Goodthings Warehouse Sale

Yesterday I invited some of the girls from work and we did lunch at the Good Things Warehouse Sale currently happening (7/29-7/30) in White Bear Lake.  I wandered around with housewarming parties and decorating on my mind, but ended up coming home with a couple of things just for me.  What do you think?

As the World Turns

I fancy myself an observer.  I like to think I have a constant eye on the world – gathering information, storing it, distilling it, finding the patterns.  And I especially love to watch people.  I find people to be the most baffling, interesting things in the world.  And, frankly, the most baffling and interesting of all are the little people - kids.  I love observing their views on life, their foibles and their triumphs.

I have made an unofficial pastime, like many parents I'm sure, of observing my own kids.  Last night the adults in my house spent a lot of time discussing the life of my oldest.  He is one of the most annoyingly brilliant people I've ever met, and probably one of the few people in my life that I just can't figure out.  He is an enigma in many ways because his moods and attitudes are so mercurial.

Recently, I have noticed him struggling through a realization that can truly be earth shattering - a realization that even some adults have yet to grasp - the world does not revolve around him.  Wait, what?

As an only child, I think that the first borns and the onlys of the world may struggle a little harder with this reality.  There was so much of our lives that the family dynamic really did revolve around us.  We were the only ones commanding attention, right?

But, really, beyond the generalities, I have noticed so many changes in Urban since he started his new school.  For the past year, he was home either with me or a nanny.  He really drove much of the action.  He had a major say it what happened and when.  And, with his behaviors, he could steer the day along any path he chose.  Hard as we would try to redirect and stay the course, he was in charge.  Do you know how hard that is to admit?

But what's equally hard is maintaining a calm, collected demeanor when faced with a screaming, grunting 4yo who you KNOW is openly defying your wishes - wishes that are mutually beneficial - like going to the park!  He would (and does still at home) push and push and push until you fold and say, "fine we're not doing X, but now you are spending time in time out" or in your room or whatever.  Nope, he's not doing anything fun, he's not "winning" like an adult would see it, but he is.  He is not having to do whatever it was he didn't want to do, or worse, now he's doing it - but on his terms not yours.  Now you're late.  Or the whole neighborhood is outside looking at you because he was shrieking.  Or whatever.

But now he's at school.  Now it isn't on his terms at all.  He's better behaved at this school than ever.  He listens.  He's focused.  He tries really hard.  He loves numbers, math and is even starting to enjoy writing and reading.  He is making friends.  (He has always made friends, but these friends are different.)

In his past schools, he was a leader in his class.  If there was a yearbook for preschool, he would have been voted "most likely to start a cult".  Whatever Urban did, everyone did.  If Urban left the room, he announced his departure and return to a rapt audience.  Everyone cared.  His friends were active, imaginative and predominantly male.

Now, his friends are quiet, mostly girls, and sweet.  I come to pick him up and see him, not running around shouting, "I'm SPIDERMAN and you're BATMAN!", but sitting to the side watching the other boys roughhouse and chase each other around.  When he leaves the room, he still announces his departure, but no one really cares.  There are a lot of looks of, "So?"

I watch him, and I wonder what this is doing to his sense of self.  He understands so much.  He processes so much.  And he is blessed/cursed with equal parts of my personality and his father's.  Where I (as referenced in a previous post) was weird and didn't care because I just didn't know any better, Brett was weird and cared.  He knew that he was an outsider in his elementary years, and I didn't.  Urban has the same trail-blazing, against the grain tendencies I do mixed with this very acute social awareness of his father.  He is different, and he knows it.  He and I have long discussions about social norms.  He's trying to work it all out.

And I am sitting and watching him absorb the fact that his world is shifting, and he's not the center anymore.  Not at school.  And not at home.  Because, now there's this pesky little thing called Beringer running around.  And Beringer has his own ideas and his own personality and his own needs.  And many times none of them align with Urban's.  And many times the attention... the most valuable commodity in Urban's life is pulled away and directed toward someone else.  And what is he to do?

We often describe Urban as 2 people.  There is 2-year-old Urban – an overwhelmed little boy who doesn't know how to communicate his needs and falls into fits of screaming and crying and non-verbal grunting, running, hiding, pushing...  Then there is 7-year-old Urban who is articulate, kind, helpful, imaginative and focused.  We never see 4-year-old, age-appropriate Urban.  And although you are talking to 7yo Urban now, in 2 seconds you could have a kicking, screaming 2yo Urban, and you don't know why.  One minute you're talking about cakes and parties, the next you are trying to stop him from angrily ramming his head into the floor.

