Month: June 2005

This was going to be yet another griping entry. The summer schedule I planned so carefully is simply not working. The kids are bored, I’m exhausted, and we’re all too housebound. I was all set to complain about it in detail when I was forced to go out in the back yard by the screaming of children. This turned out to be a good thing. The screams were happy screams because my kids were playing with the kids of my backyard neighbor. My neighbor was out there too. I realized that her summer seemed to be going much more smoothly than mine was and so I started asking questions trying to figure out what she was doing differently.

I’ve had the days structured wrong. I’ve been trying to have the mornings be times to be at home and get work done and then afternoons available for activities. This meant that at my most fatigued time of day I was trying to entertain kids who’d already played with all their toys and games all morning. Not only that, but it was taking forever to get the work actually done because the kids had no motivation to get it done quickly. So tomorrow I’m trying out a new plan. We get up and breakfast at 8 am. Then we do housework until 9:30. At 9:30 I leave the house for an outing with whichever kids are done with their work. These will be small outings to parks, libraries, museums with no admission fees, going for a walk, etc. Any small trip that gets us out of the house in a place that lets the kids see new things and run around. Kids who don’t finish their work have to stay home with daddy (who has to do his cartooning work in the mornings.) I think that will be sufficiently motivational. It will also mean that we come home ready for some down time and happy to play with the toys and games we have here.

I don’t know if this new plan will work. But I do know that something needs to change or I’ll go crazy with two months of summer left and zero trips planned.

I don’t like who I am when I am furious with my kids. I don’t like feeling like I’ve mistreated them. I think it’s the closest I ever really come to hating myself.

Taking kids to the library is on my mental list of “Things Good Mommies Do” so I try to do it regularly. It is almost always a frustrating and engrumpifying trip for me. I have mental standards for appropriate behavior in the library, but it is impossible for me to actually enforce them on both Gleek and Patches simultaneously. And every moment spent enforcing appropriate behavior is not spent selecting materials to take home or checking books out, which is the reason I went to the library anyway. I don’t get to help Kiki or Link select books. I don’t get to select books for myself. In fact I don’t really “select” books at all. I tend to snatch a few picture books from the handiest shelf and hope they have good bedtime stories in them.

Today herded my children through the library only to be rewarded with a Patches tantrum serenading me all the way home. Then upon arrival I needed a simple response from Gleek which she actively avoided giving until I was screaminly furious. Going to the library was a highlight in my childhood. It is supposed to be a good and happy thing. Instead I’m increasingly convinced that family trips to the library are a bad idea and I cringe at the thought of using up child care options for a library trip. Willing child care is always a scarce resource. It makes me want to cry.

All day long all of the kids (and me too) forlornly checked to see if any of the food in the open cage had been disturbed. I was pretty certain that we wouldn’t have a chance to find the hamster until evening. I was right. Link selected my bedroom for story time and half way through I spotted motion in my walk-in closet. Small, furry, brown and white motion. I walked over and there was the awol hamster. I knew I had her cornered, so I called for Kiki to bring the cage while I recaptured the critter. Hamsters are FAST when they’re scared. I didn’t like scaring her, but she simply isn’t tame enough to be captured fearlessly.

So now the Hamster is caged. The hole in the cage is patched. The kids are all wound up and excited. Kiki in particular is beaming with joy. I’m so glad to have the little furball back where she belongs.

A crisis erupted this morning when Kiki discovered that her beloved hamster is missing. Apparently last night Kiki popped out the plastic from one of the habitrail expansion spots so she could see the hamster better. Then we all went to bed. I’m sure it didn’t take the hamster long to discover the hole and disappear out of it. Unfortunately the cage was on top of a dresser, so once the hamter got down there was zero chance that it could return.

We had weeping and sadness. We frantically poked in corners and cleaned the room just in case. Now we’ve placed the cage with food down on the floor in the hopes that the hamster will return. If we can get the hamster coming back for food and water then her eventual recapture is inevitable. If I had live mouse traps I’d set those all over the house, but I don’t know where to get any without spending money. Usually I want the small rodents in my house dead not alive.

What surprised me in this event was my own reaction. I actually like and miss the little hamster. I was having fun guiding Kiki through the process of hand-taming. I was anticpating having a really tame and friendly hamster. Patches is sad too. He’d taken to going to visit the hamster 2 or 3 times a day. In fact the room that Gleek and Kiki share had been relabelled in Patches head as “the hamster room.” For now I just hope that the hamster comes back to eat.

