Blessings

Yeah, I know I’ve been quiet again.  Christmas is a tough time of year for me.  By this point in the holiday season (this year not excluded) I’m generally more like the Grinch than any of the other characters from Christmas movies.  There are just too many “extra” things to do at this time of year...shopping and baking and decorating and wrapping and cards, oh my.  Might be different if any of the regular things that need to get done would conveniently go away in December to make way for the seasonal stuff, but no...somehow lunches and dinners and laundry and cooking and errands and child transport to sporting events still need to happen, just with all the other stuff added in as well.  It gets overwhelming.  I suspect that just about every adult who is primarily responsible in his or her household for making the holiday “magic” happen feels the same way.  I was having lunch with my husband at our favorite Thai place one day this week (he was off from work) and a friend walked in.  We chatted with her for a few minutes, and while we were talking the song, “It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year” started playing in the restaurant.  My friend looked me straight in the eyes and said, “No, it isn’t.”  At least it isn’t just me.  She says she’s way more partial to Thanksgiving.

Anyway, Thing One has one of his college ID soccer camps tomorrow.  (I.e., camps for high schoolers who want to play college soccer, run by college coaches.)  Because it is the better part of three hours from home and starts at 8AM, we decided to drive up today and stay overnight.  It is now 8PM, and I’m sitting in the hotel room thinking about what went *right* today.

*Petunia and I had fun decorating Christmas cookies before Thing One and I left home.

*There was a huge wreck on the major highway between home and here that caused us to be about an hour later than intended getting up here, but since we left early, it didn’t matter.

*We weren’t IN the wreck.

*Even with the delay, we had time to walk around the (gorgeous) major well-known university near here, and the kid let me take several pics of him there without grumbling, even though he did tell me at one point that I reminded him of a Japanese tourist!  It will not surprise anyone that he also insisted that I drive him to this university’s (separate) soccer facility as well so that he could check that out too.

*Most importantly, my son is a really good kid, and I enjoy his company.  This one on one time is priceless, and the opportunity for it is dwindling.  He’s already 15 and a sophomore.  I cherish every minute I get, so I really don’t mind going on the road trips with him even if it does mean driving for hours each way and/or watching soccer in heat/snow/rain/gale force winds etc!  Tonight, as we sat in a Greek diner eating burgers and discussing why hominids arose in Africa and not anywhere else on earth (don’t ask me why, he brought up that topic!) I was struck by how fortunate a woman I am.

I just need to remind myself of that fact daily from now until the 26th!

Don't Forget To Stop And Eat The Roses

Gary Larson's Far Side comic has always been one of my favorites, right up there with Dilbert.  This may be one of my favorite Far Side strips of all time.

My brother has been on a tough road lately.  About a year ago, a dear friend of his from college committed suicide.  Then, a few weeks ago, another dear friend died of cancer only a few months after being diagnosed.  Bearing in mind that my brother is only 41, he's having a hard time coming to grips with, as he put it, being old enough that these kinds of things happen to your friends.

He has always been a seize-the-moment kind of guy, and I know that these recent events are likely to push him even further in that direction.  You just never know what's going to happen tomorrow, after all.  I've always been more of a planner and a delayed-gratification kinda gal myself, but what's hitting me these days is how little time (relatively speaking) I have left with my kids at home.  Thing One in particular, who is already halfway through his sophomore year, taking the PSAT and thinking about colleges.  That whole days are long, years are short thing again.  We need to work on making more memories with them while they are home: life can't always be about soccer practice.  Time to eat some roses.

Another Cross-Cultural Moment

Thing One's high school soccer team this year included (very unusually) not one, but TWO German exchange students.  One sophomore from Hamburg, one junior from Hannover.  Given how much I have said over the years about the rural nature of this area, you can likely imagine the culture shock that two boys from city-center Germany are having here.  The one, who happens to be living with the family of a friend of mine, at least has three host siblings, and their house is in a neighborhood.  The other is living on a sheep farm with no other kids!  Apparently these kids were assigned to families all over the country by their exchange program and where they ended up was to some extent a matter of luck.

Karl, the kid from Hannover, ended up in carpools with me frequently because his host mother, the mother of another player from the team and I are all friends and live in the same area.  We joke that we carpool in self-defense, since between us we have nine very active children between the ages of 11 and 17!  Karl is a really nice kid, and although his English is heavily accented, it 's excellent.  In all the hours he's spent in my car overall, we've only run into one standard English word he couldn't remember, and as a consequence Thing One and I now know that the German word for "kite" literally translates as "air dragon."  

Not surprisingly, though, we do have the odd communication breakdown when figurative speech and slang get involved.  Having studied two foreign languages in school myself, both Chinese and German, I have been on the other end of that many times.  Sometimes you just have to know what something means, because it doesn't translate literally.  My high school Mandarin teacher explained to us once that if someone calls you a rotten turtle egg, it is the rough equivalent of being called an SOB in English.  Who knew?  I remember at one point having to explain the meaning of the word "hick" to Karl, and when somebody told him to put the biscuit in the basket (meaning to shoot the soccer ball into the goal) he was totally befuddled.  Unsurprisingly.  

So, with this as background, you can understand why I was a bit taken aback at the grocery store yesterday.  All I wanted to do was buy the kid a 17th birthday card, but I hadn't realized until then just how many teen-appropriate birthday cards rely on either figures of speech or language-based puns for their humor!   I took pictures of a few examples.  Pictures 1-2 and 4-5 are the front and inside views of the same cards, FYI.  

 

You couldn't blame the kid for looking at any one of these and going, "Huh??"  I finally found another one with humor that would translate across the language divide and bought that instead.

I'm glad he's here.  I'm deeply impressed that he had the nerve to leave everything familiar to him and expand his horizons, and I'm grateful that my son has learned something about Germany from him and also made a good friend in the process.  It's a step toward making the big world a tiny bit smaller, for both of them.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!  Wishing you a happy day with your friends and loved ones.  

 

Not A Good Run

I told you about the former classmate of Thing One's who went missing recently but was found.  Another kid of roughly the same age from around here has been AWOL for a week or so now, apparently because he had a fight with his parents about his grades and took off.  Then, just yesterday, Thing One might have saved a third kid's life.

I was in the kitchen baking with Petunia when he yelled down from his room, "Mom, I need you to come look at this right now."  Something in his tone had me running up the stairs almost before he finished the sentence.  He told me to sit down and handed me his phone, which was displaying an Instagram post.  As soon as I read it I understood why he was concerned: the kid in question had written something that legitimately sounded suicidal.  Among other things, he wrote, "See you all on the other side when you get there."  We immediately reached out to the high school (for help identifying the kid since it was an IG account under an alias), and the vice principal called the police.  They actually came to the house to talk to us, although all we could do was show them the account and the post.  Thing One sent the kid a direct (private) message too, asking him to please talk to someone trustworthy before he did anything he couldn't walk back.

I'm really proud of Thing One.  Apparently, of all the followers this kid has on Instagram, he was the only one worried enough to talk to an adult after seeing the post.  I'm incredibly happy that the high school and police department acted so quickly.  I hope the kid is okay.  And I can't even fathom what would make a high school sophomore decide that life isn't worth living.  Reading back through his post history on my son's account, I can only guess that depression is involved, but what the hell do I know.  Hug your teenagers, folks.

