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. 

The opposite of fall

For sundry and assorted reasons, none of which, unfortunately, have to do with moving back into the house (an event that remains depressingly lodged in the future), I have not felt up to posting. I still don't, really, but I am tired of staring "Doggy Bags" in the face every time I open up this blog.

In the blogless interim, however, I HAVE felt up to doing other things, including but not limited to:

1. Sanding down assorted bedroom doors. Our house has very nice, solid wood doors. The previous owner had very anxious, insistent dogs that were often closed into the bedrooms. Need I say more? There's a delicious feeling of exorcising the last of the house demons as I rub those scratch marks into oblivion.

2. Celebrating our 14th anniversary at Rioja, one of those fancy downtown restaurants whose menus read like short stories involving collisions of luxury ingredients (Alaska-caught halibut in an Earl Gray-Tarragon reduction with lemon cream fraiche and a fig tartlet) (which was delicious). Pretentious, yet mmmmm.

3. Receiving rather handsome T-shirts from our builder (although the shirts have the alarming motto "It's not our fault!" written on the back). I'm hoping this isn't one of those "I took out a second mortgage and moved out of my home and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" situations.

4. Finishing the fall baseball season with Silas (thank GOD. No more long haul missions to distant fields.)

5. Finishing untold piles of homework with the same. Eegads, the HOMEWORK. It's more than I had in many college classes. The boy continues to soldier on, bravely and stoically, but sometimes it breaks my heart. M offers a refreshingly different perspective, however--he says that when he lived in Germany in fourth grade, his homework loads were similar. Weekdays were for doing homework, and only weekends were for playdates.

6. Being dazzled by the autumn colors. This happens every year. All year I remember, intellectually, that autumn is very pretty, and then every year I amazed again at the incandescent yellows, the burning reds, the glittering grasses, the way a tepid vista of green and brown is suddenly spiced into brilliance, and everyday acts, like driving to pick up the kids or going for a disappointingly short run, become miracles of hope and beauty. (Why hope, though? I don't know.)

What I'm worried about this week

It's been a little light with the posts around here lately, eh? Argh. I'm going to pick my favorite scapegoat and say that I haven't been blogging because I've been fretting about a presentation. Silas's presentation. Which he may or may not give today but I hope he does so that I, for one, can get back to some semblance of a normal life. JEESH. I'd read about this too-much-homework crap, and I'd been warned by other parents, but I think I secretly thought that it wouldn't happen to us.

See, normally Si is Mr Lickety Split with his homework, mostly because he's not allowed to touch the Wii or the computer with a ten-foot-pole until his assignments are complete. We fudge a little on the spelling, and we may or not have several evenings a week that end with dragging him bodily away from Wii Lego Batman and pushing a pencil into his suddenly-paralyzed hand while he weeps and carries on and asks what's more important, him getting his sleep or him doing spelling? That's a post for another day (you: I can HARDLY wait).

No, this post is about book reports, and the worst kind of all, presentation book reports. Si's school prides itself on turning out kids that are comfortable giving in-front-of-the-class talks (me: what? you mean we're going to be fighting about this through the fifth grade?). That's great. I'm sure it will prepare these kids splendidly for a life of presenting reports before the board of directors, blah blah blah. In the meantime, it's misery. Silas-the-Efficient thrives with a certain kind of assignment: the cut-and-dried kind. He loves worksheets, and math problems, and puzzles: anything he can whip through, fill out a couple of items, and get the answer. He's even coming around to doing small writing assignments and the like. But presentations involve CREATIVITY! And AMBIGUITY! And UNCERTAINTY ABOUT OUTCOME! Which meant it was all just too overwhelming to bear--and that I had to break my cardinal rule about homework, and get involved.

UGH. I will spare you the details of the cajoling, cheerleading, browbeating, and nagging that have gone down in the house over the past week. I was sick of myself after about five minutes. And I kept second-guessing myself. Wasn't I weakening his ability to self-motivate and take responsibility? Wasn't I supposed to just let him fail, if he couldn't bring himself to do the report on his own? What was the worst that could happen, anyway? (and oh, I could TOTALLY imagine the worst--standing up blankly before the class? Standing up and blushing? Standing up and crying? LOTS OF WAYS TO BE THE WORST)

God. It was miserable for all concerned. I could totally understand parents that freak out and just take over the damn project themselves, and I might even have been tempted, except it would have been a little hard to sneak into class pretending I was Silas.

But then something kind of miraculous happened: he put the pieces together himself, and came up with a halfway decent presentation. After a week of robotic recitations of unconnected facts, followed by gentle prompting from us ("and do you think that will give me a good sense of what the book is about?"), followed by slightly less-gentle hints related to things like transitions, which I called transitions, even though he is in 3rd grade and had NO CLUE what I was talking about--when I got home last night he gave a reasonably spirited, funny, and coherent presentation about the book he'd read ("I didn't really LIKE this book, but if you're in the mood for a longish book with lots of facts, this book would be GREAT for you!")

So, take home lesson: nagging works? Procrastination-followed-by-last-minute-panic works? The jury's still out.