New Dresses for Easter (courtesy of Mama Big Cook)

 I think these photos express a lot about the difference between these kids at this time.

Updates

1) It has been sunny.

2) The Big Cooks are visiting. They must be shown all our martial arts skills.

3) Antarctic Uncle is also visiting. He must be slashed to death with two-handed swordplay.

4) Easter is coming.

Appraised

We're refinancing our house, which means we have to act like adults and try to do things like understand how mortgage loans actually work.* Today an appraiser came to the house, and yesterday I cheerfully web-searched "how to prepare for an appraisal" and was horrified by what the interwebs said I should have done to prepare. I took a look around the house, pretending to be a stranger, and realized that the list of things that we should have done in the last two years is very, very long. We should have replaced all the crappy fake gold fixtures, for starters, and all the other stuff (medicine cabinet, I'm talking to you) that signals that a 90-year-old Croatian man** owns this house. We should have replaced the ugly, battered linoleum in the mudroom. We should have painted the trim in the dining room. We should have painted the porch. We should at least have cleaned the mildew off the porch. We should have gussied up the concrete pad in the backyard to give it an attitude of "patio" rather than "concrete pad." We should have washed the windows - not just recently, but EVER.*** Thank goodness for visits by handy houseguests, without whose efforts the house would look much scrappier.



*There is nothing in my life experience that has so deeply undermined my confidence in my own intelligence.
** He lived in the house, first with his parents and then alone, for 50 years. They liked things to be fake gold.
*** This is the most embarrassing omission. It's just... I don't know, it takes so much time. Time I could be spending watching tv! Or napping! 

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Duchess specifically asked me to tell the internet that she managed, in the classroom contest today, to recite from memory pi to thirty-five digits. She also asked me NOT to tell the internet that she came in second to her friend the Nerd King, who recited it to forty-one digits. I got her permission to tell the internet that, however, because I wanted to write about her academic relationship with the Nerd King.

Duchess is, for the first time, part of a small clique in her class that has persisted for more than a few days. The clique is Duchess and two boys, and the three of them are understood to be the academic champs of the class. They have a lot of nerdy fun, making up secret languages and whatnot. I have the impression that the Nerd King has significant intellectual power, leaving Duchess and the Nerd Earl fairly far behind. This has been unsettling for Duchess, who wasn't used to having her academic superiority challenged, let along trampled. However, lately she seems to be stepping up to the challenge, spurred on by the hope of doing as well as or better than the Nerd King. When the pi contest information was passed out to the kids at the end of the school day yesterday, the Nerd King memorized ten digits during the few minutes they waited in the gym for parents. Duchess wanted to beat him, and she worked pretty hard on it. Thirty-five digits is a lot of digits. The contest was optional, and only five kids participated. The Nerd Earl got to thirty digits, and the other two kids got nine and seven digits. I'm pretty sure that if the Nerd Court wasn't around, Duchess would have memorized nine or ten digits and been very pleased with that. While memorizing digits of pi isn't exactly a life skill, it's just the beginning of how the Nerd King is already expanding her idea of what she might be able to do.** Her friendship with these two boys is making her push herself harder academically, and that's great.

If the Nerd King leaves, for private school or homeschooling or the magic TAG school, Duchess will lose this motivation. She won't have the reminder that she can do more and better, or the competitive push to try harder. She'll go back to thinking that because she can do well without breaking a sweat, she doesn't have to break a sweat. THAT'S why kids who are doing exceptionally well, and kids who are doing exceptionally badly, should be at least somewhat mainstreamed.* There's no reason to try to swim faster when you're already the biggest fish in the pond.


*Okay, not the only reason.
** Not to mention the Nerd King's imperturbable confidence. When the class sociopath taunts him, the Nerd King apparently waves him off and says in a bored tone "...expected..." Duchess, who is unable to brush anything off, is as impressed by this as by any of his other skills.

Happy pi day!