The Spirit of Halloween

They found that boy, by the way.  Thank goodness.

Thing Two has soccer practice on Thursday nights.  Last night, his coach sent him over to goalie training, which is at the back of the large field complex.  There was another team practicing between where I was standing and the field where the goalies were working out, but I wasn't paying a lot of attention to them until the coach of that team started dropping pinnies on the ground in front of me.

Thing Two is one of those specks in the background.

Pinnies are the mesh 'vests' that coaches have players put on over their regular shirts when they are separating a team into smaller groups by color, by the way.

The coach arranged the pinnies as you see in the picture.  Then he handed a couple of bags of Halloween candy to his assistant and told him to place the candy under the pinnies, Easter-egg-hunt style.  Except, and this is the part that threw me, he told the guy to put a lot of candy under some pinnies, one piece under others and none at all under the rest.  I had to ask why, since it seemed like that would be a recipe for disaster.

The coach told me that he wanted to see how well his boys would share with each other, as a measure of character and team spirit.  We left before their practice was over, but I hope they made their coach proud.

Fifteen

Thing One always loved school starting from his first days in nursery school, so when he came home one day around Christmas of his kindergarten year telling me that he hated school and didn’t want to go anymore, I knew something was up.  It turned out that there was a kid in his class who was picking on him and generally making his life miserable.  I talked to the teacher about it, she had a chat with him and switched some seats around in the classroom, and things got back to normal. A week or two after this I was in the classroom volunteering and met this kid for the first time. Watching his behavior, I understood why he’d upset a lot of the other kids, but as an adult all I wanted to do was give this boy a hug. From my perspective, it was easy to tell that he was screaming out for love and attention.

I met his mother once in the school pickup line. She looked more like his older sister than his mother, and she had a couple of very young children with her as well. I wanted to give her a hug too.

This kid was only at our school for a couple of years, and then he moved and we didn’t hear anything else about him.

This morning, I opened my Facebook page and there he was.  I wouldn’t have recognized his picture because it’s been so many years, but I remembered his name as soon as I saw it. He’s listed as missing from a nearby city and people are desperately trying to find him. He’s 15 years old, just like my Thing One. There but for the grace of God.  If you are a praying sort of person, please say a prayer for his safety and well-being.

Cross-Cultural Moment

I got an email yesterday from a guy in Germany who is coming to the US next month for business and wants to find a series of my geocaches while he’s here.  These particular caches all require solving some sort of puzzle to get the final coordinates.  He’d gotten all but three of the puzzles in the series and was very politely requesting help with the remaining few, which is a totally ok thing to do.

One of the three is a complicated cipher but one that would theoretically work equally well in English or German, so it was just a matter of telling him what sort of cipher it is.  The other two made me laugh, though.  The solving of one requires both a knowledge of how to keep a box score in baseball and an understanding of the Abbott and Costello “Who’s On First” skit.  The other requires familiarity with certain episodes of the old “I Love Lucy” show.  It doesn’t surprise me at all that a native German would have trouble with those!  I can’t even imagine trying to solve puzzles that rely on a knowledge of German pop culture.  Talk about frustrating.  If the situation were reversed I would certainly appreciate kindness, so I sent him a bunch of links to helpful Wikipedia pages and told him to please get back to me if he still had any trouble.  My family is actually going to Germany next summer (Himself grew up there as an Army brat and wants the kids to see it) so maybe I will find myself in the position that he is in now while trying to find geocaches on that trip!  Who knows.

As a side note, I’ve been very surprised at how many stereotypical red-blooded American guys of my acquaintance don’t know how to keep a box score.  The critical piece of information as far as puzzle-solving is concerned is that each position on the baseball field has its own designated number between one and nine, but a significant number of people seem not to know that, judging by the number of questions I’ve gotten on this particular puzzle.   I didn’t even grow up in the US for the most part, but every summer we would go to one major league baseball game, and my father and my uncle taught me how to keep a box score. I still remember how. Makes me think of them every time I do it.  This puzzle was in their honor.

Courage

Had one of those fascinating “people talk to me” moments the other day.  I was chatting with the parents of a boy on Thing Two’s soccer team before pickup from practice, and the woman mentioned that she came to the US from Hungary at 22.  The husband added that he’d arrived at 17, joining his stepfather who had mysteriously disappeared from the family home in Hungary years before and then contacted him out of the blue from what might as well have been Mars.  The two had been high school sweethearts but then he emigrated and they broke it off.  Five years later, he called her and asked if she was married yet.  Since she wasn’t, he told her that she should come and join him!  She arrived alone, speaking no English whatsoever, and because of traffic he was three hours late to pick her up at the airport.  She said she spent those three hours sobbing and confused and frightened. I can only imagine. There was no going back, and she had no idea what she was going toward.

They’ve been married for almost 25 years now and have two beautiful children. It sounds like they’ve made a good life for themselves here.  And both of them have serious guts!  I’m in awe.

OK, This Is Getting Weird Now

The universe has clearly decided to use me as a tool for bringing good into the world by repeatedly placing me into the right place at the right time to help somebody.  Granted, it beats the hell out of being an unwitting force of evil, but still.  Just a couple of days after the water bottle incident, another one today.

My younger two kids are playing in a gigantic local soccer tournament this weekend. Because Thing Two’s new club actually hosts it, all parents from his club are required to put in a certain number of hours over the course of the weekend to make everything happen.  Volunteers handle everything from concession sales to parking to supervising fields of play and lots of other stuff besides.  I spent from 8-1 today sitting between two fields acting as a field marshal, which primarily entails keeping score, making sure the refs and coaches sign the official score cards, getting the scores to the scorekeepers at the main tent, and making sure the refs get paid.  However, it also involves making sure that injured players are seen by the tournament medics, whom I had to call three times in that five-hour span for one reason or another (luckily none major.)

 My replacement arrived promptly at one.  By 1:15, I was comfortably ensconced in my folding chair in the middle of the parent sideline of an adjoining field watching Thing Two’s second game of the day.  At 1:18, I kid you not, one of the kids from the other team collapsed onto the field not 5 feet from my chair, clutching his ankle in distress.  I’d already turned in my field marshal supply bag, but the medic’s number was still in my cell phone.  By 1:20, he was at the field and shrinkwrapping an ice bag to the kid’s ankle.  Again, I didn’t do anything the marshal of that field couldn’t have done, but I happened to be right on the spot with the right number at my fingertips when the kid went down.  Uncanny.

Going Out With A Smile

This afternoon, I attended the viewing for an acquaintance who recently passed away at the very advanced age of 102.  She was born in 1916!  I can’t even begin to process all the changes she would have lived through in her life.  IMHO, viewings are a totally barbaric custom (who in the world decided that it was a good idea to make their loved ones make small talk for hours while standing in front of their open coffin??) but as Sheldon Cooper would say, one must observe the non-optional social conventions, so I went.

