Category Archives: Kid conversation
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.
The Sweetest Girl in the World
My daughter is a little obsessed with all things floral these days. If allowed, she’ll spend entire Fresh & Easy shopping runs leisurely perusing and sniffing all the floral goods. (Which oddly seems to slightly annoy the resident geriatric security guard. shrug.) She regularly inquires if we “have money to buy flowers today”, and sometimes she is allowed to pick out a pot or bouquet. In fact, in an interesting show of childhood priorities, she has even spent her tooth fairy money on various flora. I find all this to be charming, but slightly mystifying, as her parents certainly aren’t blessed with green thumbs, nor have we ever especially emphasized such things. Just another facet of her lovely personality and interests, which fill me with a sense of pride and amazement.
Anyway, back to the point. Today when I got home from work, the little genius ran out to greet me, as she often does. She was very excited and told me that she had a surprise for me, and commanded me to close my eyes and follow her. Being led blind through our obstacle course of a garage was a little dicey, but she managed to keep me alive and when I arrived in the kitchen I was greeted by the sight of a lovely vase full of flowers. She was so sweet and excited, and told me that she bought them for me “even though it wasn’t my birthday anymore”. A loving and delightful surprise, and well-timed as it had been a long and somber day, with the sad news of the passing of a coworker’s mother.
The best part of the surprise though, was getting “the rest of the story” from FF. Apparently when they stopped at the store for bananas and milk after school, she of course went to do her usual flower inspection, and then asked if she could buy some flowers for me. She also informed her father that she had five dollars at home, so she negotiated for him to buy the flowers and promised to pay him back when they got home. FF, simply thinking she still had tooth fairy money left over, didn’t think much of it and bought the flowers.
Upon arriving home, she scampered off to her treasure box and proudly returned to hand over her flower money….
all eleven cents of it.
Sweetest girl in the world.
I Survived*
Well, here I am back from the brink of fall-semester-induced insanity. I dearly wished to have kept up with the blog more actively, but it is unfortunately one of those things I’ve had to include lately in the complex time/energy equation of daily life. I hope to get things freshened up in a bit in the next couple weeks, design-wise, and to try and jam out a few miscellaneous update posts, and if I get really froggy I might even be able to pick up the threads on a couple of half-finished drafts! Won’t that be exciting…in a reheated-leftovers-kind-of-way!
So basically I thought I’d just try to capture some short-ish snippets from my current stream of consciousness, but be warned there is little organizational rhyme or reason.
Fall sucked. I tried not to be tedious here and whine-blog ad nauseum about my academic woes, but I gotta say, this fall was a ringer. I may have been a little more emotionally balanced than past semesters, but the two classes I took were incredibly demanding on my time and patience. After putting it off for two years, I had to take another class from the she-devil, that whorish instructor that nearly made me quit the program way back in my second semester. I’m pleased to report that (obviously) my stubborn persistence was more viable than her stupidity, but the consequence was having to take another class from her. It was every bit as obnoxious as I expected, but forewarned is forearmed. Or some shit like that.
I’m so fatigued. I presume this is not a unique phenomenon for any grad student but I am definitely feeling the drain of this academic adventure. I am lately beginning to look at the tally book to evaluate whether the trade-offs, financially, emotionally, logistically…will be worth it. I do value the experience and the opportunity, blah blah blah, but still. When viewed in scope with the rest of my life, I am just really fatigued right now…intellectually, emotionally, physically. It is sort of a numb feeling at times and I think some days it causes me to coast through other life-minutiae to which I should be paying more attention. Sigh. And ironically this causes my insomnia to flare up, so here I am blogging at 5 o clock in the morning.
One semester to go. Yes this is very exciting, but I am also currently experiencing a lot of trepidation and anxiety because I don’t have a handle yet on what the hell I’m going to do for my capstone applied project. I’ve been saying that for well over 6 months, with a sort of blind hope that I’d be struck with an academic epiphany (yes, this does happen to me sometimes), but as yet, I haven’t been able to dial in the picture with any clarity. I’m planning to do some serious thinking, and maybe some serious drinking, and then maybe some serious thinking-drinking over the next couple vacation weeks. The failsafe plan is to BS something or other that is doable but perhaps not anything in which I’m really personally or professionally invested. Less than ideal, but it offers an escape hatch from grad school, and ideally, I can pick up the threads of more-invested research projects a bit further down the career road.
Merry Christmas. This has been truly a less-than-engaged holiday season for me. I have been so drained that it’s been difficult to summon the mental energy for anything other than the basics for the sake of the little genius. Minimal decorating, minimal shopping, minimal excitement, minimal everything. We decided to stay home this year for Christmas morning, but I am a little bummed that Gmom, Uncle Bubba & co. won’t be joining us. Instead we will be packing up and heading to their place later in the day for Christmas dinner and to spend a couple days in the (hopefully) snowy northern reaches. So we’ll still get to spend some time together, but no Christmas morning follies and famous Gmom cinnamon rolls. The thing I am most looking forward to is a lovely Christmas eve feast that FF, kiddo and I are planning to cook together. I really wish it were possible to enjoy such a thing with all my siblings and their families too, but it is simply impossible to gather everyone for Christmas anymore. I wish it were important to them in the same way it is important to me, but I guess that is part of growing up and away from one’s immediate family.
