Mortimer's Mom

How to make sure you drive your kids mad

There is a reason for this virtual life archive... So that I can look back and avoid doing stupid things. Case in point: Next year, on the last Sunday before Passover, someone remind me to read this entry, OK? Because for the second year in a row, I made the mistake of going to the grocery store on the last Sunday morning before Passover. And this time, I had the girls with me. And not the husband.....

The store was packed with crazed matzo-seeking lunatics. Most people had 2 carts. And the 60-something men pushing the second cart had clearly not been to the grocery store in a year. Sheer madness!

Try to get two kids and a cart through the ceiling high mountain of matzo, surrounded by women clutching lists, men parked wherever they pleased and little old ladies with "helpers" trying to plan a menu for 25 when they have no teeth left to chew... (let me help: Matzo ball soup. It's the friendly food.)

Then, because clearly I was trying to ensure my daughters would be crazed and tantrum-prone for the rest of the day, I dragged them to the Kosher butcher. I am not in need of Passover meat, as we will be in Florida and Hub's step-mother is already on top of the meat order down there, but I am in fact hosting the second Seder (only one third of the family, no biggy) so I needed to buy one red meat and one poultry selection. I am no making Brisket, so I opted for Miami Ribs. Except there were none. And I asked the butcher if he had any in the back, and he replied that yes, he did.

Well, he was lying. He had meat that could be cut into Miami Ribs. It took 35 min. With two kids, standing in front of the chicken fridge, constantly in the way of the other shoppers who were piling meat up in their carts. I wanted to leave, but the butcher made it clear that he was already running low on "good" cuts and if I didn't wait, I would end up with chicken breasts for my Seder....

So we waited and took many, many 2$ rides on the stupid Schmall carousel. And I got into a fight with a mother who was too cheap to pay for her own rides, but kept insisting that my kids switch seats "to keep it fair". Lady, fair would have been you chipping in at least once! I have no problem with kids filling up the empty seat (it rides 3) but don't make my kids sit in the stupid boat instead of the car and horse! I paid, we pick.

So yeah, next year, on the last Sunday before Passover, when I think it would be a good time to run to the Schmall to pick up a few things, somebody please send me the link to this page!

Top Momma!

Well well, after signing up what seems like months ago, I was just picked to be a Top Momma (insert your own dirty joke here).

I need your clicks people! come on! just a little click for me... please!

And by the way, carpool-free life is fantastic! We have an extra 15 minutes in the morning and the ride the school has been so quiet and pleasant.... sure, Dumpling is sort of wondering what happened, and we have been very discreet and she seems ok with the vague reason we gave her. Man, I should have done this weeks/months ago!!!

I finally grow a backbone.... well, kind of.

Thanks for the multitude of takes on the car pool situation. I'm sure you are all DYING to know what happened..... Turns out I'm a big chicken. After reading all your comments yesterday and weighing the pros and cons with Hubs, we sort of decided that because of the size of the school/the 2 rides we really needed covered but mostly because I'm a big woos, we were going to stick with it but gently pass the message that we expected her to do the agreed-to days or to give us a weeks notice.

But!!! And there is a But! This morning, I brought BB to her class, which is in a different school in the same building, at 9 am, a full 40  minutes after Dumpling's start time. Then I went up to Dumpling's class to take some pictures of the kids for the teacher (look at me, budding photographer!), only to find out that Dumpling was just arriving...... Even though we had dropped her off at the carpool before 8 am. (yeah, she doesn't actually pick her up. We have to bring her to their house because their sitter doesn't get there til 8 am..... I can hear you screaming at me, I really can.) There was a whole big mix up because they got there very late and Dumpling was put on the absentee list, but the mother didn't go to the office to correct it when she got there (which is what we are supposed to do)

I was pissed. Royally pissed. So after taking portraits of all the kids and calling Hubs to let off some steam, I called her and left a message on her voice mail, expressing my displeasure and wondering why on earth Dumpling got to school at 9. To her credit, she called me back... She told me her sitter didn't get to her house til 8:30, hence the late arrival at school, and that her daughter's teacher hadn't done attendance yet, so that's why she didn't go to the office. I explained, calmly, that I didn't understand why she didn't check with Dumpling's teacher if her own attendance was done, and I also expressed my displeasure at Dumpling being so late.

