Claire = 3

Clarita is growing up!
I made the traditional jello cake to celebrate her birthday at playgroup. She wouldn’t eat a bite. What! She doesn’t like jello cake? Where did she come from? Who is her father? I tried the next day with chocolate cupcakes, but not too much luck there either. Could it be the cook?We went with friends to a kids play club. Claire, of course ran straight to the beauty parlor to get her hair and makeup done. Elijah was in charge of his own makeover. The sweat did most of the work.
There were several other fun things to do. Claire zip-lined for the first time to the music of Madonna: “Like a Virgin” which must have either been chosen by a pervert or, let’s give them benefit of the doubt and say the childcare club employee didn’t understand English.Due to bureaucracy, we were not able to hit the piñata in the parking garage. So we improvised. And then we improvised again. These could be prison scenes (below)! They beat that poor lion senseless. I'm still not sure what piñata lynchings and beatings will do the psyches of my children.

CLAIRE

• She loves all things girly and is starting to get more confident and assertive.
• Although she still has problems distinguishing between Spanish and English, it’s funny to see how she directly translates things that don’t quite work. For instance, she says “for why” when mentally translating both “porque” and “por qué?” Both she and Elijah still say “choke” instead of crash and “burp” instead of “throw up.”
• Claire loves her family and usually wants to be in the same room with at least one of them.
• She’s starting to turn the sassy corner and will respond with things like, “what do you think,” and “what did I just say.”
• Although she eats like a pigeon, she can usually be bribed into eating with either watching Leap Frog Letter Factory or my tricky refrain, “Open your mouth and close your eyes and you will get a big surprise.” Neither of these strategies guarantees that she will swallow the food within 30 minutes of putting it in her mouth.
• Favorite pastimes: Painting nails, putting on “makeup,” dressing-up as a princess, making up songs, reading books, riding her scooter, doing whatever her brother is doing.
AND
She's proud of those Southern roots:

Clean floors? I think not.

Do you ever feel like you’ve ignored the kids most of the day so that you can clean the house and in the end the kids are crabby and the house is a mess anyway? Now that I have a mobile, teething baby on the loose, I’m re-realizing how hard it is to maintain not even just a semi-clean environment, but a hazard-free floor. I found a bead in the diaper the other day—it came through un-scathed, and so did the child, fortunately.


Here are the girls enjoying Claire’s birthday presents today. Happy birthday Claire! I will post more on it later since the festivities are far from over. By the way, I’ve been asking myself what ever happened to the days when I didn’t celebrate anything besides a bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos alongside a tall, refreshing cup of milk? We have finally reached the age when Elijah understands that cake, presents, and special treatment should usually accompany the “birthday” and has graciously enlightened his sister. Here's to hoping the connection b/t Santa and presents won’t dawn until the mid-20s.

Thoughts on semi-single-motherhood

Disclaimer #1: Single mothers, I mean not to lightheartedly bash you. I honor you, revere you—you are brave women, I am not you. But I am kinda you with a nice pension and a date many Friday nights with the same man who sometimes shares my bed for a few hours a few nights a week and with whom I happen to have an eternal, binding contract.

I get puppy-dog faces and pity when others find out the hours my husband works. I welcome them, glory in the attention, but really, they are not needed. The schedule isn’t all that bad—for me that is. Talk to David and he might give you a different story. Then change the subject to income and as soon as his eyes gloss over into dollar signs, he might say something like, “I wasn’t made to live a pauper’s life.”

Back to me. I have little to no husband-time during the week. Weekends are better in Mexico than NYC, but still not perfect. The time I usually do have with him involves me sitting on the porcelain throne, yelling over the sound of the shower as he gets ready for work.
I grew up with a work-a-holic father. I remember being very bitter about his schedule, envious of his newspaper-reading habit when he came home. I picked, I nagged, I complained, I was rotten with that poor man. More recently I have resurrected into a more docile, accepting woman with my husband. Let me share my secret:

ZERO expectations = ZERO disappointment.

On the bright side, I have been able to develop talents from the hours of 7:30 pm until unconsciousness settles in. Although these talents may be vague and un-useful to everyday society (e.g. computer surfing, dead skin picking, dozing), they are enjoyable. Yes, I would much rather have David at home to pick my dead skin (when pigs fly), but meanwhile, life is so much happier with ZERO expectations.

Disclaimer #2: This tune changes significantly when I am on a hormonal rage and expect him to do just about everything including being the wind beneath my wings so I can fly higher than an eagle.
Disclaimer #3: He has worked 38.5 out of the last 40 hours and still going strong. Check your faces: are they puppydog pity faces (for me, not him)? If not, regroup and get it together.

"Aim for the stars and maybe you'll reach the sky," was a quote from Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr an American Protestant theologian (wikianwers.com). “Aim for nothing, it’s easier,” was a quote from a wise, semi-single-mother.

