Tuesday, February 10, 2009

It’s springtime in Chicago. At least for the week. There has been a great thaw and when Mac and I step out this morning Mac declares, “It’s spring!” Indeed today’s high is set to reach 63 degrees Fahrenheit. I send Mac to school in his puffy vest over a sweatshirt and turtleneck, with hat and mittens. He walks with his friend S.J. and her mom. At 8:10a.m. I phoned her mom to confirm that she would pick up Mac. “Yep, I’m about to wake up S.J. now.” I want to learn her secret for getting her daughter out the door in less than ½ an hour. It takes us no less than 90 minutes to get to the front door in the morning. Mac is walking with S.J. today because Sailor threw up yesterday. “I feel shaky,” were his last words before he spewed breakfast all over the living room rocking chair. I couldn’t move him. I let him puke. When the wave seemed to subside I ran him to the bathroom. He threw up some more. And I realized we were both covered in scrambled eggs, oatmeal and bananas. “What do you think caused this?” he asked me.

Mac catches a ride home with Isabella’s mom. We spend the evening on the couch. Sailor is whining, crying. I feel worse and worse with every hour. At 8pm Mac says he is hungry. I ask him to clean up the living room. I heat up fried rice. He gets into bed without having cleaned up the living room, the kitchen table, the playroom (that we spent Sunday morning cleaning out – and now have a wall of bags and boxes to be donated). He gets a walk around the house. I am displeased. “I don’t want you to grow up to be the kind of husband who leaves his towel on the bathroom floor and his socks on the living room floor,” I tell him. “Cuz you know what will happen then?” “What?” he asks. “Your wife will divorce you!” It is easy for me to be hard on him. I am not sure why, tho. I have always had such high expectations for him and I don’t tolerate him not meeting them. He is still not an easy child. A good boy, yes. But never easy. Yet in some ways so much easier than Sailor. Sailor, it turns out, is rather easy, if I give him what he wants, and thoroughly delightful. Most of the time anyway.

Sailor and I bake cookies today. The batter is yummy. We make three batches. The first is fine. The second is slightly toasty and the third is so toasty the cookies look like chocolate. What a waste of my good ingredients. But that’s what happens when Sailor asks me to come see the big scary spider in the bathroom and I get distracted and head into his room, where I left my computer yesterday so he could watch DVDs in bed after he puked. I check my email and see one from a basketball camp being offered later this week, when the kids are off for Lincoln’s birthday. I decide to do a last-minute email blast to try to get enuf students to run camp at the studio on Thursday. I send that out then build my email list. All the while Sailor is pilfering a large basket that has sat untouched for years on his radiator. “I remember this,” he says to item after item. Baby hair brushes, art work, baby toys, things meant for his room as an infant. “It’s fun to look at things you haven’t seen in a long time, isn’t it?” I ask him in the exact same inflection used for years by Mr. Rogers. I am so good at this home schooling thing! The cookies! It’s just like that book … If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. The cookies are indeed done. Toasted. Just the way my dad likes them!