More updates

It's hot. It's summery. I'm in the midst of a bunch of stressful work deadlines, but the kids have been wringing a lot of summer out of the week. Skipper has been on several adventures with friends - hiking on Wednesday, the local amusement park yesterday, an exploratory baseball playdate today.




































She also finally consented to get a haircut* that included bangs! I am really enjoying looking at her face. (She's cuddling Momo in this photo. Momo hates being picked up, but once you finally catch her, she utters a small, hopeless squeak of despair and then surrenders completely to the pleasure of a warm quiet place to doze where Snufkin can't pester her. When I pick her up to put her back in the cage after she's been sitting on Skipper's lap for a while, her whole body is so relaxed that she feels like a warm beanie baby instead of an actual living mammal.)

Duchess started rowing last week - she rows from 8 to 10am every weekday. She loves it. I dropped her off the first day, and walked with her back into the boat-storage/rowing-machine area, and I felt like I had wandered into the Land of Giants. Duchess is considered small in the Land of Giants, and I felt pretty much pocket-sized.

And today Cook dropped her off at an intensive week of ultimate frisbee camp. There's a lot going on around here. And next weekend I will be done with this wave of scary work deadlines, and I will get to wring out some summer!

*Skipper's distrust of my judgement around haircuts is hard-earned.

Updates

We're doing fine.

I continue to half-ass most everything. Cook continues to work too hard (knowing me for twenty years has somehow not taught him how to half-ass).

The girls have their last day of school tomorrow. They're spending the summer mostly home together unsupervised. I expect it'll involve a lot of reading, screen time and resentful bickering.

Skipper, who has been watching the Detroit Tigers games with Cook for years, and read "Summerland" with him this year, is suddenly interested in actually playing baseball, and has lately been out in the driveway alone for half an hour before bed, throwing a tennis ball at the garage door to practice throwing and fielding. She's terrible, and she doesn't want to play with other kids, because they'd see her being terrible. You tell me what to do with this.

Skipper is also very into the Horatio Hornblower books right now, an interest that I doubt is shared with many other 9-year-old girls who have ever existed. She knows what a water hoy is.

Duchess is pretty much thriving, an open-hearted, easy-tempered, ethical, sensible person (in 13-year-old-adjusted terms). She raptly follows all her many friends' social dramas but doesn't perpetrate them herself. She texts and instagrams all the time. She wants to be the flute section leader in band next year. She wants everybody to like her. She wants to wear a little makeup, but not very much. She wants to get all As and have pretty hair. She wants to join the Foreign Service or maybe be a criminal defense attorney (she cheerfully embraces the idea that she would find herself defending guilty people- she thinks she'd enjoy and be good at figuring out how to make an effective argument and use the system on her client's behalf). She wants to be on the cheerleading team in high school. You tell me what to do with this.

I am sometimes torn, when I consider my daughters, between feeling that they are profoundly mysterious to me and feeling that they are uncannily similar to me. I do know, though, that there's nothing much I should do with them, or can do. They are who they are  and they'll be themselves all along (and they both know how to half-ass, which is both irritating and a relief).

Anyway, summer. We're taking one big trip to Maine and DC, and we have some small fun weekend trips planned. I'm still employed, through at least October and maybe through December. Duchess will be rowing every weekday morning for two months, and playing ultimate frisbee (and texting). Skipper will have occasional rollerskating lessons (she loves this). I plan to do some hammock time. That's the whole plan...

Momentum and inertia

Summer is rapidly approaching. The kids have reached the point in the school year where everything is pointing toward end-of-year performances/tests/celebrations/field trips. The weather is leaning hard toward shorts. The trees are leafing out. Cook is mowing the lawn right now.

I find myself even more than usually lazy. I literally lay in the hammock yesterday and did nothing but lie there and grow my ennui. It was pretty nice, but I do recognize that weeds need pulling and dishes need washing and dinner needs cooking, and it's probably not a great marital-maintenance plan to just let Cook do all of it. Last weekend I forced Skipper to accompany me to the library and grocery store, and she objected strenuously. I said she needed to leave the house and do something other than loaf, and she said "WHY!? What's the POINT? Why can't I just read books and do word searches?" and I didn't really have a great argument for that. So maybe she's just persuaded me to give in to the sloth.

It just seems like there's so much schlepping; a classic middle-class middle-aged person's complaint - orthodontist appointments, dentist appointments, eye doctor appointments, regular doctor appointments, vet appointments, roller skating lessons, grocery shopping, hardware store trips, bike repair appointments, car repair appointments. Plus, you know, work and housework and the normal slog of shepherding everybody through the day. It feels like A Lot, even while it also feels like a great stroke of luck to be able to have this particular bag of A Lot.

