Who needs the big bad wolf?

The wind!  DA WIIIIIINNNNNND!  I may be the third little pig, all snug in my brick house, but seriously, I'm starting to wonder if another good gust might just pick me up and deliver me to Oz.

Although, if it's warm in Munchkinland SIGN ME UP!  I had to go digging for some woolen socks this morning.  Woolen socks!  It's JUNE for crying out loud!

I dressed my daughter in fleece and wondered if I should have given her tights as an added layer under her pants.  Not that she cares.  She's just figured out where the local playground is and she'll be damned if she stays inside with me and her buttloads of toys.  Wind, rain, cold?  Bah, these are but concerns of the parental units!  Come, the slide awaits!

I have two tomato plants that really need to be potted in a planter if they are ever going to grow.  I even have picked out which of my planters I'm going to de-weed in order to use, only it's right in the maelstrom that is my back patio and at the moment the wind is doing my weeding for me.  My little tomato plants will be naked if i try to put them out there!  I'LL be naked if I try to go out there!

I'm wondering if we'll lose another glass pane in our greenhouse.  I'd like to put the planter and the tomatoes out there, but not if it means being killed by flying shards of glass.

Most of the birds have decided to stay in today.  Every now and again a small black shape goes tumbling past the window and I know a blackbird has foolishly tried to catch lunch.  A seagull just went by... backwards.

I can't be sure, it could just be my over-active imagination, but I think the lamps upstairs are swaying.  Just slightly.  It could be a breeze, forcing it's way into the house through a crack or improperly sealed joint.  Or you know, it could be because the whole roof is swaying.

Once again I have to put aside the summer recipes I've been hoping to make and come up with something cozy and stodgy to keep us warm.  I dream of salads and ice cream, of iced coffee and mint juleps.  I watched a program about barbeque the other day and almost cried.  We got three days of summer over the weekend.  I wore shorts.  And then it was gone!  GONE!!

[in a hoarse whisper] GONE WITH THE WIND!

Danish is going to kill me

So I’ve taken the first half of my Danish exam; the half that covers reading and writing.  I won’t know my grade for a few weeks, but I’m fairly sure I passed.  Probably not with top marks, however. There were problems.  Like, I forgot to put the location and date at the top right hand corner of my “email.”  (In quotes because it was an imaginary email sent to an imaginary foreign friend.)

This will cost me points and while I don’t particularly care about getting a high grade, all I want is to pass, it does cheese me off that a stupid error like this will be marked down.  Because putting the location and date at the top right hand corner of an email is THE STUPIDEST FREAKING RULE ON THE GODDAMNED PLANET!

First of all, NO ONE DOES THIS. 

NOT EVEN DANES.

I went back through buttloads of emails I’ve gotten from Danes, official ones, informal ones, company emails, doctor emails, immigration emails, and not one, NOT ONE, has the following:

København den 25. maj 2012

Kære [name],

Blåh blåh blåh

You get the picture. 

The reason for this is because it’s THE STUPIDEST FREAKING RULE ON THE GODDAMNED PLANET!  Emails are time and date stamped!  You don’t need to write the date in the text because I already know that!  It appeared in my email box with a little tag telling me what day it came!

Secondly, I don’t freaking care where you were when you sent that email!  When the lovely people in my computer store wrote to tell me that my Mac had been shipped from China (we’re talking about an event many years ago), I didn’t care if they were sitting in Copenhagen, San Francisco, or Shanghai.  They gave me the tracking number and an arrival date and really, that’s all I wanted. 

Thirdly, do you have any idea of the time and effort it takes to get one line in an email to align to the right hand side of the page? Yeah, you say, you just have to include “rich text” and hit some buttons and VOILA!  But it’s an email!  You’ve got it set up to include an automatic signature because you are too damn lazy to type your name (and contact information if you are an official person or like to pretend to be one).  My father-in-law wanted help getting his email signature set up so he didn’t have to type “Kind regards, XXXX” every time he sent friends and family an email.  And yet I’m supposed to write information that no one gives a shit about or already is included elsewhere in the email WITH SPECIAL FORMATTING or you will take points away???

That’s BULLSHIT.

