The collage hanging in our stairway

Guys? This is the part where you lie to me, tell me that, no, it was just the little kid years that flew by like I was blinking, that the rest of it slows way down, that he’s going to stop morphing into a man while I’m standing here, watching it happen.

He went to “shadow” at the second hippie-dippy middle school yesterday, and I’m really going to need to come up with another nickname for it if he gets in, because that sounds like I’m not 100% on-board with the whole concept. It’s not exactly far off the mark when Eric calls me a dirty hippie, myself, so, sure, I’m down with Sam potentially calling his teachers by their first names and stopping to pet the school dog on his way down to the bathroom where they’re growing the hydroponic tomatoes. Cool with me, y’know? More importantly, cool with him. Yesterday’s visit was a particular success, since he actually got to know a couple kids by name, and he got to sit in on a comics class. No kidding. So he likes that school, I’d have to say.

We’re in the waiting game now, where we’ll chew our nails and check the mail to see if his name gets picked in the lottery to attend either charter school. If not, well, he’ll go to Mega-Middle and be a good little cog. I know, I know. I’m not telling him that! I’m being all sugar and cream about the whole business, talking to him about each school’s pros and cons, and he thinks he’d probably be happy anywhere. (Mega-Middle has ROBOTICS. That soothes a lot of worries for a ten-year-old boy.) ALl the same, I heard him pray last night to get into one of the hippie schools, and darn it, I’m not a rock. That twisted my gut.

This is stupid, really. We didn’t do this when I was a kid. You lived in a neighborhood, so you went to that school. My elementary school fed to three different middle schools, and if your parents didn’t like the one you were supposed to go to, well, then, it was the Christian school for you, where they had to hold their hands folded at their waists when they walked demurely down the halls. (I had friends who went there.) There wasn’t a whole lot of anxiety involved, so far as I was aware. Maybe we have too many choices these days. Maybe if this wasn’t going on at the same time as my friends with younger kids are frantically doing the “which elementary school?” dance, which is constantly keeping it at the forefront of my brain. Gah.

In the meantime, little Gabe is obsessed with Pokemon, and that’s JUST FINE. He can stay small, and obsessed with small child things, just as long as he wants.

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Told Mom I was going to make this shirt. She could have one, too, I said, since it affects her like it affects me; obviously, if I’m old enough to be sitting in a gymnasium for a freaking middle school orientation, then she, as my mother, must be ancient.

But for real. This kid isn’t old enough for middle school!

Right? And obviously this girl isn’t old enough to have a kid old enough to go to middle school…

…shut up.

(Oh, the memory; she plays cruel, cruel tricks.)

Anyway, it was a very nice middle school, if I have to send my kid off to the dark and horrible place that middle school holds in the recesses of my recollections. This one is a charter school, and it’s all alternative thinking, and no bells, and random dog in the hallway, and calling teachers by their first names. Sam would probably love it and thrive there, once he got past the initial bump of realizing that he would have to be more of his own boss. Then again, it’s a very competitive lottery, so I’m not getting my hopes up, and I’m trying to discourage him from counting his chickens, too. The orientation for his home middle school is tomorrow night, and maybe it won’t be so bad…maybe all those police calls for fighting are, y’know, exaggerated in the newspaper…(somebody hold me!)

So, say Sam doesn’t make it into the hippie-dippy middle school, and my little free spirit becomes a target for bullies at the home school. There are other options, too. Another charter school, from which I’m waiting to hear back. Maybe the Christian school, though it’s private and expensive. And maybe the home school wouldn’t be so bad, after all; some people are reassuring me that it’s not. Demons always seem to rear their heads more vividly in your rear-view mirror than they do through the windshield. He’ll probably be fine wherever he goes…probably.

Man, do I wish I was sending Gabe with him. Not wishing Gabe’s life into fast-forward, of course, but if ever there was a brother willing to step up and defend his brother against all comers, it’s that one, bless him. But they won’t be in school together again after this year – unless, of course, they get into one of the charter schools, which are sixth through twelfth grades. Another reason to keep fingers crossed!

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Should get my toenails tattooed back on. I’ll bet there’re a lot of nerve endings in nailbeds, though. Hmmmm.

Here, have a picture of the ornaments my children made at the company Christmas party. A snowman and a star. I’ll bet you’ll never guess who made what…

Bonus: their letters to Santa.

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As I’ve said before, what’s the point of having kids, if not to mess with them on a regular basis?

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Of Sam, since toddlerhood, I’ve often joked that he was just waiting for the perfect militant cause to which he could attach himself. He’d shriek to the heavens when he saw litter on the ground; he’d rail against the system when he heard about bullies or cheaters. Now, apparently, he’s been assigned a class project – the details of which are sort of sketchy to me; maybe a position paper? – and his topic is whaling. Oh, my. He found his current cause.

He and his partner, a young lady with similar passionate feelings, are getting more and more outraged with every bit of information they uncover…and their plans to “fix” the situation don’t appear to follow conventional paths. “So, working through the system isn’t your style?” I lamely said this morning, when he told me that his friend planned to use pepper bombs against the whalers, as “red herrings.”

(“Yeah, our teacher taught us that phrase,” he said, proud of himself.)

No, it’s apparently much more his style to go all rogue here, with stealth ships and weapons. He is morally disgusted by the images he’s seen (sidenote: I think I’d have been a little more wary about letting a bunch of ten-year-olds go searching the internet for images of whale slaughter…), and moderation isn’t something he’s really developed yet. So now I get to walk a fine line between letting him do his own homework and trying, for the love of Mike, to get him to please consider the ramifications of joining the Youth Ecoterrorist Brigade.

Meanwhile, Gabe’s education is following a more ordinary path, though he’s regularly cracking me up with it. He prefers to work extremely independently, with the result that some of his assignments look as though they were penned by Nell:

Click to embiggen.

This is an older paper, and in case you can’t decipher it, he was talking about birds in a tree. Yes, “brs” in a “teyu.” Now he’s getting a little better at the phonics, but he still surprises us. This next was from a “Day of the Dead” assignment, where he chose to write about his late Grandma Richmond:

Well, sure! Who doesn’t love to eat some fresh, juicy Florida “oinchjis”? Or maybe have a glass of “oinch” juice?

The spelling isn’t the only creative thing he does, though. From a math paper. Note: the questions he missed were intended to be related to the one above:

Instead of doing the math, deciding whether the numbers could fit logically into the comparison provided, Gabe went straight for practicality. No, Luz couldn’t paint eleven rocks; it would take too long. I guess Luz had other things to do. On the other hand, two rocks would fit neatly into Luz’s busy schedule, since those would take only a “hoat” (short?) time.

Oh, Gabe. You don’t disappoint.

(I didn’t ask what was hanging from the belly of the…fire beast? My best guess is a saddle or a weapon, not what you’re thinking. For all his craziness, Mr. Gabe has a strong streak of Puritan-like modesty in that arena. )

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November, finally/already. This whole year has been just bizarre, feeling in turns hurried and crammed, and yet creeping and slow. I don’t think I’ll miss it, though you’ll have to forgive me if I revisit that thought after finishing JFK. Could be a redeeming factor (or otherwise, which I choose not to consider right now). I think I just want to get to 2012 and see if it can be a more consistent year – though I’ll also press my luck and hope for consistently good. Don’t I just want everything?

Halloween was the same mix of strange. On the one side, both boys were in miraculous agreement as to when they wanted to finish trick-or-treating, without one howling at the moon to go home while the other begged for “just one more block.” On the other hand, their agreement stemmed from the fact that rain was blowing in our faces and wind was turning our umbrellas inside-out. Then they happily agreed that they wanted to go to a particular restaurant (a rare non-fighting event!), which was supposed to be letting kids eat free in costume. Well, apparently, that offer was good for actual Halloween night only, and our town’s trick-or-treat was happening the night before. I guess the restaurant got off lucky on that bargain; don’t know too many folks who would have been willing to re-costume the kids for the next night. Oh, well.

Gabe, by the way was “The Dread Pirate Roberts” from The Princess Bride – a choice which, while awesome, would have been obscure enough amongst the first-grade circle, but he made it more so by introducing himself all day long as “Wesley.” Sam went as a World War II flying ace, and Eric said people kept asking him if he was “The Aviator.” He just blinked.

(“Wesley” was wearing a laced black shirt beneath his leather jacket, but it was too cold to forgo the coat. Sam’s coat was part of his costume, so he was thrilled to not need adaptations.)

Gotta go get them from the bus stop!

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Somebody hopped off the bus with a plan this afternoon.

Now, we’ve had a few false starts with regards to music and my older son. Violin came to a tragic end when he couldn’t handle the idea of having (::shudder::) people adjusting his fingers for him, and he fought me every time I mentioned practicing; even lessons with the teacher, who was clearly an Educational Ninja, couldn’t resurrect his willingness to try. Choir was a a let-down for him, since it meant giving up all his recesses in the end, not simply the single one the teacher had said would be enough for the group. I don’t blame him for not wanting to do that again. And our church musicals made him uncomfortable, standing in the spotlight, so he’s the sole junior member of the scenery crew for those now.

There is a difference this time, though: with the violin, the choir, and the musicals, I have to admit to being the propelling factor. Well, can you blame me? (Don’t answer that.) I mean, music was my life for so long, how could I help but hope my son might want to share it with me? I didn’t actually force him (except for the church plays, since his age group at class is primarily based around the staging of plays for much of the year, and there’s no other class for him), but I didn’t hide my desire that he’d give them a try…and he did…for a while.

This time, I thought I’d learned, so after some initial asking whether the band started this year and whether he’d try it (“No!” he said “I don’t want to give up my recesses again!”), I let it go. Then, today, he jumped down the bus steps and said, “I want to play the trumpet!”

Okay, so I know the shtick. The band director goes around, demonstrates all the instruments for the kids and makes it sound like being in the band is the rockstar life. I can even remember my own elementary school band director doing the same thing. He let us try all the mouthpieces, and the only one on which I could make a sound that I liked was the flute, and so there I went for the next ten years before switching primary focus to piano (mostly based on instructor preference, but also on practicality; a piano is a much more useful instrument for an aspiring composer, especially with so much being done electronically). Apparently, Sam’s teacher didn’t go so far as to let them try the mouthpieces yet, but Sam liked the sound of the trumpet best.

Well, that was Eric’s primary instrument, so we happen to have a couple of them in the basement. Reasoning that, even if it goes south again, at least we can mitigate cash outlay, I pulled out some mouthpieces for Sam to try. He did a couple of times, puffing out his cheeks like Dizzy. “It TICKLES!” he yelled. After failing to get a good buzz after a handful of attempts, he sighed and said, “I guess it’s not for me.”

“What?!” I laughed. “Did you think you were going to be Louis Frigging Armstrong on your first try?” Gabe barked with laughter, and Sam shrugged and said, “Well, yeah.” At least he’s honest. I told him of my fledgling attempts and failures, and he seemed cheered.

I am not getting my hopes up again. I am not going to push it. If he wants to try this, I’m supporting him, because music education is so very important, and I want him to have every benefit I can give him. But I’ve seen what pushing brings. Time will have to tell, as it always does.

(Gonna suggest he puts down “percussion” or “flute” in the “Second Instrument Choice” blank, though. The latter will also save money, since we’ve got that downstairs, too, and the former is less likely than any of the above to hammer on his sensory issues. No spit valves there, you see. )

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SAM: “I have a very funny teacher who gives us a lot of time to read. I was very nervous at first, because I didn’t know how to act as a fifth grader, but then I got over my nerves and felt better. Two of my friends were in my class – well, three, actually – and I can’t wait to learn more in school.”

GABE: “I was scared and very nervous, because it was my first day, and I might not make any friends. But it was fun – I don’t know why I was scared! And my teacher is very nice. My favorite thing was when we were doing a scavenger hunt in my room. You have to find a friend that’s wearing red, and a friend that’s a boy, and a friend that’s a girl. And we had Spanish. I only cried at lunch, because they told us to sit where we wanted, and I sat down, and my whole class sat really far away, and I was scared, and they wouldn’t let me move. But then it was okay.”

There were some major teardrops shining in Gabe’s eyes as he got onto the bus this morning, but he had two Sharpie hearts drawn onto his wrists as a reminder of how much I love and was missing him (one wasn’t enough; he demanded one for both arms), and that seemed to help a little. Sam, meanwhile, didn’t show a blink of either excitement or nervousness until he looked around and realized that he was going to be the oldest one at the bus stop this year. Somehow, that brought it all home for him, and he was filled with the “importance of his position.”

For my part, I got in my run, and then I settled down and into the inordinate amount of paperwork required to send kids to school these days. Exciting times, I know. (RIP, acres of trees.) The boys were home, climbing off the bus (on the wrong side of the dangerous intersection, which had better not be the way things will be all year, or I won’t be the only disgruntled parent at our stop) before I could blink much, both full of stories and relieved that everything looks optimistic for a pleasant year. Hurray!

This may well be the last year they share a school. That feels momentous to me.

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I read to him, though early bedtimes often mean no story, and I tucked him in; he smiled with his eyes closed and melted into my hand as it stroked his forehead. “Mom? Can we do this every night?”

“Well…seven o’clock is pretty early for bed, Sam, don’t you think? You might wind up waking earlier than you want to.”

“That might not be so bad, with school…”

And I came downstairs, feeling both warmed at the nice time I’d spent with Sam and guilty at the idea that perhaps I’d really been neglecting him. He’s been very prickly lately, snapping at people for no reason, deliberately provoking Gabe and starting fights, rude when asked to do things he doesn’t want to do. It’s hormonal, I know, and I’m sympathetic, but it’s all new to me, too. When a kid’s refrains have become “Nobody talk to me right now” and “I just want to be alone,” it’s hard to know when he means it literally and when he just doesn’t know how to handle the storm in his brain and body.

At his eye appointment, he confessed to the eye doctor (when asked whether he’s focusing well on written pages) that he’s been sneaking out of bed at night into the bathroom, to sit and read. No wonder he’s grouchy and red-eyed in the morning.

Gabe is demanding of individual attention at all times, and Sam is pushing us away – sometimes gently, sometimes forcefully – as he heads into his tweens. It’s too easy to accept that as the way things are, to cuddle Gabe close while letting Sam drift. I’d already been giving Sam more and more privacy (both in our home and, if it hasn’t been obvious, online), but then moments like last night happen, and I get smacked in the face with the realization that it’s the toddler years all over again, when they push away for independence, then come careening back in terror when they think they’ve gone too far.

Instead of the terrified return, though, the reaction is subtle and easier to miss. The slight clinging to my hand as I stroke his head in the dark…the suggestion of a bike ride…the request to sit next to me in a restaurant. If I don’t pick up on it, he lets it go so easily, so easily, and maybe next time it won’t even be there at all. This is how it happens, maybe. I guess it’s different for all of them, but maybe this is how my Sam grows up and away.

He’s so young for ten. That makes sense to people who have or work with kids; there are ten-year-olds who act their age and more, and then there are ten-year-olds who cling to their “little kid” years with their fingernails, trying so hard not to go on. Sam’s in the latter camp; only moving into “big kid” activities when the closest of his peers can convince him that it’s worth the exploration. He’s the boy who’ll happily carry a stuffed animal with him into the grocery store, oblivious to any strange looks he’ll receive; he’s the one who wanders through stores, looking for something shiny to hang around his own neck, looking startled and appalled when clerks try to suggest he might be shopping for a girlfriend. Knowing that about him, it’s easy to forget that time is passing so fast that none of us had better blink.

He starts fifth grade on Thursday. If you can believe that, you’re doing better than I am.

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There were eye drops involved. No coincidentally, there was screeching and red-faced struggling, as well. In his defense, halfway through the appointment, he did stop, unprompted, to say, “I’m sorry I said mean things.” That’s my Gabe: shoot first, apologize later. (And, also in his defense, Sam did corroborate his story that the drops stung.) The eye doctor was very gracious and said that, aside from the drops tantrum, Gabe did very well. He even refrained from saying “I told you so” when she told him he didn’t need glasses (he had insisted quite loudly that this was the case, as she stood over him with the eye drops)…though he did barely restrain the eye roll when she had asked him to tell her when the letters on the screen started to “turn all fuzzy.”

“I know what ‘blurry’ means,” he said, sounding slightly offended.

So, I think that’s all the body parts that need checked, cleaned, or trimmed before school starts next week, which is a good thing for my nerves. I can tell they’re really fraying, because I lost my temper and laid down the freaking law last night at dinner. Among other things on their plates was a tiny slice of grilled zucchini, and you’d have thought it was fresh excrement from their reactions. After one too many rude remarks from Sam, I made a decision: “That’s it! I have one more zucchini in the fridge, and it’s for dinner tomorrow! And I’m hitting the farmer’s market for more zucchini, and there’ll be zucchini at every dinner from now on until it gets eaten without a fuss!”

Anybody got any good zucchini recipes? I’m thinking a gratin, maybe…

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We were watching the construction crew across the street demolish an old driveway. A forklift was loading slabs of concrete onto a pickup truck, where a couple of guys attacked them with sledgehammers to break them into smaller pieces. Gabe looked thoughtful.

“I’ve always wanted a sledgehammer,” he said. I asked him why. He eyed me. “It’s complicated,” he said, waving his hand.

Sam, meanwhile, terrifies me in other ways. Little Mr. Daredevil wasn’t technically breaking any rules as he whipped up and down the street on his bike, but with all the construction equipment (small stuff, but still), he was making me nervous. I told him to get on the sidewalk.

“But, Mom! You told me I wasn’t supposed to ride like that on the sidewalk, since this is a serious bike, not a toy!” Well, true. I told him it was just the equipment, so he obliged…and came blurring down the sidewalk, moments later, barely clearing Gabe and me as we stood there. I told him to slow down for sidewalk riding; he gave up and went inside. (I did suggest, before he did, that he go over to the bike trail, which interested him until I reminded him that, as it was an hour before bedtime, he couldn’t really go on any really long trail rides.)

Is my hair grey yet?

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Well, somebody had the audacity to wake up ten years old this morning. Can you believe that? The nerve! I told him to knock it off right this instant and go back to being the little ball of baby he’s supposed to be, but he just giggled at me! In a voice that, while not exactly changing yet, is way deeper than the giggle I know he had yesterday, when he was pushing his little Elmo lawn mower around the yard, or even playing on a blanket, surrounded by soft toys. That was yesterday, wasn’t it?

