I thought I had it all figured out, today: Chickadee was invited over to a friend's house for "as long as she likes," and I had made plans to bring a friend over here for Monkey. My day would be busy, but manageable. With the children occupied I'd be free to finish up getting ready for our trip, doing my work, and cleaning the house. HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. There were too many things crowding my brain. I made a rookie mistake, thinking this was going to make it all work out okay. First of all, I had to spend the early part of the morning trying to convince the kids to eat breakfast, get...
Apparently when I was a toddler, I took to ripping out my hair by the handsful. My mother recounts with sadness the story of taking me in to have my beautiful curls (what was left of them, anyway) cut off so that my hair would be too short to grab and yank. In kindergarten I rode the bus with a group of older girls who tormented me every single day with the assertion that I was surely a boy, because no girl would have hair so short. Thus began The Hair Wars between my mother and me. I had certain ideas about the way I wanted to wear my hair (long), and she had certain OTHER ideas about my...
When Otto and I picked up Chinese food this weekend, they gave us three fortune cookies. We, of course, ate two of them. The third cookie has been sitting on my kitchen counter ever since. I moved it to a more prominent location this morning while I was packing the kids' lunches, reasoning that maybe I would see it when I WASN'T running around, busy, and do something with it. I'm not sure what I thought I was going to do. Eat it? Throw it away? Who knows. All I know is that I was tired of seeing it shoved back on the corner of the counter where I stack the diet coke cans waiting to be...
I tasked the children's father with the annual Selecting Of The Valentines for the kids this year, in part because I hadn't gotten around to it and he had them with him this weekend, and in part because the entire exercise makes me want to shove sharp pencils into my eyeballs. When it's up to me, we go to the Dollar Store and have a choice of maybe six different kinds of cards. When the children whine that they want something that isn't there, I try to look sympathetic. Then I tell them to hurry up and pick because we have to go get groceries. The REAL stores have entire WALLS of valentines...
It's been kind of a long road since it became clear that Monkey was struggling, which those of you who've been reading along already know. Things at school kept getting worse, we've waded through the proper HMO channels and had him (mis)diagnosed as having ADD, we went back to the allergist, we increased therapy, and there continued to be no answers for us. Until today. The school finally completed the last of the testing Monkey's team decided to do. He has a whole team! Trying to help him! It's like they care, or something. (I am going to miss this school.) Although Monkey is more or less...
I'm fighting a cold right now, which is frustrating. I've barely been out of the house this week, so where did it come from? Maybe from the orthodontist's office, where everything is coated with invisible platinum for your bankruptcy enjoyment. (Note to self: invisible platinum is apparently not antimicrobial.) So I perhaps read a little faster, at bedtime, and tucked the kids in a little more briskly than usual. I did the most cursory clean-up of the kitchen that I could justify, then retreated to my bed with my laptop. I planned to finish up some work and go to sleep early. About half an...
The children---have I mentioned?---have had a run of bad luck lately. And bad luck is what it is, because none of it is their fault. Just ask them! They will tell you! It's just that the universe, well, it is cruel. So cruel, in fact, that they are both currently grounded. Now, grounding a 7-year-old and an 8-year-old is tricky, because what can I do? Make them miss the prom? No dates? Turn over the bong? Mostly it means that there is no television and no computer. Now we all know that I would shrivel up and die under such an edict, but the kids are actually doing just fine. Which is rather...
Because I was raised Jewish and then fell into a rather extreme Christian religion in college, when I regained my senses I was (understandly, I think) a bit wary of committing myself to another church. It wasn't that I didn't still consider myself a person of faith; it was that I was beginning to realize that first I needed to know what I believed, apart from what a group of people might tell me to believe. My (ex) husband (is) was Methodist. I went to church with him. Sometimes. The Methodists seemed nice enough. The years went by and challenges came with them. I couldn't get pregnant. We...
I'm in something of a holding pattern with my children, at the moment. One of the supreme joys of the complicated child (because there are just so many) is figuring out how to balance patience and appropriate consequences. In other words: Misdeeds require correction, yes, but you don't want to be punishing behavior a child cannot help. On the other hand, you don't want to be issuing a free pass to be irresponsible and bratty to a kid just because they have some issues, either. It's such a delightful conundrum, constantly trying to discern when an infraction requires creative problem-solving...
