Lose your load, leave your mind behind...

"Oh, Mexico..." James Taylor sings. It's been more than fifteen years since I'd been there and back then it was only a three-star hotel room in Cancun, directly across the street from Senor Frog's, shared with two other girls during spring break. This trip was so very different.


For starters, once we arrived I learned that the resort, Dreams Riviera-Cancun, had only been open since last month. It was a risky proposition, but one that paid off. I was involved not at all in the planning; I did nothing other than, when asked by Hub if I could get away, determining that I could take two personal days. When we first decided to go a friend at work inquired as to our destination and I responded "I don't know! I don't even care! Mexico, maybe?"

Our group was made up of four couples, all close friends. It was the most relaxed I've been in literally four years, nine months. (Nevermind that when we got back, both Hub and I felt like things were more hectic because we needed to catch up.) Since we were only there for four days, we didn't leave the resort at all, didn't take any excursions, do any activities or have any spa treatments. We just relaxed, hung out with our friends, ate and drank. I told our friends that in the future when the adults-only trips are planned, we're in!

I'm including a few details here about the resort because when I searched for reviews (the day before we left -- better late than never), I found nothing because of its relative newness.

The Good

• The room was so wonderfully peaceful, it was almost a zen-like cliche.
• Since it was a new resort, we got a special price. Since I wasn't involved in the details, I was very pleased to learn that we'd booked at six-star (Sorry... six "apple") resort at a four-star price. Score!
• I've never gone anywhere all-inclusive before, and as our group likes to drink, it was well worth it. I'm resisting the temptation to discuss the number and variety of alcoholic beverages I consumed in the time we were there.
  
• The pools were very pretty and not crowded at all, although I have no idea how if the resort was booked anywhere close to capacity.
  
• The Rendezvous Bar was, in truth, where we rendezvoused every evening before dinner. It was beautiful, comfortable and located close to the restaurants.
  
• The food was fantastic, from the buffet in the World Cafe each morning (I ate quesadillas for breakfast every day) to the restaurants.
  
• The Italian restaurant, Portofino, had the best food, but the Mexican restaurant, El Patio, had the best "experience." Marco, our waiter made our last night there fun and memorable. Surprisingly, the French restaurant, which gets all the hype, had neither the best food or the best service.
• The Coco Cafe, the coffee bar, had very good coffee, even if the one size option was on the small side when you're used to American-sized servings.

The Meh

• The beach was not great, because the resort is the only thing on that stretch of beach right now. It's sort of plopped in the middle of the jungle.
  
• On Friday night there was an influx of what seemed to be wealthy locals coming for the weekend. They were clearly given preferential treatment, from bumping our party of eight from the only table for large parties at the French restaurant on Friday night to the bizarre experience of resort staff saving pool lounges for them, warning away anyone who approached the empty chairs over the course of more than four hours on Saturday. I think these people were investors of some sort, as there was a private party on Saturday night.
• I wouldn't ever say I'm a person that's easy to please, but my requirements for this vacation were simple, so there were really no major downsides.
  

Excuse the crappy photos. I didn't take very many, so it was slim pickings.

The Swine of 09

If you follow me on Twitter, you already know that at the end of October, Goose had H1N1. Ugh. The tiny margin of togetherness I'd managed to accrue went out the window when I had to take time off of work to share in sick baby homecare duty. Couldn't get anything done at work; wasn't there. Couldn't get anything done at home; was spending all my time comforting a sick, fussy baby. Up until then, I barely had a moment to catch my breath between my 5 a.m. wakeup and my 11 p.m. bedtime, my days a crazy mash-up of work, childcare and housework. Everything fell behind.

Then I got kidney stones. I'd always heard that they were as painful as childbirth and let me say, that's a very accurate description. The pain was almost exactly like labor pains. Two caveats. One, whereas you can sometimes kind of "ride the wave" of labor pains if they come in spaced contractions, kidney stones aren't like that.* Two, there's no baby at the end of it all. When I went to the ER my second night in pain, they admitted me! I had to take off another day from work, at the end of the quarter when grades are due.

