One indication that we’ve settled into the right community for us is the classroom Valentine’s Day exchange. What a FRAUGHT holiday this has the potential to be! Sneering at sweets! Sneering at non-sweets! Sneering at store-bought cards! Sneering at homemade cards!

In my kids’ classrooms, things are pretty much the exact way I would have set them up if I’d been in charge. There is a party, and the party is composed of one Obvious Treat (cupcake or cookie) plus fruit, cheese, crackers and/or pretzels and/or popcorn, and juice boxes. The teacher generally asks that the juice boxes be 100% juice, which is right where I am on the spectrum too, though I’d be fine with it if she didn’t specify. There are no other adjectives used in the list: no “organic,” for example, or “unprocessed.” And I would be okay with two Obvious Treats at the party, but I’d be unhappy if it were none.

Valentine-exchanging is optional but all-or-nothing: you either bring one for everyone or you don’t bring any. This too would be my preference. (The children mentioned to me this year that there is no safeguard in place for making sure an EQUAL valentine is brought for all the students in the class. I too would rather not set up a policy unless it started being a problem.)

The valentines themselves are the true marker of the community. If everyone but me sent clever Pinterest-type valentines, I’d feel uncomfortable; if cards with trinkets/sweets were banned, I’d feel unhappy. Instead, it is exactly the mix to make me feel like I can do anything I want. In a class of 24 kids, the rough breakdown is:

– 2 Pinteresty/crafty/elaborate valentines

– 1 completely homemade valentine, kid-made/construction-paper style

– 1 completely homemade valentine, bigger but non-Pinteresty: for example, a homemade card with a homemade lollipop/cookie

– 1 valentine made with a valentine-making kit

– 7 store-bought valentines, 24-for-$3 type, no added items

– 2 store-bought valentines of the “bag of M&M’s or goldfish crackers with a to/from on it” type

– 5 store-bought valentines where a bonus item is included in the set: a matching pencil or sticker or tattoo or lollipop

– 5 store-bought valentines where a bonus item has been separately selected and added: a Hershey’s Kiss or lollipop or trinket taped to the card, for example

– 1 valentine from the teacher: often a bag with a pencil, eraser, and treat; sometimes also a valentine from the assistant teacher

This is not a strict count, clearly. For one thing, it varies considerably from classroom to classroom and from year to year: one year, one of the kids had to bring valentines home in TWO bags because coincidentally most of the families went more towards all-out (one did a beach pail and shovel, with “I dig you, Valentine!”); other years, a kid is disappointed because he or she got two pieces of candy while siblings got more like ten. For another thing, I wouldn’t notice if one or two kids in the class opted not to bring valentines. But this gives a general idea of the distribution.

For me, these proportions mean I can do ANYTHING I WANT. If I see a fun idea one year, or if I particularly love Valentine’s Day and like to do it up, or if a child wants to go fancy that year, or if a child and I enjoy doing such projects together, I would feel like the community at large would not sneer at that. If I wanted instead to buy a box of valentines and not add a treat or trinket, or cut hearts out of construction paper, I would feel like the community at large would not sneer at THAT.

I feel like I can add candy or not: maybe a parent or two in the class would prefer their kids not have any candy or particular kinds of candy, but if so they’re handling that themselves rather than trying to make all the other parents’ children follow those preferences as well. I feel like it’s fine if I buy TV-show-tie-in valentines or fine if I don’t: maybe one person sneers at SpongeBob, but the community at large has spoken its preferences, and the community at large thinks both ways are fine.

This seems like a good moment to link to my own post on the topic of Active Disinterest. (The too long, don’t like to click version: It’s about how when people don’t like something or don’t want to participate in something, they don’t need to try to ruin it for (or show scorn for) the people who DO like it or DO want to participate. They can just participate in something THEY like, instead.)

My Valentine’s Day present from Paul is my new ring:

He made it out of brass on his metal lathe. I was pretty impressed. He didn’t intend it as a Valentine’s Day present: he gave it to me days ago as soon as it was done, and he didn’t say it was for Valentine’s Day. But it is in the spirit of Valentine’s Day, and so I am chalking it up as such.

