caused the anti-Martha “less is more” backlash I think we’re in now.

Crafty, homey Martha-ey people would agree that in about 1990, Mrs. Stewart changed a whole lotta people’s notions about house and home. That whole more is more is better thing really stuck with people, especially me, for such a long time.

She’s got a new homekeeping encyclopedia out now and I keep seeing it online and honestly, it’s painful for me to not purchase it. Isn’t that strange? I feel like I must own it.

But I already have a swell home organization book that I like very much and that, honestly, I really don’t need, either. I mean, if you’re in the market, buy Home Comforts instead, by all means, because she’s a swell writer and the book is useful, but so much of this home stuff is common sense. Dude, I can make a bed with hospital corners. I can hang a picture.

So, I have another problem in the Martha world stemming from my love/hate relationship with her. As far as problems go, it’s not a horrible one, but it’s getting in the way in my wayback. A nice gal gave me the past ten years of Martha Stewart Living magazines. They’re in pristine condition, except that the boxes they were in have collapsed and they’re now swishing back and forth in my wayback whenver I round a corner a bit too sharply.

I wanted them; heck, I loved those magazines! But I don’t want them now. I had them all when they came out and I saved what I needed. But I hate to be irreverent and just send them away.

So what do I do with them?

Do YOU need some Martha?

What excites me most about “Black Friday” is that I am doing the same thing I did last year: absolutely nothing for a large portion of the day. I think I did some online shopping last year, but I know I didn’t go out.

This year, not going anywhere until Friday night. Not buying anything. Not spending a dime.

I might be knitting this easy, good-lookin’ scarf out of my favorite yarn in the world* (I’m using two strands together on size 11–NOTE CORRECTION TO CORRECT NEEDLE SIZE!–needles) while waiting for more of the same yarn to arrive from Purl,** but I will most likely be wrangling children and leftovers all at once until nightfall, when we’re throwing on the shiny clothes and heading out for a ball. We have to go, too. We made a dinner date first (not paying! not spending any money!), so there’s no getting out of it.

* Seriously, those colors are to die for. Lotus and orchid and espresso (2 of each, already wound) are on their way to me for scarfy gifts.

** Prettiest yarn/fabric/accoutrements website ever. They helped choose the colors for the yarn I love.

I AM USING SIZE 11 NEEDLES, NOT SIZE 13! SORRY EVERYONE!

a blinding realization, I do it big, y’all.

This week, my daughter has been driving me up a tree.

(She loves it when I say that, by the way. I guess the mental image charms her.)

She is argumentative and recalcitrant (one of my favorite words in the world). She’s hit some super-talkative phase where listening to direction isn’t happening much, so the morning routine we’ve had for, hmmm, FOUR YEARS NOW, is lost on her. Brush her teeth? Wha? Bathroom? Why? Brush hair? Pack up the backpack? No one told her to do it!

There are moments when she is so annoying that I could pinch her. I realize this isn’t unusual, but for me and for my mostly perfect child, it is. Well, the talkativeness isn’t unusual, but the rest of it is a newish sort of mouthiness 2.0.

I had a moment yesterday when I couldn’t bear her presence for another second. We were at the bookstore, shopping for her school sharing project (kids are encouraged to bring a gift for a child who has lost everything in a disaster; it was started by a student whose house burned down last year and is named after the girl’s dog, who died in the fire) and while I was picking out books, my daughter was whining for a book for herself.

I am a reader. I am always willing to buy another book for my children, but we’d just had book fair that week and she received an early birthday gift of two fanstatic books, too, so I wasn’t planning to buy her a book. I shouldn’t expect a little kid to fully comprehend what we were doing, I guess, but the whining annoyed me enough that I almost took her home in between the bookstore and the grocery store, where we purchased cupcake and frosting ingriedients. I told her as we left the bookstore that I was going to take her home first and she said, “You don’t want to take me with you, do you?”

(Well, gee, no, no I don’t, but when you say it like that, I feel awful about it, but also vaguely like it should be okay to not take you but at the same time, I will take you anyway but AUGH! AUGH! AUGH! Why is it all so hard and painful and why does even thinking about it make a big knot in my throat?)

Then she explained that she just really, really likes to have new things when we’re out and that she was sorry for whining. It was sweet and she promised to behave at the grocery store. Plus, how do you keep a little girl out of her pink peppermint frosting preparation the night before she takes birthday cupcakes to school?

I felt horrible in the car on the way to the grocery store as I remembered my mother’s inability to deal with me as a mouthy teenager. Isn’t being able to deal with your kid a basic parenting skill? I was a moody brat, but I was a good girl. I made fantastic grades and I never got in trouble, but I drove my mother up the biggest redwood in California every single day. I don’t think she dealt with me very well: she either just let me go or shut me down. We never worked through it. Does that make sense? I knew, last night, exactly what she felt when I questioned her every move in a horribly snotty voice and snooped through everything and rambled on in monologues about exactly nothing because it’s what my daughter does now.

