…place your head between your knees… *

For about the fifth or sixth time today, I am finding it necessary to stop and BREATHE. This morning, we met with the accountant who is handling our taxes and the city’s lawsuit against us. He was reassuring in that he’s certain we will not have to appear in court on Monday morning. That was the good news. The bad news is that we screwed up our taxes big time. Apparently in ‘05 we really underestimated how much we owed the city; now we’ll have to pay the amount owed along with penalties and interest and all that great stuff.

I keep repeating to myself my (insane?) mantra: It’s only money. It’s only money. We’ll make more, we’ll use more, we’ll lose more, we’ll not starve, we’ll not be put out of our home. It’s. Only. Money. It is not our health. It is not our art. It is not something that cannot be replaced. It. Is. Only. Money.

This is maybe not the best mantra for someone running a business. Now, back to reconciling accounts.

*
(… and kiss your ass goodbye.)

I’ve been a little reluctant to post a new post after that sweet, sweet letter that D wrote me. I just kept coming back to my blog and re-reading it. I know that I am loved. I will be fine. We’ll get through, it, whatever it may be.

Yet life and its insecurities rage on. I don’t know if it’s safe to write about using illegal drugs on one’s blog, no matter how anonymous it is (and this one’s not all that successful at anonymity!) So I am only going to say this: that if I were to be the sort of gal who enjoys a puff or two of a relaxing kind of smoke from time to time when the kiddos are safely put away on their shelves, then now would be a pretty good time to seek such relaxation.

In fact, D and I are both pretty anxious right now. I hadn’t mentioned this before (probably because of denial, shame, or whatever) but we’re being sued by the lovely city of brotherly love. It’s because apparently our accountant made a mistake on our 2001, or maybe it was our 2002, tax returns. It seems that our city taxes were not filed, or not filed properly.

Since I’m someone whose eyes glaze over and ears seemed stuffed with fluff whenever taxes are discussed, I honestly don’t fully get what happened, or when, or why. I just know that our tax situation requires that a (new) professional accountant deal with it. In order to avoid the $5000 fine and being required to appear at a hearing, the city requires that we file (or re-file, if it was filed) no later than three days before the hearing. If we do, the hearing’s cancelled, the $5000 fine is avoided.

The hearing is August 11. When we’re in upstate NY on vacation. Talking to the accountant’s office today, he said they’d get right to it and work on our taxes. Um… please hurry the fuck up, ok? I mentioned to the clerk I spoke with that there’s this little $5000 fine we’re trying to avoid, and the little lawsuit we’re trying to have dropped… and the best he could say is that they’re going to get started on it right away.

Anxiety much? Now you can understand why I might just be interested in something that might take the edge off. Ease the freak-out a little.

I am also anxious about packing for our vacation (remember my little problem with packing for a ONE NIGHT STAY recently? Well how’s about a two week trip to the middle of nowhere NY where you have to drive 30 miles to get anywhere civilized?) I am perhaps equally anxious about preparing for next year and working as the after school teacher at this wonderful little school. It’s like being pregnant in a way. You get to this point where you suddenly remember OH SHIT! I’M GOING TO GIVE BIRTH! AM I READY FOR THIS?

The fact is I am NOT ready. I am far from ready. I also am not feeling ready for the simple daily life functions of getting my kids up daily, dressed, fed and out the door to go to school on time each day. I am not ready to pay my business bills, either. I really need to do much more, or else face serious consequences.

It’s also 11:52 AM and I am not ready to feed my kids their lunch today. I didn’t get them an adequate breakfast, yet, either, though they both ate something.

And here I am just lolling in anxiety to the point where I wonder if it would be a good idea to take part in some kind of relaxing herbal refreshment (what my pals and I sometimes called it when we were teens).

I need to get my shit together. Perhaps the first thing to do is get dressed and go buy some food. I’ll need some snacks later on if I go with the whole herbal refreshment plan, anyway.

C (making homemade sock puppet toy talk): Sweetie, we have to get married! I’m pregnant!
A (holding other puppet toy, talking for it): It’s okay, you can just have the baby. You’ll see, everything will be alright. You can have a baby first, before you get married.