Bullying vs Life is Like That

Recently, Duchess has been collapsing into tears after school pretty regularly. This is not all that surprising; Duchess is a creature of highs and lows, and the effort of maintaining an eager, focused attitude all day at school usually yields a whiny, low-blood-sugar slouch home. On the walk home, she reports all the Terrible things that happened to her that day. Usually, she can be reminded to consider all the positive things that also happened, and often concedes that yes, in general, the day was pretty good, EXCEPT for one or two bad things. However, she's been having a harder time doing that lately, and her enthusiasm about going to school is waning. I'm not sure why, but she's definitely reporting more occasions when other kids have hurt her feelings or embarrassed her publicly.

She's not being bullied. I don't think a lot of Official Bullying happens at her school. Mostly what happens, as far as I can tell based on my observations and reports from my very unreliable informant, is garden-variety power plays, the kind that a teacher might not notice, might not be able to easily identify the culprit, or might decide isn't worth the time to address. However, those can be really unpleasant, and hurtful. Duchess is thin-skinned and extremely concerned about her social reputation, and I am increasingly concerned that she is an inviting target for bullies of all stripes. It's very possible that she won't be the middle-schooler I imagine - a six-foot-tall thirteen-year-old with glasses, a loud laugh, and the tendency to burst into tears at any real or imagined insult - but if she is, she'll be temptingly vulnerable to anybody looking to hurt somebody.

I'm probably being too sensitive, not to mention borrowing trouble. Cook, who was a tall, skinny, shy kid with huge glasses and a dorktastic penchant for short shorts,* says that he didn't feel bullied or tortured-by-garden-variety-meanness at any point in school. There is also the school of thought that people are just crappy, and kids need to learn how to cope with it. Sometimes when Duchess describes the small cruelties of her day, I respond with more or less a shrug. People are crappy. We just are. I do believe it's theoretically useful to learn how to cope, because someday you may find yourself working for somebody who enjoys perpetrating garden-variety meanness on their coworkers.**

However, I was subjected as a kid to a substantial dose of garden-variety meanness,*** and the only coping skill I learned, as far as I can tell, was to retreat into my own head. This coping skill, it turns out, isn't terribly helpful for a healthy life, and it hasn't helped me handle meanness as an adult. So...yeah. Maybe instead of letting kids all develop their coping "skills" on their own, we should encourage them to identify and discourage garden-variety meanness. I don't know if it works, but wouldn't it be nice if it did?

Anyway, Duchess is fine. She's not joyfully devouring her life the way she had been doing, but she's still charging along with gusto. I think her coping skills may already be better than mine, for all that they involve a lot more crying.


*Oh, the photos. 
**Or at least, I imagine this is possible. In theory.
*** I was short, fat, liked to read, and had stunted social skills. Either kids in my schools were bigger assholes than Cook's classmates, or his introvert's gift for listening to people (and making them feel heard) was more beneficial to his social life than he realizes. My class in middle school was so dysfunctional that we actually had a therapist (have I mentioned this was a private school in Connecticut?) come in to work with the whole class. The only thing I remember from the group therapy sessions was one girl telling me in front of everybody, as part of some kind of honesty exercise that was presumably supposed to be helpful, that she felt sorry for me because I dressed so badly.**** I also remember that I actually felt this to be a positive interaction, because hey, she felt sorry for me!
**** I have a long, noble history of dressing badly. My very best outfit, circa 1982, was a purple velour tracksuit, worn with a lavender t-shirt with white fringe across the chest, and it's all been downhill from there.

Status quo

Everything is pretty much the same.

• Duchess has fully recuperated, finally, from her digestive illness, though she still seems a little bit sadder* these days. Fortunately, it turns out that Suzanne Collins has written some enjoyable books for non-teens, so things aren't too bad.
• Skipper is not sad, and is instead on a streak of generally excellent cheerfulness, marked by nonstop prattling,** running everywhere at breakneck speed, and willingness to eat kale. 
• I went to the eye doctor, and my retinas haven't fallen off. 
• I still don't have a job. I'm still feeling pretty sad about that. 
• Cook is still working hard.
• Spring appears to be just around the corner. 

*SadDER. She's still happier than almost everyone.
**On the topic of space, or the ongoing Polly Pockets story. A little bit on her new model dinosaur, Pachycephalosaurus, and on exciting events at preschool: "Mom, the play structure had too many kids on it today!"

