Trying New Things

History in the making: My first time ever buying
holiday decorations for a holiday that isn't Christmas.

All day Tuesday, I was trying to think of ways to break out of my daily rut. Day-to-day is mostly the same-old, same-old, transporting household members to various engagements, tidying up the house, writing, trying to find time to be creative in the evenings between dinner and bedtime while occupying Ruby. I just sort of coast along and coast along doing my little thing, and most days I have no idea what day it is, or how far into the month we are. Mine, like everyone's, is a rote, robotic existence at times. Eat, work, eat, work, eat, play, sleep. Life just moving right on by without you fully in it.

I read my horoscope every morning. Sometimes they're spot on, and sometimes I wonder if they got Taurus mixed up with Virgo. I don't put much stock in horoscopes, especially when it's a mass-produced Yahoo! version of things, but I do like the advice that they give. Here was Wednesday's horoscope:

Have you gotten a bit lazy about exploring new things? It can seem like a lot of work to try something new or investigate a new restaurant to go to with friends. The tried-and-true is so easy and safe! But unless you add a new element of the unfamiliar to your life, how are you going to find any exhilaration or inspiration? Try someplace new today, or start a conversation with a stranger. Keep trying new things until something exciting happens.

So I thought trying something new might be a good way to break out of the rut.  My first thought was to part my hair on the left instead of the right. Because that's how adventurous I am. I thought and thought all day, what can I do, what can I do, what can I do....and aside from taking a scenic driving route or hauling my office up to the dining room table for a day, I could think of nothing new to try that would make much of a difference in my level of exhilaration or inspiration. 

Remember Liz? Ruby's cousin and twice-weekly daycare provider? Well. Let me tell you. Liz has four kids, two in kindergarten and two in diapers, and she has one on the way. Instead of popping into Russ's Market at 8:15 on Kindergarten Christmas Party day to buy a few dozen cupcakes for 42 kindergarteners, she spent a good amount of time gluing pipe cleaners, googly eyes and a red puffball nose to 42 candy canes, turning them into reindeer. For Valentines Day, she's using a new frosting she's been experimenting with to make 42 conversation heart cookies for the kids' classes. She's writing each of the 42 kindergartener's names on the cookies and tying them with ribbon in a cellophane bag. Oh, and did I mention she has four kids? With one on the way? Sometimes I find it difficult to get up the energy and wherewithal to brush my teeth in the morning. 

Liz reminds me of my mom, who made every holiday extraordinarily special, building up excitement and getting creative and festive to make a kid feel really, really loved.

And then there's Ruby, who's growing up with a couple of cranky old cynics. When did holidays become just another damn chore? When did we start complaining about the commercialization of holidays and stop thinking about the meaning? I recently posted about how we're approaching religion with Ruby, given that we aren't religious. Holidays could a perfect opportunity to cover the most basic religious tenets with her. And yet, I don't think I mentioned the Baby Jesus more than once this whole Christmas season.

Liz has given Ruby the Valentine's Day bug with her talk of a wild and crazy Valentine's Day blowout at daycare. Ruby's been talking about it nonstop for three days.  At first I was all, yeah, yeah, Valentines Day, another excuse for buying blood diamonds and lining the pockets of florists and Hallmark, love can't be manufactured, blah, blah, blah. Well, things are what you make them, and I don't have to make Valentines Day another excuse for buying blood diamonds or lining the pockets of florists and Hallmark. I can make Valentines Day and every other holiday about giving Ruby the same kind of warm and happy childhood I had, where my mom enjoyed making holidays something we anticipated with giddy excitement, a day that stood out from the others and seemed to be a different color than the rest.