Memo to self: have that birth control talk with the girls before they turn, what, 10?

I think cooking with a crock is awesome… even though I don’t know what I am doing, things seem to turn out yummy.

(Hey, kids, this isn’t a restaurant. You’re getting what I cooked for dinner and you’re going to like it.)

That approach isn’t all that successful, but hey, if they’re hungry, they’ll eat, right?

I had an anxiety dream about my job that starts in the fall. In my dream, the school year had begun, and I forgot to show up to work. Instead, I tried just picking up my kids and going home. I was greeted by all the kids there at school, who were all hungry and tired from their first day of school. What’s for snack? was the constant refrain. It was then I realized that I was supposed to be their after school teacher.

And I’d kind of forgotten to prepare for that, as I also forgot to show up to the job. I rooted then through the pantry, trying to find some snacks left over from camp. Then I tried to get the kids to do some kind of activity. The hostility from the older kids was intense. They rolled their eyes at me, walked out of the room, snickering behind their hands. It was awful.

When I woke up from this, my heart was beating kind of fast. I realized with a jolt that the summer is halfway gone. What am I doing this summer, I asked myself? My life is so disorganized. I have no structure. I am not taking care of business, and I’m not getting this place ship-shape. I am not planning ahead for the fall.

That dream was a wake-up call. I need to get myself in order. But I feel really stuck, paralyzed. I don’t know what I can do to get out of this feeling of trying to move a mountain. I am just able to get to OT appointments and provide three meals (sometimes just two) to the kids each day.

This is not an easy place to be, mentally. I feel really stuck.

Seems that Mondays are when I do the running around. Making a lot of stops with my two gals in tow is tiring under the best of circumstances. Doing so in 90 degree summer humid heat is really tiring. And doing so after a long (very fun!) weekend at the beach is really, really, tiring.

No wonder I am sitting here feeling utterly wiped out. We picked up our CSA delivery today, and oh my! What lovely freshness! What beautiful produce. At long last, the tree fruits are hitting their stride. We received five pounds of peaches and two pounds of little sweet plums this week. Tomatoes are in, and we have two beautiful pints of assorted cherry / grape tomatoes along with four generous slicing tomatoes.

The squash are here and threating to take over the fridge. Good thing I managed to make Carla into a squash lover, simply by not calling the stuff “squash”. She refers to them by fancier names. For example, she’s OK with eating courgettes but definately not zucchini. She loves Crookneck but not so much plain yellow squash. She’ll eat Straightneck, too. She was very hesitant to eat PattyPans but came around once she realized they taste just like crookneck.

Marketing. I tell you, it’s all in the marketing!

So my fridge is stuffed to the brink with all these great veggies (lots of lettuce, cucumbers, green peppers, green beans, new potatoes) and so I need to plan for some good cooking. My own garden looks like it’s coming along at last, too, with some cukes, lots of basil, some purple green beans, and tomatoes are getting started.

Unfortunately, it’s so hot down in the kitchen that it really puts a damper on my excitement about cooking. I mean, who wants to be in the kitchen when it’s 90 degrees out? We have no air conditioning in the kitchen, you see. As a matter of fact, our kitchen is my least favorite part of our home. I fantasize about fixing it up someday, but it’s a big, big project. It needs a total overhaul. Walls need to be taken down. Floor needs to be replaced. Ceiling, lighting, cabinets, everything should be replaced.

We just don’t have the dough right now to hire a contractor for something huge like that; and we’re not handy ourselves.

So for now, I just make do with what we’ve got. And what I’ve got a is a lot of squash. Er, courgettes and crookneck, I mean. Yum.

I think I have some kind of freakish aversion to packing. Unpacking, too. I just do not like it. I avoid it.

That is why, here I am, after midnight, without any clothes packed or organized, and maybe not even clean. And we’re hoping to leave for the shore First Thing After Breakfast tomorrow.

Part of the problem stems from not knowing what I want to wear. That alone can keep me stalling for hours. The other problem is when clothes aren’t washed and ready to be packed anyway. A huge pile of laundry in the hallway suggests it’s not very promising.

