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?

I got a haircut, and I told the stylist specifically what I wanted (“To grow it long, but wear it up”), and she said a blunt cut would be best for that. Then I told her that I also sometimes wanted to wear it down, and that I would prefer to have some layers, and that I didn’t mind if that meant having little pieces sproinging out of the updos. I reassured her about that several times: “I know it means little sproingies! I don’t mind! I LIKE little sproingies!” It turned out that I was wrong about that.

I think I was picturing that the sproingy pieces would be softly and charmingly disheveled-looking, but instead they just stick out everywhere in a bristly, non-romantic way, and keep me from making a smooth braid or twist. Luckily my stylist knows I don’t always know my own mind (it’s one of the reasons I am so loyal to her), and so she didn’t put in MUCH layering (just one long layer and some ends-choppiness) and she didn’t do MUCH tapering (just a few pieces). It’ll be easy to grow out.

But then I’ll have all-one-length hair, and it’ll look like a triangle when I wear it down. Dilemma. Well, there’s just no such thing as having hair that is BOTH of the opposite ways I want it, at the same time. This is how mullets came to be.

I did something really cool with it today (it would be cooler without the little pieces sticking out) (BYGONES), but then got extremely frustrated trying to get a picture of it.

First there were twenty pictures like these first three, as I tried to hold the camera behind my head:

(You see what I mean about the unromantic sproings?)

Maybe it would be better to take the picture in the mirror, so I could get farther away?:

Nope.

Nope.

Hope rises! This is getting better!

Nope.

Okay, just…never mind. I’ll TELL you about it. It’s one of those two-strand twist things, but I started it over one ear, and then did it over the top of my head and around to the back. Then I put the last bits in a bun that ought to look charmingly disheveled but instead looks like a wad of hair-ends. (IT’LL BE EASY TO GROW OUT.)

I often wish we’d get an EARLIER heads-up from school about things that will be needed. The twins’ classes are making bird-nest bags at school, and so we got a note home from the teacher saying each child needs to bring in a net bag (like the kind that has onions or apples in it) by next week, and to please send in extra bags if we have them. If I’d known this, say, a month ago, I could have been saving bags and/or looking for alternative sources for them. As it is, I had to go out and buy two bags of overpriced apples just to harvest the bags.

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I read The Road, and I was very nervous the whole time because I remembered reading something someone wrote about it that convinced me it was not a good book for me to read even though I like apocalyptic fiction, but I couldn’t remember what it was they said. It was okay, though.

I wouldn’t recommend it, however, mostly because it destroyed the Fun Apocalypse Thoughts I have sometimes, like when I stock up on peanut butter or when I buy a hand-crank radio. Now I realize it wouldn’t matter if I were prepared for a genuine emergency or not, because someone stronger and meaner would come and take everything I had within microseconds.

Also, I was confusing it with On the Road, so I was thinking it was a Famous Old American Classic I Really Ought to Read for Cultural Literacy. But actually it’s from 2006 and it’s an Oprah’s Book Club pick—a category I’ve learned through bitter experience to avoid.

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Have you tried DeKuyper’s hot cinnamon schnapps? It has a Swear Word in the name, which I won’t put here since I’m ALREADY getting blocked by some workplaces. I bought it on a whim, and Paul and I tried it, and we both liked it. Paul said it’s like someone took huge handfuls of red hots and melted them into a bottle of vodka, and I was too busy coughing to do more than nod my agreement.

I am not feeling at home here on the new blog. At our house, we refer to this particular feeling as “not knowing where the toothbrushes are.” The phrase comes from when Paul and I had just moved to a new state and town, and we discovered we’d left our toothbrushes behind at the last motel. We went to a drug store to buy some replacements, and I started crying in the store because I couldn’t find the toothbrush aisle—and not being able to find something so normal and simple seemed to symbolize all the new things we were going to have to figure out. I like things to be FAMILIAR.

