I sat down to write a MIL Update, but then suddenly I was, “…Wait. Do I write about MIL stuff here?” I can’t remember. I think what I do is write it, and then delete it later? Hm. I need to leave myself some notes or something.

I will start with the boring part, which is that the visit is going Fine so far. It nearly always DOES go fine for the first few days, before she gets comfortable. I still don’t like her, I’m not enjoying the visit, but I’m not SUFFERING. And it REALLY HELPS that this time we’re doing things the way we usually do them (and looking like experts at it even though she disapproves) rather than doing things the way she would approve of them (and looking like total incompetents). All right, now for the venty examples:

1. Rob and William came home from school. SHE ASKED THEM if they’d done their homework, then reported to me: “I just got the old ‘I did my homework on the bus'” and rolled her eyes. Which, um. I checked, and they HAD done their homework on the bus, and also? Why is she getting involved in this AT ALL?

2. Rob and William wanted to learn how to knit, so she taught them. My mom taught William last year; he hasn’t knit since then but picked it up quickly. Rob has never knit before. After no kidding LESS THAN AN HOUR she pulled me aside and said, “William may make a knitter. Rob? No”—with a pfff and a totally dismissive tone. NICE. He’s TEN YEARS OLD and this is his FIRST TIME KNITTING. And he was DOING IT: he has two inches of knitted stuff already.

3. We went to the store and she kept speaking firmly to the children. I wrote “sharply” there first, but it wasn’t quiiiiiite sharp. BRISK, though, and authoritative. “Edward! Stop that! Come here and hold my hand! Come on now, you didn’t get hurt!” And I gave Henry things to play with, and he was doing NO HARM and she kept taking things away from him. After I several times gave them back to him, she started instead lunging as if to take them, then correcting herself, then saying to me, “We’d better take those away from him, don’t you think?” I’ll repeat: NO HARM was being done to the items. And they were things _I_ was buying.

4. First she made several “funny” remarks about my bargain shopping. “Oh, Swistle and her 75% off!” with a little head waggle and widened eyes and jazz hands. Then, later, she told a lonnnnng anecdote about her stupid sister who always buys stuff she doesn’t need and doesn’t like “but it was ON SALE!”—using “stupid sister” tone of voice. The “but it was ON SALE!” chorus was repeated half a dozen times as her stupid sister was stupider and stupider about her purchases, which—and I’m sure this was pure coincidence—my mother-in-law remembered had been 75% off. This for purchases made back when she and her sister lived at home with their parents, and in her sister’s early homeowning days nearly 50 years ago.

5. At the table, in “I am repeating the tone of someone I saw on TV” voice: “Americans eat FAR too much salt!” (For the FIRST TIME EVER I pulled off the kind of response I always MEAN to give when she makes such pronouncements: I said “Mmmmmmmmmmm….salllllllllt.”) This WHOLE salt thing is because she personally has high blood pressure and has been personally instructed to cut down on salt. ALL AMERICANS need to obey her medical instructions, because what SHE does is THE ONLY WAY TO DO THINGS. If she were diagnosed with diabetes, we would ALL need to have insulin shots and Americans would eat FAR too much sugar. If she were diagnosed with cancer, we would ALL need to have chemotherapy treatments and Americans get FAR too little radiation.

6. Now she’s self-diagnosed herself allergic to eggs, too. No salt, no fat, no caffeine, no tomatoes, no eggs.

7. Regarding her cousin’s panic attacks, she told me: “I said to her, ‘Now there is just NO REASON for you to have a PANIC attack! WHY would you panic? You are JUST going to the GROCERY store!’ I mean, for Pete’s sake!”

This has to be QUICK: I have 10 minutes before my mother-in-law is UP IN MY GRILL.

ONE! Because it was the LEAST important thing on my To Blog list, I have written another disclosure post [note from the future: this was for the reviews blog, which was deleted, so I’ve removed the link]. Oh hai. I can haz prioritiez?

TWO! William’s best friend is a girl. He saw some inexpensive charms at Hallmark where you can click the two halves of a heart together, and he found his own name AND his friend’s name on heart halves (it’s lucky his best friend is a girl, because only girl-boy halves fit together), and he wanted SO BADLY to get them each a necklace with both names on it, so I allowed it.

