Guess I’ll go be a grown-up now.

I don’t think I did a single productive thing this week. Well, besides mother two small peoples and keep them from running away with the circus or into traffic or any of that usual stuff. And those nasty rumors of grocery shopping and washing four loads of laundry are unfortunately all too true. But other than that, I don’t think I did a single grown-upish thing all weekend.

I had plans to. I had plans to be all social and productive and stuff. But then Thing One – she who is never, ever sick (except for her asthma and allergies, natch) – turned into the Drippy PukeMonster on Friday night. So there went our Pankcake Party, swirling down the drain. In fact, we couldn’t really stray that far from the bathroom and laundry facilities.

And so we danced. We danced, danced, danced, danced. And now my poor wiimuscles are all kinds of wiibroken. We won’t even begin to get into the kind of revenge my kidney scone is wreaking. All Friday night and most of Saturday, we spent jamming in front of Just Dance, with Gracie and I having a little side competition to see who could trick Bee into thinking she had the high score. Heh. But I can’t make fun of Bee too much – she did, after all, turn me on to the fabulously wonderful Russian dancing in Ra-Ra-Rasputin, a song I must’ve danced to a dozen times in a row. (Curse my wiimote – I can’t break 9800!)

Even my sisters got into the act. Well, mostly they taunted from the bleachers, but there is a question hanging over our heads of whether we can hold a dance-off over the interwebz a la online gaming. We shall see. But! I was telling you about how my sister started the madness. Kim bought a wii with her tax return money immediately after being addicted to crack Just Dance when she visited a few weeks ago. As soon as she started playing, I started getting emails about which songs she had broken 10,000 points on and “beaten.” Fatboy Slim fell first. The she conquered Reggaeton and Wham! Then Rhianyn got into the act, with an unfortunate crack about mastering George Michael. (Well played.) So, see? I had to jump into the melee or they would all beat me! I couldn’t let anyone beat me! It was all I could do not to skip work…er, I mean, come down with a nasty virus…just so I could hang at home for a day.

And that is why I couldn’t raise my arms above my head Friday night or Saturday, and why today I have a giant knot on the muscles in my shoulders and radiating down over my scapulas. I haven’t been able to work out since my kidney scone started protesting so loudly way back in November, so I am a wee bit out of shape. And boy do I feel it.

It’s a good thing I am going back to being a grown-up instead of turning on the wii every time I wasn’t feeding or bathing or otherwise neglecting the children. I have a feeling my muscles (or kidney scone) would soon stage a coup and someone would find me twisted into a knot on the living room floor, unable to reach the wiimote to switch the song from Tik Tok before my ears started bleeding. Yes, I’m definitely starting to see the upside of this Grownup Thing.

Quote of the Day.

Last night, as I was giving Bee her bath, she was trying to figure out – again – why exactly I didn’t have her teacher for daycare. Apparently, in the Universe Of Bee, time-travel isn’t only possible, it’s a way of life.

Bee: You love Miss S.?
Me: Yes, she’s a great teacher. Isn’t she?
Bee: Yes. Well, why weren’t you in my class when you were little?
Me: Because my mommy didn’t work. She stayed home with me during the day.
Bee: Because they hadn’t made up kindergarten yet?
Me: …

Apparently, I am older than kindergarten. After the week two weeks I just had, I’m started to feel that way! But now – huzzah the weekend! Hope you all enjoy it.

The other shoe didn’t just drop, it fell on my head.

Remember just last week when I was bragging about my daughter the smartypants? Yeah, apparently karma got the memo and laughed in my face because BOY, AM I STUPID for writing about it out loud. Um, so to speak.

See, I was all basking in the glow of My Daughter is Speshul! when I picked up the girls from school last Thursday. It was (almost) the end of a very crappy, very draining week and I was looking forward to having a night of relaxing with the girls. I was going to treat them to pizza, eat in our pajamas, in the living room, in front of the TV. I needed to relax that badly. And then Gracie handed me an envelope from her school when I picked her up from daycare. I read it in the car while everyone was buckling up. Her teacher had informally let me know that Gracie was asked to test for the Gifted & Talented Program and I figured this was just the official letter.

Except it wasn’t so much telling me that Gracie was awesome as much as it was notifying me that my kid was failing gym.

