One Giant Ball of Confusion (Hey Hey)

I should have added in my last post that I am very, very unnerved at the thought of people touching my laundry. I used to drop my laundry off and have it washed and folded into perfect little pieces. It was so easy and convenient. But as I got older, it became another one of those things that I could no longer handle, like eating on the subway or rollerblading through Manhattan streets or pressing elevator buttons with my fingertips (I try to use my knuckles). I don’t want people touching my underthings, my overthings, my anything. Once I was doing laundry in my building, and an eccentric man who lives in the building casually fondled a tee shirt of mine on the top of my wet pile of laundry that was headed to the dryer and I almost threw the shirt out.

A housekeeper isn’t out of the question down the road, but right now I feel like I can handle keeping the apartment clean on my own. Plus, I really like cleaning, which may sound weird, but I really do. Also, what I said about my laundry applies triple to how I feel about my stuff! And I am very particular. I need things done in a very certain way. I know, I am a control freak, and years of therapy hasn’t managed to break that cycle yet.

I know I need to embrace day care and babysitters. It’s inevitable, I know. But for the time being I am dragging my heels, bitching about my lack of help instead of bitching about my refusal to take the paths given to me. Ideally, I wish I had a babysitter who lived in our building. Once upon a time, before I even had the girls, I had my eye on a teenager on the third floor, this sweet-looking, polite girl who I would see in her Catholic school uniform every day. Then one summer, she literally morphed in front of our eyes from a sweet, innocent girl to Aerosmith-esque groupie, decked out in tight, tight jeans and tight, tight belly shirts. And that polite child who used to smile hello now screeched into her cell phone and yelled at her mother in the elevator, rolling her eyes a lot. So much for my image of a babysitter working on her chemistry homework at our table while we went out to dinner. And I know I can’t judge a book by its cover, but I have to be honest: She now kinda scares me.

Madeline I think will be very particular about who babysits her. She sometimes looks at me with this expression, as if she is thinking “Philistine!” It’s like she came out of the womb reading The Economist and the Wall Street Journal cover to cover and she is just biding her time with us until she gets a loft in the Meatpacking District. She is such a thinker. She looks at things, and you can almost see the gears in her head moving. When I play a silly game, like hiding a ball under a cup and then lifting the cup to reveal it, she will sit and watch me for minutes, which is light years in baby land. Avery, on the other hand, will barge over like Baby Godzilla and grab the cup or ball. She is much more tactile. Maddie needs to look and see; Avery needs to touch and feel. At least, tat is how it is this week.

Maddie has been having a hard time going to bed at night lately, because she discovered it is infinitely more fun to fall asleep on Mommy’s chest while getting a head rub and back rub. Who can blame her? But it was turning bedtime into a way-too-long ritual.

Now that the sun is going down later, it is getting harder to bid the girls good night because the sun tricks them, I think, into thinking it is still Awake Time and therefore Fun Time. Their room has blinds but for some reason a ridiculous amount of sunlight still seeps in between those wooden slats. We have been looking for curtains but everything we have found was too pink or too green or too dark or too stripe-y. Have I mentioned that I have such a hard time making decisions lately? I spent an entire day trying to decide what color water bottle to buy. Green. No, blue. No, red. No, green. Yes, green. No, blue. All day. The curtains decision, it was like I was picking a college to attend.

Yesterday, after not one but two trips to Bed bath and Beyond (I guess I logged in about three miles yesterday, all because I didn’t measure properly), the girls room is now sporting blackout panels, the kind used in Vegas to shut out the sun so gamblers can get shut-eye during the day and win/lose money all night. These blackout panels make their room perfectly dark. Instant Nighttime. They are plain white and are designed to go behind curtains, but I am fine with these minimalist white curtains acting as the Main Curtains. Call off the curtain search. During the day I am tying them back with a pretty ribbon and they look great.

I don’t want to jinx it but last night Maddie night right to sleep in her newly dark room. It was the first time in a long time she didn’t insist tuck-in service. I am crossing my fingers that these curtain were the magic bullet. I feel like I am always crossing something and hoping something is some sort of magic bullet.

A Chop’t salad bar opened in our neighborhood and I am beyond ecstatic. There are only a few in NYC and none of them are particularly close to us. I love salads and salad bars, but this one is really good. They chop the salad up (hence, the name) and while that may be gimmicky it is enough to get me to walk a few extra blocks. Eating a chopped salad is so much more civilized then trying to fold giant leaves into your mouth. Yesterday I got a salad for lunch (mesclun, grilled chicken, edamame, apples and tomatoes) and it was enough for my lunch and for both Nicole and I to have with dinner. I got the lemon-lime vinaigrette and it is the BEST salad dressing I have had in a decade. I love lime, and citrus things, and light dressings. I could drink that dressing. No, I am not affiliated with Chop’t and I am not getting paid to write any of this! I just really, really love my salads! And I am so glad this place opened in our neighborhood.

Pictured above, then and now. Maddie as a salad when she was six weeks old and Maddie as a salad now.