Snow Day? They should call it Heightened Productivity Day!

I'm not a homebody. I like being out in the world. Spending too much time at home tends to make me claustrophobic. It doesn't help that I share a small apartment with four very large characters. They are large and they are loud and they are messy. So, at the end of a day spent at home, I have:

A huge freaking mess
A headache from yelling at the kids to clean up the mess (and still, it remains a pretty sizable mess)
A headache from the general cacophony of kids at play and kids in fights and kids being kids.
A guilt complex from how much screen time they'd had
Did I mention the headache?

To stave this off, when we are stuck at home, I go into Super Intense Prpductive Mode.

So when my kids hear "snow day!" they think, "Yay!! No school! We can take it EASY!"

And I think, "Time to get shit done." If you dramatically re-enacted this scene for television, this would be the musical montage where you'd see close ups of me rolling up my sleeves, tying a doo rag over my hair and punching my fist into my open palm  in the universal, "It's on!" gesture.

I get VERY productive during snow days. Very. And I cannot help but involve the children in my intense industry because the largest project is always the "Rehabilitate the Children" project. Which is totally great from a multi tasking point of view. If this continues, my kids may very well be the only ones in the U S of A to hate snow days.

The real secret to my success for last week's snow day was that we dragged Nonny over to stay at our apartment for the blizzard. It was supposed to be this historic storm, and we didn't want her on her own. Also, we needed her to mop the floors and then wash the mop and generally help me take my Mommy Dearest act to new levels.

We did laundry.

We made chili.

We cleaned out our closets.

We changed the bedclothes.

We practiced math word problems.

We matched the mountain of unmatched socks (well, 20% of them, the rest have no match. But we hold out hope for them! Single socks will not be tossed away in our house! On a related note, we may be borderline hoarders. Not sure.)

We made piade, which are Italian tortillas.

Then the kids were poised for revolt so we let them play Just Dance for a while and then we made homemade Italian crema to forestall mutiny.

We super glued every item in the large pile of toys and accessories and hardware and home decor that has required super gluing.

We paid bills.

We cleaned out the high cupboard that only David can reach without a ladder.

Primo did most of his big school project on the Civil War and Seconda wrote an essay for a summer program she's applying to.

We scrubbed the bathtub and threw out the 8 year-old bath toys which probably carry dysentery.

It was so much FUN!

Then, when even Nonny could take no more productivity, we watched Pee Wee's Big Adventure and everyone, even the doubters among us, laughed their tired asses off.

And when the kids found out there was school the next day, I think they were more than a little relieved.

The cheapest haircut on earth

My grandmother had a lot to get used to when she moved from Bensonhurst to Park Slope. First was the dearth of elderly people of any kind, but in particular Italians. Second was the exorbitant price of everything but in particular, groceries. The thing about Park Slope is, one never gets used to just how insanely expensive everything is, especially if one is 80 years old and used to prices which haven't changed since the 1960s.

Case in point: my grandmother's beauty shop.

Last week, my grandmother had to go to a wedding, for the granddaughter of one of her best friends. She needed a haircut. Now I can never really tell the difference when Nonnie gets her hair cut -- it goes from boy short to slightly boy shorter -- but you better believe she can tell the difference.

"I can't go to dis weddin' witoutta haircut," she said early in the week, "Where do you get you hair cut?"

"There's a place around the corner," I told her, "Its pretty cheap."

"Oh yeah," she said, "How much?"

"About $60, I think," I said.

"No, Nicole," she said, clucking her teeth, "You wrong."

"You get you hair color, and so dat's why you pay $60," she went on.

"Well I do get highlights," I said, "But those cost more than $60. Those are probably $75/ 80 on top of the haircut."

She looked at me in horror, speechless.

"Whaddayou, crazy?" she asked, "You wanna know how much I pay to get my hair cut in Brooklyn?"

I have stopped reminding her that Park Slope is Brooklyn. Its futile.

"How much?"

"Guess," she coaxed me.

"I don't know, $35? $30?"

