Category Archives: best intentions

Begin as you mean to go on

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No, don’t. Who could ever live up to that? The pressure’s killing me already.

“Begin as you would like to go on” would be more accurate. Begin well even if you know you’ll never keep it up in a million years. Begin as if someone was watching. Begin as if you’re blogging it for your very beautiful lifestyle and homeschooling blog that makes people want your life and think your children are always perfect because you’re doing it right.

Begin by going all out, and some little part of it might stick and become a bit of every day.

This brings me to summer vacation, which is breathing down my neck. In fact, it’s practically here. It is  here, I’m just hanging onto denial with my fingertips. Mabel finished last week; Dash has two more days.

(I can’t believe he still has spelling homework for a spelling test on the last day of school. When they added those extra four days to make up for all the snow cancellations earlier in the year, they decided to really get their money’s-worth out of them.)

I have so many half-baked plans for the summer. On Monday morning we’re going to sit down and have A Meeting. We’re going to Decide “Together” what we will do this summer. Mabel will wander off and start drawing a picture after about three minutes, but Dash will like it, and I will have some sort of buy-in from the kids on every rule I lay down thereafter. I have notions, like…

- While I work out (I’m doing the 30-day shred again, day 6 today, woot) every morning Dash will do his reading. Mabel will… get in the way, probably, and cause this plan to be amended, but I’m going to try to get them to go for it.

- We will specify exactly which two hours, and no more than two hours, daily will be accorded to tv, and then we’ll stick to it yes we will. If this involves some time when they get to watch My Little Pony  or CyberChase  on my computer, I will put up with it, because that way I have to clean up the kitchen.

- We will allot some time every day to housework, which the children will partake in, my control-freakish tendencies bedamned. (Not that I want to do the housework myself, but I get all twitchy when they start trying to clean things because it never works the way I want it to.)

- We will write a list of things “we” want to do, or parks we haven’t visited, museums, whatever. Dash will put “Make a lemonade stand” on this list, and I will try very hard not to shoot him down with my killjoy attitude to him and lemonade, which always involves me buying a lot of lemons and doing all the work. (I think he actually can do the work himself by now. But see above re. control freak.) (See this whole post, I suppose. Shush.)

- We will write a schedule (what? what sort of crazy woman am I?) wherein all the things we are going to do get their own time of day, and we will put meals and snacks in this schedule so that we leave the allotted 3 hours between each, just as the doctor ordered. Or we’ll work up to the 3-hour gap, because so far we haven’t been doing very well with that. Going cold turkey straight from a grazing lifestyle to a rigidly French-children one has not been a good or practicable thing this week. There has been much whining and asking and yelling and being turned down and finally helping of oneself to unauthorized snacks.

- We will teach ourselves Italian from the Internet. That’s a great plan, that is. I have great faith in that one working out well.

And then we’ll just go to the pool every damn day we can and maybe that will do the trick.

Whatever the trick is. The staying-sane-over-the-summer trick. That one.

Terrible mother seeks redemption: dinner-time edition

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Here is my secret shame. Which I can only tell you about now that I’m doing something about it. Because up till now I’ve just been a bad parent, and no matter how much everyone pretends to blog about their terrible parenting, nobody really does.

Increasingly, totally, I’ve been feeding my children their dinner by bringing a plate into them while they watch TV. Dash, we know (bad parenting already acknowledged), has a sandwich on a plate. Mabel might have a bowl of pasta, which she would eat with her fingers although I definitely gave her a fork. There might be some broccoli in there. She might have had an apple or there might not. There might be some chicken, which I would offer and she would reject. It was all very terrible and reeked of atrocious parenting and yet I was powerless to change it. It made my life easier because once they were nominally “fed” I could make something nice for B and me and we could eat it in peace while they continued to watch TV. Mostly, I was lazy and blaming it on the children.

Two nights ago I decided I’d had enough. I was sick of being the waitress in the movie theatre of my home. I called a family meeting, got out my trusty notebook, and wrote a list.

This was basically how it went:

  • Aim: We need to eat dinner together at the table.
  • Difficulties: They don’t want to wait till 6pm. B can’t come home earlier than 6pm. How can I get them to wait longer, and then to turn off the TV and sit with us?

