Sandra Tayler

I now have a matching pair of toy cupboards in my family room. They stand one on either side of the fireplace. They are a monument to order and cleanliness. They have plenty of space to house all of our toys. I have the sneaking suspicion that they will spend significant portions of time emptied of their contents. This is one of the drawbacks to having cupboards large enough for kids to play hide and seek in. Sigh.

I had a joyful surprise in my email last night. A friend that I love visiting with, but never seem to run into, discovered my blog here and emailed me. it turns out that she has her own blog. So now I can keep up with all her stuff conveniently from my computer. Perhaps this will serve as a reminder to me to actually call her and schedule that luncheon we always talk about having, but always forget to do. Her blog is very artsy and cool. After I’ve obtained permission, I’ll send all you fine folks over to look at it. It makes me remember how much I loved studying humanities in college. Someday I’ll have time to study it again I hope.

Oh, and in case anyone is interested, I’ve enabled anonymous comments on my journal here. I realized that I want non livejournal users to be able to comment. This also allows random trolls and spammers to comment. I’m not sure how much of a problem it will be, hopefully not a problem at all.

A final point of interest for today is that our house has been invaded by latin pigs. Kiki has been joyfully using pig latin to communicate things with me without letting the other kids know what she is saying. Only, they can tell she’s saying things sneaky and they invariably want to know what she said. It tends to cause more interest than it keeps secrets. Also parsing hesitantly spoken pig latin is tiresome for me. Fortunately Link is starting to comprehend it, so soon they should be able to speak it to each other and leave me out of the loop.

It is fascinating to watch this folklore get passed from one child to another. They’ve also been teaching alternate versions of Jingle bells. The kids delightedly sing these versions as if they’re new, but I heard them and sang them when I was a child. The approved curriculum is not the only thing that is taught at school. These folkloric songs and rhymes have a life of their own as they are passed from one generation of children to the next. I took a folklore class in college that discussed this phenomenon. It was fascinating to think about. Now it is fascinating to see in action.

Today I feel accomplished. As of yesterday I finished an entire month of blogging every single day. It was my own private writing goal and I did it. I wanted to do it because when life gets busy/interesting that is exactly when I am least likely to write an entry. But those are exactly the times I’d like to have recorded for my own reference later. So as of the 30th I had 32 consecutive days. Then of course I missed December 1st by about 20 minutes, which makes my crowing about writing every day a bit ironic. Oh well. Can it count as yesterday if I haven’t slept yet?

Today I also rearranged my office. I did this with the wonderful and willing help of my friend raisinfish. We shuffled furniture around to create table space next to my desk. Now I actually have a space that I can work with. This makes me very glad indeed. I’m sure that within a week I will have piled things all over the wonderful open space, but I still believe that the arrangement will be much better. I probably should have taken before and after pictures, but I was in too much of a hurry to get the job done. Oh well.

Yesterday I purchased a pair of free standing cupboards which are destined to hold the toys in my family room. Last night I assembled one and placed toys in it. It looks so much better than what we had. I’m looking forward to getting the other one in place.

After almost two weeks of fairly aimless drifting I feel like I’m gaining control of the chaos again. It is a good feeling.

Today Howard and I loaded Itunes onto my computer and copied our joint music library there. The point of this is for me to be able to create a library of music that I like and can use without messing up Howard’s ratings and settings. So I’ve just killed an hour poking around to see what music is in there. I threw out things that I don’t like and discovered some old favorites. The point of all this is that eventually Howard will replace his current ipod with a newer version and I can have the old one. Then I can have music around the house even when Howard is elsewhere. I don’t know when the new ipod for Howard will happen. I wish it could be this Christmas, but we’ve already been too spendy and all the things that we’ve been “making do” are beginning to break and need replacing. Just today I had to replace the toy cupboard because the drawers on it completely broke. In fact I should be assembling those shelves rather than poking around our music library. Sigh. But music has so much less work involved.

Today Gleek had a tantrum over departing for school. Partly the problem was miscommunication between Howard and I over whether she is allowed to take toys in the car for the to-school trip. Howard ended up taking Kiki to school and swinging back by to pick up Gleek. After he left with Kiki, Gleek curled up on my bed into a little ball. “I don’t like school.” she told me in a small sad voice. “People call me crybaby.” I wanted so much to snuggle her into my lap and make it all better, but when I reached for her she fled from me. She didn’t flee far, she didn’t want to be held, but she didn’t want to be alone either. I asked her if there was anything else that she didn’t like about school. Apparently one day she was teased that the clothes she was wearing weren’t clothes at all, but pajamas. Also she doesn’t much like circle time. She says it is boring. I then asked what she likes about school. She brightened up for this part. She told about a girl who makes her laugh.

