Honesty Policy

Two days ago Amaya said to me, "Santa's not real, right?"

I decided to take on a policy, right then, to be truthful.

Today she asked me, "But how do babies come out?"

I told her.

She said, "But that's too big!"

I said, "I know. It hurts really bad."

She immediately started crying and said, "I don't want to have a baby."

I said, "Oh, but you won't until you're a lot older and get married. We're glad we had babies."

She cried harder and said, "I don't want to get married. I don't want to have a baby. I just want to be a little kid."

Am I glad? Or am I rethinking my policy on being truthful?

The doctor just claps his hands, and you have a baby! The baby sleeps really well, coos when you look at him, and loves you forever.

Having babies is like going out for ice cream sundaes, whipped cream, and nyan nyan cats dancing in the background. You wish you could have them every day.

The only problem is that they make you fat.

don't give me that girl power crap.

I defy gender stereotypes in small, but important ways.

Jake uses the pink toothbrush. This may seem insignificant to you, but I actually have to consciously choose the yellow toothbrush. Mariko, I say to myself, you have the yellow toothbrush. Jake has the pink one. You don't even like pink. Just because there IS a pink toothbrush doesn't mean that it's yours. But maybe the next pink one will be yours, to mix things up. 

I say this all the time, but I married the only guy on the planet who doesn't like action movies. 

Oh wait. Am I saying that all guys have to like action movies?

Yeah. I am. 

I like action movies. I do like chick flicks too, except those ones that are more about girl empowerment than the romance. I have to show some discrimination, otherwise it's like I'm just falling in with the mold. And I will not be formed, especially when it comes to Drew Barrymore. *shudder

I also do not think that Ryan Reynolds is the sexiest man alive of 2010. Puhleeeeze. 

I'm not really the nurturing type. If you hand me a baby (people do this all the time) I don't go all soft in the middle and obsess about having another baby. Any attention I give to little kids, I give to my own kids. I like to think this makes my kids special, because, hey, I like 'em, so they must be pretty good. 

I have long hair, but I think my primping in the morning takes about the same time as Jake's. Meaning, we shower, use deodorant, and then brush our hair. I've got contacts so it takes me 5 seconds longer. I find that this is pretty important as we have only one bathroom. 

I did buy some makeup for Halloween, and I wear it about once a month. For kicks.

You can't denounce all female-ness. That's typical feminist.

I still expect Jake to put the trash cans out, and he does the laundry. I make dinner, but I work full time too. Then I expect him to watch Downton Abbey with me without groaning. He refuses to watch any action movies, though. 

Knowing all of this, that we've never followed the normal roles, why do I still feel terribly sad when I think about the fact that I've never been able to stay home with my babies without having work hanging over my head? 

The kids have always been taken care of, and I can't for a second undervalue the good relationship Jake's had with them because he has been their primary babysitter. Plus he does still work part time and hour for hour, however few they are, he makes very good money. I work for the money and the health care and I am good at it. I have a great role to play and I imagine I would want to work, if I had no kids. There are a million people in my same situation and millions more who have it much worse off. I know I shouldn't complain.  

I'm not good at enjoying my time off and trying to catch up with my kids then. Afternoons are completely useless other than getting ready for dinner and bed (if that). Saturdays are the day to do three of the fifty things you were supposed to get done during the week just to keep your life going, paying bills, going to the doctor, buying groceries, cleaning the kitchen. 

Even during the summer, my brain is saying, "Tick, tock, tick, tock." It's like living a bunch of Sundays in a row, with school on Monday. Plus you're still trying to catch up with your regular life because you couldn't fit everything on those Saturdays. I walk around like a person who expects their crimes to catch up with them at any moment. 

I know taking care of babies all day is hard. I like to think that I fall apart so easily because I have a million and one things to do that nag my brain and I try to do them while I am taking care of my babies, but probably I would fall apart from having nothing else to do. I intellectually know all of this. It doesn't change the fact that I'd like to have the chance of doing that anyway. 

I'd like to take my kids to playgroup, go for morning trips to the beach, put them down for regularly scheduled naps, sign them up for piano lessons, take them for walks around PCC, invite their friends over for playdates, visit with other mothers while our kids wreak havoc, make cookies with them without worrying how long it's taking or how much mess it's making, watch too many cartoons together, and make lunches for them to take to school. I'd even like to yell at them for frustrating me for real, instead of yelling at them because I am already frustrated about something that happened at school. I'd even like to really handle their tantrums poorly without believing that I would be more patient if I didn't have to work. 

