Sources of information

Cook and I both had encyclopedia sets as children.* I remember picking up random volumes and just leafing through them, marveling at How Very Much Information There Is In the World. My kids, of course, can just leaf through the internet any time they please, but they also have fingertip access to an extraordinary variety of information concierges who tell them what information is important to know.  Skipper has been watching not only Stephen Colbert, but also a lot of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which means that she is constantly surprising me with her knowledge about things like SLAPP suits and biased jury selection. (This knowledge has been relevant because of the presidential election and the fact that we've been watching The West Wing.**) She listens to podcasts when she runs, and she often sits on the porch for a little while afterward, cooling down, staring off into space while listening to a podcast about volcanoes or what it's like to be the organist at a baseball game. So much information, so many potential guides to point us to what's important and what's not. I don't know how any of us can organize it all,  but I guess I'm glad that John Oliver is one of Skipper's teachers in her remote schooling life. 

*Cook's family's encyclopedia set was procured by Mrs. Big Cook from a stranger in a parking lot. Cook doesn't know any more details than that, and I have secretly built it out in my head into an elaborate adventure during which she wears a fedora.

** Skipper started watching it, and then Duchess discovered that it's leaving Netflix at the end of December, so now Skipper is watching a LOT of it. She calculated she'd have to watch more than 5 episodes a day in order to finish the series, and I don't think she's going to make it, even though she skips an occasional boring-looking episode. The West Wing is also prompting her to consider all kinds of questions. What's "Don't Ask Don't Tell?" What's Kashmir, and why are India and Pakistan fighting over it? Why should a president do fundraising calls inside the residence instead of the office? Why doesn't C.J. get more respect?

Ha, and I thought perimenopause was crummy!

We're "social distancing" here in Oregon. Today was the first day for me of working remotely. My office is encouraging everyone who can to work from home with no/limited in-person meetings, and Cook's office is reorganizing around staggered shifts and partial teleworking so they can all stay six feet away from each other all the time. (All the meeting rooms have been assigned quotas based on their size, so the smaller meeting rooms can now accommodate two people who sit pressed against the opposite walls.) I was supposed to go to a conference in Chicago next week, but it was cancelled. (And I was really looking forward to it.) Skipper's school trip to Japan in June has been cancelled. (Though our family trip to Japan is not cancelled- we're going to hope as long as possible that we can pull that off.) Skipper's baseball season and Duchess's ultimate frisbee season (long story) have been postponed. All my meetings have been cancelled or turned into video chats. THE LIBRARY SYSTEM HAS CLOSED.

All the stores are out of toilet paper, which briefly seemed very problematic when I thought this morning that we had only two rolls left in the house. Turned out we had an unopened box in the basement containing 36 rolls, so we'll make it a bit longer.

The kids are out of school as of today, through next week and the following week (which is spring break) and half the week after that (unless they extend it). All activities are cancelled. I'm not sure how that's going to go. Based on experience so far, Duchess will spend it lying in bed texting, and Skipper will read a bunch of books and periodically appear to ask questions like "What's communism?" or "What's a nuclear family?" or to startle me as she did this week when we were talking about COVID-19 and she said "Well, Mom, one death is a tragedy, and a million deaths is a statistic" and I said "ARE YOU QUOTING JOSEPH STALIN AT ME?!?!?" and she looked at me with a puzzled expression and said "Yeah!" like that's a normal person thing.

None of us know how to prepare or what to do. Skipper had a sore throat and abdominal pain this evening - do we now all stay in the house for 14 days? Are grocery stores going to run out of food as the supply chain falters? Should I have bought more canned beans today? Is it really going to snow tonight? The future, even the immediate future, feels wildly uncertain. And yet, people are still out and about, going to work and to bars like it's normal. I met a colleague at a coffee shop this morning; he was firmly in the this-is-overblown camp, and mentioned that his 75-year-old mother who has compromised lung function is really paranoid right now and makes everybody wash their hands. Sitting there, eating an almond croissant, with people socializing cheerfully all around us, I felt crazy. (And I told him his mom is right and he should wash his damn hands.)

Anyway. I bought a puzzle and the new Hilary Mantel book. We may starve to death, and/or have to wipe our butts with rags and moss, but we're not going down without reading material.

Kids these days

I've been reading a book about how screwed millennials are, and what I'm gleaning from it* seems like it will dismally apply to Duchess and Skipper.

Also, Duchess and her phone. Ugh. She's constantly holding it and staring at it. Last night I made her turn it off earlier than usual, and she was such delightful company - she played a stupid card game with Skipper, manically and amusingly did a dance and voice interpretation of my uterus, and worked on a crossword with Cook.** I've missed her.

*Kids are having to work increasingly hard on training themselves and making themselves more valuable resources in order to compete with each other for increasingly unstable and poorly paid jobs. This is bad.
**I have fond memories of doing crossword puzzles with my friend in middle school, in the Eugene Maleska era. That's how I learned the word "ort."

