I am going to tell you an appalling story with, as far as I can see, very little hope of any good ending, and I will hope against hope that this is like the time I could not find my new kitten anywhere, and I told the internet and the internet said “One time I found my new kitten asleep in a closed drawer,” and I thought, “Psh, there is no way!”—but I opened a closed drawer, and there was my kitten, asleep.

Here is the story.

The housecleaners came today. Our usual cleaner (who seems to own the business, which may or may not be a formal business) (we did not hire her ourselves; we were passed on to her by our previous cleaner, who quit the business; this is why I am so vague/uninformed) is out for medical reasons, so she sent her helper plus a relative she said she had used as a helper before.

When I got home, on the kitchen counter was a plastic bag containing some miscellaneous items, one of which was Edward’s brand new driver’s license, so I left it on the counter to ask him about. When he got home and saw the bag, he went running upstairs. He came back down to say that those items were the contents of a box in which he keeps his money, and the box was gone. He’d had approximately $300 in the box. He knows it was in there as recently as yesterday, because he took some out to buy something.

(Edited to add: the plastic bag in question was…out of the trash. It was a packaging bag we’d thrown away in the laundry room which, to be fair, is 99% dryer filter fluff, so pretty clean.)

We went out to the garage, where the cleaners always leave a bag of trash. We searched the bag of trash; no money. We found the cardboard box Edward had been using as a bank—not in the trash, but sitting with the cardboard. No money in it.

Here is the thing: There is no universe in which the cleaners would open a cardboard box, take out the things inside, put them in a plastic bag on the counter, and put the box out with the recycling. And it’s not, like, a tattered shipping box with flaps flapping open: it’s cardboard, but it’s small and tidy, and the lid is attached to one edge and closes neatly, with little side flaps that tuck into side sockets.

Another thing: There is no universe in which anyone who stole money would carefully draw attention to that by putting the OTHER items from the money box on the kitchen counter, and leaving the empty box visibly in the garage.

Another thing: It is my understanding that hearing “Um, hey, some money is missing” is way up there at the top of the list of Housecleaner Nightmares. I don’t see how I can even ASK. Or rather: if I have to ask, it seems like I am at the point where I am ending my relationship with the housecleaners—or they are going to end their relationship with me, because I have accused them of something, and they can’t keep working for me after that. Or if they do keep working for me, their heart will be flattened and all the joy/satisfaction of the work will be gone, which is how I would feel in that situation.

The impossibility of any situation in which they took the money is leading me to reach wider and wider with my theories of how the money could be gone. For example, I asked Edward was there ANY CHANCE AT ALL that he had recently moved the money. (But…even if there were no money in the box, they would not have taken the items out of the box and put them into a bag and disposed of the box!)

We have looked anywhere that immediately came to mind, and Edward is continuing to look obsessively in places the money just CAN’T be (the housecleaners would not have taken money out of a box and put it in his bottom bureau drawer), but I understand the impulse. We have a large jar of coins in our bedroom; I looked there. I looked on our desks, and on the bureaus in our room, in case a cleaner thought “Whoa, this money shouldn’t just be sitting in a cardboard box.” I looked on the counter where they’d put the bag. I looked in the bag. I’m not finding it anywhere.

I checked my texts and messages, just in case there might be an explanation there. Nothing. After I post this, I am going to go back to roaming futilely around the house, trying to think of anywhere at all the money could accidentally be. (I also think there is a small chance of hearing from someone: it could possibly be that neither cleaner speaks English, and that something has happened that they will tell our usual cleaner, who will then contact us, and that they specifically left the items on the counter as a sign that a story would be forthcoming. But…the box is undamaged.)

Also, it is worth noting that the language barrier involved is considerable: two Christmases ago, I left them the usual check and also a cash tip for each of them inside holiday cards, and they never cashed the check, but refused to take a replacement check because they said they HAD cashed the check (they had not), and so the only conclusion I could come to is that they thought their divided-into-holiday-cards Christmas cash was the payment? or something? and just recorded it as “paid” without keeping track of whether it was cash or check? and, coincidentally, lost the check for the first time ever? It all seemed impossible—and on that occasion, the impossible situation was against their own interests.