Or perhaps not. This Sam has huge feet, and he’s “maybe, sort of” interested in girls, perhaps. This one wobbles wildly between sweet and gentle and filled with raging hormones with which he’s only barely acquainted at this point and has no hope of controlling. He uses that shower gel that’s supposed to surround you with women wild to run their hands through his hair. (Hasn’t happened yet, thanks this mom.) He rolls his eyes at the injustice of having parents who refuse to buy him video games that feature eviscerations and flying intestines.

But he actually cooed this morning when he saw the origami crane and butterflies his great-grandma sent him in his birthday card. He snuggles stuffed animals, and he sees absolutely nothing wrong with taking them out to dinner in restaurants with him. He draws in notebooks, frequently and with great detail. He still can’t quite wrap his mind around schoolwork and organization skills that many kids his age are beginning to handle with ease. And he’s singing to himself in the kitchen right now, completely without self-consciousness: “It’s my birrrrrrrth-day! Happy birrrrrrth-day!”

This Sam chose a bike for his birthday, as he did four and six years ago.

  

The bikes keep getting bigger. That’s easier for me to focus on noticing, not the fact that the kid riding them is also growing, up to my chin with no signs of stopping. In the end, it’s still the same look on his face as he flies down the street, laughing at the wind in his face and loving the way he can move so fast, riding farther and farther away from home, away from me.

And then he turns, looks back, and flies back to me. For now.

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After we left, we had another, longer talk. He was utterly appalled, thankfully, and I was very relieved that he hadn’t taken the time to help Gabe sound out the words on the locker. Thankfully, Gabe was uninterested in the actual vocabulary used; he was far more freaked by what had caught Sam’s eye first: the rest of the sentence, which made reference to hanging. (Can I just say, once more, that these are the milestones you really, really don’t want?!) I told them both that the sort of people who write those things on lockers are usually cowards, the sort of people who would probably drop the pen and run if anybody caught them at it.

I didn’t say that they wouldn’t have had much to worry about, anyway, being the “right” color of skin for this racist vandal. That lesson, the one about privilege, can wait.

I hope the graffiti is gone when the kids enter the locker room next time. Honestly, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m a little less comfortable sending them in there next time than I was today. The time they go in, the locker room is full of young kids, not grownups, but I don’t like it. Sadly, Sam’s just undeniably too old for me to take him in the women’s or the family locker room, even if Gabe wasn’t hitting the borders of that stage, himself. I felt fine about Sam being in there with Gabe before today. Now we’ve hit yet another of those bumps that make me want to whisk my family away to some safe, clean place…that doesn’t really exist, I know, but I can’t help wishing, and mourning yet another loss of innocence.

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SAM: “Okay, I want to stop working.”
ME: “How many days do you have left?”
SAM: “…not counting days 14 and 15…five.”
ME: “So, seven?”
SAM: “Yeah.”
ME: “You had nine left when you started. It’s taken you this long to do two, and at that speed, there’s no way you’ll finish tomorrow without crazy work.”
SAM: “Okay, but can I at least take a break until four o’clock?”
ME: “That would be fine. But no arguing when I say it’s four, and you need to get back to-”
SAM: “ALL RIGHT! I’ll work now!”
ME: “Um, okay…”
SAM: “Stop talking to me! I said I’d work now!”
ME: “Okay.”
SAM: “STOP SAYING OKAY!”
GABE: “…I’m almost done my Lego guy.”
SAM: “NOBODY TALK!!!”

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The kids brought home their new school pictures.

  

And I insta-aged about ten years, just looking at them. Seriously, between Sam’s “too cool to giggle out loud” facial expression and Gabe’s Casanova-ish swagger, I just…where did my babies go? I think I’ll just make myself feel a little better:

Ah, yes. There they are.

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It can be really tough to be somebody’s hero sometimes.

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Also, apparently Gabe works better if the bath toys used for the babies’ “splash class” are incorporated. Yes, my six-year-old will doggedly swim across the pool to reach a green rubber ducky. I don’t know what that says. Nor do I care.

Sam, meanwhile, is doing splendidly, outside than his reluctance to put his face in the water and risk getting water up his nose. I keep trying to tell him that if he puts his face in flat, instead of up and down, and if he breathes out of his nose, it’s not likely to be a problem, but so far, he hasn’t gotten the knack, so he keeps getting his sinuses soaked. It’s not dampening his enthusiasm, though; despite being the oldest one in the group, he also seems to be the least reserved about things, so I could hear him gleefully hollering from across the room, “CHICKEN…AIRPLANE…SOLDIER!!!”, swimming his arms in the accompanying pattern as the teacher towed him along on his back. (Part of the shouting was due to his ears being submersed; when he reached the end of the pool and stood, he asked, “Was I yelling?”)

Three more lessons. I don’t know if either kid will “graduate,” but at least there’s increased comfort in the water. Gabe was most impressed with his progress last night, asking me if I was proud of him, over and over. I tried to tell him that I’m always proud, but he knows well enough to be able to compare the previous weeks’ efforts with last night’s. He knows there was a difference, and I think we’re turning a corner.

(So long as next week doesn’t involve face-dunking, anyway.)

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Gabe scribbled and drew during choir practice, stopping frequently to ask me questions about what was going on and what we were singing. He tried to sing along with a couple of the songs, but that seemed like too much work before long. Sam didn’t appear, but I figured he had found a friend or a class full of toys, so no big deal; there were enough people we knew around the church that he wasn’t going to get into much trouble. Besides, I was a little distracted by “Why do the boy singers sit in the back?” and “Why isn’t she using a stick to conduct? Is she dancing?” and “Why are the microphones hanging so high? Do we need to yell?”

After rehearsal ended and we began getting ready for service, Sam wandered in. He…didn’t look so good. His face was a little red, he looked tired, and he said his head hurt. He sat on the pew next to Eric, giving off waves of miserable. Eric questioned me with his eyes, but I said that Sam had been fine over dinner, so he could probably make it through church. By partway through the first hymn, I leaned over to him and suggested that he go get one of the “Quiet Bags” fro the back of the church, since drawing usually cheers him up. He wandered out toward them, and he never returned. (He found a couch in the narthex instead, curling up and dozing.)

Meanwhile, Gabe was anything but unobtrusive. There were moments where it was okay; the pastor asked us to call out things for which we were grateful, and Gabe piped up, “My mom!” He also said the Lord’s Prayer with us, loudly and slightly out of sync, so everybody around us could hear. When the choir got up to sing, though, he began to panic and wanted to come with me. Plenty of chuckles around us; one man said, “Aw, let him come up!” I knew that wasn’t the answer, so I tried to get him to just sit in the front pew instead, where he could see us (and we could see him). Seemed okay…until the piano started, and Gabe got up to dance. For the record, I don’t think “The Monkey” can be legitimately construed as liturgical dance. I heard more laughter, and I tried to motion for him to sit down and knock it off.

Our director, in the middle of conducting, whispered for him to sit. He didn’t. He started to get agitated and unhappy. I envisioned myself having to jump down from the stairs and take him out of the church, midway through the song. The director eventually grabbed him and took him to stand in front of her for the second part of the song, where he was happier but more curious; I saw him try to pepper her with questions as she tried desperately to just get us to the double bar. (By the way, he was marched up to apologize to her after the service finally ended.)

So the sermon started, and he listened with half an ear while he scribbled more. I actually didn’t think he was listening at all, but I was wrong; when the word “ashes” was spoken, he was on his feet like a shot, ready to RUN to the front and get ashed. Had to hold him back until his turn came, at which point he cooperated nicely. When we got back to the pews, though, he started to cry. “This is making me SAD!” he whispered. “Jesus DIED!”

Service ended; the pastor invited Gabe up to blow out the candles on the altar. Went and retrieved Sam; bundled up and fled. Gabe may not be ready for primetime, but he does keep us on our toes.

(Sam’s home from school today; the fever’s getting hotter and hotter. Poor kid!)

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Ash Wednesday today. We’ll be at the church service tonight. Last year, Gabe was highly resistant to me talking about any of it, but this year, he’s a little more receptive. He even went so far as to very generously suggest that he give up his swimming lessons for Lent. Yeah, sure, little man. (I overheard the man I presume is in charge of the swimming lessons talking to Gabe’s teacher yesterday after lessons, telling her that she needed to “get tough” with Gabe. I actually agree; Gabe spent about 85%+ of the lesson standing next to the pool, wringing his hands and weeping loudly, while the teacher made a couple of attempts to encourage him to jump in and participate on his own. That was not going to happen in any universe; he needed somebody to take a firm hand and make the decision for him. It’s one of those things that he’s built up in his head as a horrible, terrible thing, and he’s not going to be able to wrap his mind around the possibility of being wrong until somebody presses it and shows him so. I eventually went and stood beside him next to the pool, doing everything I could to encourage him, but I wasn’t in the water to catch him, so he wasn’t buying it.

Sam, of course, had tremendous fun again. His only issue came when the teacher had to tell him to stop getting away from the wall when she wasn’t helping him dog paddle up and down the lane. This could have been a serious issue…was he not about a foot taller than most of the other kids in the class, well able to stand flat-footed on the bottom of the pool and in no danger. But he needs to listen, so that’s that. (Second verse, same as the first…)

Hmmm, I think Sam’s head might be feeling better; he’s perking up enough to play with Gabe – and giving me resistance about combing his hair and finishing getting ready for school. Better go deal with that now!

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More swimming lessons today. Cross your fingers we have more success with Gabe than we did last week.

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Sam samples a tiny taste before it hits the table. “It’s okay!” he says with a polite smile. I give him a small portion on his plate, which he picks at and picks at and shoves around with his fork, before he finally gives up. “I didn’t really like it,” he says. “I guess I was just saying that.”

Gabe clamps both hands over his mouth, refusing to even look at the new food. Attempts to get him to take a teeny taste are met with gagging (before the fork enters his mouth) and tears. He nibbles on the few items on the table that he recognizes (last night, it was dry taco shells and some bits of grated cheese). Just as I’ve given up, he suddenly folds. “I want you to be PROUD of me!” he says. “I’ll try to taste something new so you’ll be HAPPY!” And he unflinchingly pops a small bite of the offending food into his mouth, which he doesn’t enjoy, but which he chews and swallows. “There! I did it!”

Two sides of the same coin. At our parent-teacher conferences last week, most of the shared teachers (music, art, etc.) said that they wouldn’t have even known they were brothers if I hadn’t brought them in together. I can tell, though.

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And that’s pretty much how the whole thing went.

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My summarization ended with him shouting, wide-eyed, that he did not want to read it. “I don’t want to think about that! What if that happened for real?!”

I battled mentally with myself, Eric and I significantly silent for a moment in the front seats of the car, before saying something along the lines of, “I would hope people would stop things before they reached that point.” That seemed a bit lame, so, remembering a previous talk, I said, “This is why we’re learning about citizenship in Scouts. It’s important to know your rights. You have to know them in order to hold onto them.”

We all talked some more, discussing specific Constitutional rights (some of which he knew, some of which he didn’t), and I left the talk feeling moderately okay; there’s still plenty to discuss, and I thought the door was open for him to explore and ask more questions. He was thoughtful, which seemed like a good sign.

And then we woke up to this. Looks like I get to do some more discussing today. Wish I wasn’t trying to deal with a bad head cold at the same time; these conversations are tricky enough when your brain isn’t fogged up with Nyquil.

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For Valentine’s Day, I got Eric a carry-on suitcase, since he travels so much for work and his current carry-on bag has a busted zipped. This one rolls and is much nicer. He asked me whether I wanted him to get me a gift, and I told him no. This dinner, the one he was planning and for which he was not giving me any tempting details, was going to be more than enough of a gift. I was very, very right.

I had mentioned in passing to him that a blogger I follow had very concisely described the vegetarian approach to meal planning as being “a bean, a green, and a grain.” Eric took that and ran with it. Now, he’s not a vegetarian, but he planned four lovely vegetarian courses (the garlicky lentil soup was actually vegan) that left us both feeling perfectly satisfied in both belly and mouth. This beats flowers or boxed chocolates any day of the week, in my book! (I actually want to get him to write down the recipe for the soup, which, like most of the meal, he developed himself; it would be a perfect carbing-up meal for the days before a race).

Running is going adequately. My foot is fine; my groin is mostly recovered. I suppose all things work as they ought to, since I wouldn’t have had time for a long long run this weekend, anyway; Sam’s Scouting pack has “Mike Fink’s Winter Challenge” this weekend, which will involve spending a very long day out in the snow, playing games and such. It’s warmer this week and supposed to rain between then and now, so there’s a good chance the day will be spent in icy slush instead of snow, but I guess that’s what boots are for!

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“If somebody has been burned,” the mother leading the meeting said, “put the burn under running water until it stops hurting.

Sam’s hand was immediately in the air. “But, what if it was a gasoline fire?”

The mother looked confused. “The treatment would be the same…” she said.

I knew where his mind was, though, so I said, “Sam, we’re operating under the assumption that the person is no longer actively on fire.” He nodded.

(Then the mother nodded, too, and said, “Yes, if they’re on fire, you want to get out a hose and douse ‘em!” I saw Sam’s eyes nearly pop out and his hand start to rise again, and I quickly patted him on the back before he staged a coup and took over the meeting entirely. )

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Ugh. So today, in what was not a shining example of parenting finesse, I taught Gabe the old “I am rubber and you are glue” technique. NOT as a rebuttal, mind you; I said it was just something he could, you know, keep in his head, so when Sam called him a name, he could just giggle and imagine in bouncing back. I guess some things are universal, though, because he immediately ran to tell Sam, and soon enough, they were all, “No, I’M rubber! YOU’RE glue!” back and forth and back again. Good times.

But then there came the lunchtime post-game.

“Mom,” said Sam, “not everything bounces off rubber. Swords wouldn’t.”
“Okay, but this is just for name-calling, Sam.”
“And metal spikes.”
“And cheese,” said Gabe.
“Yeah! Shredded cheese doesn’t bounce off rubber!”
“Maybe little blocks of cheese!”
“If they were big enough! But not slices!”
“We were calling each other names, not throwing cheese!” I said, and then noticed the folks at the table next to us giving me funny looks.

School resumes tomorrow. Good thing, too; another snow day, and maybe the cheese-throwing wouldn’t have been so far-fetched…

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Sam brought home tons of unfinished classwork and homework this weekend, much of which revolved around the dreaded long division. I booted up Khan Academy, and he and I worked through lots of exercises before tackling the assignments. His sticking point is in looking at two unrelated numbers and trying to divide one into the other when the answer isn’t cleanly even. Nine doesn’t go into sixty-one well, for example, and his brain refuses to put the two together and come up with six. It’ll just take practice, which he dreads.

We’re about to get whomped with a couple of snowstorms over the next few days. I just hope the one starting tomorrow holds off until the afternoon; there’s a funeral in the morning, and though I don’t know the man who passed away, I’m singing at the service, and it would feel sad if the weather kept people from attending. (Actually had to go get a dress for the service; I didn’t really have anything that seemed appropriate. Lots of clearance sales, thankfully.) Anyway, when all’s said and done, there might be a few feet of snow on the ground, which somehow doesn’t bother me so very much. It feels like we’ve gotten off lucky so far this winter, compared to most, and we’re overdue for a whomping.

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MICKEY: “Will you help me find some gooey fish?”
GABE: “Well, I’m not sure I want to. I mean, sticky, gooey fish…why would I want to do that?”

Sam, meanwhile, is upstairs; having gotten ready for school, he’s now confined to his room to finish the homework he didn’t complete last night, which was only a small part of what he should have been doing in the first place. He forgot to put the rest of it in his backpack – even after the teacher wrote it for him in his planner. And there was a lot of it, because he apparently had trouble getting anything at all completed during classes yesterday, when he was supposed to do it. This stopped being okay a long time ago.

You know it’s bad when Gabe stands at your shoulder, muttering that maybe you need to call Sylvan Learning Center for his big brother. Of course, he’s only doing what he’s done since discovering the joys of the commercial advertisement; I can “fondly” recall him stroking my hair a year or so ago and informing me that “[your] hair is so blah…you need Bumpits! Then you’ll look fabulous!” But now he is convinced that Sam is the one in serious need of help from the tiny people inside the television.

We’re looking into more possible solutions, really. I don’t think it’s that the work is too hard, but that he gets overwhelmed and bored very easily and simply checks out mentally. Not acceptable, but a different sort of issue than if he was really unable to understand what’s being taught. And, again, it’s all so familiar to me. Been there, I have.

Anyway. The day beckons. Onward and upward, right? Nowhere to go but forward.

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Today will be “interesting.” The kids have the day off from school for Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, and Sam is really just too big to be in the gym childcare room. I found out yesterday, though, that what I thought was a Couples Membership is really a Family Membership. Sam’s too small to use weight machines (not that I’d have allowed it in any case; no prepubescent chest presses, thanks), but they said he was just fine to use bikes and such. Today, therefore, he and I are going to work together. I want to do a little less extended pedaling (see: saddle sores), so we’ll do a hacked together High Intensity Interval Training, suitable for children. Ten on a bike, jump rope (we’ll see if I can jump on one foot!), balance board, more bike, etc. I want about 30 minutes total of biking today (did 45 on Saturday and an hour yesterday), and we’ll play with the rest.

Wish me luck!

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Biggest thing on my mind right now: on Saturday evening, I did my regular long run, and in the last mile, I felt a pain on the top of my foot. I stopped and loosened my shoelaces, which made the pain disappear, but it came back very slightly at the end. I was too scared to run yesterday, though I could walk without pain and even squeeze my foot without feeling anything, and I’m a little nervous to go today. It’s above my big toe, and, as I said, I can flex and squeeze the metatarsals with no problem, so I’m fairly positive it’s not a stress fracture. Can’t stop worrying, though. Of course, it sends me into my usual tailspin of evaluating every aspect of my life and training – cutting back on coffee/caffeine, studying my calcium intake, etc. It’s not even as though I recently changed anything in a drastic way; one week of marathon training, with fewer miles than I’ve been doing, and only one “hard” workout (the pace did for the flawed pace run wasn’t challenging in itself, just wrong for what I was supposed to be doing), shouldn’t have been enough to cause overuse injury. Probably, my shoes were laced wrong. Doesn’t make me stop freaking, though…

But we played Kinect Sports as a family last night, which took my mind off it for a bit. I don’t understand how Gabe, when pitted head-to-head against me, can consistently wipe the floor with me on nearly every event. What’s that about?

