Since I usually look as if I just walked off a Milan runway, it will come as a shock to some of you that I wasn’t always so stylish. I found this treasure of a picture in a stack of family photos that my parents sent to me. Picture is circa 1991, and clearly taken at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas.
I mean, really, could we possibly be any dorkier? I feel bad for the poor gladiator, who was the only one appropriately dressed for the occasion.
Recently, the boy was drinking lemonade on the toddler chair we have in the living room, and he spilled it all over.
He didn’t mention a word to Eric, who was the only one home at the time.
A short while later, Eric noticed that the chair was soaking wet.
“Hey, did you spill something on this chair?” he asked.
“Just water, Daddy,” replied the boy.
“Are you sure about that?” Eric asked, picking little bits of lemon pulp off the fabric chair. “Are you sure it wasn’t lemonade?”
“Welllll,” the boy paused, and seemed to reflect for a bit. Then he tilted his head and asked “What would you do if I told you it was lemonade?”
A little over a month ago, Eric started looking into solar panels for the house. The process yielded some interesting information.
I’d always thought of ourselves as relatively energy aware people. I mean, we don’t run the air conditioning much, don’t leave lights on and are generally mindful of how much power we are using. I didn’t think of our bills as ludicrously high.
I was wrong. Though it’s not entirely all our fault, you’ll see.
As it turns out, the average kilowatt hour usage monthly (averaged over the year) for a house of our size is 632 kWh/month. We had been using an average of 1033 kWh/month. Jeez. And now I feel like I’ve revealed something like my weight. Anyway. We got an energy audit from Xcel Energy, during which I learned that our biggest electricity drains were our electric dryer and our electric water heater. Seeing as how we do at LEAST one load of laundry a day, our dryer gets a lot of usage. (As a side note, you always assume that you’ll do more laundry after you have kids because you’ll have their laundry to wash. What no one tells you is that they also manage to make your clothes filthy as well, so your overall laundry quintuples.) I’d always thought our water heater was gas. Of course, this explains why our gas usage is so much below the average–34 therms instead of an average 70 therms. In the summer, our only gas usage is our stove and the pilot light for the fireplace and our bill is only 7 therms/month.
So, a few changes.
First:
Using this tutorial, I put up a couple clotheslines. (The lady may be a jailbird, but she’s got some good ideas.) We started the time-honored activity of hanging our clothes out to dry. Of course, since Colorado is well-known for late afternoon thundershowers, we also got to engage in the time-honored activity of scrambling to pull your clothes off the line before they get soaking wet again. And there was a minor emergency when a wasp got stuck in the corner of a fitted sheet and popped out of hiding while I was making the bed. A few times, we left the clothes on the line overnight and forgot it was sprinkler night. And yes, that’s practically our entire backyard, but the clothes never seemed to get in the way of kids playing. We managed to use the dryer only once.
We also made a concerted effort not to turn on the A/C at all. We’d have to open the windows every morning when it was cooler, then shut them and close all the blinds when the sun came up. It kept it fairly livable, though we did turn on the air conditioning one day when my mother-in-law was here. (See? Not my fault. I was forced to use more energy for the sake of family peace.) We also turned our water heater down a bit more and turned the fireplace pilot light off because, well, it was idiotic to keep it on in the summer anyway.
I eagerly awaited our September energy bill to see what the effect would be. I was expecting that the total would go down by around 100 kWh, but not hugely.
Our bill dropped by 300 kWh from July. Thirty percent. Our gas usage went from 7 therms to just 3. Our bill overall dropped by $46. Holy energy savings, Batman!
Obviously it’ll go up significantly in winter since we’ll have to use our dryer more and will have to run the heat. Of course, now that we don’t have little babies in the house anymore we can keep the place a little cooler and use more sweaters and blankets. Keep that in mind if you stop by this winter. We’ll never get below the average year-round simply because of the water heater and dryer, but I feel a lot better about cutting our usage at least in the summer months.