I don’t want to squash my child’s spirit or to break her, which might have been what my mother thought she wanted for me and might have been what parents did in the seventies, especially if they were raised strictly themselves. But my mother sort of gave up on me, too, in that respect. She would say, now, that I was a force of nature and couldn’t be told anything and I would agree, but only partly. I think I could have been told, if told in the right way.

I’m searching for the right way right now. The Husband listened to me last night as I whispered, when we got home from the bookstore and the grocery, “I know how my mother felt and I understand why I felt like she disliked me so much sometimes, but I don’t think she handled me well at all and I want to do better.”

He said, “I think most of it is that she just wants attention.”

I agree.

Her teacher agrees, too. We had a wonderful chat this morning as I dropped off cupcakes* about teaching respect versus squashing the spirit of a wonderful child. The teacher has magic signals that work in the classroom and I’m stealing them for at home and she assured me that my daughter is almost always the model of politeness in the classroom. Kids save the worst for their parents, don’t they?

Good attention for a crafty girl who will turn six on Monday means mommy/daughter projects. I’m stealing them from all over the internet:

* clothespin dolls (must have felt pouch, per McPantses)

* with their own home, an amazing but simple little dollhouse

How fantastic is that?

It’s so important to guide a child well, but it’s a terribly, terribly daunting task for me as I am forced to confront painful truths about my own childhood, which I have viewed, for most of my life, as hazy and idyllic and perfectly happy.

I never want my daughter to feel the dislike that I sometimes felt as a child. I want the real hazy and idyllic for her. Of course, I also want to stop the snotty voice. I think that for now I am going to let the monologues and incessant questions go, though. I have to rest sometime.

* That, in addition to the chocolate cupcakes with pink peppermint buttercream icing (thank you, Mark Bitman, for being my go-to man in the kitchen) with crushed peppermints on top, I also made vanilla cupcakes with the same icing is a testament to how much I like the chocolate-hating boy in McPantses’ class’s parents. Can’t have one kid do without!

** Boxed cupcakes. ShutupSHUTUPjustshut.up. I was still up til midnight.

Being able to discern the Snickers bars in the Halloween candy bowl by touch alone in a dark kitchen.

Shopping for new khakis at the Gap last night and being forced to buy the biggest clothing size I have ever purchased in my life and skulking up to the counter with those pants, wondering if I would feel any better about them if I just cut the darn tags out altogether.

Running hard every morning this week and still being a bloated toad last night.

Waking up this morning in a horrible mood. Horrible.

Things that are very, very good:

Getting to work and realizing that the new pants (worn today) are suddenly so loose that I can pull them down without unfastening them at all. They’re baggy, even. How did that happen overnight?

Coming home from work and realizing, after a trip to the bathroom, why I was moody this morning and bloated last night and that I don’t really wear that size pants.

Hearing the Husband say, after weaseling the boychild out of my bathroom cabinet, “Generic tampons? Generic? I don’t mind if you spend the big bucks on the name brand.” I’ll spare you the rest of the conversation.

Things that are very, very interesting:

I think the Democrats will take the Senate, too. At this hour on this day, that’s not really big news, is it? But I also think that if the Democrats have both the House and the Senate during this particular midterm election, they almost guarantee that we will have a Republican president next election and I think it’ll be McCain. If the Dems had just the House and not the Senate, too, I think we stand a better chance of having a Democratic president in 2008. However, I think Clinton isn’t the candidate of choice and I think Obama is too young as a Senator.

So, that’s what I think. If a Democratic senator turns the tide in Virginia, we will have a Republican president next term.

I know I don’t usually talk about this sort of thing, but I wanted to put it down somewhere so I can check myself in two years. I had a great time voting yesterday and watching election returns last night. Local politics is a fascinating beast and what occurs on a statewide level here is mind-boggling. We can split a ticket like nothing you’ve seen.

If you live in the Mobile area and you’re feeling like shopping at a particular women’s service league event, I shall be there Thursday afternoon (late) until Saturday when it shuts down and I and my friend would love to see you.

The booths (two together on a corner by the food court) will have her signature item, personalized cups, along with various gift items, and a bazillion (or 200ish) notepads we have busted our behinds to make over the last week. The notepads are printed on heavy linen-textured cottony paper and have perfectly darling illustrations at the bottom of them **coughcoughminecough** and ribbons. We are tired, but we are ready to sell sell sell.

If you’d like to know more, feel free to e-mail me; be sure to mention what it’s about in the header of your e-mail. I will be wibbly during my adventure because it’s the first time I’ve left the boychild at night, but I will be worse off than him, so there you go.

