Sick Day

My son has a cold … again. I feel really sorry for him, with all the sniffling and blowing and constantly being asked “Have you washed your hands?” and told “Don’t get too close to your sister.”

So, rather than sit at home all day and watch movies like we usually do when he’s sick, this time we decided to make a movie instead.

The set? Our basement playroom? The costumes? Trader Joe’s bags transformed with scissors, markers and green electrical tape.

Wardrobe.

The final product? Knight Patterson.

Workout Face

It is not that I have anything against exercise.  In graduate school, after my car died, I rode my bike everywhere for two years. In Miami.

But aside from those two years, and an award for being Most Dedicated on the Stone Mountain High School swim team my freshman year, I’ve been sitting at a desk for the better part of my life so far.  And, like most college-educated professionals in this country, my work involves very little of what most people in the world would call work. So I must work out.

workout face.

This is something I accept intellectually and have managed to put into practice only sporadically.

My freshman year of college? I actually lost 15 pounds when my roommates and I made regular appearances at step aerobics classes.  I even bought – and wore! – one of those thong leotard things you wear over the biker shorts.  Ew.

I went running a few times with an old boyfriend, and I even took kickboxing for a brief period in 1999.  There were two stints at the Ladies’ Workout Express, where I worked out in a circuit with a traffic light in the corner telling me when to move from a weights to a step and then on to the next machine.

Each time my motivation flagged, and it felt inevitable.  So this time, I decided to bring in a professional.

So far I’ve had just one session with my trainer, but I feel like the accountability, encouragement and variety may keep me on track.  That and the fact that I need to fit back into my business clothes when I go back to work.

More importantly, though, when I lay down on the floor for tummy time, helping my daughter learn to lift and turn her head, I want to be able to get up without rocking and launching myself with a grunt. And when my son wants to race me across the parking lot I want there to be a chance I will win.

So, I will get up while everyone is still sleeping and sneak out when the kids are in bed.  One week down, a lifetime of better health to go.

Eat Clean

At the end of this post I will be bravely sharing the before photos from my first-ever session with a personal trainer this morning. If you’re anything like me, you’re a sucker for before and after photos, so don’t look. Please? Save them for the end?

Good. You haven’t peeked yet, so as your reward, here’s a little before and after photo of part of my dinner tonight:

before.

after.

“No prepackaged foods,” my trainer said this morning. “You can have a lot of food, but it all needs to be fresh – fruits, veggies and protein.” Inspired by a recent NYTimes piece and the insanely low prices and great selection at Giant Gourmet Farmers Market in Hackensack, I spent half an hour prepping fruits and veggies after lunch and roasted up enough to last us several days.

They were just as delicious as they look, I assure you, and the leftovers settled in nicely next to the gallon-sized bags of raw fruit and veggies I put on the top shelf of the fridge for easy snacking.

Just as we were wrapping up (after she showed me the exercises she promised will change my body) Coach Thommie said two words that I can’t get out of my head: Eat Clean. Every time I open the fridge or a kitchen cabinet, I hear them. Eat Clean rang in my ears as I pushed my cart through the aisles of the farmer’s market grabbing broccoli rabe, pomegranates and butternut squash.

poms.

I even braved the fish counter for some salmon steaks, scallops and catfish fillets. Next time I might even try some shark.

fish.

As I entered today’s meals into the tracking app on my phone, I thought about how simple eating right becomes with those two words as a mantra. Zucchini, onions and portabellas are as low in calories as they are high in flavor and vitamins. Feeding Nacine as the day was winding down, I also thought about how Eat Clean means I’m passing on these healthy choices and giving her the vital nutrients she needs.

She’s helping me out in the bargain, too, burning at least 500 calories a day before I even count the ones I’ll be using to complete my trainer’s workout at the gym.

So those before pictures I promised? (Gulp) Here they are.

before.

more before.

Coach Thommie assured me that a) I’ve just had a baby only two months ago, and b) the before pictures are supposed to look awful. She even encouraged me to mess up my hair.

Performance Review

“Math. I’m really good at Math. Can you write that down, Mommy?”