After I picked my jaw up of the floor of my jeepy jeepy, I read the letter again to see if I could actually take in something other than Failing! And Gym! What I found wasn’t helping my sense of incredulity very much. Apparently, my daughter was failing gym because of classwork (in gym? What, are there worksheets?), and wasting time, and because her behavior was consistently at unacceptable levels. I actually double-checked that the last category was really the one that was checked off because that is just not Gracie. But darnit, I was mostly mad because I couldn’t have Pizza & Pajama night if my kid was failing a class.

The kid was resigned to having A Talk when we got home, but she took it like a trooper until I explained what it meant that she was failing a class, and why she was supposedly failing. Then, well, we both talked it out and we both ended up confused. Lemme break it down for ya:

Evidence the letter might be dead-on:

• I know my children aren’t angels. For one, it just isn’t in their DNA. (Ahem.) Secondly, hellllooooo – did you forget that I just spent four straight days locked up with them because of an ice storm? That’s an awfully painful reminder of just how human they are.
• I know Gracie dawdles – the kid basically has one speed – so I understood why she might waste some time in class. If she wasn’t, I’d be a little miffed that she was basically putting one over on me all these years. And if that was the case, exactly HOW did they make her move faster, for the love of Pete? Turns out, they don’t have any more answers than I do. Sadcakes.
• Acting out occasionally? Um, DUH! Hello, welcome to the land of MY CHILD IS SEVEN YEARS OLD! (Almost.) She is going to act goofy and sometimes yell and sometimes not stand in a straight line with her classmates! Gracie is particularly prone to being a follower if she’s in a less-structured environment (like, say, gym class) where she feels more invisible. And have I mentioned that her gym class has almost 80 students in it? I’m surprised the teacher has time to send out letters by name as opposed to prisoner student number.

 

Reasons I think my daughter might not be who they think she is:

• As much as I know Gracie can be a giant, very loud goofyhead, she is much afraid of disappointing authority figures. So I couldn’t really buy into the ‘unacceptable behavior’ bit. Yes, Gracie will act out. But as her regular teacher confirmed when I talked to her about the situations, when you call Gracie out, she falls back into her normal do-gooder self. Otherwise I whip her with noodles. (KIDDING!)
• Um, you saw the bit where there are 80 kids in her class, right? There is a chance the gym teacher confused her with someone else. Five bucks says he doesn’t even know who she is, as horrible as that would be.
• Gracie confesses. She’ll sing faster than a jail bird. It’s one of the things I love best about her! (In my devious mom way, of course.) When I talked to Gracie about the letter and quizzed her down about what she might have done and whether she had done x, y, or z, she wasn’t upset or defensive – she was bewildered.

 

The bewilderment sealed it for me – she didn’t do it. (Miss Marple got nothin’ on me. Heh.)  But I couldn’t tell Gracie that. I had a role to play. Lessons to teach. Teaching her that it was okay to slack off on gym class wasn’t one of them. I mean, if I taught her that she could slack on some things in life, what in the world would she learn during college? I mean, seriously.

So I told Gracie that I would talk to Coach E. and see what the dealio was. Gracie forgot she was only almost-seven and responded with tears and sobs and reasoned that it wasn’t FAIR and that he was the teacher and could just lie and she couldn’t do anything about it. I hugged her and patted her back and tried to beat the jaded 16-year-old out of her, without much luck.

Here’s hoping I get this resolved and soon. I kinda sorta told Gracie that she can’t have friends over on school nights and told her no more Mrs. Lax Mom when it comes to no TV on school nights and – oh yeah – bedtime has been moved back thirty minutes until she fixes her behavior in gym class. Well, I couldn’t have Gracie think failing a class is okay, now could I?! But this is rotten, having to punish a child you truly believe is probably not guilty, just because you’re the mom and it’s your job.

I wish I could say I hate to love you – but I LOVE to love you.

In other words: Kohls, I just can’t stay away. Especially when you play dirty rotten tricks like stuff Kohls Cash in my hands.

Evidence the first:

When Kim was here, we celebrated our escape from Housebound Island by venturing out to Kohls. My sister found a very sexy wrap dress, a few shirts, and a laptop bag that doubled as a funky purse. I found these four shirts, a pair of earrings, and a dress for each of the girls (angelic summer A-line for Bee; Euro trash t-shirt dress and matching ski hat for Gracie). All of that – for $156. We TOTALLY rocked that sale. We saved over $270 and got $30 in Kohls Cash.

Which I brought to Kohls this weekend. I give you: Evidence the second.