[Edited to add:] I have had another terrible thought. William lost a bag of Christmas/birthday cash and gift cards earlier this year. I completely assumed he had misplaced it. I told him that the ONE thing I knew could NOT have happened was the cleaners taking it. I told him I was CERTAIN it would show up among his things. But when our housecleaner mentioned we would be having a sub, she said it was the same sub we had this summer while our housecleaner was on vacation. I don’t remember, unfortunately, when exactly the bag of cash and gift cards disappeared, but our cleaners started back in May. I have a sick sinking feeling that yesterday’s situation is not the first time, and may not even have been the second time. And I don’t think I can have any housecleaners in the house anymore.

I am feeling good right now because I took my Christmas-Card Photo Fretting, plus your input/advice, plus a rare moment of calm motivation, and I butter-churned it all into ORDERING COLLAGE PHOTOS THAT WILL BE HERE NEXT WEEK.

I went into it thinking I wouldn’t necessarily CHOOSE anything, just sort of play around with some sample photos to get an idea of what my options were. I combined that with an attitude of “Who really cares? No one, that’s who!” and also an attitude of “Don’t spend too much time on this: just sort of PICK some photos and be done with it.” I didn’t worry about whether I’d already posted that photo on Facebook so everyone’s already seen it, or whether it was the BEST or MOST REPRESENTATIVE photo of each child, or whether the photos were cropped/color-corrected ideally, or whether each child was in the exact same number of photos. And I know I talk a lot of smack about Walllmart, and I intend to CONTINUE to talk smack about Walllmart because there are many levels on which they fully deserve it—but I will give credit where credit is due, and in my opinion their photo-collage-designing-and-ordering process is easy and good and well-priced.

Normally we take a photo at Thanksgiving, along with what is apparently the entire rest of the country, because it is not uncommon for me to place the order and have a delivery estimate of mid-or-later December, as I panic about getting the photos into the cards and still having time for the cards to arrive before Christmas. So having the photos instead arriving in early November feels like a COOL BREEZE—especially THIS year when concerns are already ramping up about shipping delays, and LAST year cards were already taking weirdly long amounts of time to travel, and that pinehat in charge of the USPS has only done more damage since then.

So now my NEXT task is to haul out the Christmas cards and see if I have enough scraps left over from previous years or if I need to buy some more, and then I am ACTUALLY GOING TO ADDRESS AND SEND MY FEW INTERNATIONAL CARDS ON TIME THIS YEAR!!!! ONE DREAM LEADS TO ANOTHER, BABY!!!

I have a book to recommend, especially if you and/or someone on your holiday shopping list is into sci-fi / speculative fiction of the sort NOT written by middle-aged mid-century heterosexual white men:

The Space Between Worlds, by Micaiah Johnson (Target link) (Amazon link)

I am pretty sure I read about this book on one of the blogs I follow, but can I figure out which one? Can I hell! So if it was you, give a little wave and I will link to your post [found it! reviewed by Shelf Love], because it got me to add the book to my library list, and it turns out it is just EXACTLY my thing. It is one of those plots where there are a bunch of different parallel Earths, with a version of each of us on each Earth. Travel between Earths is possible—but only if your equivalent is no longer alive on the Earth you travel to. Which ends up meaning that educated/advantaged/well-off people are not able to travel. Our protagonist is someone who has been born into such disadvantaged circumstances that she has died on almost every Earth.

This was a book I kept wanting to get back to, and kept thinking about. There were a few good twists/reveals of the kind that left me blinking as I brought the new information on board. I am very much hoping for a sequel—and/or for anything else by this author.

This reminds me to report on a couple of other books. First:

Anxious People, by Fredrik Backman (Target link) (Amazon link)

I went into this fully expecting to take a long time to warm up to it: A Man Called Ove and Britt-Marie Was Here both started, as I remember, with a thoroughly unlikely character doing cringingly unlikeable things, in a way that made me think I did not want to read ANYTHING MORE about them, before evolving gradually into books/characters that made me weep with love. So I was BRACED, but I was not sufficiently braced. There is a series of interviews, and each of the interviews is so MADDENING, and each person being interviewed is so MADDENING, that I don’t know why I kept reading as long as I did. But I did, and I felt it was well worth it. But I would not put this on a gift-recommendations list, I would put it on your library list.

