Day 23: A (Satur)day in the Life

February 6th, 2016

hoecakes

Hoecake: check

I‘m taking part in a 30-day writing experiment. The theme for me is “personal, not pretty.” See Kale & Cigarettes for details and the Facebook Group to read stories by other 500-words-ers.

I have a love-hate relationship with Saturdays. I love them because I get to spend the entire day with my daughters, by myself, without working. I hate them because I have to spend the entire day with my daughters, by myself, without working.

In addition to how NO JOKE that is in the first place, I often come up with outlandish to-do lists for myself “since I’m not working” and set myself up for very stressful weekends wherein I’m trying to spend tons of QT with the girls and also make creative baby food, get the house immaculate, and knock out a few other whimsical craft projects. 

Last weekend my to-do list wouldn’t fit on the one shard of scrap paper I grabbed out of the drawer. It was degrading, and at the end of the weekend I had to give myself a little pep talk about how unreasonable the list had been in the first place.

This weekend, however, I’m trying to keep it realistic:

  1. Water the plants
  2. Make cornmeal hoecakes
  3. Make kale chips
  4. Wash and fold 3 loads of laundry
  5. Make homemade sanitizing spray with orange, eucalyptus, and balsam fir essential oils so I can spray down the girls’ room (they have runny noses)
  6. Melt down the Mom’s Stuff Salve I bought (this shit is the shit for dry baby skin) and reconstitute it with jojoba oil so it’s easier to spread and lasts longer (the shit is the shit, but it costs $30 for a very small jar)
  7. Cut the girls’ fingernails

Of the above, the last one is the one I’m least likely to tackle. I have a mortal fear of cutting the girls’ nails. There is just never a good time for it, and I am so blind that I have to wear a headlamp and concentrate very hard with their fingers about three millimeters away from my eyeballs. If they’re awake, they are very squirmy. And I’m not about to disrupt a precious baby nap to risk doing it when they’re asleep.

Jon is way better at it. His tactic:

  1. Forcibly restrain baby while cutting nails.
  2. Give baby ice cream.

I don’t have it in me to restrain the baby, so my tactic is more like:

  1. Chase baby around begging and crying.
  2. Distract baby with something for long enough to cut one half of one nail.
  3. Give up and try again tomorrow.

In this way, cutting their nails is sort of like painting the Golden Gate Bridge: it is an ongoing process that never ends and never really even gets to a satisfactory stage where I can feel like I’m getting somewhere.

I have to admit that I’m also terrible at cutting my own nails. In my old life I used to stall until I could find a chance to get a manicure. Manicures in San Francisco cost like $12—which if you must know is way less than I get paid an hour, so doing my own nails is not an economically viable pastime. Or so I would tell myself.

 

 

 

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2 Responses to “Day 23: A (Satur)day in the Life”

  1. Emily says:

    Have you ever brought the twins to get a manicure?

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