And so my hectic, sucking autumn became even more hectic and sucking. (Eloquent, huh?)

Luckily, there have been a few positives. Goose was the only one who got swine flu in our house. Amazing. After he'd been sick a week -- involving a doctor's office visit, an emergency room visit and two(!) chest x-rays -- one of my doctor-friends offered to put Monk on a prophylactic dose of Tamiflu. (The hospital had already prescribed it for Goose.) Normally, I'm not for unnecessarily medicating children, but after the experience we'd already had with Goose -- the high fever, the breathing difficulties, the associated fear, not to mention that healthcare providers treat you like you have Ebola when you get treatment for H1N1 (no joke) -- we thought it was a good idea. My kidney stones passed on their own, although I live with a cold, nagging fear that it will happen again someday. But, best of all, this Thursday Hub and I are GOING TO MEXICO with friends.

We rarely get to go on fun grown-up trips with each other and without kids. Our group of friends does a long, couples-weekend in the Caribbean every other year, but I've always been saving days for maternity leave, or pregnant, or breastfeeding. Not this time. My mother-in-law is flying in to care for the kiddos while we fly out to laze on the beach and relax. For four days I want my only concern to be: frozen or on the rocks?



*Although, childbirth isn't always like that, either. With Monk I didn't have any space between contractions, so it was a lot like kidney stones. Until I got an epidural.

Planning Ahead Are Smart

Next week is picture day at the kids' school. A couple of days ago, Hub told me he was going to cut Monk's hair. We essentially give Monkeyboy a crew cut; his hair is thick-thick-thick, straight as the proverbial board and grows like a weed so his only other choice would be a Prince Valiant-esque bowl cut. The Hubster didn't want Monk's hair to look too short and freshly shorn in the pictures. Cutting it then would give it a week to grow in and look natural.


As you can see, that worked out very nicely. The clipper guard fell off as Hub was going in for a pass at the front (you can still see the very low spot dead center if you look closely) and so he was forced to even it out. We think the resulting haircut makes Monk look like one of the Spartan boys from 300.

No More Good Days

After thirteen years, we are now dogless. On Friday, we had to euthanize Marley, our remaining dog of the three who were once part of our family.

After years of extraordinarily good health, about six months ago she developed osteosarcoma. We were unwilling to put her through surgery (amputation) and chemotherapy/radiation/other painful treatment at her age. Twelve years old is the equivalent of about 95 for a Giant Schnauzer. Instead, we opted to keep an eye on her condition and medicate her to keep her comfortable. For a while, she was the same as always. She ate and drank. She played with the boys (as much as a 95-year-old would). She greeted us at the door after work. She could still use her dog door to go in and out on her own. She ran the fenceline and howled like the Hound of the Baskervilles at the deer in our woods. She wagged her tail and perked up her ears. And so we worried about how we would know it was time, when the time came. We didn't want her to suffer. Our first two dogs each just died; no terrible math was required from us. Everyone we talked to gave us the exact same advice: When the time comes, you will just know.

Last week, it became obvious. Without going into agonizing detail, it's simplest said that she stopped having good days. We're lucky that since we got our first family pet thirteen years ago, we've become good friends with our vet (seven pets means a lot of vet appointments). Hub and I have never had to have a pet put to sleep before; Doc was there for us as both a vet and a friend. But it was still probably the hardest thing I've ever done.

Now it's constantly obvious that something is missing. It's still at our house in moments when it shouldn't be.* After the kids go to bed, no dog stirs in the great room when we pass through it or sighs softly on her bed in the corner of our bedroom when we go to bed. No eighty pound dog blocks the front door and refuses to budge. There's no click-click of dog nails on the hardwood floors. No dog comes to lay their head in my lap. There's one less being that I have to think about feeding and caring for, yet I still find myself thinking about her before I remember that she's gone.




*Yes, we still have four cats, but two stay mostly outside and besides, cats are silent ninjas compared to dogs.