I would like to complain about something, and as I begin this sentence it occurs to me I would be better off complaining to the people who can do something to fix it, so I will do that after I complain to you. Here is my complaint: the giant Hershey’s Kisses sold at Valentine’s Day say “#1 Teacher” on them.

That is very, very silly, to customize something so specifically. A giant Hershey’s Kiss is exactly what I like to buy for the kids for Valentine’s Day, and it’s what they want to receive, and we had to have a little family meeting about whether the “#1 Teacher” thing ruined the idea for us and whether we should choose something else as our tradition. They said no, but it bugs me every year.

A giant Hershey’s Kiss would be a great gift for a high school sweetheart, or for a high school crush, or for a friend you have a crush on but aren’t ready to say so yet, or for a friend you DON’T have a crush on, or for a co-worker, or for a parent, or, sure, why not, for a teacher. So WHY LABEL IT ONLY FOR TEACHERS? My guess is that the marketing concept was to plant the idea of buying a gift for the teacher. Instead, what it has accomplished is to make the gift completely unusable EXCEPT for teachers (and for children who have specifically said they don’t care and want it anyway). I’m going to write to Hershey’s about this, for actual.

I’m accustomed to my name being misspelled/miswritten in various ways (Kristin, Christen, Christian, Kirsten, Krystin, Kristine), but I got the most severe misspelling of my whole life this past weekend: Chusen. HOW DID THAT EVEN HAPPEN? I wish I’d saved the Taco Bell receipt so I could prove it. I’m going to assume that was more of a fumble-fingered scramble-up (whoops, forgot the R; whoops, hit the U-key instead of the I-key next to it; whoops, forgot the T; you know what, never mind, I’ll just bring the tray to the table rather than call a name) than someone’s actual guess at the spelling of Kristen.

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Quite possibly you already know this next thing, but I did not. You know how when you’re filling out your address on an online form, you can do it by tabbing and typing and not using the mouse at all—until you get to a pull-down menu? You can type the first letter of your title/state/province/country/suffix, but if that brings you to the wrong one, I thought we had to use the mouse to scroll to the right one. But it turns out that if you type the first letter AGAIN, it gives you ANOTHER of the options starting with that letter! And so on, until you get the right one! So you don’t have to use the mouse after all! I don’t know if it always does this, but I’ve done two online forms since discovering it, and it’s worked for both, so that is a good sign.

Paul claimed to already know this, and in fact he gave me the “EVERYONE knows this but I am being kind to you by not saying so” look, which I find excruciatingly annoying—especially because I suspect of him of sometimes NOT knowing something but PRETENDING to know it so that I won’t be the one telling him something he didn’t know. (This is one of the potential issues when two firstborns get married.) (Or possibly it is one of the potential issues when two PEOPLE get married.) (Or possibly it is one of the potential issues when someone marries PAUL.) And also annoying because if he DID know, why didn’t he rush to tell ME the way I rushed to tell HIM?

Certainly it could be PMS—but couldn’t it also be that my children are impossible and I married the wrong person?

One way I know it’s mid-winter is that everything either pisses me off or depresses me. I used the f-word (though only about 30% voiced) in front of my mother the other day, and usually I am the kind of person who says “bull” with only the slightest hesitation to let you know I’m thinking of what the second half of that word could theoretically be.

Oh! Here’s something happy that happened: I needed a new clock, and I bought a replacement and it is WAY TOO BRIGHT—like, I turn my back to it so the light won’t bother me. But I’d already thrown out the packaging, so I felt stuck with it and also mad at myself for throwing out the packaging and having such a hard time with the sunk-costs concept. Then at Target I found a clock on an endcap that was a “repackage” so it was $10-something down from $15, and I impulsively/defiantly bought it. It rang up at $13.99 so I’m going to have to go back and get that fixed, and so far this story is an illustration of how everything pisses me off and/or depresses me, but it is about to take a turn for the better.

