Hm.

I'm sitting in my living room taking a break from work while Skipper has a FaceTime piano lesson. Cook is on a conference call, and Duchess is rattling around somewhere. I've had three hours of conference calls today, and have two more scheduled for later. I also have a date scheduled with a friend - we're planning to complain to each other by phone while we walk in our neighborhoods, miles apart.

Our household is pretty much in full social distancing. Kirk and I both work at home full time, and often one of us is on a conference call in one room while the other is on a conference call in the next room. School is closed through the end of April. The school district is scrambling to set up distance learning, and in the meantime Duchess has no homework and Skipper is supposed to do three hours of stuff a day.

Restaurants and bars are closed, library is closed, activities are cancelled. The kids both got to hang out with friends (outside, no touching) yesterday, but I think that was probably the last time. Skipper has begun writing letters to friends. I go to the grocery store once in a while, but they're often out of things like split peas or toilet paper or flour or tofu (all apparently important staples here in Portland). We're all just... waiting. Presumably we're waiting until they can start robust testing and we can all start circulating again and find out what's left in the rubble. I've been buying gift certificates to local businesses in the hope they'll still exist in a year.  My boss has begun a conversation about how staff would like to begin cutting the budget - cut back on extras, reduce hours, reduce retirement contributions...?

There are some outcomes that seem positive. We bought a Nintendo console, to be more American and have another home entertainment option. Cook and I are scrambling to figure out cheap jury-rigged home office setups that aren't terrible ergonomically. We're getting some yardwork and baking and household chores done. (I have been attending remote plenary sessions for the conference I was planning to attend in Chicago, and it turns out listening to people talk while washing dishes is a good combination.) Duchess is planning to crop and hem a bunch of t-shirts so they look cool. I'm getting more confident with conference call tools. I think. We're trying to make the best of this, or at least not the worst.

Momentum and inertia

Summer is rapidly approaching. The kids have reached the point in the school year where everything is pointing toward end-of-year performances/tests/celebrations/field trips. The weather is leaning hard toward shorts. The trees are leafing out. Cook is mowing the lawn right now.

I find myself even more than usually lazy. I literally lay in the hammock yesterday and did nothing but lie there and grow my ennui. It was pretty nice, but I do recognize that weeds need pulling and dishes need washing and dinner needs cooking, and it's probably not a great marital-maintenance plan to just let Cook do all of it. Last weekend I forced Skipper to accompany me to the library and grocery store, and she objected strenuously. I said she needed to leave the house and do something other than loaf, and she said "WHY!? What's the POINT? Why can't I just read books and do word searches?" and I didn't really have a great argument for that. So maybe she's just persuaded me to give in to the sloth.

It just seems like there's so much schlepping; a classic middle-class middle-aged person's complaint - orthodontist appointments, dentist appointments, eye doctor appointments, regular doctor appointments, vet appointments, roller skating lessons, grocery shopping, hardware store trips, bike repair appointments, car repair appointments. Plus, you know, work and housework and the normal slog of shepherding everybody through the day. It feels like A Lot, even while it also feels like a great stroke of luck to be able to have this particular bag of A Lot.

We're all doing the same old things. Skipper is walking herself home from school every day and latchkeying it. She likes that a lot. She instant-messages us when she gets home to tell us she's home, and then she just reads for hours. The third day she did it, I was at a meeting when she normally arrives home, and didn't look at my phone till a little later when I was alarmed to find no message. I got a text pretty much right away from Father Blond, saying that Skipper was at his house and that she was "Wet. Unhappy." Turned out Skipper had run home in the rain (she had no raincoat, due to poor planning) and couldn't find her key in her backpack, so she left her backpack on the back steps and walked to the Blonds' house. She knows she's not allowed to cross the major street between our house and theirs except at a controlled intersection, but she got disoriented and walked much further out of her way than she needed to to get to a light. She walked 16 blocks in the rain, terrified that she was going to get arrested (she actually saw a school friend of hers and hid behind a corner until the friend's family was out of sight because she was afraid that they would call the police if they knew she was unescorted), and arrived at the Blond house weeping and soaking wet. She was upset, scared, embarrassed and uncomfortable. After I retrieved her, I pointed out that she had in fact just demonstrated her coping skills by solving the problem in a fairly sensible way, and she made a bunch of good decisions. I felt a lot more confident about the whole thing after that episode. I'm not sure that she shares my confidence; as always, she was pretty focused on the stressful and humiliating elements of the experience. I did reassure her that the police are NOT going to arrest her for walking alone in the rain.

