Endings, beginnings, elusive middles
It seems like I should have more to say about the end of middle school, but I’ve been a little too verklempt to manage it. [Talk amongst yourselves! Here, I’ll give you a topic: Attendance awards; universally annoying or only to bitter parents of chronically ill children who feel like other kids getting medals and certificates for having good immune systems is bullshit? Discuss.]
In the end, it was sort of anti-climactic. Chickadee hasn’t been feeling great, and in the post-moving-on-no-we-are-most-certainly-not-calling-it-a-graduation-ceremony hubbub as I tried to corral her and some friends for pictures, she finally stopped rolling her eyes long enough to walk up and stand nose to nose with me. “Time to go,” she said. “I need to go home.”
So I bought her a milkshake and took her home, whereupon she slurped down said milkshake and promptly fell asleep on the couch for several hours. Not really the celebration we’d maybe had in mind, but sometimes you’ve just gotta take a nap. read more…
Looks like we made it…
It turns out there’s nothing quite like living the one-day-at-a-time-at-the-hospital life to make you REALLY excited about middle school graduation. Part of me still can’t believe this almost didn’t happen, and the other part is afraid to breathe, just in case I’m asleep.
Today is a good day.
Here, let me Google that for you
Sometimes, having a record of our lives is awesome. Every now and then I will go back and read something in my archives and be AMAZED, because I’d completely forgotten said event until reading about it and reawakening that memory. I’m constantly grateful for that when it comes to the day-to-day marvels of raising small humans.
Other times, I have to go silent for several days in a row, because it’s the kind of weekend that ends with a hysterical child and me Googling “how to remove (ripped,partial) contact lens?” and that, my friends, is the BEST thing that happened in those three days. I am counting on these sorts of memories to shrivel and disappear, much like the agony of labor. (We all know it happens, but our brains are designed to let go of the pain, lest the species die out altogether.) Today is a new day! Thank God.
Here’s a memory that I’ve kept and don’t mind: Have you every been skinny dipping? I have, and I think it’s good for your body image. C’mon over to Off Our Chests to see what I mean.
Slow and steady
Otto never tires of telling people the joke about how it was an easy decision for us to have a small, family-only wedding ceremony without all of the traditional hoopla. “We’ve both already been to the wedding where she wore the big white dress,” he’ll deadpan, then sit back and wait for that to sink in.
In a few more months, Otto and will have known each other for 23 years.
Today, we’ve been married for 5 of them. [Aside: OH MY GOD look how tiny the children were!!] Just 5 years; our marriage is only embarking on kindergarten, and in some ways I’m still holding its hand to cross the street, tucking it in at night, and trying to convince it that there are no monsters hiding in the closet.
Make no mistake: for me, our marriage definitely fears there’s a big hairy beast either in the closet or under the bed, just waiting to pounce. Except in this case the hairy beast is “One day Otto wakes up and realizes it’s maybe not supposed to be this hard, this much of a slog, this kind of endless grind,” and then he tells me that he can’t do it anymore. read more…
Foiled again
Once upon a time, on a day when I brought Mario home to our house after school, the boys played and played and played some more, and when Mario’s dad came to pick him up, he said, “Hey, we’re going to Crazy’s for dinner tonight, y’all want to come?” [Crazy’s is not really the name of the restaurant. I have changed the name to protect the… crazy.]
Monkey, of course, immediately began begging to go too, so we all went to Crazy’s together and it was there that Mario corrupted my son.
But first, let me back up a minute. We don’t eat out all that often, partly because of cost and partly because we like to cook and also partly because it requires leaving the house, and you KNOW how I hate that. Our food-cooked-by-others preferences tend to run towards take-out (see also: Mexican food, hole-in-the-wall; Chinese food), and while we do take-out once a week, the sit-down-in-a-restaurant thing is much rarer.
So we all went to Crazy’s, which was the first time I’d been there in years. read more…
Me dress pretty someday
I am fresh out of magical solutions to the recent Year Of Continuing Suckage, so I did what any red-blooded American female with a weakness for cute shoes would do: I spent a couple of weeks dressing up to see if it helped me feel better.
Read all about it over at Off Our Chests, if you like. Mostly because I’m pretty sure that two consecutive weeks of me wearing mascara every single day is one of the signs of the Apocalypse.
