Cruel shoes

we're not in target anymore...

Having strange days. Wondering if the summer solstice has something to do with it. The skies have been especially tempestuous and the nighttime light especially odd. Despite my usual hate for the summer, there is something special about the beginning of the end of the long days. A desperation of the sun. Blasting during the early hours, then holding on as long as possible in the evening, a little bit less each day till December 21st-ish. It is sad and empowering all at the same time.

I have an octopus painting dry enough to start working on again, except, of course, for the fact that there is no longer a place to paint. There isn’t actually too much left to work on for this piece, so I can paint without making too much of a stink, methinks. I am glad I pulled it out of 4badluckhorseshoes studio two months ago so it would dry. If I hadn’t, I bet it would’ve started to mold like some of the other pieces. Sigh. And sigh again.

Took the girls to Target Wednesday to look at shoes… Beenie woke up saying she needed some high heels. What is it with these girls, anyway? I figured we could check out some play high heels that might satisfy their deep, unexplainable need for stilletoes. Instead we ended up getting some fetching pink sparkle shoes (pictured above), which, in addition to making the day especially magical and full of fairy dust, littered the house with tiny flecks of pink glitter. I know, I know. In what way could this be bad? I ask myself the same question. The shoes were quickly deemed outdoor shoes, much to almost everyone’s shagrin. I took them and their sparkle shoes to the zoo the following day, a glorious day, a cloudy and cool and sunny day. They ran amok and dazzled all of the zoo goers with their immense sparkles. Though 3/4 of the way through the zoo Mimi took her sparkle shoes off and I put her regular comfy sandles on her poor paws. Beenie was even in worse pain, but always a slave to fashion, insisted on keeping her shoes on, rather, and had me push her in the stroller the remainder of the time there. She has some nasty little blisters on her poor girl paws, which should keep her out of those cruel shoes for a few days.

Bottom line

Re-entry was challenging this week. Once I returned from the Chicago of my dreams, I fell into a desperate funk. Really. Truly. And when mommy is in a funk, the girls get their funky funk on, too. I was so happy to see them, and also happy to see their father, my spouse. B. But honestly, must we discuss what needs to be cleaned in this house?

I would like, before I rant and rave any further, to make a small but important note here: there exists a bottom line of respect for my husband. I may whine, but in the end, we chose one another ten years ago, to hang out, then have a home together, then have a child(ren) together. And all the crap that goes along with it. That is what a committed relationship is. It is not easy, that’s for damned sure, not many things that are very very important that have lots riding on them are. I’m just saying there must be respect. There is. I want it to be clear that there is mad love and respect for him and his efforts at a seriously hard job: a. being my husband, b. being a father. Make no mistake.

With this said, I’d like to extend my comments on respect to the doofus who had an affair with some lady in Argentina. The governor of one of thems southern states. And finally…. FINALLY… I want to continue the extension to his awesome fucking wife. Finally, a woman who does not stand next to the asshole who lied to her in private and in public and thought he was above all of it as he confesses in front of the media. I don’t care about any of it in a political sense, I just can’t imagine supporting someone who would drag myself and my children through the muck like that. That man had no respect for his family. I hope his wife finds some comfort in the fact that she doesn’t have to deal with him anymore. If you gotta have sex with someone else, GET A DIVORCE! That’s what they’re there for! You’re not doing anyone any good by lying.

Oh yeah, back to my mini-nervous breakdown. I dunno. This summer is just kind of brutal. Some days are excellent and I feel like the job I am doing is good, others suck ass. Is that description enough? Two more months from now, three mornings per week will be spent driving my darlings to preschool, followed by two hours of, I dunno, grocery shopping? Then picking them up again. Doesn’t it just sound divine? Maybe I can even find gainful employment if I don’t have some crazed non-napping maniac pounding my computer keys or screaming in my ear or climbing on my legs and back. Today’s non-napper ran wild until about 4pm, a half-hour before we wake children up from naptime in this house, then passed out by herself on the nasty little rug at the bottom of the stairs, a pile of cookie crumbs beneath her. Wearing her wedding cake dress.

The Hammonds

Last night I floated under the stars in a hot tub, in the backyard of Sheila, Jeremy and Jemma’s house. After drinking two powerful lemonade drinks (I think someone slipped vodka in that lemonade), and eating a delicious grilled chicken, cucumber, potato salad, and cannilini bean salad dinner SOMEONE ELSE PREPARED. Welcome to the Hammonds!

I am sad my time here in the flat flat flat midwest is so short. There are many other people I’d like to see, but 48 hours is 48 hours. So I gotta keep it small, intimate. I need to convince Sheila and Jeremy to move to the greater Baltimore area. Then we could set up another hot tub situation on the East Coast.

