El sicko, namely, me

Here’s the thing about having kids and being sick. Its tough shit for you. When you don’t have kids and you get sick, you rest. Period. Maybe you take a day off or maybe you have to go in to work, but for most of us blog-readers that means sitting at a desk which is -- come on, let’s face it -- pretty restful and when you get home at night, you order in and watch TV. You take it easy until you feel better. It is a very civilized way to live. I miss it.

When you have children you are bound to be sick all the time because those children go to school or day care and bring back awful, weird germs that cause viruses that sound like STDs. The first time I heard of Cox Sackie, I nearly blushed, it sounds so dirty. So, as a parent, you get sick all the time and when you are sick, your children will likely be sick, or recently-sick and still cranky, and you will have no choice but to care for them, just as if you were perfectly healthy.

Children aren’t understanding, they aren’t sympathetic to your woes. In fact, I’ve found it’s quite the opposite. They prey on your weakness. For instance, now that I’ve been sick, my son has decided to push back his wake-up time to 5:30am. And that’s after my daughter wakes several times in the middle of the night with the lingering cough she shared with me. If I didn’t know better, I would say they were purposely trying to do me in.

Once, when Primo was about four months old, I took him to a Mommy and Me Yoga class and the yoga instructor told this story about how she had just recovered from the stomach flu. She said it was great. When you have two kids, she explained, the only way you get to stay in bed for a day or two is if you’re vomiting while on the toilet bowl.

At the time, I thought this was insane. Now, of course, it seems completely reasonable to secretly wish yourself sicker so that you can justify convalescence.

When you’ve got a high fever and are vomiting uncontrollably, you have no choice but to shut down. You can not bring your children to school, you cannot drag yourself to playground or the grocery store. Family or friends or babysitters will relieve you, or you can let your kids watch TV for eleven hours straight. You can be taken off-duty.

When you have a cold, even a very bad one where your head pounds and your chest aches and can’t hear out of one ear, you must continue to shoulder your normal burden. You can continue like this, making dinner and taking the kids to birthday parties, propping yourself upright Weekend-at-Bernie’s–style for weeks if necessary.

That’s precisely what I’ve been doing for two weeks. Two weeks! Pre-kids I was never sick for that long. I’d get a cold, sleep a lot, eat soup and be up and running in a day or two. Instead, with lack of sleep and bad nutrition, my cold has bested my immune system and developed into a super-cold, perhaps even some kind of sinus infection.

David says he’s sick too but I don’t believe him. Or, I should say, I believe him all right, I just don’t accept it. We can’t both be sick at the same time, and I was sick first. Plus, ever since I had a baby I have regarded him as belonging to the weaker sex and so I feel that when he says he’s suffering its only because he doesn’t know what suffering is.

I am insufferable sicko. Send wishes of speedy recovery.

Who needs Manhattan?

We had a perfectly delightful day of Brooklyn fun yesterday. Stunning Los-Angeles-type weather, the likes of which we only see a half-dozen times a year, made it a good day for a trip to Dumbo. I like Dumbo, Here’s why:

If you go to Bubby’s at 10am, there’s no wait and you can sit right by the play area which allows you to enjoy brunch with your husband and friends while your children play with a variety of Melissa and Doug toys. Bubby’s has great biscuits and pie and I like biscuits and pie. Sure, it’s not the cheapest brunch you could opt for, but hey, its not like it’s a recession or anything.

There is a playground across the street which is right on the water and when we go there I feel like I am more wealthy and hip and in-the-know, like a real Dumbo mom.

Then you can walk through the Brooklyn Flea and find all manner of cool shit you can’t afford like little print dresses that look vintage but aren’t and look like they should cost $15 and cost $60. And how cool is this T shirt company, t-me, that has tables and markers set up so kids can draw images that are promptly printed on baseball tees?

Proud of yourself for not spending money at the Flea, you can treat yourself to dessert at Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory.

And once you’ve loaded the kids up with all-natural ice cream, you can bring them to Fulton Ferry Landing, where you can introduce your young children to the works of Walt Whitman.

"Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore;
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east;
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high;
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide."

A way with words

My children have got a way with words. Specifically, they have a way of using their words like a knife cutting straight into your innards. My daughter may only be 2 ½ but she already knows the power of a phrase to take a man down.

Sec doesn’t have school on Thursdays or Fridays so the past two mornings, she’s been left in the hands of my grandmother while David and I go to work and Primo, to kindergarten. She despises this arrangement. If she could take a step back and, as parents used to say, “be sensible,” the kid would see that staying with Nonnie is a “Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!”-type jackpot.

I know for a fact that my grandmother spoils my toddler ‘til she’s rotten as a wormy apple. Regarding television,

Nonnie institutes no limits on duration of viewing and exercises no control over content. This is why when I come to pick the kids up from her place, I find them watching Star Wars or X Men or other programming that Primo will have nightmares about for weeks, requiring me to “make Star Wars disappear,” and barring that, sleep with him.

Nonnie used to hurry to shut off the TV when she heard me coming but now that we live in the same building she doesn’t have the lead time she once did, when I had to buzz in to the apartment building. Plus, after covering-up for his great grandmother once or twice, Primo told me flatly, “Nonnie told me to lie and tell you we didn’t watch any TV but that’s not true we watched Spongebob SquarePants, twice! And I just felt I HAD to tell you.”

I told my grandmother to please refrain from instructing my children to lie to me, as I’m sure they’ll start doing it of their own volition soon enough. So now we just all accept that the kids will watch whatever the hell they feel like for however the hell long they feel like it and that’s that. Don’t even get me started about the unlimited access to juice, ice cream or cream puffs.

