The Final Countdown

School starts tomorrow morning.

All three kids were completely out of control today.  Wild, emotional, exhausted.  Wondering how tomorrow will go, especially since the powers that be decided that the boys will have one of their regular after-school activities starting tomorrow.  I ask you: who in the hell schedules something in the evening for younger kids the very day that school starts?  Someone clueless who has never had children, that's who.

At least they all went down hard tonight.  Hopefully they will sleep well and get up cheerful and be enthusiastic about the new school year in the morning.  Hopefully it will also not rain like it did today, as waiting for the school bus in a downpour is no fun.  Will be on edge all day waiting to hear how things went, particularly for Thing Two.

But for the moment we are as ready as we are going to get.  Backpacks are organized and lunches are packed and all the kids are clean and shiny and sleeping.  Time to take a break and a deep breath and remember my mantra and blog namesake:

        
I have done what I can to prepare and tomorrow will be what tomorrow will be.  I cannot control the tides or much of anything else.  Not good at the whole serenity thing either, but working on it.

I Beg Of You

If there are any parents of autistic children in your life, or parents of any children who are "different" in any way, please read this post.  The author has the gift of putting into words what so many special needs parents feel but could never hope to articulate with such grace and clarity.

Monday Night

iPad in hand in the hours of darkness.  Clearly I did not learn anything from last night--here we go again.  Fool that I am.

Spent the evening assembling school supplies and sorting them into backpacks.  School starts Wednesday and I wanted to get things organized in case I needed to make a last-minute trip for a missing item or two tomorrow.  Fortunately, we seem to be in pretty good shape.

I love those commercials for back-to-school supplies with "It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year" as the theme song.  That is exactly how I feel right now.

The kids are ready to go back to school. They have been for a while now.  They need the structure and the direction and the release from each other's constant companionship.  Three really is a crowd and somebody is always left out of the playing pairs.  And don't tell me to have a fourth child, since I already have one more kid than hands and further down that path lies lunacy!  At least for me.

Part of me feels guilty that I am not one of the many moms on Facebook currently lamenting the end of summer vacation.  Maybe that's just the good moms.  Or at least the moms of lower-maintenance kids.  At this stage of the parenting game, I am "on" from the minute I get up to the minute they go to bed, and that is a LOT of driving and cooking and cleaning and playing and reasoning and working on speech therapy activities and refereeing (so much refereeing!!!) and I am just tired, bless it all.  If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy, and that is the truth.  Mama is ready for a break.

Mama still has a crazy schedule during the school year--three kids' worth of activities means that we have one or more things every day after school plus homework--but I can sit and read a book for an hour or walk the dog or get my nails done or heaven forbid go to the doctor without three kids tagging along and those things will be manna for my soul.  And because I do sincerely and deeply love my kids I will be a homeroom mom and class reader and party organizer and computer lab helper and school board member and all that at their school for them.  But I will finally have a few minutes' peace every so often and that will be good too.

Two days and counting.

I Need To Put The IPad Down

It is a real mistake to bring it upstairs with me at night.  Last night I was up until 2AM reading blogs. Part of the problem is that I enjoy checking out the blogrolls of people whose blogs I read--I figure that if I like what they write, I will probably like the blogs they read too.  But when I find a new blog I like, I usually read it back all the way to the beginning.  Does anyone else do this or is it just me??  Some of these people started posting a bazillion years ago and have thousands of back posts.  Damn you all for writing so much stuff that I want to read!  This lifelong addict of the written word is finding it impossible to keep up with the bounty that is the blogosphere...

How I Met Your Father

This is another one of those posts that I hope Himself never reads because it will embarrass him.  So far, he seems completely uninterested in looking over my ramblings, which is doubtless a good thing, since I don't want any editorial comments from the peanut gallery anyway.  This is my space, dammit.

Both of my parents went to Catholic school straight through till university.  Raised on horror stories of plaid uniforms and nuns with rulers, I told them for years that I would never go to one myself.  Which of course made them laugh when I later chose a Catholic university with no prompting from them at all.  God has a magnificent sense of humor.

