Updates

Duchess turned thirteen. THIRTEEN!

Skipper lost another tooth.

The guinea pigs remain very strange. But they feel more comfortable with us. A little bit.


















We went to Astoria! It's been nine years since we last visited, but we revisited some of our favorite sites.

The Maritime Museum, whre Skipper purchased herself a hat.:

A different hotel with a view of the bridge. Skipper, who has very little hotel experience, was thrilled with things like the elevator, the pool (a POOL!), the vending machine, and the room key card. "This is a life of luxury!" she said.

And Fort Stevens, where the camera ran out of batteries. It was very beautiful, I swear.






































We also went to the Lewis and Clark Historical Site, and we ate dinner at a restaurant that had sea lions sleeping under the floor, visible through a viewing window. This was all very exciting.

Braces off!

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.

Thanksgiving

She lost this tooth today.

Note the braces!

Growing up, and belated photos

Look! Old bad phone photos from our beach trip in August.

Duchess got braces this week. This is her before they were installed.

No post-braces close-up photo yet. Duchess headed straight off to her camping weekend after school on Friday. This is her at the bus stop, snarfing a hastily-assembled burrito, and rocking an overall awesome adolescent geekery. She's now a good inch taller than I am.





















And this is a random photo from my bike commute last week, waiting for the drawbridge to go down.

Expensive Day

1) Duchess is commencing Project Braces this fall. Should take two years, plus a follow-up retainer. No headgear or other extra misery.

2) Looks like we need a new roof, a full tearoff. While we're at it, we should remove the extra chimney, right? And if we're doing that, we should renovate the kitchen, right?

Skipper lost her second tooth today, and had an eye appointment involving dilation drops.

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I am still here. Busy. The only news I have is this: Duchess lost her last baby tooth last night; she's an adult now. (Actually, she lost the last piece of it - it shattered a couple of weeks ago, and pieces of it have been falling out slowly as the new tooth shoves them out of the way. This seemed like an appropriately disgusting way to wrap up this weird process of losing chunks of tissue.)

Milestone

Tonight Skipper lost her first tooth. It's been loose for so long that I was pretty sure she was never going to actually let go of it, but it's been holding on by a thread for days. She was, of course, pretty worried about losing it, and every morning for the last week I've said something like "I wonder if your tooth will fall out today!" and she's looked at me grimly and said something like "Oh, it won't fall out today." There's already a half-grown adult tooth behind it that got tired of waiting for Skipper to release the poor baby tooth. Tonight she bit into the remnants of the gingerbread house she made at school on Thursday, and her tooth socket started to bleed. She started wailing in terror, and I escorted her to the bathroom, cleaned the blood off her finger, and suggested that she pull the damn thing out. She was weeping and wild-eyed, and apparently undone enough by fright that she actually immediately did just that. Then she started worrying about the tooth fairy, and about how long it would take the tender spot to heal up. However, the pleasure of wearing her Christmas hat cheered her up, and she went to bed feeling optimistic.

Yeah, she has about ten different styles of underpants, including "boyshorts". None of them work. I can't tell how much of the problem is a legitimate sensory thing, and how much is control. I don't know how much it matters.

Anyway, I'm sitting here on the internet while Cook makes ice cream, so as my contribution to the household, I will now give you your official update on my kids' fascinating school experiences! Skipper has had art, PE, library, and music, and she likes all of them. Tomorrow her class has "social skills class" with the school counselor. Skipper will probably ace it, because she has made some big social strides lately. She has been speaking to the new (and excellent) babysitter. She greeted the grocery store checker with an unsolicited "hello" yesterday. She has been going to kindergarten EVERY GODDAMN DAY, you guys. That's nothing to sneer at, when you're dealing with horribly uncomfortable underpants and paralyzing social anxiety.

Duchess is still happy. Things are still mellow at school, with minimal homework, and she still likes her teachers and has had no social disasters yet. She gets more pre-adolescently snarky and volatile every day, but she's still basically cheerful about most things, so I think we'll get a year or two before everything is grumpy all the time. Maybe.

And Cook and I are still alive! Our teeth are crumbling out of our heads, and I was almost crushed by a falling branch while biking home from work in the gusty evening today, but we are alive!

