It's a beautiful fall-ish day here, sunny and just cool and breezy enough to be autumnal. A friend gave me a fresh apple today. Our yard is full of the smell of fermenting grapes. (Sure, Cook made some juice, but there are still a LOT on the vines.) The girls have a month of school behind them and are settling in. 

We haven't yet figured out where all our stuff goes now in the new house configuration, so things still feel a bit unsettled here. We're also still getting used to having Duchess gone. We're glad she's out there in the world, as she should be, and she seems to be thriving (if grumpy about Midwestern humidity), but we also haven't quite shaken out into the new triangular normal. 

I've also apparently entered a stage of life where I keep being surprised by how much time has passed. Cook and I have now been married for 22 years, which means that our marriage is probably graduating from college and getting a job. We've lived in our house for 12 years. Somebody at work recently referred to a mild local political kerfuffle that happened a decade ago, and I realized that while I will never be a full-fledged Portlander,* I've logged nearly 17 years of my adulthood here. Somehow. And somehow I have friends here whom I've known for a decade or more. I recognize that this is how time actually works, but it still boggles my mind.

* This requires at least being born here yourself, and ideally having at least one parent born here as well. 

Dear lord it is somehow time for school again

 I read somewhere that as you age time feels sped up because your sense of time is determined by the way you sort experience and memories, and as you age you have more established categories (which I imagine as file folders) in which to place experiences as you have them, so your brain does not have to take the time to build new categories, just drops the experiences into the established categories and moves on.* 

Point is, the last year has passed extremely quickly for me, presumably because I am so old that nothing is new to me any more. And yet, in that time I have moved out of and back into our house, started a new job, and experienced a kid going through the college application process and then leaving for college. Feels like that should have taken longer. 

We're starting a new school year, and a new phase of school for both kids. Skipper had her first day of high school yesterday, and Duchess has her first day of college next week. Skipper is tackling high school (loud, chaotic, class sizes of 30+, confusing, etc., and thus not at all Skipper's jam) with her usual grim determination. When I asked her how the day was, she said "It was okay. Only 171 more days to go!"**

Duchess, after a week and a half of the crosscountry preseason, is starting freshman orientation proper tomorrow (and meeting the rest of her fellow freshmen, including her roommate). She's having a pretty great time so far, in Duchess style, which means that she has been getting acquainted with every single person on campus, including the lady who serves pasta in the dining hall and a French guy she met in the dorm elevator. (He lives in Paris. Imagine LIVING IN PARIS and deciding to go to college IN MINNESOTA.) She has been generously communicative with us in this initial stage, and it's been fun vicariously experiencing the collegiate delight of going somewhere new and starting a new life with lots of comfortable safeguards. She's making lots of new experience categories.

*I tried to look this up to determine if this single-sentence paragraph has any actual science behind it or if I just completely made it up, and the search results I got were along the lines of "when will my toddler learn to sort objects" and so I may have made it up.

** I don't know where she got this number, or if it's accurate. 

Next steps

 Duchess and I went to Minnesota to deliver her to college. She had a LOT of feelings about this, as you can imagine, but the predominant feeling was excitement. 

This is Duchess sadly saying goodbye to Portland.

We stayed the night in St Paul, got into the dorm the next morning. 

Duchess is housed in The Worst Dorm on Campus (a time-honored rite of passage for unlucky freshmen across the country). She's making the best of it, though, and already relishing her new adventure. She's going to thrive, grim cinderblocks be damned.

(And I got to do a little bonus touristing - it's been 25 years since I last saw Minnesota!)

Summer!

 We made it! We finished the school year, made the turn into summer.

Duchess graduated from 12th grade. 

Skipper graduated from 8th grade. 

Duchess is heading off to Sweden for a couple of weeks, and while she's gone Skipper will play a lot of ultimate frisbee and Cook and I will prepare to move back into our actual house. 

Also, here are some photos from Skipper's trip to Japan, courtesy of other people who took pictures of her.

what is time

Here's Duchess (and Skipper) on her first day of kindergarten.

Here's Duchess (and Skipper) today, on her last day of 12th grade. (Skipper was not yet awake enough for the sunny morning.)

I took Duchess out for mediocre pizza to celebrate at the end of the day. She has a weekend of parties and sentimental weeping over yearbook notes to come, and then graduation next week. 

