Skipper turned ten.

Zero

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Six.

Seven.

Eight.

Nine.

Ten.

Resolutions

It's time to do end-of-year lists, right?














Here's what I liked this year:

• half-assed bullet journalling
• Skipper's bangs
• better lighting
• liquor in my coffee*
• yuppie salads for lunch
• my favorite co-workers
• no screens after 9pm** 
• bridges over the Willamette
• The Good Place & Schitt's Creek
• music on demand

Here's what we expect and/or hope for in 2019:

• Scandinavian adventures
• Skipper wraps up her first decade
• Duchess starts high school
• I get a new job 
• Cook gets a new job

So... here's to 2019. Let's see what it holds.

*Only occasionally, to be clear.

** One of my sleep-improvement efforts that I can actually manage to usually do...

Fine.

I'm listening to: Julien Baker
I'm reading: Shrill
I'm feeling: I don't know. Indeterminate. Fine, I guess.

Things are fine. It's hot.

The girls are getting ready for school. Skipper feels pretty comfortable, returning to the same school for the third year, confident in her academic chops and excited to see her friends again, though she's of course nervous about new teachers.

Duchess is very excited and nervous about middle school. She has said several times this week "Mom... I'm nervous about middle school!" and she announced tonight that she does, actually, care about what she wears. She was very embarrassed to tell me this, and to tell me that she wants to use her recently-established clothing budget to buy new cheap clothes made by sweatshop laborers.

Hello, my dears

You have possibly thought me dead. Or retired. But no! Here are facts. FACTS.

1) I am pretty happy.

2) I am coasting, a bit. My job is not hard right now (though I am feeling unpleasantly useless at work). I'm pursuing no productive hobbies. I'm not doing anything but the minimum in terms of housekeeping or whatever other stuff adults are supposed to do to maintain basic functions. I don't know - pay bills? Dust?

3) I'm enjoying making more money -  Cook and I are both employed full-time, an unprecedented state of affairs, and feeling the weird upper-middle class dilemma of having money and no time. (Not a LOT of money, and not really no time, but you know.) I am employed through March, so I'm campaigning hard to spend part of my income in that limited time on frivolous vacations. Skipper is 100% on board and we are already planning a week in London. (Duchess will be on board, but she's off at dorks-in-the-woods camp right now and doesn't know about our plan. We're definitely going to the Tower of London.) I also think we need to step up our half-assed and unsystematic charitable giving.


4) My kids are loons. Beautiful loons.

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.

Report

So... I should say something here, right?

Hm. Everything's fine. We're here. We're alive.

We're having a large wooden fence built between us and our crummy neighbors,* probably marking the completion of our transition into the world of smug upper-middle-class homeowners.

The kids are fine. Weird and mean, but fine.

My new baseline for work: a day in which I don't cry in front of other people at work** is a successful day! (I'm going to make a poster.) Today was a successful day.

Cook has not cried at work ever. As far as I know...

Eating Less continues, and continues to take up all my remaining energy after work and family.

Skipper had lice again. I think they're gone now.

Duchess is so excited for middle school. SO EXCITED, you guys. She's struggling to decide on which afterschool club she wants to do - Magic cards club, or Math/Engineering/Science club.

That's all. I hope you all have successful days!

*Not the gun-selling, broken-car-collecting libertarians, who have been ideal neighbors from Day One - the other ones. The ones who are outside smoking and swearing and talking about boring things ALL THE TIME. 
** Weeping softly alone in a bathroom stall doesn't count.

Resolutions

A whole new year! We flew back from Maine on New Year's Eve, and were all asleep by midnight (the girls both fell asleep as the plane was landing, actually), so we kind of jury-rigged some conversation about reflection and looking ahead over the following few days.

2015:
Duchess got braces.
I was employed continuously ALL YEAR!
Skipper really learned how to read.
Skipper rode a horse for the first time.
Duchess read the entire Lord of the Rings.
Cook built a bike.

2016:
We're going to Hawaii.
I will be employed at least half the year.
Duchess will learn how to needlepoint.
It will definitely snow in 2016 in Portland at least once.

Oh, hi! You may have thought I was dead. I'm not. I've been busy doing things like unsubscribing from email lists, trying to clear out my email inbox, listening to a backlog of podcasts, etc. You know, end-of-the-year kind of stuff.

Also, I've decided that I should probably look for work in a field where my work is not subject to criticism from people beyond the basic circle of my coworkers. It turns out that I do not like being criticized by lots of strangers. (Not that I'm good at handling criticism from anybody; it's a major flaw of mine.) I take it far too seriously, and it makes me feel awful and I pretty much want to lie under my desk and cry, and then pretend it all never happened. Also, I want to punch the people who are criticizing me, but of course I don't. It's all a very Skipper-like response.