After giving my condolences to her loved ones in the receiving line, I made my way over to the kneeler in front of the coffin to pay my respects.  I understand that shouldn’t give me the willies, but it does.  I think it must all be in what you get used to growing up, and up close and personal viewings of those who have passed on was not part of my early life.  Anyway, I was jolted out of my disquietude by the sight of a small light brown wooden box propped next to her in the coffin.  There were letters engraved into the side of the box, which appeared to spell out the word PITA.  All I could think was that the acronym couldn’t possibly mean what it usually means given that the box was in the position of honor next to the deceased in the coffin! 

Her aide happened to be standing near me, and I couldn’t resist asking about the box.  I was told that it contained the ashes of her cat PITA, which she had requested to have buried with her.  Ok, all good.  It’s just the cat’s name.  Maybe it’s a foreign word or an odd nickname or something?  After all, we are talking about a very elderly woman here.  Then the aide clarified: the cat’s name was actually Pain In The Ass!  I burst out laughing right there in front of God, the coffin and everyone.  A dear friend of hers said that she would have enjoyed hearing laughter at her viewing so I guess it’s okay. 

An Unexpected Mitzvah

As I get older, I increasingly appreciate the idea that on occasion I can be the inadvertent vehicle through which someone receives a blessing or has a need met.  Makes me feel like I am giving a little back to the universe that has provided for me so abundantly, I think.  A karma thing more than a religious one.

Thing Two had a soccer game this afternoon.  It was a beautiful warm sunny day in a summer and fall that have been overly cursed with rain in these parts, and it occurred to me that I should probably bring the dog along and walk her at the park where the game was being held while the boys were warming up.  I loaded her and her standard array of dog supplies into the back of my SUV alongside Thing Two’s soccer paraphernalia when we left the house.

Because she happened to be with me, I had a half-empty liter bottle of water (untouched by human or dog lips; I pour from it into her portable bowl when she gets thirsty) in the car fifty feet from the field when the woman next to me on the sideline started getting a migraine and needed water with which to take her medicine.  I was the only person on the sideline who had any.  By the time the game ended, her vision had cleared and she was feeling much better.

I didn’t do anything special.  I just happened to have water with me when she needed it, but it was a small thing that made a big difference to her.  My contribution to the forces of good in the universe for the day.

On Getting Old

Two nights ago, I went to my second Back To School night in a week, this time for Thing One.  I emerged from it with several take-home thoughts, many having to do with the ridiculous cross-enormous-campus sprints he has to do several times a day (it’s a good thing he’s fit) but others relating to the fact that at least three of the seven teachers I met that night could theoretically be my children too.  They can’t be much past their mid-20s, which is looking pretty young to me these days.

The other day, I talked to a friend whose teenaged son had recently come across a phone booth for the first time and asked her to show him how it worked.  After she obliged, he said, “Now I finally get why you tell me to “hang up” the phone when you want me to get off a call!”

Then, this afternoon, Thing One and Petunia were in the car with me as I drove to taekwondo class.  The song, “Hey Ya” by OutKast came on the satellite radio, and since both kids like it, they were cheerfully singing along.  In the middle of a lyric, Thing One broke off singing to ask me what “Shake it like a Polaroid picture” means.  Ye gods.  Of course, he’s never seen a Polaroid camera or shaken its film to develop it, so how would he know??

Has someone asked a question recently that made you feel old too?  Hoping it’s not just me. Please tell me your stories!

Back To School

Back To School Night for the middle school two days ago: I attended, while Himself dealt with the soccer practice taxi runs.  The usual division of labor.  It will be repeated later this week for the same occasion at Thing One’s high school.

Unfortunately, there being two middle schoolers in this family these days and only one of me, I could only follow the schedule of one child.  In practice, an easy decision.  I am now on my third sixth grader at this school, so I’m pretty familiar with the logistics and demands of that grade; she has neither of the new teachers and in general, sails through school like a Sunfish in a stiff breeze anyway, so I told her ahead of time that I would be seeing her brother’s teachers.  She understands.  I did take the opportunity over the evening to stop in and say hello to her math, science, and LA/SS teachers, though, so I don’t feel that I entirely neglected her.

The procedure is that you follow your child’s Monday schedule in its entirety from class to class. Each teacher has about 10 minutes to give you an overview of who they are and what they plan to teach that year. As veteran parents, most of this we’ve heard several times before. We know the drill courtesy of Thing One, our ‘trial balloon’ through the system. My goal for the evening was twofold: unusually for us, we have two new teachers this year, whom I wanted to meet, and secondly, I wanted to have a talk with Thing Two’s language arts teacher and get a bead on the aide who will be with her this year, since she plays an important role in his IEP.

I walked away feeling very good about the two new teachers. Granted, I also felt very old, since the new math teacher looks like she’s 12. I understand that she’s in her early 20s: like I said, I’m just old. The new Spanish teacher is actually one of the very few minority teachers we have, in addition to one of the few males. I love his enthusiasm and I think he’s going to be a great role model as well as a good teacher.  These evenings are always very stressful. The teachers frequently mention the homework they assigned for tomorrow and the tests that were today or are tomorrow or next week and of course I haven’t heard about any of these things. This is by choice because I want to see how much Thing Two can handle on his own, but I couldn’t resist texting my husband and asking: did he study for that test? Did he do that homework? The answers were invariably reassuring. But I think in general, as long as he is able to manage his own affairs, I am better off just not asking those questions.

I have to say though: the best part of the night was a conversation with another parent that I had while I was walking into the science classroom and she was walking out of it. It was almost at the end of the evening, I was tired and overwhelmed and I wasn’t paying attention to who was walking by me. All of a sudden, I heard my name called and I turned to see a woman whom I know well. Her sons are a year older and a year younger than Thing Two, so I’ve seen a lot of her over the years.

What she wanted to tell me was that her sixth grade son had had a tough time in band that day. He made a couple of mistakes and he was upset with himself. Thing Two, who plays the same instrument, apparently told him that it was OK and that everybody makes mistakes and not to worry about it, which made him feel a lot better. Not a big interaction, but apparently it meant enough to her son for him to go home and tell his mother about it, and then for her to turn around and tell me about it at school.  Absolutely made my evening. He’s a good kid.

Mutually Exclusive

Passed on the road today: a midsized sedan driven by a sixtyish white woman.  Left side of the bumper: a Trump sticker. Right side of the bumper: a “Just be nice.” sticker.  I’m going to bet she doesn’t realize that they are totally contradictory.

This Sign Made Me Laugh So Hard

Seen on the front door of a friend of Petunia's, who legit does have two very weird yippy rat-dogs.  I think I need one of those signs.  Yes, for this dog.  

Such a sweet face.  So loving.  So smart.  She just wants to be with the family, go for hikes in the woods and lie in the sun.  

Also, she's needy beyond description these days.  She hasn't recovered emotionally from the arrival of the cats a year ago...if she could talk, a lot of what she would say is, "Mom, you still love me, right??????"  Even though I absolutely do and she knows it.  

Luckily, she gets along with the cats.  She never had an issue with them, just with the time and attention that they take away from her by existing.  Did I mention that she's needy?

I love pictures like this, where I can capture the three of them interacting.  She's seven and they aren't even two yet, but she doesn't act like an old-lady dog (or middle-aged one.)  She just wants to play with them.  

Just waiting for it to stop freaking raining here so I can take her out with me!  That's all she wants.  It's so simple.  Amazing how much joy she has brought to us over the past almost-seven years.  My sweet rescued mutt-girl. 