We have been in family therapy for a year.  We have amazing tools.  And so often the tools escalate the situation instead of diffusing it.  You can have all the tools you want in your toolbox, but you can't force him to use them.  And if you do...  stand back.

So what do we do?  What do we do...

American Exteriors: Part 1

So the guys showed up yesterday to install the windows.  I must say it was a flurry of excitement and stress leading up to their arrival.  The night before, Brett got a migraine and spent most of the night int he fetal position.  Not fun.  So, that left Mom and I to take down all the window coverings and move the furniture 3-4 ft. away from the windows.  Here are my conclusions:

1.  I have a newly enforced hatred for mini blinds and the holes their myriad screws leave in the woodwork.

2.  We have a lot of damn windows.

3.  We need new curtains.

4.  We have a lot of damn windows.

So, in the morning, with the furniture in every room mounded in the middle, I left Mom and Beringer to supervise the installation.  Little did I know that not even 2 hours later I would be pulling back into my driveway to deliver Urban into the loving arms of his grandmother because his eyes got infected formt hat pesky sunburn.  Joy.  Now Mom had to wrangle 2 rambunctious kids, 2 window installers, 3 cats and, on top of it, had nowhere to sit.  My mother is a saint.

So, anyway, American Exteriors showed up right when they said they would and immediately got to work.  Mom said they were so careful with everything and that they worked around naps like it was no big deal at all.  That is a HUGE thing for our house.  They were finishing up around 6 – about the time I got home.

I walked into the house and was amazed.  First, by just how great the new windows looked – no more salts obstructing our views of the park and trees.  But also by how clean they left the house.  I think Brett mentioned it more than once.  They work the way he would work.  They cleaned as they went and really didn't leave any sign that they were coming back today!  (they did come back, of course.)

So far, we are very impressed.  Can't wait to see it tonight!  I will post pictures tomorrow.

Magical Thinking for Mere Mortals

I was reading this article this morning on CNN, and it really struck a chord with me.  First of all, I too was completely engrossed in my dreamland when I was a kid.  I was weird and dreamy with short, dirty blond, very curly hair (that I thought was the ugliest thing in the world until I learned that not all hair is meant to be brushed) and a penchant for the dark and dramatic.

Yep, that's me at age 8.  I often imagined myself as a mermaid.  I loved Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid.  Even as a kid I was drawn to the dark beauty of this story.  I loved the magic and the sacrifice.  I also loved the long hair.

I remember taking my blue blanket (a twin-sized beauty with no ribbon edging left) and tying it around my head so that it would trail on the floor as my long, mermaid locks.  I would sit side-saddle on my unicorn and race around the back yard discovering fairy kingdoms in the grape arbor.  It was awesome.

And I didn't know until much later on (Like probably high school) how amazingly geeky I really was.  I was just cluelessly happy in my little world.  A couple of good friends who enjoyed my hair-brained ideas for fun, and I was good to go.

I can't even tell you how many nights I spent in the back yard playing Ouija and lighting candles in my pubescent years.  And, now, as an adult I look back to that magic with longing and joy.  In fact, I will still, on occasion, light the odd candle in the backyard and summon some spirits - mostly those sold in bottles with corks, but spirits none-the-less - I have not grown up too much, really.

But, like the writer, Eric Poole, I turn to different magic these days.  I have, as chronicled here, gone through many of my own life-changing issues in the last few years, and I totally know what Poole is talking about.  I found myself more than once in this dark (not the cool, goth kind) place beating myself up over decisions made or chances taken, wearing my "poverty... like a badge of honor," and spending more time than not cursing those who had wronged me.  What a waste of time and energ.y.

And, looking back now, I can tell you the day, maybe even the moment, it turned around.  It was the day we found out we were being foreclosed.  A big day.  A scary day.

Brett and I sat in the basement of our house and nervously danced around the issue.  We were so tense, neither of us wanting to start a fight about what we were going to do, who was at fault or whatever other useless yelling could have taken place but didn't.  And, although I may remember it wrong, I feel like we said it at the same time, "We just have to let it go."

It's such a simple sentence.  And it really applied to more than just the house.  All of it...we had to just let all of it go.  We had to stop beating ourselves up and feeling like victims and failures for the position we found ourselves in.  We had to look forward, make decisions and move on.

We had to let it go.  The house.  The "urban hipster" life.  The idea of who we were supposed to be.  None of it mattered anymore.  We had to stop talking the victim talk and walking the failure walk.  We had a family to think about.  We were done making bad decisions.  We were going to take our lives back and stop covering our faces when bad things happened.  And in that moment, we had more to be happy about than we could see.