Nonnie got that terrifically satisfied look she gets on her face when she has found an amazing bargain, outwitted people from robbing her blind.

:$15," she said, "including tip."

"FIFTEEN DOLLARS?" I asked her.

"Yes," she confirmed, "$13, and then I give her $2 for tip."

"And you know how much Maria pays to get the color?"

"I can't even imagine."

"$26," she replied, proudly, "For that, you get you head washed, hair cut, hair color, and she blow dry you hair."

"You don't have to include the head washing part," I told her, "That comes with the price, everybody gets their hair washed when its cut."

"Oh no, I'm sorry, you wrong," she corrected me, "To wash you head, that's extra. But I pay $15 and I get my head washed."

"Well, I don't think you'll do better than that. I don't think you can buy a pair of scissors to cut your own hair for that price. I think you should go get it done in Bensonhurst."

And today, $15 lighter in the pocket, she is the proud owner of a slightly shorter boy haircut. The hairspray involved in the 'do alone probably cost more than $10. You can't beat Bensonhurst for a bargain.

The Hurricane Chronicles Part Two: Preparations

Because my grandmother is more or less always preparing for natural disaster, she rountinely has enough canned goods for several months stored in her teeny tiny pantry. She went out Friday morning and bought even MORE food, two gallons of milk, and six gallons of water. I figured we were pretty covered in the food and drink category.

We could, however, use some more flashlights. I headed out to our local hardware store where I waited on line for fifteen minutes as everyone else bought three and four flashlights apiece and tons of D batteries. The radios in which to put those batteries, however, were already sold out.

Sometime Friday night, Nonnie realized that if we lost power she wouldn’t be able to use her oven or toaster or microwave and this threw her into a new paroxysm f panic. She woke at 4am to start cooking, before the power went. eggplant parmesean, pasta with broccoli, a roast, she food kept piling up. Then she began cleaning, though I’m not sure why. I suspect it is because if something happens to her, she wants her house to be impeccable so she can impress the emergency workers who arrive. Her bathtub and every available pot was filled with clean water by noon. David and I, meanwhile, took the kids on a last foray out before the storm hit – picked up masking tape to X the windows and the last two cannolis in the bakery. We then spent the rest of the day trying to clean the house enough to stand living in it for the next 24 hours and we failed, miserably, mainly because, as anyone knows, you can’t clean a house with CHILDREN in it. As you go around cleaning, the walk behind you re-messing it up. We had dinner at my grandmothers – a real feast – as she prayed and invoked the heavens and told me she’d always watch over us no matter what happened.

After dinner, she came downstairs with us, bearing a bag full of her important documents, and cleaned up our kitchen – the which we had just cleaned but which, of course, looked unthinkably filthy to her. Then she forbade David and I to sleep in our bed, which is directly next to a big window. Before I lost my mind, I had a moment of revelation and sent her in to sleep with the kids in the bunk beds thus occupying both the kids and Nonnie. David and I watched the cinematic failure Failure to Launch followed by The Jersey Shore in Italy. It was just what we needed. Then we slept on the fold out couch, because even though I know my grandmother is insane, it doesn’t mean I doesn’t listen to her.

True Story

You may recall the night, a few months ago, when my kids woke to start the day at 4:30am. Well, my daughter has beaten that record. And I hope her brother doesn’t try to outdo her.

She woke at 3am and DID NOT GO BACK TO SLEEP.

I can tell you think I’m exaggerating. I’d think I was, if I wasn’t there in the room watching her wriggle around and sing softy for THREE hours in – literally—the middle of the night. I thought to myself, “There is no way the child won’t go back to sleep. It’s not a borderline situation, the kind that occurs at 5am, where some people might actually consider it early morning. At no point in the year does the sun EVER consider 3am to be morning. And the sun is a morning expert."

. I tried to point this out to Seconda. I showed her the darkness that lay around us. I kept repeating the phrase “middle of the night.”