Whatever.  I’m going to lose more points because of all the terrible errors I’m sure I made when writing my essay. “Write simply,” advised my teacher.  “Don’t try to write at a high level, keep it to what you know you can say.”  This is all very well and good until I’m facing the clock and an essay question.  Years of academic training mean that when I’m in test mode, I can only operate as I have been trained.  There will be an opening paragraph that ends with a thesis statement.  There will be paragraphs that back up this statement, using personal experience, scientific experience, and historical experience, if I have time.  I will include and discuss whatever various points you tell me to include and discuss.  I will write a concluding paragraph in which I restate the thesis in a different way that points to the evidence I have outlined above.  I will do all of this in the time provided and leave myself 15 minutes to check for errors.

In English, I can whip out a well-reasoned essay of varying length and complexity in a very short time.  I can type almost without pause.  Doing it in Danish is a bit harder.  Part of my brain composes in English and another part translates into Danish.  Great, right?  Uh, no, not really, because Danish grammar is close but not quite the same as English grammar, and sometimes it is violently different.  The position of adverbs, for example, change based on whether or not you are in a subordinate clause or a main clause, whether you have begun the sentence (or clause) with the adverb or a question word or a conjunction or a verb, and whether or not you intend on emphasizing the subject or the verb. 

To write simply, I would need to stop writing sentences JUST LIKE THIS ONE, and instead make sure my clauses were arranged in descending order.

Alas, this turns out to be impossible to do in the allotted time. 

As for the reading portion, I thought that I’d done fairly well.  After all, reading is my strongest skill and I can breeze through a newspaper and get the gist of the stories (except for opinion pieces and editorials, which often use more complex grammar and vocabulary, in any language - check out your newspaper at home and you’ll see the difference immediately).  BUT THEN, the next day, my phone rang a little after 10.  Italics=Danish.

AG: Hej.

S: Hej.  Did you forget that we had a mother’s group today?

AG: No.  You cancelled it.  You sent me a text.  You have work today.

S: No, I have to work later today.  I wrote that I’d have to end it early. “Afslutter” not “annuller.”

AG: Balls.

So yeah, I can read a text on noise pollution and find within that text three examples of things you can do to reduce the impact on your ears, but I can’t understand a simple text message that relates to my daily life.

face/palm

A Day Out With the Family

I really wish this post had photos, but we didn’t bring a camera.  Why should we, we only all decided to go to the recycling center because we were really hoping the Spawn would take a hint and TAKE A FREAKING NAP ALREADY, WHAT ARE YOU TEETHING OR SOMETHING???

And on the way home, having gone to the supermarket (maybe if we just drive a bit farther…), the DB mentioned that the hardware store was having an open house and would we like to stop by?  There’d be beer.

Would I?!  I’d only be more excited if he’d told me that there was a certain Swedish mega-store opening up down the road and they were giving away free kitchen gadgets to American archaeologists!  AND THERE WOULD BE BEER???  WHY DID THIS NOT GET MENTIONED UNTIL NOW?

See, the not-so-secret is, I love hardware stores.  Home Rhymes-with-Meepo?  I’d live there.  If you could graft Home Can-those-tiles-I-keepo onto an I-Swedish-home-store, I’d never leave.  Home Deliver-me-from-Repo lets me fantasize that I can Do It Yourself and then an I-can’t-pronounce-this-style-but-I-wants-it-store makes it a reality, one little hexagonal-headed L-shaped screwdriver thingy at a time.

I think it might be the smell of steel nails.  Or the 101 types of sealant.  Or hearing the following exchange:

Big Redneck Dude to Sales Clerk: I need caulk.

SC: What sort of caulk, sir?

BRD: Hard wood.

SC: Hard wood caulk?

BRD: I need something to fill my holes.

SC: Here, I think you’ll find this caulk will fit your needs.  But you’ll need a more pliable caulk if you have a bigger hole.

Okay, I haven’t actually *heard* that exchange, but I’m sure if I could just hang around "Tiles and Flooring" long enough I would.  I live in anticipation.

I’m also a big fan of small town hardware stores.  The one in my hometown was fantastic.  It’s gone now, but it used to be housed in the old assayers office.  Yes, assayer.  It’s a Gold Rush town; we had mines, miners, and assayers.  In fact, now that one of the mines re-opened, it’s an assayers office once again.  It’s like the circle of life.  Ore not.

