Funny and frustrating things that make me question my sanity

On the funny side: For whatever reason that is incomprehensible to me, the Boy has managed to bang his head on some surface in the kitchen every single day this week right before leaving for school. I have no idea how he does it, one minute we’re all: ok, shoes on, finish your juice, let’s go! And then: whack! And screaming and wailing.

Yesterday he banged his head on the counter, today he banged his head on the door. He was walking backwards. That could be why he didn’t see the door… but why was he walking backwards? Every day, I tell you. I just don’t get it, and I hope it’s just this week or his teachers are going to call social services on me.

On the frustrating side: One of the reasons I stopped working when I had kids was because I was exhausted at the idea of yelling and coaxing people to do stuff all day only to come home and have to do the same thing with my kids. Because, honest to God, I don’t understand how people in Italy work. We’re buying a house, in point of fact we’re buying a stable from the 1600’s and converting it to a house… this actually sounds way more historic and romantic than what it is in reality. We’ve been having some delays on the actual buying part but as the bureaucracy in Italy is biblically long we’ve decided to go ahead and get all the plans ready for the restructuring and hand them in to the proper authorities so they can take their sweet time to give us approval and let us start the works. What I don’t understand is this: I’ve been having to call the architect to task weekly, he makes excuses, he sheepishly tells me he’s sorry and there will be no more delays, he calls my husband – because apparently I’m too scary – when a delay that’s not his fault happens, today after I called him he told me that the plans I was supposed to see yesterday will be ready on Monday. I don’t get it, I’m not his mother and yet I feel like it, with the coaxing, the wheedling, the negotiating and the yelling. And this is what any type of construction work (or really any type of work where you need to get anything done) is like in Italy. Why can’t people just do what they say they’ll do? I’m already exhausted at the idea of what the next few months of my life will be like.

I need bigger arms

I have two kids, one comfortable lap and two arms, sounds like that should be enough, shouldn’t it? Apparently, It is not. I need bigger arms. I’ve already mentioned the hell that is bedtime at our house; recently the situation has taken a significant downturn with the introduction of a new point of contention: my lap. Used to be that I would hold the girl for a while, sing to her, cuddle a bit while the boy hung out with daddy, brushed his teeth and did secret “man stuff” (I don’t know either, do they wrestle, have burping contests, lie there staring vacantly into space with their hands down their pants?) and then I’d put the girl down and hold the boy for awhile, sing, cuddle and whatnot.

Now for some reason everybody wants to sit in my lap together, like when they were teeny tiny, except now they’re quite large, and wiggly. So now at the tail end of the entire, exhausting, infuriating ritual we have an additional five minutes of pushing and shoving on my lap, of elbows in my ribcage, of heads banging against my shoulders, my chin, and occasionally my nose. Let me just say that it is in no way pleasant or comfortable for anyone involved, but for some reasons they need this further reassurance that I do, indeed, love them the same.

So I need bigger arms, à la elasto-girl, just until they realize that they don’t actually both fit in my arms at the same time and the previous way was better. Which should be any day now cause we all know how reasonable toddlers and preschoolers are, right?

Killing me softly

Bedtime is killing me. Night after night it’s slowly making me lose my will to live. How humanity has survived for thousand’s of years with toddlers and preschoolers and their bedtime antics is beyond me. Every night, every friggin’ night my kids, my sweet well-behaved kids, turn into these tiny sanity sucking monsters that make me want to run screaming for our wolf infested hills. I don’t understand what the universe is telling me with this. Is it some sort of cosmic challenge we need to face as parents to reach nirvana?

So this is what goes down at my house: we have dinner, and everything is normal, a little whining will occur occasionally, maybe a cry for some dinner time tv, but at this point everyone still inhabits their own bodies and my kids are relatively normal albeit a little tired. Then we move on to bath time. Bath time is usually fun, some splashing, a lot of me yelling at them to keep the water into the bathtub and not onto the floor, a few admonitions for them not to drink the scummy bathwater, but all is still right in our world. After bath everyone has a warm drink and teeth-brushing, peeing and clothes picking for school ensues. And as I utter the sentence “ok, last call, bedtime. Everybody get in bed” my kids transform, before my very eyes, into a couple of odious, weepy, whiny, annoying imps that I simply cannot stand.

