18March2010
Posted by Sara under: Grownup Time; Venting.
No, there was no snowstorm, no blackout, no internet outage.
There was just life in the New Economy. You know, the one where we all do More with Less.
The one where there’s no longer any layer of backup at work between projects, so that when I got sick at the end of last week there was simply no way to take a sick day. And where we have fewer people covering more projects, so a Big Event that was assigned to someone as her only duty for a month last year became one of several big projects I need to monitor simultaneously. And where the others working on this project are equally, if not more, stretched, so they couldn’t get all the pieces I needed to finish my part of the job until the morning of the Big Event.
The Big Event is over. It was yesterday, it went very well, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. And turned to our desks and began excavating all the things we’d left undone over the past week. And went home and began excavating all the things we’d left undone over the past week. And tried to catch up on all the sleep we’d been short over the last week.
9March2010
Posted by Sara under: General.
The snow is melting, slowly. Sleds and buckets and shovels are emerging from the snowbanks they were left in before the big blizzard.
It was nearly 50 degrees today. The college students were out in tank tops and shorts. Joggers choked the roads.
And as we headed out to the car to go to swim class, Charlotte crowed, “Mama! It’s a little like Fall! It’s like Fall and Winter are mixed!”
“Sweetie?” I said. “It’s actually a little taste of Spring!”
“No, Mama, its JUST like FALL!”
8March2010
Posted by Sara under: Celebrations; Secunda, Sweetness, Pinky...; Teeth-aching goodness.
This is the grin Charlotte flashed me from across the street, the moment she got off the bus:
She lost it at school. Unlike WIll, she did not swallow it, and so was given it to take home in a little tooth-shaped container.
And tonight, the Tooth Fairy will not be scared away by wakeful mothers or brothers. Nope. The Tooth Fairy is definitely coming. She won’t forget. In fact, when Charlotte forgot to put her tooth under the pillow, Mama took care of that. Everything is set….
7March2010
Posted by Sara under: Secunda, Sweetness, Pinky....
Charlotte had a birthday party this afternoon. It was at the city ice rink, and after getting there, seeing the setup, and seeing how many kids were there, I decided to stay. Charlotte isn’t a strong skater, and if she bailed on the skating I wanted to be there to help her off with her skates and keep an eye on her. The rink is open to the public during parties, and it was a warm and sunny day, so things were pretty chaotic.
The birthday boy was in full hockey gear – helmet, knee pads, and gloves – and two other boys were too. The hockey kids were relatively confident on the ice, though the birthday boy had just finished his first ever little season and was still a bit shaky.
Charlotte gamely took the ice, though, and soon found a parent who had brought her own skates and was helping her own kid. Char is always willing to accept help from friendly adults, and made a circuit of the rink on the other arm of that parent. It was tough work, though, and at the end of her round she stumbled off the ice, demanded that I take off the skates, and told me she was done skating for the day.
I didn’t realize until we went back to the party room for cake and presents that I realize that Char was one of only two girls at the table, along with a dozen little boys.
The mixed-gender party has been a new experience, in general. Will’s classes, so far, have skewed heavily boy; his first grade was 15 boys and 6 girls, if I remember correctly. Will was always adamant that he only wanted to invite the boys to his parties, and the vast majority of parties he’s been invited to have been boy-only, unless there was a sister involved and perhaps a friend of hers.
Charlotte, though, has been to as many boy parties as girl parties, if not more. And most of the girl parties she’s been invited to have not been girl-only. I don’t know if this is because the class is more evenly balanced, or if this is because Charlotte is Charlotte, or if there is some other class dynamic at work.
At any rate, this one skewed heavily to the boy side, but Charlotte was right at home at the table, and had a grand time with several of her favorite school friends. After cake, she decided to put her skates back on. And this time, encouraged by her buddy Sept, she stumble-skated all the way around the rink in only ten minutes.
She agreed, on the way home, that skating was kind of fun. I suggested that maybe some skating lessons might be a good idea, if she’s going to go to more skating parties. She’s not sure, but agreed to consider it.
4March2010
Posted by Sara under: Primo, Light, Brain...; Secunda, Sweetness, Pinky...; Sensitive.
The school district went to a 2-day Parent-Teacher Conference plan last year, and repeated the experiment this year. Rather than having a Friday off, filled with conferences, the kids get two “half days,” meaning that they eat lunch before 10am and are released at 11am.
So I fled work at 10:45, leaving behind a bunch of half-done tasks, and was home to meet the bus. We picked up Owen at noon and I headed off to school to have our conferences.
