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Wednesday, September 03, 2003

"not much to report" -- right

Not much to report today.


You know, I always find that after I say that I think up five zillion things to say and it ends up being a really long entry.



hmm. nope. Not happening today. Really, there's not much. School went fine. (LT's writing prompt response: "The fair was fun. It is sad that the fair is over. My favorite is the 'wrestle' ride. My least favorite is the Tornado." explanation: the "wrestle" ride is actually the Indiana-Jones-decorated obstacle course sort of thing, so named by the kids because when they were on it once, three "big boys" were also on it, and they were wrestling each other, knocking into my kids, and really causing me to get in touch with my mama-bear side, if you know what I mean. grr. And the Tornado is a teenager ride which my kids would never even watch for long, let alone go on. Need I remind you that they are 3 and 7? Anyway, I promised no more posts about the fair, and besides, so far about 80% of this one is one long parenthetical statement, so I'll shut up about this now.). Other subjects also went well. LT loved his solar system quiz. It is amazing that I, being really pretty anal about spelling and grammar, can find his misspellings so adorable that I have a hard time correcting him on them. I mean, 'Plooto'? 'Joopitr' (can't duplicate the backward J)? Of course he does have to learn the correct spellings, and I have him write the missed ones over, but I make sure to keep his original papers intact so that when I look at them in five years I can sob because I'll never have a little boy who spells things so cutely again.



C did more pencil-control tracing and tried her first color-by-number. She had fun. She also totally blew away my plans for patterns and counting with Unifix cubes; I underestimated her abilities there. I'm going to have to step back and re-plan her math goals for the year, since she's pretty much met the ones I had for her, in the first two days. Not that she's excessively brilliant (although she is, aren't everyone's kids? ;-) ), just that I hadn't realized how much she already knew until we sat down and worked on it together.



In other topics...


I got the official Brush-Off from an old friend today. Last spring I started getting this desire to get in touch with some of my high school friends. It started because my class started planning its reunion. I did not want to go to that (posted about that in I think my first entry) but it did get me thinking about friends that I did want to find and get back in touch with. I ran into someone from my old crowd at the library, and we were both asking about the same person (whom we'd asked each other about every time we ran into each other for the last ten years or so) so I started with her. She has a really common name herself, but her half-brother doesn't, so I googled him, found him, emailed him, got my friend's phone number, and called her. Now, I hadn't had any relationship with this woman in ten years, almost no contact with her in that long, due to a lot of things, but we hit it off well, in spite of the differences between us (which had been what kept us from keeping the friendship going years ago, when we were less mature) and have been emailing back and forth, IMing, etc., and we're great friends again. We were glad about the way that turned out, and she and I were wondering about another of our close friends, so we googled her, and my friend emailed her. She emailed my friend back cheerfully, and expressed an interest in hearing from me, so I emailed her too, just before she went on vacation, as I found out later. She came back from vacation and emailed me to tell me she doesn't think a friendship between us would work, too much time has passed, we're too different, maybe if she had more time, etc etc etc. O-K. I'm really not bothered about it in any real way. It's not like this is a part of my life that's being taken away or ended; it never started and that's fine. I just got so glad about the success of one "reunion" that I thought another would go well too, and it didn't. Can't win 'em all.



OK, this is nuts, it's like a curse. Or a blessing. If I want to write a really long entry, all I have to do is start it with "not much to report today" and I'll go on and on filling several screens, unable to stop typing. sigh.

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Sunday, August 31, 2003

short and dull

I am not feeling terribly articulate right now so this won't be a long, scintillating post like you may be coming to expect. ;-). Just a few highlights.

• T won second place in the destruction derby last night. Woo hoo! great job.
  
• He's really sore.
  
• Some drunken jerk spilled beer all over LT's shirt during the derby. He was fully traumatized, poor little boy. At least if he's that disgusted about getting "that silly nasty stuff" spilled on him, I don't have to worry about him drinking it anytime soon...
  
• Today I returned to the fair to spend a 4-hour shift in the booth run by our local pro-life organization.
  
• It was very, very hot.
  
• No more posts about the fair till next August, I promise.
  
• I finished reading Pride and Prejudice (which I enjoyed immensely) and got right into Sense and Sensibility (which I am not loving quite as much)
  
• Somehow the scale says I have gained two pounds. I have not been very careful over the weekend but I certainly have not consumed 7000 extra calories in three days, so it must be water or something. Who knows. The human body is a really strange thing.
  