We're all doing the same old things. Skipper is walking herself home from school every day and latchkeying it. She likes that a lot. She instant-messages us when she gets home to tell us she's home, and then she just reads for hours. The third day she did it, I was at a meeting when she normally arrives home, and didn't look at my phone till a little later when I was alarmed to find no message. I got a text pretty much right away from Father Blond, saying that Skipper was at his house and that she was "Wet. Unhappy." Turned out Skipper had run home in the rain (she had no raincoat, due to poor planning) and couldn't find her key in her backpack, so she left her backpack on the back steps and walked to the Blonds' house. She knows she's not allowed to cross the major street between our house and theirs except at a controlled intersection, but she got disoriented and walked much further out of her way than she needed to to get to a light. She walked 16 blocks in the rain, terrified that she was going to get arrested (she actually saw a school friend of hers and hid behind a corner until the friend's family was out of sight because she was afraid that they would call the police if they knew she was unescorted), and arrived at the Blond house weeping and soaking wet. She was upset, scared, embarrassed and uncomfortable. After I retrieved her, I pointed out that she had in fact just demonstrated her coping skills by solving the problem in a fairly sensible way, and she made a bunch of good decisions. I felt a lot more confident about the whole thing after that episode. I'm not sure that she shares my confidence; as always, she was pretty focused on the stressful and humiliating elements of the experience. I did reassure her that the police are NOT going to arrest her for walking alone in the rain.

That's pretty much the news.

Skipper turned 9!

I asked Skipper (by instant message) for a list of birthday gift suggestions. She wrote me back this:

Craft stuff
Books
Games
Stocks
Definitely stocks
BALOONS
Oranges

She got balloons. And oranges. And books. And craft stuff. Not stocks yet - I'm trying to figure out how a 9-year-old can invest in stocks.

We ate ramen for dinner.
































Skipper had another sleepover birthday party. We all agreed the next day that it was the last sleepover birthday party. Cook concocted another scavenger hunt that required digging.

Catching Up

We're good. I'm just feeling kind of overwhelmed by things and spending my spare time idly playing computer games and watching Schitt's Creek. But look, here are photos!

Sunny walk in January.

Sunny day in March.

Easter eggs.

Hiccups

Last week, Duchess went to do her daily chore of sweeping up all the poop in the guinea pig cage (this needs to be done twice a day, because guinea pigs are prodigious poopers) and was very alarmed to find it smeared copiously with blood. Turned out Snufkin had injured his back - the fur on his back was matted with blood. Cook spent most of Tuesday driving Snufkin to the vet (all the way across town), watching the vet pull away the matted fur and then be sprayed with arterial blood, leaving Snufkin and $300 there for surgery, driving home again, and then driving back later to retrieve Snufkin after surgery. The vet declared Snufkin's problem to be "weird - really weird" ; the bleeding was because he had somehow ruptured a growth that he had had on his back (which we were ignoring because it was small, not changing, and didn't seem to hurt or bother him in any way) which was somehow involved with blood vessels, AND was somehow associated with an old injury (childhood trauma probably incurred in the garage where he spent his youth with a LOT of other pigs) that had left a huge scar down his whole spine. Snufkin seems fine, indifferent to his comical shaved patch and stitches, though he really hates the probiotic and antibiotic he has to ingest twice a day. His whole "fuck you, don't touch me, just give me food" attitude somehow seems more nuanced now that we know his previous life literally left him scarred. Like he's a tough, damaged loner who's secretly tender-hearted and vulnerable under all the tattoos and intimidating glares. (Also, because the money we spent on repairing a rodent who literally spends all his time eating, pooping, and running away from us in terror is now spent, and I have to emotionally justify it by making a connection with the rodent.)

Also, this week we have sounded the alarm on Duchess's health. She's generally fine, but she's missed quite a bit of school and activities lately because she intermittently feels tired and dizzy and vaguely sick. I have been annoyed by this; she's a responsible person (except at home) and doesn't really like missing school, but she's also kind of whiny and inclined to laziness (she gets this from me!), and it I have been feeling like she should Just Toughen Up And Stop Malingering.  However, it's starting to feel like an actual thing, so we finally called the Kaiser advice line, which suggested that it could be anemia, a potential diagnosis strongly supported by our subsequent googling. She is not enthusiastic about eating liver, so we'll have to find another way to iron her up. She'll need her strength for all the rowing.

On Friday, I had to go (along with all my coworkers) to a 5-hour training on how to interrupt microaggressions, which put me even further behind on all my work tasks that keep piling up. So I would say it's been a First World Problems kind of week.

Parenting; or Fumbling Around in the Dark Trying Not to Break Things

Hello, my wee piece of the internet. We're all fine. It's sunny and warm here today. We took the guinea pigs outside, and they cowered in terror, too afraid to do more than nibble tentatively at some of the delicious fresh grass (which they will savagely devour if we tear it off and bring it inside and feed it to them in their cage). I'm afraid the guinea pigs are too perfect a metaphor for our family. We should have gotten a less fear-based sort of pet.

