If you were to ask me on any given day what (if any) song was in my head, almost always the answer would be some theme song from a children’s television program. Most days, I will be going about my day, humming “Toot and Puddle, what a day for adventure”, or the much catchier “Overture! Curtains, lights!”. (Toot and Puddle – if there is a better children’s show on television, I would like to know what it is. And how can you not love Bugs Bunny? Except of course the fact that our dinnertime conversations now include comments like “I like this spaghetti. I am going to blow it up with a cannonball!”). These themes are highly preferable to the “Wonder Pets” or “Backyardigans” themes, which had a tendency to haunt me in my sleep, and which I’m thankful the boys don’t really watch anymore.

The past couple of days have found me humming actual songs that I chanced to hear (and are now probably going to haunt me in my sleep). The first is the Pina Colada song (does that song have an actual name other than the Pina Colada song?). Upon listening to this romantic ditty, I realized that I am actually the exact opposite of the individual described in the personal ad. In other words, I would have been un-dateable in the 70’s. It’s like how I used to think of myself as somewhat of a free spirit, when in reality I am incredibly rigid. Or how I used to think it would be great to live and work in NYC, when in reality a) I hate crowds, b) I love gardening, c) I can’t stay up late, and d) the thought of packing myself, let alone myself plus two kids, into a shoebox of an apartment gives me eye spasms.

The second song circling my brain is “Bust-A-Move” by Young MC. Yes, “Bust-A-Move”. The sad thing about this is that I actually know all the words. I have to think that this is a large waste of brain space. Really, it’s taking up room for information that I really should have in my brain. Information like, is it okay that my four year old thinks it would be funny to put his brother in a dehydrating machine, and then pour water on him so he is back to normal? And if this is not okay, should I start rationing the Bugs Bunny?

So here it comes, the question of the day – what song is going through your head right now?

When I was an economics student, the process of mean reversion was kind of interesting to me. Okay, I just realized that if anyone was actually reading this post, they have probably stopped. But, if you are still reading this, stay with me a minute. Anyway, it was interesting to me that, for example, inherited or spontaneous wealth has a tendency to mean-revert, exemplified by the high percentage of lottery winners who end up broke after a few years. Another fine example is Barbara Hutton, heiress of the fabulous Woolworth fortune, who died with only a couple of thousand dollars in the bank.

Rob has been away this week and without him, I have been reverting to some single-girl ways. Now don’t get too excited: this is not a post about me Mrs. Robinson-ing with the guys down the street or anything. Since I’m at home with the kids, the shape of our days is pretty much the same as it always is, with some exceptions, dinner preparation being the most notable. The only reason I’m not eating popcorn for dinner is because our ancient and cheap air popper recently set off the fire alarm. I have, however, eaten Greek salad and pita bread for four straight nights, allowing the kids to eat cheese pizzas and chicken fingers. Dinner notwithstanding, the real difference in my day is when the kids are in bed. It’s a smorgasbord of wine drinking, straight-from-the-box cereal eating, and, sadly, NYPD Blue rerun watching. It’s like when the cat’s away the mice will play, only the mice are lamely addicted to the episodes with Kelly and Sipowitz, and also Mini-Wheats.

Now I’m going to go out on a limb and say something that may actually make you die laughing: I think motherhood has actually made me cooler. Please stop laughing. Despite the fact that I absolutely love my minivan, I think I am actually cooler now than before I had kids. Please note that this is highly relative, I mean really, I’m pretty lame. I still love me a good book and a good math-based joke, but at least I don’t spend my days poring over Visual Basic and creating option pricing models. When Rob’s away though, my (relative) coolness evaporates and what emerges is a lame-o girl with a weird crush on David Caruso.

So here’s the question of the day: what behaviours do you revert to when your significant other is out of town?

This morning I woke up without a splitting, pounding, sinus headache for the first time in a while. I’ve been sick, in varying degrees, since December 21. In my last post I wrote about the positives about having sick kids over the holidays. Well, as time wore on and the viruses continued their playdate in our house, my sunshiny attitude became replaced by that of an irritable, mangy dog.