Now I just have to wait until the kids are tall enough to hang clothes themselves and then I’ll personally be able to expend less energy.
A few months ago, a friend from work was trying to get a bunch of women to race Tri for the Cure with her. I initially blew it off thinking that it seemed like a lot of work and time, but eventually caved in. I figured it would be a good way to get in shape and to hang out with people from work whom I liked. This being Colorado, no one seems to just grab drinks after a hard day of work to relax and hang out. Nonononono. You must engage in some physically taxing activity to spend extracurricular time together. This includes skiing, snowboarding, river rafting, biking, running, and training for a triathlon.
The other thing about Colorado is that performing for races is part of agreement that you sign when you move here. I didn’t believe this at first. I then perused the fine print on my driver’s license application and saw that there’s a clause requiring that you sign up for a race. Tri for the Cure is a sprint distance triathlon, which means a 750m swim, 12 mile bike ride, and 5K run, in that order. To me, any one of those taken separately qualifies as a pretty vigorous workout. To do them all together, it seemed like insanity.
Here, though, the general response to “I’m doing Tri for the Cure” was this: “Oh, that’s just a sprint distance. Those are easy.”
The conversation would then continue and everyone around would chime in to talk about what longer/faster/more grueling race they were going to do. They would talk about their training for the Boston Marathon (a race you have to qualify for by running a marathon in 3 HOURS and 40 MINUTES if you’re 18-34), upcoming Century rides (100 mile bike rides), and swimming the ENGLISH CHANNEL. I’m not kidding. Next to that, the triathlon seemed a bit piddly. I’d lower my head and start to mutter about patients to see and slowly back away. One of my friends (and you know who you are) even said nonchalantly, “Oh, yeah, Tri for the Cure. I did that a few years ago as a first triathlon. I won in my age category.” You WHAT?!
I mean, my idea of a workout is some frantic knitting, which burns 99 calories an hour.
Still, I managed to train and felt pretty good. I was going to ride my old, 3 speed 1970s bike for the race. A friend of mine who’s a big bike racer was horrified by this. I think he was as horrified by my wanting to ride Ol’ Betsy as I am when I see people wearing nylons with open toed shoes. He actually managed to wrangle a bike from a friend’s wife. A few days before the race, I went over to his house to learn how it worked. There were so many gears. And so many switches. And so many places to put your hands. And little cages for your feet. He showed me how it all worked, and I went back home and flopped into a chair and actually burst into tears, overwhelmed by how real and serious it all seemed.
The next day, I took the bike for a ride and after I got over my initial fear of mortal injury, it was great.
Race day came and I woke up strangely calm and feeling prepared. The race itself was, well, pretty fun actually. Initially Eric and the boy were going to come down later, but they managed to get to the bike start just as I was about to go through and it gave me such a boost to hear them cheering for me as I got onto the saddle. For this particular race, you can wear your ipod for the run portion. I’d preloaded it with a playlist of fast, upbeat tunes that I loved. I set the ipod to random and took off on the run. Everytime it would shuffle to the next song, I’d wonder HOW my ipod knew that I loved that song, sort of forgetting that the playlist was basically all my favorites, so it couldn’t really go wrong.
I was rather proud of myself when it was all over. There’s something in knowing that you can push your body to work that hard and it responds. I’ll do the race again next year, and maybe do a little more fundraising.
I also learned that you CAN drink beers with friends here in Colorado, you just have to do so AFTER you finish a physically taxing race.
The boy has always had amazing language skills. I remember when we’d go to his well child visits and would receive a sheet of paper with his expected language milestones, all of which he had achieved months prior. I thought, rather uncharitably, that the milestones were for the dumb kids.
Things were a bit different with the girl. We’d go to the same well child visits, look at the sheets, and she’d have maybe one or two of them achieved, and just barely at that. I know you’re not supposed to compare children, but it’s sort of hard not to.
