Author: callsignmommy2

Dinner — almost how it’s supposed to be…

Life is good. I think I can officially say that the move is over. We still have a few boxes around, and things are not hung on the walls, but the pressure to get it all done is off. (Which most likely means that we’ll still have things that need to be hung at this time next year…)

Last night I picked up those little boys from school, and we had a really nice afternoon (minimal yelling from anyone involved.) At about 5, I had a glass of wine and fired up the barbeque. Once the Major came home, he had a glass of wine with me and we had dinner outside at Turbo’s request. Of course, Turbo suggested that we eat outside and then as soon as the table was set, he began throwing a fit — “Why are we eating out here? I want to eat inside….” Agh!

For once, I just enjoyed dinner. I didn’t harangue the boys about eating two bites of this or four bites of that… we had artichokes, so they were both very into pulling the leaves off and eating them. Turbo would scrape all the flesh off with his teeth over and over and then tell me, “I can’t do it! I’m not getting any…” While Lunchbox, following his brother’s example, would dip the leaves in mayo and then just suck the mayo off and show me the untouched leaf, looking quite proud. Regardless, it was so nice. I didn’t worry about food on the floor/chairs/table (part of this may have been the 2 glasses of wine), and I just enjoyed the perfect weather, the company, and the beauty of our new home. More than that, I was finally able to just sit and revel in the wonder of having a family to call my own. It felt wonderful.

The Major took care of baths while I cleaned up, and then we put the little guys to bed and had a nice evening together. Most nights, we kind of go our separate ways after bedtime, doing our own things. But last night we talked, watched an episode of Mad Men (my new addiction) and even went to bed at the same time! (I am usually in bed by about 9:30 and the Major tends to stay up late.) It was really nice.

This morning I got a real treat. I got up at my usual ungodly hour, but instead of getting ready for work, I…wait for it… got to go to the gym! That’s right! This is the week that the Major and I begin our gym rotation. I am going to go on Tuesday and Thursday, and he’s going to handle little boy responsibilities on those mornings! He’s going to go on M, W, F. It was really freeing to walk out of the house, just me, and drive away to do something good for myself. Of course, I spent most of the time wondering how things were going at home, and hoping that the Major wouldn’t forget anything or end up really late or anything. Despite the fact that I usually manage responsibilities for three people every day of my life, I suffer from tremendous guilt on the days when I rely on the Major to do it. I feel like I’m asking him for some huge favor, and I worry constantly that he’s going to be annoyed or put out. I’m not sure why, since I know he doesn’t worry at all about whether I’m annoyed about being the “default parent.”

This is probably a whole other topic — but I talk about it with some friends regularly. Why is it that the man in the marriage can basically do what he wants to do, while the woman takes on most of the responsibility for day to day management of children? One good example of this was one that a friend gave me the other day. She was downstairs herding small children all afternoon, and her husband walked through the room where she was peeling her youngest off of his shrieking brother. Sure that he’d come back any second to help, she found herself searching for him a few minutes later when he didn’t reappear. Where did he go? Upstairs to close the door to the master bedroom and take a 2 hour nap. Could she (or I or any other ‘default parent’) just decide to go nap? Definitely not. If I want a nap on a Sunday afternoon, I basically have to ask permission. I have to make arrangements for the care of the TLAs. If the Major wants a nap, he just says, “hey, I’m going to go take a nap.” And I get to say, “oh, okay.”

Is this always the case? Why? I’m not really complaining — like I said, I had a great night with the Major and am in a happy place at the moment. But I do wonder why moms are the auto-parents and dads have to be asked to step in…

Pass the Duct Tape, Please

You know how when you were in college, you slept on a mattress on the floor and most of your furniture came from IKEA and had to be assembled with those crazy hex wrenches? Well, we haven’t moved on from that phase yet. A lot of my furniture is from IKEA. I actually really like the whole Swedish minimalist aesthetic, but in reality, the stuff looks pretty good and is cheap enough that you don’t get too upset when the moving guys (who visit us military spouse types every 2-3 years) bang it up, sweat all over it, break the legs off, etc. Or at least you’re supposed to not get too upset. But, dammit, I’m upset.

If you’ve ever put together IKEA furniture, you know that it revolves around “locking cams” and bolts, right? And if you decide to, say, take this furniture apart because you are a government-hired moving person getting minimum wage to manhandle the beloved goods and household belongings of a family that includes at least one person who puts his or her ass on the line to protect your freedom, you might want to make careful note of where those all-important locking cams and bolts end up! Like, you might want to, say, put them all in a baggy and make sure that they get attached to the actual piece of furniture that they belong to. Maybe. Just a thought.

But not everyone can come up with ideas as brillant and original as that one that I just shared with you.

