Questions…

27 March 2012 By 4 Comments

Call me a sucker. But my blogging buddy Keesha over at Mom’s New Stage hit me with one of those chain interview deals, and for her, I would post about my worst period if she asked me to. It was fun answering her questions, and man do I wish we could meet up live for a drink one day.

Here is how it works:

1) Post the rules.
2) Tag up to eleven bloggers by posting links to their blogs, and let them know.
3) Create eleven questions for the people you’ve tagged.
4) Answer the questions your tagger posed for you.
5) Have fun!

When prompted to tag a few bloggers who I thought might actually take me up on this, my mind went immediately to these fantastic writers. People who I respect as storytellers, who make me laugh in my most stressed out days, and who I would do a backflip for to have a virutal happy hour. If you get a chance, please check them out!

Diapers, Dogs and Cooking in Heels
Mom’s Madhouse
Caffeinated OC Mommy
Misadventures in Motherhood
Crazed in the Kitchen
Cool Bean Mommas
Momfever
The Un Mom

1. How long does it take you to write a post?
This one is tricky to answer, because I rarely sit down and create a post from start to finish. Sometimes I start a post, get six words in to it, and then have to wipe someone’s butt. Then I might come back to it eight hours later, or three days later. This cycle can go on and on…

2. What does hubby think about your blogging?
I’m not sure if he reads this blog or not (Jon? Do you?). My assumption is that he doesn’t get it, but doesn’t mind either. I spend so much time on the internet anyway that the line between blogging and surfing become fuzzy.

3. Number of times per day you check your stats? I ask because I have a problem.
I actually don’t check my stats that often (GASP! I KNOW!). I know my bounce rate is horrendous, and I don’t need that kind of downer. Every now and then I peek up at that Alexa rating on my toolbar, or will check my Google Analytics page. Mostly because I want to see what bizarre string of keywords have led someone to my blog. My latest favorite is “apple crushing man.”

4. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Wait. Would I have to have my kids with me? If the answer is “yes,” then I’d say somewhere in Europe. Maybe Brussels, as it’s central to a lot of other countries, but I have a fond spot in my heart for Florence. If the kids are in college by the time this hypothetical situation occurs, then I might say Tahiti…

5. Time you go to bed vs. when you should be in bed?
I actually have a decent bedtime - around 10:30-11. Although, if left to my own devices, I’d stay up until midnight or 1:00 am. But that “alarm clock” of a kindergartner goes off pretty early. I’m a complete mess if I don’t get my zzzzz’s.

6. Current fashion trend you’d pay to have bombed off the earth immediately?
I’m not a huge fan of the Ed Hardy look. Not sure why, but I guess it’s not a vomit-inducing trend. And the wearing of the pajamas in daytime thing. Really? You couldn’t muster putting on an outfit this morning? Would it have killed you to invest in a decent pair of sweats? The ever-present baggy pants that come down past the butt-crack should be abolished everywhere.

7. If someone put you in Target right now, what is the first thing you’d buy?
What WOULDN’T I buy at Target? I usually head straight for the boxed wine, but I don’t mind perusing the handbag section either. I never buy anything, but I do like to daydream.

8. What makes you laugh these days?
George Takei posts some hilarious stuff on his Facebook page that speaks to my inner-geek. And you can’t go wrong with “Funny or Die” videos. “Modern Family” is my go-to for television humor. And any time one of my kids says something so “adult” and in the correct context, I can’t help but crack up.

9. Toy you would very much like to see your child “lose”?
Being that we’re about to put our house on the market and have total strangers come in and peek in our closets, I have certainly “misplaced” those annoyingly cheap trinkets my kids bring home from parties or restaurants. My son has a marble race set under his bed, and there is a ladybug that goes off at random times of the day. That thing? I’d chuck that in the trash the first chance I’d get if it wouldn’t make so much noise heading out to the dumpster.

10. We all read about stars and think “Hey, she’s normal! We could hang!” You know you do! Name a female celeb you think would be a good pal.
Tina Fey, without a doubt. She’s my Hero. Brilliant, funny, has hips like mine. She’d be the one I’d call when I nearly avoided getting in to a fight with a stranger at a playground to talk me down off my ledge.

