Category Archives: huh?
Slacker Parents
So I’ve been intermittently working on a few post-drafts lately but the majority of my bloggy time allotment has gone toward slowly working on the site revamp. It’s sad but true that if I treated this venue more seriously and really put some effort into it, the overall web design would be much snappier. But as I treat this as something akin to self-therapy / entertainment, I’m afraid that if it becomes too much like work, it’ll kill my desire to even bother. This is, incidentally, one of the reasons why I never proof, and rarely edit/correct actual posts either. I really want to focus on that stream of consciousness for the most part, and let it exist in its natural state. This often results in less than perfect style and form. But hell, I’m good with that.
WELL, that was a really long explanation (excuse?) for my anemic writing efforts lately. I REALLY do have to get cracking on that kindergarten post, or before we know it, she’ll be off to college! Oh well. On to the good stuff!
So over the last few months, the little genius has naturally undergone a bit of a circadian rhythm shift…fortunately for us this has been fairly concordant with the onslaught of a very demanding school schedule. It has, however, altered our family weekend rhythm a bit, because she has been getting up earlier than her poor tired parents typically do. I needsssss my weekend R&R, people!
Fortunately, we gradually devised a natural solution to the issue by embracing our slacker parenting skillz, and empowering the little genius to self-serve her early morning needs while we continue peacefully snoozing. She was already good on getting herself dressed (check), and recently learned how to master the DVR system to load up her fave recordings if desired (check), often prefers to play with her downstairs toys in the morning anyway (check), and she loves to periodically graze rather than eat specifically scheduled meals (double-check!). So all that was really necessary to put these components together was to gently urge her to go free-range in the mornings and ensure that she could access appropriate (and at least semi-healthy) snacks and beverages. Voila!!!
So far, this has worked out pretty damn well, if I do say so myself. Often she will let us sleep an extra 60-90 minutes, and I have completely refused to allow even a smidge of guilt to disturb my conscience, because I have been hard selling myself on the idea that we are “encouraging a healthy level of independence”. Muahahahaha, who’s the evil genius NOW?!
However, we have run into a few small pitfalls that required adjustment. Such as the morning when she felt it appropriate to snack on about half a jar of peanut butter, spoonful by spoonful. Apparently generalizing portion size for most types of foods did not click in her brain when it came to jar and spoon. Go figure. And then one morning she was breakfasting on grapes, and felt compelled to come in our bedroom and give me a play-by-play on every grape (look Mom, a TEENY TINY one!)
So, all of that background to give context for today’s experience: K got up as normal and went off to do her thing. About an hour and a half later, she came in to talk to me just as I was getting up, and so I gave her a hug and asked her if she had already eaten anything for breakfast. She responded “oh yes Mom, I had a slice of cold pizza.”
It took a few seconds for my barely awake brain to let THAT sink in…my first thought being something like, “oh god, she’s already turning into a college student!”. All I could think to reply at that moment was a shocked, “you ate cold pizza for breakfast?”
To which she elaborated, “well, yes, I got the pizza slice out of the fridge and I ate MOST of it, but not the crust part. I went back to the fridge to put it back in the box but it was too hard to get in there so I decided to throw the crust away in the trash. Is that OK?”
If I hadn’t still been mentally asleep at that point, I might have laughed hysterically at her explanation, but as it was, I was still more dumbfounded than anything else.
Well, ultimately I guess this is proof that she really IS taking that independence thing to heart, because this is the kid who wouldn’t even skip wearing socks to bed without asking for ‘permission’ first! And lest anyone wonder, I solemnly swear we are not uptight control freaks….the kid has always been extraordinarily attuned to routines, norms, rules and very precisely observes such behavior systems. She has an incredibly analytical mind for such things and any deviation will prompt countless questions until her need to understand is satisfied.
But apparently, eating cold pizza for breakfast was just the thing to inspire her burgeoning independence!
I’m not sure if this should make me proud, or horrified. 
Literary Debut
As we wrack our brains here in the Clueless household to come up with interesting summer projects to keep the little genius busy, I have to admit that “writing a book” was entirely her idea. I think it is a pleasant, avant garde, impressionistic first offering that surely heralds a stellar future literary career.
Bedbugs, Brain Collapse, & Birthdays
Long time, no type.
Mainly, I’ve been riding the wave of gleeful post-homework life and spending very little computer time doing anything that requires significant cognitive processing. Not to mention that the last few weeks at work have been tremendously busy, and insanely stressful what with top-down administrative reorganizations, severe budget cuts, and the like. So needless to say, I haven’t been in much of a bloggy frame of mind.
However, I feel the need to issue a report on our grand vacation in early June; a whirlwind trip that started with my #1 niece’s high school graduation and ended with a crazy 5-day stint in…..you guessed it…..Las Vegas. The Vegas leg of the trip was a long-awaited family celebratory extravaganza to ring in a host of decade-centric birthdays (ahem, yes, I wasn’t the only one with a milestone this year.) One of my nephews, my brother, and my dear hubby all hit “decade” birthdays between mid April and mid June. So naturally we all felt the need to hoop it up in sin city.