RIP 4horseshoes…

RIP 4Horseshoes. I will remember the drought fondly...

I no longer have a painting studio. Went over there this past Sunday afternoon to work for the first time in two or three weeks, and it was a mold and spider infested brick box. I lost two or three paintings to mold. Luckily I hated the paintings, so no great loss, OTHER THAN THE FACT THAT I LOST MY PAINTING STUDIO. The 36″ square canvas I just got for a commission looks awful big in my basement. Pray for me and what pittance is left of my creativity. I have hope something better will appear as it always does, but am so sad to say adieu to 4horseshoes. T’was not meant to be. The spiders just got too greedy.

Woah! RIP Farrah and MJ, too.

Something a fruity vodka drink can’t fix…

bad baby bubbleducks

… an entire day with no time to myself. Mimi once again is refusing to relax and nap. I told her I need alone time. I told her it is quiet time. I tried to lie down with her in numerous rooms in the house, to no avail. I want to put a box over the little tyrant and sit on it, wearing earplugs so I can’t hear her bloodcurdling screams. I cannot, of course, do this. She just crawled over my shoulders, across the top of the couch. I suggested going to the Barack H. Obama Presidential Library, located in the front right corner of our living room, and she won’t even do that. I must re-think this nap thing. Maybe I need to pretend they never took naps, learn to ignore them, and go about my business. I did take Mimi down to the basement to help me do laundry. She was a big help putting wet clothes into the dryer. Beenie quietly sleeps beneath her purple polar fleece tent in their bedroom.

The only thing that could possibly help me is to go away. Oh yeah! I’m going away this weekend! To the flatlands of a small section of the midwest. I lived there once, when I was younger, in my 20’s. I thought I knew everything when I lived there. I now know and fully embrace the fact that I know very little. I don’t even know how to make the one daughter who becomes irate without an afternoon nap, nap. She is singing a nice ABCD alphabet song, so that’s gotta count for something.

“Zoe and Cookie Monster, Zoe and Elmo, Zoe and Big Bird,” she chants. I know it is a sick form of brainwashing. Now her airplane is landing on Baby Alive.

Oh yeah, my mini trip. It is forty-eight hours not being responsible for anyone but me time. I leave on a plane Friday noonish. I have not been on a plane since a year before I was pregnant with the girls… I’d say summer 2005 was the last trip I flew somewhere… Albany, NY methinks… I shouldn’t look at this as a vacation, because it won’t be one. More a short attempt to clear my head of family build-up. Like tartar on teeth. Every now and again you gotta clean that crap off before the whole mouth and gums rot.

An image I’d like to share with you before I exit this post: Me giving myself a whore’s bath with baby wipes. This act was performed in Ocean City, NJ, a few weekends back when I took the girls by myself on my bookclub’s weekend at the beach. BON APPETIT!

Outline online

a beautiful moment in the backyard yesterday, betwixt thundershowers

This morning we actually managed to get out of the house while the sun shone. It has been raining. Lots. Went with Jiyun and her kids, me and my kids to the Baltimore Museum of Art sculpture garden for a picnic and to let the small ones loose. IT RULED! We have been trapped in the house of smeary poops all week. That is correct, friends. The trotts. Both girls. Couldn’t quite bring myself to take them out in the midst of it. Today marks day #5 of the unsavory scourge, and so far, I am relieved to report there hasn’t been so much as a squirt (sorry). We shall see if my optimism is squashed post naptime, but for now I haven’t smelled one whiff or seen one blob of the stuff, so life is great.

I just looked up online how to write an outline. I know that I should be able to do this small task. Why does it seem impossible to me? Wasn’t someone supposed to have taught me how to do this in high school? I must’ve done one in the past… right? Ugh!

Divide and conquer appears to be working in regards to naptime. Mimi passes out in the living room somewhere, Beenie scrambles up the stairs to her bedroom and parks underneath a purple “tent” (a fuzzy purple blanket she likes to have angled over her from wall to edge of futon, in a triangle shape, like a tent) and dozes off. When I go into the room to awaken her, books have been placed on the floor and every item from both her and Mimi’s beds are piled on the futon. She is a bit of a packrat. She gets this honestly.

Before we exited the house this a.m., Mimi threw a huge, screaming tantrum regarding a dress. Similar to the tantrum she threw last evening about a dress. I see a loud, expensive future in front of us, unless my hubbo can embrace my love of second-hand clothing. Beenie was wearing the dress Mimi wanted to wear yesterday. Today, Beenie took this dress off and put on the dress Mimi had just taken off to put the yesterday dress on, and she LOST HER SHIT. Powerful stuff. I need to harness this clothing and shoe obsession into something positive before she hurts someone. Or have her start a band called “Yesterday Dress.” Put those maniacal lungs to good use.