The only way to make this familiar is to keep using it, though, so here I am. Let’s think of something to talk about. Rob got his braces off and is signing up for high school stuff for next year. William got several C’s on his report card and seems to have lost his trumpet (I say “seems” because he also lost his new expensive down winter coat, and then it turned up two weeks after I’d given up all hope). Elizabeth went to her first sleepover and it went great. Edward has been put in a weekly lunchtime group with the school counselor, and when I saw him at a birthday party with his peers I felt unpleasantly sure that it was a very good idea. Henry has got to be enrolled in something this summer or I’m not going to make it. I think I got my first grey hair, but maybe it was just one that got extra bleached by highlighting conditioner. I did our taxes with tax software today, but it’s saying they can’t be filed yet because the forms haven’t been updated yet, even though the website says all forms are now available. I still can’t get my profile to show up at upper right where it’s supposed to. I took down a curtain we put up in the kitchen when we moved into this house, and I laundered it and it completely fell apart.

Also, I bought myself a Webkinz. Elizabeth has one, as did Rob and William before her, and it looked like fun, and I kept being jealous that she was getting to choose decor and clothes and so forth, and so in an impulsive mood I bought one for myself. I have not regretted it. It’s fun. I got the fox, but he was $9 when I bought him, not $20 as he appears to be now. If you’re not picky about the type of animal, you can get one for way cheaper (around $5 at time of typing: golden retriever, moose, Siamese cat, lamb, pig, frog, polar bear, and about a million others)—and the animal itself isn’t really the point, the point is the games and decorating, and the novelty of buying a toy for oneself at such an advanced age. (Plus, the children were impressed.)

[This is all that was in my drafts folder. Just the title.]

[Here’s another one from the drafts file. After I wrote it, I thought, “I’ll bet someone else has already done this, and better.” So I was going to look around and find out. Then I lost the energy for that. Then I thought, “If I had to check everything I wrote to see if someone else had already said it, I’d never hit publish on ANYTHING, because EVERYTHING has already been said.” So here it is.]

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I am thinking of writing a new series of more realistic children’s books:

– If You Can Dream It, You Are Among Many Others Dreaming the Same Thing, and Only a Few of You Will Do It So It Would Be Sensible to Have a Backup Plan, Maybe Something Like Business or Computers

– The Little Engine Who Could, Because Luckily His Design and Physical Components Met Those Specifications

– The Little Engine Who Couldn’t, Because Despite His Constant Repetitions of “I Think I Can,” It Turned Out Those Words Were Not Some Sort Magical Spell Capable of Overriding His Design and Physical Components

– You Can Be Anything You Have Been Born and Trained and Motivated and Had the Opportunity to Be!

– SOMEONE Has to Do the Jobs That Are Less Fun, Rich, and Glamorous, and I Don’t See Any Reason It Shouldn’t Be You

– All That Talk About Everyone Being Special and Unique and Bound for Greatness Can Be Filed With the Whole Santa Claus Thing. Oh, Oops, Didn’t I Tell You About Santa Claus Yet?

– In This Economy, I’d Keep in Mind That We Always Need People Who Work With Pain and Death

– You are Not the Only One Dreaming of Being a Singer, an Author, or an Astronaut

– Believing and Dreaming Don’t Actually Do Anything, So Get Good Grades and Maybe Take Some Extracurriculars

– What, Do You Think People DREAM of Some of These Other Jobs?

[It turns out that if you’re taking a blog from Blogger to WordPress using the WordPress import thing, all your drafts get published. So I’m going through 250 drafts to see if anything is worth saving before I delete. Short answer: no.

But I kind of liked this one that I wrote after a former male classmate on Facebook made me angry with some comments I didn’t feel like I should respond to, right after a former female classmate activated my empathy center. At the time, I decided not to publish it because it makes such sweeping generalizations: clearly not all guys are casual about it, and clearly not all girls are being sensible about it: it was just these two individuals I was thinking of. But I feel pissy about it anyway.]

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I am feeling a bit pissy this evening about how my former MALE classmates are in no danger of running out of chances for little heirs, while my FEMALE classmates are counting years and panicking.

It is making me feel further pissy that some of the males in question seem to have a “I stuck a piece of myself into someone and look what accidentally happened!” attitude about the whole thing, whereas the females are taking folic acid just in case and carefully looking for a quality, intelligent person of good genes and good character who will be a good co-parent and good co-provider. A crappy lack-o’-plan appears to be succeeding, genetically speaking, while a good and sensible plan seems to be tanking.

