On a completely different note...
I'm still hating being virtuous and thrifty. Hating it. I swear, I'm going through impulse shopping withdrawal. I just spent about an hour window shopping on eBay, playing the if money was no object game. I think I mentally spent at least the tax value of this house.
I feel an urge to go splurge on skincare products I know won't do anything near what they promise to do, but that feel so good going on that I'll forgive them the lie. Or maybe some ridiculously overpriced bath products that will leave me smelling like the gals from a whorehouse set up a head shop in a bakery.
I want stockings with backseams and Cuban heels, and I want the shoes to go with them.
I want to drink Gingerbread Lattes until I am sick of them, at which point, I'll start in on the Peppermint Mochas.
I want to dress the girl in outfits that are thoroughly impractical and thoroughly adorable.
With my fingers still all about a half-size larger than they were pre-pregnancy, I want to restock my ring collection.
Also, I would like to pay someone to make me nursingwear that doesn't look like ass.
But I'm being good.
So I'll do none of these things.
Just don't make me promise to like it.
How I spent Black Friday and stuff about breastfeeding.
I am pleased to report that we utterly failed to take advantage of whatever sales were offered for the day after Thanksgiving.
Instead, I slept in after downing some vitamin C, letting the boy watch the girl while I rested up for fighting off the various colds to which we were exposed. It seems to have worked, knock wood. I woke up stuffy and feeling a bit under the weather, at which point, I decided not to surface again until close to noon, waking halfway for feedings before pushing them both out of the bedroom so I could shove my head under the covers. When I finally dragged myself out of bed, I felt much more human.
Once I regained my sentient state, we made a frittata (using up most of our past-prime veggies--frittatas are great for a cheap and tasty breakfast), and I took back the baby reins while the boy started in on the basement sorting project.
We've been putting off the sorting project for a while now, as more important things have come up whenever we've planned on doing it. Months and months after we first discussed the project, we're finally getting around to it.
It's like going shopping in a way, as we unearth things we'd completely forgotten we owned. The hope is to reclaim storage space while finding perfectly good items we can use as Christmas gifts for family members.
I'm not sure how much luck we'll have with that, frankly, as most of the things we have stored are either broken or gifts we never got around to using because they were pretty useless novelty items. The Goodwill donation station may be seeing a lot of us this year.
Still, I don't think we'll really have to do much shopping. I have a store of things that I can pull from for the women in the families. The men are going to be trickier. As a back-up plan, in case the basement hunt reveals nothing giftworthy, I've checked out some knitting and crochet books from the library. The menfolk may just wind up with hats this year, assuming I can find where I put my crochet hooks when we were making room for the girl. If I can't find them, I'm stuck with knitting, a craft at which I am far less skilled. If I have to knit, then it's Scarf Central for the XYs.
Children are going to be trickier, but excluding our own, who is too young to care, we really only have two of them on our list, and I will probably cement my position as cranky old fuddy-duddy aunt by giving them books.
Speaking of books, my journey to the library produced another two books on the politics of breastfeeding.
I've only managed to read
Milk, Money, and Madness: The Culture and Politics of Breastfeeding. It covers a lot of territory, which leaves it feeling unfortunately slight. There's a lot of emphasis on the Nestle boycott and the impact of formula advertising on breastfeeding rates in developing countries, but not enough depth or focus on the (somewhat less fatal) impact that advertising has in the developed world. A lot of history, not enough analysis. While there's a chapter on working and breastfeeding and the effect of maternity leave policies on breastfeeding rates, it's toward the end of the book and feels like a bit of an afterthought. I got more out of
At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States.
As with
At the Breast, when I finished the book, I found myself feeling pessimistic about seeing any real changes in social policy that would positively affect breastfeeding rates in the United States.
While I still feel that the economic benefits outweigh the costs of the ones usually suggested (paid maternity leaves, longer maternity leaves, on-site or near-site care with nursing breaks, and so on), said benefits are all of the long-term variety, and I guess I doubt the dedication to long-term planning in our cultural climate. And as pro-breastfeeding as I am, I have to admit, with everything else we're faced with as working mothers, I seriously see the appeal (in the abstract, that is, as I rather expect my mother* would disown me if I even considered it) of using formula as the path of least resistance. After all, breastfeeding can be damn hard work, especially in the early weeks, and pumping's even worse. I'm sure somewhere out there is a person who loves to pump, and more power to her, but most of us are none too keen on it.
Of course, as long as we're willing to stick to that path, those changes I'd love to see happen won't, because it will continue to be seen by employers as a simple issue of a choice between near equals, so if there's a sensible alternative to it that doesn't put the employers out, why should they bend over backwards to encourage breastfeeding?
