Not a lot to say.
The rain has begun; the freakishly un-Portlandy sunny October weather is gone.
I have realized that the thing I find most interesting and rewarding right now is working with individual kids* at Homework Club. Apparently I should chuck all my educational investment and become a school counselor. Or something.
Skipper is slightly happier at school, but she really dreads the terrible, unstructured time at recess. Having been known as Track Girl** at a school where I spent 5th grade, I am very sad to hear that she spends a lot of her time walking around the playground alone. We haven't heard anything from Murphy lately, though, and her sleep patterns seem to be settling back down a bit. So that's good. I've been reading a lot of books with titles that combine the words "parenting," "anxiety," "sensitive," and "worry" in a variety of ways. Some of them are somewhat helpful.
Duchess is pretty excited about turning nine. She's excited about everything, actually, and chooses ways to express her excitement that are calibrated to maximally annoy me.*** She's really good at it.
I recently applied for a job for which I am extremely well-qualified. I hated doing the application. Every minute of it felt masochistic and terrible. No doubt character was built, but it hardly seems worth it.
That's the news, mostly.
Also, here's what we're reading right now:
Skipper: Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs
Cook: The Aubrey-Maturin series, when he has time between work and volunteer commitments.
Duchess: Pi in the Sky and The Robber's Daughter
*This is ridiculous, but I had never really thought about how it would feel to get negative feedback on every single thing I did at school. (Granted, I later had that experience in a job, but at least I had some banked-up self-esteem to carry me along through that.) Grading spelling tests for Duchess's class every week has made me recognize how brutal a bad assignment looks after it's been corrected. On some of those tests, I have to write out the correct spelling of every single word. I can't imagine what a pummeling it would be to get back sheaves of paperwork every week that were covered in corrections. I don't think I'd be able to keep going to school, honestly. These kids are brave.
**I didn't walk around the track ALL the time - in the winter I made a lot of very small snow people and snow houses in the open space inside the track. I did enjoy the snow people, though I would have much preferred having human friends.
*** It's all about me.
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