Two Mommies and a Shmoo

Holy shit this post is a long one. What did I say last time about long posts?!?!?

And I’m sure not too many people will actually read this. I’m probably the only one who finds our life so exciting lately.

First of all, thanks to everyone for your kind words and comments last post. Sometimes, you feel like such an ass bitching about your kid. I mean, we absolutely love Shmoo, he just knows how to make us a little crazy from time to time. But we’re working on it!

To explain yet another multiple day hiatus from blogland, I will apologize for my lack of posting, reading and commenting and attempt a recap of our last 5 days.

Let’s go back to Wednesday.

There I was minding my own business at about 4 pm, working with my head down, anxious for the firm transactional vs. litigation attorney softball game at 6 pm that night.

Then WHAM!

I got hit by a train. Or a bus. Whatever. I never saw it coming.

A senior partner who I’ve never done work for came into my office asking if I could “help out” with the real estate stuff on a super huge stock deal that had been in heated negotiations for many months.

Silly me, I said yes.

It turns out that the partner who was supposed to do the closing stuff decided to take the next 2 days off and was totally handing it off to me.

Oh yeah. One more thing…

It was supposed to close on Friday.

Long story short:

- 17 documents to draft (mostly 1 pagers)
- no oversight
- no knowledge about the huge stock deal or the parties involved
- no attorneys involved (5) had much time for questions
- difficult people on both sides of the deal
- I had a member/guest golf tournament Thursday morning and had to get to work at 3 pm in my hat and golf attire to work until I almost fell asleep
- Missed the softball game (and the beers afterwards)
- Had total terror and heart palpitations about this whole thing for days

It’s like they brought up the AAA batter for the Game 7 World Series game winning homerun. I felt like their blind faith was totally misplaced.

Then, to top it all off, just when I thought I was done, I was told I had to actually do the real estate closing with all of these characters.

A normal commercial real estate closing should take about 45 minutes. This closing took 5.5 hours.

And I think I did ok. It closed and no one died.

My paralegal buddy spent all day telling me that I was a superstar. She was either calling me a superstar or asking me why I didn’t feel like I was going to throw up (like she felt all day).

I hope that got some recognition, even if insignificant. At least 4 partners working on this deal must now think I’m not a complete moron.

Just the day before all of this happened, that senior partner who gives me advice was again reiterating to me that I need to work for other people, that the partner I report to is not very supportive and very difficult. No kidding.

I do feel a sense of accomplishment, but no other work got done for the better part of 4 days. Even today, I was post-closing stuff from 8 am to 4 pm before I could even organize myself to work on other things.

On top of that, the wife’s latter part of the week went something like this:

Wednesday: phone conversation with potential job possibility in neighboring town. Work sounds like fun, but the pay is too low. She needs a full time position, but is stressing out about 2 full time working parents and the stresses that come with it.

Thursday: meet with the owners for interview. Mention that will forego health insurance if they give her $2 more an hour.

Friday: get phone call with job offer (full time) for pay requested. Accepts job. Walks into boss’ office to (1) quit and (2) ask if she could buy the 2 remaining Stevie N.icks tickets for the next night. Boss actually gives tickets for FREE.

Not bad.

Saturday went something like this:

Pack up everything for us and the boy for an overnight. Drop off the boy at Lois’ parents’ house by 10 am. Actually leave their house by 10:35 am.

Drive to N.Y.C. to pick up the tickets in T.imes S.quare.

Totally displaced this poor fly. He’d been flying around in our car for over an hour and we finally shooed him out somewhere near W 56th Street. He was probably terribly confused because before he got in the car, he was surrounded by trees, green grass and a babbling brook. When he exited the car, he was 70 miles away in a concrete jungle.

I drive around the block and park illegally while the wife gets the tickets.
The naked cowboy walked right by my car and I didn’t have my camera. I grabbed it out of the trunk waiting for him to walk by me again after he took his coffee break. He never did, so I snapped a picture of my view from my illegal parking spot just for the hell of it.

Get moving again a little before noon. Supposed to be at a baby shower in L.ong Is.land by 1 pm. Hit a shitload of traffic. Get to baby shower by 1:10 pm. (I’m not a patient driver).

The wife’s father takes Shmoo to the “boys’ party” while the womenfolk do the baby shower thing. Get absolutely 100% tired of my mother-in-law. But get to hang out with the cool cousins.

Head back to cousin’s house to continue festivities. Lois’ parents are going to take the boy back home, so we are childless for the night!

Leave cousin’s house at 6:38 pm.

Arrive at J.ones B.each at 6:47 pm.

Find our seats 7 rows from the stage!

First, we totally and completely fell in love with the opening act. Yes, the wife and I were both head over heels for a young, straight man. I love his music and he was so adorable.

