I made an exciting purchase this weekend:

(photo from Amazon.com)

And I very nearly embarrassed myself getting it, too. I’d seen it for the first time at Target a couple of weeks ago, but it was on one of those locked racks where you have to have an employee get it for you, and I didn’t have time that day to fetch an employee. Then I saw it a second time at Target, again on a locked rack, and I was going to summon an employee but then inexplicably got shy and didn’t want to. So this weekend I was in the store and felt shy again about asking an employee, and I thought, “This is ridiculous. ASK AN EMPLOYEE. THIS IS NOT A SCARY THING TO DO.” But then the first one I saw was with another customer, and the next two were talking intensely to each other about something that seemed to be a problem, kind of speaking sharply over a clipboard. I was about to use the call button when I thought, just on a whim, that I’d see if the rack was still locked. No reason for that to have changed, but, you know, just in case. And it WASN’T a locked rack anymore. So I almost summoned an employee, “Oh, yes, hello; I want to buy this but it’s on a locked rack”—when it wasn’t on a locked rack. With double relief (didn’t have to ask employee AND didn’t make fool of self), I put it into the cart.

It came in black and pink. I thought pink would be easier to find in my purse. Plus, I like pink. I’m very happy to own it. I was under the impression that mace was no longer available to purchase, because of a time back when I was pregnant for the first time and nervous about walking alone, and I tried to buy some and the clerk told me it was no longer available and that maybe the police department could help me if I really needed some. I gave up, just like that. I thought it was like syrup of ipecac, where it used to be in the baby section and then suddenly it wasn’t available, and finally I asked the pediatrician and he said yeah, they weren’t recommending that anymore. I used to feel anxious if I didn’t have it in the house! It was a PARENTING ESSENTIAL! And then…gone!

Where was I? Oh, yes, the mace. Or perhaps pepper spray is not the same as mace, but anyway something I can spray into someone’s eyes and then run away. I don’t USUALLY feel the need to have mace nearby, but there have definitely been times (walking to my car in the dark, for example) when I’ve wished to have a reassuring little canister in my hand, and now I have a reassuring little canister.

Some of my kids are taking lessons this week from a guy in his 60s we’ve encountered previous summers. I think he’s probably a good teacher, but I also think he thinks of himself as a great and inspiring person who commands the children’s admiration and respect. He also thinks he does a better job than the parents, and has some issues with correcting children’s behavior when the parents have already picked up the children and the lessons are over. “No sticks! Put that down!” he says sharply to Henry, when Henry has picked up a small stick in the parking lot.

Also, he is the type of person, and I don’t know how to describe this but I’ve encountered it before: he FREQUENTLY says something mystifying and then does a long significant pause, and I’ll have no idea at all whether I’m supposed to know what he’s talking about, or whether he’s waiting for me to ask him what he’s talking about, or whether he’s pausing for effect before going on, or WHAT. Or worse, he’ll ask a question and I’ll have no idea what he’s talking about. “Do you feel the giant change?,” he’ll say, in a tone as if he’s making a very clever in-joke. Me: *blank look, inner panic*

This is all just background for the story I’m going to tell about what happened yesterday. I was the last parent to pick up kids, and he gave me a report on how they were doing. Then things went right off the rails. He asked Henry if Henry knew what coordination was, and Henry gave a close-but-no-cigar answer, so the teacher said he would tell him what it was. At this point the teacher went for audience participation, which is way at the top of my Most Hated list. I associate it strongly with several of my least favorite things: not knowing what’s expected of me; looking foolish; having to think fast; not knowing what’s going on next to someone who DOES know what’s going on and is exploiting that situation to enhance their own performance; feeling pressure to go along with things.

So I was already feeling unhappy when I put out my hand palm-up as instructed, and I wished the teacher could tell Henry what coordination was without involving me, but another thing I hate about audience participation is that I can’t imagine saying, “No, I’d prefer not to do the absolutely small and reasonable thing you just asked me to do.” And so I don’t say it, and later I worry that this means I am someone who would go along with Terrible Things just because I wouldn’t want to say anything.