And for the first time the theme of both conferences was “Gee, what great kids you have! What a pleasure your kid is to have in my class!”
Sure, each of them has an area in need of improvement. Charlotte will continue to get extra sessions with the reading specialist. She’s making a lot of progress, and recently seems to have had some kind of cognitive “growth spurt” as far as her sight word recognition goes, but isn’t quite where she needs to be.
Will is, not unexpectedly, dealing with the handwriting problem again. When they started cursive writing last year, everyone was thrown back to square one as far as writing went; they were all beginners and he was just one among many. Now, over a year later, most of the class has advanced with their lettering, while Will once again is lagging. His letters are large and crooked, and producing them is laborious and doesn’t let him transfer many of his ideas to paper in the allotted time.
But these issues were all presented as things each kid is willingly and happily working on. Both of them are growing and maturing, working hard and getting along with their classes. And that’s all I was really hoping to hear today.
2March2010
Posted by Sara under: Secunda, Sweetness, Pinky...; Sensitive.
Charlotte is getting some extra reading support this year, much of it in the form of extra time with the reading specialist, who gives her little texts to bring home and read to us.
These are part of various series produced by various educational publishers. They’re little booklets, 14 to 20 pages long, with one line of text per page. And they all follow a fairly predictable script: a main character encounters three variations on a difficulty, resolves the difficulty, and gains a reward.
They repeat at irregular intervals – something to do with familiarity and comfort levels – so we’ve seen one particular one many times. “The Hungry Little Kitten” relates the story of a hungry little kitten in search of a bowl of food, only to be turned away by rude beasts who are older and/or larger several times before meeting a friendly boy who takes the kitten in.
Last week, though, we had a new one. The Little Bulldozer.
Char started in. The Little Bulldozer apparently wanted to help work at the construction site, but was turned away by a haughty front loader.
“Hey!” said Charlotte, “This is just like the hungry kitten story! Except with a bulldozer where the kitten was!”
And indeed, it was. Two rebuffs later, Little Bulldozer was accepted by a friendly and paternalistic piece of worksite equipment and allowed to dig a hole.
Hooray for educational materials!
28February2010
Posted by Sara under: Secunda, Sweetness, Pinky...; Venting.
We haven’t been as hardcore as some parents we know about setting time limits on media. I make the kids finish homework before screentime begins on school days. There are time limits set for them on their computer logins, including limits on how early and how late they can log in. When we realize its been a heavy TV or Wii day, we tell them to turn it off and kick them outside to play, if possible.
The kids’ current Screen Fixation is a Wii game called Animal Crossing. They play characters in a little anime-styled village, and go around catching fish, digging up fossils, and picking fruit off trees to sell to the local general store. They are utterly absorbed in this. Dinner conversation for the past month has consisted of “Mom! Did you know that if you take a pear in to Noku at the store, you will earn BELLS to pay off your MORTGAGE?”
This morning, as I glared at the world over the rim of my coffee cup, trying to work out the kinks in my neck caused by Charlotte crawling in with us with freezing feet at 5 in the morning, Owen said, “Did you say the Wii has parental controlled time limits?”
“Nope,” I grumbled. “l looked and looked. APparently they considered it in development and the head of Nintendo was in favor of it, but in the end they decided to just have a play-time counter that cannot be deleted. You’re supposed to check on your kids and have conversations about how much time they spend playing, instead of just preventing them from playing all the time automatically.”
“Well,” Owen said, “A time limiter would have meant that Charlotte couldn’t go down there at 4am to try to sign on to play Animal Crossing.”
“What?”
“I could hear it through the floor. I didn’t realize at first that was what woke me up. She was down there at 4am. She came up shortly afterwards, freezing cold, and crawled in on your side of the bed to get warm.”
“That little….stinker!”
“Yeah.”
What to do? We don’t mind them getting up before we do. Letting them self-amuse with TV or Wii lets us sleep in peace that much longer. A rule like “You can’t play Wii until it’s light,” will backfire on us during the winter months, but 4am is way too freakin’ early. And when she crawls in with us to warm her icy toes, she invariably kicks, pokes, flops around, and hogs the covers.
There’s always putting a padlock on the basement door, I guess….
26February2010
Posted by Sara under: General.
This was what we saw when we opened the front door this morning:
And when I say “opened,” I mean, “Opened the front door and then attempted to open the storm door.”
The storm door wouldn’t open. Probably because of this:
It snowed hard, most of the night. I think the storm total was over 18 inches.
