Carpe le diem

So here we are in March, or "march! march! march!" as Helen used to say when she was two years old and wanted to get things moving again. Thus, a selection of activities behind which I have been wearily tagging along:

1. Over the weekend we went to Winter Park (to ski), Frisco (to sleep, mostly, and also order waaay overpriced pizza) and Steamboat Springs (more of the ski) (sigh) (I am getting to the point where I think as we leave the ski area parking lot at the end of the day, "Well, one less ski day to go in this life." I suspect my relief is deeply unhealthy.) While in Steamboat, Helen carpe-ed the diem and talked us into fulfilling her lifelong dream of bungee trampolining:

Embiggen for her expression of anticipation.

Was it as good as she dreamed it would be? She said yes.

2. While fulfilling Helen's lifelong dream cost only $10, Silas has been badgering us for a little more payout. "It's time to make some Spring Break plans," I told him wearily the other night, thinking that if we had a plan, we might be able to avoid some of the wretched fights* of the past two long weekends. "Hawaii?" he said immediately, lighting up. "No, that's too--well, sure, price it out, kiddo. See how much it would cost to fly four of us to Hawaii."

Twenty minutes later he looks up from the computer screen and says, "$3,384. How much do you make again?"

I explained about budgeting and vacations and If We're Going To Spend That Kind Of Money, feeling like a miserly fool (well, why can't we use one month's salary for a four-day trip to the most expensive destination you can reach without a passport?), and also like I walked right into this one.

"What if just you and me go?"

 "Sweetheart, we're not going to spend our entire vacation budget on a trip for two of us."

"But I want to go to Hawaiiiiii."

"It's just not very realistic for a trip three weeks from now."

And etc. At least it didn't end with weeping, if I'm remembering correctly, which I'm probably not.

3. The ironic thing is that we've spent nearly that amount to get us all skiing, a dream destination vacation for people all over the world (especially that trip to Wolf Creek. Damn. Four feet of snow in 48 hours.) Si is only vaguely aware of this expense; he mostly notices the imperfections of the experience, such as the lack of suitable ski partners (Mom's too slow, Dad's too good, and cousin can't goooo), the irritating length of the drive to get there, the fact that getting there involves leaving at particular times not of his very own choosing. The fact that in order to get to skiing tomorrow, less Minecraft must be played today. Also, we said he DID choose this and he DID NOT, we're LYING, he DID NOT choose this.

(Etc.)

(For Pete's SAKE, kid. Let it GO.)

I hesitate to leap into this run. Si no longer does.

 In any case, we all went skiing this weekend, as I mentioned above, and Si was enthusiastic and engaged as soon as we left the premises. He made great strides in his skiing this weekend, or so I heard. I myself was straggling along behind Helen, who is still in the Very Cautious phase of her skiing career, which tends to lead to one grownup or the other being dissatisfied with the skiing experience at the end of the day. Skiing with Helen also makes it difficult for me to determine exactly where I am in my own skiing development - I am definitely better than I ever have been, but I still have a visceral dislike of speed. I am not exactly slow, but I am deliberate. And I am exactly slow when it comes to trying to keep up with Silas, even, as of this weekend, on the bumps (I used to be able to keep up with him on the bumps.)

So the discussion then becomes: in what ways is my blithe admission that I will never be as good a skier as my 11-year-old son demonstrating blind adherence to these familial patterns?

Familial patterns that are not mine, by the way, and don't really get under my skin in a significant way, but which are perhaps more worrisome to M for stemming from his own history. Will this be the shoal on which our family founders? Unlikely, I maintain. Nevertheless, I try to put on my game face and at least make a good show of pretending in company that I want to be a middle-aged first-time extreme skier.

(To which I say: HA. And also: is it time to stop for hot chocolate yet?)

I'm always taken by how much skiing is like sledding, except for the cost. It makes it harder to take seriously.

* We had a taste of teenager this past weekend. On the surface the fight, which was full family, and lasted approximately TWO HOURS, which is insane, was about monitor time and also the frankly minor rhetorical point that while we said that Silas said that his choice was to go to Winter Park on the way to the condo, he said that he did NOT in fact say this. Below the surface, of course, the fight was about control, and how we wish he enjoyed different leisure activities, and how sometimes this wish comes across as wishing he was a different person.

Piercing

Sunday morning I took Helen to get her ears pierced. This is a desire that came on her suddenly: Tuesday morning at 11:32, apparently. I got home from work and she had the computer on, open to the webpage for Claire's, which is apparently where everybody gets their ears pierced. I'd never actually heard of Claire's.

"It's right in the mall," she said. "By JC Penny. You go up the escalator, Maddie says. Angelina says it doesn't hurt at all."

No one really likes the paparazzi in the morning

"I'll need to do a little research," I said, buying some time so I could take off my coat. Also because while I am fine with her getting her ears pierced - this was clearly an event that would be coming, as we have a girl, and particularly as we have Helen - I needed to consider the bribery possibilities of the event before I let it disappear over the waterfall of missed opportunity. Did ear piercing need to be a Reward Event?

I ultimately decided no. Helen is not really my need-to-be-bribed child, anyway. So bright and early  Sunday morning we put on our nice clothes and drove to the mall. As we got ready, I was a tiny bit reminded of a former colleague who said that she understood the fairy tale archetypes of replacement and obsolescence when she had a teenage daughter. "They're blossoming just as you're hitting menopause," she said. "It really feels like you're being replaced." Not that Helen or I are doing either of these, just yet. But they are on the horizon.

Originally, for example, I was going to wear my "not actually pajamas" clothes, but then I started imagining myself standing in the overlit mall shop next to some pretty young thing wearing her work outfit and Helen in her coordinated "I'm getting my ears pierced FINALLY" outfit, so I put on a non-pilly sweater and newer slacks and my boots and a necklace and makeup (makeup!).

"You look tired," Helen said in the spirit of helpfulness. "You have those black things under your eyes."

"Bags," I said. "Those are called bags."

So Helen, me and my eye bags headed off to the mall. We got there about ten minutes before anything opened and wandered around looking at the puppies, smelling the cookies, looking at the goods. I tried my best not to be actively hating the mall. It helped that it was early morning and the sun was streaming in the windows; it didn't feel like the day the shooter would come bursting out of the food court firing on everyone. I could imagine that the other people there were just, like us, running a few routine and irritating errands, instead of living their fullest and best lives under the artificial lights of the House of Mammon.

I still offered up a little prayer that neither of my children will grow up to be teenagers whose favorite hangout is the mall.

Finally our store opened and I followed Helen in. The pretty young thing was very sweet and encouraging. "Have you been waiting for this a long time?" she asked Helen, who nodded happily. I signed the waivers, we picked out the earrings, Helen held the comfort bear and the deed was done. A person who occasionally gets hysterical in doctor's offices about potential shots sat calmly and happily through two ear piercings.

It made me realize, or maybe remember, that kids can bring themselves to do just about anything, so long as it's their idea. If it's something I impose, or that I'm taking too much charge of, they're much more likely to fall apart. This might actually be something of a Parenting Truth, one which I'd better pay attention to.