The clock was in a bag waiting for me to take it back to Target, and the alarm kept going off (okay, this is still not better), so I thought, “Actually, why don’t I take it out and set it up, because the WORST would be to go get the price adjusted and then end up returning it.” So I set it up this morning, and I love it. I feel FONDLY toward it, in a way I would not have expected to feel toward an alarm clock. Part of it is that I’d thought it was broken because I couldn’t set the time, but then I read the instructions and found out what I was doing wrong and the clock was not broken. Part of it is that it has a brightness setting, and TWO alarms, and it’s a radio. When I took it out of the box it seemed HUGE (this is it; it looks petite, doesn’t it? IT IS NOT), and I thought there was no way I was going to end up keeping it—but not only am I keeping it, I went into my room later to VISIT THE CLOCK.

I lost my wedding ring a week and a half ago, and I am in stage three of the loss. First stage was assuming I would find it any minute: it would be in my pocket, or I would have absent-mindedly put it on the bureau (I don’t normally take it off), or it would show up in the washing machine. Second stage was more like “Whoa, I guess this is going to take some looking!” Maybe it’s down in the sheets or under the bureau, or maybe I sleep-walked and put it into my jewelry box, or could it possibly be in the sink disposal? Third stage is “Man, we might actually not find it.” Maybe it fell off my hand into a trash bag, or maybe I lost it when I was out, or maybe it’s in a part of the washing machine where we’ll never find it or think to look for it, or maybe it fell into the bag of clothes for Goodwill.

I feel weird without my ring on, so I’m wearing a cheap ring I got on clearance at Target a long time ago—but it’s a fashion ring, so already the gold color is chipping off from me wearing it around-the-clock. I started thinking about buying a more serious temporary ring. Maybe a relatively-inexpensive-but-real-gold ring (about $100 on Amazon, or something from a consignment shop), something that would be valuable and nice to own even if I found my ring; or maybe a stainless steel ring that would be a fun change and work fine but would only cost $5-10. And then if we still hadn’t found the ring by the time of our next significant anniversary (a few years from now), we could take an anniversary trip to the same place we bought the original ring and replace it for real.

I mentioned these plans to Paul, though, and first of all he thinks it’s too soon to panic and that the ring is still very likely to turn up. And second of all, he’s going to make me a ring on his metal lathe, so it won’t be very expensive but it will be sentimental. I like the idea, and he’s glad to have a project. There are more calls for a metal lathe than you might think, but always fewer than Paul hopes.

In the meantime, I’m trying to feel that this doesn’t really matter. The ring is just a symbol of being married; it doesn’t have to be the original ring, and plenty of people deliberately choose a new ring because of changing tastes or improved finances. I don’t feel superstitious about the ring, like my grandmother when I took off my wedding ring to show it to her and she said in an incredulous voice, “I’ve never taken off my ring! Never!”—as if I were divorcing and re-marrying my husband by taking the ring off and putting it back on. (That’s not fair to her. She was just surprised by it and commented on it, but I was surprised and embarrassed by her surprise and comment, so I later had an argument in my head where I defended my actions and criticized her reaction, and that imaginary argument has lingered.)

But still. Of course the ring is important to me, and of course it’s sentimental that it’s the very ring I got married with. And I really love my ring, too, and have been happy with our choice. Plus, it’s an item of actual cash value as well as sentimental value, and would be quite expensive to replace, especially since gold has tripled in price since we bought it. So what I really want is to find that ring. (I would very much enjoy hearing some “found a lost ring” stories—or some “lost a ring and never found it, but it’s okay now” stories. Or actually even some “lost a ring and never found it and it wasn’t really okay” stories, on the misery-loves-company principle.)

Katy Perry’s public image appeals to me, so I was repeatedly disappointed that I didn’t like her songs. Not the one fantasizing about aliens. Not the one fantasizing about high school relationship sex. Not the one about getting too drunk to remember anything about a party. Not the one about a firework. Not one that made me wonder if we could perhaps sing a song about girls in a non-California state for a change.

