Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Stocking stuffers and bananas

I say it often, a bit tongue in cheek, but there's a hint of truth to #SorrySecondChild, especially this Christmas. I looked at Calvin's tidy pile of gifts and at Genevieve's much smaller pile, and felt guilty. It's not that I favor the older child over the younger, it's that all of the things that we bought for Calvin's second Christmas, developmental toys to delight an almost-2-year-old, are still here and it doesn't really make sense to purchase a pink version of a learning table or an easel just to have a new and shiny version, not when Genevieve would be just as delighted by a banana. This leaves us with very little that we could reasonably purchase for her, so we found ourselves scrambling.

It doesn't help that Calvin has real and defined interests and goals at 4 years old, which make it easy to find something to gift him. The new DogMan book. A small locked-down digital device so he can finally stop begging us to pull out our phones for music. A pair of fingerless mitts ("mittens with no fingers and thumbs, please, Mom"). A big fuzzy blanket "just like a kitty" that he fell in love with at the clearance shelf in the store. He likes things. Genevieve delights in the world with equal wild abandon for everything, and also abandons things wildly in her wake, leaving behind a trail of stuffed animals that she passionately adored in the store for 20 minutes before dropping it and walking off as soon as we got it home. Miss G wants everything and nothing (unless her brother has it, and then she wants it desperately). Her interests are transient and tenuous at best, and really she'd really rather that you play with her, to get down on the floor with her or to pull her into your lap while you read her a book. Eleven months out of the year this thrills me, that I have a child that likes experiences and people more than Things. On that twelfth month I feel a whole lot of Mom-Guilt as I looked at the disproportionate piles of gifts. The Middle Child in me screamed that things must be fair.

This extended to Christmas stockings; not something that my family did in my childhood so I find myself asking co-workers what kind of things one is supposed to put into stockings (so far the consensus seems to be "cluttering junk that you don't actually want and will probably be thrown into a landfill within two months" which seems horrifically wasteful, "hygiene supplies" and "school supplies," candy, and "small presents that you would otherwise put under the tree" and honestly the whole thing still seems very strange to me). Calvin's stocking bulked out quickly while Genevieve's lagged behind.


I will say that Liam put in a lot of effort to help me navigate my first stocking Christmas, and I started to get it when he sent me a "just bought the first stuffer for your stocking" and it occurred to me that I would be getting trinkets and doodads as well. In a way, it appeals to my particular love language in that everything in a stocking was picked out because someone saw something small and said "you know, that reminds me of Elisabeth" and that means that I mean enough to someone that they remembered.)

So I put a banana into a shoe box and wrapped it, and Genevieve was just as delighted to open that package as Calvin was to open a tablet with pre-downloaded Spotify playlists. She liked dramatically  ripping open wrapping paper and shouting "oooo!" though, so she had a good time, and really that's all that matters.

Friday, August 31, 2018

Ten Years

Ten years ago, I fired up my laptop, waited while Windows Vista loaded, and opened Facebook up in a tab while I checked my email to see if I had heard back from the grad school I had applied to. I had a new Facebook message! It was a slightly cryptic message from another Facebook user, someone with an obviously fake name pulled from literature, whose profile was not yet connected to my own, asking if I was the Elisabeth Sokol they thought I was, peppering their paragraph with enough clues for me to deduce that they did in fact know the real me (or at least the real High School Me from six years previous).

That was the beginning. There were fun chats and phone calls back and forth as we reconnected as friends, reminiscing and catching each other up on our lives. We had grown up dramatically since high school, and were eager to be friends as adults. With promises of mini-golf in the future, I met up for a friendly friend-group meetup of dinner (they had never had Indian food before!) and watching a cheesy movie. I didn't dress up like it was for a date, because that would be silly, but I did wear my cute new lace blouse and style my hair nicely.

After all, Liam was my ex, and one must look their best when meeting up with exes, so they can see what got away.

The chemistry was immediate, and we promptly spent almost a whole month trying to ignore it, because neither of us was in a particularly great headspace for relationships.

But sometimes something can be incredibly easy, and when you know, you know. We moved in together less than a year later. We were engaged a year after that, and married four months later. Two apartments, two houses, four moves, three cats, and two children later, here we are. It seems like the last decade has flown by (how can it have been ten years? Ten full years, with at least 365 days in each year?), but at the same time I cannot remember a time when we were not two halves of a matched set.


I'm glad we didn't work out the first time, in our teens; we were terrible in our young relationship. It was only with several serious (and terrible) relationships under our respective belts that we could recognize what it took to make a good one. So here's to you, darling. Here's to mini golf, and making cookies at 11 pm, by the romantic light of a preheating oven. Here's to hiking Mount Major, and knowing when I'm willing to share desserts.* Here's to buying a WHOLE BOX OF SPOONS from the gas station to eat a WHOLE CARTON OF ICE CREAM on the swings near our home until twilight fell and we had to go home. Here's to remembering each other's favorite flavors, and hiding love notes and presents, and knowing how to argue without fighting. Here's to the rest of our lives.

*never. I never share dessert. Get your own. Your "one bite" is negative one bite for me.

Monday, June 25, 2018

What the fork?

I've mentioned before that our household objects have a peculiar habit of disappearing at random (you may remember me mentioning that our power drill vanished after a move, and our seeming inability across the years to keep our pie pans from escaping), but this new instance is more peculiar than others.