ANYWAY. There I am, hand held out. And the teacher put his hand palm-down, about an inch over mine. I waited for the next thing to happen, but nothing else happened. Then he said expectantly, confidently, “Feel that?” Me: *inner panic, FEEL WHAT???* *looks at hand to see if his hand is touching, because I don’t feel anything* “……..I just feel……heat?” “No,” he said, “That’s ENERGY.” Me: *inner panic increases* Fortunately, he interpreted my blank, panicked look as amazed attentiveness, so he went on: “Now, what kind of energy is it?” Me: *INNER PANIC INCREASES EXPONENTIALLY* Him: “Does it feel relaxing? nervous?” Me: *oh hey I know this answer* “Nervous.” Him, and I am not even kidding: “That’s because you don’t let people get close to you. You haven’t for years, have you? I can sense a box around you. You keep people out, don’t you?” Me: *dear God, I will pay you one million dollars to make this stop happening, seriously I will write you a post-dated check right now*

Wouldn’t it have been great if I’d said, “Do you notice that box around most people you meet? Because I think what you’re sensing is a thing called Personal Space, or perhaps we could call it Appropriate Social Boundaries. ‘Not liking to have a strange man standing this close and doing weird things’ is not the same as ‘Not letting personal relationships develop emotional closeness over time'”? Instead of what I DID do, which was to stare at him in horrified, paralyzed silence.

Again, fortunately or unfortunately, he interpreted my reaction as hitting a hole in one, and he nodded at the way he was astounding me by telling me truths about myself. He made very intense eye contact. “You get headaches, too, don’t you?,” he continued. “Behind your eyes, and at the back of your neck.” I wondered what on EARTH the kids were thinking of this. I tried to imagine transitioning from this activity to one in which I was walking away toward my car, and couldn’t picture how that would go.

He continued with his cold-reading/horoscope stuff. I had goals, he told me; I kept THOSE close to me, didn’t I? Our hands, unbelievably, were still extended, about an inch apart. Noticing this, he said he was now going to CHANGE the energy from nervous to soothing. He appeared to concentrate. He looked at me expectantly, already anticipating and appreciating my forthcoming impressed response. At this point, I am glad to say that at least I did NOT agree that the energy was soothing. I said I still just felt heat. Then I looked at the kids, just a regular mother monitoring their behavior and accidentally not noticing that in doing so she had taken her hand away from the oddest demonstration ever of the word coordination, not a trapped rabbit looking for an escape route. He clapped his hand onto my shoulder and kept it there, and I looked up, startled, broadcasting a strong clear signal to anyone with any psychic/sensing abilities whatsoever: “III HAAATE THISSS.” Every empathetic person within ten miles probably got a weird feeling for a second. I thought “Crap, he’s going to think this obvious all-but-hissing-and-spitting reaction confirms his theory that I don’t let people get close.” He nodded understandingly: he felt he had received my signal loud and clear. “Felt that, didn’t you!” he said proudly. “THAT was relaxing energy!”

My savior appeared at this point: a little boy from the class wandered back over. The conversation turned back to the lessons and how they had gone and what needed to be improved. I asked the children had they said thank you yet, and they said no, so I had them say thank you and then we followed that path of politeness right through to good-bye and see you tomorrow. As soon as the car door closed behind us I said “What the ACTUAL HECK was that?” and the children relaxed into relieved laughter. Then I told Henry what coordination was.

I woke up to an unseasonably cold breeze coming through the window, so I am giving my forehead wrinkle some deepening/strengthening exercises this morning worrying that Elizabeth isn’t warm enough and we should have packed her more long pants. Well, she does have a lightweight hoodie, a medium-weight hoodie, and a raincoat; she can layer them if she’s cold.

Last night I finished an absorbing book: You Should Have Known, by Jean Hanff Korelitz.