But because I'm a big chicken, I left it at that.... UNTIL! (yes, it's not over!) Until I picked up Dumpling from class today (because remember, she canceled on me) and Dumpling was upset because she didn't pick out a book at the library today. When I asked her why, she told me it's because she didn't return her book from last week. Again, I was puzzled, since I know for a fact that I sent her to school with the book this morning...... Come to check her backpack in her cubby: the mom never took it out to give it to her!!!!! OK, maybe Dumpling should have said something to her, but she's 5 and she was probably totally flustered because she was late, so I'm pretty sure this is the mom's fault...... This time I was LIVID. So I called her house again, without the benefit of calming down, and her babysitter answered the phone and told me she was sleeping. At 1:30 pm, instead of picking up MY kid from school....

So yeah, I'm waiting for the call back. And telling her that I will happily drive her kid to school for the rest of the week. And that gives her until Monday to come up with new arrangements. Because I am DONE.

EDITED TO ADD: She called. And she was totally nutty. That I should be more understanding and that it's not her fault and that it's only a book.... totally unapologetic and not understanding of how upsetting the whole thing was for Dumpling..... So it's over. I am carpool free.

Monday Morning Assvice needed re Carpool

OK, so I hate my carpool situation, but I don't know what to do about it. Hubs and I keep going around and around the question and can't come up with a good way to deal with it, so I thought of asking the Internets!

Quick background info: Dumpling's school is a private Jewish School, so we have no buses. Parents bring their kids to school and arrange carpools whenever possible. Because most families around here have 3 or 4 kids, some families are their own carpool as soon as all the kids are in Kindergarden (pre-K has shorter hours).

When Dumpling started, we made some calls and looked for someone to do carpool with us. The people in our neighborhood mostly have older kids along with their pre-K kids, so they already had established carpools. There was one other new family who live very close by and have a child in the other pre-K class.

Since we go to work every day, we originally offered to do all morning dropoffs and in exchange, the mother would bring Dumpling home in the afternoon. Right away, it was uneven because she signed her daughter up for activities after school 2 afternoons, so we were getting 3 rides back and had to do our own pick up 2 days a week. Then when winter rolled around, we started picking Dumpling up on our own on Friday afternoons because we head straight to the country, so she brings her home 2 days and we bring her to school 5 days.

In addition to the uneven-ness of the number of rides, the mornings have been difficult because the girls don't particularly like each other. We've had issues with High School Musical and other types of oneupmanship that have made Dumpling really unhappy. It got to the point where in January after the break, we tried to politely get out of the carpool. But seing as she as a good thing going (not needing to drive in the morning) she promised to have her daughter be nicer and even agreed, though relunctantly, to do one morning a week.

This morning, there is a crap load of snow anywhere and the drive is going to be a pain, so I call her promptly at 7 to tell her we are going to be leaving 15 min early. I can tell right away she is pissed. She probably wasn't even up yet. But it's going to take extra time to get there, so we are going to be early and that's that. She then mentions, in passing, that her daughter has a bday party after school TOMORROW so she can't bring Dumpling home, 1 of the two days that she does...... ARGHH! We count on that ride. Hubs is taking his car to the shop tomorrow because Tuesday is the one day when we don't have to do carpool at all (she does morning and afternoon).

I am mad because she knew the party was coming at least a week, probably 2 weeks ago, why couldn't she give me warning? Also, it's sort of unwritten policy that if you don't need to pick up your own kid, you don't cancel the carpool, you still go to get the other kid (like when Dumpling stayed home from school last week, I still went to her house and drove her kid to school).

Clearly, we don't want to do carpool with this family anymore. But how do we politely end it without being "those people who canceled that carpool"? It's a small school, if we want to set up a new carpool next year with other families (which would be possible because once she's in kindergarden, there are more families to pick from) we don't want to be marked as the people who couldn't get along. Also, since there are only 2 classes per grade, this kid will end up in Dumpling's class at least 3 times until she graduates...... On the one end, I don't see the point of continuing, we get no benefit out of this carpool. On the other hand, I think of the long run and wonder if we shouldn't just suck it up for the next 3.5 months and call it a learning experience.

