E(xcellent) coli

A couple weeks ago, I dug out our biggest whiteboard and gathered the children round.  The purpose of this congress was to write down all the things we wanted to do this summer vacation:  Places we wanted to visit, activities and crafts to be done, etc.  Summer tends to whiz by so fast that I didn't want to hit August 1st and panic, realizing I've squandered our time together.

Now, just because I wrote it down doesn't mean it's guaranteed to happen, as I explained to the children.  Some things I refused to even waste the dry-erase pigment upon.  "Go to Disney World," "Make a for-real weapons arsenal," "Eat at Burger King," being three such examples.

One of the very first things they wanted me to write down was "Visit Big Creek."  This one was no problem-o.  It's close, it's free, the swimming area is shallow enough I don't have to constantly watch for possible child drowning.

So, last Friday, we went.  Check one off the whiteboard, make the kids happy, collect my Super Awesome Mom badge.

Yay!

Yay!

But then, Saturday morning, the internet greets me with this headline:

Apparently there are elevated levels of bacteria present at Big Creek, although the article did note that these go up after heavy rainfall, so it was worse Saturday morning, after Friday's nights showers; in other words, our trip Friday afternoon was safe.  Well, safeish.  Also according to the article, there were signs up at the entrances to the park warning good parents who do things like look for warning signs.  I saw no signs, and have made my peace with having my shiny Super Awesome Mom badge revoked.  

The silver lining?  I'm thinking of adding "Expose offspring to E. coli" to the whiteboard, just because I like checking things off of lists.  Is there an "'A' for Effort" parenting badge?  Maybe a "Whoops! My bad!"  Because I've earned a ton of those.

Dog Days

We're closing in on the final couple weeks of summer vacation, and I'm a little blue.  I always have trouble letting go of our kids in the fall- school just takes up so many hours of their day!  It's one of the few ways in which I am thankful to be a muggle:  At least they're still living at home!  They could be going away to school (um, somewhere- Rowling never addressed exactly where or what the North American school of magic was.  It would most likely need to be somewhere remote, right?  Wyoming, maybe?) until Christmas, so I suppose I'll console myself with the fact that I still get to see them everyday at 3:20 pm.

I've learned to accept that I panic a bit every August:  Where did the summer go?  Time to do aaaaallll the fun summer things I put off in June and July, packing the zoo and Reiman Gardens and pancakes for breakfast and one last trip to Big Creek and late nights watching meteor showers (this one's not my fault, as I have no control over the Perseids...yet) into three short weeks, the hopeful effect being our children will be good and sick of me come the first day of school, and eager to jump on that school bus and march into those classrooms where they will, naturally, be star pupils.  (You are welcome teachers- also, please be advised this little fantasy of mine does not apparently feature my own children.  I'm as sad about this as you are.)

In addition to the manic We Will Have Fun or Die Trying activities, we still have to do our back-to-school shopping.  This is a gauntlet that does not end, as you might believe, when every item on a myriad of lists has been checked off, oh no:  It's over when none of our children are speaking to me and I have made at least one cry tears of rage and/or self-pity.  Because, as it turns out, the lack of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-themed backpack in one's life is totally worth crying over.  Thankfully I have a titanium-plated heart (at least according to one of the more dramatic of our children, i.e., ALL OF THEM) and cannot be swayed by tears or begging.  At least I don't have any pillows to make this year.

I therefore have two specific sets of instructions for you all:  Internet companions, if it seems like I've become one of those irksome parents who does All The Things, filling each day with a precious something-or-other for our offspring; and Real Life companions, if you see me at the store- any store- with heart-broken children; to both of you, all of you, please realize that it is simply August, and this is how we do.

Poor Third Child

The other day I was dusting for the first time in probably a couple years- quick aside: it's not that my house hasn't been dusted in a couple years, okay?  Dusting is one of those chores I long ago delegated to the children, which means I should probably go over the house and dust it myself to get all the missed spots every few weeks, but I don't do that.  I go over it every couple years.  I refuse to be ashamed.

Anyway, I was dusting the piano, which was relatively dust-free (good job, children!  And take that, clean-freaks!), but also remarkably devoid of ornamentation.  Sure enough, an inspection behind it revealed three photo frames and one lantern that looked like they belonged in that obstacle course housing the Holy Grail in the last Indiana Jones movie (well, the last Indiana Jones movie that counts):

It was seriously like this, except minus the suspiciously adventurous professor/archaeologist.  I'm not trying to hate on Indiana Jones, I LOVE those movies, I'm just saying 95% of my professors were all way too smart to get themselves into the kind of messes Junior perennially finds himself in.  Oh, yeah, and image via www.indyfan.com.