The answer, as usual, was bribery. Sorry, I mean a star chart. They now both have clear motivating factors – an Anna doll (from Frozen , that Anna, of course) for Mabel and more money for Dash, who likes acquiring money and has no immediate plans to spend it on anything.

I put forth my plan, as follows: That we all have dinner at 6pm every night; that we all sit together and eat our food with nice manners. That in return, I will provide food that people like, and also a hearty snack at after-school-time so that they can wait until six for dinner.

Then I got them to help me list food they like for dinner (Mabel, that is) and for snacks, so that I could go shopping. And we agreed on the star system, of course. They can earn a total of three stars per dinner: one for eating at the table, one for using good manners, and one for trying/eating a new food. (Definition of “trying” is at my discretion. Because for Dash sometimes a lick counts; for Mabel I expect a bit more than that.) And I get a star for every dinner-for-four I get on the table, because mums need motivation too.

Once Dash stopped shouting at me because he wanted to have the meeting in what he had decided should be the “meeting room” (aka the front room) and I wanted to stay at the kitchen table, the rest of the discussion went down a treat. They loved being part of the decision-making process, they really did.

Last night too, things went surprisingly well. I’m still making three (mostly) separate dinners, but first things first. Dash sat at the table while we ate cooked food that he could smell (quinoa, kale, chicken) and didn’t complain about it. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but for him it’s a big deal. Mabel ate her pasta and peas with a fork. They both tried some raw carrot: Dash didn’t like it and Mabel has found a new favourite food. (They have both had carrrot before, I promise.)

I made the table a bit more exciting by letting them both drink their milk out of small, sturdy wine glasses, which they loved. I’m thinking tonight I might put fancy napkins at each place, if only to stop Dash wiping his fingers on his sweater.

So we all got our stars last night. I have decreed that they will earn 5c per star, which doesn’t sound like much but works out to 1.05 at the end of the week, which effectively doubles Dash’s allowance and will get Mabel to her Anna doll a lot sooner than she otherwise would. I have not yet decided what my reward will be, but I’ll be making sure I get one.

Will it work? Will it fall by the wayside like so many others of our star charts? Will I be ferrying food back into the TV room in a week’s time? I suppose it’s up to me, really. I do feel better for having started it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a pizza to put together.

Children sitting at the table

Dash dictates exactly how much pizza he might taste.

Glass containing some proportion of liquid

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All the things I have not done that were on my to-do list for January:

  • Made the children write thank-you notes for Christmas [hangs head in shame; no excuse for that]
  • Booked the summer holiday. [Was just about to do this last night when Mabel wet the bed and all the information I had just entered and selections I had made timed out. Then when I tried again the flights had disappeared. I gave it up as a bad job and will try again tonight.]
  • Contacted my so-called contracting job to see if they might ever again need my services, for money, that they would pay me, that I could use to go to the hairdresser, for instance. Or pay for expensive summer holidays.
  • Planned dinners, preferring to continue to fly by the seat of my pants and make a lot of something-with-pasta.
  • Made muffins, because I need to do that today.

Things I have, however, managed to do, so it’s not all bad, you know:

  • Gone to the chiropractor, which is an ongoing adventure but I’m glad to have started it because I do officially have a bulging disc and it’s good to know about that so that some day when I accidentally bend sideways to pick up a dropped pencil and it suddenly agonizingly herniates, I’ll know what’s going on. Now do I have exercises which will “take the pressure off my spine.” Which is not all that reassuring when you wonder where else you can lean the rest of your body if not on your spine. And it’s nice, you know, when they tell you that it’s great because it’s not your whole spine. Just one little bit of it. So yay.
  • Acquired an audition for Listen To Your Mother, as promised, which was very easy to do once I knew it was a thing, because I wrote my piece and then when they said auditions would be happening I just sent an e-mail and they gave me a timeslot. So that will be this Saturday and I will tell you all about it afterwards so that if you do it you can be forearmed. (But not four-armed.)
  • Got anything done at all, such as keeping milk and cereal and toilet paper in the house, considering all the snow days and polar-vortex days and two-hour delays we’ve been running up against for the past few weeks.
  • Continued to make a renewed effort to, if not exactly prioritize, at least not let fall entirely by the wayside, writing that is not on my blog. By which I mean I have done a little of it and there are more words on the page than there were before. Chipping away at all that white space, I am, sentence by sentence.
  • Oh, and I did do that moving to WordPress thing I had planned for. And my stats are looking more realistic and yet not totally non-existent, so I suppose that’s good too.