That's pretty much the news.

updates

1) I had two days at work last week that did not meet my new baseline for a successful day. One of my coworkers offered today to teach me a few exercises she learned "from a local shaman" to help me shield myself from negativity emanating from other people. I enthusiastically took her up on it. At this point, any kind of shielding - magical, physical, psychological, hypnotic, technological, imaginary, placebo, cardboard box, whatever - is something I will try. We scheduled a training session for tomorrow (right before I have to go talk with some people I really need to be shielded from). I'll let you know if it works.
2) I am continuing to Eat Less. I consequently weigh less. (I suspect that my commitment to this campaign is due to the fact that I desperately need a successful project in my life to balance my increasingly awful projects at work.) Turns out that I don't actually need to eat anywhere near as much as I thought I did in order to function perfectly well. I don't know where this knowledge is going to take me, but it's probably a good thing to know.
3) I am bullying everybody in the house into an ongoing pseudo/lite-KonMari tidying process, one small category at a time. Next weekend, stuffed animals!
4) Skipper has a piano recital coming up.
5) Duchess meets every stereotype of adolescence that you could possibly imagine. Surly? Check. Sulky? Check. Sleeps late? Check. Really wants a phone? Check. Et cetera.

6) Skipper lost another tooth.

Raising an adult

I've been thinking about parenting.* Both the kids right now are storming through growth periods, transitioning more or less into being A Grade-Schooler and A Middle-Schooler. Both these stages involve increased rights and responsibilities, and they're working out how to balance these things. I have been reading a book about the perils of helicoptering, and considering how to balance things in our family life.  In general, I think Cook and I are pretty good about giving our kids opportunities to handle stuff on their own, though of course we can do better. However, some of the cautions in the book, particularly about overscheduling and under-responsibility-ing, ring alarmingly true to me. Since reading the book, I am considering how to deschedule the girls a bit. It is very evident how much Duchess is benefiting from her free time in the afternoon (which will be somewhat less expansive when she starts Chinese one day a week next week). She loves being home alone to do homework, practice flute, and lie around reading or playing Minecraft. She listens to music and podcasts and practices being a teenager. More free time for everybody would clearly be a good thing.

I am also stepping up chore expectations a bit (though not as much as apparently I should). This school year we have a chore chart on a whiteboard, with chore cards affixed by magnets. The cards get moved to "done" when they're done, and it means much less nagging.** I've added a few new chores since reading this latest parenting book, mostly after a review of the annoying small tasks that I do that make me crazy - I realized that the kids can do many of them. The first thing I punted to them is the packing of lunches. (I think I need to next get them washing the lunch dishes, since the endlessly repeated washing of those damned small containers remains pretty much my least favorite chore.)*** This is working out okay. Not great. Okay.

The trick here is to make these tasks so consistent and regular that they become automated and the girls stop complaining/arguing/resisting. Skipper in particular is so relentlessly awful about doing chores that it is very tempting to just give up. Duchess tends to flare up, yell, cry, and then angrily do the chore very ostentatiously and then be quite pleased with herself for having done the chore. (She usually brags about it.) Skipper never moves past the yelling and crying. She's actually kind of a genius about resisting things. She ends up taking so much time and energy to do the chore that we subsequently ALL consider the chore as much larger and more painful than it actually is. While her schedule is far busier than it should be (and I'm just talking about the aftercare required by having two working parents, not an overscheduled life of extracurriculars), she has plenty of time to get her chores done if she just did them. She does not have plenty of time for extensive screaming and crying AND doing chores.****

This weekend, Duchess is gone on her 48-hour ninja adventure, and we're having an unusual stint of weekend time with just Skipper. Turns out she's MUCH nicer when she's an only child. And it also turns out that she's more willing to do chores. The presence of a sibling creates an additional energy-drain because each kid has to constantly assess the Fairness and What She's Doing While I'm Doing This. It's exhausting for them, and for me and Cook.

Anyway. Oh! The other thing I've been meaning to tell you (all of you) is that we have been trying to do Movie Nights on Friday nights. And right now there is ONE thing that we can all watch and enjoy together as a family. ONE thing. Skipper likes incredibly mild television (Caillou!) and cannot bear more than a frisson of possible danger, and Duchess still has pretty unsophisticated tastes as well (she loves a TV show called Lab Rats). Cook likes depressing, complicated movies and TV shows. I like silly TV shows. The ONE thing we can watch together is Mythbusters. That's it. Thank goodness there are so many seasons.




*I always think about parenting; I suspect I think about parenting as a way to love my kids without actually being with them, similar to my diligence about reserving books from the library for them.

** Or at least different nagging - I say "How's the board coming?" instead of "Did you brush your hair? Did you brush your teeth? Did you pack your lunch? Did you pack your lunchbag? Did you pack your flute?")

*** The girls spent a few days this summer at an expensive day camp which has a few major selling points, but key among them is that you can drop your kids off any day you want, without reserving a day, and the camp provides ALL THE FOOD. No small containers!

**** Want to know what they do for chores? Of course you do. Duchess does the family's breakfast dishes every day, changes all her bed linens once a week and cleans the toilet once a week. Skipper cleans the bathroom sink (when Cook doesn't get impatient and clean it first) and strips her own bed every week. They both are responsible for at least one irregular household chore (like organizing and cleaning the spice rack) per week as assigned, tidying their own things daily, and periodically making their room less miserably messy. They both are (now) responsible for packing and unpacking their own lunches and backpacks for school. Their non-chore daily tasks are practicing flute/piano, homework, and personal care. We need to start moving Skipper into dishwashing and Duchess into cooking...

