Six Hours

Bob, The Baby

Now that Bob is in pre-school, I am looking at six delicious hours to myself every week: two hours every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I have big plans for my sweet, sweet, new-found freedom.

The novel will be written. Or an outline for the novel will be completed. Or I will use up all 140 characters in my Twitter updates.

The house will be cleaner. Or straightened-er. Or I will get that sticky area off of the floor between the big chair and the bookcase that showed up last spring that I'm pretty sure is cat barf.

I will dress like the moms in Cookie Magazine. Or I will dress in street clothes instead of pajamas. Or I will wear actual clean pajamas, not “clean” as decided by a sniff test.

So, I have plans, lofty plans. Here's how it's going so far:

On Day One, I came home and used my two free hours to clean the baseboards, make a wish list on the Anthropologie website, and do some research for the novel.

On Day Two I watched 3½ Tivo'd episodes of How I Met Your Mother.

On Day Three I changed back into the pajamas I slept in and ate a 12 oz bag of Trader Joe’s Veggie and Flax Seed Tortilla Chips while getting misty watching baby videos of my son on YouTube. Then I counted the minutes until I could pick him up from school, drove back early and sat in my station wagon in the parking lot until that damned two hours was up.

I think I'm really hitting my stride.

The First Day

I have spent much of the last four months preparing for last Wednesday: Bob’s first day of pre-school.

First there was the desperate potty training: Fun for the whole family.

Then because of Bob’s intense-ish separation anxiety, we enrolled him in a six-week summer school program at another school where I could stay in the class and work up to leaving him for longer and longer periods of time. He only cried until he threw up the first four times that I left him. From then on it was just the wailing without the projectile string cheese.

In the last two weeks, we bought a book for Bob called Llama Llama Misses Mama about a llama with issues. Somehow Bob only seemed to grasp the-whiny-little-llama-was-miserable-and-sad part, never the-he-made-friends-and-had-fun-and-mama-came-back part.

At the suggestion of another mom at school, Bob and I created a book together about his new school and routine. He seemed to enjoy working on our project but got fixated on the “Bob brushes his teeth” and “Bob puts on sunscreen” parts of his schedule. He focused only on wanting to re-write these parts of the story to include, "Bob watches another Toot and Puddle, the one with the tire swing" and "Bob eats ice cream sandwiches for breakfast."

When we arrived at school Wednesday morning, Bob was excited. He donned a red choo choo name tag and got to work on a sponge paint project and said goodbye to me. No tears. As I locked the yard gate behind me, I saw Bob running out of the classroom. He smiled at me and waved but ran in the opposite direction towards the bin of train toys. I heard a teacher call out from inside the room, “We’ve got a runner!” I trusted them to deal with it, made my way to the car and drove the eight blocks home. No tears.

Later when Bob came home, he told me that school was ok and that he liked the bike yard and the grapes parts the best. Then he sat on the couch and ate a green felt tipped pen.

They grow up so fast.

Snack

If there is mousse involved, I probably did not make it.

Tomorrow is my turn to provide “snack” for Bob’s summer school class. The guidelines are simple: A fruit or vegetable, a carb, and a protein. I’ve seen the other snacks roll through in the last few weeks. Cereal, rice, baby carrots, yogurt – what you’d expect. Occasionally an inspired mom will bust out with the errant mango chunks or micro-waved potstickers, but mostly it’s a string cheese festival. Then, there was Mrs. G.

Mrs. G had a kid in the school last summer. Bob was not in school then and I do not know Mrs. G, but her snacks are the stuff of legend. The teachers describe her as the “Foodie Mom.” She brought hand rolled sushi, homemade spring vegetable hand pies, oiled cutting boards filled with organic charcuterie and dried figs. The kids loved it.

I am by no means a foodie or even a foodie-lite but I am sort of nuts (ask anyone) and also oddly competitive, especially in areas that Do Not Matter.

Here’s my crazy: I spent an hour today brainstorming Amazing Snack Ideas. This is time that would have perhaps been better spent doing really almost anything else. Taking my once every 48 hours shower? Enjoying a TiVo’d episode of Tori & Dean? Preparing “snack” for people that actually live in my home and are at this moment foraging for weird old bean dip in the back of our refrigerator?

Here is today’s remedial mini-epiphany: I do not need to compete with a Mommy faux -Nigella Lawson by learning to press my own tofu or by baking individual brie and rolling out a carving station for a dozen three-year-olds. I am not Foodie Mom. I am Always-Leaves-Her-Travel-Mug-of-Coffee-By-the-Sign-In-Sheet Mom and I am sticking with my strengths.

Oh and tomorrow is: watermelon, string cheese, rice cakes.