Get it, ORE not?  Maybe I should have been more dead-PAN, eh?

Anyway, being the former… uh, and is again, assayers office, it was built with solid stone walls and the windows had solid iron shutters.  The floor was a patchwork of thick wooden planks that had been worn down by the feet of numerous fortune seekers. As a hardware store, it held large bins of loose nails and screws.  There was gold-panning equipment and paint.  I’d go in there during the summer with my dad, who would need a hammer or other odd tool.  No matter how hot it was outside, it was always much cooler inside.  You’d step through the doors and leave the heat behind; I’d always get goose bumps from the sudden drop in temperature.  And there was the overwhelming odor of nails and oil, with a slight hint of pine from the two-by-fours stacked out back.  You would buy nails by the weight, so there was a large scale that I’d use to weigh various odds and ends while my father chatted with the shop clerk.  To this day, the smell of nails makes me think of summer.

The local hardware store here isn’t quite the same.  It’s more modern with clean white walls and cement floor, but it does have the same smells and it has something the old hardware store didn’t: power tools.

Jigsaws, be still my heart! 

This being Denmark, where if you can’t do it slightly buzzed on beer, why bother to do it at all, the free beer was flowing and men in blue boiler suits and garden clogs stood around and chatted.  There was a treasure hunt, which invited the participants to go ahead and wander through all the back rooms and workspaces.  People took tractors for test-drives (I didn’t, alas) and the Spawn sat on one of the riding lawnmowers and said “Vvvvvvv!” while violently turning the wheel.  The DB got a slightly crazed look on his face and I had to remind him that she can’t mow the lawn until her feet can touch the pedals. 

All in all, it was a fantastic afternoon.  And on the way home, the Spawn fell into a nice deep sleep.  Happy days, my friends, happy days.

The Guilt, I Has It. Also, I Has Two Days of Rest a Week.

I always over-think things.  I know I do.  Every single one of the good decisions I’ve made in my life was made spontaneously, from the heart.  Usually followed by a good amount of supportive data collected after the fact, but always first proposed in an “OMG I’VE GOT IT!  I’M GOING TO [insert crazy thing here]!”  And if I try hard to make a good conscious decision, thinking and weighing the consequences, I’m likely going to make the wrong decision.  My past regrets are always ending with “well, it made sense at the time.” 

Sure, there are decisions that were made that made sense at the time that did not turn out to be bad.  This epitomizes that logical saying, “all trees are green things but not all green things are trees.” 

But because I over-think things, I then go back over the decisions that I made that I deemed “made sense at the time” to make sure that they still make sense and that they weren’t one of those bad decisions, because I know that I didn’t make it spontaneously so it could mean, in fact, that it was a bad decision but sometimes they aren’t bad, so which one is this, a bad decision or a good decision and oh, my god, someone hand me a drink ‘cause my head hurts.

If that last sentence made sense to you, you should have a drink too.

So what am I over-thinking these days?  Well, I put my child in childcare at 9 months of age. I could take a year off of school, but I wanted to go back before I forgot everything and when I went on maternity leave I was only a few months from finishing.  So I went back when Spawn was 6 months old and the Danish Boy took his three months of paternity leave to watch her.  But after three months, I wasn’t done with Danish, so once again I had to cross off another “when I have a child, I’ll never X” on my list. 

She’s in a private daycare, with one woman and a total of 5 children (including mine, the only baby), not one of those massive institutions that they have in DK, which may have a better ration of adults to children, but where the adults are often spending time with the other adults or focusing on one child exclusively because they assume the other adults are watching the other kids.  I get some flack for this, not just from Danes, but from other foreigners who say “oh, that’s a lot of children for one adult” but I feel far more comfortable watching our daycare minder keep tabs on her charges than when I see the ten children running wild at the large daycare while three adults sit on a bench chatting away with each other.

