One of the best parts of belonging to a group of friends formed around the grade-level of our children is that it’s a great way to figure out what’s going ON. For example, I’d heard from Rob that the last dance of the year was an 8th grade semi-formal. Have I heard anything about this from the school, even though this is allegedly happening next month? No. Luckily, I have the group, and some of them have kids older than 8th grade so they’ve been through this before. Unfortunately, none of those kids are boys, so I still don’t know what the boys are supposed to wear—but I know the girls are wearing dressy-but-not-prom-like dresses, so that makes me think trousers, dress shirt, and tie for the boys.

At Goodwill yesterday I bought Rob a pair of dressy trousers. They could end up being the totally wrong thing, if it turns out he needs a suit. But they were $4.49, so I figured the risk was low. One weird thing is that there’s no size/fabric tag in them—and there wasn’t in any of the other pants we looked at, either. Paul rolled his eyes at me, like DUH, of course there isn’t, they’re men’s trousers! But I’m left wondering if they’re supposed to be dry-cleaned or if I can just put them in the laundry or what.

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In our school system, children are not allowed to bring treats on their birthdays. It’s because the absolutely brand-new, certainly-not-done-for-generations-without-having-the-affects-currently-attributed-to-it tradition of eating a cupcake once or or twice a month is one of the leading causes of children being fatter than they used to be. Instead, on one day a month, all the children with birthdays that month can bring in a non-food “treat” (pencils, erasers, little party-favor-like toys) or a “healthy” snack to share.

I find this extremely irritating, but I am willing to go with it. HERE IS WHAT DRIVES ME CRAZY, though: many parents STILL send in cupcakes with their children on their birthdays. I suppose some parents didn’t read the handbook, and perhaps those same parents also don’t read the monthly newsletter which contains a monthly reminder of this policy. Others probably read those reminders but still forgot. Others think it’s a stupid rule and decide not to follow it. But MAN. Unenforced rules are one of my least favorite things. EITHER have the rule and enforce it, OR don’t have the rule. Because as things are, my own children are complaining that they don’t get to bring in cupcakes on their birthdays because their LAME MOTHER doesn’t want to break a CLEARLY-STATED rule.

At one point, when I had seen for myself that parent after parent was bringing in cupcakes (before then, I’d wondered if my children were exaggerating the number, but at kindergarten drop-off I got to see it), and when both twins were complaining to me about it at the same time, I started to compose an email to the teacher. My goal was to ask if I could send in cupcakes despite the rule. I worked on that email for a week, and could not come up with one single way to phrase that question that didn’t sound judgey, prickly, manipulative, passive-aggressive, and/or bitter. It’s surprisingly difficult to avoid a tone of “Since you’re not enforcing the rules for those other rule-breakers, does this mean I don’t have to follow the rules either?”—even if you really, really try to go for something more like “I want to make sure I’m behaving correctly in this situation.” Finally I told the twins that I was sorry but we were going to have to follow the rule even though other people weren’t following it, and fortunately they said “Awww!” and then dropped it.

Last night was a high-school-redo dream. We were all in the gym and I was making eyes at the cute boy I liked freshman year, and I was thinking that now that I had the advantage of NOT BEING THIRTEEN, I would go over and talk to him instead of just staring at him across an English classroom for 9 months. And then a song started playing in the background; it was a boy band singing about a girl. They’d finished the segment praising the girl’s awesomeness, and now they were at the part where one of them has a solo mournfully/dramatically listing the hurdles standing in the way of the relationship:

But she’s a size 16
I’m the skinniest guy at school
And she’s a…QUEEEEEEEEEEN

So my brain wrote a song. To call me fat.

That boy I liked, by the way, was the son of another teacher at school. I’ll bet the English teacher TOLD him in the teacher lounge. Because _I_ would, if I were a teacher. “There is some girl who just STARES at him! The whole class! Every day!” I wonder if they worked together on the plan she put into action, which was to suddenly move me from the very last seat in the back corner to the desk next to his in the very front row. She did it abruptly and obviously, like: “Okay, settle down everyone. First, I want to make a few changes to the seating chart. Swistle, move up here next to Jason, and Andrew sit where Swistle was. Now, let’s open to page 37…” I’ve wondered if that was a cruelty-based plan, or a helping plan, or a “I am so tired of her staring at him instead of paying attention in class, and in fact I can’t stand it even one.more.day” plan.