Next:

Early Morning Riser, by Katherine Heiny (Target link) (Amazon link)

(It seems weird to me that, at time of posting, all of these hardcovers are less expensive than the paperbacks. It makes me want to buy a stack of hardcovers.)

Several years ago I read Katherine Heiny’s book Single, Carefree, Mellow and LOVED it. And what’s funny is, I had the exact same thing happen with Early Morning Riser as with Single, Carefree, Mellow: I saw it at the library, found the cover appealing, read the book flap, rejected it; and then someone else recommended it (in this case Nicole) (HI NICOLE) and I thought “FINE I WILL TRY IT”—and I got it from the library and I loved it. LOVED it. Wished it would not end.

It’s a little hard to say what it’s about without making it sound boring. It’s kind of about ordinary life, but also there are plenty of unusual things, and there is a protagonist who takes them in stride in a way I aspire to—like how I aspire to being a brilliant trial lawyer, or Julia Sugarbaker: no hope, only aspiration. Now I’m reading Standard Deviation, and so far, so good.

I am especially excited about Christmas this year, and strangely early. I hope this doesn’t mean I will be sick of it by Thanksgiving. For now I am going right ahead and enjoying the anticipation: I am not on board with the “one holiday at a time” philosophy, especially with holidays that are packed closely together. I can still fully enjoy autumn and Halloween and Thanksgiving while enjoying thinking about Christmas—and besides, waiting until after Thanksgiving to do anything about Christmas seems like the kind of thing a person can do when all that person has on their Christmas to-do list is “shop for my spouse, who takes care of LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE, INCLUDING THE GIFTS FOR MY FAMILY, NOT THAT MY SPOUSE IS AT ALL BITTER ABOUT IT.”

I am finding it charming that I am clearly not alone in my pre-Christmas-anticipation enjoyment: every day at the library there are Christmas books/movies on the requests list, and Christmas books/movies on my re-shelving cart. There are a whole bunch of Christmas-themed romance novels and Christmas-themed Hallmark movies, in case you didn’t know that, and those are crossing my shelving cart with increased frequency. Someone took out a book of Christmas cookie recipes and then returned it, and I’m curious to know which ones they tried. A book about simplifying Christmas caught my eye when someone requested it; when it came back I considered checking it out myself, but I leafed through it quickly and saw it was basically an online clickbait article turned into a book: no ideas we haven’t already thought of ourselves.

Right now my favorite things to anticipate are:

• Christmas lights
• Christmas cards/photos/stamps/stickers
• Christmas wrapping paper (I used the last scraps last year)
• Advent / Countdown-to-Christmas calendars
• Christmas breakfast
• Christmas specials on Love Nikki Dress Up Queen (phone game of my heart)
• Christmas mugs

Also, I have a shopping mission: I’d like to purchase a new musical snowglobe to replace the one I accidentally stored in the unheated barn the first year we moved here, when I was not remembering that there was water-encased-in-glass among my Christmas decorations.

In case we are not acquainted on Twitter, I will mention here that SEE’S CANDIES HAS PUT OUT AN ADVENT CALENDAR FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER. I have ordered one. I thought about delaying the order until we were closer to Christmas, for freshness reasons, but (1) I was very worried it would sell out and (2) my guess is that they manufactured all the calendars at once, so it doesn’t matter when I get mine.

Have I already fretted here about the Christmas card photo? I tried to search for it in the archives, but I have fretted about Christmas card photos so often over the years, it makes the search difficult. Every year I take at least a picture of the kids; in recent years, as they’ve gotten older, I’ve had the energy to try for a photo that includes Paul and me as well. Last year I was too overwhelmed to face it at all, and then panicked at the last minute about skipping it and ended up putting together a two-photo collage of the photos Paul and I took from our ends of the Thanksgiving table, and that was a very satisfying last-minute solution. What I’m saying is that I do not require a GOOD photo.

