Sleeplessness sucks
Sep 30, 2010 What's Going On
Yes, I know, thank you Captain Obvious. And if I were slightly more awake I might be able to come up with something more original and informative than “sleeplessness sucks” but I’m not so I can’t.
I usually have no problem sleeping. If anything, I sleep too easily. The last time I had an epic bout of sleeplessness was when I was pregnant with Fiona. I was getting only a couple hours of sleep a night, and that was in small chunks. By day seven or eight I was having trouble standing upright. I was bursting into tears for no reason. I forgot how to tie Jake’s shoes.
Finally I called my OB/Gyn, who said something to the effect of “What the hell is wrong with you, why did you wait so long to call? Take some Tylenol PM.” My first Ob/Gyn, who seemed to go out of her way to tell me that I was fat and weak whenever she could, had brainwashed me into thinking that taking any kind of medicine while I was pregnant was a sign of weakness and an indication that I was destined to be a terrible mother. Gee, do I still sound bitter, nine years later?
Anyway, the Tylenol PM worked like a charm, so I didn’t hesitate to use it earlier this week after just one night of shitty sleep. But whatever’s going on, it’s not helping, so I’m on my third day of walking around in a fog. I was supposed to be at a conference today, but I had to stay home so as not to risk having a nervous breakdown in the middle of a room full of people armed with cell phones and YouTube accounts.
If there’s one thing that being this tired has taught me, it’s that I don’t have the patience to pussy-foot around things. So it’s best that I be alone as much as possible. Then again, if this lasts until tomorrow, it will make our next Blogging Angels podcast extra interesting.
I’m going to try to take a nap. Wish me luck.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, Momtourage, and podcasts with The Blogging Angels.
Tags: insomnia, sleeplessness, Tylenol PM
On kitties, suicide, and the JFK assasination
Sep 29, 2010 What's Going On
Today was a weird day. It started with exhaustion, which is never a good thing when I’m trying to sound smart (I end up rambling). I got in late last night from a trip to Buffalo, went to bed very very late, and didn’t sleep well. I shuffled out of the house this morning, wearing ill-fitting clothes, mad at myself for not jogging, forgetting my business cards. I crammed a manicure and chair massage in before the first event, which of course made me late for that event.
Then I went to a completely delightful lunch at Redbook Magazine, where I was in a room for two hours with a group of insanely smart people that I so wanted to impress, and while I had a great time I left wondering why I’m ever invited anywhere when I often sound like an idiot. I was just tired. And aggravated that I’d worn a raincoat and rain boots for no reason. I mean, if I’m going to go through the trouble, then the least it can do is rain.
So I got on the subway back to Brooklyn in a weird funk. Happy, because the events I’d been to had been great, but mad at my clothes and sorry that I’d once again left a meeting thinking “Why do I talk so much?” I settled uncomfortably into a subway seat with my backpack still on my back, and checked my email. There was one from my husband. A former friend of ours had killed himself over the weekend. My husband had happened upon it by chance online.
I don’t want to give the impression that I was at all close to Nick. Whenever something bad happens to someone – or something very good – suddenly they have a thousand times more best friends than they really did. Drives me crazy. No, I hadn’t spoken to Nick in about five years, since we saw each other at a wedding. He’d been a classmate of my husband’s in North Carolina, one of those really cute, totally funny, and unbelievably smart guys who just seem too good to be true. I have no problem, as a happily married woman, saying that I had a crush on Nick. Knowing my husband, if he read that, he’d cock his head to the side and remark “Yeah, I’d fuck him.” (And that, in a nutshell, is why we’ve been together for 21 years.)
I gasped as I read the email, and the people sitting near me looked at me. Twenty minutes later I almost missed my stop. I couldn’t quite process the fact that this smart, funny guy had taken his own life. The word “waste” kept running through my mind.
My funk continued throughout the evening, which was confusing because honestly, I probably hadn’t thought about Nick in years. Maybe that’s part of it. If it hit me this hard, how hard was it hitting his family? His friends?
