That's hot: Nov. 30, 2003

During a 40th birthday dinner for a friend last night, us girls all got to talking about our boys. Someone asked me what it was about Jim Fortune that convinced me he was The One. I talked about the fact that he is an honest-to-god genius, hilarious, the kindest person I've ever met and the best father in the world. But I forgot to mention this part: He builds the most jaw-droppingly beautiful things.

It must be some lizard-brain, cavewoman part of my DNA, but guys who can build stuff make me absolutely swoon.

The two-week working vacation is much more fun than I thought

    My husband took two weeks of vacation this month and spent every single minute working on the house.

    He made a two-page list, with indoor tasks on one side and outdoor tasks on the other. We sat at the dining room table and prioritized the jobs.

    "Kitchen crown molding?" he asked, pencil poised.

    "Well, I have been waiting six years for kitchen crown molding."

    "OK, it’s No. 2, right behind finishing the window trim in the addition."

    Does this sound like fun? No, it does not. My husband gets two weeks of vacation a year. He took them all in one fell swoop and planned to spend most of those precious days in the basement, sawing and painting and using loud tools with sharp edges that make me nervous.

    Part of me wanted to object. We should take a trip, I thought. We should do something fun, something frivolous. But we don’t really have any money for a trip, and we sure do have a long list of projects that need to be done. We live in an old house, and we added on to it before we finished renovating. So we stayed home, and Jim worked.

    Halfway through his vacation, my husband had finished and painted all the window trim in the addition (39 pieces he custom-made in the basement on one of the aforementioned loud tools). He also had taken a trip to a concrete supplier to buy 500 pounds of construction sand to make our 3-year-old son a sandbox.

    Does a 3-year-old need 500 pounds of sand? Well, apparently he does. I never saw a happier boy than our son that day, up to his calves in the mother of all sandboxes, plastic trucks and buckets strewn across the landscape. Daddy is his hero. The back yard is Disney World.

    Jim also spent a day at our neighbor’s house, helping pour a concrete driveway. This was a purely impromptu job. We were drawn by the promise of a cement truck parked behind our house, and came to watch the show. (High culture around here, yessiree.)     

    As the truck started pouring, Jim realized our neighbor and his friend were up to their ankles in concrete and needed an extra hand. He grabbed some rubber boots and a shovel and spent the afternoon moving concrete around.

    Our neighbor was extremely grateful. He came over that night to give us several thank-you six-packs of really good beer and took a tour of the addition. Jim and our neighbor talked about building stuff. It turns out our neighbor builds decks. He and Jim are going to build a deck on our house. Later, though, maybe in the spring. Too busy right now. Still have to hang the kitchen crown molding and build a retaining wall along the driveway.

    As the end of Jim’s vacation approaches, I have rethought my attitude about free time and how it ought to be spent. For nearly two weeks, my husband has been in a state of near euphoria, elated over his window trim, ecstatic at the chance to pour a driveway and help a neighbor, grinning constantly at the prospect of another job checked off the list. There is no trip we could have taken that would have made him this happy.

    I told my co-workers about all this one night at work. "He needs to live in one of those religious communities where the men get together every day and raise barns," I said.

    I can already see our son following in his father’s footsteps. I watched him yesterday, sitting in his spectacular new sandbox, moving trucks around, looking earnest.

    "Whatcha’ doing, Jack?" I asked.

    He looked up at me. "I’m working very hard," he said. "I’m building a lot of stuff."

    As I write this, I’m sitting in the office nook my husband built me last winter. Jim is sitting on the floor with a hammer, finishing the shoe molding around the perimeter of the dining room. A cold front is moving through tonight, and he plans to spend the next day or two in the kitchen, putting up and painting crown molding. Then he’ll build some bookshelves for the office. Does this sound like fun? No, it does not.

    He’s having the time of his life. 

Money is yucky: Nov. 2, 2003

My husband and I have always been pretty nearly broke. We will probably always be pretty nearly broke, largely because neither of us is especially interested in money. We both like to work. Sometimes, depending on the nature of the task at hand, we even love to work. But nothing we're good at is especially lucrative.

