But Seamus is a preschool right now so I have some time to eat my toast, drink my coffee and blather on a bit. Mondays are good for that. It’s my cleaning and shopping day, a day of prep today is special, since I’ll be playing with “lesson plans” - games and projects dedicated to slipping the kid some skill sets.

First the food. I didn’t do any resolutions this year, but about a week ago I found a blog from a woman in Australia who wrote about adjusting to life in their new suburban home. (And of course now I can’t find it, and therefore can’t link to it, so there’s the Monday in this post for you.) In one post she makes a tart from Patricia Wells’ book of Provencal home cooking, and I thought about how a good third of our cookbooks are French or Californian cuisine, how we’re eating mostly locally and seasonally and in tune with those books. Not only that, but I’d begun teasing out recipes from my copy of Paula Wolfert’s Mediterranean Greens and Grains that looked possible even with an appliance-climbing monkey in the kitchen.

So I decided to start playing around with Provencal/Mediterranean food, to make it the backbone of my cooking repertoire. We have region-specific cookery books, along with Julia and Jacques, so the rest is up to how well I plan and learn. And of course, adapt to my refrigerator contents. Based on what’s in there right now, this is how the week is shaping up, keeping in mind toddler pickiness and other disasters.

Omelets, roasted asparagus, salad

“Wild” greens torta inspred by Cretan scarf pies (I’ll be using the tops of my beets, turnips, and carrots, rounded out with some braising greens)

Carrot soup (just Seamus and I that night, Patrick works late)

Roasted chicken with root vegetables and sauteed greens

Leftover chicken, vegetables and cous-cous

We often spend Saturdays gadding about so I’ll prep some cranberry beans for the crockpot and cook them in the chicken stock I’ll make overnight from the chicken carcass. We’ll eat the beans soupy with salad or sauteed greens, and the leftovers go into soups or pasta e fagioli. I’d like a fish for Sunday, so I’ll have to start figuring out where to get one that’s mercury/PCB safe and sustainably harvested. I’ll shop for it on either Thursday or Saturday, and if need be, swap the Thursday menu.

So that’s the easy list. Now for the DIY preschool thing.

We’ve kicked around home-schooling Seamus if we ended up in a crappy school district with no money for parochial school (I say parochial because they tend to be cheaper than the private secular schools, and after 400+ years of practice the Jesuits seem to have their fundamentals down. The preschool Seamus attends has play-based pre-kindergarten curriculum, but I don’t know how my wee maurader experiential learner is taking to it. So I’m paging through my copy of The Well-Trained Mind, Elizabeth Hainstock’s book on Montessori at home for preschoolers, and the Exploratorium’s snackbook for replicating the museum exhibits in the classroom. I’m breaking things down into subjects like so:

Letters (recognition and eventually writing)

Numbers (counting and character recognition, writing)

Shapes/spatial stuff

Natural science (animals, plants, stars, weather, environment, etc.)

Physical science (haven’t figured this out just yet)

Art

Music

Life skills

Yes, this would be a lot to cram into a day. Which of course, won’t be happening. I want to create a block schedule with room for playdates, maybe a class, and a ton of outside time. It should get interesting, and I hope to have a rough draft up this week.

And with that, it’s time to clean before heading out.

Once upon a time in 2004, I was planning my wedding, finishing my MLIS program, and sending out resume after resume. I understood that technical services librarianship, like writing and teaching, required a deep understanding of the materials in a collection, and the ability to present those materials in an accessible and enticing manner. I felt ready to fall headlong into a job and immerse myself into a collection, to do my best to serve patrons through catalogs and finding aids. I was also very tired from my long drives to my beloved internship in San Jose and my late nights trying to do XML programming homework, and worried about the odd dizzy spells I had been experiencing off and on for three years at that point. I would turn thirty that winter, and find work as a consultant, a role that gave me a lot of anxiety. Consultants were experts who wore awesome suits, I thought, whereas I had some nice off the rack stuff and I new degreee and really wanted some mentoring. I got comfortable enough with the role to do it, but not enough to sell it.

