Madame Helen's School for Fine Stuffed Animals

As I said in my last post, it will surprise no one if Helen becomes a teacher. Yeah, sure, she vigorously denies this possibility herself ("I want to be an ARTIST"), but come on, her favorite game right now is playing school:

Class is in session. She calls them The Children. As in, "The Children are having recess now, so I can brush my teeth."

She works very hard at it, since she has to be both teacher and nine students. 

The subjects are spelling, gymnastics, soccer and drawing.

She has not missed Silas at all this week, by the way. Or claims not to. "Do you like getting all of our attention all to yourself?" I asked as she rode her scooter to the bus. "Yesssss," she answered, cackling a little.

I miss him, though. He'll be home tonight. Then all my chickens will be under my roof.

Another heartbreakingly beautiful weekend. I spent it in the usual ways: cleaning, chipping away at projects, watching sports, and snatching moments when I can for reading. I maybe spent more time at the latter than usual, doing a little comfort reading (Room), but I did manage to show up here:

Sports are fun, but it's really about the snacks

Where we ran into more old acquaintances--we knew two girls on the opposite team, plus the coach. The whole Kidsport craziness--the endless idyllic days dragging out endless folding chairs and applying endless rounds of sunscreen and cheering, endlessly, for the team that either wins or doesn't win, broken only by the perhaps-longer-than-necessary trips to the bathroom or the car or escpaing, hooky-like, to the nearest coffeeshop--is made marginally better by the social aspect.

Still a little uncertain about actual game play

It's still kind of tiring. On Sunday I didn't even try to drag Helen to Si's early game, the one that started at 8:30. Instead we biked over to the local kid triathalon, in which two of her friends were competing and which struck her fancy enough (I think it was the medals) for her to get sulky and grumpy and want to leave because "I wanted to do the race. Why didn't you sign me up, Mommy? You're MEAN." So: next year, triathalon. Then we came home and cleaned. That is, I cleaned, and took comfort-reading breaks, and Helen spent 2.5 hours closed up in her room administering spelling tests to her stuffed animals. They all did very well, although I think there was a little grade inflation at work, because even Carrots, who got an A+++, spelled animal wrong, and no one did worse than a B+ despite some test-takers having long lists of meticulously misspelled words.

It will surprise no one if she becomes a teacher

Sometimes it feels a little like we live in separate families--the baseball family and the everything else family--so in the afternoon we roused ourselves and went over to Si's second game. The social aspects of that crowd are less congenial, now that we're on a new team and only know a handful of other parents.

It was a quiet weekend. The rest of our time was spent packing for Si's week of Outdoor Education with his school--his whole class will be spending three days up in the mountains, playing trust games and orienteering and who knows what else. Si is up to his ears in excitement, mostly at the opportunity to pack (like me, he loves packing a list of supplies) and also about the bus ride.

Oh the busy days of now

It was a beautiful fall weekend--no, an exquisite fall weekend, and we did all the sorts of things a family should in this event. We went to a Rockies game, we watched some fireworks, we stood about on the sidelines of a soccer game* and two little league games**. I went for a run along trails brushed by yellowing leaves and ripening plums. I strategized about making wild plum jam and chokecherry jam. I bought plants and planted them in the yard and now one edge of the yard is looking better, definitely starting to look better, less like the chicken-scratched flats of a tarpaper shack and more like something you'd like to rest your eyes on while you have a drink. We had dinner with friends (the long-delayed BBQ I complained about earlier, in fact). There was a sleepover and a birthday party and neither one was at my house. I cleaned the floors.

In spite of all this, or, probably, because of it, I spent the entire weekend holding my breath while I dashed from one thing to another and by Sunday night I was in a vicious, hectoring mood. I need to improve my practice, I can see. My living-in-the-moment zen practice.

*Helen's first. I now have two children in organized sports. This is both a wonderful thing and sort of a slow torture.

**I managed, regretfully, to attend neither. The secret saving grace to having multiple children in multiple activities is that at some point it becomes physically impossible to be present at them all and while this doesn't exactly provide free time, it does provide some respite. Except on the times, like next weekend, when everything is staggered and there is neither free time nor respite--nor time that would normally be occupied by doing things like, say, brushing teeth or securing food.

But am I grateful? Yes. I'm grateful for it all, and already feeling melancholy about its inevitable end.