Turkeyful

Here's what we did on Thanksgiving:

Then we took the bus to the ski area and messed around on the carpet of snow they had laid down at great expense to themselves and the environment. You'll note the sum total of the natural snow in the Winter Park region there in the photo behind Helen:

Then we came back to the rented condo and had Target's Thanksgiving in a box. This is much better than it sounds and we just had the last of the turkey leftovers last night, in soup.

We added a new twist to our three-year-old tradition this year, in that we invited some of the relatives we started the tradition to get away from. One of the many things I am thankful for this year is that it was fine. We completely avoided any discussion of politics, healthcare, child rearing - or, well, anything else. Things got a little testy in the kitchen, but that was mostly due to the lack of elbow room. I stayed gracious (no, really!) and M. only had to do that "calm it down" hand motion at me once during the whole three days.

It was good, and I really am thankful for so much. I'd list it all except that I have limited gigabytes and also I am a little superstitious about laying out all my goods online for the fates to take.

Completely throwaway side note: I found one of our photo albums face down in Si's "man cave" in the basement, and when I went to pick it up, tsking to myself, I noticed that it just happened to be open to a page with a photo of two friends of mine from a visit to a natural hot springs many years ago. Many, many years ago, back in the days when young women went au naturel in this situation. I did a few rapid calculations - man cave; recent playdate with a new friend from middle school; rather eye-popping photo - and made the very prudent decision to remove it. Then I reconsidered: I like having this photo scattered in among all our sober wedding photos and random "watch me stand on one foot beside the pickup" photos. Once we, too, were careless and carefree and wild and fun and this is what we did.

However, after sleeping on it, I decided that my first impulse was the correct one.

I also am a little nervous, because that photo - of two women I've completely lost touch with and am unlikely to ever see again - had a companion photo, one that features a person that Si and his friend might recognize even though it was taken 20 years ago. And I have NO idea where that photo has got to.

Hmm.

Wind sprints

These two photos

I've been going along with Si to do his wind sprints (which reminds me: Si has started working on track stuff again, in response to parental pressure to DO SOME KIND OF EXERCISE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD) and whatever we are doing must be working, because my legs are SORE. And I say this as a lifetime runner. A lifetime slow runner, but still. The two of us are improving.

pretty much sum him up right now. Especially if one involved guns and/or gaming.

It's been making me think about one of our perennial frets about Si - that he doesn't work at things - and trying to reconcile it with this idea that kids know how they themselves learn best and will show you (by learning that way) if you are willing to watch.

It's an idea about which I'm skeptical but which I can't seem to put down, especially since it hits a harmonic resonance in my own personal philosophy, which is that a kid's job is to grow up and a parent's job is to help them do that - to help them become the person they're supposed to be. Which, since none of us can see the future, involves a lot of observation. The watching, in this philosophy, is more critical than the shaping or correcting.

So when he wakes up at 7 a.m. and immediately, before breakfast, starts pinging around on his iphone game collection, is his future self crying out for discipline and correction, or should I observe this learning style objectively and let it go unremarked?

[Note: it did not go unremarked. I told him to turn the phone off. "No faaaair!"]

When I see on the class calendar that there's an algebra test coming up next week, should I say something, such as, for example, "Yes to the playdate but only after you've done some problem practice for your test," - or is that just indoctrinating him in the test-based education model, which will teach him to be helpless in the face of his learning needs unless he is preparing for a test?

[Note: I told him to practice for his algebra test. He doesn't have a study worksheet, so he went online and found practice problems in the subject area. Not a bad use of initiative and problem-solving skills, even if it is in service of doing really well on tests.]

It's a dilemma. He's smart. He's conscientious. He loves to be seen as smart and successful and wants, like most kids, to be rich (riiiiich!) And nine times out of ten he will shrug and give up when faced with a task requiring complex effort. He's designed to fall for get-rich-quick schemes, I sometimes think, and it seems criminal of me as a parent not to counteract this tendency - by proselytizing for the good old Protestant work ethic, by inculcating good study/ life habits, by limiting noneducational monitor time, by saying, as our personal daily mantra, "not until you've finished ___."

 Well, okay, fine, if you put it like that. However, other times I think what I'm really doing is wanting him to be a different sort of person: a quester and a researcher, a searcher after truth. I don't want him to just study for the test: I want him to ruminate on the meaning of the problems, and why we do math, and what is life all about, anyway? But he's really more of a life is good, let's finish this up and break out the beer kind of a guy. An efficient worker, one who, like myself, prizes his downtime, his home life, his quality of life (and thus the quality of his monitor graphics). He likes to bake, read quality escapist lit, pit his wits against the computer game and curl up by the fire: he's a hobbit, not a wizard. Is that so wrong?

No, of course not. Not wrong at all. Just...

...and here's where I start to see a problem in my approach. I've never been particularly interested in parenting books, but I'm suddenly checking them out in stacks, hoping to come up with a useful set of standardized rules that I can quick substitute in when my aspirational parent starts to say, well, shouldn't he be....?

Because the answer is no. He shouldn't be. He is who he is. And thank the stars above for my sweet, prickly, stubborn mid-size guy who only occasionally points his nerf gun at me and pretends to fire.

Mississippi Hot Dog

Helen started taking violin lessons in September. She'd been pestering me about it for six straight months, and since I am a clever and responsible parent I waited until I thought she was sure--ha, ha, kidding. Mostly I just couldn't bear the thought of introducing yet another freaking activity into our roster of Things To Do. Also, the money. Also, it involved phone calls. So it took me a while, but finally I managed to break the task down into doable chunks and complete each one until ta-da, lesson time.

Now, those of you who know me in real life are probably saying, "And so, Melospiza, how is it being on the other side?" For lo, as a minor, violin playing was pretty much My Thing, especially by the time I got into the identity-crucial teen years. I didn't do sports, I had an awkward social life, my grasp of academic subjects was tenacious but perfunctory - meaning I was able to allow that occasionally, other people at my school might be better than me and I would not die - but violin, that was me. It was my baseball and swim team and math meet all rolled into one hugely time-consuming and expensive endeavor.

(And then I got to college and quit, with a mixture of grief and joy, but that is another story.)

And the short answer to your question is: good. It feels really, really good. After a brief deliberation, I signed Helen up for Suzuki lessons, which was my background (rather insufferably so - I remember one of my friends snapping at me after yet another comment about something violin-related, "Suzuki isn't god!"). We're learning all the same songs and exercises that I learned, so the first time in this parenting thing I feel like I know what's going on. It took me about five years to know or care what a DRA score is or what sort of baseball hit is most desirable, but I know from Mississippi Hot Dog (which they call Mississippi Stop Stop now, but I've been able to come to terms with that). I know all about tone and straight bows and how to hold your elbow when playing on the A string and what a good left hand position looks like, and I can talk shop with a casual fluency that eludes me in all other areas of my children's endeavors.

