Bolt Upright

“Morals” and “values” are not precisely the same thing. Please do not substitute words when you quote me, especially when I know I was on tape. It makes me sound like even more of a doofus, and frankly, I don’t need help with that.

I had an email exchange last week with another single woman who is considering adoption. She had some questions about the process, choosing a program, and the whole single-parent gig. Her last question was, “What’s been the one hardest thing for you?”

Exhaustion. Hands down. I live in a chronic state of exhaustion, and two years later, I’m still not used to it. My constant answer to the question, “How are you?” is “Tired.” And of course everyone has helpful suggestions, like “Maybe you should go to bed earlier.” Yeah, maybe I should. But it’s not going to happen. Here’s why: Sport is usually asleep by 8:30. Two to two-and-a-half hours later, I need to wake him up to get him to go to the bathroom in order to prevent bedwetting. (Doesn’t work if it’s earlier, doesn’t work if it’s later.) So I have to stay up til at least 10:30, and am almost always in bed by 11. (On occasion I mutiny, and go to bed at 9. And then get woken up at 1 when Sport wakes up in a wet bed. So, not really worth it then.)

11:00  isn’t that late, really, but bear in mind Sport is up in the morning around 5. He’s doing well at following the order not to wake me up until 6:30 unless it’s an emergency, but I usually wake up anyway because once he’s up, then the dog is up, and there is tappity-tapping of claws and running of water in the bathroom, etc. Add to this the three or four times a week that Sport wakes up with a nightmare around the 1 am mark – and sometimes again at the 3 am mark – and you begin to see the problem. We’re talking about 5-6  hours of interrupted sleep, max. And as it turns out, I’m not 22 anymore, and I need more than that. (God, remember those days when you could stay up until 3 and still make your 8:30 class and do it all again the next night? I swear, the only time I think it’s better to have kids when you are younger is when I remember how little sleep I needed then.) And of course, it’s not like I can sleep in on weekends anymore. I do occasionally go back to bed after getting Sport’s breakfast, but it’s just not the same.

After Sport had been home about 6 months, I was whining about the lack-of-sleep issue to another mother. She assured me that you just get used to it and you function on less sleep. I’m here to tell you, that is a BIG FAT LIE. I mean, I guess you function on less in the sense that I am still mostly functional. But you do NOT get used to it, or at least I haven’t. At 6:30 tonight I finished cleaning up the kitchen from supper and I was ready to just go to bed right then. As the Brits would say, I was knackered. I did  contemplate having a nap from 6:30 to 8:00… but then I probably just wouldn’t be able to fall asleep later and I’d be awake til midnight, thereby gaining no ground. Plus of course there were still 3 loads of laundry to do. So heigh ho, it’s 9:30, and despite the fact that I can barely keep my eyes open, I’ve got another hour to go until I can escort the zombie child to the bathroom. (Seriously, he does not really wake up for those trips. I have on occasion found myself yelling, “SPORT! That’s the BATHTUB not the toilet!” and other highly improbable things.) And then the best case scenario is not waking up until my alarm goes off at 6:30. Bleh.

Here is your little known fact for today: Daylight Saving Time was first officially proposed by an entomologist from New Zealand. Yes, an entomologist. Apparently early darkness was cutting into his after-work bug-collecting hours. (I swear I’m not making this up.)

Well, bug-man, now that I know who is responsible, you are totally on my shit list. I admit, the annual daylight saving time “fall back” day used to be my favourite day of the year. An extra hour in the day! And on a Sunday, at that, when you can actually sleep in. What’s not to love?

Children. Having children is exactly what’s not to love about daylight saving time. Unfortunately, the beauty of that extra hour of sleep is not something they seem to grasp. We’re over a week in, and I still have a kid who is waking up at 4:30 am. Put him to bed later, you say? Make him stay up? Yeah. We’ve tried that. He wakes up at the same time, only now he’s cranky because he hasn’t had enough sleep.

I seem to remember from last year that it took about a month to get his clock reset. For now, we have had the discussion again about what time he is allowed to wake me up (6:30) and what sorts of things would qualify for a reason to wake me up before that time. (Eg: nosebleed? yes. How to spell a word? Not so much.) Unfortunately I forgot to set a different time for holidays & weekends, so my wake up call came bright and early at 6:30 this morning.

I hear they do not observe Daylight Saving Time in Arizona and Hawaii. I also hear they do not have snow there. If I win the lotto we are totally moving.

(Totally off topic sidebar here – Namibia observes DST. South Africa does not. Which means you can be  canoeing down the Orange River and realize it’s an hour later on your left than it is on your right. Or is it an hour later on your right… wait… which side is Namibia again? In other words you have to be really careful about what time and in which country your takeout vehicle is meeting you.)

(Not that we effed that up or anything.)

The cake pop post has (not surprisingly) generated not only a lot of page views, but a lot of emails. And a lot of snorting. Naturally, several people have pointed out that someone who admits to being useless at crafts and at baking should probably not attempt a project that basically combines both.

Yes. Fair enough. All I have to say to that is, Why the hell didn’t you mention that LAST week?

