Month: June 2005

Soccer Begins

By / June 7, 2005

First day of soccer training camp was today. I had pre-event anxiety last night. 47 degrees. Windy. Threatening clouds which eventually poured out rain. Hundreds of kids kicking balls through obstacle courses. Link loved it. But the cold made him willing to go home early. So far so good.

Patches rode along for the Soccer Adventure and proved that the straps on his car seats are not going to put his poor sunburned shoulders into agony. This is important because tomorrow we get to drive for 12 hours to California.

Agh! I’ve got to Pack!

Sunburn

By / June 6, 2005 / 2 Comments

Patches has developed blisters across his shoulders and some “I’m in pain” crankiness. Poor little guy. Tender 2-year-old skin just isn’t equipped to handle a heavy sunburn. I cringe in sympathetic pain whenever I look at him. I also cringe in guilt. Bad mommy.

More thoughts from reading Middlemarch

By / June 6, 2005 / 8 Comments

I’m going to try this again. Last time my train of thought went some interesting places, but it wasn’t the track I intended to take. So once again here is the quote from Middlemarch by George Elliot:

“now more than ever she was active in sketching her landscapes and market-cares
and portraits of friends, in practising her music, and in being from morning
till night her own standard of a perfect lady, having always an audience in her
own consciousness, with sometimes the not unwelcome addition of a more variable
external audience in the numerous visitors of the house.”

So what does it mean to be a lady? During my high school and college years I spent a lot of thought on this subject. Part of the reason for my focus was because the last thing my grandpa told me before he died was “always be a lady.” So as I read and lived I tried to gather a list of accomplishments and qualties that I wanted to have in order to “be a lady”. For a while I was reading Gone With The Wind at least once a year because I loved the way the novel approached the question of what it means to be a lady. Over the years my focus has changed some. Now I’m less concerned with the concept of being a lady and more focused on being a very good person. I want to be someone who:
isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, particularly in the service of others.
is kind and gracious both as a guest and as a hostess.
disciplines her children by raising her eyebrow instead of raising the roof.
keeps a clean house.
grows flowers.
creates beautiful things.
makes the world better by being here.

There are many more things I want to be. But kids need breakfast and my contemplative time has run out. Maybe I’ll add to the list later.

Thoughts from a book.

By / June 5, 2005 / 3 Comments

Howard and I share many interests, but there are a few things we feel very differently about. He persists in renting zombie movies which I won’t watch and I continue to read books written in different centuries than my own which baffles him. I enjoy modern books as well. Modern books are like being taken for a ride. All the events and characterizations are compact and flow quickly making the books exciting to read and hard to put down. In contrast books from prior centuries read much more like a scenic stroll through the countryside. They lend themselves to frequent stops for contemplation and lots of wandering thoughts. Right now I’m just getting into Middlemarch by George Elliot. I’ve never read it before and I’m enjoying watching the characters unfold without knowing how it will turn out. This is a nice contrast to re-reading one of Jane Austen’s books. I love Austen, but I already know all the endings three or four times over.

As I was reading Middlemarch I came across a passage which prompted a pause for contemplation. The passage was this:
“now more than ever she was active in sketching her landscapes and market-cares and portraits of friends, in practising her music, and in being from morning till night her own standard of a perfect lady, having always an audience in her own consciousness, with sometimes the not unwelcome addition of a more variable external audience in the numerous visitors of the house.”

It caught my attention because I remember doing exactly that during my teenage years, altering my actions as if I were in a movie or somehow on display even when I was alone. In my head I was the heroine of a musical or some other grand romance. I imagined futures for myself and then got confused when other people departed the script. I think many of my romantic failures occurred because my chosen hero refused the role I had chosen for him. Just prior to meeting Howard I decided that I needed to stop seeking romance and just seek to be myself. Ironically this decision ushered in three months where I had dozens of romantic prospects just when I didn’t want any. Then came Howard. Somehow he came along, grabbed my romantic script, and completely revised it. I ended up with something much more meaningful and lasting than any of the books, movies, or fairytales had prepared me for.

American society is awash in tales where people fall in love. Frequently the romantic pair spend the whole movie or book misunderstanding each other only to discover at the end that they’ve “loved” each other all along. (As an aside, I don’t believe in love at first sight. Lust at first sight, yes. Attraction at first sight, yes. But Love is something that takes time and effort to grow.) In movies and books we always see “falling in love” without ever seeing “being in love” or “building a life together” or “toleration and forgiveness.” Is it any wonder that my youthful romantic scripting was so skewed?

I think that is one reason why I like old literature. The characters have time for complex motivations and gradual growth of feelings. Events aren’t compressed to take place in a mere three days time so a relationship has time to grow over the course of months or years. It much more accurately represents the way that real relationships grow and wane. I sometimes ponder how to counteract this “falling in love” culture. How do I teach my children the value in building and nurturing a relationship even when the adrenaline rush of courtship is over? The best way I can think of is to stay happily married to Howard. If my kids can see their parents being happy together, playing together, laughing together, and sharing a closeness that can only be grown over years of shared experience, then they’ll at least know there is something better available. Whether that will be enough for them to build realistic expectations for relationships I don’t know.

burned.