It seems that OUR particular government moving people have not ever experienced the frustration of having all the pieces of their furniture laid out in front of them, with NO WAY to put them together to form a useable object. Like, say, a CRIB. Or my damned BED. Or the GUEST BED on which I have actual guests planning to sleep this weekend!! Currently, the guest bed is fully assembled, reliant totally on the small wooden dowels that go between the parts to hold them in place politely while those big bolts and cams do all the dirty work of making sure things actually STAY put together securely. I even put the boxframe and mattress on the bed, and dressed it up in all it’s pretty sheets and pillows. The Major came in surprised, “oh! you found the hardware!” When I told him no, he looked at me quite skeptically. I explained that I thought that if our friends laid in the bed carefully, the distribution of their weight over the surface area of the mattress would prevent any one tenuous joint from having to bear too much of a load, thereby ensuring that they did not actually find the bed collapsing on top of them. Or under them, to be specific. Do you think it is rude to ask your houseguests to please refrain from performing any variety of the horizontal limbo in your guestbed to ensure their own safety?

Don’t worry. I’m going to come up with a solution before they arrive.

The solution for the lack of hardware for the crib was to buy a whole new friggin crib at Walmart. I was the most angry crib-buying mommy they’ve probably ever had in that Walmart baby department. “Give me the cheapest crib you’ve got!” When the pimply adolescent Walmart employee pulled the giant box out of the shelf for me, looking somewhat frightened, I eyed it skeptically and then proceeded to pick it up and drag it BY MYSELF up to the register, abandoning my shopping cart and ordering my 4 year old to WALK. NOW. I can’t believe I had to buy a whole new crib. But Lunchbox doesn’t deserve to sleep in a pack and play for the rest of his babyhood when there’s a bunch of perfectly good crib pieces leaning against the wall in his room, right?

The last piece of the no-hardware puzzle that needs solving is my bed. I loved that bed. It had a built in bookshelf in the headboard. Which is totally obsolete now that I read everything on my iPad, but it’s still a nice idea.

And do NOT suggest that I go to the hardware store to pick up replacements. I tried that. These are special secret-squirrel IKEA-specific Swedish metric system parts that are not available in your neighborhood Lowe’s. IKEA is only helpful if the parts weren’t included in your original purchase. I haven’t yet tried duct tape. Maybe that will work.

It’s a fort! It’s a doghouse! It’s a spaceship! And look, we have four thousand of them!

No, Turbo, it’s a box. And yes, we still have four thousand of them. Only they have been flattened and placed strategically in that pile in front of the front door because Mommy is desperately trying to get them broken down and out of the house so that I can figure out what kind of floor our new rental house actually has. Cuz I haven’t seen it yet.

Turbo and Lunchbox have spent the last week proving the old idiom that the best toy you can give your kid is the box it came in. They spend their evenings smashing and crashing around the living room and play room in their newly received kid-sized boxes, screaming like banshees and giving me a chronic nervous headache. They spend their mornings whining and crying because their spaceships/doghouses/forts have mysteriously vanished overnight, though the back of the truck holds a boatload of cardboard that looks suspiciously familiar to their tiny eyes.

We’re close, though. I think there are four more boxes upstairs and maybe four downstairs. And there’s a crapload of crap in the hall. Both halls. That’s because the Major’s organizational strategy seems to consist largely of taking things that don’t belong in one place and deciding that he isn’t sure where they belong. So they end up in the hall. And I think they’re all slated for the attic. And I’m so tired of looking at it all that I think I might actually haul it up there into the 125 degree sweatbath myself.

Turbo is turning four this weekend. And we’re having houseguests. If that isn’t motivation, I don’t know what is! I know this blog has been less than scintillating lately… and I would like to tell you that I’ve got all kinds of gems saved up for you. But I’d be lying. For now I’m just trying to maintain my sanity and sobriety — turns out unpacking is easier if you’re just a teensy bit tipsy because you no longer care where things go. Makes it tougher the next day though:

“Major, why did I think it would be a good idea to put my curlers in the pantry?”

“I dunno. You said something about the stairs being tall and not wanting a workout, and then something else about curlers and coffee and killing two birds with one stone in the morning. I’m not sure. I don’t really listen when you talk.”

“Oh, ok. Thanks.”

This Mommy needs a drink…

It turns out that unpacking thirty kazillion boxes while trying to manage the never-ending interests of a two and four year old is difficult. Maybe impossible. It turns out that apple juice and goldfish are going to trump unpacking just one tiny box during every spare second between getting home from work, making dinner and getting the TLAs into their beds. (TLA – tiny little assholes… no, they aren’t really assholes. But sometimes the Major and I need to feel like we’re getting a good curse out here and there without them knowing, so we call them TLAs. I know. God hates me, etc., move on.) ANYWAY, I suppose that during this time, I haven’t been quite the nicest mommy in the world. I have a lower than normal tolerance for having to ask ninety times for something to get done, for repetitive questioning, for pretty much everything that goes along with being a small person who ALSO just moved his entire life and is way more confused about the whole thing than I am. But a couple times since we’ve gotten all our boxes, Turbo has told me that he wants a “different mommy” because this mommy is mean. It’s funny… but it also hurts. Because I know I am not always a nice mommy. When I really question him about this new mommy, or give him my permission to go find a new one, he usually breaks down and says that he only wants THIS mommy. And THAT is always nice to hear. (But it ain’t helping get these boxes unpacked, either.)

