Until today, I had no idea an olive oil cruet could hold such meaning.

This is my favorite corner in my kitchen, and it came around by accident.  It started with the vintage pictures of Buenos Aires I received two weeks ago.  Then, last week, I brought out this old basket (8 years?) I had collecting dust in a cupboard and used it to corral Mikey’s cold medicine.  I have the boys’ vitamins in there now.  The flowers are from the garden, and the container is one of Nicholas’ glass baby bottles because I needed something tall and thin and free of charge.  And then, there is the olive oil cruet.

I’d been admiring my happenstance corner of lovely all week, but it looked even more charming when we came home last night from an early showing of Where The Wild Things Are.  When I pulled into the driveway, I could see through the kitchen window my favorite corner bathed in the soft light from our porch.  It all looked so warm and inviting and picturesque that I immediately thanked God for blessing me as He does daily.

And then I thought it was a shame the olive oil cruet was so circa 1999.

If I took a picture and posted it on the blog, I reasoned, I would have to style it nicely, the way other bloggers do.  The piece of paper detailing how I should dispense the boys’ vitamins would have to go, and I should probably find a third flower, since things look better in groups of three.  The cruet, though approaching ten years of age, is in mint condition.  It would be a terrible waste to buy something new or “I’m trying too hard” vintage just to avoid a shot of faux-Tuscan kitchen accessories.  Maybe I’ll just take it out and replace it with something else for the picture.  Le sigh.  Being disingenuous is hard work.

I took the picture this morning, deciding against all the changes that would make my favorite corner perfectly vanilla.  (Quirky and vintage can be vanilla, too, you know.)  The whole idea bothered me.  It took me a while to figure out why, because I don’t like that olive oil cruet.  It doesn’t match my house and as an actual Italian, the grapes bug me. But, in trying to figure out why I refused to style the picture I realized I also love that silly thing.

I remember buying it.  The Mister and I were newly married and in our first home.  We had invited to dinner his brother, John, our sister in law, Stephanie, and their 9 month old daughter, Brayden.  (You can see all 9 years of our niece in this picture, here.)  They would be our first dinner guests, ever.  I was very nervous and wanted everything perfect.  I rushed out to House to Home (remember that store?) on the day of the dinner and bought that olive oil cruet to hold the chimichurri.  I also bought the matching bowls, appetizer plates, and platter. And steak knives.  I bought steak knives, too.

That night, at our first ever dinner party(ish) we had rib eye steaks with chimichurri, mashed potatoes, roasted bell peppers two ways (stuffed with brie and drizzled with honey or mozzarella and basil drizzled with olive oil) and a mixed green salad.  For dessert I made brownies from scratch, vanilla ice cream, and drizzled that with ducle de leche, also made from scratch. (Do you remember that night, Stephanie?)

At the time, Brayden didn’t like mashed potatoes.  Potatoes at all, really.  But she ate mine, and I had a smile a mile wide for days because my potatoes were good enough to please the palette of a 9 month old who didn’t like potatoes.

Since then, that trendy, trite, and out of style cruet has drizzled more olive oil than seems healthy.  I’ve tossed and sauteed and marinated countless meals over 9 years for family and friends, each time reaching for an olive oil cruet I purchased as a young bride from an ordinary home store in the middle of suburbia.  If our last nine years could waft out of that bottle like jeanie smoke, out would come two homes, a law degree, a layoff, a new job, a few vacations, many celebrations, just as many arguments, a couple of businesses, new friends, old friends, two boys, two dogs, and one happy family.

And that is why the olive oil cruet stayed in the shot.

Even if it’s midnight, and you’re tired, and you can’t really draw so your attempt at barrel curls winds up looking like a follicular tsunami, I recommend you hide a love note in the lunch pail of any little boy heading off to his first school field trip. And, when he stays home sick and misses said field trip, let him find it when he later eats his lunch. I can almost guarantee the response will be priceless, and when you return to your desk after everyone is down for a nap, you just might find something like this on your keyboard.

It isn’t easy writing love notes when you barely know your sight words, but the message came through loud and clear for me. :)

Did Mama
Love Mama
Mikey Love Mama

The Friday night of Labor Day weekend Mikey came down with a cold.  At his age a cold shouldn’t be much trouble, but Mikey isn’t one to do anything average, and that includes rhinitis.  First, we have the fevers.  Mikey runs fevers so high and so suddenly that you would think I delivered him in a mosquito infested swamp.  One minute he is sniffling and the next he is a glassy eyed fire-ball mumbling about ways to extract dinosaur DNA from bugs trapped in amber. (He watched this video 88393092 times Labor Day weekend.)

