Monthly Archives: May 2013

Alexander is his middle name, after all

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Poor Dash had a bad day.

There was a substitute teacher at school, so he didn’t get to advance to a three-star math general, as he had been hoping he would. (The sub still knew about the spelling test they were due, though.) They didn’t get to do their usual Fun Friday activities, and recess was cancelled becuase it was 99 degrees outside. (Really? I mean, it’s 92 right now but I’d be surprised if it had been all the way up to 99 today.)

He also fell off his chair and hit another one with his cheek on the way down, which I’m sure was entirely not his fault and nothing to do with leaning back in a way not officially sanctioned by either his regular teacher or the sub, I bet.

Now I tell him that it’s the nursery school picnic tonight but instead of my usual lemon scones (which he loves) I cruelly made rhubarb snacking cake , even though I know he won’t eat any of that. (The fact that there will be plenty of cookies and/or cake that he will like is not holding much sway here.)

But the worst thing, from my point of view at least, was that at around 2pm I was getting Mabel a piece of toast, and thinking as I opened the new loaf bag that I hadn’t seen a slice of bread yet today. Which meant maybe I hadn’t made Dash’s lunch. A quick consultation with his father revealed that neither did he. Usually one or other of us does, or it’s realised and thrown together at the last moment before they walk out the door. Today the shock of Dash being ready to leave the house in good time apparently discombobulated us both so much that we forgot to think of lunch.

“Are you going to move to Australia?” I asked him, after apologizing for the oversight and hearing about all the other that happened today.

“No. They say it happens there too.”
_________

This crazy kid can’t hold a grump for long. He just discovered that his top tooth is a tiny bit wobbly. He also has a lower tooth that’s a tiny bit wobbly.

“I bet I’m the first person ever to have two teeth wobbly! This is the BEST DAY EVER!”

Happy seven-year old boy
I tried to get a grumpy picture, but it didn’t work

Why on earth did I not try this before?

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Scene: Yesterday, getting into the car to go to school. I open the passenger door to put something on the seat. Mabel takes her chance to jump in the “wrong” way.

Me: Don’t… oh, okay, fine, just don’t squash my stuff in the bag there.

Mabel notices the bag and purposely smushes a fist down on top of the carefully ironed and folded clothes I’m bringing to the consignment store.

Me: Sigh.

Mabel switches direction and heads for the driver’s seat instead of her own.

Me: [lightbulb moment] Mabel, don’t sit in your seat.

Mabel looks at me, confused.

Me, more clearly: Mabel, whatever you do, you’re not allowed to sit in your carseat. Don’t come over here.

Mabel gives me a tiny grin and clambers very purposefully towards her seat. She sits down beautifully.

Me, doing up her straps: Don’t sit here. You’d better not sit here.

…

We get to school and Mabel shows signs of reluctance.

Me, wondering if it can possibly keep working: You’re not to go to school today. You’ll be in big trouble if you go into that classroom.

She gets out of the car, eager to break a rule, and heads for the building, and down the corridor, having the time of her life as I call after her.

Me: Don’t go inside. You’d better not go through that door…

And so on. Her courage failed her when it was time for me to leave, and I did have to read a story and then have her teacher peel her off me and distract her with snacktime plans (muffins!), but it worked amazingly well. 

Just something to keep in my arsenal and pull out only ocassionally, I think, in the hopes that it might save us all a meltdown some other day.

———————–

(I can’t find a video clip, but here’s the audio for exactly what this calls to mind, just to save anyone from having to go and look for it.)

Summer: QED

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Reasons to hate the pool:

  • My swimsuit
  • My swimsuit with me in it
  • My thighs
  • The sun
  • Sunscreen
  • Splashes on my glasses
  • Cold water
  • Wet towels
  • Bad hair

Reasons to love the pool:

  • Happy children
  • Hungry children
  • Tired children

The pool wins.

Out like a lion

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We have our second first-grade project . I use the word “we” advisedly, since five minutes ago his father was busy with protractor and ruler, lamenting our lack of compass, happily working out distances and angles to form a small pyramid out of cereal-box cardboard (I did suggest that one could probably just find a template on the internet, but he was clearly having fun) while the first-grader was upstairs helping his little sister throw raisins around her room.

“She wanted to sleep on beans,” Dash said by way of explanation.

He has to make an animal out of 3-D shapes, the better to exhibit his understanding of angles, vertices, and sides, and also his knowledge of our natural world. He was quite gung-ho when he came home with the instructions, and has been busily stockpiling items from the recycling ever since, but showed some reluctance to actually get down to working out which shapes would go together, and how, to form whatever animal he wanted to make, which he said was a lion.