It was 8:15 this morning, 45 minutes before Elisio’s parent-teacher conference, and I was going over the sheet of pre-conference questions in the car with him to get his input into what we should say.

“Is there anything you don’t understand or that you still need to work on?” I asked, rephrasing one of the questions to make it both gentler and easier for a four year old to reply.

He was thinking about it as we made the turn up the hill onto Church Street, his school up ahead on the left.

“Ms. Rosa said you are still learning to use your lower case letters,” I offered.

“I know all my letters,” he said, getting a bit defensive.

“I know you do, but do you always use them?” I asked. “Like when you’re writing your name?”

Writing his first name was one of the other items – of just five or six on the preschool skills evaluation they’d sent home – that was listed as “needing development” rather than “good progress.”

I was the one who felt defensive about that one, remembering back when he was only three and had spontaneously written his name on a paper ice cream cone and quietly hung it on the wall with the other kids’ names in the children’s department at the New Haven library. I could only assume that the lack of lower case letters, other than the two i’s with giant circles for dots, was the reason for his teacher’s assessment.

I had tried to make a conscious effort to focus on the positive marks as he’d opened the envelope and looked at the progress report on his own in the back seat a couple of days before.

“I know what this is!” he exclaimed. He looked at some of the pictures along the side of the grids for his ratings and told me which ones he could do.  “I only have a few I can’t do yet,” he said.

I willed myself not to ask what those were and instead replied, “I can’t wait to get home so we can look at all the things you can do!”

When we did look at it together, I saw that he could do things I didn’t know he could – things I was, in fact, unnecessarily still doing for him, like buttoning buttons and zipping zippers.  Other things I know he hasn’t practiced enough – tying shoes and bouncing a ball.  But his sneakers are velcro, and when it came to balls, he is much more interested in kicking.

I saw that skipping was on the list – and that he’d mastered it, apparently.  I remembered a comment from my father when my parents were reviewing my sister’s preschool progress report as she was preparing to enter kindergarten more than 20 years ago.

“They want to hold her back because she can’t skip?”  They were overruled.  My sister has turned out to be a smart and successful woman, even if she lacked the ability to skip when she started school.

Skipping aside, as we sat in the parking lot and wrote down the rest of our responses and questions of our own in preparation for the meeting with Elisio’s teacher and principal, I couldn’t help but think how similar the criteria were to reviews I’ve done each year in my working life.

How does your child feel about his interactions with other children and school staff? What aspects of the classroom does your child enjoy most? What do you feel are your child’s strengths? In which areas does your child need improvement?

Answering them with my son felt like a critical step in preparing him to succeed as an adult, and the similarities were underscored this afternoon when I had my own performance review.  After less than three months in my position and just under a year at the company, I had completed a self-assessment back in November. I’d spent half an afternoon completing the “what” portion of the process; my responses had been detailed and data-driven, stressing my contributions to our department and the company as a whole.  I’d put considerably less time and effort into answering the “how” questions, not sure how to quantify the way I interacted with project partners or made my colleagues feel.

My boss and I talked at 4:30, just before I left to pick up Elisio from school.  It turns out I feel the most satisfaction – and have made the greatest contribution – not by just being “highly effective” at doing my job, but in criteria that could have been lifted from the pre-K form I’d completed a few hours before: cooperation, creativity, responsiveness, and respect.  I was most proud, though also humbled, to hear that those I work for and work with greatly value and enjoy having me as part of their team.

I feel good about the developmental milestones my son is surpassing and all he is learning at school.  Immediately after we agreed to review his progress report together at home, he picked up a book I’d gotten for him at the library.  I glanced at him in the rearview mirror, and, for the first time, I saw that he was focused on the words.  His lips were whispering the sounds of the letters – he was beginning to read!

But as proud of him as that moment made me, I have to say it meant even more to hear the type of person he is becoming along the way: someone who will succeed not only because of what he can do but how.

“Elisio is a model student and a good friend,” Ms. Rosa said as we walked out of the office after half an hour discussing his progress over the first half of the year. “He is just a pleasure to have in my class.”