Speaking Of Beasts...

...it’s been a while since I posted anything about the cats.  This is Bingley, aka “Bingbat.”  A classic literary name (from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice) spoiled, but the nickname fits him.  He's slightly over twelve pounds of goofy part-Maine-coon fluff, as far as we can tell.  Yes, both of our current cats are male, but this pink bed originally belonged to our prior female cat, and it makes me very happy to see the boys using it.  Bingley in particular loves this bed, which sits on the desk to the right of the big computer in our office.

Catly bliss

He’s an interesting critter.  Most of his eccentricities stem from the fact that he gets along extremely well with the dog, to the point where we wonder sometimes if he actually understands that he’s a cat. Case in point: he begs for food whenever the dog does, no matter what she’s begging for.  Despite the fact that cats are obligate carnivores, he has been known to eat small pieces of goldfish crackers, chips and bread and he absolutely LOVES marshmallows.  He materializes underfoot every time the marshmallow bag is opened, yowling his fool head off for a treat.  Go figure. Like I said, he’s a weird cat.

Not a great picture but that white thing is a marshmallow.  Now a very ex-marshmallow.

He also serves as the the dog’s alarm system, I kid you not!  There’s a Christmas bell hanging from the doorknob on the inside of the back door, which she gently rings with her nose when she wants to be let out. (No dumb on her...it took her about thirty seconds to learn that trick.) Bingley, from his favorite cat perch near the door, watches this with interest.  When he sees her return to the back door through the glass, he meows persistently and loudly until we let her in.  She doesn’t even need to ‘knock’ anymore.

The perch overlooking the door

Bingley’s buddy Darcy (and supposed littermate, although they look nothing alike) on the other hand, has absolutely no doubt that he’s a cat.  He turns his nose up at everything that isn’t either meat or cat kibble, and peacefully coexists with the dog but that’s about it.  Try giving him a bit of marshmallow and he will give you a look of disdain that could curl your eyelashes!  All he wants is a warm spot in which to sleep, which often results in his full thirteen pounds of weight landing solidly on my chest at about 4AM.

"Who, me...disturb your sleep??"

His new habit is crawling under the quilt on our bed (after he wakes me up) and rolling himself up like a sausage.  

He's lucky he's so cute.

We adopted them together from a shelter when they were about three months old.  They are close to eighteen months old now, so pretty much full-size.  We actually met the shelter volunteer who trapped them in a barn as tiny kittens, and she said she trapped them together on the same day, so maybe they are actually brothers, although for all I know there was more than one litter in the barn at the time.  They have been together all their lives, anyway, and get along very well.  They certainly provide us with hours of entertainment, too!   Lively little critters.

Next up, the dog!!

Beast Of Burden

I took this picture of Thing One (who is wearing a soccer jersey to school, because of course he is) just before he walked out to the school bus this morning.  This is what he carries every day. 

Standard morning load

Starting from the front, the red pack on his chest is his soccer pack.  All his gear for his JV practice after school today: cleats, practice clothes, shinguards, etc.  The navy blue pack on his back is all his school gear: binders, Chromebook, textbooks.  It's hard to tell, because it's the same color, but he's also carrying a *third* bag over his shoulders, hanging atop the school pack.  That's his gym bag.  They have to bring a change of clothes for gym class.

When he gets to school, he can drop the soccer pack in a locker room, but the rest he has to carry around with him all day.  That would include a coat if it were cold enough to need one.  There are lockers, but he doesn't have one: his school is so ridiculously enormous that he wouldn't have time to get to a locker between classes anyway so he told me not to bother getting him one.  Very few kids actually use them for that reason.  Back to school night is next week and he told me to wear sneakers again!  Last year I clocked about three high-speed miles on my FitBit that night just crossing and re-crossing campus between his classrooms.  I was tired afterward and all I was carrying was my purse.

     

Here We Go

Yeah. It’s been a while. I have to admit, the thought of trying to catch up got intimidating!  I miss writing though, so I’m back.  Thanks to Joan for providing the necessary kick in the butt that got me going again.  :)

To summarize the downtime, briefly: several more soccer camps, soccer practice out the ears for everybody, high school soccer tryouts. JV team for Thing One! My parents’ 50th anniversary and a long weekend away with that whole side of the family.  A week at the beach with the other side of the family.  A quick trip to the San Diego area with Himself for a Change of Command ceremony at Camp Pendleton. We are so very proud of his longtime best friend the Colonel, a Marine pilot, and luckily we got out of there the day before the area caught on fire.  It was great to see some dear friends who used to live near us who are now out there, too.  Great progress for Thing Two in his annual checkup with the neurodevelopmental pediatrician. Run-up to school: no more elementary schoolers in the house after all these years!  Wow.  The kids are sixth, seventh and tenth graders this year...we’ve started PSAT prep and serious consideration of colleges with the big one.  Oh, and the house water tank needed replaced, also both furnaces (ugh) and on top of that we've been working with an architect and contractor on plans to completely upgrade the backyard.  Whew.  It’s been a busy summer!!

Deep breath.

Happily for me, the kids are back in school and the year seems to have started well for all three.  Petunia is making the biggest adjustment with the transition from elementary to middle school.  Her first middle school dance is this Friday, may the gods give her father the strength to accept that.  :)  I am now teaching two taekwondo classes a week and making every effort to see the friends I don’t see over the summer, including two who are having significant health issues.  The one real downside of having friends who are substantially older than I am.  If it ever stops raining and cools off, I will be trying to get out hiking with the dog again, too.  I passed the 8000 geocache finds mark a couple of months ago, but darned if I’m going back out in the woods around here till they become less of a muggy swamp.  Last time I tried I ended up stepping in a tick nest, which was just as much fun as you’d imagine it being. Thank goodness for antibiotics.

How’s that for a CliffsNotes version?  I’ll be better going forward, I promise.  I’ve learned my lesson on trying to play catch-up!

Thank You, Joan

I’m still here and will be back soon. :)

Preview, Part 2

(Or maybe this should have been part 1 since it will happen first.)

We dropped Thing One off at his first sleepaway soccer camp on Saturday.  He was gone through yesterday morning, so four full days in total.  Unfamiliar university, didn't know a soul, and he had never interacted with college soccer coaches before, so very a steep learning curve.  On top of that, he was one of the younger kids there.  A few rising freshmen, a few rising sophomores like himself, but the bulk of the 60-odd boys were either a year or two years older.  You could see it looking at them, not so much in their height but in the breadth of their shoulders and in how they play the game...quick, explosive and deadly.

Good practice for sending him off to college I guess.  For both of us.    

Within the first 24 hours, he managed to lock himself out of his dorm room.  Rite of passage.  He handled the situation, though.  Two days into the camp he decided that he needed to do laundry, since he couldn't take the stench of his laundry bag full of dirty clothes.  Ha.  As I'd suggested, he texted me a picture of the dorm washer and dryer controls, and I walked him through the process.  Baby steps, but success.  Four days of getting himself up in the morning, to meals, and to whatever facility he needed to be at on campus on time with all the correct stuff, entirely on his own.  Life practice, right there.

