I'm Old and Wise Now That I'm 40

This is the year I turn 40, and instead of guilting all my friends into making a big deal out of me (no, really, you're too sweet!) I'm going to give you all a present instead. A present of my Wisdom and Experience. You're welcome.

A Random Number of Things
 I Have Learned in the Past 40 Years 

If you need to get something from the kitchen in the middle of the night, an open microwave gives a nice non-blinding light.

Having Tres Leches cake for your birthday means low-guilt leftovers for breakfast the next day. It's cake soaked in milk. It's basically cereal.

You can get a baby or small child to swallow yucky medicine instead of spiting it out by putting one finger in the corner of their mouth and giving it a tug (so they look like Two-Face) while squirting the meds into their mouth. The kid can't get the right mouth shape for spitting.

If your life is boring, try injecting adventure into your everyday tasks. When cleaning, wear rubber gloves and imagine you're getting rid of incriminating evidence after a murder. When starting the dishwasher or washing machine, pretend you're on a starship. "Set course for the laundry nebula, maximum spin." BOOP BOOP Dial Turn START thrumming noise

It's easier to open a box of macaroni and cheese from the bottom. I'm sorry, did I just BLOW YOUR MIND?

You will never not freak out about your housekeeping when your mother comes to visit. Ironically, embracing this fact can lead to less freaking out. Try leaving something obvious messy or undone or objectionable out for her to focus on. This will deflect her attention from anything you actually feel bad about (which you have stuffed into a closet or basement).

The helpful person in a new workplace who takes you aside to warn you about someone else MIGHT be the person you should watch out for.

If Sunday night is the most depressing night of the week because you have to go back to work the next day, you should consider getting a new job. Don't wait two more years while you lose the will to live.

There is such a thing as too much bacon. Theoretically. Much like Absolute Zero, one can only approach Ultimate Bacon under carefully controlled circumstances.

Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies, much like revenge, are best served cold. Stash them in the chest freezer and forget about them until you're looking for freezer space on a boiling August day. Finding cool Thin Mints might change your outlook.

If you rinse off spaghetti, a four-year-old will still be able to detect the foul taint of marinara.

A Tale of Woe and Betrayal, Laundry Edition

Something glorious is happening in my house right now. I've been waiting two weeks for this, and it's finally happening. My clothes are getting washed!

About two weeks ago I pulled some clothes out of the dryer and found huge dirty oil spots all over them. I checked the clothes still in the washer, and they were even worse. Some kind of oil was leaking from my machine into the washtub. I suddenly had a dirtying machine instead of a washing machine.

This is just a small sample of the horrors.

At the time, I was pretty freaked out about two loads of MY clothes getting ruined. I'm still not happy about that but the last two weeks have given me a little perspective. I wasn't worried about the washer because I knew I could just call a repairman and get it fixed, because that's what adults do. No problem. I have a phone and a check book.

But after waiting two days for the repairman to show up, he took approximately 45 seconds to look in my machine and tell me it was toast. The transmission was shot or something.  I didn't even know washing machines have a transmission, but you learn something new every day. Sometimes what you learn is boring. That's another aspect of being an adult.

So later that same day the hubster and I took our brood of frisky children to a local appliance place that sells scratch-and-dent machines. We love this store because we get much nicer appliances for less money as long as we're willing to have a ding on the front. I proudly show off the ding on the front of my stainless-steel-french-door-freezer-on-the-bottom refrigerator, because it not only saved us $500, but it also saved us the trouble of worrying about our kids putting a ding in the door of an expensive new fridge. If I don't feel like looking at the dent I cover it with a magnet.

As our children roamed the store, racing up and down the aisles and pushing buttons on appliances, Kit and I carefully picked out a new washer using our tried-and-true technique: looking for the cheapest one. That day it happened to be a nice new front-loading high-efficiency washer, because the store was running an Earth Day special. Yay, us! We put the washer into the back of the van and took it home like hunters returning from a successful hunt, full of pride.

We dragged the old washer up out of the basement and to the curb, and put the new washer in the garage to wait for a better time to wrangle it, since it was already past the kids' bedtime. The next day the kids and I went to the garage to visit it, and I couldn't help but caress it a little. It was so beautiful, so clean, so efficient. "We're going to make beautiful laundry together," I murmured to it.
But all along, the new washer was hiding a dark secret.