This morning, as I was taking out the recycling, I remembered that Liz asked me to find a cereal box for Ruby to bring to daycare to decorate for her valentines. And what you just read above is what went through my head as I rummaged through beer bottles and dog food cans. So on the fly, giddy with my sudden and newfound appreciation for holidays, I told Ruby that we should decorate a shirt for her to wear to the Valentines Day party. We went to Hobby Lobby and I bought pink, red and white fabric paint for the first time in my life, along with a cheap little felt and chipboard banner just to solidify the deal. Ruby spent the afternoon painting her trademark layers upon layers on a shirt and a pillow case, both of which are now stiff as a board. We talked about love and hearts, and then for Ruby, it somehow turned into a holiday about blood. Well, whatever. Once she's older and out of her gore phase, we can talk about the origins and the meanings of various holidays. (It'll be interesting to explain the crucifixion to her come Easter.) 

So, try something new. Huh. Screw parting my hair on the side. I'm trying something new that will make Ruby's life a spot happier and ours a spot less cynical. We're gonna start celebrating the holidays with all the trimmings! Valentines, corned beef and cabbage, Easter baskets, hilarious pranks, May baskets, fireworks, carved pumpkins, horns o' plenty, menorahs and all the Christmas bangles and baubles. The Valentine's shirt we made and the decorations we put up today will be my daily reminder to lighten the hell up about the holidays and have fun getting into the spirit with the kid.

God is in Your Stomach

We're not particularly religious around our house. We're not athiest or even agnostic, quite the contrary, but we don't subscribe to any particular religious ideology. The only time we really mention God is when we're taking his name in vain. Both of us grew up religious, him Catholic and me some kind of fundie freakshow drawing on the fear of the Rapture to keep us in line. I'm more skittish than my BFF about the personification of All That Is and the oppression and ignorance that sometimes stems from organized religion, and I am hellbent on not letting Ruby grow up in the dark shadow of paralyzing fear of death and of God and of eternal retribution for her sins like I did. Took me 30 years of hard work to shake it off.

We've had a few discussions about how we will present religion to Ruby. I certainly don't want her going to kindergarten not knowing the essential Bible stories--Noah's Ark, Adam & Eve, Sodom & Gomorrah, Jonah & The Whale, Daniel & The Lion's Den, Josie & The Pussycats and other classics--and I want her to at least be aware of various religious beliefs so that when her friends are being confirmed or celebrating Hanukah or observing Ramadan. she'll have an inkling of what that means to them and won't appear to be a complete philistine. Plus it'll help her do the New York Times crossword puzzle later in life.

The thing is, neither of us is going to sit her down and give her a lesson on the major world religions, so much of what she will come to know of each religion, other than our very broad and unimpassioned version, she will come by in her interactions with those who subscribe to those religions. And my hope is that when she hears something that gives her pause, she'll talk to us about it.

One evening just before Christmas, Ruby was riding her tricycle in manic circles around the kitchen singing this really long, weird song. She told me to say, "Ladies and Gentlemen! Introducing...Ruby Gianna Meza singing God's Song!" I started filming a few minutes in.

GOD'S SONG
by Ruby Meza

He doesn’t know when God is coming to save him.
God, baby Jesus!
God, come!
You don’t know that Baby Jesus is in your heart.
Cause you don’t know her.
We still can’t live in people’s bodies by themselves.
People can’t wander in somebody’s body
cause they can’t go in the dream that they wanna go in.
That they wanna go in.
When they want go in.
God lets them go in
people’s stomachs
and people get some food to eat
and they live in your heart forever.
God lives in your heart forever.
Cause one! two! three!
God lives in your heart forever.
You don’t know what she’s in.
And she doesn’t know that he’s
in your heart forever.
And she doesn’t know
that she’s on the computer
and she wants to sing
like her God and her father
and if she doesn’t know that her little brother
is in his stomach,
but one! two! three!
She doesn’t know that she’s in her stomach.
One! two! Three!
She’s in her stomach
but you don’t live,
he’s in your stomach,
she’s trying to get out of her body.
It’s been a long time to get out of this dishwasher
and God doesn’t know
if she’s pregnant or not. Whoooo!!!

