The Great Purge of 2011 (as Neil dubbed it)

Earlier tonight Neil and I were talking about our weekend plans.  The debate:  do we paint the laundry room, or the master bathroom?  We decided to see how hard it would be to pry off some of the trim and remove it prior to painting, rather than taping it all off.

As Neil, hammer in hand, looked up to the laundry room ceiling, he frowned. 

"What's that?"  he asked.  "It almost looks like a cocoon."

You don't even want to imagine the ensuing three hours.

Remember a month ago when we found a little yellow worm in the orange juice?  And we chalked it up to one of those horrible but isolated incidents (curse you, Minute Maid!)

Ahem.  No.  (Minute Maid, we apologize.)

You guys, our pantry was INFESTED  with little yellow moth larvae, happily cocooning away.  Nowhere visible.  Just, oh, on the inside of the tin foil tubes in a glued-shut-from-the-store box.  And between individual freezer bags, also in an unopened box..  At the bottom of the sealed box of creme brulee mix.  Inside bags of black beans.  Hidden in the folds of a rarely-worn apron.  We finally found the culprit that started the whole awful mess:  a bag of brown rice, at the bottom of one of our sealed 5-gallon buckets (note:  the larvae were all over the threads of the bucket seals.  Note to self:  be more careful about actually putting those on straight.)

Fortunately for me, my husband spent two years living in the Philippines as a LDS missionary, where this was kind of run-of-the-mill, so when I started screaming and dropping things to the floor and gagging, he took over.  (I had cold chills and was shaking the entire time we were cleaning. My arms and legs were covered in goosebumps; every time a wisp of hair touched my neck I jumped about a mile.)  We developed a good system:  I removed everything from the pantry, checked to see if it had larva or cocoons on it, and handed it to Neil for cleaning.  We threw away so much--our pantry is almost completely empty (pretty much the only things that survived were canned beans).  Worst part: a toss-up between trashing a 5-gallon bucket of steel-cut oats, and the larvae that we vacuumed up "splatting," as Neil put it, against the clear plastic wall of the vacuum chamber. 

So.  That is how we spent our Wednesday night:  cleaning our pantry like it has never been cleaned before.  (Sadly, it was Neil's basketball night, and he missed out.) I am SO hoping we caught everything--from what we read online, the larval stage is about 40 days, so we're going to scrub down our laundry room Friday and hope for the best. 

I am just so grossed out by the fact that it was the PANTRY.  The food that I feed my family.  It's just...so wrong.  From now on, every grain or sugar product that enters my house is going in the freezer for four days before I use it or put it in the pantry.  Consider this a public service posting! 

And now I am going to go take the hottest shower I can stand.  Aaahh!!

PS--Mom and Dad, we are super excited to have you come visit next week.  Aren't you?  :-)

pumpkins

Last night we had a (delayed) family home evening to welcome in fall: we decorated little mini pumpkins.




As you can see, Abigail got totally stripped, and for good reason: she thinks her skin is a lot more fun to color than the pumpkins.



I don't even know how to caption this. Neil doing...something.


My puffy-paint-galore pumpkin


Abigail's pumpkin about halfway through


Realizing that she can make this go a lot faster


Giving up all pretence of coloring the pumpkin

After we cleaned up, Neil talked on the phone to his brother, I put Abigail to bed, Juliet started howling, and we spent the next few hours until 1 am alternately doing the following: studying (Neil), crying about a huge list of guilt complexes (me), which ranged anywhere from not having gone to the gym that morning because I was tired due to the fact that although I went to bed at ten I still only got four hours of sleep, to things like feeling guilty because I hated potty training Abigail or I felt like the house was always a mess and I hadn't had dinner quite ready when Neil got home because I'm afraid of the grill because I always burn things, or other things like feeling guilty for asking Neil for help with the girls when I know he's super busy and stressed and then feeling guilty because I monopolize taking care of the girls and rationalize that he's busy and stressed, and then feeling guilty for alternately asking for help/not asking for help. Or feeling guilty because I was jealous of the fact that Neil got to leave and go to work and do things that had tangible results and were seen by the world as worthy pursuits, but also feeling guilty because he's working so hard he can't even think straight when he comes home while I get to lounge around while the girls nap. It was kind of a very long day.