Winding down the school year

 Time has passed! It was relentlessly cold and rainy here for a long time, and then very terribly hot for a week, and now we're back to a normal late spring, and everything is so green and flowering and lovely. A lot of things have happened. 

Duchess is wallowing in intense sentiment as she wraps up her high school experience. She chose a college, had a great time at prom, finished up debate season, ran at a fancy track meet in the fancy Eugene stadium that apparently runners care a lot about, walked the Wildwood Trail in a day, published her last edition of the school newspaper, picked up her graduation gown... all the things. 

Meanwhile, Skipper was busy hating track, playing ultimate frisbee, turning 14, and going on a long-awaited 2-week school trip to Osaka (where she loved the orderliness, the built environment, the rice for breakfast, and the vending machines, and disliked the lack of fresh green produce). True to form, she returned from Japan with piles of candy to share with us, but no photos of herself, so you'll have to settle for a photo that she took in Japan.

Here are miscellaneous photos of my smirky girls.

 

Frayed around the edges, but let's talk about pets

We're fine. Not thriving, but fine. Cook and I are still employed. Kids "passed" their distance learning classes (though I'm pretty sure they learned nothing). Here they are, in a rare moment of being together and not actively crying or yelling at me or eachother.

But I'm here today to tell you about the pets. 2020 is the year of Pandemic, Social Collapse and Pet Adventures at Our House.

1) Regarding Guinea Pigs. Snufkin is dead. He got bladder stones and started peeing blood and crying in pain, and we had him euthanized. There was a whole ethical crisis around this (we COULD have gotten him expensive surgery and a lifetime of medicine with no guarantee the stones wouldn't recur, leaving me awake at night pondering the ramifications of holding a small life in my hands and whether I was euthanizing him because he's never liked us, etc.), but we did it. RIP Snufkin. (He got to eat a last meal of treats that we'd never given him before.)

And then we set about trying to replace him, because guinea pigs do not like to be alone. We went back to the guinea pig rescue fanatics and tried speed-dating Momo with a couple of potential buddies. She was okay with one of them, Fracas, so we took him home. He was really charming - much more curious and friendly than Snufkin or Momo have ever been.

But when we took him home, we realized pretty quickly that he was also peeing blood. I told the kind guinea pig fanatics that I could not do this again, and they took him back. (Turned out he had a bladder stone and an enormous kidney stone, so he's now in hospice care at the rescue.) We tried speed-dating again, but Momo, as it turns out, is too passive to manage most males, and wasn't compatible with the few females available. They don't adopt out unspayed females, and spays are non-essential procedures, so we're waiting until they have some more spayed females ready for speed-dating. Hopefully we'll get Momo a buddy sometime soon so she doesn't die of loneliness. Pro tip: Guinea pigs are terrible pets.

2) Regarding The Dogs. We have had a series of foster dogs. Cook does not particularly enjoy dogs, so this has been a sacrifice for him, and they have been a lot of work, but they do provide something to think about that isn't us, which I do appreciate.

Dog #1 was a lovely, mild-mannered giant American Bulldog mix who was confident and able to self-regulate. He loved tug of war and lying in very soft places. In retrospect, we can see that he was exceptionally easy. (Pro tip: by all accounts and our anecdotal experience, American Bulldogs are excellent pets.) We had him for maybe six weeks, and then he was adopted.

Dog #2, an old boxer mix, arrived late at night, straight from a 14 hour drive in a van full of dogs from a shelter in Northern California. She also arrived infested with ticks and with a burgeoning case of pneumonia. She was quite fat (thyroid issue) and had very limited mobility. She also didn't much care for people, but defended our house and me (as her food source) with unpleasant barking, growling, and snarling. None of us much liked her, but we all felt a lot of sympathy for her because of the neglect that brought her to the situation and condition she was in. (Old dogs, apparently, make up a lot of the shelter population because nobody wants them.) We had her for a couple weeks, long enough to get her over the pneumonia and ticks (Duchess was our expert tick wrangler - life skills!). When she snapped at Skipper, we asked the dog rescue fanatics to move her to another foster home, which they did. (She subsequently was moved to another home, one free of dogs, cats, children and stairs. Not an easy dog, and I can't imagine she'll ever be adopted.)

