Month: March 2009

The first hours of the reunion are chaotic. None of the kids have settled into games yet. Instead they are all running from room to room, tossing toys around at random. The adults are not settled either. People are still arriving. There are suitcases to be carried, questions about schedule, beds to set up, dinner to make, and a dozen fragmenting conversations as everyone tries to catch up with everyone else. The chaos continues into the dinner hour as we attempt to feed 16 kids and 11 adults in one large kitchen. We scramble to answer all the demands “I want to sit there!” “She’s pushing the table!” “Do I have to eat this!” “Where is my juice!” “Can I be done?” The children leave the room in age-grouped clusters, all running off to play. The adults linger talking before cleaning up. Everyone has settled in and the reunion is in full swing.

Half a dozen kids dash past me, scattering as they round the couch in different directions, then regrouping before continuing to run out the opposite door. All are sporting brightly-colored, long-armed monkeys fastened around their necks like capes. My nephew has two rainbows’ worth of these monkeys and they have become vital to whatever game it is that they are playing together so intently. The world is at stake and monkey beclad children will determine our fates. At the moment they each only have a single monkey, but on prior circuits through the room, Gleek was begirdleed with half a dozen, like a fuzzy, multi-colored batman utility belt, armed for any monkey-requiring emergency. I asked about the purpose of the monkeys, but none of the kids will tell me. They all just give me a look that says I shouldn’t inquire into these top secret matters. Then they run off to save the world again. This is why we have family reunions, so that we can observe these age-range spanning cousin games. With monkeys.

I stayed up until 1:30 AM talking with my adult relatives, related both by blood and marriage. One thing I love about my extended family is that the distinction between sister and sister-in-law does not matter. We are all family. That is one of the things I love about Howard, he understands that being a close family is a choice rather than a happenstance of birth.

Up next we’re making padded swords, heading out to play at a gym, going swimming, and then playing games until everyone is too tired to stay up anymore.

Last night we hosted a gathering of over a dozen writers from the online writer’s forum to which Nancy and I both belong. It was a delightful evening full of laughter and good conversation. Hostessing is potentially very stressful. I feel responsible to make sure that all the food arrangements run smoothly, to make sure that everyone gets introduced to everyone else, to make sure that everyone is having a good time. It is particularly stressful if I have to splice the hostessing with running upstairs to manage parenting. But none of those stresses manifested last night. All of the conversations were inclusive, everyone was understanding when I needed to duck out for kid stuff. The kids were all well behaved. There were a couple of altercations between Gleek and a cousin, but nothing unmanageable. I’m so glad that it all went well, because that means I can do it again sometime. I can’t host large parties often, they are too disruptive to our regular schedule, but it is nice to know that it can work really well. Now I need to rest before tackling the family events the rest of this weekend.

My sister Nancy is here for a visit with her husband and children. It makes me glad. She lives so far away that we don’t get to see each other much. We still keep in touch via the internet, but that is different than being together and having random conversations sparked by a stray comment. These free-form conversations frequently lead us interesting places, or to places where one of us passes along information that the other finds very useful, but that would never have occurred to us to mention in a blog entry or email. Someday I’m going to go visit in Germany instead of always waiting for them to come here.

I’ve now gotten the delivery schedule from our printer. We’ll receive delivery of Scrapyard at the end of May. This means we’ll be doing our book release party at Conduit and doing the shipping events early in June. It is good to have a schedule.

All four of the Schlock books have been submitted to Baen. Now it is up to their technical wizards to figure out if/how to format these books for electronic distribution. I’m really glad to have this out of my hands and I hope that it doesn’t come back to me.

It feels really good to be back into a maintenance state rather than a pushing-to-finish state. I get to relax and vacation for the next week and then I need to dive in to Resident Mad Scientist. I’ll also use the quiet space before opening pre-orders to do some work on some of my own projects. Once we open pre-orders I’ll have shipping preparation to do.

Parent Teacher Conferences were last night. These were much nicer than the ones I had last Fall. Last Fall there was a lot of puzzlement about how to help struggling kids. The plans we made then have worked well, because this time all of the teachers and I got to smile at each other and agree that things are going well. It was a nice change. I was particularly pleased with Patch’s kindergarten teacher. She demonstrated to me that she really understands Patch and likes him. Since she’s the one teacher I haven’t had the the time to get to know well, I was really glad to see it. I was pretty sure this was the case, which is why I spent my energies helping out in Link and Gleek’s classrooms. Family stuff needs a larger share of my time in the next couple of months.

The weather is warming up. There will be gardening soon.

I remember myself ten years ago, when Kiki was little. Parenting was still new to me then, but I had some very clear ideas about how it should happen. I look at myself now and I am doing some of the things that I believed I would never do.

I thought I would never push my kids into extra curricular activities. I currently have Link in gymnastics classes, not because it is something he loves, but as a form of physical therapy. I did not understand back then the things I know now about practice. I did not realize that preteens start needing something more than enjoyment, that they need purpose and a goal to strive for. Link finds energy and satisfaction from gymnastics even if a particular lesson is frustrating or embarrassing. Sometimes he’ll walk out of a lesson angry and frustrated, but what he says to me is not “I want to quit” but “I need to practice.” And so I scramble to help him practice so that the next week can go better.

I thought that kids should not be over scheduled. I still believe this, but my definitions have altered to include the fact that some kids need more structured activity than others. Gleek enjoys her free play time, but she also gets bored if there is too much of it. She needs things to do. If I don’t put her into activities, then the burden falls upon me to find constructive activities for her. So Gleek has both Gymnastics and Piano as well as a twice monthly church activity group. This leaves her plenty of play time, but gives her things to practice when she is bored. It is a good balance for now. But it will not surprise me if she needs even more schedule when she starts hitting the pre-teen years. On the other hand, Patch does well with long stretches of self-directed play. So does Kiki.

We were far less immersed in electronic entertainments when Kiki was little. In fact I had a ban on battery operated toys of any kind. Mostly I found that the batteries were simply there to provide additional noise or lights without significantly adding to the play value of the toy. I lifted the ban when I realized that I was making gift giving extremely difficult for my technology loving father. So now we run things on batteries and we play quite a lot of video games. I’m not always sure this particular shift is a good thing. We’d all benefit from playing outdoors more. At least we continue to not bring commercial laden television into the house. We still watch shows that we love, but it is all via DVD or online sources. This way we can pay for the content we love and avoid supporting idiotic commercials that we don’t.

I think the biggest shift is that when Kiki was little, I could not have pictured myself as a working mother. I was completely immersed in parenting and house maintenance. If you had asked me, I probably would have admitted that once the kids were all in school, I would pick up some sort of a job. I would not have been able to tell you what the job would be. I thought the switch over would be an event. Instead work slipped into existence piece by piece before I knew it was happening. What would my younger self think of my life now, I wonder. She would probably worry about the harried pace I keep. I know that I look back at her and wonder what she did with her time. But then I think and remember what it was like to have my days chopped into tiny slices by the needs of infants and toddlers. I remember what it was like to sleepwalk through the day because baby wouldn’t sleep. I remember the endless thing after thing. My days were full then too, they were just full in a different way.

So much of my life now is different than what I could have predicted. My choices have altered because of those differences. I wonder what thing I will find myself doing in the future that I would not consider now. It would be a scary thought, except that I am still guided by the same principles that drove my parenting in the past. The difference in choices is driven by differences in information, not fundamental changes in what I believe. So my future choices will be different, but they do not frighten me because I will still be me, just a more informed and experienced version of myself.