens of times and never seen any sign of the cat but the food and water bowls and litterbox will find it even more entertaining.

Me, right now, I'm not entertained. I want to be listening to music.

Sigh.

Guess I'd better go write that speech now. Which has to be written without R's or L's, because the person I'm writing for is Japanese and can't pronounce them...

Eight months going on eighty

Have I mentioned Iyyar's feelings about solid food?

Specifically, his one feeling about solid food, which can be summarized even more concisely in three letters, those being "Feh!"

He doesn't like food. He doesn't like rice cereal, or mashed bananas, or mashed avocadoes, or baby food, or any of that. He wants to nurse. A lot. All the time. To the exclusion of all else.

But he's closing in on nine months, and we're getting to the point where there just isn't enough on tap to keep him happy. He's waking up more at night to nurse, and going through much more stored milk on the mornings I work than I can pump. (Yes, I've got that freezer stash, but it isn't going to last forever.) He needs another source of calories. So I've been trying.

I mentioned a while back that he did show a very great interest in the vegetables in my chicken soup. Excellent, I thought--he's eating vegetables, even if chicken soup isn't the standard first food. And I think I had a good laugh at my little Ashkenazi baby.

Yeah, well. It gets better.

Today we were invited out for Shabbos lunch. Iyyar wanted to nurse as soon as we got there, so he nursed through the gefilte fish course (not at the table, obviously--I repaired to the guest room). Then we went back to the table and the cholent came out.

He plotzed for it. It was ridiculous. He WANTED MY CHOLENT. What could I do? I gave him some, trying to stick to the barley part and mashing the occasional kidney bean (don't tell me what his diaper is going to look like tomorrow, I can imagine it vividly enough on my own). He ate everything I had on my plate (which wasn't much) and then another entire ladleful. Every time I decided he'd had enough, he disagreed. At the top of his very able lungs.

He's not a baby. He's somebody's Galicianer Zaide, reincarnate--smaller, cuter, equally toothless, and with the same taste in food.

Tomorrow for breakfast: matjes herring.

This is why I made this blog private

So, let me tell you about my job.

I am a speechwriter. When people ask me how to become a speechwriter, I tell them very honestly that I have no idea. I sort of fell into it myself, after about ten years of working as a writer with occasional bouts of freelance book editing (not my favorite, but I can do it and it paid the bills in grad school). In general you could categorize the field I've been working in as nonprofit and corporate communications; I write speeches and other material for CEOs, politicians, folks like that. Very, very rarely is my own name publicly associated in any way with the things I write.

It suits me. I am congenitally averse to being in the spotlight; I am congenitally averse to any kind of conflict. I like to just be left alone to just write--all I ask is to stay behind the scenes, wear what I want, and be as invisible as possible. Ghostwriting is great for that. The flip side of it, of course, is that in a way my job is extremely high-profile; every so often I'll see something quoted in the Times or wherever and it'll be something I wrote, with someone else's name cited as the source. When I meet with one of my current clients, he is wont to grumble about this. "Look at that," he'll say, gesturing irritably at a pile of clippings. "They all cite Plony ben Plony. They don't know that it's all pure Uberimma." If he really minds, I don't think he minds much; I think it's just his way of paying me a compliment. He's a nice guy.

Anyway, so, that's background for what happened yesterday.

The division I work in at my place of employment is, naturally enough, Communications. There is also a PR division, which deals with stage managing major meetings, training sessions, press conferences, publicity events, etc. Those folks, they are High Stress. We in Communications try to make their lives as easy as possible and stay away as much as possible, mostly because we like to keep our heads attached to our necks. With me so far? Good.

I have one client who is not a born speaker. In a few days, he's going to give a public presentation that will probably determine the rest of his career. He's nervous. I wrote his speeches for this event a few months ago, and we've talked about them since a few times. He asked me if we could get together and practice before the event. He'd be rehearsing on site, but didn't think that would be enough. I said sure, and reserved a room, a teleprompter, and an AV guy to come run the prompter and film it.

Oh, I don't feel like going through the whole saga. Let's fast forward a little, noting in passing that someone from PR, when I called to let her know about the practice session and ask for the teleprompter text, wanted to come along. I said I didn't think it was necessary or a good idea; he was already tense, and I thought he needed some time to get used to the pacing of the speech without an audience. She insisted. How about coming in halfway through? I suggested. No, she wanted to be there for the whole thing. And her assistant too. Well, I wasn't going to fight over it. "I'm not going to tell you you can't come, but I really don't think you need to," I said. It's not like those guys don't have enough going on already, and remember, they were going to have all their regular rehearsal time onsite in addition.