This morning I looked the guy up on Facebook. Facebook is excellent for snooping, but also can be a terrible dream-killer—even more than unkind brain songs. The guy I liked is now a serious outdoorsy person. (Maybe he was back then, too—I never talked to him.) There are pictures of him camping without a tent in March, and biking a mountain trail in full biking gear. There is no way that would have worked out.

When we left off, I was working my way through the List of Things to Tell You poem:

Happy with comments
Front teeth; portrait appointments
Lost phone list
Crown, and already chipped
Too much apocalyptic fiction

Let’s do the front teeth next: Henry has lost both his two front teeth. Don’t be ridiculous, that’s nothing to CRY about. Just because I’ve had ample opportunity to notice that the baby/adult front-tooth transition is the one that pretty much ends the young-child stage completely, and just because this is my LAST BABY—goodness no, I’m fine, stop patting me.

I took him to get his picture taken to mark the occasion, which is something I highly recommend. I consider portraits such an enormous and stressful hassle (choosing what child should wear! child not cooperating with photographer! all the attempts to sell me “portrait collages” and “enhancements”!) and EVEN SO I would highly recommend the front-teeth-out portrait. They tend to be my very favorites, and it’s such a short stage: I have one million snapshots of, say, “age 6,” but only a very few that show the missing front teeth. I usually try to dress the child in a very neutral shirt, ideally one that is close to the color of a studio backdrop: I dressed Edward in light blue, for example, knowing there was a light-blue backdrop, and I dressed Rob in light grey, knowing there was a light-grey backdrop. This helps direct attention to The Teeth.

It was puzzlingly difficult to get an appointment. There’s no big portrait occasion in May, is there? But the session went well. I mean, Henry was pretty terrible, but the photographer is the kind who can catch the half second between “making a stupid face on purpose” and “covering an accidental smile with his hand,” and I’m happy with the photos. I dressed Henry in a t-shirt that was kind of old and grubby and that I knew wouldn’t go particularly well with any of the backdrops—but it was a sentimental choice because it’s been a favorite shirt, and all five of the kids have worn it.

Let’s see, what’s next? Oh, the lost phone list. We somehow LOST our phone list, the one we keep tacked up next to the phone. Since it’s a printed-out list, it should be no big deal: just print a new one. Except, er. It turned out I hadn’t updated it since adding Rob’s first grade teacher’s phone number at the beginning of that school year. (Rob is almost done with 8th grade.) I just kept writing new names/numbers in the margins. So this has actually been a huge problem. It’s not just that I’ve lost numbers, it’s that I can’t even remember whose numbers I’ve lost.

And finally, the comments. I think I’ve mentioned that switching from Blogspot/Blogger to WordPress was a huge and stressful hassle. BUT: one thing I love love love is the new commenting set-up. No more word verification! All I did was put it on “moderate first comment.” So all the spam comments get sent directly to moderation, and they never show up on the blog! And everyone else has to wait for their first comment to show up, but then they can just comment freely without having to figure out what those blurry letters/numbers are!

The downside is that the word verification was apparently keeping out a huge number of spam comments: I’ve moderated over a thousand in the short time since moving here. With word verification, I would sometimes get a few spam comments leaking through all of a sudden, but usually they were few and far between. It’s not all THAT big a deal to click “spam” a thousand times, but it’s not uplifting to the spirit, either. And my eyes have to look at those comments, even briefly, and a lot of them are gross.

Oh! And here’s a weird thing I’ve seen others mention too: some of the spam comments are INSULTING, or express disappointment in the post, or they accuse me of plagiarism, or they complain that the feed isn’t working or the lines are going off the screen. Why would a spammer go that route, I wonder? (And if it has briefly flickered through your mind that perhaps these are real comments and I’m incorrectly assuming they’re spam, I don’t feel hurt by your doubting, THOMAS, and I’m happy to explain further that the comments are left by, for example “[BRAND NAME] LUGGAGE 4 CHEAP” and “MALE ENHANCEMENT NO PRESCRIPTION NEEDED,” and are followed by many, many links to various spammy locations.)