Dog #3 is a subfoster from another foster household who went on a dog-free weeklong vacation. He's our first dog under 85 pounds, a medium-sized pitbull mix who would like to spend all his time in your lap. He's our most people-loving dog so far, coming up to people wiggling and smiling and wanting love. He also is horrible to walk, because he pulls a lot is distracted by everything, forgets there's a person at the end of the leash, and lunges hard at passing bicycles, motorcycles, squirrels, and other dogs. Also, he occasionally marks pee in the house so he has to be supervised constantly.

Dog #4 is about to arrive tonight, a few hours after Dog #3 leaves - he may be the last for us for a while. He is a medium-large middle-aged pitbull, infested with fleas and with some kind of skin condition that's probably mange, and he's unneutered, so we'll be making some vet trips (and probably cleaning up a lot of pee...).

So there we are. Maintaining at one dog and one guinea pig. I hope you and all your pets are well, and that nobody is peeing blood right now in your home.

Also,

Skipper has grown nearly an inch since July, devastating her clothing budget and making us speculate that maybe SHE's going to be the child who grows to an enormous adult height, since Duchess appears to be done with growing.

(This is Pioneer Square, where the Christmas tree was set up this weekend, and an enormous poop was also set up to advertise something.)

growth

Skipper has grown four inches this year. (Imagine how much she'd have grown if she ate vegetables!) She's no longer small for her age, and with her new haircut, her sardonic perspective, and her facility with words, she doesn't really come across as child-like a lot of the time.

It's messy and weird in here.

I've been thinking a lot about pain over the last year. I haven't experienced very much pain, personally. I occasionally get headaches, of course, and I've had a few minor injuries that were painful (fireworks are BAD!!!!), including sports injuries that still occasionally hurt, decades later. I'm not like that lady in Scotland. But pain hasn't really been a feature in my life. When I was a kid, my family didn't really do over-the-counter medicine. We definitely had aspirin or ibuprofen or acetaminophen or something that was occasionally used for things like headaches. And band-aids, I guess? But I don't remember pain or discomfort being really a thing in our life. The sense was that discomfort is a symptom of something that might need to be treated, but the discomfort itself doesn't necessarily or even usually merit treatment. Pain felt (and still mostly feels) like a clear, direct and actionable communication from my physical body to my thinking. Your head hurts? Drink some water. Take a nap. Your stomach hurts? Drink some water. Rest. Wait and see what happens. For now, for me, this mostly works. (Except chest pain associated with anxiety. That's weird and confusing and unproductive.)

For the last few years, Duchess has had lots of experience with discomfort. She was a pretty robust kid who didn't get sick often and rarely complained of pain. Since adolescence rolled around, though, she complains of menstrual pain, knee pain (from ultimate frisbee) and now back pain (from rowing). She has had recurring episodes of dizziness and fatigue (we thought she was anemic, but she wasn't even close - turned out that MY iron levels were low, though). We've vacillated between telling her to just suck it up, and taking her to the doctor, where the diagnosis is always that they're not sure what's going on, but there's nothing seriously wrong. My paradigm isn't working here.

And then there the emotional pain. Duchess frequently talks about how her friends have "hurt" her or other friends. Usually by saying something casually or even accidentally mean. She is very, very upset and righteous when people hurt her. I find most of the the "hurt" she's describing to be far below my threshold for "hurt," even in 14-year-old-adjusted terms, and the grandiosity of it feels off to me. This makes me feel like she (and all her friends) put far too much weight on Being Hurt. My theory is that girls are socialized to feel that being hurt and feeling pain are legitimate emotional experiences for them. Being angry or annoyed or humiliated or indignant aren't okay, because they're more outward-facing, but being hurt and being a victim is.

Some of Duchess's friends are also engaging in self-harming activities like cutting or disordered eating, and I think this aligns with my theory - they're embracing Being Hurt as a way to focus and feel in control of the emotional chaos in which they live. I looked up self-harming on the crisis text line website recently, and was surprised to see on the list of self-harming activities something that Duchess actually does right in front of me, which is hitting herself in the head (with her hands). I've only seen her do this a few times, and never actually hard enough to do damage, but it is shocking every time. She does it when she's upset, and it does seem to be a way to channel her emotions, so I guess it makes sense that it falls into the same category as cutting.