It all sounds incredibly romantic. 

I wish you could put the baby years in a box, and save them for later when you have the money, healthcare, and leisure to give it every second of your attention.

Why do you only get one chance to do something so frickin' important at a time that your life is so frickin' hard? 

Rage Me

Today was not so great.

Sometimes I hear, at work, that we spend all this time worrying about how the 1 kid is affecting our class instead of focusing on the other 99 that are being great.

There's a funny thing about one thing. It can mess up your whole day.

One inappropriate comment stops the whole discussion cold.

One misbehavior ruins the whole period.

One rude confrontation can gnaw at you for hours.

You think about your "one thing" s, and suddenly the gnocchi in your stomach from dinner feels like a whole ton of bricks.

Not losing your cell phone helps just a little.

The Day Before Christmas

Before, and After

I am just beginning my third bout of sickness in the last month. There is something seriously wrong with my immune system. I think the technical term is “kids”.

Many people have been asking me about our recent big news and it’s hard to even know where to begin, but really all you need to know is:

We bought a (little) house.

Read on if you want just the tip of the iceberg.

It basically needed to be completely gutted, and we haven’t even started with the outside yet.

For such a little space, it’s certainly expensive in money and time to fix up a house. How do people buy extra houses?

Jake gets all the credit. I watched the kids every afternoon while he worked. I did feel like I was working hard too.

Buying a house in Hawaii is way more complicated and weird than I would have thought. People want way too much for the most falling apart termite-eaten places, more than you’d ever imagine, and we learned all the funny tricks people use to get around legalities. For example, “square footage may be different than tax-records” means that there’s way more house than they can legally list (which is almost every house), and there might even be a rental attached. One place had a tenant living in a part of the house we wouldn’t be allowed to see until our offer was accepted. Some places that are “for sale” are not really for sale, and building your own house or even buying an extensive fixer-upper is almost never approved unless you’re buying with cash. We learned way too much about mortgages, types of loans, and all the costs and credits associated with them. Many houses lately are real-estate owned and we learned a bit about the process from short-sale, to foreclosure, to REO which is a strange process. Flood zones are a killer—we are in the most expensive flood zone and our flood insurance is as much as all the other insurance put together. If we want to build on to our house we have to lift the whole house and we can build on to the outside—but not below us because the bottom of any new house area we build has to be lifted a whole lot of feet too. Our house was a Fannie Mae REO and the closing date was pushed back something like two months because of extremely silly things and we had to fix things on the sly to get approvals. Jase, our real estate agent, worked a lot of miracles to get this thing to go through. I made him take me to every single house for sale within 15 miles. Even the $700k (but still needing work) ones.

One house we saw was literally the most crazy thing I’ve ever seen. It seemed like a joke. The floor plan made zero sense and they had built on to the edges, gradually, so the outside of the house was now on the inside in several places. The bottom floor’s ground sloped to one corner (like a 6-8 inch gradual slope) and the upstairs parts where they built on to were all an uneven step down, even though it was only 3 feet of a room area. It was super solid, but just crazy crazy ugly and still needed a bunch of remodeling work. The bathroom had a straight up full length picture window next to the toilet so you could do your business and say Hi to the similarly crazy neighbor’s house windows 5 feet away. Most houses are literally completely cemented over any area that are not house, so there was no yard at all.

Luckily, even though our house needed a lot of work, it was solid and it was mostly cosmetic. The bathroom had to be completely redone, including the base floor had to be ripped out. Other awesome plusses about our house include a good sized back and front yard, being right up the street from Adam, and a really large covered patio area where Jake can eventually do some work. If we could do something about the covered area, we could also have an amazing view to the mountains.

I am really sad that we won’t be living right next door to Pammy. I think that will be the hardest adjustment for us. And Amaya.

These afters are really still in progress, but it’s the best you’re going to get right now.

Before:

After

 

Before:After

Before

AFTER:

   

I’m glad it’s almost done. I wish it was just a flood of relief to finally be working on our own home and I am grateful but it has been really hard. The fact that Jake hasn’t even been surfing in more than month should tell you something serious is going down. We’re packing and moving this next week. It’s been very very stressful. I think it has definitely been hard on the kids too. It may explain why I completely forgot about Amaya’s primary program and why I bring her late to school almost every day and why we go days, lately, without even writing down what books we’re reading her. Wait, am I reading her books lately? No. Probably not. Everything has been slipping. Absolutely everything.

Or maybe that’s just normal. Who knows. I’m blaming the floorboards for hogging all the attention.