Yesterday I had a crappy day. I didn’t write about it here because meh. But it was crappy, and YES as a matter of fact it DID turn out to be partly PMS, and PERHAPS YOU SHOULD NOT ASK SUCH NOSY QUESTIONS, GEEZ.

ANYWAY. Lucky for me I had in my possession a heap of Crappy Day Presents from Rachel, AKA Doing My Best. This is such a great idea: she and her friends send these to each other, not to be opened right away but rather to be held for a crappy day when such a thing is most needed. Not only does the recipient then get a well-timed gift, she can look look forward to it the entire time BEFORE she needs it. And then when there IS a crappy day, the feeling is not just “ACK, CRAPPY” but also “But this means I get a PRESENT.”

I love this. Rachel sent me a sampler of FIVE Crappy Day presents so I could try this out over time, and she labeled them with how severe of a crappy day should be matched with each gift. Here’s Rachel’s key:

Minor—“Life certainly can be blah!”
Moderate—“Why is everyone around me *SO* IRRITATING?!”
MAJOR—“If people don’t *WATCH OUT*, HEADS MAY ROLL!!!!”

And yesterday I went straight for a Major. Look what was inside:

A two-layer tin of chocolates, and a little card containing kind words.
Foreground: the label that was on the outside of the package.

Would you like a closer look at those chocolates? I’ll bet you would, you naughty wench.

Those are See’s Chocolates, mostly MY FAVORITES (Butterscotch Squares) but with some Polar Bear Paws thrown in for variety and the fun of trying something new (and they are REALLY GOOD: peanuts and caramel and white chocolate and cute name).

So! I can now give first-person testimony that this is a great idea, especially if you ALREADY like sending impulsive little presents to friends.

We’ve been dealing with sleep issues with Elizabeth. With Elizabeth WHO IS FIVE YEARS OLD. Actually, that looks young when I type it (aw, FIVE!)—but it seems like I wouldn’t still be working on sleep-training issues with someone who knows how to do air quotes.

This time it’s that she started waking up in the middle of the night wanting to come to our room. That was fine periodically, but soon it was every night, and soon after that she started waking earlier and earlier until she was waking up before our bedtime. I thought she was old enough to have this situation explained to her, so I told her now she would need to go back to sleeping in her own bed.

After that, she continued to wake up night after night crying, and I’d go down there and explain it to her again, and then she’d cry for an hour, or an hour and a half, or TWO hours. I would lie in bed, wide awake and simmering with angry resentment, going down periodically to reassure/re-explain through clenched teeth. She’d finally go back to sleep, but meanwhile my frustration and awake-in-the-middle-of-the-nightness would have turned itself into a full-color review of Every Situation In Which I’ve Ever Felt Angry Resentment.

So I decided to break up this fight. Trying to force Elizabeth to do things my way in the middle of the night has never, ever worked: not when she was brand new, not when she was an older baby, not when she was a toddler, and not now. She has recurring sleep issues, and maybe there is a way to deal with them that would solve them, but my guess is that we’ve tried everything at this point (I’m reluctant to try to decree absolutely that no suggestions for books/methods could possibly be useful, but I do think that we’ve heard all of them by now). Trying to do things My Way is leading to misery and anger, and it’s not solving anything. So last night, she cried and I brought her up to our room.

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William gets Night Sadness: feeling in the evening or around bedtime that everything is too awful and sad and hopeless to be dealt with at all. He goes long periods without getting it, and then some daytime thing will show up as nighttime stress. Right now it’s his Monday schedule: he gets pulled out of the classroom FOUR TIMES on Mondays for various things. William is not a Sharer, talking-wise, so the first we really understood the depth of the problem was when two Monday mornings in a row he was “sick.”

I preferred he not drop out of any of the four things, so my first way of dealing with it was to try to treat the Night Sadness. I taught him the various things that help me deal with my own; I used my dad’s Nightmare Cure, which I might have changed over the years but still think of as his (turn lights on, pee, chew a Tums, drink of water, brush teeth); I let him stay up a bit and sit with us. Nothing was working.