As if the fevers weren’t enough, there is something about the anatomy of his throat that causes it to swell when he is sick.  His pediatrician has explained this condition to me on countless occasions and has even called it by name, but these conversations have always occurred when I am dead to the world from exhaustion so the only thing I can recall is that it is essentially benign and something he will outgrow.  However, on the first night of every cold his throat will swell between 11:30pm and 2:30am (of course!) to such an extent that we can hear him wheezing in another room.  Except we are never in another room because before he wheezes he develops a barking, racking, whooping cough that accounts for 75% of my gray hair.  It’s a croupy cough so deep that the first few times it happened I could do nothing but stare at him open mouthed and whimper from the nerves.  So, we are never listening to him wheeze from a different room because we are with him, in the kitchen, sitting in front of an open refrigerator and freezer trying to create cool, humid air in the middle of a damn desert.  (We have humidifiers, but he is usually crying and tired and resistant to hovering over one.)

That was Friday.

By Monday he was feeling better, which is when Nicholas started to get sick.

Nicholas isn’t a fever runner.  He runs your normal 99.9, maybe 101.  He nose does run like a faucet, though, which means at night it will run down the back of his throat and produce coughing attacks violent enough to make him gag and retch.  This also occurs between 11:30pm and 2:30am.  (of course!)  It almost never occurs during the day, and on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning when he was scampering around the house silent as a mouse except to ask for cookies, it was all I could do to keep from lifting him up by the collar and demanding he act sick.

I’m lucky enough to have The Mister, who plays a very active role parenting the boys with me, especially when they are sick.  He stays up late into the night with me, checking on the boys frequently and rocking them both to sleep after their coughing attacks.  When Mikey’s throat closes up, he sits on Daddy’s lap in front of the refrigerator while I pace the kitchen and rip apart my cuticles.  When Nicholas coughs until he vomits purple Tryaminic, it’s The Mister who rocks him back to sleep while I change the sheets or pace the nursery and rip apart my cuticles.

So, despite a week of exhaustion and ragged cuticles, I was at least satisfied knowing The Mister was exhausted, too.  Misery enjoys company, which is why we called each other frequently during the week just to recount how little sleep we received the night before.  By Friday it had become a point of pride to see who could brush their teeth without rinsing with a caffeinated beverage.  I was looking forward to recovering from a very long week.

And then The Mister turned to me on Friday night and said, “I think my throat hurts.”

And that is when I admitted defeat.  I think you know why.  No, I know you know why.  There isn’t a woman out their who doesn’t already know that no matter how sick your children are, no matter how high their fevers runs, how tight their throats swell, or how loudly they retch from coughing, they will never be more sick than a middle aged man with the sniffles.

It begins with a cough.  Not a wracking cough like Nicholas, or a croupy cough like Mikey.  It is the shallow, weak cough of a 92 year old man with congestive heart failure.  heh-heh-heh.  heh-heh-heh.  heh.  heh. Anemic bursts of air all through the day and night.  I once suggested to The Mister that he put his all into his coughs,  maybe get three or four wimpy ones for the price of one good hack (and a few minutes of peace and quiet).  My suggestions continue to be ignored.

The coughs are then followed by long stretches of sleep typically seen in cats.  The Mister went to bed early Friday night (wisely), knowing we had the first soccer game of the season the next morning.  We showed up, he coached, and then we went home so he and Nicholas could collapse into bed for four hours, lulled to sleep by dueling coughs.  They both woke up just in time to eat dinner.  Nicholas went back to bed, and The Mister spent the rest of the night dozing in front of war movies on T.V., opening his eyes only to make sure I was watching him die slowly.

Then come the patient progress reports.  At some point early, early Sunday morning I woke up as The Mister returned to bed after getting a glass of water to sooth his shattered throat. [<---sarcasm.]

“How are you feeling?”  I ask, as if I don’t already know the report will be grave, near death, or plague like.

“It’s…in…my…chest.  heh-heh-heh.  heh-heh. heh. heh.” He gasped as he crashed into bed in a tangle of arms and legs and covers.

“Oh.  Okay, well, sorry to hear it.  Just keep sleeping {as if  you won’t!} and maybe when you wake up you’ll feel better.”  Roll over.  Shut eyes.  Ignore cough.  Fall asleep.

A scant three hours later Mikey was up and ready to go.  Because his Daddy was so very, very sick {sigh} he wanted to make him breakfast in bed.  Twenty minutes later we were back in my room presenting to our patient a plate of scrambled eggs, two pieces of toast, a banana, and some apple juice.