She was unconvinced. And I know why. Primo was also awake at 3am -- in fact I think it was his blood-curdling nightmare scream which woke her. And when Sec sees that Primo is awake, she will not stand down. She does not want to be duped into sleeping when he is awake. This is why she dropped her nap just after turning 2. So while Primo was coaxed back to sleep, she was not.

To her credit she stayed pretty still and quiet, but I knew she was awake because sleeping children do not sing all the words of “Whole New World” on repeat play,

It's pretty awful when you know, at 5:45 am that how you are feeling, after having been awake for three hours, is the best, is the most well-rested you will be feeling all day From that point on, your perkiness will only get more and more degraded, not only because you will have been awake more hours but because you will be taking care of a three year-old who STARTED HER DAY AT 3AM! A child who is intractable on a full night’s sleep does not grow more manageable after half a night’s rest.

But I did manage to do two things which saved my ass. A. I sent her to her Nonnie’s at 5:45 for two hours and got to sleep then (Nonnie had been up for hours, incidentally, and already cooked a pot of marinara sauce).And B. I miraculously persuaded her to take an hour nap at 2:30pm by telling her I would not take her to the end-of-the-year class party if she didn’t. I literally can’t remember the last night she napped in a place outside of the car, but I guess that’s what waking at 3am will do to a gal.

The only upside to these abysmal sleeping habits is that it affords me more of an opportunity to feel like a martyr. And I’ll have better baby stories to regale her with when she’s grown and brings boyfriends over for dinner.

Mother's Day

I spend a lot of time sharing what I consider to be embarrassing anecdotes about my grandmother (since she thinks she's always right, she’s not the slightest bit shamed about them) but this Mother’s Day I’d like to share a different side of my grandmother with you. So I won’t talk about the ordeal I’ve gone through this week trying to find a gift or activity for Mother’s Day that she won’t reject (“Its too expensive! I’m gonna return it!” or “This food taste terrible! Mine is much better!”) Instead I give to you:

Top 10 reasons I Love My Grandmother

1. Single best back scratching til you fall asleep, ever. I’ll do it for my kids for max 3 minutes, but Nonnie can seriously go all night.

2. You know Proust’s Madeline? For me, its Nonnie’s melted mozzarella on Italian bread. The smell of that melted cheese is the smell of my happy childhood.

3. Same goes for her pasta sauce, except that it is also the smell of my happy adulthood. Her sauce is so stellar that my high school ex-boyfriend who I’m not really in contact with just emailed me a few weeks ago begging for me to try and explain how to make it – again.

4. Ditto for the riceballs, stuffed artichokes, pizza, gnocchi, manicotti, and basically everything else that comes out of her kitchen. She literally wakes at 4am most days to start cooking homemade delicacies for my kids to eat for dinner every night. And get this -- Primo’s been obsessed with Spanakopita lately so she decided rather than have him eat the frozen ones, she’d make her own. With ricotta added of course. Italian spanakopita.

5. Loyalty. You don’t need a whole mafia when you’ve got Nonnie. She’s always on my side, no matter how wrong I am, and now the same goes for my kids, Once, when I was 13, I got into an Upper East Side elevator altercation with a haggy bitch who insulted my grandmother, and when the woman raised her hand to hit me, my grandmother literally beat her off the elevator with one hand, because the other one was holding a baby. You don’t mess with the Nonnie.

6. She tells dirty jokes.

7. Her favorite word in the English language is “sunofabitch,”

8. When Sec woke up at 5 am earlier this week and wouldn’t go to sleep, I called up Nonnie, who was awake of course, beginning her daily epic food preparation, and she was - I am not exaggerating – DELIGHTED to come pick up her great granddaughter at 5:10am. Kept her til it was time for school. She even made her chicken soup for breakfast.

9. Besides David and I, she is the only one in the world who truly understands how extraordinary our kids are.

10. For as long as I can remember, she’s always been there – for every good and bad occasion, every birthday, wedding, Christmas, every birth of a child -- loving me, and now my kids, like there’s no tomorrow, loving out loud, in living color, with everything she’s got. I can only hope my kids and grandkids and great grandkids will one day feel a fraction of the love and gratitude I feel for her.

