This school year is worse than last school year, schedule-wise. Last year, I had 3.5 hours three times a week with no kids, and I told myself sternly that I could spare 30 minutes (which is 60, including preparation and clean-up) for exercise on those days, and I did. This year, I have 2 hours five times a week, which is almost the same number of hours but doesn’t feel like it. Am I willing to spend half the day’s child-free time on exercise, even three of the five times per week? No, it turns out I am not. Do I instead invest that time in increased sugar consumption? Why, yes I do. So I am feeling marvelous all the time, as you can imagine.

Speaking of which: every year for the last three holiday seasons, I have seen at Target GIANT novelty Reese’s peanut butter cups. The first year, I marveled but did not buy, and later I rued it. So the second year, I determined to try some, so I put them on my wish list and I hinted to Paul, but he did not buy them for me. So the third year, I was definitely going to buy some for myself, but they were $10/package and I knew they’d go on sale for $8/package, so I waited—and they sold out before they went on sale, and I rued again.

This year I saw them at Target and they were already on sale for $8, so a pack came home with me.

I’m not sure this fully communicates the vast novelty size.

That’s better.

William felt it was important to compare the size of a single peanut butter cup to a quarter. Edward, meanwhile, loses the battle with his self-control.

I cut one cup into eight pieces. It didn’t make nice tidy wedges, but close enough. I had Paul advising me that I should have warmed the knife first, but I don’t think that would have helped.

Here’s what 1/8th peanut butter cup looks like. It’s about an ounce, which means it’s approximately the equivalent of 1 and 1/3rds regular peanut butter cup.

Our family consensus was that the proportion of peanut butter to chocolate was done very well (though it requires careful bite-strategies to make sure it STAYS right), and that this was a very fun novelty sort of thing. I can imagine starting a tradition of buying one package each year—maybe having it on the Friday after Thanksgiving, to kick off the Christmas season.

Today Paul is taking the twins out for most of the day, and I needed to send a dose of medicine with Elizabeth for an annoying cough. I didn’t want to send the whole bottle, because that’s messy and heavy and I am not 100% ready to give dosing responsibility to Paul, who always jokes things like “I’ll just give her a swig, is that okay?,” and also because it’s happened before that I’ve sent off a bottle of medicine and then I need it at home, or it gets left in Paul’s car and he drives off to work with it the next day, or whatever. Hassle.

Anyway, here’s what I do: I measure a dose into one of those little sample-size liquor bottles. Yes, I suppose it DOES look a little odd to be pouring a child a shot (though I feel like most parents would nod understandingly and wonder only why I wasn’t pouring another for myself), but I generally administer it in the privacy of the bathroom, or in the car, or from behind a large fast-food soda cup. Plus, I bring a dosage cup so that the child is not actually seen drinking DIRECTLY FROM a liquor bottle.

First I measure out a dose of the medicine I want to bring with me. Then I pour it into a little liquor bottle.

Usually I peel the label off the bottle to make it look less seedy, but this particular label was leaving a ton of sticky residue and I didn’t have time to mess with that so I just left the label on. I have a tiny little funnel that makes it easier to get the medicine into the bottle, but I’ve also just carefully poured it.

Then I rinse out the little dosage cup, put the cap on the little liquor bottle, and label a baggie with what’s in there. I also put down when to give it: I’ve been surprised at how easily I can forget what time I gave the last dose. Sometimes I’ll add a note about exactly how much medicine it is (“two teaspoons” or whatever), if I plan to have the medicine along for an extended amount of time—if, for example, I were making an emergency single-serving of Benadryl to keep with me.

The baggie is for easy labeling and also for in case of leaks, but it’s also because AFTER the dose of medicine is given, the dosage cup will be sticky and I might not have an opportunity to rinse it.

I put the bottle and the dosage cup into the baggie, and the baggie into the diaper bag.

I HAVE worried about various open-container laws. But it seems like the odds of me being pulled over on a particular trip, AND of the officer deciding to search the diaper bag, AND of the officer not believing me (or believing his/her eyes or nose) that it’s cough medicine or Benadryl in the bottle, AND of the officer thinking that what he/she has mistaken for 2 teaspoonfuls of liquor (1/3rd of an ounce) is worth making a fuss over—even if ALL those things went wrong, a test of the substance would vindicate me. I imagine myself in court saying to the judge, “You see, your honor? I was telling the truth ALL ALONG.” Music swells, courtroom cheers, officer looks mortified and starts stammering, judge apologizes fervently that the state has so flagrantly wasted the time of an innocent citizen, etc.

