Welp

Still at home. Kids have no school for the rest of the year at least. I don't know if I'm going to have a job after six months. Cook is furloughed for a tenth of his time. Everything is crazy. And there's still no toilet paper on the shelves half the time when I grocery shop.

Our temp dog got adopted on Monday, and we are feeling sad about it. He had been cuddling with both kids a lot (they let him on their beds, and he LOVES a soft place with people on it), and they miss him most. We told the foster people we're ready for our next dog RIGHT AWAY.







































































I administered quarantine haircuts last weekend. Verdict is still out.

Working from home is hard. Like everyone lucky enough still to be working, I'm struggling with distinguishing work from personal; it all swirls together. Cook and I did invest in some office set-up equipment (headphones!) and time, acknowledging that we're not going back to any "normal" office commute any time soon. The bedroom is now my office, with an old piece of kitchen furniture repurposed as a standing desk. Cook shares the study with the guinea pigs. The TV is now in the basement. I know my way around all the video conference software, and roll my eyes (with video off) at people who still can't manage to "raise hand" in Zoom. I attended a two-day virtual conference this week, complete with networking sessions.

We watched every single one of the Star Wars movies. (Okay, I didn't actually sit through all of them with full attention. You got me. Lots of them aren't very watchable.) Skipper and I have developed shared escapist/vegetable habits of playing Stardew Valley on the Switch and watching Parks and Recreation.

I just feel really, really tired. So tired. I just want to live in Stardew Valley and plant parsnips.

Happy end of 2019!

Hi!

Catching you up: We decorated our house a little bit.
















































































































Then we went to Maine!

Then we took the train to Boston for a brief visit. We saw the USS Constitution and we also watched TWO movies!* In the THEATER!

*Knives Out and Little Women. That's who we are.

Family viewing

The TV/movies we've been able to watch as a family is a pretty limited universe. Things that we've managed to enjoy together:

• Mythbusters
• Amazing Race
• Horrible Histories
• Great British Baking Show
• Master Chef Junior

And now, the thing we currently most enjoy watching together, the thing that makes Skipper laugh uncontrollably in a way that nothing else ever has...

Total Wipeout

This is a show in which normal British people go through an obstacle course while the hosts mock them. It's really mean, and actually seems like it might be a little dangerous, and it is SO funny. The best thing in our lives is a pizza on Friday night, eaten while laughing at the Total Wipeout contestants as they bounce off giant red balls, get punched in the face and fall in the mud.

In other news, the girls have spring break this week. Duchess is off at hippie horse camp again. Skipper is planning to Do A Lot Of Reading.

This ad was shown at my staff meeting this morning (because it's women's history month!) and it made me cry.

Yup, still alive.

I realize that the fact that I have to keep posting reassurances that I haven't died since the last assurance suggests it might be time to retire this blog. But I'm not going to do that. Let's just assume I'm alive unless I post otherwise.

We're in Maine, visiting the Big Cooks. I've been lying on couches a lot, reading newspapers and also staring out the window. The weather has been gorgeous, and it might even snow for us tomorrow!

Cook and I took Duchess to see Star Wars today. I enjoyed it tremendously, Duchess enjoyed it, and Cook thought it was okay. (He reasonably thought it would have been nice to see a movie that was more different from the first movie, but I didn't care. Fan service works great for me, and I felt an actual thrill when the Millennium Falcon took off.) Skipper wisely chose to stay behind and have a fast food and video-at-home date with her grandparents. (She's in her sweet spot watching Mr Rogers, and would have hated this movie. Not to mention the EIGHT awful-looking and violent previews that came with it.)

And we had a lovely Christmas, full of food and sloth and presents. And instill have almost a week before I return to work! (Which I will - they extended my job another six months. I found that out about two weeks ago,)

I hope you all had holidays with the exact right amount of food and sloth!

Also, memories of three and a half.

For grandparents and insomniacs (or maybe both): video of Duchess dancing

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!)

Crasee prsen.

I wanted to share this amazing thing with you, but I apparently couldn't be bothered to take a decent picture of it. This is something Skipper brought home from the 100th day of school. It says "When I am 100 years old ... I will run a round like a crasee prsen!"  and the 100-year-old version of Skipper is depicted saying "I like runing a round like a crasee prsen!"

Skipper explained that she will wear ponytails when she is 100 because she looks good in ponytails. And that is a candy cane she is using as a cane because she will have grown so small that a candy cane will be the right size.