So I was pleased that I liked Roar, and now I also like Dark Horse. When I liked Roar I thought it was a fluke; liking Dark Horse makes me think she changed between the last album and this one. Which I imagine means there are a whole bunch of people saying they used to love Katy Perry songs but they don’t like ANY of the new ones.

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I was very sorry to hear that Philip Seymour Hoffman died. It seemed both worse and better that it was apparently drug-related: worse because that means it didn’t have to have happened; better because it means I can do that human-psychology thing where it means it won’t happen to me. I don’t do drugs = Oh good, I won’t die.

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This is going to sound like such a McDonald’s ad, but our local McDonald’s is doing something so extremely right, I wrote a letter to the manager. What it is is this: they make me feel like I am an important executive and they are my devoted assistant helping me get on with my day. Like, you know those movies where an important executive is striding down the hall and an assistant appears out of nowhere and is immediately jogging alongside handing the executive a coffee and a briefcase and a folder while saying things like “You have a 9:30 with Mr. Jones; remember his wife just left him so don’t ask about her. At 10:30 it’s the fish people; PLEASE be nice to them this time, we need their grant money; I put a framed painting of a trout in your office. You have a lunch date with…” and so on, so that the important executive can continue striding importantly? That is how EVERY SINGLE DRIVE-THROUGH EMPLOYEE AT OUR MCDONALD’S makes me feel, even though I am wearing jeans and a t-shirt and driving a minivan and on my way to Target. They have kept this up for a couple of YEARS now, so it’s not just a particular employee or catching them on a particularly good day: someone is hiring a particular type of staff and/or training them to act a particular way. And “act” is the wrong word, because they don’t seem like they’ve been trained to say certain words, it’s like they MEAN IT. It makes me want to stop there to get a coffee I don’t even need or want, just for the hit of feeling important.

For the second time in recent months, a child has had a friend over and the friend has been…not someone I would have chosen. Both times, I got all agitated about it. It really is kind of astonishing, the way we don’t get to choose who our children like. They can bring people we dislike or even DETEST into our lives—can even make them PERMANENT MEMBERS OF OUR FAMILY. And they can bring people into our houses, because IT’S THEIR HOUSE TOO. And anything we try to do about it will likely make them even MORE attached to these people. This is something I knew when I was having babies, but it’s not something I KNEW-knew. I didn’t FEEL it the way I do now.

It helps me to remember my own childhood friends. My mom had the same exact dismay I’m feeling now, because I made friends with kids just like the ones my kids are now bringing home. Before saying anything or even THINKING anything, I imagine my mom saying/thinking those things when I was a child, and that shuts me right up. I understand now why those friends of mine would be worrisome to a parent, and yet those kids were good kids. The things that might make a parent nervous were not things that applied in those cases and/or not things that affected me in any negative way, and in fact I ended up with some lifetime positive perspective on a few spheres where it is very tempting and easy to judge unfairly. …Which is helping me now, but only with considerable and deliberate effort.

Still. That doesn’t mean these friends of my children will turn out to be as good and no-need-to-worry as my friends were, and it doesn’t mean I find them pleasant to have around. It’s helpful to remember, however, that I don’t even really like it when the kids’ friends I WOULD have hand-picked are around: I feel weird when there are non-family people in my house, and that part has to be added equally to both sides of the equation.

Another thing that helps me is having read Eleanor & Park. It’s a good reminder that kids don’t have much power over their upbringing, and that there can be a lot of reasons why kids might act/be certain ways. As with Eleanor, a kid might not shower or wear clean clothes, and that could be something related to her personal safety, plus no washing machine and no money to use the laundromat; a kid might want to hang around too much, and it might be related to circumstances at her own house. A kid might act needy because he IS needy, and it shouldn’t be considered in the same light as if an adult I’d just met started acting that way: any adult in a society can help take care of a kid, and that tends to be GOOD for kids. A kid might be over-share-y because she’s very friendly and social and hasn’t yet learned where the line is, or because the other adults in her life are very open about things I might not be open about; and again, it’s not necessary to deal with it the same way I would if a new adult in my life were doing the same. Kids are different.

