Month: May 2007

That’s Vince in there.. (What the heck is in Jeremy’s pocket? Were cell phones really that big in 2001?)

And here’s Vince on the outside. I didn’t notice until I sat down to write this entry, but he seems to be making an obscene gesture.

When I was growing up, we were the last folks on the block to get a color TV and my parents only got rid of the trusty Gremlin in 1988 when I learned to drive (which they replaced with the tank-like Ford Crown Victoria). My parents were thrifty and frugal.

However, there were two things we were allowed to spend money on: books – I remember going to the Crown Books behind the Dart Drug and picking out first Little House on the Prairie books and later Sweet Valley High books and second, food – I remember going to the Giant with a hand basket and Donald and I would each carry a handle and we’d walk up and down the isles filling the basket with whatever caught our fancy.

So now that I’m grown up, those are the two things I like to spend money on. I don’t have many gadgets, don’t buy any makeup, I have fewer clothes/shoes than Jeremy. I just love bookstores and grocery stores.

My bookstore habit was getting pretty pricey, so now I’ve replaced that habit with libraries mostly. But I’ve never paid much attention to how much we’ve been spending on our grocery bills. The year Edda was born, I really ramped up my cooking skills and I pretty much had a different dinner on the table every night for 6 months. This involved reading lots of magazines and cookbooks and writing down ingredients on a shopping list and buying whatever I needed – jars of paprika, marmalade, capers, fish sauce, adobo sauce. It was a lot of yummy dinners, but also pretty high grocery bills.

I’m not back up to speed on cooking like that yet, living in Singapore meant that a lot of ingredients I was familiar with weren’t available unless I trekked into downtown and here, well, it’s just a mess here – but I have made a great discovery on my quest to spend less money on groceries!

The store brand!

You got store brand organic milk, organic sour dough bread, frozen lemonade concentrate, cottage cheese, and cran-rasberry cocktail. Sitting right next to the thing that you want, there is a store brand equivalent sitting right next to it, usually about 25% less expensive. I know they’ve had this stuff for years, but I guess I didn’t pay much attention to it. You know, I’m so used to buying Land ‘o Lakes butter that it just felt weird buying the store brand. Also, it’s been 5 years since we’ve owned a TV, maybe it’s just taken that long to debrainwash me from buying the branded stuff. Who knows! I just love a good bargain.

So now that I’m in my mid-30s and have experienced many, many, many moves and many, many, many apartments/condos/houses/hotel rooms, I figured I had outgrown two things. IKEA and U-Haul. I think I swore to myself 3 years ago, I would never buy furniture from IKEA (as the year-old dining room chair I was sitting on broke from under me) or ever move myself in a U-Haul (which must have been in 1999, it was a painful experience and we didn’t even have kids then).

However, it seems I can’t keep a promise to myself. In Singapore, our apartment was furnished 100% IKEA even down to the wine racks and the bathroom mats thanks to our landlord. And now I see my U-Haul vow soon to be broken as well. I think we might save thousands of dollars by hiring guys locally at both ends to load/unload and renting and driving the damn U-Haul ourselves. Hmmm. We are waiting for a 2nd quote from a mover tomorrow and then decide. As long as I don’t have to lift the washing machine.

Didn’t we just unpack? Oh yeah, that’s right, just 3 weeks ago!

Vince is a little sick today (he’s wearing his favorite Sponge Bob pjs!).

Went swimming in Lake George – the water must have been freezing.

Here’s looking at you, kid!

Jeremy and I are trying to have at least one outing a day with the kids so we don’t go batty. The catch is that it has to be free – or as close to free as possible. Usually, we go on a walk, but it was raining today. A few weeks ago, I had joined the local children’s museum as members and as a member you get free admission into the Albany Institute of History and Art. So that’s where we went. Neither child particularly enjoyed this outing, but we got out of the house on a rainy day.

We saw oil paintings:

They did have a children’s room where we could all chill out. Edda and I dressed up like early settlers.

Edda’s new haircut – inspired by Dora.

She’s eating a pancake breakfast, which I usually consider too fancy for the weekdays, but if you use pancake mix, you just have to add water. How complicated is that? I don’t know why I reserve it for the weekends, I think it’s just that the syrup is too sticky and messes are to be contained to the weekends.

But for us now, everyday is a weekend. Ruby is so confused, every morning, she waits by the door to go to the park or on a hike and I have to explain to her, no sweet doggie, I’m sorry, it’s Tuesday and we aren’t going anywhere even though it’s 9 am and everyone is still at home. Her ears go limp. Sheez, I wonder if I could teach Ruby PECS (Picture Exchange Communication System) or how to use some sort of computer-talking device that Stephen Hawkings uses, I bet she’d be really good at it, maybe she could tell us her thoughts on our management of the family. “You guys are just not alpha enough, look at Vince, he leaves crumbs and messes everywhere he goes and Edda gets whatever she wants by screaming her head off, is that discipline? You know I’m a total softie, but you guys have to step up to the plate.” We had a small therapy session with Edda today with her PECS, she just laughed at us like we were idiots and refused to tap the cards. Grrr, so frustrating.