(photo from Amazon.com)

I am so sick, SO SICK, of book summaries that are like this: “Kate Ellington had everything she ever wanted: a handsome successful husband, talented intelligent children, a great house, a cool name, and an interesting/colorful job typical of a women’s book—something like writer or psychologist or fashion-magazine staff, never accountant or Target clerk. THEN ONE DAY…something! happens! that turns her whole world upside-down and she has to re-evaluate her whole life.”

SO SICK OF IT. Furthermore, that category of book realizes it’s overdone, and so has raised the stakes: it’s gone from “it was the husband having an affair” to “it’s a car accident involving a child.” Seriously, over a period of just a few months I started THREE books that pivoted the plot on a child getting hit by a car. NO. I decline to pivot in that manner.

Anyway, this book has that exact set-up: Woman with everything; TRAGEDY STRIKES; life re-evaluation. So I NEVER would have read it except that I must have read a good review of it, because I remember I requested it from the library just by the title, without reading the jacket. Once I’d read the jacket, I renewed it TWICE before reading it: I kept putting it off and reading other books from the pile instead.

And it started off kind of slow. It’s the kind of book where the main character is having a conversation with someone and there is one line of dialogue, and while we’re waiting for the other character to reply, our girl spends two pages thinking about her office furniture. Then there is the next line of dialogue, followed by two pages of remembering how she met her husband. Wearying.

It didn’t take too long, though, before I was All In. This turned out to be a book I wanted to get back to: I’d take out my phone to play Candy Crush, and then put it away and go read the book instead. The basic plot is that a psychologist writes a book called You Should Have Known, telling women how they could have avoided a bad relationship by noticing things that were obvious from the very beginning: things the men essentially told them straight-out would be the major issues. This, as you might expect, leads to some irony.

I was very interested to see how things would turn out, and the author kept the suspense going but not in a way that made me feel I might as well flip to the last page and get it over with: the story DEVELOPED. And I found it very satisfying. There are a lot of places where WE realize something before the character does, and so the point is not the surprise of the plot but more the interest of seeing it happen to someone.

For those sensitive to scary things happening to children, I’m going to put small, non-plot-ruining spoilers in the paragraph, so skip the part between the lines of asterisks if you don’t want to read things ahead of time.

********This is the slight spoiler part beginning here*********
There is one relatively brief (a couple of pages, I think) scene where one character tells a story about something that happened to a small child, resulting in that child’s unnecessary death. Because someone is telling someone else about it calmly (rather than experiencing it as we’re reading), and because it’s not a child we’ve met elsewhere in the plot, I found it tolerable, though I did skim as soon as I realized what was going on, and I had to be careful not to start imagining the story from the mother’s point of view at the time. I think you could skim even more skimmily than I did and still understand the plot: no need to read all the details. Also, one of the main characters works as a pediatric oncologist, so there are a few example-type stories told of children dying of cancer: nothing too vivid, more like how the character will miss events because a child dies, and the age of the child will be given, and it’s easy for one’s imagination to make that a whole lot more vivid than it has to be. Again, I found it tolerable though of course unpleasant. There is one additional scene involving a child, but it crosses the plot-spoiling line to tell it; I will say only that as with the others, I found it tolerable though best to avoid imagining it too vividly. (If you won’t try the book without knowing, email me and I’ll tell you: it won’t completely spoil the plot, it just gives too much information about the kind of trajectory the book is going to take.)
*********This is the end of the slight spoiler part here********

I found the book gave me a lot of interesting things to think about, enough that on a recent longish car ride I turned off the music so I could think about the book. And it’s the kind of book that leads me to see if the author has written anything else because I want to read more. I liked it and would recommend trying it to see if you like it too.

I have dropped Elizabeth off for a week of Girl Scout camp, and I am feeling anxious and bereft. But, happily, not even HALF as anxious and bereft as last year, when it was the first time she’d ever gone to sleep-away camp and also the drop-off went so terribly I ended up feeling like I’d left her with people who wouldn’t even remember to feed her or make sure she didn’t wander off into the woods (and afterward learned of even more issues).

