Downtown Sound at Millennium Park

Cloudgate

In the hopes that if I keep coming up with fun stuff to do I'll have to miss something because I'll be having a baby, we took the girls to Downtown Sound.

...that's a series of free concerts in Millennium Park.

Millennium Park has a really wonderful outdoor amphitheater, and it was perfect early summer weather.  Mid seventies, sunny, just a little breezy...

We packed sandwiches and snacks and drinks and headed off to enjoy the live music.

So. much. fun!

Last night the free concert was Jonathan Richman.  If you're not familiar with him...



You also might recognize him as the troubadour in "There's Something About Mary."

He's pretty much my mother's favorite person in the universe.

At any rate, it was a thrilling evening of picnicking, dancing, attacking Daddy, and adventure.

Actually, we lost SI for one horrifying moment.  I had sat down on the ground to comfort her after she took a spill, and thanks to my gigantic pregnant belly, I couldn't get up.  By the time I got off the ground, she was gone.  Thankfully, a policeman found her about twenty feet away, lost in the crowd.  It was utterly terrifying for both of us.

And now?  The picture spam!

A beautiful day for a concert in the park!

SI, Grandmommy, and DD at Cloudgate- or as we locals call it, the Big Bean.

...shiny!

Chasing pigeons!

Chasing pigeons!

Thanks to SI, there are probably no pigeons left in Millennium Park.

Dancing!

Dancing!

Dancing!

Hug break!

Mommy's hat!

Watching Jonathan take the stage.

This photo makes me laugh so hard.  Sorry, Grandmommy.

Daddy's hat!

Attacking Daddy

Also super fun- Jonathan ended the evening by playing one of my favorites of his tunes:

A wonderful evening.  Now, if we can't just become a family of five already... I think we'll all be even happier.  Right?

Grandmommy Films Yo Gabba Gabba

The girls have been under the weather, so Grandmommy is letting them watch all sorts of TV while they convalesce.  However,  some TV shows are less restful than others.

...this is apparently episode #3.  SI pooped out after two.

Pomp and Circumstance

You might have noticed it's been a bit quiet over here the last couple of days.

I didn't even post a Sunday Blogaround this week, and I'm sorry for that.

But you see... I've been busy.

I graduated from college.

...sort of.  I still have one summer class I've got to hammer out- it starts a week from today.  And hopefully, I'll finish it before this baby evacuates my womb in a safe and relatively friendly manner.  But I did the graduation thing.  I put on a cap and gown, and I walked across a stage, and I shook hands, and grinned like a crazy idiot, and received an empty folio to put my diploma in when it finally arrives.

Although I could have, I didn't graduate with honors.

I graduated with my totally unspectacular credentials at 28 years old.

I graduated in a TINY class, comprised only of people who knew each other well.  Who, for the first time, I opened up to in a personal way.  Because for the first time, I was presented with them as people, rather than obstacles to my success.

Most of my classmates?  They didn't know I was pregnant.  I've been scarce this semester.

Most of my classmates?  They didn't know I had kids.  A husband.  A life outside of my brief intrusions into their class discussions where it was clear that only I and the token neo-Con had done the homework.

But I did get to graduate with a few of the folks that I considered *my* classmates.  When I started with the program, I knew everyone.  There were about a dozen of us at first, and my two favorite classmates were there with me.  One is now the assistant to the undergrad department head, the other was receiving his master's.  They know what the last five years have been like for me.

Since I started at this program, five years ago, my husband was diagnosed with and then beat brain cancer.  I took time away from school to take care of him.

I got married.  I took time away from school for that.

I got pregnant with twins.  I took time away from school to gestate them.

And I went back, part time, and got pregnant again.  And this pregnancy has been hard.  I've had gall bladder disease, skin cancer, SPD, and I've been under a ridiculous amount of emotional strain.

And here I am, nine months in.

One class left, but the hard part has passed.

From here on out, I have no idea what is going to happen.

But I know how hard I worked to get here.

And I am proud of all I've done.

Thirteen years, I've been at this.  Thirteen years I've been taking classes, learning, at first loving my education for every minute lesson it offered me, lately slogging through because it didn't matter whether or not I was learning- the end was near.  And now?

Worth it.

Every single second.

Wealth, The Mommy Wars, Some Family History, and the Nature of Parental Stress

My granny is the little girl on the right

Part of the Mom Pledge reads, "I want to see moms work together to build one another up, not tear each other down. Words can be used as weapons. I will not engage in that behavior."