My brother and I grew up in a very, very, very tidy household. The family joke is that if you put your book down to go to the bathroom, you’d return to find the book on a shelf with a bookmark in it. My mom worked more than full-time but kept up with the housework constantly whenever she was home (full table/counter/stove wipe-down and floor-sweeping every night after dinner, for example, and constant clutter-clearing), and also did a huge multi-hour house-cleaning every single Saturday.

Fast-forward a bit, and my brother keeps a very tidy household, and mine is a constant mess. I’m sure we could both find ways to attribute these results to our upbringing no matter what our original household had been like: just as one person can say “My parents always kept sweets around so I got in a terrible habit” at the same moment another person is saying “My parents never kept sweets in the house so I grew up constantly sugar-seeking,” we too could frame our reactions as either complying with or reacting against our house-cleaning training. I think if we’d grown up in a messy household, we’d just switch sides: he’d be reacting against, and I’d be a result of. It’s very easy to blame parents either way for everything, which is so very pleasing and useful until we are the parents.

What I’m curious about is your own set of experiences: What was the cleaning/cleanliness situation in the household you grew up in, and how clean do you keep things now? And have you been considering your own cleaning system either a result of, or a reaction against, your childhood training and experience?

I wish I could use the same verb for watching a movie as for reading a book, because what I want to say is that recently I verbed a movie and a book that both struck me in some of the same ways. Both shocked me at some parts, and some awful things happen in both, and I wouldn’t know whether to recommend either one—but on the other hand they’ve both stuck with me.

(photo from Amazon.com)

The movie was Young Adult (Netflix link). Parts of it seemed SO GOOD, and I thought Charlize Theron did such a good job, and I got a crush on Patton Oswalt, and I approved of the basic messages of the movie. And it was refreshing to the point of riveting to see trichotillomania shown all casual-like (she’s scalp and I’m eyebrows/eyelashes, but that’s like saying someone smokes a different brand of cigarettes).

But there are some agonizing scenes where someone ruins a party or says something very very inappropriate/awkward/mean. And the character sketches are good and well-accomplished but depressing. But in the end I was glad I’d seen it, and there were quite a few funny moments. I don’t know. I’m not really recommending it, but I’m bringing it to your attention in case it looks good to you.

(photo from Amazon.com)

The book was The Chocolate Money, by Ashley Prentice Norton. Dear god. This is the kind of book where I kept looking at the author’s photo thinking two things: (1) This book is heavily based on her actual experiences, I’m sure of it; (2) She is just self-aware enough to realize she’s been damaged by these experiences, but not self-aware enough to realize just how badly. Also, the author photo has her ostentatiously wearing ripped jeans with heavy jewels, like “Look how quirky!” It turns out she’s a Rockefeller heiress, and her mother isn’t speaking to her after reading the book.

I kept thinking I was going to stop reading, because I found it so many parts gross and disturbing, and because so many people were doing so many devasting-emotional-impact things to each other, and I was afraid those parts would linger with me, and I think some of them will. But the thing is, I also thought it was good. I didn’t ever think “She only got this book deal because of who she is”; I thought, “Whoa. Ouch. Ick. Oh, dear.” It reminded me a little of Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld—but it was as if Ashley Prentice Norton said to Curtis Sittenfeld, “Oh, you think YOU depressingly and painfully exposed the disgusting underbelly of the rich and privileged? Nice try, OUTSIDER.” Again, I’m not really recommending it—more like exclaiming “dear god!” in front of you and, when you say “What?,” telling you why I exclaimed.

This seems like a good day to have my coffee in my Will and Kate mug.

I’m also wearing my bleach-fireworks shirt, for probably the last time (fabric is finally disintegrating from being worn/washed a million times).

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I am having a touch of the blues. They are of the “Some day all my lovingly-acquired possessions are going to be dumped in some yard sale or consignment shop, where strangers will look at them and say ‘meh’ and/or make mocking remarks” variety.

This is the flip side of one of the things I like about shopping at consignment store, which is the feeling of giving someone else’s lovingly-acquired possession a loving new home. It can backfire, as seen here.

