Pioneers with technical backpacks

Not a lot to say right now. Everything is fine, but busy.

Duchess is off on an overnight fieldtrip - it's Oregon Trail-themed. I left her at school yesterday dressed like this. (She's using her brand-new enormous backpack that we just purchased for the backpacking camp she's attending later this summer. It has very little in it, but she wanted to try it out.)

Also, here is another photo of Duchess's haircut. 

Just punching my card today

• We're busy. 
• I just finished a big deadline at work, and am picking up all the other things I abandoned in order to get the big one done. That feels both pretty good and also scary, as many of those little things have become bigger things...
• The weather is gorgeous. 
• Yesterday Skipper started plucking at the strings of my very-neglected guitar, crouching beside it and listening intently to each note ring out and fade. "Mom, I'm listening to The Whole Sound!" she said. 
• Skipper has been enthusiastically playing a game she was given for her birthday, which is like Uno in that all her family members are willing to play it; it's a pleasant, not-too-taxing mix of luck and strategy.
• Duchess has nothing to show for hours spent working with her partner on an engineering-y science fair project, because neither of them are interested in taking the time to READ THE DIRECTIONS or to be at all careful in construction, so their constructions keep disintegrating. I'm happy to go with natural consequences here, but Cook pointed out that Duchess, due to her tendency to be satisfied with pretty much anything, never actually learns anything from natural consequences. That is why he is in the living room with her while she builds, monitoring her for slap-dash heedlessness, and I am in here, blogging.
• Last week Duchess and I had a terrible morning (Skipper and Cook usually leave about 20 minutes earlier than we do, because the girls' schools are on different schedules) in which she aggressively and irrationally blamed me for the disappearance of the raincoat which she wanted to bring in case of rain. I totally lost my temper. On the walk to school, she was trying to chat about something, and I told her "I'm having a really hard time just conversing with you right now, because I'm still feeling pretty mad about being yelled at and blamed for stuff that's not my fault. I need to finish being mad before I can be pleasant. Do you understand how I feel?" and she said (I'm paraphrasing, but this is pretty close) "Yeah. You were trying to get lots of stuff done and you were doing stuff for me, and you were stressed out and it makes you angry when I blame you for stuff that's not your fault. I can see why you're so mad. I'm sorry I did that." I was pretty staggered. Duchess's deep flexibility and willingness to see other perspectives, while sometimes worrisome (as when she sees the perspective that an extremely sloppily-executed science fair project is really no big deal), allows her (when she's in the mood) to be sincerely sensitive and generous in her relationships in a way that makes her sound like she's read a bunch of therapy books.
• However, I still don't know what she did with the raincoat. I suspect she lost it, which is why she so badly wanted it to be my fault...

All the stereotypes

There are moments of my life that feel like they easily could be snippets of Portlandia episodes. Yesterday, Skipper went to a birthday party at a rock-climbing gym. The party was for the Blond twins, who turned 7 last week, and I asked their mom for gift suggestions. She said that they would really like something for their terrariums. (Terrarii?) And here's the extra-Portlandia thing: I knew off the top of my head exactly where the closest terrarium store is, and it's within a ten-minute walk of our home.

I went to the party for a while, because Skipper was pretty worried about the whole rock-climbing thing, but I biked there while Skipper got a ride with the Blonds. On my ride there (on "neighborhood greenway" streets, through painted intersections), I saw two adults I know. One was riding a bike with part of another bike strapped to the back. The other one was riding a cargo bike with panniers full of groceries, with her two (adopted) kids riding their own bikes behind her.

I do love this place, as silly as it is.

Spring, last weekend

Thank you, lice!

Duchess got a haircut!

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.

Brief recap of stuff I've written before

Duchess went to the first in a series of five three-hour programming classes today. I signed her up at the suggestion of a parent of a friend of hers (Spruce, whom Duchess has known for seven years), who is also signed up for the class. Duchess really enjoyed the class; she said it was "awesome."

My goal for Duchess's extracurriculars have changed. I initially thought I'd sign my kids up for a range of activities so they could find a thing they loved to do. When it became clear that Duchess likes to do almost everything, I found myself casting around. for a reason to keep lining up activities for her. For this class, though, and also her after-school electronics class, I know exactly why I want her taking them. I want her to enter college (or at least middle school) feeling competent and confident in skills that open the doors for careers in tech. Playing with tech stuff is still the province of boys. Duchess is the only girl in the ten-kid electronics class, and she and Spruce are two of the three girls in the ten-kid programming class. It will take a lot of confidence to sign up for computer science classes in college, and I want her to have that.

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!

Social

Duchess got a love note this week at school, ostensibly from a boy of whom she is fond and who is widely acknowledged to have a Crush on her.* (Duchess is suddenly, and somewhat surprisingly, popular these days. There are a handful of boys who have acknowledged Crushes on her, and some of them are social leaders.) She thought it was probably a forgery, and she wanted to know. So she promptly asked the boy if he had written her a love note. He said no. They spent some time speculating together about who was responsible. Everything ended well.

Here's the thing. I can't imagine this scenario playing out for me when I was ten.** I can't imagine getting a note and then asking the kid if he had written it. Ever. At ANY point in my life. I would much rather deal with the ambiguity than confront anybody about anything uncomfortable. But Duchess has a different threshold than I do for social discomfort, and more confidence in her own social power. Watching Duchess make her way in the weird world of almost-adolescence makes me feel like I'm looking at entirely new territory, because her path is so different from mine. It's really interesting.

Anyway, Duchess has a new cast. It's green. She'll get it off in three weeks.


*I am also fond of this kid, who seems very ethical and thoughtful for a 10-year-old, as well as endearingly forthright.

** If I had not been a hopeless social outcast, I mean. I didn't get notes.  

Crasee prsen.

I wanted to share this amazing thing with you, but I apparently couldn't be bothered to take a decent picture of it. This is something Skipper brought home from the 100th day of school. It says "When I am 100 years old ... I will run a round like a crasee prsen!"  and the 100-year-old version of Skipper is depicted saying "I like runing a round like a crasee prsen!"

Skipper explained that she will wear ponytails when she is 100 because she looks good in ponytails. And that is a candy cane she is using as a cane because she will have grown so small that a candy cane will be the right size.

Also, Skipper is now officially reading chapter books. This unfortunately means that the Accursed Fairy Books are back in the house. She isn't yet able to read silently, so she was banished to her room to read.

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