.

How to get a baby boy or girl

Since the dawn of man, people have been trying to figure out how to conceive babies of a specific gender. There are books about it with various crazy strategies to increase the chances of having a girl, or a boy. But I am here to tell you that yesterday my grandmother told me the secret.

Yes, I now know how to conceive a specific gender, and I will share it with you.

Here’s what my grandmother told me.

"You know, in my time, everybody used to say it was the woman’s fault if she didn’t have a boy baby, and you know, these men would get mad at her. ‘Why didn’t you give me my boy?’ and it was terrible. Me, I don’t care. Me, I was so happy I got two daughters and I got five granddaughters. But anyway, all these time everybody thought it was the woman’s fault and they blame her and call her names. Sonofbitch.”

She went on:

“But now, of course, they find out it’s the man’s fault. He’s one who makes it a girl or a boy. He’s the one who plants the seed, you know.”

This still was unclear to me, but thankfully, she went on to clarify:

“You don’t plant a tomato and get a pepper. You understand?”

So there you have it. Men, it’s up to you. Get your seeds straightened out before planting time.

Me, I’m grateful my husband likes a diverse assortment of vegetables because I hit the jackpot and got a tomato AND a pepper.

If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say . . .

Then don’t say anything at all.

This is my new motto with Seconda who has become, I have to confess, outright hostile to almost everyone she encounters – strangers, friends, people in authority, her family. If someone in the elevator says, “What a beautiful hat!” she will say, “No! You can’t say that!” If a friend's mother says “Hello!” she’ll reply, “I don’t like you.” We’ve moved way past “Go away!” in terms of rudeness. And the worst part is, of course, my SEARING embarrassment because people must think I’ve raised her to act this way.

But I realized yesterday that my daughter is not the only one in our family who needs to learn a lesson about tongue-biting. I will now relate to you a one-hundred percent true and un-exaggerated list of remarks my grandmother made in the span of one hour:

12:27pm:

“Dio mio! This house is a pigsty! I don’t know how you people live like this!”

12:45:

About the new photo of Seconda I’ve hung on the wall:

“What a terrible picture. She’s so gorgeous! Why don’t you ever have a nice picture of my poor baby!”

12:54:

About the new, expensive curtain we hung up on the kid’s Maxtrix bunk beds:

Her: “Why you hang those things up? I think the baby’s gonna feel suffocated.”

1:15:

Her: “You husband came to my apartment yesterday after he did his exercise and he was wearing these little itty bitty shorts and – Dio Mio – I was worried! I say to myself,‘These are Nicole’s shorts! Why he dressing in Nicole’s clothes? Something wrong with him?’

Me: “Those are biker shorts, Nonnie.”

Her: “No, its impossible a man gonna wear something so tight!”

1:23:

I see that a dress Seconda is wearing is looking a little tight so I remark: “Wow, that dress is almost too small on her.”

My grandmother says, “Don’t worry, You’re gonna lose weight.”

“Non!”

“What? You said you pants are too small and I’m telling you they gonna fit you again one day!”

“Ok, that’s it, Nonnie. You know what I’m gonna have to do now? I’m gonna have to write a blog about you.”

“Good. I’m gonna write a blog about you too.”

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.

Our New Neighbor

Big news on the AMAM front. Huge. Colossal. My grandmother has moved into our building. Nonnie is now our neighbor.

For forty years Nonnie’s been kicking it in Bensonhurst, buying her fruit and vegetables from Two Guys from Brooklyn, enjoying the best cannolis in the US of A, hanging out of her window and yelling in Italian to her friends, most of whom are named Maria. But when her landlord who was a good friend, and incidentally also named Maria, died, things started to change at the old homestead. Maria’s granddaughter moved in, took over and brought a certain seediness to the attached house. Where my grandmother and her friends used to sit on the porch clucking their teeth at passersby, there is now large gatherings of young people smoking and drinking and playing music loudly. Nonnie’s friend, Lucia, who was living there when Nonnie moved in, fell and broke her hip a year or two ago and went to live with her daughter in Florida. Some of the new landlord’s friends moved in, in her place, and a few months later my grandmother gets a knock on her door at 11pm and it’s the cops looking for her downstairs neighbor.