We made a plan.  We stopped talking about the negatives, and magically our lives began to turn around. Yes.  There have been backslides.  Yes.  There have been bumps.  And, yes.  Our lives are 100x better than they were 2 years ago.  Partly because we have changed the "plan".  We have shifted our priorities, and we are talking about can happen instead of what has happened.

Everything changes.  Everything.  It is the one thing you can plan on.  And I fully believe that we have the power inside us to make every change a positive one.  I totally understand that it can be hard in the moment to see the positive, but it's there.   I promise.  If I can say, "bankruptcy and foreclosure improved my life."  I'm pretty sure, I know what I'm talking about.  Or maybe I'm still just that goofy 8-year-old riding on a unicorn and discovering fairies.  I'm cool with that too.

Life Lessons

I remember, when I was kid, running around in the summertime in a spaghetti straps and shorts.  I would watch the older girls in the neighborhood baste themselves in baby oil trying to get that deep Malibu Barbie tan.  No one talked about sunscreen until I was well into high school...college even.  I remember our band trip to Hawaii, and one of my very fair-skinned friends going snorkeling and coming back the color of a well-cooked lobster - but never thinking twice about "SPF".

Now, as an adult I buy clothes specifically made to protect my kids from the sun.  I slather SPF 50 onto their little faces and arms and train them to wear sunglasses at a very young age.  But even with all of that - sometimes burns happen.

When Urban went to the cabin last week we were sure to pack his sunscreen and his swim clothes.  We knew he would be out in the sun and in the lake A LOT.  He is a boy who loves water and loves adventure.  And although we expected him to come home full of stories and a little pink in the cheeks, we never expected the result of an ivory-skinned boy + a lot of time outdoors + not enough sunscreen.

Here are the pictures we expected to get -

Urban with a frog

Urban Goofing Around

Perhaps less expected - 

Urban holding a snake

Urban Shooting a Bow and Arrow

Definitely unexpected was this 

This is Urban at the ER with 2nd and 3rd degree sunburn across his nose, cheeks and eyes.  

When he returned on Friday evening I was concerned.  His face was red and swollen to the point he didn't look like himself.  I called the nurse line, and they said cool washcloths and aloe and to watch it closely for any changes.  That night, his nose began to blister and his eyes swelled even more.  By morning his under-eye area was so swollen it had gone from deep red to white with fluid.  His eyes were matted shut with discharge and his nose showed obvious blistering.  We decided to take him to the ER incase there might be infection or something else.  I had never seen a sunburn like this.

He was excited to get to go to the hospital again.  We felt terrible.  He looked beaten.  His bottom lip was so swollen!  The doctor checked him thoroughly for all bruises and other signs of trauma.  It was somewhat humiliating.  She chuckled a little seeing how white the rest of him was.  "You were serious when you said he always wears his SPF clothes, huh?"  She said.  Yeah.  I am serious.  I just wish he had an SPF spiderman mask.

The doctor prescribed Ibuprofin for the pain and swelling, cool compresses and oatmeal baths.  (Aveeno makes an oatmeal bath that we mixed with water and used to gently pat on his face with a soft cloth.  It helped with some of the itchiness and heat.)

He woke up the next day with his eyes matted shut, but the blisters had already begun to rupture and peel.  He was less swollen but still not back to normal.

Here is Urban Day 3:

You can see the peeling, burnt skin and puffiness around his eyes.  We continued with the ibuprofin and cool compresses.  By Monday he was back at school - peeling like crazy, but all the swelling was gone.

He was also very much over my photographing his burn.

Today he just has a few spots where the dead, burned skin is still hanging on and this tender pink skin is emerging from below.  It is amazing how quickly the body heals itself.  I have a little concern because his skintone looks really uneven right now.   Hopefully that will clear up with time.

But, I tell you, always use sunscreen.  Use more than you think you should.  Put your kids in hats or sunglasses to protect those tender eyes.  Let your kids have fun outside in the beautiful weather, but remember to take breaks and drink water.  The shade is a beautiful thing too.  

We all learned a lesson about sun protection this weekend.  I hope I never have to see my one of my boys like this again, but I'm sure the next thing will come.  And we'll live through that too.  

Let's talk about shoes.

I was reading a post on Ohdeedoh this afternoon that got me thinking about shoes.  The main picture in this post is this quaint little basket of summer footwear, carefully styled, and residing by what is clearly a main entrance.

This is where my mind began to wander to my own house.  I know, it's sad, the basket of shoes is not really the point of the post at all, but the sight of it pulls me to a constant annoyance I carry, and have carried, ever since my husband and I moved in together over 10 years ago.  I can be a bit of a festerer, I admit, but I have not come to a suitable solution, and I am flummoxed.