But this year, Rob will not be home until Christmas. So there will not be time to take a photo with all seven of us / all five of the kids. And I am having trouble figuring out how to transition to this new stage—because it IS a new stage! Isn’t it! Because Rob will GRADUATE COLLEGE this spring, and then WHO KNOWS where he will be living, but he is clearly not going to keep coming home to pose for the family Christmas card picture! Is he! I do not travel to my parents’ house each year with my brother to be in THEIR Christmas card picture!

But what about the years between “all five kids still at least technically live at home and are in the photo” and “none of the five kids live at home and we start taking photos that are just Paul and me and, like, our dog, for whom we select a new holiday outfit each year”? Does it seem weird to send out a photo of us and four kids, as if Rob is no longer in the family, or does that seem absolutely normal and is exactly what you’d expect? Maybe we are now at the stage where we only send out a photo on the years when we’ve had a family get-together and have a photo from it. Maybe instead of taking a photo around Thanksgiving, we use a photo from any time the previous year when we were all together. Maybe I only do collage photos now, so we don’t all have to be together. That last one is probably my favorite idea for this year, since I didn’t think ahead and so I didn’t get a photo when we were all together this summer. And also, Elizabeth got a buzz cut, so she looks very different than she did this summer anyway.

This morning I would like to talk about the phenomenon of feeling cute vs. not feeling cute, and I would like to give you the heads-up that this post will be simply LITTERED with unhelpful/unhealthy attitudes about appearance and so forth, in case this is not a day where you feel up to that. I thought about not even posting it at all, but I kept thinking about it, and also sometimes it is good to discuss the unenlightened ways we may feel about things despite all the careful striving towards having a different/better attitude.

Recently, after a rather long stretch of feeling Quite Cute, I have suddenly started feeling Not Very Cute. I don’t THINK it’s that I have ACTUALLY taken an abrupt downturn into lower levels of cuteness, though who knows. But it doesn’t SEEM like one of those moments where one realizes that one suddenly looks a new stage of Older ( <– unhealthful/unenlightened, as if young is always better, when frankly when I look at my peers I think almost all of us look BETTER now than we did two or three decades ago) (NOT THAT APPEARANCE SHOULD MATTER): I think I look pretty much the same as when I felt Quite Cute, but that it’s not hitting my eyeballs in the same way.

Here are some of the things bothering me:

• My jeans are either too big or too small, or maybe they’re BOTH because they’re not the right fit for me, or maybe my eyes have finally stopped seeing bootcut as fashionable, but in any case they are making me feel frumpy. And I firmly believe that if the clothes don’t work on the body, the problem is with the clothes and not with the body—but WHY can’t I find an inseam that isn’t either HIGHWATER or STEPPING ON IT??? I’M STARTING TO THINK MY BODY IS THE PROBLEM

• I cut my hair too short by accident (I was aiming for collarbone-length but made a mistake of overconfidence, and now it’s mid-neck-length), and it feels Practical and Older Woman ( <– again, poor attitude about aging), and also my hair is one of my Good Features and now I have less of it. And instead of going into a long, luxurious ponytail (which had gotten TOO long), it barely fits into a stubby one, with a fringe of hair along the back of my neck, like neck bangs, and then pieces escape the ponytail and tickle my face and I HATE that. For work I’ve been putting the top part back in a barrette, but I don’t feel cute with it that way. I mean, I don’t hate it; it’s fine. But I catch sight of myself in a mirror and I think it looks kind of dowdy.

• Also, my hair continues to darken: I was blonde as a child, dark blonde as a teenager, and then it’s just been getting more and more brown ever since. And I LIKE brown hair! Brown hair is NICE! But my feeling about What I Look Like got locked in while I still had dark blonde hair, so my current mid-brown feels wrong ON ME. Combined with the shortness, it feels like I used to have Good Hair and now I don’t. I know it will grow. And I could get highlights. But right now it feels like I have Sad Hair.

• Is my hair maybe THINNING?? I have been assuming I’d inherited the stays-thick-and-hardly-gets-any-greys hair of my mother and my maternal grandmother—but maybe in fact I have inherited the goes-fully-grey-then-fully-white-then-thins-to-full-scalp-visibility hair of my paternal grandmother!! After all, I have inherited her narrow shoulders and rounded neck/shoulder area, unlike my mother who has straight non-narrow shoulders and no rounding!! TIME TO PANIC, and also to spend a small part of each day futilely and unhelpfully peering at the scalp in the mirror and trying to predict its plans.