Also, Skipper is now officially reading chapter books. This unfortunately means that the Accursed Fairy Books are back in the house. She isn't yet able to read silently, so she was banished to her room to read.

Skipper had a taiko performance on Friday. She was pretty worried about it. She survived:

Triumphant peacock.

I am not the sort of parent who thinks her kids are the best. I tend to err on the side of underestimating them. Duchess danced her peacock dance at the Lunar New Year celebration at her school last night, and I was concerned that it would be a boring flop. She had worked on it a LOT under the tutelage of her Chinese teacher, but what I had seen looked pretty uninspiring, like a listless, jerky aerobics routine. She's not terribly graceful or coordinated, and she's really not concerned about stuff like attention to detail. (See?) But she's also a person who does stuff, as we know, and doing a solo performance (a solo DANCE performance!) is just a thing that people who do stuff... just do. She was nervous, but not terribly so, and she just took it all in stride. My concern was tempered by her casual attitude; I figured that if it was a disaster, she'd take that in stride, too, as she does with everything.

Anyway, she did her dance, all by herself, at the end of a typically boring but mildly charming bumbling-kid show, in the hot, crowded cafeteria. She did great. She didn't look nervous, though she also didn't smile or engage the audience at all. She just seemed like she had the whole thing in hand, like she was just doing it. Even a doting mom wouldn't say that she looked like a gifted or experienced dancer, but she looked like she had practiced, and she absolutely did not embarrass herself. And then her performance was over, and she was beset by friends and their parents congratulating and complimenting her, and she LOVED that. I think it might have been the best moment of her life so far.

(This, by the way, is a classmate and friend of hers. Not all of her friends are built on such a different scale from Duchess, but this is not unusual.)

(Skipper, of course, took this all as a personal affront. She was very worried that Duchess would humiliate herself, and then when it all came off well, she got really pissed that Duchess was getting so much attention. Poor kid - another lose-lose.)

Almost ten

Duchess will be ten tomorrow. Today, for Stage 1 of the birthday celebration, we took her best friend from kung fu along to the archery range. The older two had a lovely time, but Skipper struggled mightily to coordinate arrow, hands, and bow, and got extremely frustrated. Here are bad photos, and a very long, boring video, all taken with my elderly phone.

Skipper

Skipper still only wears four t-shirts and four pairs of shorts. She's let the underpants battle go for now, and the sock battle has been totally ended by my incredibly brilliant purchase of a set of days-of-the-weeks socks. She won't wear any sweaters or jackets, or any longsleeved shirts. (Fortunately, the weather has been quite warm.) She hates wearing her glasses, and fights them all day long. She is very proud of her status as second-best reader in her kindergarten class. She has many strong opinions. She is rapidly improving her monkey bar skills, which is closely associated with success at recess in kindergarten at her school.

Brief check-in

We're almost through the week! Skipper has enjoyed some elements of her camp experience, and definitely NOT enjoyed others. Today she went on a field trip and refused to participate in any of the activities. But she went! Small steps. She's been very clingy, and mostly just wants to cuddle when she's got a parent at her disposal. Skipper's happiest when her world is rock-solid, and having her daily routine changing every week is really screwing with her sense of stability, so she feels very vulnerable. She's powering through, though. She's learned some dance routines and martial arts routines at camp, and she really likes those. She puts on her hand-me-down taekwondo outfit after camp and punches and kicks very seriously.

Duchess has loved robotics camp. She is one of two girls out of the twelve kids participating, but four of the boys are classmates of hers from school, and she likes three of them, so she's pretty comfortable. They play games like "Secret Circuit," which is apparently great fun. AND they're going to have root beer floats and watch "Spirited Away" tomorrow, which is even greater fun. (The kids at this camp are the sort of kids who spend time arguing over whether they should watch a Harry Potter movie or a Hayao Miyazaki movie. As I guess you would expect from a robotics camp.)

Duchess is still swimming, before camp, and enjoying it a lot. I think she may be at the highest fitness level of her life right now, having spent the last five weeks doing 7-10 hours of fairly intense aerobic activity (swimming, kung fu, gymnastics, and ballet) a week. Between camp and swimming, though, she's very much missing loafing-on-the-couch time, so she burrows into it whenever she can.