It has been raining steadily for weeks - flooding and general misery abounds. I know that you think that it rains all the time in Portland, but it actually doesn't, really - we typically get a lot of grey and frequent but not very heavy rain. Not only has it been relentlessly grey (the sun came out for about an hour this afternoon, and I think it was the first time in at least ten days), but there's just been A Lot Of Rain. I biked to a dental appointment in a tremendous downpour last Monday, and I arrived (after adventures including at one point having to carry my bike up a brambly bank to avoid a sidewalk-and-street-swamping lake) completely drenched, dripping all over everything. The receptionist offered me a blanket. All our clothes are wet, all our shoes are wet, and the umbrellas drip on the floor of the mudroom all the time. It's like we live in a submarine.

However, everything is basically fine. Some lists.

Skipper's roster of Clothes She Is Willing To Wear:
- four pairs of pants
- four shirts
- one fleece jacket
- one raincoat
- three pairs of socks
- one pair of sneakers
- one hooded sweatshirt

What Duchess is Reading (all at once):
Navigating Early
The Two Towers*
All Creatures Great and Small

What Skipper is Reading (and LOVES):
Harriet the Spy

What Cook is Reading:
Barbarian Days

What I am Reading:
If You Only Knew**
All your awesome holiday cards. Thank you!

Hey, NPR has the 2015 version of the Book Concierge up! (The girls recommend Interstellar Cinderella, by the way.)

That's all I've got. I have to get back to unsubscribing to things.


*She picked up the trilogy again because she really wants to watch the movies, and Cook is holding firm on his Book Before Movie rule, but then she got sucked in. It's fun to see.
**This is a romance of the sort that you would probably never read, and while I read lots of crappy romances, this is pretty good stuff. I recommend it, should you be inclined the romance way.

Things I like

• Songs We Love 2015
• I went to yoga! (I liked the yoga, but the thing I really like is that I went.)
• Cooler weather
• We went to a movie! A first-run movie! In the theater! All of us! For the first time! (Skipper cowered miserably in my lap and Cook's lap for most of the movie, but she was there!)

Updates, part 342

1) I have stuck with my exercise program, more or less, for six months. You would think that having exercised for 2.5-5 hours a week on top of my regular activity (which amounts to 4-5 miles of walking a day), I would be notably lean and fit. This is not the case. (I am certainly fitter. I may actually be stronger than I ever have been, which is very satisfying. I sometimes offer to pick up heavy things for people. Of course, I can't lift very much, because my Strongest Ever is still pretty wimpy.)  Due to both my advancing age and my tendency to eat too much of everything, I am not going to be lean and fit unless I make drastic lifestyle changes, and I am not going to do that. But I'll keep going with it. Fending off additional weight gain and getting fitter is a reasonable and worthy outcome, if unexciting. Cook suggested I set myself an independent goal, like running a marathon or climbing a mountain, or bench pressing 200 pounds, but I'm not feeling it.

2) I am so old that Birkenstocks have become trendy. Also, high-waisted pants, but somehow the Birkenstocks surprised me more. I do like the idea that I will eventually become fashionable if this normcore thing sticks around.

3) Summer is half over.

4) I have been watching TV. Specifically, I have been watching Friends. FRIENDS! I am enjoying it, but I had forgotten/never realized how soaked the show is in homophobia and misogyny, plus the astonishing whiteness of it all. Also, I had forgotten how much I loathed Ross. So I have mixed feelings.

Yeah, that's it. Kids are fine, Cook is fine, weather is less oppressively hot, the whole city hasn't fallen down around us yet. All's well. 

No executive function

Last weekend, we went on a rafting adventure with extended family. The rafting trip was great fun, but I found myself, over and over, standing or sitting around doing absolutely nothing, often while other people swirled around me doing things. This is obviously partly because I'm just lazy, but it's also because I have no brain capacity available. My job is absorbing so much of my executive function right now (PLUS I have to exert the willpower to exercise every night) that I have nothing left at the end of the workday, and by the end of Friday, I'm a zombie. I have no initiative, and no ability to translate cues into action - I can follow specific, direct orders, but that's about it.