Now I’m feeling a little awk. Should he be giving jewelry to a friend in third grade? Will her parents think that’s weird? So what I’m asking you is: should I have asked the mom first, or should I have sent a note to her about it the day William gave his friend the present? Does it change things if he brought the necklace in today and I neither asked first nor sent a note?

You know what book I thought of out of the blue the other day? Fifteen, by Beverly Cleary, the part where Janie is trying to knit a pair of argyle socks for boyfriend Stan and has to take out the stitches over and over again.

What I would like to know at this point, a good 25 years later, is how did I identify so strongly in the 1980s with a book in which the protagonist calls her father “Pop” and irons a dress before a date? And yet I did, and in fact I would go so far as to say it is the book that, more than any other, created my dating expectations. When I was fifteen years old myself, I arrived on the doorstep of dating fresh-faced and in an ironed dress (ironed turned-up-collared shirt, whatever), waiting for an ID bracelet. None of the boys I dated had ID bracelets, and why not? Bring sexy back, boys.

I also read Forever… by Judy Blume, and I read it at age 14 when it was getting passed around by the girls in my grade with the interesting sections pre-dog-eared, and yet that one didn’t influence my views of dating. I read it with the same interest I read the sack of paperback romance novels my babysitting employer recommended to me, but didn’t think to apply any of them to anything in my own life. It seemed to me that the book ended kind of abruptly: relationship, relationship, more relationshipping, off to camp and the sad necklace and the end. I was like, “Huh? How come they broke up? They seemed to be getting along so nicely.” I do still remember what Michael’s, er, little friend was named, do you?

I was interested in the idea of The Transition Into Womanhood but did NOT want to discuss it with my eager-to-discuss-it mother, so I think I read Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret a dozen times. The discussions of various feminine hygiene product possibilities. “We must, we must, we must increase our bust” exercises. The friend writing “I GOT IT!” on a postcard and then crying in the bathroom when she really did get it. The grandmother saying that if Mohammad wouldn’t come to the mountain, the mountain would have to come to Mohammad—and did they go on a shopping trip into the city? The big religious decisions she felt she should make. The…party with BOYS, and the girl with epilepsy? Or, no, I think that was another book.

Rob and I went to the Fifth Grade Open House this week, and I seriously had to dry-swallow a TRANQUILIZER after seeing a little group of fifth grade boys going through a set of student-written poems displayed on the hallway wall and mocking each of them line by line. The poems were fill-in-the-blank style, and ranged from “I wish we were having pizza for lunch today” to “I wish my mom still lived with us” and “I wish there didn’t have to be so much fighting” and “I wish my cat were still alive.” The little group of assholes boys read the personal stuff aloud in stupid voices, and spent extra time on the poem written by a student with Down Syndrome. Fifth grade is, apparently, the year when self-revealing poetry should no longer be posted publicly.

So I was in a sensitive and not-yet-fully-tranquilized state of mind when, on the way home, Rob said, “I think I’m the chosen one.” And I was glad it was dark, because SNORT. Chosen One. Hee! But I asked what he meant, and he said that every year, he’s the one on his bus and in his classroom that the other kids choose to pick on. Oh. So he’s noticed.

I was really glad I’d taken the tranquilizer, if this was going to be the evening’s topic. It’s hardly original to whine about “not sitting at the Popular Kid lunch table” (OMG, REALLY??? You and I were BOTH in the 99% of non-most-popular kids??? We can go to intensive psychotherapy together!!!), but my own unpopularity in school reached “counselor twice a week” levels, followed by “moving to a different school” levels, so this is not a shruggy “kids are kids” issue for me.

Rob asked if I had any strategies for dealing with it, and I was like, “Dude, you are asking the WRONG PERSON.” The counselor gave me MANY strategies, and what I learned from employing all those strategies was twofold: (1) It is impossible to persuade people to like you if they don’t, but especially if those people are in mob form, and (2) Adults, even adults who are experienced, educated experts in this area, know JACK SHIT about children and their social relationships. I’m going to repeat that, because I write a swearish post about once a year and when I do I like to make it count: JACK. SHIT.