So I can’t help but feel a lack of sympathy when Seconda resists being left in the care of Nonnie, who makes our apartment into someplace resembling Pinnochio’s Pleasure Island.

But Sec knows how to cut through my impassivity. She started crying this morning, as usual, and asking plaintively, “Are you gonna leave me Mommy?”

“Mommy has to work,” I told her.

“No, I don’t WANT you to leave!” she bawled. And bawled. And bawled. And I. hard-hearted mother that I am, ignored her.

Then she looked up at me with her big, tearful blue eyes and said in a shaky voice:

“I’m scared to live in a house all by myself.”

Shot to the heart.

I kneeled down and hugged her and assured her she would never, never leave in a house all by herself. Until, maybe she was a grown-up. But then only if she wanted to. She could still live with me, and we could have coffee together in the morning and share clothes.

What can I say? She’s got a way with words, that one.

Let's get physical, physical . . .

Interested in the state of physical education classes in New York elementary schools? Oh, come one, you know you are. You know you want to know where your kid can take sword-fighting for PE credit.

So read this article I wrote about it in Time Out NY Kids.

Who says TV is bad for kids?

In defense of the merits of television as a learning tool, I present to you this scene, taken directly from my morning:

The children sit watching Tigger and Pooh. Not my preferred programming, but not nearly approaching the reprehensibility of SpongeBob SquarePants or the potentially traumatizing effects of watching Crashbox in toddlerhood (the last time Sec watched this along with her ig brother, she saw the skeleton character who rearranges his bones to do math problems and she told everyone for a week, "When you grow up, your head's gonna fall off!"). Right now, Tigger and Pooh is the only show the two children can agree on, leading me to conclude it surprisingly fills in some gender/ age gap in between the Backyardigans (Seconda's pick) and Magic School Bus (Primo's pick). Point is, they're watching an episode entitled "Darby's Tail" in which the human protagonist, a little girl named Darby, searches for a tail of her own, since all her friends (donkeys, pooh bears and tigers) have tails and she does not.


My daughter ventures confidently, "I have a tail!"

And I explain that children do not have tails (I mean, there are some tragic exceptions to this rule but as my son is a chronic worrier, I opt not to mention this fact).

Later on, Seconda sees fit to impart this new-found wisdom to her brother.

"Primo," she informs him somewhat regretfully, " you don't have a tail!"

To which he replies with classic big brother's exasperation, "I know that! Remember that I have lived longer than you - two years longer - and i have more EXPERIENCE!"

See? TV can be highly educational.

The Picturesque Picking of Apples

Every fall, my family has a date with destiny. At Maskers Orchards. It is very picturesque, see?



Here's how it goes down:

I (unpictured, as always because hey, someone needs to operate the camera), take a shitload of pictures.



Seconda eats a shitload of apples -- without, I might add, bothering to polish off the pesticides.



Primo picks a shitload of apples, each with painstaking care. He is in charge of Quality Control and he is exacting.



David does everything else, including lifting children for high-altitude picking, changing baby's diapers, and caring for kids in general, while I take pictures and enjoy the fresh air.



David also carries the monumentally mammoth bag of apples. This year, though, he began the young one's apprenticeship.



Now I have enough apples to feed a small village. I should donate them to a small village, in fact, because what inevitably happens is David says we should make a deep dish apple pie and I say, sure, but there's no way I am peeling allllll of those apples AND making homemade pie crust, too. Its one or the other. And fresh apple pie with frozen piecrust, well, I won't say its garbage, but its a lot of coring and slicing for a sub-par pie experience. So then David says HE'LL make the pie crust and I say I won't hold my breath. Which I don't, thankfully, since it never happens, because even when he gets as far as checking recipes, he remembers we don't have the Cuisinart thing requisure for pie-crust making. So then we figure its best to just eat the apples, fresh and raw, like God intended -- I mean, advised us not too. Except by that point the apples are no longer fresh. So I give them to my grandmother who then eats a lot of apples for a long time, since she lived through the war and knows the meaning of an empty stomach. How do you like them apples?

My daughter talks like William Burroughs

Its stream of consciousness word association all the time with her. So, either like William Burroughs or the crazy pregnant lady in that commercial who talks like a Google search engine and freaks out the nice woman in yoga class. You know the commercial I mean.

Here is an excerpt from one of Seconda’s monologues:

“I like Dragon Tales, you can’t feed a dragon because it will bite you, a dragon will bite you right on the head and it is so FEROCIOUS, and my dog is ferocious and my dog will bite you and my dog will not bite a dragon but do you want to see my dog bite you, Mommy, right on your head? When I grow up I’m gonna get a dog and a cat and chew gum but you can NOT chew the wrapper because that is paper and if you gonna chew the wrapper than you gonna get TIME OUT. Time out is where I got my bloody finger from the air conditioner in my room and I was cryyyyyyyyying and I was so sad and you said ‘Why you crying, honey?’ And I said, ‘I got a bloody finger’ and then you gave me a Band-Aid and it had Snoopy and Snoopy’s a dog who can bite you on the head and he likes to drink milk and my brother likes milk and I want some milk milk MILK FOR THE MORNING CAKE!”

If her brother starts to say something, she will literally start talking at the same time, even though she has nothing to say, just so that he can not be heard. She will use the few first words of his sentence as a platform, as above, and then just dive right off the edge of sanity, until she is hoarse. But usually it doesn’t take too long for her to get hoarse because when she starts these conversational coups, Primo goes nuts and they start yelling at each other within seconds.

“IT’S MY TURN TO TALK!” they shout simultaneously.

The prime location for this to occur is in the car, where David and I are trapped. David says it’s like being plunged into icy water. Bracing.