Flashback Friday is BACK! (The Rub)
Every Friday, I post an oldie but a goodie blog for your enjoyment. To those of you who just started reading The Grownup Girl recently, enjoy the “new” blog! To those of you who have been with me from the start, but have memories like mine, enjoy the “new” blog!
And to those who were with me from the start and who already read this blog and burned it into your memory, word for word, photogenically, I say:
What are you doing wasting your time dilly-dallying on my website? Get out there and find me a book deal!
If you hate to read, just click on the audio link, below.
BatSheva (BatSheva Vaknin) – The Rub – the BLOG
Usually, there are three ways I can put my one year old daughter to sleep.
#1: the easy way. Only happens if her nap is cut short and she’s very tired. In this case, she will nurse and fall asleep almost immediately after (or during) – no matter if her 2 sibs are still making noise (all 3 kids share a bedroom).
#2: the sucky way. Most often, the baby will be wide awake and want to play, nurse me dry, then play some more, then scream her lungs out and try to climb out of her crib, long after the 2 older sibs have passed out from exhaustion & from the sheer hopelessness of getting me to hear what they want to say over baby’s sleepless wails.
#3 the best way – my husband puts her to bed, or a babysitter does, in which case she will usually rest her head on their shoulder and allow them to put her to sleep within a matter of seconds.
But the other day… A 4th way was born!
I was alone with the 3 kids, Husband working late. It was much later than their usual bedtime, but 2 factors were working against me – 1, Baby had taken too long of a nap, I think over two hours, and 2, I had given her a bottle of almond milk to keep her busy while I helped Husband prepare for his meeting, and this milk has so much sugar that it woke her right up.
Brilliant planning, I know…
So as usual, the 2 bigger kids were giving me a bit of trouble, but both dropped off pretty quickly once the requisite hazing period was over. I was just starting to steel my shoulders in preparation for the screaming and crying and flailing from Baby as I refused to let her leave her crib, when I remembered something my mother had said to me once. When we were visiting my parents – not even our most recent trip, but I think it was the trip 1 year ago – my mom told me the baby fell asleep easily with her after she gave her a “baby massage”.
What the hell, right?
I started rubbing and gently kneading Baby’s shoulders and arms.
Holy crap.
Girlfriend lay still, relaxed, and loose, lapping up the feeling it was giving her. Encouraged, I kneaded her little chunky thighs, her calves, those romping stomping feet, back up to the shoulders, the arms, the hands. I even worked on her ears, her eyebrow bones and her chin. I was SO Burke Williams.
After a few quiet murmurs and a roll here and there… she yawned once and fell asleep.
Score!
To sleep , perchance to dream… my turn now.
c/xo
Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
How do they KNOW?
Can I ask you something?
How do those little buggers just KNOW?
Explanation: kids have an uncanny 6th sense. I’m not talking about remembering their past life, seeing and/or talking to angels, speaking in a language they’ve never been taught, or any number of the other spiritual abilities I’ve heard comes naturally to many kids.
I’m talking about the ability that comes naturally to ALLLL kids.
Knowing just when to bother Mommy.
Por ejemplo. Exactly two minutes into any phone call I make or receive while my kids are at home, one child starts to whine for me. Thirty seconds later, the wailing begins, and three minutes into the call, all three kids are sobbing and/or cage-fighting each other in a manner that not only forces me to end my call abruptly, but also no doubt causes the person I’m on the phone with to consider calling social services.
This never fails. And yet, somehow, I STILL believe “the next call will be different”.
Maybe it’s the fact that they start in two minutes into the call. If they started RIGHT as I received or made the call, I’d know what was going on. But instead, each time, with each new call, I am lulled into a false sense of security, privacy, comfort of personal space and feeling that I will be able to conduct this phone call… with my mom/friend/teacher/client/sister/father/credit card company/PRESIDENTOFTHEUNITEDSTATES,DON’TYOUGETIT,ITDOESN’TMATTERWHOIAMONWITH,THEBUGGERSDON’TLEAVEMEINPEACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! –
Ahem.
As I was saying, that first minute of quiet as I conduct each phone call tricks me into thinking that THIS time, THIS phone call, I will be left alone…
In peace.
HA.