WHERE FAIRNESS HERE? It is an extremely pissy situation.

I tried another of the appetizer recipes for a get-together and I am ready to make a report! This time I tried Emily‘s party bread, which a friend of hers posted about here.

I was worried because the party was 15 minutes away; I could have done the second heat-up at her house, but I felt nervous about that and preferred not to, so I took the bread directly from the oven, put it into a bag, and ran from the house. It was just fine for the party: not piping hot, but still plenty warm. If I keep going to these get-togethers, I might buy some sort of insulated transportation bag.

Next time I’ll bake it longer: the cheese in the middle hadn’t melted. But the edges were great. People kept going back and picking at it more. There were about seven of us there, I think, and we ate about half the loaf—and that was with six other appetizers to choose from. It seems like it would be a nice flexible recipe that could handle a bunch of different kinds of seasonings. I’ve added the recipe to my recipe box.

********

Okay, so what I really want to talk about is that these get-togethers are getting me all agitated, and I don’t know if it’s good or bad. It’s really hard to tell the difference between “Getting outside your comfort zone! good for emotional stretching and growth! relationship/community-building! change of pace! social needs! wheeeee!” and “This is not a good fit for me, and is resulting in distress and agitation instead of the good things that might be experienced by a different person.”

And sometimes in a situation there might be the additional issue of telling the difference between “Not everyone is going to get along with everyone, and one of the benefits of a group is that it’s good for us to have experience dealing with people we wouldn’t have chosen and/or people who have different views on a subject” and “Yes, and that can be true of dealing with the rest of the people in the group because they also have upsides, but this particular person is a humorless, strident, pushy, aggressive, oblivious ASS, and contact with her should be severely limited, and she ruins the entire event so maybe these alleged group benefits should be experienced with a DIFFERENT GROUP.”

…Okay, just typing that out was a big help. I think I will continue to get all RILED: it’s not only a matter of there being one person I find challenging, it’s even MORE an issue of general overstimulation (TONS OF PEOPLE! TONS OF TOPICS!), plus all the usual party issues of “Did I talk too much/little, was I boring, did I say something I shouldn’t have, did I keep killing the conversation, was I too quiet/loud?” But overall, and for now, I want to keep going anyway.

Plus there’s this issue: if she’s so awful, why is she still in the group? Maybe I’m the only one who finds her insufferable. Maybe everyone else finds her sufferable.

And even with the insuffering, the good outweighs the bad. Just for starters, these are the moms of kids in Rob’s grade. EXCELLENT INSIDER INFO AND NOTE-COMPARING. And also I do like THEM. And perhaps I will learn some tips on how to deal with the particular sort of person I mentioned, since there seems to be no world shortage.

I also noticed two other things that lead me to wonder if a Difficult Person can actually enhance a group:

1. You know that thing about friendships being based on shared dislikes? Another guest and I made a huge leap in friendship over one single “o.O” facial expression.

2. I noticed that the one strident person’s strident views seemed to make everyone else more open to the concept of assorted views. Like, a conversation might be getting a little intense and divided—but then Stridentella lets loose with her views, and suddenly everyone else is saying things like “Well, different choices make sense for different families.” It’s like she shows us a caricature of how our own views were shaping up, and that makes us all want to back away from that.

You know what’s incredibly frustrating to launder? Anything filled with down. It floats like a duck. Water rolls off it like….water…off a duck’s…. I think I see the problem. But how to get our down jackets clean, then? Mine is aqua and it might as well be white for how clean it stays, and Henry’s is dark blue but he has nevertheless managed with effort and ingenuity to make the dirt really represent.

I looked around online for awhile, but got frustrated by all the non-answer answers all written in the same format (paragraph about the benefits of down! paragraph asking the question about washing! paragraph failing to resolve the issue! paragraph congratulating ourselves on resolving the issue!) and gave up. How would a person go about washing a DUCK, is perhaps the question we should be asking.

Right now I have the coats floating on top of the water in the washing machine (“soaking”), and periodically I go shove them under the water in frustration, and that is going to have to be good enough.