Our silverware is disappearing.

Over the last year, I've noticed that our silverware drawer is dwindling. We came to this house with a multitude of flatware, but as of this moment there are only four proper forks in my entire kitchen. I got up and counted just now.

"That's weird. Maybe you can use the salad forks instead?"

I am. That count of four included the salad forks. There are two dinner forks and two salad forks. (Some friends at this point might ask me if I really have actual real salad forks, and the answer is 'yes' because my flatware was gifted to me by my mother when I moved into my first apartment, because she had something like 37 full complete table settings of this fancy silverware, because she purchased one full table setting each month from Oneida when she was footloose and fancy free, building up her household over time in a frugal and reasonable manner. In the end she turned out not to need 37 full table settings for her household.)

"That's... really weird. Did you check to see if little hands stashed them somewhere?"

We've checked under all the furniture and all the cushions. We've checked all of our late-night-snacking crash points. We've checked under the refrigerator and under the stove. We've even surreptitiously checked the silverware drawer in the in-law apartment to see if Calvin has been bringing and abandoning forks at my parents' home (they use the other 20 table settings, so an extra fork wouldn't be noticed) and they have fewer forks too. It's very peculiar.

"So... how do you ... eat.... food?"

The full table settings happened to include seafood forks, which I call dessert forks, because I like to eat desserts with them with a tiny fork, partly because it makes the dessert last longer so I can savor it, and partly (okay, mostly) because it makes me feel very fancy. I don't particularly mind using shrimp forks to eat the occasional meal. It's getting really old, though, to eat every meal with them in order to give Calvin and Liam a full sized fork to eat with.


"So.... buy more forks?"

But then they won't match all my current flatware (which I really like, it's heavy but not too heavy, and it's so nice looking and it's really nice quality), and I can't just go buy new forks from the manufacturer because Oneida discontinued this pattern and I'm not willing to spend $10/fork on eBay*, and now it's turning into buying a whole new flatware set which is really not a justifiable expense right now.
Although now that I think about it, I notice that we have significantly fewer dessert spoons, and an extra soup spoon with a different handle pattern.
And our plates and cups have all broken enough pieces that we've got a weird mismatched set of everything, so we would not be amiss to purchase a new set of dishes.
And honestly our dining set is getting a bit creaky, because it was purchased when we were young and couldn't afford something that would last for decades.
Do they make "you've been together 10 years and need to upgrade all your stuff to Grown Up Stuff" registries?


~*~*~
*one day let's talk about how I got banned from eBay

Monday, May 7, 2018

Hobbies as a parent

It has been an eventfully uneventful (and sickly) 2018 for us so far, with several visits to Urgent Care/E.R. (Liam got turned into a newt*, Calvin spiked a dangerously high fever, etc), as we all adjust to our first year with Calvin bringing home the pathogens from the public school germ season. There's an extra petri dish in the household too to percolate the microbes this year, too, as Genevieve adds her immune system to the mix. Recently she has decided that she has learned how to kiss, which is more of an open mouth slobber with extra saliva and boogers and light suction. It's... charming. And full of love.

It has been the sort of winter and spring where we are astonished to realize that it is nearly summer, and nearly 8 months since my last blog post, and yet we have no news to report. Liam's job continues well. My job continues well. Calvin is almost done with his first school year. Genevieve is hitting all of her milestones and continues to blow the growth charts away.

Liam and I are trying to figure out who we are as thirty-somethings. Aren't we supposed to be wearing fashionable clothing and hosting dinner parties effortlessly by now? We've so much less energy and time for hobbies, but we both refuse to be subsumed entirely by the societal expectation of disappearing into the mantles of Parenthood and instead cling stubbornly to old hobbies and interests. I've had not time for my art lately without little fingers pulling all the pieces around to stain the furnishings or tangle the expensive silk fiber, and Liam's old physical hobbies must obviously be curtailed after all of the doctor visits the last few years.
I've gotten back into reading books, by which I mean that I move a book around the house every day but if you look closely you'll observe that I never actually get a chance to read the book. I'm also actively trying to say "yes" to invitations and that's how I made two new friends in the last few months, and also how I naively ended up in a year-long commitment on the board of a local non-profit.
Liam tried several varieties of meditation/tai-chi but none of them seem to be sticking. Tabletop gaming stuck around the longest, but getting a good group to show up on the same day, or, honestly to show up at the same time twice, is a Sisyphean task.

Calvin has taken up writing letters, which mostly means me convincing him to scribble a drawing in a card and tell me a sentence or two about his day, but it was in fact his idea; he saw a packet of unicorn greeting cards in the store and asked me to buy them so he could send letters to people. His enthusiasm lasted for three letters, so now I suppose it's now MY hobby to force him to send letters. He did get a letter back from on of his June2014 peers, though, so perhaps he'll stick with it now.

Genevieve has taken up couch climbing and is trying to take up base jumping but we keep catching her before she tips over the back of the couch. Also she enjoys putting small objects into cups and boxes and then taking them back out, and pulling tissue after tissue out of the tissue boxes.

Maybe she'll sign Calvin's letters for him. "hugs and light-suction-saliva-booger-kiss, Genevieve."

--------
*he got better