Still to come:
Don't Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. I should probably hold off on that one for a couple of days, as too much rage and frustration in a short time fails to do a body good.
* My mother had three children between 1960 and 1976. She breastfed all of us, and was a working and breastfeeding mother with my older sister. See previous backstory on my mother, her expectations, and our expectations.
Notes to self
When posting a long, self-pitying rant about something, re-read after publishing to see if Blogger has eaten paragraphs that make the thing make a little more sense.
Or, alternately, avoid writing long, self-pitying rants.
I'm trapped on the bed with a napping baby again. I don't really have any objection to this state, as it allows me to feel almost virtuous about being huddled under the covers after noon on a weekday.
One of the cats has decided she wants in on the action, and I keep brushing against her ear as I type. There's no way of training this particular cat to understand that my laptop isn't a pillow. At least she's just on the edge of it this time, instead of trying to flop her whole head on the keyboard.
Between the cat and the baby, they're making the whole nap thing look pretty appealing.
I think I should join them.
The one about the house.
There is nothing in the world that can drive me to tears of frustration like my house. At times, it feels less like a home, more like a bear trap with my foot in it.
The backstory, short version:Five years ago, nearly to the day, we made an offer on this place, it was accepted, and we closed two months later. We'd been house-hunting for several month with no luck--not much on the market, and what there was sold almost as soon as it hit the MLS--and our agent said that in her experience, things would pick up again in November. It didn't, prices were still rising, and we were starting to panic, so in a fit of stupid, we offered on a place entirely unsuited for our needs.
The backstory, long version:When I was 12, my mother went into real estate.
Several years later, as she was preparing to retire, she made us an offer we'd have been idiots to refuse: as housing costs were rising rapidly, if we were to buy before we were priced out, and she'd throw her commission towards the closing costs. So we went, got prequalified, and started looking and saving. Our goal was to stay in or near the neighborhood in which we were living, and to find a place with enough room for us, our stuff, and potential future children. Our requirements, such as they were, were 2br, a full bath, and a dining room (my husband's family has a lot of gatherings, and we wanted to be in a position to host them). Room to expand preferred, but not required.
At the time, our neighborhood was, as they say in the biz, taking off.
The amount we qualified for, $200k, had us looking at serious fixers (a no-go, as we were going FHA), condos with confusing bylaws and pet limitations (we have cats), 1br cottages on small (sub-2000 sqft lots). So we started looking outside our area, first north, than east, then, finally, south.
That was our first mistake. No wait. That was our second mistake. Scroll back to the part where my mother made us an offer we couldn't refuse.
I still think we'd have been idiots not to take my mother up on her offer, but the thing we glossed over in our minds was the part where we'd be working with family. Specifically, with my mother. Our first mistake was not thoroughly taking this into account when we started, because there wasn't (and, I fear, still isn't) a clear dividing line between my real estate agent and my mother.
Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three houses we passed on--at least one in our target area--because my mother didn't like them from a mother point of view. ("I'm sure they treated the lawn with all sorts of nasty chemicals, and you don't want to be exposed to that." and so on and so forth.)
The other thing about working with my mother and how it colored our view of the houses we saw is hard to explain. The boy says she's the annoying kind of optimist who sees every obstacle as easy to overcome and thus easily glossed over when she showed us houses ("That? Oh that's an easy fix."), and it's partly that.
The backstory for the backstory, my mother:My mother grew up in rural Canada without indoor plumbing or electricity (my father grew up mainly in rural Canada, blah blah blah, but he's a hell of a lot less annoying about it). Five girls and three adults all squished into a space smaller than those 1br cottages mentioned above. If you didn't have something, you made do or did without (leading to an exceedingly can-do attitude). Eventually, she moved to the big city, got her nursing degree, married my father, and continued to make do for several more decades. At some point, after my sister but before me, they left Canada when my father was offered a job in the States. They bought a rundown old house with a fabulous view, my father switched careers (from engineering to teaching), and they had two more children. These last three things led to a sharp drop in available money, so the rundown old house became a never-ending DIY project.
She has this expectation that if they could manage, so could anyone else who shares her blood. It's how she judges, when dealing with her children, how much we should be able to bite off.
And of course, as she's our mother and we hate to disappoint, way more than we can chew is, without fail, how much we bite off. This has the natural effect of making us feel like complete failures when we choke, because we're not living up to these expectations that none of us are willing to admit are unrealistic.
Back to the backstory.
So, after the aforementioned months of looking, much second guessing, and a lot of frustration, we decided to go for a second look at a house we'd viewed a week earlier. In the back of my mind was the fact that my mother, for whatever reason, didn't like this particular house (actually, this was the house with the chemical lawn, so there's your reason), so while we were in the general area, we decided to look at one more house she'd pulled up.
