Rox and Roll

A great day for the wheat-free!

No, your eyes aren't deceiving you -- Betty Crocker has gone Gluten Free!  You should have seen the dance of joy I did in Price Chopper!  Let's face it -- most of the gluten-free mixes out there taste like a sandy health product.  I've tried many of them, and have generally decided that it's better to never eat cake and cookies again than it is to eat that crap.  My wheat-allergic waistline has thanked me well for that.  But every so often, a girl just needs a cookie.  Betty to the rescue!  I have high hopes that this will taste as wonderful as the highly-processed, not-Michael-Pollan friendly, Betty Crocker total junk of my youth.  If I'm eating a cookie, it better be worth it.  Betty, I'm counting on you!

I will post again after baking this decadence.  If it works, up next are the three other mixes: Brownies, Yellow Cake and Chocolate Cake... one at a time, weeks apart, for the only up-side of pneumonia is my ten-pound weight loss.  And I just bought a killer new dress at my favorite shop ever, Revolution in White River Junction VT, to show off my svelteness.  So one cookie at a time, please...

On recovery, mom-style

I admit it: I have been somewhat of a crabby bee-yotch recovering from this evil pneumonia.  I have had pretty bad bouts of bronchitis before, but I don't think I've had pneumonia since I was a child -- and I woefully misjudged the recovery  involved.  I thought I would take my magic antibiotics and be back to my effervescent self.  Ha, ha.  Of all of the awfulness of pneumonia -- the ten days of fever, the nausea, the twelve pounds I lost (wait, that was the good part!), the headache, the horrific coughing -- the worst part has been the overwhelming fatigue.  I am so damned tired every minute of every day, and it's just. not. going. away.

Well, strike that.  I had this wonderful few days where my children slept well, and I felt rested, and then I spent a wonderful afternoon and evening with my former neighbor and her two kids (the Cleavers!  How I've missed them!) ... and I just felt great.  And then Petunia started getting up in the night, and then Dash started waking up at 5 am, which is 2 am PST, which I am still on... and, yeah.  I got through a wonderful few days back in NJ, and now all I want to do is sleep.  I get more tired in these Green Mountains anyway, as the air is so oxygen-rich that it takes my body some time to adjust under normal circumstances.  Add in pneumonia, and the simple act of breathing seems like a physical feat worthy of a medal.  Strike the exhaustion -- the worst part of this illness and recovery is the constant feeling of breathlessness.  It's a horrible sensation, and it totally sucks -- that, and the looks I get from people who are convinced that I'm coughing swine flu into the air!

The good news is that the Guv is now on vacation; so, over the next few days, I'll get some good rest, and I'll start perking up again.  We're even signed up for a tennis court tomorrow, though I confess that the thought of dressing in tennis clothes, driving down to the club, and wielding my sure-to-feel-like-a-thousand-pounds racket seems a bit daunting right now.  But I'll do it, and why?  Because I'm a mom.  I don't have the luxury of taking a week off to just sleep.  And even if I could, I've slept through enough of the past few weeks.  What I really need has been apparent for quite some time: I need to transition Dash to sleeping in his own bed, in his own room.  I need to make sure that both children know that waking me up in the night is unacceptable unless they're truly sick (and have proof of that) or the house is on fire -- and, even then, Daddy is less likely to cause them injury for a night awakening.  As well, next school year, I need to stop over-volunteering and under-sleeping.  And lastly, I need to get a good few bottles of wine, have a glass every night, and not worry so much about everything.  This too shall pass, but not without my fair amount of bitching about it coupled with beating myself up.  I am a mom after all, and it's all my fault.  Now, where's that wine?!

Greetings from our 54 hours in the Green Mountains

At long last, we arrived in Vermont at 3 am on Friday; but, by 9 am on Sunday, we'll be headed south to New Jersey via a visit with the Brooklyn in-laws.  We will have had 54 hours in verdant Vermont before heading back to a place to which I have mixed feelings returning.

