I Don’t Like Mondays

It's 9:04 a.m.

I am at work, sitting in my office in comfortably low light, looking at a photo of my beautiful daughter taken back in the summer. I have just finished a bowl of oatmeal, garnished with blueberries, dried cranberries, and coconut.

So far, this has been one of those days that I will think about later on when I'm wrestling with the work/life balance question. When I look back at "that January when Nora was 16 months old."

Nora has been sick lately. She caught a cold right after Christmas and this manifestation came with a croupy cough and morning stuffiness. I feel for her, because I have been fighting it as well. The cough is now going away (two weeks later) but she still coughs for a bit after waking up – understandable, as all that snot from her nose has likely run down there through the night. Last night, she woke up screeching at 1 a.m. and could.not.be.consoled, until I realized that the whole front of her sleeper was soaked in pee – another diaper breach, which is happening more and more lately. She doesn't like it. After struggling to change a hysterical twisting Nora in the dark, and hubby getting her a nice little bottle of water (I know, counterintuitive but she loves it), she settled back down. Half an hour, all told, which isn't too too bad.

I hauled my butt out of bed four and a half hours later, after hitting snooze a couple of times. Had my shower, and then went to the basement to get the second half of my outfit, which was still in the dryer. I saw a red blob at the bottom of the stairs and was concerned, since I knew it had something to do with the cat (the dog can't get down to the basement), and she's diabetic with recently questionable health. By the time I got all the way to the bottom of the stairs, I realized it was a barfed-up half-digested mouse. I know this, because I found its face, staring up at me whiskers and all. I pulled my clothes out of the dryer while suppressing my own barf, and tiptoed back upstairs carefully avoiding the pile of yuck.

Next I prepared a bottle – a bit larger than normal, maybe 1.5 oz more than she usually gets in the morning - and went up to Nora, who was still sleeping in full jellybean mode (on her tummy, hands tucked under, bum in the air – it is the cutest thing and getting her out of it breaks my heart). I pulled her out of bed and gave her her bottle, which she took eagerly. Her stomach was making hungry groans and her slurping was noisy, mostly because her nose was stuffy. She finished the bottle fairly quickly, and sat up, still sleepy. She does this cute thing where she sits up, rubs her eyes, then puts her arms around me and her head on my chest. It melts my heart. So I held her for a delicious minute, smelling her hair, then picked her up and took her downstairs to change her diaper and get her dressed. I always lay out her clothes the night before, so I have the time to wrestle her into them, which lately takes a good 15 minutes all told.

I put her down on the change mat and got her diaper off, wiped her bottom, and she coughed. Just a small cough, nothing crazy, but it caused a bit of spit up to come out the side of her mouth. Understandable, ok, I go to wipe it up with the arm of the pyjamas I was taking off. I was halfway to her mouth when a bit more came out. Uh oh. Then BLAAAAAAAAGGGGHHH the stream issued forth, out of her mouth, her nose, and possibly even her ears, I can't be sure. Barf has now sprayed all over the mat, her hair, the books that were lying nearby, a couple of toys, and the adorable clean outfit I'd prepared. Curdled milk all over everything, puddling on my nice wool rug. I'm pretty sure the entire bottle ended up outside of her body.

So she is very (understandably) upset, I'm flipping her over trying to clear her airways while also selfishly trying to keep her barf off of my own clean work outfit. She is giving me a horrible "mama help me!" face and I make her sit there, miserable, naked, while I run for some clean washcloths to wipe up the mess but I don't really take the time to make the water hot, so I had to wipe her with a cool washcloth, which I imagine feels miserable at 6:45 on a January morning. The poor little bean. I wiped off her books and propped them up to dry. I managed to diaper her and put her undershirt on and thankfully Daddy woke up at that point and came down to be with her while I went up to pick out new clothes. I bundled all of the barfousness (change mat, pyjamas, cute fresh outfit, two washcloths, 6 oz of barfed up milk), and headed back down to the basement, around the mouse face, and tossed everything into the washing machine, set to wash. Back upstairs, upstairs again to get clean clothes, and finally dressd Nora who protested – as usual – and would only put her pants on when I convinced her that she can't go outside and visit Frosty (our snowman) without pants.

I bundle us both up and am heading out the door when hubby yells that we have no water. No water. No freaking water. Here is the sum total of the water used so far today: I flushed the toilet once. I had a 7-minute shower. I soaked two washcloths, and started a load of laundry. It's my feeling that our well ought to have enough water in it to handle these small tasks. What this means is A) we have a plumbing issue somewhere or worse, B) we need a new well/our well drilled deeper, as well as C) the load of barf laundry is sitting there with only a drizzle of water on it, for the entire day. In the mouse-facey basement. This also means that hubby has to go over to my parents' place to shower, since he has not cleaned himself since Saturday afternoon.

Anyway, I dropped a pretty-cheerful Nora off at Oma's, then encountered a huge asshole driver on the road to wakefield, where I met my girlfriend in pretty good time. We got in slightly late, but the roads were a bit greasy and traffic was bad. I had my oatmeal, and got an email from a friend with some nice news. I am almost ready to greet my day.