I bought a new brown purse (my favorite purse snapped last weekend in Target. Sadcakes.); a red clutch by Vera Wang that’s big enough for my cell phone, my ID and some cash, lipstick and an inhaler – win!; a new wallet that can fit all of my ID cards, pictures, medical cards, etc, and an Easter dress for both girls. Go ahead – guess how much…$76! And that’s before I applied my 15% off scratch off and my Kohls Cash.

The worst part – they made me take $10 in Kohls Cash. I’m going to have to go back again. I think I better go this weekend when I have both girls with me or else I might walk out with the rest of the store.

Why I hid every single pair of scissors I could find.

Last night when the girls came home, we had a little mini-reunion. They hadn’t been gone that long – four days – but there was still a rosy glow hanging in the air. (Oh shoosh - do not hate on my cliché. It happens so infrequently {the glow at home, not my horrid writing} that we can just deal with the clicheness of it all.) Where was I? Oh yes – everyone was (pretty much) happy. Know how I know? No one was even bickering while they got ready for bed. I told you it was rosy.

My feelings of Happy pretty much evaporated when I walked into the bathroom to watch my youngest daughter primp in front of the mirror. I love when she acts all Big Girl and stuff, so I sat down on the toilet seat to watch her.

“Mom, wouldn’t I look pretty with my hair like this?” Bee asked, holding her bangs back up off her face.

“Yes, you would. We could grow them out if you want,” I offered.

“Yeah, we can cut them ve-wy, ve-wy short, all the way down!!!” I’m afraid there were just as many exclamation points in her voice as all that.

“What?! No! You do NOT cut your bangs! You let them grow out! You pull them to the side, like this,” I swept them over with my fingers verrrrrry gently so she could see, “and then they grow longer like Gracie and my bangs did.”

“No, Mom – you cut them way down at the bottom so you can’t see them!!”

The Happy was still in her voice, but I could already feel sweat beading between my shoulder blades. She wasn’t even listening to me. And, darn it, she sounded so happy with her plan to make them ve-wy short. That is when I hid every single pair of my scissors. It’s the difference between raising your first kid and your second – with your second you don’t laugh it off and think, “Oh they are so cute!” Nope. You hide scissors, make sacrifices to the Gods of Sanity, and start looking up cheap wigs on eBay.

Welcome to another week in my crazy house, folks.

Little Miss Smartypants.

Sometimes, Gracie scares me with just how much she seems to be morphing into a mini-me. Allow me to illustrate one teeny tiny example.

After Christmas break, Gracie’s school sent home notices that the school had evaluated all first-grade students and some would be selected to test for the district’s Gifted and Talented Program. In order to be considered, students would need to be nominated for the next round. Nominations could happen one of three ways: they could be nominated by their teachers; they could be nominated by parents or someone else in their community (no doubt to appease Those Parents who would insist their child had been snubbed); or, students could be invited into the next round because they had placed so high on the standardized tests they had taken at the very beginning of the year.

I spent a lot of time thinking about that notice. Did I want to nominate Gracie? Sure, the kid is alarmingly clever and incredibly bright. She reads 60-page chapter books in a single night and breaks any sort of code I create to communicate restricted information to other adults in the room. Throw in her 101 math average and you can see why the CIA is gonna love this kid. So, yeah – she’s smart. But is she gifted?

It’s a tricky question. Gracie will make intuitive leaps and spend her free time concocting inventions and dreaming up imaginative-play scenarios you wouldn’t think she could ever in a million years think of on her own. But she turns her gift (if that’s what it is) on and off at will. She can be a typical 7-year-old who isn’t held back by this so-called giftedness. She isn’t bored in class on a regular basis (although really I think that’s because she has such strong and gifted – yes, I said it – teachers this year). She doesn’t seem hampered or held back by whatever it is. She can be as dumb as anyone when she isn’t in the mood to be smart.

And oh lord can she be moody about it. If she doesn’t want to work on her homework, she can collapse faster than a house of cards under a hippo. She will much more often come up with the easiest, quickest vocab sentences she can think of, rather than trying to be tricksy and show-offy with them. She doesn’t particularly like to work; she’s a bit lazy. I have aboslutelynoidea where she gets that from, by the way. Ahem. My point is, the kid is almost seven years old and in this regard, at least, she acts like it. And that’s okay! I love seven! Especially on her.