Early on, when we asked him how the soccer itself was going, he sounded a bit intimidated.  For this camp, the boys were divided into four teams, each run by a college coach.  The coach of his group runs a Division 1 program.  Four of the boys that were on his team play the same position he does and are two years older.  I asked if he was able to keep up with them on the field, and his response was "Ish."  As in, sort of.  The training consisted of various sorts of field exercises plus a round-robin of games between the four teams, three sessions of soccer a day in brutal heat.  (Oh, and the dorms had no air-conditioning.  That life experience thing again.)

He seemed to be getting quite a bit of playing time in the games, which was cool.  Usually three quarters or so.  And his team was doing well.  Tuesday morning, he texted us that his team had made it to the final, which I would get to see since it was the last thing on the schedule, right before pickup yesterday morning.  Then, later that afternoon, another text: "I think I made the All-Star team."  He had.  The coach who had read out the names laughed when he went over and asked if he could see the list because he thought he'd heard his name but didn't believe it!  Talk about a confidence booster.

The temp was in the low 80s and really muggy for the final yesterday morning.  It was clear from the warmup that the other team was stronger, and they ended up winning 2-0, but it was still a good game.  And Thing One played for 30 of the 40 minutes (I timed it) as the only centerback.  This coach only put three defenders in the back line in front of the goal, unlike his club and high school coaches who play four across the back.  Thing One was by himself in the middle of the field immediately in front of the goal as the last line of defense for a full 3/4 of the final game.  And he played solidly there.  If it hadn't been too hot to cry, I would have cried.

I asked him on the way home if he'd learned anything at camp.  He thought for a minute, and then told me that he's learned that he can play to the level of his competition, even when that level is very high.  Sounds like a good take-home.  So proud of that boy.  

 

      
  

On White Privilege

If there was ever a hobby absolutely guaranteed to get you up-close-and-personal attention from police officers every so often, geocaching is it.

Cachers spend a lot of time hanging around in weird places looking for hidden containers.  You'll see us near guardrails and bridges and telephone poles and in corners of parking lots, or poking around in patches of woods or in parks.  Sometimes the police officer will spot you himself.  Other times a concerned citizen will call them because they've seen you somewhere and are wondering what you're up to.  (This is a perfectly legal activity, for the record.  The containers are all hidden on public property, or with the owner's permission on private property.)

Most officers I've run into have heard of geocaching.  The ones that haven't have generally been polite and receptive to the explanation, although they sometimes still run my plates.  A couple have even pitched in to help me find the container I was looking for.  One that I met recently was actually a geocacher himself!  I emerged from a bush near a light post to see him pull up and roll down his window.  I was expecting to have to go into my standard explanation spiel, but his first words were, "Is there is a cache in there?"  Whew.

Another recent interaction was a bit (or a lot) more Big Brotherish.  I was out with a friend.  We spotted a Tupperware container tucked in the end of a guardrail and brought it back to the car to sign the log.  (The whole point of this game is to find the hidden container, sign in and then replace the container for the next finder.)  He went back to return the container alone while I looked at the map to see where we should go next.  Apparently somebody spotted him doing that, and decided that since the guardrail in question was maybe 200 feet from a small local bridge, we were trying to blow up the bridge.  Good grief.  Anyway, maybe 15 minutes later his cell phone rings, and it's the police.  He was driving that day, and I gather they used his license plate info to track him down and get his phone number.   Long story short, we explained what we'd been doing, exactly what was in the guardrail and where, and, oh by the way, that the container had been there for TEN YEARS already without anything blowing up.  They never called him back, so I guess they checked it out and verified that we were telling the truth.

Now here's the thing.   Both of us are Caucasian and very non-threatening looking.  My friend has neatly trimmed gray hair and is nearly 60.  I look like the middle-aged soccer mom that I am.  And the car he was driving that day was a Range Rover, fer crissake.  We don't exactly look like a stereotypical pair of troublemakers.  I think it's safe to say that the color of our skin, our general appearance and the cars we drive get us the benefit of the doubt whenever police officers interact with us.  We are fortunate that way.

I have one friend who looks for all the world like a stereotypical Vietnam vet, although apparently he isn't.  Big guy in his 70s, long flowing white hair, bushy beard, bandanna.  Always looks like he just got off a Harley.  Another friend, a line cook at a diner, drives a beat-up car and is so skinny he could easily be mistaken for a drug user.  Both of them have been hassled a lot.  The first one won't go near any park that has a playground anymore.  Guess too many concerned moms have called the cops on him.  The second has actually had his car (fruitlessly, I might add) searched for drugs multiple times.  And both of them are Caucasian, too.

Where I get polite questions, and other white friends get hassled, darker-skinned people doubtless would get arrested or shot in today's America.  Can't imagine why there aren't many minority geocachers.

Preview

With the exception of Thing One, who came back last night for soccer practice, my children have been at my in-laws’ house since Friday for their annual ‘grandparent camp.’  In the entire week of their absence, I did one load of laundry, ran the dishwasher twice, and cooked one dinner.  I spent one full day out of town on vacation, went out to dinner with my husband twice, and spent minimal time keeping the house clean since it stayed clean after I went through it on Sunday.  My only real responsibility was the care and feeding of the three pets.

This is a temporary state, to be sure: Himself and I looked at the calendar for the rest of the summer last night and it is going to be totally insane with trips and soccer and tryouts and appointments.  The usual summer madness.  Still, I sometimes wonder what we are going to talk about when the kids have all grown up and moved out.

On The Family Tendency To “Neat-Freak”

My mother’s family, anyway.  The tendency to twitch until everything is put in its place and spotless seems to be genetic, and goes hand-in-hand with the face that says “Tell me your life story.”  (I’ve heard some absolutely crazy-personal stories from total strangers.)  Back in the days of shag carpets, my grandmother’s carpets were always neatly raked.  Remember carpet rakes??  There is not so much as a speck of dust in my mother’s house to this day.  They know better than to enter.  Carrying on the tradition, I’m embarrassed to admit that the first thing I did when walking back into my house after a couple of days in the hospital when I delivered either Thing Two or Petunia (don’t remember which) was to grab a broom and sweep the kitchen floor.  My MIL just shook her head!

Yes, my house usually looks decent, but I stress when things are disordered around me.  Clutter hits a certain point and then all other activities cease till there’s a cleanup.  My family has learned to ask how they can help and/or get out of the way when that happens.  It’s not something I’m proud of, it just is what it is.  It means that I feel like I have to clean whenever someone is coming over, even my best friends or my family.  My best girlfriend is also Italian, and we joke that I won’t notice messes at her house if she promises not to notice the ones at mine!  At least we can laugh about it.

This is the annual week that my beloved in-laws take all five of their grandchildren, who range in age from just nine to almost fifteen.  Given that four of the five are boys, this is an undertaking. They have movie days and beach days and museum days, and today they actually did some crazy rope course up in trees!  I got some great pics from that.  I dropped them off Friday evening and will pick them up Friday or Saturday.  Since my husband was leaving Friday morning to visit a friend in Detroit, I decided that I needed a vacation too, so I packed up the dog and took a road trip.  We saw some beautiful scenery and found a bunch of geocaches and she did really well at a hotel, despite never having stayed in one before. She’s a trouper.

