I've said it before and I'll say it again: Dinner is my favorite time of the day. I don't know if it's because we rarely ate together as a family when I was a kid, or because the various tidbits my kids choose to share always seem more hilarious when we're all seated around the table, but whatever the reason, the best conversations are punctuated with the clatter of silverware and someone slurping their milk. The daily ups and downs with a nearly-teen seem suspended at the table, too. No matter how rotten Chickadee's been in other respects (hint: I love that kid more than chocolate but EGADS...
Y'all, I am bursting with maybe-good-news. I am positively OVERCOME with actual hope that young master Monkeypants is finally---FINALLY!---feeling better. This week at school has been... well, it's unprecedented. That's not to say that there haven't been any challenges, but said challenges are fewer and haven't turned into crises. And when Otto asked Monkey if he could describe what he was feeling, he sort of fluttered his hands around the way he does when there's more than he can force out of his mouth and said, "I don't know. I just feel a lot calmer." But we're not going to talk about it,...
Pop quiz time! 1) You are a typical seventh grader. You receive a manageable assignment which is due in three weeks. You: A) Complete it right away---no use wasting time! B) Chart out your anticipated work trajectory, chipping away at it regularly for the next few weeks and finishing right on time. C) Work on it here and there, spending most of the evening before it's due finishing up. D) Spent five minutes on it one day and then the night before get super-annoyed that your mother won't just "edit it" for you (where "edit" means "do") so that you can hand it in. 2) As a gifted student...
There is Logical Me, and there is Emotional Me. Logical Me is, well, LOGICAL. It knows things. It understands reason. It is measured and wise and only if-thens things which truly have causal relationships and is very rarely given to panic and knows exactly what to do in the unlikely event of a water landing without so much as raising its voice. I love Logical Me, but Logical Me is kind of a robot. Emotional Me is Chicken Little on steroids. The sky isn't just falling, it's SHOOTING TOWARDS US and there's NO WAY TO STOP IT and therefore requires that Emotional Me runs around, arms flailing,...
You know how I never talk about sex here? That's about to change. Sort of. Hang on; let me rev up my spam filter, because I'm about to get slammed with a lot of spammy links for things that I'm desperately going to wish I could unsee. (Like, you know, yesterday's thing. Apologies to those of you with delicate sensibilities.) So I spend a lot of time lamenting the thing I do wrong as a parent or the things I think I ought to be able to fix as a parent, and it was pointed out to me that I really am not given to appropriately celebrating the things I do RIGHT as a parent. Today I thought I...
I'm not saying I have it all figured out, nor am I claiming I came up with this---it was suggested to me, last year, and I've been doing it ever since---but what I AM saying is that if you have a kid on an IEP and you have meetings to attend, the single most important thing you can do in preparation for those meetings is to BAKE SOMETHING. I'm not the world's greatest baker. Not by a long shot. You don't have to be. Just bake something delicious. And then bring it with you while it's still warm. Why? It's very simple: 1) Low blood sugar makes people grumpy, and 2) It turns out that it's...
I forgot to tell you perhaps the greatest thing about Christmas Day: We got to be in the family picture! See, Otto and his brother had arranged for us to talk to the family on Skype at some point on Christmas morning. Which would've been fine. But NO, Nearly Nickless somehow wired up his computer through their giant plasma TV up in the corner of the room and set a webcam on top of it and Otto and I were then beamed into the room, Starship Command-style, to converse with everyone else. That was pretty cool for us, because we could see the entire living room and watch the nephews run around...
Christmas has already been completely ruined, and we still have five days before the actual holiday, so I'm thinking this is some sort of truly awesome record for Maximum Suck. The Plan was that the kids' dad would pick them up on Saturday to fly north; Otto and the dog and I were to follow the next day, driving up to my folks in New York; the kids would spend a week with their dad, we would work our way Boston-ward for Christmas, and then on Christmas Day we'd get the kids back, they'd have time to see the New England relatives, and we'd head back through my folks' place again on our way...
[First: Before you ask, yes, the party was a success, I think. Otto had a grand time, his brothers enjoyed meeting all of the folks Otto is always talking about, the crock of spinach artichoke dip was all but licked clean (it's the jalapenos! brilliant!!), and I'm equal parts glad we pulled it off and glad I hopefully won't have to do this again for another 10 years.] If there's one thing I've learned in my dozen years of parenthood, it's the golden mantra of "Don't engage." Okay, that sounds bad. I don't mean never engage with the kids, of course, I just mean to not engage when it's only...