Interruption

I told Skipper, who was deep in an enormous pile of library books, that I was going to the basement to exercise. "I'll be down there for about an hour," I said. "Okay," she said.

Half an hour later, I heard her running footsteps overhead, and then thundering down the stairs. I assumed something had happened, like maybe a package was delivered, or an injured pedestrian at the door needing help. "Mom!" she said, "listen to this awesome tongue twister! Two witches watched two watches. Which watch did each witch watch?" and then she ran back upstairs.

There's a huge stack of books on the living room floor, not all of which have tongue twisters. I've been putting a lot of books on hold for the girls lately, many of them unsubtle attempts to encourage them to recognize a variety of life experience by taking advantage of their baked-in a) love of reading and b) strong desire to empathize. Thumbs up from both of them for Number the Stars, Esperanza Rising and What the Moon Saw. Duchess liked Jazz Day. (Skipper independently checked out of her school library the books George and Wonder, and liked them both very much.) I put a library hold on The Hate U Give for Duchess,* but of course if it's in the house Skipper will read it too. This is a very privileged-educated-white-person approach (one that would be decried by my social-justice-focused coworker, who likes to tell me that "white women cry, black men die"), but I guess it's a starting place.



*Duchess asked me last year "Mom, the kids have been talking about Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. Which side should I be on?" 

Skipper is reading in the living room. I'm washing dishes in the kitchen.

Skipper: Mom! I have a predicament!
Me: Yeah?
Skipper: What's a predicament?
Me: Um... a problematic situation that you need to solve.
Skipper: My predicament was that I didn't know what predicament meant.

Just a note

I was looking at the coverage of the marches today, and I got curious and went to the Fox News home page:

At first I thought it said nothing about the marches, and then I saw the little item on the bottom lefthand corner.

Here's the NY Times:

No wonder it feels like we're living in different worlds, when your standard media coverage (not EVEN your facebook feed) looks so different.

Anyway, Skipper and I are off to the Portland march. Don't look for us in the Fox news coverage; we won't be there.

Merry

We did it! Christmas happened. It was lovely. Lots of sloth and food.


















Cook and Duchess played a game. Cook won the first round.
















Duchess won the second.
















Skipper did some hard-core slothing.
























Duchess got a hat, which completed her transition into tweenyness.

Skipper got a globe.
















We went for a walk. Skipper took photos with the new family camera.

Duchess took photos with HER new camera.

And that's pretty much the news from here!

Glimpse inside Skipper's brain

Skipper is eating a sandwich, sitting alone at the dining room table with her hand-me-down Furby "sleeping" in a box beside her. I'm washing dishes in the kitchen, ten feet away.

Skipper: Mom, why did the Titanic sink?
Me: It hit an iceberg.
Skipper: But how did that make it sink?
Me: I don't know. It broke in half?
Skipper: But all six of its tanks filled with water. How did breaking in half make that happen?
Me: Sounds like you know more about it than I do.
Skipper: I keep checking a book about it out of the library but I always stop reading it because it makes my mouth hurt because I know what's going to happen.
Me: Oh.

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.

Last camping trip of 2016!

The girls and I ditched Cook and went on a car-camping trip. I learned some stuff: 

1) Driving still sucks.

2)  Camping is more fun when ALL your meals are prepared over the fire (preferably with no dishwashing necessary).

3) Audiobooks are awesome - preventive of carsickness in the car, promoting of peace at the campsite when the kids are bickering.

4) S'mores don't have to involve a graham cracker. In fact, it's best if they don't. (I made this when the kids were listening to audiobooks and I was left to my own devices. I didn't bring any books, and had to entertain myself with marshmallows.)

5) Sand castles can be made even when it's 60 and rainy.

6) A lot of the interactions between Skipper and Duchess play out sort of like this:

Skipper attempts to persuade Duchess to play with her. Duchess is adolescently skeptical but is eventually persuaded to participate.

It was damp, sandy, and cold. We inhaled a lot of woodsmoke and ate a lot of sand. We and all our stuff came home wet and filthy. We missed Cook. I read something recently about the effect of curated vacation photos on social media - how we are all at least a little jealous of each other's perfect vacations and feel bad about how ours seem to have a lot more whining, frustrations and missteps than other people's. Don't be jealous of mine - it was far from perfect. There was a lot of yelling and tantruming and whining and selfishness and general jerky behavior, and the weather was also quite poorly behaved. But we had such a good time that it was even worth the driving, and that's saying a lot.

Everything's fine.

My job continues to involve bearing up under a lot of negative feedback (not from my coworkers or boss; from the public), which I suck at, but I'm moving slowly into a more comfortable place of not caring. This probably makes me less effective at my actual job, but less likely to cry under my desk at work.

Skipper and Duchess take turns throwing tantrums.

Here's today. Skipper and Cook made waffles.

Duchess read Harry Potter to Skipper, who was terrified and had to hide under a blanket. (Note Skipper's new Safe Place, a chair she got for her birthday and drags all over the house for comforting nesting.)
































Skipper read alone in the hammock.