NOLA Spring

The magnolias are in bloom, already.  Early each morning I am woken by a cacophony of birds twittering.  The windows in this temporary apartment have no insulation – even when tightly closed and locked, most still have gaps the width of a pinky finger between frame and sill – and so those birds might as well be perched at the foot of my bed, so clear and intrusive is their chirping.  We also live near some extensive road construction that shakes the house all day like an earthquake.  The rumble and crunch and beep and jackhammer compete with the mellifluous sounds of my bar study lectures, as I hunker down in my shimmying drafty old house and try not to hate the Louisiana Committee on Bar Admissions for what it’s doing to me.  (In this day and age, we seriously need to have a uniform bar exam.  No person should have to do this more than once, let alone three damn times.)

I’ve enjoyed this time “off” for studying.  I gained 35 pounds in my first 3.5 years of law practice – that’s 10 pounds per year, due in part to Death of Thyroid and in part to sitting in front of a computer or in the car for upwards of 14 hours a day.  Plus with the Professor gone so much, I just could not exercise outside the workday with the three kids in my hair and no home gym equipment of any type. Since coming here, however, I have walked at least a mile most lunchtimes while at work (I work in a building on the edge of the French Quarter, so it’s pretty easy to convince myself to step outside and walk through that fetching little grid of streets).  I also got an under-desk set of pedals, and I really do pedal on them most of the day – it helps with concentration and keeps the blood moving, even though it’s not fast enough to constitute any kind of cardio (I am wearing a suit, people, no major sweating allowed).  I’ve also used the past few weeks to kickstart a HALT on the weight gain and a hopeful return to fitness, if not to my former weight (Death of Thyroid seriously makes weight loss darn near impossible, but weight GAIN does not have to be inevitable).  My firm gave me three weeks off to study and take the bar, and in those three weeks I have also run several miles every single day.  I also found that I absorb more of the info from my lectures if I am moving, and so I would walk or jog literally 3-4 hours every day – sometimes more – listening to lectures on my headphones.  In addition to bar study/exercise time, it also doubled as an opportunity to explore New Orleans neighborhoods and look for houses for sale or rent.  After all this walking I now have a really good grasp on the nearby streets, and it is no joke that on one block you can have a house for sale for $425,000 and two blocks away, see the exact same type house for $750,000.  It’s so important, in this market, to have a good sense of each block and its safety/resale potential.  I now have that, along with a pretty sizeable memory palace full of the Louisiana matrimonial regime of acquets and gains and an understanding of solidary liability in the context of suretyship (this is all just as boring as it sounds).  And while I have lost a few pounds – it’s hard to pinpoint how much, but some – I am also stronger, fitter, my knees and back hurt less, and I feel great.  I wish I had the time and money to take a class – that’s next on the list, after we find a house.

Day one and Day two of the bar are both over (Monday and Wednesday), and I’m brushing up on the Day three topics before Friday’s final tests.  I’ve spent the least time on these three because they are repeat for me, and also worth the least in the grading.  Even so I’ve got to get cracking, and have only a moment to share some of the goings on with you, in a sort of inchoate form.  Forgive – I needed this little mental break, but I have to be disciplined and keep it a “little” break!

The bar exam essentially dashed any hope of a special Valentine’s Day, as I spent the entire day holed up and practicing mnemonic devices like a crazy person, and so we have plans for a delayed V-Day/End-of-Bar-Exam celebratory dinner this coming weekend.  I am also getting a celebratory haircut – Treat Yo Self.  (I treated myself to a pretty amazeballs trip to Santa Fe with my husband after I took my first bar exam . . . my standards are slipping.)  Nevertheless, to get in the Valentine’s Day spirit I used some washable crayon to draw hearts all over the windows for the boys, and the Professor bought a heart shaped cake for us all to share after a dinner I made of Cajun chicken thighs, mashed potatoes, and steamed carrots – which was actually a pretty darn good dinner, and the night before a bar exam, too!  (Cooking was a nice break from counting the elements of different crimes on my fingers and trying to remember if the jurisdictional threshold for federal diversity jurisdiction is $75,000 or $75,000.01 – not that any case ever in the history of America has ever turned on the value of one cent, how ridiculous is this test??)

