Monthly Archives: August 2011

Giants

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Mabel woke up last night at 2.30 and wanted to go downstairs and get a doll. I knew this was a ploy, because I’m astute that way even in the small hours of the morning, and also because she’d mentioned earlier that she was scared of giants and that her dollhouse looked like one.

Monkey, sensitive soul that he is, had gone a few bouts with bad dreams and night fears by this age, so while I had been happy that Mabel so far seemed immune, I hadn’t counted my chickens. I think it’s a maturity thing, really, to start distinguishing fact from fiction and have an imagination wide enough to encompass things you didn’t even want to imagine. It’s not surprising when they spend half the day in imaginary play – and you only have to give Mabel any two items – forks, crayons, shoes – to find her turning them into a mother and baby and voicing their dialogue -  that when they go to bed it’s sometimes hard to turn it off.

I could sort of see what she meant about the dollhouse: it’s a simple wooden one with a pitched roof, and the big windows on either side look, in the half-light, like huge eyes in a big head. I moved it downstairs today. But last night I just took her to our bedroom rather than try to convince her that the giants only wanted ice-cream and would happily take directions to Target and go away again. There, she finally nursed back to sleep and took up most of B’s side of the bed. Sorry, honey.

This morning I’d sort of forgotten about the night’s shenanigans, and I sent Mabel off to play with friends while I helped get the nursery school ready for tomorrow’s meet-your-teacher sessions; because I am, as we must remember, the housekeeping chair this year. So far I’ve mostly shown up, but I’m not sure I’ve been of much practical use beyond reminding the other parents to sign in. I suppose I do know a little better than the new parents where a few things are kept, but so far mostly I’ve shown a startling lack of initiative.

Mabel headed off to the giant sandbox (aka volleyball court) happily enough in the caravan of laden strollers, strewing goldfish crackers as they went, but a mere hour later I had a call to say that she was very sad and perhaps should come back to me. As I brought her back inside I asked, “Did you have fun with your friends?”
“I don’t like my friends.” A wail of despair.
“Oh. That’s a pity, since they’re all going to be in your class next week.”

I think it was just the fatigue talking. I took her home early and she was napping by 12.45. Another hour or so on the sofa (she watched Mr Rogers, I read my book, she nursed; we were both content) and she was back to her usual happy self, excited about going to nursery school and all the snacks she might eat there.

Then again, it’s possible that she too has a few start-of-school nerves that are manifesting themselves one way or another. When Mabel was on the way, Monkey had dreams about giants too. My children, with their literal metaphors.

From the coalface

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This is what I wrote last night. Then I turned off the laptop, with its modicum of remaining battery life, blew out the candle, and was about to go to bed when the lights came back on. There was much rejoicing and also some logging into Facebook.

********************

I write to you by candlelight, such is my dedication to blogging. Candlelight and the light of my laptop, that is, which has 46% of its power left, so I’d better get on with it.

Hurricane Irene swept through last night, starting with gentle rain around midday and working up to a full-blown (heh) tropical storm by midnight. Our power went out at 6.30pm, and came back around two hours later, leaving us congratulating ourselves on our easy storm experience. I’d bowed to Facebook peer pressure and decided to put us all to bed on the family-room floor, rather than upstairs where a falling tree might come through the roof onto isolated individuals. That left me looking at Monkey, asleep directly under a large ceiling fan, and wondering what would happen if the tree crashed through the roof right here or a projectile hurtled through the window beside him instead. But there just wasn’t room for us in the basement, what with all the crap we have taking up vital floorspace down there.

Anyway, the kids thought it was a great adventure to bring down the mattresses, and they – amazingly – went to sleep quite quickly before the daylight had entirely gone. Leaving B and me to happily update our profiles and drink coffee when the power came back on.

Several hours later I was busy obsessing over the ceiling fan while lying on the spare-room mattress a few yards along and waiting for Mabel – who occupied the spot in between – to wake up. I had set my phone to receive severe-weather updates for our area from The Weather Channel because the other thing I was obsessing about was tornadoes, and I wanted to know if there was a tornado watch, even though then I’d have to decide whether it was worth waking everyone to move them downstairs to the basement where there was no room, just because conditions were favourable to a tornado, or whether I would wait for an actual tornado warning, when a funnel cloud had been already sighted, before making that upheaval. Thus taking the risk that swirling our house into the firmament would be exactly where it was first sighted.

I made sure my phone was on vibrate. Then I spent the next five hours or so checking my phone every time it vibrated to tell me that there was a flood watch, a flash flood warning, or a tropical storm going on, but never a tornado. I’m happy about that – don’t get me wrong – but I wish there had been a Tornado Only setting. Then I might have got more than four hours sleep before the kids woke at their usual time of 6am, by which time the electricity had been out for about two hours.