Plus the car is a mess (again!?) The only good thing about that is that most of the stuff in there is quite useful. I mean, other than the garbage. I can usually find a spare pair of undies for one of the kids should they happen to need it, by rooting around in the clothing in the car.

I just don’t like being disorganized, but at the same time, I am really mired by the messes that are in the way. They just stop me, in my tracks. I do something else instead.

I was actually extremely active today, which is weird because it was so damn hot. Not the kind of day where you feel like being out and about a lot, but we were.

Carla’s new filling has been bothering her, so we were off to the dentist this morning to have it adjusted. She did incredibly well, making only a few pathetic whines when the dentist used a noisy tool to reduce the size of the filling. Noises scare her, but she was brave and it was over pretty fast.

After the dentist, we headed to do some grocery shopping, and then brought it home and put it away. By then it was time to head to Annie’s occupational therapy. Annie did great work, as they always say at OT, and it’s true that she is a very cooperative kid. She throws a heavy ball, does animal walks, scoots on a scooter on her belly, and draws and cuts in the ways she is supposed to. We are trying to get her to increase her strength and use her hand muscles so that she can write more effectively. I wonder sometimes if it’s really going to be relevant in her future — how she hold the pen. But the therapy is covered by insurance, and much of it is fun, and she doesn’t seem to mind it, so I figure it may help. And it’s certainly not harmful.

After an hour of OT, we headed over to the swim club, and to my garden. With this hot weather, I knew my plants would be thirsty as heck, so while the girls frolicked and swam in the pool, I sweated like crazy under the sun in the garden. I am delighted to report that there are jalapeno peppers, purple greenbeans, itty bitty tomatoes, itty bitty eggplants, and a wee little pumpkin! There is also hope that maybe the bunnies won’t eat all of it before I get to! A few more cucumbers are growing nicely, and the pumpkin vines are lovely even if we don’t get a 100 pound pumpkin out of the deal.

After the swim club, we went shopping! And to McDonald’s to use the bathroom, which prompted my kids to beg for food (oh yeah, food! Right! Sure!) and of course an LPS toy with the happy meal. I convinced them to only get one happy meal, this way they’d not get two of the same toy again. (which is so boring!)

After McD’s, we headed home. It was a lot of stuff to do.

So you see, I had no time to pack. All day. And now, I’m kinda wiped out. But I’ll swing into action at any moment. Just you wait and see!

The last few weeks have been kind of hectic, in a summery kind of way. I’ve been driving Annie three times a week to her occupational therapy sessions. It’s kind of far from home, but not really far from the pool where we swim, so we’ve been trying to fit going there to swim into the day’s plans. Of course this requires planning ahead, making sure we have food with us or eat before we go. It’s all good things, but the driving is still pretty tiring for me. Happily, where I swim is also where I garden. This year’s garden got started a lot later than last year’s somehow. I don’t really know why or how that happened. Actually, I do know. I was working: having two jobs really took a lot of time away from when I would usually do my garden planning and planting seedlings.

In between, I am trying to keep up with email, and phonecalls from clients. Thankfully the requests have been light. Earlier this week I spent several hours catching up on way past due book-keeping: I realized that it had been more than six months since I’d balanced the business checking account. Not good. I’m still not caught up with that.

On the good side of things, I am finding time to cook, and this is a good thing, given that a) I love food b) I’m responsible for feeding the lot of us and c) our CSA is staring to come through with some lovely produce. I’d bought some beef stew cubes on discount — these were not just any old feedlot beef cubes, oh no! From a small farm, naturally raised, humanely treated cows. Happy cows. I can eat happy cows. As long as they have a good life before they’re killed and I eat them, I don’t have a problem with beef. Strange logic behind food, isn’t it? I still keep the meat that I eat fairly limited, and don’t eat it that often. I don’t feel like I have the moral fiber to be a vegetarian. It requires such self discipline.

Anyway, I finally pulled out the crockpot and made some beef stew, using the onions, cabbage and potatoes from our CSA delivery, along with the delicious basil they included. I’m looking forward to eating this stew today — it’s supposed to be even better a couple days later. I used this and that as the liquid in the stew: some mystery stock I found in my freezer, some sherry wine, some chicken broth, a little wine vinegar. A shake of oregano and pepper.

