me no do math good

Last night around 3am, the curtains that I sewed last week, fell off the wall, nocking Nipper's bedside lamp onto his head and smothered him in curtains. Oops. He and Jack, who now apparently just sleeps with us, because we have become those freaky "family bed" people without really meaning to, went right back to sleep. I mean the kid has his own room...with a bunk bed, and a goldfish and everything!

But then I was wide awake. Thinking about how I need to fix the curtain rods, and check to see if the button company received the artwork for the "I love you Taco", and "Me llamo Gringo", and " Hola Whitey", buttons we'll be passing out at the NYTVF, and how I need to figure out how to get two more tickets for our Tuesday night screening because it's already sold out, and a dear friend from Boston is coming, and why is everything electrical breaking in our house, including: Nipper's macbook, our flat screen, the kitchen wiring... and why is the downstairs bathroom smelly again after a whole summer of no bad smells, and should we get a tankless water heater, or build a deck, and can I live for one more year with no closet, and I need to pay the credit card, and clean my desk, and how I need to wash Jack's puppies because they went to school with him, and are probably covered in cooties, and how I wish Jacks pokey fingernail wasn't digging into my arm, and how depressing and totally lacking in his usual irony Jonathan Franzen's new book is... So basically I was up.

I wouldn't have been in this predicament if I'd just paid attention in Ms. Nesper's geometry class. Our curtains are floor length and the mattress being on the floor and up against the wall, they get tugged on a lot. I've been trying to finish the headboard project, which would safely tuck them in behind the headboard, never to be pulled on again. But I didn't measure correctly, and now I don't have enough fabric, and the girl who I bought the original fabric from on etsy is sold out and... THESE ARE MY PROBLEMS???!?!?!

Did I mention Jack didn't cry when I dropped him off at school on Friday?

Book worm

Jack has handled the transition from his crib to his new bed in his new room like a champ. He's also been surprisingly obedient about staying in his room until Boo, his monkey alarm clock "wakes up" at 7, even though we suspect he's in there at 6am playing. Until yesterday that is. I made the mistake of telling another mom that he doesn't seem to know that he can get out of his room or hasn't tried anyway. Why did I do that? I said it all self deprecatingly, like "oh he's too dumb to realize he's free" so it wouldn't come off as braggy. But the universe knows. 

That night, Nipper and I went to dinner at a place downtown called Bottega Louie. It was amazing! We had portobello mushroom fries, and corn with bacon and swiss chard, and a rocket salad, and chicken with lemon and capers, and pasta with rib-eye and swiss chard, and a chocolate souffle, and WHOLE bottle of Magnificat meritage. Whoops. Oh, and they have french style macaroons, and their boxes look very laduree-ish. 

We came home, and I immediately passed out on the couch watching American Idol. I'm really romantic like that.  First time we've been out since the infamous Christmas date, and I'm like Gary Busey on a Tuesday. Jack's nanny Brenda had put him to bed, which has only ever happened one other time in his life. SO around 1:30 in the morning, Jack wakes up, thinks, "Are mommy and daddy still gone?" get's up, walks into the hallway, then, stunned, he says, standing in our bedroom, "Hey! I just opened that door". Sigh... I cursed myself, took two advil, and lay awake the next two hours, as Jack went back to sleep ON Nippers head, and the two of them battled for mattress real estate and who can snore the loudest. Jack won. 

Before he made his big break I was finding stuff like this when I went into his room in the morning:

Yes, the iphone, and the helicopters are in there, but also BOOKS! And a flashlight! Could it be I already have a little reader? Is he too young to be reading under the covers with a flashlight? Do kids even do that anymore? More likely he was using the flashlight to "shoot" something, but a mom can dream.  When I was very small we lived in a small town, right next door to the public library, which was also very small. The librarian had to make a rule that I was not allowed take out books and return them on the same day. I would walk over, get a stack, take them back to my room, where I would curl up in my closet and read them. She also had to make a rule that I wasn't allowed to eat red pistachios and read her books. Somewhere out there, are a whole slew of public library books with tiny pink fingerprints all over them.