So my second attempt was to ask him if perhaps one thing was stressing him more than the others. Last year he was stressed to tears by a writing group he was in, and it got bad enough that we said to the teacher that we didn’t really care at all if he wrote below his ability PERMANENTLY, it was too much stress to be worth it. But this time he said he didn’t really want to drop any of the things, he just wished they weren’t all on the same day. So I asked if I should contact the teacher and find out if things could be spread out a little, and he explained the various reasons why the schedule can’t be budged.

So my third attempt was to ask if he could think of anything we could do to improve Mondays in OTHER ways. He couldn’t think of any, but I started thinking of some. Like, maybe he could get hot lunch on Mondays and not have it count toward his “once a week” limit. And if the hot lunch that day was one he didn’t like, I could make his lunch for him instead. And he could bring a chocolate-chip granola bar as his snack. And he could get a pass that day on practicing his clarinet.

Last night when he had Night Sadness, I put him through the Nightmare Cure, and as he was doing it I reminded him that in the morning he wouldn’t have to pack a lunch. And he could have deviled eggs for breakfast. And he wouldn’t have to practice his clarinet.

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These things cause older-brother Rob to hit the ceiling, of course. Why can’t HE have an extra hot lunch on Mondays?? When HE took clarinet, why didn’t HE get to have a skip day?? I try to be understanding about this (I too was a firstborn, and I too had a fine-tuned sense of Justice Betrayed), but I also think it’s a good opportunity to discuss how we make different accommodations for different people. Elizabeth gets a pass in the middle of the night right now because she can’t figure out the sleep thing and neither can we. William gets spoiled on Monday mornings because he’s having trouble handling his Mondays and yet doesn’t want to get out of it either. When Rob was younger he had social and speech issues that meant he’s the only one of our children to have attended two years of expensive pre-kindergarten plus three summers of expensive “preschool camp.” Henry’s getting extra time with Paul right now, because for whatever reason he’s going through a Daddy-craving stage and nearly has a breakdown during the week, so on weekends Paul doesn’t expect to get anything done without Henry attached to him.

And then it won’t be long before some of these things shift around. Maybe Henry will go out of this Daddy Stage, but then he’ll need something else; maybe Elizabeth will start sleeping all night in her own bed again, but then she’ll need something else. The hard part, to me, is that it’s so SHIFTING, and that it’s so different from child to child: it’s not something that lets me say to Rob, “Well, when YOU were five, YOU got to sleep in our room.”

Christina asked for cat/SIL updates, and I will also throw in a freebie “falling-down-the-stairs injuries” update.

Cat update: Mouse is holding steady. She continues to be a shadow of her former luxuriously plump self (6 pounds down from 11). Her thyroid was re-tested this fall and her current dose of medicine is still working for her. She still occasionally pees in inappropriate locations, but nowhere NEAR as often—and the vet thinks at this point it could be partly an old-age thing. She doesn’t wear a calming collar anymore: for a number of months I could TELL when the month was up and it needed to be changed, but then one month she didn’t seem to need a new one so I tried not using one, and she seemed fine. Benchley and Feather continue to be lovey-cuddlekins-friendy-friends, so they mostly leave her alone. Sometimes all three of them will sleep on the same chair, though it’s always that Benchley and Feather join Mouse, not that Mouse joins THEM.

(Benchley at rear of chair; Feather at front of chair; Mouse on arm of chair)

Sister-in-law update: Holding steady, WE HOPE. The lawyer is waiting to do the final settlement of the estate until after the 2010 taxes (including taxes to be paid on sold stocks) are done. As far as we know, Beth hasn’t changed her mind about keeping the house, but we also keep getting cc’d on letters to her from the lawyer that say things like, “Because I haven’t heard from you regarding my letter of the 18th, I will go ahead and…,” so that’s a little worrisome.

As an aside, Paul’s aunt (his mother’s sister) got bonus points (+3 for thinly-veiled family gossip) on this year’s Christmas letter by adding a P.S. that she hoped we’d wish Beth a merry Christmas from her, because she had no contact information AT ALL!!—with “AT ALL” underlined twice. Because this came on the heels of a letter saturated with “blessings”s and “amazing”s (including suggestions that these amazing blessings prove that God favors not only America [sic] ((because she definitely means “the U.S.”)) in general but also their family in particular), the peevish little passive-aggressive P.S. was EVEN BETTER and I upped the bonus to +5.