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Gabe is less willing, as it turns out. In his kindergarten classroom, kids are encouraged to “write notes” to each other, which can be put into cubbies to take home later. Last week, one of his friends gave him her phone number, scrawled in crayon, which we found precious, if a little precocious; he didn’t see any sort of implications in the note, so we kept quiet. Today, he brought home a couple more notes from this girl; he only had glanced at one side of them, which featured her traced hand, along with a signature. I flipped them over…and found hearts a-plenty. Gabe, to put it lightly, was appalled.

(I will note: no actual farting happened during the filming, despite any attempts at character slander from my costar.)

I’m relieved that Sam, meanwhile, remains innocent of any further attempts at flirtation with him. He comes home with playground tales that involve both girls and boys, but unless the young lasses see romantic subplots in the recess adventures of “Spy Force Five” (which they’ve dubbed themselves, racing around and solving crimes), it’s all quite platonic. Very relieved to have boys, at moments like this. (Even when they’re fighting, as at present, over what – or whom – to blow up next on Roblox.)

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So when he said he wasn’t interested in choir, I may have pressed, though I realized I shouldn’t push and I stopped. Months later, when the actual sign-up information came home, I was surprised and pleased that he had changed his mind and was going for it. (It later became clearer; a couple of his friends were doing it, and he decided to join with them.) Not much more was said about it until he brought home a paper about the upcoming concert. He needed a white shirt and black pants, and the other parts of his outfit were to be provided by the school.

He brought home a brown bag earlier this week. “It’s my bow tie and my cubbernuckin,” he told me, and I was felled entirely. Do you know how long you have to wait between instances of mispronunciations when your child is nine years old? When they’re toddlers, and every other word is a cute little mashup of nonsense, you take it for granted, but trust me, you’ll miss it when they’re all big and intelligible.

The concert was pleasant and enjoyable, much in the way that elementary school instrumental concerts aren’t. (Again, as somebody who’s been through the system quite thoroughly, I’m allowed to say that.) Sam wasn’t the most enthusiastic singer on the risers, but he participated gamely. Meanwhile, Gabe sat between Eric and me, singing along to every word he could, beating our hands to the rhythms with good accuracy, and whispering that he wanted to be in the choir when he’s in the fourth grade. They sang lots of holiday songs, including one Hanukkah tune that Gabe liked. “But it wasn’t the dreidel song I already knew,” he clarified on the way out.

“No, it was a different one,” said Sam, “and we’re learning another song in Hebrew.” After a beat, he mused, “You know, Hanukkah really isn’t much about Jesus…”

…and I was felled again. Twice in one week! A seasonal miracle! (And yes, we had a subsequent discussion about the differences between Judaism and Christianity, and why Hanukkah would be really very light on the Jesus.)

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Sam is doing better behaviorally this year – no distracting or bugging the kids sitting around him – but his grades are suffering because he’s finally hit the level where late or missing homework gets counted against the grade. And has it ever… So his teacher and I chatted, and I told her that he has a planner that he’s reluctant to use, and we’re planning to have him get it signed by both of us regularly now. He’s not failing (yet), but he could be a letter grade higher than he is in just about every subject, which is maddening. When he does do poorly on a completed assignment, the majority of the time it happens because he didn’t read the directions well. That, too, is frustrating for us.

Basically, I have two smart, well-intentioned, very human sons. Could be worse.

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Then we went over to Ulta, which was a huge mistake and blow to my ego. All I needed was a blush, since the last one I masterfully picked out (Walgreens, as usual) is somehow the exact shade of my normal skin, so you can’t see anything at all when I put it on. I figured a big cosmetic store would be better, but my brain completely freaked out at all the products all over the place – stuff I’ve never even heard of – that I spazzed and left empty-handed and feeling like I need to turn in my Girl Card.

ERIC: “Didn’t you read ‘Cosmo’ or those other magazines? Didn’t they tell you what to do?”
ME: “When I was a young teen, until Mom made me stop.”
ERIC: “The sex articles?”
ME: “No, the fact that I couldn’t really process any of the beauty stuff very well, and it was becoming…mortifying.”

Oh, I’m such a little lady, with my un-primed (seriously? Primer? Like what you put under wall paint?) face and nailless toes. Why do I even try?

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We got through Sam’s family tree project last night, or as much of it as we could do at home, anyway. He’s doing the rest at school, where there’s apparently an art class component. That certainly threw a hitch in things when we weren’t certain about the exact due date; most of the folks with kids in Sam’s grade whose phone numbers I knew had art on different days, so the due dates were wildly different. We ran into the mother of a classmate last night when we had to run out for printer ink, and when I told her we needed to print Sam’s work to take in tomorrow, I thought her eyes were going to pop out. “Chris had better not come home from Tae Kwan Do to tell me he needs to finish it tonight!” Sam assured her that he didn’t think Chris had art for at least another day.

The work itself went more smoothly last night than the night before, since we’d gotten through the “dates and places” stage and moved on to the fun information part. Sam was fascinated by how many military veterans were in our family, as well as by how many coal mining families. That part sort of freaked him out, as did the part where I went back a little further in history and mentioned how the families got much bigger and had many more incidences of “Infant Son” and “Infant Daughter.” No amount of explanation about better medical knowledge, sanitation, and general health improvements made him feel any more reassured. Sam is not my little stoic. (And I rather love him like that – not tearful and worried, of course, but sensitive to the idea of a parent’s pain.)

Tomorrow’s going to be complicated, with having to take the train down to Chicago to pick up my race packet for Saturday morning. Has to be done, though! Wish me luck!

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I was in a bad mood because of homework. Once again, Sam put off a project until the last minute, so we had to skip Scouts last night to work on it. (It’s due tomorrow, and it’s definitely more than two night’s worth of work, but that’s all we have…) This one is a “Family Tree” project, which had the potential to be interesting, but not when we have to battle through it relentlessly like this. Also, I’m a little confused about the point on the rubric where he’s called to “note ethnicity of each relative.” With the exception of two great-grandparents, every single other relative on the chart is from the Appalachian region (and those two were born there, too, even if their parents weren’t), and other than “caucasian,” I have no idea how to identify them as anything other than Appalachian. I counted, actually; you’d have to go back about eight generations to get to anything other than West Virginia for many of the lines, and a few more leaps are required to get to England for one of the lines my grandfather traced.

(I wish he was still alive for many reasons, my grandfather, but one of them would be to go over with him the family tree notebook he assembled. It’s invaluable, but some of the details are “interesting.” One distant cousin, for example, has his name followed by a cryptic note: “WW I, sheep entrails.”)

I really, really pray that by the time Gabe gets to this level of homework, Sam has either grown into better organizational skills, or else Gabe has a far different work personality. Handling two of them like this would drive me around the bend.

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Thank God I had to go down into the basement with a whining second child who needed me to check the dryer for his “skinny jeans” that weren’t in his drawer. Who knows how long that little trick would have kept going? Also, that robe wasn’t exactly organic cotton; it was going to melt long before anything else happened, so even if we got it before a fire, the smoke and stench would have been extraordinary.

(And yes, Mom, I know exactly where he gets it (says the mom who, when she was a girl, used to warm up her pajamas by briefly draping them across the top of the kerosene heater. Turns out you really shouldn’t do that, especially when the front of the PJs has plasticky pictures that melt quickly. Oops.)

Today is trying to kill me.

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On the other hand, a father of another boy from Sam’s old den was also there, and he and I briefly chatted about it. He, too, is crazy busy, but we did some figuring: with five boys who, according to the pack leader, still want to do Scouts, and with meetings every other week, that’s only one meeting every ten weeks that each of us would have to commit to running. I can manage to find a sitter for that, if Eric happens to be out of the country. So we’re going to dig up the email list and see what we can manage; the other father suggested that we phrase it, “If you want your kid in the den, you have to do a meeting,” and that sounds fine.

Meanwhile, I was doing my best to keep Gabe occupied. When he started going nuts, I frantically scanned the Android app market on my phone for a game that he could play that wouldn’t be too noisy and that wouldn’t eat up every bit of my memory. Found a very, very basic jigsaw puzzle game that he immediately latched onto, even though it was obviously geared for the preschool set. The bizarre thing? Some of the bigger boys spied him playing it, grabbed him…and the next thing I knew, Gabe was absorbed into a small herd of kids, each eager to try a turn at this game. Um, okay…

It’s been a long week already. I want my husband back home!

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Gabe, meanwhile, continues to keep me gobsmacked. Dentist appointment for both boys today, and I went in with a clenched stomach. Last time, the dentist – who is really amazingly good – spoke to the necessity of getting through one solid appointment with Gabe. Gabe was absolutely terrified, but the dentist felt that if we could just get through a cleaning with no major trauma, Gabe would see that it was all right. He mentioned the possibility of a mild sedative – not to knock him out, but to keep him calm through the worst of it. Neither of us wanted to jump to that, but when Gabe burst into tears at the sight of the light over the chair, I felt hopeless. He had tried so hard to psych himself up, but it looked like it wasn’t going to happen.

The hygienist went to get the dentist, and in the meantime while we waited, she grabbed a picture book and started reading to Gabe. About halfway through the book, I felt him tense and draw himself up. “Wait,” he said. “Are you just going to brush my teeth and that’s it?” She said yes, and after he clarified a couple more times, he said, “Okay, let’s just do that.” It took a few extra false starts beyond that, but by the time the dentist came in, she’d managed to clean Gabe’s bottom teeth. The dentist did the top, flossed, and even just barely managed to get Gabe to cooperate with a minor polish. It was very helpful that Gabe leaped to embrace the idea of the water sprayer, asking for it every few seconds and demanding to hold it, push the button himself, and generally hog the whole office’s water supply until we had to cut him off.

“I can’t wait for the next time I come to the dentist,” he said at the end. And if that doesn’t beat all, I don’t know what could.

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(And this was after I delivered a lovely little self-righteous lecture to Sam about why he needed to study the Bible, using the reference about how babies have milk, but as we grow spiritually, we need solid food. Maybe Mama needs to put down the bottle sometimes, too.)

(Not that kind of bottle. Shut up.)

I got humbled on the run today, too, though not be any particular failure on my part. It’s just hard to maintain one’s poise while having gallons of water dumped on one’s head from heavy, lightning-streaked, clouds. “Squish, squish, squish” is not the sound of victory…unless you consider victory to be not throwing in the towel as water streamed over our faces. (Ah, running club: where insanity is actually contagious.) In that case, sure, I was successful – and then we all got to sit around looking like drowned rats over coffee mugs, while the other cafe patrons eyed us significantly and not approvingly. “But I don’t want to go among mad people.” “Oh, you can’t help that. We’re all mad here.”

Is there any other way I can have the rest of my self-image shaken today? I’m a little afraid to put that out there…

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But he seems to be adjusting otherwise, at least. He had Spanish today; they learned “hola” and “adios,” though he scoffed and told me how he already knew that.

Sam…continues to attend school. He did have to write me a letter today, as an assignment, informing me of some of what they’re doing, which includes this. Pretty cool!

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Then Alysia came.

I think it’s safe to call that an “up.” We had so much fun all weekend long, including retrieving a giant aviary she’d bought on eBay. (Good friends don’t point out when their friend has obviously lost her mind, devising ways to house, not just one, but MANY birds inside their home…)

And then she went home. (Down again go I. ) And we got ready for school, and there was much excitement for my boys as they chattered eagerly about the fun they’d have. I, too, shared in the joy, and it came down to the first day, this morning, when all was in readiness, and they’d met their teachers last night, and it all seemed a definite “up.” I put their happy little butts on the bus, and I ran (yes, literally) the two miles to their school, beating them there so that I could see Gabe into his classroom.

Unfortunately, their bus was running late, so almost everybody was in the class already. I stood in the courtyard outside the window, peeping in to see if I could see Gabe. Finally, there was commotion at the doorway, as they arrived from the other side of the building. Gabe stood still in the door…chin ducked, eyes huge, lower lip wobbling.

Oh, dear.

An adult helper whispered in his ear, talked him into the classroom, and he began getting out his things. I started on the run home, not nearly as light in my running shoes as I had been on the way there. I didn’t cry when I took Sam to kindergarten, and I wasn’t going to cry today…until I saw that face. My baby is scared and sad at school. You can tell me about how quickly he’ll get over it, and about all the wonderful things he’s doing there, but until he’s home this afternoon and telling me himself, that’s the picture I’ve got in my head. It’s why my own lower lip is a bit wobbly now, too.

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Oh, yes; I know how to schedule my time and energy.

Right now, the kids’ workroom is getting closer to where it’s going to be; there are still things in there that need to come out, and a few surfaces that need emptied, and we need to get the computer hooked up in there, but it’s at least mostly usable space. The living room, on the other hand, was collateral damage. Sam’s desk that was in here needed to be taken upstairs, and so it needed to be cleaned out first, and…let’s just get the mental image of the whole “Snakes in a Can” gag, or perhaps a clown car spouting out passenger after unlikely passenger, because good GRAVY, I don’t see how all this madness was contained in that little wooden desk. It’s not all fitting back in there, certainly – not that it needs to, after having filled almost two large garbage bags as I emptied it. And there are still large piles, even now that the trash has been removed and the pens, pencils, crayons, glue bottles (we had six!), and other items have been organized into the craft cart. Yikes.

(But let me take a moment to just stand in amazement that I am the mother of a kid who can actually help lift and carry a heavy wooden desk up two flights of stairs. Of course, the same son collaborated with another boy just older than him yesterday in maneuvering a few other mid-sized pieces of play furniture into the back of a car without so much as being asked to, so maybe it’s not so shocking, but it continues to be so to me.)

So, I press on. And Gabe is a little confused but game about the how and why of all this commotion; he knows that it’s related to his starting school, and he knows that he’ll be doing more Work in the near future, but he’s still trying to fill the emptied desk drawers with toys and to decide whether he’s willing to let Sam continue to work at the desk, now that it’s been declared community property.

Back to work!

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Found out yesterday that Gabe got assigned to what’s been reported to me as the “easier” of the two kindergarten classes. Not that they use different curricula or anything, but I guess one teacher prefers a “sit down and write” approach, while the other is a bit more chill about things, and Gabe got the latter. I hope it works out and makes things pleasant for him, though he did do better at the less play-based preschool than he did at the opposite. We’ll see. For some reason, the kid who’s never been scared of school is now telling me that he’s afraid of kindergarten. His reason? “I won’t be in the same class as Sam.” Well, he’s never been before! Maybe he was hoping it’d be like Wednesday night class at church, where when he graduated from the nursery, it was to sit next to his big brother. In any event, this all started coming out after I read him Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus, where she went to kindergarten; it was a wild romp of naughtiness that reminded me so much of him, but perhaps Junie’s apprehension of the bus let Gabe feel free to express his own anxieties. Poor guy. I reassured him that what Junie needed was what he’ll have: a big brother on the bus.

Sam got the teacher about whom we know nothing, good or bad. Keeping fingers crossed that he finally, finally, didn’t get the strict one. Not that there’s anything wrong with firmness, but after a few years, I think he’s served his time and has earned the right to the smiley teacher who giggles a lot, right? (Maybe I’ve earned it, too?)

Anyway. Supposed to be hot today, and I’ve got seven miles scheduled. I should work hard on waking up a little more, or I might doze right off in the middle of the run.

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Everything here is…going. Nothing wild, nothing wonderful, nothing much new. I did volunteer at a local half-Ironman triathlon last weekend, which was a lot of fun.

I handed out sports drink at an aid station along the run route and got rather sunburnt. But I looked and felt better than some of those athletes, though; it was super-hot, and some of them were pretty destroyed by the time they got to us.

My running has just about recovered from Devil’s Lake, and I’m ensconced in training for the Haunted Hustle, now that Eric’s fairly certain he’ll be in the country for me to run it. That’ll be fun. I don’t know whether to set a time goal or just have fun; think I’ll leave that decision for a little further out, when I can wrap my brain around it a bit better. It’s only been a couple of weeks, after all. There won’t be pace groups or anything like we had at Green Bay, which was a big help to me. This weekend, I’m scheduled for thirteen miles (already? Again?), and it’s supposed to be flirting with thunderstorms, but I’ll manage. Ran in the rain this morning, and it’s not bad, even if it does slow me down a touch. (That was the dark, too; this morning nearly hit two points of my “Do Not Like” trifecta – heavy rain/snow, dark, and strong winds – that will sway me towards the treadmill when all three are touched. But the rain wasn’t all that heavy, and the darkness was lifting, so there wasn’t really much temptation there – just a slower-than-usual pace.)

The kids are kids. Gabe is doing fantastically in his summer class, with his teachers praising him to the heavens. Sam is doing well, too, though he’s had some issues with the older kids in his class, some of whom are naturally a bit sneery at the younger kid who’s there voluntarily instead of having been placed there for being behind. That’s been hard on Sam, and I don’t know if I’d have made the same decision to put him there had I really anticipated it. (He didn’t make things easier on himself by cheerfully announcing on the second day, “I’m here because I’m really good at reading!” ) His teacher’s standing up for him, thank goodness, but…I’ll breathe a sigh of relief when it’s over next week.

Summer is going quickly. How did that happen?

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Sometimes, it happens with other kids, too, if he’s caught by surprise. Today, while I was with him at his summer school (a tale of mishaps, that; the brief version is that his computer class got canceled, but the principal arranged to put him into a reading class at a level above his grade, so it’s fine), and a couple of kids passing in the hallways yelled, “Hey! I know you!” Sam froze, total deer-in-the-headlights. I prompted him with a whisper to smile and say hello, so he did, but it was glaringly obvious that he had no idea who these kids were. Undaunted, they pressed on. “You were at that festival with the bikes!” Sam’s smile slipped a little. “Yeah, you were doing all the tricks! I liked the frog-jumping one! I’m working on that one now!” And they waved madly as they kept going. Sam grinned a very sickly grin, nodded, and turned away.

“Um, Sam?” I said. “I’m pretty sure you don’t know them. I think they have you confused with somebody else.” He looked even more baffled. “I mean, can you do bicycle stunts? And have you ever performed them at a festival, for an audience?”

“No,” he said. “I can do a wheelie, though.” He looked back at the boys, confused. Poor kid; life’s tricky enough without being mistaken for Evel Knievel, especially when you lack the social skills to credibly deny it.

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Or not. Perhaps it’s a little too vivid, if surreal.