Rehashed

I'm unemployed! Hurrah! I kicked off my unemployment by getting my teeth cleaned yesterday morning.* Hurrah! The kids have two more weeks of school, and then we're all summer all the time.

Now on to today's topic: gender!  I've written here about gender and school socializing before, but it's always in the back of my mind, so I'll probably write about it a hundred more times before I'm through. I continue to be irritated by the way that every single teacher Duchess has had has embraced the same system, in which the Responsible Girls are tapped to help the teacher with chores. Duchess started out by escorting feckless classmates to the bathroom in kindergarten, and it's been all chores ever since. She LIKES the chores, of course, because they come with teacher approval and a thrilling sense of maturity and independence, and this is just the way the system works throughout school. But it really pisses me off. Boys are not expected to be Responsible. Girls who are Responsible are normal, just meeting the expectations of Girlhood, and boys are almost never even asked to do Responsible things like cleaning up the classroom unsupervised while everybody else is out at recess. Girls do extra work because they are Responsible. Boys do whatever they want, get in minor trouble (A reprimand! Sent to the office where nothing bad happens and they get to miss some class!), and never clean up. Even when everybody is supposed to be cleaning up together, guess who's doing most of the work? I was just reading somewhere** the theory that this socialization makes boys learn that failure isn't actually that big a deal - they experience first-hand, early in life, that the consequences of doing something wrong, or breaking the rules, aren't actually that bad. This leads to more risk-taking behavior in life and in work.** Girls often never get the chance to try breaking the rules, because they're steered so hard away from it, and if they DO break the rules, the social (and sometimes the disciplinary) ramifications are more unpleasant, because they're breaking social expectations as well as school rules. So they learn to follow the rules all the time, and the perceived risk of breaking them, or of failing to live up to expectations, just gets bigger and bigger in their minds. Boys can be careless, self-centered, irresponsible, and disruptive, without suffering serious immediate consequences. Girls have a lot less wiggle room. I asked Duchess what would happen if she said "No, I don't want to clean up the classroom. I want to go out to recess," and she said (understandably) that she just could not say that. She's nine, and she's already stuck not only cleaning up the classroom, but also feeling like a failure when she doesn't get 20 out of 20 on her spelling test.*** And we wonder why women don't become CEOs. (Or rather, only become CEOs when there's a mess that needs to be cleaned up.)

I understand why teachers lean so hard on the Responsible Girl model. They have a lot of shit to do, and very little time, and it probably doesn't occur to most of them that there's any problem with the time-honored Responsible Girl tradition.  There aren't any administrators I know of out there who are interested in doing the heavy culture-changing lifting it would take to break that model and try a model in which boys and girls are given the same expectations.

On a related note, Cook alerted me to this amazing piece of news: people take hurricanes with female names less seriously than hurricanes with male names. More people get killed by storms with female names than by those with male names because they can't be bothered to evacuate for a frivolous girly storm. This is disturbing in a lot of ways.

I feel overwhelmed by the way the world just beats down girls.  And don't even give me the statistics about how girls are over-represented in college. Whatever - that's just an advanced education in Being a Responsible Girl. (Also, being Responsible Girl means being diligent in avoiding being raped. Because that's your job, just like keeping the classroom clean and getting good grades.) What matters is all the rest of life, and I don't see any progress happening there.

And yes, there are many Responsible Boys and Men**** out there, and Irresponsible Girls and Women, too. And this is all pretty much just anecdotal. So there are all kinds of caveats on my repetitive ranting. But it feels very real to to me, and when I see Skipper busily picking up trash off the floor of her preschool classroom while the boys are coloring, my heart sinks a little more.


*I have had a crummy six months of dental visits, in which I've gotten a ton of fillings, including several along the gumline, which is extra-awful because the drilling for these, unlike the sort of top-down fillings to which I had been accustomed, somehow feels like it's rattling your ENTIRE SKULL. So just getting my teeth cleaned seemed like a cheerful fun adventure.

** And no, I can't be bothered tracking it down at the moment. I'm busy being unemployed!

*** Last week a boy in her class pointed at her 19 out of 20 score and said mockingly "Wow, Duchess, looks like you need to get a new brain." She cried. 

**** I'm married to a Responsible Man! So there's just no way that our kids are going to avoid being excessively responsible, given their genetics. 

Us Updates

1) Skipper got a green flag from a speech therapist, who concluded that there are no issues with her speech that won't be cleared up by a few more years of growing and talking, and surmised that the issues with her comprehensibility mostly stem from the speed (rapid) and volume (low) of her speech.

2) My housekeeping is lagging behind. There's so much to do! And it's so boring! And I have blog posts to write! However, things are noticeably (to me) cleaner around here, though I'm not going to win any prizes, or even impress anybody unfamiliar with my previous practices.