My time as a human luggage rack…

Traveling with kids…ah, the curiousity, the excitement, the four million questions every thirty seconds of a five hour plane ride — what memorable and wonderful family building moments we have shared in the past two months. I sit in a Starbucks writing to you today because I do not actually have a desk and chair in my home… though we hope that our stuff will be showing up at the end of this week. Then there’s just the little issue of unpacking thirty thousand boxes and putting everything where it will go… but that’s another drama.

We spent almost a month driving around the great state of California, just me, Turbo, Lunchbox and absolutely anything that we could stuff into a small four door car. This included two carseats, a stroller with a stand-on attachment, many stuffed animals, Legos and random assorted hotwheels, a sleeping bag, two pillows, diapers, wipes, overnight diapers, etcetera, etcetera. It was a bit of a mess trying to unpack and repack the car at every destination — plus, California is kind of big and we actually went through several climate changes while there, so I had the trunk working like a huge suitcase, shufflling jeans to the bottom, shorts to the top; stashing sweaters over here and tank tops down there. When it came time to reduce this all down to the gear that we’d fly east with, well… that was hard. My mother in law shipped a large box of our stuff out to us, and I left a good amount of stuff in the car when it shipped (shhhh!) In the end, I was dropped off at the airport with three large pieces of luggage, a stroller with a stand-on platform attached, three carryons, and a carseat for Lunchbox. Oh, and two small kids. In otherwords, I was basically immobile once delivered to the curb of the United terminal at LAX.

I’m typically airport girl. I love traveling, and have done so enough for work and pleasure to have my airport approach down to a system. A finely tuned machine. It works best when I’m on my own, and I’ve streamlined the process so as to move very quickly, carry very little and do the absolute minimum of waiting. I can’t control security, but I can certainly have my laptop out, baggie ready and shoes off before I even get to the conveyor belt. I can choose the shortest line, dart into it quickly and plop my carryon luggage up on the belt before the long line has even crawled a step. I can have my boarding pass and ID all ready to go and slip them effortlessly back into the right pocket of my pants before stepping through the beepy thing that hates metal. And I can sit at the gate, quietly sipping my coffee and eating my breakfast, glowing with the confidence that my luggage will absolutely fit in the overhead bin and that I will waste no time waiting for checked bags. Bag checking is for suckers.

This system broke down the second I found myself on the curb at LAX surrounded by my luggage and children, being eyed warily by those speedy carryon only business travelers who moved like I once could. I might have broken down crying right there if I hadn’t happened to glance over and see another woman standing on the curb looking less than confident. She had at least five big bags at her feet, three kids running around her, and three carseats to contend with. She also had a seabag at her feet, and I knew she was a fellow military spouse. When I finally got moving with all my crap, kids safely installed on the stroller contraption, I paused next to her — maybe to offer her some empathy, but mostly to get some for myself.

“Military?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Me too,” I told her.
“We’re moving,” she said, indicating all of her belongings.
“So are we!” I laughed, nodding at the bags hanging off every appendage. “Where are you headed?” I asked her.
“Hawaii!” she said, and looked really excited. Then her husband returned and picked up half the bags she had at her feet. I was glad to see that she had help. And sort of sad that I didn’t…but the Major was helping… he had found us a house, we just had to get there!
“Good luck!” I told her, as I shuffled on towards the curbside check in like a desperate Madison Avenue exec approaching the only bar for miles around. (I may have  watched too many episodes of Mad Men last night.)

I hope she’s gotten where she was headed and that her family is more settled than mine at this point. I’m just glad I bumped into her — even that casual exchange of words helped me remember that I’m not the only one struggling with all the difficulties that military life (hell, any life, really!) can present! There are lots of us out there, moms who make things happen for our families because we have no choice in the matter and because we can’t imagine NOT doing it. The airport experience wasn’t my favorite part of the journey, but it is one that I’ll remember because you know what? I did it!

When the Major picked us up on the other end and all our bags came off the baggage claim, he picked up a couple and struggled with how to hold half of it and manage the kids. “Wait a minute,” he said. “How did you carry all of this and the two kids by yourself on the other end?”

I told him the truth. I honestly don’t know! But somehow I managed it. Things work out when they have to.