Month: July 2007

A couple of days ago Howard declared his readiness for summer to be over. He is tired of hot and would like to have some cooler weather. I would also like to have the weather cool down a bit, but I don’t know that I am ready for Fall to arrive.

Fall means the kids going back to school. The past two years have been tough school years and I am drained. Theoretically this on will be easier, but my subconscious won’t believe that until it is an established fact. Kiki starts junior high this year and I can’t believe that transition will be entirely smooth. Link is going into 4th grade, which tends to be a tough year for kids. It is particularly tough for kids who sometimes struggle academically. Gleek is going into first grade. She had so much trouble adapting to Kindergarten and first grade is so different. In hindsight part of Gleek’s struggles with Kindergarten were due to a less-than-stellar teacher. I hope she gets a good teacher this year. Patches will have his first experiences with preschool. I hope that he loves it. It is never fun to try to detach a young child that is barnacled to my leg.

Fall also means a return to a schedule that I do not control completely. This is probably good news considering the shambles of my intended summer schedule. I look forward to more schedule so that my days can regain a rhythm. I look forward to regular times when I’ll have a reduced number of kids in my care.

Fall means cooler weather and longer nights. I like Fall weather. I like changing colors and falling leaves. But I can not forget that Fall is followed by the hard cold gray winter. I fear winter. I’m not entirely sure why I fear winter. I’m not afraid of cold. I like snow. But there is never enough bright sunlight. Last winter I consciously did some things to alleviate winter blues. They helped and I got through. I’ll do the same thing this year. I feel like I’ve talked myself into having Seasonal Affective Disorder. In my case it can’t qualify as a disorder because it does not interfere with things I want to do. Yes I had a really bad winter in 1999. Yes I’ve had a dip in my moods every winter ever since. Shouldn’t I be over this by now? I’ve done piles of emotional purging and sorting and examining. All of that is supposed to make it better. And yet I can not deny that I feel dread at the thought of oncoming winter. I dread Fall because winter follows it. As hot and miserable as the weather has been lately, a piece of me wants to stay right here because it is as far from winter as I can get. (Staying in Spring would be even better, but apparently that isn’t allowed either.)

Hmm. All of these things have been lurking in the shadows at the back of my brain. Pulling them out here into the light where I can look at them makes me much more comfortable with the impending Fall. Four weeks of summer schedule left.

I have run out of distractions.

All weekend I was so busy being stressed about getting Howard ready for Comic Con that I successfully ignored the fact that he was leaving. Leaving as in going to be gone. For a whole week. Denial was my friend then.

Today Distraction has been my friend. Within 30 minutes of Howard’s departure, his sister arrived with her two kids. She helped me clean my kitchen and talked to me about all kinds of stuff and then fed everyone pizza. It was truly wonderful. Then there was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. That occupied me until dinnertime. Then I announced to the kids that they could have a movie slumber party in the family room. I turned on a video for them and went upstairs to watch my own movie on my mini player.

Now the movie is over and it is time for bed and Howard isn’t home yet. In fact he’s still in the process of going away since he’ll get up in the morning and go even farther. I’m going to need more books and movies. I can tell.

Yesterday definitely qualified as Not A Good Day. All the pre-convention stress erupted and left both Howard and I as emotional wrecks. The kids were frequently snapped at. By afternoon we were stressed beyond functioning, but Howard was 90% ready to go.

Things turned around at 3pm when the mailman delivered Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I let Howard have first read, while I opted to dive into a re-read of Half-Blood Prince. What a beautiful calm evening we spent in a world of muggles and wizards. This is why we need fiction. Sometimes the only way to make this world better is to step out of it for awhile. Then we can come back and deal with what is here.

In addition to Harry Potter, we had a wonderful visit from an old friend. We knew him way back when we were engaged, but lost track of him during the intervening years. It was fun to catch up, reminisce, and eat a yummy dinner all at the same time.

Today I get my chance at Deathly Hallows. I’ll be back when I know how it ends.

Last year the Sci Fi channel ran a mini-series called The Lost Room. Howard and I rented the two discs of it through Netflix and we were not at all disappointed. It is a tightly written, fascinating little universe that still has me speculating about alternate outcomes and what I would do if I were in the universe. The ending is satisfying while still leaving the series open to sequels. I don’t think I’m interested in sequels to this series. I like it the way it is with some of the mysteries remaining mysterious. If they try to unravel it all and explain everything, they’d likely ruin it.

Anyway I highly recommend The Lost Room.

Gleek was grounded from friends today, which meant she was bored. In fact by 7 pm she was in-my-face Boooorrreeed. I had to go to the mall and return a couple items anyway, so I suggested we make an outing of it. Patches, with unerring four-year-old senses, showed up and demanded to go too. So I took my youngest pair of kids to the mall. They were unbelievably good while waiting with me to return the items. Gleek did try to convince me to buy several clothing items. They were right there and obviously my size and so I should buy them. I didn’t. Instead I returned unwanted clothing items. Then we braved the wilds of the mall.

Our first stop was a toy and hobby store. Small stores have a very different feel that the big chain stores. The kids were intrigued to wander the aisles and discuss purchasing possibilities. They’d both brought their money and fully intended to buy something before we went home. The toy store didn’t seem to have anything they wanted in the right price range, so we headed out. Then Patches spotted it. A sword and shield set complete with axe and gauntlet. The whole thing was $4.99, which was just exactly how much he had. From the moment he saw the set, no other toys existed. He didn’t even care about looking at anything else. So we bought the set and went on our way.