The Girl will start to cry, doing a weird floppy-legged, bouncing her tush up and down, arm flailing move, reaching out to me, wailing “Maaaaamaaaaaa” like I’m the last thing she sees as she falls off a cliff unto certain death. The Boy, not to miss out on any of the melodrama, starts crying for his binky (that is in his mouth), for me to stay one more minute, for some juice. I edge out of the door, cheerfully calling goodnight, like all is normal in my world. Five minutes later the girl starts flinging herself against the crib sides, choking and sputtering like she’s getting ready to throw up her milk, the boy wails with an ever mounting crescendo “Mama, I want Mama”, like he’s been abandoned in an orphanage in Eastern Europe. I go in, they pathetically ask for water, as if I had ever refused them a drink, so I wipe noses, clean off tears and distribute drinks. I leave, everything is quiet, I’m hopeful. I go shower.

The second I step out of the shower, someone’s calling me, they have to poop, or pee, or have pooped and I need to change a diaper. I get them settled and leave. They cry, they’re dying of thirst, they need water. They drink, I leave.

One’s quiet, the other calls me, he dropped his lovey he can’t sleep. I leave. The other one calls me, she’s got eight hundred stuffed animals in her bed, she can’t sleep. I put them back on the shelf, I leave. And then one needs to be covered. The other one is hot and can’t get out of the covers alone. Then they need water again, but they also need to pee, or a diaper change.

One more kiss, I’m lonely, I need a hug. Mama, can I have some waaaaattttteeeeeerrrrr?

Night after night, they are slowly driving me crazy. How, I ask you, HOW has humanity managed to survive? Because I tell you, running in there and screaming “shut the fuck up and go to sleep” isn’t working, for me or for them (I’ve tried). I’m starting to think that parenting is one of those survival of the fittest challenges, and it’s slowly, slowly killing me.

In fact, as I write this, it’s 11.48pm, they both finally shut up and went to sleep a couple of hours ago and the girl just woke up again and is calling me. She probably needs water. Or a diaper change.

And in the silence of our darkened and sleeping (for the most part) house all you hear is the thud, thud, thud of me banging my head against the wall.

Stuff that drives me nuts (yet again)

I recently mentioned that I was doing a sort of detox by basically eliminating wheat, dairy, eggs, corn, sugar, soy and peanuts from my diet, and shockingly I’m still at it. 

Though to be honest I’m a little lax on the eggs and sugar part, I’m avoiding them but I’ll have mayo (eggs) or chocolate (sugar) sometimes. Anyway, I’m not missing bread too much anymore, I can live without the cheese (I can have goat cheese) and I’ve found alternative pastas that I can eat (buckwheat pasta, mainly), what I do miss with a passion is baking. So the other day I had the most amazing, gorgeous, wonderful fresh blueberries and I got a humongous hankering for blueberry pie. Can’t have pie, as pie crust has wheat, so what to do?

Well, I went a-searching for a wheatless pie crust, found one, made the pie (recipe here) and all was well in my world. For like, three minutes. I then got a hankering for pancakes, and sponge cake, and donuts, of all things. So I hit the internet again and found this Babycakes cookbook. Babycakes is a bakery in NY (also in other cities now) that is mostly gluten and dairy free and gets great reviews especially for their donuts. Anyone who can make a convincing fake donut is a baking goddess in my book so I zipped over to amazon and got myself a copy.

I haven’t hit the oven yet because the author is very specific about certain ingredients and I’m working on finding them or somehow getting them over here. 

But this is what drives me nuts: she goes on and on about how precise one must be with measurements and which measuring cups are better than others and so on and so forth, for pages and it just made me want to yell at her “for crying out loud, lady, you’re a professional baker! If you want the rest of us to make accurate measurement put the freaking weight on there along with the cups and spoons”. Seriously, flour can be closely packed or loose, even when sifted (which she doesn’t specify) it can have a different density every time but the weight will always be the same, sometimes when pouring you can get a little more, or less sugar in a measuring cup but the weight will always be the same. I’m pretty sure that anyone who’s willing to invest in specialty flours and top of the line ingredients to make freaking muffins probably has a digital scale in their kitchen and if not is likely willing to buy one.

Phew, so glad I got that off my chest! I just hate it when people are adamant about something and then basically do the exact opposite of what they’re asking you to do. WTF lady, help us novice bakers out here!

Linking up with WTF wednesday over at Funny or Snot.

Surviving Ikea and Beach Reno part 2

view from my room

Last Wednesday the Husband and I went to Ikea to order all the furniture for the beach house and to finally put an end to the drawn-out discussions on the merits of one sofa bed over another, one type of chair over an other and on and on, but what in fact happened was us almost putting an end to our marriage.