So, okay, perhaps our children could use another lesson in Dusting 101: How Not To Destroy The Items You're Supposed To Be Cleaning.  This is astonishing to exactly no one who has their young offspring "help" around the house.

After excavating these lost relics and re-establishing them to their rightful positions on the piano, I began to notice something.

We have no photos of Caedmon anywhere in our house.

There's a baby photo of Atticus on the piano, and another photo of him as a toddler on a bookshelf.  There's not one but two photos of Adelaide on the piano.  Anyone visiting our home would assume we have only two chilren.  Whoops.

This is not exactly unfamiliar territory.  I've made note in the past of the detail in which I filled out Adelaide's baby book, followed by the half-hearted attempt I made with Atticus's, and finally the empty shell of a baby book that belongs to Caedmon.  I remember the same problem plaguing my mom with my youngest sister, Steph.

It's not that we don't have any photos of Caedmon.  I have hundreds right here on this laptop, safe and sound where no one can ever see them.  Just yesterday morning Cade approached me while I was eating my breakfast and asked, "Can you take a picture of me?"  For one guilty moment I thought that he, too, had noticed the shameful void that existed in our house where photos of our sweet youngest boy should be.  But then when I said, "Of course, Cade...so, uh, why do you want me to take a picture of you?" he responded "Because I like to look at my face."  There I go, ascribing meaning and guilt where none belongs.  And boy, he does like to look at himself.  I frequently find him dancing in the downstairs bathroom, watching himself in the full-length mirror there.  I do pull him away so he doesn't stare himself to death.

I should add that after I took a couple of photos of Caedmon, he asked for more specific photos that included me:  "Can you take a picture of you and me now?  Can you take a picture of me kissing you?  Can you take a picture of you kissing me?"  After I'd taken all those, he spent a long time staring at our images on the back of the camera and smiling.

Which only makes me feel guiltier.  Because that's what I do.  I swear, I'm finally going to take the whole five minutes and two dollars it takes to order some prints on walmart.com and slap them in some picture frames I already have.  I really am.

Later.

Caedmon always closes his eyes when he does anything remotely close to hugging.  This is darling to watch, but not very conducive to getting decent photos.

This might be my favorite.  

Oldest Vs Middle Vs Youngest

My coffee maker has me thinking about birth order.


This coffee maker is a hand-me-down from a grandparent- I don't remember which- who, a few years a go, didn't need it anymore.  We took it because I wanted to be able to serve coffee to any java-loving guests who might accidentally stumble into our home.

Over the past few weeks, I've started making coffee for myself, two, maybe three mornings a week.  I have 3/4 cup, which doesn't sound like much until you take into account how much Thin Mint creamer I add (holy. cow. that stuff is crazy good), but I can't even drink down my whole cup.  Whole 3/4 of a cup.  Whatever.

Because I don't like to waste perfectly good coffee and because he's just so darn cute when he asks, I've been letting Caedmon have the last few sips of this coffee.  (DON'T FREAK OUT ON ME HERE.  These are literally sips I'm talking about, and it's, like, a quarter creamer, which makes it healthy.  hahahahaha  Oh, and nobody tell Derek coffee stunts your growth, because he's already super paranoid about Caedmon being the midget amongst Amazons- which yes, is looking more and more like his fate, but not because of me!  Well, yes, because of me, but because of my genetics, not my coffee, okay?  I'm so glad we had this talk.)

A few days ago, after I fed our three-year-old fully caffeinated coffee, I decided to educate the both of us on what this whole "What does the fox say" business was about, so we watched that video on YouTube, then Cade wanted to watch a Lennon and Maisy video, so we watched that, then I realized I had become a terrible parent.

When Adelaide was little I was completely and totally neurotic.  That child had zero sweets before her first birthday.  The only tv I allowed her to watch was sporadic VeggieTales DVD's, and only the ones I thought were particularly biblically educational.  When I was pregnant with Atticus, I decided that it was imperative that Adelaide be able to identify all her letters before her second birthday.  I couldn't have told you why, even at the time- it just felt monumentally important, and probably had something to do with an obscure article I read that featured some kind of claptrap about what Asian toddlers could do vs American toddlers.  (I really don't remember anything about the article itself, just the mental image it gave me of fat, pasty American children lying on the floor eating cake and staring vacantly at brightly colored lights while their young Asian overlords glared at them in disdain as they solved complex mathematical equations and honored their elders.)  The library was our home away from home.  I read books to her in Spanish.  I used insanely advanced vocabulary around, refusing to make anything easy.  In short, I was the most annoying person on earth.