Unfortunately, the girls aren’t as keen to try things like this, but when I prepare the fresh produce simply, they are more apt to enjoy it. Carla, especially, has had a real turnaround in trying the fresh foods. She’s come to understand that fresh, local, and organic are all adjectives that seem to go with “tastes good”. I have had to be a little bit deceptive about it, though. I know she’s said in the past she does not like squash. Period. Yuck. Ick. Blech.

So the other day when C came downstairs to the kitchen as I was pan frying some crookneck yellow squash, I thought fast when she said “Mmm! That smells delicious! What’s for dinner, Mama?” I knew if I said, “this is squash” she would turn up her nose. Instead I said, “This is called Crookneck. Wanna try a piece?” She loved it. Ate several pieces, and then next night asked me to make her some more. I decided to call the zucchini by their French/British name, courgettes. This did not entire her to try it, unfortunately. After all, the girl does have her standards: courgettes, are after all, GREEN. GREEN means “be wary, be very, very wary.”

Now that’s she’s 8 years old, I expect her to be more mature. And she is, though she’s also developing that pesky sense of injustice that you seem to find in older children. She got a new virtual interactive pet for her birthday (I gave her a gift card to Target, and let her pick her own present). This requires being able to go on their website, and by the time we got home from her birthday dinner last night, it was too late at night to log in. We also gave her a bicycle, which she was too terrified to try riding. In the morning, she proceeded to get up early (in spite of going to bed late last night) and nag me about getting up so she could log in. I finally told her that we’d do it at 9 am, but that before then I was not getting up. When we finally did try to login, their stupid website was down. “Thanks for stopping by! The Hasbro Web sites are undergoing routine maintenance and are temporarily unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience and welcome you to check back after midnight Eastern time (GMT -5).” She rolled her eyes and said, “That is so stupid! This is supposed to be a website for kids! We’re not allowed to check back after midnight!”

The squabbling continues. Annie has taken to humming to herself, in a tuneless kid kind of way. This gives Carla a headache. And C’s birthday presents caused A to cry that she herself wasn’t getting enough toys. And back and forth. Oh, the nuisance of this! Thankfully, this is only sometimes, and generally not at all if we’re out and about. I guess they get bored after a few hours of occupying themselves.

I find myself alternatively grateful to them for amusing themselves and then annoyed with them for quarreling. Writing this down just now made me realize I’m kind of being a whiner.

I think it’s because I haven’t been getting enough sleep, too. Whatever the reason, I’m kind of just floating along. My thoughts aren’t really that organized. This post feels like a rambling mess, which is about what my life is like. In spite of all this whining, I am still quite grateful for the life I have. It could be a whole lot worse.

Reminder to myself: future posts on early tweenish-ness… and on the garden update … and fears about the future.

I’ve had a couple of posts brewing in the back of my head lately.

I’m really wanting to write about my surprise that my first born is turning 8, and all that it implies. It seems like the tween years are nearly upon us, somehow. She’s so … sophisticated for her age. This can be delightful at times, but at other times the eye-rolling and “yeah whatever” can be off-putting. Also, am I the only one around here who’s already tired of her birthday and it’s not even come yet?

I also wanted to write about, um, something. Uh, what was it?

You see, I’ve been thwarted from writing over the course of the last several days. I don’t recall all the reasons, but often it was because someone else was using my computer.

And now — JUST NOW — I am thwarted because my computer just let me know that it’s tired and would like to recharge its batteries or else it’s just going to sleep.

Which is what I should probably do, too. In the meantime, I will try to gather my thoughts and save them for later.

…that cup of ice coffee I enjoyed with dinner.

At some point during the weekend, I came to see everything around me as being at a level of filth that was just intolerable. The house had begun to look and smell like the inside of a car that has been on a cross country trip with four young children. I wondered what kind of mentally ill person was responsible around here, anyway? Who would let themselves live in this fashion? Dishes, piled up… flies were delighted but not me. I suddenly had this flash of shock as I thought about how it must seem to my kids, to live in such a messy place. I think it was getting on their nerves as much as mine, as they frolicked about and teased each other mercilessly.