Which is why I haven't written any blog posts lately. However, I can reassure you that we are all well (even though one of us is a zombie). Summer has started, and is already shaping up to be the kind of scramble of activity that I suspect is typical of white overeducated upper-middle-class families with two working parents. The girls are wrapping up their first week of day camp, and Duchess is off to sleepaway camp next week. Between the prep for camp each day (snacks, lunch, change of clothes, sunscreen, etc), preparing for/cleaning up after camping trips on weekends, and extracurricular classes (kung fu! piano!), there's no time. But it's pretty fun, when I have a minute to think about it.

Rafting trip redux:

• Skipper learned to pee in a river.
• Duchess learned to help paddle a canoe.
• Cook learned how to row a raft.
• I ate jellybeans.
• We all had a lot of fun.

Just punching my card today

• We're busy. 
• I just finished a big deadline at work, and am picking up all the other things I abandoned in order to get the big one done. That feels both pretty good and also scary, as many of those little things have become bigger things...
• The weather is gorgeous. 
• Yesterday Skipper started plucking at the strings of my very-neglected guitar, crouching beside it and listening intently to each note ring out and fade. "Mom, I'm listening to The Whole Sound!" she said. 
• Skipper has been enthusiastically playing a game she was given for her birthday, which is like Uno in that all her family members are willing to play it; it's a pleasant, not-too-taxing mix of luck and strategy.
• Duchess has nothing to show for hours spent working with her partner on an engineering-y science fair project, because neither of them are interested in taking the time to READ THE DIRECTIONS or to be at all careful in construction, so their constructions keep disintegrating. I'm happy to go with natural consequences here, but Cook pointed out that Duchess, due to her tendency to be satisfied with pretty much anything, never actually learns anything from natural consequences. That is why he is in the living room with her while she builds, monitoring her for slap-dash heedlessness, and I am in here, blogging.
• Last week Duchess and I had a terrible morning (Skipper and Cook usually leave about 20 minutes earlier than we do, because the girls' schools are on different schedules) in which she aggressively and irrationally blamed me for the disappearance of the raincoat which she wanted to bring in case of rain. I totally lost my temper. On the walk to school, she was trying to chat about something, and I told her "I'm having a really hard time just conversing with you right now, because I'm still feeling pretty mad about being yelled at and blamed for stuff that's not my fault. I need to finish being mad before I can be pleasant. Do you understand how I feel?" and she said (I'm paraphrasing, but this is pretty close) "Yeah. You were trying to get lots of stuff done and you were doing stuff for me, and you were stressed out and it makes you angry when I blame you for stuff that's not your fault. I can see why you're so mad. I'm sorry I did that." I was pretty staggered. Duchess's deep flexibility and willingness to see other perspectives, while sometimes worrisome (as when she sees the perspective that an extremely sloppily-executed science fair project is really no big deal), allows her (when she's in the mood) to be sincerely sensitive and generous in her relationships in a way that makes her sound like she's read a bunch of therapy books.
• However, I still don't know what she did with the raincoat. I suspect she lost it, which is why she so badly wanted it to be my fault...

Long time!

It's been a while, eh? We've been busy. My work has had a series of nutso deadlines (actually, there's been a series of nutso deadlines over the last three months), and then there's so much TV to watch!

Bullet-point updates:

• Cook has finished building his bike. It's pretty cool-looking. He fears that it will suddenly fall apart on his commute to work, but I think it probably won't. And it hasn't yet!
• I continue to exercise daily (this is very time-consuming - I don't know how people who exercise a lot get their TV-watching in), in pursuit of my goal of someday being anywhere near as fit as my in-laws. I have a long way to go.
• Duchess has another week to go in the cast. She thinks she dropped a resistor into it during her last electronics class, but it doesn't seem to be bothering her.
• Skipper is getting excited to turn six. She is thinking that this year she may want to have a party. A party! With actual human beings who are not her immediate family! We'll see if she goes through with it, but it's cool that she's considering it.
• Duchess and Cook are plotting that if I get a permanent job (IF), we will sell our house and move to a bigger new one, so that Duchess can have her own room and not have to argue with Skipper over who's responsible for cleaning which mess. Skipper and I say no. We want to stay in our safe place, and Skipper wants to avoid mess-cleaning responsibility.
• Duchess has completely embraced the wilderness-dork program that she has been enjoying so much at day camps, and has decided to spend her considerable savings on a program next school year in which she will meet up with her group once a month for a full day of running around in the woods, practicing archery, and foraging plants to eat. She says she feels like she really fits in with the kids and adults associated with this program. It's a weird hodgepodge of LARPers, homesteaders, wilderness folks, and hipsters, but the general zeitgeist is pretty much nerdy-teenage-boy. (There are always a few kids with seriously dubious social skills in her camp groups, and the girls are always outnumbered significantly by boys. The adults, however, are the real draw for her - they have tattoos and piercings and cool punk hairstyles, they wear homemade tunics and leather boots and carry large knives, and they are sarcastic and playful and knowledgeable, which is a very powerful combination for Duchess.)  However, she has quite a bit of cultural catching up to do.  She has begun reading the Lord of the Rings books (mostly because Cook declared she can't watch the movies until she has read the books), and I got Monty Python and the Holy Grail out of the library for her, too. (Cook and I support all this; we're making her watch The Simpsons.) She asked if we thought she could start a Dungeons and Dragons club at her school...

