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)

I have been feeling a little thinner lately, and wondered if I was slimming down a bit without realizing. I started working it a little, even, feeling extra cute and doing a little more sashaying. I finally checked the scale yesterday morning, and I’m up five pounds. Now I feel plumper. I’ve had the opposite experience, too: feeling really dumpy, SURE I’ve gained at LEAST five pounds—and then I weigh, and I’m actually down five pounds, and then I feel like I can DEFINITELY tell I’m thinner.

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We rearranged our kitchen a bit, and now we have a little more counter space but also my coffee maker is more difficult to get to. This morning I was wondering why I have felt SO tired and draggy and motivationless recently—and then I realized I haven’t had coffee for three or four days, not since we rearranged things. That slight change in coffee pot location made me (1) stop drinking coffee and (2) not realize it.

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I have made a mental note: if I am ever in charge of a group of volunteers, I am not going to spin the volunteer tasks as “FUN!!!” and “EXCITING!!” It gives me flashbacks to teachers in school instructing us to “Have FUN” with an assignment. “Just PLAY with it! Have FUN with it!” No. This is not fun. Let’s add the word fun with our vocabulary list, since not all of us here seem to understand the definition. And yet I find myself tempted to say the same thing when helping one of the kids with an assignment: “Just PLAY with it a little! Make it more FUN! Don’t make it into such a GRUELING TASK!” Nice. That’ll work.

A more recent example is a volunteer “opportunity” I am participating in. I signed up for this on purpose; I am glad to help out for free with the work that needs to be done. But it is WORK. It is NOT FUN. It is CERTAINLY not “The Great [Type of Work] Adventure of 2012!!!” as the PTA officer is currently referring to it, in what I always assume is a voice that could be described as “chirpy.” It’s all email, so I don’t know for sure. Maybe she’s using more of a Daria voice. Maybe I could READ it in a Daria voice to improve it.

Acting as if the work is fun diminishes the contribution people are making. I am doing WORK, and I want CREDIT for doing work. I don’t want anyone pretending that this is a PARTY and that we are ENJOYING ourselves. I find elements of it satisfying or else I wouldn’t do it, but I would never, ever, ever do this for fun. I do this to be HELPFUL and to DO MY SHARE. I am not PLAYING, I am BEING A GOOD CITIZEN.

Acting as if it’s fun seems to be intended to make it fun, or to lighten the attitude. Instead, it becrappens the attitude: if someone tells me what a grand fun adventure this is, I find myself noticing how non-fun it in fact is, and wanting to point that out to them. If someone instead thanks me fervently for all this hard work I’m doing, I would find myself saying no, no, I didn’t mind at all! It was fun! See? Attitude improvement! …And kind of an argumentative personality, apparently, but WHATEVER. No more chirping about how work is fun, is the point here.

I would like to nominate a candidate in the “Ugliest Nailpolish” category:

I’m not sure even this ugly photo lets you appreciate just how ugly it was. Maybe another photo is needed, a super close-up:

That’s still not QUITE expressing it. I’m not even sorry I didn’t do a good job staying in the lines, because I think the bits on the skin give a better feeling for what the color looked like. Nauseating yellow-greenish brown, with chunks. It felt like it ought to come as part of a Halloween costume. A zombie, maybe. Something decaying and dirty.

It’s Revlon Nail Art Moon Candy in Cosmic, and I’m so happy I got it on clearance instead of paying full-price:

It’s two attached bottles. First you’re supposed to put on two coats of what looks in the bottle like a nice dark green but is in fact a streaky algae/mud combination. As I was doing that, I was thinking, “Wow, I wonder how the topcoat is going to transform THIS?”

Then you put on the top coat, which looks like it’s going to be a glorious gold with cool shimmery iridescent bits, but in fact ends up adding a “pee” element to the color, as well as being more litter than glitter.

I took the pictures quickly, so I could remove the polish right away—and I NEVER take polish off immediately, even if I think it’s meh, because it’s discouraging to waste all that work. But I wanted this OFF MY NAILS. (I didn’t even wait to take the picture of the bottle, figuring I could do that later; you can see the edge of my thumbnail, which is now a much nicer medium green.)

It was fun to show the kids, though. I was like, “Look at my nails!” and each in turn said “EEEEEEWWWWWWWW GROSS!!”

I had to drive a little bit yesterday evening, and some of the “grateful to be alive” feeling persists even unto this morning.

I drive in the dark only a few times a year. Part of it is that I don’t like to. Part of it is that I don’t need to: we’re pretty much always in for the night after the dinner/bedtime routine starts (at, like, 4:30).