SO much better this year, though. For one thing, even though the drop-off was still poorly organized and non-intuitive, I’d DONE it before so I knew what to expect and didn’t have to figure it all out this time. My first time doing new things, I’m at a stress-level of 11, defined as “Assuming I will die on the trip and so before I leave should make sure everyone has enough clean clothes for the funeral”; the second time, I drop down to about a 4-5.

And because this year we didn’t sign up for the very first week of camp, there were far fewer mishaps and confusions on the camp’s end, too. The only one that annoyed me is that they said I needed a prescription for the Benadryl she’s supposed to take if she has an allergic reaction to tree nuts. Since I had to fill out all those health/medication forms with a deadline back in May, I think “at the moment of drop-off” is unreasonably late for the “You need a prescription for an over-the-counter medication used for emergencies” information. Anyway, I was annoyed but it’s not a huge deal, especially because I was JUST complaining about not finding online doctor sites useful yet, and then last night was able to use the site to request the doctor fax the camp the prescription, so that was happy (assuming it WORKS).

Also, it helps HUGELY that THIS year I know that LAST year she was happy and everything went fine as far as she was concerned. The things I was MOST anxious about (that all her stuff might have gotten soaking wet; that she would be sad and scared and hate it and have a terrible time) didn’t happen: when I picked her up, she didn’t entirely want to come with me. So I’m still doing things like monitoring the weather in her zip code and feeling sad when I realize she’s not sleeping in her room, but I’m not feeling like I made a terrible mistake to let her go and that I need to drink and cry every night. Progress!

Also, on the way home, the person in front of me paid the toll for me. I think that person would be enormously gratified if they could have seen me choking up about it intermittently all the way home. I mean, that’s like the FANTASY for pay-it-forwardy randomy-acts-of kindness: that it will be done for someone who is having kind of a rough day, who will then be Deeply Affected by that small kindness.

I wanted to make a whole multi-exampled post about this topic, but I can only think of one example. I know I’ve thought of OTHER examples while thinking about this topic before, but right NOW is when I want to write about it and I can only think of one. The topic is: Things I Have to Keep, Even Though I Don’t Want Them, Because Otherwise I Will Keep Buying Them.

And my example is headbands. I think of myself as liking headbands. Whenever I have a new hairstyle and I’m looking for ways to wear it, I think of headbands. But I don’t look good in headbands. It is some combination of my glasses and my face shape and perhaps my type of hair and my personality. All I have to do is put a headband on to remember this VIVIDLY.

I am not the only one to think so, either. When I worked at the pharmacy, I had a day I couldn’t get my hair to do anything so I put a headband in it. A co-worker (not a mean one) blurted out a laughing “Oh my god, you look like a politician’s wife!” So you see.

Several times I have, in a fit of “Don’t waste space storing things you don’t even want,” thrown out all my headbands. Which means that I can absolutely throw some money right out with them, because I WILL buy more headbands later, forgetting I don’t like the way I look in them. I’ll REMEMBER throwing out the headbands, but I’ll think, “Well, perhaps THAT haircut didn’t work with them, but I’ll bet THIS one would be adorable!” or “Well, perhaps I was just a bit down on myself that day and didn’t realize I actually looked cute in them.” I will buy more headbands, and lower the first one onto my hair, and oh dear.

So, even though it is silly to keep something I don’t like and never use, it is WELL WORTH IT to do so in the case of headbands: I need a headband (in fact, TWO headbands) to keep me from buying headbands. (Also, very rarely they come in handy if I want to do a face mask or something.)

I wish I could think of more examples of this, because I KNOW I have more items that I keep only so I won’t keep buying them. Perhaps after I post this, more will occur to me—or perhaps you will have similar things to report and those will jog my memory.

Things have improved pretty dramatically around here since yesterday. First, I got my dentist appointment done. It turns out that just about everything looks better AFTER a dentist appointment, even if that dentist appointment includes “Listen, we really need to think about getting those crowns put in.”

Second, Paul was taking a day off this week anyway, so he switched that day with the day I had to take all five kids with me to the city, so now I only have to take one kid with me to the city.