3) I'm doing a lot of volunteering, and it's totally compromising my ability to get housekeeping done. Dang.

4) Skipper is getting excited about her Japanese schooling adventure. Because she loathes transitions, we're trying to get her as comfortable as possible with this one. We walk past the school at every opportunity to watch the kids at recess* and talk about what's going on in there. We've been giving carte blanche to visit the school after the schoolday is over and before the secretaries go home, and we'll do that a few more times before summer starts. Skipper has already started contributing part of her allowance to her "Summer-After-5th-Grade-Trip-to-Japan" jar.**

5) Tomatoes are planted! It's been hot here, and summer feels moments away.

6) I've planned out the entire summer. Duchess will be doing swim team and a couple of cool camp-y things, and Skipper will be doing a few activities, too. She wanted to sign up for a lot more, but I argued that her history of non-participation suggests it would be best to start slow. I'll let you know how that goes.

7) Duchess has signed up to do a science fair project testing how changing different variables affects the strength of a homemade electromagnet. I'll let you know how that goes.

8) Duchess is testing this weekend for the next level of her martial arts program, and has been invited (along with a couple of her classmates) to join a class for 10-12-year-olds, taught by the woman who runs the school. She's excited to be testing, and very proud to have been recognized as a serious student. Whatever else the faults of this particular martial arts studio, they are really good at making students feel like part of a loving, supportive community, and when Duchess walks in their door, she feels like it's her place.***

9) Antarctic Uncle, aka The Best Houseguest Ever, has left for another year.

10) We did successfully refinance (did I ever tell you that?), consolidating two loans and saving ourselves some money. Hurrah! The house also appraised 20% higher than we paid for it, which is nice.****

That's the news, mostly.***** All is well.

*If anybody was going to report a slack-jawed preschooler and a frumpy lady wearing socks with sandals to the police, I'd be worried that they'd call us in as stalkers.
** Duchess is already very jealous that Skipper gets to do an immersion program (and I share her regret, as Duchess has a knack for language, and would kick ass at learning in two languages), and almost blew off the top of her skull when she heard that Skipper would have the opportunity to actually go to Japan. We promised her that we'd save an equal amount for her to take a trip of some kind, too. Thank goodness we only have two children.
*** Another small sign of how parenting goes to weird places. I never thought I'd have a kid doing martial arts, given that I never liked them myself. I see why she loves it - the community feeling, the rules, the clear protocol for improvement, the uniform - it's all stuff Duchess loves dearly - but I didn't see it coming.
**** Though I'm left to imagine how much higher it COULD have appraised if I'd ever washed the windows.
***** Cook has all sorts of work and extracurricular excitement going on; I'm leaving him out not because he's boring, but because he's private. 

My new occupation

No, I haven't gotten a job. Well, not one that pays. I have decided to hire myself as an unpaid housekeeper/childcare provider for the spring and summer, in the hopes that if I reject the job-hunting process, I won't feel so eroded by its ongoing rejection of me. I will start looking for jobs again in the fall,* but in the meantime, I'm going to do THIS job right.

I am assisted in this quest by technology, which I'm using to keep me on track while also deploying microrewards, because I don't do stuff unless there's a reward involved, even if it's vanishingly small. For example, today I have used a music app to play me motivational songs, a to-do list app to check off numerous small tasks as I plow through them, a workout app that generates random workouts, and a podcast app that allows me to learn all sorts of interesting things.  I find that, for me,** checking things off lists is a sufficient microreward to keep me going. Brains are weird.

I started things off by downloading a free trial of a housekeeping to-do list app. This taught me what sorts of housekeeping tasks I'm supposed to be doing, and when, and then when the trial expired I just added a bunch of those things to my regular to-do list app. I've been an adult for over 25 years, and I have never before done these tasks on a regular basis, if at all. In the new housekeeping paradigm, I do things on a schedule. I clean the kitchen sink every other day*** even if it doesn't look dirty. In the old housekeeping paradigm, I would clean things when I noticed they were looking/feeling grungy.**** I truly don't think there's anything wrong with that approach, and if I ever get another job or even an interesting hobby, I expect I'll shift to a hybrid of the new and old approaches. But right now, I find that housekeeping chores are working well - they keep me busy,***** make me feel productive, keep me from sitting at the computer melting my brain all day, and I get to reap the rewards of having a (relatively) clean house. That's all good.

On the other hand, the childcare provision part of my job hasn't yet seen any improvements. I haven't found an app that will make me more patient, more generous, and less profane in my parenting. Recently, I shooed the girls outside on a hectic morning to wait for me while I put on my shoes and locked the door so we could go drop Duchess off at school. When I came out, I had the privilege of hearing Skipper say "Jesus CHRIST, Duchess! What the HELL are you doing?!"

Coming up: updates on Skipper, who is four entire years old, as of this morning.


