Randomness

Lauren: "Deer die easily."

Me: "They do?"

Lauren: "Yeah. They are too soft on the outside and their insides are too fragile."

***

Lindsay, playing pirate: "Hi, Mateys!"

***

This morning, Lauren sat reading a book to herself about Ernie and Bert.

"What are you reading?"

"It's a book about Sesame Street, y'know the tv show?"

"Is it good?"

"It's kind of predictable."

At my computer

I thought this picture ended up kind of cute. Happy Friday!

Awkward

I have walked to school with a different mom I don't know nearly every day. The walk to school is always fine, and then you start off on the walk home and realize you have absolutely nothing to say now that your conversation isn't directed by your 6-year-olds interacting. Yesterday, I tried so hard to give the mom an out - Lindsay wanted to walk home, which takes forever, and still, she braved half the walk before she suddenly remembered she'd left her stove on. No, actually I made that up.

I'd been introduced via email to a mom "desperate to meet other stay at home moms", who reportedly has a son "about Lindsay's age". Now, considering the source, I should've just left it at "I am too busy these days", but I didn't, and arranged to meet at the local community center playgroup, which I thought, well if it is a failed meeting, at least you don't feel like you're abandoning the other person in a park with nothing to do, and I usually know at least another mom there.

It turned out "about Lindsay's age" was 15 months, which is tough, because Lindsay is sort of a bruiser around peers. It also turned out that this mom had just gotten a job because she can't stand being a stay at home mom, so our conversation was very clipped about how boring and awful she found staying at home. About 10 minutes into the conversation, she made a call on her cell phone to a lab to ask a question about bloodwork...so at this point, I realized our playdate was over. Fortunately, a mom I know arrived right after that and we began chatting about PTO stuff. The playdate mom said, "Matthew has to take a nap now", and left abruptly.

I was introduced to another mom who went on and on about how gifted her 3 year old was and how she couldn't BELIEVE she had to wait another 2 years for her to place into Pre-K because of her December birthday (the district cut off is now October 1st). When she said that she "saw no point in Pre-K anyway because what can they do in 2 hours", I tuned out of the conversation. This is why I hate playgroups, because it has always seemed the whole point is to talk about how above average your kid is, and y'know every kid is really good at something, and not good at something else.

Tonight is Back to School night at Lauren's school...

Doing more listening

Alright, so here's the breakdown:

After the bank, I met Kim and Fred for lunch at Panera. Despite my wriggly, snotty, mostly ignored 2-year-old spilling water on herself, eating cream cheese off of a knife, and throwing cups at other customers, I had an excellent time. Kim and I have plans to play Rockband 2 this evening. Yay!

Alec came home at 4 and did, actually, clean the house, did laundry, dishes, and made a fabulous dinner of ribs, corn on the cob, and green beans. He even ran out an bought me a heartshaped Carvel cake, one I'd pointed out to Lauren was my favorite, which he knew without having spoken to Lauren. Jessie, Nick and Jack joined us for dinner bearing beautiful roses and yummy wine. Around 7:30, we realized the sewer pipe was backing up. By 8 PM, the Snake Dance Kid arrived while I was tucking an overtired, expectorating Lindsay into bed. By 8:15, the pipe was snaked, and besides the basement needing a good clean and having spent $300 on an emergency visit, we had a lovely evening, and made plans for picking fruit and veggies this afternoon.

So, it wasn't a perfect day, but y'know. Well, I know you know. I'm going to be a bit wiser and listen more to Karen whose advice is always spot on.

So far 34 sucks

I nearly got hit by a car this morning - for the 3rd time walking my kids to school in a crosswalk. Ms VWL50G, if there were police at Lauren's school this morning I would've reported you, which I wouldn't have if you'd leaned out the window and apologized. You STOP at a stop sign. You yield to pedestrians in crosswalks.

I then headed to the bank. My bank hasn't had a pen in the ATM vestibule in weeks. I should've remembered to bring one along with a check from Mudda for my birthday (Thanks, Mudda!) but I forgot. It was 8:50, so I decided to wait for my bank to open. Lindsay has a bit of a runny nose today, and the 10 minutes after having walked Lauren to school made her a bit testy. We got into the bank at 9:03 (grr) and I quickly signed the check and filled out the envelope.

Now, Alec got his annual bonus this week, so the deposit was a pretty good one. It turns out my bank puts a hold on large deposits via the ATM, and I have a lot of bills to pay with that money. So I went back into the bank, got a deposit slip and then got into the line, which was now to the end of the stantions (about 15 people ahead of me). I got into the line and realized I didn't have my ATM card. When it gave me the message about the hold, I just walked away from the machine. So I stepped out of line, but the card wasn't there. I began to get very nervous. By the time I got to the teller, I apparently looked panicked. She checked the ATM and found my card in the machine, so returned it, and printed out my statement. Thankfully, I only suffered 10 minutes of worry and we didn't lose any money for my stupidity.