Maybe Gracie was “just” wildly intelligent and not gifted. Certainly she’s young. I explained the Gifted and Talented Program to Gracie and asked her if she wanted to maybe try to join a class of witty and beautiful students like her. Once she heard that she would have to work harder, she passed. Then I emailed her team teachers and asked for their input. Ms. N echoed my thoughts and explained that’s why she wasn’t planning on nominating Gracie at that time. Since the kids are invited to joint the G&T program [how much do I love that it’s the G and T program? Ha!] every year, and since Gracie wasn’t very interested, I decided not to nominate Gracie on my own and to see what happened next year. If her second-grade class devolved into a mess of behavioral issues or Gracie was bored from a lack of structure or challenges, I could press the issue next year. Ta da! A solution!

I was very happy with my decision…and then Gracie’s teacher emailed me to say that the scores from the standardized test she took at the beginning of the year had just been delivered. The little brat had absolutely aced the test and the G&T Program Director specifically asked that she be moved to the next round of evaluations. Suddenly, Gracie was thrilled and excited about being in “the smart class.” Suddenly, I was too.

But seriously?! Again this child of mine has a way of making things happen on her own timeline and circumventing my system. It’s a good thing I was a master of it myself at that age or I wouldn’t quite know what to do with myself now. (The answer, by the way, is to just enjoy the ride. I really did know what I was doing at her age. Good for Gracie!)

A lil “Quotable Katie” to break the monotony.

Yeah, it’s been pretty deathly around here. That’s what happens when your colleague goes out of town and you’re all on your own for just about forever. And until Survivorman comes up with an Escaping Your Cubby edition, I’m just going to focus on absolutely nothing…except maybe getting through the day (mostly) intact. Or, um, something.

In any case, in between screaming for my mama and shooting deathglares at anyone who asks for anything, I’ve been chatting back and forth with my sister. It turns out, Kim misses my wii even more than she misses me – so much so that she flew home and filed her taxes just so she could justify buying one with her return. Naturally, I gifted her with Just Dance 2 for her birthday so she could enjoy all the comforts of being housebound at my house while she is housebound at her house. 

Apparently, all of my sibs are getting in on the excitement. My sister sent me this:

Rhianyn, rather earnestly: ”Can we have a *reeeeal* first wii dance party?”
Kim, rather skeptically: “What do you mean?”
Rhianyn: “…costumes…?”

Hee hee hee - I hope they have this “real” wii dance party when I’m home. I’ll even pack my feather boas to cushion my extra wiimotes.

Book Review (without spoilers): Little Bee by Chris Cleave

This is not a story to pass on.

Okay, yes, it’s rather bold to liken the book so soon to Toni Morrison’s masterpiece, Beloved, but I couldn’t keep from comparing the two as I thought my way through Little Bee. Before I could even figure out exactly why, I knew this book was different from most recent fiction; I knew it was important, that it had significant meaning. Its social commentary was much more subtle – but infinitely more thought-provoking – than Cleave’s Incendiary. And yet, at first, I didn’t quite like Little Bee.

I reminded myself that I loathed Beloved (since that was the book that insisted on coming to mind so often) the first three times I read it. So I kept plowing through Little Bee. Maybe plowing is the wrong word – it certainly wasn’t as much work as that implies. No, it wasn’t that it took an extraordinary amount of effort or time or attention to read Little Bee. It took an enormous amount of thinking and pausing and tripping around. I wanted to understand why Little Bee was pulling at me so. Why did it scream significance?

It wasn’t until I was three-quarters of the way through that I found the first answer – one of many, I’m sure, that I’ll find with re-readings and discussions with friends. This is a story about what it means to belong. That’s why Beloved kept peeking around every corner. It’s about what it feels like to belong somewhere or to someone – and conversely, what it means to be adrift in this world without a “gools” or a homebase to seek refuge and feel safe from the world around you. It’s about journeying through worlds to find identity of self. It’s about our debt to both ourselves and those who are not us, who are not at home in the world we live in (and how easy it is to overlook those who are literally at home with you). It’s about eyes opening and hearts shutting. Mostly it’s a story about worlds – the ones we create for ourselves, the ones we actually live in, cultural and economical worlds, the flexibility of these worlds (or maybe it’s the flimsiness of the curtains between them?), and the leaps of faith and journeys from one life into the next.

Really, Little Bee is my favorite kind of a book. The kind you can be reading, humming along, and then everything shifts: the meaning beneath the meaning jumps out of you, like in one of those magic eye puzzles. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. But the story is just as fine either way. Little Bee is a magical story for everyone, whether you want to analyze it to death (and I do), or whether you want to just escape into someone else’s world for an afternoon.

Regardless, I think Little Bee will be on everyone’s mind for a long, long time.