“Thanks, guys.  You didn’t have to do that,” he said, barely lifting his head two inches before letting it drop again on the pillow.

Uh huh.

The Mister finished his breakfast in record time and was back frolicking in dreamland before I made it out of the room with the empty tray.

He woke up some time later and agreed he needed some fresh air.  We left for IKEA shortly thereafter at the crack of noon and were back home within a couple of hours so that he could rest.  Again.

By Sunday evening The Grim Reaper had showed up at our front door three times.  I have to say, by the third time I almost felt sorry for the guy, walking around in that black hooded cloak in the heat of September with an expectant gleam in his hollow eyes.  I said almost.  Surely as a harbinger of death he should know that despite the moans and groans and proclamations of imminent death he was no doubt receiving that this was a false alarm.  Braxton Hicks.  The ultimate tease, if you will.

I was nice about it, but finally had to suggest that he come back when someone is actually running a fever or, wait for it, has a cold severe enough to require a tissue.  But what do I know?

Some time later I was cleaning the kitchen before dinner so that I could mess it all up again when I felt a hand on my shoulder.  I looked up and found The Mister staring at me sheepishly.

“Sorry I’ve been so lazy the the last couple of days,” sniff-sniff.  heh-heh-heh. Then he left the kitchen and asked the boys to help him set the table for me.  I turned back to the pile of dishes in the sink and smiled.  I heard The Mister sneeze, and felt the teensiest bit guilty for giving him such a hard time about being sick.

“Christ!  I think I just cracked a rib with that sneeze!”

Sigh.

Some people long for wealth.  Or fame.  Or true, everlasting love.  I just want to face a camera head on without fear of double chins.  Granted, even thin people have double chins.  My best friend was once married to a man with a chin so weak that no amount of diet or exercise could chisel that jaw line into anything more defined than a turkey wattle.  It turns out his weak chin reflected an even weaker character, so the fact his face resembles a plate of flan pleases me to no end.

I, on the other hand, have no desire to look like custard.  So after years of study, I have perfected the art of hiding my double chin.  A talent many of you have witnessed first hand.  The techniques are simple, but work best when you are either taking the picture or comfortable enough to tell the person taking the picture what to do.

Technique #1: Lose weight.  This technique sucks, is rarely any fun, and is impossibly  hard.  But, it’s also the most effective.  Le sigh.

Technique #2: Hide it.  This is where you hide your double chin behind any number of props, including, but not limited to, hands, cameras, turtlenecks, small children, and your husband’s shoulder.

Technique #3: Crop it. Seriously, pull the camera in tight. Conversely, take a regular picture and then crop it with photo-editing software. Either way, get in real close and get rid of that wiggly beast.

Technique #4: Lift it. Stand next to tall people. Lift your chin up just so, as if you are trying to help out the composition of the picture by positioning yourself more in line with the rest of the subjects in the photograph. You’re not, of course. The only composition you care about is the adipose tissue dangling from your jaw.

{Me and The Mister, at my brother’s wedding, before I lost 40 pounds.}

Technique #5: Position it. This is a hard one, but one that when done well, can fool a lot of people. If you do it often enough, you can even fool yourself, a disappointing truth that becomes apparent when you see candid pictures of yourself at a baseball game and all you can think is, really? Damn.

So. If you are taking the picture of yourself, with or without a tripod, position the camera at slightly above eye level. Forehead level is best. Then, every so slightly point the camera down so that the aperture of the lens is pointing at the spot right between your eyebrows. It will be a subtle shift, but necessary if you want your entire face in the shot. Next, more positioning. Drop your chin slightly, push your shoulders back just a touch, and elongate your neck as best you can without looking like an invitation to vampire. All of this is easier to do from the side, by the way.

These techniques are guaranteed to swipe ten pounds off your face. When you consider the camera also adds ten pounds, it’s a bit of a wash, but let’s not think about that. Occasionally, the techniques don’t work, or aren’t enough to combat your natural tendency to look ridiculous. Case in point:

Problems: Hair is wonky. Shoulders scrunched from trying to contain wild dingos. Chin tucked very, very low in an effort to position face closer to said dingos. Smile is plastered on, and looks every so slightly defeated. Camera is positioned dead center, aimed at nose.

Solutions: Edit the crap out of it on Picnik. Increase the exposure. Take down the highlights. Add a 1960s effect to the image. Try taking picture again.