What do you get when you cross a math-challenged English major with a gentle-souled kayaker and carpenter? You get this column:

There’s no such thing as extra money

    I was driving home in the old truck, paying bills in my head.

    OK, I get paid tomorrow, so that covers the water bill and a few groceries. Jim gets paid Friday, so we can use that for the mortgage, which makes the mortgage only slightly late.

    Then there’s no more money, but we’ll get through the month if nothing goes wrong ...

    I approached a stop sign and shifted into neutral.

    The truck began shuddering violently, slamming the gearshift into my arm. My seatbelt locked as the cab of the truck rattled. I jammed the truck back into gear, which brought the shimmying down to a shake, and lurched home.

    "You know why this happened, don’t you?" I said to my husband later that night. "This happened because of my freelance job."

    I had been positively giddy over the freelance job. I was paid a whopping $350 to write an article for a communications company about (of all things) warehouse management systems. The topic was not exciting, but the check was absolutely inspiring. It was a big pile of extra money.

    We never have extra money, not ever — not since I traded full-time work and half our family income for a (very) part-time job and the chance to stay home with our son.

    I put the freelance check into our savings account, which we’ve all but depleted in the last few years buying extravagances like haircuts and car insurance. I should have known it wouldn’t take.

    "You know how much it’s going to cost to fix the truck," I told Jim. "Just watch. It’s going to cost $350."

    The next morning, Jim drove the shuddering truck to the neighborhood auto shop and then walked to work. That afternoon he called with the news.

    "Honey, it’s not going to cost $350 to fix the truck," he said.

    I waited.

    "It’s going to cost $351."

    "NO!"

    "Yes. And I’m pretty sure you’re psychic."

    "What’s wrong with it?"

    "They said it desperately needs a tune-up."

    "Of course it desperately needs a tune-up. It’s 10 years old and it’s never had one. But for $351?"

    "That’s what I thought, too," he said.

    We decided not to get a $351 tune-up. The next morning found us in the auto shop parking lot, waiting for the truck while a mechanic "put it back together."

    Then we had to give him $60 because he apparently spent an hour of $1-a-minute time figuring out that it needed a tune-up. (Note to self: No more visits to the neighborhood auto shop.)     

    Then Jim drove out of the parking lot and discovered the truck was running fine. This was good — way too good to be believed.

    So Jim went to the auto parts store and bought about $60 worth of things apparently used to tune up a truck. Spark plugs, I think, and wires of some sort. Something called a distributor cap and something else called a rotor.

    Jim spent an entire Sunday afternoon doing stuff to the truck that involved those parts. He then drove the truck uneventfully all week and pronounced it fixed.

    "So we got out of this for, what, about $120 instead of $351?" he said. "That’s pretty good."

    I agree. It is pretty darn good, and it leaves us $230 of that celebrated extra money, which probably does a lot more for my sense of well-being than it really does for our bottom line.

    I’m proud of Jim for fixing the truck. I’m proud of us for scraping through yet another month on an amount of money I would never have believed could sustain three people. And despite the nearly comical level of struggle involved in making it on one full-time income, I’m really happy I get to wake up every morning and have breakfast with my 3-year-old while we decide whether we feel like going to go to the park or the fire station.

    My friend Susan, also a mom with no extra money, says I should just be happy the freelance check came along when it did.

    "Breaking even is a huge victory," she told me. "Just be glad you didn’t have to put that stuff on a credit card."

    She’s right, of course. We even did a little better than break even on this one.

    Which means there’s a $230 crisis out there with our names on it.

One little worry: Oct. 5, 2003

My older son was a skinny 3-year-old when I wrote this. Now he is a skinny 11-year-old. I used to be a big worrier -- about this and a whole slew of other stuff. But I've learned that worry doesn't get you much of anywhere.

There are worse fates than skinny. 

Having a tiny child just one of life’s worries

  

    My son is a tiny little person.

