Groundhog Day

So, just for something different, it rained all day today.  I did dishes and folded laundry and vacuumed, dashed out to grab a couple of caches (yes, in the rain--there is no explanation other than that I NEEDED to get out of the house), cooked dinner, then drove kids hither and yon from right after school until bedtime.  Oh, and I spent some time on the computer taking care of bureaucratic matters, too...Petunia's first grade class volunteer schedule and wrangling other volunteers for the upcoming PTA fundraiser.  The picture of domesticity, the typical stay-at-home mother.

Right now my life feels small and very repetitive.  I cook, I clean, I grocery shop, I do laundry; soon they all need doing again.  I pack lunches; they are eaten and more are needed.  The after school schedule is full, and the kids get where they need to go each day.  Nothing big or important, just the life of a primary caregiver.  (A life I actively chose, by the way, so I shouldn't be complaining.)  I have my caching and taekwondo, and I appreciate them because they are my outlets, but I sometimes wonder whether I should be back at work by now.  Especially when I am folding the fourth load of laundry and wondering why nobody in my family can EVER be bothered to turn their clothes right-side-out and/or un-ball them before tossing them in the hamper.

I know I do a lot around here...I just wish it would stay done for a while!  Sisyphus and his rock come to mind.  The picture below is not of me or my house, but this is what my house would look like if I was not constantly battling the forces of entropy.

And tomorrow, I will get up and do it all again!  But hopefully minus the rain, at least.

Weekend By The Numbers

Husband out of town from Friday to Sunday: 1

Number of children in my family: 3
Number of children in my family who play soccer: 3
Number of soccer teams they play on: 3
Weekend soccer practices: 1
Weekend soccer games: 5
Weekend soccer games more than 60 miles from home: 1
Weekend record in games: 2-3

Number of meals eaten while sitting on the tailgate of my SUV between games: 2

Number of loads of laundry done: 4

Number of times I heard the word "Mom?" over the weekend: 962
Number of times I seriously considered changing my name: 960
Number of times my patience was rightthere on the edge of being gone forever: 12
Number of children who nevertheless survived the weekend: 3

Very tired mothers in the house: 1

Good night...

"You Know You Live In the Sticks When..." Part I-Don't-Even-Know-What

I've mentioned before that I live in a very rural area.  Amusingly rural, for all those who knew me as a citified sort way back when and are having a hard time picturing me here (although I do love this town, honestly.)

I took the picture below this morning at the town park--with permission, lest you think that I am some kind of weird creep who takes sneaky pictures of other people's children--because I simply could not resist.  Please observe that this team is sponsored by a local taxidermist.

Only out here in the boonies does the same guy mount your trophy deer heads and sponsor your second-grade daughter's softball team.  :)

Random Multicultural Morning Conversation

This morning, while I was sitting in the kitchen groggily downing my first cup of coffee, Thing One wandered in and asked me--out of a clear blue sky--to remind him how to say "rotten turtle egg" in Mandarin.

I still remember the class vividly.  Ding Laoshi (Teacher Ting), our Mandarin teacher, a survivor of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and a somewhat dumpy and formal elderly lady, walked into the classroom, put her books down on her desk and informed us flatly--to our great surprise--that she was going to teach us to swear properly in Mandarin that day.  I must have been a freshman or sophomore in high school at the time, and therefore would have been in my third or fourth year of studying the language.  I guess she figured that part of her job was teaching us more colloquial speech as well; either that or she wanted us to recognize expletives aimed in our direction for what they were, Chinese being a highly figurative sort of language.

Case in point: the example above.  The literal meaning notwithstanding, "wang ba dan" translates roughly to "son of a bitch."  Interestingly, there are several other ways to say the same thing, all of which involve the word for dog ("gou"), which at least makes more sense.  A lot of insults involve the word "gou," actually...my personal favorite is "gou pi," which translates as "bullshit" but literally means "dog fart."

Anyway, my first reaction this morning was to ask why he wanted this particular piece of information.  I'm not aware of anyone he might encounter around here who would understand him if he used that particular epithet (especially since Mandarin is a tonal language and his pronunciation is abominable) but still...it's the principle of the thing.  Once he assured me that it was just annoying him that he couldn't remember and that he had no intention of calling people names at school, I felt a lot better about answering the question.  Even if it did make for a highly unusual start to the morning!