 I consider myself to be something of a technophobe, more in the sense that I'm lazy and don't care to think about the gadgets in my life than in the sense of being afraid of or opposed to technology. I think it's absolutely amazing that I have a little computer that I hold in my hand and I can watch videos and play games and write emails on it. AMAZING. I am living in the future! But I generally think that it's better for my brain and for my kids' brains to be looking at the actual world, and I have no natural inclination for gadgets anyway.

However, tonight I interrupted the Polly Pockets epic to watch this

and this
 
with the kids. And that's just awesome. Thanks, technology.

No more zombies.

Duchess is alive! We took her to the doctor today, to make sure that she wasn't dying.* She's been tragic and lethargic for five days now, not eating, barely even stirring herself to read occasionally, and she was starting to look like a doomed consumptive character in a Victorian novel, all eyes and bones and hair. It was all very unlike Duchess, except for the whining. Duchess, as it turns out, is not at all a pleasant patient, and Cook and I were both feeling very frustrated by both her crappy behavior and her failure to bounce back from the illness. When they weighed her at the medical office, she weighed 6 pounds less than she did at her checkup in November. The doctor's verdict was that she has a stomach virus, and is dehydrated. The doctor's lecture, and the anti-nausea medication she gave Duchess on the spot, inspired Duchess to drink a lot of water this evening, and eat a few raviolis, and begin her return to life. She even participated tonight in the epic ongoing Polly Pockets story that Skipper and she have been engaged in for weeks. So I think she's going to make it.


*Well, you know. More than usual.

Duchess is taking this Sick thing seriously.

Duchess hasn't thrown up for nearly 30 hours, but she's still incredibly limp and tragic. In the last 40 hours, she has consumed (and kept down) maybe a cup of water, a few sips each of sports drink and ginger ale, a quarter cup of miso broth, and five saltines. She is, however, reading books today, which is a big step up from yesterday, when she was just lying around looking glassy-eyed and semi-conscious.

Sick day

Duchess is sick. She woke up in the night complaining of stomach pain, which Cook and I assumed was gas or constipation. It's pretty hard, with Duchess, knowing if she's dying or just being very dramatic. She likes to look at herself in the mirror while she moans in agony. Anyway, we weren't terribly sympathetic, and I was very grumpy and tired when she finally threw up around midnight. I made her a pallet in our room, which turned out to be super-convenient when I could just reach over without even getting out of bed and hold her hair while she barfed in a bucket on the floor every two hours for the rest of the night.

Currently she's lying on her pallet (she drank a sip of ginger ale, fetched along with saltines and sport drink from the convenience store by Cook on a pre-work trip, and she promptly barfed it right back up), listening to a random story I dredged from the internet.* Skipper is playing with the pretend kitchen, organizing fake food and chanting "Too much, too fast! Too much, too fast, too much, too fast, too much, too fast..."**

Last night I went to a mandatory meeting for the language-immersion school a few blocks from our house. We entered Skipper into the lottery for their preschool program, which she would start in September. What I learned at the meeting is that the school community is much richer than Duchess's school community, presumably because parents have to lottery their kids in, and therefore are more likely to be well-educated and/or affluent.*** They have fulltime PE and music teachers! There is a teacher AND a teaching assistant in every kindergarten classroom of 28! Parents raise over a hundred thousand dollars a year to supplement staffing and materials! As I sat there listening to the principal, I felt both covetous and resentful on behalf of Duchess's school. Why should this public school have so much more good stuff than another public school less than a mile away?



* My tablet is reading to her, you see, while I ignore her. Technology is a great parenting resource!
** I don't think I said anything along those lines to trigger the phrase, but you never know. Actually, that's kind of Skipper's feeling about the world in general, so it may be a kind of protective mantra of hers.
*** If you lottery into a slot in the preschool program, your kid is guaranteed a slot in the kindergarten the following year, so you're more likely to get into the school than if you try to lottery into kindergarten. The preschool, however, has tuition involved, so if you can't afford to pay for that, you're screwed. (There are scholarships, but it's pretty easy to be too rich to qualify for those but still not have extra cash to pay for preschool. For example, if one parent is unemployed. Ahem.) This makes it even more likely that the kids entering kindergarten are richer than your average bear.