Working on my computer/checking emails is exactly the same, with the only added benefit that only I hear the screams, wails, sobs and pleading, whereas the person I am doing work for/emailing is blessedly ignorant of the ruckus my attention to them has caused.
The only interesting sidebar here is that while the kids go completely Cuckoo for CoCo Puffs when I’m involved in a creative, work or communicative endeavor (phone/email/writing), they actually leave me almost completely alone, in peace, when I’m doing dishes, laundry, or otherwise cleaning the house.
Sorry, THEIR house.
Ahhhh, now I get it.
c/xo,
Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
Hey mom! No, it's cool, keep talking on the phone. I'll just wipe all this on the new curtains, k?
Vacation’s All I Ever Wanted
Sometimes I have trouble getting lost in the moment. Perhaps this is why I don’t like cooking – it’s impossible for me to put food into a pot without already visualizing what it’s going to take to clean that pot later on. Similarly, I like to clean because I like things clean – but I have a hard time sweeping up crumbs, dirt, wood chips and other tiny items from the floor without already bracing myself for the new layer that will surely appear once all three kids descend on the house after school.
A dear friend of mine used to make me laugh, regaling me with stories about how his cleaning-obsessed mother used to scream at him and his brothers if they walked into the living room, since she had inevitably just vacuumed. Then she would chase them back out and re-vacuum her beautiful floor, kids be damned. They’ll be fine outside; it’s not snowing!
Ha. Ha.
I have so become that mom. Back in the good ole “full time cleaning lady” days of yore, I used to snack on rice crackers and chips and challah bread right alongside my husband and children, caring little whether I left a Hansel and Gretel trail behind.
Now?
I still let my kids and husband eat in the living room. I haven’t yet succumbed to my friend’s mother’s deepest instincts to chase them out with a broomstick, shouting, “Shoo! SHOO!”
But it is hard – nay, impossible, for me to watch them enjoying their snack without already seeing the layer of snack snowdrift that will accumulate once they have satiated their cravings.
This tendency of mine is causing arguments between me and my husband, too. He suggests a new idea, a new venture, and I’m excited! But I also mention all the work that will be involved, manifesting that new idea. This gets him upset – why am I such a buzz kill? Why must I shut him down at the moment he first lets a new idea fly?
Why indeed?
I’d go ponder it over a bowl of cereal. But I hate how the milk always drips onto the tablecloth.
What? This place is like one giant perpetual load of laundry.
Okay, I think I need a vacation. Translation: a maid.
c/xo,
Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
They SO have the right idea.
How Conveeeeenient
So my husband’s eyes? Gorgeous. Deep brown, thick lashes, windows to a beautiful soul… But in the “vision” category, not quite a 10 out of 10. I think I remember a time when we first dated (10-ish years ago) when he didn’t squint as he read small text. But we all know what kind of memory I have, so I may just be making that time up altogether.
What matters is now, and now… my husband needs reading glasses.
Mind you, my husband HAS glasses. They just aren’t the right strength. For years, he argued to me that if he would just do a half hour of eye exercises per day, his eyes would retain their prior eagle’d glory. And I get it – my wrists have never been the same since I was pregnant with my 2nd child, and to this day (6 years later), I am still absolutely convinced that somehow, someday, with the right combination of diet/meditation/doctor treatments/healings/acupuncture/medicine/exercise/denial, they will once again regain their former imperviousness to pain and downward dog.
But for now, my wrists are fragile and my husband’s eyes are not seeing 20/20.
I got so tired of seeing him squinting like crazy as he stooped to read a text or email, that I began badgering him to go to an eye doctor and get a proper prescription months ago. Finally, last month, he went! He got new glasses! He wore them! He stopped squinting!
And then he stepped on his glasses.
He had the lenses refitted to different frames… but the magic was gone, the spell broken. Those frames soon broke too, and as if no eye doctor’s visit had ever been paid, back he went to CVS Drug Store to by the over-the-counter glasses he had used for so long.
The kind that are about 2 points weaker than his actual lens prescription.
Yeah, there’s been a lot of squinting as of late.
But something else… when I brought up the issue of toothpaste stains on the sink that he hadn’t wiped away, he mentioned that he hadn’t seen them.
HADN’T SEEN THEM?
Ahhhhhh…. methinks me understands.
No can see… no need clean.