This was our third mistake.
I don't know why we didn't veto it without even looking. It was on a busy street, it was at least a mile south of our cut off point, it didn't have a dining room, and it needed a lot of cosmetic work.
Exhausted, vulnerable, and already mentally prepared to offer on something, we looked.
My mother seemed to really like the house.
And for some unknown reason, so did we. Despite the fact that it was in the wrong neighborhood, lacked many of the things were looking for, and despite the curious lack of closets anywhere but the bedrooms. We figured that if, after living in it for a while, we didn't like it, we could sell in five years and move somewhere else.
Five years ago, nearly to the day, we made an offer on this place, it was accepted, and we closed two months later.
All would have been fine, and we'd have stuck with our Worst Case Scenario and We Hate It, Out in Five Years plan, but a few things we weren't counting on happened.
More backstory, the economy part:
When we bought the house, our economic future looked pretty sunny. The boy was working for a local broadcast company, and his particular division was doing fairly well. I was working a temp-to-hire gig for a company that seemed fairly together and stable, even if it was taking them several months to get to the whole "to hire" part of things.
We closed in late January of 2001.
At the end of February, there was an earthquake. While we escaped with very little damage, it was a sign of things to come.
At the end of March, my company finally got around to making me a Real Employee.
At the end of April, meeting notices went out. Three separate ones. Each at a different time, all must-attend. Sinking feelings invaded pretty much all of our stomachs, and with good cause.
The company was laying off about half of its staff. My particular group had to stay on for three months to finish things up, then we'd be out of work.
The last day of July, after my last day at work, I came home, took a bath, and noticed when one of the plastic tiles surrounding the tub fell off that the wall beneath was squishy. Three guesses where my severance check went.
Then the world went to hell and took the economy with it. Our city in particular, reeling from the tech bust and the hits to the aerospace industry, slumped. Parts of the local economy, specifically the parts I work in, haven't quite recovered.
For a very long time, I was without work. When I did find work, it was back doing temp contracts in the tech industry, which is pretty much a feast-or-famine thing.
The boy took a pay cut, first at the old job, and then to take a new job elsewhere.
We had the girl.
The house kept breaking in new and interesting ways, none of which were found during inspection.
Our incomes stagnated while the cost of living and the cost of housing went through the roof.
A house just as frustrating and just as broken, but in a better neighborhood, would cost us at least $325k now, if we were in a position to buy and lucky enough to find one.
So here we are, 4 5/6 of the way through our five year plan, which appears to have been extended for five more years in the best case scenario. There's too much that needs to be done for us to sell, and even if there weren't, we couldn't afford to buy elsewhere, and renting would wind up costing about as much if you figure in ownership's tax benefits.
And here I am, still unable to escape my mother-influenced expectations of myself, a huge lump of house angst stuck in my throat.
The house has broken me. I feel like a wimp and a failure.
I want to curl up and ignore the projects we never finished, because there was always something else to be done that took priority or because, by the time the weather had improved enough to work on them, we could no longer afford the materials.
I want one room, just one room, to not have anything that needs fixing or finishing. A room where I can set the girl down so she can try to crawl, without me worrying about splinters from the floor or random bits of broken crap hurting her.
More and more frequently, I make the mistake of articulating my frustrations to my mother like I did this morning, and she takes it personally, because she sold us the house. When she's not taking it personally, she's giving me impractical and overly cheerful advice of the "In my days, we DIYed uphill in the snow both ways!" variety. (I'm sorry mother, but if and when we finish the attic, I'm not building railings out of random bits of leftover wood that some factory you know of might still give away, nor am I going to repurpose the random cabinets in the basement.)
I should know better, but I don't.
Some days are better than others. On those days, I look back at the mistakes we made when buying as learning experiences, things we'll know not to do next time. Days like today, though, I manage to convince myself that there'll never be a next time, that we'll be stuck here in this house I hate in this neighborhood I dislike for the rest of our lives while the stupid thing falls apart around our ears all because I lacked the job and life skills need to be able to afford to fix it and escape it.
I wish I knew the trick to break myself out of this mental loop of doom.
Of course, I also wish I had a pony.
Somehow, I don't think I'm getting either of those any time soon.
Things I should be doing.
- Going into the basement and putting the diapers in the dryer.
- Going into the kitchen and entertaining the girl while the boy does something.
- Getting ready to go help the girl's semi-Aunt with a project.
- Researching new and exciting foods with which to tempt the girl.
- Preparing for Candyfest 2005 by making sure I have all the ingredients needed for caramels.
- Anything other than playing around on the Internet.
And yet...
I would page my motivation, but I'm feeling too lazy to move.