That's about it. Happy spring!

Ten

Duchess has been here ten years. Ten years. The alert, responsive, unsleeping baby is suddenly an eavesdropping, sarcastic, guffawing giantess who's been knocking around for an entire astonishing decade.

Things about Duchess:
1) Her favorite podcast is Ask Me Another. (Really, you can stop reading right now, because that's a full portrait. She understands very little of it, but she already knows that she's definitely going to grow up to be a person who enjoys things like Ask Me Another.)
2) Her favorite book is whatever she's reading right now.
3) Her favorite anything is almost always the anything she's doing right now.
4) Nothing that goes wrong is her fault. It's probably Skipper's fault.
5) When things go wrong, they are irreparably ruined and definitely worth insanely weeping and wailing and railing over, until she thinks of something else to do, usually within two minutes.
6) Oh, is that something new to try? Duchess wants to try it. Unless it's dangerous, because then forget it.
7) She wants to go to New York City more than anywhere else. Unless you're going somewhere else and you invite her, because then that's the place she wants to go.
8) She laughs at everything. (This makes Skipper crazy, because she hates, above anything else, being laughed at.)
9) She likes you. And me. And everybody else.
10) She wants to tell you, and me, and everybody, everything that flickers through her brain. In detail.
11) She has no notion that we might not be very interested.
12) She still believes that all the minutes come hopping along full of interesting and delightful possibilities. She has a wonderfully low threshold for taking pleasure.* She doesn't make things happen, but she enjoys or at least is fine with most of the things that happen.
13) She is so, so alive. People usually say that about people who make things happen, but Duchess eats up experience in a way that, while passive rather than active, is a very strong engagement with her life. She's always been intent on being here, caught up in the immediacy of what's going on around her, since the moment she was born. I don't know where life will take her (and it will take her, not the other way around), but she will be in it completely all the way.

*"Wait, we're getting the pizza DELIVERED? It's coming to our HOUSE? That's so cool! Wow! It's being delivered!"

Words for living

My bike commute to work involves a long downhill stretch that is turning out to be a kind of barometer on how confident or optimistic I'm feeling each day. On Monday I barreled down the hill at (relatively) high speed, heedless of pavement imperfections and the possibility of getting t-boned by a driver making bad decisions. This delirious positivity was the result of a weekend that made things feel pretty good.

Here's what happened this weekend:
1) I recovered from the flu! The flu is terrible, and just the pleasure even of being able to lie in bed and NOT feel like a damp bag of scrap metal was pretty tremendous.
2) The girls and I went with friends to a Renaissance Festival. It was very hot, and I was still maybe slightly delirious from fever, but I can't even describe how weird that was. We saw a magic show, a rat circus, a falconry show, a joust, and, weirdly, an air show going on above the whole time, and it was all really fun and strange and disorienting. The girls loved it. Duchess wants to buy a corset. Skipper said later that she married one of the jousting knights.
3) I read three parenting books while lying in bed feeling like a damp bag of scrap metal, and found a strategy in one of them that seemed very silly, but, when I dutifully deployed it on Skipper, WORKED.  It worked, you guys. We finally have a way to help Skipper correct her own behavior, and it works at least a little bit some of the time. Yay!
4) On Monday morning, when Skipper came out in the kitchen seeking breakfast, I said, in greeting, "Hey, Skipper, what's the word?" (this sounds ludicrous but is a greeting I fairly frequently use because I am ludicrous), and Skipper said "Awake! Happy!" and I was so happy to hear that those were her Monday morning words. (Duchess, following in her wake, said "Sleepy! Zombie!" to balance it out.)

That's the words. Happy Tuesday!

We're alive. We got back from vacation, had three house guests, hired two babysitters, and managed a large pile of work crises. And Cook went on a camping trip. But things have since calmed down. A little. We're still working all the time, trying not to let the squalor rise above tolerable levels, and attempting to feed everyone food that isn't terrible for us.