• My new glasses. I am still getting used to them. Sometimes I think they’re GREAT. Other times I think I should go back to my old frames. Combined with the hair cut, I feel like they’re less good. Or else they’re great! I can’t tell. They are making me feel uncertain; and also, their newness means I notice myself more often in the mirror.

• My upper arms. Sigh. They sometimes make SOFT FLAPPING SOUNDS as I go down stairs. I knew this would happen! Flappy upper arms come for almost all of us! (And losing weight certainly made the situation worse.) But it’s still disheartening, along with the decrease in the quality of the skin of my neck. I am trying to be philosophical about it. I am TRYING. I don’t notice OTHER women’s upper arms / neck skin as a bad thing! It looks entirely age-appropriate, if I notice it at all, which I generally don’t!

• I bought a bunch of cute t-shirts as per last year’s New Year’s resolution, but the sizing/shrinkage of the brand I like is inconsistent, so sometimes the XL ones are perfect and sometimes they are too snug and I have to keep tugging at them and I feel like they make me look lumpy; and if I size up, sometimes the 2XL ones are perfect and sometimes they are too big and and I think they look baggy and sloppy. It is frustrating.

• And actually ALL my clothes seem wrong in every way. These are the same clothes I was wearing before, when I thought I looked super cute, so why do I now feel like I look frumpy/silly/wrong? Maybe I was falsely perceiving them BEFORE, when I thought they were cute!! Or maybe I have aged out of fun Converse sneakers and graphic t-shirts?? ( <– terrible/ageist) How is it that polo shirts, which before seemed like just the right level of dressing up for a very physical job where jeans and sneakers are necessities, now feel frumpy?

• Okay, a veer into weight issues. One reason I suspect my perceptions are flawed is that those perceptions can be affected by what I THINK I weigh, even when I am WRONG. So for example, I thought my weight was at the high end of the 10-pound range it goes naturally up and down within, and I thought that would explain why my jeans felt wrong and my shirts felt tight. Even though normally my clothes seem to fit fine no matter where I am in the range—but what I’m saying is that I thought it would explain why I might FEEL like they didn’t fit right. And then I found out actually I am at the lower end of that range, not the higher end. So something is clearly wrong with my perception. AND ALSO WEIGHT IS A TERRIBLE WAY TO MEASURE CUTENESS. SIMPLY TERRIBLE. WRONG ON SO MANY LEVELS. LET’S NOT DO IT. GAH WHY

(I would like to add for the sake of balance that one reason I stopped losing weight is that I felt I looked right/cute HERE, at THIS weight, even though HERE is certainly not what our culture considers thin, and in fact it would be a Nightmare Weight for many, many women. Which makes me feel bad to think about, so I try not to.)

I will tell another anecdote that involves unenlightened perception. I donated blood the other day, and the guy who did the screening (took my blood pressure, did the finger-stick, asked the questions, etc.) was My Type: a big fellow about my age, with a beard. He complimented my driver’s license photo, which IS a good one. Then, he was kind of humming along to the radio as he held my hand to do the finger-stick, and I’d noticed the radio station was a good one as I was waiting (NEARLY AN HOUR PAST MY APPOINTMENT TIME, RED CROSS NEEDS TO GET THEIR ACT TOGETHER), and I said so, and he said he’d chosen it, and I said nice work, and ANYWAY the interaction wasn’t, like, overtly flirty, but I did feel he was APPRECIATIVE of my appearance. And of course of my taste in music. And certainly none of us would want to get our validation from men, or view ourselves only through The Male Gaze, or count their opinions about our attractiveness as having more value than our own opinions or than our friends’ opinions; and certainly none of us would want to tie ANY part of our value to our physical attractiveness TO BEGIN WITH!! But I am just saying, I felt cuter after that exchange. Then felt kind of stupid about it. (But still cuter.)

