How to exercise

Running is inherently a boring activity for me. But it gets me the most aerobic bang for my babysitter buck so I do it anyway. And when I discovered those treadmills that have a TV built into the dashboard, it changed everything. Suddenly I was doubling and tripling the time I spent on the treadmill because I just had to finish the Daily Show, or stumbled upon an awful reality show more engaging than staring at the person in front of me.

The goldmine of TV-running was the fateful day I was flipping through the stations, sweat beading on my brow, and suddenly found a show chronicling a woman giving birth. No seriously, there she was lying in a hospital bed pushing the proverbial piano across the room. Thank you, TLC ("A Baby Story").

That was the best work out of my life (except for the couple of times I’ve actually given birth, of course). I forgot all about my running time or pace or even that I was IN A GYM WITH OTHER PEOPLE. I laughed at the terrible jokes her husband was making, I not-so-silently cheered her on, and then when she finally gave birth to the baby, I started crying. On my treadmill. With my earphones in. Sandwiched by other joggers, I'm running in place and crying my eyes out. If you're looking for a killer workout, take my advice and run alongside a birthing woman.

The Complaining Box

My brother and sister-in-law just returned from a trip to China. While browsing through their photos, I came across this one:

Is that not the most brilliant idea? Why don't we have these things in the US? I'm going to install one in our kitchen so whenever the kids start whining I just can direct them to the box. Or hand them a phone and tell them to call China about it.

Spring Break is not for parents

My daughter is on Spring Break this week. It couldn't be a better one in terms of the weather. Like the rest of the country, we're basking in 70 degree sunshine, contentedly awaiting the 80s forecasted to arrive mid-week. We've been to the park, gone out for ice cream, and dug out our sandals and sunscreen. Our mornings are suddenly devoid of alarms and rushing and packing lunch. So why does this feel like an anti-break? I think it's because school is out. Routine is shot. And without routine, I slowly dissolve into a puddle on the floor.

I met a friend at the park yesterday. Since it basically felt like the middle of summer out there, the place was packed with kids. What was intended to be a relaxing morning, letting the kids run off some energy while catching up with another mom, turned into The Great Kid Hunt. Keeping your eye on one was hard enough, but two? Nearly impossible without neon flagging attached to their foreheads. My friend and I were lucky to get 5 minutes of talking in before we each had to run in opposite directions to prevent our 2-year-olds from trying out the fire pole or running into the swings.

I see the point of spring break for kids, but for parents I think it serves more as a warning to get your summer plans in line fast, or else risk 12 back-to-back weeks of spring break repeated.

Not fruitcake

Almost anything is better than fruitcake, but one thing is worse. I discovered exactly what this one thing was many, many years ago during the holiday season. I may have been around 9 years old, which would my brother 6 years old, and we were both totally hopped up on the excitement of Christmas. One day, my mom sent us over to our next-door neighbor's house to deliver a little gift. Now that I'm on the other side of childhood I can't imagine anything better than answering the doorbell and finding two giddy children delivering a wrapped present. Especially because that neighbor was an elderly woman who lived alone.

She immediately invited us inside the foyer where she kept this mind-blowing bowl of candies. At least that's how I remember it. They were those strawberry hard candies that have the chewy insides. You know the kind.

Good god, do I want one of those now. Or maybe even a mouthful of them. But I will push them out of my head and continue to write this story.

So while my brother and I are figuring out how to carry ten pieces of candy in each fist, she disappears into her kitchen and comes back with a bakery box for us to bring home. A holiday gift of her own. We thanked her with our mouths full of strawberry candy and stepped out onto her porch.

What could be inside the box? We carefully brought it home and begged my mom to open it right away. When she cut the strings and opened the box, we found a delicious-looking cake with white frosting inside.

Whatever happened after that has been permanently blurred in my memory.

I think the basic gist is that my mom cut into the cake and as soon as we recognized what we were looking at, we were forever scarred. In fact, if someone even mentions the words "sandwich" and "loaf" together I find myself fighting an urge to stuff my face with those strawberry candies at once. Just to get the memory off my taste buds.