On the one hand, I am excited to see our former NJ neighbors and friends, and I am extra-excited for Petunia to see her old schoolmates.  But on the other hand, I really don't want to see how the new owners of our fomer home have completely bastardized our house.  For the first year we lived in it, I called it the Stein's house, because we bought it from the Stein family -- but then I brought baby Dash home to it, and it became our house forever.  Yet, of course, it's not our house anymore, and some people who were a real hassle to deal with bought it and changed it immensely.  I think that Dash is probably going to have a world-class freak-out, but I probably won't notice because I'll be having my own while Petunia bitches in my ear about those awful people who ruined our house.

And then there's the matter of health -- which is a funny thing for me to chirp about while I'm recovering from pneumonia.  (Did I mention that I have pneumonia?  Yeah... probably should've posted about that diagnosis, but I've been too damned tired.)  Aside from my horrific illness at present, a lot of my memories of NJ are of Dash's 3+ years of ill health.  Coupled with the multiple bouts of bronchitis I had there and Petunia's and my asthma that totally disappeared in California, I'll confess: I'm scared of the air in our former home state.  I have a bag full of inhalers, and we'll be using them as a precaution.  In all fairness, I've heard from plenty of people that their health/allergies/asthma is worse in California; but for us, well, we're well.  (OK, we're all well except for me, right now, but that's my own running-myself-into-the-ground fault.)  Dash gained seven pounds within five months of living in California; a year before that, he'd been failure-to-thrive.  Hence, California is good for our health; New Jersey was not.  And we're going back, and I'm a little scared.

But I have so many happy memories there, too, that I'm going to have to focus on those.  Worry won't make me well any faster, but I'm thinking that a five-day stay in a super-nice Westin might help me along.  No cooking, no cleaning... a vacation from vacation!  I like it.  I can do it.  And I can also take my kids to their former favorite Vito's pizza, and to Sumo Sushi, and to climb on the tigers at Princeton... we can play on Petunia's former school playground, and, best of all, we can visit our old friends, some of whom we've missed terribly. 

So tomorrow, we're off, for a wonderful visit with grandparents and a very special aunt and cousin, and then with good old friends.  I wish I had more than 54 hours in Vermont to sort out all of these mixed feelings, but it is what it is.  It's been a long and wonderful year away, but it's time to see our old home again -- and to accept that places change, but friends remain.  See you soon, NJ.

I'm still out here...

... just half-dead.

I did the one thing that a mother just cannot do: I got sick.  Not just a little sick -- a lot sick.  I-can't-get-out-of-bed sick.  The kind of sick where my husband altered some of his own plans because he knew that the situation was that dire.  And it was horrible.  I have no idea what "it" was.  Perhaps a flu, perhaps a virus, perhaps a stomach bug... but four days into it, I'm still sweating through the sheets at night, waking up with terrible headaches, and have zero appetite.

To that end, perhaps I should call this my swimsuit-season diet?

I remain repulsed at the sight of food, which must be making my husband chuckle since he declared me a bottomless pit a couple of weeks ago during our wine country weekend getaway.  The thought of tasting wine right now makes me sick.  Actually, the thought of tasting air right now makes me sick. 

So enough about that.  I feel like the worst mother ever, as it was the last week of school and I pretty much missed it.  My Petunia is now a fourth-grader.  High praise to her dad for showing up for the year-end picnic while Dash (who miraculously got less sick than me for once) and I watched movies in bed.  I am moderately better mostly because of that fourth-grade angel, who has distracted her brother magnificently while I've been laying in bed moaning. 

That brother, on the other hand, will not tolerate me being sick for one more minute.  He has screamed "MOMS DON'T GET SICK!" in my face about 2000 times.  He has ordered me to put my shoes on and take him to the park RIGHT NOW about as often.  Thank God it's the weekend, and daddy has them at the park... which makes me wonder why I'm not in bed.

Oh, that's right, there's laundry to fold.  I forgot: Moms don't get sick.