I'm due to meet my friends for lunch in about a half hour, and Alec is cooking (and cleaning!) and invited friends for dinner...so things are looking up, but I have to say my first 9 or so hours of 34 didn't look great...

Some quick points and pictures

Don't get too excited. My camera is broken, so these are some bad ones from my phone.

We're doing soccer and children's choir at church, so all our activities are compressed into the first 3 days of the week. Last night we didn't get home until 7:20 from soccer, and then had to make and eat dinner, bathe, and get the kids to bed. After struggling to make dinner after soccer practice on Monday, I did all my dinner prep early. It meant we got the kids to bed at 8:30 instead of 9:15, so that was good.

On Fridays, we go to the farmer's market in town, and drive out to Suydam Farm to feed the chickens and buy eggs. They also have sheep. We pet them. When Lindsay and I got there on Friday morning, we discovered they had about a dozen piglets.

Lindsay called them "scaredy pigs" because one of them would startle and then they all would run into the barn. Lindsay thought this was very funny.

On Tuesdays, Lauren has soccer clinic. She wanted me to take a picture of her posing. You can actually see her new 'do in that picture. No more ponytail. Unfortunately, every other girl she knows has this same chin-length haircut (though most of them don't wear it with bangs), and I still don't recognize her all the time with short hair.


Lindsay gets really into the practice. Here she is dribbling the ball. She's the red blur in the background - she was wearing an Elmo shirt. She was sort of playing with the blonde in pink the the foreground who didn't understand, as Lindsay does, that soccer is a game you play with your feet.


Yeah, that's the youngest Anderson girl, but I don't remember her name.

Management issues

Lauren adores her new teacher. They seem to have a lot in common, both very happy people. Miss H is probably about 4'9", so she must know what it's like to be one of the smallest people in the school even though you're one of the oldest kids. Lauren really likes school, so I imagine she's fun in class.

Although Lauren really likes her, the stories coming home from school don't instill me with a lot of confidence in Miss H's classroom management. Last week, Lauren reported that the class received 2 warnings for talking at inappropriate times. In the lunch room, 7 students were standing when it was time to sit and lost half their recess. The whole class was punished later by losing free time, and instead they had to sit quietly at their desks.

"I didn't think that was very fair to the rest of us." Lauren reported.

Yesterday, there was a fire drill at the end of the day. Lauren said that none of the rules were followed - they are supposed to exit the building single file silently and go to their designated area. When the fire drill ends, they are supposed to return to their classroom the same way. Since these rules were not followed, everyone in the class lost all of their good behavior points they'd accumulated. Lauren was pretty upset by this because she felt she had accumulated enough points to earn a prize and didn't, and she'd worked hard to earn a point each day since the first day of school and had 9 points already. Since she wasn't one of the kids who misbehaved she felt this was arbitrary and unfair.

Lauren is a bright kid. Her reasoning for following the rules isn't to get a prize, but if it's promised and doesn't happen, she will likely stop. If you're going to get in trouble even if you follow the rules, what's the point?

Netiquette

I maintain an e-mail list for the PTO. This year we're doing a push to get as many addresses as possible so that we no longer have to send paper fliers out. Most likely, we won't be able to eliminate paper memos all together, but we're hoping to reduce the number to around 50 from 300.

I have a spreadsheet I keep my information in, in case I have to look up a particular parent or student. Since it's the beginning of the year, we're doing a lot of updating. The PTO president sent me about 40 names to add to the list.

I've always wondered about those people who use e-mail addresses like "born2ski at yahoo dot com" on business correspondence. It's a FREE e-mail service, you can have more than one. You can even set one up to forward to another if you chafe at the idea of checking more than one mailbox. Admittedly "loves2bmom" isn't inappropriate for a PTO mail list, but when I saw "nudist99". I mean, are you kidding me? You couldn't have set up a Sue_Jones at gmail for this puppy? We only send out e-mail once a week!

We will never forget

A bit of an update

I had thought about pulling Lauren out of school today and trying to attend a memorial in the city, but the idea of going into the city with my two kids was a little scary for me. I thought I might make my morning walk longer, but I found that walking this morning, catching my clock at 8:43 AM, that I remember those details just too vividly...walking down 8th Avenue to work, noticing people were stopped and pointing up. Looking up, finally. Ducking into the coffee shop, smelling their dark roast. They were listening to 1010WINS, and they were just announcing the second plane hit as I paid for my morning cup. I went outside into the little alcove where I would sip my coffee and smoke a cigarette, looking at a grotesque hole in the North Tower, with flames leaping out and smoke billowing. The atmosphere on the streets was becoming panicked, and I retreated to the silence of my office - I was the first one in always. My phone was ringing as I sat down, it was my mother, and then Alec. The phones were gone pretty much directly after that with all of the circuits either jammed or gone.