Her daycare providers are her aunt and her cousin Liz, and they're fairly religious, so I assumed that's where she got the God living in your heart forever part. I figured they had talked about the Christmas story at daycare, although I did think it was odd that they would go that deeply into the pregnancy of Mary, with Jesus in her stomach trying to get out. But, whatever. Maybe that's a big part of the Catholic Christmas story.

A few days later, Liz was telling me about how one of the little girls at daycare decided she doesn't want a little brother. Liz told her that it's too late--Jesus already put the baby in her mom's stomach, and so she was getting a little brother whether she wanted him or not. A light went on, and I told Liz about the song Ruby had been singing, and we got a good laugh out of it. It sounds like Ruby got a whole bunch of information that was new to her in a short amount of time, and "God's Song" was my opportunity to see how her little brain wraps itself around ideas that are very difficult for a 4-year-old to grasp, then spits them back out.

Given this song, I'll probably wait a couple of years before trying to familiarize her with the concepts of religion.

A Taste of Stay-At-Home Motherhood

Ruby's daycare has had a run in with the flu, so I'm keeping her home this week. She usually goes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, then spends Thursday at my mom's house doing special stuff with grandma that almost always results in some strange artifact, like an inexplicable lump of baked clay embedded with buttons (it's a paperweight!) or an old Visa bill embellished with bows and stickers and whatever else my mom pulls out of her apron pockets.

That gives me a full day of work three days a week, which is generally sufficient for making what I need to make, although when I have Ruby on Mondays and Fridays, I sneak down to the office whenever the kid is engaged in whatever project I set up for her, whether soaping up her babies in the bathroom sink or watching her Peppa Pig DVD. When she's home, it can take me a whole day to write the same 700-word article that would normally take me a half hour, due to the constant fetching of gum, blueberries, pretzels, oranges, grapes, Starburst or whatever else she decides she needs right this second. Like the napkin she just dropped two inches away on the floor. Or moving her blanket an eighth of a centimeter so that it doesn't touch her neck.

Yesterday was frustrating to say the very least, and I found myself regarding Ruby as more of a distracting annoyance from my writing than my darling child who needs my attention. So today I decided to not even think about writing. I would just take the day off and be a mom.

First we had a tea party, complete with gloves and tiaras. You may recall that I hate to play. A boring old tea party with stuffed animals and my kid dishing out pretend food in a high-pitched voice would have made me nutters, and I would have lasted maybe five minutes. But she wanted to pretend like I was an old friend, and so I came to the tea party wanting to catch up. I asked her about her son and daughter, and about her boyfriend. Here's what I found out:

• Her son fell off the roof and broke his leg and his head. He bled a lot. 
• He was putting water in the chimney for the birds when he fell backwards and landed on the ground.
• His blood was hembrolating. It was hembrolating in his arm and his head and his legs and his eye and his other eye and his cheek and his other cheek and his mouth. I don't know what hembrolating is, but apparently it has to do with lots of blood being all over the damn place.
• He was in a wheelchair the last time she saw him because zombies had eaten his legs. They bled. A lot.
• Her boyfriend has a studio downtown. They kiss all the time.
• Her boyfriend's name is John, but he's not Johnny, the ghost who lives in the fireplace in our TV room.
• Her daughter got kicked out of school for kissing a boy. They kissed like this. The boy didn't get kicked out. 

After the tea party, we embarked on the task of getting Ruby's room in order. Ruby has been sleeping with us for way too long, not because we are believers in the Family Bed (ew, that just sounds icky) but because during her phase of refusing to go to sleep no matter what, I found it easier to plop her in my bed so that at least one of us could rest. But that monster has run its course, and for her birthday, we got Ruby a really cute set of sheets that will hopefully sweeten the deal and make her more likely to want to sleep in her own room, in her own bed. Our faces will enjoy not being kicked every night by deceptively small feet.