Trying to encourage this positive train of thought, I mentioned a project her class is working on. That was a huge error. It turns out that the project is supposed to be a surprise for me and for Howard. I’d seen the surprise and that seemed the end of everything for Gleek. She cried inconsolably while I racked my brain trying to think of a way to make things better. Inspiration hit, I grabbed Kiki and Link’s versions of this same project and showed them to Gleek. I told her how I was really looking forward to her project being done because then I could hang it on the wall with the one Kiki had done and the one that Link had done. We compared the two finished projects with hers which is in process. Then we quickly put the projects away so that it can still be a surprise for Howard.

Leaving for school was still hard for Gleek. I know that school is a hard place for her to be. She has to work very hard to control herself and follow rules while she is there. I also know that there are things about it that she really enjoys and loves. I know how she feels, because parenting is the same way every single day.

Today Patches was sick. This meant I got to snuggle him to sleep in my lap twice today. He snuggles so small when he’s in my lap. When he’s awake I keep marvelling at how big he is getting, but when he’s asleep he still seems so small.

Kiki’s school class has been mummifying chickens. That’s right, they buy a chicken from a store, bury it in salt for two weeks, the wrap it up in approved mummy manner. These mummified chickens are then stored for a year so next year’s class can have the joy of opening a mummified chicken. Kiki got to open one from last year. She says it smelled really gross. And yes the kids always wear gloves for this, I checked. Today Kiki was telling me that they’re doing an extra special chicken that will get stored for 5 years. Along with the mummified chicken this year’s class is including notes and “curses” for students 5 years ahead. It’s kind of like a time capsule, only new and improved with a dead chicken. In case you hadn’t guessed, they’re studying ancient Egypt. I don’t know if mummified chickens are proven to improve absorption of knowledge of all things Egyptian, but I do know that it has Kiki fascinated. She has babbled about mummifying chickens many times over the past few weeks. I never got to mummify a chicken when I was in school. Now I feel left out.

In unrelated news, we now have light. A while ago I wrote about household quirks and I mentioned the light in the girl’s bedroom which won’t turn on at all. With the shorter days of winter the lack of light became increasingly annoying. This particular light has been a problem for years. It flickered a lot and burned out bulbs frequently. We figured it was a bad fixture and replaced it. The new florescent light was wonderful until the day it refused to turn on. We put up with it that way for months until I finally purchased new florescent bulbs. I put in the new bulbs, it still refused to turn on. It sat that way for nearly a year until last week when we replaced the switch. Still no light.

Captain Electric came to our rescue. They sent a nice man who found a shorted wire and informed us that the florescent light fixture was permanently broken. The only alternate available was the basic utility room bare bulb fixture. So now that is what the girls have in their room. BUT they have a switch that makes their room light! We can replace the ugly fixture later now that the bad wire is fixed. He also replaced the motor on one of our bathroom fans, changed a lightbulb on a 12′ ceiling, and put a cover plate on the box that used to hold controls for a swamp cooler. As an added bonus Captain Electric has a policy that if their technician is late, the customer gets free movie tickets and a dinner coupon. It’s a psychological trick that works very well, I was almost glad when they called me and told me he would be late. So lights, a fan, dinner, and a movie. If only it didn’t come with that $400 bill.

Thank you for all the wonderful responses to my last post about where to shop. I now have a plan for how to proceed and I’m dreading the process much less than before.

Last night I sat down with the kids to make bead candy canes. You make these by stringing beads onto pipe cleaners and then bending the thing into a cane shape. They make great Christmas ornaments and gifts. We also used jingle bells and pipe cleaners to make door hangers. I had mentally figured that both of these projects would take about 30 minutes to complete. I seriously underestimated the creative potential of pipe cleaners, beads, and jingle bells combined. The kids were making constructions for two hours and having worlds of fun while doing it.

For some reason Link felt that this sort of Christmas project required music. Since none was readily available, he favored us with a rendition of Jingle Bells. Gleek and Kiki joined him. It is a little known fact that any group of children who begins singing this particular Christmas tune will gradually increase the volume of the song with each iteration. In no time at all I had kids shouting Jingle Bells at full volume while bending pipe cleaners to their whims. Ah Christmas.