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Friday, August 29, 2003

The Fair, Part 1

Music: none, kids are watching Jonah

Mood: aaaahhhhhhh.... :)


You know how fantastic it feels when you've been uncomfortable, to get comfortable finally? Like when you've had on tight shoes and you can take them off, or when you've had to pee for ages and you finally go and then for like ten minutes afterward you're just ecstatic that you don't have to pee anymore? That is me right now. My chapped lips have Blistex, my parched throat has cold water, I'm wearing sweats and I've got my hair loosely confined and out of the way. Bliss. Mmm, and diet Coke too.


We had a nice time tonight. After the shuttle bus driver drove right by our stop without, um, stopping (this has happened the last three years -- the fair board gets a cheaper deal contracting with people from the valley for the shuttle bus, except that they hire these idiots who take three of the four days of the fair just learning where they're supposed to go. They should go back to using school buses and school bus drivers from the local school district, IMO), we drove to the fair and paid to park. We looked around at some exhibits, got some dinner (Indian fry bread, yum), and then hit the rides. Right away we discovered a shocking truth: LT is too big for kiddie rides. No more motorcycles, no more jeeps with beepy horns, no more dragon roller coasters. And of course, tonight, that left C without a riding partner for those rides. She befriended a little girl and went with her on the jeeps, and ended up holding her ears the whole time because of the incessant and loud squawking, beeping horns (I swear the guys who manage that ride must only last about two days before they're carted off to the looney bin). But she wanted the comfort and strength of her big brother with her on the motorcycles, and since he couldn't go, she didn't either. Instead the two of them had a fantastic time on this obstacle course sort of thing made to be like an Indiana Jones adventure or something. We did the obligatory Super Slide as well, and then ran into some friends of ours, M and his wife D. D and I were talking about how chicken our husbands are, and how they are afraid of scary rides. Somehow we ended up being sorta dared to go on this really wild one; my dad bought 4 tickets and put them in my hand, and off we went. This ride is hard to explain -- picture a rigid oval track, and a train sort of thing that rides around on the inside of it; when the train is on the inside of the top, it is upside down. Now picture that the oval track swivels on an axis. OK, I actually, believe it or not, found a website about it. Anyway, we went and got in line. Now, M and D are in their mid-late thirties (I think). I'm 28. We felt like absolute dotards waiting in this carnival line. We were surrounded by enough pubescent hormones to power Cleveland. And the music -- well, it's really loud. The funny thing is that ten to fifteen years ago this was the place to be. I was one of those hormone-laden teenagers not so long ago. T was taking video of us in the line, interviewing our kids and my parents and probably M as well, Geraldo-style, about us going on this ride. Very clever. Then we actually got ON the ride. OH MY GOSH. THAT is what it felt like to be 17! We laughed the whole time. I haven't done anything that crazy in a long, long time. It was a blast, really it was. I don't have the iron stomach I once did, though; I was glad that it didn't last much longer than it did. So, whether she knew it or not, was D. :)



After a Ferris wheel ride for me and LT (C didn't want to try it, so of course T stayed with her), and one more round on the obstacle course, we headed home, and as soon as was humanly possible I got into jammies-and-comfort mode. aaaahhh. :) Tomorrow is the big day for T -- the derby. After we go to the parade in the morning, the kids and I will go to briefly visit T at the area where the derby drivers take their cars to be inspected and wait for the derby; then we'll go to the fair for a while, to look at the animals and use up the rest of the kids' ride tickets; then I'll take C out to my parents' so that Mom can watch her for the evening while LT and I go back in to watch the derby. Then I get to drive back out there and pick her up. Looong day ahead....

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Killing time...

Music: When In Rome, "The Promise" (one of those songs that brings back the late 80's for me in a big way)


Mood: Expectant


We're trying to kill three hours between our return from shopping and our departure for [insert "Fanfare For The Common Man" here] the FAIR. The kids are so excited. C came into our room at about 6:30 this morning. Groggily I looked over at her and saw her holding her hair up off the buttons on the back of her nightgown. "What are you doing, sweetie?" I asked. "Please unbutton my nightgown so I can take it off and get dressed to go to the fair," was her reply. She was quite disheartened to be reminded that the fair doesn't even open until 4 in the afternoon today. LT had a similarly rude awakening. Horrors, instead of gallivanting around on fair rides all day, they had to ride in the car to the valley and behave themselves in the grocery store instead. They DID get a picnic at the park, which was back to its pleasant school-year state of desertion (ah, the benefits of home schooling). Now they have their wooden train set spread all over the floor in one half of the living room - and they haven't asked "how many minutes" for around half an hour. This is a vast improvement.