Here’s a school picture of me from that bad time. I don’t like to look at it, and not only because of the overbite and the always-painful appearance of fashion from previous decades:

Is that the fakest of all fake smiles? Not only does the smile not reach the eyes, it doesn’t even reach the LIPS. And I have bags under my eyes. Can you see from that picture that the meanness was constant? It did. not. stop.

This incessant meanness contained a valuable lesson for me, but I think I could have learned it a little later and a little gentler: that the world is liberally sprinkled with assholes who KNOW they are assholes and nevertheless persist in being assholes. They are GLAD to be assholes. They consider it their DUTY to be assholes, and to ladle out meanness wherever they see a lack. Children sometimes outgrow it. Grown-ups rarely do.

Does it make you want to start speaking very brightly and without blinking, as it does me? “Goodness, it must be WONDERFUL to have such a SINGULAR PURPOSE in life! There are so many people who harm others unintentionally, but YOU! You do it DELIBERATELY! That is how you SPEND YOUR LIFE, being mean to others and finding opportunities to do it! How does that make you FEEL, knowing that that is WHO YOU ARE?”

Well. I do have a survival tip, which I am happy to share: find the one kid less popular than you, and be friends with that kid. This doesn’t generally result in a highly satisfying friendship, since it’s a friendship based on nothing more than where a person is located on the Popularity Scale. But then, that’s no different than the kind of friendship people are looking for when they pine for friendship with the popular kids.

And sometimes the most important thing is having someone—ANYONE—to pair up with when the teacher says to pair up (pairing up is an excellent opportunity for children to remind other children where they live on the popularity scale), and someone to sit with at lunch, and someone to go out to recess with, and someone to pretend you don’t care about the meanness with. It’s more of an alliance than a friendship.

My intended point is that I don’t know if I have anything to offer Rob here or not. On one hand, OMG I am the perfect parent for this because I totally get it. Furthermore, I am more than willing to make changes to help: I will drive him to school if the bus is too bad; I will switch him to a new school if this one gets too bad; I will homeschool him if I have to (I am temperamentally a poor fit for homeschooling, but I would be ABLE); I will never ever tell him that he should just stop caring what other people think—what a stupid, ignorant, ridiculous thing to say.

And on the other hand, I am of no use to him. I never figured it out myself. My parents turned it around for me by putting me in a tiny private school where there were four children in my grade. I saw those fifth grade boys making fun of their classmates’ poems, and the only strategy I could think of was kicking them hard in the shins and then running away and crying—maybe telling the teacher.

My current Tidying Project is moving all the stuff from the old bureau we hate into the new (used) bureau I bought this weekend. No big deal, since they have the same number of drawers and are the same basic size. EXCEPT—bureaus have a horizontal surface, and in my house, horizontal surfaces get built on vertically to their toppling points. So I have to deal with a large heap of dusty stuff, some of which belongs there (jewelry box, little dish of Mysterious Parts that look familiar and we know we’ll be saying “Oh THAT’s what that was!” when we’re looking for it a month later) and some of which doesn’t (medicine dropper used for glow-in-the-dark paint, doll pantaloons), and that’s going to take some time.

In the meantime I’m working on the drawers, and it turns out that if you want to come to my house to rob me of the three Percocet left over from my 2005 c-section, or the bottles of USELESS Demerol the OB prescribed in 2005 and 2007 when it turned out I was allergic to the Percocet, you should look in my underwear drawer. That’s also where you should look for the remaining pills from The Failed Psychiatric Medication Experiment of 2002 (six bottles, some duplicates, each with a few pills). There are several more bottles, too—I haven’t dug all the way to the bottom yet, but I know there are more beneath the Underwear That Fit in 2006 But Not Now. Betcha next I find the Tylenol 3 that made me queasy in 2001.