The closing quote of Middlemarch reads thus: “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

This quotation resonates with me because it is essentially how I picture my life. I do not expect to ever be written of in history books. I don’t plan to ever be seen on national television. If such things do occur in my life it will be a convergence of happenstance not because it is a goal of mine. I can’t say I would mind making a huge and visible difference for the better in the world, but I don’t expect it. My gift to the world will be four well raised children, an emotionally supported cartoonist, and whatever other good deeds happen to come under my hands. I would much rather do thorough good deeds for a few people than scatter my efforts so thinly that they coat the intended targets like dust.

Perhaps my ambitions will be raised once I’m not buried under the needs of small children. But at the moment I don’t feel I’m doing well enough tending the small spot that is given me to want to spread myself any thinner.

Most of today was pretty rotten for me. I was discouraged at how much I hadn’t gotten done, how much attention the kids demanded and I failed to supply. I was tired and cranky and in need of time off. So I was glad to abandon the kids to Howard and attend a comittee meeting. The meeting lasted two hours. It was full of fun conversation and decision making. I came home invigorated and happy. Time off makes for a much better mommy.

On the other hand Howard had a really good day. He accomplished lots of buffer stuffing and was in a really good mood. When I came home his good mood was all gone. He was full of frustrations that he wanted to vent. Including the fact that Patches wandered into his office and drew on one of the Schlock Mercenary originals. The really good news is that the kids had fun. (well other than Patches who got significant scolding.) None of the kids had any idea how angry/frustrated their daddy was. Not quite the happy homecoming that I’d love to have, but better than total chaos.

Right now my mood is pretty good. It may even stay that way if I can just convince the kids to stay in bed. Hopefully Howard will be able to salvage his evening as well.

Today when I was playing a hug-and-snuggle game with Patches I was struck with a thought: He doesn’t get to remember today. He’s only two and this joyful experience will forever be lost to him. And in another year he will have grown so much that he’ll be a completely different person. Right now is the only chance I will ever have to enjoy two year old Patches.

For years I’ve answered kids begging for pets with the response that they have to save up $60 to buy pet and cage and supplies. This ensured that they REALLY wanted a pet and were willing to be responsible for it. For years that was an effective dead-stop on the pet issue because the kids inevitably find things to spend their money on long before they save up $60

Then came today. The kids have been saving money for spending on our California trip since last year. I paid out allowances right before we left for the California trip. Kiki scored another $8 while on the trip. Then we never spent the money in California. Kiki came home and counted up. She had $55 and announced that she was going to buy a hamster. Link volunteered to pitch in $5 if it was needed and off the the pet store we went.

Going to the pet store and coming home with a little animal in a box is an experience every kid should have at some point. It has been 10 years in coming for Kiki. Now she gets to learn about caretaking and matinence. I would have preferred a parakeet for a pet, but I’m just partial to things with feathers. Hopefully this little brown and white fuzzy hamster will get a good name rather than one lifted from a cartoon character.

Today was a wonderful day. We visited Greg and Liz Dean of Real Life comics. They have a beautiful apartment in downtown Sacramento. They claim that the furnishings were “all old stuff from our old place” but everything matched and Liz’s talent for design showed everywhere. They also claimed to be “not moved in yet” but I couldn’t tell that either. Best of all was the fact that despite the fact that they have three cats and I’m seriously allergic to cats, I simply didn’t wheeze up at all. The only explanation I can figure for that is that they kept the house so spotlessly clean that I simply wasn’t exposed to enough cat dander. I wish my house looked as nice as their apartment did.

Greg and Liz were fun to hang out with too. We had a marvelous dinner at a Sushi place. I’m not really fond of sushi, but the restaurant also had the best tempura that I’ve ever eaten so I was really happy. Most of the time was spent just visiting and there was no lack of subjects for discussion. I wish we lived closer to them so that we could get together more often.

Another really good thing about today was having 3 hours of drive time during which Howard and I had nothing to do but talk to each other. I like talking with Howard. The trip home was especially important because I was able to talk through several things that I have been sitting in the back of my brain and causing me to feel stressed lately. I should probably write them down and the resolutions Howard pointed me toward, but I’m just too tired to sort them properly in my brain. It can wait a couple of days until I get back home.

We drive home tomorrow. I didn’t get all the things that I wanted out of this vacation, but I got enough to be content and staying longer wouldn’t gain me anything but buffer stress from Howard. The suitcases are all packed, everything is ready to be loaded, so as long as no one else comes down with stomach flu between now and tomorrow at 10, I’m headed home. I’ll be glad to get there.