Day

Skipper is singing (over and over again) a chant that goes like this:

Alchemist
Arborist
Who likes snot?

The kids, particularly Skipper, are driving me bats today.  Skipper works SO hard to continually monitor the way all good and bad things are allocated to her and her sister and over-react to any perceived imbalance, however slight. If she channeled even half that energy into, say, a hobby, she'd be a master of that hobby by now. I guess she IS a master of this one terrible hobby.

What's up with us? Not much. I'm fine. Cook's fine. Kids are fine.

I have been driving lately, after about 15 years of not driving. Driving sucks. I can't wait for the self-driving cars to take over; I cannot believe that we let humans drive cars. I think it's be the kind of thing where Skipper will look back over her childhood 50 years from now and says to Duchess "Can you BELIEVE that PEOPLE were responsible for navigating huge, heavy, polluting metal vehicles at high speed when we were kids? That was insane! Also, did that drone just give you an infinitesimally bigger serving of virtual dessert than me? That's NOT FAIR!!!!"

I am still Eating Less. Eating Less sucks. However, I weigh 20% less now than I did two years ago, and am warily pleased. I am unambiguously pleased to report, however, that I am also 14 days into a series of 30 days of youtube yoga videos, and am very much enjoying it. It's gentle yoga for inflexible idiots, which is perfect, and it's short, only 15-35 minutes per video, so I just do it in the evening before bed, and I usually wrap it up with a few minutes of lying on the floor staring at the ceiling. This is not the kind of yogic Mindfully Breathing While Being Present In Your Body lying on the floor you may be thinking of; I literally just lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling. Sometimes I listen to music. It's pretty great, even without mindfulness.

Also, I want to say that I misreported a few weeks ago what Skipper says to express astonishment. She doesn't say "holy crackers!" - she says "holy cackles!"

That's all I've got.

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.

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. 

Seven!

Sustained uneventfulness

I guess that's a good thing, right?

We're fine.

• The girls got report cards, and they're acing everything.
• Our fence and landscaping are finished, and everything looks great. I'm going to start NIMBYing now that we have a nice yard.
• Skipper is about to turn seven, and is quite elderly and accomplished. The only thing she still annoyingly needs help with is filling her cup with water at the kitchen sink. If she would just get a little taller, she could basically live independently now. (She would, presumably, mostly eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and tiny citrus. Could be worse.)
• Duchess is so, so, so ready to be a teenager (but not live independently, because she prefers to have people fetch her things). She wants, above all other things, just to hang out with her friends. All the time.
• I did not cry at work at all this week.
• Cook also did not cry at work at all this week.
• Skipper got new glasses.

What Skipper says to express amazement

"Holy crackers!"

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.

Hey, it's been a while, eh?

I'm home today with a limp and feverish Skipper, and feeling kind of crummy myself - perfect opportunity to blog!

Except I don't really have much to say. I'm not doing a lot of thinking lately.

I'm starting to tentatively look for another job (mine will officially be over at the end of June) while also trying to do decent work at my current job, which has brought me to tears several times over the last few weeks, once (humiliatingly) in public. This is pretty draining.

Duchess continues to be large and loud. Skipper continues to be small and mean. They both continue to refuse to take any responsibility for anything going wrong, and this continues to madden me and Cook.

Skipper is quite happy without gymnastics.

I've laid out the basic summer plans already, and Skipper is, for the first time, going to a mini (one-night) sleepaway camp. She wants to do this for the same reason she wants to do many things - to match up to Duchess (who would be delighted to spend the whole summer at sleepaway camp). She also has a friend who's going to a WEEK of sleepaway camp, and wants Skipper to come. We haven't decided on that one. Duchess is going to a week of sleepaway horse camp, and is very, very, very excited. The plan is also to have Duchess do parks and rec swim team again, which means an hour of swimming every weekday morning. If I am employed, she will be on her own all day, and will walk herself home and (presumably) lie on the couch reading for six hours at a stretch. She's pretty excited about this, too. (Skipper, predictably, is pissed that she will have to go to daycamp if I have a job, and do stupid activities with stupid other people instead of getting to lie on the couch and read for six hours. I pretty much feel this way about work, so I get it. Stupid other people.)

We're also thinking that it's probably time to buy the kid a phone. Many questions remain.