“I’m waiting for another toilet roll,” he said every time I asked him how the lion was going to manifest.

When we finally had five empty toilet rolls – one for a very fat tail as well as four legs – he did a slapdash job of sticking things together with a lot of tape. His sister took the tape and started an animal hospital, putting plaster casts on the legs of all her teddies. We haven’t much tape left any more.

Then I noted that he needs to use at least three different shapes and his lion was made of one cylindrical ice-cream tub, two cylindrical bottle caps (eyes) and five cylindrical toilet rolls. He added a square tissue-box head. Thus it stayed for two days, until I wondered out loud a few dozen times how it was ever going to look more like a lion and what the third 3-D shape would be.

Boy writing
Writing the accompanying text

The paint came out today. I hate painting with the children more than I hate baking with them. This is why I send them to school, so they can make this mess on someone else’s time (and table, and floor). We did it outside on the deck and it still made an unholy mess and left me twitching in the corner. He disassembled the lion (so much for all that tape) and tried to paint it, but the writing on the boxes showed through, so instead we painted some sheets of paper yellow to cover the boxes with.

We were still one shape short, though, which is when I came up with the pyramid idea and his father put it into action. I’m not sure if it’s going to be a nose or a tail-end; maybe the student himself will have some input at this point.

But I feel I’m falling short of my lofty plans to have no input at all in Dash’s school projects. If we’re getting this involved at this point, what will be expected of us by the time he’s doing science-fair baking-soda volcanoes, or decoding genomes, or whatever the kids are expected to accomplish these days? It’s the sort of thing that makes me wish we could all just unschool, let the kids follow their interests, let them earn a crust doing something that makes them happy, make them self-motivated and entrepreneurial. I don’t know exactly how you grow an entrepreneur, but I’m pretty sure it’s not by bugging them to paint sheets of paper yellow and making pyramids for them.

So now I’m just going to sit here in the other room until I stop twitching, while his father helps him put the lion together.

Finished 3-D shapes sculpture
Note the mismatched-on-purpose eyes. I think it’s the Lalaloopsy influence.

Agnes, elsewhere

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I wrote a teeny piece of flash fiction, once upon a time, and then I sent it to the lovely Carmel Harrington, who just happens to be running a competition for such things right now.

Agnes


My basket held a packet of pasta shells and a jar of pesto along with the bottle of red, only because it’s polite to keep up the appearance of dinner when you invite a friend over to gossip for the evening. I was about to make an offhand comment to the woman in front of me, but somehow the words changed in my mouth.

‘Holy f*ck, it’s Agnes the Bearded Lady!’

Go here to read the rest , and if you like it, I’ll remind you to vote after June 1st.

End of an Ergo

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I’m giving you a little break so you can catch up on all my past posts, and all the other things going on around the Internet, whatever they may be. At least, apparently that’s what I’m doing. But in the meantime, a few bullets to get me out of this bloggy doldrum:

  • I dusted off and gussied up my resume (which mostly meant changing all the fonts so they looked less 2004 and more 2013 to my non-graphic-designer eye; maybe it just made the whole thing look different to me and therefore as if it must have new information even though it doesn’t, much) and sent it to someone who expressed an interest. So that was nice. I will now proceed to freak out about all the free time I don’t have even though nothing has happened yet.
  • We had visitors, which was lovely and gave my deeply ingrained Internet addiction a little break. I’m also re-reading the His Dark Materials trilogy, which is exciting enough to get me away from the computer from time to time.
  • I have given away, sorted out, and designated for donation the last of the baby clothes. Even more finally, I am selling the Ergo. (And the Moby, if anyone wants it.) I put them on a local mailing list yesterday afternoon and by 6pm I had three offers for the Ergo. I think it will be taken today. I used it daily for, I’d say, four years in total, and apart from some fading it’s in perfect condition, not a stitch out of place. Those things are built to last, and if you’re looking for a baby carrier I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Baby-wearing on a bus with an Ergo and a toddler
Oh, Ergo. The fun times we had.
  • By which I mean that the baby train has left and I am not on it and I’m finally fine with that. (Disclaimer here so that writing this sentence does not immediately cause me to accidentally conceive. We do not intend to procreate any further, that’s all.)
  • Bedtime has taken a turn for the worse. It’s not fun. I do not like chasing Mabel around the street in her nightgown after stories because she’s not tired (except she is, so much) and as a result her second-favourite Barbie is now reposing in the recycling bin. I suppose I’ll take it out, but it’s the first time I’ve actually been forced to take such a drastic step. Or lost my temper enough to go through with it, I suppose.
  • I hope it’s a phase, because the rest of my life isn’t looking much like a good time if it’s not.