Pretty sneaky, sis.
c/xo,
Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
The drawer where hubby's glasses go to die.
The Best Mother’s Day… a Dream in Words
As I sat down to list the top five or ten things a mother REALLY wants on mother’s day (to be able to sleep all night uninterrupted, all the way until 11am if she wants to, to be given space and time to catch up on her favorite novel, to be treated by her husband to brunch, to be given flowers, jewelry, taken out to the movies – or allowed to go on her own), something occurred to me.
For our birthdays, we generally want stuff that we need or would love to have, but don’t have or want to spend the funds necessary to buy them for ourselves. Jewelry, new sneakers, a mani/pedi – these and other gifts are perfect for birthdays because they spoil us in a way that we’d like to spoil ourselves were we not so darned frugal.
The funny thing about Mother’s Day gifts is that the actual list looks similar to that of a birthday – mani/pedi or spa day, jewelry, new sneakers, a night out – but the idea behind them is very specific:
On Mother’s Day, we want to be given the exact things we can’t indulge in regularly exactly because we are moms.
Like a spa day. On a birthday, we appreciate a spa day gift certificate because it’s an indulgence we wouldn’t allow ourselves to purchase for ourselves. On Mother’s Day, we appreciate a trip to the spa because WE WANT TO GET THE HELL AWAY FROM OUR KIDS FOR A FEW HOURS.
Let’s get real, moms.
Being a mom is great but it’s hella hard work. “Mother’s Day” is every day for us – what we really want on Mother’s Day, therefore, are “Single Girl” gifts: flowers, jewelry, getting pampered for a day, or a movie night. Perhaps the best example of this is our favorite “Mother’s Day” Single Girl gift (take note, dads): 10 or more hours of uninterrupted sleep. (Single girls – you may protest here – I know you wake up early to go to the gym or work, and stay up late watching TV, partying, or studying, but really, how many of you can say you’ve spent 5 out of 7 nights a week getting woken up and then spending 5 to 120 minutes of those mid-night waking hours trying to soothe a child back to sleep? EVERY week? For SIX years straight? Thoughts not.)
Judge us if you want, but the real desire of every mother, every Mother’s Day, is not crayoned pictures from your little ones or breakfast in bed.
It’s a few hours – nay, let’s be real – 24 hours, of blissful quiet, grownup fun, and peace.
A Grownupgirl can always dream…
c/xo,
Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
This was the daughter (tall one in the back who looks exactly like I did when I was 6) who DIDN'T cry her lungs out during their school's most excellent Mother's Day brunch today.
Merple
My husband and I have a pretty awesome arrangement when it comes to division of household labor. He cooks, and I (usually) clean. He also gardens, by the way, which means not only do we have a beautiful backyard, we also have an edible back yard – tomatoes, peppers, artichokes, strawberries and lettuce keep happy company with our fig, grapefruit, loquat and lemon trees.
So what could ever go wrong in this veritable Eden of a home?
Sorry, did you not read what I wrote in the first paragraph? I USUALLY CLEAN.
Which, let me clarify, I am NOT complaining about. At the moment.
No, what I am complaining about right now is not cleaning per se – it is, quite specifically, cleaning a particular cutting board who for the sake of this blog I’ll just call “Merple.” (He doesn’t deserve a regular human name.) Merple sucks. He is gigantic, heavy, and doesn’t have a handle. His surface has deep grooves, which makes him extremely hard if not impossible to clean completely, especially after something tomato-y and oily has spilled on him.
Now take my favorite two cutting boards, Mavis:
Ain't she a cutie pie?
and Pearl:
Sweet as candy!
They are adorable! Lightweight, smooth, colorful, easy to use, easy to clean and of course they have handles. Neither Mavis nor Pearl has EVERY given me trouble.
Merple, on the other hand?
Of course my husband LOVES to use Merple.
Uses him any chance he gets – whether it’s to cut chicken, lettuce (no, not exactly in that order, I do know a few things about sanitary rules), chiles, lemons and anything else he can dig his knife into. Loves, loves, LOVES Merple.
Ergo, I get stuck cleaning Merple, just about every day. Often several times a day.
Yesterday, as I soaped and scrubbed Merple for like the 20th time, trying to erase the color orange from his belly, he slipped out of my grasp (no handle, remember?) and banged down on my finger, slamming it against the counter, hard. My fingertip STILL hurts today.