Words like "Mommy Wars," words combined into 140 characters that set whole presidential campaigns against each other.

I'd like to address this, if I may.

The thing about life is that no matter what you're doing, you want to have somebody tell you how impressed they are with what you do.

You want to have somebody who made a different choice than you say, "Wow, I could not do what you do.  You work so hard.  You impress me so much.  You must be exhausted.  You must feel amazing about yourself."

Or, you know, some sort of paraphrased version of that.

So today it's been hard for me to get away from the back and forth over the comments that Hilary Rosen made about Ann Romney.

What she said was, “His wife has actually never worked a day in her life.  She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we — why we worry about their future.”

Now, these are two entirely different statements.  If Hilary Rosen had left off that first sentence, this wouldn't have ever turned into an issue.  Of course the left believes that the Romneys are out of touch with the majority of Americans.  Let's face it, they are.  But that isn't what the argument is about.

This has been made into yet another occasion for people to accuse each other of accusing each other of being lazy.

I know that sounds like nonsense.  That's because it is nonsense.

Do stay at home moms think that working moms are worse parents?  Do working moms think that stay at home parents are worse parents?

No.  Nobody actually cares.  This only matters when somebody feels that they are being accused of being less than the best parent they can be for their children.

Being a working mom is hard.  But a lot of women in this country don't see it as a choice.  They see it as a necessity.  If they're the only parent, or if their spouse is in a low wage job, they may not have an option.  And then they see stay-at-home parents as having the luxury not to "work."

But they know that staying at home with kids is work.  It's just work that our society doesn't seem to value very much.  The United States is one of only a tiny handful of countries in the world that doesn't require employers to pay maternity leave.  In many countries, that pay can go to either parent.  In either case, a parent can stay home, if they choose, with their child.

Not so here.

So now in this country, we have a situation where some women CAN choose to go to work, or to stay home.  You have many families, like mine, where the choice comes down to whether or not the cost of childcare exceeds the benefits of a second income.

So the so-called Mommy Wars have grown around the ability women have to work, the frustration of being torn in one's desire to both contribute financially and their desire to contribute in the many intangible ways of being a constant and positive figure in their children's lives, and the frustration of people who make different choices being happy.

Because, you see, their happiness is an affront to anyone who has made a different choice.  If your life is willfully different than mine, and you are happier than I am at this moment, your happiness is an indictment of my choices.

...this is crazy talk.  But we all do this.  We all see somebody else being happy and we think that because we're exhausted or sick or overworked or somebody three feet tall has peed on our favorite chair twice that morning, they must have made a better choice.

And we can't stand that.  But we've made it up ourselves.

I was talking to my mother the other day about how tired I was.  How I couldn't imagine how she did it when she was in labor (for a month) with my younger sister.  How I had no idea how single mothers could do this.

And then she told me about my great-grandmother's diaries.

You see, my great-grandparents were wealthy.  Mansion in Chicago, vacation house in Aspen, property across several other states...  My great-grandparents were patrons of the arts (the Dadaists in particular), had the sort of living room that has a full grand piano "in the corner," and built a bowling alley in their basement.  My great-grandfather refused a request to invest in Henry Ford's early plants- although whether that was a poor business decision or a good choice based on Ford's anti-semitic sentiments is up for debate.

My great-grandfather was independently wealthy, despite the wealth of his father, who was also a construction magnate.

My great-grandmother and her son

My grandmother was in many ways closer with the house manager than her own mother.

But my great-grandmother, the wealthy socialite weathering the Depression in mansion, hosting her benefits and having chamber orchestras over to play parties with centerpieces made of gilded lilies...

(Yes, she actually gilded lilies.)

She agonized over her work.

Her journals were full of worry, worry that her baby was sick, that her household help couldn't do things as well for her children as she knew they needed to be done, that she was terrified that she was incapable of caring for her three children alone, that her son wouldn't speak after learning to speak Spanish during their years in Mexico.  She had so much to do and that she was pulled in so many different directions.

She was terrified and exhausted.  She was overworked and miserable.

She was, in short, a mom.