The Eating Less campaign continues, with decent success. I still feel that it is easy to see what I have to do, and set things up so I can generally do them successfully, but I certainly feel the drain of the requirement that I have to repeatedly and endlessly make the choice to not eat, and to stop eating. There's only so much I can do to set myself up to make better choices, because I can't actually set things up so I don't eat at all. Eating less, unlike many other self-control challenges, requires me to frequently do a little of the thing that I want to do a LOT, and then exert willpower in order to stop doing the thing. That's a big demand on my small reserves of self-control.

That's about it. I have to write up some job applications now...

staggering along

Work is swamping me, and all my extra energy is absorbed in the great Eating Less* campaign and in trying to be a decent parent (this is not going terribly well; my kids are also very self-absorbed). I have nothing left for housework, blogging, or planning ahead.

See you when I get out of the swamp!


*Which is going well. It just takes a lot of time and energy.

My daughter, Marie Antoinette.

We're alive. Not much in the way of news. The roof sprang a leak (or rather, we became aware of a leak). Duchess continues to be insanely adolescent (and we have all learned not to talk to her at all until after she's eaten breakfast). Skipper, with all the hiragana characters under her belt, has begun learning katakana. Cook and I are both scrambling at work to get a handle on our workloads, but are remaining more or less above water. Both girls brought home rave review report cards. Skipper has, in the last few months, quit two extracurricular activities,* bringing her to a more sustainable activity level of after-school kung fu every weekday, and piano once a week.

Skipper's fairly dramatic quitting of gymnastics raised a question for me that keeps coming up in my parenting of Skipper. She has a very strong aversion to making choices - I believe it's because she is so afraid of making the wrong choice, or having to feel the responsibility of having made the choice. She much, much prefers for others to make choices for her so she can freely enjoy the benefits and hold others responsible for the negative outcomes, keeping her spirit totally unburdened. This goes for everything - choosing what clothes to wear, choosing what to eat, choosing what book to read, and choosing whether or not to go somewhere to do something. My instinctive feeling in parenting Skipper is that there is a line in there that we need to find - we need to help her practice making choices and working through her feelings about the consequences, so she can learn how to be a functioning human being, but I think we also need to assume the responsibility of making some of the bigger choices, because they're too big for her still.  I don't know if Cook and I came down on the right side of the line in this situation. Here's what happened. Skipper often says she doesn't want to go to gymnastics. We always tell her it's her choice, but that if she chooses not to go to class, it'll mean that she's deciding to quit gymnastics, and she always eventually decides to go, and she ALWAYS really enjoys the class. Last Saturday,when I told Skipper it was time to go to gymnastics, I reminded her that it was her last day in her current class, before a switch to a new class at a more convenient time slot, with an older group of kids. She got very upset, because she didn't want to switch (forgetting that she had previously grudgingly agreed to the switch), and said she didn't want to go. Over the course of the next half hour (in which she dressed for gymnastics and we all got in the car and drove to the gym), she raged back and forth, saying she didn't want to go, she did want to go, she didn't want to go, she did want to go, etc. She repeated many times "You're forcing me to go!" which was such a ridiculously obviously untrue statement that it was pretty clear she was saying "PLEASE force me to go so I don't have to negotiate my maelstrom of feelings about my fear of change and transition and my enjoyment of gymnastics, and make a decision!!!!"

We kept saying "You don't have to go, but if you don't go, that'll mean the end of gymnastics. It's your choice." We might as well have been saying "It's your torture chamber."

The back and forth continued way past the duration after which we expected it to stop, and way past when it's stopped before (even at the worst, it had never gone past the moment when we go out the door of the house), and then, AT THE GYM, four steps away from her teacher, she said "I don't want to go." and I said "Okay. You understand you're choosing to quit gymnastics." And she said "Yes." and we all left. (I will note that Cook and I were both pretty pissed off, though sympathetic.) And on the way home she said in a shaky voice, "I think I'm going to regret my choice." and I said "Yes."

As I work through the consequences of her choice, and the parenting choice that we made (because working through consequences is something functioning human beings have to do), I wonder if we should have lifted this choice, which was so painful for her, off her shoulders and "forced" her to go to an activity that she enjoys and that I think is valuable for her. I don't know the answer. I think regretting your choices is an important experience, and I think it's important to learn through experience that it's not usually that big of a deal when you screw up a decision, even if it's painful. But maybe the lesson wasn't worth the cost. I don't know.