But before I get ahead of myself too far, let me reel back a bit and describe the first segment of the trip. My dear eldest niece, so lovely in body and spirit, was graduating with honors from a tremendously rigorous International Baccalaureate-affiliated school the first weekend of June. I was very excited to attend, particularly to hear her speak at the graduation ceremony. However, seeing as said ceremony was scheduled to begin quite early in the morning, at roughly a 2-hour drive from our house, we opted to drive up the Friday before and meet up with GMom to share a hotel room.
Considering that we also had to plan ahead/pack for the Vegas trip, get the pets settled, load the car, feed the kid, and a million other things after an already-long day of work, we didn’t get out of town until almost 8pm, which put our arrival into a rather late-ish timeframe. After unloading our overnight gear and securing a late night snack courtesy of the only open business in the area — Circle K — I started prepping the little genius for bed. I left her in the hotel bathroom to marinate in the shower for a few moments while I went to unpack her jammies and get the bed ready. Upon reaching for a pillow, what did I see but a tiny little bug on the pillow!
Now, not that I travel all that much, but you’d have to live in a deep cave anymore these days not to be aware of ye olde modern hotel bedbug epidemic. Being a bonafide bug-o-phobe already, of course my mind leapt to the possibility of bedbugs, although the little specimen was very tiny. I asked FF and Uncle Bubba (also sharing the room) to give it an eyeball, and in the course of examining that and other pillows, they located a much larger and more suspicious looking critter, which we caught in a plastic cup. At that point, with frantic smartphone image Googling underway, we felt rather alarmed and certain that we hit the unlucky jackpot of a bedbug-infested room.
And honestly, the front desk wasn’t all that much help…they offered to move us to a different room, but that wasn’t very reassuring considering that all of us had horrific images of bringing home our very own bedbug buddies to our respective domiciles, never to be pest-free again. This was particularly unsettling to FF and I, considering that a few years ago we suffered through an epic, almost yearlong flea war at our old crappy apartment. And believe me, we tried everything, to no avail. Moving out WAS the final solution. So needless to say, we are pretty particularly picky when it comes to bug issues.
So our troops did a quick huddle and we decided to relocate to another hotel (by this time nearly 1am), yet unfortunately the only affordable place reasonably nearby was a 30 minute drive away. Ugh. However, despite our collective exhaustion, this seemed a better option than potentially offering ourselves up as blood donors to the native fauna. The little genius was taking everything in stride pretty well, despite some confusion and tiredness. We repacked our overnight gear and shuffled back down to the van. Unfortunately however, during the baggage and kid-loading insanity, we managed to lock a) the kid b) all our stuff and c) the keys, snugly in the van.
Oh shit.
So yes, friends and neighbors, we stood outside a bedbug-ridden hotel in a sleepy small hamlet at 1am shouting instructions through a closed window to our frantically crying daughter on how to escape her snug, safe, 5-point carseat harness with the child-resistant latch so that she could unlock the van for us. Totally not one of my proudest moments. Fortunately the little genius is a trooper and she calmed down and persevered enough to get us out of the fiasco. After that, we hit the highway and about an hour later we all collapsed into an exhausted slumber.
So the management did call and talk to Gmom the next day (she had made the reservation) and were properly apologetic and all that crap, issuing refunds and free night coupons ad nauseam. And a few days after that, they emailed a copy of their pest company report, predictably denying any bedbug issues but admitting the presence of some “carpet beetles”. Well, I appreciate them sharing the report and all but I gotta say that I’m still not convinced and I don’t think they actually examined the critter we captured and showed to the front desk staff.
SO, needless to say the next morning came very early and as for my little family pod, we reluctantly decided to skip the main ceremony and let the little genius continue to get some much-needed rest. We did attend the post-ceremony graduation party and it was a lot of fun, particularly when my niece “unwrapped” a very exciting present: a car! K thought that was just about the coolest and most exciting thing she’d ever heard of, and I’m pretty sure she will not forget it, and thus expectantly hold it over her parents’ heads until her own high school graduation. Sigh.
So with that dramatic report out of the way, I’m happy to say that the Vegas phase of the trip was tons of fun and very smooth sailing with no buggy or incompetent parenting episodes. We bowled, we saw movies, we gambled, we swam, we played a lot of cards in the sumptuous top-floor suite that K2 & family occupied, and generally a great time was had by all. The young guys (uncle bubba, my #1 nephew and #2 nephew) camped out in the 2nd suite bedroom and turned it into an X-box blazin’, Dr. Pepper guzzling, stinky man cave. They loved it.
FOUR LAYERS!
The guys went to see Cirque’s new Elvis show one night, and the next night the girls went to see Menopause: The Musical. Which was, um, quite an experience and has given me a slightly worried perspective on my future hormonal event horizon. (Is it too early to already be experiencing the whole brain collapse thing? ’cause lately….) Seriously though, the show was quite a laugh and a lot of fun to see with Gmom and Aunt D (K2′s mom).