That reminds me, though, to show you one of my recently/lovingly-acquired possessions:

I’ve been questing for a bureau for Elizabeth’s room, and found this old bureau at a consignment store. It had been marked down, like, THREE TIMES, yet it is gorgeous (cream and gilt and all curvy and shapey) and has drawers that are dove-tailed front AND back. And it goes very nicely with Elizabeth’s bed frame, another consignment-shop find. And also with the little bookshelf, which we assembled from a box from Target.

It took a year for this to work out—but then today it did, EXACTLY AS PLANNED. This morning I caught myself saying, “Let’s see, it’s going to be LIGHTER in the morning now, right? Or wait, let’s see, we…”—so I went directly to the computer and printed out my own Fall Back Printout (I actually DID get around to making a Google Doc for it, so you can print it out too) and put it on the fridge so that NO ONE has an excuse to start ANY sentence with “Wait, we set the clocks BACK an hour, so…”

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(photo from Amazon.com)

Last night I watched Get Low (Netflix link), and I greatly enjoyed it. It’s a slow-going movie; it took me awhile to get into it. It’s the kind where there’s something we don’t know, and we get the story verrrrrry gradually; at first I found this frustrating, but after awhile I was willing to wait. Bill Murray was in it, and he was my favorite kind of Bill Murray: underplayed, with a lot of tiny voice things and tiny expression things that I found hilarious (but difficult to explain to the children why I was laughing). At the end there’s some cathartic crying. And there are a lot of interesting things to think about afterward (including “Wait, I thought they were going to tell stories. Why didn’t they tell the stories? I wanted to hear the stories”).

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I am confused about B vitamins. I went to the store to buy B1, and they had B6 and B12 and B-complex, but no B1. I went home to look online, and found that B1 is usually sold as thiamine. B3 is sold as niacin, and B9 is sold as folic acid.

Isn’t that strange/neat? Some B vitamins are known by names, and some by numbers. …That seems less remarkable/interesting now that I type it out.

I want to make a note for next year: glow stuff is THE BEST HALLOWEEN IDEA EVER. I got a pack of 15 glow bracelets in the Target dollar section for, as you might suspect, a dollar, and I also bought three glow necklaces and a pair of glow glasses. The glow glasses were not a great idea (Paul wore them and looked awesome, but he said they messed with night vision), but the rest of it was great: the kids were SO INCREDIBLY MORE VISIBLE than the kids without glow stuff on. Each kid wore a bracelet on each wrist, and a bracelet on each strap of their trick-or-treat bag, and if I’d thought of it I would have put a bracelet on each ankle as well. (Next year I’ll spend TWO dollars on glow bracelets!) Taking motion photos outdoors at night rarely goes well for anyone, but this gives the GIST of what two kids look like in the dark if they’re wearing some glow stuff:

I had some costume triumphs this year. The best one was Elizabeth’s costume: she wanted to go as Raven from Teen Titans, and I didn’t want to spend $40 on the costume + shipping, so I tried for DIY/homemade. Here’s what Raven looks like (I would like to credit this image, but it is ALL OVER THE PLACE uncredited, so here it is with thanks and credit to whoever it belongs to):

Looking at Raven, I’d say her most important feature, costume-wise, is that cloak. I looked into buying just a cloak, but that was in the “might as well just buy the costume” league of expensive. My mom offered to sew one, but that looked like it was going to end up more expensive and time-consuming than would be worth the savings.

Here’s what we did: I bought a $4 one-size-fits-most blue rain poncho (the kind that comes in a little packet) and cut up the middle allllmost to the top (leaving the neck opening intact). I also ended up cutting a long strip off each side to make the sleeves shorter. It was PERFECT.

She’s trying to look crabby like Raven

For the jeweled belt/brooch, we happened to find some of those big-version flat glass vase-filler things at a consignment store (if I’d thought of using those glass things before seeing them at the consignment shop, I would have looked at a craft store). Paul happened to have four flat round metal things to hot-glue the big red glass things to, but if he hadn’t had those I would have used cardboard painted with gold paint. (And if we hadn’t found the big red glass gems, I would have used circles of red paper, maybe with saran wrap over it for shine.) Then I hot-glued the glass-on-metal-circles to an old belt, which she wore backwards so the buckle wouldn’t show. (There was originally another round thing on that belt, but it fell off and got lost at school.) I glued one more glass-on-metal to a clothespin, which I clipped to the top of the cape-cut as a brooch. (I colored the exposed part of the clothespin with a blue Sharpie.)