It’s 9.30pm and it hasn’t come back yet.

Apart from that we had no damage. There were a lot of leaves on the lawn this morning, and a tree fell sideways from two houses down into the back garden of our next-door neighbour, but apart from the power, everything’s dandy.

It was funny how, once we lost electricity, it seemed surprising that even the tiniest thing could actually be accomplished. I was a little amazed this morning to find I could, in fact, brush my teeth. It was also (sadly) perfectly possible to sweep the bathroom floor and clean the shower without electricity. But mostly, B and I both got stuck into good books to replace our usual web-surfing habits for the day. This was bad for our parenting, because it made us both even more prone than usual to wait for the other one to address the screaming/yelling/pumelling/indoor bike-riding that may have been going on, rather than just doing it ourselves.

Anyway. The problem now is that we find ourselves totally unprepared for a long-drawn-out power cut. B went to Target for batteries, it’s true, but it was only when the light was dying that it turned out we didn’t know where any of the flashlights/torches were. We’re now – right now, I mean – operating with two bike lights and a tiny ornamental lantern that I’ve had for about ten years and never used before.

This is because, I have decided, Irish people – please allow me to generalise wildly here – don’t go camping. The weather’s too bad in Ireland, and there’s a lack of wilderness to get out into because the country’s just too small for that sort of thing. So while here in the US camping is a perfectly acceptable hobby, something people can take off and do for a weekend at the drop of a tent pole, Irish people mostly limit themselves to Posh Camping in France. This is the sort of camping where you just drive there, and then wheel your suitcases into a fully equipped, already erected, family-size tent, caravan (trailer), or mobile home on a campsite near the beach and mostly populated by other Irish families and nice Dutch people with perfect English. You have a selection of on-campsite and local restaurants, a little shop that sells baguettes and sunscreen a short walk away, and lots of cheap wine to bring home and see you through the Irish winter. It’s not what you’d call hardship camping. The most difficult part will be when you have to lift up your suitcase because the weels got stuck in the grass.

I did, once, spend two nights in a tiny two-person tent in Yosemite with my best friend. I spent most of the time wide awake worrying about bears. Have you read Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods ? Where he sits up all night armed with a toenail clippers to defend himself from marauding bears on the Appalachain Trail? It was like that, except I didn’t even have the toenail clippers. But even then, we didn’t need stuff, because we were in a campsite with a pizza restaurant, and we were 20, and it was only for a weekend.

So by the time you read this I’ll presumably have power again and all this unmitigated darkness and lack of Internet connection will be but a hazy memory. I just hope I remember it for long enough to go to REI and invest in some sort of camping lantern for the next time.

This entry was posted in adventures and tagged weather on by .

Calm before storm

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I’m very bad at American weather. I’m very bad at extreme weather in general, I suppose; it just happens that America tends to be where I experience this sort of thing. Ireland is one of those nice calm places where we don’t get earthquakes, we don’t get hurricanes or tornadoes (unless the hurricane is the tail end of one that made its way all the way across the Atlantic like Hurricane Charley in 1986), we are hardly ever snowed in (except last year and the year before; I blame global warming) and where I lived, on a hill, we never flooded either. Also, we have no active or dormant volcanoes. It’s a nice place to live.

And now, here in Maryland, after the – traumatic, devastating – earthquake, we have a hurricane on the way. We don’t live close to the coast, we don’t live in a floodplain, the trees behind our house shouldn’t fall down; but our power will probably go out, because all our powerlines are above ground and the power goes out at the drop of a weatherman’s hat. The electricity company has already called us to tell us to prepare for outages.

My husband has gone to Target to stock up on a few things. I imagine he’s currently beating off the hordes of other frantic Marylanders to get to the shelves that by now are depeleted of everything but reject crayons and incoming Halloween baskets.  No, on second thoughts, I don’t believe anyone here is panicking. I’d be surprised if Target today was anything other than the cornucopia of stuff you didn’t think you needed but actually you do that it always is. He will buy batteries for our flashlights/torches, and more bread for Monkey’s ubiquitous sandwiches (I’m already stocked up on peanut butter, so that’s him sorted) and some bananas and pita chips. I have tins of beans, but unless we’re actually starving, I don’t really imagine us eating cold beans straight from the can.  Even if starving, my children probably wouldn’t.

