PS 29....Summer is Here!

    Not only is it muggy, and your clothes cling to you, the air feels sticky, you want to jump in a pool and tear your blouse off, but the kids are almost out of school!
    These feelings are ancient-summertime, summertime, summertime.... I always get a little sad on Sunday night because that means Mondays coming and school.  But I am not in school, the girls aren't in school, but still, everyone else in Cobble Hill is in school!  And PS 29 is where they all gather at 2:50 to pick up the children.  I said to Sidney, who was at school to pick up her children, that it was mostly mothers who were picking up the children...
    "Go to the private school-that's where all the nannies are"Sidney said.
  There's a Montessori school on Court that is 30,000 a year...that's after taxes!
    SO everyone is trying to move into Cobble Hill to get their children into PS 29!  That's one of the reasons the rents have sky rocketed.
     At the doctors today they said that the girls, Giggy and Tess, are in the 95% in terms of head size.  Because they are twins, and don't always have a lot of room in the womb, their heads may get fuild inside them...that they have to watch them at 9 and 12 months.  Well, I think they are just fine.  Of course Jordan worried about this and do they both recognize their names, can they pretend to talk, etc.  The worries never, ever, end.
    But Tss is climbing all over, crawling and Gigi is getting up on all fours and rocking.... We now have a huge pen in the loft for the girls to stay in with this matt with numbers, etc on it.  The apartment looks like a nursery!

Oh the body and aging!

    I actually thought it wouldn't happen to me, my body would never give out!  At least not until my 80's.  Four years ago, right around the time of my eldest sons death I noticed a tremor in my right thigh and then a small one on my lip.  My partner had been saying I walked like a zombie.  I said it was because I was in pain.  I'd had a lot of hip and back pain.  Then my daughter-in-law said I didn't swing my arms when I walked. So what, I thought.  But when I looked up tremors Parkinsons came up.  I couldn't believe it.  I was sure it was all those years of remodeling houses and the paint remover I'd used.
  It took 6 months for the doctor at Kaiser to give me medication-I worked hard to look normal.  Like everyone else I read all about it and had investigated stem cell work in Germany.  It's since then been disbanded.
   It's hard to believe I have it. I expect my  body to function and when it doesn't its quite frustrating.
   When I was in my mid forties I feel off the deck and fractured my back. I'd healed from it just fine.  I'd also taken Fosamax for a number of years and stopped it when they said people's jaws were locking.  Then one night we skidded going home.  It was raining, and in order to avoid oncoming traffic our car went up the curb.  I was holding our dog andtried to protect er.  WHen it was over I'd fractured my back on top of an old fracture.  I didn't find this out until I insisted on a MRI of my lumbar spine, Kaiser (no longer with them but where the ambulance went) missed looking at my lumbar spine.  It took 2 weeks to get an MRI that revealed what was going on in my body.  And two vertebrae popped out.  I thought they'd put themb back in place but the consensus was to leave them.  It's driven me nuts.  I've now learned that's what dowagers get!  And I've heard the word Osteoporasis, taken the drug Forteo, and realized I'd not been taking proper care of my bones.  Like Parkinson's, this wasn't something I could spontaneously heal.  It was a mess because with my back out, my spine was weakened.  I can't pick up the twins, and a really heavy bag of groceries is tough. I thought with the milk I had every day, and the walking and yoga I did, I was fine.  Apparently not.
    So aging.  The body doth age, unfortunately, and even for the baby boomers.

Life is a strange repetition!

     Life is strange.  I just heard from a friend of my childhood-Peggy, who I trick or treated with when I was 10!  I remember one year I was a cigarette box, I can't recall what Peggy was,  and we went back to her house and her mom was there smoking a cigarette.  I remember her mom in the kitchen and how we'd come in and she'd listen to us.  It's strange having these memories from so long ago.  We both went to Catholic grade school and high school together, Nerinx Hall in St. Louis, Mo.  Now we are grandmothers!
Also our first children were born at the same year, one day apart, same month.  She breast fed a lot longer than I did.
    It's funny because we moved to Glendale, Mo., when I was 9 or 10.  It is in St. Louis, Mo., the gateway to the west and home of the "arch".  There were 2 golf courses just a half block and 3 blocks from our house.  I would run down to the golf course in the summer at night time, and just walk around it.  I thought of the golf course as my own private back yard even though we didn't belong.  And I remember ice skating, and sled riding on the golf courses. 
     I think it was high school, one of the "cool" girls from grade school, Mary Queen of Peace, was named Kathy L.  One Sunday at Mass I saw her and she was pregnant.  I guess she dropped out of high school for the time being, and I'd see her at Mass with her family as her pregnancy grew.  She was about 15 or 16.  Then you didn't abort babies, you'd give them up for adoption.  But she was so young and it was so strange to see her pregnant.  Somehow I got the lesson that you could be very cool, from a cool family, and strange things can happen to you.
    Now, here in Cobble Hill, we have every kind of combination.  At dance class the other day I saw 3 triplets, girls, and their nanny informed me that the parents were two "gay" men!  That must be wild I thought, two guys and 3 girls in puberty!  Another young mother I met, has two boys, 3 and five, with her gay partner.  It seems PS 29 has every kind of combination.
   

The Nannies Compare Notes

   On Mondays and Wednesdays we have two nannies and it's interesting to watch them interact with one another.  Josephine, from St. Luci, and Samantha from Jamaica traded off today.  Josephine was going, Samantha was coming.  Jordan had tried to get Josephine to be her full time nanny, but she still wants to work for the three different families she has over the years.  It's strange...because its a lot of traveling and peacemeal days, half a day in NY, half a day in Brooklyn.  Josephine was not ready to leave her families even though for two of them the kids are grown and she's cleaning their houses.
   I could see today as Samantha and Josephine compared notes, that they were doing whatever emloyees will do when they get together-talk about their holidays, their jobs, what they're doing.  It reminded me of two ladies at a sewing circle. 
    Samantha, who is always well dressed when she arrives, said she'd had a great weekend and not gotten to bed until 6am.  She looked happy.  She also said she was going to Atlanta this weekend with her husband and children.
    Then somehow the talk meandered around to the girls.  Samantha said she thought they looked alike.  She also said that she "burps" Gigi right after 5 ounces and that way she doesn't throw up.  Josephine nodded that she did the same thing.
     I mentioned how we'd met these two twins over the weekend who lived in the neighborhood.  They were having a book and lemonade sale and we found out the boy and girl were twins.  I said they didn't look alike at all-the girl looked a couple of years older than the boy and she was a completely different body type.  
   I mentioned how Nancy, a mother of another set of twins, said that her girls traded positions-one would be fussy and the other one easy.  And then they would switch back. Apparently that is a trait.
   Josephine said she knew the twins I was referring to, that they were in school with the girl she watches.  They went to PS29, the neighborhood school all the families want.  That's why the rents have risen 25% in the last 7 months!
   Josephine said she needed to get going-picking the girls up at school, and she said her goodbyes.
    Samatha got "undressed".  When she nannies she takes her wig off, and there is her short braided hair, she wears old hospital socks, warm up pants and a top.  The other day she was so hot she was in her bra for a few minutes.  I told her you wouldn't recognize her from seeing her on the street.  We are a 3rd floor walk up in a Brownstone and we rarely get visitors.
   It's a funny world!