New School Year's Resolution

I don't generally make New Year's resolutions, because I find I never keep them. The reason for this, I figured out a few years back, is that I track my years from August to August (which is when school starts around these parts).

I've spent most of my life circling the school year. The elementary-junior high-high school track flowed seamlessly into college and then, with only a two year break, graduate school. Overlapping with grad school was my teaching certification program which launched immediately into my teaching career. For 32 of 39 years, my year has "begun" with the start of the school year.

The last several years have been a blur. Thank gah I knew what I was doing at work (and could do it blindfolded), because I certainly haven't felt very sharp. There's nothing like a near constant round of fertility treatments, pregnancy, breastfeeding/infant care, fertility treatments, pregnancy and breastfeeding/infant care to make a woman feel like she's drained of her very essence. I knew there was a light at the end of that tunnel, but there were days that it seemed very small and far away. I can't say I've walked out of the tunnel yet, but the opening is definitely closer and now looks human-sized.

I feel like I finally figured out to slip the pills under my tongue, rather than swallow them, when the insanity-ward nurse brings them 'round.

So now that I feel like I'm awake, alert and getting a grip on things, what do I go and do? Change teaching positions. I'd been teaching the same subject and grade for the past seven years. I didn't have to do any planning. I didn't have to do any preparation. I could walk out of school one day and back in the next and not have to think about it in between. I was at the top of my game with minimal effort.

Uh, wait a minute. What part of "I have two young children, a husband who takes more than twenty business trips a year, no family to help within a 90 mile radius, five aging pets, a daily hour-long commute (two hours when the Hubster's out of town and I add the daycare run), a car on its last legs that I can't afford to replace, a mammoth landscaping project underway, a house renovation project about to start and a shamefully low level of household management and organization going on" made me think I needed a change from my easy, predictable, mindless job?

Oh, yeah. The easy, predictable, mindless part.

So, I've left the middle school world behind and have returned to high school (11th grade, mostly). I've left the field of American history behind and have moved back into what is my original field, European history. It's exactly where I wanted to be when I originally decided to leave academia and teach high school. But it means starting from scratch. I haven't been this swamped at work in years.

I'm still making a New School Year's Resolution, though: This is going to be the year that I get my shit together.

For starters, I'm talking about my shamefully low level of household management and organization. Part of the problem arose when we had two kids before adding on two bedrooms for them (our plan when we bought the house before they were born), so we lost our guestroom with storage closet and study with storage closet. The main problem, though, is that there is no realistic way two people can work full time, raise children, maintain their relationship and effectively care for their house and property if they have any interests or hobbies other than those things alone. And the Hubster and I do have hobbies. Many, many time-wasting -consuming hobbies. They make us the people we are and keep us sane. (Well, okay... sane-ish.)

But I have a plan.

Step one: Hire a cleaning person. My friend, Frieda, quit her job as a social worker to return to school for a more lucrative career and has decided meanwhile to clean houses to make some side income. She's the amazing combination of trustworthy with mild OCD (no joke) which makes her perfect for this job. This won't actually free up any of my time -- Come on, like I regularly cleaned? Get real. -- but it will mean that basic household cleaning tasks will be taken care of. Before they become our own personal Augean Stables requiring an entire weekend to get under control.

Step two: Start the house renovation project. Even if we have to eat mac and cheese for a year, we will launch this project which has been in the planning stage since we bought our house five years ago. We need more room. Everything that once resided in the rooms the boys are using is currently in boxes. Two rooms worth stuff in boxes: boxes that are now in my bedroom, in the attic, in the basement, in the dining room... you get the picture. It's making me crazy not to be able to find anything or put anything away. (Well, okay... crazier.) In the classic "things are always darkest before dawn" scenario, this will raise the level of chaos before lowering it, which is one reason why we've hesitated. But the time has come.

There will be more steps in the "getting my shit together" project as it unfolds, no doubt, but so far I'm being cautiously optimistic that I can actually do it. Right?

It gets even better. And weirder. Or something.