I arrived home this afternoon, ran a couple of errands, and then cleaned the house so it will stay clean for a few days. No surprise there, but at least I took a vacation first.  I’m considering that a victory!!

Time In A Bottle

Okay, time can slow down now, please.

When I was a kid, I remember my mother saying that the days were long but the years were short.  I didn’t understand then, but dear god, do I understand now.

No more elementary schoolers in the house anymore.  Petunia will be in sixth grade next year, Thing Two in seventh.  And worst of all for this mama’s heart, Thing One in tenth.  Sophomore year already.  How did we get here so quickly?  Answer: one long day and short year at a time, I guess.

Thing One is going to a couple of soccer camps this summer.  They are called ID Camps...the idea is that multiple college coaches get together and offer one camp at one college so that kids who are potentially interested in attending/playing at a subset of those colleges can meet a bunch of coaches at once.  I’m struggling with this, partially because it means that in order to pick camps, he has to think about where he’d like to go to college already.  He has to make up the biography that players give to potential coaches.  And since these are sleepaway camps, one five or six hours away in another state, I am finding myself doing the same shopping that friends with college-bound recent graduates are doing right now: XL-sized twin bedding, towels, fans for unairconditioned dorm rooms, laundry bags and quarters and detergent.  I am so not ready for this.  I don’t care HOW big the kid is, he’s still my baby.  I will let him go, and I will try to smile about it, but that’s all I can promise right now.

School Logic

Yes, I’m still alive. All is pretty well, even...it’s just been crazy, and now it’s been so long since I posted that it seems like whatever goes up next should be of major significance!  This really isn’t, but no better time than the present to get back on the horse, so I’m going with it. 

Thing One is finishing up his freshman year of high school (yikes.)  With this comes finals, and with that, the final for his math class.  Mercifully, Himself has been able to keep up with the curriculum and work with him where he needed help with it at home so far.  I also got well past what he’s currently studying back in the Stone Age sometime (think the last math class I took was in 1992 or 1993) but I have no desire whatsoever to relearn it all now, and am beyond grateful that I don’t have to!  Anyway, this is review week in class, but due to unfortunate family circumstances, his math teacher is out on leave.  His class has a sub who has some basic math skills, but is essentially there just to maintain order.  The kids are supposed to be working on the review material on their own. 

I asked him what happens when somebody has a question.  I was told (which utterly floored me) that they are supposed to go out into the hall and ask the hall monitor, who is actually a math teacher.  

I didn’t even bother to ask him the obvious question: i.e., why the hell the math teacher isn’t subbing for the math class as opposed to sitting in the hall making sure nobody does drugs in the bathroom or randomly wanders the halls or whatever it is hall monitors do in large public high schools these days.  

I strongly suspect that the answer has something to do with union regulations.  I’d love to hear from anyone who has had a positive experience with any major teachers’ union, but the one here seems to have elevated the pursuit of mediocrity to an art form.  

Rough Around The Edges But A Heart Of Marshmallow

Thing One and Petunia share a soccer coach.  To say that he is blunt would be an understatement of epic proportions: he's one of those inherently loud Northeasterners (originally from the NYC area, I would guess, based on his choices in sports teams) who speaks his mind in no uncertain terms and often in profanity-laden ones, depending on his audience.  Having seen the man coach teenaged boys first, I was more than a little dubious about how that would translate to my ten year-old daughter, but fortunately he is able to filter himself around the girls.  As a coach, he is a yeller, albeit one every bit as quick to yell praise as criticism.  Petunia was terrified of him until she got used to his decibel level, but her first choice for next year is his team, if that tells you anything about the turnaround in her opinion of him.

Anyway, this evening there was a tryout for his team.  I was running back and forth between three fields between the three kids, so I didn't get to watch as much of the tryout as I would have liked, but Petunia seemed to be doing an awful lot of sitting on the sideline and was looking rather forlorn as a result.  After a while, he called her over to him and they had one of those conversations between a coach and a player that you sometimes see on the sidelines of a televised football game, where the coach is holding a clipboard in front of his face so you can't read his lips.  After a minute or two, she nodded and then he told her to grab a pinney and sent her into the game.  I asked her about that in the car on the way home.  She said that he called her over to reassure her that she wasn't playing much because they already knew that she was going to make the team and there were other players he needed to look at more.  Clearly he understands how hard she is on herself, and he both noticed her mood and took the time to make her feel better in the middle of a busy tryout.

Strangely enough, he had a very similar interaction with Thing One last weekend, adjusted for age and gender.  Thing One is one of those kids who takes his job on the field very seriously.  Whenever he's pulled out of a game, if there's any question at all about it, the first thing he does is ask the coach if he did something wrong.  It's actually become kind of a running joke with the coaches although they do legitimately appreciate that he's asking because he wants to get it right the next time.  The boys had two games last weekend, a regular league game on Saturday and a huge State Cup game on Sunday.  Before the Saturday game, the coaches told the boys that they were trying to figure out a way to win the game while resting the starters as much as possible for Sunday, so they should be expecting some odd assignments on the field.  Thing One was one of the boys told to expect to sit more than usual.  He played most of the first half and came out just before halftime.  He didn't go back in after halftime, and seemed ok until every other boy sitting out at the time was sent back in other than him, at which point he actually started pacing up and down the sideline.

As he recounted the conversation afterward, around then this coach asked what in the world he was doing, and he asked if he was going to get back into the game.  The coach looked at him and said, "I already told you that you were going to sit more than usual today.  When there's a big game, you play every damned minute of it because we need you in there, and you know it as well as I do.  Now sit your &%$&% ass down on that bench and &%#$& REST!"

Clearly, his internal marshmallow takes different forms with ten year-old girls and fourteen year-old boys, but no doubt it's there in both cases.  The man cares deeply about the kids he coaches and both of my kids are fortunate to have him training them.  My daughter is also fortunate that he has that filter!

Yeah, I Guess A Few Things Have Changed

2018: My son's high school has a strict no-tolerance, no exception drug and alcohol policy.  This includes nicotine (vaped or otherwise.)

Late 1980s: My high school had a smoking lounge, and most of the kids drank alcohol well before the legal age in the US, but then again, we were outside the US.  It wasn't something we officially talked about at school, though.

Mid 1970s: See picture below, taken today of the "Class Favorites" page of a high school yearbook.  Sorry, I know it's a bit hard to read.  Aside from the clearly dated choices in musicians and actors, holy cow: do you see that their favorite brands of cigarettes (Marlboro) and beer (Heineken) are listed?  And that their favorite mixed drink was 7&7??

It also cracks me up that their favorite athlete was OJ Simpson.  Talk about a time capsule!

I Don’t See This Ending Well

A girlfriend of mine recently told me that her son was being bullied at school.  Today, she announced on Facebook that she will be homeschooling him, which is an understandable reaction, except that she both misspelled “homeschooling” and capitalized “Son” in the middle of the sentence.  I don’t mean to be unkind, I really don’t, but given that the kid is in elementary school, I hope she is either going to use a textbook or some sort of online resource to teach him Language Arts.  And much more importantly, how awful is it that a kid in this age of bullying laws could still be harassed so badly at school that his mother feels it necessary to pull him completely out of school??