He’s having a swimming party this year, and going along with our track record of fearing the unknown when it comes to planning birthday parties (you just don’t know what the weather will do around here), we booked an indoor hotel pool for it. Not too pricey, considering that it includes a party room for cake and gifts. Considering Gabe’s strong feelings about outdoor insects, also, it seemed prudent to plan for climate control. Interestingly, we’ve already far exceeded our usual rate of RSVPing this year (love not knowing if more than one or two guests are coming three days out from the party…); perhaps it’s the allure of the pool, or perhaps it’s a fluke, but I’ll take it.

But that’s not for a bit (the party is well after his actual birthday, due to scheduling stuff). I can’t wait to see his face when he discovers what we’re doing this weekend to celebrate his actual birthday… I anticipate much happy screaming on his part, as well as on his brother’s.

Just think: nine years ago, I was reaching the end of my rope, wondering if I’d ever have this child who was stubbornly refusing to make his downstage exit. Now…

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A rare appearance by him. I have so many more videos and pictures of Gabe lately, it seems, because Gabe is always all over me, yelling, “TAKE MY PICTURE!” or “MAKE A VIDEO OF ME!” Sam is more reticent. It’s nice when I can get him to share. He is just getting so big lately! He’s past my shoulder now, which is simply unacceptable. Of course, I’m short, and we’re still holding out hope he inherited taller genes. Really, though, would it be too much to ask for nature to allow me to grow taller while he does? (Sure would make those kitchen cabinets a little less annoying. Also, capri pants. I’d love to not look as though I just shrunk my trousers.)

So now I have a fourth-grader (despite Sam’s reluctance) and a kindergartner. And they’re both out playing in the neighborhood right now, which is the most bizarre thing ever, because how can I have kids that just…go, and I’m left saying, “Don’t run off and leave your little brother behind!” (I know he won’t, and even if he would, I would quickly HEAR ABOUT IT from Little Mister Indignant.) Shouldn’t somebody be sitting in my lap? Shouldn’t somebody be in that bouncy chair over in the corner…now, wait, what happened to the bouncy chair? I could swear it was here and occupied, just last night…

Everybody’s having babies, too, which goal I want to clarify quickly is not shared by us. No more babies; not even to try for a redhead (the question I get asked more often than the “trying for a girl” one). Nobody appears to be missing from our family, which is sort of the litmus test we use for such things. Still, it feels as though, with that decision made, we’ve officially moved on to the next stage of things, while many of my friends are opting for another go-around on the first ride. Honestly, this new stage is scary in its own right. New doors open, and all the things that were so very, very important in recent memory are fading. A brand new baby products store just opened downtown, and it looks awesome, but…*sigh* Somebody buy something nice for me, okay? (Well, not for me, you know. In my stead. As I would have liked to, had I a current need for a fleece diaper cover or teeny little twee moccasins.)

Caveat: the first person to try to “console” me, evil glint in his or her eye, with all the fun I’ll have shopping for aftershave, jockstraps, or prom boutonnieres gets it between the eyes.

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Been dealing with some behavior issues from Sam lately, to which I alluded when I mentioned his allergy testing. It’s nothing malicious or even mischievous, honestly; it’s just plain old, garden-variety scatterbrainedness. Talking when he should be. Fiddling with things in his desk instead of paying attention. Not participating in class, to the point where he has no idea what they’re discussing. It’s driving his teachers, and us, crazy. I talked to Mom yesterday, and I begged her for every horror story she could give me from my own childhood. “I’ve tried to forget most of them!” she laughed. “Try harder to remember,” I said.

I was chronically tardy, unwilling to cooperate or participate in class. Going through my desk was always a terrifying adventure of discovery. Mom despaired of ever reaching a happy ending with me, and nothing worked to change things, until I hit sixth grade and suddenly everything resolved on its own. She also claims never to have said, “I hope you have kids just like you someday!” but I think I don’t believe that. Somebody must have, anyway.

Hopefully, the allergy med adjustments will help; I seem to recall that they have in the past. In any case, I’m also willing to try “helping” by providing incentive to work harder. Sam’s never been one to follow trends (I blogged once, long ago, that when I asked him what kids at his school were “into,” he said, “Math?”), but from what I’ve heard from other places, Silly Bandz are the Hot New Thing that All The Cool Kids Have. (I also find it amusingly fitting, as a couple of people have suggested having Sam wear a rubber band on his wrist, snapping it when he catches his attention wandering.) Perhaps if he can go a week with no notes being sent from school, we can treat him to some of these; the price is certainly right. (Each of these packs was a buck.)

Ugh. Well, school just let out; I need to try to call and touch base with his teacher now, before she leaves the building.

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Poor Sam, on the other hand, is still emotionally recovering from yesterday, when he had a recheck on his allergies. It’s been a long time since he was examined thoroughly, and back then, we were assured that he might grow out of some of those allergies and possibly into new ones. Recently, he’s been acting as though he’s allergic to pollen, for which he didn’t test positive back then, so I figured it was high time he got rechecked. This time, it was 52 pricks to the skin, and they were on his forearms, and he suffered much more visibly. It wasn’t just overreaction, either; one of his arms, the one exposed to tree and grass allergens, was visibly inflamed almost immediately from wrist to elbow. Poor kid has himself some nasty ragweed and related weed sensitivities. He’s also allergic to cats now. That’s just the icing on the cake, as far as he was concerned. So he’s on a new regimen of meds, which I hope helps in short order. It would probably explain some of the attention issues he’s been having in school lately; the doctor affirmed that.

Tangentially, the yard is in serious need of mowing. I suppose I’ll need to be ever more diligent about that from now on; can’t have the boy too miserable to play in his own back yard!

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Really, what’s it say that the road trips up and back intimidate me as much as the actual running? Not to mention the packing and trying not to forget anything. Travel races are rough that way.

Last night, Sam asked what else we’d be doing there. “The Expo, for one thing,” I told him.

“What’s an expo?”
“It’s a…” I floundered, trying to multi-task unsuccessfully and subsequently losing my ability to communicate. “A thing.”
“Oh. I think I’ve been to something just like that,” he replied, without a hint of giggle.
“GO TO SLEEP.”

If anybody cares to track me, which you can do via text message or email, my bib number will be 1301. I’m not entirely sure what my finishing time will look like, since it’ll be warm, but maybe not too warm? I plan to stick with the four-hour pace group, but I’m not dying on that hill; if the weather warms up and I feel like it would deplete me too much to try to stay with them, I’ll fall back with no regrets. This is NOT my A Race. I have to have some reserves in the tank, finishing strong, ready to keep moving. This is a training run.

1 Corinthians 9:26
“Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air.”

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Sam will be doing the run in new shoes. Last night, before he and I started getting ready to go play Ultimate Frisbee at his Scouts den meeting, I picked up one of his sneakers and looked at it. The upper part of the shoe was completely unattached to the bottom for about two or three inches across the front; it looked like a hobo’s shoe. “Sam!” I said. “You need to let me know before your shoes get to this point!”

“I didn’t notice,” he said, which…Bill Cosby may have been right when he talked about how “all kids are brain damaged.” It’s been raining like crazy for days up here, and this hole looks to be entirely not new, so Young Man has been walking around with cold, wet toes.

So we ran by the shoe store before Scouts, because, well, see: the aforementioned rain. No way could he be running around in puddles and mud with his current shoes (now that I’m aware of their state). I led him to the shelf holding shoes in his size, where he immediately latched onto the idea of a pair of trail running shoes. They didn’t have them in his size, so he gravitated toward the Saucony running shoes. Gee, think somebody’s being affected by what he sees?

Eric was a little baffled by it, when we got home, but I’m actually feeling quite encouraged. “You chose running shoes,” Eric said to him, “so now you have to run.”

“I’m going to! We’re going on a run today! And I have a race tomorrow!” And if we can keep the pep in his voice that I heard in those sentences, I will be one happy runner-mama.

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Yeah. No.

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I’m running the Mount Pleasant Half-Marathon on Saturday, and I was talking to him about it. When I showed him the website with the name of the race on it, he said, “Why is it called ‘Mount Pleasant,’ since it’s going to hurt?”

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At least it’s a running step-back week, so I won’t be running for huge amounts of time either day.

I think we’re going to have to split up for parts, with Eric attending the Classic while I take the boys to the movie night. The alternative means running around wildly and crossing fingers that nothing crops up. Of course, we don’t have to attend anything except the choir rehearsals and the performances; nothing else has received our official commitment yet. I think I’ll avoid telling the boys about most of the events; that way, if we have to skip something in the interest of sanity, they won’t be too disappointed.

*I am really not looking forward to shepherding Sam through these. He’s not good about accepting help graciously, but he also gets horribly intimidated by what he perceives as large amounts of work. Either I leave him to his own devices and listen to him complain at the top of his lungs while avoiding putting actual pencil to paper, or else I sit with him and have to repeatedly ask him to quit abusing me and my good graces. What usually happens is an alternation of the two, with me getting up and leaving each time he gets toxic because I’m not doing the work for him, then returning when he panics, apologizes, and freaks out over the whole thing. (I don’t immediately return, mind you; I’m not trying to perpetuate the cycle.) It’s miserable all around.

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I remembered the traumatic parts in the story after he’d chosen it, but he insisted that he could handle it. I’m really not looking forward to his reaction to what happens to the brother. Oh, well; I don’t have any sort of lingering issues from when I read it, I guess.

Man. He keeps drowsing, too. I’m not the only one for whom this has been a long day. Read, kid, read! Thankfully, he’s on the last page of the chapter, or else I’d throw up my hands and declare it an exercise in futility.

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Sam is not a bookworm, a fact that rips me inside. He likes books; don’t get me wrong. What he likes, though, isn’t the story or the drama. He likes the information he can glean from the pages. He likes the facts, the figures, the diagrams. He enjoys reading about the sinking of the Titanic, studying the cutaway illustrations to see where the flaws lay. He relishes studying the names of various trains and planes, knowing which ones are the fastest and which ones are the biggest. In short, he’s male.

When I worked at the library, I came to see that, yes, there is a difference between how boys and girls approach reading, as much as my feminist heart wanted to decry it. Exceptions acknowledged, for the most part, it was the girls who skipped into the stacks, hauling out troves of their favorites to take home with them. It was the boys who were dragged in by their moms, who were muttering things like, “I don’t care what book you pick, but pick one!”, and the boys who would sigh mightily and grab the nearest book to hand without even glancing inside it. (Funny how I so rarely saw a father filling the role of the dragging parent.) We librarians even kept a list of books handy that might entice boys’ interests. We lauded the creation of Guys Read.

And now I have my own little guy who would much rather draw or play than flip pages. I cringe, but I look at his father, who is one of the smartest men I’ve ever met…and who isn’t much of a recreational reader, either. He loves books deeply, but he primarily reads for purpose. That’s reasonable and good, and I respect that in him. How can I adjust my thinking to respect it in Sam?

He’s reading this morning, though. Last night spiraled into family chaos, and I wound up fleeing to the bookstore alone to select his book (after him telling me he wanted a “city” book). After much searching, I came home with a couple candidates, and he chose Number the Stars. He read some last night, and this morning he read a little more at my gentle request. No urging required! He says it’s “great,” though without much enthusiasm; I’m keeping my fingers crossed that he’ll find some excitement in it as he goes deeper. If not…maybe he’d prefer a history text over a fictionalized tale. Maybe a compilation of World War II tank diagrams is more his speed. (Hard to write a book report on that, unfortunately. Why must all report assignments presume a preference for fiction?)

They just keep on growing, keep on changing. I guess my best bet is to continue to surround him with as many choices and chances for learning as possible, not steering it in the direction of my own tastes, even unconsciously. Eric and he have recently been talking about electricity and circuits, following an assignment from school. I know nothing about that, and, honestly, I have no desire to even know about it. That doesn’t make it less worthy of his energy, of course! It’s all up to him to pick his paths, and I’ll be content…so long as he’s learning, learning, and never stopping the learning.

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On the other hand, it feels weird today because I’ve started into the training plan, and what would ordinarily be a running day suddenly wasn’t. I dropped Gabe off at school, and suddenly everything felt off-kilter. I went to the gym (which Karri found amusing: my “rest” day) and did strength work, and then I went on a walk. The morning felt so…long. Not in a good way. I suppose I’ll get used to it. The weights will do me good; I’ve been skimping on them lately, which isn’t great for me. Lifting heavy things is beneficial in so many ways, not least of which will be to strengthen my core for the trails.

Sam’ll get home here in a bit, and I have to haul him right back out to find a book for an upcoming book report. Man, I thought I was doing good, stocking up on a variety of chapter books for him, and now he keeps getting assigned book reports for which none of the books I procured are a match. This time, he has to read a book set either in a city or the country. You’d think that would be easy, but almost every book he has is set squarely in the suburbs, which I think would be stretching the point of the assignment. Meh. I’m also a little aggravated because he’s not a particularly fast or voracious reader, so we get caught in a tough spot with these reports that are due in less than two weeks. Last time, he got chastised for reading a book (Cam Jansen) that the teacher said was beneath the level he should be reading right now. Okay, fair enough, but if he’s to actually be able to finish the book and write a report within the given time frame, it has to apparently be a hard but short book. (Or, you know, she could give out a list of upcoming assignments further in advance, so we could be better prepared. Maybe she’s trying to train them to read faster as well as thoroughly?)

In other news, it was warm enough today that I wore a running skirt out for my walk. I got honked at repeatedly. I’m wondering if I should be flattered or whether they were just trying to tell me that, despite the sunshine, March in Wisconsin is in no way the season for bare legs.

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My running club buddies are finishing up their long runs right now, as I type this. Bummer. There was just no way I could rationalize doing a long run with the boys here by themselves, though, and no way I could make myself believe it would be okay to drag Gabe out in the stroller and Sam on his bike at 6 in the morning in sub-30-degree weather. Parenting skillz: I has them. So it’s the treadmill for me, where I’ll put in 12 miles while the boys are safely supervised and mostly unfrostbitten. Sam will enjoy that; he’s already had his Moment of Pique with me this morning because I made him write in a journal for a short period. See, at his conference, I found out that while he’s doing well in most areas, his weakest ones are writing-related…and I saw his most recent efforts to write on a prompt. I decided that more practice was definitely in order, and so that’s what we’re doing. He grouched and moaned and whined, but he did it; I told him that tomorrow, if he wanted, he could start doing it on the computer, which made him a little less upset, but it’s looking like I’ll have my hands full with it. Mind you, it’s not that he can’t do it; he just daydreams and mentally wanders, and the paper reflects it.

Got to get ready now. Have a great Saturday!

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But Gabe actually let the dentist hold his hands when it was all over, listening to what he was saying, with the last of his whole-body shudders and lower-lip quaking. The dentist was remarkably calm and patient through the whole thing; I think it was me, honestly, who tipped the event into the “Let’s just get it done” territory. Mom Fail, probably. But, hey, Sam did well! As well he might, considering that it’s still a distinct possibility that he could need orthodontia for the laterals that look to be coming in via the Soft-Serve Ice Cream Swirl Method.

Phew. Glad that’s over for another six months. Somebody please tell me that we’ll see remarkable strides in self-control between now and then? Doesn’t have to be the truth, so long as it’s convincing. (Not gonna go look through my archives at Sam’s history; it’s becoming less and less relevant, anyway, as Gabe grows and evermore plows his own path.)

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Unrelated, but making me smile: Sam left his copy of The Lightning Thief at school, “where I have more free time to read it!” And I think I believe him. (Little brothers do tend to interrupt quiet reading time around here.)

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Better “new”: Eric and I tried a televised, on-demand yoga workout this weekend. I’ve attempted yoga in the past, with little success, and I figured it was one of those things that A) really require a live teacher over an on-screen one, and B) are better left to people without fused-straight lower backs. Still, we did our best, and I found that I’m much better at yoga now that I’ve lost weight and can better support myself on my arms than I could before. I was surprised when Eric informed me that I was, indeed, forming a triangle when I did Downward-Facing Dog; in the past, I was more of a distorted rectangle. We’re going for it again tonight, hopefully. This could be fun, and it might help with some parts of my legs that are less flexible than others, as per the physical therapist who helped me through my ITBS a long while back.

Yesterday, we took the kids to a benefit for Dan DeMatthew yesterday, and Sam spent the whole time staring in awe at the crowd of people packed into the hall. “He must be a really nice man!” he kept saying. “All these people really like him!” Then, because he’s Sam and has his own priorities in assessing a man’s character, “Do you think he likes nature?”

Need to go flip laundry now.

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(I also sent along a note saying that while he’d recovered from his headache, he should stay inside at recess, just in case. He didn’t protest that, either, which makes me feel a little less skeptical of the whole morning.)

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Gabe is intrigued by this, as it doesn’t happen very often at all (I think this is the first sick day Sam’s had this year, maybe?). I think he may be a little suspicious. He says, “It would be bad if Sam was just pretending so he didn’t have to go to school, right, Mom? I would never do that. That would be so bad!” Then he asks when Sam will be coming downstairs and remains mystified when I tell him that he’s up there for the day. He did try to sneak up there a little bit ago (“I’m not going to the bedroom! I’m just going to the other room!”), but I’m keeping them apart in every effort to prevent the illness from spreading – and to keep Gabe from bugging Sam, of course. Sam gets headaches when he feels bad, and the last thing a headache sufferer needs is a little brother peppering him with questions, especially those questions designed to trick them into “dropping the act.”

Now, where am I going to put Gabe for his own rest time?

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Sam has been a cuticle biter for over a year, now. It’s bad. His teacher was quite irritated about it last year, but her irritation is nothing to what his poor little fingers are showing. The tips are red, scarred, and swollen-looking, and nothing we’ve tried has gotten him to stop biting. He does it when he’s stressed, and he does it when he’s distracted. Bandages, bad-tasting creams and paints, reminders after reminders…it doesn’t help for long. This afternoon, when Sam reached for something in front of my face, I spied one of his fingertips looking very nasty, indeed; it had a large, discolored bump in the middle, and I knew, just knew, it was the infection we’d been worried would arrive if he didn’t stop.