It also helps, and is gratifying, that Helen likes it. She's a practicer, so the Suzuki method suits her personality, as I knew it would. Every component is broken down into small tasks that can be practiced for a set number of times at home; advancing to the next task, whatever it is, is a delightfully big deal. "I think you'll get to move on to the A STRING next week!" says her teacher, with a proud and happy smile. I used to love this part (I wish I had that kind of cheerleading in my current life: wow, you did that Mail Merge REALLY WELL! I bet that next week you'll be ready to do the WHOLE BATCH!) (Or on second thought, maybe that would just be depressing.) Helen loves it, too.

It's also a welcome contrast from baseball, where there is a wearisome emphasis on Talent and Your Son Has a Great Swing and etc., with an equally wearisome carping on how the boys are expected to "practice this at home" (practice what?  how many times? for how long? what's reasonable to expect?) Soccer and swimming are like this, too. I think it's partly that many of the adult professionals in sports are there because they were talented enough to overcome uneven coaching, so they tend to believe in the talent god. There's also the fact that it's hard to practice in-game performance at home.

Anyway. I'm really glad we're doing it. I hope that my enthusiasm doesn't outlast Helen's, although I know I can't expect the same outcome I had. But right now it feels like we've opened a wing of my house that had been closed for years.

6th Grade

 As I've mentioned, Silas is in 6th grade this year, which is revelatory in many ways, not the least of which (so far, after three weeks) is that 6th grade can actually not suck. I'd heard this from other people; my sister-in-law, in fact, said that middle school was her favorite part of school, and then added, peering down to where I'd fallen on the ground, that yes, she'd heard that was pretty unusual.

This is pretty much his approach to life right now.

What most people say about middle school, actually, is that it doesn't matter where you go, large academically challenging school, small intimate school, personally designed and tailored just-to-you school, middle school is hard. It's the time of life. It's just difficult, and also your companions are difficult, and also your parents start getting on your case in the weirdest ways.

But in my experience, it's especially hard if you go from a small comfortable school to a large suburban school, so I was worried for my little snowflake, both for his actual anticipated anguishes and also for things he wouldn't know better about, like those hard-edged big middle school teachers for whom subject material is just so much meat to be squeezed through the heads of this year's crop of meat grinders.

I may have been projecting a little. 6th grade happened to be the worst year of my life. (And I'm compelled by fate to add a hurried so far, just in case, because if that's as hard as I have it, I'm well aware it's pretty good.) But there are areas of convergence in our circumstances: see previous paragraph.

The social elements are still subject to change, of course. Right now things are golden: packs of friends and acquaintances roaming the three or four local neighborhoods on the weekend, walking home from school, stopping at Panera's for smoothies and baked goods. I assume the law of middle school averages means that there's a bad stretch waiting up ahead, but in general, the setup reminds me of the occasionally tumultuous-but-mostly-settled pack of friends I had in middle school, once we left the big urban suburb and came back to Ohio.

The academic elements seem, however, much better. On the one hand, I don't think Silas cares. I myself, when I was closer to the age in question, confidently asserted that it was impossible to learn anything in middle school so you shouldn't even try. (Oddly, I was concurrently criticizing my smaller and much much more pleasant 7th-and-8th-grade middle school for being not rigorous enough. We were learning both algebra and Latin and in our English class read Beowulf and the Iliad.) (Teenagers, man.)

On the other hand: whew.

 They will read real books this year. When I said this, happily, to Si, he said, "What does that mean?" Fair enough. They will read The Red Pearl, The Call of the Wild, A Comedy of Errors. That's what I mean by real books. They'll also read Julie of the Wolves, which comes close. (What do I mean?)

The main things I remember about 6th grade English are that the teacher played in a rock band and kept pointing out that Sting also played in a rock band and taught English; that he spent the entire class, every class, sitting at his desk facing us in our desks, and that he had a thing against one of the students in the class and devoted some of every class period to humiliating him (nice.) We wrote a few stories and must have read a few, too, but I don't remember them; I'm pretty sure we didn't read any book-length books. We mostly studied grammar, and spelling, and sat in embarrassed silence while Mr. Manning lobbed mocking diatribes at poor X.

The other classes were better than this, but not much better. So when I am glad, so very, very glad, that the academics in the middle school seem both serious and like they recognize that there can be joy in learning, that is what I mean.

 Si has also been expanding his extra curriculars. Last week he snapped this photo of the first-ever chocolate cake he baked; he also made mini pizzas for lunch for himself and Helen. (I know, right? I'm afraid even to talk about it in case he hears the note of crowing satisfaction in my voice and shuts down the bakery for good).

Sticky and delicious.

So far, then, 6th grade has been one long compelling argument about why we live where we live, in the expensive part of town, far from the mountains and neighborhoods and, well, vibe that we like. This is not an argument that I like or even quite believe in, but so far it has been pretty hard to find any evidence to the contrary.

One week down

So, School started.

There's the awesomeness: middle school is like a whole different game, not only in terms of the obvious, classes and lockers etc. (they get to read Call of the Wild! and also other things), but also in terms of expectations for parents. It's sort of assumed that we have lives outside our parenting responsibilities, for example. There's an activity bus. If Si stays late to talk to a teacher (they have after school hours, which are called, disappointingly, intramurals) (his favorite part of elementary school was the optional gym class they got before school one a week, also called intramurals), or to run track (ha) or any other scheduled activity, he can just hop on the activity bus. It drops him off a million miles from our house, according to him, but still: hot dog. Even Events are this way. Si is joining the Math League: I got a little tense, reading over the schedule of meets, until I noticed the fine print: they take the bus. And the bus brings them back to the school at 5:30, 5:45. At that point we do need to pick them up, but 5:30 is a time even my we-want-your-shining-faces-in-your-desks-for-8.5-hours-a-day workplace can accommodate.

It's like the independence I've been pushing for since 2005 is finally here.

I guess I'm supposed to feel sad, and I do (always), but not for that.

Are we in the wilderness? The high plains of Colorado? The African Savannah?

Another awesome thing is that M. and I sat down as a team and decided which days I was going to go in to work late so that I could walk Helen to the bus stop, and which days he was going to do this and I would leave early and get back in time to be here for the kids when they get home. We've needed to do this for two years, so it's nice to have it done. No complaining, no scrambling: we just do what needs to be done.

Then there's the not-awesomeness. Si's new independence is accompanied by actions favored by evolution to hasten the separation between parents and children. He argues everything, particularly if it comes out of M's mouth. He bewails things a lot. Yesterday I got a tearstained call at work (I kind of dread getting calls from home): "Dad is abusing his power as Dad." Oh, dear - what's going on? "He says we need to clean off the table AND outside. Because they're a mess. He says he can't sit down. You need to come home right away."

"That actually sounds pretty reasonable, kiddo." More tears.

Sigh. And the homework has had moments of intensity, already, and it's only the second week of school. And my other child: she goes to school. Sometimes I hear about it. I haven't seen or heard a single thing from her teachers, however: not a flier, not a note, nothing. When I ask her what her favorite part of the day is, she says, Art class. A girl after my own heart.

