Oh, I’m trying to get my (late) annual review done. And there’s this pounding in my head. I can’t concentrate. Am I going crazy?
The problem is that I’ve banned them from the Wii this afternoon because they were fighting over it. Can’t. Win.
Category Archives: momness
shameless commerce
If you’re a runner and a blogger (or otherwise-online-type), you can win a pair of great Oiselle Lesley Knickers over at Fitness for Mommies.
I myself am looking for some running mojo during the ides here in CNY. And since I have no dinero, the shameless blog-post-for-possible-personal-material-return.
please learn from my mistakes
H is on her third pair of pointe shoes this year. My fingers are near-bleeding from sewing in the elastic and ribbon. The woman who fits H for her shoes reprimands me every time because I don’t make H sew them in herself. But *I* can barely push the needle through the thick elastic–how can I expect her to do it??
I complained, half-jokingly, that H is setting some sort of record for her studio in going through shoes. The saleswoman, a retired ballerina herself, looked at me aghast. “Professional dancers wear out a pair of shoes in about eight hours of use, and in ONE ACT of a performance…” She shook her head slightly at me, as if to wonder how stupid I could be.
Quite stupid, apparently. Here’s more proof (aside from having cultivated in my daughter a taste for the most expensive hobby a young girl might have): On the way home from pre-school on Monday, Little J complained of intense thirst. It had been his day for snack, and so we happened to have a half-gallon of chocolate milk, about a 1/4 full, in his backpack. While I knew chocolate milk–or milk of any kind, really–is no thirst-quencher, I still allowed him to swig milk out of the gallon jug. Luckily he did NOT spill milk in the car, but now he refuses to drink milk out of a cup. He’ll wander into the kitchen randomly during the day. I’ll hear the fridge open and the cap of the milk come off. Then I’ll hear him *thunk* return the jug to the fridge and *whump* shut the fridge door. And then he’ll wander back out of the kitchen, a small milk-trace on his upper lip.
Gross.
Edited to add: Now he just passed me, walking from the kitchen into the living room, the jug of milk in hand. Great.
thwarting winter break
Today we went to the ice rink–as though we don’t spend enough of our lives freezing at ice rinks. [That new Dunkin Donuts jingle about "freezing at Pee Wee hockey..." is practically my life right now.] But instead of sitting in the bleachers or working the snack bar, we all skated, including Little J, who is four and is as freakishly coordinated as his older brother. He skated for an hour using this little walker-like contraption, and for the second hour I could barely keep up with him. Big J kept getting in trouble with the rink monitors for “going too fast.”
“But Mom!” he tells me, “I don’t know how to skate slow!!”
H skated with us for the first hour, and then during the second hour she found a hallway and practiced her jazz routine, garnering a decent crowd of onlookers.
Wednesday we’ll go rollerskating (and I’ll school the kids then; I spent many a Friday and Saturday night at the roller rink as a youngster). Friday we’ll do a movie at the el-cheapo theater.
Tuesday and Thursday are up for grabs, if anyone has any ideas. Maybe we’ll venture out and go sledding.
But that involves snow. Blech.
winter break
In central New York, the public schools do an especially mean thing to parents.
In the dead of February, when everyone (read: ME) is near insanity with the snow and crappy weather, the schools let the kids have a week off school.
What I have to look forward to this week: Big J on his roller blades practicing his puck-handling with a heavy rubber ball and hockey stick. H working to stick her aerial and back handspring. Little J riding the full-size skateboard (probably in bare feet, which makes my back crawl).
Yes. All of this IN. THE. HOUSE. I’m not even exaggerating.
the gods must be crazy
_The Gods Must Be Crazy_ (imdb) is a movie about, among other things, a tribe in Botswana that finds a Coke bottle (it had been thrown from an airplane window).
The Coke bottle becomes immensely useful to the tribe: for grinding meal, stretching and smoothing animal skins, and making music. And because there is only one Coke bottle, the tribe, which has heretofore not had to deal with ownership, envy, or theft, is quickly introduced to the negative effects of having and not-having.
A similar thing has happened in my house. Recently, we got cable. And we have one viable TV in the house, in the living room. There is a TV in our room upstairs, which means to watch the TV one has to go upstairs, which we keep at about 53 degrees to conserve heating fuel. So really, that TV doesn’t count.
Since the cable came to the Yonker house, the kids’ fights have exponentially increased. They cannot agree on what to watch, and so I’m constantly mediating “It’s-my-turn!-No-you-just-watched-something-it’s-mine!-No-way-am-I-watching -Hannah-Montana-again!” fights. (On a side note: the Disney Channel is odious. Each show is about spoiled, snotty, back-stabbing, lying, disrespectful children who are completely superficial and rude to their parents.)
And I very much want to do what the dude in the movie does: get rid of the damn thing. In this case, the damn cable.
Why, exactly, am I paying more money simply to bring a barrage of ads into my house, and so my kids have one more thing to yell at each other about??
bumpy cookie
We returned last night from the annual southerly pilgrimage, which this year included an additional westerly jaunt to MLA in Chicago for me.
