Lawyerish

Let the Hurricane Roar

We survived the two days of Irene-induced house arrest last weekend without losing power, water, or our minds.  Felicity did great, despite her usual preference for being outdoors, and since several of you asked, I'll share the low/no-cost ways we kept her busy:

-- My signature Balls! game.

-- I keep several new books in my closet at all times, just in case of bad weather or sudden-onset ennui, so introducing two of those was my first salvo in the war against tedium.  She especially loved this one; we have several by that illustrator, Allison Jay, and they are all so beautiful with SO much to look at on each page, and this one has a sweet rhyming text that Felicity got hooked on instantly.  We had to read both of the new books many, many times over the course of the weekend, but at least they were fresh to all of us for the first hundred repeats or so.

-- On my mom's advice, I filled an empty Kleenex box with scarves, long ribbons, a couple of satin belts and a length of rope.  This kept Felicity enthralled for a LONG time.  She had so much fun pulling each item out of the box, carefully putting them into a pile on the floor, then giving them to me to put back in the box.  When I first gave it to her, she must have burned up 45 minutes at LEAST on this activity, and she has wanted to do it many more times since.

-- I also filled a shoebox-sized plastic bin with a bunch of random items that could be sorted by color and/or type -- several measuring spoons, some balls (which light up when you throw them, so that was a separate activity all its own), sea-animal bath toys, plastic links, blocks, some fake squash from Michael's (which I ended up taking out of the magic box later on because Felicity kept putting them in her mouth and I realized they were kind of flimsy).  A lot of these were things we already had around the house, but somehow when they were presented to F in this new way, it was exciting to her.  She would pull out all the spoons at once and we'd count them, and then she'd parade around waving them in the air for a while, and then she'd spend some time finding all the red objects, and so on. 

-- I had bought two tubes of little farm animals at Michael's (I think they're called Toobz?), with the thought that she could sort those (find all the sheep, which ones say "moo", etc.), and I put them in a separate plastic bin, but we deemed them too small (they were indeed labeled for ages 3+) so we shall save that activity for a time when she's less likely to asphyxiate on them.

-- I also busted out the pasta-transferring activity again and it was just as absorbing this time around.  This couldn't be easier:  get two bowls, one larger than the other.  Put dried pasta (I used penne -- any non-choking-sized, easy-to-grasp shape would work) in the larger bowl and show the child how to take a handful and transfer it to the smaller bowl.  When it's all in the smaller bowl, they can pour it back into the bigger one and start over, or transfer it by hand back to the big bowl.  When they're done, let them try with a spoon.  Felicity loves the sound and the tactile sensation of it, and she's very thorough about making sure every piece of pasta makes it from one bowl to the other, even picking up stray ones from the floor and table as she goes.  I have no idea why this is fun, but I don't question it when it keeps her this interested for this long.

-- Another thing I had planned but ultimately didn't have to pull out of my back pocket was to have her play at the kitchen sink.  I was going to fill up the sink, give her a bunch of plastic cups and big spoons, and let her stand on a chair (closely supervised, of course) and splash, pour and scoop to her heart's content.  (My mom also recommends funnels to add to the fun, but we didn't have any and I hadn't seen any in my tear through Michael's on Friday.)

-- I also bought construction paper, triangular crayons (easier for her wee hands to grip) and small Post-It notes in bright colors, figuring she could stick the notes on the paper and "draw" on them, but we didn't get that far, either.  I shall save that one for another rainy day. 

-- Oh, and I had thought maybe she would like to play dress-up (or just indulge her mother's ballerina fantasies), so I put a tutu on her one morning.  She immediately said, "Naked.  NAKED!" so I took it off.  But she had fun running around in her diaper after the offending garment was removed. 

So there you have it.  Several simple ideas for occupying a toddler for good chunks of time with stuff you already have or can cheaply procure.  Got any of your own to share?