I have just finished this book and I loved it so much that, although I don’t wish to oversell it, I came directly to my computer to oversell it:

The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman (Target link) (Amazon link). I checked this out after my supervisor at the library kind of pressured me to by going on and on about how much she thought I would love it, until the only way out of the conversation seemed to be to bring the book home with me. I don’t really enjoy murder mysteries in general, and also I thought it sounded overly quirky and cute. Old people at a nursing home solving crimes in a little club. Gosh.

And I cannot tell you it’s NOT cute, because it REALLY IS. It is SO CHARMING AND DELIGHTFUL. And it will absolutely be made into a movie like Red or The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (but without the patronizing colonialism), with Judi Dench and Helen Mirren and Bill Nighy and Ian McKellen and Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley and Richard Dreyfuss and Celia Imrie and please lord Maggie Smith, and I will go see it IN THE THEATER. And in the meantime the book would make a terrific Christmas present for pretty much anyone who likes books, and/or anyone who finds it heartening to read about older people still being able to do things. I loved it SO MUCH. It made me cry more than once. It kept catching me off-guard with little dry funny subtle things I almost missed. The only thing I didn’t like is there is an understanding that people telling one character, based on his visible weight, that he “didn’t need” a candy bar, or tricking him into taking the stairs instead of the elevator, was being helpful/caring/kind. But OTHER THAN THAT, this is a book that makes nursing home life sound appealing and fun, and makes The Elder Years seem appealing and fun, and also was just very very enjoyable to read.

And, AND: when I went to get a photo/link for this post, I found there is a SECOND BOOK. So I have put that on my own Christmas wish list, and if no one buys it for me I will buy it for myself as a little New Year’s present, so THAT is something to look forward to!

I did some yoga on my own (as in, without a video) for the first time. The day before, I’d tried a video that left me feeling defeated and disheartened (whole series of movements from a starting pose I couldn’t do and didn’t know how to modify; lots of poses that bothered my wrists and knees; lots of WAY WAY WAY too hard poses that were presented as if they were nothing special/difficult, like “Oh, just climb into Crow pose here”), and I still felt too discouraged from that to want to try another new one, but also felt pretty tired of watching the same videos and hearing the same instructor jokes/mistakes/motivations every single time. But I also didn’t want to skip doing yoga. I don’t know why it had never occurred to me before, but it occurred to me that I could just do some things on my own, without a video.

I felt odd without any background noise, so I asked the Alexa to play yoga music, and she played some. I did only my favorite poses, which was fun—but they were less fun without the contrast of the less-favored poses. I found that in general I did not hold poses as long when I was the one making the decision, which seemed like a downside: I will keep going longer than I want to if someone ELSE says “We’re here for 5…4…3…2…1″/”Hold it a LITTLE longer, I know, this is hard work, you’re doing great, keep going!” but apparently not otherwise. But SOME of the poses I held longer, especially the stretchy ones where I feel like the instructor moves on from them too quickly. And normally I HATE Downward Dog and it’s not uncommon for me to sulkily skip it, and instead I found I naturally added it a few times to what I was doing, because I felt like I could do it just briefly, or however it seemed to fit with what I was doing, instead of feeling resentful and stubborn about being asked to do it much longer or more times than I wanted to. And in fact I found I could make it feel nice and stretchy instead just making my wrists feel terrible / making me feel queasy, so that seemed like an upside.

I could better see why people might like the “flow” yoga where you cycle through a series of repeating poses: I don’t like it when an instructor is telling me to do it (it makes me feel rushed and flustered and left behind), but when I was choosing poses on my own I could see how it would be nice to have a pattern to follow so I didn’t have to spend so much of my attention thinking about what I would do next.

I was a lot more sore than usual in the day or two afterward, and I don’t know if that was because I put more effort into what I was doing, or because I chose only poses that worked on the same areas, or because I didn’t hold them long enough / warm up enough / cool down enough / or whatever, without an instructor. I can picture adding this kind of yoga to my usual “Whatever I feel like doing today” options.