Assvice?

Fun with hats

Rather than bore you with yet another episode of "Mortimer's Mom stresses out and loses her shit over bubble-floors and now, the language police" I will give you one of the canned posts I wrote before I left, in case I had nothing to write. I promise you, it's better that what I could produce today....

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Amy over at Grrltravels wrote a post a few weeks ago about playing restaurant with her kids. I too am of the "play while I sit and watch" school of parenting much of the time. Don't get me wrong, we play boardgames and I do tons of arts and crafts with them, but there are days when I seriously don't feel like it. So I sit on the couch and we have tea parties. The girls serve me like the Queen that I am! Because she is quite Disney-princess-yfied, Dumpling calls me "Your Majesty"....

An other game we love to play is dress-up. In her room, Dumpling has a giant drawer full of old clothes, along with a dozen princess dresses and a whole bunch of jewelry and shoes. This can provide hours of entertainment. The other day, we were in the basement and I seriously wanted to watch Oprah (with Seal and Heidi Klum, fyi). But they weren't feeling the tea party. So I grabbed the basket of winter hats and mits that I was getting ready to bring to the front hall, and hilarity ensued. take a look:

  So I would say, sitting back on the couch and watching them play can be a very good thing once in a while. Even if it does make me the Evil Queen, or Ursula the sea witch....

confessions of a terrible SAHM

I stayed home today. I never stay home on Mondays. Monday is my big work day, when I go in and create the codes for all the new products, catch up on weekend-events, things that are out-of-stock, etc. But Hubs pointed out that I work more than he does and I had things to do today, so we switched and I stayed home.... I'm not very good at it.

• I dropped off my car at the dealership for a 15000 km tune-up. Turns out I was supposed to go at 6 month/8000 km, not 14 month/15000...... oops!
• I don't like the park. It's taken me 3 years of being a parent to realize, I don't like taking the kids to the park. I don't mind pushing them on the swing in my own back-yard for an entire hour, and I don't mind watching them make 12 dozen sand cakes at home, but it doesn't translate to the public park. I'm miserable there. BB had a tantrum because a daycare was using all the swings, and tryas I might to teach her about waiting her turn, all I kept thinking was that if we were at home, she could switch from swing A to swing B without even having to fight her sister for it. And when a little kid came over and grabbed her pail without asking and she protested, I packed her up and took her home. I should have been teaching her patience and sharing, but I didn't. I went home. In the end, she was in a terrible mood and needed an early nap, so it was a good move on my part, but that's not why I did it. I did it because I don't like going to the park.
• at 10 past the hour, I started freaking out because the carpool hadn't dropped off Dumpling yet and school let out at 1:30 and she should have been home by now, it doens't take 40 min to drive home from school.... But instead of panicking and calling the other mom, I called Hubs at work to see if it ever happened that Monday drop-off was late (since he's usually the one home on Mondays). He asked me what time it was.... 1:15 I said..... yeah, school lets out at 1:30, she'll be home in an hour! it's 10 past ONE not 10 past TWO......

Hockey Night in Canada

It's 7:00 pm on a Saturday night. What does a good Canadian-Jewish family with 2 Chinese daughters do in the middle of Passover?

Watch Hockey! At the risk of having CSIS come to my door and demand that I give back my Canadian passport, I must make a confession: I'm not big on hockey. OK, you can pick you jaw up from the floor now. We were skiing people, we didn't get into hockey because my brother didn't play hockey. So we didn't watch.

I've been to the occasional game at the Forum, and once or twice at the Molson/Bell/New Forum Center, but by and large, I am not a Hockey Girl....

But tonight, even I know the significance of the Habs/Leafs game, the last of the regular season. If the Habs win, they go into the playoffs. The guy on the news said this was the most important game since the last 60's. This is a historical game.

So we are sitting on the couch, eating honey-passover cake, not drinking beer because it's not Kosher for Passover. Go Habs Go!