("You get to start intramurals this year, Helen!" Si told her joyfully. When she gave kind of a roll-the-eyes response, he said, "But you've GOT to do intramurals. It's like gym class! Before school! You get to play games!" Still nothing. I finally had to chime in, "When I was in school, I didn't like gym either. In fact, it was my LEAST FAVORITE class." And Si looked at both of us in total bafflement.)

Nope. Botanic Gardens. I suppose one tipoff might be that there is a trace of green in this grass.

Awesome and not awesome: more or less like regular life. I do feel like we've clawed our way to the second level of parenting, though. For better or worse. 

Melancholic

The kids went back to school today and appropriately for my mood it's overcast and fuggy. It used to be the start of the school year was an enlivening time for me - apples, sweaters, sharp pencils and new classes - but the past two or three years it's leaned more toward sober and pensive, with perhaps a big dollop of self pity (on which I am trying to cut back, so bear with me). Today I am definitely feeling sober and pensive, with occasional dips into the black bile. Just dipping the toe, though. Rather than bolt into white-hot rage when, say, some unmemorable lawmaker says something breathtakingly stupid and cruel (That's what unmemorable lawmakers do, I remind myself sternly. It's like painting their drab house pink in the hope that it will stand out from the 90,000 other drab little houses on the market), I just get irritable. Rather than feel weepy and mournful on a morning when my son starts middle school, I just make him an honorary First Cup of Coffee (sweet, and half cream - I'm not sure if these make the habit more pernicious or less), take a picture of his impatient self, and feel, well, rather more wrinkled and middle aged than not as he heads off to the bus stop. And I try strenuously to put out of my mind my unfortunate breakfast reading, which centered on middle school power plays. Augh. I tell myself with rather more bravado than conviction that Si's still too young for all of that. Or too oblivious. And I mean that as a compliment: obliviousness is a powerful social coping tool, one which I have kept sharp and well-polished.

I told him not to smile for this one. He's actually very excited.

Later this very morning, in fact, I bring it into play at the elementary school bus stop, when a gaggle of bus mothers from the neighborhood stand around chatting and their topics are: a) how underestimated their children are at school (our beloved school, which admittedly is bursting to the seams with Exceptional Children); b) how very very awful teacher X is and how both they and their children were thankful that they hadn't gotten teacher X this year (Teacher X was ours last year, and while he was not without flaws, I thought he was sweet and gentle and fine); and c) crazy ex-husbands shacking up with crazier girlfriends.

Also very excited. And maybe got a up a mite too early.

Ai yi yi. It reminded me why usually I say a polite hello and bust obliviously on home.

On the brink

Last week, we had nine boys with guns over to celebrate eleven years of this guy:

Even at this age, Si's favorite thing to do was throw things.

It was a fitting tribute. Equally fitting is that his job for the next eleven years is to pick fluorescent airsoft ammo out of the lawn and garden. He was game for the first day, and stoked that he'd managed to trick Helen into helping (two minutes in, however, she quit - "I didn't know that this was going to be boring!" and he's been miserable, but committed, ever since).

On Monday, he starts middle school, the first step toward his much-anticipated adulthood. He regularly points out all the things that are proof of his ready-to-be-independent status: he can cook for himself (smoothies and chocolate milk), he is too old for a babysitter (cough not cough), he can earn money to pay for his own entertainment and consumables (from us, though. I'm still hoping he adds an external revenue stream to his earnings sometime soon.)

Character traits: goofy

I could go on about his usual personality markers: baseball, math, games, the newish interest in (fake) guns. The way he is at heart a bookish kid who, through baseball and games, has positioned himself squarely among the jocks. The way he is basically shy and respectful but has an unexpected flair for performance. How when M., reading out loud from a magazine, said "Having confidence and asking questions are not being rude," Si jumped up with a light of revelation in his eyes and said, "That's good to know! I'm always worried about seeming rude."

But with a sense of responsibility. And of beleaguered oppression.

In the past few months he has discovered radio and developed the regulation eleven-year-old taste for mass-produced music. While I am sorry that Beethoven is no longer in the hizzouse, and I am probably approaching my lifetime limit for 97.5 The Party, it's fun that he can take charge of this aspect of himself. It's gone along with some more inspiring acts of independence, too: he decided, in response to seeing his baseball friends buckle down and train, that he needs to improve his running speed. All month we've been going to the middle school track after dinner and running speed intervals and endurance work: this is probably the first time he's taken initiative in self-improvement, and it's good to see. As the kids and I drove home from the track last night, with them dangling their arms recklessly from the open windows and party music blaring, it felt like the new normal: life with big kids.

Not afraid to take a break.

It felt pretty good.

Relief trucks on way

We've officially reached that moment in summer when I stop believing that fall will ever come, or snow, or cool weather, and it will be hot, gray and grim until forever. This would be depressing except that my inner response seems to be, oh well, better keep working, then - which is kind of a relief, to just give up on the idea of reaching for the stars, or blissfully idyllic autumn runs, or homegrown ripe apples, and just put my head down and do what needs to be done.

So it's kind of hard to believe that the high tomorrow is supposed to be 75. I hope it doesn't lead to a sense of wild imbalance or unsustainable hope.

One thing that has been a backdoor relief for some of us - for me, mostly - is that the crackling dry city combined with all these fires has led to a complete and total moratorium on home fireworks (and a near-moratorium on commercial displays). Silas got weepy about it - "I just don't want to have a fourth of July without fireworks," he said, sobbing, and my heart broke a little, because we *could* have dragged ourselves downtown, in the traffic on a work night, to the lacrosse game at Mile High Stadium, where there would be fireworks, except that we cruelly opted for sensible. Meeeean, is what we are. Especially since I felt nothing but triumph in my heart about getting to opt out of the "highly illegal vs. but it's so fun" debate this year.

Anyhow. It kind of comes back to something I've been thinking about a lot this summer - I wrote about it on the Get Born blog, but imperfectly - this disconnect between what we want for our kids and what they themselves want. One of the commenters on that post made the excellent point that one of hard things about parenting is finding out that "children are people--real, flawed, normal people." When they're beautiful babies who have everything yet to learn, it's easy to think they can be anything; then they start growing up and it turns out that they actually have no desire to chase the gold ring, or the brass ring, or however the saying goes. Silas is never going to be an aggressive competitor, the one who gets down the mountain the fastest, or who stays at the gym the longest, or who cranks out the most perfect score on the most important test - and this should not be a surprise, since neither are his parents. He's going to be someone who gets pretty close, since he is smart, and he does have kind of a talent for throwing a ball - and he'll like being that close, and maybe even feel that he's entitled to be there, since he's smart, everyone says so - but then when it comes to consolidating his gains and closing in for the gold, he'll abstain, and go off to play his iPod touch instead. Just like me, only for me it's a good book and an afternoon spent puttering around the yard.

The difference seems to be that I feel like my lack of ambition is a calculated choice, and is furthermore sustainable, as in it's paid for by a job. Whereas one could argue that I and all the other parents who urge their kids to improve their freestyle stroke or practice reading for one hour a day or work on their endurance are deeply insecure about their children's ability to become functioning adults.