This is nothing new, every single couple I know fights when in Ikea for some reason or another, it’s the curse of Ikea. But what normally is nothing more than a spat that resolves itself in the walk from couches to dining room sets turned into a blown out of all proportion bonanza of passive aggressiveness not seen since the wedding planning days, due to the fact that we were in Ikea for eight straight hours. Yes, eight hours. We had both lunch and dinner there. It’s a miracle we didn’t get divorced. It’s actually an even greater miracle that we chose, ordered and paid for all of the furniture for a three bedroom apartment, kitchen and closets included (as houses in Italy come with none of these things, plus we’re renovating so the point is moot anyway).

Anyway, the apartment will look AMAZING, if I do say so myself… if cheaply furnished. When we saw the total amount we spent we almost clapped our hands in glee. I mean, it’s not like they were giving furniture away for free or anything, but compared to what one usually spends here to furnish a house… let me just say that we spent less than we would have to outfit just a regular-sized kitchen in a normal store, so you can understand the glee, right?

Anyway, Thursday we went to check on the progress on the apartment and were thrilled to see that the floors were practically completely laid, the kitchen backsplash was up, the walls were whitewashed and the bathroom floors and tiles were almost done. So “YAY!” was our initial reaction, thinking of our basically certain two week vacation at the end of august in our new house. HA! What’s that they say about chanting victory before the battles done? But first, here are some pics:

Entrance as seen from inside the house. Not grand but all our own!

just wanted you to see the cute little sign they have to put on construction sites.

Living room side - see the floors?! Yes, that's my tush in the background.

Kitchen side! the backsplash has a few decorated tiles, but you can't tell from this angle, will take a better shot next time.

hallway leading to bedrooms and bathrooms

pink bathroom! 

green bathroom! (not yet fully tiled when this photo was taken, but all done now!)

So, as we gleefully plan the last jobs that need doing, the plumber coming in to put a few vital things in (like toilets), the electrician finishing up, what color we wanted to paint the walls and such, we ask when the windows and doors would be arriving. Windows and doors we ordered the first week of July. Windows and doors that, we were assured, would take no longer than forty days to arrive.

please note the lack of a window.
 also note the husband looking pensive to the side - he's been complaining of being heavily under-featured on here.

The second week of September was the answer we got. The apartment resonated with the sound of our jaws dropping to the ground. 

So there go our hopes of relaxing at the beach before school starts. And the worst part, it’s all our own stupid fault. We know how construction works in Italy, we’ve done this before. They never, ever, never, ever, ever deliver on their promises, if they tell you the house will be ready by mid August count on at least an extra month cause something is bound to go wrong.

At times like these I hate Italy and stupid Italian workers who won’t let me go on vacation. Stupid. And mean. 

view from guest bedroom, not great, but I really like that tree.

Virtual Coffee {13}

Hello friends and welcome for coffee!

We have had some DREARY weather here the last week or so. It’s been raining and raining and then when it stopped raining, it rained some more with no end in sight. It even feels like it starts raining harder whenever I have to leave the house, as some sort of roundabout karmic message coming to me from the great beyond via the weather. A message I don't get, incidentally, so really just a load of wasted effort on the weather’s part if you ask me.

Anyway, I’m still here reeling from the dire predicament I’ve unexpectedly found myself in, you may read about it here (but the short version is the husband’s decided I need to go back to work. Sigh). Men. I swear, it’s like you’re finally getting your things in order, your kids start sleeping through the night (50% of the time), they’re both in daycare in the mornings, and you finally have five minutes to go to the gym or get a pedicure or file away three years worth of crap that’s been piling around, basically you’re finally starting to feel human again and bam a man shows up and slugs you from left field.

Can’t live with them… actually, that’s it, can’t live with them.

No, just kidding, but seriously, he’s so going to regret this decision, you mark my words! Give me a couple of months and he’ll beg me to return to the status quo, work from home, hang with the kids, make sure his life runs smoothly.

Now on to happier subjects: You may remember I mentioned that we were going to start renovating an apartment at the beach, well we started last week! So we’re very excited. It’s great for the husband’s mood as he has a fun project to work on and it’s exactly the kind of thing that I think will really help his recovery, which incidentally is going quite well so far. 

And I’m having fun daydreaming with the Ikea catalogue. In fact, tomorrow I’m off to Ikea to plan the kitchen, so that should be fun (and should also be counted as work, since I have to drive an hour and a half there and back and the apartment is technically the husband’s, don’t you think?).