Both my kids do a thing when they're upset that also seems similar, though less controlled - they move around the house in a way (fast, careless, flailing) that makes it inevitable that they'll bang into a doorframe or a table or fall down or hurt themselves physically in some other way. I think they're experiencing an imbalance - an inner storm and an outer calm. I believe that girls, especially girls like mine who are deeply invested in being Good, don't feel entitled to just let out that inner storm into the calm world. So they have to create an outer context that is acting on them that feels like it rationalizes the inner storm. They have to Be Hurt.

I recently listened to an interesting Invisibilia episode about girls and pain, exploring the phenomenon of people (mostly teenage girls, I think) with "amplified pain" who feel unexplained pain, and following a girl who was pursuing a treatment involving doing a lot of painful things to sort of retrain her nervous system not to respond so sensitively. (There was also a kerfuffle of angry responses to the episode, apparently, pointing out that dismissal of women's pain, and particularly girls' pain, is a long and bad tradition and should be vigorously challenged.) I guess what I'm coming to is mostly just an awareness of how little I understand. I can't tell Duchess how she should experience pain, or what she should do when she's experiencing it. It's real pain; she's feeling it. But what it is, how it should be labeled, where it comes from, and what it means, I have no idea. For now, we talk about it with her, and try to help her unpack what she's feeling. She's emotionally wise for an eighth-grader, so she can understand what we're getting at (when she's not in the throes of The Feelings). But none of us have any solutions.

What I think Duchess might have, though, thanks to her ridiculous, masochistic sport, is evidence that if she keeps going, if she moves through pain, she gets through it, and sometimes she also gets something more - in this case, mighty thigh muscles, strong calloused hands, and an improved ability to make boats go fast. Rowing is pretty much entirely the practice of enduring physical discomfort. The coaches set out barf buckets next to the rowing machines. So Duchess experiences something nearly every day that I almost never experience - pushing her body to the point of pain/intense discomfort and having to keep going through that. (Note that I don't necessarily recommend this approach. I have a lot of qualms.)

Discomfort is usually associated with change. If we don't see it for what it is, if we avoid it (hi, Skipper!) or explain it by tying it to external circumstances that are unrelated (hi, Duchess!), we can miss the opportunity that change offers, whether it's physical, intellectual, or emotional. But not all change is good, either, and it's often hard to tell if it's the kind of discomfort that will tear you down or build you up. Basically, I have no idea what we're doing here.

It's all about me, part 586

Having my youngest child turn ten feels like a personal milestone in my life. I am officially a Parent of Old Kids. Then there's Parent of Multiple Teenagers, and then there's Parent of a College-Age Kid, and then there's Parent of Adult Children. It's a different place, here, and I like it. (Except for the part where I'm going to die.)

I like that my kids do things themselves. Skipper gets away with us doing a lot more for her than Duchess has, because she gets so ragey when asked to do things that it's just easier to not ask, but even she is stepping up to the plate more, and can of course do most things in a pinch. Duchess requires almost no transportation to anything, and while she resents that her friends all get rides everywhere,* she does like the freedom of being able to take the bus all over the city on her own schedule. Having them both be able to stay home on their own is a great blessing. Having them decide to make pancakes and then make them themselves is lovely.

And I like that they are their own people. Weird, poorly behaved, selfish people, but still.

Duchess is in Canada this week, at a rowing regatta. She's experiencing the Duchess Plateau in rowing right now, and she's struggling with it. As usual, her coachability gave her early success, and she quickly rose to the top of the group of the kids she started rowing with. Now, though, her improvement has flattened out, and some of the other kids are getting better faster than she is. With that, plus the addition of new, good rowers coming from other clubs (Duchess's club is the largest and most competitive in the area), Duchess actually got demoted to a worse boat last week. She was very, very, very upset. It's an interesting moment - I'm not sure if her enjoyment of the sport and of her friends is enough to push her through the discomfort. I thought that when you rowed, you competed at the beginning of the season, got placed in a boat, and rowed with that boat all season. That's not the case at all; you're continually competing with others to protect your place and try to displace the next person in the ranks. She's a sensitive person, and external judgement is very important to her, so this constant evaluation is hard on her, even when she's moving up or holding fast. When she's moving DOWN, it's very hard. And she's also not temperamentally inclined to voluntarily and on her own do the kind of extra work it would take to improve her outcomes. Cook and I are watching with interest - we have no idea if she'll quit and move on to other activities, or if she'll keep doing it and keep being tormented (this is definitely the worst outcome for the rest of the family, since Duchess does NOT suffer in silence), or if she'll keep doing it and develop a reasonable coping strategy. Or if she'll suddenly, magically turn into the kind of person who does extra work on her own. Or if she'll become the largest coxwain in the rowing world. Stay tuned!