Our little monkey
Little genius is 5. We did a combo-birthday extravaganza with K2 and it was a really fun, happy day. We rented one of those moon bounce inflatable things and everyone had a great time. They went with a Tangled (Rapunzel) theme, and we happened to also see the movie the same weekend, which reminds me…I’ll have to whip up another post one of these days regarding my reaction to such a weird Disney movie. Moving on. Recent kiddo developments:
- New antagonistic/argumentative/dramatic behavior swings. Um hello, where did THAT come from? It’s crazy and I haven’t figured out how the hell to respond to all that yet. Ugh.
- Yesterday she discovered her first loose tooth! This is exciting and yet it makes me feel a little nervous and anxious…which is kind of strange, but there you go. Hopefully this first baby tooth experience goes smoothly with a minimum of drama, and the tooth fairy comes through with some good loot.
- She was pretending to be a mommy giraffe the other day with 2 babies and couldn’t recall the word “nipples”. She called them “piffles”, and both FF and I nearly wet ourselves trying to hold back the hysterical laughter.
- This spring will be her last semester of preschool, and then it will be on to Kindergarten. Still makes me want to go somewhere and cry a little.
- This spring she is switching from the regular gymnastics class to a combo dance/gym class. Because my kid? she wants to DANCE! I think this is going to be a lot of fun for her (and us).
- We are going to get her started with soccer at our local Y sometime in the next couple months and she is very excited, yet anxious about “not winning games” and thus being ineligible to receive trophies. Uhh? I didn’t even TRY to explain the concept of non-competitive soccer yet. Will definitely cross that bridge when we get there.
- She randomly had a freak-out the other night around 4am when she came into our room to sleep, because she noticed while getting in bed that the fuzzy blanket caused a couple static sparks. You would have thought the kid was about to get hit by lightning. She was so wigged out that even after 30 minutes of patient (sleepy) discussion, she still wouldn’t stop sitting on her pillow plastered against the wall, cringing away from the dreaded, death-ray blanket. She simply couldn’t be reasoned with and she chose to go back to her own bedroom to sleep, rather than risk electrocution by killer blanket. Oddly by the next day, she was over this phobia and all was well again for her with our bedroom. WTF?
- She recently volunteered herself to help out with a project at my office, in which we needed a child to “star” in a brief educational video on measuring height of pediatric patients. She was willing to do this as long as we all promised NO shots or needles. Pretty pragmatic negotiator, if you ask me. Anyway, it went well and she was quite cooperative but halfway through production, a renegade spider appeared in the clinic room and she refused to commence acting until the media techs disposed of the offending vermin. That’s my girl!
I finally got to watch season 6 of LOST. I always wanted to watch the show but never connected with it during actual broadcast seasons, so I decided to make it my summer entertainment project, and consumed the first 5 seasons in short order. But due to various time constraints and Netflix availability issues, I did not get to start season 6 until last week. I gotta say, I tried to avoid a lot of the media/fan commentary since May so as to not spoil the ending but I was generally aware of a lot of fan heat following the finale. After impartially watching the season 6 episodes, I have to say I found them to be really confusing and lacking a lot of the little touches that captivated me in earlier seasons. And then…the finale. I had high hopes to get some questions answered and to generally just not be pissed off. On the one hand, it seemed pretty anticlimactic, and there were more unresolved issues than you can shake a stick at, but on the other hand, awwwww, who doesn’t love reunions! Still, I think it was pretty weak for a story that had so much magnificent potential, creatively-speaking, and such a strong cast. So I guess that leaves me thoroughly irritated, if not exactly pissed, and still kind of mourning what could have been but able to make peace with the way they closed it. I read one critical analysis which suggested that the weirdness might be easier to take if one viewed the final season storyline separately from the other 5, and I think there is something to that notion. For the record, I’m still totally in love with Des, and I’d certainly play footsie with Sayid as a reasonable second.
Before this gets any longer. So much for “shortish” stream of consciousness! This final bit is a multimedia box of holiday cheer…the few things that have actually brought a little Christmas spirit my way lately.
- Baby it’s cold outside – Martina McBride/overdubbed Dean Martin version. how is it that I didn’t hear this particular version until a couple weeks ago? Definitely the best I’ve heard and deliciously retro-glamorous! Just listen to that smooth, sexy Dean-voice surrounded by big sultry brass, and McBride’s crystalline, expressive voice playing along. Brilliant!
- I have to watch the Christmas Can-Can every year by Straight No Chaser because it’s just damn funny.
- Amazing light shows created by hobbyist dude in Utah. Really incredible and worth a few minutes of exploring on his website. Here is a sample:
*but I’m more burnt out than a flaming piece of toast.