Now blog-reading public, a question for you: I realize each case is unique, but what do you think: Aim for the stars or aim for nothing?

The man working for the Man.

If I Were a Rich Man

If I were the richest man in the world, what would I do with my money?
I would hire my son-in-law to build a "wonky futuristic hourglass" covered by more than 16,000 hexagonal aluminum plates.....which houses my personal art collection from artists including: El Greco, Matisse, Monet,van Gogh, Salvador Dali, Diego Rivera, etc...
...including The Thinker, Rodin.
Alas, I am not the richest man in the world but will settle for visiting museums.
We also went to the National Palace. Here we are in front of a huge mural by Diego Rivera. It took several years to complete.

Dia del Niño

On a Mother's day, years and years ago I asked my mother why there wasn't a day for just kids. She said something like, "there are about 363 of them." Little did I know I my kids would have 363 days and then some. There was a Jumping Castle and other festivities at church.
Iris has mastered screaming and scooting.

Getting my Mother's Day chi on!

Fat camp. If you ever want to gift me a week at fat camp, I promise I will not be offended. Actually, it’s kind of been a dream of mine to have time solely focused on making my body feel wonderful. Did my journey begin when I married a sugar-eating machine? Probably not. Ever since it began, I have fantasized about being a contestant on Biggest Loser. Although, deep down I know I’d be the contestant who gets caught by the night-vision cameras eating an entire bag of Doritos while hiding in the shower, and then the teary confession on the +5 lbs scale and I’m voted out of the house.
On that note, I got a great Mothers’ Day gift: a child-free, girls’ only, yoga retreat. Yes, I hugged some trees and ate some granola. Yes, I dreamed of growing dreadlocks, but chickened out. Pre-retreat, I was afraid my kids would be at a fat camp of other sorts when the day before I left, I caught my friend (who took care of the kids while I was gone) feeding Iris M&Ms and was asked to buy popcorn, chocolate milk, and ice cream for the kids before I left. I was also afraid I’d arrive home to a “Lord of the Flies” scene with the kids dancing around David’s skull and bones. But no such luck (bad luck that is).
I traveled with 6 other women to Valle de Bravo for 3 days. We did yoga every day and I’m proud to announce that I was not voted out of the house even though I ate the chocolates that were left on my pillow. It was relaxing to be called beautiful warriors, strong trees, happy babies, and many other things, although not always so pleasant: baby cobras, butterflies, pigeons, crows, fish, wheels, bridges, table tops, plows, dancers. And my favorite yoga word is shavasana: in English, corpse pose.


My frazzled brain is really bad at meditation. But I'm OK at faking it.
The house we stayed at was beautiful with a beautiful view complete with a heated infinity pool:


A steep walk down to the town:A girls' trip without shopping? I think not.

Scenes from the town:



Mother's Day itself was nothing too special. As promised last year though, I told David to jump and he asked "how high" upon prompting. Mother's Day in Mexico was 2 days after US Mother's Day. Many people got the day off work and school. Elijah had a presentation with the other 2 bilingual classes in "kinder." They sang and danced.
E's class presented on Antonio Vivaldi. Here's his line:



In case you didn't catch that:
“Escribió 4 conciertos que lo hicieron famoso en toda Europa.”

PS: 5 de Mayo is definitely a bigger deal in the US than here: ironic.

September 11th

I think everyone will remember where they were on September 11, 2001. I was in Chile on the way to pick my companion up at the church offices. My Spanish skills were somewhat meager and with the excitement and confusion of the day, I understood that 2 planes crashed into each other. At the office, we were told to go straight home and not to speak English in public. In the apartment all day (we closed all windows and blinds because my roomies really thought we would be shot) and cut off from all types of media, my brain went absolutely haywire. I knew little of what had happened, just that it was bad, really bad. From my journal “I seriously thought I was going to have to go back to the States and work in a bomb factory. I told Hna McDonald that we would never be going back to college and that our life savings had been reduced to pieces of green paper. I almost told them that they couldn’t take showers b/c we should conserve the gas we have in case the rest of it had to go to the war effort. I thought my family was going to die of starvation in a couple of days b/c they don’t have food storage.” More from my journal: “I’m sure the world is in an uproar and I know nothing about it…I had to stop thinking about it so I exercised. I exercised hard. Really hard. At one point I almost started hyperventilating. Then I showered, shaved, painted my toenails dark purple and calmed down.” At a mission conference a few days later, the mission president said “millions of people died yesterday, we can’t get in touch with most of them b/c there are no phones.” Afterward, we were bombarded by images and urged by many people to come in and watch the news. But I avoided the topic and averted my eyes until years later, after marriage, when I watched part of a documentary about it in the Ortiz home and realized how horribly evil that was.

Now, almost a decade later the mastermind is dead. Osama is dead. We listened to Obama announce his death. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see lightning splash the sky.