This Saturday there is a craft & bake sale at Sport’s school to help raise money for new playground equipment. In a moment of complete and utter insanity, I volunteered to donate baked goods. It was a process of elimination, really – I couldn’t really volunteer my time, since that means finding someone to look after Sport, which is a chore at the best of times. I certainly wasn’t going to have a craft table, since my idea of crafts hasn’t really progressed past popsicle sticks and play dough. But baking? Ok, sure, I can make a few dozen cookies and toss ‘em in ziplocks, right?

Yes. Yes, I could have done that. Or I could have taken leave of my senses and forgotten that I SUCK AT BAKING, and gone for something slightly more ambitious. Here’s how it went down:

Tuesday night: discover the existence of something called “Cake Pops“, which my bloggy friend Danielle made for her kids for Halloween. Hers were little pumpkins, and they looked freaking adorable. I clicked around the site for a bit and found these ones, and thought, hey, those are great! And only 3 ingredients!  Wait… I could totally make those for the bake sale! (Insert ominous music of your choice here.)

Wednesday night: stop on the way home from work to buy yellow candy wafers, lollipop sticks, and edible ink pen. Can’t find edible ink pen, so buy a tiny tube of black decorator icing. That’ll work, right? After supper, bake cake, cool, crumble and mix with icing as per directions, form into balls, insert sticks, and stick in the freezer. Man, this is a breeze.

Thursday night: arrive home from Scouts at 8 pm (why, why do they always run late?) and start melting wafers. Retrieve first pan of pops from the freezer. Melt wafers and begin!

Here is pan # 1 of frozen cake pops, ready and waiting to be dipped. Lookin’ good!

Here is the assortment of containers I tried to use – unsuccessfully -  to prop up the dipped pops so the candy coating could harden without getting flattened on one side.

Here is the apparatus I finally came up with, which holds only 3 or 4 pops.

Here is the first completed pop. Looks great doesn’t it? Yeah! Go me! So what if it took 10 minutes to get one pop finished… the rest will be quicker, right?

Here’s what happens when the frozen cake pops thaw before you dip them. Which, as it turns out, takes about 10 minutes.

This…

or this….

So back the tray of pops went into the freezer. Right… I’ll do the faces on the ones I’ve dipped while the rest of the pops re-freeze.  Here’s how that went:

Decorator icing in a tube doesn’t set. Who knew? Probably everyone in the world but me, that’s who. Let it dry for an hour, put it in the freezer, use less… no dice. It doesn’t set. Which means there is no way I am going to be able to bag these, they’ll just get wrecked. (Forget the ominous music, insert string of bad words of your choice here.)

Well… maybe I can still salvage this. Plain yellow? Bo-ring. Sprinkles??? Yeah, maybe sprinkles…

Okay, no, not sprinkles. Dammit. Well, maybe I”ll just eat this one while I try to think of some other way to make this work. Here’s what happens when you try to take a bite out of a cake pop:

And the kicker is, the bite I got… I didn’t enjoy. Bland, and kind of gross texture. Seriously… I am going to all this trouble to make something that doesn’t taste particularly good?

Here’s where the rest of the cake pops went:

(I just heard a shriek of anguish all the way from the South Canyon Ranch. Yep, I threw cake in the garbage again.)

Not pictured: my trip to the bakery on the way home from work tomorrow to buy some cookies to throw in ziploc bags. No one will know I didn’t bake them, right?

… that the universe wants me to stay fat. Seriously. The stars, they are aligned against me.

Back in July I started a 12 week workout/diet program. Then I got sick halfway through week 1. Then we went on holidays. And … yeah, Fail #1. I tried again at the end of August, and oh, what happened? Week 1 down and whammo, head cold followed by that whole ear/sinus infection and the resulting antibiotic rash from hell. I couldn’t even walk up the stairs at work, never mind do cardio or weights, and it’s not like I was cooking healthy food either – more like heating up chicken fingers and fries. Fail #2.

But since I am a glutton for punishment and all, I got motivated and found a different program that needs less daily time investment and should show results in 8 weeks. Right! 8 weeks! I can do this!

Monday was day 1. Check! Tuesday, day 2… by midday I was feeling nauseous and light headed and had the mother of all headaches. And a sore throat.   No. NO NO NO NO NO.

Yes. By evening I was incapable of exercising, and by this morning I could barely swallow yogurt and had to drive Sport the 4 blocks to school since I didn’t think I could walk that far. Hmm, lasted only one day, that might be a new record for FAIL.

In case you are wondering what would happen if you went out on a cold, rainy morning and ran 5K when you hadn’t been running at all for the last three months due to various colds and infections and a critical lack of time…

… the answer is, a pulled hip flexor and a recurrence of patellofemoral syndrome (aka knee pain that makes it impossible to go down stairs or slopes.)  Two days later and I”m still staggering around groaning like an 80 year old.

That is it. No, really that is IT. I am getting back in shape if it kills me, and it might.

Yesterday I tried a new route home from work and was picking Sport up from daycare less than twenty minutes after I walked out the door of my office. Seriously! Holy speedy commute, batman. That was a full 10 minutes faster than my previous best time.

This morning I took the same route (well, in reverse, obviously) on my way to work.

And I was 10 minutes late. This makes absolutely no sense, since the morning drive is usually much faster than the evening one.

So, did I just hit some bizarre gap in the time-space-traffic continuum yesterday? Or are the traffic gods trying to make me go insane? Or what?