So, yesterday morning. I went to meet the client and we headed down to the practice room, where, as you may recall, there should have been a teleprompter, a video setup, and a camera guy. Oh, and the basics: there should have been an unlocked door. There were none of the above, and there I was with Important Client, Important Client's Assistant, my notebook, and nothing else. And there were the folks from PR, looking baffled. "The door's locked." Indeed it was.

I ran for a custodian--ran, literally, once I was out of sight--and within five minutes had everyone inside. Inside the dark room, where there was NO AV EQUIPMENT. No prompter. No camera guy. Nothing. Now, the AV person is reliable, and I've confirmed the date and equipment with him. What gives?

Fortunately I had the speech on paper--PAPER!!--and passed out copies. He did a run through off the paper version, and I did some coaching. Now I might note in passing that I was getting some extremely negative vibes off the Events people. They were ignoring me, and running the rehearsal as though they'd called it. Very dismissive body language--backs to me, etc. Oh, well, whatever--I don't get into that stuff. I gave him my feedback, which was, as often as not, disagreed with by the PR people, who then started arguing with me over my feedback. Folks, you DO NOT DO THAT in a situation like this. It's pass nisht. You don't. If you disagree, you state your opinion, explain your reasoning, and let the speaker do what he/she will. I tried my best, saying, "Okay, I think Plony's heard both sides of that, so moving down three paragraphs to the line beginning..." Ugh. Ten minutes into his second run-through, in rolled the AV cart, pushed by the camera guy. PR person #2 went up to him and apparently told him to leave, which he did. You can't go setting up AV at that point anyway.

After an hour and a half, he seemed more confident, though said something like "another 22 tries and I'll have it down!" at the end. I went back up to my office, and stopped by my supervisors to say, "Man, those PR people are over the edge."

"I hear you ruffled some feathers," she said.

Huh??

Turned out she'd just had some irate phone calls from PR.

Do you know what happened? The PR people didn't like that I was having my own rehearsal. Despite the fact that, you know, THE CLIENT REQUESTED IT AND WE DO THIS ALL THE TIME BECAUSE HELLO, I WRITE THE SPEECHES! [To be fair, it has been a while since we have had such a request, because we have had a run of confident speakers. But it's definitely done.] Did anyone from PR say this? No. What did they do? They chose not send the text to the AV people until twenty minutes before the first-thing-Monday-morning rehearsal, because they did not want me to have a prompter. Without telling me. This effectively also cancelled the video setup, because the AV guy was frantically loading the speech onto the prompter instead of a) setting up the camera or b) calling me to say he'd be late. They did not realize that the AV guy was the one who was supposed to unlock the auditorium, and the AV guy, thinking (now why would he think this?) that someone had been communicating with me, just came in late with all the stuff. I thought, sitting there, that he'd gotten the dates wrong, and after the rehearsal went down to talk to him. Nope. He knew exactly when it was. But he had gotten the text at 8:40 am.

So yeah, the PR people were so ticked with my chutzpah at having a rehearsal that did not involve them, they actually sabotaged the rehearsal with the person who, at this point, is probably our single biggest client.

The kids are fine, B"H. Today's best Barak line, referring to a new pair of 3T pants that are slightly too big: "My pants are falling down!" Iyyar has spent the day chewing on a small stuffed stingray. It's Shabbos tomorrow, and I'm really looking forward to that.

But I just needed to get this little tale off my chest.

Iyyar

Grandma E emailed me the other day and asked how Iyyar was doing. She mentioned that he doesn't get much press on the blog, and she was right.

Well, B"H, Iyyar is doing fine. He is smiley and chunky and has a very definite mohawk, especially when his hair has just been washed. He's still got the dimples and when he gets excited and doesn't know what to do with himself, still jams as much hand as possible into his mouth. If you pick him up and lift him up over your head, he does his signature openmouthed grin, and you'd better watch out below because there's usually some drool on the way down.