From Wikipedia:

A sandwich loaf is a stacked party entrée that looks like a cake. While rare today, the food was quite popular during the mid 20th century in the United States. To create a sandwich loaf, bread is cut horizontally and spread with layers of filling. Common fillings include egg salad, chicken salad, ham salad, tuna salad, and Cheez Whiz, but other fillings are possible, including peanut butter and jelly and mock egg salad made from tofu. After the layers are assembled the entire loaf is coated with whipped cream cheese, which may be tinted with food coloring.

Bon Appétit!

Threat

All I'm saying is, there's a reason why this is a threat. And it's not so much about the caffeine.

Related.

Cultivating Nordic Appreciation

You know how you can grow up thinking everyone talks the same way that your parents do? Like my dad will usually substitute the word "pry" for "probably". Don't ask me why, it's just his thing. "I think we'll pry be there in, oh, 17 minutes." I thought that's what everyone said for a while. Maybe too long of a while.

So I just realized that I might be doing the same thing to my kids except instead of shortening a word by a few syllables, I'm replacing the names of different types of furniture with IKEA product names. Here are a few examples.

Daughter: Mom, can I have some tape?

Me: Yes, it's in one of the NORDEN drawers.

-------------

Daughter: Where is your chapstick?

Me: On top of the HEMNES next to the stack of laundry.

-------------

Husband: What do you think about switching the EKTORPs?

Me: Or we could just move the white EKTORP over there instead?

-------------

I guess only time will tell whether our kids will start calling side tables, dressers, and sofas by their nordic names. Our kid could very well be at a friend's house someday and proclaim, "This is the most comfortable EKTORP I've ever sat on!". Of course the difference between this situation and my situation with "pry" is that the couch she'll be sitting on actually has a chance of being just that. Nobody I know besides my dad uses the word "pry".

By the way, I only just found out that there's actually a method to the naming madness over at IKEA. Check this out (compliments of Wikipedia):

IKEA products are identified by single word names. Most of the names are Swedish in origin. Although there are some notable exceptions, most product names are based on a special naming system developed by IKEA.

• Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish placenames (for example: Klippan)
• Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names
• Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names
• Bookcase ranges: Occupations
• Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays
• Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names
• Chairs, desks: men's names
• Fabrics, curtains: women's names
• Garden furniture: Swedish islands
• Carpets: Danish place names
• Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, nautical terms
• Bedlinen, bed covers, pillows/cushions: flowers, plants, precious stones
• Children's items: mammals, birds, adjectives
• Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms
• Kitchen utensils: foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions
• Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks: colloquial expressions, also Swedish place names

WHO KNEW?!? I love that place.

The future of dog

I frequently find myself running errands in a cluster of stores that also happens to contain PetSmart. Since my youngest is nearing 2, and therefore not the easiest shopping companion, I will often take him into PetSmart between errands as an offering to the toddler gods. It's great, we check out the rows of aquariums, visit the rodent cages, stroll by the birds, and then inevitably end up at their so-called "doggy day camp". This part is his favorite.

He's fascinated with dogs of all varieties and has no problem approaching them on his own. I can see that of my two kids, he's going to be one begging for a dog. And the problem is that neither me nor my husband want a dog. It's not that I don't like dogs, I grew up with one and had a fine experience. But I just can't even begin to comprehend adding the doggie responsibilities to my already-towering list of things to do and people to take care of. Is it not enough that I'm already changing tons of diapers - let's add the pooper scooper to the repertoire! And how much money do they eat up in specially formulated kibbles and health care? I'll admit it would be nice to have the dog under our kitchen table for scrap clean up, but that doesn't even begin to cancel out the shedding or the smell. I guess I'm just not enough of a dog person to accept all those other duties that go along with one. And certainly not while we're overrun by small kids. So, given my strong feelings about the matter, why does something about this whole business seem slightly out of my control? Famous last words.

