Spring, 2019 edition

Hey, it's spring!















































Duchess went to a regatta.









































Cook celebrating his 39th birthday again, insisted that we all play a goddamn game together to celebrate. (It's a really fun game, though the girls were not feeling it at the time.)


















What else is up? Lots of feelings. The girls have lots of social feelings at school. I have I-will-never-have-another-job feelings. Cook has too-much-work feelings.

But it's spring! And we busted out the hammock. It does help with the feelings.

Skipper turned 9!

I asked Skipper (by instant message) for a list of birthday gift suggestions. She wrote me back this:

Craft stuff
Books
Games
Stocks
Definitely stocks
BALOONS
Oranges

She got balloons. And oranges. And books. And craft stuff. Not stocks yet - I'm trying to figure out how a 9-year-old can invest in stocks.

We ate ramen for dinner.
































Skipper had another sleepover birthday party. We all agreed the next day that it was the last sleepover birthday party. Cook concocted another scavenger hunt that required digging.

8

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

Duchess turned twelve

Saturday

Skipper's birthday party was this morning. It's over; phew. Duchess acted as party master, which was very nice - Cook and I pretty much hid out in the kitchen while she ran the scavenger hunt and bossed everybody around. 

catching a breath

We have been busy.

My work life has continued to be very busy. My job has been extended through the end of the calendar year.

Duchess is now fully healed from the Broken Finger Episode, and is cramming in a bunch of makeup gymnastics classes before the end of the season in June. This is hectic. She is also taking a programming class on Saturdays, which is hectic. And she's started extra training sessions on weekends with her kung fu friends, preparing for their Big Test this summer. Hectic!

Last weekend was Skipper's birthday. She had invited six kids to her party on Sunday, and we heard back from three, and she only had one confirmed attendee. She decided she wanted to go ahead with the party, even with just one kid. On Saturday night, after the kids had gone to bed, I asked Cook to inspect my itchy head for lice. I had a louse. Our first lice! On Sunday morning, we started the bedding-washing and kid-delousing project, and it rapidly became clear that we were not going to be able to get ready for the looming week, bake and frost a birthday cake, lay out a scavenger hunt, host guests, delouse* everybody AND still remain sane, so we cancelled the birthday party. I called the parent of the one confirmed attendee, and emailed the parents of the non-RSVP-ers  as I didn't have numbers for them. One of the non-RSVPers subsequently showed up for the party (which was confusing and hilarious and mortifying in equal measures - they knocked on the door, and Skipper, Duchess, and Cook, who were playing Uno in the living room between combings, all scattered in terror and surprise).

It all worked out okay. We seem to be louse-free, and my head no longer itches.***  And ALL six kids are coming to the rescheduled party this weekend, so it probably actually worked out for the best.

Skipper's birthday? I think it was pretty good. She got presents she liked, she ate her weight in sushi for dinner, and then she ate chocolate cake frosted with whipped cream and garnished with raspberries. Her favorite present seems to be Uno, a last-minute inspiration of Cook's. She feels old.

That's all. Hectic! Old!

*Manual delousing, using a spiffy anti-nit comb, a lot of conditioner and the magic of television.
** Skipper appears to have been the vector, which makes sense - I've heard from other parents that her class is particularly lousy. Cook was clean, and Duchess and I both had very small infestations.
*** The internet told me that the itch is the result of an allergic reaction to lice saliva. That made me feel much itchier.

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!

Growth

We have had a hectic few days. There has been baking, parties, gymnastics, roller skating, visiting relatives, restaurants, ice cream, and much more. It's been wonderful and dizzying.

On Sunday, I took Duchess to get her ears pierced. This was her request for a 10th birthday present, but her swimming schedule required a delay. This seemed like a good time to get it done, so on Sunday evening she and I biked over to a local piercing/tattoo place, a place that regularly handles much more sensitive and complicated piercings than easy-peasy earlobes, and has rave reviews online. She got her ears pierced by a guy with a lot of tattoos who was really great with her. She was thrilled by the experience, and LOVES her new earrings and clearly feels 100% more sophisticated.















































(Though she was mad at me when I took these photos, and thus looks kind of pissy.)

This morning, we went to a well-child checkup. Duchess asked me and Skipper to let her do the appointment herself, so we waited in the waiting room. When they called us in, Duchess's doctor told me that Duchess is "perfectly normal. Except that she's super-tall!"