Then there's my grandmother- her daughter.  In her stories of her early motherhood, she and my grandfather are living in a rapidly collapsing house in backwater Florida in the late 50's, subsisting on food stamps and around $3,000 a year.  My grandfather turned down an opportunity to compete in the Olympics because back then, that meant forgoing any sort of income.  And besides, he was focusing on his Ph.D.  In these stories, my grandmother mastered the art of stretching her food stamp allotment into real meals for her family, every day.  She made pasta out of her flour rations, she made sauces and soups from every last scrap of meat.  And of course, her children were mischievous or dangerously ill in turns.  She had truant officers stopping by her house to discover that her children weren't in school because they had scarlet fever, mumps, and measles.

My grandparents

She was frustrated and exhausted.  She was worried and overworked.

In short, she was a mom.

I have no idea how either of those women did it.  And honestly, I don't know how I do it.

The problem with wealth is that it does nothing- nothing- to make you happier.  The more you have, the more you come up with to do with your time and money.

You have the money to hire a nanny to watch your children?  You will commit to all sorts of other activities or causes that will depend on you, and you will be pulled in more directions.

You have four houses?

You have four times as many rooms to clean, four times as many lawns to care for, four times as many cobwebs to combat.

You have committees and causes and charities.

You are working.  And you have your kids.

You have less money?

Well, you have fewer rooms to clean, fewer cars to keep up.  Fewer bills to pay.

There is no world where this is easy.

But your bills take up more of your income.  You have to "work" harder to stay on top of them.  You have to make choices between phone or gas, food or car, rent or a medical bill.  Even if you're subsisting entirely on government aid.

You are working.  And  you have your kids.

And kids?  Kids are a lot of work.  Kids are hard.  Kids are exhausting.

And they will always have more energy than you.  They will always have a leg up on you.  They will always have a million things that they need you to do.  That they simply cannot do for themselves.  That nobody but you can do for them.

Being poor is hard.  I've done it- it sucks.  I've been on public aid and literally lived off of leftovers from going on as many blind dates as I could squeeze into a week.  The closest I've been since I've had children involved food stamps and WIC, and I know the difference between relying on the public safety net and being totally without one.  As millions of single mothers in this country are.

Being rich is not hard in pretty much any of the same ways, but it's not as much fun as you probably think.  My family has been rich.  It didn't solve our problems.

There is no world where this is easy.

Even when my family was rolling in it, my mother was still dealing with four teenagers who, while independent and intelligent, were just as crazy and disaster prone (and in some cases, much much much more so) than any other teenager.  There were car crashes, bad boyfriends and robberies.  There were brushes with the law and curfew violations and plenty of standard rivalries.

My mother?  She must have been exhausted.

And when we were all little, and she was working as a secretary while my father worked on his Ph.D., she must have been exhausted.

Because all of us, all parents, everywhere... we are all exhausted.  We are all stressed.  We are all paranoid and concerned and determined to be better.

But we are what we are- human beings.  Human beings trying to raise other human beings.

And honestly?  None of us know how we do it.

You know what it's like to be 32 weeks
pregnant, working on your degree, fighting
off skin cancer and gall bladder disease, and
raising two toddlers?  It's exhausting.  This
is how I look most days.  It's not a failure.

Somebody else having a good day doesn't mean they made a better choice than you.  It doesn't mean they're happier than you.  It doesn't mean that they are judging you in any way.  It just means that they're having a good day.

Ann Romney?  She raised five boys, she's fought cancer and MS.  Yes, she is out of touch with the majority of Americans.  The majority of Americans can't afford to buy horses to help them through their MS, or furnish half a dozen homes.

But all of those things?  Those things are hard.  Those things are more things that Ann Romney has to do.  And she must be exhausted.

There are no Mommy Wars.  There is no battlefield where women are attacking each other for their parenting choices, or lack thereof.

There is only the horrible, self-critical part of our own minds that insists that we are being judged by everyone.  All the time.

And we are all working our asses off to do the best job that we can.

Next Year In Jerusalem, or Everything I Need To Know About Passover I Learned From The Ten Commandments

Thanks, Google!

Aunt Genocide and I are standing in the kitchen, watching Moses return to his adoptive father after a successful military campaign in Ethiopia.

Aunt Genocide looks over her shoulder, sweating slightly as she stirs a hot pot of molten orange honey and ginger.

"This movie is full of eye candy," she says.

"Oh yeah," I reply.  "Charleton Heston was so hot."

"Yul Brynner was hotter."

I grin.  "Oh, yeah."