Or maybe it's that we want our kids to become a certain kind of functioning adult - I would be so very depressed if Si chose to support his video game lifestyle by becoming the manager of a Chick Fil-A, for example, even though the salary he'd most likely pull down is not much different from M's salary as a professor.

I ought to point out that I would also be disappointed if he chose to support his video game lifestyle by becoming an investment banker. It would be a different kind of disappointment, however. One mixed with pride and bafflement (you do what, again, son? invest in...banks?)

I get confused, though, about how much of that choice is my business. I assume, I think, that Silas would find that managing a Chick Fil-A as depressing as I do, and I am trying to steer him toward a path that avoids it. But what if he would actually like managing a fast food joint? (shudder) It's no berth on a major league baseball team, sure, but I think we need to agree that there's going to be some kind of Plan B for that dream. What if his satisfactory Plan B is different from my idea of a satisfactory Plan B? What then? How do I parent that? I have no earthly idea.

If anything, I feel like I'm steering him toward the investment banker option. He's good at math, and I know enough about schoolish things to encourage him in this pursuit and encourage him in improving his math scores and math savvy - mostly by taking advantage of various school and community math-burnishing options. But where do these lead? What if they lead toward investment banking? I don't even know. I just cheer on the sidelines and push him in the community-sanctioned directions and I'm not even sure what the community is sanctioning.

You know what I mean? Parenting is the blind leading the blind, man. And then getting crabby when the follower doesn't end up where we wanted him to go.

Ramona and me

I've been reading the Ramona books to Helen, and other than the pleasure of remembering scenes and phrases I've been turning over in my head for over thirty years and a slight irritation with how long the chapters are, what keeps gobsmacking me every time I turn the page is how free ranging these kids are. Okay, yes, it was the fifties, and yes, I get it, it's fiction--no one evvver exaggerates in fiction--but still. Nine-year-old Beezus looks forward to her Saturday art class, when she can leave preschool-aged Ramona to play by herself in the sand pile at the playground while she goes in and paints. Meanwhile their mother is--what? Learning to dance the mambo, presumably, or working on her novel, or running a political campaign out of her home--I mean, the mind boggles! What couldn't be accomplished, if your kids were free to just go ahead and take care of their own needs, unattended by you?

It hit especially hard, since while we read Beezus and Ramona I was trying to firm up summer plans and furtively googling latchkey kids and legal age home alone. (Spoiler: the law in Colorado still trusts parental judgment on this one, thank god. Unlike Illinois, where it is apparently the law that no one under the age of 14 can be left home alone--I mean, can you imagine? What the hell? There are states where you can get married at age 14.) I wanted to be able to drag the book out as a kind of living proof that kids used to be thought more capable than they are now- how once upon a time we parents weren't expected to be in constant doting attendance on our offspring. And how that offspring had a chance to develop on its own as a result. Kids used to be able figure out how the world worked on their own, I argued to imaginary juries. Or imaginary authority figures. Or imaginary other parents. I'm not sure whom I was arguing against, here, and frankly, the range of what parents are able to tolerate in other parents in this corner of the world, separate from Internet Crazytown, seems pretty reasonable.

In any case, I happen to disagree with my argumentative self on the last point, anyway. I think kids still independently figure out how the world works. The most helicoptered kids in the world still come to an independent assessment of cause and effect, and it's probably one over which their parents have little knowledge or control. Sigh. Which is the other reason I love reading the Ramona books. They give a little insight into what's happening behind the scenes when you ask, "So, how was school today?" and they answer "Fine" or "Good I guess" or my particular favorite, "I don't remember."

Even in Ramona, though, no one ever sends kids off on the bus to baseball tournaments alone (well, nobody HAS baseball tournaments. Still. If they had them, kids would be driven en famille. Probably.) Which is what I'm thinking about this weekend as I juggle 2 kids, 3 baseball games, a birthday party, a swim meet, an overnight, and a playdate as a solo parent, as M's in Utah for work. I'm getting by with a little help from some friends--not my friends, since I don't really have any in this set--but my kids' friends. It's quietly insane.

For what ultimate purpose? I don't even know, but we seem pretty committed to it, whatever it is. Must be good.

Endings

Si's last day of 5th grade was yesterday, and while I am making a determined effort not to get too wistful/ slide into a sea of despond, I must remind myself that it's okay to own my feelings on the subject. Which are:

1. Iiiii want to sleep in, tooooo.

2. What the--didn't we take photos of his first day of kindergarten/ first day of second grade (which is when he started his current school)? I could have sworn we did. Honestly. Who's the record keeper in this family, anyway? Where are they? WHO CAN I BLAME FOR THIS.

3. Ack! Summer's beginning, and here I am, still trudging off to work.

4. We forgot to get a teacher gift, didn't we? Losers, man.

5. Everything ennnnnddds.

First day of 3rd grade, which is apparently the best I can do on the memory comparison front.

Close to first day of kindergarten with bonus Viking chain mail.

Close to first day of second grade with bonus broken collar bone (Sand Dunes).

Last day of 5th grade. You'd hire this guy, right?

Back from Duluth

 And busy as ever, of course. I've been absorbed in a project of which more at a later date (nothing life-changing, just absorbing) and the baseball tournaments continue unabated. Mostly without me, too, I am sorry to say. I am planning to attend a game today (but only one) and with the one I went on Friday that makes the most games of any one tournament I've attended this season. This makes me sad, less for the loss of all those games I could have been watching than for the way, when I show up, none of the other parents know me. Sigh. C'est la vie. Even if I attended every game and every practice, these parents live all over creation. Or the greater Denver metro area, anyway. It is not a situation conducive to grownup bond-forming.

These photos make it look so sunny and pleasant.

 But! Enough complaining. It was a hectic week, I spent much of it in airplanes/airports, and the second night I got home Silas's old long-suffering gerbil died (quietly in his sleep, I am relieved to report). Silas was distraught and felt that his grief required a day off of school (denied.) He also began researching replacement pets and was disappointed to find that the more playful an animal is, the less likely I am to approve it. (Ferrets? In your dreams, buddy.)

In fact, it was 33 degrees and snowing most of the time.

 The garden is growing in greenish bounds and could be using my constant attention (this is really what I want to be doing, rather than driving to baseball games/ soccer games/ birthday parties/ the store). I finished Undaunted Courage, felt bad for Lewis, and signed Helen up for swim team (since baseball is clearly NOT ENOUGH.) At least that's with friends and other neighbors, the same ones I am delighted to see and gossip with at soccer games. Yesterday, in fact, as I drove Helen from the soccer game to the American Girl Doll store to buy a present for the party she was going to later, and reflected pleasantly on the chats I'd had on the sidelines (these chats tend to rather overshadow the game, which is surely as it should be, unlike the tense silence at baseball games), I thought, Raising Arizona-style, of the distant gray-haired future, in which perhaps these women would be my actual friends with whom I would actually do things, like drive into the city and attend concerts and shows or drive into the mountains and drink beer in the sunset.