11. Can you talk about personal goal for 2012?
We’re on the verge of a very big life-changing event, so my goal for 2012 is to make it through this move with my sanity and family intact.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Luck of the Irish…

21 March 2012 By 4 Comments

leprechaun 13304 Luck of the Irish...St. Patrick’s Day was Saturday, so I know I’m a few days late in posting this. But I DO have a few things going on that are keeping me busy: cleaning the crap out of the house so that the realty photographer can come and take pictures tomorrow, trying to hide all of our clutter to make it appear as if we have a much larger house than we do; taking care of small children who require a modicum of attention; squeezing in work during the times my children are at school or sleeping; and add to this list the therapist-mandated 20 minutes of meditation twice a day. Yeah, you heard that right. 20 MINUTES! TWO TIMES A DAY! It’s been a challenge to get it in throughout my day, since it needs to be done before breakfast, and before dinner (but two hours after I’ve eaten). So, there goes my free time….When’s a girl supposed to obsess over Pinterest?

But, I digress. What was I talking about again? Oh, right, St. Patty’s Day. The day where everyone’s a little Irish. I was never one to feel the need to booze up on this holiday, even in my younger years. And now that we have kids, my day is spent cleaning up after celebrating the fact that leprechauns have visited our house, overturned furniture, and peed green urine in our toilet. When we lived in NYC, I think perhaps I’d attempt to duck in to an Irish pub to down a pint with hundreds of drunken strangers, but the scene was never my style.

So, let me give you a piece of advice. If you find yourself in New York City on St. Patrick’s Day with a broken bone, if you can stand the pain, don’t go in to the ER until the next morning. I happen to know this from personal experience, and it sucked balls….

That’s me, standing on the left…

Back in 2005, I was dancing in New York with a choreographer named Mollie. Her company was very small, and she would work extremely collaboratively on a project for over a year, work that I felt extremely connected to and invested in. The last major work I performed of her’s was about 45 minutes long, a lot of dancing, but also a lot of spoken text and theatrical elements, performed in March of 2005 at Dance Theater Workshop. In this particular piece for four women, Mollie was exploring some major medical issues that she had experienced as a young girl. About 20 minutes in to the piece on the second night of our four night run, in a trio we called the “triage” section, I was feeling great. Everything felt like it was flowing, I was completely present and enjoying performing, and the evening had gone well so far. Then I put my foot down from a lift and heard a SNAP. “Okay,” I thought, “I don’t think it’s that bad, I can still put a little weight on it…” and then had to stand still for a couple of minutes. Mentally I was trying to assess things in those seconds, and trying to keep my shit together to get on with the show. “I can wiggle my toes, that’s a good sign…I don’t think I see any bruising, maybe it’s just a tweaked tendon or something that will shake off in a minute or two…”

And then I had to walk. Holy Moly, did that hurt in a way I wasn’t expecting or had experienced before. And yet, there was nothing I could do. There was no one waiting in the wings to take my place, and I didn’t leave the stage for the entire piece, save for one moment when I exited to cross backstage to the other side. I had the piece of mind to stop off in the dressing room to shove an ungodly amount of ibuprofen in my mouth, then made it over to the other side of the wings. One of the dancers looked at me and asked if I was okay, because I had gone completely white. My answer? “I think I just broke my foot…” and then threw myself back on stage. One of the other sections toward the end had all four of us standing in a line, engrossed in over-dramatic crying like women at a wailing wall. Except, my tears were completely real that night! After the performance was over, I hobbled over to the side of the stage and just absolutely lost it.

After I calmed down and had a discussion with the choreographer, dancers, and my husband, it was decided that I should head over to the ER at St. Vincent’s to get an idea of whether I could dance on it for the next two nights. Bad idea, waaaay bad. And now I know that if I ever have to go to the ER with a broken bone, I will roll in to that waiting room like a bat out of hell, screaming my lungs off and faking pain and tears. By the time I had made it to the ER, I was calm and collected, so I had to wait five hours to be seen. Did I mention it was St. Patrick’s Day???? So the room was filled with all sorts of drunks, people having been the recipient of a fist to their face, homeless people peeing and pooping themselves, and me. The first story we heard while sitting in that shithole was from a police officer walking up to a guy and saying, “Okay, your buddy is going to be alright, but he lost his big toe.” Big toe? WTF did you have to be doing on St. Patrick’s Day to lose your big toe? It was surreal.