I’ve got about an hour left of quiet unless something weird happens. It is a lot of time and no time at all. I can think about my impending weekend trip coming up on June 26th, to see friends I have not seen in five or six years, who I used to see almost daily. Back when I was young. Before I had children or had even thought about that sort of thing. Or in my case, those sorts of things. Visiting an old life is always freaky, but energizing. I am ready.

Sides

I don’t think I have a problem with children. Especially my own. I like and love my dear daughters. Even their resistance to pooping in the potty, even their occasional tantrums. They are just being the purest little beings they can be, which is their job. They are doing their job. And I am trying to do mine. Not great every day, but for the most part, I attempt to do the right thing, whatever it is. Most of the time I go to bed at night feeling pretty good about me and them.

I am coming to realize, however, that I do have problems which revolve around the fact that I have children. Peripheral problems. Stress on close relationships because of my having had children. Issues with money because I haven’t worked a full-time job in two and a half years. Stress surrounding my own creative needs. I do not believe the girls cause me half as much stress as the complicated side situations that exist as a result of all of it. As we watched Cinderella AGAIN yesterday, I continued to wonder how things worked out for ol’ Cindy after she gets married off to Princey-poo.

Her dad, well meaning and rich, when faced with raising his only daughter alone after Cinderella’s mother died, decided it would be best to marry a socially well-placed widow with two daughters Cinderella’s age. Then he dies, leaves his money to the big bitch of a stepmother, Druscilla and Anastasia’s mother… what is her name, anyway? Oh yeah, last name is Tremain. What’s her first name? Lady Tremaine, the interweb says. That sounds about right, who cares what her first name was, anyway? Did anyone pursue her story? Lady Tremaine? What a crappy lot she got stuck with. It didn’t seem like she had any help around the house after Cinderella’s dad died, except for, of course, for Cinderella. She got stuck with her uber-bratty brats and her late husband’s kid, too. Though, nothing excuses treating your stepchild, especially after her second parent dies, like an indentured servant. And from the looks of her modest mansion, she could have afforded a nanny/babysitter and some kind of cleaning service.

Strangely, this type of thing — fathers not raising their children after the loss of their wives — happened on both my father’s and mother’s side of the family. My great grandfather’s wife left him (didn’t die, just left) with three kids (apparently she was young and after three kids popped out, she decided she still wanted to have some fun in her life… woah!), and instead of raising them himself, he decided to put them in a Catholic boarding school to be raised by the nasty kind of nuns. I won’t go into why this was not a good idea, but it wasn’t. Then, on Dad’s side of the family, his mother died when he was four, giving birth to my Aunt. On her deathbed, the woman I grew up calling Grandmother, promised my dad’s mom she would take care of the baby. I don’t think my original grandmother meant to ONLY take care of the baby, but she took it a bit too literally…  She married my grandfather after my grandmother passed away. This, too, did not work out well. Maybe people should consider taking care of their own children. It doesn’t seem like anyone is going to treat them as well as their parents, whether or not they are dads or moms. Yeah, I know, it worked out in the end for Cinderella, but who knows what kind of emotional scars she had to endure, how it effected her relationship to the handsome prince, her relationship with her own children…

atomic mushrooms

Girls and I hit the playground this a.m. with Jiyun, Emmie and Marko. Huge thunder clouds in the sky over the park, BIG gray things. Not amounting to anything other than a little cover from the sun.

Poor Mimi has the poops. Probably from too much juice the past few days. We (me and the ladies) went to Ocean City, NJ this past weekend with my bookclub. One of the bookclub ladies has a beach condo we go to once a year. We have always had big plans to one day travel to Italy or France or Holland with bookclub, but since I and Gayle & Danielle now have small children sucking up all our money, that doesn’t look like it is going to happen any time soon. Unless, of course, that big ol’ pile of money finally shows up. I’m still waiting.

Have a new commission for a painting. Not for much money, but something kind of better, a little money and a lot of help with a writing project I’m starting to work on. The piece will be 30″x30″, and is another flora/plant painting, something in the realm of L.O.V. (pictured, right). I am excited to have another project, not necessarily conceptualized by moi. Am enjoying working on the Octopus commission/painting, which is almost done. I LOVE to trade art for other things. Seems like I am getting something useful out of painting, in addition to the usual self-indulgent escape I so desperately crave.