On our way home, we decided to stop over in Baltimore to visit a friend and celebrate the new year. Little J, always on the lookout for new treats, came over to the kitchen table where my friend and I were sitting with some coffee and catching up. He leaned in to my neck and asked, sotto voce, “Can I have a bumpy cookie??”
Neither my friend nor I could figure out what this “bumpy cookie” thing was, so Little J pulled me into the kitchen to show me the bumpy cookie.
It was Star Crunch, probably my favorite of all Little Debbie’s snacks. Which now will forever be known to me as the bumpy cookie.
oh, the places I’ll go
Our Illinois/Iowa trip was fabu. I still wish we could have flown, but the big van with armchair recliners and a TV/VCR/Playstation did the trick. I don’t know that it made being in the car for a 20-hour stretch *comfortable*, but it certainly could have been far worse.
Now we are back home, and I am officially running the summer camp taxi. This week is dance camp for the niece, Ch., and H has weaseled her way into a “helper” spot for the camp. Big J and Ch. are also in a soccer club that meets two nights a week for the rest of the summer (thankfully this activity is within bike-riding distance for them).
Beginning next week, H will be at the studio for summer intensive every day for two weeks in a row. She starts on her pointe shoes, and she is out of her mind with excitement. I will just grumble a minute here to say that ballet shoes, costing as much as they do, should really come pre-assembled. They don’t. You get the shoe, and then a length of ribbon (which seems flimsy to me), a length of elastic, and some hasty instructions for sewing each into the shoe. I am no seamstress to begin with, and then I have to carefully stitch-in-the-ditch some very unraveling ribbon and some very thick elastic…H had to take her shoes in so her instructor could salvage them. Oh! The Challenges of the Dance Mom!
The last week in July is a week long of soccer camp for Big J and Ch. with the coaching staff of SU. The youth soccer league Big J will be playing for in the fall hosts this camp up here in a North Country school district, which will make it nice that I don’t have to drive them TOO far.
August I will wrap up my online class, which seems to be going really well for some of my students (those who turn work in) and really scarily for others (those who are still on my roster as registered but have not turned in one sentence since the beginning 9 weeks ago). We’ll hop back into that van with the armchair recliners for a getaway to WV, where I will sit in my cabin alone and write while my mom entertains my kids.
it’s that time of year again
Dance recital time.
Often, the dance recital weekend is pretty stressful. The influx of family members requires that I spend a day cleaning, and usually I needed that day to check to make sure if the video camera works, so having to gear up for the recital plus the family visit normally puts me into high-frantic mode.
But this year the studio is having the recital professionally recorded, so I don’t have to worry about misbehaving video cameras.
This year I bought the convertible body bag with days, DAYS I SAY, to spare. I bought the right one. I also bought bobby pins. I am ON IT.
I do think she needs a new pair of white tights…but other than that, people, I’m READY. Bring this recital ON.
And my house is clean, linens are fresh, and my garage is painted.
Just don’t ask about that, uh, memo* I have to write.
*Lovely D refers to the diss project as “that memo you have to write.”
is it summer yet?
May and June are strange months for me; I am not “in school” (though I am teaching an online course over the summer semester) but the kids still are. I don’t know if it’s like this everywhere in NY or in the entire northeast, but the kids don’t get out of school in these parts until the END of June.
It probably has something to do with the 4 weeks of snow days we get and the week of “winter break” in February. Where I’m from, school gets out right after Memorial day.
At any rate, this interstitial space is normally a good time for me to work; 2/3 of my kids are gone all day. I get up, get the kids off to school, and then can write and work with only the small distraction of Little J, who when the weather is nice, spends his days on his bike or on the swing set (or, “swing sweat,” as he calls it).
But not today.
The school nurse, who is my nemesis, called yesterday to tell me to come get H, her eyes are itching and suspicious-looking. No matter that I’m 4 counties away on my way to a super-important lunch meeting with the boss. No matter that B is only in his second week at his brand new job and cannot leave.
No matter that this dang nurse calls me and tells me to come and get my kid because of a hang nail. No matter that H probably just sneezed and rubbed her eyes a bit and now the nurse wants her OUT OF THE SCHOOL.
I’m not saying that pink eye isn’t a serious contagious issue. I’m not saying that school nurses aren’t important and wonderful people. It’s just that our school nurse would rather everyone stay at home, all the time, and keep their germy selves quarantined–this would make her job much easier.
So dutifully I took H to the doc yesterday, who told me what he tells me EVERYTIME I have a kid with itchy eyes: it could be allergies. It could be viral. It could be bacterial. It could be dust. It could be that aliens came in the night and are using H’s eye for alien science.
But here’s a scrip for some drops that should help, maybe.
That’ll be $20. Oh, and keep her out of school for another day. And probably make sure the other kids aren’t showing symptoms either–if they are, keep them home.
So today ALL THREE kids are home.
Because of all this, I burned the crap out of my arm toasting bagels in my oven this morning. Well, the fact that the real toaster kicked the bucket contributed to my having to toast the bagels in the oven. But all three kids are here, and by mid-morning the safe bowls of cereal they ate for breakfast have disintegrated in their digestive tracts. I’m frantically trying to keep them sated–bagels are heavy, no? And I can toast THREE WHOLE bagels in the oven simultaneously, which will save me scads of time.
Except ouch. That hurts.