There are some kinds of shopping I like. I like to shop Howard’s amazon wishlist, or mine, or the kids. I like knowing exactly what I want and getting it quickly. I like leisurely browsing with money to spend how I please. Sometimes I like grocery shopping, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I like clothes shopping, sometimes I don’t. But there is one kind of shopping that I have always hated without exception. (WARNING: What follows is a discussion of the practicalities of shopping for women’s underwear. If you are male, you may want to skip the rest of this post.) I hate shopping for bras. I hate it so much that I will wear them until I can see through bits that weren’t designed to be see-through. The added see-throughness does not make them more attractive and makes them much less useful. I have finally accepted the fact that I must again go bra shopping. Grr.

I mentioned all of the above to Howard along with the fact that I’d need several hours to go try on underwear at Walmart and the fact that I would almost certainly come home from this grumpy but not necessarily having made the purchases. I confess I did rant a little about current bra fashions being more like padded breastplates. (I’m not at all convinced that bra utility is at all improved by being made out of padded foam, I think it’s just a fashion thing.) Howard listened to my rant patiently then asked: “Why do you shop for bras at Walmart?” Well, because they’re cheap. I hate buying bras even more if I’m spending piles of money. If I spend money and don’t love it, then I wear it every day and mentally groan at how much I had to spend to find something that is only adequate. I mentioned this to Howard and he countered with “If you shop someplace nicer, it might be more enjoyable.” He further pointed out that $150 for a set of bras is not too much to spend on something I have to wear every day. He further ordered me to blog about all of this and ask for advice on good places to shop where the experience will be less likely to engrumpify me.

So here I am, following orders like a good girl. I don’t need lingerie, just plain old underwear that I can use everyday. It needs to be so comfortable that I don’t even notice it is there. Attractiveness is a bonus. So, where should I shop?

This evening I was sitting with Patches while he was eating a bedtime snack. I like to sit with him and have little conversations. It never ceases to amaze me what these conversations reveal about his understanding (or misunderstanding) of how the world works. Sometimes they aren’t so much conversations as monologues. Patches will sit there talking to himself, expressing each thought out loud as it is caused by the previous one. Tonight was a monologue night. He sat with his ice cream. He’d say something, then use the time when he was eating a spoonful to ponder on what he’d said and it’s implications on the world as a whole.

All this is very adorable and sweet, except for the fact that tonight’s topic for thought was exactly how it might be possible to put poop on a stick.

Today has been a day of trying to get back to normal around here. It was more or less successful. But because Mondays are early out days and also contain two gymnastics lessons, I always end Mondays feeling a little frazzled and tired of driving places in the car. Tuesdays are a little better, but it is usually Wednesday before I really feel settled into the week. I’m hoping to slow things down some in January by putting Gleek and Link into the same Art club rather than separate Gymnastics lessons. Conveniently this art club will sandwich right between Link’s pick up from School and Kiki’s pick up from School. So potentially Mondays will be much nicer in January. BUT even though Monday’s are always tiring, at least this Monday was tiring in the familiar way rather than in a new and different stressful way.

It has now been two weeks since Link’s first dose of ADD medication. The first couple of days were a little frightening with how focused he was. He has settled down quite a bit since then. He was off the medicine for a couple of days during our Thanksgiving holiday. He slept 12 hours straight both days that he was off. He also complained that I forgot to give him his medicine. He was complaining because he couldn’t think or talk the way he wanted to be able to do. So far the only real drawback I’ve seen to the medication is increased difficulty getting him to settle down to sleep. Last night I went to check on him about an hour after tucking him in and he was sitting up in bed carefully organizing his shelf. On one hand, he’s never been very good at organizing and there he was doing a marvelous job. On the other hand, he was supposed to be sleeping.

Link’s teacher is amazed at the difference she sees. He’s right on task and happy most of the days. This is a vivid contrast to how he used to be. I concur. I am continually amazed at the ways I don’t have to slow down or simplfy so that Link can process what is happening. So mostly medication has been a positive experience thus far. Obviously I intend to monitor things closely because he is still growing and changing. What works perfectly now may not work so well in a few months.

Now I’m eyeing Gleek and wondering if she has ADHD. It might explain why she is so frequently a handful. I’ve been mentally listing symptoms and I’ll bet she has 8 or 9 out of the hypothetical list of12. I’m not ready to begin pursuing diagnosis on her yet because I don’t know that a child as young as she is can be adequately diagnosed for ADD due to developmental immaturities. Also I’m concerned that I may just being seeing this because medication made life with Link so much easier and I’d like Gleek to be easier to deal with. The gripping hand is that I’m just not ready to introduce another large change into our lives before Christmas. When things settle after the holidays I’ll see where we’re at.