In other news, I've decided that all diapers purchased from now until potty training will be of the one size variety. As the girl slowly outgrows some of her fitteds (the Kissaluv moved out of rotation two weeks ago, and the Kooshies Cuddlers are straining at the size limits), I'm slowly replacing them with one sizes. I lucked into three Motherease one-size fitteds at the consignment store last weekend. There'll be a full review later, but so far, so good. I don't like them as much as I like my Growing Greens, but at $2.95 each in nearly-new condition, they were well worth the price.
As, I should mention, was the $15 basic Exersaucer. Sure, it's bare-bones, but it seems to entertain her when we adults need our hands.
The other big consignment score was a straight swap of our old (black and hard to find) Robeez for a slightly dressier pair of black Robeez. No more shall the girl suffer from shoes that do not match her outfit! (I mean, the pink ones with the bunnies are cute and all, but they kind of clash with her leopard print dress.)
Pull-down terror to the attic. (All that and the kitchen sink.)
Our attic, which is roomy enough that we really ought to finish it off, can only be accessed at the moment by a rickety set of pull-down stairs. At some point in the last year, the last step broke and the tenuous alignment of the top and bottom sections was further severed by warping. We'd replace the things but a: broke; b: see above regarding finishing it off.
I had to brave the stairs today so I could measure our former kitchen table, to see if it would fit in a friend's new apartment.
All was well until I tried coming back down the stairs, pushing the bottom section down as I gingerly navigated the top.
It makes a horrible noise.
Upon hearing it, so did the girl.
I now know what sheer terror sounds like when my daughter is involved.
A liberal application of cuddles and boobie later, she's calmly waving her feet in the air as she watches me type. All's well, and all that.
In other News of the House, we have a new hot water heater. I can't remember if I mentioned it before, but my parents, not wishing to see their shiny new granddaughter scalded as a result of our not-so-shiny old water heater, decided to give us one as our Christmas gift. (My sister is getting dental work. Let no one say our folks are not practical people.) The boy had five days off, so we set the swap date for last Friday. Installation went fairly well until the house was repressurized. At which point, one of the ancient galvanized pipes gave up the ghost and sprung a leak.
So, of course, plans were made to replace the section. This also went fairly smoothly until the house was repressurized. At which point, the cold water pressure in the kitchen sink went bye-bye, the victim of a dislodged chunk of Pipe Crud.
So the boy, having one more day left in his five day block, spent what should have been his free time replacing the cold water supply to the sink. Thankfully, this repair does not appear to have broken anything else, but you never know with this place.
Have I mentioned that I hate my house? I'm trying to reframe how I picture the place in my head, describe it as a "quaint cottage" instead of a "tiny mind-numbing wreck," but this constant state of breakage is making it awfully difficult.
Daycare: The Hunt Continues.
Another center, closer to where the boy works, so actually feasible in terms of pick up/drop off (unlike Kindercare) has been contacted.
Infant care is $1600 a month.
There are about 40-50 people on the wait list for an infant slot.
It's $100 to get on the wait list.
They can't give an estimate for how long it would take before a spot would open up.
I'd say this is getting ridiculous, but it started out ridiculous. Absurd, maybe?
We've looked into nannies and nanny sharing. Neither are really an option. We've (and by we, in this case, I mean the boy, as I have none to contact) contacted co-workers. Their suggestions were also full (and in the same general price range we've been seeing).
Options remaining: sneak the girl into work under my coat. Disguise girl as companion animal for obscure medical condition X and sneak into work that way. Sell soul and/or left arm.
Oh yeah, and before all that, find job.
I have no doubt I'll be able to find contract work at the very least. I've been talking to my agency, I know I have a good work record through them, and they've been good about finding me work. That I don't know the whens and wheres of my future place of temporary employment just makes this childcare hunt all the more frustrating.
Umm... Uncle?
Hectic Weeks R Us
I'm not sure where the last week went.
It's not that it was an especially productive week (unless you're talking about dirty diapers, in which case, it was an exceptionally productive week). We baked. We did laundry. We dressed the girl up for Halloween and went to the local upscale semi-outdoor mall. We did more baking and more laundry.
It's just managed to feel exceedingly busy, perhaps due to lack of sleep, perhaps due to being out of the house more than we usually are.
Perhaps, just perhaps, that switch from daylight savings time is what's got me off schedule.
Last Friday was one of those days where, were my daily routine part of a regular job, I'd have been praying for the weekend to hurry up and get there. Unfortunately, while my weekends provide me with backup in the form of the boy, it's not quite the same feeling as leaving the mess at the office. By noon, I'd had to deal with both extremely curdled spit and a diaper explosion. My nose was ready to go on strike.