She wanted a black leotard, but those are not cheap. Instead I had her wear a black turtleneck and dark navy skirt. She wanted slouchy purple boots; I had her wear her dark turquoise ones. Raven’s skin is grey, so she’s also wearing grey tights and grey gloves we already had (both from Target: tights $4, gloves in a pack of three pairs for $2). I used a $1 tube of white face paint to make her face pale-but-not-clown.

The main disappointment was the hair: Raven’s is blue-purple (it looks VERY PURPLE in the image above, but it’s described as midnight blue), so I bought a $2 can of purple hair spray. It says clearly on it “Cap indicates color.” No, it does not:

It was PINK. Bright pink! The cap is DARK PURPLE! Well. We got over it, but it was disappointing.

(She was compensated by the fact that it DID NOT WASH OUT. So she gets to go to school today with pink hair! Whereas I consider that a second disappointment with the product.)

Also a little disappointing: we forgot to put her jewel sticker on her forehead, which a brother helpfully pointed out when it was too late to do anything about it. But our PLAN was to use a jewel from a Sticky Mosaics set she has; if that wouldn’t stick, I would have used a washable red marker to draw one on.

But what surprised me in general was that it didn’t have to be The Same in order to Look Right: no one is holding up a picture of Raven to compare and then saying, “Wait, her boots are supposed to be PURPLE” or “That skirt looks NAVY.” What’s important is THE GIST.

The other costume struggle-ending-in-success was William’s. He wanted to be Luke Skywalker, but JEDI Luke Skywalker. Which basically looks like a guy wearing black/brown clothes. Since William is 5’4″, I thought we were already pushing the trick-or-treat thing without also making it look like he didn’t bother to dress up. So I made him look more dressed up with a belted brown towel, and I felt like he REALLY DID suddenly look much more in-costume:

(I evened up the ends of the towel after seeing this photo)

The other crucial element was, of course, the sword, which glowed in the dark. It was $8 at Target, but then that was the total cost of the costume. I have been informed that it is The Wrong Color, but there were two color choices, red and blue, so I got blue.

This outfit showed me that Doing Something almost always looks better than Not, even if the Something doesn’t really make Sense. That is: even though the towel is not an accurate representation of any part of a Jedi costume, he still looked MUCH MORE like a Jedi with it than without it.

I’m reading a book that says parents can’t drink alcohol and still expect their teenagers not to drink alcohol AND smoke pot (because pot is reportedly less dangerous than alcohol).

I was all, “Oh, crap,” and started composing a memo to Paul (“To: Paul. Re: Alcohol. Memo: GET READY TO TOTAL THAT TEE, BABY”). Then tonight as I was folding laundry and thinking about how I couldn’t expect my teenager not to drink if _I_ continued to drink the gin-and-seltzer I was sipping, I had this thought: “Wait. Yes I CAN expect that.”

Because otherwise, I would also need to give up driving: I can’t reasonably expect my un-driver’s-licensed teenager not to drive if I’M going to drive. And I would need to stop having sex, because otherwise how can I possibly suggest to my child that he or she not have sex, if they know from the number of children in this house that _I_ must have done it at some point? I can’t stay up until 10:00 or 10:30 anymore; I’ll need to go to bed at the kids’ bedtime. And I will need to stop using matches, because otherwise I’m practically INVITING them with my own match-usage! And I can’t SWEAR, certainly, and still expect THEM not to! And so on.

It’s silly to think that it’s hypocritical to do grown-up things while expecting our children NOT to do grown-up things. The message isn’t “THESE THINGS ARE EVIL!! NEVER DO THEM!!!,” it’s only, “Wait until you’re old enough.”

Elizabeth’s ears are pierced, and have been since she was five. It’s gone really well, much better than when I had MY ears pierced at five and they got infected, and KEPT getting infected, until we let the holes close up.

She’s had two minor infections in the last couple of years, both of which cleared up with a few days of cleaning them with the stuff they gave us a bottle of when we got her ears pierced, and putting antibiotic ointment on them. Other than that, they’ve been zero care: after the first six to eight weeks or however long it was that the ear-piercing place told us to take daily care of them, we haven’t routinely cleaned them or done anything at all with them.