Things go on. Skipper is currently doing occasional rollerskating lessons, because she "likes the gliding part." She is finding third grade very stressful. She has a teacher who is fairly harsh and sarcastic, and Skipper lives in terror (see above) of the teacher yelling at her. It doesn't actually ever happen, but she's afraid ALL THE TIME (see above).

Duchess and I got in an unpleasant argument on Friday night. I told her she was signed up for a beginner rowing class in the morning and she freaked out. (Back story: this is a sport I have long thought would be perfect for Duchess. It's intensely team-oriented, it has a lot of rules, you don't have to be super-humanly athletic to succeed, and it takes place on the water. She has expressed interest in the past, but when I mentioned it recently, she was tepid on the idea. I decided to just barge ahead and sign her up and not mention it till the last minute, because she's usually pretty pliant.) She was really mad, and made some excellent points about autonomy and her right to make her own choices. Her excellent points, however, were embedded in a petulant and bratty tantrum, and I responded like a jerk.

We got over it, because Duchess is a forgiving person and I apologized for railroading her autonomy. She's right that she should be able to make her own choices. To a point. And I need to cede that, to a point. But I said that she should go row unless she had a really good reason not to - she was interested in it, and a sunny spring morning is a good way to try rowing out.

She sulked all morning, sulked and whined all the way to the class, and told me that she hates me (semi-joking) when I left her at the class. When I picked her up, I was resigned to a wave of righteous petulance, and resigned to the fact that I would deserve it. As we walked away from the "boathouse"(actually warehouse) where they keep the gear, she turned to me and said with a faux-angry expression "I HATE that you were right," and then she beamed her full-on, all-in Duchess grin. She loved it, for all the reasons I had listed off to her. I thanked her for being generous enough to allow herself to enjoy it, in spite of her determination to punish me. I would like to think that I have learned a lesson and will be more respectful of her autonomy in the future, but I'm not sure that I have.

Side note

Guinea pigs drink from the standard small pet bottle. It has a spout with a ball valve - they can push the ball in with their tongue to get water out. The rats I had as a pet (MUCH better pets than guinea pigs, should you be in the market for a pet) would just lick at the valve and get water very efficiently. The guinea pigs put their WHOLE MOUTH over the spout and bumble around for water. Every time I see them doing this, especially Snufkin, who is large and generally inept, I think of Parks and Recreation.

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."

Christmas!

We had a lovely Christmas. It even snowed!

Limping into the end of 2017

(Hello! Everything is fine. I'm fine, Cook's fine. The girls are fine.)

This fall I tried something different. I've been watching Duchess enjoy playing ultimate frisbee, reminding me of what a fun game it is, and I've also been reflecting on the fact that the kids have lots of activities (well, not Skipper anymore) and I have none. So I signed up for exercise classes (I found a company that allows you to visit lots of different exercisey places, meeting my need for variety) and have been doing all sorts of novel barre and yoga and pilates and strength training things that are fun and hard. That's been great, though expensive.

I also signed up to play "goalty," a spin-off of ultimate. It turns out that it's a more compact, much quicker game than ultimate, and there are only 4 players per team on the field at a time (2 men and 2 women in this league). This means that even if you don't really understand the game, aren't very good at throwing and catching, and aren't particularly fit,* you can't dawdle confusedly in the background while other people make things happen - you have to actually participate. This would be okay if not for the fact that everybody in the league is much better than me AND have all been playing together for years (I was afraid they would all be young and obnoxious, but they're mostly my age-ish) AND are pretty intense and competitive. They were all nice to me, but I was very clearly deadweight. And that felt terrible. The first time I took the field, I literally fell down three times in a row (I think that was about playing on turf - I never fell down again after that) and I could almost feel all my teammates' horror radiating at me from the sidelines.

This experience made me think about Skipper a lot. I didn't want to go back after the first day. I knew I should, but I was dreading it. I went, but only to three out of the five sessions (three games to a session; ugh) and hated most of it. But I did it. I even caught a few scores and made some good catches and throws. I also dropped a lot of catches, threw away a lot of throws, and failed terribly and repeatedly at defense. I even knocked over the goal once. But I did it, which is something. I think the next new thing I try will be easier, though.

This experience also made me think about my dad, who played in a baseball league when he was in his forties - he complained a lot about how his "eyeballs jiggled" when he was running for the ball in the outfield. I thought that was hilarious, and I gave him a lot of shit. Jiggling eyeballs! Ridiculous! But when I was running around, trying to track changes in play direction and locate a flying frisbee, I really felt like my eyeballs were ... jiggling. A lot. Definitely more than they used to. Dad, sorry about that.

*Barre and yoga and pilates and strength training don't do much for one's cardiovascular fitness. And I wasn't ever very quick or dynamic even when I was in better shape.