His name is Peter Cincotti and I think everyone needs to run out and buy his cd.

We jumped up after he played went to buy his CD. He was there signing autographs and he signed our ticket and our cd. We then went back to our seat babbling to each other about maybe Shmoo will get piano playing talents from his bio-dad and we’ll be at J.ones B.each someday watching women swoon over him.

The concert was awesome. Stevie looks and sounds just like she did 20 years ago. The wife was so excited and we spent most of the night trying to take pictures on her crappy cell phone.

When I figure out how to send pictures from the phone, I will hopefully post one of the blurry images so you can at least see how great our seats were.

Get back to Lois’ parents house 1 am. Shmoo is still awake. At 2 am, we’re tired of fighting a screaming child and we head home.

Sunday

On Sunday, we officially became stalkers.

Tired and groggy, we didn’t make church yet again. We were thinking about going to the Me.lissa E.theridge concert 5 minutes away from us, but we hadn’t bought tickets yet due to the weather. It’s a huge lawn park, so we knew we could get tickets even if we waiting.

And, now that the wife has so much ticket sale experience, she was certain we’d be able to get the reserved section seats for much less than the original $100.

I digress.

Lois left me and the boy home for Shmoo to nap and me to clean. She takes my car and 5 minutes later, the phone rings.

“You are never going to believe this!”

I’m thinking “if she crashed my car…..”

What, dear?

“So, I saw this tour bus pull into —- Hotel and I followed it wondering if it was Me.lissa’s and Melissa’s bass player is right in front of me. She must be here. Get Andrew and meet me down here. Maybe she’ll stop and chat for a cute baby.”

“But he’s sleeping”

“Wake him up”

(okay, Lois is not one to use our cute little baby for any of our own selfish needs. But she TOTALLY loves Melissa).

I don’t know why, but I woke up the boy, dressed him, threw him in the car and arrived at the hotel in time to pull behind Me.lissa’s tour bus pulling out.

Sigh.

But Lois said Me.lissa walked right by her.

“Did you say anything?”

“No, she was with her kids.”

Then, Lois jumped in the car with me and made me follow the tour bus. If we went up to the venue and inquired about buying tickets, maybe we could get another glimpse of Me.lissa.

It didn’t pan out. But since the rain started dissipating, we decided to go to the concert later on and buy tickets at the door.

As we were walking towards the concert area, we saw a scalper. Lois wanted to approach him, but he was also being approached by 2 security guards. Soon, he had a state trooper and a local cop surrounding him, all arguing about the state of scalping laws in CT.

We kept walking. Lois stopped us, took our money and said she’d go try to get to the scalper after the cops left.

Totally expecting this guy to be escorted off the property, with the wife in cuffs behind him, I was pleasantly surprised when Lois came back down the hill 10 minutes later with 8th row seats in hand.

They were $100 seats. She got them for $40 each. Since lawn seats with no view of the stage were $35, I think she did pretty damn good.

Inside the place, we ran into a friend who’s husband is a really bigwig with the concert park. He offered to take Lois backstage to see Me.lissa.

Of course, by this time, it was 10 minutes before the show was going to start. Lois took Shmoo and went anyway, hoping to get Shmoo’s picture with Me.lissa.

Oh yeah, and at this point, Shmoo was sleeping. We had given him Bene.dryl for his eye.
(We think he got bit or something. It’s much better today, but this is what he looked like on Sunday)

When Lois got in there, she only saw Me.lissa for a second. She didn’t even really get to see Shmoo other than his backside and said something like “awww, so cute. I miss my babies!” and went into another building.

Lois was too shy to ask for a picture and Me.lissa was busy getting ready. If she ever comes back to this venue, we are totally going to get backstage passes.

Here’s me and my sleeping boy in front of Me.lissa’s tour bus.

Me.lissa totally rocked. As always. We tried to get a picture or two, but they didn’t come out too well.

I think she was reading a sign in this one. Maybe fixing a contact? It’s not the best shot of her, but she was right on front of us.

We left the concert early to beat the traffic. We’ve seen her a million times, so we preferred to be home at a reasonable hour to prepare for Lois’ first day at her new job.

When we got home at 10 something, the boy was still awake.

Here he is on his “stage” – the bay window. He climbs up there and sometime walks around cackling and babbling. We make sure we are right there. We’re not sure how we are going to keep him off this thing yet.

And here is the boy showing how much he loves ketchup, just like his Momma L!

Hope everyone had an awesome weekend!

If I can survive this week, I’m putting the kayak on the car Thursday night and we’re taking the boy (and possibly Kaden too for a night) to my parents’ house on the beach for a few days.

Have a great week everyone!