The most remarkable thing about him right now, honestly, is the sleeping. At bedtime--around sevenish--he nurses a lot and then I put him in his crib (the pack and play, in our room), somewhere between "sleepy but awake" and "absolutely wide awake, giggling and playing." I come back twenty minutes later and he's snoring, and there's usually no crying in between. When I contrast this to how he was just three months ago--or how Barak was just last night--it's kind of unbelievable. But there we go. Of course, he does still wake up to nurse every three hours all night long, but we're working on that one.

Favorite activity right now is sitting in front of the rubbermaid box of baby toys. He'll pull them out, one at a time, to suck on and bang; when he's done, he'll drop them and go for the next one. Eventually, the box will be empty, and he'll be up to his ears in dropped toys. At this point, he looks at the empty box, looks at me, and cries, because Imma, there's no more toys in the box! Like a good Imma, I put all the toys back in the box and he's happy again.

The baby saucer is on its way out, unless Barak is doing something interesting that Iyyar can watch. (This is making it notably more difficult to cook dinner.) Weight-wise, he is on the outer limits of what I can handle in the sling; I still carry him in it, but it won't be long. He's totally out of all his 9-month clothes and most of his 12-month outfits are getting kind of short in the leg; the 12-18 month things are still pretty big on him though. He loves to be tickled and is very, very giggly.

Oh, and he wakes up every night, like clockwork, at 10 pm for a snack. And funnily enough, that's him now.

The World According to Iyyar

Things That Are Good To Put In My Mouth

1. Toys, any
2. Pluggies, preferably Barak's old ones but the ones Imma bought just for me will do in a pinch
3. Imma's necklace (and it doesn't matter when she drops it under her sweater, I KNOW IT'S IN THERE SOMEWHERE)
4. Socks (sooo tasty)
5. Shoes, mine and Barak's
6. Plastic bags (one of these days she'll let me taste one)
7. Yarn (if only she'd let me get to that big basket of pretty scraps... I'd better learn to crawl)
8. Bibs
9. Anything Imma or Barak is holding too close to me
10. The obvious [if I write the word "breast" on this blog Abba will get embarassed. Oops.]

Things That Are Not Good To Put In My Mouth, Or That Are Fine To Have In There But Only Temporarily

1. Rice cereal
2. Bananas
3. Avocados
4. Baby food of any description
5. Anything at all that is coming toward me on a spoon.

And because we haven't had a picture of Barak in a while...

Barak, enjoying our friends' backyard. That's the dog's pull toy in his hand. He never got as far as trying it out--28-lb toddler vs. 80-lb dog probably wouldn't have been the best idea anyway.

5 x 25=1

Five posts, twenty-five readers. One comment.

One? Just one?

Hi, Wendy! I still haven't mailed your yarn. It's on the floor, right there, looking at me. Hmm. If I have enough stamps I can send it out with the carrier pickup that's coming tomorrow...

In other news... Barak pooped on the potty today, Iyyar put himself to sleep, MHH (that's Meyn Heilige Husband for the one who asked) is out doing... whatever he does on Monday nights, and I have to write the first of FIVE video scripts that have to be done by March "at the latest." Yeah, on top of about, oh, a lot of speeches.

Oh, and Barak is "sleeping" on his big boy bed, not his crib. Which means that when I hear suspicious noises coming from elsewhere in the apartment, there's probably a reason to be suspicious.

Okay. The hour is about to strike, and I want to get in three hours tonight, so off I go.

This has got to be some kind of record

Five posts in one day.

I've been getting a bunch of emails from people telling me they couldn't log in with their invite. I think the problem was that I was trying to leave the blog public for a few days, but in order to send invites when people asked for them I had to make the blog private, send the invite, and reopen the blog. So if you happened to be clicking on your invite while it was public, I think it didn't work. What I should have done, of course, was just keep a list of who'd asked and send them all at once, but that would have required... um, yeah, well, that would have been the smartest thing, really.

Anyway, I just resent invites to everyone who had one but didn't respond. Apologies to those of you who didn't respond to your invite because you didn't want one.

One more Barakism

The scene: bathroom, post-potty, nearing bedtime. Barak requests his two M's. He gets them, we make our bracha, and head back to the bathroom to brush teeth--M's still clutched safely in fist. (That "melts in your mouth, not in your hand" line? Tell it to a two-year-old who likes to delay his chocolate gratification. Anything will melt in your hand if it's there long enough.)

"Barak, we need to brush your teeth, so you need to eat those M's." M's go into mouth. I put toothpaste on toothbrush.

"Are your M's all gone?"

"No. Ackshully iss not all gone. Iss just in there."