Worst moment of the day: Discovering that C's overall straps had, in spite of many explicit warnings to the contrary, managed to fall into the toilet


Best moment of the day: Probably yet to come! But so far, that nightgown-at-6:30-am bit was pretty great :)


Quote of the day: "The way [homeschoolers] learn social skills--modeling themselves after adults rather than peers--is more consistent with the way children have been socialized through most of history, Esther Baruch asserts. 'Until about a hundred years ago, the rich kids learned from adult tutors, and poor kids went to work early,' she says. 'Now, [kids in schools] model themselves after the other kids, who model themselves after tv characters--and the results of that are clear.' "
-- from a really excellent article on homeschooling in the Stanford alumni magazine

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Thursday, August 28, 2003

What They Never Tell You

C has just made a picture of a ducky for me. She is 3 which means that while the picture is adorable, I certainly needed her to tell me it was a ducky, know what I mean? Of course once she's named it I can see its legs and feet and body and head and bill. Nobody told me being a mom would be this much fun. I mean, I knew it would be nice having a baby, and I knew it would be nice having little children who grew up into big people, but all the little details like ducky pictures and stuck-on kisses and favorite storybooks requested over and over -- they more than make up for all the little stresses.


As you can tell I am back to my chipper self. Whether this has anything to do with the fact that I am ANOTHER POUND DOWN (woo hoo!), I leave to you to decide. I really don't think it is. I think it is a relief from all these agitating hormones that have been bouncing around inside me for a week, making me feel easily stressed and frustrated and bored and sleepy and mindless.



I am supposed to be going to the valley and going shopping, but I put that off until tomorrow. I did get lesson plans worked up for next week, as well as a lot of long-range school year plans done. However, I did not clean the school room. You see, all summer it's been the play room, and right now LT has the floor covered in army men, all set up and waiting for T to have time to have a battle with him. This weekend is going to be crazy-busy, but I think I can pencil in about three hours on Sunday evening to clean that room -- so they'd better have the battle done by then.



Another aspect of motherhood nobody tells you about, right? Scheduling your housekeeping around your son's militaristic tendencies (gee, wonder where he got THOSE).


I spent most of this morning chauffeuring around my neighbors. They are two little old ladies who were finally convinced by their chiropractor (funny how people who see chiropractors with regularity frequently come to see them as God-figures who are all-knowing, isn't it?) to give up driving. This is a good thing since neither of them sees or hears very well. They have lived together for years; they used to run a children's Christian camp in the mountains near here but when they retired from that and sold it, they bought the house next to ours to spend their quieter years. One is very deaf but moves around OK; the other hears slightly better but takes literally ten minutes to walk thirty yards. Or rather, to shuffle thirty yards. So understandably, taking them anywhere is an exercise in patience, as well as an adventure. Small errands turn into two- or three-hour affairs. It's VERY good for the kids to be around them; they enjoy each other, and the kids are learning patience and respect for a generation that will soon be gone. I love old people; I love talking with them. They have seen so much. I mean, I feel all mature when I meet a college student whom I knew as a newborn; these ladies were already old before I was born. They lived through times I've only read about in historical articles and school history texts. So it is definitely worth the time and effort of helping them, just to listen to them talk.


Another website I've been meaning to post about in here is BookCrossing so I'm doing it before I forget. It's a really neat concept, and the website does a better job of explaining it than I can, but basically, you "release" books in public places and then the person who finds them will ideally go online (thanks to a bookmark or bookplate or whatever that you leave in the book, with instructions), post their thoughts about the book, and then "release" it again somewhere else. So far, I have released three books which were never posted about again. :(. But I shall keep trying.



I finished reading Silas Marner and now I'm buried in Pride and Prejudice again. I LOVE THIS BOOK. This means, according to some diehard Jane Austen fans (of which I actually consider myself one) that I am not as mature a fan as someone who has Emma or Persuasion or even maybe Mansfield Park for a favorite. Too darn bad, this is a wonderful story, delightfully told. Not that the others aren't. But I suppose they're deeper, while P&P is "just" romantic. Sigh. Perfectly romantic, if you ask me. [flutter flutter]

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Wednesday, August 27, 2003

just stuff

We had a potluck tonight with our Bible study group, and I was pretty good, but I'm so used to being strict with myself that I feel like I was really bad. I ate a small square of lasagna, two different kinds of green salad, and a few small slices of sourdough bread. I have not weighed myself today. That is supposed to be a feeling of freedom but it's really not; I feel panicked. What if I gained 5 pounds? What if I'm back at my starting weight?? aaaauugggh!!