 

Plans

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I have plans. Audacious plans.

I want to audition for Listen To Your Mother this year. I don’t have to get in, I just want to get as far as auditioning. I don’t have any clue what to read, but I’ll figure that out later.

I want to finish this thing (not this thing – it’s longer than a blog post) I’m trying to write, and then I want to do something with it. Something more than sitting on it or leaving it under the bed or not actually finishing it.

I am seriously – seriously, I say – considering moving this whole blog to WordPress and actually going self-hosted, like a grownup blogger.

Is that enough for you? What are you planning for 2014?

Points of things

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Sky, sea, land

Tomorrow is the first day of the last week of the summer holidays. Mabel doesn’t go back to school till after Labor Day, but Dash starts second grade on August 19th. The second-grade thing isn’t phasing me, but the fact that the summer is almost gone is a bit stunning. This year seems to be going faster than any one before. If this keeps up, by the time I’m in my eighties, I imagine days will fly by like seconds. No wonder my mother is confused.

I partly feel like I’m just getting back into the groove of our nice laid-back summer (after the disruptions of going away, two weeks of camp, and then BlogHer) but on the other hand I’m looking forward to a bit more peace and the opportunity to throw away some of all the crap that’s been piling up around here. Because apparently I can’t do that when the kids are in the house.

I went to Target on my own for an hour yesterday and realised why I like shopping: it gives me a chance to center myself and plan things, whether it’s figuring out what might help for organizing the house a little more (I bought an in-tray!) or deciding what I want to, um, invest in this autumn. (Found a dress I want as a shirt, decided to e-Bay a bag I never use and buy one I fell in love with in Marshall’s; also tried on boots, but that’s not relevant ahem as I was saying…)

I thought I’d missed my Dad’s birthday and blamed it on the fact that apparently now I only know it’s someone’s birthday when Facebook tells me about it, and my Dad (needless to say) is not on Facebook. But then I realised I just had no idea what the heck date it was in August, and I hadn’t missed it at all. So that’s good.

I might have a freelance editing job lined up for when the kids go back to school. You might not get so much blathering from over here if I find I’m actually working instead.

In the last week both kids have started swimming underwater, Mabel for the first time ever and Dash for the first time since a little last summer. My kids have never been those ones who don’t seem to notice whether they’re on top of the water or the water’s on top of them – they would always crane their necks to keep their faces out of the water, even with goggles on for extra protection. So to see them whooshing around underneath all of a sudden is pretty cool. I told Mabel I didn’t do that till I was twelve, and she was well chuffed.

Technically, I finished the 30-day shred yesterday. That is, it was the tenth day I’ve done the level-3 workout. However, I did take off about ten days in July when I was sick and then away, and almost another two weeks from BlogHer until yesterday, and I spent a few intervening days working back up to it by doing levels one and two a couple of times. I don’t feel any different, though it’s not as hard as it was at the start, so I must be at least a tiny bit fitter and stronger. Dash says I look taller, which has to be a good sign. The scales still say I’m a few pounds lighter even though at no point did I stop eating all the muffins I usually eat. I will try to keep going until I get totally bored or something else happens or they go back to school and I try running again.

Since we didn’t do anything today, here are some photos from last weekend, when we took in some history by going to Fort McHenry in Baltimore. A decisive battle of the War of 1812 took place in Baltimore Harbor, and as the poet Francis Scott Key watched to see which flag would be flying over the fort as dawn broke the following morning, he wrote what would become the lyrics of The Star Spangled Banner.

Stars and stripes over Fort McHenry
Teeny little flag up high; huge enormous flag down low
Three people walking the battlements
Walking the battlements

A singular sensation

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A strange thing happened when I came back from BlogHer. I felt very small.

Not that I go around feeling like a great lumbering giant every day, but I usually feel comfortably right-sized in my space. But at the start of last week I found myself looking in the mirror and thinking I was a mere wisp of a thing; that a breath of air would knock me over; that I was lacking weight, significance, heft.