I'm a sucky mean mom

Seriously, someone actually is letting me parent a second child? Really, are they sure about that, because apparently, I am not doing a very good job with #1....

She started ballet in September, once a week, the baby class (3 yo and up). We are not allowed to watch the class because the uptight be-yotch who calls herself the ballet teacher won't let parents see, so we have no idea of the progress our Dumpling is making, or it turns out, the havoc she is creating. 2 weeks ago after class, the teacher asked me not to put on her headband anymore, as she played with it too much during class. OK, no problem, she hates the headband, hates to have anything on her head. So last week, hubs sends her off to class without a headband. The class ends and the uppitty teacher marches up to hubs and tells him: "we MUST talk!" and storms off. She calls the house later and tells hubs not to ever return Dumpling to class, as she is disinterested and disruptive....

OK, maybe she is, but did it just happen like that on week 9? Or did you notice it before and NOT EVER MENTION it to us!!!! So now she won't have her back... except what do we do on Wednesday afternoon when she puts on her tutu and wants to go to class. Because my girl, she knows her days of the week, and she knows Wednesday is Ballet.... So I'm taking her anyways this week, screw the teacher, and we'll tell her it's the last class and she should say goodbye to everyone. Sure I'm lying to her, but what should I tell her: Miss Iris doesn't want you back... She's not even 4! We did call Miss Iris to inform her of this, but she hasn't called us back....

Also, Dumpling is drawing a lot these days... and for the first time, it's starting to look like what she says she's drawing. So this morning, I asked her to draw her family, including her new sister in China..... This is what she drew:

   The comments in orange are what she told me about the picture: Mommy very mean, mad face. Daddy BIG happy face.

OooooKKKKK, so maybe I need to show Miss Iris my apparently permanent mad-mean face.....

On the plus side, she did put dog collars on the dogs, and she drew her sister as a tiny speck... Also, we are all very round people....

Boy, I really do look mean in that picture!

Live from sickbay: projectile nosebleed!

I t was only a few months ago that Hubs and I got our first experience with taking Dumpling to the ER. We had such a good time, we decided to go back!!! Dumpling's been under the weather since Wednesday, staying home sick on Thursday and Friday. Seemed like just a fever and a nice green runny nose. No complaining, just lack of energy.

Then, at 2 am, she called for Daddy: "Daddy, I all di(r)ty"  Dirty? She still wears a diaper, so I wasn't too sure what that could mean, until Hubs called from the other room:"Hon, better come, there is sort of blood... coming out of her... nose I think...."  OK, so I'm half asleep, but I'm pretty sure he just said there was blood coming our of her nose.... I'm thinking the skin around her nose was pretty raw last night and maybe she's just cut a little cut or something, until i got there...

Did you know that the combination of a nose bleed and a sneezing kid can cause projectile blood... like, all over the bed, the wall, the pillows and assorted dolls that reside on the bed.... It was like CSI Toddler's Room in there.  hubs was dabbing at her nose, but it was positively gushing, spurting even. I managed to get it stopped with pressure (which she hated) and we put her back to bed a bit later with a piece of tissue stuck up her nose and the promise of lots of fun in the morning.

Repeat an hour later: "Daddy, I all di(r)ty again!" more gushing, more pressure, this time, she refused to go back to bed on her own, so in our bed she came, only to toss and turn for an hour and thankfully returned to her own blood-soaked bed for about 45 minutes (I did not change the sheets in the middle of the night: mental note, daybeds with 3 sides are a PAIN to change!) and then be up for goo in the wee hours of the morning with yet another nose bleed. This time, I couldn't get enough pressure to stop it, so we put on our shoes and socks and headed to the ER.

Luckily, the wait was very short and we were promptly seen, only to be told that there is nothing really wrong with her nose, she just burst a little vessel from all the blowing and sneezing, BUT she does have a wicked ear infection and the doctor was quite surprised that she hadn't been complaining at all. After Apples and her secret appendix burst, a secret ear infection is nothing!

So she is napping, hubs is down for the count, sneezing and coughing, and I'm just starting to feel like myself again, but wasn't this fun and exciting?!?! At least we didn't agonize over the impending referral all weekend!