See what happens when I free my blogging id?

Three posts in one day, that's what.

So, we got something in the mail yesterday that was kind of upsetting. Namely, an escrow summary from our mortgage company, informing us that our escrow was way in negative numbers because our taxes had been raised and our monthly payment was about to jump, oh, about two hundred dollars from what it was when we bought this apartment last summer.

Two. Hundred. Dollars. Every month.

There aren't any doctors, lawyers, or high-paid computer programmers living in this house. There's a high school rebbe and a part-time writer. Who works for a nonprofit. Two hundred dollars, that's a lot of money. And it's a lot of money for nothing. It's not like another two hundred dollars a month for, say, insurance, or child care because of additional family members. It's not two hundred dollars a month put toward savings for tuition or retirement. It's two hundred dollars into a black hole with nothing to show.

Two hundred. Do you know how much you can get at the grocery store with two hundred dollars? That's ten boxes of diapers at Target. The big boxes of Pampers, not even the store brand.

It made me mad at myself, because I know that buying this apartment was in a very real way a mistake. I made what should have been a head decision with my heart. I'd been a nomad for so long that I ached to be settled, and I was so sick of rented apartment after rented apartment I wanted my own home, with walls the colors I wanted and kosher appliances and my own washer and dryer without quarters and no landlord holding the keys to my front door. And conventional wisdom is that owning is better than renting, so I sort of ignored the market and the numbers and the fact that the money we'd be "throwing away" on rent roughly equaled the amount we're currently throwing away just on mortgage interest, never mind taxes or maintenance to the building or our own upkeep and repairs and forget what we put down on the mortgage and what we spent to fix the place up--new furnace, new water heater, etc.

Oh, and there's that little issue that if we want to go to Israel, we'll have to either sell it or rent it out for way way less than it costs to maintain it. Yeah, there's that too.

I don't think I make a lot of dumb financial decisions, but this really was one of them.

Of course there is also the quality of life issue--I am much happier in this apartment, I think, than I would have been if we'd stayed in our old rental, or even upgraded to a nicer rental. (Yeah, I know I keep saying "I" and not "we." The truth is that my husband doesn't care. Longtime readers will know he had no opinion at all on the home purchase process except that he wanted at least two toilets. He didn't even see this place until after we closed, even though it was, what, three blocks from our old place? And on his walk to work too.) We can put up our own succah. The dishwasher alone is a shalom bayis perk like you wouldn't believe. I really like my orange kitchen and our purple walls and yeah, the central AC is really, really nice in summer. We've got storage, we've got a parking spot (if no car), we have our own home. And it's hard to quantify in dollars how much that is worth.

It's hard to quantify, but I was already feeling a little queasy about the equation. And now there's another two hundred bucks weighing down the other side.

What the...?

Did you know about this?

The United terminal at O'Hare airport, in Chicago. We fly through that airport at least a few times a year--you have to connect there to get to most of our regular and not-so-regular travel destinations (my in-laws, the home of my DSIL, New York, etc.) We usually fly United. I am very well acquainted with Terminal C.

And I read the news every day. And I never heard about this!

There are a number of related articles on the Chicago Tribune site--about United and the FAA saying, "We don't know anything about that and there's no record of it at all," and then, when Freedom of Information Acts are filed, saying, "Wait, did we say we didn't know anything? Um, now that we think a little harder..."

Creepy. More creepy because it's fairly clear that whatever happened out there, there's some serious lying going on.

Barakisms

In no particular order...

1. Yesterday we were invited to the home of some friends for lunch. Barak had a ball, playing with their enormous box of cars and eating, as is his habit at such occasions, nothing but challah, kiddush juice, and dessert. We finally left at around four, when it was getting close to mincha time. I had brought the double stroller, and was trying to effect the transfer of Barak, Iyyar, diaper bag, and blanket to same. Barak, suspicious of what might lie after the stroller ride (the Dreaded Night Night, perhaps?) was walking down the stairs verrrry. slowwwly.

"Barak, could you please come on? It's really cold out."

"Iss not cold."

"Barak, it's about thirty degrees today. That's cold."

"Ackshully, iss freezing."

2. Similarly, on a walk to playgroup, still termed "camp" by Barak:

[Blast of wind] "Ooh, it's cold! Barak, is it so cold?"

"Yeah. Iss a little chilly."