Small in a not-good way, then. Maybe it was the exhaustion that hit me when I got home, a combination of post-excitement, post-travel tiredness and a bit of an extended hangover. Maybe it was because I’d hung out with some women who were taller and bigger than me – but that was by no means the majority. At 5’4 and a US size 8, I’m pretty much average, and certainly not tiny. I am not a wisp.

I think perhaps it was a physical manifestation of the fact that I’d been such a small fish in such a huge pond at the blogging conference. I don’t mind not being in the limelight; I don’t want to be top of the heap. I have very little ambition, and I’m fine with that. I have no illusions that my blog is secretly a Big Deal. I don’t think anyone’s going to jump out of the alcove and present me with a trophy for being the biggest little blogger that could, I really don’t.

So I don’t know why, honestly. It was an odd and unsettling sensation. But I’m happy to say it’s wearing off, and I’m feeling pretty much normal again.

Which probably means I should get back to that 30-day shred thing if I want to keep fitting into my size 6 Gap jeans. (Which we all know are just like size 8s anywhere else.)

New-obsessions week: Day 1 – Exercise

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When Jillian Michaels says “Just a couple more,” she means ten. When she says “Nearly done” she means “Halfway through, maybe.” When she says “You’re well on your way to being shredded,” it’s true, but maybe not exactly the way she wanted. As I lay panting on the floor this morning with drips of sweat running into my eyes, those are the things that came to mind.

You know, this might be hard to believe but before last week I didn’t really know who Jillian Michaels was. This is what comes of not having had cable TV for three years. Apparently I never really watched The Biggest Loser because I was too busy watching Top Chef and Project Runway when we did have cable, and I think I had her a little mixed up with some red-headed chick in the UK who tells people what they should eat. Is she a different Gillian, maybe?*

Anyway, I heard once again recently about this 30-Day Shred thing that’s only Very Old News, and, always being last to run after the bandwagon and try to jump on board just as it’s leaving town, I decided to give it a go, with my self-imposed motivator of BlogHer attendance coming up apace. It checked a lot of boxes straight away:

  • Not all lying down like Pilates, so the kids have less opportunity to jump on me
  • Level 1 available free on YouTube; I bought Level 2 for just 1.99 from Amazon downloads this morning
  • Indoors in the heat and humidity of the summer
  • Quick – half an hour and I’m done, and I can actually do it with the kids in the house and no extra adult for distracting/restraining

Not that that last is easy, mind you. The first day I had the seven-year old pacing me jumping jack for jumping jack during the entire aerobic part of the workout, and he barely broke a sweat. Which was great for my ego, of course. In between times he was bugging me to have a turn of the weights (I have measly 2lb ones that the kids love to swing around terrifyingly) and getting between me and the screen.

Sometimes the four-year-old would come and try to snuggle up beside me as I lay on the floor trying to do my reverse crunches or my arm flies (see how well I can say all the words now?), and generally my panting would be interspersed with the following monologue:

“Put down the weights. No. At least, don’t hold them there. Move them AWAY from the computer. Don’t hold them over your head. Fine, just do it that way. Yes. NO. No, don’t drop them on the hardwood floor. No… okay, now I need them again.”

At least it distracted me from the pain of the lunges, I suppose. Also, my feet are too small to do lunges without falling over. Some might say it’s bad balance, but I’m going with the small feet thing.

Anyway, the point is that this morning I started level two, which means I have been working out for 30 minutes a day for ten of the past eleven days, and I’m quite pleased about that. I also stepped on the scales this morning and may possibly have lost some pounds too. If things are really spectacular, I might have some before and after pictures in another 20 days, but don’t get your hopes up because I might totally chicken out on that front.

Tomorrow in my new summer obsessions: coffee. Wait and see.

*Aha. That’s Gillian McKeith . Verrry different Gillian, apparently.

Star charts, episode umpty: A new hope

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Sometimes I wonder when having kids became this intricate tango of bribery that you can’t call bribery and reward systems and star charts and calculated praise and natural consequences and parenting strategies and whatever else it is we do to try to outwit or outmaneuver these small people. I’m sure when I was a child – ah, when I were a lass – my parents just said “It’s time for bed,” and off I trotted like a good little girl. (Actually, my dad gave me a piggyback upstairs and read me my stories, but then I turned over and went to sleep and that was that.)