You know the way, after any natural disaster, you see the people on the news picking through the remains of their houses or gazing sadly at their destroyed property, and your brain can’t really encompass that possibility, so you tell yourself that these people are different people, not like you – they’re foreign, or poor, or used to things like this happening… but before this thing happened that put them on the news report, really they probably were just like you, even if they were also foreign or poor or had experienced hardships before.

I’m not saying that on Sunday morning you’ll find me sadly picking up shards of my laptop on national tv, gazing into the foliage at my wedding photos scattered among the greenery, fishing out a sodden shoe whose partner is somewhere in Virginia… that’s highly unlikely, if not completely impossible.

But for all those people, I wonder if it starts out a bit like this, with the denial and the half-assed preparations. I wonder if I’ll ever get better at extreme weather, or if it takes an actual fully formed disaster to make anyone sit up and pay attention.

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Baby pictures

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Baby In Hat has a new car seat.
Baby In Bathtub has a new hat.

Baby In T-Shirt may have been naughty. Or maybe it’s just one of those fancy European standing-up baby baths .

Baby In Jeans is trying to escape. Baby Elmo is trying to stop her. Baby In Hat is frankly a little freaked out by it all. Baby With Headband is leading us all in a woo-hoo. I don’t think a nap is on the cards for any of these babies.

Life: Like a box of chocolates

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And then there was an earthquake, of all things.

Here I sat, rabbitting on about school and tears and expectations and feelings and yada yada blah and suddenly I thought “That’s funny.” It was as if someone heavy with a long stride was walking along the upstairs hallway, making the floorboards vibrate. Then there was more and I thought “Hmm. Is she awake?” Was Mabel jumping on her bed instead of napping? I headed upstairs to find out.

As I entered her room and saw her lying still asleep, my brain caught up with the facts and I realised it was probably an earthquake. An earthquake on this side of the US is about as likely as one in Ireland, but I’ve been in an earthquake before (a 4.2 while staying in a house on top of the Hayward Fault on, like, our second night in San Francisco in 1994; probably the same day we watched the live TV news showing an actor I’d never heard of called OJ Simpson being chased down the highway by a lot of police cars) – so I’m a pro, you know. I ran back downstairs with my dozy baby in my arms, frantically wondering what I was meant to do. Hide under the stairs, right? No, in a doorway. No, wait… oh, it’s over.

So that was that. I pretty much regretted waking her up because it hampered my Facebooking for the next half hour, when the Internet was buzzing with people all telling each other the same thing.

It’s not really that it puts things in perspective, because nothing terrible happened. It’s just that you really do never know what’s going to happen next. An unexpected day off school is just what Monkey needed to get him recovered from the stresses of the last two and to set him up well for the next two.  But an earthquake day just when I wanted it (they’re off today while the county inspects the school to make sure it won’t fall on their heads) was pretty much the last thing anyone could have predicted.

 I like it.

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Firmly rooted in our era

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B: Oh, well I guess it would be nice

Me: If I could touch your body

Us: I know not everybody

Mabel: I don’t like that song.

Us: Has got a body like yours.

Monkey: I don’t like that song too.

Us: But I’ve gotta think twice

Mabel: Stop singing!

Us: Before I give my heart away

Mabel: Stop, I don’t like it.

Us: And I know all the games you play

Mabel: Cut! Cut!

Us: Because I play them too. Well I need some time off

Mabel: Stop! Stop!

Us: From that emotion
I need to pick my heart up off the floor
When your love comes down without devotion
Well it takes a strong man, baby
But I’m showing you the door
Because I gotta have faith
I gotta have faith
I gotta have faith, faith, faith
I gotta have faith, faith, faith.

Mabel: Sing it again, Daddy.

History repeating

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September 2008: Monkey’s first day of nursery school
Monkey enters the room, excited, and plays with stuff until I say I have to go now. He turns limpet and clings to me. I peel him off, sobbing. (He’s sobbing. I’m only having my heart torn out.) I run away and linger in the hallway until I can peek in the window and make sure he’s stopped crying.
I pick him up two hours later. He runs to me in the playground and bursts into heaving sobs.

August 2011, today: Monkey’s first day of elementary school
Monkey enters the room, meets his new new teacher (lovely), happily finds his seat, his cubby, some crayons, and explains to another parent that the Man with the Yellow Hat is a bit wrong because Curious George is some type of ape rather than a monkey. I beam with pride. Then I try to leave, whereupon he gets upset and turns limpet. I peel him off, run for the door, and close it behind me. The woman who comes out after me says he’s under the table. I figure he’ll stay there for as long as it takes him to compose himself, because he hates people to see him crying.
I pick him up six! whole! hours! later. He runs to me outside the school door and bursts into tears. I hold him and tell him he did great, that the day is over and he did it and tomorrow will be better, and he’s just overwhelmed.
“What’s that word you said, Mummy?”
“Overwhelmed. I mean, you just have a lot of feelings going on.”