The dentist, and my strange kid

I took Skipper to the dentist yesterday. As with the doctor, once she realized that the situation was not as terrifying as she had thought, she went straight from mute cowering into a kind of manic show-off mode. Lying in the chair, while the dentist and hygienist were looking at her records, she pointed her finger straight up in the air and said loudly "I want to POKE SOMEBODY IN THE EYE!"

The dentist turned and looked at me questioningly, and I really had no idea what to say.

On the plus side, she has no cavities.

Dental sentiment

You guys, Duchess only has six baby teeth left, crowded in among the new, comically giant choppers. The orthodontist thinks they'll be gone within nine months.* I felt unexpectedly stricken by this news. In some deep part of my brain, I feel that when she loses that last bony vestige of babyhood, she will officially Not Be My Baby Any More. This is a ridiculous notion, and I really can't even pretend that I'm enthusiastic about infancy in general,* so it's silly that I'm pining for it in any way. It's surely more complicated than that - grief for my own looming death, probably, plus my anxiety about my girls growing up in the world. She's got a big adult life ahead of her, and those old tiny teeth were obviously not up to the job.

* Skipper has always been dentally precocious, losing her first tooth (the natural way, I mean - she knocked one out at age two) at age four. She is still in the normal range, though. And, as you may recall, that's pretty much my parenting goal - keep things within the normal range.
**It's not that I dislike babies. It's just not my favorite part of people's lives. 

Out it was.

I love the way my daughters talk. I love the way they pick up vocabulary, and the way they're always asking me what words mean, and I love hearing them deploy words as they go about their lives. They're both very  verbal kids, interested in narrative, eager to accumulate and use new words, and they both talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. One of Skipper's current favorite activities is sitting down with a picture book, preferably a newly-acquired library book she's never had read to her, and "reading" a completely invented story about the pictures. As she makes up the story, she falls back on classic oral storytelling techniques like repetition - "The sun is rising. It rises to rise! It glows to glow." - and it's pretty hilarious to listen to her. (From the next room; she doesn't like to have an audience for this activity.) They use good words with each other, too. Duchess suggested the other day that Skipper should "shed one of the blankets" she was wearing in their pretend narrative game (orphans escaping an evil orphanage, as usual), and Skipper referred casually to a "makeshift" set-up for a game. Skipper recently called me her "scornful mama!" and then, to my relief, asked me what "scornful" means.

My favorite recent language moment with the girls, though, happened about a month ago, when Duchess unexpectedly lost a tooth. (Molars, apparently, don't do the prolonged wiggling-around thing that front teeth do.) Her note to the Tooth Fairy described how she didn't know her tooth was loose, and "I was eating dinner, and kapooie, out it was!"

Miscellany

Skipper is into space this week.* She has been asking lots of questions and poring over an old Click magazine issue about space. She dug up an astronaut bear stuffed animal given to her by a NASA fan a few years ago, renamed it "Davy Baby Space Bear," and given it Most Favored Animal status.** However, when Cook delivered a bedtime story (an installment in the six-year-long Pippa and the Penguin series), in which the child heroine and her avian companion were SEPARATED from the parents and accidentally caught a ride on a spaceship, Skipper freaked out and had to hide under her pillow until the family was reunited. Apparently, we will all have to come along when Skipper makes her first space mission.

Today we took the girls to an open house at a local dance/theater/music education nonprofit, where they were offering free half-hour classes. Skipper was excited in advance, but when we got there, she didn't want to participate. ("I don't like this class because you have to talk," she told me.) Duchess, however, got to participate in an improvisational theater class, which (of course) she adored. Cook and I watched the whole thing, and we were both really struck by how much any 8-year-old (or human being of any age) can benefit from some improv training. The primary rule, more or less, are that you say "yes" to any idea that is tossed your way, that you listen and respond and not "block" your teammates' ideas by changing the storyline too drastically or by refusing to go along with their ideas. Funny but irrelevant non sequiturs are discouraged. There are no mistakes. It's all about paying attention, being generous to yourself and your partners, enthusiastically diving into ideas but still keeping an eye on the big picture to make sure things aren't veering too far off course... doesn't this sound like a recipe for success in conversations, relationships, projects - just about everything? I've decided that every second-grader in Portland should have a weekly improv class.