Then came Atticus.  My standards didn't slip so much as avalanche off the parenting cliff.  I was still really weird about television, but hey!  The rest of us are having ice cream, why shouldn't the baby get some?  And those Spanish board books?  Please, I could barely remember higher-level English at the end of most days.  (Although let me just point out that the only Spanish words Adelaide can now speak with any fluency center around food, probably because those were the ones I used the most in everyday conversation- she was a really early reader, so when I could no longer spell out things like C-O-O-K-I-E to the other adults in the room, I switched to galletas, which only resulted in Adelaide knowing the spanish words for her favorite foods and the adults having no idea what I was ever talking about.)

And now we're to Caedmon, who gets coffee and YouTube videos rather than flash cards and whatever other things on-the-ball parents do for their children now.  I do read to him all the time, but that's not so much my doing; he seems to think that anytime I sit down is Read To Caedmon Time, never mind the novel, laptop, or bowl of cereal I have in front of me, and I swear Atticus's ears are specially tuned to the sound of the pages being turned in a children's book; I'll turn maybe one page and he'll just materialize at my side.


I'm now going to use the guilt writing this post has generated to clear our children's rooms of all but a few toys tomorrow- I don't remember exactly why, something about fostering creativity blah blah blah a culture of gratitude blah doing more with less blah blah.  I'm hoping what I've lost in parental coherency I'll make up for with blind luck.

Why Not Dad?

Summer vacation has begun.

We're only two days in, and most of it has been fairly predictable.  Our living room floor looks like a library exploded on it.  I'm perpetually astonished by just how much three children eat all at the same time.  The kids are outside right now because "you can come back in when I'm done writing this post, now get away from that door or so help me I will lock you out!  Again!"

The one slightly jarring note exists during their imaginative play time.  I say that like it's a set time of day:  First we eat a hot, nutritious breakfast that I arose early to prepare, then we practice math drills lest our brains turn to sludge, then we engage in Imaginative Play Time.  (I hope you realize that every single piece of that previous phrase is so ludicrously false that I giggled madly the entire time I typed it.  "Imaginative Play Time" is code for Get Out of This House Before I Kill You All, I refuse to prepare anything more complicated than cereal before 10 am, and math drills?  I don't think I even need to explain the joke in that one.)

In general, Adelaide is in charge of any imaginary play.  If the boys are pretending to eat mushroom stew, it's because Adelaide wanted to play Indians.  If the boys are following her around, yipping, it's because Adelaide wanted to play Dogs (although she did let them choose their own names; Atticus chose Ruffy while Caedmon went for the slightly less conventional Hay Bale), and if Adelaide is sulking it's because the boys found their spines and revolted.

Whatever the game, there's one constant that runs through them all:  At some point, usually toward the beginning, while they're still setting up the basic parameters, one of my three darlings will dramatically turn toward the others and announce, "And let's pretend the Mom's DEAD."

This stipulation is, without fail, met with grisly satisfaction from the two other siblings.  It's also said louder and with more emphasis, almost like they want to be completely sure I hear that one detail, even if I miss everything else.

"Hey, let's pretend we're Indians, and I'm the medicine woman, and you're a warrior, and Caedmon's a papoose."
"And let's pretend the Mom's DEAD."
"Yeah!"

"Okay, I'm the nice robot, and you're trying to fix me, but we can't find all the right parts."
"And let's pretend the Mom's DEAD."
"YES."

"Let's all pretend we're cheetahs, and I'm the fastest so I always get all the prey."
"I'm tired of playing that game."
"And our cheetah Mom is DEAD."
"Oh, okay."


I've tried to stuff my ears with feeble explanations like "Well, I'm just such a constant in their lives they can't imagine life without me so the fact that their favorite game is pretending I'm dead is clearly just evidence that our level of familial bonding has reached a new and higher level in the basic hierarchy of human needs."  Which is such a serious crock you'd almost think Freud had come up with it.

Don't worry, though; it may bother me a little bit now, but give me another couple weeks of summer vacation and I'll be begging them to play the "Mommy's Dead" game, so long as they do it outside.

Cool, Calm, and Collected

A while back, I read a quote online.  It went something like this:

"Always behave like a duck- 

keep calm and unruffled on the surface 

but paddle like the devil underneath!" 

-Jacob Braude

Now I have no idea who Jacob Braude is, if this quote really belongs to him, or really any idea as to the veracity of any of it.  And I don't really care enough to google it, even now.  For now and for the purposes of our discussion, we'll just go ahead and assume it's legitimate.  

Anyway.

Something about this little quote struck me.  I've been ruminating on it over the past few weeks.  It really just won't leave me alone.  I can think of plenty more useful things to stick in my brain, but this whole duck thing is the one that has taken up residence.  Story of my life.

I think the reason it's hunkered down into my long-term memory is because I would love to be that kind of person:  Calm and unruffled, appearing as though to glide right through the waters of life, serene as a madonna, keeping any inner chaos or turmoil firmly tucked out of sight.  People would say, "Wow.  That lady really has her act together.  How does she do it?"