School was cancelled. The University even opened on a delay — something they very rarely do. We hauled out our shovels and dumped out the old gas-and-oil I’d put in teh snowblower the last time we got any snow, and got to work:
(the interactive bridge to our photo albums is not working. There are larger versions of these, and more pictures, at the online album.)
I took the late-morning bus in to work and worked until midafternoon; Owen had already thought he’d take the day off to rest up and drink tea to fight off his cold. The kids played in the snow awhile, rejoicing that they’d finally, at long last, gotten the show day they’d been pining for.
25February2010
Posted by Sara under: General.
I finally managed to upgrade Wordpress to fix that posting problem.
There will be more frequent posts, for those of you who still are with me.
25February2010
Posted by Sara under: General.
After a number of predicted snowfalls that did not materialize, the kids were getting cranky.
“It is FEBRUARY. Winter is almost OVER and we have had NO SNOW DAYS!” Will pouted.
I tried to explain that if there were no snow days, then he wouldn’t have to go to school on the scheduled makeup days. And since we would know in advance that there was a day off, he’d be able to plan something fun.
Yesterday afternoon, the forecast was suggesting that we might get 5 to 8 inches of snow by this afternoon. Will mentioned this as a reason that he might not bother practicing his French Horn.
I explained that karmically, the surest way to make sure that the snow went in a different direction was to assume it was coming and not do his homework. “Snow days only happen on days that you’ve done all your work and are ready to go to school,” I told him.
“I am never ready to go to school,” he answered.
“Well, there you go!”
When I got up this morning, I didn’t think we’d gotten much snow. I could see the surface of the road in front of our house, bare and wet. There was an inch or two on the deck. So I was suprised when I turned on the TV and saw the craw of cancellations across the bottom of the screen. I watched them for awhile to get an idea of where the snow days were happening – were they to the northeast of us, or to the south? And then I started to see local organizations, and finally, our school district’s name marched across the screen.
The weather report was informative. The 5 to 8 inches had been revised to 10 to 18, with gusting winds and drifts likely.
Owen had already declared he felt crappy and was staying home. I told him sick days with kids meant you had to take your naps where you could hear them if they got up to no good, and headed off to catch the bus to work.
I came home early, to relieve Owen, who isn’t used to Solo Parenting While Sick. I refrained from regaling him with the “Remember when you were on that great conference trip to San Diego and I got that awful stomach bug while I was really entirely alone with the kids?” Because I am just that supportive.
Will went outside to play in the snow, and was out for nearly two hours. Charlotte originally had said she thought it was too cold, but when she saw WIll coming in and getting cocoa, she announced she, too, was going out. She didn’t stay otu quite as long, but earned her cocoa all the same.
20February2010
Posted by Sara under: General.
The kids started making noises about going back to the Y recently.
“I don’t want to do soccer,” Will told me when I asked him about indoor soccer in January. “Swimming is the best exercise for me.”
Charlotte concurred. “I need to practice my swimming for summertime,” she told me.
So two weeks ago, while I was at the Y to drop Charlotte off for a birthday party, I reactivated our family membership and signed them up for classes.
I was worried that, when faced with actual scheduled classes instead of theoretical ones, they’d rebel. It would, after all, cut into their Wii time fairly significantly. But instead, they’ve been dragging me out the door after finishing their homework. They’ve packed their own bags and taken care to make sure they have all their stuff.
And they’ve both thrown themselves into the classes themselves with great dedication. Will has chugged steadily up and down the pool in response to his teacher pointing out that the only thing he needs to advance to the next class up is more stamina, while Charlotte is once again leaping off the side of the pool into the deep end with glee.
With both of them finally in the same age range for the classes, their classes run concurrently, and I can see them to the poolside and then run upstairs to the treadmills and weight machines and spend 40 minutes exercising, too.
So far, it is win-win-win. As long as I remember to pack the post-swim snacks in the bag. If I forget that, all bets are completely off.
13February2010
Posted by Sara under: General.
After the 2nd grade Valentine fiasco (Will’s teacher required them to give handmade Valentines with a personalized sentence written in each about the classmate), Will refused to do Valentine’s Day last year when the teacher gave everyone the choice to bring them or not.
Since he very much enjoyed getting the Valentines (what with the new “tradition” of each one having a small piece of candy attached to it, apparently), I pushed him a bit towards taking Valentines himself.
He was dubious until, on our trip to get the things to make Charlotte’s Valentines, he saw the perfect thing: Heart-shaped paper punchouts with pixie stick “arrows” to thread through them. He eagerly filled out one for each classmate and attached the pixie sticks. Even for the girls in the class.