*Of course, if a great job comes up, I'm going to apply for it, housekeeping be damned.
** For NOW
*** One of my small rebellions from the tyrannical housekeeping app, which wanted me to clean the kitchen sink every day. Seriously, what are people DOING with their kitchen sink that they need to wash it that often? (Pro tip: Do not poop in your kitchen sink.) Has nobody heard about the dangers of excessive hygiene? Also, the housekeeping app wanted me to read the bible every day.
**** Unfortunately, my threshold for discomfort with grunge is much higher than Cook's. The poor man. 
***** Because they take freaking forever. Presumably real housekeeping folks use more toxic chemicals and are better at it, because if I did everything I'm supposed to, I would be working from dawn till dusk, and I'm really just not willing to do that. 

Household hints from a human

I've learned some very valuable housekeeping tips recently, and I'm going to share them with you!
1) Vinegar is very useful. We use it for much of our cleaning. If we washed our windows, we'd definitely use vinegar. Most recently, I learned from the internets that it could save us from the ongoing mild annoyance of sour-smelling towels, and it WORKED.
2) Baking soda saved my life. Or maybe just my stove. Or something. I accidentally set a pot of oil on fire last summer, and was able to put out the two-feet-tall flames with a heap of baking soda. (If Arm and Hammer would now like to sponsor all my blog posts, they are welcome. Did I mention we use baking soda for all the cleaning tasks for which we don't use vinegar?)

Skipper, at dinner last week: Daddy is a man, and I am a gril, and Duchess is a gril. And Mama is... Mama is a human!

Half my life left to figure this out.

Every single year I have to confront the fact that I haven't yet gotten a grip on the holidays. I think some part of me still feels that the adults are taking care of all the details, so I don't have to bother.

I usually manage some stuff. I organized a very small donation drive for a domestic violence shelter in our community. We decorated. We made the traditional sugar cookies to eat while decorating.* This year, for the first time, we even got a tree! A live tree! It's two feet tall, and it lives in a 3-gallon pail filled with rocks and water, but it's a real tree! And we have a wreath that Duchess made and brought home from a craft party at the home of a friend whose florist grandmother was visiting. So our home looks WAY more Christmassy than every before. I'm also fairly prepared to cook some nice food over the holiday. And I have  presents ready for everybody who will be at my house on Christmas! All three of them!

The activity for which I am most prepared this holiday is the cookie exchange party we're attending tomorrow. This is a social event that might have been designed exactly for me - it's in the afternoon, it's brief, and it involves baking. I plan to bring three different kinds of cookies, all of which will be good.** If this was what the whole holiday entailed, I would be not exactly the Martha-Stewart-style queen of the season, but I would definitely be a reliable minister of some kind.

However, there's a whole lot of other stuff that I didn't get around to. This week, I discovered that it's prohibitively expensive to mail a present five business days before Christmas Day, so the package I sent will not be arriving until after Christmas, a week after almost half of the intended recipients of the gifts inside will have left the package's destination. That was a sad moment. But today was the day I really realized that yet again, I missed the holiday boat. Our mail today included three holiday cards from friends, and I realized that I had never even thought about holiday cards this year. At all. And I LOVE getting them, I really do. The classy ones with a brief message, the ones with all the adorable photos of your adorable kids, and the ones with long hand-written notes - I love them ALL. So maybe I'll send out Presidents' Day cards this year. Regardless, thank you all for your cards! I love them!


*Skipper, who is very interested in cooking and baking, was in charge of rolling the cookies in cinnamon sugar, so the cookies were completely brown. They tasted fine, though. Skipper is experienced enough with baking that when I assign her a bowl of ingredients to stir,  she asks gravely "Can this be over-mixed?"
** I've done a lot of baking, I've got some excellent equipment, and I have learned to use good ingredients. Cookie-making is one area of my life about which I remain fairly confident, even when Skipper is helping me out. 

July, middle of.

Tonight we ate part of our yard! We didn't get to the grocery store as planned, so we had an empty-cupboard dinner. We did have pasta and 9 ounces of ricotta, so we used that, salt, parmesan and olive oil, plus yard chard, yard garlic,* and yard basil. It made me feel (briefly) kind of like a real, honest-to-goodness gardener.
In other news, today Cook officially launched the Paint-the-House-By-Himself project. (I plan to help, of course. Just not with the parts involving power tools, which I hate, and ladders, which I also hate. Otherwise, I will be very, very helpful, I'm sure.) Here's phase one... the back of the house! Our house has experienced some additions in its time, mostly done hastily and on the cheap - you can see that the mudroom (to the right) was added on to the nook (on the left). Cook's desire to make everything better (if not perfect) is slowing him down, as he keeps seeing bubbles and blisters and cracks he wants to fix. Officially, we're just doing the trim, and will do the rest (and get rid of the orange color!) in a few years, when we're rich and can afford to hire people to do it for us. Unofficially, I suspect that there will be a lot of sanding and touching-up of the horrible orange paint, because Cook can't let those bubbles and blisters slide.















