$25 off

I realize with guilt that I haven't been doing as many things with my older girls as I used to. So a few weekends ago, the afternoon of the festival of lights and the spitting incident, actually, we all managed to get out the door together to go for a simple walk.

Gillian's new favorite pastime is pushing the little red wagon my Mom bought for Bela's first Christmas. She gets so excited, pulls herself up, and off she goes. That girl can log some distances on those big chubby thighs of hers. She pushed her little wagon all the way around the block, which on baby legs must feel like a small marathon.

So while she stiff-legged it down the street and around the corner, I walked with Chris and the girls. Their interest in watching their sister accomplish new feats faded as they began to notice that our neighborhood had been littered with little green fliers advertising $25 off a massage at a local spa.

I don't know why people do this. For my part, the minute I find my house/sidewalk/car the victim of unsolicited advertisements I silently vow to never, ever patronize that business, out of principle. But the girls were into it. They began slowly, picking up the easy ones as we walked past. But soon, our walk turned into a giant scavenger hunt whose purpose was to relieve the block of each and every speck of green paper.

They plucked them off cars. They ran up to neighbors' houses. They found them in lawns. By the time we got home they must have had at least 80. After a second trip out later that day with Chris, they doubled their numbers.

So now, the annoying single piece of green advertisement that once resided only on my car windshield has become 150+ pieces of green advertisement all over my living room.

"What are you going to do with these, Bela?" I asked that day.

"Bring them to the parade to pass them out", she answered.

Somewhere between ridding the block of the irritating litter and redistributing free of charge said litter to a much wider, more diverse audience, lies some irony. But I'm too dense to make much use of it here. 

Bela and Mae packed up their backpacks with the stacks of (really high quality) coupons and we all set off for the Festival of Lights parade, which, as you know, really didn't end up being the best environment for pamphleting, what with all the spitting and shoving.

And so, in the meantime, I'm looking for something crafty to do with all these things. Either that, or you're all getting $25 off a massage this year for Christmas.

Festival of lights

Fireworks over the Chicago River

In the unspoken competition between Dad and Mom, this lady here is 0 for 10. 

Chris and I had a "discussion" last week, and somewhere at some point during our venting and our righting of wrongs, I remember myself critiquing him for never putting any effort into planning anything for us to do as a family.

"I get depressed when we sit around on a Saturday." I said.

"I hate it when the TV is on and it's beautiful outside and the kids are doing nothing." I said.

"I want to do something!" I said.

He could have, but did not, bring up the fact that most of the things I plan end up costing us $100. They turn into major whining fests. They inspire conflict, resentment, and exhaustion.

My birthday weekend I insisted we go to Morton Arboretum to see the fall colors... with the other 4 million bazillion folks in the greater Chicago area.  I won't tell you how much we paid for crappy hot dogs, how long we waited in lines, or how little we saw of the actual trees, but I will concede that it was probably our last visit during fall festival weekend. 

The weekend before that I planned a lovely little hike to our neighborhood park's fall festival and pumpkin patch, where we dropped an embarrassing amount of money on "tickets" which gained us entrance to an even more embarrassing number of "activities." And then we got stuck outside in the middle of a rare Chicago tornado warning.

Not doing so well, you think. Learn from your lessons, Katie, you say.

Which makes me not want to tell you about tonight, except that there is no way I can NOT tell you about tonight.

Some strange and mysterious force set me up to take another fall. Stubborn and ever hopeful, I decided wouldn't it be sweet if we all hopped on the train (it's CHEAP!), rode downtown (it's only 9 stops!) and watched the Festival of Lights on Michigan Avenue (it's FREE admission)!

And Chris, in true winning spirit, agreed. Yes! he said. Yes! I will go! I'm with you! Let's plan this. Let's DO something.

And it was lovely, until we made it to the front lines near Wacker and Michigan.

I breathed in, and then out. I promised I would not lose my cool, and then I did. Immediately.

The problem: it wasn't fair that Bela was on Chris's shoulders. It wasn't fair that Bela had a better view, that she was taller, that her eyes looked higher over the crowd. Mae had a point - she is shorter than Bela, and was sitting on the shorter parent's shoulders.  They fought. They cried. We buckled.