Boring, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t everyone sick right now? It seems like no matter where you are in this country, the majority of people are either sick or just over it. Anyway, we are on the mend over here, the kids are eating to make up for the disturbing illness-related weight loss (my children, never overly stout, now have countable ribs and stick arms and legs), our life is pretty much back to normal.

Jake was the sickest of us all, then he improved, and then he…didn’t. The thing is, I didn’t really notice that he started to backslide until days later. Nothing says “bad mother” like not correctly identifying your children’s symptoms. By the time I took him to the revolting, germ-encrusted walk-in clinic, I hadn’t slept much for days and was in an exhaustion- and medication-induced fog. As I stood in line at the Co-Op to fill his prescription, I started crying and couldn’t stop, the kind of crying that has people looking at you and then quickly looking away. “Are you all right?” the pharmacist asked kindly as I left clutching the little paper bag of antibiotics.

I was remembering the night before, when I was up for the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth time with Jake; Jake who was restless and sobbing. Don’t get me wrong, externally I comforted, I cuddled, I administered Tylenol. Internally, I was seething with frustration and impatience, it practically vibrated through me. At four in the morning, after not having more than 30 minutes of consecutive sleep, I said to Rob “YOU deal with him, I just can’t anymore”. Like instead of being sick and in pain, Jake was just trying to irritate or inconvenience me. It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized how sick he had gotten; I started beating myself up and haven’t really stopped since.

I’m not really a New Year’s person. This year my “celebration” consisted of me, by myself, eating a plate of nachos, drinking an entire bottle of wine, watching “Anne of Green Gables – The Sequel” on Access, and passing out before 10:00. But maybe this year I will make a resolution. My resolution is not to win the Bad Mother Award again – I think one such trophy is enough for me.

In the spirit of walking on the sunny side of the street, looking on the bright side of life, viewing the glass half-full, making lemonade, insert other optimistic cliché here, here is my list of the day:

Benefits of Having Sick Children during the Holiday Season:

1) I don’t have to decide whether or not they are too sick to attend school.
2) No one has much of an appetite, so meal and snack preparation is taking up minimal time and effort.
3) It might be a nasty and evil flu-ish cold, but it’s still just a cold, for goodness’ sake. We are blessed to have healthy children, even when they are ill.
4) Rob is at home all this week, so I have an extra set of hands, very important.
5) I don’t have to tire myself out pulling the sled up the hill so the boys can toboggan, which is a good thing since their contagious little beings have caused me to have the lung capacity of someone in a TB sanatorium.
6) We are sure catching up on our TV watching.
7) Since the sick and exhausted boys are falling asleep before 7 pm, Rob and I are able to watch an entire movie after their bedtime, and still be asleep ourselves before 9:30.
8) When they do recover, I appreciate anew their sunny personalities, which have morphed, due to illness, into something like a cross between a sobbing junior high aged girl who was not asked to dance by the boy she likes, and Jack Nicholson’s character in “As Good As It Gets”.
9) The boys actually napped, something that has not occurred in years. When one napped, I had one-on-one time with the other, a rare event.
10) In terms of simplifying my life over the holidays, this is a real winner. Go out or stay in? The choice is out of my hands. When the kids are miserably sick, there is no option but to stay home, stay warm, and snuggle a lot.

Have you been having a nice holiday season? I have, in spite of the constant coughing, occasional vomiting, and omnipresent runny/crusty noses. In fact, I think that all this sickly time together has made our holiday pleasant, strange as that may sound, because of the last item on the list.

Or maybe I’ve just consumed too many extra strength cold medications.

Ah, the Christmas season. I really love it, and I especially love that I always finish my shopping in November so I never have to enter the horrible, horrible pit of hell that is the mall in December. This year, I really focused on baking. The boys love to help with baking, and I thought they would really enjoy decorating gingerbread men and the gingerbread house.

After our hours and hours of decorating the gingerbread house and cookies, I came to the realization that there are two types of moms in this world: those that can use the little attachments on the icing decorating tubes, and those that can’t. I belong to the latter group. Artistry is not my strong suit, as is obvious by looking at the globs of icing dripping off the gingerbread roof, and the windows which look as if someone set them on fire, melting down the gingerbread walls. But who really cares? It’s Christmas, and the boys think that the house is fantastic and the strangely faceless, but highly decorated gingerbread men are awesome. Part of this is due to the fact that they are three and four years old and hey, anything with icing and candies looks great to them. Another, larger part is due to the fact that artistry is not their strong suit either. And yes, you can tell at this age.