August 2024, how’s that for terrifying: Monkey starts college
I hope he’s got the crying down to a minute or so at either end. And I don’t think he’ll fit under the table any more.

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Procrastinatio… ah, I’ll finish that word later

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I wonder when my credit card statements will file themselves? They’re mostly on the shelf beside where my laptop lives, and every now and then I look at them and muse on when they’ll shuffle themselves off to the filing cabinet in the basement where they’re supposed to be. I’m sure it’ll happen sooner or later.

It’s always easier, I find, to leave the house and go and do something new, than to stay at home and do something boring and old. I think that’s why we’re such a nation of consumers – a world of consumers, really: it’s so much nicer to go into a shop and find something shiny and new and pay for it and bring it home and use it than to go rooting around in a box or a suitcase or on a shelf you can’t reach or wherever you might have put it to find that item you already own which would work just as well in this circumstance. 

And it’s definitely nicer to go out and get something new than to stay in and clean the house, or put away your credit-card statements, or make the doctor’s appointment that’s been hanging over your head for just a few months now, or any of the other things I’ve been avoiding doing.

It’s also much easier to contemplate that misty time in the future when you will have the impetus and the energy and the peace and quiet to do such things while you sit down and surf the web or read a book or blog (even), than to just take advantage of these exact five minutes of peace that you have right now to go and do it straight away. Because then it would be done and you’d have to move something else to the top of your procrastination list, and that would just be a new thing to feel vaguely stressed over, so why not just leave things as they are, when everyone’s perfectly satisfied with the status quo?

Get along, little credit-card statements. You can do it. I’m just going to sit here for another minute…

Troublemaker, part II

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So. I wrote that , and I thought, “I wonder how it will end.” Stories finish, they get wrapped up neatly, and even in real life things like this come to some sort of conclusion, and it’s funny to know you’re in the middle of one and have no inkling how long it will go on for and what the outcome will be.

I woke up this morning and wondered whether it had all been a massive overreaction and if I should just leave well enough alone and let Monkey fend for himself with his new teacher. If he’d get used to her, and she wouldn’t be so bad, and that I really shouldn’t be so judgemental. And then I remembered how we’d both felt yesterday, and I knew that phrases like “I have to advocate for my child” had to remain in my vocabulary, and that even if he gritted his teeth and bore it, I didn’t want his year to go this way. I want him to have a good year, a great year, to have fun and love school and have a lovely teacher who inspires him to learn and put all his massive amounts of curiosity and energy to good use. The teacher we met yesterday was so far from the idea you might have of a kindergarden teacher that it wasn’t even funny.

I felt insulted, really, by the school that seemed to think this was okay, that maybe it was because we didn’t know anyone in the school, or hadn’t pulled any strings or known the right code words to use to request a good teacher; because we’re immigrants, even – that they thought they could just brush my kid under the carpet with a classful of other nice, non-complaining types and a substandard teacher.

The school office was closed today so I couldn’t call them, but at about 8.30 while B was still at home to watch the kids, I snuck off and drove up the road to see how the land lay. I thought maybe I could snatch a quick word with the principal. I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to get in the doors, and I drew the line at banging on windows. That wasn’t really the impression I wanted to give.

As luck would have it, I arrived at the doors, glasses steaming up in the bizarrely misty early morning that precedes another hot day, at the same time as a sixth-grade teacher whose name I already knew. She ascertained that the principal wasn’t yet in, and gave me some helpful advice, suggesting that I follow up with an e-mail asking for an appointment to discuss things. She almost single-handedly restored my faith in the school then and there, just because she was so darned nice.

So I sent my e-mail, included two phone numbers, and took the kids out for the morning. I asked Monkey how he was feeling about school, and when he said he was feeling a bit better about it and thought he’d be able to give his teacher a chance, I was so proud. He’s far less judgemental than I am. But this wasn’t about how he feels: it’s about what sort of teacher I think he needs. If I had merely been afraid he’d be upset for three weeks because he was shy of the teacher, I woudn’t have started this campaign. My tactic was to be a thorn in the side of the principal for as long as it took to have my voice heard and my opinions taken seriously. An ever-polite and diplomatic thorn, of course.

By the time we got home Mabel had missed her nap, and I decided it was too late to do anything but forge ahead with the afternoon, being extra conciliatory to her whims to make it through the rest of the day and get to the hallowed early bedtime that should, by rights, await. If that meant letting her watch the dreaded Baby Songs DVD, well, so be it. The phone rang, and I hoped it might be the principal.