Today, I walked to church to sit on this bench under a weeping willow, but with the construction on our church grounds, the bench is not there right now. I sat on another bench with Lindsay, watching squirrels gathering acorns, birds bathing in nearby mud puddles. Lindsay gathered sticks from the ground (in her bare feet) and tried to put them back on a nearby bush.

I tried to focus on how much life we've lived in those 7 years, as I looked at the big muddy construction site due to be housing for a family transitioning out of a homeless shelter, the beginnings of our church's community garden planted so that we could provide our town's food pantry with fresh vegetables, and what will eventually be a prayer garden. It's not much now, but it is brewing hope. A promise of what will be.

September 11 didn't shatter my hope. My hope was already shattered then. It stomped on broken bits. Things couldn't be the same after that. Many of my coworkers left New York City shortly after that, never to return. I ended up closer. Six months after that, I took a job on Chambers Street, two blocks away from where those buildings once stood.

For today, I will try to carry on, maybe not business as usual as life around me seems, but with some semblance of profound gratitude and hope.

Lauren's birthday

It's hard to believe that 6 years ago, I held you...my itty bitty little munchkin...for the first time. This picture was taken about 30 hours after you were born, because, as I described yesterday, I was too sick in the 24 hour period after having given birth to be taken down to the NICU to see my baby. My first few days of motherhood were filled with these sort of disappointments - it was not the "birth plan" I had chosen - to be admitted a full day before having you, on what seemed to be every sort of monitoring machine in the unit while they tried to keep my blood pressure stable. The long period of not getting to see you while Daddy gushed about feeding you from a tiny bottle holding a mere ounce of formula. Being told that you would be kept at the NICU for some indetermined amount of time after I left...which ended up being only 24 hours...there was something that felt like failure in that first day, being home with no baby. Daddy would call the NICU to find out when you'd had your last bottle, when you'd gone to sleep to try and stave off the tears.

You were so tiny. 16 inches tall, 4 pounds 3 ounces at birth and just 4 pounds when we brought you home. In those first 8 weeks, we had 8 weigh-ins (one with a visiting nurse at our home), and feedings every 2 hours by the clock, even in the dead of night. Daddy and I split feedings so that we could get a mere 4 hours of continuous sleep.

And those out there in the Internets probably remember that even though your newborn wasn't 4-pounds that at times it felt you were only keeping her alive by the sheer force of your will. You'd get up even when it wasn't one of those every 2 hour feedings to stare into the bassinet at your bedside to watch her tiny chest rise and fall.

Self portrait, August 2008

You're just too cool for me these days. Our conversations are punctuated by eye rolls, foot stamps, and door slams, but you're still my little munchkin.

I love you, peanut. Happy birthday!

It may not be happening, but it did happen

I've been doing more than my share of whining lately. It's not very appealing or productive.

It occurred to me that my current state of upset is bigger than adjusting to the day without Lauren, my current level of activity including Irving, the PTO, art history class, church, whether or not Lauren can bring a snack for her class for her birthday, even flea abatement. My reactions are so far over the top from what's reasonable. I wrote today "I'm struggling a lot", and it is true but with what? I'm behaving as though the sky is falling.

And it dawned on me.

Seven years ago this Thursday, the sky fell.

And when I had that thought, I started sobbing uncontrollably. I write that with some guilt because although I was in NYC that day, I was 12 blocks away. Lives were much more effected than mine. I don't know anyone who never came home. But I can say when I think of that day, I feel the thick smoke caught in my throat. I hear the constant sirens roaring down Seventh Avenue. I remember how lost we were staring at signs in the twice closed Grand Central Station not able to comprehend.

There was heightened alert, as though you were constantly vigilant to hear what couldn't be heard and see what couldn't be seen. There were weeks when you had to plan your commute around the subway you were on being evacuated for suspicious packages and Anthrax scares. The fires burned at Ground Zero for months. The posters of the missing and then presumed dead their smiling faces from happy times of their lives holding children, dressed on their wedding day...spouses, children, parents were mourning them.

I just don't have the words to make you understand the ache inside me when confronted with all this. I have maintained media silence every 9/11, including the one I spent a year later in a New York City hospital a year later waiting for someone to tell me how my tiny 4 pound baby was doing because I was confined to my bed and she was in the NICU. The charge nurse who cheerily came in to introduce herself at the 7 AM shift change found me sobbing because I'd convinced myself I was never going to see little Lauren, and with all the drugs I was on they had just not told me yet she hadn't survived.

