Heart of Haiti

It’s been almost a year since the ground shook and the world as we knew it almost ended for the country of Haiti. I remember following the news so closely, riveted, spending countless hours poring over the Internet or lying awake in bed, wondering what I could do to help.

Turns out, even after all this time has passed, there are still ways to help. And, ironically, we can still help in a uniquely first-world way: by shopping.

Macy’s has partnered with the Heart of Haiti initiative to offer jewelry and art for sale, each piece handcrafted by native Haitian artisans, allowing them to use their talents and passions to help provide food and shelter, improve access to health care and education -- for themselves, their families, and their communities.

And the pieces these artists have created are really, really stunning. I took one look at the large "Feast of the Sea" bowl and I was instantly transported to somewhere bright, sunny, happy. I can hear music and laughter, smell the sea and the sunshine, and I am amazed and awed that such beauty and joy can come out of a place that, only a year ago, was overwhelmed by such sorrow and devastation.

I hope to put it in my kitchen, to remind me every day of all the things that I love and, most of all, the things I must not take for granted. And to remind us all that out of great destruction can come such beautiful creation.

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I was selected for this very special “CleverHaiti” opportunity by Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity. All opinions are my own.

Happy Good Morning

The good news is: this is one of my husband's nights off, so it won't just be me trying to wrangle Shae tonight, in addition to doing the dishes and giving her a bath. I'll have help this time, and hopefully The Help will also bring me a pizza and some cupcakes and possibly a wine cooler, because DAMN.

The bad news is: that in order to get this picture of them together this morning, that means that I was home before school, and the reason why I was home that late is because of snow. So who knows when I'll get home to eat that pizza and those cupcakes and the wine cooler. DAMN.

Standoff

You might think since it's just the Boo and me at home together at night that I would have plenty of opportunities to take just absolute buttloads of pictures, but if you did think that, then I would accuse you of being an infinitely fortunate naïf who has not done a whole hell of a lot of hard time with a three-and-a-half-year-old lately.

I mean, seriously, people: I am getting ready to get myself some prison tattoos at this point. Well, ok, maybe not prison tattoos (needles, yeuch!), but I am starting to consider maybe thinking about drawing some spider-web-like patterns on my elbows with washable markers, anyway.

Now, my daughter is, by and large, a good kid, really good, but like every preschooler everywhere ever, she is stubborn as a ram. The fact the she is an Aries does not help (although it is definitely fitting). Her routine has been changed, and it seems that she'll be damned before she changes along with it. All of us will.

We are talking knock-down, drag-out, scratching and clawing and kicking and screaming here. Crying and weeping and rending of garments. She fights me leaving school. She fights me over dinner. She fights me over potty. She fights me over bedtime. She hollers and wails for her Daddy, her Nana, her Pop-pop. She tells me she hates me. She tells me she hates SpongeBob.

(My readers who also have small children [or who are My Anonymous Mother] are all like: "Yeah? And?" and also thinking: "Bitch, please." And believe me -- I know. I can feel you practically rolling your eyes out of your heads right now. I KNOW.)

None of this would bother me so much -- because hey, I am not really happy about this either, not yet, even though I completely know these are total First World Problems, like call the whaaaaaaaaaambulance already, GOD -- but she has otherwise been, for everybody else, a perfect little angel.

That little booger.

Sound of Silence

My husband started his new job last night -- well, his new shift at his new job -- and I'm pretty sure that I'm going to start taking sleeping pills and going to bed at 8:00 now, just so I can deal with the soul-crushing quiet. We have a three-year-old in our house, an HDTV, satellite service, multiple computers. So why did I spend the evening washing dishes and folding laundry just to have something to do?

It's been a long time since my husband worked nights, since before Shae and probably years before that, and I'm not used to it any more. I know how weird and codependent and neurotic it makes me sound to say that I don't really like it -- but I don't really like it.

Don't get me wrong: I'm glad he has a job, bonus that it's one he actually likes, and I know this swing-shift business is only temporary. It's not even as inconvenient as it could be, because he works 3pm-2am, four nights a week, Mondays through Thursdays. He's getting up to take Shae to school in the mornings, and he'll be home at night on the weekends, so we can still do our running amok and our visiting and our catching up with all the shows on our TiVo and sitting in the same room on two different computers playing World of Warcraft.

But my house is creepy at night, especially now that it gets dark so early. It's cold and drafty and last night Shae wasn't feeling well so she basically put herself to bed at 6:00 and left me all alone. The cats kind of hang around, but it's just the girls, and they're not particularly noisy. Bossy, yes, when they have a particularly irritating itch that needs to be scratched, or if they're out of food and water. But mostly last night they just followed me around so they could be where I was and ... I don't know, stare at me, I guess.