Stocking Up

So!  Who else among you survived the Great Quake of Twenty-Eleven? 

I was at my desk, minding my own business, when I suddenly felt rather woozy.  I felt the floor sway and thought it was the wind; our building frequently shifts in windy conditions and makes me motion sick.  Aaaand then it started sort of jackhammering and I was practically bounced out of my seat.  A few other people and I went into the hallway and were kind of like, uh...WTF was that?  What do you s'pose we do here? 

Naturally, the possibility that the building had just been shaken by the detonation of a bomb crossed my mind, but no alarms went off so we all kind of joked around and waited to be told what to do.  Then the Fire Command Station guy came over the PA and told us to evacuate via the stairs, so we got our things, updated our Facebook statuses and/or Tweeted about what was going on, and headed down the very warm and very crowded stairwell. 

When we got outside, no one really knew what to do, so a few of us walked a couple of blocks away and got Mister Softee ice cream cones.  (Vanilla with rainbow sprinkles.  There is no other Mister Softee option, as far as I am concerned.)  Earthquakes are rather festive, it turns out! 

When we were given the all-clear, we headed back inside and got back online, we saw that all of California was busy mocking us for our pansy-assness about the earthquake.  Now, let's remember that the East Coast does not GET earthquakes, typically, and when one experiences significant geologic activity for the first time, it can be a little pants-crappingly exciting, OK?  Also, you know what we HAVE had on the East Coast?  TERRORIST ATTACKS.  So anytime anything remotely unusual happens -- like your office building moving as if it's a giant Shake-Weight -- it can be panic-inducing. 

Also panic-inducing?  The prospect of waiting out a freaking HURRICANE for two days with an active toddler who becomes tantrum-prone when cooped up in the house for more than an hour at a time.  Hoo boy. 

My disaster preparedness for this weekend is going to consist primarily of stocking the eff up on Things That Will Occupy My Child for More Than Five Minutes at a Time (also: booze) (for me).  Bottled water and canned goods are nice and all, but will they keep an almost-18-month old QUIET and HAPPY for 48 hours, while our city is lashed with wind and flooded with rain? 

This is when having a Montessori teacher for a mother really comes in handy; my mom has been sending me lists of age-appropriate activities and cheap (or household) supplies therefor for a couple of days now (we're talking simple stuff -- color sorting, water-pouring (over the sink, durr), dried pasta-transferring).  I really should pay her a consulting fee.  I feel that with this information and a quick trip to Michaels' tomorrow, we can soldier on and survive this next natural disaster.  Bring it on, Irene!

Here's hoping the entire Eastern seaboard will not be wiped out in the next few days, and we'll see you next week.  Godspeed!

Assortment/Array/Divertissement

Here are some things that have occupied my (clearly addled) brain lately:

1.  Do you ever mentally invent things that already exist?  The other day I was taking Felicity to the sprinkler park at the Museum of Natural History (where we have gone basically every weekend, all summer -- variety is not our strong suit) and we passed a dog run on the way.  I thought to myself, You know, they should make KID runs, like fenced-in areas where kids can just run around and play!  And then I realized that I had just invented...THE PLAYGROUND.

2.  One thing that drives me INSANE when watching a movie is when they get New York details wrong.  We saw this awful Natalie Portman movie called "The Other Woman" recently, and there was a scene in which she and her stepson were at the Museum of Natural History (all roads lead there, apparently), and she gave him a gift in a bag with the museum logo on it and said, "I got this at the American Museum of Natural History gift shop next door."  NEXT DOOR.  They were standing IN THE MUSEUM.  Granted, they were in the Rose Center part of the museum, but they are IN THE SAME BUILDING. 

I was then side-tracked for the rest of the (seriously awful) movie by questions of whether there might be some legal/licensing issue about the use of the name of the museum of which I am not aware, or perhaps the museum and the planetarium are distinct legal entities (despite being in the SAME BUILDING and having the SAME ENTRANCE procedures), or SOMETHING.  GAH.