While I'm fixing up public education, I've decided that math needs an overhaul, too. This week my curiosity overpowered my budgeting willpower, and I purchased a ridiculously expensive ($6!) math game app for my awesome tablet. Duchess has been playing it as much as she is allowed, and it appears to be more or less teaching her algebra.*** It's pretty cool, and I think the school district should have all the kids learn algebra by playing a video game for a few hours. I'll include that in my overhaul.

And, for your last item of miscellany, I took Skipper to the dentist last week, and she LET THEM DO AN X-RAY. She cried quite a bit throughout the whole experience, but the incentive of getting screen time ("Wonderpets" again) was enough to make her power through. She may be actually growing up. For a bonus, the staff lavishly praised her excellent oral hygiene, she got a sticker, and she has no cavities. Huzzah!


* Hey, NASA. I assume you're aware that Sunita Williams is a fabulous ambassador for the space program, but having her/allowing her to host a 25-minute video tour of the space station was a really great idea, particularly if you were wanting to add "astronaut" to the career wishlists of girls around the country.
** Eat your heart out, Punghy.
***Though it's not perfect, and occasionally the presence of a coach with some grasp of math is very helpful.

Bitchy

We had another family over for dinner tonight; they have a daughter the same age as Dutch. (This is a quiet girl, dreamy and private, an only child whose parents are very mindful and calm about their family life. She and Dutch get along very well, in spite of their very different approaches to life.) As the children ran amok, we, the parents, complained to each other about how awfully our almost-7-year-olds have been lately. Apparently their quiet, dreamy girl has been raging, snarky, and defiant. Just like ours!

Dutch has been really awful. Just awful. Cook and I don't seem to have the tools to deal with this effectively. I just hope it's a phase, and not the way she's going to be forever, because not only will we all be miserable, but she'll also have no friends, ever. Sometimes I'm afraid that we're just screwing up parenting so badly that she's going to be a horrible person, and it'll be our fault. I'm pretty sure that's not true, and that it's just, you know, a normal developmental thing, but sometimes when she's stomping around being a complete asshole, I lose faith that we're doing anything right. So it's nice to hear that her quiet, tenderly-parented friend is turning up nasty, too.*

I hope that we're not doing it all wrong. I'm sure we're doing lots of it wrong. I hear my voice when I talk to** Dutch during one of her tantrums, and it sounds an awful lot like her voice.

Oh, and did I mention that Skipper is also awful these days? I dream of a day when I can get even just ten minutes into a day without one of them screaming, whining, or saying something horrible.

Anyway. The kids aren't ALWAYS awful, and we do some good parenting and lots of okay parenting.  In the good news, Dutch now has a "space maintainer" installed in her mouth, and Skipper is toilet-training herself. We're looking forward to our upcoming vacation. And, hey, my boots are still awesome!



*However, we suspect that Dutch and her friend are operating on different scales of assholery. Their definition of terrible behavior is likely to be quite a bit milder than our definition. 
** By which I mean yell at

wingardium leviosa!

Dutch got a tooth pulled yesterday, the prologue to an orthodontic adventure coming up in September. I offered her a bribe if she could make it through without freaking out, and she earned it. (She really did, too. I was impressed.) She decided in advance that she wanted her bribe to be a Harry Potter spin-off book that she had seen at a bookstore earlier this summer. When we got to the bookstore, though, she saw this. I said she had to pay the extra money, and she did. And now she has a wand. And she thinks she can use it to make magic. She has been threatening Skipper with it - not threatening to hit her with it or anything Muggle-y like that, but threatening to cast a spell on her. This is Dutch attempting (unsuccessfully, in case you're wondering) to levitate me.

Updates

We're painting. The color is actually "limesickle" rather than the yellow it looks in this photo.

And we're only painting ONE ROOM (at this time), but it's a giant pain in the ass. This is our

very first painting experience, and it turns out we had a lot to learn. We still do, but now we know a few things. We haven't even started on the trim yet, so our dressers will be living in the living room for a while. Our doors are also living in the garage (until we get around to cleaning up all the painted-over hardware, repairing the dings, painting them, and rehanging them).