It made me miss Owen a whole hell of a lot, that's for damn sure.

I made dinner basically in silence. Shae sprawled out on the couch and watched The Sound of Music and didn't move until it was time to eat. When we sat down to supper she just sat there, pathetically staring at her plate, sometimes poking at the scalloped potatoes, occasionally whimpering. No conversations. No negotiations. No noise. Very awkward and Stepford. I packed up the leftovers and put them in the fridge for his lunch tonight and never once had to tell anybody to get their grubby mitts out of the candy jar.

Not even mine. It's no fun to cheat on your diet if nobody is going to catch you.

Once Shae was tucked in, I kind of wandered around the house, trying to motivate myself to do some of the housework that desperately needs to be done because for yet another year I failed to get maid service for Christmas. I washed and dried and put away two full racks of dishes. I scrubbed out the chili pot and scraped the cookie sheets. I rooted through the cupboard and made a menu plan for dinner for the rest of the week. I gathered up the rest of the clothes Shae got for Christmas, removed all the bags and tags and wrappers, and folded all her laundry. I even laid out the clothes that I wore to work today so I could hit the snooze button this morning.

Well, okay, so he could hit the snooze button this morning. He's closer to the alarm clock anyway; that's his job. I didn't get married so I would have to do that kind of thing by myself.

And then I went to bed. All alone. With nobody heckling my ratty T-shirt or my old-lady slipper-socks. There were no random fits of laughter coming from downstairs, from him talking to his friends over Skype while they play video games together. No lights, no footsteps on the stairs, no bathroom sounds. The toilet didn't even run, not once. It was strange to lay there and have to rely on myself to know when to go to sleep, having to act like an actual adult and not someone who plays one on TV. I'm a bedtime reader, and when I get really into a book, I can go for hours, uninterrupted. But if my husband is lying next to me and I have the light on, he grumbles and groans and grouches and makes me settle down, instead of staying up until half-past midnight reading Catching Fire again when I should have been asleep hours earlier.

Don't even get me started on how strange it is to try go to sleep in that bed all by myself. Normally it feels like our queen-size bed is so small, when it's him and me and the cats, trying to get comfortable, staking out a section of our own, clenching the covers so someone else doesn't steal them, fighting over which setting on the electric blanket is the correct one, accidentally kicking each other or elbowing each other in the face. There was no breathing, no random bits of hours-old conversations brought back up to be rehashed, no rude involuntary bodily noises startling us awake as we drift off through the myoclonic jerks.

Instead, it was just me and two cats, and I felt like some kind of crazy spinster with her furry four-legged children sprawled across the afghan, sleeping in the middle of this great big giant queen-sized bed, all by myself. I went to sleep with an itchy back because there was no one there to scratch it for me, just in the right spot, right how I like it, aaaaaaah right there between the shoulder blades.

And I especially missed my kiss goodnight.

When he gets home from work he comes to bed and I'm sure he kisses me, but I'm also sure that I'm three-quarters asleep, grumping about having to move now that I've finally gotten comfortable, so I don't appreciate it. Plus I have my night-time bruxism guard in, so I'm doing goofy things with my mouth, and I always have some kind of sinus cold, so I'm pretty sure my breath is not so very pleasant. It's just not the same as kissing him goodnight with minty-fresh teeth just before we settle into a mutually-soothing breathing rhythm.

Today Shae is feeling better and I expect that it's going to be a completely different scene tonight. We'll fight over how many bites of noodles and sausage and vegetables she needs to eat, whether or not she can have a treat, whether I will let her stay up until the end of the rest of The Sound of Music or if I will make her go to bed right before the part at the convent. We'll wrestle over bath and hair combing and going potty and tooth brushing and saying prayers properly and lights being turned on and toys suddenly appearing in her bed. I'll wash some more dishes, fold some more laundry, diddle around in FarmVille and WoW, and probably stay up too late reading again, because now I'm reading Mockingjay and I can't stop when I get past the good part because the whole book is basically one big good part.

And I still won't get my kiss goodnight. And I don't really like it.

Happy 2011

Yeah, yeah, we're two-and-a-half days into the New Year already. Whatever, I was busy, okay? Because it looks like the end of the world might be coming sooner than the Mayans expected, and I wanted to spend as much time as I could with these three little monsters:

Goofy

Happy

Sleepy

Also, I drank too much on New Year's Eve, and I think I might still have a hangover to go with my on-going nervous breakdown. So, hey, new year, same crap!

As if you expected any different?