Patrick and I have been talking a lot lately about work. What we want to do, how our past and current work figures into how to get the work we’d like to do (and get paid for it), where and how to live. I have tabled my idea of going back into consulting, and am thinking more about teaching and writing. In the meantime, I create DIY preschool lessons, consider a resource blog and maybe a zine, and help plan Patrick’s website. I just turned thirty-five.

Sarah - 3

Cyclonic Toddler Shitstorms - 1

Dog Puke - 0

Cat puke - 0

As you can see, I’ve managed to reasemble my sangfroid in the face of grossness. (If a mess makes me cry, it gets a point.) On Friday Patrick brought this back from MacWorld for my laptop:
I married a smartass, but a cheerleading smartass. Image by Gelaskins.I still wish I had someone I could call and tell the story to when it happened. I have local mama friends, but since our kids are all close in age and we’re a bit farflung, it’s not as if anyone has huge amounts of time on their hands to offer an ear or on the fly child-sitting.

Ah well. My village permanently altered when Seamus was born, and it’s probaby a permanent work in progress.

The funny thing about the incident is that naked/naked on bottom time has coincided with Shea’s interest with potty use, and most of his requests to remove his diaper involve the word “potty”, sitting on the potty, and actually using the potty. Tuesday was a huge snafu, but definitely an outlier regarding naked time. In fact, he’s been great on the potty ever since. He’s still not interested in underwear, and we’re still doing all outings in diapers, but so far following all of his cues has been more successful than not. I’ll probably try to get a portable potty for our forays out once we move into underwear territory, but I think we’ve still got time.

And I owe you all some actual Seamus posting, none of this ZOMFG, you would not believe my day crapola. If it helps, I have another DIY post up.

Seamus slept really well last night -  from eight to -four-thirty, then a short nursing session before going back down till 6:30, which is when I brought him in to hang out till seven. I had remained awake after his 4:30 call for about an hour before napping into a dream where I watched him drown in ocean swell, so the morning time was sweet and tinged with relief. He has the cold too, judging by his fountaining nose, so I figured we’d get him dressed and us breakfasted and maybe get out for an errand, since the snot canceled our acrobatics class. Instead, Seamus wailed about everything. From the boards:

We’re both sick today and the tantrums have been really fucking splendid. We finally ended the pantrum with him taking the option of naked on bottom and using the potty, which is working so far. It won’t get the dog walked, but I’ll fight that battle after I shower and get dressed.

Right. Shower. Fingers crossed for a puddle/pile-free living room when I get out….

So that didn’t quite work out. The later posts:

PSA: If in the course of cleaning up a massive potty accident you find your child may have sucked down chlorine-free bleach, rest assured that by virtue of being in the spray bottle, said bleach may have already broken down into water. Of course, this doesn’t bode well for the mess you cleaned, but hey, you’ve dodged the ER.

And:

I’m almost at the laughing stage myself, (redacted), but I’m almost done cleaning.

Sequence of events: Bathroom - turn on shower, brush teeth, >> living room to check on Seamus, remind him to use the potty (which he’d done earlier), “Okay Mama”, run to shower,  then ten minutes later I’m out and in the corner of my eye I see him running from the living room to his room, covered in shit. “Shea?” “Poop!”

FUCK.

He was very tractable about getting cleaned up, and cheered me on “good job, Mama” while I cleaned with him on my back. I’ve had my mom’s Oreck steam cleaner on long-term loan, and I think I’m entering into plural marriage with it this weekend. So. Grateful. To. Appliance.

He tracked his poop all over his new bedroom rug, across the hardwood between his room and the living room, the living room rug, and the floor near the dining table. All of his play areas. So I cleaned him up, got him dressed and into the carrier, and cleaned all the hardwood, started the bedroom rug, and finished the living room. I popped him down and scrubbed his rug, wishing to hell I had a neighbor I could call to keep him entertained while I shredded raised flowers of Dwell Studio for Target with my scrub brush.

I’ll have to hit that rug again with something stronger. Whatever I’m feeding that kid has lasting color the likes of which hair dye factories hven’t seen.