7.5 hours later, I left the ER with a cast all the way up to my knee and a diagnosis of a Dancer’s Fracture - a broken 5th metatarsal - with no hope of dancing the rest of the run. I was hoping they’d just tape a toe or two together and send me on my way, but this was not the case. Thankfully, Mollie’s partner was a phenomenal dancer, had been a witness to the choreographic process and was very familiar with the piece, so she agreed to step in and perform my role for me.

After taking a shower to rinse off the ER filth and a kitty cat nap, I met everyone at DTW that Friday morning and spent the entire day teaching Jean my part. Sitting there in the audience that night, hopped up on pain killers, it was a very difficult experience watching Jean perform my part and seeing from the outside the piece I’d put so much heart and soul in to for so long. At least I had many margaritas after the show to look forward to to soothe my wounds. The recovery was a pain in the butt, and nothing is as much fun as hobbling around Manhattan in crutches. To this day, St. Patrick’s Day has always been a benchmark for getting past that experience. I thank my kids for giving me something else to mark the occasion. Little green men who bring the promise of gold in little pots is a much more exciting thing to celebrate.

Filed Under: dancer's fracture, DTW, St. Patrick's Day

We’re here to Pump (clap) You Up!…

12 March 2012 By 4 Comments

When we got to the gate at the airport last weekend to fly to Columbus, it felt like we had walked in to some type of Twilight Zone. Tens upon tens of tan, chiseled, and enormously beefy men and women surrounded us, making my ass feel incredibly soft and self-conscious. Jon and I kept looking at women with apple-crushing biceps and men with necks as thick as my waist and wondering “What the heck is going on here?” To say that it was bizarre is an understatement.

Were here to Pump (clap) You Up!...

Being that we’re a family traveling with a child under the age of 4, we were able to board first and got our seats in the back of the plane (for those who often travel with small kids, you might be familiar with this area of the plane as the Kid Zone) and were seated in front of the bulkiest man I’d ever laid eyes on. Miss P started flirting with him on our way to the bathroom, so I took the opportunity to ask him where all the beefcakes were going. The Arnold Sports Festival is held every year in Columbus, Ohio, and that’s were all of these gym rats were headed, some to compete, some as spectators. Arnold, as in Schwarzenegger. He started this sports festival as a body building event (The Arnold Classic), and now it boasts competitions in everything from martial arts to gymnastics, dancesport, and even table tennis. This year it was also hosting the Olympic trials for weight lifting, and it is one of the largest multi-sport festivals in the country. Rumor has it that Arnold spent quite a bit of time there as a youngster, and that’s why he chose Columbus as this site for his event. Who knew? In OHIO. “Test City, USA” for companies like McDonald’s, Frito-Lay, Coca-cola, and chain restaurants. Huh…

Surrounded by all of these protein-laden beefy folks, it reminded me of the time I took a weight lifting class in college. Mind you, I didn’t know what I was getting in to. A dancer friend of mine and I had tried our hand at the Nautilus machines at the gym, but didn’t know what we were doing, so we thought a “weight training” class might help us out. Hey, we were taking it pass/fail anyway, so it was just for fun, right? Little did we know, it wasn’t a bunch of girls working out. Oh no. It was a room full of guys, some overweight, some scrawny, some already on their way to getting toned and buff. And then the two female dance majors. Our instructor was a Mack truck of a woman (think Ms. Beast from Glee) and she was elated to see some estrogen in the class. What she was teaching wasn’t how to pull the pin out of the weight machines to increase five pounds of weight on the inner thigh machine either. Nope, she was teaching full-on Power Lifting, based on the Periodization Cycle. This 12-week training program (fits conveniently in a semester, eh?) has three phases: in the first conditioning phase you start with light lifting. Then after four weeks, you move on to the muscle building phase by increasing the weight and decreasing the reps, so that by the last peak part of the phase, you’re only doing one repetition of as much weight as you can lift. And this is the phase where you’re supposed to see the biggest results. I’m talking bench presses and dead squats, people.