Doesn’t gingerbread decorating really seem like the kind of thing that moms should be able to do, like locating a specific, small obscure toy in a room full of other small, obscure toys, and knowing exactly when everyone in the house had a snack and therefore when they will need to eat again? It’s like a male friend said to me when his wife was pregnant “I better figure out how to fix the bathroom plumbing. Don’t dads always know how to do those things?” Very true.

When I was pregnant with Mark I read probably every pregnancy book on the market. I felt like I was studying for some strange exam that featured questions about weight gain, blood pressure, ankle swelling, and epidurals. Finished all the pregnancy books, I started on the parenting books. The bizarre world of parenting books, starting with “The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding” and ending with the truly strange “Babywise”. Every book, it seemed, had a different agenda, a different program, and “studies” to back them up. Every book promised that if I followed their program, then my baby would be well-adjusted, developmentally gifted, and the happiest baby ever. First time moms can be insufferable when it comes to the parenting books, and I was certainly no different. I really just wanted to get everything right. I wanted to know how to do everything that I thought a mom should know how to do, not realizing that most moms learn through experience and instinct.

After Jake came along, only 17 ½ months after Mark, I gave up reading anything about parenting or milestones. Hell, I think I probably forgot how to read for a while, so sleep deprived and hormonally deranged was I. At that time, it was all about just getting through the days without too much crying (on my part). But what do you know? Despite the fact that I read none of the up-to-date parenting journals at the time, Jake has turned out okay. He’s turned out great, actually. Experience and instinct – it’s what parenting is all about. You don’t have to know everything to be a good mom.

So back to the original story – the cookie decorating. So what if my gingerbread house looks like it was decorated by blind, insane people? It was fun doing it, and the boys enjoyed it. I’m never going to be able to use those little attachments on my icing decorating tubes, and I’m okay with that.

Bad days are actually good because they make you appreciate the good days, right? Well, yesterday was a very bad day. It’s all relative – it wasn’t SO bad, I guess; everyone was healthy and husband was still employed. But the minutes ticked by and I kind of felt like I was going to have to be checked into a mental hospital by the end of the day. It was all because of Jake.

The day started out fine, but by 8:00 things started to go downhill and just kept sledding. Every single little thing was a battle, the kind of battle that is accompanied by much shrieking, whining, and not-so-occasional sobbing. We’ve all had days like that, right? “Please brush your teeth” is answered by an ear-shattering “NNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOO” and the flopping of a small body to the floor. The response to “Let’s get you dressed” is the turning of a small body to steel so that you practically have to peel pajamas off and then the limbs start flailing and the body goes limp so that it is almost impossible to get clothes on without sustaining some sort of injury to either the dresser or the dressee. And that’s just the beginning. The rest of the day was all “I am NOT going to be nice today”, or “I don’t want to do ANYTHING”, or “I am not going to play, or read books, or eat my supper”. It was all so tiresome, and completely irritating yet boring by the end of the day. Eleven hours straight of this was kind of tiring.

Why is it so hard when our kids have a bad day? I mean, other than the obvious. Listening to nails scratching a blackboard or maybe a bagpipe screeching for an entire day seems to be an apt analogy.

I think it’s especially hard because it makes me feel like I’m doing a bad job. For those of us who have given up careers to be at home with the kids, the kids’ accomplishments can seem like our own, and when they are doing well, we are doing well. It’s wrong I know; I know that the kids are individuals and separate from us, but that is really how it feels sometime. So when they have a bad day, it can feel like something I’ve done or haven’t done. It’s silly, really, especially when it’s obviously one of those “I got up on the wrong side of the bed” days. Everyone’s entitled to have a bad day once in a while, right? Thank god for wine.

Anyway, this morning I woke up super refreshed thanks to a (rare) full, uninterrupted night’s sleep, and Jake was his usual sunny self. I breathed a sigh of relief that his bad day wasn’t the result of impending sickness, or that he was actually in need of an exorcism, but just a bad day.