Better than that: it was a friend calling to let me know, via the grapevine, that the teacher in question has been let go. On Monday morning Monkey’s class will have a “very capable” substitute, and a new teacher will be hired. I knew at least one other parent had complained, but it seems we weren’t alone. What it seems may have happened is that the county took the opportunity while our school was without a principal for most of the summer (the present incumbent has just taken up the job, which was part of my difficulty because nobody could really tell me how best to approach her) – the county took their chance to perhaps offload a few teachers who were hard to place, let’s say, on our poor undefended school. It’s even possible that the principal hadn’t actually met the teacher before yesterday – the latter arrived late to orientation.

Whatever the reason, I’m impressed and delighted by the school’s swift and decisive action. I don’t even have to feel guilty about the other children who would inevitably have been left behind or even switched into the class if we had managed to move Monkey out. (B feels sorry for the teacher, but he’s a soft touch. I don’t deserve him.)

Once I had called the school to confirm the news, I told Monkey. He was quietly happy, but I think he was even more happy to hear that I had been trying to switch him out of the class because I didn’t think the teacher was right for him. I do want him to know I’ll always advocate for him (yes, I said it), but at the same time he has to understand that parents can’t always just swoop down and fix things when life gets a bit tough. Sometimes you do have to just deal with it.

Just not yet, not like that, not being stuck with a bad teacher for the whole year. That’s something I had to try to fix.

So there you have it. The story wrapped up in one day, and a happy ending to boot.

Boom, baby

Troublemaker

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I wasn’t worried about entering the public school system, once the shock of being the mother of a five-year-old wore off, back in April. We live in a pretty good school district – not one of those scary high-acheiving ones, but one that’s okay, fine, definitely among the top for the county we live in (not the richest, let’s just say). I was confident that the school was nice and Monkey would settle in pretty well to his new class. It’s only elementary school, for goodness sake.

I’m not one of those parents who makes a fuss. I don’t expect special treatment. While Monkey is a wonderful, smart, amazing child, I’m under no illusions that he’s anything other than pretty much standard in the classroom, at least in the ways they notice at this age.

But now I am one of those parents, because we met his new teacher, and I was not impressed. I had assumed kindergarden teachers were more or less the same all over: mostly nice middle-aged ladies; if you were lucky, an enthusiastic young teacher fresh from college. His school has four kindergarten classrooms: three with perfectly normal teachers, and one, the one they hadn’t been able to budget for – even though this happens every year – with a teacher who looks like they rolled her out of the ark and dusted her down. Frankly, she’s scary. Monkey thinks so, and I had a hard time mustering the courage to look as if I didn’t.

We were not late enrollees. Monkey has been registered for school since May. (I know this sounds late to my Irish readers, who had to put their children’s names down for school while still in embryonic form, but here you can’t enroll them till the spring before.) None of his nursery-school friends are in this class, even though they’re allegedly divided up according to ability, and he’s neither streets beyond nor behind the others who were in his class. It just looks like we drew the short straw and got chucked in with the rejects, and Miss Havisham.

And I’m sorry: I know someone has to be in her class, and maybe for some it would be preferable to having 30 in a class, but frankly I’d prefer Monkey to be with a young, vigorous, exciting teacher in a huge class than with the teacher we’ve been assigned. So would Monkey, who was doing just fine until she appeared, and then regressed to mute-limpet-hiding-behind-my-legs state, and now claims he’s not going to kindergarten on Monday.

I hate confrontation, and I couldn’t do anything straight away, though in hindsight perhaps I should have, but I had both Monkey and Mabel (who had woken up with a streaming cold; oh joy) hanging out of me and whining about hunger and despite the vitally helpful presence of B, I was pretty much stuck with leaving straight away. Also, I didn’t want Monkey to know that I was trying to request a change, in case it didn’t pan out.

We came home, I dithered and stressed for an hour and a half, and got some good advice from friends online, and finally put Mabel down for her nap. Then I bribed Monkey with ice cream to let me make a phone call in peace outside on the deck. After three calls, all of Mabel’s nap, and no luck speaking to the principal, I was told to write her a letter. Well, I thought: probably not going to change things before Monday; on the other hand, I’m good at writing things.

So I wrote a letter with still-shaking fingers, used spellcheck to discover I’ve been spelling kindergarten wrong all this time, and delivered it in person to the school office. I don’t know what will happen now, but apparently school isn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be. Just in case, we’ll be talking a lot this weekend about appearances being deceptive and giving things a second chance.