My apologies, shoes seem to be a bit of a theme this week, since my earlier post involved the stinky kind.  But this post is simply about numbers.  We now live in a lovely house with a proper entrance.  It is a luxury we have not had EVER, and, I assure you, I am thankful for it each and every day as I shove the door open with one hip – a baby on the other – 5 bags, a sippy, a blanket and my keys in my hand as I shout to my wanderer to "hurry up and get inside before all the cold air gets out!"  – Wait, I'm pretty sure I have heard that line before somewhere...  Hmmm.  Nevermind.  – And for the first time, I can enter my house and fully turn around without knocking something off the wall or slamming into another door.  It really is dreamy.

But then I look down and slowly up the short flight of stairs to the living room, and what do I see?  SHOES!  EVERYWHERE!  This is not a new phenomenon.  Even when our entryway was a 3' square, there were piles of shoes spilling into every available space and making it so that the door would only open about 8".  – I assure you, a pregnant woman does not do well in these conditions –  But now, not pregnant, able to completely open the front door and rangling two shoe-wearing little creatures, I am still welcomed every night by a cascade of shoes.

I admit, it is a very lovely thing to have the kids trained to remove their snowy/muddy/wet/salty/stinky footwear at the door.  And I take no responsibility for said feat.  My husband is the "no shoes in the house" nazi.  (I save my neurosis for other areas of the home.  Towels on the rods folded in perfect thirds, please!)  But the consequence of this mandate is an ever-growing pile of stinky/dirty shoes at the front door.  "Welcome to my shoe store!  It's all used, but very cute."

Brett was trained well, and, in a house with light-colored carpet (although we mostly have hardwood), it makes a lot of good sense.  I assume, however, the second part of the training was to also carry said shoes to your room and put them away, but I don't know.  We never had the "no shoes" rule when I was growing up.  Maybe because my whole family spent most of the time barefoot anyway, I don't know, I'm from Iowa.  But until that first apartment where shoe racks were installed at the DOOR after we moved in, I had never experienced this phenomenon.  (At least in the apartment they were organized.)

Mom thought maybe if we put a basket by the door of our new house, then the shoes could at least be contained.  But, no.  They have filled the basket, spilled to the floor, and are slowly marching in organized pairs up the front staircase.  What is a girl to do!?

I refuse to be the mom that just cleans up after everyone all the time.  What lesson does that teach other than, "Please tip your waitstaff?"  And you know, my husband has impeccable taste in shoes, but I would much rather see them on his feet than under mine.  (Love you, honey.)

So, that's the shoe rant.  What is the solution, friends?  More baskets?  Cubbies?  A sign that says, "Please keep your shoes on until you are within throwing distance of your closet?"

Your sage advice is welcomed.  And please, if your feet are cold, come on over, we have shoes to spare.

Fly Away

Long ago in a land far far away, before there were kids, I traveled.  I traveled a lot.  I would decide on a Wednesday that by Saturday I wanted to be in a whole different place ...sometimes worlds away from where I was.  I was spontaneous and loved the thrill of discovery found in disembarking a plane in an unfamiliar port.

Brett and I visited many places together, and he discovered the joys of the last-minute flight discounts to anywhere.  For a few years, I was even traveling for work; spending 1-2 weeks each month on one coast or another directing fashion photoshoots or down in Austin, TX, directing kids' shoots.  I was having the time of my life.

By the time I became pregnant with Urban that job was past, but even as parents of a young child we managed to visit a few previously unknown locales.  Then came financial hardship and baby number two.  (In that order.)

No more traveling for us.  The farthest we have gone since then has been the annual trip to a cabin for a week with my in-laws.  And this year, we don't even get that.  Oh, everyone else is at the cabin, but after a big move, Brett and I do not have the vacation time for cabin fun this year.

Luckily, generous Uncle Jason offered to still take Urban up for a few days of fun with his grandparents and cousins.  It was a wonderful gift for him.  He helped me through my travel rituals performed on his behalf.  We started by making a list of all the things he would need for three days at the cabin - swim trunks, sunscreen, his blankie, a fishing pole...  I taught him about packing extra underwear "just in case" and why he should have two swim suits so he would never have to wear a wet one.  We put stars next to the things that would have to be purchased and proceeded to load the rest into is primary-colored rolling bag.  It was great.  I loved it.  Packing the night before in anticipation of a big journey – the excitement of the adventure that lay ahead – I was in my element.

So, this morning, as I made my twice-daily trip past the airport on my way to work, is it any wonder this thought popped in my head - "I wonder how far $500 would get me, if I just walked in and bought a ticket..."  I glanced in the rearview mirror at Beringer munching on cocoa puffs.

Yeah, not today...  But someday we'll travel again.  Someday...