3. This morning, at about 2 am, I was sitting up nursing the baby when I heard Barak start to wail. Usually he goes right back to sleep on his own, but this time he didn't. It sounded like a bad dream. I poked my husband awake and asked him to go, and listened to a one-sided attempt at adult conversation with a toddler in the middle of the night. It didn't go very far. I put the baby down and went in for the Imma Rescue. That didn't go very far either. Barak was lying in his bed wailing, and I reached in to get him. He didn't get up. "Barak, do you want to come cuddle with Imma?" Miserable whimper. I started to pick him up and just as he left the mattress he started to throw up all over himself, me, the bed, the floor, etc., and that was when I realized he was hot enough to fry an egg on. The usual middle-of-the-night-sick-child routine followed: he was so, so feverish I gave him a quick bath (also to get some of the vomit off him, of course) and tried to get him to talk a little so I could make sure he was making sense (you know, in a two-year-old kind of way.) At one point I poured some warm water on him and he started to scream.

"Hurts!"

What is this? Surely some rare life-threatening water sensitivity illness meaning we should rush to the nearest emergency room...

"Barak, does it hurt or you just don't like it?"

"Just don't like it."

We cuddled for a while on the floor of the bathroom, until he let me leave him for the sixty seconds it took me to change out of my own vomitous attire. Tylenol, more snuggles in the rocking chair, and I put him to bed, where he stayed, asleep, till 10 am. He was pretty hot when he woke up, so I gave him some more Tylenol and a Pedialyte popsicle. But he was feeling better by now, so he had a better breakfast in mind.

"Chex please."

"Barak, you can have a few Chex, but I'm not going to give you milk, okay? I don't want you to throw up again."

"I not gonna frow up."

"You're not going to throw up? Are you sure?"

"Gonna frow up tomorrow."

4. Later this morning I went on a quick Target run to get more Tylenol, baby wipes, yogurt and other necessities. I was feeling sorry for Barak so took a two-dollar turn down the toy aisle and got him a Matchbox helicopter. I told him when I got into the kitchen with all my bags that I had a present for him, and let him rummage around the bags for it. I'd pull out a box of garbage bags. "Is that the present?!" "No..." and so on. Eventually I pulled out the helicopter.

"Hock clopter! Issa hock clopter! Hock clopter go zoom inna sky!"

5. Last one, totally out of order. Earlier this week Barak found the feet for Mr. Potato Head in his toy box (well, toy milk crate, specifically, but it does the job). He brought them to me.

"Iss tomato!"

"No, sweetie, that's for Mr. Potato Head."

He tried. "Miterananeh?"

"Mister Potato Head."

"Mitratadead."

"Mister Potato Head."

Pause. "Iss feet."

"Right, those are feet."

"Tomato need it."

Thursday night

And I should really be getting to bed...

I had a brief email exchange with a college/grad school friend tonight who asked me for an invite and, in the course of a few messages, pointed out that my blog isn't really all that racy. There's nothing here that's so horrifying. What's the problem with having it public, really?

I thought about it and in a nutshell, it's not really the fear of any repercussions if anyone did find it. It's more the sense of constraint I now feel, wondering who might be reading me. I started writing a blog for two basic reasons: as a sort of online baby book, and as a way of writing for my own pleasure. I write for a living, and since almost all my writing is done under someone else's name I rarely have a chance to write what I want, how I want. I don't want to feel that this, too, has to be edited and censored to suit someone else. That's all, really.

In the same email exchange I mentioned that I felt it was sort of a chutzpa to send out blog invitations to everyone I know. ("Hey, everyone, read all about my kid's potty trips! I'm so self-absorbed I think you care!") But, well, nobody has to accept an invite, and I really do like having readers (see self-absorbed, above) so I just went through my uberimma mailbox sending out a whole bunch. If you've ever emailed me at that address, you probably just got one. Ignore at will, etc.

All that said, time for me to go to bed.

Housekeeping

A few things of note to anyone interested (well, I guess if you're reading this...) :

1. My email address is on the about page--it's uberimma at gmail, etc.

2. Yes, the RSS feed will continue to bring you all of Barak's potty updates and so forth, but it will not let you comment. If you want to comment (and you do, don't you? don't you? please? I really like the comments...) you have to be a reader. I don't mind making you a reader. Really I don't. I like readers. I just don't want them to be sitting in my husband's shiur.