Third, Paul and I started going over the inch-thick stack of will/trust drafts from the lawyer. I forgot to mention that yesterday, but it’s been another thing causing me stress: we’ve GOT to go through those papers, but for many reasons (the emotional impact of reading paragraphs about what happens if any of our children predecease us; the pure difficulty of understanding the language of any of it) it’s hard to do so. Paul printed everything out and stapled it by sections, and then cut up the lawyer’s explanatory email and put each piece of email with its appropriate section, so we could easily tackle it in smaller chunks. This made an enormous difference, and we took care of the first section last night.

Fourth, I did some laundry at my parents’ house. It’s funny how even doing two loads can bring things from THIS IS A CRISIS OF UNIMAGINABLE RESOLUTION down to Perhaps This Is Just a Regular Inconvenience Soon To Be Resolved.

Fifth, William and Elizabeth made chocolate-chip cookies, so there were cookies.

Sixth, I had a gin-and-orange-juice while making dinner. I think I will have a drink before dinner EVERY night this week.

I am having a crummy couple of days, and because it is a very specific and familiar type of crummy, characterized by very specific and familiar crummy feelings, I’ve started making little marks on my desk calendar whenever this mood appears, to see if I can find anything shall we say CYCLICAL about it. Characteristic feelings of this type of mood include:

1. Everything Is Terrible.

2. Yes, I remember feeling at one point that NOT everything was terrible, but that was because I was deluded/distracted/overcomfortable. “Everything Is Terrible” is really the only TRUE way to view the world.

3. I am a bad person in both of two conflicting ways. For example, I am too hard on the kids AND too easy on them. Also, I think too much and not enough about other people. Also, I am an over-spender and a tightwad.

4. Everything I think of as a good part of my character is actually the mask over a bad part: i.e., I donate money to charity because I like to think of myself as a generous person when actually I’m a selfish one. I return stray carts to the corral because I like to feel superior to other people, not because I’m trying to be considerate and helpful.

5. Every Decision I Make Is Wrong.

But so far, the calendar isn’t showing any hormonal patterns. What I see instead is stress patterns: this week I have a dentist appointment and they always make alarming remarks about my gums, and William has an orthodontist appointment and they always speak firmly to me about how he should be improving, and I have to get Elizabeth ready for a week of sleep-away Girl Scout camp, and Rob is having his first lesson on a new instrument with a teacher who is coming to our house, and I have to take all five kids with me on the already-stressful trip to the nearby big city for Edward to get his Crohn’s check-up. Also included are several stressful scheduling issues: we’ll get back from one thing and have about fifteen minutes for lunch and leaving for the next thing; or I’ll be at my appointment when a child needs to be delivered somewhere, so I’ll have to drop him off there half an hour early; or, in the case of the city trip, I have NO IDEA if we’ll get back in time for a scheduled afternoon activity.

Also, our washing machine broke, and it was supposed to take two weeks for the replacement to arrive, but now it’s going to be three. So we’re very very very lucky to live in a time and place where washing machines are readily available, and very very very lucky that when ours broke we could pay for a new one—but laundry was already backed up a week when the machine broke (it had been acting wonky so I was doing only the most crucial things), and now instead of being one week into a two-week wait, I’m one week into a THREE-week wait. Other people get along without washing machines ALL THE TIME and ALL OVER THE WORLD—but they have established systems for doing so. Establishing a system is one of my least favorite things.

I realized tonight that many of the people who are going to grow up to be significant in my kids’ adult lives (romantic partners, the other parents of their children, etc.) may already be born! And living their lives! Out there, totally unknown to us, and us totally unknown to them! NONE OF US HAVE ANY IDEA!

********

I mentioned this on Twitter the other day and it got a satisfying reaction, but I am still agitating about it so I’ll mention it here too. I do believe that language has to be allowed to change to fit the needs of those using it (since it’s going to do so whether we allow it or not), but here is something that CROSSES THE LINE: the term “selfie” used to describe a photo that one did not take of oneself. I AM SEEING IT USED. This is like referring to any biography as an autobiography. It’s like referring to any homicide as a suicide. It’s like saying someone is self-appointed, when it was someone else who appointed them. Most parallelly, it’s like having an artist paint your picture and then referring to the painting as a self-portrait. There is a SPECIFIC REASON the culture came up with a word as silly as “selfie” instead of sticking to the word “photo.”