And Cook and I are staggering through our days. Cook has a bunch of work projects he's mightily struggling to wrap up before vacation, and I have a big work surge next week  We're mostly just adjusting as best we can to having both of us working full-time - staying up late washing dishes and putting together lunches, and trying not to forget anything as we rush out the door in the morning. There's a chance my job (currently scheduled to end in October) might lead to permanent full-time employment, in which case we'll have to get a slow cooker and come up with some better strategies.

Swim Meet today

Duchess swam in five events this morning. She had a pretty good time. She still struggles with her dives (which remain hilariously bellyfloppy), and isn't confident enough of her flip turn to deploy it at meets, but she's now officially a better swimmer than both her parents.

These are some crappy phone videos. The first part is Duchess on the return trip of her 50M butterfly leg of a relay team that was dramatically behind even before she hit the water. By the time I started recording, her stroke had deteriorated (due to fatigue) so far as to be almost unrecognizable as butterfly, but I was just impressed that she wasn't drowning, because butterfly seems insanely hard to do. The second part is Duchess's 50M freestyle race. (Her best friend from kung fu is racing in the lane beside her.) She won her heat and came in fourth overall in the 9-10 age group.

She placed second in her age group in breaststroke later in the day. She also competed in a freestyle relay and a 200M individual medley at which she did fairly poorly. She was pretty crushed by that IM experience, because she had been weirdly overconfident about it and I think she thought she might win. So. Lessons were learned, bellies were flopped, shoulders were sunburned.

Luxury

A few weeks ago we all made a field trip to a furniture store to investigate options. It was the kind of store we rarely go to, a vast building surrounded by parking, and it was full of enormous furniture. At first I felt slightly superior in an envious way ("Sacre bleu! All the chairs have cupholders built in! Lazy Americans!") and then I just got into it.  I am naturally inclined toward reclining with cupholders, and if we had any furniture capable of that, I would do nothing but recline. And drink things.

The kids skipped the feeling-superior phase, because they don't know how to do that yet. Also, the moment we walked in, a friendly greeter pointed out the kids' area, which had televisions and these little rocking chair things that doubled as remote controls, so you plugged your headset INTO THE CHAIR and controlled the volume WITH YOUR CHAIR. And they had Xboxes! Skipper sat down to watch "Finding Nemo" while Duchess sat down beside her to play a VIDEO GAME! With an XBOX! Duchess has never seen a game controller, and it was apparently a revelatory experience.

When Cook and I finished goggling at the enormous reclining couches and armchairs with cupholders (and when I finally struggled out of the last one I tried, which I could happily have lived in for the rest of my life), we went to collect the kids. On the way out we walked through the kids' furniture area, which was full of child-sized armchairs with cupholders. As we walked out the door, Duchess said "Mom, can we come back here tomorrow?" All the way home, the kids dreamily discussed how fabulous it would be if we were magically granted all the furniture in that store. Each kid would have their own room! And each room would have a trundle bed! And a giant TV! And an Xbox! And an armchair with cupholders!

On a related note, the girls were reading the wellness handout we got at Skipper's doctor's office on Friday, and they found the advice to limit children's screen time to 1-2 hours per day. And not to let your child have a TV in her room. I silently congratulated myself for being a great parent** while the kids contemplated the possibility that these might be options. I think they may be considering trading me in for a different parent model, possibly one with cupholders.

* Yesterday I let Skipper watch Daniel Tiger for nearly two hours, which I suspect some of my friends would consider borderline abusive parenting. I considered it a great way to make dinner without Skipper's help - she's relentlessly enthusiastic about participating in cooking, which is cool, but also inconvenient for me, as it slows things down considerably. I frequently find myself sneaking into the kitchen to cook, hoping she won't notice. 

Now Skipper's learning to read!

Perhaps you remember Duchess learning to read. Happily, we have clued in to the Bob Books this time around, so Skipper is flying along.

Unusual weather

I splurged on a temporary subscription to Hulu Plus. This means I can watch television on the tablet, and it makes me feel like I'm living in The Future. I am holding a movie in my hands! Anyway. This is Skipper watching television* in bed. Because that's what we do in The Future.

*She watches Caillou. Neither of my kids like to watch scary stuff, but Skipper prefers to watch only the most unthreatening viewing material.  Caillou makes her feel safe. I do understand the appeal; one of my favorite movies for rewatching is Dave, which is pretty much the adult equivalent of Caillou.

Things Cook has said while watching Breaking Bad

1) "This isn't a show about meth. This is a show about health insurance!"
2) "You know, this show really takes all the fun out of drug dealing."