This whole thing makes me wish I were better with other people’s kids. I’d love to be the mom who makes everyone feel welcomed and safe, but knows where to draw the lines—the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle type. Well, this will give me practice. (Because of Reality is Broken and Chore Wars, my mental draft of that sentence was “Well, this will give my character XP.”)

I would really enjoy hearing someone say “He’s not a very good housekeeper” or “She doesn’t help out much around the house,” instead of ALWAYS WITH THE PRONOUNS THE OPPOSITE WAY. We’ve mastered the “men don’t ‘babysit’ their children” concept; I vote for housework to be next. Paul rolls his eyes at my household-cleanliness fretting/self-consciousness, but I think that eye-rolling comes from being 100% secure in the knowledge that NO ONE IN THE WORLD will come in and say, “Whoa. Paul’s not much of a housekeeper, is he?” NOT EVEN WHEN I WAS WORKING FULL-TIME AND PAUL WAS THE AT-HOME PARENT.

Speaking of which, we are playing Chore Wars at our house. I read about it in a book called Reality is Broken, which says, basically, “Instead of complaining about how people play computer games when they could be engaging with reality, why don’t we see if we can use what we’ve learned from computer game concepts to improve engagement with reality?”

Farming is not a whole lot of fun, I’m guessing. But make it into a Facebook game and people will do it for HOURS, UNPAID, for FUN. I remember when I was playing Sims, and I’d suddenly realize that I was spending an hour cleaning my Sims house and interacting with my Sims children while my actual house/children went unattended. We will willingly do things in a game that we don’t want to do in real life.

Part of is the whole “getting credit” concept, which is why I like my FitBit, and why I want something that tracks Good Citizen Points. Part of it is that it really is more fun to play a farming/cleaning GAME than to do actual farming/cleaning. But that doesn’t mean we can’t take some of the fun parts of the game and apply it to the actual chores.

This is what my brother and I used to do with chores when we were younger. Our least-favorite chore was filling the giant woodbin with a week’s worth of wood from the piles outside. It was tedious and uncomfortable and time-consuming and not particularly satisfying. Until we started pretending that there was a blizzard coming and that the number of days our family could survive was dependent on how much wood we could get into the house before the storm hit. Or we’d make a challenge to see if we could fit the logs together as snugly as possible to get the maximum amount of wood into the bin, with the challenge being to see if there’d still be wood in the bin the NEXT week when we had to do the chore. I mean, we still had to do the chore. It was still uncomfortable and it still took awhile. But it was a LOT more fun that way.

Chore Wars is similar: you still have to do the chores, and you still don’t enjoy them per se, but they’re MORE fun than before, and also you get CREDIT. I recommend it, if you think your family might enjoy it. I’ll say this for it: the children are coming home from school and racing each other to do housework. Someone OTHER THAN ME cleaned a toilet this week.

Paul and the kids are a lot more into the storyline than I am; I find the whole “battling monsters and collecting treasure” part uninteresting and unmotivating. (What I like best is GETTING CREDIT and having everyone see how many more points I have than they do.) I’ll add a new adventure such as “cleaning the toilet,” and Paul will change it to “polishing the throne in the hall of fountains” or whatever. I find this irritating when I’m looking for the chore in the list—but Paul pointed out that it’s the children’s favorite part so…it stays. Our arrangement now is that I add the chores with boring titles and no monsters/treasures, and Paul goes in later and spices them up, so that now there’s a 25% chance of encountering Jabba the Butt (sigh).

You set your own points system for each chore, and you can change it whenever you want. I like this because it might only take 5 minutes to clean a toilet, and points are supposed to be approximately 1/minute—but I want 20 points if I do it, and I’m happy to give 20 points to someone else for doing it. Hazard pay. Or, like, we’ll realize the children are doing a chore so often that now it doesn’t take as long: it takes a long time to clean the floor and wall around the cat dishes if it hasn’t been done for weeks, but it’s the work of a moment if it was done the day before.