I’ll start posting before pictures to document the work in progress just as soon as I get over my fear (or laziness) regarding all things photography, it’ll be fun to document this for posterity and also so you can all see how S      L      O     W     ,yet precise, Italian workers are.

I’ll leave you with a picture of the view from the apartment; I look at it often and daydream about next summer.

Yes, next summer. Because although we’re barely at the beginning of June and they’ve already torn down all the walls that needed tearing down and put up all the walls that needed putting up and they pulled up all the floors and ordered all the doors and windows, the apartment won’t be ready until the end of September. September. So though we will start enjoying our seaside weekends this autumn we won’t be able to dip our toes in that gorgeous blue water for another year. And it’s not like we’re renovating Buckinham Palace, it’s a 120sq. meter apartment. I’m baffled by their timeline. But worry not, the mystery will unfold over the next few months and I’ll share with you all the intricate workings of the Italian construction business.

For now, toodles! (and go say hi to Amy!)

What just happened here?

This is a story about how I got screwed the other day, and not in a good way.

So, the husband comes home a few days ago and says: “Isn’t it about time you went back to work?”, and I was like: “Huh?”, and he said: “Because I really think that two and a half years maternity leave is long enough, don’t you? I really need you to go back to work”, and I was all like : “whff fe hlll arya tathing abut?” (mouth was full), and him: “ok, so I need you to start coming in two days a week starting next week and we’ll go from there” and he left and I was left staring after him with a what-the-fuck expression on my face.

You see this is what happens when your husband’s your ex boss. After the boy was born and I went straight back to work but then a year later decided I was no masochist and we didn’t actually need my ridiculous income, I went to my boss-husband and told him I was quitting, I really wanted to be home with the Boy and plus I was pregnant again anyway so I was just going to do the mother thing for a while, and by “for awhile” what I actually meant was “indefinitely”, and he agreed, as long as I kept doing some things from home. Evidently, the husband agreed, the boss did not.

So now, completely out of the blue I’m going to have to go into work two days a week. I realize many of you would kill to be able to work only two days a week, but let me just say that the alternative was not working at all (or very little), so you see how this kind of sucks for me, right? Also, my job, it’s not the kind you can successfully do for only two days a week long term, soon enough it turns into three, then four, then six days a week. I’m just not motivated right now to put all my energy into working. I want to be with the kiddos, and I want to go exercise and grocery shopping in the morning and I want to occasionally have coffee with my friends. Whereas here I am, trying to figure out which two days I can give up without messing with my schedule too much, now that I finally have a schedule down. And all the while the prevailing feeling is one of having been screwed, by my own husband, out of left field.

So basically, I’m just going to have to get pregnant again or something.


Decided to link up here, with this because it just so happens that I had a WTF moment this week, and I think it's a fun idea... especially considering how many WTF I have on a regular basis.

The ugly truth

Ok, I’m just going to come out and say it and propriety be damned, lately my kids irritate the hell out of me.

At bedtime, 9 times out of 10 I want to kill them and be done with it. The crying, the mommy come back, one more story, one more song, stay one more minute, I want milk, I want water, change my diaper… oh my GOD, SHUT UP!!! It never ends, it goes on for hours, and the sad, sad thing is that it’s my own stupid fault. I gave them an inch, and then another inch and then another and two and a half hours later when they’ve taken a mile out of my patience, my willingness to take care of them, to please them, to make them happy I scream at them and then feel guilty all night. It’s a horrible cycle, perpetrated by me, the adult, but how do I get out of it? I have to be firm, I know. I just seem to always take the easy way out, I’m compliant, I coddle them, I do what they want, until I snap and then I don’t and they’re probably wondering who the hell the crazy person is who looks like their mother.

The easy way out always ends up being the hard way out, doesn’t it? Sure it’s easier handing out cookies rather than fruit or yoghurt for snack but then I get hyped up kids for an hour, it’s easier letting them watch tv while we eat but then I find I’m feeding two kids who are perfectly capable of feeding themselves because they’re both completely zonked out watching Diego or Dora or our new fave Tractor Tom.

Will I ever learn? Or are my kids going to start referring to me as Lunatic Mom, kind of like a superhero, maybe? Or more likely a super villain.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how not to want to commit massive murder/suicide every night? Cause, really, apart from bedtime my kids are actually pretty good, and I’m not Insano-Mom.