More of the same
I lamented to Otto this morning that “I don’t have anything interesting to write about!” Otto—deeply embroiled in the home stretch of grading and finishing up the semester—gave me several suggestions of guffaw-worthy student gaffes, none of which I’m actually going to share. That’s mostly because they’re not my stories, but also because I don’t want Otto to lose his job. He’s so nice to the students’ faces; there’s no need for them to know he makes fun of them here at home.
See, the problem is that all I want right now is… nothing. No drama. No excitement. I want boring and predictable and utterly ordinary. I’m not sure we’ve quite gotten there, but we’re getting closer. And I like it, but it doesn’t make for fantastic storytelling, in general.
NEWSFLASH: With about half an acre of safely gated area in which to roam, my rotten dog only ever wants to go find (and apparently roll in) the one plant (which I cannot locate to save my life) which immediately spits tiny green burrs all over her fur. That’s what passes for excitement here right now, and I know, it’s pretty boring. read more…
Various GPS follies
This is old news, I know it is, but I kept meaning to write about it and then life exploded and I never did, and it is REALLY SUPER IMPORTANT that you know that you can get Bert and Ernie on your GPS if you didn’t already know.
If you DID already know, sorry. This video always makes me laugh, even though I’ve already seen it a hundred times:
I contend that NO ONE who 1) owns a TomTom and 2) grew up watching Sesame Street could learn of this information and not immediately run to the associated website to download your favorite muppet voices. read more…
Well that’s… interesting
I am a youngest child. I grew up forever feeling persecuted that my brother got to… stay up later/go places I wasn’t allowed/watch movies that were forbidden/fill in the blank with any other life-or-death-desirable activity in a kid’s mind. I never saw him with more responsibilities than I had—therefore earning those special privileges—though that, too, is probably a perception heavily shaped by its passage through tween/teen Not-Fair-Colored glasses.
Of course, there were also rules in our family that were shaped by “because he’s a boy” or “because you’re a girl.” Different time, different place. There are no such gender rules for my kids, but I am sensitive to the siren song of But He/She Doesn’t Have To (or Gets To) And That’s Not Fair, so I try REALLY REALLY HARD to explain any such apparent unfairness in a way that will make the complainant understand that maybe it’s not as awful as they think.
For all his rigidity, Monkey is actually a pretty easy sell on the “here’s why she gets to and you don’t” party train. He protests, I explain, he either backs down or sort of harumphs his way out of the conversation, saying that he SUPPOSES I know best. No, it’s Chickadee who is the frequent recipient of the Let Me Tell You With Very Many Words Why You Are Being A Spoiled Brat Right Now lecture. read more…
A quick tidbit (quibit? tidbick?)
I am spending my entire day either in the car, waiting rooms, or too-cold doctors’ offices, which I guess I will tell you more about eventually, but there isn’t time right now, so I won’t. (Also, I am rather over the whole scene right now, and would like to go home and crawl under my desk and chant “MY CHILDREN ARE PERFECTLY HEALTHY” until it’s true or until I run out of snacks.)
Anyway. I think I mentioned that my veggies are in for the summer, finally, as part of all the work we’ve been doing killing ourselves landscaping. What I did not tell you is that this year I was so disorganized, I never got around to starting seedlings, so I just caved and bought some plants for the things that needed longer to grow. I thought I bought two heirloom tomato plants, two Early Girl tomato plants, and a grape tomato plant, but it turned out that there was another (regular) tomato variety on the grape tomato shelf, thus: no grape tomato plant.
This was a problem—a big one—because Monkey likes nothing better than to be able to wander out into the garden in the summer and graze, and he loves grape tomatoes. I planted what I bought, and my other plants, and put down seeds, and then my boxes were all full. So then I went out a week later and bought a grape tomato plant and put it in a separate planter and told Monkey, “That’s your tomato plant, right there. I bought it for you.”
I did this because he has unfailingly visited that plant every day since. He waters it and talks to it and checks it for critters and lets me know how George is doing every day. Oh, yeah—he named it George. Because of course he did. And George makes him incredibly happy.
I can think of no other way to get such a massive return on a $3.49 expenditure. Thanks, George. You light up my Monkey’s life!