I know a few women like that.  I try really hard not to hate them.

Instead I tend to get kind of frantic, too often flustered and a little bit manic, and people that see me are less, "Look how calm and unruffled she is," and more, "I think that girl's drowning."

Take last Friday.  We had to be two hours south of our home by a specific time Friday evening, as we had a rehearsal dinner for a wedding to attend.  I arranged to pick Adelaide up from school rather than having the bus bring her home, hoping to get on the road 30 minutes earlier.  

2:50 pm found me whipping through the house, throwing things into bags, wrestling Caedmon's fat feet into newly-shrunken sandals, throwing things into the back of the van, running in and out of the house as I remembered item after item we would surely need for our weekend away.  My last trip involved an armful of clothes I'd snatched out of the dryer and then threw into the front seat.  We left the house at 2:59.  School gets out at 3:00.  

I'm halfway to the school when I realize I've forgotten something important.  I would have to pick our daughter up and go back home, killing our schedule.  

I arrived at the school at 3:04.  That may not seem terribly late, but for someone mildly obsessed with punctuality, that's 240 seconds of failure.  240 seconds for my hysteria to mount to a level that made me appear slightly wild-eyed as I entered Adelaide's school, snatched her, and dashed back out.  

We raced back home (I mean, we drove the exact 55 miles per hour that is the posted speed limit on the country highway).  As we pulled up to the house, I jumped out of the van, and began to run up to our front door. 

I mounted the steps to our front porch and found not only a pair of my underwear waiting there for me, but in addition, swinging in the wind so as to taunt me, a pink bra hanging from the front doorknob, for the viewing pleasure of anyone passing by our house.  

I thought I'd felt something snag when I went out the door that final time with a load of clothes to pack, but chalked it up to the universe plotting against me to make me late.  

Nothing says, "Someone calm and unruffled runs this household," like undergarments on display in the front yard, right?

The 'F' Word

Last night, after her bath, Adelaide and I spent some time together in her room talking.  We talked about books and her future and lots of other fun things.  At one point, she went into the bathroom to get something, and came back with a pair of leggings.

"Mom, I left these in the bathroom because when I tried to put them on, I couldn't get them up past my knees."

"Oh, they're too small?  I'll wash them and get them ready to send on to Aria."

That's when she said it.  The 'F' word.  (Not that 'F' word.  Jeez, people, she's six.)

"MOM!  Did you just call me fat?"

Fat.  Fat.  FAT.

I was taken aback and aghast and bewildered.  Where did she get that?

Like just about every other red-blooded American women, I've got my own peculiar set of body image issues, but I have been very, very careful not communicate so much as a hint of those to Adelaide.  I have never asked, "Does this make me look fat?"  I have never talked about the need to lose or gain weight, being unhappy with the way I look, nothing.  I try to speak in terms of health, and on the few occasions when I have rejected a certain item of clothing, I put it in terms like, "It's not flattering on me," trying to be clear that every one is a different shape, and that's okay.

And yet here she is, a newly minted six year old, accusing me of calling her fat.

It's at about this time that I want to scrub her name off the public school's enrollment and set up our own little homeschooling venture.  I want to take her to church and home again and never anywhere else.  I want to hand-pick all her friends and never let her so much as speak to anyone who might have a negative impact on her life.

Sometimes I overreact a tiny bit.

I know of a couple little girls she goes to school with who are already all about clothes and looking a certain way.  One of them is slated to be in her class this fall, and I have already her say some very specific and not exactly Kristy-approved things to our daughter and other girls.  Let's just say she's not the sweetest little thing you've ever met.  Let's actually say she's a horrid little creature and I don't want our daughter anywhere near her.

I didn't say any of this out loud, of course; I instead firmly told her that I did not care for that statement, and we talked about how people's bodies can change based on how much they eat, what they eat, and how much they exercise.  I also reinforced the fact that our focus is not to be on someone's outside appearance- including our own.

Of course, she listened and participated in our discussion; she always does.  The problem is that, in the past, I could generally rely on Adelaide's flightiness and in her pretty-much-lives-in-her-own-little-world-ness to insulate her against what are apparently hot topics in Kindergarten, like what clothes you should be wearing and whether or not someone is fat- you know, at the age of five.  She is apparently more aware than I had thought, however, and some of that poison has been getting through.

After our discussion- including Adelaide's healthy, thoughtful responses- I calmed down quite a bit.  She obviously doesn't see herself as "fat," and clearly isn't too focused on her appearance.

But I'm still keeping homeschooling in the back of my mind.  And a petty (if satisfying) vendetta against a certain little girl.