After getting her room all set up, I talked Ruby into watching TV for awhile. I thought I was free for at least a half hour to check my stuff and waste some time on Facebook, but unfortunately, Nick Jr. has a conscience and runs these "commercials" between shows that encourage kids to turn off the TV and get off their asses and do something productive. Ruby came rushing into my peace and quiet, wanting to make a car out of a cardboard box. Thanks a lot, Nick Jr.! I put my kid in front of the TV for a reason, and that reason is to keep her occupied, not to give her ideas about how I can keep her occupied myself. If I wanted to do that, I would not put her in front of the TV. Duh.

Normally I would make a hundred excuses as to why we would not be making a car out of a box, the top three of which are:

1. I don't feel like it.
2. It will make a huge mess.
3. Collaborating with a four-year-old on an art project is not a two-way street. It's their way or the highway. If you're like me, you have to gear up to forget all the rules, and even then, it's cringeworthy moment after cringeworthy moment as you watch your child paint the tires pink and yellow and the taillights blue, cut the windows crooked and tear off a four-foot piece of tape to cover a two-inch gap. 

But today was all about not making lame excuses that children don't give a shit about, and so we gathered up a bunch of stuff and spent the rest of the afternoon making a car out of a cardboard box. Unfortunately, I didn't think it through entirely, and now whenever Ruby wants to move from one room in the house to another, she has to get in her "car" and I have to push her wherever she wants to go. But it's a good workout for my butt, so there's that.

It was a good day, but I would not sign up to be a stay-at-home mom unless I was paid a fair living wage as Ruby's executive assistant. 

Apparently, Decorum is Not a Birthright

Three-year-olds say the most inappropriate things, like little drunkards with no sense of propriety, just spewing whatever's on their mind. Yesterday in the packed Target dressing room, Ruby said the following:

"Hey! You don't have any panties on! That's silly, mom!"
"You're all naked, mom!"
"You have a cute little booty."
"I love your vagina."

At Super Saver an hour later, we followed an old lady into the women's room. After Ruby peed, she said:

"Hey, mom! There's one, two, three, four bubbles in my pee!"

I'm just waiting for the day when she REALLY embarrasses me. I work hard at saying only kind things about people in general, even moreso when Ruby can hear me. Still, things slip out, and one of these days she'll probably say something very wrong to the worst possible person. I don't know what, and I don't know who, but just you wait. I'll be posting about it soon, I'm sure of it.

How to Remove Sharpie from Your Kid's Skin

Does your kid ever do this? Tag her face with Sharpie? I learned a neat trick for removing Sharpie ink from the skin during my 11-year stint as a bartender in a music club. I can't count the times I stepped into the women's bathroom to find a gaggle of underage girls slathering their huge Sharpie XXs with lotion and wiping them clean off their hands. Next time your child gets creative with a permanent marker, do this:

Get some decent lotion. Nothing too full of fragrance, which is industry-speak for nasty chemicals.

Slather the lotion over the affected body part.

Wipe gently with a soft tissue.

All clean! 

Now, put the Sharpie back in your personal pen box and give the kid some watercolors to paint herself with. Comes right off in the shower.

The Invasion of the Tiny Plastic Toys

I gathered up this little pile of meaningless garbage while I was going through Ruby's purses and backpacks and plastic grocery bags that she squirrels things away in:

Where does it come from? I never buy this crap, ever. It grows like mold in our house, multiplies like common kitchen pests. Can it even be recycled? I just Googled that and got sucked into watching this short video of a small beach cleanup effort that shows us what washes up with the next wave. Yikes!

Plastic toys in general are the current bane of my existence. They represent everything I hate:

1. Ugly stuff.
2. Clutter.
3. Toys with TV/movie characters on them (see #1).
4. Nasty chemicals disguised as things for little kids to play with and suck on.
5. Thoughtless, wanton consumerism at the expense of clarity, order and aesthetics (see #1 & #2).

