{"id":336,"date":"2008-03-19T20:24:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-19T20:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/2008\/03\/system-failure.html"},"modified":"2008-03-19T20:24:00","modified_gmt":"2008-03-19T20:24:00","slug":"system-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/2008\/03\/system-failure.html","title":{"rendered":"System Failure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hey, you! What are you doing here? Are you just trying to distract me. People, I have THINGS to do! <\/p>\n<p>Okay, deep breath. Those of you who know me, know I&#8217;m a fairly organized person. I have binders. They&#8217;re labeled. They&#8217;re color coded. They&#8217;re pretty. Adam just went to the accountant to do our taxes. The accountant said we are the most organized folk he&#8217;s ever seen. I have systems and techniques and methods for staying on top of things. I have charts. Being type-A makes me happy. Nothing is more satisfying to me than purging the crap from my life. Did you know that I&#8217;ve not only made four batches of hamantaschen at home, but I, somewhat successfully, managed to eke out a few dozen batches with a class of nine toddlers and then a class of twelve preschoolers. And I make freakin&#8217; good hamantaschen. (My recipe comes from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0812929772\/jennyspage-20\"><i>The New Jewish Holiday Cookbook<\/i><\/a>, which is amazing!) Is it because I&#8217;m a good cook? Nah. I&#8217;m really not. It&#8217;s because I&#8217;m <i>organized<\/i>!<\/p>\n<p>So how is it that it&#8217;s now 8:29 p.m. and at 4:30 tomorrow my son is to be dressed as <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ahasuerus\">King Ahasuerus<\/a> and I have nary a king&#8217;s robe nor scepter in sight. Yes, that&#8217;s right. I&#8217;ve got nothing! <i>Nada<\/i>. Or, to be somewhat holiday appropriate, <i>Klum<\/i>. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Purim\">Purim<\/a>, the most joyous of Jewish holidays, is gonna be a tear-fest for one of us.<\/p>\n<p>How did this come about? I&#8217;d like to blame the Y chromosome. Because the X chromosomed of this family are all set for tomorrow.<\/p>\n<p>If you recall, Doodles was an astronaut for Halloween. A lovely idea but a less than lovely costume. I ordered it online, and the helmet was this rolled up piece of plastic that supposedly attached by Velcro to an inflatable backpack. Except the Velcro never stuck and I was worried he was going to suffocate behind all that plastic. It&#8217;s not a practical costume, certainly not if part of your Purim festivities include a &#8220;festive meal,&#8221; which ours certainly does.<\/p>\n<p>Exactly a week ago, on the way to feeding group, we passed by a party store that advertised &#8220;Purim Costumes.&#8221; We stopped off. <br \/>Me: What do you want to be?<br \/>Doodles: I don&#8217;t know.<br \/>He flips through the racks.<br \/>Doodles: Oooh! I want to be <i>this<\/i>!<br \/>He found a Power Rangers costume. I&#8217;m not crazy about Power Rangers, but I look nonetheless.<br \/>Me: It&#8217;s a size eight to ten.<br \/>Doodles: Will that fit?<br \/>Me: No. You&#8217;re a size 4T. Sort of. [Note: Doodles is still small. Very, very small. Truth be told, there are probably some 2T costumes he could comfortably fit in.]<br \/>Doodles: How about this knight?<br \/>Me: Nope. I&#8217;m not sending you to school with a sword. Hey [pointing to a 2T to 4T sized king&#8217;s outfit]. How about King Ahasuerus?<br \/>Doodles: No. I think I want to be Superman.<br \/>Me: King Ahasuerus is a pretty cool costume.<br \/>Doodles: No, Superman. Maybe Spiderman. <br \/>Me: [Sigh] Okay, well they don&#8217;t have any of those in your size. We&#8217;ll have to check another store. <\/p>\n<p>We leave the store.<\/p>\n<p>Over the weekend, we&#8217;re pretty busy. In my oh-so-organized way, I take my son to a Shabbat service, co-chair a tot Purim program, take my son to a birthday party, and color Easter eggs with friends. I mention to my son that we need to go to the party store to look for his costume.<\/p>\n<p>Me: Superman, right?<br \/>Doodles: No! I&#8217;m going to be King Ahasuerus. Remember?<br \/>Me: WHAT?! I thought you wanted to be Superman!?!<br \/>Doodles, sighing heavily: No, mom! I want to be King Ahasuerus!<\/p>\n<p>On Monday, I tell Adam, &#8220;Listen, I need you to go by that party store [it&#8217;s absolutely, completely, totally, can&#8217;t miss it, on the way home from work for him] and get Doodles his costume.&#8221; Adam, of course, replies, &#8220;Yeah, sure.&#8221; Adam, of course, neglects to stop by the party store.<\/p>\n<p>I contemplate making the outfit, but invariably, I&#8217;d end up spending about five times more on materials for a less-than-satisfying costume than if I had just bought the damn thing.<\/p>\n<p>So today, on our way back to feeding group, we stop at the party store. Where they have one king costume left. Size 12 to 14.<\/p>\n<p>Me: Doodles, they don&#8217;t have your king costume.<br \/>Doodles: Okay. We&#8217;ll get it somewhere else. Hey, Pie!<br \/>Pie: Yeah?<br \/>Doodles: Pie, why don&#8217;t you go as Queen Esther.<br \/>Me: Doodles, hush up! Pie has already decided to go as Pooh [a costume that our neighbors gave us a long time ago as dress up and is sitting in our basement just waiting for Purim.]<br \/>Doodles: No, Pie wants to be Queen Esther. Look at the pretty Queen Esther costumes!<br \/>Me: Doodles!<br \/>Doodles: Pie, don&#8217;t you want to be Queen Esther?<br \/>Pie: I&#8217;m going to be Pooh.<br \/>Doodles: But look how pretty Queen Esther is.<br \/>Pie: Yeah. Pie going to be Queen Esther.<br \/>Doodles: See!!! She <i>wants<\/i> to be Queen Esther.<\/p>\n<p>I dragged them out of that store as fast as I could. I told Adam we needed a king costume and he had to stop by a different party store. &#8220;Oh yeah. Didn&#8217;t you tell me to do that earlier in the week?&#8221; ARG!! &#8220;I can swing by on the way home.&#8221; When I tell him the store in his neighborhood is all sold out, he has the nerve&#8211;the freakin&#8217; nerve!!&#8211;to say to me, &#8220;Well, what did you expect? It&#8217;s across the street from a synagogue.&#8221; Little does he know that the wine I served him tonight is poisoned.<\/p>\n<p>So, anyway, here we are, now 8:50 p.m., and I have nothing. <i>Nada. Klum.<\/i> Did I mention that before? I wonder if I can convince Doodles that there&#8217;s a ghost in the Book of Esther. A plain ghost. Made out of a sheet. A green sheet. Because, you know, we don&#8217;t have any white sheets.<\/p>\n<p>Purim freakin&#8217; Sameach, people. Happy freakin&#8217; Purim. Good thing I&#8217;m <i>supposed<\/i> to get drunk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hey, you! What are you doing here? Are you just trying to distract me. People, I have THINGS to do! Okay, deep breath. Those of you who know me, know I&#8217;m a fairly organized person. I have binders. They&#8217;re labeled. They&#8217;re color coded. They&#8217;re pretty. Adam just went to the accountant to do our taxes. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14,3,10,9],"class_list":["post-336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-adam","tag-doodles","tag-holiday","tag-jewish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}