I sent her a cheery note telling her that Beth’s contact info hadn’t in fact changed (I had to tear up my first attempt and start over, because “not in the last eight years, in fact” and “the same info as your late sister’s, if you still have it” was not the tone I was aiming for) (the tone I was aiming for was “I hope you will notice that I am noticing that your silly attempt at peevishness showed only that YOU are the one who hasn’t bothered to keep in touch—but without you being able to call me out for tone”) (this is a very tricky tone to achieve). She mailed me RIGHT BACK, flustered by her tactical error and hoping to redeem herself while simultaneously shifting the blame, saying that Paul’s dad’s sister’s husband (are you following this? Paul’s uncle-by-marriage, but on the OPPOSITE side of a divorced family, so there was NO REASON his aunt would have been in touch with them except to pry) had told her the house would be sold last year.

Well well well! So this got another bonus +5 (very unusual to score Christmas card points for something that did not in fact arrive by Christmas card, but I find that awarding points keeps me from awarding smackdowns), since she has revealed herself to be a prying old pry-bag, and why aren’t ANY of these concerned aunts/uncles contacting either Paul or Beth to ask about their plans? If this had been an email exchange rather than snail-mail, I might have responded with “Oh, that’s odd! We haven’t talked with him about the plans!”—but that’s impossible to write on a little floral notecard and sign it and stamp it and put it in the mail, and perhaps that is for the best. I hope my silence instead conveys to her my intended tone, which is “Uh huh. Why don’t you just consider whether that reply improved your position.”

Okay, so that’s the update: Paul’s family in its usual dysfunctional turmoil, but luckily far away from us. And we hope the estate settlement will happen soon, with no last-minute changes of heart from his sister.

Injury update: Buttular region (injured in both falls) still uncomfortable when transitioning from sitting to standing, but improving. Ankle (injured on the second fall) doesn’t hurt to walk on, but has gradually over the course of a week gone from having a bruise on one side to having a bruise on three sides, and then the top of that foot swelled visibly, enough to hurt when I put on my shoes. But…the INTERNAL part of the foot/ankle isn’t bothering me at all: that is, the bones don’t hurt, the joint doesn’t hurt in any direction. It’s just the skin and padding that feels injured and ouchy.

Here is the problem with self-deprecation: it sets the bar. It shows other people where we draw the line.

When we say, “Oh my god, please excuse the house, it’s a MESS!,” we might mean to be saying, “Please don’t think less of me because my house is messy, I’m sure your house is WAY BETTER,” but what we’re inadvertently saying is, “This is what I consider unacceptable. If your house is better than this, it might or might not be fine; if it is the same or worse, it is unacceptable or beyond unacceptable, and now you know what I think of it.”

When we say, “Oh my god, I am so fat, I am so out of shape!,” we might mean to be saying, “Please don’t think less of me because of how I look,” but what we’re inadvertently saying is, “This is what I consider unacceptable. If you are thinner than me or more in shape than me, you might or might not be okay. If you are comparably as fat/unfit, or MORE fat/unfit, you are unacceptable too, and now you know what I think of you.”

When we say ANYTHING that judges ourselves, we’re telling someone else how we judge. Even if we only judge OURSELVES that harshly, and actually look at other people through a much softer lens.

(I feel like I need to offer a benediction after that, and perhaps communion. JUDGE NOT, LEST YOU INADVERTENTLY JUDGE OTHERS. GO IN PEACE. And have one bite of bread and one sip of wine on your way out.) (Also, I will forget this in 10 minutes and resume attempting to tell people they are better than me, while inadvertently telling them otherwise.)

I’m having BAD DREAMS about fish dying. Last night I dreamed that one of our minnows died, and I knew it was because the water in the tank was toxic, so I tried to rescue the remaining minnow but I had nothing to scoop her up with so I had to use my hand (ICK ICK ICK), and then I put her in my water glass BUT OH NO THERE ARE ICE CUBES IN THERE AAAAAAAAAAA! Anyway. Fish stress.