I feel like I can’t SEE when I drive at night. Part of this is that I’m a nervous driver, so any changes (different roads, different passenger, different weather, etc.) increases that nervousness. Part of it is that IT IS IN FACT DARK, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but WE CAN’T SEE IN THE DARK. And then, while it’s dark and I’m driving, lights shine intermittently into my eyes. That DOES NOT HELP.

I feel a little emperor’s-new-clothes about it: like, how come everyone is acting like it’s okay to do this already-dangerous activity IN THE DARK? Shall we also now have surgery in the dark? chop wood in the dark? scythe hay in the dark? get haircuts in the dark? rapidly cut vegetables in the dark? How about in the dark AND with bright lights shining intermittently in our eyes?

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I bought four Cadbury screme eggs, and I have not eaten a single one: the stuff inside the eggs is green for Halloween, and that makes me queasy to even think about. (If the regular white filling makes YOU queasy to think about, I beg you not to explain why.) And yet I WANT to eat Cadbury eggs! What a treat to get to have them even though it’s not Easter! I WANT to eat them! Maybe I should eat them in the dark. (And here, shine this light in my eyes.)

We were out shopping and Rob saw a shirt he wanted at Target: it had a picture of a bird wearing a pocket protector and glasses, with “NIRD” under it. He wanted it quite badly, and I liked it too, and I said I’d keep an eye out for it to go on sale as those graphic tees routinely do. He countered by saying he really really really wanted it today, and I countered with huh. He countered with a dismissive remark about the skimpy amount of money saved by a sale, and I countered with the suggestion that when he was handling a household’s finances he could decide for himself whether sales were worth it or not. This was fun banter, not tense teenager-wrangling—but he really did want the shirt, and I was losing interest in the conversation and starting to walk out of the department.

As an aside, Rob’s clothes now need to be purchased from the men’s department. The MEN’S DEPARTMENT. I don’t think I’d ever really pictured myself shopping in that department for my children’s clothes. I guess I thought the kid sizes went…all the way up? or something? But no. MEN’S DEPARTMENT. (Why doesn’t spellchecker like “men’s”? Does spellchecker assume I can’t possibly be shopping for my child in the men’s department and want me to change it to “boys’ department”?)

Anyway, Rob then asked what I expected the shirt to go on sale for, and I said probably eight dollars. He asked if we could buy it today if he paid the two dollars that separated the full price from the sale price, and I said yes, and he bounded back to get the shirt and then spiked it happily into the cart. I reiterated that if he would just WAIT he could have it SOON without having to pay ANYthing, and he said cheerfully that he didn’t care, it was an awesome shirt and it was worth it to get it today.

It was a very happy transaction, including the part where we got home and he remembered on his own to get the two dollars and give them to me. The whole thing reminded me of the good parts of my own teenagerhood; I remember being pleased with the logic of “I can have the shoes I want if I pay the difference between the ones my parents would have bought and the ones I’d prefer.” Some of my friends’ parents would have gotten this wrong, saying that the child would have to pay the full price of the preferred shoes, rather than just the difference—which made it even more satisfying to be in a household where it was Right.

The cat situation at our house is going SO WELL.

I haven’t written much about the cats for awhile, because it seemed like it was Always Bad News. First the three cats we’d had since before we were married dropped off one by one, and none of them died quietly in their sleep, either: it was Issues and Decisions, one after another. One with congestive heart failure plus kidney failure, with a Decision About When to Make The Appointment. One with weight loss and peeing all over the house and finally a tumor, again with a Decision. And the third hit by a car, and a shattered unsaveable leg, and an unexpectedly sudden Decision involving the kind of equations a person does with a 16-year-old indoor/outdoor cat and a multiple-thousands-of-dollars procedure that would result in the cat being restricted to indoors.

All three of those happened over about a year, which made sense because all three cats were about the same age, but it was stressful.

Overlapping and interweaving with that, we adopted three new cats, NONE OF WHOM WE NOW HAVE. One didn’t get along with other cats, and eventually we brought her back to the shelter. The other two were hit by cars and killed. I felt like we spent a lot of time at the shelter, and that the shelter was going to start thinking we were not good adoption risks—and that we really WEREN’T. I was getting really discouraged: I just wanted to HAVE CATS. Why was this SO HARD?