I am trying to think what to put into Halloween care packages for Rob and William. Rob’s will be MUCH SMALLER because I am gradually understanding (it is taking me awhile, because he is kind/tactful about it) that he does not want possessions and doesn’t like to have very many treats/snacks—but I hope HE understands that from a parental point of view, it feels Very Incorrect to send a big fun package to William and nothing to Rob. Anyway, my starting list is:

• seasonal snack cakes
• assorted individually-wrapped Halloween candies, as if they’d gone trick-or-treating
• mini pumpkin
• hand sanitizer

For WILLIAM, this will look like: one or two each of half a dozen different kinds of fall snack cakes (I have other children who will gladly hoover up the extras of each kind), plus fill the box ALLLLLLL the rest of the way up with candy. (He loves treats.) For ROB, this will look like: one each of mayyyybe two different snack cakes (he said on a previous occasion that it WAS nice to have an individually-wrapped, not-going-stale-anytime-soon treat option on hand for those times when he WOULD like to have a treat), plus a dozen small pieces of trick-or-treat candy, mostly mini Hershey bars, because I know those are his favorite. Or maybe I really will just send Rob nothing.

If this were for ELIZABETH, I would also be including a string of the gorgeous maple-leaf string lights my friend Surely sent me (in fact she sent me TWO sets, by happy accident), which are even more fabulous than you’d anticipate, and have MULTIPLE lighting modes the way some Christmas lights do.

And in fact, I might send those to William, just because I think he’d find them funny/fun: they’re so surprisingly floofy when you take them out of the box. And they’re battery-operated, so he could use them as a spontaneous Halloween costume and be a tree. And I like the way the leaf theme can carry at least to Thanksgiving (I’m going to use mine as a table decoration), unlike ghosts/spiders/jackolanterns/bats which feel like they expire on November 1st. Maybe I’ll get him this shorter, less expensive string of them. (PLUS BATTERIES. He won’t have batteries, I don’t think. I leave this as a note to myself, as well as to anyone else who might be putting together a similar care package.)

Also if this were Elizabeth (she’s the only one with pierced ears): cute ghost earrings:

If I’d thought further ahead, this would have been a good moment for a new t-shirt in a fallish color. Perhaps it’s not too late. If William were a graphic-tee person, which he is not, I would send him this autumn leaves shirt, which I have in the women’s version and love:

After mentioning the t-shirt, I went to the grocery store. I came home with more things:

• individual packet of hot chocolate mix (William)
• individual Quaker instant oatmeal cups in apple walnut (one each)
• Nature Valley Lemon Poppy Seed Muffin Bars (William)
• Sunbelt granola bars in Pumpkin Spice and Apple Spice (William)
• bag of cashews and bag of maple-toasted pecans (Rob)

The nuts seemed like a good bet for Rob: he’s a vegetarian; he likes nuts and eats them as part of his meals; and one of the very few grocery items he requested before he went back to school was a giant bag of almonds. So I think/hope those will Be Treats (nuts are expensive; these kinds won’t be standard to him the way almonds are) and Show Love while still being useful to him and non-oppressive.

Commenters kellyg and Megan are asking for information about the college-search process, particularly books that might help. This is the kind of question I LONG to answer, without being particularly competent at doing so: not only has it been almost four years since I went through it, I am not sure I particularly grasped the process even the second time through it. I will just say some things, and hope others can add more things.

ONE. I think of “spring of junior year” as the time to start the whole thing. But because I have spring of junior year in mind, I find I’m automatically starting to talk about it with them now, in fall of junior year. Low-pressure conversations, more like general chatting about do they have anything at all in mind about college. City or not? Far away or near? Same college as a sibling or deliberately avoid? A college that specializes mostly in their major and related majors, or something more general with more options and more interaction with people in other majors? So far we have almost nothing, but my hope is that the chatting makes them start to think about it.

TWO. Plus, fall of junior year is the PSATs. Once kids take those, they will start getting INUNDATED with college materials. HEAPS of brochures in the mail! More emails than we used to get from The Children’s Place! Just…TONS of material. So that feels like The Beginning, in a sense. But you don’t have to START-start, yet.