The Hubster gave me Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog on DVD for my birthday at the beginning of the month. Although I'd watched it a number of times on Hulu, and had even downloaded the soundtrack from Amazon, Monkeyboy had never seen it or heard it. The day I got the DVD, though, I opened it right away and we all watched it. Quite the family entertainment, no?


Monkeyboy is obsessed.

He's watched the DVD repeatedly, which has led to some very interesting discussions about the moral complexities of the Dr. Horrible story. (As most preschoolers probably would, he missed the point and tends to root for Captain Hammer.) The soundtrack is almost the only thing he wants to listen to in the car. He's asked me to clarify lyrics for him when he can't understand them and has even asked me to explain the meaning of some for him: "What's it mean, 'catch your breath'?"

Once he memorized the lyrics and could sing all of the songs, he started ordering me to "sing the girl parts." Which I do with gusto because, hey, there's nothing weird about harmonizing with your toddler. Even when it's a song from a Sci Fi musical about an evil scientist trying to rule the world/get the girl. Right?



Skip ahead to 1:45 (if you're not interested in watching the whole thing) to see the best part of the duet, where each person sings different lyrics at the same time (is there a musical term for that technique?). Now, imagine me doing it with my three-year-old son -- sternly directed by him, I might add -- in the car as we drive to daycare. The first time the Hubster heard us do it, he gaped open-mouthed at us.

Where my sick sense of humor, eclectic taste in music and poor judgement collide

I love music. Before I had children, I regularly went to hear live music and I still go when I can fit it in. I'm obsessed with my iPod. Making iPod playlists has replaced my old-school obsession for making mix CDs (which replaced my older-school obsession with making mix tapes). This summer, I got Monk a pair of children's headphones so he can listen to his own playlists (of songs he's chosen himself) on my iPod. The Hubster and I are always singing around the house, and to the kids, especially if a lyric fits the occasion. The other day found me singing to Goose, "Mama said there'll be days like this. There'll be days like this, my mama said. (Mama said, Mama said.)"

When Monk hears a song he likes, he always asks, "What's it called?" and when it ends, he asks to hear it again. (Often again and again and...) Once, when he was about two years old, Monk asked Hub that very question about a Tool song (Disclaimer, re: the Tool song: I was not in the car at the time) and when told the title responded, "I love it! It's noise!"

As you can tell, the Hubster and I rarely censor our music choices around our kids. Until recently, they really didn't pay that much attention to the lyrics, so we didn't have to. This summer, however, a serious misstep on my part resulted in my 3 year old singing Salt n' Pepa's "None of your Business," so we're we now giving it some thought. (I'm grateful he didn't understand most of the words and has made up gibberish to substitute for the lyrics to everything except the exclamation "It's none of your bidness!")

However, there are still a wide range of songs which it's appropriate -- or at least, mostly appropriate -- for my kids to hear. Over the last few months, Monkeyboy has made a commitment to memorizing the lyrics of the ones he likes so he can sing along. I admit that with this development, I've started feeding him songs that I want to hear him sing. This has resulted in what are some of the funniest moments with this kid so far.

There isn't much that's more more bizarrely hilarious than a three-year-old belting out, "Laundry day. See you there. Under things. Tumbling." in the grocery store checkout line.

Or when we walk into daycare, singing, "Black coat, white shoes, black hat, Cadillac... the boy's a time bomb!" to his teacher.

Or playing in his sandbox by himself, singing, "Oh, woman, oh, woman, why you treat me so mean? You're the meanest old woman that I ever seen..." under his breath.

Or recently -- and this one probably takes the proverbial cake when it comes to bad judgment on the parents' part -- at the mall, singing, " 'Booze! Booze!' The firemen cried, as they came knocking at the door." (This last one was damn hard to find anywhere on the Interweb. I also liked this rendition.**)

But, all joking aside, if this kid can't get a date in high school? I'll have to take at least part of the blame.


**The really weird thing? The more I watch it, the more I think I might have actually been there in real life for this one. The web is a strange place/six degrees of separation/it's a small word after all/etc. MacIntyre!