By / June 5, 2005 / 4 Comments

Apparently 4 hours at a reservoir on a temperate cloudy day with no sunscreen is enough to turn me and all four of my kids bright red. Now I feel negligent for allowing the sun to inflict this pain on my children. The fact that I am suffering with them is no comfort at all.

Soccer Mom

By / June 2, 2005 / 6 Comments

I just signed Link up for our local youth soccer team. I’ve never wanted to be a soccer mom. I’m not interested in the game. I worry about competition and negative experiences. But Link wants to play. He REALLY wants to play. He’s been taking his soccer ball to school every day so that he could play during recess. Now it is summer and he still wants to play. He wants the chance to run around playing soccer. He doesn’t care much about winning. So I signed him up for a team that is supposed to emphasize playing over winning. I hope this will be a better experience than I am expecting.

From volunteering to housework to bedtime and beyond

By / June 1, 2005 / 5 Comments

Last summer I attended a convention and became involved in a last minute scheduling mix up. Some panels had failed to make the schedule and had to be squeezed in. Another panellist witnessed the problem and jumped in to say “They can have my slot.” Then he proceeded to complain about how he was always the one who had to be the nice guy and it wasn’t fair. During this monologue the persons in charge found a solution which did not involve cancelling any panels. At the time I was amused at the way this person threw himself under people’s feet and then complained about being stepped on. This event is on my mind because to my chagrin I’ve noticed a similar tendency in myself. I’m all too ready to believe that people will fail without my help and that my failure to volunteer is therefore cause for guilt. It is incredibly egotistical of me, and yet I continue to consider myself indispensible. I didn’t jump to volunteer this week and was so happy to discover that my failure to volunteer had zero effect on others. They found a good solution which didn’t involve me at all. I’m not the only capable person out there and I need to remember it.

Their solution was a relief because I did NOT want to have to undertake the effort necessary to help. Instead I want to have brainspace to tackle projects like trying to get my house cleaner. There are walls that have not been washed since we moved in six years ago. Today my kitchen is clean and I finally tested that old dresser for lead paint. The paint test swab didn’t turn bright pink and so the dresser has been given a wash and moved into my boys’ room. I like it there. It has a nice sturdy shape. Someday maybe I’ll sand it down and stain it so that it is beautiful. For now it can remain cream colored with chipped off bits which show a very odd greenish-olive layer underneath. I think someone once tried to antique it, made it ugly, and then painted over the mess with cream color. Anyway it’s mine now and I feel oddly possesive about it. Don’t know why.

Today was a fairly sucessful day for work and organization. At least it was if you take “successful” to mean “things got done” rather than “enjoyable.” Getting the kids to do their work was harder than pulling teeth. Kiki has gone for another round of anything-Gleek-does-is-annoying. Gleek was deliberately bugging Kiki because she wanted Kiki to play with her. Link decided that obstinant refusal was the behavior of the day. And Patches wandered around taking people’s toys, teasing older siblings, and demanding to be held. Truth be told, I wasn’t at my best either. I spent lots more time in mean mom mode rather than encouraging/cheerful mom mode.

There is a quiet space that always happens when kids know it is close to bedtime, but if they play quietly mom will be too busy enjoying the silence to make them go to bed. During that time this evening I spent some thought trying to figure out why I’ve been having such a tough time managing kids and behaviors lately. All kids have phases where they’re easier to manage and phases where they are actively pushing the limits to see what they can get away with. Right now I’ve got four kids in pushing-limits phases. This means that I have to re-think my tactics for all four of the kids because the old methods don’t work anymore. Not fair of them to gang up on me like that.

My strategic plotting had to be interrupted to actually put the kids to bed. Naturally they all ended up in bed later than I wanted. This happens every summer, the bedtimes slip later and later even though I don’t want them to. Patches usually goes to bed easily, but this evening he called me back for extra hugs at least 10 times. I’m not sure how much of his adorable sadness was real and how much was a ploy to get more mommy time, but it worked. Then I had an arguement with Link where I explained that the correct answer to “go to bed” is not “No!” Gleek’s bedtime story lasted 30 minutes because I could barely get a sentence read before Gleek would ask a question which required an involved answer. Before we were done we covered the circulatory system, why we have bones, how new skin grows, why mosquitos drink blood, how cheese is made, how to catch crabs for crab salad, where beef comes from, where bacon comes from, and why we don’t eat seeds that we find in the back yard. Eventually I just had to let her know that question time was over. I’m glad she wants to know all this stuff, but I’m exhausted from trying to keep up with her ravenous hunger for information.

Now I am in the quiet after bedtime. I’ll probably go upstairs and finish the book that Howard brought home from Conduit. It is a self-published book that someone handed to Howard for free. I firmly believe that good writing is a skill that anyone can learn. This person obviously has the drive because according to the back cover this is his third self-published book. I also believe that some people come very naturally to the skills necessary to write a cohesive novel with believable characters. Others do not. They have to work and struggle to attain those skills. The author of this book still has lots of work to do. I’m finishing the book because I’m curious and because it may be possible that I could hand it over to Kiki for reading. The simplicity of plotting and characterizations may appeal to a 10 year old, but I have to make sure that there isn’t any age inappropriate material in there. Part of me feels a little bad for not liking the book more because I know that any self published novel is a labor of love. But unfortunately just because the author loves it doesn’t mean anyone else will.

I’ve rambled enough. I’m done for tonight.