Speaking of Gmom, she brought some serious magic to the table and managed to somehow make an amazingly elaborate cake in a hotel mini-kitchen for us birthday folks! Totally awesome. (and delicious!)
All in all, a trip (and birthday) to remember!
Like this:
The Reality of 30
Yeah, I know. I promised a lengthy reflection on the gory details about turning 30 and I swear that I actually started writing said treatise but haven’t had the time yet to properly finish lining up my thoughts. In the interim, please enjoy yet another recent true-life conversation, this one between my Mom and I, a couple weeks ago:
Conversational setting: comparing notes on the royal wedding.
Gmom: you know, I’ve watched those two boys grow up all these years throughout all the drama of their family and the loss of their mother, and when the news started pouring out about the wedding, I was surprised to realize how old Wills had gotten!
Me: Geez mom! he’s younger than I am!
Gmom: well dear, you ARE 30 now.
Me: thanks mom.
Schoolhouse Rock
I’m going to lose my mind.
And no, this post isn’t about my own personal academic endeavors, obnoxious as they are right now. No, this is an issue that has broader long-term implications, IE the rest of my daughter’s LIFE. You see, she has been happily cruising along the last 2 years in preschool without a care in the world, but it is inevitable that those people would eventually notice she is 5 and plan to so-called “graduate” her. Ugh. And actually, to give myself some credit, I really did begin researching this situation about a year ago, so I’m not going in completely blind but this issue is definitely a good representation of a Classic Cluelessmom Cluster.
The first problem is that I have an intense and soul-searing terror that if I make a single misstep in handling her academic career, I will ruin her life. Seriously. Yeah, I know that sounds pretty melodramatic but I’m telling you, I have a lot of ISSUES related to this issue. No Tiger Mom here, by any means. I was very fortunate to be able to attend a small private school for my K-12 career and received a really excellent education and a positive social experience. I would hope for something similar for my child, but I also hold the realistic view that she is very much her own person and might thrive in a different kind of environment, and that a lot of success factors really come down to the individual teacher level. But how to maximize the chances of finding the right school solution for her???
Generally when faced with such fears and insecurities, my first plan of attack is research, research, research. I started from a couple basic premises: a) FF and I are united on the priority of finding a non-public-school solution and b) we can’t really afford a private school. So logically that leaves charter schools, of which there are numerous options in our general metro area. From there, I started looking around online at potential options, and trying to figure out the various locations, admissions, curriculums, etc. However, this is a case in which my reliance on research has generally made my anxiety a hell of a lot WORSE. See, it used to be in the good old days (so I hear) that parents would pass along word of mouth about various schools and so you could generally talk to your social community to figure out where to send your kid. NOW, the whole internet is your community and boy, do they have a lot to say! Logically I guess most of the people who bother to post reviews are the squeaky wheels, but still. And have you ever seen that commercial greatschools.org site? HOLY information overload, batman.
When I started looking into this last year, my initial reaction was essentially a big panic attack, at the prospect that I’d ever be able to sort out such a mess and find a positive solution for our family in such a way that wouldn’t, you know, ruin my daughter’s life. (Yes, it keeps coming back to this.) In the end, it became apparent that she wouldn’t be able to get admitted into a program until after her 5th birthday (in November) and most of the schools we looked at did not admit new students in January. So that was actually like a surprise dose of Prozac to my overheated brain…”YAY I get to file her back into preschool for another whole year with no guilt!” Even though the process really did freak me out, I felt like something productive came from it because at least I was able to narrow down two potential school choices for the next year that I felt pretty good about. Which I hoped would alleviate the upcoming freak-out when it was actually time to enroll.
And now it’s that time. And I find myself second-guessing those choices again, and reviewing all the information again, and freaking out a little bit that I’m going to send her into a bad situation which does not nurture her personally, academically, or both. And if that should actually occur, I feel like it’s an all-in poker bet and we’ll never be able to recover from the misstep. We went to a public information session last week at one of the schools, and it left me feeling a little underwhelmed. It didn’t exactly turn me off to the school in general, but neither did it really give a lot of affirmation or excitement. (Mainly, we just left with a tired, crying little genius who didn’t understand why ALL the kids didn’t win door prizes…)
Why is this so complicated?
So right now the plan of action is to carry through with investigating the two schools we narrowed down and hope that she will find a spot in one or the other, and that it turns out to be a reasonably positive experience. I keep trying to focus on the fact that even if the situation proves less than ideal, it is not a locked door. But at what cost to the little genius if we ultimately have to shift around a few times to find the best school available to us? How to balance the factors of quality, affordability, safe/positive environment, location, parent/community involvement and whatever else I haven’t thought of yet? How to know when to draw the line on a poor academic fit for your child based on personal characteristics or because the curriculum/environment just isn’t working for them?
And ultimately, how to shake the feeling that if we fail to find excellent educational solutions for the little genius in these crucial formative years, it will ruin her life?
I’m going to lose my mind.