And this is our parking strip, which got a makeover recently - Cook dug out all the lawn and lots of the dirt underneath, and we got our lovely Friends of Trees cascara tree, and added two kinnikinnick plants and an Oregon grape (natives all!). Cook and Antarctic Uncle spent an afternoon in the blazing sun making those pavers PERFECTLY LEVEL (it's a genetic thing, apparently, as Antarctic Uncle also cannot let sloppy work slide), and then we got a Ziptruck-bed-full of hazelnut shells for mulch.

Tonight the girls are camping in our yard.**






















I can still hear them giggling.





































*We harvested about 36 heads of garlic - that might last us through August. In order to be self-sufficient in garlic, I think we'd have to plant about 150 cloves. The yard would be nothing but garlic. However, they're sort of magic - HOW does a clove turn into a head? Magic, I tell you. And having them hanging in the basement makes me feel like Ma Wilder, like if I turn around I'll see squashes piled in the corner, and jars of preserves stacked on every shelf, and a big barrel of salter pork. ** In the ancient, mildewy 2-person tent Cook and I bought 15 years ago, when we thought we were the sort of people who would go camping more than once every three years.

In case you were wondering what adulthood is all about.

Yesterday Skipper told me about what she will do when she becomes a grown-up. Here is the complete list:
1) Go to work and go to school and go to Gresham.
2) Sleep alone in a really big bed.
3) Wash dishes.
4) Do stuff on the computer.

It's Friday NIGHT!

Here's what I've been doing lately, not necessarily in this order:

1) Listening to this song (but not watching the video). What, you don't like the song? You find the subject matter creepy? I don't care.
2) Wishing that our summer weather had happened IN THE SUMMER, instead of waiting until September to do its thing.
3) Having more bike conversion experiences. Today, you guys, I biked ALL THE WAY DOWNTOWN!! I biked across the goddamn bridge. I am SO BRAVE! I actually chanted inspirational things to myself for the last half of the trip - "Look at you! You're crossing the bridge! You're biking DOWNTOWN! You're crossing the bridge!" - while dozens of other bicyclists and joggers (!) whizzed past me.
4) Doing laundry. Bike conversion experiences involve a lot of sweating.
5) Deciding that if traffic speed was cut down to a 20 mph maximum everywhere except for limited-access highways, basically everything would be better. Seriously, everything.
6) Wondering how to make Dutch happier, or nicer, or something. I think she's pretty fried from the effort of going to school, which doesn't help, but in general right now, she's just awful. The other night she freaked out at dinner, and stomped out the front door. Skipper immediately started howling, and shrieked "No, Dutch, don't run away!" but Cook and I looked at each other a little dreamily. Then she came back in and was incredibly nice and helpful and cheerful the rest of the evening. We thought maybe she'd been body-snatched, but she went back to being kind of an asshole the next day, so that theory was busted.
7) Watching TV while washing dishes.
8) Obsessively combing Ebay in search of more shoes with lemurs on them.
9) Trying to teach Skipper that it's GOOD to wash your body occasionally.
10) Working.
11) Thinking of ways to prepare and eat tomatoes.
12) Trying to avoid having to explain September 11th to Dutch.

Today a random guy with lots of missing teeth and a strong odor of alcohol helped me fix my bike on my way home from work. (And he really helped me - I would have taken much, much longer to solve the problem he diagnosed and fixed in about 12 seconds, and he was super-nice about my complete mechanical idiocy.) That was a lovely thing.

A really big whine.

I'm pretty sure I'm doing something wrong. I have so much to do, and I do it so incompletely and so poorly that I feel like a fraud as a grown-up. Seriously. I don't even DO that much, and I feel overwhelmed. Here's what I try to do:

1) Raise children without fucking them up too badly.

2) Feed the family reasonably healthily.

3) Maintain the household (and family) in a not-too-filthy state

4) Do an okay job at work.

5) Stay on top of our patched-together childcare system.

6) Not be a jerk.

7) Stay in touch with a few people outside my immediate family.

8) Maintain the house and yard in a not-too-shabby state.

9) Stay at least sort of connected with my husband.

My to-do list has stuff on it like "water plants" and "take shower" and "wash breakfast dishes" and "take out trash" and "decide whether or not to get a seismic retrofit so your house won't fall off the foundation if the Big Earthquake hits while you still own it" and it takes forever just to do that.* Not to mention the looming to-do item of GET A GODDAMNED JOB ALREADY. Plus I'm supposed to be taking care of myself (exercise! meditation! vacations!) and keeping my marriage zesty (dates! romantic notes! lacy underpants!) and building community (book clubs! neighborhood associations! potluck dinners!) and being politically active (letters to senators! protests! volunteering!) and homesteading (sewing! canning! other frugal wholesome arts!) and all kind of other stuff that would make me happier and better and whatever. I go back and forth between thinking many people feel this way, and then noticing that I know many people who get twice as much done as I do. (You KNOW those people. Some of you are those people. How do you do it, anyway? Is there a drug for this?)