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I found some Bath & Body Works lavender-vanilla conditioner on eBay for a price I considered MOSTLY reasonable (original price + reasonable mark-up for being hard-to-find + shipping + I really want it) so I bought it. But EVENTUALLY there will be no more lavender-vanilla conditioner left to buy. And I’ve tried other lavender-vanilla scents, and none of them are what I like. And what if Bath & Body Works DISCONTINUES THE ENTIRE FRAGRANCE??? Well. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, worry-wise.

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The definition of insanity needs to be changed from “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” to “Reading blogs that trigger rage reactions.”

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I know it seems early, but this is the month to register for 2011-2012 preschool, so I have to decide if Henry is going or not. He’ll be four years old this fall. The other four children will all be in full-day school.

Pros to preschool:

1. Otherwise it’s just me and Henry all day long.
2. Social interaction with peers, instead of with siblings who think of him as a baby.
3. Experience with an authority figure other than his parents.
4. Fun stuff we don’t do at home.
5. Learning to do citizen stuff like stand in line and raise his hand.
6. Me getting some time with no kids in the house.

Cons to preschool:

1. $365/month for 10.5 hours/week.

I don’t know how to decide. The money is POSSIBLE but not COMFORTABLE. Would it be better used elsewhere? We could make several extra payments on the mortgage with that. But I’m not social so he wouldn’t get peer interaction elsewhere. Rob went to three summers and two school years of preschool, but he had social and articulation delays that caused not one, not two, but FOUR professionals (pediatrician, two speech therapists, pediatric neurologist) to press upon us the importance of preschool. William went to one year of preschool, but I don’t remember our reasoning. Probably something like “We paid so much for Rob, it seems like William should go for at least one year.” The twins didn’t go, because $730/month was not possible for anything that wasn’t saving someone’s life. But we just made the last payments on our car, so the money for Henry to go is temporarily freed up (I’ve noticed that waiting too long to redirect the money causes it to absorb unnoticeably into the budget).

I did my unofficial resolution to frame my resolutions. I scanned it so you can see it close, but the color turned out wonky so I also took a picture of it after it was on the wall. I hung it tucked sort of beside/behind my computer, so the average visitor to the house wouldn’t see it but I’D see it all the time.

If you do this yourself, I recommend taking a little more time with the DESIGN of the project. I took the fake photo that came with the frame and wrote on the back of it, and I tried to compensate for the messiness and lack of margins by doodling. But I knew I wouldn’t do it at all if I tried to do it The Best Way, so…fast and sloppy works too.

(See? Huge color wonkiness.)

It is lucky I have my watch alarms set to remind me when it is time for kids to get coats on and head for the bus stop, because this morning that’s what caused me to realize I hadn’t yet seen Rob. It was five minutes before his bus was due. It was a long shot, but I risked it: I RHINOCEROS-STAMPEDED down the stairs, burst into his room, said, “Honey, wake up, it’s late, it’s time to go to the bus, don’t take a shower, just get dressed and come up and I’ll make your lunch” (worst way to wake up EVER), then I raced back upstairs, looked at the hot lunch calendar and saw it was something he liked so I wouldn’t have to make a lunch after all, peeled him a breakfast bar, shoved everything from his homework area willy-nilly into his backpack, found his coat and shoes and put them next to the breakfast bar and backpack, and peeled him another breakfast bar because Henry was eating the first one. He came running up the stairs, put on his stuff, grabbed the breakfast bar, ran to the bus stop and made the bus. Whew.

Also, the second guppy died in the night. (The first one died the night before.) Those of you who thought I was being a little over-worryish can…can…RE-EVALUATE THOSE THOUGHTS, that’s what! I don’t know what happened, but I feel very discouraged by this setback—a little inclined to return the minnows to the store and then drain and clean and Freecycle the tank and stuff. Instead we will hang tight with the two minnows for now, wait a bit, and then go back and talk to the fish store peeps. When a hobby involves living things, it’s hard to know how long to persist, resolutions or no.

Also, guess who was heading downstairs and stepped on a toy dinosaur and not only re-injured her gradually-healing buttular region but now has a coordinating bruise on her ankle? Thaaaaat’s right.