Since the doctor felt it was better to be safe than sorry, we decided to go to Urgent Care, but the news turned out to be better than our fears. (Eric had thought that if it was an infection, they might have to drain it, which would have been a nightmare.) It wasn’t infected; it was a freaking wart. Well, how was I supposed to know? I’ve never had one! Eric has, though, and he didn’t recognize it, either, so I don’t feel so bad. Anyway, the doctor did say that if he kept picking and biting at his fingers, the wart would likely spread, as well as worsen, so it ties in anyway. Sam NEEDS to stop. As it stands, the wart is “young” enough that salicylic acid and duct tape will hopefully be enough to heal it. If it gets worse, we might have to have it frozen, which I hear hurts like crazy, so there’s even more incentive for Sam to knock off the compulsion. Oh, I hope this is the end…

Not that I’m not sympathetic, as I was once a nail-biter. Still, my nail-biting never got so bad as to need or threaten to need medical attention. Yikes.

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Sam brought home math homework tonight concerning money and making change. It’s a skill plenty of adults struggle with, I think, and Sam was not finding it intuitive at all. He got pretty frustrated, actually, especially when I went over the worksheet he’d finished and found that he hadn’t gotten a single answer correct. (I’d have stopped him long before that point if I’d realized how much he was struggling, but, alas, he didn’t let on to me at all.) So I went back over the assignment with him, and, you know, it’s not that easy a concept to explain; a practical skill like change-making has a way of becoming automatic, and the brain learns shortcuts that are difficult to break down into steps for those who don’t know how to do it. But we fumbled through. As usual, the best method for getting Sam to relax and stop fighting the work was to add in the element of story and make it as fun as possible; I growled with mock frustration as the imaginary bake sale customers kept coming to me with five-dollar bills, depleting my cash box, and he giggled wildly.

I have no idea how much he’ll retain of the math part, though, so I think we’ll play some more games with it this weekend. In the meantime, I had to chill him out a bit more, since he’s actually had a few nightmares about math class. That’s no way for an eight-year-old to live. His teacher had given each of the students a small gift card to the book store at our conferences before Thanksgiving, and at my encouragement, Sam chose The Chocolate Touch. Even though we’ve been whipping through the Wimpy Kid books, this new book made for a light diversion tonight, and I have faith he’ll sleep well now. On the other hand, when we finished reading, he was yawning hard…but craving sweets. Go figure. (I’d be lying if I tried to claim that by that point, I wasn’t having my own fantasies regarding the secret stash of gourmet dark chocolate in the cupboard. Shhhh.)

GABE: “I’m not a baby.”
ME: “No.”
GABE: “I’m five, so I’m a kid.”
ME: “How old is a baby?”
GABE: “Two. Or one.”
ME: “And you’re not two.”
GABE: “I hope you decide to have another baby.”
ME: “Um. Wouldn’t count on that.”
GABE: “I think you should!”
ME: “I like the babies I already have.”
GABE: “But…!”
ME: “I know, I know. You’re not a baby.”
But you’re MY baby.

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I power-walked up steep inclines on the treadmill while Sam filled in his homework papers, and he finished pretty quickly. I’d told him to bring a game or something else that would occupy him, but he’d assured me that his science book would do the trick. Right. So there I was, trying to do strength work, while my eight-year-old stared in fascination and begged to be allowed to try the machines himself. I managed to fob him off for a while with some crunches on an exercise ball, but then he was more drawn to the punching bag hanging from the ceiling. Nobody was using it, so I let him paw at it for a few moments. Another man came over a few minutes later, strapped on gloves, and started punching, which had Sam in jaw-dropped awe for nearly the entire rest of the time we were there.

Sadly, there are no kiddie boxing gyms in our area.

Sam still wants to know when he might be allowed to use the gym like me, which is a potentially good thing; after all, a huge reason why we do this thing is to model it for our children, right? On the other hand, I’d much prefer him to be drawn to going out for a run than to lifting barbells or whatnot. He’s eight; I can’t imagine body building is a terribly appropriate way for him to be spending his physical energy. Also, I let him stretch with me when I was finished, and after seeing how well he followed my suggestions and the guidelines illustrated on the stretch-assisting device, the notion of the damage he’d be able to do to himself in short order while lifting weights is truly terrifying.

Anyway, it’s probably a moot point. Correcting his homework afterward and seeing the wild guesses he was making while distracted by the environment has shown me all I need to know about how likely I am to take him there for his homework time in the future…

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(…”but in the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you’re doing rather than to get the right answer.”)

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Doesn’t help that I’m still being a “good girl,” mostly, and sticking to my recovery plan, which is preventing me from ramping up my miles too quickly. I feel down, and running lots and lots of miles helps, but that’s something I “can’t” do right now – not and steer clear of injury. Tonight, a cross-training night, I went to the gym and hiked up a mountain on the treadmill for an hour, which was all right, but sort of like a friendly handshake when what you need is a lengthy Swedish massage. Five miles of running allotted to me tomorrow. Like Oliver, I’m all, “Please, sir, might I have some more?” only slightly more pathetic-looking.

Sam had a church play this morning. It went fairly well, though I do wish he looked a little less like he’d rather be undergoing dental surgery when he’s up on the stage. (At least he didn’t fall clean off the front of the stage, as one little girl did; the look on her face before she burst into horrified tears almost made me cry.) Sam just grimaces and does the choreography in a halfhearted, slightly delayed, manner, conveying extreme discomfort and reluctance. But he voluntarily auditioned for and was given a group solo part, which he performed without reluctance, so…I dunno. In the fall, Gabe will be in that class, too, and will therefore also be in the plays; when we told him that today, he reaction was vehemently negative. Not sure what to do; we have to attend that service, as choir members, and there’s no other Sunday School class for their age group. I don’t know whether kids can opt out or not. Of course, with Gabe, it’s likely he’ll change his mind a zillion times about being on stage before it’s even an issue.

Head hurts a little. I’m thinking early bedtime tonight, if it can be arranged.

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…and then we had practice time, and all I can say is that the first few times he has to use it, I hope he’s wearing a warm coat, since he’ll likely be standing in the driveway for a while.

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Around 4:30, there was banging at the door. One of the little girls was wailing hysterically, clutching her eye. Apparently, there were a couple of little boys in the yard that backs onto ours, and a “war” was declared, involving things being tossed over the fence. This little girl got pegged in the face.

I gave her an ice pack, and when she calmed down slightly, I sent her straight home with it (she lives across the street from us, or I’d have walked with her; as it was, she was followed by the herd of girls), and I got what I thought was the rest of the story from Sam. I couldn’t ascertain whether the throwing in our direction had been malicious or not, but it seemed a possibility, so I figured that parental involvement was unavoidable. The herd of girls, minus the injured party, returned, and we all set out. On the way, I made it crystal clear to all of them that this was not about “bad boys who hurt innocent girls.” This was about somebody getting hurt in a “game” that nobody should have been playing, and parents needing to be aware of the situation. They knew I’d be talking to their parents as well, but they were okay with that.

The two boys were waiting in front of their house, and they knew why I was there and immediately began trying to stop me. Honestly, the moment I realized which boy it was, I wanted to stop! I’d talked to this boy before, and he seemed like a really nice kid with some extremely strict grandparents who were likely to be swift with the punishment. I tried to console him, saying I wasn’t going to pin any sort of blame on him…and then the choice of whether to talk got taken out of my hands when the grandma came out on the front porch.

He wasn’t wrong. Halfway through that “conversation,” I was wishing I had stayed home. Let’s just say that even Gabe was looking appalled by the end of it. I was nearly in tears, myself.

Afterward, shaken, we went on to the other boy’s house, and then to the girls’ houses. (In for a penny, in for a pound, and I still held firm to not wanting to show partiality to the kids who had happened to be on my side of the fence.) I don’t know why I assumed everybody would be in our immediate neighborhood, but I should have checked that before hustling out the door with heeled boots on my feet and Gabe in tow; the final child lived over half a mile away, and it was quite dark by the time we got there. Thank God, there were no further fireworks at anybody else’s house. The other parents seemed glad to be informed (after all, you never know when parents of an injured child might turn around and decide to get all lawyery on everybody), but to have the incident in perspective: kids throw things, and kids act without thinking.

My feet hurt, and I’m tired. I wish I cared less sometimes.

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And to top it off, we got backed into a corner with other assignments and obligations, and now we’re probably going to have to skip Scouts tonight in order to reach the next checkpoint along the path of this project (a second “sloppy copy,” complete with illustrations, due tomorrow). So much to do, and so little time to do it all…isn’t that the story of life, though?

But this afternoon, Sam’s at school, and it’s a rainy day that’s inspired Gabe to do quiet things around the house. I’ve baked pumpkin, not for any particular reason except that I had a can of pumpkin and a need to smell something comforting. It didn’t let me down. Just imagine that I’ve put a picture here; it doesn’t photograph well, but you can’t take a photo of a smell, anyway, or of a flavor.

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He explained to me, “I didn’t want to trade, and I was sweating inside my body. My heart was unhappy, and one of my brains said no, but my other brain said yes.” He loves his friends. The idea that his friend was sad made him unhappy, but he wasn’t quite ready to be self-sacrificing, either. He left church crying, holding his toy, and begging me to “Talk to Jesus for me about it!” It’s still bothering him, and he now wants to take one of his soldier’s toy guns and send it to the friend. I told him that his friend probably has his own by now, but Gabe won’t rest easy until there’s closure and he can see that his friend isn’t sad anymore.

Last night, Sam and I went to the Eat Right Racine meeting, and honestly, other than the speaker and the group’s coordinator, Sam probably spoke more than any other person there. Every few minutes, his hand was in the air, and he was asking questions and making points that were actually pertinent and interesting. I mean, some of them were obviously kid-like (“Should we grow gardens in our backyards?” he asked once, and “What would happen if the trucks couldn’t get the local food to the people to buy it?”), but the speaker answered all he asked, and he diligently wrote down the answers as he sat without wriggling in his seat. At one point, the speaker told him that how he was sitting and listening well was obviously a sign that he was eating healthily himself.

I sort of felt a mixture of pride and embarrassment at all the attention Sam was garnering; every time his hand was raised, people were starting to look over and smile, and I had no idea what he was going to say. But it was obvious that he was taking to heart all that was said, and that seemed to impress everybody who was there. At the end, several people asked me how old he was, and one gentleman who had been sitting near us handed me his card. He works in admissions at a very, very good private school in our town, and he said he thought Sam would be a good fit. I chuckled that when we’d looked before, our finances couldn’t quite swing it (it costs as much as some colleges to attend there!), and he brushed that aside, saying that most of the kids he brings in don’t need to worry about that. So. Dude.

One point that really made everybody boggle was near the end, when the speaker offered up a question that I think was meant to be something to take home in our heads and not necessarily answered there: how do we get local foods into the hands of people who can’t afford it or can’t get to farmers’ markets? Sam’s hand was in the air. “I have an idea. We could take the library Bookmobile and turn it into a Foodmobile, to take food to people that way.” Everybody paused, and the speaker said, “That’s…actually a really good idea!” And it was.

We left with Sam’s head (and notebook) full of new ideas. “We are totally joining that club!” he said. “I’m going to start eating even more healthy foods now!” He’s an easy convert on most days, honestly, but this is one area in which I’m especially inclined to let it keep playing out.

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Apparently, third grade is the year where we’re going to transition into Big Kid work, or at least what I consider to be such. Not only are we regularly writing in cursive (without being officially taught! I guess there was something to that whole D’Nealian thing, after all!) and doing what can only be described as pre-algebra, but he’s now been assigned a six-page research paper, complete with required illustrations and a table of contents. I don’t remember doing that until fifth grade; I guess we were just coddled back then.

It’s to be about a subject relating to our town. Initially, Sam wanted to talk about the old cars once made here, but I wasn’t sure how the research on that would go. (Can’t imagine much is written at his level, uncoddled or no.) I spied a reference on the project sheet to a suggested topic about a “community concern.” Well, I’ve got a friend whose middle names might as well be Community Concern, and one of her pet projects seemed like it might fit the bill to a T. I proposed it to him, and he liked it, so we’re attending the meeting tomorrow night, and he has a list of interview questions written out for the organizers. This ought to be funny; he’s still a slow writer, if an improving one, and I don’t know how well he’ll handle scribbling down the responses. Might have to record them somehow instead. I don’t want to suggest having him email them to her, since it would be very easy for him to slip into copying her answers word-for-word into his paper if they were already written for him.

Sheesh, he’s eight. I can handle seeing him ride off down the street on his bike, and I can handle the new “frequently stinky” phase that’s mandating evening showers (somebody lie to me and tell me puberty is a VERY VERY long time away and this means nothing), but for some reason, helping him with this part is driving home the idea that he’s only a handful of years away from high school. I’m OLD. So very old!

But at least I’m not now undeniably in the second half of my thirties, like some folks to whom I might happen to be married. Today is Eric’s birthday. Give him some love!

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At least it doesn’t seem to impair my running; The runs I’ve done while sick, including the short one this morning, have felt okay. Especially since they’ve moved the rain forecast for tomorrow until later in the day, I feel cautiously optimistic about the long run. Still, I’d rather be well. I suppose that if I had to choose between being sick tomorrow and sick four weeks from now, there’d really be no contest. I’ve got time to heal!

Sam cheers me up. He’s mostly in a really good phase right now, where even when he’s ornery, it’s a manageable sort of ornery. He’s enjoying reading to me, and he likes going to school, and he’s writing in a journal every day as part of his classwork, which is awesome and gut-busting to read. He brings it home every Friday so I can read and sign it. Enjoy!

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Lady next to me at the coffee shop is working my nerves. She has a book, but every few seconds, she stops to lift her head and stare at me. I’m simply not that interesting, and it makes me want to stop and yell, “WHAT?!” when she does it.

In other news, Gabe apparently informed the kids in his preschool class that Eric and I are vampires. One mom had to grab me this morning at drop-off and introduce me to her little girl, who was frightened. Oh, Gabe…mind you, this is the same kid who kept flashing his light in people’s eyes at the candlelight hike this weekend (oh, such fun! I have to get back there to run those grassy trails!) and only stopped when he’d reassured himself that they weren’t aliens. He confessed that near the end, and it busted up the Earthmen who happened to be passing us at the moment and who’d passed the test of planetary orientation, I suppose. There’s really never a boring moment.

Sam and I are diving into the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series; we tried it a while back, and it didn’t capture him, but this time it has. Well, it took convincing; his teacher wants him reading to us about 20 minutes a night, and last night he decided that all the books at his reading level on our shelves were crap. Tears and shrieking ensued before Eric finally stepped in and convinced him to give it a shot. Five minutes later, Sam was apologizing and full of remorse for his overreaction. Love that about him; like me, he tends to blow up quickly and cool down just as fast, and he’s usually able then to realistically grasp what happened and what he did right or wrong. I know adults who have trouble with that.

If it stays this cloudy and dark all day, I’m thinking soup for dinner. Chicken noodle for the kids? Squash for us? Needs thought.

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Alysia would be going nuts about the math homework thing right about now. She and I had a recent discussion about homework as a whole, in which I said that I understood it to be my opportunity to help out my kid, who is likely to have many occasions throughout school in which he doesn’t understand concepts in the way the teacher presents them to the group. After all, everybody learns in different ways, and it’s an unfortunate truism that a lot of classroom education has to be about crowd control. Well, for the past couple of days, Sam’s come home with papers marked, “You don’t understand __________” and “You need to get help with _____________.” Somehow, I get the feeling that I know what Alysia would have to say about that.

And Gabe is sort of baffled but game about the whole Bible Blast thing. He’s listening and trying to remember, but there’s something a little weird about trying to teach particular concepts to a kid whose understanding of the necessary ideas behind them is still sketchy. After all, what is forty? He got the whole “…and on the seventh day, God rested” thing, since he could use his fingers as a cue, but beyond that, he’s visibly deciding to just take my word for it, however dubiously. Oh, and the whole “Cain killed Abel” thing struck me as a dangerous little tale to tell my younger son…

This is why I don’t homeschool. I fret enough when I’m not the primary teacher.

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(Something tells me that movie made something of an impression on Sam, since he only watched it once or twice, at least a year ago. Or maybe Eric and I have quoted it around him once…or twice…)

Tonight’s dinner is experimental. The boys won’t touch it, I know, so they got orzo with cheese and asparagus; I’m nibbling on the asparagus while I cook a pumpkin saag, based on the Veganomicon recipe, only with chard and slightly different seasonings. Heck, this recipe is just lucky I couldn’t time the roasting of the beets I’m also doing to coincide with the pumpkin’s finishing time, or else there’d be those in there, too. Very experimental. Eric is playing Scrabble tonight, so I’m the only one to witness either the success or epic fail. I’ll have it over the last of the orzo, for purely authentic what-on-earth. I’ve been enjoying The Man Who Ate the World quite a lot, and the desire for the new has seized me – even if I don’t have access to blowfish sperm at my local grocer.

Later…
This might have been better before I added the chard. It was smelling and looking pretty good. Still cooking.

Still later…
No, sir, it isn’t great. The chard is way more, well, “chardy” than spinach would have been “spinachy,” despite my best efforts. My excuse is that the whole reason for the dish is that I had the chard, and it needed to be used before it went bad. Well, it’s been used, and it’s certainly edible, so I guess we’ll call it a success in that respect – if in not many others. If Eric had been here, he could have saved it, I’m sure, but he’d have done it with seeds and other things that aren’t even labeled in their containers, so I wasn’t going to try that route.

Oh, well. Tomorrow’s another day. Gabe’s first day of school, in fact, so I have other reasons to remain optimistic.

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Is it just me, or does he look a smidge teenager-ish these days?

Wait, no, there’s the teenager within. (Actually, he was just complaining that the backpack was too heavy, which it was, and that he wanted to get to the bus stop to take it off.)

Third grade, then. We met his teacher last night at an open house, and she seems nice. No visible fangs, but no fairy godmother wand hanging out of an apron pocket, either. Eric and I firmly encouraged Sam to place his name tag on a desk near the front of the room, and Sam seemed relieved that the teacher didn’t, I don’t know, lunge for his throat when he said hi to her. An auspicious beginning, I hope.

Gabe has his open house tomorrow and starts school next week. Somehow, it’s a little less tear-inducing than with Sam. Not that I don’t treasure his baby years just as much, but perhaps it’s that he doesn’t. The bus was late getting Sam this morning, and I remarked that maybe some kindergartners were crying and refusing to get on. “Are you going to be scared when you ride the bus, or excited?” I asked Gabe.

He looked at me like I was touched in the head. “Neither.” Just another day to him, I guess. Any emotions expressed that day will be purely my own issues to handle, it seems. Silly old Mom.