The Leap Project

Last year was a big one for me personally and professionally – new job, new house, new baby. It was so big, in fact, that I’ve taken the first month of 2012 to reflect on it before deciding just how to begin.

How should I spend this first year of simply living the life that I’ve worked so hard over nearly the first half of it to build? When I made my New Year’s resolutions they offered a start: get (and stay) active and energetic; get to know the place I’ve chosen to call home; build strong relationships with family, colleagues and friends; and make more than just a living – make a difference.

So was born the Leap Project. In this year when we get an extra day, I’m dedicating the month leading up to it to action on four fronts:

1) Get moving.
2) Get out.
3) Get real.
4) Get busy.

I’ll be documenting the journey here and, after a long period of listening, leaping back into social media channels old and new to look for ideas and insights on how to make it even better.

(fore)closure

There are more than a few things I wish I’d rescued before my father lost the house.

The red wagon we careened down a too-steep driveway in. The purple tricycle I more often treated like a scooter. The J.C.-Penny-restored portrait of my great-great grandfather, who fought on the losing side of the Civil War.

The second-to-last time I was in the house – the one we all lived in longer than any other – my sister and I disassembled an antique dresser she’d had in her room. My dad had restored it for her years before, and he watched, neck craned and silent at the bottom of the stairs as we struggled to balance its uneven weight across the landing. It should have been a signal of something unraveling when he didn’t offer help, or even yell a warning to us about the light fixture when the upended foot of the dresser almost caught and shattered it on the tile floor.

I took odd things from the bottom of the hallway linen closet that day: quilts made by my great aunt, a collection of matchbook covers my mom gathered from bars before I was born, my baby clothes, handmade Christmas ornaments. They were the kinds of things that would fit in the bottom of a suitcase.

I left the sixth-grade yearbook whose cover art I’d drawn, making my dad so proud I’d inherited some of his talent. I left the small wooden chest I made in shop class and gave him for Father’s Day when I was in eighth grade. I left the yearbook from senior year that I’d worked on every day in second period, learning layout, gaining an eye for photography, discovering how to put words together that people would read, how to edit sentences for space – uncovering skills that have carried my career. I left the scrapbooks I made in college, full of ticket stubs and scissored images of the person I thought I was becoming. I left my grandmother’s blue and white china that hung on hooks above the windowsills in the dining room, cups and saucers and plates I’d always imagined on my own grown-up table filled with fancy after-dinner tea.

Then there were the things I couldn’t take: the clawfoot tub in the upstairs bathroom; the cast-iron stove that left a scar behind my right knee and melted the sole of one of my boots as I roasted myself in front of it like a marshmallow one long snowy weekend when the power was out; the trampoline.

I was sure I’d be back. I was sure there would be time or that time wouldn’t be necessary. I was right, and I was wrong.

I was back, once more. By then what remained of the things of our childhood had been boxed up and stashed in the attic eaves by my dad’s new girlfriend to make space for her kids. My sister and I had no time or inclination to rummage in nostalgia in any case.

The high stacks of full and empty beer cases made it nearly impossible to get to the secret closet that was hidden in a panel in the corner of the sunroom my dad had built on the back of the house right after we’d moved in. That narrow space – in the drafty room with dank brown stains on the ceiling tiles where the tin roof leaked – was where he hid his guns. The long rifles anyway, what was left of the collection he’d laid out on the living room floor the night my first date came to pick me up. The rest of the guns he hadn’t sold were in the top of his closet, which always smelled like the round tins of waxy shoe polish he rubbed into his cowboy boots with scraps of cloth diapers left over from when I’d been born.

He wasn’t there to watch my sister and I carry out the remnants of his arsenal, to grumble instructions on how to make sure the guns weren’t loaded and how to wrap them so they wouldn’t get scratched in the trunk of her car. Or what to do with what we’d carted off in order to ensure he wouldn’t try again to use one of them take himself away from us forever.

He was sent to rehab after that. I wasn’t there when the sheriff’s car pulled up the driveway and backed out with him in the backseat.

