Not long ago, my daughter declared that Firefly had prevented her from sleeping well. She said, "I didn't get my beauty sleep."

Her younger brother, not to be outdone, replied, "Well I didn't get my Spiderman sleep!"

They say that brands seek to hook children as early as possible, because if you are a Heinz Ketchup buyer at five, you will be a Heinz Ketchup forever. This has not held true in my life. I think my parents bought off-brand ketchup, and I find ketchup oddly repulsive in an at-home setting and never buy it. Any ketchup purchased is my husband's doing. Ketchup in restaurants doesn't bother me at all.

If brands do hook children forever, it is safe to assume that Genome will be wearing Spiderman underpants well into his middle age. Or he will do as Husband does, and have a son to purchase Spiderman underpants for instead.

Inequalities

The 1 < 4 type, not the Occupy Wall Street Kind.

"Now Munchkin, does the alligator choose three cookies, or two cookies?"
"Three cookies."
"Does the alligator choose two cookies, or one cookie?"
"One cookie."
"Does he choose three cookies, or five cookies?"
"Both."
"He has to choose one."
"Okay, he chooses one cookie."
"No, he has to choose one number."
"Okay, he chooses eleventy-billion cookies."
"No, which is bigger, three, or five?"
"Three."
"How is three bigger than five?"
"Because you drew a bigger three there, and that's kind of a little five."
"No, which represents the larger quantity of cookies?"
"Can I have a cookie?"
"If you do this page of arithmetic I will give you a cookie."
"Can I have five cookies?"

It occurred to me some time ago that many of my female friends and I seem to have essentially the same complaints about our husbands. Not that I complain about my husband often. He's really astonishingly tolerant. I'm not just saying this. People I barely know tell him so. I'm widely known as a lunatic.

So, on to the complaint. Husbands often don't seem to understand the highly time-sensitive nature of household tasks. Let me given an example. In my husband's work, he might have to write a letter. There's a deadline, let's make it Friday. So any time between now and Friday, he writes the letter. And when the letter is written, it's done. It doesn't unwrite itself and need to be rewritten tomorrow. And it doesn't particularly matter whether he writes it Monday or Wednesday.

Dishes are not like this. If he agrees to clear the dishes, this is not a single endeavor, a ceremonial Clearing of the Table after which the table will be ever and always cleared. In fact, the table is at most temporarily cleared, until such a time as we need it again, about eight hours from now. So when I ask what happened to the table some twelve hours after we ate dinner and accuse him of failing to clear it, his defence of "I haven't failed to clear the table. I just haven't cleared the table _yet_." doesn't really accomplish my objectives.

My objectives are to keep the knives away from Firefly and not to feel like my mother is looking down on us, judging.

My mother is also a very nice person who would not actually stare judgmentally, but worse, try to demonstrate how a helpful schedule-oriented system would prevent my house from looking like a frat house from an eighties Revenge of the Nerds movie, only with a wider selection of alcohol than just beer. Even though she's known me my whole life, my mother has never quite accepted that I'm a total loss on the domestic front.

So I had more or less decided that this must be a genetic defect that travels on the Y chromosome when a woman I know related that she had the same problem with her girlfriend who, as far as I know, does not have a Y chromosome.

Now I'm left thinking that perhaps I just make friends with people who are neurotic (as I am) and WASPishly uncommunicative (guilty), and that's why they can't make their life partner understand that if we don't change the children's close occasionally, the other mothers will talk.

Actually, if my husband were in charge of the dishes, he'd convert the whole house to paper plates and plastic cutlery by nightfall. I have stronger feelings against disposable tableware than I do about most of what shows up on Amnesty International, including a to-the-wall fight over the appropriateness of a plastic table cover for a formal occasion. I am against plastic cutlery. I am not quite sure why I am so against it. It's not just because of assiduous pro-environmental brain-washing as a child, because I feel very little uneasiness, say, tossing recyclables, and I never reuse scrap paper. I think it has to do with that imaginary-mother-judgement issue again.

No Rest for the Weary

As my daughter clung to the railing of my mother's house, screaming "save me, grandma, save me, don't let them kill me!", I suspected I may have made a wrong turn somewhere in my gentle guidance of her development.

Let me retrace my steps.

After we finished her morning work on phonics -- may I just interject here that phonics are very, very boring? -- she was supposed to have her piano lesson at her grandmother's. After her piano lesson, she and her brother were going to go with Tatty to deliver cookies to various ill members of our congregation.

All to the good. She was happy to see her father. She wanted to bring a glass of water. No, her father told her, you don't need refreshments to steel you for the five blocks to the home for the aged. You will not die of dehydration; this is not the Sahara.

We live in a rain forest.

This is where the little train started to run off of its tracks. Her father told her to get in the car. She refused. He insisted. She broke away screaming, running back to my mother's house, yelling, "grandma, save me, save me!"

By the time she was locked in the main floor bathroom, she was probably wise to lock the door against me.

Some time later she explained to me that she had attempted to hold on to her calm place, but it had escaped and run down her leg, disappearing.

Rather like she did, but with less screaming.

Then she wept for an hour.

Then something amused her and she fell on the floor giggling.

My daughter has more emotional range on an average afternoon than I have displayed in the last ten years.

All the weary mothers of the world . . .

Firefly declined his nap time. I hope to exact payment from him in the form of an early bedtime. And by "early" I mean "on time, like any normal child."

Thing I don't understand: the 180 day school schedule. Munchkin's books usually have lesson plans of 140 or so lessons. I don't know what the other days are. And apparently we're supposed to be doing 180 lessons a year. I have to work every day. Why is it that children don't? And given that children have the memories of goldfish (once round the bowl and they've forgotten everything they ever knew and are seeing the pink stucco castle for the very first time), would it be better to give them shorter lessons more often rather than full days only half of the year?

Drowning woman waving

I'm drowning. That's why I'm not updating here. Munchkin is spending three to four hours a day doing home school, which has tipped the workload for her mother from "controlled chaos" to just the chaos part. Plus this being-Jewish business is time-consuming. Especially in a city without a close by kosher bakery that we are willing to use.

I'm looking for someone to clean and/or run my boys in a circle a few times a week, and if I find someone (IYH) I will update more often.

Minutia

It makes me happy to know that should the police ever come to my house, they would know immediately that I'm not a drug addict. They would know this because, if TV and personal experience are to be believed (and of course they are), drug addicts never have sheets on their beds. I am marginally neurotic about sheets on beds.

No one has ever tested me for drugs immediately post-childbirth. No one has tested my children either.

If you are having a difficult day and feeling slightly tearful, it is important that you not listen to anything by Joan Baez. Just put the Joan Baez down and step away. Instead, watch documentaries about meth addiction and be pleased that you change your sheets regularly and are not in rehab. Rehab (why is it always called rehab and never rehabilitation?) looks dull in that workshoppy way. You know, trust exercises and brain storming and listening to dull people take turns speaking while everyone sits in a circle. I wish to avoid all of these activities, which is why I don't want to go into teaching nor become an alcoholic. Plus this particular TV-rehab looks like it makes you bring your children.