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Filling in the details, we did breakfast here at the hotel, which was great for everybody else but underwhelming for me. Seriously, no bagels? Not even a packet of instant oatmeal? I’m planning on getting something tomorrow at a grocery to tide me through for the rest of the week, at least in cooperation with the fruit and coffee the hotel provides. Then we went to the hotel waterpark, which was great for all except Gabe, though that was predictable; he still hates all things watery.

After enjoying/tolerating that for a bit, we went back to the room, dressed, and headed for Bay Beach Amusement Park, which was fantastic. Seriously, even Gabe loved it – my kid who normally is terrified of carousel rides! With tickets costing next to nothing, we were able to let the kids ride everything they wanted for a grand total of five dollars. Woo! And there was even a playground, where they ran and cavorted to their hearts’ content. I think we’ll go back later on, perhaps with a picnic lunch in tow.

Then we went to Cooks Corner. I think we all expected more from that, but Eric really enjoyed it, finding a few things he’s been seeking for a while now. The kids, unfortunately, were on a downward behavior spiral, despite the store’s play area. By the time we got to dinner at Titletown Brewing Co. (where I had the cranberry tukey melt: nice and soft, and on zucchini bread!), they were hanging on by a thread, and when I had to leave the table to visit the restroom, all hell apparently broke loose in my absence. Mostly Gabe, it seems; when we got back to the hotel, Eric took Sam to the pool again, while I sat back and watched Gabe unravel until he was finally asleep.

I feel exhausted just thinking about starting over tomorrow. Thank God, the day is due to start with a run.

In other news, Sam has a new, odd “tic.” He’s coughing and clearing his throat at night and in the morning in bed – allergies, I think – and after each cough, he mutters, “Okay…” I asked him not to, and he said, “I’m just testing my voice out,” and he won’t stop. He does it more quietly, but…argh! Hopefully, it won’t grow beyond those brief periods.

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If you’re reading this, I hope you’ll do the same thing, on your own site or Facebook or wherever! Many of us have gone to a sort of “radio silence” over the past couple of years, observing a new level of privacy with regards to our offspring, which is totally understandable. Still, I miss reading those old stories. These kids just don’t stop growing, and it’d be good to catch back up, even a little.

(...)
Read the rest of State of the Kids (342 words)

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Sam doesn’t want to hear my explanations about how this is all part of growing up, because, as I’ve mentioned, he doesn’t want or plan to do that. Grow up, I mean. He’s still this kid, two years after I recorded it:

(Sheesh, look at Gabe!)

We’re going out tonight to get him some new pants, since he’s rocking the Pee-Wee Herman look lately. (I pulled up the old Tequila scene to show him what I meant, and he watched it with raised eyebrows, just taking it in with solemn bemusement; suddenly, I felt really, really old, imagining the same thoughts going through his head that went through mine when Dad would listen to “old guy” radio in the car.) He’s pessimistic, though.

ME: “So, where do you think you want to go?”
SAM: “Um. Not Sears…”
ME: “Okay. What brought it to mind, then?”
SAM: “They had a commercial. They have all ‘rocker clothes’ that I don’t really like.”
ME: “Maybe you should tell me what you do like.”
SAM: “Um. Nature clothes? Things with animals on them.”

Somehow, I doubt he’s talking about alligator shirts. My big kid still wants to wear the adorable jungle prints of his toddler years. I hope to be able to find some more conservative clothes that won’t make him feel rushed into the teen world; I think that’s what he means by “rocker clothes.” In anticipation of his frustration, I’m already secretly planning an ice cream consolation prize for after our efforts tonight. A kiddie cone somehow manages to make almost everybody feel small again.

I booked my flight for Marine Corps. Looks like I’ll be hitting DC around 10:30 AM on Saturday, October 24th, racing on Sunday, and then hanging around with the folks there in town until my 6:30 PM flight on Monday. Not looking forward to flying on my own (which I’ve never, ever done; I’m as scared of missing the flight or ending up on the wrong one as I am of crashing and burning…); is it odd that the marathon seems like small potatoes compared to the travel?

We also booked our hotel for our mini-vacation to Green Bay next weekend. It even has a tiny little water park in it, as well as a hot tub in our room! And the price isn’t obscene, for that! There looks to be a ton of things to do in the town while we’re there (not a tourist attraction, but I can’t wait to eat at this place), though we learned from last year’s Dells trip that keeping no plans at all is what works best for us for now. If we leave the hotel at all, and nobody is shrieking about it, we’re ahead of the game. (Hence our desire for the hot tub and the water park that don’t require travel beyond crossing the hotel grounds.)

Of course, between now and then is my tooth extraction. Focusing on the other side of that particular event is what is keeping me sane right now. That, and these cookies.

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But even on mornings like this one, when the boundary was clear and necessary (yes, you must brush your teeth), and I kept myself outwardly cool and firm without sinking, and the incident ended, after some mild protraction, with unprompted apologies and hugs from him…even on mornings like this, a small and ugly part of me is grumpy for, of all things, not taking the last word. Not “winning.” It’s idiotic, but even though the desired goal was achieved, that ugly part of me wants payback for the rolled eyes, the hurled insults, and every other attempt to get around me or make me feel bad for having dared to impose the rule. Mind you, he has been disciplined; he won’t be going out with his friend this afternoon to play. To this, he responded with a resigned, “I know.” It’s exactly the sort of reaction you want, ideally. No extra arguing or pleas for mitigation. He accepts that he was wrong and earned what he got.

I’m drinking coffee to drown out the ugly voice that, I guess, wanted more of a reaction. How bad is that? Don’t answer that. I think it’s just my hurt feelings talking. You can only be called “meanest mom ever!” so many times before all the subsequent apologies stop meaning all that much. (And yes, we’ve told him that. But he’s eight, and self-control is still a work in progress.) I’m human, and sometimes that’s a pretty big hurdle.

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It’s a little different when Gabe draws these days.

Bob Ross doesn’t live here…

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I’ve been eyeing this hat at Copacetic for a month or two, and I finally bit the bullet and got it. It’s specifically designed for running! I’ve actually been pretty lucky so far this summer not to have gotten burned while running, primarily because most of my runs have been pre-dawn or in the first hour or so of daylight, but I’ll feel better having this hat in my arsenal for the occasions where that’s not the case. Besides, I don’t have to use it just for that purpose. I wore it out a couple of times so far, and, dude, in combination with my sunglasses, I feel positively shaded. Why did I and my pale skin and blond retinas wait so long?! I could use another couple, for when this one’s in the wash!

We went out and did Sam’s school shopping this afternoon. Predictably, there were a few squabbles, mostly over a pencil sharpener he really wanted but which wasn’t on his list. Kid, at least ten percent of your teacher’s complaints last year surrounded you fidgeting with things in your desk, and many of those incidents involved your pencil sharpener. If this teacher doesn’t specifically request that you have one, then we’re sidestepping that trap altogether! He still needs a few new items of clothing and some gym shoes, but we’ll do that when Gabe isn’t a complicating factor; he also needs a new lunchbox, having beaten the bejeezus out of his old metal one. Land’s End is running a sale on one that will hold his current water bottle nicely, and I have a coupon for free shipping, so we might go that route if I don’t find something better locally (the pickings are fairly sour, from what I’ve seen). I have no idea or recollection of what Gabe will need; there’s a school open house in a couple of weeks (the week before his school starts), so if I don’t hear anything before then, I’ll at least have a cushion after that to scramble for those items.

Ouch. My lips are burning from the pepper I put on my sandwich at lunch. Every time it dies away, I mindlessly touch my mouth, and the oils around my nails from chopping it up start the burn anew. If I were smart, I’d go wash my hands, especially before I rub my eyes or something, but… We have a bunch of peppers that need used up fairly quickly; what would be a good trick for that? (Putting them into salsa, for example, might not work because I probably wouldn’t work through it any faster than I will the whole peppers.) Cucumbers, too; Eric’s dad brought us a whole bunch of pickling cucumbers, and all the uses I’m finding call for English cucumbers that are somewhat sweeter. I don’t love pickles that much, and Eric hasn’t shown enthusiasm for making anything beyond the refrigerator pickles that take up valuable fridge real estate. And then there’s the corn, which both Ronnie and I purchased accidentally and which my boys (gasp!) don’t love, or at least not on the cob…

Sam is outside with my old digital camera, experimenting. He was feeling sad that his neighborhood friend hasn’t come out to play, so I sent him on his way with it. Wonder what he’ll return home to show me?

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He’s in a huge villainy stage right now, especially since I made the offhand comment to him that his super-villian goggles reminded me of Dr. Horrible. Now he runs around singing about Bad Horse and how “the sun is shining ’cause you’re gonna die!” (Mind you, he’s only seen a censored-by-tickle-and-kiss-attacks version of the show), in addition to his usual efforts to construct freeze guns and killer robots out of blocks and Scotch tape. Some kids play Superman, but not my baby.

Sam has a dangly tooth that refuses to let go; he spends a lot of time with his fingers in his mouth, wiggling away at it. Last night, it looked like a stiff breeze would take it, and he asked me to help him get it out, but I had little more success than he did. I offered him a dried fig to bite, and he tried; he bit twice, the tooth went sideways, there was blood, and Sam freaked and threw in the towel. This morning, Eric offered to give it a try, but Sam panicked and decided to give it some more wiggling time instead. The tooth fairy is prepared and waiting!

Going out tonight with Sarah to a wine shop. Can’t tell you how much I need this, really.

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He gets irate at the notion that he’d be “too old” for anything, such as the foam play areas in shopping centers. Of course, the fact remains that he is too old for them, especially considering that he tends to play in them with the same goofy carefree style that he’s had since toddlerhood; it (rightfully so) freaks out the parents of small children toddling around the soft structures to see a much larger child cackling and dashing past on his way to jump on and off the nearest elevated spot. He’s not being deliberately obnoxious, but he can do a lot more injury to the wee ones around him than they might to do to each other, and so we try to enforce the posted height restrictions at such places, which usually means that he has to come to terms with the fact that while Gabe can play, he cannot. That’s a difficult pill to swallow, especially considering that he doesn’t consider himself to be a “big kid.” Not yet, and possibly (if he has anything to say) not ever.

Yesterday, while we were out, I noticed that he had officially “aged out” of the little kids’ clothing section. For one horrible moment, I thought that he’d aged out of the kids’ clothes altogether, but then I spied the “tween” section, for which he apparently qualifies. It’s the boys’ version of “Juniors” in girls, I guess, which gave me an awful feeling in the pit of my stomach; how can my baby be big enough to shop in a section for which the analogous female section includes training bras?! Eric made matters worse by needling me and saying that in only ten years, we’d be shopping in the “Fill Your Dorm Room!” area.

Leaving the store, I put on a cheerful face and pointed out the “cool” clothes in the tween section to Sam. (Truthfully, it would be worse to have a girl, and I know that; the older boys’ section is full of Tony Hawk teeshirts and polos, while the girls’ is all miniskirts and sequins…) His reaction was one of horror. “I don’t want to wear those clothes! Why can’t I wear the other ones? They’re funny and cute! I don’t want to be handsome!” I relieved him a little by pointing out that there were still comical teeshirts in the new section, but he still sighed and wilted a bit. Then he asked me to carry him.

This is the boy who professes to crush on various girls in his class and who will wear very adult-styled clothing to garner attention from them. He talks about what he wants to do when he’s grown, and he eagerly looks forward to each new loose tooth and inch of height. But, as I said to Eric, it’s almost like the stage kids experience as toddlers, where they see-saw between sprinting away from their parents and then completely freaking out about being separated from Mom and Dad. He’s hurtling toward puberty (I can almost say that without wincing) in the next couple of years; I can see a few of the boys in his grade already appearing and acting much different from the big-footed Labrador puppies that most of them were last year. Nobody can put the brakes on that process, as much as Sam might try for himself. No wonder he’s so often so grumpy these days.

So, yes, that’s why I might have been seen carrying my big boy in my arms out of the department store yesterday afternoon. Too big for it? Maybe. But I still can, for now, and he still needs it. So long as those two facts line up, I don’t care about stares.

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I did try to wake him, since I know he’s going to be irate at having missed playground, but all I got was a fluttering of eyelashes and a muttered “Sleeeeep…” Hopefully, he’ll feel a little more friendly upon awakening; I’m getting really sick of the fraternal brawling taking place every time I turn my back for a moment (and sometimes in plain sight, all care about consequences tossed aside).

Sam might be overtired, too, but he’s far more stubborn about any efforts to assist in those lines. If he doesn’t want to sleep, he won’t, no matter what I try. I think, too, he’s got some hormonal stuff going on, because he’s going back to the whole “I’m so stupid, and I hate myself” pendulum swings that we had a while ago. Man, I hoped we were done with that! Nothing seemed to help last time; he just stopped the refrain one day. Hate when history repeats itself like this.

And here’s me, the “fixer” with no good solutions. Makes for a cranky Carrie, it does.

Oh, crap; Gabe just woke up, and, well…

Good times.

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Got home, showered, forced Sam to do the same and endured the dra-aaaaaaaa-ma surrounding that (we made a deal that he could shower this morning instead of last night, in exchange for no whining, but he’s a dirty deal-breaker). Was just beginning to recover my stride after that when he tearfully informed us that a friend of his is taking summer school class with the teacher whose class Sam’s just left, and the woman is criticizing Sam to all those kids in the summer class.

No.

Got us all dressed, dropped Eric off at work, and drove to the school. Ushered Sam off to his art class, then found the principal and laid it all out for him. We went through “progress reports” for wiggling and finger biting; severe and frequent punishments for ordinary silliness; and even an incidence where she reported that another teacher had had to scold Sam “repeatedly” for misbehavior, and when I talked to that teacher, she said it never happened at all – turned out that his teacher had asked other kids about Sam’s behavior, and they made up that part. This was the final straw. She’s not even his teacher anymore, and she’s still giving us grief. The worst of it is that Sam really likes her – or he did before this blow. He’s hurt and bewildered now.

Anyway, the principal seemed shocked, and he wrote down many notes and said he’d talk to her. I assured him that we didn’t want to cause trouble, because Sam had liked her and because we had another child who would be coming up through the grade eventually, and he promised he’d take care of that. We’ll see, I guess. I just don’t know that I could have met my own eyes in the mirror if I let this happen to my child without saying anything. I tried calling her after the whole “she [didn't] say, they said” experience, but she didn’t return my calls.

So! Then! I picked up Sam and took both kids to the dentist! Because I’m a masochist like that! Sam does fine, but Gabe…this was to be his first “official” cleaning, and it went as well as I expected it to – meaning that they had to actually remove us to a separate room, close the door, have me bear-hug him on my lap, and muscle our way through the trauma. Mind you, until a year or so ago, it took three adults to hold him down so the barber could cut his hair, and he’s only gotten stronger and more stubborn since then. It was BAD. By the time we finished (skipping the flossing and intro x-rays entirely), we were both sweaty, he was missing both shoes, and I was bruised from neck to waist from his kicks and thumps. The dentist did a quick check, and then Gabe went FERAL, running to the corner, hiding under a counter, and – inexplicably – doing HANDSTANDS OF RAGE while the dentist tried to make nice. I stood there, sort of laugh-crying with my hands over my face, while the hygienist tried to console me and reassure me that he wouldn’t be the last child to do this. Well, no, of course not: we’ll be back in six months!

And then we went back to Sam, and the dentist informed me that his laterals might be coming in crooked and might require straightening. Shave and a haircut…

I fully expected we’d be hit by a semi leaving the parking lot, just for good measure. We weren’t, but it would have felt appropriate.

Too hot for Calgon, too early for merlot. What’s a girl to do?

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I forgot to take into account the special activities that happen within the overlapping time frames. Today, both boys’ programs have “Parents welcome!” potlucks at 3:30.

I’ll drop off fruit at Sam’s playground at 3:30, leave (I warned him; he was fine with it) and go to Gabe’s potluck with sandwiches (nobody else signed up for them, so I, the last person signing the poster board, got stuck with it) and stay there for a bit, then head back to Sam’s to hang with him. Might take Gabe with me, might not; depends on whether he’d rather stay and play with friends or come to the Big Kid party with me.

And, of course, this virtually ensures that neither son will be remotely convinced to try the butternut squash casserole that I’ve already started prepping for tonight. I mean, they probably wouldn’t have been thrilled to begin with, but being full of greasy potato chips and fruit snacks on top of it all…yay!

Ooh! Next Thursday, they both have field trips! One’s going bowling, and the other’s going skating! They have staggered drop-offs, thankfully, but somebody’s going to need picked up a bit early and somebody a bit late; both outings end at 4:30.

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“We were born in Ohio?” I said no. The two other boys in our chaperoned group, eavesdropping behind me, started trying to guess, too, but nobody came close.

“You were both born underwater,” I finally told him.

He nodded, not being surprised, but the other boys were mystified. “How was he born in the water?” one asked. I explained very briefly that Sam was born in a pool at home, and they were wide-eyed. “Why didn’t he drown?” Reassurances given, as well as a fond joke (with a squeeze around his shoulders) that Sam had gone for a swim before taking a breath.

“I was born in a hospital,” one boy said. “Me, too,” said the other. And then Sam murmured, “I should have been…”

I suddenly saw that he was embarrassed at being the odd one out, the “different” one. I felt guilty for having said anything where the other kids could hear; eight years old isn’t a time when most kids take pride in being unique, at least not for things they can’t control. I pulled him close and whispered in his ear, “You were born in the most gentle way we could manage. You were born into warm water, with Mom and Dad right there to hold you right away. It was at home, with no scary lights or noises, and it was almost exactly what we wanted for you. It was just right for our family and for you, and I’ll never forget it.” He smiled and squirmed a little.

Then he asked, “Mom? Could you tell them that?”

Day 1, 2001

(...)
Read the rest of My birthday kid (37 words)

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/06/17/my-birthday-kid/feed/ 9 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/06/16/busy-bees/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/06/16/busy-bees/#comments Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:39:06 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/06/16/busy-bees/ Continue reading →]]> When my schedules and routines go awry, it gets harder to sit in front of a computer. Even when I’m not actively running around hither, thither, and yon, I’m busy catching up on the things I needed to do and wasn’t able to get to while I was running around. And then my brain is going, “GAH!” and is unable to formulate coherent entries, on top of that.