Soon, he’d turn 60 in jail for DUI, him unable to afford the fine, us unwilling to pay it for him. The house was lost, of course. He was too depressed to work, too broke to pay the mortgage, too proud to ask for help again after I’d been too set on not getting involved the first time he’d come to me.

This foreclosure happened at the height of the financial crisis and the depth of my father’s personal crisis. His is one he has since stumbled out of, shaking off the fog of a descent into the addiction he had held at bay for 30 years. He’d always told me that my pending birth had gotten him into AA. I was his angel, he said, a role I embraced with a literal fury for years until I decided I couldn’t (wouldn’t) any more.

I sit in the dark in my own new house where my kids will shelter memories and I imagine his addiction like a dragon or a bull and my daddy with a polished cowboy boot on its throat and a Civil War rifle to its temple. His other hand is busy wrestling its head down by a horn. As first his daughters and then his wife left that home to take up lives his efforts every day at saying no probably made way for, I guess it did seem okay for just a moment to take a breath and let go.

His descent was as rapid as a four-year-old girl and her father riding down a hill in a little red wagon, his arms around her, his hands gripping the wild handle, both beyond hope of control. Just try and keep steady. Don’t tumble out onto the gravel where the asphalt ends.

I didn’t. For a few dark years he did.

He’s back on and holding tight, despite the fact that I stopped trying to be the angel. So why does it occasionally feel that his careening began when or because I realized – in what felt like an epiphany at the other end of a phone line – that it was not my job to steer? How did I manage to carve out an existence of peace in the critical years of building my own career, marriage, family – this beautiful little life I am glad to say my son’s Big Papa is again a part of in meaningful ways – just as his peace was slipping away?

I suppose the house could have been saved, and the things I hadn’t taken out of it with it. But I didn’t do that, never offered to, so these empty shelves in my memory are the bittersweet (fore)closure costs I pay.

Expecting

We sat in the floor in the hallway outside the only bathroom in our apartment, me leaning against the frame of the door, Eduardo with his back against the linen closet. Elisio was standing, leaning over me, watching the stick I’d just peed on.

“One more minute,” I said. My legs were crossed yoga-style, and my left arm was resting on my knee. Eduardo’s feet were out in front of him, reaching almost all the way across the hardwood floor across the thin strip of granite to the cracked white tiles. Elisio kept jumping over his legs to get to mine, hoping to get a better view.

“Okay,” I said. “Come tell me what it says.”

“Y – E – S.” Not quite four years old, my son spelled out the letters on the pregnancy test and was thus the first among us to know that mini-Moncada number two was on the way.

He jumped into my lap and threw his arms around my neck.

“We still have to go to the doctor to be sure,” I said between the kisses he was planting all over my face. They suddenly stopped and his eyes filled with tears.

“What is it?” Eduardo asked.

Elisio just rubbed his eyes and sat down.

“Is it because we’re not sure?” I asked.

Elisio nodded.

“Come here, buddy,” Eduardo said, his arms out and his feet crossing into an embrace that would involve his legs too. “We’re pretty sure,” he said, and Elisio’s happiness began to return.

By now, of course, we’re sure. Just today, my belly button began the achy temporary transformation to an outie, and it has been several weeks since I last had to stand in a crowded subway car. Last month I was put on the list of those needing support for my “disability” during the fire drill from our 20th floor office.

We know now that the little being whose kicks both Eduardo and Elisio are now able to feel when they put their hands on my belly is Elisio’s little sister. Her room in our new house is set up with his old crib, and we’ve moved beyond calling her Meatball to testing actual names until one of them sticks. At my next doctor appointment next Friday we’ll set the date for the c-section – sometime in the week between my mother-in-law’s birthday and mine – that will bring her into our lives.

So much of the last year – the last decade in many ways – has been about expecting. Tonight, as my daughter turns flips inside me, I lie in bed and mark just over a month in the home where my sweet, brilliant husband and I will raise her. This afternoon an official offer letter arrived in my inbox for the position that I’ve worked toward not just since I my contract role began a few months ago, but since I packed up my little Subaru wagon and headed down I-95 to graduate school in Miami 10 years ago.

It seems that life has said “Y-E-S” to all we’ve been expecting. I humbly give thanks.