Oh, and then I felt guilty because Neil should be studying rather than comforting his crying wife. You just can't win.

And the reason I was up until 1 am? I'll give you a hint: she weighs about 11 pounds and is soft and squishy, with an amazing capability to be awake for 8 hours straight, defeating all attempts to wake her up at 5 pm so she'll go to bed at a reasonable hour.

This sounds really defeatist. I feel okay today; but at the same time my life definitely isn't perfect and I think a lot of times I only blog about the idyllic moments or the really sweet moments. So this is one of the others.

Today I was reading the article in BYU Magazine about an alumnus who'd had an incredibly successful career as a broadcast journalist (she was the one interviewing Martha Stewart when MS said "I just want to concentrate on my salad) and who achieved her "dream job" after 12 years: being a mother.

I was both inspired and depressed by the article. Inspired because it's always good to have my faith in the power and importance of motherhood affirmed (and so eloquently), but also depressed because a lot of the time I feel like I have such an incredibly important job as a mother and I'm not doing a very good job at it, or at least the kind of job that my children deserve. Or at least I feel like sometimes the way I approach motherhood doesn't really affirm it as the most important thing I could be doing. I don't know exactly.

For some reason I feel like being a Good Mother entails having a lot of exciting activities going on with a definite de-emphasis on "me time," or what I end up thinking of as "selfish time." True confession: I am so bored by crayons and play-doh that I rarely get them out, and this makes me feel a bit sub-par, especially when I worry that my children will lack basic coloring skills or fine motor movement or something as a result. And I feel like I spend way too much time dragging Abigail (and now Jules) along on my daily agenda, whether it's actually going out somewhere or just doing things like laundry, cooking, cleaning, etc. All of which are things that need to be done, but still. I guess my house can't run like a high-class daycare all the time with enriching kid-centered activities, but I feel pretty guilty that it doesn't. I do read to her/them every day, which is probably the sole redeeming feature of many days, but...I think many times I end up being more beset with guilt when reading about how wonderful mothers are and what an amazing and honorable calling motherhood is. I just feel like I'm not quite doing it.

It's hard for me to transition mentally from a very results-oriented mindset in academia, where I always have measurable progress and achievements with people consistently giving me feedback on my work, to one where the only feedback I get is my own comparison with an ideal that seems highly doable at 7 am and far out of reach at 8 pm. It's also hard to realize that I can't accomplish everything I used to be able to do--add to this equation the fact that I seem to be constitutionally unable to procrastinate and I'm a compulsive listmaker--and that the only thing I might actually "accomplish" all day is prepare (and clean up) meals, cycle through load of laundry or two, and make my bed. It's sure hard to measure the intangibles of the actual child-rearing bit.

I know this isn't anything new or ground-breaking and that just about every woman who's ever had children has dealt with this, and after two years you think I'd have it figured out, but keep on being patient with me!

On a different note, I did have good moments today: Abigail and I had a wonderful time together at the library with her sitting on my lap while we read stories and put together puzzles, and I really enjoyed my quiet time with Jules today while Abigail was napping. There's nothing quite as sweet as having teeny tiny little hands around your neck while a soft little head burrows into your shoulder...unless it's a toddler rapturously throwing her arms around your neck and saying "I love you, my mommy!" They really are wonderful little girls, and I hope they don't mind being my guinea pigs as we work all this parenting stuff out together.

The Joy of Cooking

Today for breakfast I made pancakes and bacon. For lunch I made grilled panini with turkey, avocado, tomatoes, and lettuce. For dinner I made grilled garlic, chile and lemon shrimp scampi on angel hair pasta, asparagus in lemon-butter sauce, and French bread.

Today for breakfast Abigail ate two slices of bacon and a few bites of pancake. For lunch she ate chicken nuggets. For dinner she ate three bites of pasta, a piece of bread, and two bananas.

Some days are better than others (although in all fairness I made the panini when she was already asleep).