Problems: Hair. Still wonky. Teeth appear bucked thanks to talking through smile at person holding the camera. Camera still pointed at nose, which is looking downright bulbous thanks to your habit of scrunching it up when you smile like a bunny sniffing the wind for predators.  Still wrangling dingos. Grip on dingos too tight, pushing up hovercraft boobs high enough to create two additional chins.

Solution: Edit, edit, edit. And laugh. And realize with trepidation that you will one day look at this picture and think you look young, and that in the end a little double chin isn’t that big a deal.

Now that The Mister is back at work, Mikey often complains that he misses their early morning breakfasts.  So do I (mainly because it meant I wasn’t making them), and one night after dinner I casually mentioned to The Mister how making breakfast, the easiest meal of the day to prepare, gently sucks from my soul the will to live.  There is something about matching cereal with fruit so early in the morning that I find as complicated as balancing chemical equations.  The Mister just looked at me and smiled, those inscrutable eyes of his giving nothing away.

The next morning, I stumbled into the kitchen and found this.

I think he left the cereal box out to mock me.

A breakfast of cereal and fresh cut strawberries for the boys prepared by The Mister before leaving for work.  I called him immediately, of course, thanking him for helping me in such a simple but thoughtful way.

“Oh, you’re welcome, but it was for Mikey.”

“What?”

“Well, I mean, for you too, of course.  Ahem.  But Mikey told me he missed me making him breakfasts so I told him last night I was going to figure out a way where we could still have breakfast together.”

I see.  Most likely Mikey missed eating breakfast before noon, but that’s neither here nor there.

Not to be outdone, one day Mikey woke up even earlier than usual, and after laying with me for a while in bed said, “Mama, you don’t have to worry about breakfast today.  I’ve got it under control.”

I stumbled into the kitchen and found this.

It didn’t escape my notice that Mikey’s version of breakfast also includes an old bag of candy, scissors, a crazy straw, and a plastic golf club wrapped in duct tape, which makes cereal and fruit a tame combination by comparison.

I love Nicholas, and he will always be my little guy, but holy crap is that kid acting like a total turd. Of course, I blame myself. I’m Catholic and a mom, a lethal powerhouse of guilt, so I feel confident I can shoulder this albatross. I am not confident I can shoulder Nicholas. In fact, I’m one whiny outburst away from putting him out with the recycling on Friday.

It started two weeks ago, when Nico tackled head on his first bout of the stomach flu. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: nothing good comes out of puking.

Second children are, by birth order, the wilder and woollier ones. Nicholas is no different. He has far more scrapes, scars and bruises than Mikey has yet to achieve in five years of first-born cautious living. Naturally, Nico took to vomiting with equal passion. No, he couldn’t puke a few times, maybe 3, and call it nap time. Nicholas had to unhinge his pyloric valve in the middle of the night and unleash a fury heretofore seen only in exorcisms, frat parties, and cholera pandemics.

Eighteen times. That’s how many times he threw up on me in the course of 8 hours. It was The Perfect Storm in my very own living room, only instead of spume and seaweed, Mother Nature tried to drown me under 35 foot waves of apple-flavored pedialyte and saltine crackers.

Midway through Puke Watch 2009.

After the storm, there was nothing left. Not even a scrap of clothing. Nico was left sleeping in a chair wearing nothing but a diaper, a bib, and two old towels. I was in the corner rocking, muttering softly “not again! make it stop!” The next few days after that were just as rough for him, what with the appearance of explosive diarrhea (how I wish it was strong enough to launch me into another continent!), so I cut him some slack and fed him whatever seemed to interest him, which wasn’t much.

One week later, Nicholas awoke with a clean diaper and a dirty disposition. It’s been a battle ground ever since.

He cries when he’s hungry. He cries when he’s done eating. He cries to get in the high chair, and cries to get out. He cries when Mikey is touching the Star Wars figures. He cries when he can’t figure out how to make cars travel vertically up a wall. He cries just to hear himself cry. Except there is no real crying. Oh, sure, he sprung a few tears that one time Mikey knocked him seven ways to Sunday during The Star Wars Battle of June 24 , but everything else? A total faker. Eyes and mouth wide, lungs loud and uvula vibrating like a punching bag, yes. Tears, no.

The smile of a kid who knows he’s going to work you in ten seconds.

I ignore him when he is acting up, for the most part, as do The Mister and Mikey. This sort of behavior is unacceptable. The headstrong attitude, the manipulating, the refusal to accept any position other than his own…it’s like me as a child, only different. In my case I was totally innocent, and any bratty behavior on my part was clearly my mother’s fault.

A video for you on your special day.

xoxo,
the Mrs.

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