Tomorrow morning, most importantly, I’ll be mom to an eight-year-old. It’s sort of a head trip, that. He himself seems to be having some growing pains, both mentally and, possibly, physically (he’s claiming intermittent aches in his legs, but we can’t pinpoint an exact cause; my brother had similar issues around this age, if memory serves); he’s been very emotional, alternately exuberant and tearful, loving and lashing out at us and Gabe. Yesterday, on his second grade zoo trip to celebrate the end of school, he spent the first part whining about being hungry, the second part cheerful and giggly, and added a postscript of moody sadness about not wanting to leave the second grade and his teacher (oh, the tongue-biting on my part). It’s odd, because he’s ordinarily been a treat around his birthdays, but I guess that’s going to be different this year. (Anybody got a copy of one of those “Your Whatever-Year-Old” books handy to consult that spiral-shaped age diagram about it?)

We got him a few presents this year, keeping it pretty low-key. He’ll be most excited about a little Air Hogs indoor R/C helicopter for which he’s been positively dying since seeing a commercial for them; in fact, making that link, I found the site stored in my recent browser history, so I guess he pestered Eric into checking out the site. We got ice cream cupcakes for tomorrow, and it’ll hopefully be a satisfyingly relaxed celebration.

For my part, I’m making lentil soup and French bread at the moment, the ultimate in comfort food. I feel the need to be soothed, you know? There comes a time when constant stimulation and entertainment just turns weirdly torturous; just want to rent a good, no-thinking-required movie and kick back with a warm bowl and fuzzy socks. (Why, yes, I still live in Wisconsin, and even though we were in the upper seventies yesterday, today has been in the sixties with rain and wind. I’m wearing a sweater, and we’re halfway to July.)

Oh, apropos of nothing, all the test results from my doctor’s visit came back perfectly normal. I’m just fine, apparently – despite the fact that the system in question still seems to be asleep. (And, no, not pregnant.) Well, be that as it may, I’m finally taking the step of getting to a different doc and seeing what she has to say about it. My old doctor has a new practice and is seeing new patients! Yay! So I’ll go see her on Monday. I just like reassurance, I guess.

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/06/16/busy-bees/feed/ 1 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/06/09/conversation-with-gabe-2/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/06/09/conversation-with-gabe-2/#comments Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:52:48 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/06/09/conversation-with-gabe-2/ Continue reading →]]> GABE: “Mommy, I need a girlfriend. Will you be my girlfriend?”
ME: “Well, will you do me a favor first?”
GABE: “What is it?”
ME: “I need a roll of towels from downstairs.”
GABE: “…I don’t think I really want a girlfriend.”
ME: “Oh, that’s okay. Get me the roll anyway?”
GABE: “Do I have to be your boyfriend if I do?”
ME: “No.”
GABE: “Okay, I’ll go.”

We have three responses so far, out of eight, for Sam’s birthday; the RSVP date I put on the invites was for today. Again, like I said before, I’m totally not fussed about it. No need to know how much cake to get (ice cream for whoever shows up!) and even if all five of the other boys mysteriously appear on the big day (unlikely), I’m sure we can get the theater to sell us five extra tickets. No big deal at all. Oh, except for figuring out what to get him, as he’s apparently much more focused on that aspect of turning a year older this time than he has been in the past. He keeps asking whether I’ve bought anything yet.

Eric’s taking the day of Sam’s actual birthday off from work, and we’ll do something then too; Sam’s already professed a desire to go to BD’s Mongolian Barbecue, which I find extraordinarily cool. (Gabe likes it there, too, since he can get an enormous bowl of mac and cheese almost as soon as he walks in the door. And they have crazy straws. Gabe heaven!)

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/06/09/conversation-with-gabe-2/feed/ 1 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/06/04/rest-day/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/06/04/rest-day/#comments Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:51:23 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/06/04/rest-day/ Continue reading →]]> Technically, that just means no running. Sometimes, though, it can be a cue phrase to signal rest of other sorts. My brain feels tired. Don’t know how to rest that, though, and I’m not sure why it feels so tired, anyway.

Planning Sam’s birthday party; just finished writing the invitations. We’re taking a bunch of boys (his choice as to the guest list) to see Up, and then going across the parking lot to Marble Slab for ice cream. Very, very low key, which is perfect. I’m not even all that concerned about RSVPs, since although we plan to buy a block of tickets together ahead of time, the movie will have been out long enough that we’d probably be able to get more tickets and sit together with anybody who replied late. Score! (Of course, it’s also probable that at least a couple of kids will have already seen the movie by then, too, but the worst I think that could come from that would be a running narrative throughout the movie: “Oh, watch this! Now he’s going to…” “Shhhhhh!”)

Gabe is wrestling with the concept of “not my party.” I mollified him when the issue first arose by telling him that since his birthday is in October, maybe he could have a Halloween party. Now he talks almost daily about new ideas he’s had for his “Halloween costume birthday party” (for which all guests are required, not requested, to come as either a princess or in something terrifying; apparently; he himself plans to be a “bad ninja,” complete with red eyeballs and swords all over), but I do anticipate a certain amount of jealousy-based mutiny on the day of Sam’s party.

I, personally, am wrestling with the idea of being mom to an eight-year-old. I may have many early memories, scattered here and there, but I most definitely remember the feeling of being eight; I can remember my friends, my teachers, my toys, my first crush that began when I was a third-grader, the whole nine yards. How can I be on the other end of that? How can I mother a boy who’s old enough that some little girl could be experiencing her first crush on him even now?! (Back off, girlfriend. I’m He’s not old enough for kissy-face yet.)

As a side note, which is more frustrating, in your opinion: the boy who is a sweetheart at home and in casual settings, but drives his school teachers crazy; or the boy whose teachers adore him, but who makes it a personal mission to send his mom to the loony bin? Hmmm?

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/06/04/rest-day/feed/ 8 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/28/cheering-up/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/28/cheering-up/#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 21:59:41 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/28/cheering-up/ Continue reading →]]>

Sometimes you make a day better by, um, structuring a bit of unstructured creativity. I saw these books while I was out with Gabe today, and I immediately decided that it could provide the perfect antidote to the stress of 4 o’clock “progress report” time. (Which wasn’t too bad today. He got all “okay” faces, which confuses the heck out of Eric and me. Did he do something wrong? Not bad enough to actually tell us (or, apparently, for him to remember), but not good enough for a smiley? What the heck, yo?) Anyway, both boys are loving the books, but especially Gabe, who seems to have taken to heart the idea of following the “suggestions” for each page. Sam prefers the “free pages,” naturally.

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/28/cheering-up/feed/ 0 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/28/stability-please/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/28/stability-please/#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 18:53:29 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/28/stability-please/ Continue reading →]]> It’s weird; lately, it seems like I’m either in a really good mood or really wiped out. Very few moments of mildness or peace. While I don’t mind feeling super chipper, I think I’d trade a few of those times in exchange for mellowing out some of the other end of the spectrum. Also, I’ve been trying to go to bed earlier (though it’s not actually like I’ve been “trying”; it’s more of a “not sleeping right now isn’t an option” sort of thing), but I still feel tired in the evenings a lot more than I’d like. Mind you, I feel good in the mornings, waking up with or before my alarm and being able to do all that I want to then; it’s just that I wish I had energy to last me through the rest of the day.

It seems like my really low points coincide with when Sam gets home from school…and we’re receiving “progress reports” from his teacher each day, detailing negative behaviors. Again, though, here I go with the swinging back and forth. On the one hand, I can see where some of the things he does would be disruptive, and I definitely think they’re worth correcting. On the other hand, “Sam was biting his fingernails all day; please deal with this situation!” seems a bit severe. I mean, of course, we’re dealing with it (hand salve seems to be helping), but…really?

End of school can’t come soon enough. Just hanging on and waiting for next fall.

Related, we’re giving violin until the end of the school year, and at that point, we’re giving in. It’s hit the point where he’s become almost aggressively opposed to picking up the instrument, and he spends the entire class time with a scowl on his face and angry mutters on his lips about how much he hates the violin and wants to quit. This can’t be good for fostering a love of music. On the other hand, I’ve made Eric’s and my decision clear to him: if he quits this, we are taking at least a six-month hiatus from any and all lessons and classes (not counting the summer playground program; we mean things requiring a commitment and focus). He can’t decide in a few months that gymnastics sounds like a real blast, and that’s even if Gabe decides that he wants to do them. Sam needs to show us that he’s well and truly able to give his best to an activity before we’ll invest more time and money into it. Maybe that’s firm for an almost-eight-year-old, but I don’t intend to coast in and out of lessons that he wants to drop the moment that the newness wears off and the work begins.

I remember getting bored with activities as a kid and wanting to drop out. Heck, it’s why I switched from flute to piano in college; I went as far on both as I could without putting much actual gruntwork into them, and then I needed to decide which was going to be worth actual effort. Piano won for usefulness in the future, but I was still resistant to work, honestly. I just knew that I’d be more resistant to work on the flute. Lord, I’m lazy. At least I know it, though – and I see it in Sam.

Gabe is awake, I must dash.

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/28/stability-please/feed/ 3 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/17/sams-biscuits/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/17/sams-biscuits/#comments Sun, 17 May 2009 10:33:22 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/17/sams-biscuits/

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/17/sams-biscuits/feed/ 3 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/15/pinning-him-down/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/15/pinning-him-down/#comments Fri, 15 May 2009 23:47:58 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/15/pinning-him-down/ Continue reading →]]> Tough to put my finger on what makes Sam tick sometimes – when I try to do it intellectually, that is. Instinctively, as I’ve said before, it’s easy because he’s me. But trying to set aside instinct and consciously predict him is hard because he’s also a kid, and a male one, at that.

Tonight I made a white bean soup. I’d have pictures, but it was so delicious that it was almost entirely gone before I thought of it. It was a pureed soup, so although Sam’s enjoyed bean soups in the past, I wasn’t sure how this one would go over; I mean, it was essentially a pot full of velvety white gravy-like liquid, and gravies have never been his thing. So I brought him in and had him taste it – and he actually danced. Loved it! Then I let him read the ingredient list – a dangerous step, but calculated – and he was stunned that it had onions in it, when he swore he hated them. Many kids might have switched their opinions of the soup, but Sam actually rejoiced all the more at discovering that he didn’t hate onions, after all. Hurray!

(In case you’re curious, the recipe was very simple. White beans, cooked (3/4 cup) and set aside; two onions, 4 celery stalks, and a parsnip sauteed together in a little canola oil; beans added to the veggies, with a quart of stock; mixture simmered until veggies are soft, then pureed and reheated. Season with salt and pepper; garnish with cilantro and paprika.)

But my sweet child has been having behavior “issues” again, and again I find myself confused and unsure. Instinctively, I find myself in his corner, because hey! He’s a seven-year-old kid, and seven-year-olds wiggle in their seats! It’s not like he’s shooting spitballs or putting tacks on chairs! On the other hand, intellectually, I know that I need to work with him on focus and concentration, because this isn’t something that can continue, and I see it in person when I do violin lessons with him. The other kids sit and listen; Sam taps his bow on the floor, plays air guitar, examines his hands…

There’s a time and a place for goofiness, and he’s having difficulty discerning when it’s the wrong time. How does one teach that? Rhetorical question, that; I know that if there were an easy answer, we’d have a darn sight fewer behavior issues in schools. I also know that I was that kid, too, and I outgrew it…though not without several years pretty much an entire elementary school career’s worth of tormenting my mom and teachers. Is that what we’re going to have to endure? Because it didn’t look like fun from my mom’s end of things. Then again, Sam may be me, but I was not my mom, at least then. Should it be easier on me…or harder?

I just need to survive mostly sane, because you can place your bets now on how it’s going to be when mini-Eric hits the school years. Today, he was eating a scone, and I asked him if it was yummy. “Yes, it is. Do you have any more questions?”

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/15/pinning-him-down/feed/ 5 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/12/bridging/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/12/bridging/#comments Tue, 12 May 2009 14:03:31 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/12/bridging/ Continue reading →]]> Gabe’s last day of preschool is today. He has a program tonight for a farewell thing; they’re staging a play of “The Little Red Hen.” (Oh, the initial drama, when he discovered that he couldn’t be a dragon in the play! He shouted at everybody, including his teachers, sobbing hysterically. Eventually, with encouragement, he came around to accepting, and finally being happy about, the fact that he was to be a mouse. ) It’s a different-feeling milestone than it was with Sam; with Sam, it felt bittersweet to see my “baby” growing up so fast, but with Gabe…he’s already moved on, mentally, to the next big thing, so this is no more than a tiny road marker along the way. “On this spot, in 2009, Gabriel attended a year of preschool.” Okay, what’s next?

I signed both boys up for the summer playground program yesterday, something Gabe’s been eagerly anticipating for a couple of years. He’s finally big enough to attend! He’ll be in a different program from Sam, but they meet at roughly the same time and at playgrounds that adjoin each other, so I can pretty much drop them off together. That’s four afternoons a week of organized large-motor play! Yay for summertime exhaustion! (And coffee breaks for Mama! )

So now we’ve got this gap, during which Sam’s still in school, but Gabe isn’t, and summer hasn’t officially begun, but both kids think it has. We’re rubbing our hands together over activities to come that aren’t yet here, even while we stare down the ends of schedules that still need to be completed. The urge is heavy to rush through things so as to move on to the New.

And then there’s me, still officially in “recovery” from the race, according to Hal Higdon, and yet his “recovery program” has me doing speedwork – something that the marathon training program didn’t. The idea, I think, is to keep me from losing motivation, and he encourages doing a 5K at the end of recovery, in fact. But I think that in this case, too, I might be rushing things. I obeyed and did mile repeats this morning, doing each of the miles at a quick pace…and my IT band, which had been improving, became quite angry. Too soon. The plan doesn’t know my circumstances; it’s my fault, not Hal’s.

So I’ll follow my common sense here, take a step back, and both acknowledge and try to appreciate where I am instead of rushing into where I’d like to be or what I think might be an exciting next step. You can’t go sky-diving without packing your parachute. If anybody needs me, that’s where I’ll be.

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/12/bridging/feed/ 1 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/07/813/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/07/813/#comments Thu, 07 May 2009 18:04:22 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/07/813/ Continue reading →]]> Sam finally got sick of not being able to style his longer hair “like Zack and Cody!”, so we took advantage of a school delay (records day) this morning to get him into the barber’s chair. He likes the haircut and says, “I look ten years old!” Then I took him out for a drink at my coffee shop, and we had a blast. Love these stolen moments with just him.

And isn’t it funny how changes in the way we look affect the way we feel? Sam was giddy and happy, as usual, but he also behaved very well, politely asking the barrista for paper on which to draw while we drank. It was a pleasure to watch him, especially when he almost wriggled with glee when the barrista thanked him for the drawings and said that he’d hang them up in the store. Mind you, Sam was in a good mood to start the day, but there was a palpable lift in his spirits from the moment he caught a glimpse of his new reflection.

As for me, I’m feeling good about most things, but I’m having mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, boy, could I have made that race look any more fun?! I don’t think I grinned for the entire four hours, but you wouldn’t know it to see those! On the other hand, I hate the way the loose skin I have from the weight loss is so apparent in the photos. I don’t notice it much most of the time, so seeing it in those shots comes as a sad reality check. Of course, it’s a lot less than it once was, so there’s that; it should hopefully continue to improve as time goes on and I do more strength training and toning (or so I’ve been told). It’s just a little more visible when I’m dashing along a race course, I guess.

A part of me didn’t want to talk about that. I’ve never really held back about things like this before, though, and I’m not going to start now!

Tonight is a big night at Sam’s school: an art fair, a book sale, and an ice cream social. Annoyingly, the thing starts at 5 PM and runs to 7:30, but we’ll just go for the first part and then skedaddle back home for dinner, which will be chili, kept warm in the crockpot for us. It’s unfortunate that both boys will be, thus, coming into dinner after getting their sugar high on, but switching things to the other way around would mean more chaos at the school (this event is usually shoulder-to-shoulder madness anyway, and it obviously gets worse as more people arrive after their workdays end) and being rushed through dinner to get there. If only it could have run from 6 to 8:30! Oh, well. If it was that big a deal to me, I’d probably be on the organizing committee for it, and as I’m not, I need to keep my mouth shut and give my thanks to the people who gave their time and efforts in my place.

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/05/07/813/feed/ 8 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/04/17/randomosity/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/04/17/randomosity/#comments Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:28:56 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/04/17/randomosity/ Continue reading →]]>

I went out and did four miles today, as prescribed by Uncle Higgy. Wasn’t paying any attention to my Garmin (hard to, anyway, in the dark) and managed to do 8:11 miles, on average, without noticing. (Actually, mostly 8-flats; the second mile was 8:20 and pulled up the curve.) Cool.

Had planned to try out my new running shorts for the run, as it was supposed to be about 40 degrees, which isn’t far from where it could be on Marathon Day. Got dressed, checked the temp. 32. No. Changed to pants.

Made cupcakes with the boys this morning – reduced sugar cake, reduced sugar frosting. Reduced sugar taste. And they stuck massively to the liners. The boys don’t care, but I won’t be tempted to eat many.

On the other hand, I got a package from a swap partner this afternoon, all the way from the UK, and it contained this and this. Excuse me while I hide them from the kids…they can eat the cupcakes, you know.

It’s now over sixty degrees outside, and I’m shivering in a heavy cardigan over my shirt. Whatever, nervous or circulatory system, whichever of you is sleeping on the job. Just whatever.

I did a bunch of dishes this morning, and I have to do a bunch more here in a few minutes. This is plainly unacceptable. On the other hand, immersing my hands in warm water for half an hour or so will have the effect of mitigating the previous bullet point. I can also then console myself with the one before that. (But a dishwasher will be obtained this weekend; of this, I’m almost certain.

Sam has zero phone-call-making skills. This morning, he tried to call a classmate to verify some vocabulary words for which he had misplaced the assignment sheet.

FRIEND’S MOM: “Hello?”
SAM: “Hello.”
[long pause]
ME: “Ask for Josh!”
SAM: “Um, is Josh there?”
FRIEND’S MOM: “Sure, hold on.”
JOSH: “Hello?”
SAM: “Hi.”
[long pause]
JOSH: “Hello?”
ME: “Sam! Tell him who you are!”
SAM: “Oh. It’s me. Sam.”
JOSH: “Hi.”
[long, long pause]
ME: “Well, tell him why you called!”
SAM: “Um. Do you have the words?”
JOSH: “Wha-aaat?”