Gleek requested that we find a store with more girl stuff, so we stopped at Claires. I do not think it is possible to find a more girly store than Claires. It is full of make-up, jewelry, hair decor, and all things pink. We quickly made our way back to the corner filled with Hello Kitty, Strawberry shortcake, Disney princesses, and Dora the explorer. Gleek fluttered from item to item like a little butterfly that is determined to sample every flower before settling to eat at the very best one. She loved quavering between to possibility of lip gloss or folding hair brush. Most of the items were quickly ruled out as being too expensive, so Gleek began circling the stands of sale items as she tried to narrow things down to what she really wanted. I would have loved to let her dither and enjoy the shopping experience for another hour, but Patches had begun to do his potty dance and was asking to leave. So Gleek finally selected lip gloss.

We wended our way home and Patches instantly broke out his new weaponry. Within 5 minutes each of the kids had one of the new items and they were all playing together hacking away at imaginary monsters. I love the way that my kids share. They’re really good about it except when they aren’t. It amused me greatly to observe Gleek sporting the new gauntlet and brandishing her new lip gloss in lieu of a sword.

When a child is missing, hollering her name all over the house is a good place to start. It stops being useful when the pitch and fear in the holler start an adrenaline rush which damp out thought. It would have been much better for me to alert Howard that Gleek was missing so that we could start a systematic search. Fortunately he heard the pitch of fear in my calls and started to calmly look in likely places. Kiki also responded with calm thought and went to ask our backyard neighbor. This was perfect because the backyard neighbor was the one who located Gleek in another neighbor’s back yard.

Gleek was missing a total of about 15 minutes; 10 minutes before I noticed she was gone, 5 minutes of searching.

We had a family conference discussing the importance of always notifying a parent of where you are going. I have carefully tried to not take out the post adrenaline crankies on the kids. Gleek is grounded from friends tomorrow.

I just wish I’d reacted more effectively.

One of the blogs that I read is Woulda Coulda Shoulda by Mir. I love the way she shares her life. She entertains me and makes me cry alternately. I enjoy her posts and I’m always dissapointed when she misses the occasional day. She recently got married and moved from New England to Georgia. Today her post was about the experience of having children living right in her neighborhood. She’s not used to it. She’s especially not used to having what she calls “feral children” living nearby. These are the kids who always show up asking to play, asking to be fed, needing attention, and the parents seem to be nowhere around.

I read Mir’s post and I almost commented. That is unusual for me because I’m a lurker by nature. I wanted to share the joy that I have found living in a neighborhood full of children. I love that my kids can trot themselves two houses away to play with a friend. I love that these friends come over here as well. But then I realized that my spouting about my neighborhood wouldn’t be all that helpful to Mir. The situations are very different. My neighborhood is full of kids whose parents keep track of them. I know most of these parents. I know that if little Charlie shows up at my door to ask to play with Gleek, he probably did so without telling his mom where he went and that I need to send him home to ask his mom first. I know that if little Lucy shows up at my door I need to step out and wave to her mom who is standing on the porch waiting for me to do just that. There is a whole network of relationships built up over 9 years of living in the same place with mostly the same people. There are houses where my kids are not allowed to play because I don’t trust the level of supervision there. There are houses where I’ll let my kids play during the day, but I’d never consider a sleep over. I know which houses welcome kids who show up at the door and which houses really prefer to recieve a call first.

We do have some feral kids in the neighborhood, but there are enough families around that we can take care of them. I am not shy about stating the rules for my house and bouncing a kid who can’t follow the rules. It hasn’t been much of a problem. Mostly children who are feral are so glad to find a structured place that they’ll happily follow rules in order to be allowed to stay and to be fed. It does get annoying sometimes. Non-feral children get annoying sometimes. Even my own kids are sometimes annoying. But My House, My Rules, seems to work pretty well.

I wonder if I lived next door to Mir whether she would consider my kids feral. I know that my kids try to invite themselves over frequently. I know that they ask for food in other people’s homes. I try to teach them to be polite and not invite themselves, but it is hard. I feed neighbor kids all the time and have just kind of assumed that’s normal around here. Do other people look at my occasionally ragamuffin kids and wonder where their parents are? I think we fit in here in Utah. We aren’t the over protective family nor the permissive one. I wonder how different it would be in a place that is not Utah.

I think that while the definition of “good parent” is probably pretty much the same all over the country, the expression of it can be drastically different. There are people who do not believe they can be a good parent unless they buy their child designer clothes and a private education. There are people who believe that good parents fill their child’s time with activities. There are people who believe that good parents don’t over schedule their kids. Each community develops a consensus about how children should be raised. (Note: not all neighborhoods are communities. “Community” implies a network of relationships between the people. Some neighborhoods are just places where people happen to live next door. My neighborhood is very much a community with all the benefits and frustrations that small communities always embody.) My parenting style fits my community’s image of “good parent.” But if I were to change communities I might not find so much acceptance and that would be hard.

I believe that Mir will sort it out. That she’ll be able to establish boundaries and build the relationships she needs to be happy in her new home. I just hope that the community into which she has moved is flexible enough to accept her for who she is and that they can see she is a good parent even if it is expressed differently from the ways they are accustomed to.

Saturday I felt like everything was awful. Yesterday things were normalizing. Today I feel great. I’ve been happy and optimistic. I spent time just talking to the kids instead of avoiding them. I actually did a real bedtime for what feels like the first time since school got out. This meant snack and stories and individual time for each of the kids. It was good. I need to do it more often. I need to start it about an hour earlier.

Today I love my house and my kids and my life. If this is some kind of a mad bungee thing then I’m going to dig in my fingers and hold on right here until the cord gets good and stretched out so that I don’t have to snap back the other direction at all.