3. I'll make this blog go private sometime after Shabbos. And I'll probably un-private it one of these days, when I get less paranoid. Although that might not be until my kids are all safely married.

4. I wasn't going to really post today, but as long as I'm here and you're here, I might as well bring you a potty update.

So, two days a week I work at home, right? This means that I have agreed to be generally available when not in the office--I pick up the phone, check my email, get back to people if necessary. Today I worked in the office, but came home to a fairly urgent voice mail on my cell phone (which I'd forgotten to take that morning). Just as I finished listening to the message, Iyyar woke up and demanded to nurse; just as he was done, Barak woke up howling to poop on the potty. I put him on the toilet, looked at my watch, and realized that because of the time change window (I work for people who travel a lot) I had twenty minutes to call back before the end of the business day. So I called, perched on the side of the bathtub with Iyyar on my lap and Barak on the toilet reading a book about construction equipment.

"Hi, it's me. I already faxed those remarks. They've all been translated and sent to the venue for the prompter. Does she still need the four-minute intro..."

[In the middle of this very professional exchange, I hear a car backfiring. Only it's not a car. It's Barak, with the most unbelievably explosive diarrhea I have ever heard from anyone of any age. The person I am talking to, an unflappable executive assistant, pauses.]

"What was that?"

[Me, innocently] "What was what?"

[Unflappable assistant, with concern] "I thought I heard a gunshot."

[Me, cheerily, as I pantomime encouragement to Barak, who is filling the toilet with gallons of foulness that I won't have to wipe off his tush or dispose of in the trash, hooray!] "Oh, I don't think so. We don't get many of those around here."

As my blogging ego gently weeps

Last night, my husband woke me up at 12:30 am. I was not pleased. I was tired, and I hadn't gotten much sleep for a few nights in a row, and I was cranky, and I had just fallen asleep, and I didn't react well to someone shaking my shoulder urgently and saying, "I'm so sorry!" He had, it appeared, committed a slight indiscretion: posted to a halacha blog with his real name without logging me out of blogger.

I got out of bed, none too graciously, staggered blearily into the back room, squinted at the computer, and changed the settings on my blog to "private." I said I'd think about it some more in the morning, and I went back to bed. (After forgiving him fully and freely for doing something that he would never have done if he had just gone to bed when I'd suggested it instead of insisting innocently that he had work to do and then hunkering down with a jar of peanut butter and a spoon to read some halacha blogs. I think I can get some serious go-to-bed-before-2-am-PLEASE mileage out of this, at least.)

I did think about it in the morning, and started picturing a world in which the parents of his students discovered my blog and my commentary about things like childbirth and nursing. Or a world in which my boss found my blog and found posts about mikva ladies and the TSA. Or one in which my kids' future in-laws found my blog and discovered that my husband has Strongbad t-shirts hidden in his dresser and sometimes we eat lasagne for Shabbos dinner and I wrote a dissertation on scientific atheism in the Soviet Union and... well. You know. Skeletons in the closet like that.

So, until I get over it, I'm going to make this blog private. If you want an invite, send me an email and promise me that you have no offspring enrolled in my husband's school that you are aware of, and that if you have any designs on my kids marrying your kids you are okay with the fact that I am currently wearing purple shoes. If you have me an an RSS feed, do nothing--I didn't change those settings. Which, if you are reading this, you already know.

Ah, well. So much for my aspirations to blogging greatness. I do it for the artistic satisfaction, don't I? And because my husband likes reading about what I did all day.

And now I can tell you all about the speeches I wrote for the deputy prime minister of Thailand. I'm sure you can't wait.

I should so be working now

But I can't think of anything to write for the person I'm supposed to be writing for, so I thought I'd take a crack at writing something for myself.

Um.

Hmm.

Yes.

Well.

[Deafening silence while I try to think of something to write about. And fail.]

Okay, so, well, let's see. The kids. Good place to start, right? The kids are B"H fine, although they're both under the weather right now. Barak was sick Sunday morning--slept until 10 am, threw up, slept some more. He actually fell asleep on the floor while I was sitting in the chair keeping him company. Right now he seems better, though was pretty kvetchy all day today.

Iyyar is still coughing. He's been coughing since before Rosh Hashana, despite several trips to the doctor and a ten-day course of Amoxycillin and being pronounced cured by the doctor what was it, two weeks ago now? Yucky wet chesty cough. I called the doctor today and left a message for him--not the nurse--to call me back. I think this has gone on way too long. I'm not sure what else I expect the doctor to do, but I want to at least talk about it.

