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February 11, 2005
This weekend I entered our tax information into Turbo Tax (a basic tax filers very best friend, in my opinion) and have been pleasantly surprised with a fairly sizeable refund. Now, to be fair, we sort of knew this was coming. I didn't change my withholding at work after Ava was born on purpose. The first year John and I filed taxes together we got whopped with a huge bill as our combined income tipped us into a tax bracket we had not been counting on as single people. We were a bit fearful that might happen again as John left school and began work, so we decided to leave things as they were since we'd rather be surprised with a big refund than a big bill. The whole 'family values' gig works to our advantage too - having a child, in child care and owning a home added nicely to our bottom line. Naturally we have spent this money ten ways from Sunday, but in the most boring use of 'found money' imaginable, we are going to throw most of it to law school debt, holding out a little seed money for a longed-for trip to celebrate our five year anniversary this fall. We'd love to go to Italy - more likely it will be New York, but I’ve looked at the Caribbean (we got married on St. John in the USVI) and London/France. Right now everything short if New York is probably out of our reach from a realistic financial stand point, but it has given us an incentive to figure out a way to tuck some money away. To have the mental ‘permission’ to start thinking about such a trip has been like a little mental vacation the past couple of days. In a few free moments I have explored Expedia etc… mentally setting a budget and making plans for any one of several fantastic destinations.
Saturday my father and I rode in the BRR Bike Ride. It was pretty fun… 23 (really about 25, but who’s counting) miles, mostly flat. The weather was unseasonably warm, in the low 50’s, but the wind was just wicked. On the way out the ride was great, but on the way back, into the wind, I had my bike in the lowest gear possible, working my a** off and was still only moving about 7 MPH. The paper said 30MPH winds – I’d say AT LEAST! But it was a great workout, fun to have the day with my dad and do something a little different. My father sent me an email saying it was a lifetime memory for him, which was unusual and very nice. The ride did get me just longing for spring. To have the feeling of warm air on my skin, to smell the grass… Always this time of year I am ready. This weekend I was craving a fabulous, juicy tomatoes. John made me a wonderful veggie pizza with asparagus, red pepper, pesto and roasted Roma tomatoes. I loved the gesture, but I am still craving summer tomatoes!
Even with a relatively relaxing weekend I am in the midst one of the most wretched work weeks I’ve had in awhile, which is managing to contribute to my on going professional crisis. John has a trial all week, so every day I’ve done both the drop off and pick up at daycare – usually I just do one or the other – everyday this week. And Ava has a terrible head cold. During the legislative session I do not have an eight hour a day job, so I am wrecked each day trying to figure out how to cram everything in, professionally, and not leave Ava at daycare, miserable with a cold, for ten hours a day. I am quite literally having a biological reaction. I swear I smell her hair all day. I don’t want to be this mom – I want Ava to be able to count on me. The other night I went rolling into day care at 5:30pm and Ava was crying. I asked what was going on and the afternoon teacher said the kiddos get pretty fussy when the parents start arriving. That just tugged at my heart strings. Ava is rarely in the last group of kids to be picked up. Due to her cold Ava isn’t sleeping well – waking up several times a night, so I look like Keith Richards after a hard night of partying. Seriously, no amount of concealer helps. When she wakes up we are tucking her in with us for a while to try to get her settled down, so I’m spending my nights listening to her stuffed up breathing, rubbing her back, soaking her in, wishing there was more I could do in so many ways. John and I are barely managing to speak four civil words to each other before we collapse into a heap at the end of the day. Why? Why am I working this hard? Why do I feel like I’m running in place? I just want to cry. I know the end of this week is in sight, a whole weekend to reconnect with my family, myself. I know the only way out is through. I know I have the beginnings of a plan to look for a new job. I’m having a pity party for the moment, so sue me.
As I mentioned in a previous entry we are having some family stress about Meghan’s upcoming trip to France this summer. Due to a whole multitude of issues that now involve John’s ex-wife AND his mother any last bit of celebration I might have felt at Meghan having this experience has completely evaporated. I’m not going to write about the details, mostly because I am quite confident that ten years from now I am not going to want to recall this. Hell I don’t even want to think about it now. One portion that I will talk about though is causing some marital strife for John and I. When we gave the green light for this trip to Meghan in May of last year it was with the understanding that she would work over the next year to earn her spending money for the trip. Since she’ll be gone ten days we estimated she would need $500. To date Meghan has saved about $.50 and is showing absolutely no remorse, panic etc… to get that money in her account by the time she leaves in June. Even worse, she has decided to fund her share of the trip she is going to sell her violin, the violin we paid for, to fund her spending money. This honks me off like none other. John doesn’t see the big problem. To top it off, she announced Wednesday night at dinner that a peg on her violin was broken and we needed to pay to have it repaired so she could get her instrument sold on time. John and I fight about money very, very infrequently and I know I am feeling pretty pre-disposed to a negative reaction around the France trip and money. But I feel like he made an agreement with (forgive me) MY money without checking with me.