Ears On, Mouth Off

I'm a take-charge, type-A sort of person.  I'm not proud of this, but sometimes it's a real challenge for me to shut up and let other people talk without chiming in myself.  Definitely something I need to work on.

"Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening 

when you'd have preferred to talk."  --Gary Larson

I have Jen Singer's blog on my blogroll because every so often she hits me squarely between the eyes with a post.  The latest of these is entitled "The Three Words That Make Your Kids Tune Out."  Read this post.  I don't care whether you have kids or not: the concept carries over to communications with anyone. 

For those who didn't click over, the three words in question are "I know, but..." 

(The "but" often being followed by a dismissive remark of some sort.)  

The day before Easter, I took a long walk with my eldest: he has his own geocaching account and he's trying to get his number of cache finds up to 100.  In the course of a conversation we were having, I caught myself saying the dreaded three words, and it stopped me cold.  Along with the conversation for a few minutes, I might add.  *headdesk*

Last night, our school held a public forum--as a school board, we were looking for input as to what the community wants our school to look like and offer in the next three-to-five year timeframe, since our size and demographics are changing.  The guy who happened to sit next to me had very different opinions from mine, and I felt the dreaded three words bubbling up again.  Instead, based on my earlier experience with my son, I made a conscious decision to keep my mouth closed and encourage him to talk, since that was the purpose of the forum to begin with.  We still weren't seeing eye-to-eye when he was done, but his body language suggested that he was happy to have been respectfully heard out (a problem that our school has had in general in communications with parents) and nobody's died and made me the queen of the universe anyway...it may well be that we'll end up going in his preferred direction, this being a democracy and all.  (Or, at the very least, a benign dictatorship comprising nine dictators, each of whom has a vote that carries equal weight.)

Two ears, one mouth: twice as much listening as talking!  Note to self for the day.

    

Happy Easter!

Yes, my sense of humor is more than a little twisted, but these made me laugh!

Quiet Easter here.  The kids followed the egg trails (each child has a treasure hunt of sorts to navigate each year) to their baskets and are now sugared up beyond all recognition.  We spent the rest of the day with my in-laws, sister-in-law and nephews, and I'm now gearing up for back-to-life, back-to-reality starting tomorrow morning after the week's holiday.  (And I will have that song stuck in my head for the rest of the evening, too!)

Radio, Talking and "The Talk"

The training facility where my kids do their soccer clinics offers programs on days that school is out.  The kids wanted to participate this week, so we signed them up for the morning session.  Their normal soccer facility is about ten minutes from home, but that facility wasn't offering class this week, so we were making a drive of about 35-40 minutes each way to the next closest facility.  Not a big deal--I've been dropping the kids off each day, geocaching for a couple of hours and then picking them up again; not exactly a sacrifice for me.  (Found 19 in 2.5 hours this AM, including the sneaky one below...a new daily record.)

Thing One likes listening to popular music in the car.  There's one station that is his particular favorite, and I try to humor him unless the song that is playing is inappropriate or the DJs are having a conversation that isn't kid-friendly, which unfortunately happens quite a bit on this station.  I'm not ordinarily in the car much between 8 and 9AM, but this week I had extended driving time during that period because of soccer and I was amazed at how much of that station's broadcast was pure DJ yammering; virtually no music at all.  It actually got to be funny after a while...click over, still talking, click away again.  If I was a work commuter, it would make me nuts: just play some damned tunes and shut up already!

Thing One learned about the birds and the bees this year in school as part of the regular curriculum.  He seems to be dealing fine with it, all things considered, but his formal education has not included euphemisms and slang, much of which can be found on this particular radio station between the music and the aforementioned yammering.  I spend a lot of time turning it off and telling him that I will explain why later (mostly because I don't want my six year-old innocently singing or repeating something that she doesn't understand and then getting in trouble for it.)

Terms I have had to explain to Thing One in the last couple of weeks (age-appropriately of course):

"get with/get together"
"talk dirty"
"spend the night"
"gold digger"
"knocked up"

Yes, I do understand that the easy way out would be to just not allow him to listen to that station.  However, I am not naive enough to believe that he isn't hearing these things in other places as well (his friends' houses, soccer, the school bus, etc) and I'm choosing to use it as a teaching tool and starting point for important conversations.  I want him to be able to feel comfortable talking to me and asking me questions if he has any, and I don't see any value whatsoever in having either my head or his in the sand!  Hope this does not come back to bite me later, but it seems like the right thing to do right now.