Kit and some friends got the machine down into the basement and the next day before he went to work we leveled it and removed the bolts that keep the tub in place during transport. We couldn't get the last rubber spacer out right then, so while Kit was gone I spent a couple of hours wiggling it and yanking it and levering it and finally I got it out. I held it high in the air triumphantly, like Gollum and the One Ring. And just like Gollum, I immediately plunged into a pit of fiery torment, because after I hooked everything up the MACHINE WAS BROKEN. It just constantly filled with water, even unplugged. The whole time I was caressing that machine it was quietly snickering to itself.

Several phone calls and one week later, just as the laundry piles were starting to need signs warning travelers of the avalanche danger, I finally have a washer that works! It needed a new valve or something that had to be ordered. And now that washer really is beautiful. I just wish it hadn't required so much adulting to get clean clothes.

Maybe we don't need the TV anymore??

Lessons from Mary Poppins

Mary Poppins is my idol. 
She was confident and assertive, but knew fun and magic can be found anywhere. I would love to emulate her more in my life. Of course, Mary Poppins had a couple of advantages over me. I mean, she had supernatural abilities and a three-octave singing voice, for goodness sake. She slid UP the bannister, levitated tea-tables, and charmed children, bankers, and birds with her singing. My musical repertoire is pretty much limited to "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." My super powers are making food appear every night at dinner, and the ability to make my two-year-old disappear simply by holding a tissue in my hand. So I'm trying to focus on learning some of her more attainable skills.

On Self Esteem

Mary Poppins told people she was "kind but extremely firm" and "practically perfect in every way." Of course, since references are "a very old-fashioned idea, to my mind," we only have her word for it. So maybe she isn't quite as great as she says. I bring this up because it's important to have a positive attitude toward yourself, to say good things about yourself. I find myself talking to myself, about myself, in a way that would be totally unacceptable from another human being. When I make a mistake, in my head I sometimes call myself an idiot. I don't think I'm alone in this. But if more of us looked in the mirror every morning, sang a duet with our reflection, and then declared ourselves to be "practically perfect in every way," the world would be considerably closer to awesome. Persuading oneself to be great is an amazing skill.

On Cleaning Up

The most memorable scene in the movie is probably when they tidy up the nursery. Mary Poppins tells Jane and Michael that "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down," and "In every job that must be done there is an element of fun."
Turning chores into games totally works on my kids, as long as I make the effort to make it a compelling game. This doesn't mean complicated, or that I've developed super snapping abilities. (sigh. I wish. Is there a YouTube video tutorial out there?) Let's talk about the dress-up clothes that spend so much time on the floor that I'm pretty sure that hundreds of years from now future archaeologists will study the strata of tiaras and dresses and magician costumes in the remains of our house and write scholarly papers about The Use of Synthetic Fibers in Children's Ceremonial Garb in the Early Twenty-First Century.

There's a PhD in there somewhere

On occasion I decide that it is time to check the floor of April's room, to make sure the carpet is still the color I remember and that the squirrels aren't hiding under a pile of capes, and I gather my brood.  This is crucial: if I tell them to clean this mess, without a game or instructions, not only will the mess not get picked up, but it will immediately spread throughout the house because the girls will stop cleaning and start playing after approximately 37 seconds. So this is where the "element of fun" comes in.

"Okay guys, I'm setting the stopwatch! Let's see if we can beat our best time of one minute, fifty-six seconds! Remember, pick up a whole armful, not one little thing at a time. Ready-Set-GO!!"

And it works, which blows my mind. I mean, basically I'm getting them to clean up by telling them, in a super chipper voice, to do it super fast. This wouldn't work on me if I was, say, doing the dishes or mopping the kitchen or working on our taxes. If you told me I could get these things done by just going faster, I would roll my eyes at you. So. Hard. "What a revelation," I would say. And then I would gather my wits about me, turn off the instinctive sarcasm, and ask you to demonstrate for me on the dishes. I would pull a stool up to the kitchen island and make interested and admiring noises while you showed me how to put dishes in the dishwasher really quickly without breaking them. I would eat a cookie while telling you how amazing you are, and that I could never be as fast as you. Maybe you should do the dishes again tomorrow so I can watch and maybe figure out your technique, which seems super sophisticated.