Likewise, some other film we watched recently that I cannot now remember (yet another sign of early senility) had the main characters going from SoHo to the New Leaf Cafe in Fort Tryon Park in a matter of minutes -- like, their conversation basically continued without a beat, even though they would have had to get there by some mode of transportation, and unless they teleported there or had jetpacks, it would take, bare minimum, 30 minutes to get there, and even that would only be possible in a cab with zero traffic and a driver breaking every traffic law and speed limit.  Infuriating.

3.  I bought some Aveeno shampoo and conditioner last week, and EVERY TIME I use them, I pick up the wrong bottle the first time.  The conditioner bottle has a colored top and the shampoo bottle has a plain one, and this is the OPPOSITE of how most hair product bottles are coded (right??).  So I keep getting annoyed by this, and I thought about putting LABELS on the tops of the bottles to remind myself which was which.  And THEN I realized that I could just...switch the bottle tops.

4.  Quick, easy delicious side dish:  Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Put a bunch of baby carrots on a baking sheet.  Pour a couple of glugs of olive oil over, then add curry powder (a few good shakes) and a swirl (just a small one) of honey. Toss it all together with your hands.  Bake for about 30 minutes.  Mmm.  Roasted goodness.  (Also works with sweet potato wedges). 

5.  There was an article in the New York Times magazine this past weekend about decision fatigue, and it rang SO true for me.  I kept going, "Yes.  YES!  OMG, that is ME!" as I read it.  To summarize, researchers have found that people's mental energy gets significantly depleted each time a decision is made, so if one has to make a series of decisions, those made toward the end will be less reasoned and the decider will experience a drop in energy and willpower after the deciding is complete.  This is why, when you buy a car, for example, by the time you get to the zillion options for wheel covers and such, you are just like, "DUDE.  I DO NOT CARE.  WHATEVER YOU WANT ME TO CHOOSE." 

This also helps me understand why shopping is so incredibly draining to me, unless I limit myself to a few favorite stores.  Faced with unlimited retail options, I shrink from the pressure and end up making no decisions at all -- i.e., buying nothing.  This is also true, for me, about planning meals -- I tend to make the same things OVER AND OVER during the week in part out of lack of time (and an abundance of laziness) but also because poring through 500 recipes to try to pick something for a Tuesday night dinner makes me want to take a very long nap.  So each week when I go about meal-planning and grocery list-making, I choose ONE magazine issue or ONE cookbook and select the weekend's recipes (the weekend is when I change things up, dinner-wise) out of those. 

Decision fatigue, I believe, is also one of the (MANY) reasons why living in NYC can be incredibly tiring -- on any given day, there are about one billion things to do; even in our neighborhood or just Central Park alone, you can find a hefty schedule of events, especially on the weekends.  And what do I tend to do when faced with all those choices?  The SAME THINGS I do all the time.  (Mind you, part of that is also having a toddler, because most activities are not kid-friendly and I don't want to drag her hither and yon unless it's for something AWESOME -- and the stuff she likes best?  Is just running around open areas like the park.)

When you extrapolate this out to larger decisions with far-reaching implications, like whether to move (and if so, where), it's absolutely paralyzing.  There are so many micro-decisions that make up a macro-decision that it is positively exhausting to even contemplate.  So my tendency is to avoid a huge decision like that at all costs, until I absolutely HAVE to make it, as dictated by timing or some other external circumstance.  Because when I feel as though I am at the helm of a ship that could truly go ANYwhere and do ANYthing, I will do NOTHING instead.  And now I have a good, science-y reason for feeling that way.

6.  My love for these photos knows no bounds:

Nothing to See Here...

...it's just a girl's first pigtails.

And a kid who thinks the word "crumbs" is the funniest thing ever.

I have very little to add to this. 

Seventeen Months

Oh, GOD, you must be thinking, not another one of THESE. 