The teeny tiny reason I smelled like smoke last week.

Last week I mentioned that tiny little accidental time I set the house almost on fire. And I thought, Hey! Maybe I should tell you about that! You know how much I love making fun of myself. And also saying “It wasn’t my fault.”

Because really. It wasn’t.

See, it was the snow’s fault. It was the snow and the ice and the (cue special scary music dreamed up by the networks) arctic cold temperatures that caused the power grid to start to fail, which caused the power company to tell the news to tell all of us that they were going to start rolling blackouts. Also, I apparently don’t have an emergency heat override on my heating unit, and so it was about 62 degrees in my house with the heat on full blast ‘round the clock. THAT is what I prefer to blame the Tiny Insignificant Incident on.

In any case, that was why I decided we should light a fire. A fire would totally have helped warm the living room at least. So I emptied the ashes out of the fireplace, opened the damper, used a flashlight to make sure the damper was open (I am smart, yo), got some logs from the wood pile, and fetched half a starter log from the garage. Ta da! Fire. It was lovely.

About an hour later, I noticed the room smelled kinda smokey and firey and stuff. I asked Kim if she thought it smelled…odd. But Kim doesn’t have a fireplace. I decided I was paranoid. Another hour went by and I thought my eyes might be prickling from the possibly-imaginary smoke. I asked Kim if the room seemed a little hazy. She thought it might be, but mostly thought I was nutsy. I cleaned my glasses and went back to work on the computer in the other room. A little while later I walked back into the living room and decided there was no way I was making it up – the room was full of smoke. I started looking at the damper and trying to poke it with the fire poker to see if it would open any more. No go. Of course, since I was using a flashlight to try to see the damper, I could see the smoke pouring out of the chimney in the beam of light. No bueno, Batman.

I didn’t think the chimney was on fire – that sounds a lot louder. (Um, don’t ask.) But clearly the roaring fire in the fireplace was only going to make the room worse and I needed to solve that problem first. I used the poker to smash the starter log into very small embers. I used the poker and the shovel to manipulate the log that was only a little bit on fire out of the way. The smoke was getting worse by the minute. The fire alarms were going to…. Yup, and there went the (extremely loud) smoke detectors. Kim opened the back door to let some of the smoke out. Just what you want to do when it’s 8° outside and only 64° inside! But at least the smoke detectors shut up before my neighbors came pouring out of their houses. Kim shut the back door and turned on the exhaust fans in the bathroom to help get rid of the smoke while I managed to get the log that was engulfed in flames into the metal ash bucket and somehow carry it outside to dump in the snow. Sure I could have doused it with water, but without a lip on the fireplace, all of the sooty water would have spilled onto the (very beige) carpet. That was the last option I really wanted to try. THANK GOD I didn’t have to. Instead, we used large ice chunks to throw on the embers and remaining log to burn out the fire. The ice evaporated as it sizzled out the fire, thus eliminated any flooding possibilities. The girl scout troop leader Kim and I had when we were little would have been so impressed. Heh, we would have been too if we didn’t smell so much like smoke. Ahem.

Once all of the fire was out and my house wasn’t on fire anymore and things had calmed down, I got out the flashlight again and checked out the damper. Kim and I had hypothesized that maybe the cage at the top of the chimney had frozen over and prevented the smoke from getting out, but Kim had gone out and saw that smoke was indeed coming out of the chimney. So it wasn’t that. I googled the problem and found a few possible solutions, one of which involved pounding on the slide and forcing it up. I had tried that, but it wasn’t budging. Then I tried wailing on it with the fire poker. And it slid up some more.

Uh, whoops.

Turns out, the damper had been stuck and wasn’t quite all the way open after all. Heh. Funny, huh? Yeah.

Since the flue was fixed (and now possibly stuck open), we started another fire as soon as the sodden mess left behind had dried a little. The house reeked of smoke for days. The house eventually heated up to a respectable temp late that night. And we all lived to cause chaos and destruction another day.

And that, everyone, is the story of how I almost kind of set my house on fire. But didn’t. Yet.

Quote of the Day.

This is from last week, when we were snowbound and rules were lax.

Bee: Can I please have some cookies?
Me: Sure.

I got her three cookies, sat her at the table, and then…

Bee: Can I please have four cookies?
Me: Mayyyyybe. You didn’t eat your lunch.
Bee (without missing a beat): Well, mayyyyyybe I love you.

And THAT is why I didn’t kill my children last week. They’re too dang cute, wielding their little swords of facetiousness like that.