Also, Dutch went to the orthodontist last week. She will be getting a baby tooth pulled in August, and a metal contraption installed to force her bossy new grown-up teeth to make room for one of their brethren. It'll be her first orthodontic experience, but definitely not her last.

Dutch won a strawberry shortcake walk at the grocery store yesterday (when neighbors invited her to hop on their cargo bike and come to the store with them) and again today when she went with me and Skipper.* She's now won all three cakewalks she has ever participated in. If you're considering buying a lottery ticket, I suggest you have her help you.

That's the news.

*That was complete overkill, because the kids ate the following samples while we were shopping: yogurt, cheese, strawberry kefir with strawberry granola, strawberry shortcake with mascarpone, strawberry tequila chicken, strawberry lemonade, chocolate-covered strawberry, and strawberry jam on baguette. Our grocery store is expensive and shiny, has fabulous customer service, and really goes to town on samples. We can no longer enter a grocery store without Skipper yelling gleefully "I want SAMPLES!!!"

I love you, commenters!

I do. You're like little sparkles of light in a dark, dark void.

No, really. Thank you for commenting, and emailing, and calling, and posting on your own blogs. I like hearing from you.

Also, commenters, those are indeed azalea bushes - I google-imaged them (did you see what I did there, with the verbing?).

And Skipper DID like the penguins. (She only liked the penguins, and the goats at the little farm.) However, she was confused by the underwater-viewing concept. She stared at the swimming penguins for a while, and finally said "Dey flying?" I think I got her straightened out on that, and now she does an excellent penguin imitation that goes like this: "Me penguin! FLAP FLAP FLAP FLAP! Me SWIM like DIS! Me FLYING!"

And it turned out in post-outing debriefing that she had not understood that the animals could not get out of their captivity. So she may have thought the tree shrew was seconds away from clawing her face off with its adorably tiny widdle claws, which makes her response seem a little more sensible. * Probably more sensible, when you consider it, than the people watching the polar bear play with a ball, who were making happy oohing noises and saying "That's so cute!" about an enormous predator practicing its killing skills.

Also, Dutch lost a tooth today, at school.** They gave her a little plastic treasure chest to store it in. (Clearly, our school is spending its scanty budget frivolously.) She was very happy.

* I gave Skipper short shrift in my last post. To be fair, to a person who's never been to zoo and has only been alive for two years, zoos are kind of a challenging thing to figure out. Maybe Skipper was the only child who seemed frightened and wary among the hundreds of children I saw at the zoo because she is extraordinarily thoughtful. Or maybe she had some concerns about the ethics of zoos (when she can talk better, we can discuss the ramifications of keeping our cousins the great apes locked up under display) that she was unable to express, and that was frustrating for her. Alternatively, she could be just utterly nuts.

**Her eighth! She's a dental prodigy.

Not a lot going on...

I'm writing more because I feel that I should than because I have anything to say. Hello! Here's what's going on:

1) The grapes are budding!

2) I went to the dentist. After Dutch's appointment in May, we will all be dentisted up for a while.

3) I came close to getting a job, but didn't. I'm having to take a good hard look at our budget and my job that I don't much enjoy, and I'm realizing that I can't afford to leave this job. I am never going to get another job, so I should probably clutch that bird a little tighter in the hand. Ugh.

4) Cook is being trained to do a different tedious task at work, so now he'll have TWO different tedious tasks to do during his days! Variety is the spice of life!

5) Between Skipper's tantrums and Dutch's histrionics, it feels like a Victorian-era insane asylum around here. Not that we're using straitjackets.

6) That's all. I'll let you know if something interesting happens.

Dear Diary

This morning Dutch hid under the table and wrote the following note:

"I am angry because I have a mean sister rat now. This is wat she dold she bit my tan."

Translation: I am angry because I have a mean sister right now. This is what she did. She bit my tongue.*

*No, I don't know how, exactly, one of my children came to bite my other child's tongue. It clearly wasn't a serious injury, though, so I don't really care.