Fried-Day

I am starting to think that Friday's are cursed. But is it all in my head or are Friday's truly turning into FRIED-DAYS?
When I returned to work after my first daughter was born, I was fortunate enough to work for a good little company who understood and supported a flex schedule. I was able to return to the office for four days a week and then work from home for a few hours each Friday. This was perfect. With one child, this schedule fit like a glove.
Enter child number two and an office that allowed me to continue with this schedule upon my return. What a blessing...except that through a combination of factors, the Fridays of old have gone the way of the Do-do Bird.
I now have two children, neither of whom nap, who want my undivided attention on Fridays. They call it their day. And so they should. Except that the office now seems to lay claim to this day as well. The struggle to answer calls, write emails, ichat, update, confirm meetings, conference call while making grilled cheese, untangling elastics from hair, putting on shoes, wiping noses or bums seems to be getting the best of me.
Last Friday, I was down for the count and couldn't get myself up for anything...today, a week later, I found myself awake at 6:00am with a migraine to end all migraines and the knowledge that it was Friday. My day with the girls. Coincidence? Chance? I'm starting to wonder.
Sophie came upstairs at 2:30 to my darkened room and snuggled me, while trying to pop some medicine into my mouth and then she said very tenderly "you told me last night you were going to have breakfast with me and today we would have a playdate - But you didn't".
My head still ached but my heart strings were now twanging too....

mind the gap

This blog is coming from the steamy, loud, rather damp bathroom in our little house. The girls are making potions in the bath and I am perched atop the closed toilet trying to get this blog written before the the arguing starts along with the the waterworks.

Once the girls were safely in the tub and before writing this blog, I quickly grabbed my toothbrush and did a quick post-dinner brush. I was reminded as I brushed my teeth, that on Thursday of this week, I get to pick up the whitening trays that I have had made at my dentist office. That's right, I am bleaching my teeth and I am as excited as I was when I got the gap in my front teeth fixed at the age of 16.

I have always been a teeth person. It is one of the first things I notice when I meet someone. Being a tooth-gal, the fact that my own adult teeth were far from perfect was a constant niggle in my teenage life. Sure, they were straight and not a terrible colour but they weren't sparkling white and worst of all, I had a large gap between my two front teeth. I willed that gap away from the time I was about 12 until I finally got them fixed when I was 16. Not only did I will that gap away but I resorted to some pretty new-fangled torture to fix the gap myself.

My favourite "fix" was when I would take little elastics and put them around both front teeth as tightly as I could and leave them overnight. In the morning, when I would take the elastic off, I would swear that I could feel that my teeth had moved closer together. They would always hurt a little bit. This was a good thing, wasn't it? It was strange that the gap didn't ever look any smaller. My other fix, not as saavy, but certainly something I thought made me look far more appealing, was the "chewed-up-piece-of-kleenex, tucked-between-my-teeth" plan. I was sure that with that carefully placed softened Kleenex between my teeth that everyone would see me with perfect ivory Chicklets not the "spit-gap" teeth that stared back at me every night in the mirror.

When I was 16 my parents, who clearly did not understand how horrible my life had been because of my teeth, said that I could have my gap filled with a new technique the dentist was doing. Within an hour of being in the dentist chair, my gap, my albatross, was gone. I could not stop smiling. When I returned to school with my new becoming smile it was all I could do not to smile at the water fountains.

The realization that we are our own worst critic was my lesson at this time in my life, since all the people I smiled at with my new teeth finally started saying "what are you smiling about?" to which I replied "My teeth!! They are fixed! Don't you see??!". The answers from every single person and even a couple of water fountains was "really? I didn't notice that you had a gap?!"

name that pig

I was reading some Richard Scarry to my youngest daughter, when I came across something that made both of us stop and giggle. I had just started reading about Sergeant Murphy and his daughter "Bridget" (Richard Scarry "dogs"), followed quickly by little Sophie Humperdink (Richard Scarry "Pigs"). How was it that I had named both of my children after two animal characters in the same story in a Richard Scarry book?

Of course, this just got me thinking, again, about names. I think about names a lot. When I was pregnant with my first daughter, I would sometimes have a physical heaviness, a weight, knowing that my husband and I would have to choose a name that our child would either pour themselves into, or not.

When we named our first daughter the whole thing felt organic and easy. We just knew, when we looked at her, moments after she was born, that she wasn't a Scarlet or a Esme but she was most definitely a Sophie. It felt good to be so sure. It still feels good. Sophie loves me to tell her about all the names we had picked out for her. She "yuks" or "yums" after each name that I list off but always looks contented and impish when we finally talk about how she is our Sophie and has been our Sophie from the moment she arrived.

When I was about 5 months pregnant with our second child we had a list of names that we were thinking about. We asked Sophie how she felt about all of the names (for both girls and boys since we didn't know what we were having) and, true to form, she "yuked" and "yumed" her way through the list and eventually paused and said, "I am calling the baby, Bridget" and that was that. The baby, whether it had been a boy or a girl would have been called Bridget. Things have a funny way of working out and Bridget couldn't be more Bridget if she tried.

Oh, and I am thrilled to know that my children, AKA Sophie Humperdink and Bridget Murphy, a pig and a dog, will live forever in the pages of the Richard Scarry, Please and Thank you Book.