Charlotte, meanwhile, loves Valentine’s Day. The excuse to make a handmade something for each person in her class? The highlight of her month.
So they each got off the school bus Friday swinging bags of goodies. Will had a pile of little candies, while Charlotte had a collection of personalized notes, including an entire poem in a folded piece of paper from her buddy Septimus. Sept is the one who gave her a set of folded paper planes with a long note about how she shouldn’t use them in school because she might not get her work done.
Will crowed about his bag of goodies. “I’m glad I gave VAlentines this year!” he said gleefully. “I must have had good Valentine Karma! Because I got SO MANY BACK!”
7February2010
Posted by Sara under: General.
Grandma and Grandpa are here.
Due to health issues on both sides, work schedules on our end, and general business, we haven’t seen Grandma and Grandpa since our trip back to Michigan at the end of June. I think this is the longest time we’ve ever gone without the kids seeing them, and everyone was very excited when I told them Grandpa had called and they were coming the next day.
When they unloaded the car, they revealed a Christmas present they hadn’t mailed with the books for the big day – a Wii Fit, with the balance board to go with the Wii we got after LymeFest 09. This has been a big hit, though it did have the effect of sending the kids down to the chilly basement rather than keeping them upstairs hanging with the grandparents.
Hopefully I’ll be able to troubleshoot my posting problems and put up some pictures soon…
2February2010
Posted by Sara under: General.
Could we have a bit more snow?
In a winter that has dumped lots of snow on North Carolina, Virginia, & Maryland, it seems unjust that we don’t have enough to sled on, and haven’t since the 2nd week of January.
We’ve had plenty of bitter cold, mind you. It was 7 degrees when we got up today. We’re getting winter. We’re just not getting the snow cover that makes the landscape sparkly and playing outside possible and our long winter actually fun.
And while we’re at it, I’d like Will to get more than 5 days of wear out of his snowpants before he outgrows them, thankyouverymuch.
Set cranky cabin fever rant=off.
30January2010
Posted by Sara under: General.
The small strip mall about 2 miles from our house has had three restaurants for ages – one sit-down place that we’ve been to once, one branch of the local Big Sandwich Shop, and Hope’s Way.
We started going to Hope’s regularly when I was pregnant with Will. It was right around the corner from the Midwives’ office, and after appointments we’d head over and get plates of the chicken salad with side salads that were their specialty, or maybe a cup of soup and the special sandwich, or a piece of quiche. We got to know the counter staff, and they got to know us.
They catered my baby shower.
Hope’s was where Will had his first taste of restaurant food – cubes of sweet potato from my potato and black bean salad. When we let him have peanuts for the first time, it was in the form of their peanut butter cookie. Our tenth anniversary dinner, a week after Charlotte was born when we were completely unable to go out for a nice meal, was from Hope’s “Gourmet take-and-heat” case of entrees. Charlotte learned to love quiche from stealing nibbles of the back crust of mine. We didn’t go EVERY Saturday, but we were certainly regular enough that when we skipped more than one week it might be commented on by whoever rang up our order.
Owen took his field crew there on the way to his cornfield to buy them lunches they could stow in the cooler and enjoy in the shade under the truck. My office manager used every excuse she could think of to plan meetings that would require lunch so that she could order us a selection of Hope’s quiches.
And the counter staff remained surprisingly stable for a food service place. They watched the kids grow up and sneaked them extra cookies on a regular basis.
This past week, when we went for our regular weekend visit, the cashier whispered. “You guys are regulars. You need to know. We’ve been sold. Thursday is our last day.”
I got the full story later from another employee, who came over to our table to make sure we knew what was up. The Local Deli Chain owners bought Hope out. They plan to take over the space, knock down a wall, and move their own uptown branch into the room. Hope’s employees, many of whom have been with her 10 years or more, have been told they are welcome to apply for jobs with the Deli. The first thing the remodellers will do, she told us, is erase every instance of Hope’s name from the windows, walls, murals. She gave us one of the latte bowls with that logo on it, smiling sadly.
Owen and I went, Thursday, on the way to meet the school bus. We bought a big bag of cookies, enough for the kids to have Hope’s Cookies a few more times. We said farewell and good luck to the visibly distressed staff, who were spending more time tearfully thanking regulars for all their patronage than waiting on customers.
So Hope’s is closed, an era ends. There’s a Pandora’s Box metaphor there somewhere that I really don’t want to dig out.
And we stayed home today and had leftover pizza.