Mrs. Clean

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DID YOU KNOW that I have managed to keep my house virtually spotless for four solid days now?  It is true.  We’re getting ready for an open house Sunday, so we’re doing everything we can to keep the house clean.  My poor kids go to take toys out of the toy basket and I snap, “You’re just going to have to clean those up when you’re done, so DON’T TAKE OUT TOO MUCH STUFF!!!”  And then my daughter heads for the bookshelf with the look in her eye that tells me she’s about to chuck every board book we own over her head just for kicks, and I snatch her up and sit her in the corner to play with, um, her feet.  Because I won’t have to clean that up.  Instead of teaching me that it’s really lovely to live in a clean house — and I mean CLEAN, like mopped floors, shiny countertops, organized everything — it’s taught me that it’s really a huge pain in the ass and not any fun at all.

So if we don’t sell our house quickly and have to live in a cardboard box, rest assured that it will be filthy, and that I will be OK with that.

Snowly crap

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I haven’t blogged in over a month – ridiculous.  But there is so much going on, I’m not sure where to start.  One:  we are moving.  To the ‘burbs.  Near a swim club and a playground and a good school and the woods and a creek.  I’m kind of freaking out about it, and not only because we still haven’t sold our house and might have to pay two mortgages until we’re living in a cardboard box.  But it just seems like such a huge CHANGE.  Moving from our place in the city that’s 10 minutes from everything, where all our neighbors are liberal and diverse and a lot like us, to a different state (OK, it’s 20 minutes away from where we are now, but still) where I really have no idea what our neighbors are like.  I think it’ll be great for my kids, so I’m doing it.  Which means I’ll probably be at this job a little longer than expected, and that also freaks me out.  I thought when we made the move to the ‘burbs I’d give up the working thing for a while.  I totally had visions of me wearing sporty casual clothes, clipping coupons, doing artsy educational projects with my kids, and destroying my blackberry in some extremely violent way (I think I had settled on driving over it).  But now I’m just going to have an even longer commute to the same job.  Now that I put that in writing, um, wtf.

And two:  snowmageddon.  Perhaps you heard a thing or two about it on the news?  There were two actual back-to-back blizzards in DC in the past 10 days.  I was housebound with my family for a solid week.  Which was extremely fun for the first, oh, three days, and then after that, we all were a little bored.  And I was REALLY sick of the freaking Wiggles, particularly the yellow shirt guy.  My son has some pretty sophisticated musical tastes — he loves Jack Johnson and Pearl Jam and that “Fallin'” song that is in the car commercials, you know? — but for whatever reason, he loves him some Wiggles.  They’re harmless, but I can only take so many songs about kangaroos and dressing robes.

Being housebound with two toddlers and a work-from-home husband while you’re trying to get any sort of billable work done is not a lot of fun.   As the kids were giving me my 14th pretend haircut of the week, my son was trying to let my hair down and said to me, “Mommy, are you going to pull your hair out now?”  Oh, honey, you have no idea.  But we really did make the most of our time together.  My son got to go sledding down an insanely high hill with his pops, we made an awesome (smaller) sledding course in a neighbor’s backyard, played with the neighbor kids, drank lots of hot chocolate, the whole deal.  I was so sad to kiss the kids good-bye this morning.  Even more than normal.

So today our realtors are taking pictures of our house to sell it.  It’s the only house my kids have ever known, the house my husband and I poured our hearts (and bank accounts) into renovating, the house where I learned to be a mom.  I know that moving is the right thing to do, but I’m really going to miss that house.

But I think my new WALK IN CLOSET will ease the pain.

Sigh and double ugh

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So two interesting things happened at work yesterday.  One, my boss “popped by” my office to introduce me to the general counsel of one of our biggest clients.  Right as I was wrapping up my research into a remote control fart machine (www.thefartmachine.com – GO THERE NOW).  Luckily, I had just finished playing the sample fart noises and had mostly calmed myself down when they came in.  But I was reclined in my chair with my shoes off.  Sigh.  And two, I heard through the grapevine that a co-blabbermouth told someone that I hadn’t been working enough lately.  My first reaction wasn’t to get mad at him for gossiping or talking shit about me; it was to feel really bad.  It’s bad enough to feel guilty that I slack at work when home needs me a little more (or when I need home a little more), but to have someone else notice?  Ugh.  And not just notice, but feel the need to call me on it.  Ugh ugh.

This person is junior to me, so in bizarro law firm world, his opinion doesn’t really count for much.  My very understanding boss knows I work hard, keep strange hours, and occassionally come into work with mis-matched shoes and breast pump parts hanging out of my bag.   But hearing about the gossip did make me get in a little earlier today, and hold off on the fart machine research for a little while.

Scary

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So I went to the cah-razy synagogue book signing last night (unfortch, no drunken table dancing), which was really lovely.  The author was inspirational and funny and smart.  While she was reading the introduction to her book, I realized that I kept shoving my work bag around with my feet, and kind of pinned it between my legs for a little while, you know, so some crazy non-fiction chick-lit book lover didn’t gank my work bag (which is filled with about 40 highlighters, an old pacifier, and a wallet with four pounds worth of change in it) and then make her way up the balcony stairs and down through the crowded synagogue, laughing maniacally and leaving a trail of post-it flags and old receipts behind her.

And then I remembered my own mom’s obsession with someone stealing her purse.  As far as I know, no one ever actually stole her purse (maybe because of her vigilance), but for as long as I can remember, she always had a death grip on it when we were out in public.  And now here I am, straddling my work bag at a book reading.

Totally random, but it just got me thinking about fears and how we pass them down to our kids.  I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because both of my kids are fairly cautious — both were very timid walkers, they aren’t crazy about strangers or new things, and my preschooler still “scooches” on his butt down the stairs (so he doesn’t “bite it,” in his words).  And then I think about my own life, and how I’ve taken a very safe path to get to my boring, I mean, very important lawyer job.  Where my job is to tell people how to minimize their risk.

So I want to encourage my kids to be bold, to do things that challenge them, that surprise them.  And I figure the best way to do that is to do it myself.  Which really goes against just about everything in my nature, but actually feels pretty good.  Writing like this is a risk for me, and I like it.

But I’m still not getting over my fear of opossums.  They can suck it.