None of that would have pushed my grandmother out of the place she’s called home for so long. She’s a tough broad. But then the landlady raised her rent by 30% overnight and she doesn’t have a lease so she is what you might call up shit’s creek without a paddle. At precisely the same time, we started looking for an apartment to buy, the market being what it’s been, mortgage rates at an all-time low, prices plummeting and our family much too large for our current rental. And that’s when somebody – I don’t remember who started the ball rolling – suggested my grandmother might be better off living near us, than in her walk-up crime den.

Let me tell you who DOESN’T think my grandmother is better off. My grandmother.

“You’re living in the lap of luxury over here,” I tell her, “You have a dishwasher and an elevator.”

“It’s so small! No room for anything!” she says.

I advise her that maybe she feels cramped because she brought forty pots and pans and enough plastic Tupperware to run a Chinese restaurant for a week.

“When was the last time you used this?” I asked her yesterday, holding up a spearmint-green Jello mold that is from the 70s. Literally, I ate Jello from this thing my whole childhood.

“I’m gonna start using it again one day!” she replied defensively.

When we packed my grandmother’s apartment, we unearthed:

A hand-powered meat slicer
Six aluminum mugs from the Playboy Club circa 1973
Every single Halloween costume worn by her five granddaughters, from their birth 'til they outgrew Halloween
My baby tricycle
Two unopened DVD players
A Remington typewriter circa 1930
Enough canned food for my kids to survive on ‘til they graduate high school

I can’t even describe the extent of stuff crammed into every nook and cranny of her apartment. Her closets were like clown cars – we just kept pulling out large items that you couldn’t imagine ever fitting in there. A meat slicer, for the love of God! The kind they have at Key Food that gets your honey-roasted turkey breast sliced nice and thin! We found every single item of apparel I ever wore as an infant, which would have been useful about 4 ½ years ago when my son was born, but has been impossible to reach until we spent three days digging a tunnel through her bedroom closest. I’m surprised we didn’t find members of our family trapped in there, under all the fabric scraps and baby shoes.

But I don’t know why I’m surprised. This is a woman who has been using her dishwasher, which hasn’t worked in over twenty years, as a kitchen cabinet. So when you went over to her place and she made you dinner, she’d open the dishwasher and you’d see dozens of boxes of Ronzoni penne, crushed tomatoes and Stella D’Oro cookies.

Her new dishwasher works, which I point out to her, but she says she’d prefer to use it as storage space. She needs to find a spot for that Jello mold, after all.

Simply Scatological

Since I’m surrendering fully to the unapologetic glory of TMI, I offer you today this whopper.

The other day, I was holed up in my office (read: whatever room the children are not in) working on deadline, with my grandmother “in charge” of the kids. Since our house is the size of a shoebox, with walls about as thick, I could hear every syllable of the detailed monologue my grandmother was delivering about my daughter’s dirty diaper.

“Jesu mio! Seconda, are you dirty? Uffa! You dirty! You very dirty! Che puzzo! Lemme change you diaper.”

I heard her rip off the diaper tabs, followed by a gasp.

“Dio mio! What a LOAD! Oh my God! Don’t move, baby. I gotta get da wipes. OK, don’t you move. Don’t move.”

Oh, come on, Nonnie, that’s a rookie move, I thought. You know better than to leave the kid unattended with a half-open dirty diaper

.

A minute later, I heard a piercing shriek.

“NO! NO! NO!” my grandmother yelled, “DON”T TOUCH THAT!”

With unsuppressed glee, I heard my daughter laugh, then exclaim: “I’m all MUDDY!”

It is in moments like these that it’s easy to believe we came from monkeys.