Though I’m so pleased that our dear friend rented us this apartment month-to-month for a steep discount (even at $500 off a month the usual rate, it’s still considerably more than the mortgage payment on our old house, SIGH), I am ready to be OUT OF IT.  The lack of insulation (and rain inside the windows – and boy can it rain in New Orleans) is not even the half of it – it’s also got too few rooms.  At 1800 sf I could probably live with the size, but it’s divided up into one tiny bathroom, two mid-sized bedrooms, a laundry room that’s way too big for a laundry room but too small to also serve as a bedroom, a very long and narrow kitchen, and a gigantic side hallway full of valuable and totally unusable space.  The layout made more sense when it used to have a staircase to the floor below, but since it was converted to a multi-family home it’s just a funky design.  And it drives me nuts to have no pictures on the walls, to walk past a stack of flattened cardboard boxes and packing paper in our dining room (which we’re keeping since we’ll be moving again soon), and to have half my stuff in storage.  We don’t have our piano, or the boys’ spring clothes, or our stack of new checkbooks, or our bikes or double stroller.  We do, on the other hand, have all our Christmas decorations, because even though I painstakingly went through the house marking long-term vs. short-term storage, I couldn’t be home during the moving and packing to supervise and thus most of my  marks were ignored by the movers.  I’m a nester, and it drives me nuts not to be able to settle into a new nest.  But that irritation aside, it’s been so great to get back here.  It really is a much better life we have, already.

Craig talks so much now.  He’s a hoot.  (What follows is a somewhat boring description of my two year old, so feel free to skip right to the end!) Much of his talking involves demanding his fair shake of his big brothers, with occasional tattling.  I should not encourage tattling but it is darnedest cute when he marches his tiny self over to me and says “Jack have MY Dino Trucks MY TURN.”  “My turn” is a big phrase these days.  He will also come up to you, roll on his back like a pill bug, stick his short little legs up in the air and ask, hopefully, “Piggies?”  He loves you to do This Little Piggy Went to Market, and once you do his piggies a couple times he will hop up and say “Mama piggies?” and then do yours.  Very little makes sense, but you can catch a word or two: “Piggy <nonsense nonsense> market, <nonsense nonsense> weee weee weee home!”

He’s pretty good at communicating – the other day at dinner he was passing out food, and saying “Here you go Dada bread, here you go Jack bread, here you go Weem bread . . ”  If he’s trying to tell you something and it’s not quite clear, you guess and guess and finally land on the word he’s trying to say and he’ll go “OKAY!”  in a really deep voice – his way of telling you that you figured it out!  We’re also entering the era of “I do it myself,” and so often when I’m in a rush I’ll pick him up and he wriggles out of my grasp and says “I wanna walk!”  He wants to walk himself, he wants to carry his backpack himself, he wants to climb into the car himself, he wants to buckle his carseat (which he cannot do yet, and Lord give me patience there is only so long I can stand there and watch him painstakingly try to get the buckle in the slot, but it takes all of my bodily strength to buckle him in against his will).  If he’s hungry he will drag a dining room chair all the way to the kitchen pantry, collect whatever snack he’s interested in, go get a bowl, and then bring both to you to pour him a serving.  If he’s thirsty he will open the fridge and fetch the giant bottle of juice or milk and bring it to you, plus a bottle or cup.  He loves to brush his teeth, and will say “I want soap,” which means he would like you to put toothpaste on his brush, please.  He also asks for “soap” in the bath, which means he wants bubbles.  He hates to get out of the bath, so I made up a game to distract him. I ask how his clean foot smells and then, with a side-eyed smile, he lifts his foot toward my nose and I noisily “smell” it.  Repeat for all the body parts – “Hand! Other hand!  Arm!  This Arm! Neck!”  He loves playing the Peekaboo apps on our phone (Peekaboo Barn, Peekaboo Wild, Peekaboo Fridge), and will bring me my phone and say “peekaboo?  peekaboo?” till I set it up for him.  He also loves my baby niece, and whenever I get pictures or videos texted from my sister, he’ll sit and watch and say Baby Cute!  Baby Cute!

Basically he’s a delight right now, our jolly little porker, just in the mix with the big boys most of the time.  At two years and two weeks, he’s less and less my baby and more and more just one of the brothers.  And truthfully, that’s fine – I wipe a nostalgic tear now and then for their babyhood and the knowledge that the baby era is drawing to a close, but for the most part I’m happy to see the back of it.  It’s much sweeter in the remembering than it was in the living – all the good stuff sticks, and all the toil and sleep-deprivation and trapped feelings fade away.  Meanwhile, Jack could practically run the house now, he’s such a big help.  Craig is just about to toilet training age, meaning soon we could say good-bye to diapers forever.  Liam is also very capable of picking out his own clothes and making his own lunch (if somewhat less willing most of the time).  They’re so much less work, making them so much more fun now.

So, wish me luck on my last day of the bar.  Wish us luck in finding a house in this expensive town – it ain’t no Manhattan just yet, but in a place where a 2000 sf 3BR/2BA in a non-murdery neighborhood runs about $725,000, we are struggling to find something workable for our budget that will be big enough and safe enough that we could live with it.  (Needless to say, that is well beyond our budget, people!)  I hope to check back in soon – I don’t think I did a New Years Resolution post, and I’d like to even though it’s late!  Happy spring (or continued terrible winter, for you hardy Northerners still schlepping through snow to work, bless your dear chapped selves).