I keep interviewing for jobs and not being hired for them. (I actually bought a blazer for my last interview!) I'm trying to learn how to brag more and also blather less, which are both difficult for me. I find that am a self-deprecating but also somehow self-centered windbag, which is a weird combination, and not great for convincing people to hire you.



*This makes me bonkers. Our neighbors drive the .75 miles to the local grocery store, and 1.2 miles to their kids' school. If people can't even manage walking or biking those trips on quiet streets with sidewalks, climate change seems completely unsolveable. 

It isn't summer any more.

It's fall!

Duchess is in eighth grade, and she seems cool with it so far. She has a pretty brutal rowing schedule lined up, so it remains to be seen how that works in balance with homework and her demanding social media brand. I'm guessing a bunch of tantrums will be part of the process, but I'm holding out hopes.

Skipper is in fourth grade. She would like to drop out of school. I'm guessing a bunch of tantrums will be part of her school year as well.

We took first-day-of-school photos, and they were really adorable. However, there was no memory card in the camera, so they exist only in my memory.

First Day of Seventh Grade

Summer winds down.

Hello from steamy Portland! We've been in an oppressive streak of hot days, which combined with a few days of terrible air quality to make a miserable end-of-last-week. But we survived. We try not to move very much. Skipper has been sleeping in the basement because the upper bunk in a west-facing bedroom is unbearable at her bedtime.*

Updates: 

1) We had our third weekend in a row of camping, and it was a lot of fun. The camera ran out of batteries, so I have no photographs. But it was fun. There were a LOT of my relatives, and dogs, and an adorable toddler, and there was river floating and swimming. The kids were thrilled. Duchess paddled an inflatable kayak by herself, and she loved that - she was afraid at first, and then super-pleased with herself for not falling out in one of the little rapids. Skipper got to ride in a canoe, and also was afraid at first and then delighted by the experience. And now we're home for a weekend, scrambling to catch up with all the stuff that went undone for nearly a month.

2) Duchess is gone, off in Minnesota competing in an ultimate frisbee tournament, under the quasi-supervision of some young volunteer coaches (thank you, volunteer coaches).** After the tournament, she's going straight off for a few days at a lake house with a teammate and the teammate's relatives. She'll be gone for a week total, and doing stuff that requires her to take more responsibility than she ever has before for both logistics and her own emotional and physical well-being. She seems to be having a great time so far, as far as we can glean from her cursory, infrequent communications.*** Cook and I fully expect she will return home completely converted to ultimate frisbee. Duchess was born to be part of a team,**** and ultimate has some fundamental characteristics that really appeal to her, plus she loves the people. One of her communications was pretty much a lot of squee over a player she thinks is AMAZING! 

3) Skipper has been muddling through all her activities in a storm of anger, fear, and resentfulness.  She's been struggling with swimming - she has missed so many practices due to vacations and camp that she hasn't ever really settled into it, and she still feels very uncomfortable. She has also continued to struggle with ultimate - she enjoys it but feels really uncomfortable because she's so bad at it. She went to her first ballet class today very anxious, and came through it okay. She's talking and thinking a lot now about her habitual thought patterns, though, which is potentially a very good development. (Actually, having Duchess gone is giving her a time and space to do a lot of interesting processing. Last night she asked me where love is stored in the heart - if there's like a big reservoir or what.)

That's pretty much it. We're turning the corner toward school now, and I think both kids are looking forward to settling back into it...

* I have also learned this week that Skipper is extremely embarrassed by the way I look in a tank top. I've been trying to explain to her that body-shaming is not okay, and also I'm HOT and I'm going to let my blotchy upper arms fly.

** To clarify, Duchess is now playing ultimate frisbee at an elite level not because she's good (she's mediocre, though being tall is helpful), but because teen girls who play ultimate even mediocrely are scarce in Portland, and an even smaller number of them have families who can be suckered into buying their kid a plane ticket to Minnesota.