Merple.
c/xo,
Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
Asshole.
Cold Case (adilla)
Many of you know about the “cooking dynamic” that exists in my household. That is, my husband is an amazing cook – a veritable rice whisperer – and I, dear readers… am not. An amazing cook. Whatsoever.
Most days, my husband is able to either cook for our family, or I am able to re-heat something he cooked for our family a day or two prior. But SOME days, as you can imagine… we’re on our own, me and the kids. And the food I cook.
Sorry, I meant the food I “cook.”
Because some days, we just have hot dog popsicles – no cooking required! I think I could give Jessica Seinfeld a run for her money – who needs broccoli baked into meatballs when you can take a cold (pre-cooked) hot dog out of its packaging and hand it to your kids, encouraging them to “eat up! Hot dog popsicles for everyone!”
I admit, my son doesn’t like them cold, so I will usually go to the lengths to “cook” it for him – AKA, dropping it into a long coffee mug, filling the mug with automatic boiling water from our kitchen sink filter, let sit for 5-10 minutes, and… voila! A “hot” hot dog.
Another one of my favorite meals that I’ve distilled down to a no-cook dinner are “cold cases” or cold quesadillas. Don’t get me wrong, my kids do love a hot quesadilla – and it’s really not too hard for me to “cook” a couple slices of cheese atop a store-bought quesadilla, fold the thing over, then serve. But perhaps my children have unconsciously picked up that their mother does not love cooking – (Could it be from those times when I have unceremoniously announced, “I HATE TO COOK!”? God only knows…) – and therefore more often than not, they just ask for a ‘cold case’ instead of a hot one.
So that’s what I give them: A couple slabs of pre-sliced cheddar, rolled into a cold tortilla, and… voila! A delicious cold case, ready-to-order.
But what about greens, you may ask? My husband makes one of the most delicious green salads you will ever taste. And while I do make a decent Israeli salad (tomatoes & cucumbers), who has time for all that chopping? I prefer giving my children cucumbers “au natural.” No, you are not wrong – I give them a whole cucumber, and the little buggers are smart! They know to bite off each end and spit the ends into the trash before eating the cucumber entire.
On days when I feel the children absolutely MUST eat something hot? I generally stick to one of three reliable standbys: 1) Deep fried Fish Sticks, 2) Deep fried Chicken Nuggets, and 3) “Soupy and Rice” whereby I take a scoop of their father’s rice cooked the day before and add it to a steaming hot bowl filled with powdered soup mix & filtered boiling water.
Hey? Where are you going? Weren’t you and your child going to stay for supper???
c/xo,
Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
Who says Mama can't cook? Hot dogs for everyone!
Reality Me
Blogging. Reality “TV” for those of us who can’t get a Kardashian deal?
I hate to think that. I prefer to think of myself as a would-be writer who uses blogging as a creative outlet.
But let’s get real.
It’s not exactly as if I’m writing tomes on Shakespeare, or even gossiping about fashion or celebrities. (Well, sometimes I am. But that’s different.)
I’m writing about ME. My life. My thoughts. And while I actually love to read other writers who write about their personal lives (engaging ones, anyway, like Sedaris, Tina Fey and Sarah Silverman, and the 30+ other authors of memoirs I’ve poured through), and I love to write about things ‘close to home’ (duh, ME), it IS a little disconcerting to realize that people I don’t know, or what’s actually even worse, people I DO know but don’t know that WELL, now know me… very well.
They know, for example, that I’m a bad cook. That I hate to clean. That I’m low on dough. That I’ve been on diets that have worked, and diets that haven’t. That I am a Jew who celebrates Christmas. That I changed my name. That I put safety pins in my bras to make them last longer. I’ve written about losing my virginity, for crying out loud!
[BTW - SO annoying that some of my old blogs have disappeared & MOST of the pictures/videos from my older blogs have disappeared. But since I'm as techno-stupid as they get when it comes to 'computers' - other than tapping on their keyboards to make pretty stories - I have little choice but to cringe and move on...]
So, anyway, occasionally, when I’m out and about and I run into someone whose name I don’t remember but whose face I’ve seen around, and that person gives me that knowing smile and eye-crinkle, I can only assume it is likely that he/she has read my blog.