So am I wildly incompetent? Is my laziness even more rampant than I thought? Did I miss some big secret about how to do this?** Is anybody else's adulthood as jury-rigged as mine? Or maybe I just spend too much time blogging.***

Anyway, I can live with it. I know that I could make more time by being more efficient and not wasting time on the internet. I just wish there was a little more real down time. Sometimes Dutch complains when I make her do onerous stuff like pick up her dirty clothes and put them in the laundry basket, rather than leave them on the floor. She says "I have to do ALL THE WORK!!!" and I have to take a deep breath so I don't whack her upside the head with her grimy socks.

*Painting one room of our house took us three weeks to complete. (In our defense, Cook is a perfectionist and insisted on multiple coats, and the previous owner was so sloppy about painting that there was quite a bit of remediation to do.)

**I'm looking for a really good tip here, like "Wait, didn't you get the manual?" or "You were supposed to buy a self-cleaning house!" or "Silly, you don't actually have to worry about retirement because civilization's going to collapse and all you'll need is a seismically-retrofitted basement full of food, attack dogs, and guns!"

***Yesterday I was emailing while Skipper wandered around the study, and after a while I looked over and found she'd gone to sleep on the floor, her butt up in the air and all her limbs neatly folded under her. I think having your kid fall asleep on the floor while you waste time on the internet probably qualifies as inattentive parenting.

The Gastroenteritis That WOULD NOT GO AWAY

Skipper started barfing again this morning, almost two weeks after her first barfing episode, and ten days after her last barfing episode. We are not happy campers.

*****Squeamish people, stop reading RIGHT NOW.*****

Skipper hates barfing so much that she tries desperately not to, even up to the point of actually swallowing her vomit. While this generally means less cleanup, and I don't think it's harmful to her, it's completely appalling to witness, and I'd actually prefer the cleanup. I say "It's okay, honey, just let it out," and she screams "NOOOOOOOO!!!!!" and her whole body gets stiff with the conflict between the urge to barf and the urge not to barf, and... ew.

Anyway. Cook bought some bleach (something we've never used in this household, preferring to stick with dingy clothing and household cleaning with vinegar), but I feel like a virus that lasts two weeks and causes this much misery probably demands some bigger guns. I don't know what, though. Maybe we should leave the house for a week and have it steam-cleaned.

2011

Today is my first day of official stay-at-home parenting. I'm supposed to be working 5-10 hours a week at my job (tapering off over the next month or two, but I have serious doubts about how well that's going to work, after less than one day.

In other respects, though, it's been a successful day. I finished one of the tasks I promised myself I would do to kick off 2011 - went through our files, threw out everything egregiously out-dated or unnecessary, re-organized the system, and filed everything in the to-file folder, including stuff that has been in that file for over a year. Skipper helped me hand-shred old bank statements. (Today, she's also sorted change and swept the floor. Such a helpful child. I'm not sure what she DID with the change or the dust, but she doesn't seem to be choking to death, so whatever.)

Tomorrow, I'm tackling the Random Box of Crap that's been sitting on the desk forever. I think it was once a Box of Stuff I Was Supposed to Do, which is scary. There are probably some important papers in there marinating. Tomorrow I'm also going to the bank to put our important documents into a safe-deposit box, one of the trying-to-be-slightly-more-adult tasks on my to-do list. Apparently, real grown-ups don't keep their important pieces of paper in a plastic bag labeled* "Important" in a file drawer. Who knew?

Dutch is back at school today after a 2-week hiatus. She had mixed feelings this morning, but we got her there without a hitch. Now I just have to remember to pick her up.

We're still in the house-buying process - the closing date has been pushed back, but the seller is making repairs now, and we have bought a washing machine, which means this is official!

*In my defense, it's a plastic bag- waterproof! - labeled carefully with a Sharpie pen - waterproof! See, some precautions were taken...

not well-oiled at ALL

This morning Cook and Skipper got up at 5:45. Cook fed Skipper and himself, made coffee, and took a shower. Dutch and I got up at 6:15. Cook left for work at 6:35. I fed both kids* and myself, packed lunch for myself and Dutch, washed out Skipper's bucket (which we use to bring home her soiled training pants from daycare every night), washed dishes, took a shower, got dressed, brushed everyone's teeth, and did some other stuff I can't remember. We left the house at 8:15 and dropped Skipper off at daycare at 8:30. I dropped Dutch at her classroom at 8:45 (just as the late bell rang!) and went to my bus stop. I arrived at work at 9:30.

I worked until 4. I got off the bus at 4:52, and walked to the house of Dutch's friend Spruce, where the new babysitter was babysitting Dutch and Spruce. I cajoled Dutch into leaving (this took a while) and we walked home, arriving at about 5:30. When we got home, Skipper and Cook were already there - Cook had picked up Skipper from daycare at 4:30 and started cooking dinner (while toting Skipper on his hip most of the time, which is really pretty impressive) on arrival. I washed out today's training pants and rinsed out the bucket, got together a batch of laundry, took Dutch and Skipper to the basement to get the laundry going, emptied Dutch's backpack and sorted out all the random sad handouts for recycling and the information from the school for response or noting on the calendar. I entertained a very tired Skipper while Cook finished up dinner. We ate dinner (Skipper whining and crying and insisting on sitting in a lap instead of her chair) while Dutch told long confusing stories about her day. Cook and I managed to sneak in a few short conversations, often with long breaks in the middle. We finished dinner.