This is Duchess's growth chart. Those numbers at the right end of the curved lines are percentiles. Notice how far Duchess is above the 95th percentile line? Notice that she's 5'2.5" tall? Notice that her trajectory is heading toward an adult height of over 5'10"? Even if she stops growing today, she'll be taller than a quarter of the adult female population.

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!

Half a decade

Skipper turned five today. She didn't want to have a party; she wanted to have a family day. Most of her expressed wishes revolved around food. Our diet today was almost entirely restricted to starch and dairy; vegetables were banned. Skipper really enjoys helping with cooking and baking, and yesterday as she was spinning lettuce dry for salad, she announced jauntily "We won't need to use the salad spinner tomorrow, because there won't be any salad!" She did allow raspberries and strawberries, in the interest of vitamins. 

She got a number of wonderful presents, and got to do lots of things she wanted to do, as well as eat only starch and dairy (plus hamburger). By about noon, though, she was getting overwhelmed, and was pretty cranky all afternoon. When we brought out her cake (which she had just frosted), she practically hid under the table. 

Second dairy+starch meal. Flowers arranged by Duchess.

Setting up the thank-you-note list before opening presents.

Overwhelmed by cake.

Nothing new.

We're still slogging along with the same old, same old. I just felt that I should post something to reassure anybody who might be lying awake at night worrying that something terrible has happened to us. Here for your enjoyment: miscellany.

Spring is reluctantly easing here, with occasional lovely days and a whole lot of rain. Tonight is balmy and beautiful; Cook went to a meeting of map dorks, after which he glided and swooped home on his bike in the dark, and came home exhilarated.*

My job is in transition, possibly to a different setup at a different organization, and possibly to no job at all. I'll find out in May. (This makes it a little challenging to plan summer childcare.)

I got new tires on my bike. Cook bought them for me, and he went into the shop and said "My wife needs tires. She doesn't like to fall down, she doesn't like to go fast, and she hates getting flats. What should I get her?" So now I have these fabulous fat tires on my bike.

Dutch has been watching some women's basketball, including a game featuring a player who is 6'8". I don't think Dutch will reach those lofty heights, but you never know. I've never met a taller 7-year-old.

Skipper** is eagerly anticipating her upcoming third birthday, which she has already decided will feature cheese pizza and chocolate cupcakes. Otherwise, she continues to be rashy and reckless, with a charming love of wordplay*** and an off-putting love of whining and shrieking.

And that's about it. Further bulletins as events warrant.


*In equal parts from the ride and the map dorkery.
** aka "The One Who Isn't Tall"
*** We credit/blame the Grandparents Cook for this.

It'll take a year to recover.

We did it! We survived Dutch's party! 

Cook honored the festive occasion by dressing up. The tie, FYI, has his clan plaid on it.

It was fun. It was, however, faster-moving than I'd expected, so I didn't get as many pictures as I'd have liked. The main activity was a scavenger hunt involving invisible ink pens (when Dutch and I were shopping for party favors, she saw those pens, and she Had To Have Them) and clues written in invisible ink on "old" paper (aged by Cook, using coffee grounds and the oven) and then cut into five pieces.  

The idea was that the kids had to put the pieces together like a puzzle and read the clues using the magic lights in the caps of their pens. In practice, it was a lot more chaotic than that.

Dutch and Best Friend (remember her? Still invited to birthday parties after going to separate schools for a whole year) were by far the most engaged of all the kids in actually puzzling things out.

They had to get the shovel out of the shed so they could dig up the treasure...

Regrettably, I have no photos of them discovering the X that Cook had made over the treasure spot, or of them digging it up. There was a lot of yelling, squealing, jumping up and down, and flailing of shovels. They were then fairly disappointed to discover that all they got was a package containing five Mad Libs books. (Another thing Dutch discovered at the toy store and Had To Have.) They recovered, however, and the conversation over lunch went sort of like this (really, really loudly):
"Can I have another piece of pizza?"
"Can you give me a noun?"
"I need an adjective!"

It was tiring. Even though it pretty very low-key by kid birthday standards,* there was a fair amount of food and activity prep required. There was some weird kid chemistry. Several of the kids refused to eat any of the food, including the ridiculously sugary and buttery cupcakes I served up. One of the kids threw a fit because we have bar soap instead of liquid soap. There was a bit of a fracas over whose gift would get opened first.**  Skipper was tired and grumpy and insisted on being carried the entire time (except when she ate all the frosting off a cupcake). We were all so worn-out afterward that we just ate leftover pizza and cupcakes for dinner while watching TV, and put the kids to bed early.