Wait, this was supposed to be about how HAPPY I am with the new commenting system. And I am! It’s great. And I could sign up for a spam filtering program that would help with the many spam comments; I haven’t so far because the one I want charges for that service if you’re a “business” site, and I think the baby names site might qualify now that it offers the paid private consultation option.

I made myself a list of things I wanted to remember to talk about, and look, it’s almost a little poem:

Happy with comments
Front teeth; portrait appointments
Lost phone list
Crown, and already chipped
Too much apocalyptic fiction

However, I notice there is only one happy thing on the list. Well, that is consistent with my recent mood, which has been cranky/stressed.

I think part of it can be traced to the last thing on the list. I started with The Road, as I wrote about in this post, which led to a lot of great suggestions in the comments section for other apocalyptic fiction. So then I read Oryx & Crake, which I liked a lot—until the end, when it presented a terrible dilemma, went on a bit about how terrible the dilemma was…and then ended. I don’t have to have every little loose end tied up (even though I WAS hoping at some point for a letter from someone explaining why they’d done something a certain way), but if I have to write the ending myself I want to be paid fairly for it. Worse, because of the many, many times the lead character thought to himself that the clues were there all along right in front of him and he should have been able to figure it out, I felt like the author thought I SHOULD know what ending she had in mind. And I am someone who doesn’t even like to TRY to solve a murder mystery, but instead waits contentedly for the author to let the detective explain it to me.

Then I read Pure. It’s not young adult, but I’ll bet there were a lot of arguments at the publishing house about whether it ought to be. I liked that one TOO, but it’s a trilogy so of course it didn’t END-end, and then my library doesn’t have the second book and there’s an inexplicable “can’t be requested” tag from the library in the system that DOES have it.

Then I started World Made by Hand, and that’s where I stopped. One of the main downsides of apocalyptic fiction is that it tends to be preachy and told-you-so-ish, and this was either the worst one of the group so far or else I’d just already reached my limit on “Look what could happen if you don’t listen to what I think is wrong with the world” lecturing. I think it was the latter. And I’d already been wondering if I should take a break from the theme, because I’d been feeling increasingly paranoid, twitchy, and impotent-despairful, and also unable to tidy the house because IF THERE’S AN APOCALYPSE WE MIGHT BE SORRY WE BLITHELY THREW OUT THIS HOLEY SOCK. So this afternoon I’m going to go to the library, return the rest of the books I’d checked out, and pick out something where the world is still basically the way it is.

Some of the twitchiness and despair, though, can be attributed instead to dental work. I had the first step of a crown done this week, and I just hate everything. A little piece of the temporary crown chipped off the very first day, and I have three more teeth the dentist says need crowns in the relatively near future, and I just hate everything. (Except the new comments system. I do love that.)

I have been allowing spiders to live in my house, and I don’t know if this is a Stretching Exercise or if this is something that will land me in the madhouse, because AIEEEEEE SPIDERS IN MY HOUSE.

This came about because of a meme, in case you have been thinking nothing anyone says on Facebook changes anyone’s mind. If you’d prefer not to click any link in a spider post, it’s the meme where a spider is saying things like “Okay, I got all the termites and ants taken care of for you… HEY WHAT’S THAT BOOK FOR?” and so on. In school, my friends teased me for anthropomorphizing ANYTHING (even on one memorable occasion a crouton) (it’s Paul who makes it so memorable, by never letting anyone forget it), and this just GOT to me. Fine, spiders are good. I accept it. I will attempt peaceful coexistence.

But dear sweet biscuits, there has got to be an UNDERSTANDING. They can be up in the corners, that’s fine. They can even walk from place to place as long as I don’t have to see them do it. But there can be no (NO) dangling down from the ceiling. There can be no (NO) showing up in the shower. And this morning when I turned the calendar page to take a look at May (HOW IS IT ALREADY ALMOST MAY?), I had to add a new rule: no (NO) climbing around in the calendar. IT IS NOT A JUNGLE GYM.

I spent the weekend with my brother, sister-in-law, sister-in-law’s sister, niece, and nephew, and maybe “with relatives” would have been a simpler way to write that. Anyway it was great. I slept 3.5 hours later than usual, which is the kind of thing that can buy a day of re-set perspective. I came home with PLANS: we are going to play with our kids more! and take more walks! and get rid of CLUTTER! and try new things more often! That’s gone now, but still!