Why China (14th in the series)

I got tagged by my fellow KLB Hao Bao Bao to answer the million dollar question: Why China? It seems so easy to explain in our case...  I went back to the very first entry on my very first blog, back when I was over at Diaryland, and here is what I wrote, back on  March 1 2003.

first entry, first shot of bucerylin   2003-03-01 - 2:31 p.m.

First entry. First shot of Bucerelin this morning...

Chickened out as I was about to do it.... I knew it wouldn't hurt, I did the practice one with Saline at the hospital last week, but still, definitely hesitated before sticking myself with the needle....

Why is J. not giving me the shots? He's TERRIFIED of needles. So much so, that it would make me even more nervous if he had to do it.

Why are we doing in-vitro? J. has Cystic Fibrosis, which causes infertility in 98% of males. To make matters more complicated, I am a carrier of C.F. as well. So we are going for the whole shebang: sperm aspiration, hyper-ovulation and egg retrieval, in-vitro fertilization and pre-implantation screening....  Chances of success? Who knows, but at 32, we feel we gotta try a few times before we give up the idea of having biological children. We have begun the international adoption process in China as well, but C.F. plays a role in that too and we are not certain to be approved by the home-study worker.

See the mention of International Adoption? It's almost an after-thought, but that's because it actually wasn't. We had signed the contract with the adoption agency BEFORE the first round of in-vitro, and so the question begs, Why China?

It's a not very well kept secret that I live Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Not only do we speak French here, but also, we adopt more Chinese girls than anywhere else.... Quebec has always been very big on international adoption (our in-province adoption program is awful, people wait years and then have to stay foster parents forever, never completing adoption procedures). Also, I think the fact that people seem to get married later in life, or not married at all (we have a very very high right of common-law marriages here), so infertility seems to play a big role in those couple's lives. Anyway, it's very common here in Montreal to see a white family with an Asian girl. It's not an image that was foreign to me.

When I met Hubs, we knew right away we would have trouble conceiving because of his CF. Then, we had our first meeting with the fertility clinic and they insisted on genetic testing, where I found out that I was a carrier of CF. That was a big blow. I had sort of always seen my family with a combination of bio and adopted children, because I didn't relish the thought of several pregnancies in my late 30s, but both Hubs and I wanted several kids (more than 2, less than 5, we still haven't decided)

I don't remember a specific conversation about adoption. It was more like finding out about agencies and the possible countries, but not about adoption specifically, we sort of knew without discussing it. We agreed that we did not care if the child was white or not. Because we are Jewish, we immediately scratched out the programs that heavily involved any type of church organization (for example Haiti), not because we had anything against the Church, we just to stick to a program that was run by non-profits and governments. We never considered Eastern Europe. We talked about it once, but everything we had heard about those programs scared us: the health of the children, the potential bureaucratic problems, etc. So China came to the forefront. I mean, it seemed to be everywhere we looked, everyone knew someone, turns out Hubs even had a not-so-distant relative who had a now-teenage daughter who had been adopted from China.

So we called one agency and they told us they had a waiting list, but we could come meet them anyways in a few weeks. We called another agency and they invited us to their information session. The man who gave the session had 2 daughters from China and was waiting for a referral of a son. He was so nice, so matter of fact about adoption, attachment, China... We walked out that night and I believed we called them a week later and signed our contract. We read nothing about China, we didn't learn Mandarin, we weren't trying to save a poor heathen child, we just wanted kids. And we never wanted adoption to feel like a second choice. 

PS: (If you ever go back and read some of those old entries, I must have been smoking some serious dope because I waxed poetic about the possibilities of traveling to China while pregnant or bringing our baby to China with us.... Delusion is a side effect of in-vitro drugs, right?)

Now, to end this on a spooky note, I would like to start by saying that I am a card-carrying member of the KLBs, I do not believe in red-threads and lady-bug sightings, but here is the entry I wrote on march 21 2003, a few weeks into our first of 3 in-vitro attempts. It was our first failure, I was beyond depressed and quoting Blue Rodeo:

Falling Down Blue  2003-03-21 - 10:36 a.m.