I have been washing and chopping apples for what feels like an eternity.  I move on to grating nuts into the bowl, and add liberal amounts of cinnamon.

"Who plays Nefertiri, anyway?" Aunt Genocide asks.

I would Google it if the laptop weren't in use.  By us.  Watching this DVD.

Grandmommy points out that Baka the Master Builder is played by Vincent Price, casually glancing over her shoulder from her bowl of goo that will shortly become delicious matzah balls.  The pot of broth is waiting and simmering on the stove, full of onions that my mother cleverly spikes with whole cloves.

Aunt Genocide and I are stunned by this piece of information.

This DVD is one of my prized possessions.  M burned it to disc for me from the old VHS tape the year we got married- cementing my belief that he was the perfect choice of life-mate.  It is at least five hours long, heavily edited, and filled with commercials.  My great-grandfather Abe taped it off a local network back in 1988 or so.  When he lived in Chicago.  The commercials are so dated- it's amazing what you forget about the marketing of decades past.  Everything had a jingle.  Everything.  The Mets were doing well at the beginning of their season.  There was a different Pope, offering different Easter blessings in the same scenery and the same costume.  The cars were boxy gas guzzlers.  There was war in the Middle East.

All of that is background noise.  In fact, The Ten Commandments itself if background noise.

The Ten Commandments has been the background noise of Passover for as long as I can remember.  Certainly since around 1988, when I was four years old.  When the family seder moved out of Chicago and my great-grandfather Ezra's house, and into my granny's instead.

It's full of cheesy, dated nonsense.  Not cheesy in that 80's commercial way, cheesy in that Classic Hollywood kind of way.  With nameless Egyptian guards grumbling and warning, "That'll teach you, Stone Cutter!" as they tie Joshua to the curtains in Baka the Master Builder's tent so that he can be whipped to death.

His hands are caught in gently wound velvet ropes.  We, my sister and I, we know that really- he could just pull his arms down any time.  But honestly... he looks so pretty all tied up, waiting for Moses to come and save him.

Zipporah, responding to her husband's compliment that her eyes are as sharp as they are beautiful by looking directly and pointedly into the camera for a solid four seconds.

Nefertiri (played by Anne Baxter, in case you were still wondering), absentmindedly dragging a garland of flowers off the parapet to illustrate how careless and beautiful she is in her obsessive love of Moses.

This movie is full of eye candy.  Cecil B. DeMille really knew his stuff.

And Aunt Genocide, Grandmommy, and I are on auto-pilot.  We know this movie by heart.  We know this television broadcast by heart.  We can't replay the scenes in our minds without the same commercial breaks, the same Bartles and James commercials, the same constant reminders that Cadbury Eggs only come once a year, or that Max Hedron was on the cover of Time.

This is the background noise to Passover in my family.

I am making the charoseth.  Aunt Genocide is making the ingberlech.  My mother is making matzah ball soup.

Somebody is preparing the pecan sunshine cake- unleavened, of course.  Somebody is prepping parsley and mixing a caraffe of salt water.  Somebody is peeling an army's worth of hard boiled eggs.  Somebody is collecting pillows.  Somebody is setting the table. Somebody is arranging the seating chart.  Somebody is making place cards.  Somebody is putting candlesticks and haggadahs on the table, filling seder plates and arranging candies on trays for dessert.  Somebody is opening up cans of palm hearts for the relish dishes.  Somebody is saying, "Dayenu!" when somebody else mentions that we only seem to have one bottle of Manichewitz.

And great-grandpa Abe's copy of The Ten Commandments is playing.

This year, it's at my house.  Last year, Aunt Genocide's.  As my grandparents are selling their house next month, it will never be at my granny's house again.

But that doesn't matter.

It's not about where you celebrate your seder.  It's not about what you're having for dinner.  It's not about how comfortable you all are when you're crammed around the table.

It's Passover.  It's about celebrating our freedom.

We're free to watch a topless Yul Brynner dust off the sand from his chest with an ostrich feather.

We're free to make batch after batch of candies and cakes and eat them up in a night with the excuse that they aren't perfect.

We're free to joke endlessly about our antique and awkwardly translated haggadahs.

We were slaves in Mizrayim, but today we are free.

