- 04:45 Just uploaded 12 new photos to my SmugMug "Music > HDH próba Pilly nélkül" gallery: bit.ly/3IjE5y #
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Well, just because I haven't posted any knitting projects, doesn't mean I haven't been knitting. Here are a few projects I've completed lately (as in the last few months)
How I woke up this morning:
ReRe told me yesterday that if the baby doesn't know how to dance, then we'll have to dance and just pick her up and show her how. I asked him if that was how he had learned how to dance, and he said, no, he just knows how to dance. Duh.
Hey, remember back in June when I said I couldn't stop listening to K'naan's new CD, Troubadour? Well, you are going to hear a whole lot more of one of the singles I mentioned, Waving Flag, because it is going to be remixed as the anthem for the 2010 World Cup of Soccer! Ya for K'naan!!!! It sounds like they are going to be re-writing the words, to make it more "uplifting", since the lyrics are pretty bleak, but either way, it is such an awesome song. I am so excited to hear it all over the World Cup next summer. Well, except as the theme song for Coca Cola ads, but I'll overlook that.
More proof I need to curtail my son's exposure to pop music: he asked yesterday if he could listen to the "Bubble-Raunchy" song. He meant "Paparazzi". He also told me that Madonna is like a really old Lady Gaga.
Wow, I never knew what people were talking about, until now. I am now in my 35th week of pregnancy, and woke up with the urge to wash, fold, sort, and put away/give away every piece of clothing in the house. Given my cold/flu, and the inability to walk up and down stairs more than a couple times without a break, I managed to get all the bed linens changed, the bed rails taken off my son's bed, and finally remove the change pad from his dresser. His room is finally a little boy room. He practiced rolling off the bed, just to demonstrate 1) the prematurity of my actions, and 2) his need to make sleeping in our bed between us a permanent solution to nocturnal gravity.
The other day I showed ReRe a picture in a magazine of a couple kids roasting hotdogs over a fire. He looked concerned, and said they shouldn't be camping without their parents.
Prior to becoming a mother I worked for a large telecommunications corporation securing easements and service agreements. Yes, definitely as exciting as it sounds. But, on the upside my performance was measurable. Doing well = signed contracts = commission. Hard work paid off quite literally.
As a graduate student, my work is also measurable. There's that thesis in the not so distant future, papers and grades, as well as how well I "perform" in discussions.
This week I've been thinking about how motherhood doesn't have the same sort of measurable results. There are results, but not in accessible, black and white terms. Yes, I had a hand in the fact that the baby is in the 95 percentile for weight and height, but so did genetics. Yes, my three-year-old daughter can sing Old MacDonald in tune, as well as various Ingrid Michaelson songs, but is that necessarily impressive? I have a vague notion that most of the time I'm doing fine with the motherhood gig, but where's the proof? My mother-in-law, bless her heart, always tells me I'm doing a good job when she sees the girls, but since the kids are individuals, little people with souls of their own, I scarcely feel like I can take credit for their health.
Quite frequently I feel like a hamster in an exercise wheel on auto-pilot, particularly during the weeks when I have a lot going on with school. These are the weeks where my time is parceled out quite strictly, with the exception of taking care of the girls. They take priority over everything else. They ultimately dictate the ebb and flow, and like water, fill in the cracks of any spare spaces of time. So, obviously they are the most important responsibility or "project" I have simmering. And yet, the job comes without a performance review.
There are days of epic failure where I doubt my effectiveness as a mother. I can only measure my ability sometimes by the number of tantrums, the lost battles over fruits and veggies, and the frequency and depth of how I lost my cool. Those days I wonder what the hell I was thinking when I put those birth control pills on the shelf for a month or two.
But, I suppose, like any great love in life, we can't put numbers or measurables on them. Just like the Mastercard ad campaign, it's just "priceless". The good, the bad, they're all rapidly moving moments that we just do our best with.
Now, there are few consumer items in the world that I will plug, since I feel like we could all get along with a little less, but there is one purchase I made recently that I wanted to share. I was invited to a Pampered Chef party at my friends' place, with plans to only replace my cheese grater. I had ReRe with me, and he was getting a little bored, so the woman who was doing the demonstration invited him to help her cut up strawberries for the recipe she was making. I looked at her like she was crazy, giving a knife to a 3-year-old, until she pulled out a knife called My Safe Cutter, which is duller than a butter knife (literally, no cutting edge) but serrated in a way that cuts through many fruits, breads, and other softer foods that kids could cut themselves. ReRe cut up a whole slew of strawberries with it, which impressed me, and got me thinking about when his sous-chef training could start. The other thing is that it is only $5, well made and guaranteed, so if it breaks, Pampered Chef will replace it. ReRe knows exactly where it is kept in the kitchen, and uses his to cut his pancakes, bananas, toast, and whatever else he feels like trying.