I asked her yesterday what percentage of her female classmates had their ears pierced, and she said about half. I was interested because customs vary widely: in some communities it’s common to get the ears pierced in infancy, and in others it’s common to wait until the teens. My GUESS was that my particular community the curve would show very few (but SOME) infancy piercings, and very few (but SOME) “not until you’re 16/18/21” piercings, but then the biggest chunk of piercings divided into three basic age groups: the “about age 5-6” group, the “about age 9-10” group, and the “about age 12-13” group.

I really wish there was a good way to COLLECT information I’m curious about. I can stare at everyone’s ears and come up with a very loose estimate—but that doesn’t give me BACK STORY. I’ve gotten used to the blog-type community, where if I’m curious about something I can just ASK. …Maybe it’s not too late to get my questions added to the ballot.

Here’s basically what I’m wondering: What was your own pierced-ears experience, and how was the age decision reached? And then, what about your daughter-related experience/plans? (You don’t need to have daughters to answer this part—it can be what do you think you WOULD do if you DID.)

My own experience is that I got my ears pierced twice in early childhood, at about ages 5 and 7, once with star-shaped studs and once with birthstone studs. I remember really really wanting them pierced, so my guess is I did it at the very first age I was allowed to. The first time, the ears got repeatedly infected and we finally let them heal over, and the second time was a re-do in a slightly different location (the piercing person said the first pair hadn’t been done in the right place). Then I got them pierced twice more in high school, so I have four holes in each ear. (I use two: top pair and bottom pair.)

For a daughter, I could think of upsides and downsides to any age for piercing. I wanted her to be old enough for it to be An Exciting Event, and I had age 5-8 in mind.

Elizabeth is having a behavior regression of some sort. One reason it’s hard to put a finger on what kind of regression it is is that I think I stopped using the word “regression” after babyhood, so it no longer feels like a natural word to use. But I’m finding it’s a really good word for post-babyhood, too, as it implies “temporary” and “a step back, but still on the path” and so on. Encouraging! It felt better to say a baby was having a sleep regression instead of saying that the baby had stopped sleeping nicely, MAYBE NEVER TO START AGAIN; and it feels better to say 7-year-old Elizabeth is having a behavior regression, instead of saying that she may be morphing into someone who leaves her coat and backpack on the floor even after I’ve told her three times to pick them up.

Exhibit A

Based on her temperament I don’t THINK it’s defiance, although it’s likely to be line-finding: seeing how much she really has to do. Paul told me that when he was a child, his mom would tell him to do a task—say, mowing the lawn. He would start mowing, but then halfway through he’d “come in for a drink of water” and then drift away and start reading a book. He found that if she came upon the task half-done, and then found him reading, she would sigh heavily and then finish the task herself. As you can imagine, this pattern has caused us some issues in our marriage. Thanks for the enduring legacy, mother-in-law.

But I see how easy it is to do, without intending to. When I tell Elizabeth that after she takes her shower she needs to bring her discarded pajamas back to her room with her, and then after she’s left for school I find those pajamas still on the bathroom floor, it’s easy to sigh heavily and do it myself: I don’t want to look at the clothes on the floor all day, and I don’t want to bring out the Big Parenting Guns for a single episode of forgetting.

But it’s not a single episode anymore, which snuck up on me a bit. With my own temperament, and with this number of children, and with the way I’m typically half-composing a blog post in my head at any particular time, a child has to do something quite a few times before it gets to the front of my attention—which CAN be good (it means my controlling/micro-managing impulses are distracted and I’m not likely to jump on the kids for one single error or for an issue that will resolve itself) but also CAN be bad, because things can get pretty far off-track before I realize I need to engage the parenting engines. Then it takes longer to pull things back to where they should be than it would have if I’d noticed and corrected right away.

As in this case, where even though for several days I have been pointing out the problem to Elizabeth and cracking down on the follow-through, I haven’t yet seen a change in HER behavior—just in MINE, which is the first stage of change. I don’t remind her three times; instead, the very first time I need to remind her I include a gentle scold with that reminder: “Elizabeth. You are supposed to be putting away your backpack without me reminding you.” I DO leave her pajamas on the bathroom floor all day so she can put them in the laundry herself when she gets home from school—and to compensate me for looking at the messy heap all day, I also have her do another little task for me. Instead of waiting to scold until after we’ve had to scramble and panic, I include a partial scold with an instruction: “Time to get ready for school. And remember, you’ve been dawdling recently and then we’ve both had to scramble, and a scolding at the bus stop is not a nice way for either of us to start our day; let’s not have that happen today.”

(the view this morning, after Elizabeth left for school)