I have a pretty low tolerance for when they are squabbling. I wouldn’t mind that much, but for the telling. Mom, Annie won’t give me back my half of the silly putty… Mom, Carla bumped me with her head! Mom! Maaaa-ommmm! It makes me say things like “well negotiate with her. Offer her something in exchange. Distract her. And if that doesn’t work, then GO TO YOUR ROOM BECAUSE I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT IT! Do you need a trip to the ER? No, so why are you trying to get me involved here??” (Mother of the year award coming right up! Sarcasm: just one more service I provide!)

But amid such mess as was our house, the squabbling just kind of fit right in. I found myself recalling information I’d gathered way back in my grad school days– learning about how the environment that a person is in can really shape their behavior. Of course they were going to be miserable in this house in the heat, the awful humidity… with me being busy playing scrabulous washing the dishes and preparing meals

rather than playing with them, and with every surface for play already cluttered with toys, and laundry and quite possibly guinea pig turds.

Something, something, had to pull me out of this squalid existence. It feels like today we suddenly started to really tip the scales and head in the right direction. In fact, it’s been a solid week of chipping away at the dishes, the laundry, and sweeping up, and so forth. D helped a great deal with this long weekend of ours. The weather had a way of helping as well, because today was off and on rainy rather than perfect pool weather, so I didn’t get up to the pool (or my garden).

In addition to doing a bunch of laundry, D came up with an innovative way for us to communicate the things we’d like each other to do over the course of a day. He suggested that we each make a list of three items for the other — it could be anything you want your partner to do for you from Give a Backrub to Mow the Lawn to Put the Kids to Bed to Apply for a New Job. Anything at all. The rules: Only put three things on the list. Expect that 2 out of 3 Ain’t Bad. 3 out of 3 is a pleasant surprise. And 1 out of 3 is Not So Good.

So, I looked around and realized that the huge laundry clutter in our bedroom was really getting me down, and yet I had no desire to sort and put it all away. I put that as one of his 3 things, and lo and behold! He did that task. This then inspired me to further clean up our bedroom, and I swept the room out and cleared out under the bed as well. I would certainly never have done that if the dresser were still cluttered. You see? The environment of my bedroom was paralyzing me from doing anything to improve it, because the dresser was a hurtle that seemed too awful to tackle. My bedroom closet is still a horrible mess and a monolith that I am not sure I can tackle. But with the dresser clear, I feel a little more easy about giving it a try.

D had been wishing I’d cook up a big yummy dinner, with lots of leftovers for him to take to work over the week, so he wrote that on his list. Getting this information early in the day gave me a chance to think ahead: sure, I can cook dinner, I thought. Dinner is important to me, too, and I like cooking. This in turn helped me get focused on grocery shopping, and planning some meals for the week. I ended up making a big pot of curried chicken, a pot of basmati rice, baked BBQ chicken legs, and a big container of salad. I also prepped some things for tomorrow’s dinner.

What tends to happen to Drob and I, is that our creativity kicks in when we have a problem to solve. The novelty of a creative way to handle expectations is very helpful to me. I can deal with small, concrete wishes, written on a piece of paper in a way that I cannot deal with a houseful of chaotic needs ricocheting off the walls.

I don’t know if this will be something we continue long term– it often happens that we have a good system going that Really Works until, that is, it stops working. Then … we try something else.

In my dream world, there are all these Very Clever Solutions to Life’s Problems… I find My Little Ways and teach the secrets to successful and happy living to my kids. I tell them all this Wise and Awesome stuff and they are able to help run the household like a well-oiled machine.

The truth be told, I really hope to someday be able to have some level of organization that I can pass along to my kids. How can I expect them to clean their rooms, or find their shoes, if all around them is a constant whirlwind of chaos? In short, I can’t expect that of them, in that circumstance.

There needs to be a system in place, and it needs to be consistent and simple. And when I forgot to do it, there needs to be a fail-safe way of getting back on target.

So far, though, I don’t have this magic bullet. I just have my creativity, my unreliable energy levels, and a husband who is a lot like me. And I have coffee. That counts for something, as surely I am going to need it in the morning.