Cook took Skipper straight off to the bedroom to put her to sleep. I sat down to write this while Dutch sits on the couch reading to herself (and asking me to help her with a word about every 72 seconds). In a few minutes, I'll start ushering Dutch through her bedtime routine, and I expect to be done at about 7:30. Then I'll wash the lunch and dinner dishes, if Cook hasn't done them already. Cook and I will fetch and hang the laundry, wipe the counters, and tidy up as much junk as we can muster energy for. We should be done with all this by 8:30ish, and I will be so tired my eyeballs will be wobbling.

That's the news.

*Skipper likes to eat two breakfasts.

Dreaming

"Hey, Dutch," Cook said last week, when both kids were being ominously quiet in the corner, "what's Skipper doing?"

"Oh," Dutch said, "she's realizing the American dream."

She was. Actually, she was reading about it in our brand new book. We've signed up with a local non-profit that provides home-buying support for poor first-time home-buyers, and I attended an all-day class a few weeks ago. I brought home a giant tome that is actually called "Realizing the American Dream," a title that must have seemed perfect when it was first written, but now seems kind of ironic and cynical.

We are extremely fortunate to have relatives who have been much more successful than we have, and have recently come into Piles of Unearned Money. In spite of the fact that we have not very much income (and if I do stop working at the end of December, which seems increasingly certain, we'll have less), we are able to at least consider buying a house. In fact, we're going to go see a few this weekend.

I have many, complicated, fascinating thoughts and feelings about this process. I'm sure I will tell you all about them ad nauseam.

In the meantime, welcome to Baby P!

Video catchup

It's been a while. Watching some of these older videos, Dutch and I realized that we can tell what Skipper was trying to say, even when we weren't able to figure it out at the time, because we have another month of Skipper-experience under our belts. Poor kid. We're always trying to catch up with her.

End of August:

First Day of School:

Some time in September:

Dutch has launched a cafe in her room. The prices of the menu items are a little erratic.

A houseguest, an electronic hamster, and the way Dutch feels about her sister about 25% of the time.

Earlier this evening:

Flaws

Being an adult is just too hard. Are there really people who can do this well? I think they should take me on as a charitable project; they could make sure my bills get paid, and track down and move my money in that state retirement fund somewhere in Massachusetts, find me some excellent and affordable childcare, dust the blinds, and do all of the other nine thousand things grown-ups are supposed to do. I've got my hands full just showing up every day.

The grass, it is greener, in patches.

Our housemates have So. Much. Free. Time. It boggles my mind. Granted, they have even less enthusiasm for housework than we do, which frees up some extra time. But mostly, they have free time because they a) have only one job apiece,* b) are not in school, and c) have no children.

Lately I've been so exhausted and hectic that I've been babbling even worse than before, and frequently find myself talking incoherently and (apparently) unstoppably while the people around me look confused, or, worse, look anxiously around for some excuse to escape from me. One of my babbling topics last week was about how freaking hard it is to be in grad school while raising young children. I'm pretty sure that what I effectively communicated was "Don't have kids! Oh my god, don't have kids!" Living with Emma and Brendan reminds me daily of one big difference between having kids and not-having-kids, as they crash on the couch to watch a movie or read or chat after dinner while Cook and I scramble to get the kids to bed, prepare for the next day, and then report to our respective work stations. Free time. What is that, anyway?**

I love both of my incredibly burdensome children. But I want some free time. I can't believe how much free time I used to carelessly squander. What was I THINKING?! I used to play the Sims (a game Cook dismisses as terribly boring, but which I loved). I want the hours I spent playing that game back. It was a mistake, and I'm sorry, and I think I should get a do-over. I will take those hours now, added on to the 24 I get each day. I will be happy to spend them sleeping.

(I'm REALLY looking forward to being done with school, too. But school work can be put away for an hour, and a sad baby or a frustrated preschooler entangled in her swimsuit cannot.)

Tonight after dinner, Dutch and I started some seeds for our new vegetable garden. My tall girl, terribly serious about The Big Responsibility, standing next to me carefully counting out seeds and reading*** packet labels, didn't feel burdensome. She felt like my life. There's no second-guessing; my life has no computer games in it,**** no leisurely mornings, and very little coherent conversation, but it also has two lives nested inside it.

If you happen to talk to me in the next four months, I'm sorry about all the babbling.


*Though Emma is a union organizer who disappears into 120-hour work-weeks when she's on a campaign.
** Oh, right. It's the time I spend frivolously writing blog posts.
*** "P.E.A.R.... puh-eh-ah-rrr. Peru!"
**** just blogging.