* No balloons. No decorations. No bouncy house. Home-made food. Boring.
**Gift-giving and parties - it's a disaster. We've tried to do no-gift parties, or hand-me-downs-or-home-made-only gift parties, or open-presents-after-the-party parties, and this year we just gave up. Now they're old enough that they actually WANT to see the birthday kid open the present they brought. And I guess it's worthwhile to practice giving and receiving gifts. Dutch and I talked a lot about her responsibility as hostess and as the receiver of gifts. Luckily, she didn't have to suppress any disappointment in her gifts, because she loved them all. 

Seven

 Dutch had a good birthday. We did the traditional wake-up with singing and (this year) apple muffins with candles in them. Skipper refused to wake up for it, so the waking and present-opening were all about Dutch, which was nice. She loved her presents, and just the sheer gleeful Dutch-centric-ness of it all.

Then Skipper finally woke up, and we ate breakfast. 

Then Dutch spilled Skipper's celebratory juice on the floor, and this is her expression just after it happened. Apparently, anticipation of my spill-related wrath is terrifying. Also, I think this may be a preview of what Dutch will look like when she's 90.

I went to Dutch's school to have lunch with her, which was fun, and we all went out to eat for dinner tonight. Dutch had an orange soda with whipped cream in it, and a plate of french fries covered in bacon, sour cream, scallions, and cheddar cheese. She knows how to live it up, that kid. But now her birthday is over, and it's back to leafy dark greens.

Oh, and it POURED rain all morning - we had our rainiest bike commute yet, and it was cold, too. Dutch was a trooper, though, as befits a seven-year-old.

And THIS is the only photo I have from our houseguests' visit. Next time I must do better.

There's not much point in trying to get anything done at this time of year.

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned the altered state Dutch enters every year about a week before Halloween, and sustains until New Year's Day. Because her birthday is in November, she spends the last two months of every year receiving and giving gifts, attending and hosting parties, and taking time off from school at such high frequency that it pretty much feels like a non-stop celebration. 

This means highs and lows. Very high. Very low.  This weekend she was great, because hey, playmates! and today she was great because OMG this is her last Monday as a 6-year-old!!!!!!! And OMG another box arrived for her!!! I expect this crazy-happy state will last through her birthday, with a brief crash and then another lift anticipating her birthday party this weekend. Then a week off from school! Thanksgiving! And then a few weeks of let-down, ramping back up for The Big Event. Should be pretty crazy. Also, she has three weeks off of school in the next six weeks, so even if she was emotionally stable, I think I'd find it a little trying.* 

We've been piling up her presents in the dining room to be opened on the birthday morning, and I allowed her to touch and smell them but not pick up, shake, or poke them.** She sniffed the first box and turned to me with her eyes alight with excitement. "Mom, I know what it is! It smells musty, like spell books! It's Hermione's spell books!" So she might be momentarily disappointed when it turns out that she won't get to learn real magic when she's seven.

*Luckily, I love holidays, too. Food! This year, no traveling! Days off! Anticipation! Food! Awesome. 

** These are basically totally arbitrary rules, because parenthood is all about power trips and I can get away with it. Ha!

oh, the fear

Today I was riding the bus home, thinking about life,* and the bus passed Dutch's school. She was at school still for her after-school Spanish class (I was heading further west to pick up Skipper at preschool), and I craned my neck, hoping to catch a glimpse of her in the classroom. I didn't see her, but I started thinking about her, particularly her crazy-ass moods, and her near-total lack of self-censorship. As much as her blabber-mouth approach to life drives me crazy, it's going to be a sad day when the endless river of words dries up. It's sad to think of Dutch putting herself in hiding, holding back from the judgmental world of adolescence. I wonder when it'll happen - four years? Less? Maybe never, and my kid will always be loud and crazy. Part of me wishes for that.

I have a friend here whose daughter is a few months older than Dutch, and she's Dutch's opposite in many ways - totally disinterested in pleasing people other than herself. This has cons, obviously, and I expect will make things hard for her in school and other social environments for a while. But I can see that she is going to do really well in life, this kid - she's not afraid to take what she wants (but she's not a sociopath or anything - just kind of impervious to criticism). People like that seem to thrive. I am afraid that Dutch is getting too indoctrinated into the idea that she must be a Good Girl. At school, she likes to volunteer to help out, and clean up messes she didn't make. It makes me nervous - girls always have to be Good Girls, and being a Good Girl never got anybody anywhere that I know of. This is an old story in my parenting of Dutch. I want her to be well-behaved and sensitive to other people, but I'm deeply divided over the fact that I'm teaching her to be compliant, careful of other people's feelings, and generous. It's pretty easy to go from there into self-sacrifice and being seriously taken advantage of. So... anyway. Her adolescence is going to be scary for me. (Do I have to remind you that my children's lives are ALL ABOUT ME?! Isn't everything?)