One of the (many) reasons I didn't want kids in the first place was because of all the ugly crap that accompanies them, most of it garbage. Molded plastic toys, awkward talking books, cheaply-made stuffed animals, all of it made out of plastic, much of it with BPA, and none of it beautiful to look at. It gets played with once and then becomes another piece of clutter that attracts dog hair and dirt. 

I swore from the beginning that we wouldn't have it in our house. But then Ruby wanted that damned ugly plastic molded cash register so badly, and it was only $1.98 at the thrift store, and now it's in our living room.

I PROMISED MYSELF IT WOULDN'T HAPPEN AND I LET IT HAPPEN AND NOW IT'S INFECTING MY LIVING ROOM. Plus, you know, there's Christmas and birthdays, and our families are so big that the plastic ugliness adds up, and what kind of ingrate would I be if I wasn't thankful that Ruby gets to have new toys twice a year? And what kind of detestable, self-righteous bitch would I be if I insisted to my family that they only buy beautiful things for my kid? Ruby doesn't want beautiful things. She wants a doll that comes with a plastic bottle with yellow liquid in it and a shiny pink car seat with a hideous plastic cover and a tiny pacifier that never stays with the doll for more than a day. She wants a Batman figurine with a cape that comes off and a tiny shooter plastic thing screwed to his arm that houses a tiny little projectile that I find among the dog hair in the vent a week later. 

Fine. But the minute she's old enough to prefer fashion or whatever to toys, I'm scooping it all up and getting it out of my house, and good riddance to bad rubbish. Meanwhile, I try to keep it reined in, try to keep the ugliest stuff in her room, door closed, and the rest of it corralled neatly in the living room. It's her house, too, after all. But that doesn't mean I can't hate plastic toys with every mitochondria in my body and bitch about it to you, my faithful readers. 

Still, iffen I had my way, all of Ruby's toys would come from companies like B. Toys, whose offerings are mostly easy on the eyes, entirely devoid of the meaningless and the pointless, and just plain smart. Ruby loves these toys. I love the packaging. (Jesus, don't even get me started on the insanity that is toy packaging, with all the twine and wires and rubber stoppers and tape and molded plastic you have to open with heavy-duty tin cutters and cardboard inserts and advertising pamphlets and plastic bags with warnings on them...I CANNOT SHUT UP ABOUT TOYS.) And no, this is not a sponsored post. But I'll be happy to write one!

I could go on and on about ugly toys, believe me. But I won't. Because look how much she loves her ugly plastic cash register.

A Conversation with Ruby About God and Batman

Ruby: Why won’t you answer the door?

Me: Because those people want to talk to us about God.

Ruby: Is God real or pretend?

Me: God is real.

Ruby: God is in church.

Me: God is everywhere.

Ruby: What does God do all day?

Me: Well, God is in everything, so everything everything does all day is what God does all day.

A week later…

Ruby, watching Batman: Is Batman real or pretend?

Me: He’s a pretend character, but he’s real in our hearts and our collective consciousness.

Ruby: What does Batman do all day?

Me: Well, he’s the CEO of a huge corporation, so I imagine he goes to the office and works. Sometimes he hangs out in his Batcave waiting to help people who need help.

Ruby: With God?

Me: Sure. 

Ruby's Process

When Ruby paints, she likes to layer color after color after color and mix them and mix them and mix them with the paintbrush, and ends up with these really lush, cool paintings:

Today she was painting squiggly lines, a total departure from her norm:

"I like your painting," I said. 

She looked at me like I was nuts. "It's not a painting, Mom. I'm working on my process."

Fast forward ten minutes later, ten minutes of me gloating about my very own child prodigy, my absolute genius of a child, wondering if it was too early to start her college applications. She came into the room and wanted to perform "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" for me. The kid didn't get a single body part right. Where she should have pointed at her head, she pointed at her shoulders. Where she should have pointed at her toes, she pointed at her ears. And so on.

Thanks for keeping me honest, kid.