I'm sure the monthly updates are unbearably tedious to everyone except me, so I apologize.  But at the moment my mind is currently in the fetal position over the possibility of another economic meltdown and other cataclysmic world events, and is therefore devoid of anything clever to write about.  Okay, not really.  Mostly, I'm mulling over how disappointing last night's SYTYCD finale was, and how badly guest judge Mrs. Katie Cruise needs a vocabulary builder -- if you'd been playing a drinking game based on her use of "strong," "beautiful" and "amazing," you would have been quite drunk indeed. 

And anyway my mom needs scrapbook material.  So you're getting a Felicity-centric post and YOU WILL LIKE IT.

This is what happens when I go away for the weekend.

To start out with, I am mourning the fact that Felicity has started calling me Mommy instead of Mama.  I never thought I would care one way or another, and I always called my own mom Mommy (and later, Mom -- although as a teenager I simply addressed my mother with a gusty sigh and an icy glare), plus I think of Mama as being primarily a Southern form of address.  Still, somehow she has shifted my title without prompting, and I'm a little bummed.  Not enough to correct her ("Actually, it's The Countess"), of course, but...well, it's just one of those things. 

Felicity's favorite indoor activities are

- reading (as always),

- singing ("shing.  SHING!" is her command).  I can blow through my entire repertoire of children's songs (I need a bunch of those Wee Sing books to help me out) and still she is not ready to move on to another activity ("more!").  She especially loves the Hokey Pokey ("hok pok") and I will do it over and over just to see her turn herself around, very diligently, in a neat little circle, until she gets dizzy and falls to the floor;

- playing with bubbles (she wants to dip the wand into the bottle HERSELF, thank you very much),

- playing hide-and-go-seek ("Hide!" she exhorts, and then when I slip behind the curtain of her closet, she says, "Where?" and then shrieks nonsense words when I pop out -- this can be repeated roughly 1,000 times without her enthusiasm waning),

- assembling her babies and stuffed animals in her doll stroller and pushing them around,

- assembling her babies and stuffed animals in her wagon and pushing them around, or

- assembling her babies and stuffed animals in her wagon and being pushed around WITH them ("WaGON, waGON," she says.  "In.  IN!  Baby.  Piggy!  Bear.  PIG!  Go go go!"). 

"Museum of Natural History, please.  And make it snappy!"

Much like her mother and her Grammie before her, she does not like to get in trouble; she seems to be hard-wired to be a rule follower (YES!) and gets upset when she is chided for testing boundaries.  She was coloring (and I use that term very loosely) the other day and then she went over to her bongo drums and started to swipe the crayon on those, and I said, "No, ma'am.  We only color on paper," and I directed her back to the paper.  She got a little flustered, and then she turned toward the drums again and said, in a sad, wavering voice, "No." 

Ah, the innate fear of authority.  I know it well. 

She is starting to exhibit the first hints of Older Toddler-ness, mostly in the arena of randomly picky eating.  Thus far, she has merrily hoovered up pretty much every food we have put in front of her, but now she will go through brief phases where she suddenly won't eat chicken or blueberries or whatever, or she will only eat with a spoon, not with her hands, or she will only eat something if I put spinach puree on top and feed her with the spoon myself.  Alternatively, she will eat whatever you want her to, but only if you sing to her and do the airplane-spoon thing for every bite. 

I know it will likely get worse at least temporarily as she gets older and wields her little mini-dictator desire for control in various ways, so we're trying to roll with it.  And she still eats a lot of good, varied stuff in respectable quantities, so it's a VERY minor, fairly occasional thing and we're treating it as such so as not to make a BIG HONKING DEAL out of food in general, you know? 

And, really, she's game for just about anything so long as you repeatedly sing "Three Little Monkeys" while she eats, and I can live with that.

"No! More! Monkeys!  Jumpin' on the bed."