In semi-related news, Dutch is having her birthday party soon.** She's decided to invite four kids, and two of them are boys, including the boy who's become pretty much her best friend this year. He's loud and nerdy. Dutch seems to have a type, because all the boys she likes best are loud, bossy, self-important nerds. I'm beginning to consider my future as a mother-in-law, and I have some concerns.


* I do that on the bus. Today I looked out the window a lot, and I noticed, for the first time, a  strip club called "The Pitiful Princess." Isn't that the saddest strip club name ever?
** Seven. SEVEN!!!!!

Exactly as it should be

I am now 35 years old.* This is the age I have always felt myself to be, and now I am at exactly the right age. This is it! This is my year. I think I'm just going to stay 35 forever.

Last night, I sat in the dining room in the dark while Cook and Skipper and Dutch lit the candles on my cake. Cook said "Skipper, don't blow the candle out," and then he lit a candle and she immediately blew it out. They finally got the candles lit, and they came out singing. Dutch may be totally tone deaf, and Skipper doesn't actually know how to sing  the Happy Birthday song, so it was a little hard to tell what they were singing, but it was beautiful. My family, in the dark, with candles, singing.** I got a little weepy.

Which is not to say that the whining and tantrums are in any way diminished, but they feel okay today. Tomorrow... we'll see.


* I thought twice about writing this, in case you suddenly feel that you need to send me presents or apologies for forgetting my birthday. If you're feeling that way, you should stop, because I neither need presents nor ever remember other people's birthdays. I'm sure I'll forget yours, and have forgotten it repeatedly in the past. So do NOT feel guilty, because then I'll have to feel guilty, and that's a terrible thing to do to somebody on their birthday.


** "Singing"

Sunday!

Pizza!

Tomatoes!

 

Boots!

Underpants!

 Cake!

Will your birthday party be worth eleven miles of biking?

Yesterday Cook escorted Dutch to a birthday party. The birthday party took place at an amusement park by the river, and they had a choice of biking five and a half miles each way or riding the bus for over an hour each way. They picked bike. It rained. Dutch had an awesome time at the party, and was apparently a total trooper about the biking.

Tin, aluminum, and diamonds

Cook and I are approaching our tenth anniversary. Last night, while Cook was trying to fall asleep, I recounted half an episode of the Daily Show (an OLD episode) while wearing my nightguard. "And den he was prutehding to be Johje Boosh and he was like 'heh heh heh deh room has to smell like ciddamon!'"And Cook, good person that he is,* said nothing until I finally noticed that I was being insane, and then he gently confirmed that yes, I was.

Cook and I are very different, and he is a very private person,** so all I'm going to say about this whole married-for-a-decade thing is that it's been good, and it's been bad, and here we are!

*Also being mostly asleep.

** You can imagine how he feels about having stories about him posted on the internet. He's pretty gracious about that, too.

Sentimental Interlude

My friend is getting married this weekend. We won't be there when she gets married, so I'm not going to be able to stand up and give a toast, but I wish I was (though it's a barbecue-and-hammocks kind of wedding, so I'm not sure toasts are even an option). This friend was my first real friend, the first friend I chose, the first friend of my heart. I had friends before that (though not very many, as I have been socially awkward since my first breath), but they were mostly proximity-based - neighbors and family friends - or the sort of person who is kind to a socially-awkward classmate not so much because of any particular chemistry as because they are just kind people.*

This friend arrived in my life when I was miserable and mean and sad. She was smart and funny and weird and warm-hearted. She was generous and expressive and loving in a way that I was afraid to be myself, and she showed me that being open to happiness often requires making yourself vulnerable. She taught me that it was fine to be both cynical AND sentimental. She introduced me to the joys of crossword puzzles and trashy books. I think it's not too dramatic to say that her friendship changed me, and only for the better.

I wish for my daughters that they find friends like this, who open their hearts to joy. And for my friend, I wish joy.** And trashy books, and crosswords, and everything else that is good.

*And may I say how grateful I am to those people? Deanna whatever-your-name-was in fifth grade, I'm talking to you. Thank you.

**But this does not affect my opinion that Beaches is a terrible, terrible movie.