Mimi is passed out on the living room floor. I rubbed her feet and sang her quiet songs to help her forget her bum pain and she drifted off without much ado. Beenie requested I carry her upstairs and put her in her bed, which I did. I think they need to sleep in separate rooms for naptime, since Mimi can’t control herself from opening up the shades in the room and going through all her clothes when in there with her sister. This is okalie-dokalie. All I care about is having some quiet time during the day to look for and apply to possible jobs, write/answer emails, bang my head against a wall. You know what I mean. If I have to go downstairs to the basement to accomplish this, I will happily do so. As long as I get a small bit of ME ME ME time. And it is small, this time, but concentrated. I deserve much, much more of it. So do other SAHM/D’s. Primary caregivers work it. Hard.

At the entrance to the playground mentioned above, sat a gigantic atomic mushroom cloud mushroom. About the size of a tennis ball. Head for the hills!

So this is what makes life divine…

doesn't this look GOOD?!

Beenie and Mimi (but especially Beenie) are currently obsessed with Cinderella. I’m not entirely sure how it found its way into our house. VHS. I have my theories… probably the same way two Angelina Ballerina stuffed mouses arrived. The kindess of others. I felt kind of icky when I found out Beenie was into it. It’s such a freaking fairy tale. YEAH IT IS!!! hahaha. I watched it with them before naptime today. The whole reason Cinderella gets her big chance is because the king of wherever-ville wants a bunch of grandchildren. Yuck. It has very little to do with his son’s happiness, though Cinderella’s happiness will probably explode once she’s away from the Queen Bitch of a stepmother and her heinous step-sisters who basically keep her as an indentured servant. I guess a Princess/Queen has good childcare options. All those slaves working for free around the castle. That stuff is pretty standard in royal families, right?

The only thing Cinderella is thinking about is love. Handsome love. She doesn’t care about the rich part of it, though it couldn’t hurt. Someone should make a movie about what goes on in the kingdom once she pops out a kid or two. Does she become a mom blogger? I doubt she even knows how to use a computer. The really freaky part about the animation of that movie is the EYES. Have you looked at ‘em? A little bit too realistic. Hyper real. And the movement of the characters. Not so cartoony, more fluid human. Kinda creepy. I feel like I should limit Cinderella time, but the animation really is spectacular. And the good girl does “win” (if forced childbearing counts as winning. I wonder if she gets her head cut off when her fertility is brought into question…) in the end. Escapes evil stepmother and stepsisters, moves into the castle with her hot Princely Hubbo and his fam. I just wonder. Who makes Cinderella Part Deux? Did someone already make it?

The end times are here, methinks. From Cinderella a few times a week to every day a thunder storm. It was inevitable. Nothing good lasts forever. Put on your fly fishing rubber pants and learn to swim. I feel the next Great Flood approaching. I would like to offer up my two, female, neutered cats for the ark. They would be good mousers for the trip to the promised land, wherever that is (somewhere in Appalachia?), on a mountain nearby. Though to my knowledge, they have never caught a mouse. I do suspect Olive cat once murdered a large mouse that got into our house and placed it underneath a chair until the room smelled like death. But she never ‘fessed up to it, so I am still a bit unsure. Slinky cat acts like she can be vicious and I believe her.

Beware — shitstorm ahead!

Why? Why? Mimi, my current terrible two, called out to me a few minutes ago from her room… Mine have big poop! She had climbed out of her crib, taken off her diaper and smeared SHIT on the floor and the rug and two blankets and all over herself. Naptime began around 2pm and I just got them quiet in their room after the big clean up, an hour and fifteen minutes later. And I haven’t even had any coffee yet today. That should be remedied soon, before it’s cocktail hour. Not that I can indulge much in alcohol these days, but the thought still can get me through a tough morning and afternoon. Sigh.

The shades are pulled down around the house. Darkness feels good on my skin. The sun is quite burny today. Took girls with me to the gym and Mimi was unable to let me leave the daycare room for over an hour. Even though the girls’ friend Laynie-bear was there. I just sat around, hung out with a bunch of kids — NOT the reason I wanted to go the gym to begin with. Beenie was quite amused and enjoyed the little kiddie area. Eventually, pal Lynn (Laynie-bear’s mama) finished up her workout and came in to distract Mimi and Beenie for a bit while I got out and did ten minutes on the elliptical machine then the rowing machine for another ten minutes. I’ll take what I can get. I am trying to think of this summer experience with a childcare situation at the gym as a warm-up for the fall’s preschool schedule. Only two and a half more months. YEAH! A light shining for all of us in September.

There’s a state of Maryland arts grant deadline coming up in a month. I’m contemplating applying for it, though I know rejection is inevitable. Still, it is free, and I have been working on paintings. I don’t want to waste my energies, but could really use some cash moolah if I were to get one of the grants. Hope springs eternal, no?