***Either she's having a great time or she's joined a cult. I guess we'll find out when we go to pick her up at the airport.

**** Left alone, she's pretty much an inert lump. Put her in a team environment, and she instantly kindles into life and becomes an energetic, responsive, thoughtful, engaged participant. Take away the team, and you have a lump again. It's an amazing social alchemy. 

8

Skipper had a birthday party. (You weren't invited. Sorry.) This year, she opted for a sleepover party. Duchess played host again, which was nice. Everybody had a lot of fun, and it was pretty much a rip-roaring success.

Thanks

We gave thanks! (Though the political climate put a wet blanket on our thanky-ness. Cook, on his turn to offer up a thing to be thankful for, said glumly "We don't have Mussolini for president.")

I forgot to say a thing I was thankful for, so I'm offering it now: I'm thankful I have two kids who are old enough and competent enough to stay HOME ALONE TOGETHER on a day when they have no school and Cook and I have to work. They did this for the first time on Wednesday, and it was uneventful. They fought some, were bored some, went out together to the local coffee shop to purchase hot chocolate, and they decorated for Thanksgiving. 

We had a wonderful holiday, as it turned out. I decided last weekend that I'd like to actually do Thanksgiving food this year instead of burritos (I love burritos, but I love stuffing, too), and everybody got on board. We had stuffing and mashed potatoes (I ran the starch department) and brussels sprouts (Cook ran the vitamins department) and lemon bars (Skipper ran the dessert department with Cook's help) and apple pie (Duchess ran the other dessert department with Cook's help). I think that between those menu items we ate a few sticks of butter apiece. We didn't bother with the cleaning or decorating other than the girls' festooning, and didn't stand much on ceremony with the meal, but we had a really good holiday. It rained torrentially all day. We draped ourselves around the house and played games and watched a movie and bickered and digested and just goofed around. Lovely. I hope you all had lovely holidays of your own, in your own style!

Duchess turned twelve

The natural course of things

My kids are getting old, you guys. (This, presumably, means I'm getting old. Let's talk about that in another post.) This year, nobody in the family had to buy crayons for school. Let that sink in.

My family is Beyond Crayons.

Here's what the kids are up to:

1) Skipper is totally and happily back in the school routine. She has a nice variety of friends and feels comfortable and happy with her social situation. Academics are a breeze. She had a friend sleep over for the very first time last weekend, and today is off on an all-day hike with another friend and her family. She's made a new friend at her kung fu after-care program and continues to really enjoy that. She has chosen to do piano lessons as her one additional activity and is showing signs that she may eventually stop being a complete asshole about practicing it. She is willing to wear at least four different pairs of pants, though she still refuses to wear any shoes but the one pair of sneakers (her fourth pair of the same make and model, though she has gone through several different colors). She continues to be alarmingly clear-eyed and articulate, and to be aggressively nasty and obnoxious whenever she feels any kind of emotional pain (it's way more comfortable to dump your pain by blaming somebody else than to unpack it inside yourself, apparently). In sum, everything is going pretty damn well. Homework starts this week, though, and that may introduce some new unpleasantness...

2) Duchess is hurtling into teenagerhood at high speed. Cook and I are taking a fairly hands-off approach to her middle school experience, giving her a lot of independence and letting her work out things like how to organize her stuff and her time effectively. She's the last of us to leave in the morning, so she washes the breakfast dishes, turns off the lights, locks the door behind her, and walks very slowly to school, picking up a large gaggle of friends on the way. She negotiates a day of switching classes, moving herself, her notebooks, her PE uniform, and her flute to class and between lockers as needed. Also, apparently lots of  social negotiations. After school she hangs out teenagerily with friends on the playground for a while, then walks very slowly home, dropping off a large gaggle of friends on the way. Two days a week, she gets ready for her evening kung fu class, feeds herself a snack, and leaves the house again to walk to class before the rest of us even get home. Yesterday after school she walked straight to ultimate frisbee practice and then straight to a Dungeons and Dragons* session at a friend's house. Cook picked her up at 8PM, twelve hours after he had last seen her. She's thriving. There are occasional flareups of tantrums/histrionics and she's pretty nastily sarcastic (fair enough, given her genetics) and sulky, as might be expected, but in general, she's just straight up happy. She likes her teachers and classes fine, she is building new friendships and reinforcing old ones, and generally she's delighted with everything. She's probably 5'6" now and looks like she's 15, so she's getting attention from older boys that is confusing and alarming and thrilling, and she often wants to discuss and analyze those experiences she had during the day that felt out of her depth. She still wants to talk about everything, actually. She literally follows me and Cook around the house, talking endlessly about her teachers, her friends, her worries, her excitements, her D&D character, the book she's reading, etc. This is lovely and also spectacularly tedious.