I had another ultra-sound this morning.... Not good news. The right ovary is definitely not participating in this effort.... The left one went from 7 follicles to 5 (where did the other 2 go???)

So we have 2 options: Scrap the whole thing and try again in a few months with stronger doses of hormones, or keep going, freeze the embryos, do the whole thing again in a few months and combine all the embryos before having them tested. Seems like a total waist to forget about these 5, so we will go ahead with the retrieval next week.

But I am totally, totally bummed out right now. I feel like the big guy in the sky is playing with my mind.... First, my husband has this nasty disease that will eventually take him away from me. Then, I'm a carrier of said disease which means we have a 50/50 chance of passing it on to our children (IF we can have any). The bureaucrats gave us a terrible time about our plan to adopt in China. And now we finally find a doctor that has the right technology to not only operate my husband, but also test the embryos for afore-mentioned disease and now MY BODY is not working..... Couldn't just one thing go our way for once....

I'm not kidding myself, I know that even if we had 10 perfect, grade A embryos, the chances of having 3 that are disease free are pretty low, and then implanting those 3 and getting pregnant is also a very long shot. But that exactly why I would hope that the Big Guy would cooperate and at least let us have the 10 embryos...If each of these things is a slap in the face, then I feel like I'm falling down blue...

That turned out to be the day our daughter was born...

So, It’s Come Down to This>OmegaMom>Letters from the Zoo>The Singing Bird>ElsieElsewhere>Chicago Mama>Sopapilla>Are We There Yet>Hope Springs>Jiaozi>Figlet>Shelba> Hao Bao Bao> Mortimer's mom> ….

Will Lulu's mommy come out and play with us on this one???

my first mother's day

Last year on Mother's day, I had only a referral picture and a whole lot of stress to make me feel like a mom.

This year, I got the 6:15 plaintive wail of a waking Dumpling, a morning snuggle in the big bed, a little girl carrying a huge Golden box from Holt Renfrew containing the next addition to the Kate Spade collection I've been building, a quick trip to the farmers market for some fresh goodies, hours of building a counter at the store, and then a return home where my little Dumpling and I drew on the sidewalk with giant chalk, her favorite outdoors acitivity.

She got so dirty with the chalk, she was a technicolor mess! And then, my parents came over for dinner, and I thanked my mother for all she does for us by gifiting her a bicycle trailer so she could take her precious granddaughter on bike rides. We hooked it up and then went aroudn the blocks a few times. Dumpling absolutely loved it.

So I got to be both a mom and a daughter today. What can i say, no matter how tired it makes me, I think being a mom rocks!

an apology to the husband and baby

I'd like to apologize to my husband and child for being missing in action these days. I get up and leave, only to return dirty, tired and cranky at the end of the day. It's not that I don't want to spend time with them, it's that darn new store..... I'm almost done, we'll be opened by Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest.

in the meantime, my daughter is starting to hate my guts and has gone from being a regular daddy's girl to being completely and utterly in love with him, allowing me to parent her only while he is int he shower/bathroom/taking out the garbage. Actually, scratch the last one, she likes to watch him out the window while he takes out the garbage.

This morning, hubby was doing his physio and she was a tad cranky, so I just held her and rocked her while she watched Clifford. I had forgotten how she smelled.  I don't know how other moms do it, going to work everyday. It's killing me. I know it's only for a few weeks and then I'll be back to my half schedule and I'll get to watch her every move, but in the mean time, I feel like I'm missing out on so much.

She looks like a little girl now. She's not a baby any more. That totally freaks me out! She's starting to put two words together to express herself, and this morning, she buckled her own shoes.... I wanted to take them away from her and tell her to stop it, I'm not ready for her to be so capable.....

I will try to take some pictures tomorrow, so you guys can get a look at the cardboard box maze that I've been building at the store. Between the shelving boxes, the stock boxes and the supplies, I should forget the gift store and go into the carboard box business!!!!

a buzy stork

not only did he stork land on Shelba's door yesterday, it also visited a couple of RL-friends who are now the proud parents of a 9 month old little girl! Babies, Babies, everywhere!