Parenting, Travel, Youth Exchange

Tips for the outbound exchange student

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exchange flagsOne recent Saturday morning I woke early, my brain spinning. Jack had announced the day before his plan to take the bus to the ski hill. He hadn’t asked for help and I hadn’t offered. I hadn’t pulled his boots, gloves, hat, goggles and helmet out of the closet, checked to make sure his ski pass was securely attached to his coat, rifled through our medicine drawer to find the motion sickness medicine I’d have to insist he take. I didn’t make sure he had some cash on him for lunch, load his skis into the truck or roshambo with his father over who would give him a ride to the bus stop an hour before dawn.

I wasn’t going to do any of it, either. I looked at the clock, fluffed my pillow and lay my head back down. If the kid wanted to go skiing, now was about the time he needed to find out whether he could manage all by himself.

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Parenting

The office bully? Totally my fault

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55H (1)I recently took a mini road trip with a colleague who needed a ride as well as a shoulder to cry on about coworker conflicts.

I can empathize. I have a fair amount of experience with people who can masquerade as well-adjusted adults in every other setting but the office, where they’re likely to pair up the emotional maturity of overtired toddlers with the aggression of lowland gorillas.

I let my colleague talk, without making suggestions, trying to focus on driving while staving off the episode of my own work-related PTSD her stories inspired.

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Parenting

Betty, Bill Gates, and Beer Pong

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young-betty2Originally, today’s post lamented the lack of beer pong at baby showers.

No, really, it did. This is an important conversation to be had.

However, I recently also realized that today is World Polio Day, which is another subject that speaks to me, although it occupies a different part of my consciousness than beer pong.

You may remember that my grandmother lived with us for the better part of five years when the kids were little. Before that, I knew her mostly as the curly haired lady who lived far away, watched a lot of Lawrence Welk when she and Grandpa visited, and sent one or two crisp dollar bills in a card every birthday.

When she moved to town, after the death of her second husband, it didn’t take long before her regular anxiety attacks and inconvenient trips to the emergency room helped us realize that independent living wasn’t her thing. We had moved our little family into a much larger home, down the street from my parents, and there was space for a full apartment in the basement.

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Fitness, Parenting

A Dog Day Run

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penny_anxietyIt starts like this:
She’s back in there. Where the shoes are.
The sunscreen.
That hat.
That hat that’s for running.
Oh that hat. And the shoes.

And so I wait.
I whine very small to remind her I’m here.
I yawn.
And stretch.
And groan.
Why doesn’t the door open?

Finally, she’s in the shoes, the watch, the shirt.
Reaching for
OMYGODTHELEASH
THELEASH
I leap and leap at her and THELEASH
This helps I think. Helps her be faster.

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Parenting

What to do with a couple bazillion cherry tomatoes

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Cherry Tomatoes Garden Fresh September 02, 20101Every spring, Mike starts putting things in pots that he swears he’ll care for properly and that won’t die out in mid-August in our yard in front of God and all the neighbors.

Around about this time a year, he’s all but given up on those plants and I get to be responsible for keeping them alive. This doesn’t create as much marital friction as you might think because usually he’s planted stuff I want to eat.

Usually.

This year, he planted tomato plants that were supposed to be of a variety one could use for sandwiches or salads, or sauces or soups if I gave myself enough time.

Except our plants were mislabeled, and instead of a couple dozen decent-sized slicing tomatoes, we got roughly four gazillion cherry tomatoes. Smaller than cherry, even. Maybe a Lilliputian varietal. They’re teensy.

There was a time when Colin would pop these things like gumballs. Back before anything closer to a vegetable than ketchup somehow became anathema to my youngest child. These days, he prefers his vegetables hidden in fruit juice, or else ground up and molded into a shape that holds his favorite spiced mystery meat. Preferably coated with an MSG-based powder and wrapped in Taco Bell paper.

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Parenting

Of Hobbits, French Crepes, and Crappy AC: A Night of Junior High

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IMG_3703By the time we got to the school, all the other parents had cleared the halls and filed into their kids’ respective first-period classrooms. Our first stop was orchestra, where the parents who’d arrived before us filled the whole room except the front row.

I stifled the urge to bow as Mike and I passed in front of everyone to take our chairs seconds before the bell sounded and a video started of the band playing a halting Star Spangled Banner. Afterward, the orchestra teacher used a baton to emphasize each point she’d written on a PowerPoint slide.

This was Colin’s junior high school open house. Speed-dating for parents and faculty. Members of the student council directed bewildered parents through crowds between sessions wherein each teacher had exactly eight minutes to describe themselves, their strategy, curriculum, graded assignments, homework, rules of conduct … hopes and dreams and zodiac signs, ruminations on the state of affairs in the Middle East, and whatever else they had time for.

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Parenting

Parenting, the ‘meh’ mom style

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thedrawing“We are new to the area. What time does school start and end?”

This was the question hanging out there on our neighborhood social network last week.

I had to think. When does school actually start and end? These days, only thing I’m sure of is what time I have to shoo kids out the door to catch the bus, or to get on the road in time to beat traffic.

Last year was the end of our ushering anybody into the venerable halls of elementary school. It was also the end of my keeping track of exact school start times.

I used to know. I used to calibrate all our clocks in the house to the school bell right down to the second. We needed every minute of the morning. It wasn’t uncommon for me to deposit a kid at the crosswalk or at the edge of the drop-off late enough he had to sprint across the playground to hit the door before the tardy bell. The difference of one second could mean escaping the notice of the duty in her bright, yellow vest, or hearing “stop by the office for a tardy slip, sweetie.”

There I’d be, the lone mom in the drop off area, calling out to my kid and all his fellow latecomers from the car like we’d just hit ground on the beaches at Normandy.

“Run, you sons of bitches, RUUUN!”

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Parenting

In search of a not-so-crappy first car

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the_carI didn’t have a car in high school, but I had friends with cars. One girlfriend’s dad used to buy used heaps and work on them as a hobby. He regularly had one in working condition for her to use. It wasn’t always great condition, but it got her from one place to another. Janet went through at least four cars from sophomore to senior year.

One such vehicle was an oxidized red Cutlass convertible, probably chosen because it was a boat of a thing, capable of withstanding a bigger impact in an accident than something smaller. That car eventually went away before actually falling apart like some of the others. I suspect Janet’s dad got wise to the fact that a red convertible is not a car in which you want your teenage daughter and her very loud and reckless girlfriends cruising around town, the propensity for causing a ruckus being that much higher in such vehicles.

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Parenting

Mom’s new camping checklist

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boys_at_camp“Mom, when I’m at camp, what will you be doing?”

“Well … when I finally stop crying,” I said, “I’ll probably write a sonnet describing my love for you. Then I’ll call and leave you enough messages to fill up your entire voice mailbox. … And then I’ll find a picture of you and gaze lovingly at it, memorizing every strand of hair until it’s time to go to bed. … And then I’ll get up and do it all again the next day.”

Jack gave a little laugh that said he wasn’t sure if I was kidding. Clearly the kid needs to recalibrate his sarcas-o-meter.

Jack left for camp Monday, Colin will head up next week. Every year for six years, the night before the camp departure has consisted of the same exhausting routine: sorting, folding, and labeling clothes, shoes, and jackets, shoving teensy bottles of shampoo, sunscreen, and bug spray and blister packets of allergy pills into little baggies, filling another baggie with pens, paper and stamped postcards, and stowing the whole collection of way more than they’d ever need for the end of the world – much less a week at camp – into a couple of battered suitcases.

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