Denver has a city program for early evaluation and intervention for any delay, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to have the girl evaluated. We sat on the ground with a bunch of toys, books, and puzzles, and two delightful women engaged the girl in a series of tasks. During each one, the women would nod vigorously and beam at the girl, who was at her charming best. At the end of it, they looked at me and said, “She’s not behind at all! She’s actually about 15% ahead of her age.”
Um..okay…I’ll just…walk away now…I’m not an overacheiving parent…no…not at all…
The funny thing is, I just went to find a video of the boy speaking at her age and you know what I found? They use exactly the same number of words. The only difference is that the boy’s speech was much clearer.
The therapists did note this, especially that the girl tends to skip letters and drop the end off of words. They encouraged me to enunciate and repeat sounds back to the girl to improve her pronunciation. For example, if I show her a picture of a dog, and she says, “Daw!” I’m supposed to say, “Right! Dog! Do-Guh-Guh-Guh,” emphasizing the “g” sound.
I went over this at dinner that night, and the boy listened to every word.
This morning at breakfast, Eric asked the boy what music he wanted to listen to.
“Wilco!” he replied.
“Wacko!” parroted the girl.
The boy turned to his sister, “Wuh-Wuh-Wuh-il-il-il-ko-ko-ko.”
“Wacko!” said the girl.
He kept repeating the appropriate diction of “Wilco” until she more or less got it right. “Wuhlco!” she finally blurted out.
With such a talented speech therapist in the house, I’m sure she’ll be speaking clearly in no time!
Available for weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs, and birthdays.
Or maybe just for birthdays.
At the park today, I’m pushing the girl on the swing. My boy was off on the play structure. The nanny pushing the boy in the swing next to us looked at me and asked in a friendly voice, “Where are you from?”
I almost immediately knew where this conversation was leading, but thought I’d wait just to be sure.
“India,” I reply, giving the untrue answer for which most people are looking. “Where are you from?”
“Ethiopia. Oh, Asia? Are you a student here or something?”
“No, I usually work but I have the week off, so I’m hanging out with the kids during the day.”
“Oh, it’s just that I don’t see many Indian babysitters around here.”
“Oh, I’m their mom,” I say with a smile, gesturing in the general direction of the play structure to indicate that there is another child of mine in the vicinity.
The woman looks at the blonde, light-skinned girl that I’m pushing in the swing and says, somewhat incredulously, “She’s your daughter?!”
“Yup!”
Truthfully, I’ve been expecting this and am quite surprised it hasn’t happened sooner. I mean, look at us (pic from another day):
I know that nowadays families come in all sorts of mixed colors, but the general truth of darker-skinned nannies with lighter-skinned babies largely holds true at the Denver playgrounds, at least in my experience. Should I have been offended? I wasn’t, really. I have to admit to myself, though, that if the person who had mistaken me for a nanny had been a white woman, I would have been entirely offended. I’m not saying that that’s right, but it would have been true. The funny thing is, I make the exact same assumption that I don’t want people to make about me–that if I see a dark woman out with a pale baby, she must be a nanny.
This won’t be the last time this happens, I’m sure.
There was something else about the exchange that I found a little disturbing, to be honest.
I’m old enough to be slightly flattered that she thought I was a student.
What’s next? Lighting up at being carded?
I’ve decided that both of my kids inherited the recessive gene for potty-training, or perhaps I’m just really, really bad at it.
A few weeks ago, the girl’s Montessori teacher informed us in no uncertain terms that “She is ready for potty-training. If we miss the window it will be too late.” Read that to yourself in a severe Eastern European accent and you’ll understand why we couldn’t say no.
We went and bought a few packs of training underwear. We had a training seat and potty at home and had, up until this point, treated them like bathroom decor.
On Monday, she went to school for the first time in underwear and we sent the extra pairs with her. She returned with a two pounds of wet underwear and clothing and wearing some other kid’s training pants.
We went out and bought more training underwear. She seemed to prefer the potty seat, so I bought another one so that we wouldn’t have to cart the one up and down the stairs a million times a day. The new one has Elmo on it, and she refuses to use the old, plain one. We now cart the Elmo seat up and down the stairs a million times a day.