THREE. Your high school guidance/counseling department may host some parental information seminars. Ours had two, and we went to both, and one of them was mostly about financial aid and the FAFSA (federal financial aid application form), and I’ve forgotten what the other one was. I took a lot of notes and got quite agitated about it, but also felt as if I had a better grasp on what was going on; and it was soothing to get the feeling that we were just the most recent set of parents/students going through an annual process that was familiar to SOMEONE if not to us. Also, they seemed like they knew that what we wanted to hear was things such as “BE SURE you do THIS thing NOW” and “Don’t forget to do THIS OTHER THING by THIS DATE.” And funny stuff like “Wait until you see what the FAFSA thinks you can afford to pay per year for college!”

FOUR. College visits! Here is what I learned: (1) If you are like me and you are overwhelmed by this, just pick the EASIEST POSSIBLE COLLEGE to visit first, whether or not your kid has any interest in that particular school. Getting the ball rolling helped me CONSIDERABLY, and as soon as we’d seen ONE college, I found EVERYONE’S enthusiasm was a little higher for seeing MORE. (2) Take COPIOUS notes, and at least a few pictures. It is amazing how every college blends into every other college. I had a college visit notebook, and wrote down just anything/everything that seemed even mildly relevant, and I ended up consulting those notes a lot more often than I’d thought I would, just to remember which college was which. (3) Wear comfortable shoes, be prepared for far more stairs at a far faster pace than you might prefer (tours are led by perky, active college students), and bring a water bottle and a snack. (4) Quite a few colleges have virtual tours, if visiting in person is not safe and/or too overwhelming. You can also choose to wait to visit a college until after the student is accepted there. (5) For a fun little game, see if you can figure out which buzzwords the college wants their representatives to lean heavily on! Each school seemed to have approximately three, from a list that included diverse, flexible, cooperative-rather-than-competitive, interdisciplinary, etc.

FIVE. We purchased one so that we could write in it, dog-ear the pages, take it on car trips without worrying about losing it, etc., but libraries often have huge honking college guides that have a little comparative write-up on a whole lot of colleges, and this CAN be overwhelming or it CAN be super-helpful. We got the Fiske Guide to Colleges, and I don’t remember why I chose that one, but it’s the one I’ll probably buy the updated version of in the next few months unless someone says “Wait, this other guide is way better!” It was handy for getting an overview of the school that is separate from the sales pitch the school gives for itself, and it was handy to be able to flip back and forth between two schools comparing their stats. Rob ended up choosing a college that appeared on the “People who applied to this college also applied to these” list.

SIX. I think the only thing that threw me into an OH NO WE DIDN’T THINK OF THAT panic was the SATs senior year. And I’ve been hearing that a lot of colleges are not worried about those anymore, so this might be irrelevant. But at the time, some of the schools wanted the regular SATs plus specialized tests in certain subjects, and those tests were held infrequently, and I’d thought we had all fall to think about it but many sections were full, and other sections wouldn’t have the results in time for the college to consider them, so anyway it was a panicky time and I ended up paying some fees for last-minute scheduling and rescheduling, and he had to drive a considerable distance to take one of the tests, but it was all fine in the end, and now it probably doesn’t matter so much! Which I think would be REALLY GOOD, because it was very frustrating to have a kid taking a specialized test in math when he still had a WHOLE YEAR OF MATH LEFT. Or taking the Physics SAT when he’d taken Physics almost a year earlier. The whole thing seems weird.

SEVEN. I remember Rob and William both put off the application process until I was nearly SCREAMING. The deadline was in December sometime (I think? it was awhile ago), for colleges that had a deadline (as opposed to the ones that accept/process applications at any time). I couldn’t do the work for them; I couldn’t seem to make them do it. William submitted his last application at eleven-fifty-something for a midnight deadline. I know high schools are already expected to do so much, but a fall-of-senior-year Filling Out the College Applications course, where a counselor divides up the process into assignments, would be SO VALUABLE.

EIGHT. One reassuring thing is that the high school AND the colleges ALL wish the students to complete everything they need to complete by the deadlines. And so there will be cues along the way: the high school will host SATs; the colleges will nag helpfully about filling out the FAFSA and about their application deadlines; the senior year English class might work on college admissions essays; etc. As long as you are wringing your hands fretfully, you will probably catch the cues.