So next time I do this, she'll be a whopping year and a half old.   Have mercy! 

Taking it in Stride

Well, that was an AWESOME birthday. 

Despite an initial hiccup in getting to Charlotte (we got on the plane, taxied out to the runway, sat on the runway for a long while, then taxied BACK to the gate and deplaned to wait out a weather delay for an hour, then reboarded and finally took off), I arrived in NC on Friday afternoon and Allison and I dove right into our girls' weekend. 

When we got to our room at the resort, we found a very generous gift card from my parents (which I used my for hot stone/deep tissue massage on Saturday) and a single long-stemmed rose and, shortly thereafter, a bottle of wine and a plate of chocolate-covered strawberries arrived, courtesy of Joe (he is really gunning for Husband of the Year (and winning), wouldn't you say?). 

We moseyed down to the bar and had drinks and shared a bunch of appetizery dishes for dinner, then returned to the room for some pajama time and tickle fights (ok, not really -- just seeing if you were paying attention).  We went to bed at a reasonable hour since we had to get up at the buttcrack to run a 5K, although some women decided to park themselves outside our room and CACKLE their heads off for a very long time so it took a while to get to sleep.  When we got up at 5:45 (OOF), I considered running through the corridor, laughing maniacally and pounding on the walls for payback, but I restrained myself.  

We headed out in the steamy dawn toward the Panthers stadium, where the race started.  Then we rocked the ass off that 5K! 

Twinsies!  (Check out the forearm definition on both of us.  We are Muscle Women!)

I did my best to comport myself with grace and dignity. 

And Allison did her best to pretend she didn't know me.

After the race, we headed back to the hotel, freshened up, and ate an enormous breakfast worthy of an Everest expedition.  I wanted to climb into my dish of grits and weep, they were so good.  You can get grits in New York, but they are never quite right (see also: biscuits -- why doesn't anyone up North know how to make a proper biscuit?).  Then we did our Fancy Shopping at Target, Ulta and a Border's (RIP) that should have been GIVING it away what with being bankrupt and all, but instead only offered moderate discounts.  I still bought some books, though, because it SEEMED like I was going to save a bunch of money, what with all the fluorescent signs everywhere, screaming about deep discounts, and the almost-empty shelves.  WhatEVER, store! 

That afternoon, we had our spa appointments, and ooooooh, man.  That massage was tremendous.  I hadn't had a hot stone massage before, and this incorporated deep tissue as well.  It was one of those experiences that is kind of an agony/ecstasy thing.  Like, WHOA NELLIE I THINK MY HEAD IS GOING TO POP OFF OW OW OW, but then afterward you feel like you could just slither off the table onto the floor.  I came out of there looking sort of shaken, but in a good way.  Also, I had gotten a scalp treatment so my hair was full of oil and sticking out like an Eighties hair band gone wrong.  But I did not care, because all my knots had been kneaded out and my system was flushing out toxins (or something -- all I know is I always pee a million times after I have a deep tissue massage) and I was in a state of bliss. 

After we collected ourselves and drank some fruity water, then sauna-ed and showered, we headed out to the pool and took a dip.  But then the golf course alarms went off and we were ordered out of the water by a boy who probably did not even have a driver's license.  The thunder and lightning descended, so we retreated to the room and watched the rain pour down as we drank wine and read Allison's old diaries on our terrace, then ordered room service and talked late into the night. 

I learned from perusing Allison's journals that I spent a great deal of the time between about fifth grade and the end of high school "being kind of a butt" or "getting on [Allison's] nerves."  This is hilarious, and not really surprising, because I have no doubt that I WAS kind of a butt and not as good of a friend as I should have been.  As Allison noted in one tenth grade entry:  "Meredith has an official new best friend: BALLET" -- which was true, plus I know I could be an insufferable know-it-all as well as boring and self-absorbed. 