Friends of the Mosquito Coast

I have been thinking a lot about friendship lately, and who has it, and where one can get it, and how one can improve it when one does have it. This may or may not be related to a slightly pathetic email I sent to an old friend saying that we needed to schedule a hike ASAP because I was feeling lonely and weird (see, this is the kind of friend to whom I can get away with saying stuff like this. I haven't been making many such friends lately.) But this life of ours right now--with the full-time jobs and the full-time kids and the kid activities and the House Issues--does not leave a whole lot of room for friendship. And it's partly that the last three casual BBQ get togethers we had planned fell through at the last minute due to scheduling conflicts and it's partly that these were in June and it's partly that other social interactions we've been having as a couple, as a family, as a unit have been deeply unsatisfying, but I'm not even sure at this point that we're capable of either making new friends or maintaining contacts with old ones, and I think it's a phase but I'm not sure and I'm getting just a liiiiittle bit desperate. And by we I mean us as a family. Because at this point, except for a few dusty holdouts from previous lives, I do not make friends independently. I just do not have the fucking time. And it kind of fucking sucks, which is why I tell myself that it is a phase and not a prison sentence without possibility of parole.

So: who has it? The kids have it. The kids' friendships are a total priority in our household, a fact of which I'm both proud and kind of irritated with. Playdates, sleepovers, even the fact that we're in a neighborhood we can't quite afford (well, the NEIGHBORHOOD is fine, it's the particular HOUSE we bought that sits on our shoulders like a 2-ton vulture): if we make a decision about social life, it's generally to promote the kids' ties with other kids of their choice. We do this because I think it's the right thing to do, and also it's easier. The children are a Force that Must Be Obeyed.

Who doesn't have it? The adults, that's who. We have old friends, whom we both neglect and feel resentful toward for neglecting us, when we have time for resentment, which is not often. Our old friends live in other towns, so most of the time, they're sort of off the radar. We have a few sputtering friendships as a family/couple, but these are arduous to maintain (see canceled BBQs above). There's the sheer logistical challenge, which we usually aren't up for. We barely have dinner together, let alone in the company of others. The few families we do, or did, see regularly tend to be baseball families, only now that Si's changing teams that doesn't work so well (plus the competitive BS that's starting to accompany baseball kind of seeps poisonously into the grownup friendships, too.) M., for all his baseball involvement, is sort of bored to death by other baseball dads. I like the baseball moms, generally, but I like them better when we don't talk baseball. Anyhow. It all adds up to a whole lotta not seeing anyone, ever, except on sidelines or at front doors while exchanging children.

How to get more of it? That's what I'm trying to figure out, when I can devote the energy to figuring, which is not often. Most of the time I feel stuck in a place of great activity and busyness but also great echoing spaces of loneliness and strangeness. I feel both dazzled and sad, when I have time to notice my feelings, which luckily, I guess, is not too often. Mostly I try to feel resigned and accepting of the fact that I am just in a lonely period of my life right now.

The hopeful thing is, we (and I) have been in this place before. We've come through.

*

I have also been thinking about The Mosquito Coast, which I am listening to as I drive, and which could be considered the original primer of how not to be a helicopter parent. Along with, say, David Copperfield. It's about an eccentric and antisocial inventor who ups and moves his family of four to the inner jungle of Honduras (where, confusingly, most of the people they encounter speak English, which, if you have to be stranded in a third-world country with a psycho parent and in a novel by Paul Theroux, besides, is really the best possible option, or so it seems at this point in time. I'm only a third of the way through.) And I'm finding myself having a strangely mixed reaction to their situation. On the one hand, when in the first chapter it seems for a while that the father has died, I was very happy, because I was so sick of him already. On the other hand, I think I could learn a little from his parenting, even as I'm wincing at his method (just up and move to a third-world country for selfish, screwed-up motives of your own! what about providing security?! what about stability?! what about a kid's right to self-determination?). I mean, not even the most old-school we've-got-to teach-the-kids-independence diehard would approve of his methods (humiliate your son into climbing a ship's rigging in a storm, and enlist younger siblings in the teasing--not great parenting). But the son did climb the rigging, and got over his fear, a little, and came a long way toward being stronger and more self-reliant: he learned very decisively that the world didn't revolve around him, which is a useful lesson. Of course, it helped that he didn't die while he was learning it. And one of his enduring lessons does seem to be how to hate his dad. But, speaking as person who has basically shaped her whole life around her kids and who occasionally gets resentful about it (see above), teaching kids that they aren't the center of the universe does seem to have a certain bracing value.

Tom Sawyer and Mary Lennox

I don't consider myself a heliocopter parent (smugly so, I might add), and then I notice myself doing things like checking the 5th-grade website five times a day (still not updated for the new week) (I HATE that). In my defense I'll insist that I'm just curious and I have NO INTENTION of discussing the contents/ activities with either my fifth grader or his teacher.