Then a little while ago I got an email from my mom. My kitty, Patty, died this evening in her arms. We had gotten Patty (and her sister Selma) in North Carolina. Before we had actually babies, they were our babies. But by the time I’d had my second child, my patience with the cats was wearing thin, and thankfully my mom took them. Patty had a long happy life, ten years with us and five with my mom. I was just in Buffalo staying with my mom this weekend, and I’d remarked how Patty had sat next to me and let me pet her for fifteen minutes, which had to be a record. She’d gotten very thin and wasn’t eating well, and my mom had been talking about taking her to the vet. I had actually told her not to, that Patty was just getting old and would be fine in a few days. Well, I’ve been wrong before, and I’m sure I’ll be wrong again.
So now I’m sitting here crying, and I don’t know if it’s for Nick, or for my kitty, or out of guilt because I’d kind-of forgotten about both of them for the last five years or so. I’m wondering who else I’m ignoring, who else might need me while I’m wrapped up in my own life. He was my husband’s friend really, not mine, but I’ve got plenty of friends out there that I don’t think about unless I stumble upon them or happen to see a Facebook entry. And I’d love to end this post by saying that I’m going to make more of an effort to keep in touch with people, but I know myself better than that.
Instead, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite stories about Nick. I remember about nine years ago I was at a wedding in Dallas, and a few of us had gone out to dinner not far from where JFK had been shot. I got up to go to the bathroom, and Nick told me that it was back and to the left. I took a few steps before turning around and seeing him laughing quietly at me. He had exactly my sense of humor, and it always pissed me off that he could get me like that.
I’m sorry that Nick felt his only option was to take his own life. And I’m glad my kitty died in my mom’s arms.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, Momtourage, and podcasts with The Blogging Angels.
Tags: Duke, Nicholas Marsh, suicide
To sum up
Sep 24, 2010 Around NYC
This note pretty much sums up my mood for the last week. Not all the time, of course. People who saw me this week would probably say that I was normal, happy even. And in those moments I was. Or I was faking it really well. Either way, I didn’t walk around all week with a thundercloud above my head, but I was very tired and overwhelmed and crabby much of the time.
Most of it was probably lack of sleep. Being exhausted is kind of like having PMS: you don’t always realize in the moment just how much it’s affecting you, but then when you look back, it smacks you in the head. I got ten hours of sleep last night, so I’m much better now.
But back to the note: it was on a car near my kids’ school. I would never ever condone a brick through a window as revenge. But the note did get the message across loud and clear. And the car? Not only was it mashed up against the bumper of the car in front of it, but its ass was hanging very far into the cross walk. Not cool.
Tags: parking
How not to behave during a tornado
Sep 17, 2010 Around NYC
So it’s official: according to the National Weather Service, a tornado touched down in Park Slope, Brooklyn yesterday and traveled north for a couple of miles (another touched down in Queens). It passed by us around 5:30pm. Let’s see if we can count how many things I did wrong.
Fiona and I had just gotten home from dropping Jake off at Tae Kwon Do in Park Slope. On the way home the skies had darkened very quickly, and by the time we got out of the car there was almost constant thunder and lightening. But since there was not a drop of rain, we were hanging out on our steps, talking with a neighbor. When it started to sprinkle, we went inside.
Within a couple of minutes, the skies opened, and it’s hard to describe just how hard this rain was, and how much. It was like a solid wall of water coming down. It was completely dark outside, and suddenly the wind was howling. But I live in Brooklyn, and the word tornado never entered my head. In fact, I called Fiona over to the window to watch the rain.
After about a minute, we heard an enormous crash, and that kind-of woke me up to the fact that this wasn’t a normal storm. A thought entered my head, and I actually yelled it out loud: holy shit, the kids’ windows are open! I told Fiona to follow me and we ran upstairs. I couldn’t believe I was just thinking of the windows. We were almost to the top floor when I noticed there was water on the stairs. I looked up, at first thinking that the skylight was leaking, but I couldn’t see any water coming down. That’s when I realized that the water was coming out of Fiona’s room, branching off in one direction and pooling outside of the bathroom, and then going in another direction and running down the stairs.
So much rain had blown straight into her window, the wall was wet about 15 feet into the room. There was an inch of water on the side of her room next to the window, soaking the rug under her bed and seeping under her shelves. I told her to go downstairs and find all of the towels she could, clean or dirty. We both tried to wipe off books and toys and dolls and hauled everything downstairs that could go into the washing machine.