My annual Duluth run.

It could happen, I suppose. Or there will be others. I have to assume that there will be somebody, that once the hectic smash of the current nontimes have passed (and they will pass, that is certain, with the swiftness of a freight train), that we will actually pick ourselves up in the ensuing silence and go about having a life of our own again.

Blooming

The nectarine tree is full, rich bloom, and while I can only sigh with pleasure at its abundance of creamy pink blossoms, part of me wants to whisper tactfully that it miiiiight want to wait a little next year. Our average frost-free date is two months away. Slow down, buddy.

In other news I've been researching small homemade greenhouses. What's a little coddling between friends, after all, especially if that coddling results in nectarines? Nothing. Nothing at all. I wouldn't think twice about coddling a tomato--why should a tree be any different?

Beautiful. And doooomed.

(For perspective, to look at our lawn you wouldn't think I thought much of coddling at all. Or home maintenance, for that matter.)

Speaking of coddling, we've been experiencing an unusual reversal at home in terms of which child has been receiving the Most Difficult to Tolerate Award most days. For years, our high-scorer in that category was the oldest, hands-down. Screaming fits about routine tasks, like fingernail clipping and the weekly bath? Check. Back talk? Check. Throwing body to the floor weeping in response to missed homework or the potential thereof? Check. Bossiness, oversensitivity, meltdowns that took over the house, sheer random acts of shittery? Check, check, check and check. But lately--and by lately I mean the past six months or more--the youngest has been making steady gains and now the Most Likely to Interrupt Dinner/ Get a Time Out/ Receive a Stern Talking-to During a Playdate has been H for several months running. Of course, her style is different from her older brother. Her policy toward homework is: if I like it, I'll do it. Attempt to convince her that something else is worth doing and hoo boy. Look out. (I admire that in a kid, especially regarding homework.) Routine upkeep is not an issue. She rarely has full-on, drop-down, scream-the-house-down tantrums. But! Good lord, the bossiness. She bosses everyone. Parents, friends, Romans, countrymen. Not teachers, I think. Not yet. Hence her popularity at school. But try to gently correct her course of action ("Sweetheart! It's time for dinner! Go wash your hands!") and she will stop in her tracks and scream at you. Last week she yelled at me in front of her entire soccer team because I was bringing two tupperwares full of apple slices instead of one. You can see that there are other factors at work--this sort of breakdown is not really characteristic and I think that like most of us she'd prefer to stay poised before an audience--but a little bit of performance pressure just fries any sort of ability she has to modulate her response. I sympathize, even as I hiss at her to stop it, already, it's just two tupperware, for god's sake.

Recent neighborhood visitor. Not coddled.

Silas, on the other hand, has retreated from some of his characteristic need to control. M. surmises that it's a developmental stage, the ability to relinquish the need to Control Everything, and Si has reached it (while H still struggles mightily.) I remember the days when Si would go through the cards prior to playing, say, Candyland, and arrange them in the exact order for one player to have a perfect game (orange first, so you get to cross the Rainbow Bridge). Or when he would throw a fit because his cousin just. would. not. put the Legos together in the proper order. He hasn't quite attained the art of the imperturbable Zen smile in the face of chaos, of course--we're all, uh, working on that one--but he's just on average more pleasant to be around. Usually reasonable! Mostly helpful! Easy to predict!

Right now his all-baseball-all-the-time schedule seems to be working in his favor (at which I am surprised and very, very grateful). He comes home from practice bright and energized, and except for his unfortunate reluctance to take a shower immediately, or *cough* at all, what seems on the surface to be overscheduling is apparently meeting most of his needs for activity, focus and attention. He does his homework. He sets the table (I even found myself looking up, at his request, the proper order of silverware in the Joy of Cooking the other day. Now there's a piece of knowledge I hadn't anticipated using. Like, ever.) He loads the dishwasher. He sets his watch timer and goes to play his allotted 40 minutes of Wii without complaining of its brevity or saying things like But I've looked forward to this ALL DAY. He comes back up and sits companionably beside us as we watch Portlandia or March Madness. I ask if he wants me to read him and he says, "I guess," in a hopeful way.

It's so very nice and reminds me of how all the childhood books say that at ten years old you have the personality you will have when the nonsense of the teen years are done. You are your real self, in other words. This makes me cast my mind back to being ten: what was my personality in fourth grade? While I can state with certainty what my likes and dislikes were, I can't really put a finger on my personality. Kind of a peacemaker, overall? Loyal to my small but sufficient group of friends and uninterested in anybody else? A bit dreamy, a bit vague? Occasionally self-aggrandizing and confident in my classification as a Smart Person, but lacking the snappy comeback or spunky smart-aleckiness to make this evident to anyone else. I guess those are personality traits, and they're pretty consistent today.

This also makes me remember with a wistful sigh how our fourth-grade teacher made us all decorated blown eggs at the end of the year. On the eggshell she'd drawn a picture of us as a grownup, engaged in our predicted profession. She'd predicted I would be a botanist, and I'm shown with a big smile and a test tube. This is one of those memories that makes me think I've missed my calling, somewhere. I was supposed to stay on the path, take all those specialized plant id classes, and end up writing papers on the role of pollen protein folding in the plant reproductive strategy or some such. Instead I stepped out too soon and ended up just editing those papers: it still feels like a disappointment. Like I've let myself down.

Then I remind myself that I haaate lab work. I hate the smell of all those chemicals and having to use the hood and spending all of a summer's day indoors checking on the deterioration of plants in response to some poisonous chemical. That's why I stepped off the path. That and a million other reasons. I'd much rather be out in the dirt, whispering advice to an early-blooming nectarine or staring at the ground, wondering whether the kale seeds are going to come up this year or not.

Someone is seven

In all the hoopla over holidays and the New Year, someone's milestone got lost in the scrunchled up wrapping paper and discarded boxes.

I asked her not to look mad, for once. See, it's possible.

  Bloggily speaking, anyhow. In real life, the preparations for and recovery from the celebrations of sevenhood can be directly tied to several balls dropped this holiday season, including a) half the Christmas cards not leaving the house until too late to actually arrive before Christmas; b) several ungifted or subgifted members of the extended family; c) the singing Christmas decorations never managing to get paired with batteries (this one wasn't so bad, actually); d) probably something else that I am forgetting. Like baking. I meant to bake this year. It didn't happen.

We had 14 girls under the age of 8 in the house. Miraculously nothing got broken. Note: the soundtrack for this picture is all girls shouting in unison "Tramp-o-leen! Tramp-o-leen! Tramp-o-leen!" while they jump up and down. In unison.

A girl and her doll, united at last.