I wrote in my last entry about how excited I was for my Valentine’s date with John. He told me last night that it looks like our babysitter is going to fall through. Because we only hire a babysitter every couple of months we really only have one young woman we call. So we don’t have a back up and it looks like our date might be off. We have three good Netflix movies we haven’t watched yet, “Ray” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “House of Sand and Fog” but I am so disappointed, especially given everything else I’ve written about so far. Tomorrow is the five year anniversary of the day John proposed to me – on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial facing the tidal basin. I feel almost desperate to reconnect with him and I really wanted to do something we love doing together to mark that occasion. I’m trying to keep hope alive that our babysitter tangle gets untangled so we can have a real, honest to goodness, just the two of us date.
So this entry doesn’t turn into a long narrative about everything that is wrong in my world I did want to spend some time talking about some things with my girl. First, she did the cutest darn thing Sunday night in her sleep. All night I kept hearing her roar like a lion (“Loud as a Lion” from “Quick as a Cricket”) in her sleep. Monday morning I said something to John about it and he said “you heard that too? I thought I was just dreaming.” I wonder what she was dreaming about that she kept growling in her sleep? And more and more Ava is becoming a world-class mimic. She loves doing the things we do – helping us. So we try to look for lots of things to include her in. The other night I was making this boxed organic risotto she absolutely adores (and it’s not too bad for boxed risotto) she calls it RICE. She was just tickled to darn death to help pour the liquid in, help me stir etc… Wednesday morning when John was shaving she took some of her lotion and smeared it on her face. So John turned his razor around and ‘shaved’ her lotion. The look of pure wonder on her face was flat out priceless.
Ava wakes up every morning and calls for either John or I. And she knows for sure who she wants. It’s either ‘MAMA’ or ‘DAAAADEE’ I presume as soon as she opens her eyes. There doesn’t seem to be any routine to it. Sometimes it will be me for several days in a row, then she’ll switch… Even though I don’t wake up super well I just love it when she calls out to me, I go to get her and we have that first thing in the morning hug and snuggle. I always say “good morning sweet girl, did you have a good sleep?” We change her diaper and then bring her back to our room. In the early days of her life that routine started with me lying in bed nursing her, then when she was weaned we would just lie there, the three of us and cuddle. But anymore Ava is waking up ready to EAT and telling us from moment one that it is time to eat. Nearly every morning John gets her started on breakfast while I hop in the shower, but I miss our cuddle time. I suppose she was bound to out grow it sooner or later, but I guess I didn’t expect it to be so soon. Our Patito is a breakfast fiend – she eats more than most adults. For example, this morning she had a mini-bagel with cream cheese, a whole banana, then a piece of cinnamon raisin toast with apple butter, plus a little unsweetened applesauce to boot. It is almost unreal. But she tapers off quite a bit as the day goes on, eating very little for dinner, which I suppose is why she wakes up so hungry.
I work for the state’s human services agency, dealing with Medicaid, Child Welfare and host of other issues. The child welfare cases can tear me open. I was watching Ava with her Daddy, practicing shaving. She was so beautiful, so happy, so trusting, so nuts about her dad… Later that day I read some background on a child abuse case that made me weep. I think about families who abuse their children and I just feel sick that people do that to these wonderful little souls we’ve been privileged to raise. I know I wasn’t insensitive to these issues before becoming a mom, but now I am impacted in ways that are difficult to describe. I like doing work where I feel like I make a difference in people’s lives, but now I think I’d like to give that up to someone new so I can make a better difference in my own child’s life. Maybe that’s why I’ve struggled so much with the question about what I should do professionally. I am driven to make a difference, to have a job that ‘matters’ in this world by forces I don’t quite understand. I feel like once I figure that out (or just figure out how to let that part of me go) I should be able to better pinpoint what it is I want to do. In the meantime I’m searching for something that pays well, doesn’t demand too much and makes a difference. So many jobs like that out there…
Thanks for reading—
--Kate
PS The tagline for this week’s entry comes from a Maroon Five song – ‘Sunday Morning.’ I probably never would have found Maroon Five on my own, but Meghan loaded their album “Songs About Jane” into my iPod and told me I just HAD to listen to it. I think its quite good.. But I especially love that song – it has an almost Stevie Wonder quality about it and it makes me think of John.
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