    This makes me crazy. It makes me worry. It makes me crazy with worry.

    He is 3 years old and still hasn’t hit 30 pounds. He’s skinny all over, with legs that look like wrists, and arms I can wrap my hand all the way around, overlapping my fingers and thumb.

    I recently measured his waist, just to see. It’s 18 inches. My mother witnessed this exercise in neurotic parenting. She feels sorry for Jack because his mother is crazy.

    "That’s not so bad, 18 inches," she said. "Scarlett O’Hara’s waist was 17 inches after she finished tightening up that corset."

    "What?"

    "In the movie, "Gone With the Wind." Her waist was 17 inches."

    "Where do you come up with this stuff, Mom?"

    I look for other little kids, seek them out. When I see a tiny child in the park who is talking too well to be as young as he looks, I ask the parent: "How old?"

    "Oh," she says, "he’s almost 2, but he was born six weeks premature. He’s catching up fast, though, doing great."

    "Mine’s 3," I reply.

    They watch Jack, his spindly little arms, his comical, birdlike legs. "Was he early?"

    "No. Born the week before his due date. Average weight. Fell off the charts around 9 months. They did a bunch of tests, didn’t find anything wrong."

    "Hmmmm."

    What else can they say? He’s built like a Pez dispenser, and I have no explanation.

    I took him to the doctor this summer for his 3-year checkup. I hate checkups. He’s always so much smaller than those stupid charts say he’s supposed to be.

    I hate those charts, with their blue lines and curves and percentiles. They make me feel like I’ve failed in my primary responsibility as a parent: to get the child to grow. Feed him, watch him grow. Simple.

    Stupid charts.

    "He’s in the fifth percentile for weight," the doctor announced, after measuring and weighing Jack and drawing numbers on the stupid chart.

    I gasped. "He’s on the chart? He’s on the chart?"

    "Yep, fifth percentile."

    That means, of course, that 95 percent of 3-year-old boys are heavier than Jack. But that is much better news than usual. Usually, Jack is in the basement under the chart, falling out of the blue lines into the white area, where he is bigger than absolutely no one.

    The doctor scribbled some more. "He’s in the 10th percentile for height."

    "Tenth? TENTH percentile?" I am ecstatic. I hug Jack. "You’re a linebacker, baby boy. You’re a lumberjack."

    Then the doctor tells me about this formula he can use to determine Jack’s projected adult size and to make him his own growth chart. I am very much in favor of this.

    I want a new chart. The old one is just stupid.

    I tell the doctor my height and weight (5 feet 4 inches, 135 pounds) and my husband’s height and weight (5 feet 8 inches, 135 pounds.)     

    "You both weigh 135 pounds?"

    "Yes. I used to weigh 125, but hey, I gestated and then delivered an entire human being. I am entitled to my 10 pounds."

    (I am NOT defensive about the 10 pounds. NOT AT ALL. It looks good on me. GOOD, I tell you.)     

    So the doctor starts scribbling and determines, based on complex math and stuff, that Jack will be 5 feet 8 inches tall and weigh 135 pounds as an adult. He is in the 50th percentile in height and weight based on that projected adult size. He’s average, for a child born to his particular parents.

    Discovering this has allowed me to relax a little and enjoy some of the benefits of having a tiny kid.     

    For example, I can still lift and carry him easily, while most of my friends’ kids are way too big to tote. His clothes take up virtually no room in the wash, and his entire itty bitty wardrobe fits in two dresser drawers.

    He can pass for 2 and get into stuff for free. He is so small that people think he’s some kind of baby genius, talking as well as he does. Sometimes I explain that he’s older than he looks. Sometimes I just smile.

    Also, when my husband and I walk on either side of him holding his hands, we can swing him really, really high between us because he is so light. He absolutely loves that. He laughs wildly and flips his little bird legs up, up, up as far as he can, giggling, pushing himself into the air.

    We laugh, too. Our boy is beautiful. He is perfect. And that is just huge.