Cheese

When I was a freshman in college, my parents sent me a quarter wheel of stilton cheese in the mail. This has got to win the prize for most unusual and unfortunate care package to send your kid during their first week of college. And I'm sure it was sent with only the best wishes for starting off the year on the right foot, but oh my god. It's a miracle I made any friends that year, let alone married the boy living across the hall seven years later. Actually now that I think of it, he probably needed those seven years just to clear the air.

Let me take a step back and say that my parents didn't go out to the store and select a partial wheel of blue cheese with me in mind. It was leftover from a party they threw. Although I'm not sure that makes it any better. If they had instead sent leftover plastic forks, my life would have been so different. Because it's not just what that boulder of cheese did to our room, it's what it did to the entire dorm hall.

The mini-fridge I shared with my roommates stunk to high heaven while closed. When you opened the door? The door would only need to be opened a slight fraction of an inch for the odor to fill our room, travel under and around the sides of the shut door to our room, and envelop the hallway with the suffocating stench of ripe Stilton. I was the definition of a bad roommate.

Don't get me wrong - I love cheese! Stilton even. The stinkier the better in my opinion. But you have to be in the mood for this sort of thing, prepared for the onslaught. One of the most ill-prepared I ever was for the stifling scent of cheese was when I was in the first trimester of my second pregnancy. I was walking down the town's main drag and suddenly succumbed to an extremely powerful 1-2 punch in the olfactory department. Look at this line up:

The first part was walking past The Body Shop, but about 7 stores before you reach the Body Shop, you can already smell their latest fruity product from the candle they're burning out on the sidewalk. Sometimes it's Japanese Cherry Blossom or Moroccan Rose, but other times the White Musk White Hot Summer Smooth Satin Body Lotion inside completely overpowers the little candle outside. It's that smelly. Even their Black Velvet Apricot Candle - which sounds kind of glum and low-key but you would be surprised to find both your eyebrows singed off from the sheer stink of it.

Then, just one store past the Body Shop, when you are still within the bubble of fruity doom, you are forced to walk right in front of the Cheese Shop. And it is here that the White Musk White Hot Summer Smooth Satin Body Lotion is abruptly replaced by this:

I mean, even a non-pregnant person sometimes has a hard time distinguishing between an expensive, soft French cheese and their own dirty laundry. So you can imagine that when this complex, blasting aroma hits right on the heels of Passionflora Fruitstick Body Butter, I nearly went into preterm labor right then and there. Of course, the ironic part is that just a few months later I would have happily devoured the entire contents of that store.

Unsightly growths in your front yard

We bought a house last May. Talk about a project to last a lifetime - there is never a dull moment around here. We've done a ton of inside work this winter in terms of getting stuff up on the walls, arranging furniture, switching over from oil to gas heating, insulating the attic and installing drop-down stairs, etc., etc. Just a couple more months to go before we can pop the screens back in the windows and start getting outside again.

Last summer was downright manic with all the outdoor projects we tackled. We'd get the kids down at like 6:30 and then work outside with the baby monitor on until 9. The big stuff included putting a fence in the front of the house, establishing a veggie plot with anti-bunny fencing (they ate right through it), starting new garden beds, and creating a woodchipped play area under a cluster of maple trees for all the plastic crapola (slides, sand tables, ride-on toys) that inevitably comes along with kids.

Plans are already underway to continue the bonanza this coming summer with a few new projects. The first one on our list is to fence and screen the sides of the house so the backyard is more private and secure. I want to be able to personally threaten those bunnies getting into the vegetable garden without worrying that kids are running around to the front of the house (we live on a busy road).

Along with the side fence, we'd like to put in some sort of tree or shrub to give the backyard a little privacy from the road and sidewalk. There are tons of options out there for screen plants, but the most popular ones are the evergreen arborvitae trees:

They're tall and skinny and provide a screen year-round. Just one little problem:

WHAT IS THAT?!