We originally chose our daycare minder because of location, but then when we met her, it just felt right.  And it always feels right when I drop the Spawn off (she tends to tear away from me and dive head-first into one of the toy boxes) and when I pick her up (she’s always glad to see me, but she’s never in a hurry to leave).  To this day, I’ve never once had to unwrap a crying child from my neck when we get to daycare.  The DB once remarked on this to a colleague, who suggested that it was because OBVIOUSLY we are such awful parents that our child must be glad to get away.  I told the DB that it would totally have been justifiable homicide, but he prefers to think that that not cutting the bitch is evidence of his highly evolved nature.  As an American, I am by default not as evolved… so she best sharpen her “It was just a joke, don’t you get Danish humor?” defense because I am sharpening my knives.

But why the guilt?

On Wednesday and on Friday, I don’t have class.  And on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, I am out of class at 1:30.  And I don’t go get the Spawn from daycare.  I leave her there, until 4:30, every day.

At first it was because she naps in the afternoon, so getting her at 1:30 was interrupting her nap.  We did that the first week she was there and it SUCKED.  Then there was the problem that her schedule was all out of whack.  She only went three times a week, so establishing a routine was impossible.  See, it totally makes sense.  *Sound alarm bells!*

The truth is, as much as I don’t want to admit it, I really need non-baby time.  Yeah, time to do homework and housework, but also time to catch up on sleep and read and cuddle the cat.  *Open the big bag o’ guilt.*

It was only after I pulled a chest muscle and couldn’t lift the Spawn, which forced us to put her in daycare every day, all day, that I realized how much better it was for everyone.  Sure, I miss her bunches and I’m glad when she comes home.  But that’s just it - I actively look forward to seeing her!   After a long weekend, where I am the Spawn’s main companion (Dad and the cat are fun, but nobody beats the Mommy-lady), I’m exhausted.  Before I had the Spawn, I worried that I would be the kind of mom who just couldn’t wait to go back to work.  I discussed it with the Danish Boy, what would happen if I just really didn’t like being a mom?  What if I felt trapped or felt resentful?  So really, I like being a mom a hellufalot more than I thought.  But then the pendulum swings the other way.  Why can I not be the perfect mom who wants to stay home and nurture the child?  Some moms are forced to go back to work (cultural or economic reasons) and they would LOVE to be able to stay home or have more time with their child. 

So yeah, I’ve got some nice excuses: routine is good, she’s socializing, she’s getting her Danish lesson of the day, blah blah blah.  The truth is I cannot parent full-time.  In order to have that boundless patience, to be able to interact completely, to be able to read the Barnyard Animal book one more freaking time, I need to be able to sit in my pajamas until 3 in the afternoon twice a week.

One Year In

Okay, actually it’s 13 months because I had weeks of catching up to do.

But there you have it.  One year (plus) of livin’ in the Mommy 'hood.  A year of burp-rags and poop-filled diapers.   A year of surprises.  And yes, sometimes poop is the surprise.

You know how there’s this whole joke about babies not coming with a manual?  LAME!  There are a gazillion books about pregnancy and birth and then everyone stands around and goes “boy, I really wish that they had a manual for babies!”  What the hell man!?  I spent half the year googling “is [insert behavior/strange physical manifestation] normal?” A book would have been really handy.

And there ARE books out there on childcare and development and all that other stuff that you might want to know about.  But no one ever gives those books to you.  No.  They gift you with a dozen books on pregnancy and then it’s up to you, in your sleep-deprived, manic-new-parent way to wonder how long does projectile spit-up last and when, exactly, should one begin to worry.

I went with the old stand-by: until there’s blood, there’s no problem.

I still really could have used a book, though.

Here are some things that I’ve learned over the year.  Some of which came as a surprise. 

1) Whatever annoying behavior your child has, he or she will soon grow out of it.  And develop an even MORE annoying behavior.

2) Poop is just gross.  It never gets any easier, in fact it gets worse, but you do get better at holding your breath. 

3) Why the hell did people keep going on and on about doing Kegels?  Push-ups, people, PUSH-UPS!  You can wear panty-liners or Depends, but if you have weak arm muscles, you are in for a world of pain when you have to hold that baby for a few hours.  And you WILL have to hold the baby for hours at a time. 

4) The reason that you lose so much weight while breast-feeding is not because your fat is magically transformed into milk.  No, it’s because you end up trapped on the couch, nursing, while your dinner goes cold and then is eaten by the cat.  You miss a lot of meals while breastfeeding. 