So. Seven. It's an amazing age, or at least the seven-year-old we have constantly amazes me. M. and I joke that what she really needs is a production studio. And a workshop. And a warehouse. And...a trained staff. At least once a week Helen comes to me and in between bouncing up and down on the couch or petting her favorite stuffed animal or brushing her hair with her exciting new brush she describes in great and casual detail how she's going to build a car for her American Girl Doll, or a bed, or a teepee, or a desk. Then she wants to get started right away, and when I stutter-- "Um, but, I'm actually making dinner right now," she bursts into angry tears. At any one time she is busy making sets for the stop-animation movie she's making, or a book about a girl in the city, or a box full of Kings Cibul (King's kibble) for her Pick-a-Pet store. Her half-done projects are all over the house. I may come back from a run and be commandeered to help sand teepee poles, or wield the hot glue gun, or listen to her new project, which is to get "my very own puppy," which, sadly for both us, turned out not to be My Very Own PuppyTM but an actual live puppy, "either a fox terrier or a chihuahua but not from a pet breeder place because those cost like $400."

"Ack! No! We are not getting a puppy!" I said, a veritable portrait of parental understanding and graciousness.

Tears, and a refusal to eat dinner until a puppy was promised and/or bought. After I'd gotten my shoes off and peed, and discussed the matter with M., I softened my tone a little (although just to be clear: we are *totally not* getting a puppy, for the love of god). Helen was not distracted and insisted we set a timeline. I refused, gently but firmly, to set a timeline. Tears.

It's unavoidable that many of her projects end in disappointment and despair, especially since we have neither a workshop nor a full-time trained staff. However, what is an amazement to equal her idea-generating brain is the fact that, actually, a lot of her projects do get completed. There's the Squirrel Stop game, sitting in its box under the counter. The book describing our trip to Yellowstone, which languished for months before finally being finished up in an afternoon. The doll bed. The doll desk. The million and one movies and stills featuring her stuffed animals in our digital camera's memory card. Most of these are just what you'd expect from a seven-year-old: cardboard and flimsy, with spidery writing and odd-shaped cutouts. She doesn't waste a lot of time laboring over the final product, in other words. But a few are actually really good, good enough that I find myself wishing that if I could grant her one fairy godmother wish it would be this: follow-through. (Actually, if I could grant myself one fairy godmother wish it would be follow-through.) Because when this girl harnesses her persistence to start a project to completing her vision of how the project ought to turn out, she's going to be a force of nature.

This photo kind of says it all.

First firsts

First day of first grade:

First day of the last year of elementary school (ce n'est pas possible):

First photo of the first season of the sideyard garden, of which I am inordinately proud (see also: the nectarine tree behind the kids above. You would think I was sprouting these fruits myself):

Pumpkins, sunflowers, morning glories, beans, a lonely (and late-developing) stalk of corn. A glorious case of powdery mildew on the curcubitae associates.

It's been a good week so far. I've heard rumors of kids who dread going back to school and get grumpy and weepy and out of sorts as the ominous day approaches, but I have not given birth to children of this stripe. They were little wound-up springs of anticipation all last week and they have been exhausted but jubilant (and kind of strung out) this week. They both have male teachers this year and while Helen is on occasion prejudiced against boy teachers and boys in general, she has so far given a tentative stamp of approval to her teacher. Silas is thrilled unto death. As he should be. His teacher is young, funny, energetic and smart: he makes me wish I could be going to fifth grade. I have high hopes for this year. At the very least, maybe Si's writing scores won't decline over the course of the year, as they have the past two years in a row. Argh.

One thing that has been kind of--not sad, exactly, but melancholy--is that by fifth grade, we are getting into the time when parents who chose our elementary school for list-y, rate-y, type-A kind of reasons are starting to get restless and look for the next Xtreme Education Challenge. I sound judgy but I'm not, not really; I have certainly played in that tournament myself over the years. However, in a possibly ironic twist, and one which I did not quite anticiapte, the kids who are leaving now tend to be the most interesting and unusual ones--the boy who has already started his own business, the smart, arty girl with the Velma vibe and the awesome glasses whom I maaaybe had had a little fantasy of S dating sometime in the future. I was kind of looking forward to seeing how these kids developed, come middle school and high school; now I see that I won't. They aren't regular friends of Si's, and I don't know the parents, so: chapter finished. See ya. So I'm a little bummed for that.

Overall, though: wow. What a difference a year makes. Last year we were up to our eyeballs in drywall dust, mold, torn-out walls and money panic, not to mention the first prickings of irritation and misgiving about our choice of builders. There wasn't one thing that was easy, from keeping track of school-to-home papers to washing the damn dishes. Now, despite a triple-book schedule of baseball, swimming and soccer (we're like, a sporty family--I never would've thought that, not in a million years), M's four-year review at work and accompanying 80-hour-a-week workweek, things feel smooth.

I survived my son's first sleepover party

and all I got was this little frisson of social anxiety.

Si's birthday celebration choice was to have seven, or eight, or maybe nine--"let me look through the school directory again real quick, Mom"--of his closest friends over for a sleepover. On his actual birthday, which did fall on a Monday this year, meaning, for the record, on a work night, and for the record let me also come right out and admit that I agreed to this arrangement. I'm not sure where in this process I conveniently forgot that this was insane.

Luckily--luckily--only four friends plus his cousin actually attended, so we had a total of six boys, who created a din that even a sleep-deprived and increasingly c-r-a-b-b-y adult could talk over when necessary (and oh, was it necessary). The night's first plan, the campout, had to be abruptly called off at 11:30 pm when the boys could not stop hootling (but there was toothpaste! in our tent!!). Plan B, which would have been nice, involved boys sleeping on couches and rugs. One solitary boy opted for this plan until 12:30 or so, when he gave up trying to sleep and asked to go home (M walked him home). Plan C involved legos, the basement, me trying to lay down the law and Silas protesting, "But it's a sleepover, Mom! That's what we DO on a sleepover!" and a very loud fan in our room. I was glad that the house was still standing in the morning and I reminded myself that Si and his friends will probably *not* be the types you can trust not to hold a Facebook rave at your house when you're out of town. Just for future reference, self.

However, now that I have caught up on my sleep and can reflect in peace, what the sleepover was the most was educational, with the topic of learning being pre-middle-school politics. Whenever the boys were eating they would talk, mostly trash talk, mostly about girls. ("P--- totally has a crush on me. It's so gross. Whenever I'm like delivering papers to her house she's all like, 'Hiiiii, I---, how arrrrre you.'" "Oh, I know! M--- has a crush on me! It's like awful! She's always asking to be in my group and stuff!") It was all chaste, thank GOD because if it wasn't I'd have felt pressured to intervene in some way. As it was, it was interesting to see who in the group held social dominance, who was observant enough of other kids' behavior to report on it and speculate about motives, and what they thought those motives were. It was also interesting to see who listened with big ears but didn't really participate. Si, for example, while he seems to have a relatively middle-to-high social status (this was a little hard to read at the party, since he was the host), didn't chime in with the trash talk at all. Oh, he listened, and laughed and groaned in all the right places. But he didn't have any stories about girls having a crush on him. (And although the fact that his MOM was washing dishes five feet away may have influenced the stories he chose to tell, this behavior tallies pretty well with the Silas I know and also my own personal growing-up self. I've never been very good at gossiping--oh, I can say the offhand snarky thing and/or put my foot in my mouth just like anyone else. But I've never been able to rivet others with stories of known-to-both third parties. In fact, Silas's game cluelessness about social snarkiness felt so familiar that for a little while I forgot that I'm a grownup and my own cluelessness doesn't matter any more.)