How to Keep Your Little Kid Busy While You Get S**T Done

Summer's over. My BFF went back to work today, so it's back to business at home. By business, I mean trying to work and entertain Ruby at the same time. The television goes a long way toward allowing me to write in uninterrupted 25-minute increments, but I try not to plant her in front of it for too long, although she's become an official emergent reader as a result of watching Super Why. She recognizes most of the letters in the alphabet, and is beginning to understand that letters are symbols for sounds. She'll say things like, "S is for soap, Mom!" So yeah, keep up the good work, TV! Save me some time teaching my kid to read. She also watches Batman, Power Puff Girls and The Littlest Pet Shop, which aren't "educational" but introduce her to a wealth of popular culture.

When she's done with TV, I've usually gotten enough done that I can take a break for awhile and pick up the house or do a load of laundry, and Ruby helps a lot with that. (She loves to fold towels and clean the bathroom sink.) Or else she makes huge messes, but whatever. Her messes are usually easy to clean up, and they keep her busy in one place for a long time so I don't have to go looking for her and stumble upon some horrific scene that's going to cost me an hour to rectify.

Here are Ruby's favorite messes to make, and the ones that keep her busy for as much time as I can hope for.

Fun with Corks

We drink a lot of wine, and for some reason (posterity? habit?) we've saved wine corks for the last 12 years. They come in really handy nowadays. I fill a couple of big plastic bowls with corks and set then on the floor, along with a ladle, the blender (she loves that thing for some reason. She never plugs it in, of course.) and a few more bowls of varying sizes. She plays with those things forever.

Go Nuts with Art Supplies

The key to keeping your kid busy with art supplies is to not care if they break the crayons, drown the watercolors or make tiny confetti out of your old gas bill. I set up Ruby on the kitchen table (she sits on it, not at it) and give her the glue, some scissors, some popsicle sticks, a few odds and ends and some paper. She uses way too much glue and tries to mix paint with glue and pours glue into the paint water, but whatever. She's discovering, and she stays at it for an hour at a time.

Let 'Em Help You Clean

When it's time to clean, Ruby wants to help. Sometimes that's good, and sometimes that just means she wants to follow me around and make little messes in my wake. If it's the latter, I offer her a cleaning rag and the spray bottle full of water with 5 drops of tea tree essential oil. I always tell her to go easy on the spray, but she never listens. By the time she's wiped down all the lower kitchen cupboards and the fronts of the appliances, the bottle is pretty much empty, and there's a little river of water on the floor in front of the cupboards. When we're done, I throw down a towel and clean up the water with my feet, scrubbing as I go to get the wayward grime up as well. In this case, her mess turns into a cleaning tool.

Play Dress Up

Ruby is only now discovering dressing up. She never went through the whole princess thing or wanting to wear girly dresses or anything pink. Her favorite outfit since I can remember has been her black skinny jeans and her Batman shirt (Thanks, Mom!) She calls it her "awesome outfit." But recently, she's been caring about her appearance more. She's learning a lot from her big sister about clothes and about "getting ready." And that's what I call "dress up." I'll say, "Ruby, we're going to go to the store later. Why don't you start getting ready?" And she's on it. I filled an old detangler bottle with water, and she uses it to comb her hair. For fifteen straight minutes. Then, she brushes her teeth, which takes another 10 minutes. She spends a ton of time putting on her "makeup," which is some old crap I gave her, along with a clean mascara wand and some old lipstick that's really pale. No matter that she looks like a clown when she's done. We're probably not going to the store after all, and it'll come off in the shower later. Speaking of which:

Take a Play Shower

Whenever we can't find a kitchen utensil, we look in the shower. I know, gross, right? But that's pretty much where we keep our measuring cups and spatulas and whatever else keeps Ruby in the shower for at least a half hour. She loves taking showers, pouring water from container to container and finally over her head. She likes getting all soapy and making soup with her drippings and the like. I end up with a clean kid AND a good chunk of time to write an article or two. The shower floor is always covered with filled containers that turn cold and gross. I need to stay more on top of that mess. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.