Besides getting paid and being able to pay your bills, having a job also allows one other nice perk – you get to not spend every waking moment with your spouse. Even though Jeremy and I get along as well as Bert and Ernie, we still do have a need to spend some time apart. Hence, I found myself alone at the local Target looking at cool crap and not being able to buy anything because of our new budget of – shelter (mooching off my generous and wonderful parents), food (eating all the stocked food in the pantry and the freezer) and clothing (only if it’s completely worn out and you will be on the street naked or freezing without it). So basically our budget is zero.

It’s been an emotionally draining 4 days. This was suppose to be the QUIET year! Oh well, I’ve been eating too much for my own good. Mmmmm, carbs… yummy.

Being a mother doesn’t come naturally to me. When I had Vince and Edda, it took me a long, long time (years actually) to get used to being touched so much, to not have my own personal space or my own personal time. You know on Friends, when Rachel had Emma and she could put Emma in the next room for what seemed like days at a time and she still looked fabulous in her clothes and she could still go out and have dinner dates and work long hours at Ralph Lauren and then every once in a while, she’d go pick up Emma and they would coo at each other and that would be that? Well, I seriously believed that Hollywood lie. But now, 5 years after my first mother’s day, I’m finally comfortable being the mom. Hooray for the mothers! Hold your loved ones tight, and give them a kiss good night!

For mother’s day, we climbed Burger Hill.

We went to Coney Island with Emy yesterday.

Our first stop was Nathan’s hot dog stand – in operation since 1916 at the same location. Every year on the fourth of July, they hold a hot dog eating contest. How many hot dogs do you think you can eat in 12 minutes? Well some Japanese dude can eat 53 3/4 hot dogs! Puke-o-rama.

We had chili cheese fries for lunch.

Went on some kiddie rides:

Went to Emy’s apartment in the hip Williamsburg area of Brooklyn (you can pretty much see her whole apartment in this photo).

Then we went to the playground in her neighborhood (Emy had never noticed it before – it’s huge).

And had italian ice.

It’s kind of exciting around here. We are excited and nervous to start new things, I haven’t worked in 5 years and before Jeremy got riffed I was going to do find some work, something not too hard/stressful, something maybe part-time and work around Jeremy’s career, but NOW, I’ve got the opportunity to find something exciting and challenging and interesting. Hmmm, I wonder how it will go? All these years, it hasn’t been me who has been taking the family all over the world, it’s been Jeremy, I’ve always been the one who has followed him. We’ve actaully fallen into very traditional gender roles even though it’s nothing that either of us had invisioned when we got married. So Jeremy laughed at me yesterday and said it was my turn to support family and take us somewhere interesting. Ha ha! We’ll see, we’ll see.

I feel a kind of lightness and happiness, things were getting a bit stale at Jeremy’s work, but we were kind of reluctant to give it up since he had such a history with it and he made pretty good money and with Edda’s diagnosis, we wanted to settle somewhere for a few years at least. But now we have a little gift of time, Jeremy’s got a bit of severance package, the health insurance also continues for a little while and we have my parent’s empty house to move to. So now we have a chance to start fresh and clean!

Yesterday, less than 24 hours after Jeremy lost his job, I was at the IEP meeting in New York which was kind of strange. The IEP meeting is the yearly meeting for special needs kids to determine the services for next year – all the occupational, physical, and speech therapies as well as the school and the type of environment that you’ll have. Will Edda have a 1-on-1 aide? Will she have physical therapy everyday? Will she be integrated into a class with typical kids or will she be in a class with only special needs. That type of stuff.

The IEP meeting was in the afternoon and that morning, I went to an ABA school which I saw and I liked and I had heard some rumors of people not really “believing in the philiosphy”. ABA is Applied Behavior Analysis which is a fancy way of saying that there is a lot of 1-on-1 tutoring where the teacher places flash cards to teach.

So you can teach the alphabet, you can teach how to talk to a friend, you can teach how to perform any task. So let’s say Edda is going to learn how to read, you would put flash cards in front of her and have her choose the letter “A” correctly 10 times. That’s the trial part. So it doesn’t look very much like preschool, it looks like rote training. The parent advocate at the IEP told me that she cried after taking a tour of the school. It’s very little interacting with typically developing peers, very little “free play”. My dream is to have Edda communicate effectively enough to participate in mainstream class by kindergarden or first grade, but I feel like she has to make some progress with the communication. All the people at the IEP looked at me as if I had an extra nose for wanting to go to this ABA school. But it all doesn’t matter because we won’t be here.. Ha Ha!