But hey, we were teenagers, so self-absorption comes with the territory, and as was apparent from these archival documents, we were both jealous as hell of positively everyone else, including each other.  And my own diaries, by the way, bear this up as well; I spent a tremendous amount of time worrying that Allison had changed -- meaning that she had DARED to find friends other than me since I was always at BALLET -- and thinking that I deserved things that she had (usually attention of some kind), and generally being a total ass. 

God, I would not accept ANY amount of money to go back and be a teenager.  But I do love that we documented so much of our tortured existence, because it SURE is funny to go back and look at now.  And also, it makes me all the more appreciative that Allison and I stuck through all the rough times and stayed friends, and now even though we live (WAY TOO FAR) apart, our friendship is one of the best things I will ever have in my life. 

On Sunday, I had an easy trip home, and I came back to find a pile of cards from friends and family, an exhausted husband who went out into the hot afternoon to get me some birthday cupcakes, and a bright-eyed toddler who shrieked with delight as we played hide-and-seek over and over again.

And I didn't even have to make a birthday wish, because I already have so much more than I could ever ask for.

Good Times

It's been a good week so far. 

Last Sunday, when Joe and I sat down to dinner after putting the sprout to bed with her armful of stuffed animals and dolls, Joe took a sip of beer and then casually remarked that he was going to have to figure out what to do with Felicity next weekend.  It took a second for me to realize what he said, and I think my response was something like, "Huh?"  And he said, "Because you're not going to be here.  You...are going on a girls' spa weekend with Allison." 

Kuh-WHA? 

On Friday (that's TOMORROW!), I'm heading down to Charlotte, thanks to Joe's careful planning and conspiring, and Allison and I are going to spend the weekend lolling about and lounging by the pool and getting massages at a resort/hotel/spa and running in a 5K on Saturday (we are hardcore like that).  And obviously we will be gabbing our fool FACES off, because we have not hung out, just the two of us, since...well, I think since before Maggie came home, so we're talking August 2006.  FIVE YEARS.  We've spent lots of time together in the interim with our husbands and kids, and that has all been Very Good Stuff, but there's still a lot to be said for having one-on-one time with your best friend since first grade. 

Oh my God, you guys.  I just realized that this month it will be THIRTY YEARS since Allison and I met. 

Shit, I am old.

So, anyway, that was a great way to kick off the week, and then on Tuesday I had an exciting win in one of my pro bono cases, and to top THAT off, on my way to the subway from our little victory party near the courthouse, a random dude on the street complimented me on my shoes (and not in a creepy way, just with a breezy "Great shoes!" as he passed by). 

Plus, I got a card in the mail from Starbucks for a free drink!  It's the little things, really, that thrill me the most, because I was actually TOUCHED that Starbucks would celebrate my birthday with me in this way.  Yes, I need to get out more.

Today the week promises to take a brief downturn, as I'm going to the dentist for a chipped tooth and a belated cleaning, and I just KNOW that I am going to end up having to have some kind of gum procedure, because that is how things go for me.  If I get my teeth cleaned every three months (!) and floss like a crazy person, I can MAYBE avoid the dreaded scaling and root-planing or whatever the eff it's called; but if I end up going a mere five months between visits, invariably there is some area of my mouth that needs rehabilitation and it SUCKS.  Oh, it SUCKS.  I end up having it at least once a year, and it's dreadful.  I just have bad gums, it seems; it's a genetic thing, not much to be done except LIVE at the dentist's office. 

Nevertheless!  That is but a small price to pay for the weekend o' fun that awaits.  And while I'm going to miss my little family like mad (Felicity is so stinkin' FUN), I am incredibly excited about going through airport security with just my own body and bags to deal with, and then sitting on a flight and reading my Kindle for a long, uninterrupted stretch, and then seeing Allison for 48 whole hours.  And when I come home, there will be dinner and birthday cake, and right about now I don't even care that I'm turning 36 on Sunday, because where else would I want to be than right here, right now?