Mommy's Pen

A writer's notes on family

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Timeline of Last Evening

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7:00pm Storytime begins.  Nora lays playing with a small flashlight while I read the Flopsy Bunnies.

7:05pm Nora claims she is tired and wants me to stop reading.  I turn out the light and we lay in bed while she plays with the flashlight and is repeatedly warned against kicking her sick daddy.

7:25pm Nora asks to move to her bedroom.  We stop to go potty.  I begin to hiccup.

7:30pm Nora and I lay in her bed.  She mimics my every hiccup.  I use hiccups as an excuse to leave her bed.

7:35pm I decide cereal is the perfect hiccup cure and eat a very small bowl. Hiccups are still heard from Nora’s bedroom.

8:00pm I am in bed reading tweets and all is quiet from Nora’s room.  I can hardly believe my good fortune that she is asleep by eight.

8:02pm Nora bellers from her bedroom, “Mommy or Daddy!”

8:03pm Nora is wide awake and demanding a snuggle.  I lay with her for a few minutes, then make an excuse that Hoover needs to be let outside.

8:15pm Nora bellers down the hall again.  I walk halfway down the hall and use my sternest voice to call, “Nora, go to sleep.”  To my amazement, this works.

8:30pm I’m pretty sure this is when I fell asleep.

10:30pm Hoover wakes me up to let him outside.

1:30am Nora calls out from her bedroom.  I drag myself to her bed.  She winds herself around me and seems to fall back to sleep.

1:32am Nora sleep talks, “Mommy, all the bears died.”

“Go to sleep,” I whisper.

“Mommy, all the bears died.”

“How?”

“They just died, so don’t worry about it.”

 1:35 I drift off to sleep, wondering what happened to the bears.

Best Laid Plans

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Ben and I took this week off to build a fence and put in the vegetable garden.  It has poured down rain every day.  The soil was perfect for tilling a week and a half ago; now it is a soggy mess.

Monday was the only day the forecast didn’t guarantee rain, so we took Nora to the zoo.  We saw:

  • a male black bear named “Tough” get the bejeezus scared out of him by an intimating, glossy black female (all she did was approach him quickly);
  • a really big frog;
  • a cougar who took a particular interest in Nora and kept looking from her to me, as if asking me for permission to let her in to play (or be eaten);
  • a baby elephant messing with a huge log in the swimming hole (I kept thinking of my mother-in-law who has a weakness for baby elephants —  she would have been a puddle);
  • two otters who thought very highly of themselves, displaying back-flip skills against the aquarium glass;
  • some primates, who make one question the whole concept of a zoo, so human and forlorn do they appear;
  • and a pride of lions casually lounging on some rocks.  They looked like they could jump the ravine and pick off a few middle schoolers any time they felt like it. 

Farmer wanna-be that I am, my favorite exhibit was the family farm, with miniature cows, goats, chickens and a raised bed garden.  I now want raised beds.  This would be advantage in a number of ways, the biggest one being there would be no annual argument about if we should till and when we should till.  You build the bed, put great soil in it and leave it the hell alone.  The soil doesn’t get trampled by dogs and toddlers and it warms faster in the spring, so early planting can begin without concern about the tiller wrecking early crops come May.  And they look cool.

It’s ten years since we moved to Portland, the webs between our toes have fully formed — so we forged ahead on constructing the fence around our garden, it is nearly complete.  Putting in the garden beds will have to wait for a few weeks of dry weather.  I’m trying to roll with it, but sometimes I get a bit uptight about gardening.  I strive for Martha Stewart like tidyness in the garden which is not realistic without a staff of dozens and oodles of cash.  And she doesn’t have a toddler to contend with.  Nora’s garden enthusiasm is strong, but she’s a soil tromper and will tear open a seed packet and fling seeds every which way.  My only hope of keeping her as my garden companion is to chill out. 

In the meantime, I can catch-up on laundry, because if Martha Stewart saw my basement right now, she’d be appalled.  Do I care what she thinks?  Not really.  But Nora’s almost out of clean underwear.