And so on.

I’m grilling out tonight. Hot dogs, baked potatoes, possibly some leeks or whatever else I find to throw on there. Very simple. Anybody care to join us?

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/04/17/randomosity/feed/ 2 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/04/14/this-is-why-sam-is-me/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/04/14/this-is-why-sam-is-me/#comments Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:19:38 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/04/14/this-is-why-sam-is-me/ Continue reading →]]> ME: “Sam, what’s Bakugan?”
SAM: “Um…I dunno.”
ME: “Oh. See, my friend Whitney has a son who’s about your age. They don’t live here, but where they are, she says that all the second graders have Bakugan. Is Bakugan not popular in your class?”
SAM: “Oh, that. No, not really.”
ME: “Is there something that is popular in your class? What does everybody like?”
SAM: “…Math?”

(I can probably guarantee that there are tons of kids in his class playing Bakugan during every free moment. I can also guarantee that Sam is honestly and completely oblivious to it, just as I would have been, right up until about five minutes before it went out of vogue. )

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/04/14/this-is-why-sam-is-me/feed/ 4 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/04/09/spring-break-in-543/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/04/09/spring-break-in-543/#comments Thu, 09 Apr 2009 13:42:32 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/04/09/spring-break-in-543/ Continue reading →]]> Actually, Gabe’s already on break; he doesn’t have preschool today, so he’s coming with me to MOPS and then to the store, where I have to buy All the Freezer Containers, due to an increasingly glaring obsession with making soup. Seriously, it’s like this: I like having hot lunches, but I hate making ‘em at lunchtime. Leftovers are great, therefore, and nothing creates leftovers like soup! Plus I’m getting deeply into all sorts of legumes, so this is perfect. I’m currently exhuming the last of my freezer stash of pinto bean soup, just in time to load it back up with a Great Northern bean concoction. I also ordered an acorn squash with my groceries, instructing Eric to make the awesome cream soup he made a few weeks ago. Oh, yum.

Sam “confessed” yesterday that he hopes Spring Break ends quickly. I say “confessed” because he immediately edited his statement in the apparent hope that I didn’t hear his first choice of words, that he “couldn’t stand to be away from Ms. P. so long!” He altered it to “be away from school,” which I guess he felt was less embarrassing. He also said he needed to get back to Spanish class quickly, as apparently the teacher there is eagerly awaiting the next installment of the story he’s writing.

Have I talked about this? Sam, and a group of a few other boys, spend their leisure time writing stories at school. He carries around a notebook and scraps of paper, on which he jots the tales…which he then reads in front of the class. I knew about the writing, but I didn’t know about the presentations until I caught his teacher on the phone; she didn’t know that I didn’t know, so nobody had told me! She’s amazed by it, since although she’s had little girls who write and share stories, she’s never had little boys at this age doing it so intently, and never a group of kids doing it together. Sam says he wants to be a story writer when he grows up. I remember wanting to do that, too, although I think that was when I was in fifth grade or so.

Anyway, Spring Break could feel very long for all of us this year if I’m not proactive. Long for Sam, missing his classes and story group; long for Gabe, spending the week with kids bigger than he is, who he can’t so easily boss around. And long for me…just because. So I’m coming up with ideas for ways to break up the week – places to go, projects to do. If it were slightly warmer, I’d take the time to start tooling around with the Sisyphean task of fixing the back yard to grow things, but I’m not sure it’s nice enough yet; the ground is still pretty hard. Already got tomorrow planned, though! The boys and I are heading to a neighboring town for some Hammer gels (a whole jug of Espresso flavor, just for me! Whee!) and a new flask, and then, since it was a bit of a hike to get there, we’ll find something to do in those parts to entertain ourselves.

What are you guys doing, or did you already do, to kill your kids’ Breaks? I’m trying to put off the Chuck E. Cheese option indefinitely, if I can.

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/04/09/spring-break-in-543/feed/ 5 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/03/19/hi/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/03/19/hi/#comments Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:44:38 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/03/19/hi/ Continue reading →]]>

I’m having real trouble being awake today, for some reason. I had to run by the store before MOPS (needed DVD-R disk for Sam’s school project), and I let myself buy a Diet Coke, which kept me animated through the MOPS meeting, but now I’m sinking back below sea level once more. I don’t think this coffee is going to cut it, either, as good and lovely as it is. Caffeine is just a bandage on an open wound. Need to get to bed early tonight…but that might prove tricky, if we can’t get Sam’s project done quickly.

I had a bad dream last night, which could help explain my tiredness. Some folks dream fretfully about serious issues, like illness, mortal danger, etc. Me, I have nightmares about loose birds in a moving car. In the dream, I pulled a blanket over my head and screamed and screamed, but the driver wouldn’t pull over, and the bird kept landing on my blanket and peck-peck-pecking at me. I shuddered for a long time when I woke up. In fact, I shuddered more just typing it.

And then MOPS was challenging. Let me ask you parents this: if you had to write down what your best parenting attribute was, could you do it? Would it be a simple thing? Or would you, as I did, find yourself holding a pen over a blank piece of paper, suddenly feeling like crying?

Sam has a violin concert tonight, on top of having to finish his project. (The project is recorded, by the way; we’re just in the “post-production” segment of the work.) He’s not ready. I suppose that in the grand scale of things, that’s not catastrophic or even a bad lesson to learn, though certainly not an easy one. Still, I cringe at the thought that he’s going to get up there and in no way be able to play the pieces as fast as the other kids, and it’ll be a mess. I don’t know how that makes him feel, but it makes me feel pretty rotten. I’m over-identifying, maybe, or else it’s Mama Guilt again. Whichever. Doesn’t matter. Both suck.

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/03/19/hi/feed/ 3 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/03/13/after-all-that-venting/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/03/13/after-all-that-venting/#comments Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:09:40 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/03/13/after-all-that-venting/ Continue reading →]]> I called Sam’s teacher yesterday afternoon to verify some due dates (Sam’s memory can be rather reminiscent of Swiss cheese at times, and his record of recording things in his homework notebook is spotty at best), and it was a nice chat. She commiserated about the fact that there were, in fact, a huge amount of projects right now, and not all from her. Many of the kids are having trouble keeping up, and she’s sympathetic to them and not inclined to ride hard. She also seemed impressed when I told her that, rather than just writing a script for a TV broadcast, we’re using iMovie to record the thing to DVD; I actually think that will be simpler for him, not harder, but we’ll let her feel impressed.

While talking to her, I asked about his behavior of late. As it turns out, the recent changes in clothing style have done more for Sam than aid in his efforts to attract the Girl of His Dreams. His attitude has been far more restrained and calmed, and his teacher feels that it is due, in part, to how he’s dressing and perceiving himself. He gets a lot of attention from other teachers, as I suspected was happening, and he seems to be really enjoying that. On the other hand, the Girl of His Dreams has had to be moved to a table away from Sam – not because of him, but because she couldn’t stop talking to him. (Apparently, she’s no more quiet at the other table, so I don’t know how much of it was due to Sam and how much of it is just her manner.)

Anyway, we turned in one project yesterday and another today, and yet another project, according to the teacher, doesn’t even have a due date specified more closely than “by the end of the month,” so I’m feeling somewhat more relaxed. Of course, he could come home today with an urgent note that he’s fallen behind in math and needs to be able to do his one hundred timed subtraction facts by Monday afternoon. Anything’s possible!

Going to run out and do errands this morning, then have lunch and violin lesson this afternoon. Nice easy dinner tonight, then, tomorrow morning…twenty miles. Woo!

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/03/13/after-all-that-venting/feed/ 1 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/03/12/down-with-homework/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/03/12/down-with-homework/#comments Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:34:54 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/03/12/down-with-homework/ Continue reading →]]> Seriously! I was a freaking lazy child, and I detested doing homework. I’d put it off, drag my feet, whine and tantrum, lie about not having any, lather, rinse, repeat. Now I sympathize with my mother more than ever, for not only do I now have to deal with homework all over again (no fair! I’m done with school!), but I’ve got a child who is exactly the same way as I was…and this time, I get the joy of being the one who drives the homework train, even as my inner kid screams and throws her pen across the room for the billionth time.

I love Sam’s school. I love the enthusiasm with which each grade embraces the “big unit” designed for them, and how they approach it from all sorts of angles and learning styles. What I don’t love is how that somehow translates into All The Projects. Second grade does Africa, and so Sam has to put together booklets, write news broadcasts, sculpt bugs and write reports about them, research various peoples of Africa, and more. I’d love to know exactly how much of this is being done at school, because when doing said news broadcast (“…about what you’ve learned about Africa!”), it became clear that he’s not retained more than a handful of unrelated facts. (Or else he’s deciding not to cough up more than that to us, thinking it could lead to more work. See above genetic traits concerning “dragging feet” and “lying.” )

I don’t want to do it any more than he does! Does it make me a rotten parent? If I am, I’m in good company; I mentioned it to a few people, on Twitter and in real life, and the universal response was, “Sing it, Sister.” I can’t stand the arguing, the trying to toe the line between motivating him and staying out of his way, and the constant stream of paperwork coming from the school. A part of me feels shamed when he suddenly brings home an assignment with a due date that he’s already missed or has no hope of reaching in time; he’s the one who messed up, but that inner kid of mine is the one with the knot in her stomach. Why is that?

Again, I have to remind myself: he’s just like me, and I survived this, and I’m not living on a park bench. He probably won’t, either. (But it’s the qualifier in that statement keeps me awake at nights. Okay, maybe not really, but check back with me after a few more years of this.)

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/03/12/down-with-homework/feed/ 8 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/03/10/feeling-tired/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/03/10/feeling-tired/#comments Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:10:53 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/03/10/feeling-tired/ Continue reading →]]>

I feel foggy today, which is appropriate, since we have dense fog outside and I ran in it. Maybe I absorbed it through my skull. Thunderstorms are coming, so perhaps that will blast away the mist and return my mind. In the meantime, here’s a picture of Sam from our trip to the museum this weekend. That butterfly perched on his hat for a long time, well after he got freaked out and had me take the hat off his head.

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/03/10/feeling-tired/feed/ 0 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/24/sammy-ism-4/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/24/sammy-ism-4/#comments Wed, 25 Feb 2009 02:06:58 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/24/sammy-ism-4/ Continue reading →]]> SAM (talking about school): “Joshua told me that Ms. P. was mean, but she’s not. She’s nice! He just probably never met her.”
ME: “Sam, you have the ability to see the best in people. Not everybody does.”
SAM: “She really is nice.”
ME (hesitant): “You know, some people have trouble seeing that…”
SAM: “Yeah, bad kids. And parents who think that their kids are always right. That’s just wrong.”

Sometimes I feel blessed by this kid, beyond words.

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/24/sammy-ism-4/feed/ 8 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/23/brain-wanderings/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/23/brain-wanderings/#comments Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:44:44 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/23/brain-wanderings/ Continue reading →]]> Mind you, with the exception of the pasta (with which I am entirely uncreative and my “planning” involves jarred sauces, occasionally with vegetables added in), I have no specific plans for any of these. Any ideas will also be appreciated in the comments. These were the front runners; they beat out stew, pork chops, and Leftover Bonanza.

We now enter a second solid week of Sam dressing to the nines for school. Today it was a black dress shirt and tie. This girl must be exceptional (though now he’s suggesting that there may be a second girl catching his attention, the little player). Of course, the alternative is that he’s enjoying the attention he gets from adults in the school for looking like this, or that he’s relishing the role of “boy interested in girl.” He tried to insinuate that I was proud of him because he “finally found a girl to like!” but I shut that down in a hurry. Good grief, Mister Seven Years Old. On Friday, he went with his dress shirt open at the neck, with a hematite cross pendant around his neck; he looked like a member of a church praise band. I’d take a picture, but I don’t know how much I care to encourage this. On the other hand, he did choose to dress like a complete slob all weekend long…

Eric has taken to heading to the gym on a regular basis! He’s going in the evenings, which works nicely with my morning running preference. He’s actually doing a walk-run thing on the treadmill, and he’s musing about possibly eventually working up to being able to do 5Ks. It’s a struggle, now, not to want to talk about running ALL THE TIME with him, which would be a complete turn-off for him…but, like I said, it’s hard not to. He does need new shoes, fitted properly, so that lines up nicely with my desire to get up to one of the big running stores soon and check out fuel and hydration systems for the marathon. My Crush Fuel Belt isn’t going to do it, I think I’ve decided. Just too much of a pain to get the bottle in and out; once, this past run, when I tried, I managed to accidentally rip the whole belt off my waist. Suggestions for an alternative, and one that hopefully carries more than a single packet of something besides the bottles? (I hate gels, so need to carry Beans, Blox, etc.)

Been running a smidge earlier in the morning than I have to, so that I have time to sit and eat breakfast with Eric in the morning before he heads to work. (Meaning that he, too, is rising before he had been, so he’s not rushing and eating a few bites while standing over the kitchen counter.) It’s nice – so much more satisfying than an extra 15-30 minutes of sleep time would be.

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/23/brain-wanderings/feed/ 13 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/18/so-this-is-interesting/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/18/so-this-is-interesting/#comments Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:38:05 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/18/so-this-is-interesting/ Continue reading →]]> Low iron in your diet can lead to being cold all the time. I’m not getting nearly enough iron, somehow. Therefore, I am cooking a humongous pot of pinto bean soup in a cast iron pot. Should be leftovers for ages! Yay, beans! (But boo on what discovering that iron deficiency did to my mood last night. So frustrating, all this focus I’m finding I need to do.)

Also, boo on the book I just finished. I don’t know, guess it wasn’t my cup of tea; it wasn’t poorly written, but I just felt completely unmoved by any of the characters. Instead of feeling pulled along by the tale, it read like, “Oh, hey! This author learned a bunch of Chinese history and designed a little story around that framework! Hurrah, history!” I like history, but in this case, I’d just about rather have picked up a history book than wasted the time wading through the narrative. Meh.

Sam is still dressing up for school. I tried to encourage a sweater this morning, but he came down dressed in a button-down shirt again.

In the car this morning, Gabe cheerfully remarked, “Those buses are peculiar, aren’t they? They’re blue and white.” (I can’t recall using that word in casual conversation in…well, ever, though I’m sure I have.)

If I eat enough iron-rich foods, will I stop feeling like I’m walking through a fogbank and every little thing is catching me by surprise?

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/18/so-this-is-interesting/feed/ 12 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/16/somebody-blow-reveille-for-me/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/16/somebody-blow-reveille-for-me/#comments Mon, 16 Feb 2009 16:29:08 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/16/somebody-blow-reveille-for-me/ Continue reading →]]> I can’t manage to feel awake. Sitting here with a bottle of water, post-coffee, and all I want is a snuggly blanky and a nap. Darn, I hope I’m not overtraining; that would really suck. I am going to try for a nap at some point today, I hope, or at least a little rest. Don’t want to artificially perk myself up with extra caffeine and mask anything.

Apparently, Valentine’s Day wasn’t enough for Sam to try to impress the girl on whom he had a crush; this morning, he shouldered himself into another dress shirt, though I talked him out of a tie in favor of just a sweater vest. “I want to look good for B______!” Okay, then. I think he also really enjoyed having all the grownups tell him he looked handsome on Friday. At this rate, though, I’ll need to pick him up some more nice shirts; he only has three long-sleeved dress shirts that fit at present. He’s been living in screen-printed tee-shirts, long and short-sleeved, for a very long time. I was caught off-guard by this morning’s wardrobe issues; I hadn’t realized that this was going to be an ongoing thing. Live and learn. My little man is growing up, sniff-sniff…

I should totally do this. How fun would that be? Most of the courses are so far away, though; I’d have to plan. But it also looks like there are only two RRCA-certified coaches in my state, so there might be an untapped market.

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/16/somebody-blow-reveille-for-me/feed/ 2 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/13/parenting-i-fail/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/13/parenting-i-fail/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:06:26 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/13/parenting-i-fail/ Continue reading →]]> I just taught Sam multi-column subtraction using Tom Lehrer’s “New Math.” He loved it, and now he chants to himself while he works. “You can’t take seven from zero; zero’s less than seven…”

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/13/parenting-i-fail/feed/ 0 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/13/toeing-that-privacy-line/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/13/toeing-that-privacy-line/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:40:28 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/13/toeing-that-privacy-line/ Continue reading →]]> I debated over whether or not to share this, but I finally realized today that as a grownup, I would love to be able to look back on a journal that my mom had written and find out this stuff about myself. Someday, Sam might appreciate the same sort of insight into his own past.

He went to school today in a dress shirt and tie, with new shoes. I asked him if he thought anybody else would be dressed up, and he said, “Are you kidding? Nobody dresses up for a kids’ school party. I’m doing this for B_____.”

Yes, there’s a girl in the picture. Not that she knows, of course, though she might have a clue by later today; the school is selling silk roses for 50 cents each, and he left home with a dollar in his pocket, so as to be able to get a flower for his teacher (kiss-up!) and for his crush. He actually asked me if he ought to write a poem for her, but after I told him it would be fine but to make sure to give it to her privately so as not to embarrass her in front of her friends, he decided against it.

According to him, she’s a very smart girl, but also “a little bad.” (Eric cracked up and started singing Fiona Apple songs.) He wouldn’t elaborate on what that means, but I presume it just means that she’s getting her share of scolding from their teacher. He also says that she’s very, very pretty. “I get nervous when I try to talk to her,” he sighs.

I’m too young for this, aren’t I?

And in the meantime, Gabe made a bracelet out of pipe cleaners and pony beads, then wanted to take it to school to give to his friend, Rachel. I’m not concerned about any puppy love there, though; he’s adamantly against kissing of any kind.

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/13/toeing-that-privacy-line/feed/ 4 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/12/let-me-tell-you/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/12/let-me-tell-you/#comments Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:11:53 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/12/let-me-tell-you/ Continue reading →]]> It is a true treasure to send your child off to the bus stop, listening to him scream down the street, “I HATE YOU, MOM! I HATE YOU!”…because you didn’t have exact change for both his lunch and the class pizza party tomorrow, so he’ll have to ask for change.

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]]> http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/12/let-me-tell-you/feed/ 7 http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/08/sunday-morning-blahs/ http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/08/sunday-morning-blahs/#comments Sun, 08 Feb 2009 15:51:20 +0000 Carrie http://www.redhairedgirl.com/main/2009/02/08/sunday-morning-blahs/

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