When we got done with this (about 15 minutes after the storm had hit) it occurred to me that the mom picking Jake up from Tae Kwon Do would have been driving when the storm hit, so I called her to make sure she was OK (she was). Then I called my next door neighbor, because I could see that her backyard was completely trashed – her canopy had flipped over and the legs were mangled, and her very large BBQ had tipped over (I’m pretty sure that was the crash I’d heard).
By this time Fiona was watching TV, and I told her to sit tight while I went outside to investigate. I just went a block in each direction – lots of big branches down, and a few whole trees. Jake got home soon after, and seemed very excited by the whole adventure. He said that water was leaking in from about a dozen places at Tae Kwon Do. I asked him what they did, thinking that maybe the kids had been scared, or they had been trying to keep dry with all the leaks around them. He just shrugged and said “We kept sparring.” Kids. Love it.
After my husband got home around 8:30 I went for a longer walk to survey the damage. I posted those pictures last night. It was crazy. I kept reading about damage nearby and realized how lucky we had been, just having to deal with some water. A roof was completely torn off of a brownstone a few blocks away. A skylight was ripped off down the street. A car was crushed by a tree a couple blocks over. And then came word that a woman had died in Queens when a tree fell on her car. Serious stuff.
At no point during the storm (which actually only lasted about five minutes) did it occur to me to take Fiona to the basement. Hell, I called her over to the window! I went outside right after without giving a single thought to weak branches coming down on my head, or power lines.
It reminds me of the time I was living in North Carolina, and hurricane Fran was closing in. I passed by three gas stations on my way home even though my tank was near empty, thinking I would get gas tomorrow. I had a freezer full of newly-purchased food, and no candles or batteries. I could not have been less prepared. I didn’t grow up with hurricanes.
Or when I was living in Chile, and woke up to an earthquake. It lasted a really long time, long enough for me to get out of bed, get my shoes and jacket on, start to leave my fifth-floor apartment, reconsider whether being outside is safer, go back in, reconsider again, head for the bathroom, remember that that was for hurricanes and tornadoes not earthquakes, and then have a conversation with my (future) husband about how in the world we could be living in Chile without bothering to find out the basics of earthquake survival.
I grew up with snow, that was it. In Buffalo it snowed a lot. You shoveled it. Easy. Tornadoes? Hurricanes? Earthquakes? Crazy.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, Momtourage, and podcasts with The Blogging Angels.
Tags: Brooklyn Tornado
Some Pictures of the Brooklyn Tornado
Sep 17, 2010 Around NYC
I took a walk around my Brooklyn neighborhood, Clinton Hill, a couple hours ago to see what the damage was from the (apparent) tornado that came through here this afternoon. What I saw was amazing (in a sad way). I’m very lucky, in that I’ll probably never see anything like this ever again, and thankfully it wasn’t that bad (although one poor person did die in Queens, when a tree fell on a car). But not having ever lived in an area prone to weather disasters, it looked very scary to me.
Since it was dark out I lightened the pictures up a little bit.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, Momtourage, and podcasts with The Blogging Angels.
Tags: Brooklyn Tornado
A Rice Krispies Treat follow-up
Sep 15, 2010 What's Going On
[You can read the first Rice Krispies Treat post here.]
Yesterday morning, we were doing our usual get-out-the-door dance before school. I was in harried no-nonsense mode. I’d forgotten to have the kids gather their snacks the night before, and I was trying to go on a jog right after school drop-off, and since I hadn’t jogged since June, I was running around trying to find what I needed. Fiona came up to me with her hands behind her back, looking a little sheepish. I kind-of barked at her “What is it Fiona, we have to go. What have you got?”
She took her hands out from behind her back to show me: a Rice Krispies Treat, and a Sharpie. “Mommy, I know we’re late, but could you write me another note please?” I wanted to cry. I told her of course, and did it. And gave her a hug.
Then Jake got things back to normal by rolling his eyes and asking if he could have a Rice Krispies Treat, but no note this time? I said sure. He’s nine, I get it. But I’m glad Fiona’s still not embarrassed by that stuff.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has Compensation Levels of 1 & 8. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, Momtourage, and podcasts with The Blogging Angels.