My hand still smells a bit like barf, so I am off to the washroom. I do not like Mondays.

Cleansing vs. Cleaning

I have a number of facebook friends who, on this New Year's Day of 2012, are proposing cleanses, lifestyle changes, resolutions and the like. I applaud them! I really do, I really hope they can make positive changes in their lives if that is what they are inclined to do. And if I were a different, more motivated kind of person, I too might take this opportunity to make some kind
of statement of intention to make positive changes in my own life. Only I know myself too well.

I once did the stereotypical join-a-gym-in-the-new-year thing. I signed up, bought running shoes and loaded up my mp3 player, and gamely went to work with a gym bag of dopey clothes and good intentions. I think I lasted 3 weeks. My problem wasn't that I didn't enjoy it (ok I found it boring as shit to tell you the truth, I think there's nothing at all interesting about staying in one
place trying to move constantly), but that I hated my gym clothes and felt phony. Every time I put them on I thought "I have the ugliest old gym clothes in this place" but I was unwilling to invest any more money in the venture, and I felt like a fraud in anything more jazzy/lululemony. I am not an athletic person and I do not feel comfortable dressing like one.

So I found various reasons to quit. I'm not sure what my exact justification was.

And I often come across lists (because I like to make lists, and I have books of them) of foods that I at one time or another pledged to eat or not to eat FROM NOW ON. None of these lists were adhered to. I have similarly found lists of budgets that I should stick to, books I should read, and activities I should take up. Once I came upon a list I'd made of things to do before I die, where I'd written numbers 1 through 50 down the left-hand column, but only came up with about five or so activities. I aim low.

So I resolve once again to make no resolutions this New Years. Phew it feels so good to be let off the hook by myself so early in the game. Oh sure, I vaguely pledged to worry less, be nicer to my husband, and keep my house cleaner but we all know that none of that is likely to change overnight. I yam what I yam: a messy paranoid meanie.

However, I did kick off the new year by doing one onerous cleaning task: I sorted out my kitchen cupboard. It's the cupboard (actually two doors, covering three shelves) over my main prep area, where I keep basically all of my smaller ingredients, spices, baking stuff, etc. For years I have just piled things on top of other things and let them accumulate, wedging miscellaneous spices and crap into the front one inch of shelf space as it came along. See? A mess. So the other day I was irritated by it and I tackled it.

In addition to discovering that many of my herbs and spices no longer had any recognizable scent besides "dust" and that I was storing a few empty jars in the cupboard, I found the following ridiculousness:

- two near-full bags of shredded coconut
- 4 bags of dried thyme
- 3 bags of icing sugar
- 3 bags of rock-hard raisins
- 2 full cartons of molasses
- a HUGE jar of 'ground amchur' (mango powder?) that I bought once for
an Indian recipe that required, like, a teaspoon of it. I have had
approximately six pounds of mango powder hanging around for 11 years.
- 2 full jars of instant coffee (we do not drink instant coffee)
- a big jar of green flakes that I at first suspected might be someone's
stash of marijuana, but turns out to be a pile of real green loose-leaf tea
- no less than 5 jars of honey. For this I blame the Austrians and the Germans - every time they come and leave whatever place they have rented/occupied, they bring us their unused food, and they like honey. We always get the leftover honey (and pasta, pounds and pounds of it). Same with pesto - I must have 7 jars of pesto in my fridge.

I also found about four half-bags of rice so old that it had yellowed, about 7 different kinds of lentils, various jars of mystery powder (don't get excited, most came from the bulk barn), and two unopened boxes of salt that are hard like bricks. There were a lot of 'what the hell is this?' moments, where I sniffed a jar or a bag and set it aside.

Here is a shot of my cupboard, taken AFTER the great cleanse. Hubby says "this still looks like a 'before' shot." har har. Note: shelves are still sagging, though they are propped up behind that middle bar. Don't worry, my lentils are safe.

I realized a few things during this process: 1. I am a food pack rat, and 2. I have weird friends. How many friends do you have who have gifted you with strange bundles of herbs for asian soups and packets of agar agar powder? A giant bag of loose green tea from China? Three different friends. Lumps of cane sugar? Part of Christmas gift 2006 from friend #2, may have come with the agar agar powder. I feel like some kind of minor deity, with all these food offerings. I guess my friends also know that I am a food pack rat. I was just given several lovely foil-wrapped packets of Korean tea and from this paragraph you may surmise that I am into tea, but actually I am not. Sorry friends. I drink really mundane coffee from a crappy percolator, hate to disappoint.

As I write this I am plowing through a baggie of Christmas-issue jelly belly jellybeans. Just ate one that tasted suspiciously of barf.

So I am not making any resolutions, just taking this break as an opportunity to start fresh with certain things, get some chores done, try not to disgust myself anymore with my gross food hoarding. I may make a minor promise to get through the 7 jars of pesto and 18 kilos of pasta, to prepare all of those lentils somehow and to stop buying things in bulk and forgetting
to label them.

Here's to 2012. I promise to follow all of your exploits in self-betterment with mild fascination from my spot on the couch. Cheers to you all.