(And where could the dinosaur have come from?)

We bought two more fish for our bigger fish tank. I am very nervous about this, as well I should be: it’s not an established tank yet, just for starters, but also any addition to the tank is nerve-wracking to me (WHAT IF THEY LOSE THEIR LIVES BECAUSE I’M TOO STUPID TO TAKE GOOD CARE OF THEM??). The fish store person and I had two conversations about it: one talk, then I went home to think, and then a second talk a couple of days later, and then I bought the fish.

(Look how good they are about swimming WHERE WE CAN SEE THEM.
Minnows still hiding.)

We chose guppies, because they are pretty (the picture didn’t capture them AT ALL: one is pale yellow with an orange tail, and the other is grey with a blue tail), and because they are hardy, and because they are reportedly a good fish for beginners.

The main issue, in fact, is not the unestablished tank (guppies are the kind of fish you might very well start with, and SOMEONE has to get the unestablished tank), but rather the minnows we have living in it already. And that we’d intended to get a third minnow along with the guppies. The fish store clerk’s opinion could be summed up in this way: “Please do not waste perfectly good tropical fish by putting them in with those dirty, dirty MINNOWS.”

So. One possibility is (or rather, WAS) to have all minnows in the tank: get four or five more of them and just have a minnow tank. We rejected this option, especially since, so far, having minnows has been a lot like having an empty aquarium, except that we have to keep cleaning the water.

The second possibility is to put the minnows back into the smaller tank, and put only tropical fish in the new large tank. This was the fish-store clerk’s favorite option, and it might be ours, too: the minnows don’t seem any happier in the big tank (they continue to hide all the time), and they don’t need the heater the large tank has, and we would like to get more tropical fish. But we thought the minnows might be happier with more fish around them, and they DO seem to be swimming a little more with the guppies around. We could perhaps buy one more tiny minnow to keep them company in the smaller tank, if that might help, and we could also get more plants for hiding. And with the minnows out of the big tank, we could work on the new fish community with far fewer complications and risks. Hm, I am talking myself into this option.

The third possibility is what we’re currently doing, which is to have everyone in the big tank (but not buy the third minnow). I described this plan to the person at the fish store as “Allow the current minnows to live out their lives, and then not get any more minnows.”

No, never mind, I’m going to go set up the first tank again. That just seems like a way better idea.

[Edit: Crap, I don’t have filters for the small tank. (I was at the store for new filters when I found the larger tank on such a great sale.) Okay, okay, not to panic: they can live in the big tank for a few days while I buy them new filters and some more things to hide in. And some new gravel, because I put all the old gravel in the new tank. I changed a bunch of the water (OMG temperature!! OMG water conditioner!! OMG PLEASE DON’T DIE!!) and rinsed the filter in the meantime.]

Okay! Are we ready? It is time.

Last year I resolved to use my reusable bags more often, and even though I totally forgot I had resolved it, I nevertheless did it. I am now at Current Maximum Reusable Bag Usage for me, which means I use reusable bags at the use-percentage that still leaves me with enough plastic bags for my various plastic-bag-needing needs. I carry two fold-small reusable bags in my purse, and I take a big huge sack of reusable bags with me to the grocery store. I don’t use a produce bag if I’m buying just one or two of some non-messy produce (like a green pepper) and/or I use reusable produce bags, and I say “Oh, I can just put it in this other bag” if I’m buying an item at the mall that can be put into a bag I already have. To sum up: mold a golden idol in my image.

I resolved last year to think more before buying something. Again, I forgot that the motivation for doing this was a resolution, but I still did SOME of this. I tried to think to myself, “Yes, $1.74 is a great deal for a shirt, but he does not actually NEED any more shirts,” and “A whole bunch of $1.74s add up to extra sent to the mortgage” and “Won’t it be nice for someone ELSE to find this deal?” and “You know, actually I need to get rid of some of the shirts he already has because there isn’t room in the drawer on the rare occasions I get caught up on laundry.” On the other hand, it led to several regrets, like when William grew into the same size of shirts and pajamas Rob is wearing, and now they each have half of the supply.

I forgot to drink champagne more often, and in fact I haven’t had any since last New Year’s Eve. I will see if I can cram a whole year’s worth of champagne into this evening.