So when we adopted two new cats (aiming for adult, mild-personality cats who were already indoor-only and had lived well in the past with other cats and children), I mentioned them here but then stopped mentioning them, because probably we were looking at another failure: the orange one was relentlessly chasing and scaring the grey-and-white one; the grey-and-white one was so skittery and scared, I worried he couldn’t be happy in our noisy house: we kept not being able to find him because he was hiding. I talked to the vet; we started using a spritz bottle on the orange one and various feral-cat-socializing techniques on the grey-and-white one—but I felt like we were dooooooomed just like before: the cats would never get along, and any replacement cats we got wouldn’t work out any better, and we weren’t going to have a plain “household with cats” EVER AGAIN.

But they get along now! They’re not snuggling up, but we notice they tend to do a lot of things together: they’ll go to their food dishes at the same time, or they’ll both be on the cat palace at the same time, or I’ll get out of the shower and they’ll both be standing on the sink. They tussle a little, but not excessively, and sometimes it’s the grey-and-white one who starts it. The grey-and-white one is still a bit skittish, and still sometimes runs from us, but much much much less—and he purrs when petted/held, and he doesn’t hide. We were able to go from multiple litter boxes down to one large shared one. They’re staying indoors and not trying to get outdoors! They sleep on the bed sometimes but not oppressively! They don’t mind if the kids pick them up! And the orange one has jumped up on my lap SEVERAL TIMES in the last week or so! They’re being GREAT CATS. They’re being HAPPY cats.

I am feeling cranky, because I took Henry to the dentist and it cost $155. No cavities, no x-rays, just a totally routine check. The dentist poked his teeth, the hygienist brushed and flossed them and did a 1-minute paint-on fluoride treatment, and it was $155.

The fluoride treatment alone was $38. That’s the same price I’d pay for 950 daily chewable fluoride tablets (generic, without insurance), so HOW CAN THAT BE? The fluoride came in a little plastic ketchup packet and was painted on with a little paintbrush.

And this wasn’t some sort of super-extra-special dentist—not a pediatric-specialist dentist, or a dentist with lots of child-distracting stuff or TVs or whatever. Just a regular family dentist.

HOW CAN ANYONE BE EXPECTED TO ROUTINELY AND UNBLINKINGLY PAY THIS TWICE A YEAR PER MEMBER OF THE FAMILY? PLUS EXTRA FOR X-RAYS AND FILLINGS AND SO FORTH???

Ahem.

Also, may I suggest that while charging $46 for seriously under a minute of tooth-examining, the dentist not mention his children are taking horseback-riding lessons? I realize even the children of regular-earning people sometimes take horseback-riding lessons, and that the dentist might very well send his children to such lessons even if he were, say, a teacher or a Target clerk instead of a dentist—but it is an unfortunately expensive hobby to bring to my mind at a moment when I am wondering WHY ON EARTH DENTISTRY COSTS SO MUCH.

I started my Gift Card Plan today! One down, twelve more to go! I got the same pretty butterfly as last  year, because they don’t have the Generic Holiday ones out yet. I’ll switch to snowmen or something at that point.

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You know what’s kind of challenging? Maintaining the parental philosophy of “The two of us are a united front” when a teenager is confiding agreement with me, against his dad, on something I disagree with his dad about. STRENGTH OF CHARACTER NEEDED, PLZ PROVIDE KTHANX.

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The rock tumbler is going to have to come to a Negotiation Stage soon, if the fad doesn’t pass off on its own. Here is exactly what it sounds like at 2:00 a.m.: “*someone sawing through a screen* *someone creaking up the stairs*”

THIS CANNOT CONTINUE.

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I watched The Lives of Others (Netflix link) last night, and may I not-recommend it to you? Except that it’s a really GOOD movie if it’s your style. This would be your style, if this movie was for you: Depressing and scary movies that show how bad things can get with a government and with the actions of the citizens under that kind of government—and it makes you believe it could easily happen in your own country, and that you wouldn’t be able to do anything to prevent it from happening. To YOU PERSONALLY in REAL LIFE. But it’s really well-cast and well-acted and probably gives a really good view of what that kind of life is like, because you really understand why all the characters behave the way they do. But OH GOD, SUICIDE SOUNDS LIKE SUCH A GOOD OPTION RIGHT NOW.

If that’s your movie style, I recommend it to you heartily! It was very…thought-provoking! (The thoughts were of despair and suicide.)

I DO appreciate that the schools do Fire Safety Week. I DO appreciate that they make homework out of it, forcing me to talk to the children about where to meet up, how to break a window, where to wait for the firefighter if they can’t get out of their rooms and we can’t get to them, how to keep low to inhale less smoke, and so forth.

But I DO wish they’d give us a heads up, so I could make sure beforehand that there was sufficient liquor in the house.