Oh! Insano-Mom! I kind of like that, a cape-wearing, sword-wielding, bottle-bearing, diaper-changing, time-out-giving, often-screaming super villain type character. I’m off to draw my costume now.

In the Zone

Recently I realized something astonishing: deciding I’m going to lose weight, thinking about losing weight, and angrily putting back clothes that don’t fit on their hangers is not actually helping me lose weight. Unbelievable, I know! I first started talking about this in October and again in November, it’s now practically April and I’ve managed to gain two more kilos. So my strategy was a resounding success.

At this point, I gave myself a long hard look (as I was trying to even out my eyebrows, cause honestly, who’s got time to just randomly stare in the mirror?) and decided to go to a nutritionist. Those who have known me for any number of years can now pick themselves up off the ground where they fell in total shock. Because, no matter how delusional I often am, at this point I cannot but face the fact that wishing myself skinny is just not having the desired effect. So, after much coaxing from my pilates instructor I saw the infamous (in Italy) Dr Gigliola Braga. She is basically Italy’s Zone diet Guru. I did not know this at the time I made the appointment. Had I known I never would have made the appointment, cause honestly, The Zone Diet has always freaked me out just a little bit.

But anyway, in my total ignorance I went and met this thoroughly delightful lady, who explained the diet to me so comprehensively and so enthusiastically that I honestly couldn’t wait to go home and start it. This happened Friday. Obviously, I spent the entire weekend drinking soda, eating cookies, croissants and starches, because despite all the talk about how balanced the diet is, even I was not deluded enough to think there would be a lot of chocolate chip cookie days. So Monday comes, and I’m all excited about my new diet. I sit down for breakfast and eagerly grab the list of foods I can eat for my two whole blocks (this is a zone thing, if you don’t know what it is, I envy you greatly!) at breakfast, and panic ensues.

It starts out fine, one 40g slice of whole wheat bread is two block of carbs, my green tea doesn’t count, I can eat a few nuts for the fats, but what the hell do I eat for two whole blocks of protein, in the morning? Oh, right, an egg. Ok all perfect, let me check the quantities again, weigh the slice of bread and off I go for breakfast. But then I’ve got to do it again at lunch, and snack, and dinner, and soon another snack before bed, and OMG this is driving me crazy! The counting, the weighing the endless consultation of the list, so tonight I realized why people lose weight on the Zone, they would just rather not eat than have to figure out what in the hell they’re allowed to eat and in what unholy combination.

I’ve been told it gets easier. At this point, I’m highly motivated to have it work because more than looking decent in a bikini this summer I really, really want to beat the Zone. I want to show the Zone that I can totally figure it out, I can tame it, in fact by the end of the week I will be so totally in the Zone that I will own the Zone.

Finally, a diet that appeals to my competitive side.

Grammatical Pet Peeves

Just in case you needed more proof of how neurotic I am, I decided to occasionally post on something that drives me completely bananas: Bad Grammar. Now, I concede that my own grammar is not always perfect, I’m a victim to run on sentences like the majority of Italian speakers, but I do know what a run on sentence is. Sure, sometimes I make mistakes too, who doesn’t? I could certainly proofread more, but I believe I do have the basics of grammar and spelling down. Incidentally, a great proofreading tip I got back in my translating days was to change the font, size and even color of the draft often while proofreading, it helps the eye catch mistakes.

So, back to grammar et al. most of the time I mis-grammaticize on purpose, and I make up words on purpose, I know what I’m doing is wrong and I do it for a reason, even though often that reason is apparent only to me. Mostly I do it because I want the writing on my blog to be more colloquial, more spontaneous. So what on earth am I going on about?
 There are mistakes being made all over the ether that are neither justified nor voluntary, they are quite simply the result of bad grammar and laziness. And that’s what drives me nuts. (fragment) So occasionally I’ll post on one such error that particularly irritates me, thus exorcising it, so it no longer bothers me. In this manner I’m hoping to achieve the zen-like calm that appeals to me yet eludes me completely.

Today’s pet peeve is: WOULD OF. What you actually meant to write is WOULD HAVE, in fact word just went all apeshit on me trying to correct it. What I’m talking about here is the third conditional and you use it when you want to talk about something that could have happened, but didn’t, in the past. For example: If I had won the lottery, I would HAVE left my job. (You can use the contraction would've)

In any case, there is no reason on God’s green earth to write “would of”. Ever. So don’t, just don’t.

Gosh, I feel so much better now!