(Total lie, BTW. I'll "discuss" it with Si, and the conversation will go something like this:

Me: Hey, I noticed that you guys are reading ___.
Si: (crickets chirping)
Me: (slightly aggrieved whisper) Si. That was kind of a question.
Si: What? Oh. Yeah, we are.
Me: And what do you think? Do you like it?
Si: (shrugs) Mm hmm.
Me: (kicking self for asking a yes-or-no question) What's it about?
Si: Um. This guy does this thing, and then he has a dog, and then he does something, I don't remember what, and then he does this other thing. He rides the bus, I think.
Me: Oh. What's your favorite part?
Si: (raising his face to the ceiling and speaking in a just-end-this-conversation-NOW monotone): I like it ALLLLL.

Meanwhile, I ask Helen on the third day of school what she did in class today (this is after we reviewed in detail all the important parts of the day, such as recess, the other recess, lunch, and specials). She sighs noisily and says, "We just did the USUAL STUFF, MOM."

In summary: I have NO BLOODY IDEA what either of my children are doing in school. Hence my obsessive refreshing of the 5th grade website.


This is one reason I like reading to them at the end of the day so much. At least that's one thing that's going into their brains that I'm involved in. Also, I've said this before, but reading kids' books is one of the main reasons I had kids. As soon as Si reaches a non-read-aloud-to-age--like, gasp, 11--I'm going to have to insist that he start reproducing, so that by the time Helen is too old to read to, I'll have a read-aloud partner again. Although the catch will be that I'll have to read a bunch of the same books instead of all new material. Already I'm on reread #2 of The Secret Garden--there could be worse books to reread twice in two years, of course, but I find myself throwing longing glances at Pippi Longstocking and the Moomintroll books.

Si and I are reading Tom Sawyer, and we're both more-or-less enjoying it. This is one of those books that I wanted to read less because I lovity-loved it as a child (I didn't, and I still don't--Tom is kind of vain and self-aggrandizing, and the book is a little heavy on the adult-directed cultural commentary for either my taste or Si's) than because it's an Essential Book. You might think, from this statement, that I'm a canon-driven, reading-is-good-for-your-character kind of pedant, and, well, you'd be right. In my defense, I'm doing it because someone has to. His school favors dreary, good-for-you Cultural Context/ Sensitivity Training books, and he favors series. Both of these are fine, but they tend to omit or elide certain aspects of real life. Such as: one of the things I like about Tom Sawyer this time around is that it shows girls and boys living in entirely separate, mutually antagonistic worlds. Sure, Tom likes Becky Thatcher (that part is kind of weird, actually), but they aren't friends. Almost every other kid book in the world is based on a dual girl-and-boy hero/heroine set, and they're usually best pals and completely support each other. Which is a nice model. It also doesn't exist for kids over the age of 6, as far as I can tell.

Also, Tom's friends are both his bosom pals and...kind of based on opportunistic serendipity. They aren't friends because they really understand each other, or have long heart-to-heart conversations, or show up on the doorstep bearing comic books and bubblegum when the other guy is sick. No, they're friends because they happen to be in the same place at the same time and like to play the same things. Or they're friends because they totally envy the other guy's set-up (see Tom's affection for Huck: is it Huck he likes, or the fact that Huck doesn't have to go to school or bed or church? And does he even get Huck? I don't think he does. Camping out on the island with stolen food is a lark for Tom but pretty SOP for Huck, and it's not at all clear that Tom understands that this is what Huck's life is like all the time.) But none of this stuff matters: they're friends, or buddies, or whatever, and that's all they need. Whenever I stare at Si's roster of hero-worship friends, neighborhood pals, baseball buddies and other opportunistic associations and wonder what the hell friendship even means for him, it helps to remember Tom Sawyer.

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.

Three...two...one...

For his daily writing assignment so that his writing muscles don't atrophy, I asked Silas to write about what he was looking forward to most about school. Here's what he wrote:


It has been a long, boring summer. Camp, horseback riding, fishing, Legos, a trip to Yellowstone, fishing, playing with friends, sleepovers, a sleepover party, homemade ice cream, homemade popsicles, pool, cousin time, grandparent time, crawdad fishing, biking the neighborhood, zoo, museum, more Legos...

Thank god that's over and he can finally DO something all day. Well, six hours of the day, at least.

Meanwhile, Helen and Mary, her doll, are both looking forward to starting first grade.

We visited the Denver Doll and Toy Museum to celebrate (and also because The Boys went to the Rockies game).