Pedicure

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One wholly superficial thing that tends to make an otherwise nice-looking man less attractive to me is long fingernails. Long dirty fingernails are, of course, worse. I had a huge crush on a guy in college until I noticed his nails, and that – happily for me because I was more insignificant than a gnat in his eyes and he was probably a total asshole anyway – put the kybosh on the crush. I was once again able to attend my Greek and Roman Civilization tutorial without blushing furiously and fumbling my pen the entire time.

So when I met B the B, I was happy to see that his fingernails were perfectly groomed. Not long at all. Maybe a tiny bit on the short side, to be honest, but whatever, there is no too short. Unless you’re talking about my History teacher in high school who used to bite his so low that they were painful to look at. (No crush there either. Not a hint of one. Good teacher, though.)

So anyway, B and I had probably been married quite a while before I realised that he never clipped or cut or filed his fingernails. “What do you do?” I asked, mystified. “I bite them off,” he replied. They don’t look bitten. They just look neat. I never see him biting them. I decided that I could live with this, and decided to pretend we’d never had that conversation.

Trouble is, apparently it’s genetic. Dash lets me cut his nails very nicely now that he’s, you know, seven; though for the first few years of his life I carried the nail clippers with me and would give him a manicure whenever he dropped off in the carseat. Mabel, on the other hand, is a whole other kettle of keratin.

When she was a baby, I suppose I managed to cut her nails as required every now and then, but since the age of about two she’s been biting them, just like her father does. They’re too short, but they don’t look gnawed, exactly. I tell her she’ll pull off too much and hurt herself, but it hasn’t happened yet.

She also bites her toenails.

I suppose some day in the distant future she’ll want to wear nail polish enough to stop herself biting, or else her joints will seize up in old age and she won’t be able to get her toes to her teeth any more. In the meantime, this is just one fight I’m not really fighting.

She’ll probably blame me when her boyfriend dumps her for doing it, though.

The momentous and the mundane

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Oh, dinner, how you tease me with your needing to be made, every single damn night, unless I was organized and made lots the night before, which works well with winter dinners like chilli and lasagne but somehow rarely manages to cut it in the summer, when I have all these leaves and tomatoes and things.

I don’t know what we’re eating, don’t bug me. There’s hours yet to dinner time. Well, one hour, maybe. Dash has a baseball game to which his father will take him, and Mabel and I are on track for an early bedtime, seeing as how yesterday was one of those thankfully-not-common nights when I held her for several hours because she has a phlegmy cough (sorry, were you eating?) and was borderline feverish and I felt she needed to be propped up in bed but couldn’t engineer that unless she was actually on me. Which is not so conducive to me sleeping either. It was like old times with a snurfly newborn. Except she didn’t nurse. Which really is quite lovely and amazing, because it would have been a lot more tedious this time last year (or even a few months ago) when she’d have been latched on all night as well.

And you know, the funny thing is that she seems (seems, I say, not counting any chickens) to be dropping the morning nurse as well, the only one we have left, the one she was so adamant to keep. A few non-standard mornings have distracted her from remembering at the point when she normally would, and it’s possible – just possible – that we will have weaned at four-and-a-half after all. Which is nicely matching her brother’s age of weaning, and let me emphasize this may mean that I will soon be no longer lactating for the first time in seven years . Seven straight years. That’s a long time. For all I know, my boobs might schlurrpp themselves into tiny fried eggs when they figure out what’s going on. Or, more probably into the sort of things I could helpfully roll up before stuffing into a bra. Sigh.

This is not what I was going to say, but is it ever? Stream of consciousness, baby.

Oh, I know.

There are only thirteen and a half days left of school before summer. Hold me.

Four-year-old girl in stripey leggings
Gratuitous photo of Mabel, hiding around the corner the more safely to watch a scary part of The Princess Bride.

Exposition

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So what happens nowadays (by which I mean this week, probably; my memory is short and constantly renewing itself) is that every few mornings I put on my sexxay workout gear and I flit around the house doing the normal before-school morning things like eating cereal and making Dash’s lunch and nagging people to get dressed and checking my Facebook in case something important happened on the Internet overnight. The children are slightly confused: “What are those jeans?” Dash asked me this morning.

And then I bring Mabel to school and then sometimes I actually do something like exercise and other times I have what my cousins taught me is called a French workout, when you dress for the gym but don’t go. And they should know, because they live in California where you have to at least pretend to go to the gym.