Oh yeah. They have to be wrapped in burlap each winter to protect them from deer and rabbit grazing as well as snow fall which could damage the branches. Minor inconvenience, right? While everyone else is putting up their holiday lights, you get to drag the ladder over to your needy screen plants and delicately wrap them up in blankets. And it doesn't stop there. Then you get to tie strings around the entire tree, creating unfortunate bulges that evoke the worst of the low-rise-jean-muffin-top phenomenon. How humiliating!

I think we're going to skip over these and keep looking for the perfect screen plant - preferably one that doesn't require a special cloak in the winter months. Because it seems to me that all your efforts to create a screen would only backfire as people literally gawk from their cars getting a load of your yard's unsightly growths. Instead of gaining precious privacy, you've just converted your property into Dr. Seuss habitat.

Stop, Drop, and Roll

I used to live in Santa Cruz, California while I was a grad student. My dissertation research focused on a parasitic plant called dodder - a name alarmingly similar to "daughter". It grew in salt marshes along the coast which is where I spent most of my time, smeared with mud, running experiments and documenting patterns of its growth.

Much of the land surrounding those marshes were beautiful rolling meadows of tall grass with high quantities of ticks and low quantities of mountain lions. That's what I'd always tell myself when I was out there alone - the quantities of mountain lions are exceptionally low here! Would you stop turning around every 3 minutes to check if one's behind you? But I just couldn't shake the nagging thoughts that I might see one out there - and be armed with nothing more menacing than a sharpie and some ziplocks.

My mind wouldn't stop, and soon I would move beyond the sighting to the inevitable attack I would endure once I had been discovered by the man-eating cat. How would I respond? What would I do to defend myself besides waving around a few permanent markers? This was where the real fear set in, as I started imagining the sounds of twigs snapping under foot and tall grasses being pushed aside by the stealthy predator. My mind would be swamped with every single safety order I could remember - Make lots of noise! RUN!! Stand your ground. Make yourself appear bigger than you are! MAINTAIN EYE CONTACT. Under no circumstances should you make eye contact. Play dead! Run and tell the nearest adult. STOP, DROP, AND ROLL!! I mean, who in their right mind could actually remember any of these instructions at the time when they are intended to be helpful?

When I was trying to decide on a name for this blog, I thought "Stop, Drop, and Roll" would be a good one because this story of the imaginary mountain lion is a lot like being a parent. There are tons of "recommendations" for parenting that are constantly being changed on us at such an alarming rate that it becomes hard to remember what the current recommendation is anymore. Don't eat peanut butter while you're pregnant! Eat lots of it and start your baby on it within the first year! Don't allow your child to see a jar of peanut butter until age 4! Introduce solids at 4 months! Wait until 6 months! Sleep with your baby! Under no circumstances should you sleep with your baby! The list is endless. And many of these "recommendations" are issued with the same intensity as those intended to save you from a mountain lion attack. I guess the only difference is that while you can rely on your instincts for child rearing, the same will hardly make a difference with a mountain lion.

Diaper bags

My mom just gave me me a new bag/purse which I am so excited about that I had to write about it right away. She did not intend it to be used as a diaper bag but that's exactly what I see in all bags. Either it's a diaper bag or it's not. I immediately decided that this was a diaper bag.

Before I elaborate on this fascinating turn of events, let me start with some background. As most moms would agree, your diaper bag and purse tend to merge into one fairly sizable piece of baggage that you must lug with you everywhere. In certain cases, it may actually require a set of wheels on the bottom for easy maneuvering. Thankfully, I haven't gotten there yet. My bag of late has been this super cool green number that my husband gave me as a birthday present years ago when I would have barely recognized a diaper if it tapped me on the shoulder. That's probably why I brought it out and started using it tote around all my stuff, even though it has no segmentation and immediately turned into a vast stew of used tissues, receipts, cracker crumbs, and other essential belongings. Oh how I will miss digging through this wasteland of debris in search for my keys!

So my mom arrives today and gives me this:

And would you believe that in its four neat compartments, it can hold everything that is actually required of a diaper bag and purse? It do! I feel like I just lost like 30 pounds.

Now we'll see how long it lasts before I start pushing around a shopping cart to catch the overflow.