I resolved last year to at least open my Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Workbook for Dummies to where I’d left off, and I did, and in fact I skimmed to the end, but I didn’t find any other gems of insight. So actually I was right when I stopped reading it the first time.

I’d resolved to throw out the $5 giant bottle of lotion I hated and replace it with the $5 giant bottle of lotion I liked, and I did that.

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Now! Time for 2011 resolutions! And I know this will seem CRAZY, but I’m going to ONCE AGAIN do resolutions that do NOT involve losing weight or exercising more! Not only do those sorts of resolutions tend to be extremely boring (especially when made year after year with no follow-though), there are many, MANY other parts of a human being that can be worked on!

1. I will try to be less of a self-conscious sissy about hair dye. I keep intending to go, say, burgundy, and then thinking, “Oh, wait, but there is a parent-teacher conference coming up!” or “Oh, but it’ll be Christmas!” It seems totally reasonable to avoid going a crazy color right before a wedding in which I’m a member of the bridal party, or maybe before a childbirth where I want to look a certain way in new-baby photos, but there are very few other occasions that require this level of burgundy-avoidance.

2. I will try to be more caught up on trimming/editing digital photos. I tend to be three or four months behind, just chronically. And as I regularly think when someone is tailgating me: if you’re going at a steady pace regardless, you might as well be at a more pleasant distance. For tailgating, that’s FARTHER; for digital photos, that’s CLOSER.

3. I’m going to try this fish tank thing enough to see if it’s something I want to pursue or if it’s something I want to give up.

4. I’m going to act with less inhibition on generous impulses. I’m going to spend less time wringing my hands wondering if my impulse to send someone a present is going to make them feel uncomfortable or obligated, or if a fun giveaway will make some people roll their eyes and write about how stupid they think blog giveaways are. What a stupid waste of hand-wringing.

5. I’m going to find more Bath & Body Works discontinued lavender-vanilla conditioner on eBay and see if it’s worth buying. The ones I bought 2 years ago are almost used up. If it’s too expensive or hard to find, I will try experiments such as mixing Bath & Body Works lavender-vanilla oil/lotion with unscented conditioner, or using the lotion directly. [Same-day follow-up: I researched on eBay and you would not believe what people think they can charge for this stuff. FORTY-ONE DOLLARS for four TRAVEL SIZE bottles. Bitch, please. So I’m moving right on to experimenting.]

6. I will no doubt add some sixth thing.

7. And probably a seventh thing. It happens every year, so I might as well add place-holders.

I’m also resolving to frame my resolutions and hang them on the wall, but I don’t want to put that as one of the resolutions because that is too meta for my current fill-level of champagne.

If you still need some resolutions for your own list, perhaps you would like some of these others I’ve used in the past?

1. Try ONE cloth pad and see if it’s something I like or something I can stop thinking of as “something I want to do someday.”

2. Try ONE cloth napkin and see if it’s something I like or something I can stop thinking of as “something I want to do someday.”

3. Pretend to invest $1000 in the stock market. Choose stocks and follow them as if I’d bought them. At the end of the year, decide whether to invest real money or if it’s something I can stop thinking of as “something I want to do someday.”

4. Have a baby.

5. Learn to knit, enough to see if it’s something I want to pursue or something I can stop thinking of as “something I want to do someday.”

6. Try Postcrossing, enough to see if it’s something I want to pursue or something I can stop thinking of as “something I want to do someday.”

7. Pass along nice things I hear about someone.

8. Use reusable bags more often.

Happy New Year, everybody! I better post this before I start typing embarrassing songs.

The trouble with resolutions is that I forget all about them. Like, did you know that last year I resolved to pass along good things I hear about people? ME NEITHER! It was a total surprise to me to read that just now!

You know what would be cool, would be to write our resolutions on a piece of paper and frame that paper somewhere we’d see it all the time. Then each year, replace the piece of paper. Not only would this be kind of fun (choosing the frame, decorating the paper), it might, like, WORK.

So I think I’m going to do that, if I can think of any resolutions. I guess I could reuse last year’s, since they seem completely fresh and unused.