Hmmmmm…..
Conundrum: I WANT more & more people to read my blog. I apparently suffer from a bit of a “Kim Kardashian Complex,” AKA I’m happy to put my private self in the public eye. (NO sex tapes, thank GOD – coming of age sexually during a pre-cell-phone video/YouTube age has its advantages!) And yet…
I feel pretty vulnerable when people give me that look.
Ok, readers: eyes averted, from now on!
Just kidding. Read, enjoy, look away. I’ve asked for it, and I’ve gotten it.
Toyota.
(couldn’t resist)
c/xo,
Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
Me, in front of one of those PR party-sponsorship boards, pretending to be on the red carpet. When in reality, my friend and I had snuck over after the celebrities had already entered in order to snap photos of each other.
WHY I’M NOT IN BED YET
It’s 9:51pm. I’ve made a commitment to myself to go to bed by 10pm (which means I’ll be in bed by 11pm). I put kids to bed, participated in a PTA fundraiser hour long conference call, and while they spoke about items I’m not involved in, I pushed mute and washed the dishes and put away groceries I bought earlier (or rather, forgot to push mute, then got about 10 people annoyed as they heard me wash dishes thru my phone and THEN pushed mute), and when I finished cleaning the kitchen and finished putting the laundry in the dryer, I sat down….
…to write the PTA mass email I had committed to write.
I wrote that email. A beautiful, color-coded, bolded in just the right places, web links inserted, just-the-right-amount-of-cheery email. And as I cut & pasted the email addresses into the “to” box and prepared to click “send”…
My Outlook crashed.
***
Wait – no biggie, right? Restart it, and check my “drafts” folder, and… voila!!
It wasn’t there.
It had disappeared.
Poof.
WAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
So instead of re-writing it, I decided to vent.
(Sorry, my dearest readers. This is not my finest hour.)
But I have to get this off my chest:
Not cool, Outlook.
Not.
Cool.
whew.
c/xo,
Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
If I KNEW how to use photoshop, I'd draw a LARGE UGLY RED X OVER YOU, MICROSOFT OUTLOOK! AND A SKULL AND CROSSBONES! I'M STICKING MY TONGUE OUT AT YOU NOW!!!!!! 
Glue on the Walls
Cleaning one’s own home can be a slippery slope. I know it’s true that when someone else has cleaned my home in the past, I have been sensitive to areas that were neglected, especially after I asked them to be cleaned.
But when it’s all up to me?
I take the cleanliness neurosis to a whole new level. On the one hand, I am obsessed with the parts of my house that are not clean. On the other hand… I do not succeed to actually “clean” those areas I’m obsessed with. Thus the cycle perpetuates.
Por ejemplo. As I clean my bedroom floor, I notice that under the bed lives a veritable life-producing planet of dust, fuzz, hair, and God knows what else. I can’t reach it, my vacuum can’t reach it, so there it sits… producing, I can only hope, our human race’s next answer to the Penicillin resistance we hear our children are slowly developing. Because that bed is heavy and large and will be a major pain in my ass to move in order to clean what lies beneath.
Likewise, the walls. Are covered with gook. Sticky little fingers produce sticky little streaks, which later harden into indestructible little streaks, at which point I prefer the term “Venetian plaster” because they are impossible to remove so I may as well include them in the décor of my home. One can try… Mr. Clean’s “Magic Eraser” is pretty magical. In that it not only removes those hardened streaks when I use it to scrub them, but also removes the paint underneath the streaks.
Thanks a lot baldy. That box come with a paint touch-up kit too? In eggshell?
The streaks are colorful at least – brown from chocolate, red from strawberries, white from challah dough, and so on.
Which brings me to the glue… a while ago, my kids saw me taping their crayon drawings to the walls of my office, and wanted in on the action. So naturally, they glued their pictures to my walls.
The pictures are long gone, torn off and/or ripped off in a fit of covetous or jealous passion. Which leaves me only with streaks of thick yellow hairy glue to stare at as I write this blog.
At least they aren’t boogers.
c/xo,
Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
Would I lie to you? And you are right, I didn't even mention the blue streaks beside the glue. Because your guess is absolutely as good as mine as to where those came from.
Say What!?