I got a mysterious box at work today that turned out to contain sixteen thousand calories' worth of chocolate-covered pretzels. I'm not making that number up--I did the math. On a similar topic, I appear to have lost a grand total of two pounds in the last month. Better than no pounds, I guess, but... sigh. I miss my wardrobe, and I'm sick of the three skirts that fit me. Who would have thought I'd one day be longing to fit into a size ten?

Anybody out there want to host us for, um, all of Pesach? My DSIL is going to a hotel with her family, and my ISIL is in Israel, and there is no way to spend the holiday with either of them without spending many many thousands of dollars we don't have. It's not even really a matter of making Pesach--I'd manage it somehow, despite work and kids and the general chaos--but the second Pesach in a row all by ourselves (I was on bedrest last year)... bleh.

What else. I made Barak a new pair of mittens out of the leftover Shetland handspun from the gloves I made the friend we just visited. I think he likes them--he wore them around the house for a while this afternoon. I'm working on baby things for the friend who just sent me the pretzels, who is expecting, and for whom I seem incapable of knitting anything but hats. I keep trying to make a sweater and it invariably comes out the wrong size and gets turned into a hat. Fortunately she is expecting twins but I'm on my fourth hat right now and this is getting silly. I should stop it with the fancy handpainted merino sock yarn and just whip something out in Lamb's Pride already.

My boss's boss's boss (someone who is Up There at work) had a talk with me today about the "sleaze factor" of someone I'm about to be writing for. Someone I'm about to be doing an awful lot of writing for, for the next two years. She rates the sleaze factor as a ten out of ten and recommends keeping distance and not being alone with him. Great. Just... great.

Iyyar had his first successful solid food adventure yesterday. He thinks rice cereal is vile (can you blame him?) and has not had any interest in bananas, avocados, or jarred food (which I like to avoid anyway because honestly, could there be any nutritional value in there at all?) Anything I put in his mouth he shoves right back out with his tongue. Then he cries. It goes exactly nowhere, every time. Despite having no interest in any normal baby fare besides that of the nursage variety, he plotzes for anything anyone is eating in front of him. Yes, I know you want it, but it doesn't help when you go nuts for my food when I'm eating, say, schwarma! Last night, I was in the back bedroom playing with him while MHH worked on the computer. Barak was in bed and I had made a late supper of chicken and vegetables thrown into a pan, covered and cooked--it comes out sort of like chicken soup without much soup. I sat down with my bowl of dinner and Iyyar went berserk. Not the standard first solid food for babies, but whatever--I mashed up a few pieces of zucchini and yellow squash, sat him in my lap and fed him with my soup spoon. He inhaled everything I gave him. I guess nobody switched babies at the hospital--he's definitely mine.

You know, I might as well have numbered these paragraphs and had another one of those list posts. Oh, well, whatever. I think that's all I can come up with for tonight anyway.

I think this is one of the worst-written posts I've ever done. Sorry about that. I hope the stuff they pay me to do comes out a little bit better.

Another one of those lists, even though I'm too tired to think of very much to say right now

1. We've been away, visiting my in-laws while staying with some good friends who live nearby. I have not gotten to have a good visit with the friends in question--a former housemate and her new husband--in years and years, so this was something I was really looking forward to. It also solved a slightly sticky issue with visiting my husband's parents. Staying in my in-laws' home is difficult for a number of reasons, mainly related to fire safety concerns. My friends' home has no such issues--she is a firefighter and there are smoke detectors (or, as Barak calls them, "Smoke tatector! Go beep beep!") in abundance. However, since they are newlyweds they have no kids. They've also just moved into the house, and didn't have time to childproof. As a result, the first ten minutes there were spent removing the matches, Sharpies, nails, scissors, and, oh yes, axe from the floor and low shelves. ("If you're looking for anything sharp, deadly, indelible, or self-igniting, we've probably relocated it.") They also have two very large, friendly, and extremely well-trained dogs (they are working search and rescue dogs) who delighted Barak no end. "Issa doggie! Hi doggie!" My friend wanted me to go for a wander in the woods with Barak and let the dogs track us, but we didn't get around to it. Maybe next time.

2. When packing for the trip, I considered packing the potty seat. I did. But we already had so much stuff, and I thought, he'll be fine with the toilet for a few days. What was I thinking? The child has a tush that is about six inches wide. Of course he wasn't going to be fine.