Rbelle writes:

I’m wondering if you would be willing to do a post about your family journal and how it works – i.e., what types of things you put in it, how often you update it, how long do you spend? I’m feeling terrible that I have so little record of my oldest’s life so far (she’s almost four), but I gave up keeping a journal for myself when I realized it was all FEELINGS and no one but me would care about my FEELINGS years from now, but I didn’t want my FEELINGS ending up in a landfill for the hyper-evolved rats to read, either. On the flip side, my mom keeps a diary of every day that is literally just “we did x, went y, and ate z,” and that just seems tedious and time-consuming. I’m looking for a middle ground, and a “family journal” sounds very intriguing.

The journal system I use is one that happened after I tried a bunch of other ways (3-ring binder, small diaries with lined pages, regular notebooks, baby books) and didn’t like them and/or liked them for awhile but then didn’t want to do it that way anymore. I use Canson 9×12 recycled field sketch books: cardboard-bound spiral books of unlined paper, which I found in a stationery store back where I used to live; when I moved, I couldn’t find them ANYWHERE and my friend Surely went to the stationery store for me, placed a huge order for me, and then boxed them all up and shipped them to me. I’m still taking journals from that supply, well over a decade later. They were something like $10 each when I bought them; I see Amazon is selling them for $25 now. I can’t picture paying $25, so when I run out of my stash I’ll have to see what’s available. (Or I see I can get them here for $13.40 each if I buy in sets of six, so that’s probably what I’ll do; that seems like a reasonable price increase after fifteen years.)

When I finish a journal, I write the date and age range on the front cover in black permanent marker; for example:

April 12, 2008 – July 16, 2009

Robert: 9 years 3 months – 10 years 6 months
William: 7 years 0 months – 8 years 4 months
Elizabeth and Edward: 2 years 10 months – 4 years 1 month
Henry: 10 months – 2 years 1 month

I’d say I needed three main concepts in order to make this system work for me. The first main concept: “Doing it the way I like doing it, even if that changes.” For a lonnnnng time, I glued photos on the left-hand side of the page, but I think it was after the twins were born that I lost the oomph for doing that (and mostly stopped getting photos printed), and it was CRUCIAL to be able to say, “Then I’m not going to do that anymore, even though it means the journals are not consistent.” Ditto for when I used to WRITE on the left-hand side: I didn’t like the way the spiral dug into my hand/wrist/arm, and so after awhile I stopped that and only wrote on the right-hand side. It was CRUCIAL to be able to say, “If I don’t like it, I’m not going to do it anymore, even though it means (1) the journals are not consistent and (2) I’m kind of wasting paper.”

The second main concept is “not worrying about it too much.” If I scribble something out, if I forget to write something down, if I have to write, “Oh, I forgot to say that last week we…,” if my handwriting is messy, if I keep track of something for one kid that I didn’t think to keep track of for another kid—none of that really matters.

And the third crucial concept was the English-class one of “choosing the audience.” My guess is that my children are extremely unlikely to want to read detailed smooshy “Today you are twenty-seven months old and you are the heart outside Mommy’s body” stuff, either as children or later as adults; I came to that theory by imagining my own mother writing such things and asking myself if I’d be interested in it (“No”). The intended audience of my journal, then, is Later Me. I can picture myself paging through to remember these years, and so I write what I think I will be interested in, and I write it to myself: “William likes peas and oatmeal,” not “You like peas and oatmeal.”