My niece and nephew are at particularly great ages: my niece is 4, which according to anecdotes in my own kid-recording journals must be the best of all ages ever; and my nephew is almost 20 months, which means every time I see him he’s made enormous bounds in communication. In December he was saying some words; when I saw him in February he was saying lots more words and putting two together; this month he’s saying little sentences. “Aunt Swis! watch! dancing!” Language acquisition is kind of FREAKY.

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Today I am trying a chignon Gibson Tuck. I didn’t look up how to do it because I thought I remembered how (make a low loose ponytail, then pull the ponytail open right above the elastic and stuff the ponytail into there), but I think I should probably look it up because I didn’t know what to do after THAT. I used little clippies, but it seems like there could be a more elegant method. Also, I wasn’t sure if “stuff the ponytail into there” was the right instruction, or if it would be better to sort of roll it up first or what. Still, overall I like it and will try it again after, like, looking up how to do it [now that I know what it is called].

Would you be interested in discussing a minor ethical dilemma? My mom and I talked about it for awhile this weekend, and we couldn’t come to any solution that seemed Good and Right. And yet it was a small enough issue that it was only interesting, not upsetting. That is, I am not suffused with doubt and anxiety over this; it’s more that I think it’s the kind of thing that brings up a lot of different interesting issues that could then later be applied to larger situations. My mom said it’s the kind of thing that would be in a book of discussion questions for groups, which is what made me think of doing the post.

Here is what happened: I took four of the kids to see a school play. The cost to get in was $3 per person, maximum $10 per family. As we approached the door (so, no time for thinking things over), one of Rob’s friends said (in a pleasant, charming voice), “Hey, can I be part of your family?” Meaning: Could he come in with our group and not pay his $3.

My assessment: Obviously that’s ethically wrong. But it would be extremely awkward to tell him no. And it’s minor, not major. Also, I’m a slow thinker and can’t figure this out.

I said yes. Then I felt a little conflicted about it, but not conflicted enough to do anything, though if I were I could put $3 in an envelope and mail it anonymously to the theater club, since that would at least patch up the money part. So far I’m not that worried about it, but might do it just because it would be pleasing and would remove the element of someone losing out on this situation.

One issue here is the division of ethical responsibility. Rob’s friend is the one who came up with the plan, and the one who involved someone else in a pressured situation, and the one who benefited from it; I paid the same amount of money either way. If anyone were to reimburse the theater club, it should be him. Which is another element that made it harder to say no: it cost me nothing, so it would have been nothing but ethical prissiness behind the no. But it also brings two more details into this: my role was accomplice (as opposed to primary ethics violator), and also it’s important to note that I don’t have authority over the behavior of the teenager involved.

On the other hand, my mom pointed out that one does not want to behave in front of a teenager (one’s own or another) as if such things are no big deal. But then we also agreed that acting in front of a teenager and his friends as if such things ARE a big deal can backfire. And, frankly, such things probably AREN’T such a big deal: this is probably on par with finding after you get home from the store that the cashier charged you for one $2 plastic plate when you bought two. Except since I was not oblivious in this case, it’s more like noticing that the clerk rang up one plate instead of two, but noticing it when it would be awkward and uncomfortable and some minor hassle to fix it (like, after putting my credit card through) and deciding not to. Or maybe it’s like if the clerk winked and rang up both plates as one. Yes, that’s a little better, because it captures the prissiness of response that would be required to Do The Right Thing, and that I’d be bossing/criticizing someone ELSE’S ethical behavior.

You could probably also factor in that for the same $10 the theater club would have let me bring in two more people: Paul and Henry. This doesn’t factor in directly (i.e., the obvious response is “Yes, but that’s because they’re in your family; this other kid was not”), and yet it does add another detail to consider.

So! Isn’t that kind of interesting? We kept circling back to, “Well, it WAS wrong, and I should have said no”—but then getting to “Yes, but then what would I have SAID? Like, what ACTUAL WORDS?” and the fact that it was not a huge deal and that it wasn’t fully my own ethical decision. Which is why it’s so good for thinking through: I DON’T wish in this case to go back in time to do it differently; even with time to think, I would make the same choice in this particular situation. But there could LATER be another situation where I DID consider it a big deal, and all this thinking-it-through NOW can help counteract my slow on-the-spot thinking.