5) When you are pregnant, you always have to pee.  You get very good at holding it and being uncomfortable until you can get to a toilet.  This is good practice because you will always have to pee while breastfeeding and you’ll just have to hold it until the baby a) falls asleep and you can hand her off to someone b) decides he’s done eating and is ready to play.  Either of these scenarios can also end with you holding a sleeping baby or a baby who is determined to beat you senseless with a stuffed bear WHILE YOU PEE.

6) When I was little, I imagined what it would be like if I had no hands.  (Didn’t everybody?  No?)  I taught myself to write (badly) with my feet.  Just in case.  Turns out this was great training for parenting.  Almost everything can be done one handed.  This does NOT include putting on a watch.  Try as I might, I cannot put on my watch while holding my child.

7) At some point, you realize that you are missing too many meals and start making your child more food than they need, just so you can eat the leftovers.

7b) Baby food tastes better than I thought.

8) There is nothing better in the whole wide world than when your child wraps their chubby little arms around your neck and gives you a hug. 

9) The three-second rule* becomes the three-day rule and I’ve decided that cat food can’t possibly be that bad, it hasn’t killed the cat, so it shouldn’t kill the child either.

*Wherein you can eat food that you’ve dropped as long as it has been on the ground for less than three-seconds.  Not applicable in every situation. 

10) Every “when I’m a parent I’ll never…” promise has been broken.  If fact, I’ll guarantee that if you say, “When I’m a parent I’ll never…” you WILL.  It’s like the Murphy’s Law of parenting.  Better not to verbalize what you won’t do.   People who have kids WILL CONTINUE give this advice to people without children and those people WILL CONTINUE to say, “When I’m a parent I’ll never…” It’s a vicious cycle.  It will never end. 

11) Being a parent has not made me less selfish or a better person.  I’m just too tired to give a crap about looking pretty.   

12) Having a child is like wearing a huge sign saying, “Please make snap judgments about me based on the performance of a small, willful, cranky human being with impulse-control issues.”

13) I have discovered a vast reservoir of patience that I never knew I had.  Unfortunately, the husband and the cat cannot tap it.  Neither can the stupid old people who pull out right in front of me when I need to get somewhere and DON’T THEY KNOW THAT MY CHILD IS SCREAMING IN THE BACK SEAT??  DIE, YOU GREY HAIRED BIDDIES, DIE!

14) I do amazing impressions of dogs, cats, sheep, cows, roosters and pigs.  Geese, on the other hand.  Geese are impossible.

15) Everything is more important than shaving your legs.  However, you should trim your toenails because it’s faster and easier to do than darning socks.

16) So far the weirdest thing I’ve had to do as a parent is hold my girl’s hands and whisper encouraging words while she has a particularly difficult poop.  Constipation is a BITCH and I would stab it in the eye if I could.

16b) Prunes work wonders.  And now you’ve been warned.

17) Buttons on baby clothes are the work of the devil.  After a child reaches 6 months of age, no buttons should be in use until they learn how to sit still again… approximately age 18.  Also, after six months, Velcro is a dumb idea.  “Hey let’s put something that makes an interesting noise and is easy to use on this article of clothing!  We’ll put it here where it’s easy for the child to reach!  And we’ll put soft, fluffy, decorations all around it for the Velcro to also stick to!”  Who the hell designs this stuff anyway?

18) There comes a day when you realize that your child is smarter than your cat or dog.  Suddenly, you can no longer assume “out of sight, out of mind” and you have to remember that they have opposable thumbs.  The only safe place for your valuables is in a locked trunk at the bottom of the sea.  Until they learn to swim.  Which they will, clever little monkeys.

19) Develop the “ah, how interesting” face - slight smile, slight lift of the eyebrows, slight nod of the head.  Non-committal and non-confrontational.  You need it for Judgy McJudgersens and it will probably come in handy when your child reaches puberty.

20) I look forward to doing things and seeing things even more because the Spawn will be part of it.  It’s like the whole world has been made new again!  It's amazing and awesome.

Putting the War in Wardrobe

Why does the New Year have to begin on January 1^st?  I think we should move it to April 1^st, get rid of April Fool’s Day (a stupid non-holiday only enjoyed by lame child-like men who find other people’s discomfort or distress amusing) and let the new year begin with the arrival of spring!