It doesn't matter who's house we are in for Passover.  It is always the same.  This year, Aunt Genocide determined that she will pass the ingberlech torch to DD.  I am reserving judgement, I think SI will be the better candidate.  I expect DD will pick up the name card decoration slack when I have moved on to more important tasks.

It is always our family.  Always filled with love, always filled with the same jokes, the same smells, the same foods, the same story.

Once upon a time, we were slaves.

This year, my house.

Next year, in Jerusalem.

Chicago's Shedd Aquarium

Jellies!

One of the benefits of living in a world class city like Chicago is that it has all sorts of great opportunities for family fun.  Like the Museum of Science and Industry, which my children frequent, or the Shedd Aquarium.

Until a few days ago, my children had never been to the Shedd Aquarium.  But I decided the time was right.  After all, they are *obsessed* with fish.  They live for "Finding Nemo."  In fact, one of their favorite games is what I quietly refer to as "The Nemo One-Man-Show Game."

It's sort of a reenactment of the entire movie.  If you haven't seen the movie, I'm afraid this won't actually make a lot of sense.  My apologies.

The girls start at one end of our nice long hallway, and run towards me while crying out, "I coming Nemo!  I coming Nemo!  I coming!"  When they reach me, they fling themselves into my arms with cries of, "Daddy!"

SI says, "It's a man hugging a fish!"

After many hugs and a great deal of exclamations such as, "I found you!" they begin to tell me who they are.  Usually DD is Nemo, while SI tends to be Marlin- I am often told that I am Dory.  After these explanations they stand up, apparently confused.  "Where Nemo go?"

"I don't know!" I reply, "Why don't you go find him?"

And then they run away again, calling out, "Nemo!  Where are you?"

They have a toy fish that is intended to be laced up with a piece of cord.  This fish is so important that my mother has had to make them a paper copy, so that they each have their own fish to play with.  They make the fish swim around the house... under the dining room table, over the couch, into their chairs... into it's home, which is apparently under an end table in the living room.  The fish also gives Mommy kisses, and occasionally attempts to eat Mommy.

The aquarium seemed like a great place to take a break from all of that.

Grandmommy and Poppa were in town, so one day Grandmommy and I decided to just pack up the girls and go.

We parked by Soldier Field, and ended up sneaking into the museum via the handicapped accessible entrance.  My mom was having some trouble with her knee, and as I'm all pregnant and uncomfortable, the idea of *not* climbing up the steps to the main entrance appealed greatly to both of us.  An extra bonus?  The very odd sculpture that graces the courtyard in front of the accessible entrance.

There are DUCKS in there!

I cannot stress enough how much the girls adored the aquarium.  From the moment we stepped inside, they were transported with delight.

The major highlights were a fish in the Caribbean Reef exhibit that DD decided was Dory, otters that actually POOPED in the WATER (oh, to be two again), and of course... the clown fish.

"It's DORY!"

"It's MARLIN!"

"It's NEMO!"

If those three creatures ranked a 10 on the excitement scale, everything in between came to about an eight.

Sharks!

Turtle!

SI was particularly impressed by the star fish, which *I* found impressive because star fish don't, you know, DO anything.

And then there were the jellyfish.

Upside down jellyfish

SI's favorite jellyfish

DD's favorite jellyfish

The Shedd is currently showing a special exhibit on jellyfish.  It's beautiful.  The perfect place the sort of relax while at the same time letting your kids be totally insane with delight.

It was a blast.

SI is utterly transfixed.

The girls got popcorn for lunch, which thrilled them to no end.  On the way out, we even got to see a scuba diver feeding the fish.

This guy claimed his name was Marlin, too.

And, of course, Grandmommy and I had to spoil them a little bit.  They had been SO well behaved, and SO charming, and SO cooperative... between the two of us we got them snacks (which included the miracle of a veggie hot dog purchased at a street hot dog stand for me and Grandmommy), books, suitcases/backpacks, and a goofy photograph.  To be fair, the suitcase/backpack things were something I was already planning on getting them... somewhere else.  Somewhere cheaper.  But still.

With all their Aquarium swag

We just couldn't help ourselves.

On the way back to the car, we stopped to jump in some mud puddles and play in one of the sculptures in the Children's Garden on the museum campus.

Puddles!

Sculpture!

And then... home.  For a nap, and yet another viewing of "Finding Nemo."

Grandmommy, SI, DD, and yours truly.  Yes, DD and I are pretty much clones.

All in all, an awesome day.  :)