Tonight I am watching The Breakfast Club. Allow me to remind you of the poster:

(photo from IMDB.com)

If this movie was one of the big influences of your teenager / young adult life, I have a question for you: Which boy from that movie was your favorite? I think we’re going to need a poll, though I do hope you’ll go into explanatory detail in the comments. (I was a Judd Nelson girl. The earring.)

[yop_poll id=”2″]

It is good, I guess, to get a periodic reminder that I didn’t do the wrong thing when I switched my major from elementary education to business. I have been VERY FRUSTRATED, because Henry’s teacher has asked me to work with him on his handwriting and I’m finding it…challenging.

I can see that he’s definitely having trouble with his writing: I’m saying, “Okay, now write a lowercase N!,” and he’s making a little hill with no stick, floating in the middle of the dotted-line area it’s supposed to be below. So I say, “No, remember it goes below the dotted line, and it’s a little stick first and THEN the little hill.” Meanwhile I’m thinking it would be super-useful if I knew the terms the TEACHER uses for these things. Maybe part of the issue is that she doesn’t say “little hill” and “little stick” and he has no idea what I’m talking about.

Though it seems like a bigger issue is that he doesn’t seem to have been taught to make his letters yet. I consider it my job to help with homework and reinforce skills (e.g., hold flash cards, practice spelling words, check math problems)—but that’s after the teacher has done her part, which is teaching the skills. If he’s making his O’s from the bottom and he doesn’t know a lowercase N has a little stick and he doesn’t know what the dotted line is for, then I’m not reviewing/reinforcing, I’m TEACHING. I’m not trained or qualified for that, AND IT SHOWS.

Let’s not pretend that “Just go talk to the teacher about it!” is an option here. What’s really going to happen is that I am going to keep working on this with him every day, and then next year he will have another teacher who will either teach him to write or will refer him for special services. He’s only in kindergarten, so I am not particularly worried about it. My main worry is not his writing, but that the teacher will think he’s bad at it because I’m not doing a good job teaching him.

I am having a long, slow, and mild freak-out about moving on to the next stage of life. Perhaps “freak-out” is the wrong word for something slow and mild.

Anyway, I was fretting about my fretting, and kind of SCOLDING myself about it—and then I realized I don’t actually have to do anything about it at all. Fretting about stages/aging is like fretting about breathing, or maybe more like being 30,000 feet up on a non-stop flight and fretting that I don’t really want to go there: it doesn’t matter if I’m mentally on-board or not, because I’m PHYSICALLY ON-BOARD.

I can fret all I like about not being ready or not wanting to go onto the next stage or not knowing what I’ll do when I get there, but it’s not like trying to make myself eat better or exercise more, where if I don’t take action nothing will happen. Assuming the plane doesn’t crash, I WILL continue to get older, and probably WILL start adding “Better than the alternative, har har!” every time I say it. Henry WILL go to first grade next year, and I WILL have a different way of living as a result of it. I WILL have to start paying for teenager car insurance and college educations; I WILL have to deal with the children dating, and bringing new people into the family whether I like them or not, and naming their children whatever they choose, and living wherever they want to live; I WILL have to see my face sliding down. Better than the alternative, har har!

The thing is, as with most other fretful situations, it’s not going to happen ALL AT ONCE, so I don’t need to WORRY about it all at once. When my babies were babies, I had a tendency to pre-freak-out about kindergarten and school bus issues and sleepovers (on one memorable occasion I cried over my 2-week-old baby, imagining him an old man in a neglectful nursing home)—but it worked pretty well to override that as much as possible with a Sufficient Unto the Day Is the Trouble Thereof concept, worrying instead about whether the baby ought to have better neck control by now, and are we almost out of diapers, and is this a tooth or an ear infection. That way, by the time it was actually TIME to worry about sleepovers, I was DONE worrying about diapers and teeth and rolling over and could concentrate JUST on sleepover fretting. No sense doubling up unnecessarily.

So in the same way, it would be silly to fret NOW about what kind of person Rob might marry and what that other person’s family might be like, when I’m already pretty busy worrying about his retainers and his high school course selection sheet. It’s not that thinking “I shouldn’t worry” STOPS me from worrying, but sometimes it lets me redirect the worry to CURRENT concerns.

Where was I? Didn’t I start out talking about aging? Young man, have you seen my purse?