I bet more resolutions would be kept.  February was created just to ruin people’s best intentions of bettering themselves.  Valentines Day wreaks diets.  The dreary monotony of the weather ruins everything else.

Anyway, while I’ve been fighting to overcome the flu and a secondary infection (fancy words for shit-full-of-snot), I finally went though my wardrobes.  Yes, wardrobes plural.

The Danish Boy complained that I’ve gone through more clothes than he could possibly comprehend in the years that I’ve known him.

I told him that he was an idiot.

There was the skinny-chick wardrobe (wardrobe 1), that I had when we met, because I was unhealthily skinny when we first started dating, for a wide variety of reasons.  (None of them being the obvious ones.  I didn’t have an eating disorder or a body image issue, I was just a poor student who was in a bad relationship and I’m a comfort reader, not a comfort eater.)  Almost immediately I put on weight, bumping me up to normal weight and requiring a new wardrobe.  So that was wardrobe 2.  That wardrobe lasted until I got pregnant, 7 YEARS LATER.  Maternity clothing was wardrobe 3.  A woman’s body is permanently changed after giving birth, she simply does not go back to the way she was shaped, so I needed more clothing and that would be wardrobe number 4.

I pointed out that there are women who buy a new wardrobe EVERY YEAR.  I don’t think he believes me.  We even watched “Sex and the City: The Movie” (it was on TV, don’t get all excited) and he was all “don’t be silly, it’s a movie, women like that don’t exist in real life.”

Is there anything more frustrating than a man who doesn’t know how lucky he is?  I should switch from an Oreo cookie dependency to Manolo Blahniks.  (Although, let’s be honest, if it was a choice of overpriced footwear or more Oreo cookies… I’d say, pour me another glass of milk, good sir!)

ANYWAY.

I pulled all my pre-pregnancy clothes out of storage and went through them.  Out with the too small, the horrifically ugly (alas, I sometimes make huge fashion errors of judgment), and the seldom worn.  Some people might ask, “why get rid of something that you haven’t worn frequently?  Why not wear it more often?” and I would answer, “Because if I’m not wearing it regularly, it’s probably because I don’t like it and life is too short and my closet too small to keep clothing that I don’t wear.”  This doesn’t mean I got rid of *all* rarely worn outfits.  Obviously my wedding dress remains.  Fancy clothing gets a pass because it is a rare event when I get a chance to gussy up, but I’m not going to buy a new party dress ever time I have a party to go to.  Out went clothing that might-fit-if-I-just-lost-a-few-pounds, because who needs that shit?

Of course, in order to find out what fit, it meant a lot of trying on clothing.

The only thing more awful than trying on clothing is trying on clothing that you KNOW is going to be too small.  And obviously my mirror hates me.  How is it right that 90% of my shirts were too short, so that the post-baby-muffin-top hangs out in THE MOST UNFLATTERING WAY?  Or they were too tight across the shoulders.  Heck, some of them were both.  I looked like a quarterback squeezed into a cheerleaders uniform.  And how come the Hulk can hulk out and still fit in his pants and I go and have one little baby and suddenly it’s like no amount of fabric can cover my ass?

Ugh.

The worst part is that I know what I used to look like in those clothes.  Cute.  Svelte.  Dare I say, sexy?  Okay a few of the tank tops bordered on “trashy” and I wouldn’t wear them now… but at least let me be able to get them over my head!!

I was able to salvage a number of shirts, a sweater, and a pair of pants.  I shockingly still fit in most of my shorts.  I now fit perfectly into my oversized dig clothing (*sob*).  But what is noticeable is how much of my clothing was purchased for a woman who had a flat tummy.  No muffin top.  “Clingy” and “fitted” were apparently my guidelines.  Solid colors, no decoration to draw the eye upward or distract from unwanted bulges (can you tell I’ve been studying “What Not To Wear”?), no delineation of a waistline (because I used to have a pretty obvious one, now, not so much).

It’s become apparent.  I need a new wardrobe.  One that says “yummy mummy.”  Will someone be so kind as to distract the Danish Boy while I go shopping?

My apologies!

Sorry, y'all for not posting these last few weeks.  I'm laid low with a sinus infection and even after a few days of penicillin, I'm still a snotty, coughing, feverish mess.

*cough*  Arghhhhh....