Stealer of childhood whimsy
Sep 15, 2010 What's Going On
Jake, being my oldest, was able to throw himself completely into Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, and to a lesser extent the Easter Bunny (for some reason kids are more willing to believe that an overweight man will squeeze down their chimneys with gifts, and that a fairy will sneak into their rooms with cash, than that a giant bunny is actually providing them with chocolate eggs). He had a good six year run before classmates started to erode his complete belief in these childhood staples.
But for Fiona, doubt came very soon on the heels of belief and understanding, as Jake decided that it was his job to tell his little sister the truth. Every once in a while she’ll come to me, a confused look on her face, and ask me if Santa Claus is real, or if I was really the one who put the money under her pillow. And Jake will be behind her, snickering, showing off how smart he is. And I give him a mean warning look, and he lets it go for a while.
But this morning, he went too far. Fiona had lost her second tooth, and she very excitedly put it under her pillow. Then, this morning, she came into my room almost in tears, telling me that the tooth fairy had taken her tooth but not left any money. My first confused sleepy thought was that I had forgotten to make the switch. I’ve forgotten twice already with Jake, and that took some explaining and quick thinking. But no, I clearly remembered putting five dollars under her pillow. I told her to go upstairs and check all around her bed and make sure it hadn’t fallen. She brightened up a little: “That’s OK Mommy, Jake felt so bad for me, he gave me $5. He said that you had forgotten to put money under my pillow, so he gave me some.”
I yelled for Jake. He came quick. He could hear it in my voice.
After a few threats, I got him to admit that he had taken the money. I’m not sure he deserves a defense, but I’m in a generous mood. So, in his defense, he was never planning on keeping the money. He’d had it in his possession all of twenty seconds, enough to make Fiona think it was his. He just wanted to get the credit, and at the same time discredit the Tooth Fairy. And make me look forgetful. Genius, really.
But I was in no mood. I yelled and punished and he apologized to Fiona. Then, after she left, I told him “You know, that’s fine if you don’t actually believe in the tooth fairy anymore. But keep it to yourself. Because if word gets out that you no longer believe, then you don’t get any money for your teeth.” He’s got about 14 more baby teeth to go. That would be a lot of money to leave on the table. He actually looked scared.
Christmas should be interesting. I think he still wants to believe, but doesn’t want to put his gifts in jeopardy. Frankly, I’m not ready to let Santa Claus go, if only because it’s such a great concept to be able to hold over their heads for about three months every year. Jake lies about so many other things, I need him to throw me a bone and lie about this one a little while longer.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, Momtourage, and podcasts with The Blogging Angels.
Tags: Santa Clause, tooth fairy
A Rice Krispies Treat & a Message
Sep 13, 2010 What's Going On
The following post was commissioned by Kellogg’s.
A couple years ago, after managing to hang on to them for most of the school year, both of my kids lost their lunchboxes within days of each other. Since there was only a month left until summer I decided to just use brown bags for the rest of the year. For reasons that I probably would have understood when I was a kid, they were both a little embarrassed by this – brown bag lunches were not cool. To make up for it, I drew little pictures on their bags each day, which they loved.
Of course we’re back to lunchboxes now, so no cute drawings. But today, when they open them up at snacktime, they’re each going to find a little surprise: a Rice Krispies Treat, with a little note from me written on the package. This is a cool new feature on Rice Krispies Treats, allowing parents to write a special message that will give kids a virtual hug at school.
I didn’t want to make mine too mushy – Jake would be especially mortified, being the ultra-cool nine-year-old that he is. I was tempted to make a joke out of it, one that he would surely get, being the big Simpsons fan that he is: in one episode, Bart and Lisa get each other’s lunches by mistake. They know this because Bart finds a note saying “I am very proud of you” and Lisa finds one saying “Be Good. For the love of God, please be good.” But there’s a time for snark and a time for sincerity, so I told them both how proud they make me. I think they know that, I tell them enough. But now it’s official – it’s in writing. :-)
Next time I’ll make sure to have a fine-point marker on hand. I had to have an especially light touch with my thick Sharpie in order to make the messages legible. But the package was very easy to write on, and after drying was un-smudgeable. I can’t wait to hear what the kids thought when they get home!
Do you write notes to your kids? Do they love it?
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 2. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, Momtourage, and podcasts with The Blogging Angels.
