Hair

I cut my hair - two and half inches -- and got the grays shined up and blow dried and straightened.

Hasn't been one person I've seen today who hasn't noticed. Hasn't been one person who saw me and didn't mention how nice my hair looked. Not one.

I can take no credit of course; this blow dry is the work of someone else. I could never do this myself. But what lies beneath all these luscious comment? It's the fact that I usually look like a hot mess.

I know.

Today was a good day, a good hair day at least.

Don't Cry For Me 2

This is Part 2, of two parts.
You will be better served to start with part one.

Don't Cry For Me, Part Two

We were expected at a baby shower on Sunday in Connecticut. By “we”, I mean the girls and me. This struck me from the beginning as odd: kids at a baby shower? Why?

I am old school I guess and also, truth be told, pretty much despise all these rites of passage. My mother was happy to make my own shower a simple event – it was small and fast. It was a gesture, a loving one, and nothing else.

Things have changed since then. Things are bigger now. Even unwed, unemployed, overeducated 33-year-old sisters in law who choose to get pregnant can enjoy the windfall of a baby shower. It's a major big deal; they wanted my kids there. In some ways, it was less important that I attended, and more important that I attended with my kids. I don't really understand that but I obliged.

So the girls and me climbed into the car. We stopped to rent movies; I downloaded a great book. This ride would be amazing. And it was. Until…

The breakdown. What a beat down. We were stuck at the gas station for 3+ hours. There were no tow trucks that could haul the kids and me too. We eventually got a cab to an airport (40 minutes away and out of the way) and rented a car. We were fueled by peanut M&Ms and lemonade, but we got to my sister’s eventually. Got there at 7:30. Left my house at noon. It should have been a three hour trip.

But wait! It gets better. Upon arriving at my sisters, we discovered that R has lice. (Should I capitalize that word: LICE?)

The last time we were at my sister’s house – it was Xmas night – the Giant Three Year Old puked all over the guest room. My sister, she never bats an eye, never freaks out, just lends a hand, throws a load in the wash, cracks open beers for us. She was the one scoping through R’s head and applying the olive oil. She was the one who took care of it all.

We made it to the Shower, though R’s hair was still soaked in grease we couldn’t get out and she hardly looked the showpiece. I cannot imagine what all the relatives thought of her or me. So much for parading your kids…

When we returned home (well after bedtime), I bathed R again: three times in vinegar, and then in the shower for a regular shampoo, and finally with the CVS shampoo that would nix it all.

When it was done, I tucked that little trooper in her bed at last, and he and I shook out our own psychosomatic itchies. Satisfied and exhausted, we plunked down on the couch for what was left: the news.

A woman my age and two tiny children suffered car troubles. No one knows what happened next or why, but each was hit and killed by oncoming traffic. I cried when I heard the news, when I saw their faces on the television, when I listened to the Gramma so much in shock that she was eloquent – her pain so poignant, it was unknowable even to her.

It reminds me to remind you:

Don’t cry for me.

On Boys: From Annie

She hasn't really met R yet, so I forgive her for the semi-sexist ending, but nonetheless, I found this reassuring -- my son, just three, has already broken two windows in my house -- and I feel for our poor neighbors almost every day:

"I have a lovely new neighbor across the street. His name is S.; he's around 50, single, n/d (no dogs) n/k (no kids).

We are a family w/d and w/k. S. very pleasantly informed me this morning that something was dangling from my third floor window, wrapped around a telephone wire and hanging over the street. "Just a parasoralophas (editors note: a dinosaur with a horn from the back of the head that made a trumpet type sound)" I said. "Batman's hanging out the back window and in fact, he doesn't fly. Just in the movies."

I make these matter-of-fact statements like I'm simply breathing. I've become oblivious to the faces of persons with n/d and n/k.

My middle son has intense curiosity for all around him. Why don't chickens bury their eggs like turtles do? What is different and what is the same? Beats me. All I know is that when I went to make breakfast there were no eggs in the fridge. Not ONE. They were indeed, buried in the garden and being watered everyday. I don't know what his hypothesis is, but I do know my yard is going to smell like hell at some point, probably soon (sorry S.).

There was the day I thought my son had head lice. I took him to a hairdresser/lice specialist, disinfected my home, laundered every single piece of bed linen, had all the dogs groomed and slathered all heads in pesticides. It was an unhappy day. Next morning, a girlfriend on the playground (in "the yard" as we call it) says, "So...how was it washing all that grape soda out of your sons hair? He was tossing it up like peanuts at the baseball field and trying to catch it in his mouth...sooo funny."

(Crystallized sugar looks like lice. Boy was under husband's care).

Boys LOVE my house. It is full of critters and the backyard is full of things you can just pick and eat in the summer. Beans and peaches and raspberries. Blueberries and tomatoes. There's a working well here and a hen house we haven't quite crafted for foul but it is great to lock other kids inside.

Other moms say, "They like HER house because she has no rules", but I do have rules starting with the Golden Rule. But I don't have rules about micro waving a marshmallow until it becomes the size of a loaf of bread. I don't have rules about rolling every inch of tin foil in a 200 square foot package to see how big it is, how much it weighs, how it dents when it is airborne. The experiments are endless. The curiosity is endless. Labrador retrievers, notorious for their appetites, will even eat a sandwich after you've urinated on it (hypothesis proved; please do not try at home).

My boys hate girls because they have to. They hate everything about them: Barbies, pink, ballet, dress-up, painted nails (all the things I am wistful for), but they secretly adored the girls who moved from Scott's house. My boys did not want them to move. I apologized in advance before he and the Home Inspector were hailed with mud-balls, and after, when coins (lots) were adhered to his driveway with bubble-gum.

S. picked up the coins, goo-be-goned them off and so, I guess, the jokes on them. Boys will be boys."