I did not have star charts, I did not have rewards or punishments or a naughty step or time outs. I was spanked a couple of times, but mostly the threat of parental disapproval was enough to keep me on the straight and narrow. (I did have a penny taken off my 20p pocket money every time I said “Yeah” instead of “Yes” for a while, and I admit I went into negative equity pretty quickly on that one.)

So, what? Children these days, eh? Parents these days, more like, being one of them myself. I blame some amount of my good behaviour on my lack of siblings, having seen for myself how much better behaved my kids are one at a time rather than both together, when they egg each other on and rile each other up and kick each other and love each other simultaneously in ways I, a sibling-deficient only, could never even begin to fathom.

But I do keep thinking it should be less complicated. We should just tell them what they have to do, and they should just do it. I’m sure I’m not remembering it wrong. I’m sure my parents had it easy.

———–

And so the summer vacation begins and I haul out a new star chart, a new System, a new set of bribes and routines and things to aim for and fun in return for no fun (also known as cooperation). I am suffused with hope, shot through with organization, filled with plans, inspired by lists.

It’ll probably all fall apart in a couple of weeks, assuming it even gets off the ground. My goals won’t be SMART enough, or my menus won’t be planned enough, and I’ll be winging it daily and we’ll all be yelling at each other and then there’ll be another reset when we’re on vacation, and for camp, and for the second half of the summer.

But we have to start somewhere, right? We can be shiny with optimism and glowing in the delight of our no-failure-yet for a little while longer.

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.

Weekend edition

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I have a confession. I hate weekends.

At least, I’m really bad at them. I suppose it’s a leftover inclination from all those years when weekend meant something different, and less taxing, than Monday to Friday. But now all it means is that we have no particular schedule and are required to either have some of that holy grail – quality family time – or else feel guilty for failing.

I am also hampered by my extreme lack of ambition, outing-wise. The museums downtown are great, but we’ve seen the child-friendly ones quite a lot now, and they don’t change the dinosaurs all that often. I’d like to go to the art galleries, but the children don’t enjoy those much. A nice walk in the great outdoors would be excellent for our mental and physical health, but dragging our offspring to walk somewhere and look at scenic nature is doomed from the get-go. You can try to bribe them with hot chocolate afterwards, but they’d much rather have the drink right now and skip the nature, thank you.

Today we even considered pushing the boat out and going to see a film.

Us: Hey, guys, how about we … [thrill of anticipation]… go to see a movie this afternoon?
Them: Nooooooo.
Us, grasping at straws: There’d be popcorn.
Them: Nah.

They’d much rather sit at home watching tried and trusted episodes of Curious George on PBS than see something new and exciting and potentially scary on the big, noisy screen that you can’t get away from.

It almost makes me yearn for the old days, when they were little. Okay, so you had to pack the entire contents of your house and fridge before you could get out the door, and someone always had a huge up-the-back-of-the-onesie blowout just as you strapped them into the car, but the decision-making was up to you. If you said “Right, we’re going to have a lovely walk and see a waterfall!”, they’d be pretty much powerless against your bundling them into their coats and carseats and stroller and Ergo and just going there. Apart from the poop and the requisite tantrum, I suppose.

But nowadays, everyone’s buy-in is essential just to get people out of pyjamas, never mind wearing shoes and socks and coats and sitting voluntarily in the car.

Honestly, sometimes I almost want to have another, just so that I can get someone doing what I want instead of what they want. (Don’t worry. I know that’s just an illusion.)

So today, despite everyone being already dressed by 9am (thanks to the remaining snow, that needed to be played in before it dissipated entirely), despite our having a conversation about what we should do today quite early on, despite discussing museums and cinemas and walks in the park, we ended up getting into the car at 3pm and going to that most exotic of destinations, Target.

Not just our regular Target; a slightly more distant, newer one. We bought one thing we needed and a few things we decided we probably needed, weathered tantrums about Christmas presents never received as we perused the toy department for someone else’s birthday present (never a good move), spent $3 per child on a “small, inexpensive” treat, and finally sat down in Starbucks for our reward for getting out of the house: latte, latte, vanilla milk, smoothie, and one slice of lemon cake split four ways.

And now we have to figure out something to do tomorrow. I’d like to curl up with a good book, but that sort of weekend is both behind and, I hope, ahead of me yet.