And when the kids were not eating, they played games, which was almost worse. Cops and robbers, mostly, only the group was lopsidedly distributed and COINCIDENTALLY the smallest, most outsiderest kids were the ones who had to be the cops when everyone played NOTIT and also had to use crutches and sticks as weapons instead of real nerf dart guns ("If this was real, the cops would TOTALLY have real guns," protested one cop-by-fiat, to which the robbers said, "But this is just a game." Which seemed to be kind of missing the point in a deliberate way.) In fact, the cops and robbers game was so on-the-edge with leftoutness that I called it off early (by using my sweet-yet-strict teacher's voice to instantly quell the meanies--I mean, ha ha, by ordering pizza. I had no other trick in my kid crowd control repertoire--clearly mistake #53 of the evening.)

Ugh. Basically it was fine. The kids were overall well-behaved and mostly followed directions and it is always illuminating to see which kids have the best manners training. I would do it again. In ten years or so.

Holy Horse, the Kid is Ten

As of seven minutes ago, I have officially been a parent for a whole dang decade. That's a lot. That's also, as Si will soon be but is not yet irritated with me enough to point out, me making someone else's big event all about me.

When it's obviously all about this guy.

I left the house this morning before he woke up, but I've been in touch several times since then to a) wish him a happy birthday; b) receive last-minute instructions on what to pick up as party favors on the way home; c) receive modifications of those last-minute instructions based on a late-breaking cancellation; and d) receive notification that his great-aunt's birthday card had arrived in the mail--"She said that she's going to retire this year and come visit us," he announced. "I want to see her again."

"Me too, kiddo. I hope she does come visit."

"...And? She sent me a gift card? Not just to a place but a visa card? For one. zero. zero. In my haaaannnnd!"

"That's awesome!"

"I know. That's all I had to say. Bye, mom."

For someone who's been keeping close watch on his earnings lately and making plans as to how to best invest those earnings in Lego products, that's a whole lot of present.

When I did become a parent all those years ago, and in fact for several years before, this was the time I imagined. The ten-year-old times. This is the age when, according to Dr. Spock (I think), kids have the personality that most closely matches who they'll be as adults.

If that's the case, Si as an adult will be the kind of guy who says his idea of a great Friday night is to spend it at home with a close friend and a good book. Or a good video game. He'll like things to be neat and organized, although he will continually be surprised and vexed when they don't get that way on their own. He'll be good at getting his work done efficiently and going home--I'm guessssing he won't be an 80-hour-a-week kind of guy. He's not really a striver--somewhat at odds with his tendency to insist on being the one with the remote, but hey, that's what his teenage years are for. To work out the kinks.

He'll be kind, and funny, and not a complainer. He'll like making people laugh, but not necessarily being the center of attention. He'll be a man I'm glad to know.

Happy birthday, kiddo. It's been a good ten years.

In defense of fireworks

We'd planned to go backpacking over the holiday weekend but at the last minute couldn't bear the amount of packing that would have to occur, not to mention the drive, the food planning, and etc. Fortunately, though, Si had a backup plan in reserve (and fortunately for family harmony we decided to accept his plan; whoo boy is the kid a planner/control freak). In brief: Saturday camping; buy fireworks on the way home Sunday; Sunday evening dinner-fireworks-sleepover with friend TBA; Monday attend the real fireworks at Cornerstone Park. The friend TBA didn't quite work out, but luckily we had Cousin instead and we spent Sunday evening sitting in lawn chairs and watching the boys light brightly packaged gunpowder on the street in front of us (and having our eardrums strained alternately by the fireworks and by Helen's delighted screaming). Monday morning bright and early we got the hand-delivered neighborhood newsletter, which of course had as its very first item the reminder that in our city fireworks are illegal, punishable by a $1000 fine. The second thing I noticed was that the hand-deliverer would have had to walk past the pile of discarded fireworks trash left prominently at the end of our driveway. I may have muttered an annoyed imprecation about how the last ones to come inside could have cleaned up a little and what the hell were they thinking. I may also have cursed the fact that I married a man who likes fireworks and produced a child who also likes fireworks.

But then I readjusted and set my grumbling on the proper target: the anti fireworks brigade.

Before I begin, let me emphasize: I do not like fireworks. If I were a single parent, my children would have to content themselves with the state-sanctioned event at the park on the 4th of July.

But. I'm not a single parent, and furthermore, I happen to have a child who loves fire, explosions, and busting stuff up. These are mighty powerful urges and I'm starting to learn that growing up, and teaching a child how to grow up, involves learning how to channel powerful urges in socially acceptable ways. Duh. And I'm going to submit that option A, the option provided by the City and County and not least by our neighborhood nagging association--namely, that all urges are bad and should be vigorously stifled--is not productive.

I'm not going to argue with the City and County bans, which are based on the need to prevent massive grass fires and barn burnings and teenage maimings and blindings (although I'll point out that there are plenty of dangerous-but-fun/useful things that we DO manage to monitor and accomodate instead of ban, like swimming and driving and GUN OWNERSHIP FOR THE LOVE OF PETE) (also that the ban extends to sparklers).

Nope. I'm going to go after the neighborhood ban, which seems to be based mostly on "OMG they're so annoying" and "don't you know those are against the RULES?" These statements are both true, of course, but if we're going to be cracking down on annoying things, I'd like to point out that I find sparsely-planted geraniums VERY annoying, and also the widespread use of broadleaf herbicide. But nobody's going after those practices.

And, okay, 1-am firecrackers are their own special brand of annoying. Even 9:30-pm firecrackers are more annoying than geraniums. But it's like when the neighborhood nagging association lobbied (successfully, unfortunately) to curtail the post-school gathering of teens in the local playground: people, a community is for everyone. Not just the quiet types who prefer to stay indoors or take a brief constitutional walk in the open air. If you have teenagers in your community, and thank god we do, you're going to need to accomodate their desire to congregate and engage in loud and annoying behavior. Ideally, you're going to do that while teaching them how to be loud and aggregated without starting in on self-destructive and criminal behavior.

Likewise, we have a lot of explosion-loving people in our neighborhood (like, you know, BOYS.) I'd like to see us (read: YOU, neighborhood nagging association) come up with a way to help them indulge their explosion urges while learning how to be relatively safe and courteous about it. That's hard to do if the only option is "no. Also no, and no. And don't even THINK about poppers."

For me, I do this by sitting tolerantly in a lawn chair while my beloved coaches my other beloveds in the safe(ish) use of fireworks, and only wincing sometimes. And then making my beloved child go out there early the next morning and clean up the mess.

And yes, you might make the argument that if I didn't have an explosion-loving boy, I would probably be more-or-less in the anti-firework camp. But even then I'd still argue for the need to be a little more tolerant of non-toe-the-line activities.

Because otherwise, I might be tempted to get there and ban badly planted geraniums.