I will not go weigh myself. I will not weigh myself. I will not weigh myself.



I got one thing on my list of goals for this week done yesterday: I went through the boxes of clothes I had lying around, which the kids had outgrown, and sorted them out and got some of them delivered to where they're going. I do still need to get ready for school next week though. That's tomorrow's job -- cleaning the room, getting it organized, and figuring out what our first week will be like. The next day is the day that our family looks forward to second only to Christmas: THE FAIR. How exciting. It is a lot like Christmas; you love it when you're a kid and then you love it even more as an adult watching your kids love it. And the next day is the destruction derby, which is not only fun, but it's also the end of destruction derby season which means I have my husband around on evenings and weekends again. ;-)



ah, my radio program is over, and I'm practically falling asleep sitting up. I'm going to bed... I will not weigh myself on the way by, I will not...

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Tuesday, August 26, 2003

death to all ants

Music: Loreena McKennitt, "The Highwayman" (amazing, wonderful song)

Mood: Virtuous Again

Another pat on my back for this evening: Not only did I spend two hours cutting out reflective sheeting into letters for T's derby car (major brownie points there), but I also cleaned the kitchen pretty thoroughly. OK, so this was partly to declare war on the ants who have finally found their way into our house. I don't know if it was the storm last night that decided it for them or what, but after a summer of being the envy of all who knew us, we ended a long ant-free streak today. Little beasts. They are cheerfully carting back mouthfuls (or whatever) of Terro to their nest, wherever it is. Terro is the best ant killer in the world.



This is day, what, ten? eleven? of being stuck at the same weight. I am combining advice from friends and I'm going to do two things differently: First, I am going to aim for 1400 calories per day instead of 1200, to help avoid putting my body into we're-starving-save-the-fat mode. I should still be able to lose at that calorie level, especially if I keep getting some good exercise. And also, I'm going to make sure that I don't eat too many carbs (note, I am not going to do low carbs really, just I *had* been having a lot of them), and that the ones I do eat are mostly from whole grains and things. We'll see if those two things, plus the resolution of the possible hormonal reason for the stalemate, don't help. (if they don't I will scream. Really loudly. And then I will go see a doctor.)



Meanwhile it is again getting late (shameful, absolutely shameful, how that keeps happening every day) and I got a notable lack of sleep last night. More tomorrow...

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Sunday, August 24, 2003

irritation :-/

This is a really irritating five minutes for me. I have a twitch in the muscle at the back of my left shoulder which refuses to go away. My dial-up is messing up and not actually transferring any data (so I am typing this in Notepad and will save it and then post it later when I can do so). And, while I haven't been exactly as strict with myself as I had been this weekend (it WAS a birthday party, after all, and all things considered I HAVE been pretty good -- I didn't even have cake and ice cream!), I don't think I was bad enough to gain two darn pounds! I must be having some [males, avert eyes] premenstrual bloating or something [OK, males, you can look again]. I got a good amount of exercise yesterday, even -- one brisk walk and one casual one. I don't understand it. grr.


Other than that, things are really boring right now; I won't torture you with any detailed descriptions.

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Friday, August 22, 2003

just stuff

I just finished watching When Harry Met Sally. That is definitely not a movie without moral faults, but I have to confess I love it, especially the second half. I love the way Marie (whom I cannot help thinking of as Marie Organa since we've been plunged into the world of Star Wars so much lately -- she's played by Princess Leia, I mean Carrie Fisher) and Jess get together, I love the 80's clothes, I love the way it makes New York look like such a lovely place, and I love love LOVE the "I love you" line at the end. Possibly one of the most memorable such lines in movie history. :) My friends and I used to watch this in high school and we had the whole last scene memorized. I was having an 80's nostalgia moment just looking at the clothes. Watch it and see if you don't think Meg Ryan's sweaters and slacks and formals were much wiser fashion decisions than all the slinky tank tops and goofy flare-legged hip-huggers everyone's wearing today. (well, everyone except me).



My parents have the kids tonight, not because we had a date or anything, just because. I finished the tape for my dad, and then folded a bunch of laundry (watching the beginning of the aforementioned grown-up movie this time), and then we drove to the valley to buy some groceries and derby supplies. I found THE most filling 600-calorie dinner I think I've ever heard of -- a footlong roast beef Subway sandwich, no mayo or cheese. I really could have done with a 6-inch and wrapped the rest up, but a) we weren't going straight home and I didn't want it to sit there multiplying bacteria in the car while we shopped, and b) I would have been under 1200 calories for the day and I'm trying to stay at or just above that so that I don't go into "fasting" mode and start losing muscle or something. Not that one day would do that, but still.