You can also add “quests,” which are chores that disappear from the list when someone claims them. So for example, I’ve lost my wedding ring (woe), and so I put it on the list as a quest: 100 points to whoever finds it. Or if I want Paul to fix something, I can put it as a quest and it works a lot better than nagging.

I saw my doctor today, which I hate doing but they are so much friendlier about sick calls if I do the well visits. And also, if I go too long between check-ups I start imagining scenarios where a doctor tsks regretfully and says, “If only we had caught this sooner.”

The doctor noted that I seemed nervous, and I paused to reflect on how I really do believe that MY type of responses to things are fairly normal and it’s everyone ELSE who could stand to use a little medication to adjust their responses to reality. It OUGHT to make a person nervous to be wearing only the front half of a nightgown and talking with a fully-dressed near-stranger asking Very Personal Questions, in a doctor’s office TEEMING WITH THE GERMS OF SICK PEOPLE, with the potential for hearing Bad News at ANY MOMENT. A nervous response seems NATURAL and APPROPRIATE.

Anyway. I’m supposed to take my blood pressure somewhere that is not a doctor’s office, because she wasn’t sure she was able to get an accurate result, and the number was high for someone my age. In the meantime, she would like me to cut back significantly on salt. Which, is there an easier way? Amputating a limb, would that help?

I am hoping to collect some salt-cutting-back tips, and maybe some salt-COMPENSATING tips (like, if I’m going to eat too much salt, some ways to help counteract the effects). The most helpful kind of tip is something like this: “I love salt TOO! I used to eat it PLAIN as a child!—okay,fine, sometimes as an adult too. And so when I had to cut back, I thought I MIGHT DIE. But I didn’t, and here are a few things that made it easier / more comfortable.”

As opposed to the kind of tip my late mother-in-law used to give, which was criticism + sweeping scorn + complete lack of empathy, along the lines of: “Nobody NEEDS so much SALT! People eat WAY too much of it! All these PROCESSED FOODS! Why, I cut out salt completely and I don’t even miss it! …No, I don’t use other spices instead! Nobody NEEDS those!”

(See also: Which Pieces are in the See’s Candies Chocolate and Variety Box? and Which Pieces are in the See’s Candies Soft Centers Box?)

I’m evaluating the See’s assortment boxes to see if I like the included pieces enough to be worth saving $4.00-$4.50/pound over a custom mix. The last two have both been no: it made more sense to get the Custom Mix, especially since the Custom Mix boxes tend to be a bit heavier than a pound.

Now I’m trying the Assorted Chocolates box. Here’s the description: “…from Butterscotch Square to Dark Nougat, Marzipan, California Brittle and more.” There is a note that Rum Nougat and Mayfair are temporarily excluded, but there was one of each in my box.

Because one of the things I take into account is that the Custom Mix boxes weigh more than a pound, I’m glad I thought to weigh this box before opening it: it weighed 1 pound 3 ounces, which is similar to the amount the Custom Mix boxes tend to be over (though of course it will vary from box to box). However, then I weighed the empty box (with the wrappers and protective layer and pamphlet inside) and it weighed 3.3 ounces. So that is somewhat less impressive, because that means the chocolate weighs slightly less than a pound.

Here are the pieces in the box:

Almond Square
Butterscotch Square
California Brittle
Caramel
Dark Almond
Dark Nougat
Dark Butterchew
Dark Pattie (2)
Maple Walnut (2)
Marzipan
Mayfair
Milk Almond
Milk Bordeaux
Milk Molasses Chip (4)
Milk Walnut
Mocha
Rum Nougat
Scotchmallow
Vanilla Nut Cream (2)
Walnut Square

Of those twenty types, six are ones I would order for sure. Three are ones I really like but might not think to order, and so would be especially pleased to see in an assortment. Five are ones I think are okay; five more I think are kind of meh. And one I actively dislike and would give to Paul. (I don’t specify which are which, because it’s a matter of personal preference only: it’s not that I think some pieces are objectively higher or lower quality.) So for me, this box was good to try but not as good a value as a custom-mix box.