Also, Cook and I are okay.

The weather has turned and it's definitely not summer anymore. This is okay, too - time marches on!



* Yes. This is happening now. Duchess's extracurriculars are gymnastics class, kung fu classes, dorks-in-the-woods one weekend a month, ultimate frisbee  and Dungeons and Dragons.  Basically, nerd training. Oh, and she's doing band at school, so she practices flute at home a lot. Nerd training!

It's fall!

Last Monday was the first day of school.

Seems like it's going pretty well. Skipper is sliding comfortably into second grade, and Duchess is boggled, stressed out, and delighted by sixth grade and middle school. She likes ALL her teachers, has a few friends in some classes, is making  new friends (including the only girl in sixth grade who is taller than she is), and is handling it all okay.

Weirdly, Duchess also appears to have turned into a stereotypical middle schooler overnight. She texts. She sulks. She brought home the roster of cool after-school activities offered by parks and rec at her school - super-conveniently located and timed, and very cheap - and when I asked her which ones interested her, she said "Eh, I don't want to do any of them..." and Cook and I both turned and stared at her. She had expressed great enthusiasm and excitement for after-school activities just a few months ago. "Why not?" I asked. "Nobody does this stuff, Mom," she said. When I pointed out that she likes people who have eccentric interests, and that in fact most people, even middle schoolers, respect people with eccentric interests and enthusiasms, she reluctantly conceded that was true. But I don't think she's signing up for any after school activities regardless.*


*She still does kung fu twice a week, and gymnastics and ultimate frisbee, plus dorks-in-the-woods, so she has plenty going on. But still. 

Hey, it's been a while, eh?

I'm home today with a limp and feverish Skipper, and feeling kind of crummy myself - perfect opportunity to blog!

Except I don't really have much to say. I'm not doing a lot of thinking lately.

I'm starting to tentatively look for another job (mine will officially be over at the end of June) while also trying to do decent work at my current job, which has brought me to tears several times over the last few weeks, once (humiliatingly) in public. This is pretty draining.

Duchess continues to be large and loud. Skipper continues to be small and mean. They both continue to refuse to take any responsibility for anything going wrong, and this continues to madden me and Cook.

Skipper is quite happy without gymnastics.

I've laid out the basic summer plans already, and Skipper is, for the first time, going to a mini (one-night) sleepaway camp. She wants to do this for the same reason she wants to do many things - to match up to Duchess (who would be delighted to spend the whole summer at sleepaway camp). She also has a friend who's going to a WEEK of sleepaway camp, and wants Skipper to come. We haven't decided on that one. Duchess is going to a week of sleepaway horse camp, and is very, very, very excited. The plan is also to have Duchess do parks and rec swim team again, which means an hour of swimming every weekday morning. If I am employed, she will be on her own all day, and will walk herself home and (presumably) lie on the couch reading for six hours at a stretch. She's pretty excited about this, too. (Skipper, predictably, is pissed that she will have to go to daycamp if I have a job, and do stupid activities with stupid other people instead of getting to lie on the couch and read for six hours. I pretty much feel this way about work, so I get it. Stupid other people.)

We're also thinking that it's probably time to buy the kid a phone. Many questions remain.

The Eating Less campaign continues, with decent success. I still feel that it is easy to see what I have to do, and set things up so I can generally do them successfully, but I certainly feel the drain of the requirement that I have to repeatedly and endlessly make the choice to not eat, and to stop eating. There's only so much I can do to set myself up to make better choices, because I can't actually set things up so I don't eat at all. Eating less, unlike many other self-control challenges, requires me to frequently do a little of the thing that I want to do a LOT, and then exert willpower in order to stop doing the thing. That's a big demand on my small reserves of self-control.

That's about it. I have to write up some job applications now...