The week went by and she did a bit better, but the laundry load was getting to be unbearable. I was about to give up. I tried to mention it to her teacher, who looked at me with widened eyes and said forcefully, “There’s no going back now.”
The next week she started to use the toilet a bit more, and was dry as long as you remembered to put her on the toilet. I felt heartened.
Every single one of my friends with a 2-ish year old proudly exclaimed, “He/She is potty trained!!” Some online, some in real life. Some even said things like, “She was just dry all the time in her pull-up so I put her in underwear and she’s even dry at night!” I was jealous.
Then all of a sudden, she suddenly has realized that I want her to use the potty, and therefore she no longer has any interest in it. Just this morning, I tried to get her to sit on the potty seat about 3 times in an hour. She refused every single time, and eventually just peed on the floor.
Sigh. Who needs to be toilet trained, anyway? Don’t they now make diapers in adult sizes?
So the garden obituary was a little premature:
I’ve actually had to cut down the tomato plants several times because they were getting too big. My wonderful neighbors, a couple in their 70s and avid gardeners, counseled me that my plants were putting too much into green growth and not enough into fruit, so I lopped off branches and branches. And now look at them!
Nothing red yet, but there’s still time. My neighbors tell me their tomatoes are slow to come in this year, too.
I couldn’t believe how much the cucumber grew in just two weeks. It covers the trellis now!
July 15
July 29
And there’s flowers, carrots, and an eggplant just waiting to fruit.
I also love the deep purple color of these beans. Apparently they cook up green just like regular ones.
The peas had done their job and were exceptionally delicious. I’ve replanted in hopes of a fall harvest. I also tried putting in some brussels sprouts seeds where the dead tomato plant was and have reseeded the center of the trellis with spinach. The irrigation is a bit tough to manage with the new seeds. I can’t just have them get drenched three times a week like the bigger plants, so I’ve capped off those drips and am hand watering daily until they sprout. The bush beans in the front are almost done, too, and I plan on planting broccoli seed there.
A few things already for next year–I’m definitely putting in many many more peas. They were so tasty but not enough. I’m also going to buy larger plants for the things that take a longer time to grow. And more lettuce–I’ve been harvesting once a week, but twice weekly would be better. I’m going to try and plant cold-hardy plants to overwinter for early spring fruit once the tomatoes and cucumbers and such are gone and plant some other ground cover in the other areas to add organic material and to prevent having brown dirt all winter. Another option would be to allow some of the fruit to fall and just mulch over it to see if anything comes up on its own in the spring.
Also, the pole beans are clearly not “trellis beans” but pole beans. The plants sought out anything round and wound themselves around it and laughed at my attempts to train them along the horizontal trellis wires.
Hopefully there will be some red and yellow tomatoes in the next installment!
Yesterday at the school, a policeman came in to gave a talk. According to the boy, he talked about how he is there to protect us and he tried to trick them with a disguise.
Today, I heard more about the encounter from one of the assistants at the school.
The policeman showed the kids pictures of “pretty” people and “ugly” people. He asked them to say whether or not they thought the person looked “good” or “bad” based on the picture. (I can’t say I love the idea behind this lesson, and there’s much to be said about it but since it’s not the point of this story I’m just going to let it slide.) The kids uniformly said the pretty people were good and the ugly people were bad. I’m not sure what all the “ugly” people looked like, but I was told that one of them was a man with a mohawk and an earring. All the kids called out “bad” when the card was displayed, except for one kid who yelled out “that looks like my daddy!” Indeed, her father sports a kelly green mohawk, piercings and tattoos. The policeman then went on to say that we can’t tell if people are good or bad based on whether they’re pretty or not.
The boy shot his hand up into the air and was called upon.
“Also,” he said, “If they are too pretty, then they might be vain.”
And really, isn’t that the bigger threat?
fretzes on the loose 