How to torment your fruitaholic
Most dogs will go completely berserk for meat, and while Licorice is perfectly happy to eat that meat out of your hand (or off your plate, or the floor, or whatever), her very favorite thing appears to be fruit. You cannot sit down with an apple or a banana without her pouncing on top of you and sitting there with pleading, velvet-painting-esque sad eyes that speak of years of sorrow and starvation. And a few days ago when I was scooping a cantaloupe in the kitchen I thought she was going to stroke out with all of the prancing she was doing to get my attention. (“Hey! Down here! See me? Me, the starving yet adorable one? So! HUNGRY!”)
Of course, if you have a little dog who loves fruit, and you are us, you see this not so much as an opportunity to be a hero as a chance to have some fun at the poor pooch’s expense. Because it turns out that half a cantaloupe rind is larger than her head, and that it’s really, really funny to drop banana strings across her snout so you can watch her try to slurp them down into her mouth. (No one ever accused us of being kind. Or hard to entertain, for that matter.)
Good thing my husband always has a camera ready. read more…
1,000 words about my closet
Today is Friday, and that means I have the luxury of directing you elsewhere, which is good because otherwise I would have to tell you about the letter I got in the mail yesterday. That letter included a handy chart that had drawings and statistics and the body of it said:
Dear parents of Chickadee Lastname,
Your child participated in our school scoliosis screening program and ZOMG! How have you never noticed that her spine is bent? SHE FLUNKED! TOTAL FLUNKAGE! TAKE HER TO YOUR DOCTOR IMMEDIATELY!
And because we totally don’t trust you to have the crap scared out of you by this letter, you also need to have your doctor sign this form and send it back by this date, because we don’t want any crippled hunchbacks at our school.
Sincerely,
Random Public Heath NurseP.S. YOU ARE A CRAPPY PARENT.
Okay, maybe that’s not an exact transcript, but you get the gist. Thank goodness I’m not the sort of person who overreacts, right?
Anyway, nevermind that. I shall reserve my full freak-out for after the doctor checks her out. In the meantime, why not head on over to Five Full Plates to read my second installment in our Spring Cleaning series—it’s all about my closet. And the rest of my bedroom. Fascinating, I know. But much less anxiety-provoking than that stupid letter.
15 things I love, just because
It’s Love Thursday, and lately I’ve felt like Thursday leaves me anxious about finding JUST THE RIGHT THING that is, you know, PROFOUND ENOUGH to pass muster.
Which is silly, of course, both because if profundity is the measuring stick by which I’m going to take stock of my work, um, ACK, and also because that’s the thing about love—it doesn’t have to be profound. Sometimes it just is. Sometimes it’s everyday, plain, and perfectly simple.
So rather than a long story or Yet Another Picture Of My Dog (okay, some of you tend to enjoy that, but it does kind of feel like cheating, sometimes, because who doesn’t love a sweet little dog?), today I thought I’d celebrate Thursday with some of the simplest things that make me feel most happy, and fill me with love.
If you’re looking for deep, today, you should probably move on. Just sayin’. read more…
Reading logs killed the bibliophile
Oh, public school. Our love affair has trod upon a very rocky road, but I always come back to you. I’m starting to feel a little like a battered wife, but I come back! Because I love you! And you love me! Rather, you love my children. Sometimes. You certainly love my children when it’s time to Leave Every Child Behind and do state-mandated standardized testing, anyway.
And public school, it’s not me. It’s you. Seriously.
Oh, I was dazzled by your promise. I want to believe in the System. You know the one—the one that’s utterly, completely broken. And from where I sit, as a person of relative good fortune and privilege, I couldn’t stomach the idea of turning my back on those who are stuck without a choice just because we could, theoretically, choose something else. I want to be part of the Solution, I said.
So how’s it all working out so far? read more…
How do they know?
Early Dismissal (school definition):
The three days in a row set aside for parent-teacher conferences when school lets out after just half a day. This process is designed to facilitate greater teacher-parent interfacing and to accommodate everyone’s scheduling needs.
Early Dismissal (reality definition):
The three days in a row set aside for parent-teacher conferences when school lets out after just half a day. This process is designed to fall on the busiest three days of my life, such that I not only fall behind on all of my regular work, but so that having the kids home and having eleventy doctors’ appointments scheduled makes for mass chaos.