Update

We found out last night that the pink socks of ferociousness came through yet again for Petunia.  She made the soccer team that the player development coach of our current club recommended that she look at. (See this post)  Since we don’t know much about the team other than that it comes recommended by a man whom we trust and respect, we’ve requested permission to bring her to a practice of theirs before we make a decision.  We shall see.  She had two games yesterday, one with each of the two teams for which she currently plays, and had excellent games in both, so it seems that things are starting to come together for her.  The difficulty will be choosing what is best for her, bearing in mind that the major objectives are that she have fun and play on a competitive team that will allow her to grow her skills, in that order.

Way More Than Just A Little Help

Himself is out of town again. Murphy’s Law being what it is, my kids have four soccer games between them today, in three different places. And in cold rain, too. Ugh.

I needed help getting Thing One from point A to point B for his game and put out an email message to his team last night to see if anyone could give him a ride. I got SIX responses, including several from people who would have to drive significantly out of their way to do it but offered anyway because they are kind souls.  I love this team. He’s staying on it as long as they’ll have him.

Whomever said that it takes a village to raise a child clearly had kids who are travel athletes. Boy, am I grateful for my village!!

Pink And Proud

My daughter has a screaming pink pair of soccer socks that she wears when she wants to inspire herself to play especially well.  She calls them the “pink socks of ferociousness.”  I love that kid.

She’s had some soccer drama surrounding her lately, mostly centered on trying to figure out where she should play next year.  (It’s tryout season again, meaning that teams are being chosen for fall 2018/spring 2019.)  To make a very long story short in an attempt not to bore you all to tears, she’s currently playing on two teams, one her own age and one a year up, but neither for various reasons is the best fit for her.  We’ve been looking at other area teams in her age group, even though that would involve her moving to a different club.  Right now all three of my kids play for the same club and we like it a lot as an organization, so that’s not ideal.

We had her try out at a couple of the clubs and subsequently found ourselves in a position where we really needed some guidance.  I called the director of player development at the current club, whom I know well, and explained the situation.  While he *really* doesn’t want her to go, he understands our thought process.  Over the course of a twenty-minute conversation, he outlined what he thought should happen with her if she stays and told us that in his opinion one of the other clubs we were looking at was a good call and that the second should be removed from consideration immediately.  Then, to his unending credit, he told us that we should also look at a team we hadn’t even considered, at which a man he knows personally coaches her age group at a high level.  He subsequently called the guy and said we were coming to the next tryout and to keep an eye out for her.

Last night, Petunia donned the pink socks of ferociousness and we went to check out this newly recommended club.  We haven’t heard anything official yet and won’t till Sunday, but our back channel suggests that she will likely receive an offer for their top team.  There isn’t a rush to settle this and we have some time, but I’m so proud of my girl that I could pop.  Not because she (supposedly) made the team, but because she’s a fierce and brave little soul who will charge headlong into a tryout full of total strangers on two days’ notice, armed only with pink socks!

Oh, and I can’t say enough good things about our player development guy either.  His willingness to go the extra mile (or hundred) to get her on the right team for her even though it might mean she ends up playing for another club speaks volumes about his integrity and how much he cares about the kids.

That Venus And Mars Thing

Sometimes I am strongly reminded that male and female brains work very differently. Yesterday was one of those days.

As a male friend and I were pulling into a parking spot at a convenience store, a woman came out of the store and got into the car in the adjacent spot.  She was too close for both of us not to register her presence. She was a larger woman with a very unusual hairstyle and a ring in her nose, all of which I noted casually to myself as she walked by.  The only thing my friend noticed was that she was wearing a Penguins sweatshirt!  He is a big hockey fan and hates Pittsburgh because Crosby is a punk.

XX versus XY for you in a nutshell, ladies and gents.

Success

I believe I mentioned here recently that one of my (more tongue-in-cheek) goals in life is not to fit any of the conventional stereotypes.  To that end, I have recently taken up knitting since it SO would not ordinarily go along with my black belt in taekwondo and semi-extreme geocaching habit.  Gives me something to do with my hands other than mindlessly surf the Net, too, and I like crafty stuff.  Win-win.

The needle variety of knitting seems more complicated than I am ready to handle without personal assistance, but I bought a set of those round plastic loom things on a whim a couple of weeks ago.  With the help of the accompanying booklet and a few YouTube videos, I am happy to say that I have so far successfully managed to produce one scarf, four hats and three double-takes from friends.  :)

finished scarf

close-up of end of scarf

beginning of hat on loom

middle of hat on loom, brim complete at bottom

four completed hats, two brim styles. top left hat has two different-colored strands of wool woven in, top right hat switched between two colors  

Another Planet Heard From

Or at least part of this one that is far, far away.

Walked into my laundry room to run a load of wash today and discovered this on the floor between the washer and dryer.

In case you can't see it clearly, it's an Aruban 10-cent piece.   We've never been to Aruba.  Somewhere, an alien is is either laughing at my confusion or annoyed that it dropped a coin into a wormhole.

And if there IS a wormhole in my laundry room, that would explain a lot about all the missing socks. Maybe the aliens have them.  :)

Happy Easter!

There have always been two schools of thought in the Christian churchgoing community regarding those folks who only attend services on Christmas and Easter (lovingly referred to by some as "C and E-ers.")  The one school says that twice a year is better than never.  The other holds that people who don't attend services any other week of the year shouldn't be taking up valuable seat space in the packed churches of major-religious-occasion-time, which could otherwise be occupied by more regular churchgoers.  

I have to admit that I do see both sides of the argument.  I'd also like to add for the record that some of the most "Christian" (as in behavior, not in name) people I know are galloping atheists who also happen to believe in the Golden Rule and act accordingly, so as far as I'm concerned, church attendance is not necessarily connected in any way with whether or not people are decent human beings.  I would say, however, that if you do consider yourself a believer and it ain't important enough for you to be at services any of the other 50 weeks a year, well...not sure it would make that much difference to any deity I'd care to believe in whether or not your butt was in a seat for one of the big 2 Sundays.  At that point, I'd think you might as well continue being whatever kind of human you are the other 50 weeks a year wherever you normally go about doing it without worrying too much about putting on a bonnet and pastels, but maybe that's just me.

One final observation, however: any person with the most casual and nodding acquaintance with religion knows that churches fill up quickly on Christmas and Easter mornings.  If you show up ten minutes LATE for one of those services, expect both full pews and incredulous stares when you wander in and start looking for a seat.

*****************

We had our traditional Easter morning of o-dark-thirty wakeup (well, 0630, but that's still early enough) followed by Easter basket hunting.  Even the resident teenaged boy still gets into it, surprisingly.  Taking a leaf from my parents' book while I was growing up, we put together individual treasure hunts for each kid's basket, complete with codes and puzzles.  Petunia had cryptograms to solve, each leading her to the next plastic egg and clue.  Thing Two's code was a lettershift cipher that resulted in words with scrambled letters, so his was slightly more complicated than Petunia's.  He got stuck on a word or two, but in general breezed through his series of eggs to his basket just as she did.

I changed things up a bit for Thing One, however.   Yesterday, while watching Petunia scrambling for eggs at our town's Easter Egg Hunt, he looked wistfully at me and observed that he wished he could participate too (the cutoff is fifth grade, so it was even the last year for her.)  On the spot I decided that I was going to redo things for him this year so that he had to find all of his eggs first and then figure out what to do with them, as opposed to having one egg lead him to the next as we've usually done.  And I recalled with glee that I had the PERFECT eggs for him on hand already.