Mind you, I was also taking Pilates at the same time, two completely contradictory activities. One focuses on lengthening muscles, the other on bulking them up. I’m not a big girl (though I was certainly chunkier back in those days), but my upper body tends to bulk up fast. Unfortunately, my lower body is more resistant to changing shape, so while my lats became gigantic, my butt continued to stay the same size, only bulkier. I ended up actually skipping the last two weeks of class, because by that point I could feel my lats against my arms when I swung my arms walking, and it was freaking me out. I didn’t want all that bulk, dammit! I wanted smaller buns and slim thighs, and instead, I was getting thicker all over. But still on a steady college diet of Cheetos and rum and cokes, I wasn’t getting ripped, just wide. Sure, there were some kids in the class that made amazing transformations, obtaining the obligatory lifting grunt in the process. But this was not for me.

Now, as I have gotten older, I have a new appreciation for that kind of work ethic. I’ve done a round each of P90X and Insanity, and while it’s been nice to work out in the comfort of my own home, I don’t have the will power to hold myself accountable for healthy eating habits. If I can’t resist an Oreo or a half a bag of tortilla chips, there’s no way I could do what some of these athletic folks do - eat clean, keep their mind on their body all of the time, and travel with a bag of protein shakes and supplements. Watching these folks in the airport, I felt a mix of envy and respect, that they can be so committed to themselves. All viewed while reaching my hand in to a bag of M&M’s…

Filed Under: Arnold Classic, Arnold Sports Festival, periodization, power lifting

Indecision 2012…

7 March 2012 By 6 Comments

Well, it’s official! Our house will go on the market March 24th, which means my anxiety level will shoot up and the ulcer will form about…oh, I don’t know…two days ago. I have never been through this process before as an adult. My only memory of having a house show ready is getting yelled at by my step-father not to grab hold of the corners of the wall as I rounded the hallway, and having to remember to flush the toilet. Wish us luck!

This past weekend we ventured to Columbus to take one final look at schools and do some preliminary house hunting. Friday we toured two potential schools, both of which Mr. B has been accepted. And I would love to say that we left feeling from one of them completely optimistic and certain. But that’s not the case. One school looks great on paper, in theory it allows Mr. B to continue with the creative and discovery-based learning he has been exposed to, and has a wonderful sense of community. It’s the school Mr. B’s teacher and principal think would be a better fit, based on reading the school’s literature, and before we went, we were about 90% sure this is where we’d go. BUT (and here’s the big concern) in watching the 1st grade classroom, they were just beginning to work on things Mr. B has been doing since the beginning of his Kindergarten year. Heck, even Miss P was busy working through their exercise on her own over on the side. The question here is whether all of the other stuff is worth potentially setting him back a year. The other school is a more traditional academic setting, which on paper makes me cringe as I envision my child regurgitating information by rote and getting his inquisitive spirit squashed like a bug. But in person? Man, did those kids seem engaged and on the same learning curve as Mr. B. The teachers seem creative and dynamic. And yet, something about this school is setting off question marks in my gut, and I’m not sure why. Is it that I fear it might be too conservative? Too white? Too homework-heavy and not enough personal discovery?

And of course, the two schools are in opposite sides of town, thus determining where we purchase a home. The area of town we like is closer to the non-traditional school, but a horrible 30-min drive to the traditional one. We saw a spec house from a builder that we are really interested in, but it’s 30-min from the non-traditional school, much closer to the traditional one. Here’s the kicker….contracts are due by next Monday, meaning we have to have a decision made and mailed by this Friday. Can you say Boxed Wine? If anyone has any thoughts they want to throw my way, or talk me off a ledge, I’d appreciate it.

Saturday, Jon’s sister Jenny watched the kids while Jon and I went out to look at houses, most of which were promising. I’m enjoying visualizing our family having more space for a change, so I guess that’s the fun part in all of this. The kids were originally going to head out to the science center with Jenny, but certain events threw those plans out the window, and instead everyone spent hours upon hours holed up in the hotel room watching television. I won’t bore or disgust you with the details what plagued us on Saturday, but it involved lots of bodily fluids from the kids. When does all of this part of parenthood end? College? Let’s face it, that’s a whole different type of puking and peeing your pants repeatedly.

So, hopefully by the end of this week, we’ll have made a decision and have a little bit more direction as we move forward. Man, am I looking forward to that.

Filed Under: moving, schools