Unprepared
I am often guilty of catastrophizing when it comes to the children. More specifically, I am guilty of catastrophizing when it comes to Monkey. I mean, I’m more or less at peace with Chickadee’s sociopathic tendencies; I feel confident that she’ll outgrow most of them and become an adult who won’t make us consider changing the locks here at the house. Her trajectory is familiar to me. I was once a little shit embellisher self-centered fanciful, myself, and think I’ve evolved into a fairly productive, compassionate member of society. She will, too. I plan to beat her until she does.
But Monkey. Dear, sweet Monkey. I know I have a long time before it’s a logical thing to worry about, but I can’t help it. I often despair over whether he’ll be able to hack it in middle school, or high school. And Otto and I often turn to one another and say, “He’s never moving out.” It’s just hard—impossible, sometimes—to picture him able to cope out in the big, bad world without us.
And every now and then he makes me think I’m just overprotective and overly worrisome. But then every now and then he makes me realize I may not even be acknowledging the half of it, yet. read more…
Why I’ll never be a design blogger
Sometimes I read the kinds of blog where people are all, “And over here you can see the Battant Ornithorynque lamp we picked out while vacationing in the south of France. I think it provides the perfect accent to the small table below it, which I created one summer by arranging shards of Ming Dynasty china into an elaborate mosaic pattern of a single feather blowing along a field of poppies on a cloudless day.” There are invariably a billion pictures of a pristine and gorgeous space where not a single molecule is out of order, and I briefly wonder if they didn’t actually just scan in some catalog pages to go along with their story.
I love those sorts of blogs, by the way. It’s just really not anything you’ll ever get from me.
From me, the tale goes more like this: My kids are slobs and my head exploded and then we bought some cubbies and I spent an entire weekend digging out a couple of rooms. Somewhere in the middle I screeched “TAKE PICTURES! I WANT PROOF!” to my husband, and he obliged because you don’t argue with me when I’m sitting in the middle of a pile of Legos.
That’s pretty much the entire story (in handy abbreviated form), but if you want the extended dance remix, feel free to check out my first post in our Spring Cleaning Challenge series over at Five Full Plates. For four weeks we’ll be whipping our houses into shape; I am going to be spending a lot of time dropping off bags of crap at Goodwill, I can tell already.
Love notes via texts
Just now:
Him: Leaving the building. Will get something for dinner. Anything else we need?
Me: Um… world peace? And a bag of spinach.
Him: What if they’re out of spinach? Will just world peace be okay?
(This is why I married him. He makes me laugh, every day. Even on Love Thursday when I’m so busy I forget it’s Love Thursday and I end up posting from my phone, in the car.)
Picking battles, one by one
Like most parents I know, I was an infinitely better mother before I actually had children. I was a career babysitter as a teen, and a nanny as a young adult. If there was one thing I KNEW, it was how to handle kids. So naturally I was going to be completely awesome at it and never have any issues with my own children.
Ahahahahahahaahaaaaaaaaaaaa. Yeah.
Parenting, first, a sharp and cranky clone of myself, and then second, an overly-sensitive yet completely rigid and filterless little ball of energy has certainly disabused me of any delusions of my superior child-rearing abilities. A dozen years of raising humans has taught me that most of what they do and think is dictated by the aliens controlling their brains, not through my loving interactions with them. (“Please stop singing that song over and over. I don’t want to have to stab you.”)
Only one mantra remains unchanged: Pick your battles. read more…
Beauty is pain
Long ago when I imagined my future children, I pictured raven-haired curlytops full of laughter. I did not, as it turns out, imagine that my curly hair would be the exception rather than the rule, or that the sheer level of DRAMA and ANGST associated with the difficulty of being a child would make for quite so much glaring. Live and learn.
Monkey did get my eyes, and Chickadee definitely has my ears. I mean, we share genetic material, and it’s evident. (Something that always tickles me about genetics: If Chickadee is with me, people swear she is my spitting image. If she’s with her dad, people swear she is his spitting image. This is my daughter, the shapeshifter.) Unfortunately, poor Chickadee got something else from me, as well: A smallish mouth, with largish teeth. That means that three years ago she had teeth pulled, and then she had a gum graft a few months after that, and now she has braces and yesterday she had MORE teeth pulled. Fun!
[Dear Chickadee: Sorry for all the years you’ll spend in therapy getting over your dental phobia. I’ll help pay for it. But, um, look how awesome it all turned out! Honey? Speak to me, honey!] read more…