In a ridiculous attempt to appease our children and ensure that they both sat at the same vantage point in the crowd, eyes locked at the same exact height, I - the smaller half of our parental unit - ended up with Bela (50lbs) on my shoulders while Gillian (22lbs) rode strapped to my chest.  Bela was bouncing to get a better view of the top 2 inches of the parade floats when all of the sudden a small group of people pushed their way through our part of the crowd.

They pushed in,  people pushed back. I could feel Bela's attention transition from Santa and Mickey and Christmas trees to the "f*** you, you white trash b****" coming from behind us.
"I'm gonna spit in your face, b****" drifted over, but shortly after, they pushed their way through, tempers settled, nervous laughter and stunned guffaws floated in the air. We turned around to take stock of the damage.

I was feeling a little shaken because I had almost been knocked over, buried under Bela and forced to suffocate Gill, but really I was feeling bad for the lady who had been the target of the group's obscenities. So I was shocked when I noticed the look on her face, a look that only meant she was taking pity on US.

As it turns out, one of the women made good on her threat of spitting, but she didn't have the best aim. For there sat Mae, atop Chris's taller shoulders, with a big, wet, loogie swinging from her coat pocket.

When it was finally over, when the fireworks ended and we had our hot cocoa in hand, we made it back to the train at Clark and Lake. I looked at Bela who was faux gagging and retching in the train station, feigning illness. I looked at Mae who was complaining of cold and sore legs. I looked down at Gillian who had grown irate at being tied to me, and overwhelmed with exhaustion. And then I looked at my husband, who never once said "I told you so."

I smiled at him. And then we squeezed into an overstuffed, hot, smelly train car packed with strollers crying kids and gum popping, and began the long, long 9 stop ride home. 

The best part? After putting the kids to bed, after pouring a glass of wine, we sat on the couch, And Chris looked at me and said, "Next year, we gotta get closer to the front."







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The lazy homeowners guide to what's what

Ok, I'm actually not lazy. My friends aren't either. But when we want to laugh, poke fun at ourselves, we usually do so by highlighting how we're lazy, unbathed, uncouth little mommies. And it's funny, because it's not true. Well, not completely.

Sometimes we are so busy in other aspects of our lives (i.e., super not lazy) that we have to let other things slide (like bathing).

As we were looking to buy the house, the fact that it was a wee bit nasty inside actually appealed to our DIY inner-selves. Chris talked about tiling, OH! the tiling he would do. I talked about painting and rebuilding and expanding. Oh yes. It was going to be fun. We were going to attack our newly acquired problems with a wrench in one hand, a glass of wine in the other, arms linked and eyes starry.

Now the truth of the matter: We've done a lot. I promise I'll take you on a tour. Walls have been painted. Rugs have been laid. New old furniture has replaced old old furniture. Some pictures have been hung. Things are taking shape.

More truth. We are busy. We are not lazy. We let things slide.

So in the spirit of a good laugh, here is the lazy busy homeowner's guide to what's what.

1) When your hallway floor starts to splinter and cave in right in the middle (and you can't reach the joists underneath without ripping out the finished basement's ceiling) you buy FLOR tiles. They are durable. You lay them down. You walk on them and hope their resiliency distributes the weight of each footstep. You hope they are pretty enough to distract from the disaster below. You hope you don't fall through the floor.

2). When your children abuse their new, personal shower... when they feel that the only way to turn the water on, to turn the water off, is by aggressively jamming the knobs back and forth until all the little doodads inside the mechanism thingy start to slip and slide and water won't stop dripping pouring from the shower head, DO NOTHING. If you wait long enough, it mysteriously just fixes itself. Go ahead. Call the plumber and get the $350 quote, sit on it for an eternity, and voila! Fixed. Free.

3) When you have no time for yard work, when you really want to remove the rotting pumpkins but can't find the energy after a long day of work, DON'T. Eventually, the squirrels will eat them all. When I saw what Snaggle Tooth Squirrel (our roommate upstairs) did to Mae's pumpkin, I dragged the rest from the front of the house and left them in the back yard - to his utter delight. This baby's only got a day and a half left, by my estimate.

Wait, WHAT? You don't know Snaggle Tooth? How have I not introduced you! Zoom in on this beauty below. (S)He lives here with us, up in the roof somewhere. Which reminds me of something else that needs taking care of - all the missing fascia on our roof. In the meantime, we're going to start charging the squirrels for their cozy housing.