On Bedtime

Bedtime seems like a simple task: put on pajamas, brush teeth, get in bed, turn off the light. But the reality is that there are days I would rather try to train a herd of cats than try to put my children to bed, because CPS wouldn't come calling if I gave up and put the cats in cages and walked out for an hour. The simplest things take an hour to accomplish. The kids suddenly remember things that absolutely have to be done right now. "I need to go through this stack of Scholastic book order forms and circle the ones I want!" (spoiler: they want the books that come with toys and gizmos.) They forget that they were putting on pajamas and play legos with their trousers around their knees and then get angry when I remind them to get dressed. ("I AM!" they insist indignantly, then go back to building a spaceship that fires flowers.) They dawdle, brushing each tooth individually. They remember how much they love us and have to come back downstairs three or four times to give hugs and kisses. (It would be more adorable if it didn't happen a full hour after we tucked them in.) They develop ailments and itches that torture them into wakefulness.

This is where the best Mary Poppins bit comes in. In the movie, after taking Jane and Michael on a outing to the park, the children are so wound up they can't calm down to sleep. She finally tells them, "Now, not another word or I shall be forced to summon a policeman." This is seriously my favorite line in the whole movie. It isn't so much applicable as it is hilariously reassuring. It gives me a great deal of comfort to know that even Mary Poppins got frustrated at bedtime, and resorted to outlandish empty threats in order to get peace and quiet. She was practically perfect, not totally perfect.

This makes me feel a lot better.

On the Interconnectedness of Cleaning and Sleeping

Last night I had a wild time out on the town which consisted of sitting in a basement family room chatting with friends about books while eating chips and salsa. It was deeply satisfying in that quiet way that reminds me that I'm an adult, and also boring. Definitely not the main character in a movie or sitcom.  When I got home it was late, the house was dark, and the family was asleep. Before going to bed myself I went around to check on the kids, you know, to make sure they were breathing and hadn't adopted any wild animals while I was gone. I've suspected for a while that the girls are letting squirrels nest in their hair, just to make life extra hard in the morning when they're getting ready for school.  I try to brush their hair and they cry and carry on like their hearts are broken, like their best friends are now homeless. I haven't actually caught the girls in the act of housing squirrels, but it's only a matter of time before one of those furry beasts leaves behind evidence more damning than matted and tangled hair, say, gnawed acorns or shredded bark.

I found both girls asleep on the floor of their rooms. I almost stepped on Kimmy, but realized at the last minute that the rug was breathing.  She was curled up in her sleeping bag in the middle of the floor.  April had made a very cozy-looking blanket nest next to her bed. She was gently lit by the glow of her five nightlights, so the chances of my stepping on her were considerably lower than the chances of my being blinded.

Why weren't they sleeping in their beds? Because the floor was clean, don't ya know.

I made them clean their rooms that day so I could vacuum up the rainbow loom bands and dead ladybugs and clementine peels. It was an exhausting ordeal to get the girls to clean. I had to yell up the stairs at them like ten times to get them to actually finish picking up, because they've got the attention span of a goldfish or a housefly. Finally after an hour I put down my book and rolled off the couch and started up the stairs with the vacuum cleaner.

"Your floors had better be clean by the time I'm done with the hallway because I promise you I will vacuum anything I find!!" I called up in the melodious and dulcet tones of a nightingale, or possibly a car alarm. Either one, really. And amazingly, the girls were ready for me. The floors were clear of everything but stuffed animal guts, snips of paper, and the aforementioned expired bugs, snack remnants, and crafting debris. I finished vacuuming upstairs just in time for dinner, and I took off afterwards for my book club meeting.

At bedtime their dad sent them to their rooms, where they learned a very important lesson. When you "pick up" by moving all your toys from the floor to the bed, stuff that belongs on the bed (i.e.; your body) has to go on the floor.

Bonus Fact: The girls independently arrived at both of these lazy solutions: putting everything on the bed, and then sleeping on the floor lest they be obligated to actually put things where they belong.