The something like exercise I’m tending towards at the moment is a 20-minute “extreme burn” pilates workout DVD. It doesn’t sound like much, especially when you realise that extreme burn is an extreme exaggeration (except for my abs, which, ouch), but it’s more than nothing and I think that’s the point.

I’ve also been known to take a bike ride or even just a brisk evening walk lately, since my Stupid Toe won’t let me run any more. (It’s much better. I don’t even notice it, unless I try to run half a mile or so, and then I start limping, which is unpleasant and makes me grumpy and despondent.) I loved the yoga class I went to a few times in the new year, but it takes too much of a chunk out of my brief, brief window of morning. By the time I’d got home and showered it was time to go straight back down and pick up Mabel, because she’s all done with formal education at 11.30 every morning. And formal education has about had it with her by then too.

The prospect of going to BlogHer bang smack in the middle of the summer is actually more of a motivator than the idea of the local swimming pool opening up at the end of this month. My swimsuit, after all, is stretchy, and I’ve basically got into the habit of switching off all my mortification circuits on entry, as a self-defence mechanism. Anyway, all the other people I run into there are similarly uncovered, and we’re mostly all imperfect one way or another.

But BlogHer is another story: I’ll be meeting a whole passel of new people, mostly women, all of us trying to make the best first impression possible but look like we didn’t have to try very hard because we always look this way. I won’t lie – it’s a scary notion. But in reality it will probably end up much like the swimming pool – we’re all imperfect, and we’ll all focus on the pretty, whether it’s someone else’s shoes or their necklace or their smile that lights up the room.

I’m really quite excited about BlogHer, you know. Apart from giving me a little more impetus to get fit(ter) and a rock solid excuse to buy some new clothes, I have a cool and lovely roomie whom I’m looking forward to getting to know a bit better, and for the first time since I’ve had children, I’m going to be doing something that’s just for me. For three whole days.

It’s a milestone of sorts. I don’t know exactly what I expect to get out of it – I’m not fired up about any particular conference session, though I may learn great things or hear great people at whatever ones I end up attending. I’m not dying to get spectacularly drunk at any of the parties (though it may happen). I’m just looking to expand my blogging network a bit, meet some new people who like the same sort of things I do, get some new readers, and – most of all – take a step towards establishing who I am when I’m not being someone’s mom.

It’s been a long time coming. It’s going to be good.

Rule of blog

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There’s this thing about blogging. A sort of an unwritten rule. If something’s going wrong in your life, you’re not allowed blog about it until you’ve fixed it. If you do, you’re just a whiner and you’re bringing everyone down and that’s depressing and nobody will want to read about it.

Or else, which is sometimes worse, you do blog about it, just this once, and everyone thinks you were asking for advice, which you may or may not have been doing but you’re going to get it anyway, and nothing makes you feel more of a big fat failure than lots of helpful advice telling you to do the things you know you should do, but the whole point was that you don’t want to do them, or you can’t for whatever reason that may or may not be basically laziness or disinclination. Like if I said “Waahh, my sentences are too long,” and you said, “Well, there’s this great thing called a full stop,” and I said, “But I don’t wanna stop it there, I just wanted to whine for a minute.”

So while we all want to remain human and mortal and real in the eyes of our readers, we also want to present our best faces, the public ones – or semi-public – wherein if we get things wrong we then figure it out and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, by jimminy, and our lives get better because we’re Doing It Right, and what’s more, You Can Too.

It’s a bit of a no-win situation, to be honest. You want to be cheerful, you don’t want your readers to leave in droves because every time they click over to your blog you’re whinging on about that thing again, and if they wanted to hear whinging they could go talk to their own four-year-olds thank you very much. On the other hand, you don’t want to be one of those insufferable bloggers who has the perfect decor and the perfect children and the perfect life and the perfect housekeeping skills because we all hate those people. And if you only blog about the perfect and ignore the imperfect, that’s as good as pretending to be perfect, which is just as bad only duplicitous as well.

I have nothing wise to say on this subject. It’s just something I’ve thought lately. A blogger narrates their story as they choose, it’s our prerogative. We are unreliable narrators, of course, because we can’t see ourselves from above, and because we can’t tell everything even if we wanted to. As a reader, you takes what you gets, and you build a picture that might be true or false or somewhere in between. You impose your own expectations and assumptions and irrational likes and dislikes on what I’ve said, and I have no control over what you end up with. That’s your prerogative.

And somewhere way back along the line, all we wanted to do was pass the time, writer and reader both. Life is complicated.