However, I realize I’m only guessing about my children’s future interest, so I keep that in mind as well: I don’t write it down every time I wonder if I would have been happier not having children, for example. I DO, however, write about somewhat personal things like weaning hormones, or when I’m frustrated about discipline issues, or at what point my periods started up again after childbirth, or how unhappy I was when Paul and I disagreed about how many children to have, or how miserable I found pregnancy. And I write about various things I suppose could hurt their feelings but could also help them when they have children of their own, or could help them understand their own childhoods: I write about my temper, and I write about how frustrating the children can be, and I give examples. I don’t want them (or me) remembering that I yelled for no reason. I also deliberately write things now and then about how delightful and fun I find them, though I hope the very existence of these journals also communicates that.

Here are some of the other things I put into the journals:

1. Milestones such as first steps, first teeth, first foods, lost teeth, getting glasses.

2. What they got for their birthdays or Christmas.

3. Funny things they say.

4. Their hobbies and interests (“Elizabeth started karate”; “William has been very interested in codes”).

5. Stuff we do, if it’s not what we typically do (“Today we went on a hike to _____”).

6. Stuff we do, if it’s what we typically do and I am in the mood to write down a snapshot of it to give me an idea later on of what life was like at the time (“Usually we get up at ____ o’clock; this is what they eat for breakfast; this is who has to be nagged to get ready for school; after school, we ___; while they’re gone, I _____,” etc.

7. Examples of their bad behavior.

8. Our baby-name-choosing lists, with the rejected ones crossed out so that they can still be read.

When they were younger, I wrote a LOT more. Little kids generate a lot more milestones and cute anecdotes than teenagers do. And there is so much more to SAY about little kids, though time has shown that I am not very much interested later on in lists of all the foods they ate, every word they could say, or what sizes they were wearing. (I did find those lists useful when siblings were at those ages: for example, it was useful to be able to find out when I started the baby on what foods the last time, or to reassure myself that no, this baby is NOT way behind his siblings in language development.)

What I MOST value later on are the anecdotes about funny things they said, the reports of their bad behavior, and the periodic descriptions of what life was like at that time. When they were younger I tried very hard to be REGULAR about the life-descriptions, doing one every month. That got overwhelming, so I stopped—and I’m glad I did, because the regimented/detailed (I had categories such as Eating, Sleeping, Playing, Talking) monthly reports are…quite dull. And monthly is wayyyyyyy too often. But if I do one every year or two, and I just write whatever comes to mind instead of following set categories, I find I really enjoy those later. It’s interesting how quickly I forget what used to be completely routine (“Then one of us sits with Elizabeth until she falls asleep…”).

I also do like the milestone stuff: many times I’ve been glad to be able to say when someone did/got/started this or that: I’d think I’d remember, but I really don’t. But I don’t worry about it if I forget to mention every lost tooth and every new extracurricular activity.

I’ve used the gift reports as a way to remember what the kids liked at certain ages. So if for example I need to buy a gift for a 2-year-old, I’ve LONG forgotten what 2-year-olds like—but I can look back at what I bought my own kids at that age and get some good ideas.

The basic idea is that it’s a jumble, and I don’t try too hard to be consistent. If I think I have to write every day, or record every single funny anecdote, or write a 2-page report every month, I get overwhelmed and stop wanting to do it. Instead I keep the journal very handy (next to my favorite chair), and I write on no particular schedule, and I try to avoid getting regimented/obsessive/weird about it. I’d rather have one anecdote out of a hundred than ZERO anecdotes out of a hundred—and if I end up with THREE anecdotes out of a hundred, how VERY NICE.

I think that when the system is all written out like this it can look overwhelming, too. I remember when for English class we had to write detailed instructions about how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and WOW that looks like a lot of time and fussy work! And yet it isn’t: you just make the sandwich and it only takes a couple minutes. Also, I think it can look overwhelming to read someone else’s system, because what’s natural/comfortable for me might not be natural/comfortable for you: perhaps what will work for you is typing your journal in a wordprocessing document and getting in the habit of working on it for 5 minutes per day before bed. Or perhaps what will work for you is buying a different pretty journal for each child and jotting down mostly milestones and the occasional anecdote. Or perhaps you’ll want to use a 3-ring binder so it’s easier to remove/rearrange pages. Whatever works best for you is what you’re most likely to find easy and non-overwhelming.