        
So, this morning, one of these little beauties was waiting for him outside his bedroom door. I told him there were seven more just like it hidden downstairs and to get busy looking.  As a side note, the best place to hide these was six inches over his head on doorframes.  Absolutely priceless how long it took him to find those.  :)

Each egg was numbered and contained the names of two professional soccer players.  The puzzle involved figuring out the country of origin of each player and knowing its capital city, thus combining his loves of soccer and geography into one puzzle.  He got his egg hunt after all, he had a lot of fun doing it, and he found his basket.  I call that a win, especially for a nearly fifteen year-old boy!

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Whatever you are celebrating today, enjoy: Easter, Passover or just a quiet Sunday morning.  There's enough room in the world for all three.  




 

Straight From The Ten Year-Old

Sometimes Petunia just cracks me up.  Yesterday, she described a pair of her male classmates as “the two musketeers of annoying.”  Today, while discussing her suspicion that a third male classmate likes an exceptionally dramatic and high-maintenance female classmate, she told me that if it’s true, she “will lose all faith in his ability to make good decisions.”

Never a dull moment with that one.

Ribbit

Sounding a lot like a frog these days.  I have a bad head cold that I initially thought was some sort of allergies but isn't.  Ugh.  Finally at the stage where I'm starting to feel a little better but I'm hoarse as heck.  It's a good thing I'm feeling better at least since we are galloping headlong into travel soccer tryout season, starting next week!  Thing One is definitely staying put where he is.  Petunia is the big wild card: she's most likely either moving up a year or out to another club, tryouts will dictate which.  Thing Two will stay put if his team stays together at his current club, otherwise he will move to one of the two other clubs at which Petunia is trying out.  If those two both move, they will have to move together for the sake of my sanity; two clubs is bad enough, can't even imagine trying to juggle three. Plus HS soccer in the fall, should Thing One manage to make the JV team.

Anyhoo.  Had some stressful stuff going on here lately.  Terrible weather, plus a really ugly situation with the school board.  Specifically, with the ongoing teacher contract negotiations.  Not sure they are negotiating in good faith, actually pretty sure they aren't.  I've hit the point where I can't wait to get my kids the hell out of this school, which is a real shame since this is the 10th straight year I've had a kid there and I have three more yet to go.  I've already decided that this will be my last term on the Board of Education.  Petunia will be halfway through eighth grade by the time I would run for reelection (it's a K-8 school) and I will have served close to ten years by then.  Enough is enough.  I'm *really* fricking tired of being the bad guy because we observe the rules and the teacher's union representatives don't.

In other news, a dear friend more than likely has cancer, and may have something else going on as well.  He's having terrible fevers, which may or may not be related to the mass they just found in his lung.  I am absolutely beside myself about that right now, and it really gives me perspective on the ticky-tack shit the union is pulling.  I don't have the energy to deal with them right now.

Sorry this is such a downer post.  Not feeling the whole unicorns and rainbows thing right now.  On the bright side, I've recently taken up knitting (on one of those circular loom things, not knitting needles) and am about 3/4 done with a scarf, which actually looks half decent.  Proud of myself for that.  My guy friends are giving me grief about it, but no matter what stereotype anyone comes up with, pretty sure I won't fit it!  That's something at least.





  

Notes From The Nor’easter

One lesson we have learned over and over and OVER again: anytime a storm is forecast, fill some kitchen pitchers and a few 20 gallon tubs with water, lay in a supply of non perishable food and batteries, and do all the laundry there is before it hits.

In our very rural area, the only public utility is electricity.  Water comes from wells and homes have septic tanks, not a public sewer hookup.  No natural gas lines come out this far, either: home furnaces are fueled from individual fuel oil or propane tanks that are refilled periodically by tanker trucks.  Storms equal rain (or snow) and wind, which bring down trees or branches, which land on power lines, and that’s all she wrote.  Our homes run exclusively on electricity, which means that no power equals no water since the well pumps run on electricity.  There’s also no heat, no cooking (except in the fireplace, since no gas stoves) and no light.  Gets ugly quickly.  If you’re prepared with water, battery-operated lamps, food, firewood and heavy clothing, you can get through a winter storm, but the key is being prepared.

On the bright side, this community is awesome.  The social networks get buzzing immediately: whomever has power has everyone else over to shower and get warm and do laundry and charge devices.  

And the best part has everything to do with dumb luck, since we didn’t know enough about rural life when we bought our home to have chosen its location on purpose.  Quite the opposite, actually: the fact that it is on a main road actually concerned me when we purchased it, mostly because I was worried that the kids would run into the road when they were younger.  However, it quickly became obvious to us that “main road” equals “good” out here in the boonies.  The municipal garage is just up the road, so ours is the first road plowed (assuming we can get down the driveway to it!)  But what proved to be the definitive advantage to our location is that both the police station and the fire station are near that garage. All three of those key municipal facilities are on the same power grid, which (by that dumb luck I mentioned) we also happen to share by proximity.  Which means that every time the power goes out around here, the first priority for the power company is this town is our grid.  Which means that right now, while literally 97% of our town is currently without power according to the power company's online outage report map, I am typing this in my warm kitchen under a light that is not battery-operated.  Am I lucky?  Yes.  Am I grateful for it?  Hell yes.  Am I ready for spring?  More than you can even imagine.

A Tough Lesson

My daughter Petunia is 10.  At this stage of the game, she is far more interested in dolls, art and soccer than boys, which makes me very happy.  Unfortunately, she is also an attractive, kind and friendly child (in my highly prejudiced opinion at least), which has resulted in her receiving unwanted attentions from boys her age on more than one occasion.  Nothing inappropriate, and it isn't that she doesn't like them as friends, she just has no interest in anything more (to which again I say: hallelujah.)

Her latest admirer is a very nice boy and they have quite literally known each other since her birth.  He's a few months older and the two of them played together as toddlers and have been in school together since kindergarten.  She came home from school one day very upset, as she'd discovered that he likes her and she didn't know what to do.  She didn't want to hurt his feelings but also wanted no part of any boy-girl anything with him.  She and I had several conversations about how to handle the situation, and she ended up writing him a very nice note explaining how she feels.  For what it's worth, the rule in our house (for all kids of all genders) has always been that you don't have to like somebody just because they like you, but you can't be mean to them about it either.

At any rate, the boy in question is now moping around school because he thinks she hates him.  Dear God and little chickens.  Petunia feels like this is her fault and is very sad.  I sat her down and told her very emphatically that it is not her job to make boys happy.  I explained that life is not all about getting what you want and that this boy needs to learn how to deal with disappointment, just as she likely will at some point when she's on the other side of something like this.  The idea that she would feel responsible in any way for his happiness, while understandable at this stage because she is a kind child, absolutely made my skin crawl.  She is not allowed to be mean, and she wasn't, but there's no way in HELL I'm allowing my girl to believe that she has to do what a boy wants because his happiness is more important than hers, and since circumstances have dictated that I have to start pounding that into her head in fifth grade, so be it.

The mother-warrior has spoken.