There is something very wrong with the family who giggles madly while standing in front of the toilet bowl for a goldfish burial “at sea.”

We are all going to hell. But, damn, it was funny. “God bless your fishy soul, Violet.”

Violet was won at McPantses’ school carnival Monday afternoon. She was dead by Friday. I’m pretty sure it was my fault and I apologized for failing her before I dumped her into the toilet. I will say that Violet lived a pampered existence at our house. She swam around in a gorgeous crystal rose bowl (the only thing remotely fishbowl shaped) while she was here.

Now might not be the time to mention that McP is getting a fish tank for her birthday in a few weeks, outfitted with wee frogs and turtles and swimmy things and, most importantly, per McP, lots of pink rocks at the bottom. I figured we’d add Violet to the mix, but no such luck.

Someone asked me earlier this week to write about the boychild, the Crabcake, because she hasn’t heard much about him lately.

It’s funny, this whole having a second kid thing–of course their personalities are bound to be distinct and different and equally enchanting, but hooBOY, I’m glad I got the screamering the second time around.

Really. I am glad. McPantses was perfection personified as a baby and as a toddler and still is, mostly, except for the whole petulant, obstinant thing (no idea where she gets that). Having one child was perfect, too, and easy, but it might have been so easy that the fleeting preciousness of it all slipped by me in a haze of pink hairbows and crayon drawings, you know?

I’m so glad we have Charlie. For all his screamyness (and there is so very much of it), there is the imprint of toddlerhood about us again and the nearly edible sweet gooeyness of it all now wouldn’t be mostly edible gooeyness without the experiences we had with big sister. Unlike his sister, the boy will not stand idly by and be ignored. There’s no missing him; there’s no sitting quietly and contemplating the pattern that all the crayons make when you line them up by color.*

The boy is demanding in every way. He demands attention and food (so much food, but this is a good thing because now there is a human in the house who eats more than I do, I think) and the picking up of what he’s dropped and more more more better faster NOW NOW AHHHHHHH RIGHT NOW OR I SHALL SCREAM EVEN LOUDER NOW DAMNITALL NOW!

And I hate that because it’s frightfully rude and, well, loud.

But I love it because it’s just him. Plus, the doses of screamering are balanced so nicely with the sweet, still mostly bald boy who grins sleepily at me when I put him down at night (after Family Hug, it’s me and the Crabcake, all alone for a moment); who strokes my hair (”gentle hands,” I say, “don’t hurt mommy” and he releases the fistful of hair and pats at me instead); who, when I ask “Whodabaybee?” says “Idabaybee!” in a happy whisper as his eyes blink grow heavier; who requests ‘”up?” one time out of every two that I put him down for the night and who never fails to tell his fan “nigh nigh fahn.”

When his sister dares sit in my lap, he growls fiercely at her and tries to shove her away, even if he wasn’t remotely interested in laptime before he saw her. It’s horribly obnoxious and equally endearing. I rearrange and squish both kids into place, one per thigh. I wish my thighs were too delicate and bony to endure such massive weights (he’s 25 lbs and she’s 42 lbs), but nay.

He’s a total love and gave his grandfather a huge hug and thank you (he always says “thank you,” even in the midst of the worst screamering, he will pause to thank us for whatever we are handing him in an effort to appease the Angry Volcano) when a new/used Tonka bulldozer (bullbobah? tracTAH!) turned up at our house last week. He’s also a Viking and prefers to eat chicken when he can hold an entire breast, bone and all, in his fat baby hand. (Not a good idea, as evidenced by the chicken bone the Husband had to fish out of the boy’s throat, but it stopped the screamering during a church dinner, so there you have it.) He’s not a huge sleeper; he is a climber extraordinaire and can already scale the ladder on our playground outside, get himself across to the slide and hurl himself down that same slide, and it’s is taller than me. He is so fearless that he stops my heart twice a day and thrice on Saturdays. He’s exasperating and fierce and determined and he’s still my baby boy.

And holy cow, even when he is screaming at the top of his lungs specifically (devious little rat bastard) trying to wake me (even tho he’s fed and clean and entertained by the kind Husband) when I sleep late, I am so lucky to have this kid, this exact kid, the one with my sticky outy ears (just like his sister). I love him so much that it shocks me.

*Walking into a room where your toddler has arranged crayons into a precisely ordered rainbow line is a slap in the face like that scene in Poltergeist where all the chairs are standing on the table in the kitchen.

This month is the time to work, to plan, to prepare.

Right?

If you’re doing all kinds of things to get ready for the holidays, what’s another one or two minor mental tasks?

I give you some brain exercise:

NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month

and

NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month.

So, start writing. Link me so I can read. Seriously. Some of the funniest, most eloquent people I know need blogs. I need more to read.