I stunned the daylights out of a Sam Goody employee at the mall, I think. First of all, because it seemed quite shocking to everyone there that two such ancient persons as T and myself (at the ripe old ages of 33 and 28) would enter their domain, and secondly because when the nearly-prepubescent clerk approached and asked if he could help me, I told him I was looking to see if they had any CPE Bach CD's, but it looked like they just had JS Bach. I think I may as well have spoken in Sanskrit, or perhaps spun my head around. At any rate, he backed away slowly like I was an escapee from a high-security mental institution. It seems like not very long ago that I looked at adults with the same kind of shocked (and somehow patronizing) unbelief that they could ever have been my age...

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Thursday, August 21, 2003

Dinner out etc.

We went out to dinner tonight at my favorite local restaurant. I was relatively well-behaved but not totally uptight either. (in other words, I ate a couple of zucchini stick appetizers which I'm sure threw me WAY over my calorie quota for the meal all by themselves, I got a salad but not the additional soup I usually get, I gave my totally scrumptious roll (this place is famous for its rolls) to the kids, and I did what all the "weight loss tips" articles always suggest: I divided my dinner in half and brought half of it home for lunch tomorrow. So now I essentially get to have my favorite restaurant food two days in a row. :)

Poor LT. He and C had a late lunch; they ate around 2:30. He had two deep-fried burritos. Then he ate a snack consisting of probably six or eight quarter-round slices of watermelon about 4:00. Then we went to the restaurant at 6; right away he got a glass of rich chocolate milk with whipped cream on top, and he ate some of the zucchini appetizer and half my roll. Then his food came and he kind of dabbled with it, meanwhile drinking about a cup and a half of chocolate milk. Just as I was asking the waitress to package up my extra portion, he said his tummy hurt, asked me to pray for his tummy, then said, "Pray fast... I gotta...." We skipped praying and he ran into the men's room (thankfully we were right near it) with Daddy on his heels. Apparently everything from lunch onward made a reappearance, poor boy. There is something about my kids (and me) and chocolate milk. C has it BAD -- if she has chocolate milk or a chocolate shake or any sweet dairy drink (say from Starbucks) in the car, she WILL throw up. If she eats too much at a meal and then drinks chocolate milk, or vice versa, up it comes. Now me, I just get a bit of an upset tummy if I have too much; LT has thrown up once before (years ago, I think he was maybe 4) after eating a large meal and topping it off with chocolate milk. This was at Hometown Buffet, and he had fully overdone it on the all-you-can-eat macaroni and cheese. That time we were NOT next to the bathroom and we did NOT make it on time (we also did NOT go back to that particular location for a long time). For about a year he referred to HB not by its proper name but as "the restaurant where I frew up." Anyway. This was only the second time it caused any problem for him, but when I really thought about all he'd eaten in the space of about 4 hours (remember, the kid's only 7), I was not surprised. He was fine almost immediately, for which we are really glad. With C losing it yesterday morning, and then that tonight, I was beginning to think they had a virus or an intestinal infection or something.



I have learned today never to say that I've never gotten a copy of a rampant virus. My online friends are all abuzz about how many copies they were getting in ten minutes and I was rather smug. Well, my regular ISP has good virus protection, but I have an address for my sole web design client and at about five this evening the virus messages just started rolling in. I wasn't stupid enough to open any of them; I even turned off the preview pane just to be sure. But that address has probably received 20 or 30 copies of it in five hours. I am getting royally tired of it, to tell the truth.



Well, I am off to bed. T and the kids watched Star Wars Episode 1 this evening while I worked on my dad's birthday present (his birthday is today, the party is Saturday). I'm reading him a book on tape. Probably a flagrant copyright violation, but he likes to be read to and this way his darling daughter and delightful grandchildren are the voices he's hearing tell the story. :) (Well, grandCHILD; LT reads; C talks on the tapes but can't read yet). He gets a tape set for every birthday, Father's Day, and Christmas; so far I've done about six for him. Anyway. Thanks to reading for an hour and twenty minutes straight tonight, I have a nearly unquenchable thirst and my throat is scratchy. It's also surprisingly tiring doing all the voices. :) I have to be heading off early in the day tomorrow for the valley so I should get going before I fall asleep sitting up.

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