In the last week, the kids have gone to an amusement park and gone berry-picking with a babysitter. And swum in the Willamette and many times at the pool. Their lives have been pretty great all summer - lots of swimming and adventures and snacks and reading and not doing anything they don't like to do. Duchess is very excited for school - she's in a combined 4th/5th-grade classroom, with a teacher she thinks she'll like, and I think she thinks it'll be more sophisticated with all those 5th-graders involved. (Hee.) Skipper, predictably, is freaking out at the prospect of kindergarten. She starts full-time next Friday, three days after Duchess (and none of the babysitters we hired can cover those days, so we're jury-rigging a complicated system of using our vacation hours and taking her to work with us for some hours, which makes things even more hectic). I am keeping my fingers crossed that the transition won't be maximally miserable.

Here's some of what we did this summer:
- In swimming, Duchess learned how to do a good flip turn
- In swimming, Skipper moved from reluctantly dipping her face in the water (when required) to enthusiastically plunging underwater and pretending to be a dolphin.
- Duchess decided she really likes gymnastics
- Duchess decided she really likes ballet.
- Duchess decided she really likes learning Mandarin.
- Duchess decided she really likes electronics.
- Duchess decided she really likes swimming.
- Duchess decided she loves the Wildwood trilogy.
- Skipper decided she does not like popsicles or blueberries.
- Skipper decided she loves the work of Roald Dahl and Robert McCloskey.
- Skipper decided she likes grocery shopping. But not leaving the house.
- We got new, bad neighbors who sit outside all the time smoking and having stupid conversations.
- We went on two camping trips (plus Cook's trip with friends)
- We went on a TWO-WEEK vacation!
- I stopped trying to learn to play guitar, but I am going to pick it back up again.
- I learned that I'm good at providing customer service to angry people. And that I am not completely unemployable.
- Cook learned that if you thread your pedal onto your bike pedal arm wrong, the threads will eventually be stripped away, and your pedal will fall off while you're riding home from work.
- We grew a lot of tomatoes and killed a bunch of other plants.
- We hired four babysitters.

And that's all I can think of off the top of my head. I can't believe summer's ending!

What We're Reading

Cook - On Such a Full Sea
Me - The Signature of All Things
Duchess - Harry Potter and the Thingymagig (she's re-reading them all with great joy)
Skipper - James and the Giant Peach (This is being read to her, of course. She loves this book very much, and wants to talk about it all the time. She says things like "I think the author decided to make a pattern in this book, so it goes scary funny funny scary funny funny and it would make you want to keep reading it!")

Our life right now, in numbers

9,998 - hours to go before I become a guitar virtuoso.* I've been increasingly bothered by the gap between the amount of time I spend on supporting my kids to do cool activities and the amount of time I spend on doing cool activities myself, so I bought a super-cheap guitar** and an online guitar course. I can now play super-simple versions of Amazing Grace, Happy Birthday, and When the Saints Go Marching In, very slowly and badly. Also, my wrists hurt. And my brain hurts.

4 - my remaining weeks of work

6 - the remaining weeks of school

89 - degrees in Fahrenheit at the hottest part of the day last Thursday.

41 - Skipper's height, in inches.

36 - Skipper's weight, in pounds.

25 - Skipper's height and weight, as a percentile of girls her age in the United States.

1 - the number of times Skipper said "Fuck!" at her appointment with her new pediatrician.


*Also, apparently I need to concentrate and get good coaching, too. But that's harder to put into numbers.
** So new that it is still offgassing solvents, and smells like the tears of abused, underpaid Chinese factory workers.

Another piece of deliciously silly television I like.

I would be more than happy to watch Jonny Lee Miller sit on a couch and read aloud from "Winnie the Pooh," but having him be a main character on an actual show is terrific.

Stuff we like right now.

This is what I like right now:

• The pope. The pope!
• The snow!
• Deliciously silly television (this and this and this)
• Watching Duchess play basketball
• Eavesdropping on Skipper's narrated games

This is what Cook likes right now:

• Holidays
• Binge-watching television. (Not the deliciously silly kind, the kind that's funny and terrifying at the same time.)

This is what Duchess likes right now:

• The birthday present she bought herself
• More Carl Hiassen
• The snow!
• Anticipating Christmas

This is what Skipper likes right now

• Cutting paper with scissors (not haphazardly - very carefully)
• Not wearing her winter jacket because it (and all warm clothes) makes her look "puffy"
• Old-fashioned stuffed animal adventures
• Singing all the time. All. The Time.
• Anticipating Christmas