I'm not doing a good job of just pretending that it's just any day where we soldier on and walk on treadmills and go to school. I don't know what to do about that right now, but it seems I have 48 hours to figure that out.

Where is Lady Epiphany these days?

Alright. I'll admit it. Rockband? Totally, utterly addictive. Alec has said with her purple librarian glasses and blonde pigtails, my avatar is just about the uncoolest unlikely rockstar, but I've rocked her way through about 3/4 the way through "Medium Guitar" and I've only had the game now a bit more than a week.

The house still has fleas. It's also an unholy mess. Monday is swimming lesson day for Lindsay, and Tuesday we volunteer for sorting at the thrift shop at church so that's unlikely to change before Wednesday.

Walking to and from school twice a day has proved to be time consuming and exhausting, particularly in last week's heat. We have a playdate scheduled at a nearby park after school, so I am thinking I will leave my car there this afternoon, and reduce the PM walk to about a quarter mile from 2 miles.

I am completely exhausted. I don't remember the last time I felt this tired to the bone. I feel constantly on the verge of getting sick.

Saturday was my first class. I love Art History. I'm so glad I decided to take this course again. It's hard - this is one of the professors who actually uses the entire alotted 2 hours and 55 minutes, and she talks hella fast. We chatted during break and after class about her 8 week old daughter.

Sunday started Sunday school. Our pastor asked me to be the classroom coordinator for the K-1st grade class. From what I understand, that means I have the schedule and must make sure that teachers have their materials and the outline developed by the lead teachers so that the routine is always the same regardless of whose teaching the class and to make it easier when teachers need subs. This all wouldn't be a lot of work if the two lead teachers had taught before, but they haven't. And they are 17. I also have to interface with the lead coordinator (who is also a class coordinator and a lead teacher) who got really irritated at me for asking her for stuff that "the teachers are supposed to provide" and that my teen teachers "aren't more organized". I don't mind doing this, I just really hate conflict. Alec offered some perspective last night: "The worst thing that happened is the kids spent too much time coloring?"

Bigger is that Lauren's school has all these new (unworking) policies in place concerning picking up children from school. This year, 70 kids aren't being bused (mine included) and the board of education increased the school day by 10 minutes to give the kids a longer recess. They did this without regard that the teachers' day ends at 2:55 PM. So during this chaos and confusion of which kids are walking versus being picked up or some combination there of (like us), all of this is left up to about a dozen or so paraprofessionals. On Friday, I went to pick Lauren up in the gym, where the "walkers" were, and she wasn't there. When I asked the para monitoring her class (she was monitoring 2 classes - about 40 kids), she said, "I have all the kids they left me". I found Lauren waiting with the kids who are picked up by car in the front lobby. I don't understand what's hard about we walk when it is nice out.

What else have I got for you? Along with my busted digital camera, the battery for my Dell now only lasts 2 hours. So 45 minutes of class with no laptop. Why not just buy a new digital camera and a new laptop battery? Oh, well, all my spare change goes toward flea spray.

First day of school

Lauren sporting her new "back to school" 'do, the butterfly dress with a built in sparkly necklace(!), and her 1st grade present - a ladybug bracelet from Auntie Jules.

More later...

Life lessons: do what you want or try to make other people happy?

I should be taking out the garbage and folding the laundry, but I thought I'd write a quick post.

Lauren's first day of school is tomorrow. All supplies are purchased. I have to check my wallet for lunch money, but otherwise, we are ready to go. Summer is officially over.

Lauren and I bought two dresses at Kohl's a while back. I think it must've been at the beginning of August. I bought both girls new sneakers, and we went to the sporting goods store next door for Lauren's cleats and shin guards.

The following weekend, Lauren spent the weekend with Nanny. There was a lot of shopping done. A "very expensive" outfit was purchased from an all girls store. Said outfit was packaged separate from the other tees and pants and labeled "First Day of School" underlined twice. There was at least an e-mail follow up on that. There may even have been a phone call. I hung the outfit up in the front of Lauren's closet.

Tonight, Lauren announced she wanted to wear one of the dresses for the first day of school. I reminded her she'd picked out an outfit with Nanny, and she repeated, "I want to wear the butterfly dress."

It is her first day of school. She's nearly six and dresses herself every day. It feels wrong to force her to wear an outfit because Nanny will be disappointed. I mean, Nanny is 58. Right? It also doesn't feel right to pull out "You have to do what you said you'd do" or to make a big deal (since deal was already made) about the cost of the item.

What do you do?

a) Make your kid wear it.

b) Don't make your kid wear it, but warn her Nanny will be upset. When she says that doesn't make sense, respond that sometimes grown ups behave in ways that don't make sense.

c) Don't make your kid wear it. Don't mention it again.

d) Don't make her wear it, but take a picture of her in the outfit to send to Nanny as "First Day of School".