With luck, bait, and caulk guns, we turned back the invaders. They entered the kitchen from behind the shelves in the pantry, an invisible opening if you merely empty the cabinet. Patrick yanked out the plywood shelves to find the hole and several very large ants (drones or a queen, p’raps). We think the colony was re-locating and not splitting, and we still think they were pavement ants. Multiple colonies? La la la I CAN’T HEAR YOUUUUUUU.

So everything is sealed shut in there and we’re waiting for the next attack with crossed fingers.

The dog tore a huge hole in the front yard this afternoon. Tomorrow’s playgroup visit is cancelled in favor of playing “garden”. On the bright side, the clover needs pulling.

The house we live in was built in the middle of the last century as part of the massive development of our neighborhood. The sand dunes braced by Golden Gate Park and Lake Merced were split between two developers who brought a hodgepode of external details to their stucco-jacketed junior-fives: Morocccan keyholes mixed with Spanish tile, plaster friezes, and the occasional turret.

View of our nabe from the reservoir, eleven blocks from our place, Novemeber 24, 1945. Photo from SFPL.The houses from this era have wiggled and settled into the sand, dripped wet with the fog that covers the skies eight months a year. It’s not unusual to see houses defaced to the studs during the dryer seasons as contractors repair water damage. The western edge of the city is home to a wide variety of birds, bugs and beasts, many of which interact with this crumbling shelter stock in ways which irk the human inhabitants. Our first year of renting we thought we had a broken hood fan. Patrick opened it up to look for part numbers and a mummified baby bird tumbled to the stove. Our downstairs neighbor revealed that a roof rat used the ivy covering part of the back fence to travel between the adjacent yard and ours. And the ants return each winter with the rains, finding new entry points. It’s very bad this year.

We’re lucky that we rent. Despite five years here, we can pack up and go if we wish. We can whittle down our accumulated trash and offer it up as another’s treasure, whittle down our choice of cities and neighborhoods, and go fishing among the rental ads or MLS listings. Since we have chosen not to go vagabonding about the country, the latter appeals to me. I’m not looking to play the real estate game, I just want a space that’s ours, with a yard that will let me grow vegetables and raise some chickens. I want to paint walls and kick the pets outside a bit more. I want to host playdates where the kids pull up some veggies for their snack, or plant seedlings in milk cartons to take home. I want my son to have his own room with a door and enough room along a wall for a twin bed.

Till then, I keep practicing my homemaking and caretaking efforts here in our post-war starter, and hope to keep up. I worry that I’m failing, and that at the very least, we will not be getting back out deposit.

Acrosports is fantastic. The classes are in one of the old gymnasiums belonging to Polytechnic High. The school closed when my high school opened in 1972, and most of the campus was later demolished for townhouses. the two gyms remain: Acrosports in one, a circus school in the other. I think the wee lunatic classes are held in the old locker room, which is outfitted now with a giant trampoline, some bars and beams for their size, and plenty of crash pads and mats. The teachers don’t give me any grief about Seamus’ lack of immediate compliance; they all say that he’ll slowly start to follow along with the other kids.

The parents are pretty friendly. This is huge for me, as I spent the first year of his life looking for a place to go after we aged out of the new parents’ group at Kaiser and running into um, people I wasn’t enjoying spending money to be around. Some of you may remember the little problem I had last year with my neighborhood playgroup.  I never went back after that incident. I tried, I’d get within a block and just veer for the playground instead. Of course, it may be obvious that I’m trying to get him to play well and be a part of the class rather than adjacent to it, what with the chasing and the somewhat burnt-out attempts at re-directing. (Seamus doesn’t really re-direct. Not through my negligence in trying, he simply refuses about ninety-seven percent of the time.)

He appears to be having a good time, enough that I fantasize about trying to stay in the city and move into the Haight where I grew up, and eventually enrolling him in Parkour classes so we don’t have to sweat school sports, and watching him graduate from Lowell or Wallenburg before sending him off to Deep Springs. Not that I have an active imagination or anything (he also knits complex geometric lace and plays the fiddle). Since a gigantic pile of additional income isn’t raining down on us anytime soon, I’ll re-up these classes if it’s a sustained hit, and then knit next to him while he plays at home in the afternoons.