Many of my classmates emerged engaged four years later.  I was not one of them--I broke an ill-advised engagement and did also have a serious relationship with someone who turned out to be geographically incompatible in there as well, but that was it.  I told Mom that if I couldn't find a good Catholic guy to marry in four years at a university with a student body that was 92% Catholic and predominantly male, I should be allowed off the hook.  (I was joking with her...this was not really the goal of my college years!) Then I cheerfully moved to a traditionally Southern Baptist part of the country for grad school and dated an atheist for three and a half years.

Shortly before I finished grad school, I signed up for an internship in patent law that was offered through the school and promptly met a handsome Irish Catholic lawyer with the most beautiful green eyes I'd ever seen.  His office was a few doors down the hall from mine.  My secretary suggested that I ask him about something organic chemistry-related (his area of expertise) I needed to understand for a patent application I was drafting; a few days later he was in my office doorway asking questions about parts of DNA that regulate how genes are turned on and off (more my scientific area) in connection with something he was working on.  We got to be friends, and eventually more.

We met 14 years ago this week.   Amazing what you sometimes find in very unlikely places when you aren't looking for it.    

 

Another One Of Life's Great Mysteries Solved

I've mentioned before that my mother's family was Italian.  My great-grandparents immigrated from Italy in the late 1800s; my grandmother was born here.  My great-grandfather did eventually learn to speak English, but not my great-grandmother, so Italian was the language of my grandmother's childhood home (although she did speak English at school.)  She never saw Italian written, however--she learned it phonetically from listening to her parents speak.

My grandfather had also grown up in an Italian-speaking home.  He and my grandmother spoke Italian together when they did not want their daughters to understand them, but it was very important to them that their daughters be American and speak English like Americans (this was at a time when assimilation was important)--so their daughters never learned Italian.  Some Italian phrases were incorporated into their everyday English conversation, however.

This morning, I was preparing cucumbers to take to my in-laws' house for the Oktoberfest party gurkensalat.  Thing Two was swiping them out of the bowl and eating them as fast as I could cut them.  In my mother's family, this sort of foodnapping has always been called "pitzking", and the person who does this is a "pitzkaral."  Bear in mind that in keeping with the family tradition, I had never seen these words written either--we were all going on what we thought my great-grandmother had been saying.  The words in quotation marks here are my best approximation of the way we have all been pronouncing them.

It occurred to me this morning, since my mother happened to be sitting in my kitchen while the cucumber-stealing was going on and I was telling Thing Two not to pitzk, to ask her exactly what that word meant in Italian and how to spell it.  She had no idea.  Ten minutes on Google Translate later, we were stymied: none of the words we could think of (picking, stealing, robbing, grabbing, etc) translated into Italian looked anything at all like what we have been so blithely saying for so many years.

I was racking my brain fiercely when it finally hit me: the word we were looking for was pescatore.  Fisherman.  Pesca.  Fishing.  Fishing a tomato out of the salad bowl.   No pesca.  Don't fish.

Essentially, we have been playing a multigenerational and multilingual game of Telephone, and have lost things in the translation as a result.  But it gave me a real sense of accomplishment to figure that out.

Day Of Good Beer

I'm mostly a wine and gin kind of girl (not together, please...) but there are two days of the year for beer drinking: St. Patrick's Day and whatever day my in-laws hold their annual Oktoberfest party.  This year, today is that day.  And yes, this is not October, but the Labor Day weekend works better for everyone's schedules and flexibility is a fine thing.

Both of my in-laws were civilians who worked all or most of their careers for the Army.  (They are retired now.)   They were stationed in Germany on two different extended occasions, including the period when Himself attended high school.  Their Christmas decorations are almost exclusively German, they have an unrivaled collection of oompah music, and my mother-in-law makes the best potato salad and sauerkraut in three states.  Their Oktoberfest party is an excuse to drink good beer, eat fantastic food, and hang out with friends and extended family--it is a bonus this year that my parents will be there too.

Oh, and of course the Notre Dame football game will be on...this is an Irish Catholic family and a Saturday during football season we are talking about, after all.