Ten minutes after we got there, after a morning of traveling that began at 5 am, Barak got That Look on his face, stopped what he was doing, and said, "Imma, poop potty please!" I took him down to the bathroom. He looked at the toilet, and back up at me, horrified. "I can't poop. Iss too big." One Target run later, he had his potty seat, but the inclination had passed.

Fast-forward to the following night, when we were getting off the train after a dinner out. "Imma, poop potty please!" It was easily a twenty-minute walk home, and we were waiting for the bus. But he was hysterical, tears rolling down his face. "Poop potty!" And I realized that wait a minute, it's Monday night and he hasn't pooped since--oh no, not since Friday night! Three days! The poor kid. So MHH picked him up and ran with him all the way back to the house, while telling him the whole way it was okay if he couldn't hold it. He did, though, and after some understandably massive explosions politely requested ice cream. Oh no--do they have ice cream?! They did--Ben and Jerry's chocolate chip cookie dough, so all was well.

I was pretty impressed by the intensity of his desire to make it to the bathroom. He always has a wet diaper at the end of the day, and sometimes poops during the night, but hasn't had a dirty diaper in the middle of the day for weeks now. (Please don't remind me that I thought I'd have him out of diapers for good by the end of the summer. Just don't.)

3. Iyyar is still saying "ah da da da," and nothing else. I don't think he feels he needs anything else to say, because he's pretty expressive with just that. It's his word, and he says it for everything, with great thought and feeling. It's very cute. We'll be sitting there nursing and every so often he'll think of something he needs to tell me, pull off, look up and inform me, "Ah da da da da!" and I'll say, "Really?" He'll agree, "da!" and get back to nursing.

4. Barak was pretty pleased to get back home on Thursday night. A few minutes after we got in, I was in our room changing Iyyar and Emese the cat appeared from under the bed. Barak was delighted. "Emese! Emese so cute! Like a bunny rabbit!"

5. I've been trying very hard to avoid sugar and white flour for the last few weeks, with the result that I've actually dropped a few pounds. I knew it wasn't going to be that easy to be good about diet while traveling, but the discovery of a full tub of Godiva Belgian dark chocolate ice cream in the freezer--well. My friend is kind of like me when it comes to feeding people, and once I had actually been encouraged to eat the ice cream resistance was pretty much futile. Our last day there, there was only about an inch left in the tub and I decided to just finish it off with a spoon. Barak sniffed this out instantly. "I want it ice cream!" "Barak, I think you can ask a little more nicely than that." "I want it ice cream please!" We took turns with the spoon until it was gone. "I like it! I like it chocolate ice cream!" Don't we all.

6. Aged eight months, Iyyar is 29 inches tall and 3 inches past the cutoff for his infant car seat. This means that he is in the stage of rear-facing convertible car seats--absolutely the hardest to install well. And I did it five times in five days, in addition to putting in Barak's (which is much easier). I've got bruises like you wouldn't believe.

7. In the category of things you don't think you're teaching your kids: one phrase that Barak hears regularly is "not for you." He usually hears this in connection with an off-limits can of Diet Coke. "Dass Imma's? Dass Imma's Diecoke? Ca'I have it?" "No, Barak. That's not for you. You can't have Diet Coke. It's just for Imma." Reasonable enough. That's my poison.

So. My friend's two dogs are both in the 80-lb neighborhood--close to three times Barak's weight. Our last day there, Barak was walking around the house with a Puffins cereal bar. One of the dogs got interested and started sniffing around it, politely requesting that he share. Barak wasn't anywhere near either of us, but didn't need any interference. "No! Iss my Puffins! Iss not for you! You can't have that!" And the dog understood that the answer was no, and didn't ask again. Now if we could only get Barak to figure out that lesson...

8. I may have mentioned on this blog that Barak snores. He doesn't just snore a little; he snores like a little old fat man after a very good meal. You can hear him across the apartment. Iyyar does not normally snore, but right now he has a cold, so he sounds about the same. MHH doesn't snore much ordinarily, but like the rest of us he--you guessed it--has cold. All of last week, the four of us were sleeping in the same room. Being in there at night was like being surrounded by three occupied park benches, each with an empty flask of Thunderbird tossed underneath.

I'm fine

just busy. Maybe I'll post after Shabbos, if I get a chance.