Listen, I KNOW I should be getting rid of these. I ALREADY KNOW IT TO BE TRUE. And yet I keep them. What if I ever had another c-section and I needed more than the prescribed day and a half’s worth of pain medication that didn’t work? What if there were an apocalyptic world event and I was really anxious/depressed and other marauders got to the pharmacies first?

Speaking of pharmacies, I used to work in one, and the two pharmacists I worked with had dramatically different opinions about expired medications. One said he would never give his own family expired medication, so he always told everyone else to get rid of it too; the other pharmacist said, essentially, piffle.

My mom, too, is a medication hoarder: half of an antibiotics prescription that was left over when the doctor switched her to another, and so on. My dad gets rid of medications immediately, either when the doctor tells him to stop taking it or, if it’s over-the-counter, when it expires. Periodically he goes through the medicine cabinet just to be sure everything’s necessary and up-to-date. I only recently got rid of antihistamines with a 2003 expiration date. It was a bottle of 100 and I’d only used a dozen or so! I didn’t want to have to re-buy them!

Anyway, this is what I want to know today: Are you a medication pitcher? or are you a medication hoarder?

Some of you smarties have already found my reviews blog, which is so new it doesn’t even have any reviews in it yet. I will not blame you one bit if you don’t read it ever at all—I read VERY FEW review blogs myself. (I do read Live Well Spend Well because WHO CAN RESIST?)

I had SUCH a productive weekend. Yesterday I bought Elizabeth a bed frame I’d been considering for a few weeks at a consignment shop. It’s painted white, and I think it’s very OLD, and it was $82 which seemed like a lot of money until I went to a few furniture stores to look at new twin bed frames and HOLY CRAP, so this weekend I went and bought it and brought it home.

I needed it because we’re rearranging the kids. Right now it’s William and Edward (bunk beds) and Henry (crib) in the biggest bedroom, and Elizabeth and Rob each in one of the two smallest bedrooms. But Rob doesn’t want to sleep by himself, and we were going to need to rearrange anyway when Henry went into a Big Kid Bed, so now Edward will be in a bunk bed with Rob and William will be in a bunk bed with Henry. But—Elizabeth’s bed is really one of a set of bunk beds, so to reclaim it we had to buy a new single bed, and we also needed to buy a mattress because Henry will be in a twin bed instead of a crib. Are you following all this?

So yesterday I bought the frame I’d been dithering about. And today I went out and bought a mattress, and I did it with very little fuss: went in, listened dutifully to the nice salesperson, bought the mattress that cost what I’d had in mind. I can go pick it up on Tuesday.

That went so well, I stopped on the way home at the consignment shop again, to look again at a little phone chair (a combination chair and endtable) I’d seen when I bought the bed frame. I had thought of it several times and thought I would buy it, but when I went back and tried it out, it was so uncomfortable there was no way. But while I was there, why not do a little browsing? And that’s how I came home with two bureaus.

Then I did my Tidying Task for the weekend, which was going through our Massive Collection of children’s books. I bought a lot of these when Rob was a toddler and wanted a lot of books read to him and I felt I would GO MAD if I didn’t have new material. I bought most of them at library book sales, where the books are 50c each or 3/$1 and the librarians seem to have very poor counting skills because they’ve known me since I was 8.

Until recently, I was thinking, “If I like the book, or if any of the kids like it, I should keep it.” But today I was thinking, “We get fresh books from the library every week anyway, so why are we storing so many books HERE?” Still, this was a first sweep: if I had any doubt, I kept the book. Here are my results in the four—FOUR—areas of the house where we keep children’s books:

Area 1, the downstairs playroom, top shelf only, Before

Area 1, the downstairs playroom, top shelf only, After

Area 2, Rob’s room, Before

Area 2, Rob’s room, After

Area 3, upstairs playroom, Before

Area 3, upstairs playroom, After

Area 4, Elizabeth’s room, Before

Area 4, Elizabeth’s room, After

The books we’re donating to the library—plus there’s another half-full diaper box I had upstairs already and didn’t want to bring down just for a photo:

Look! It’s Niestle wearing the Swistle Skirt Icon!

Last night I got dinner and pajamas done early and went to Target shortly after Paul got home from work because OMG EVERYONE TALKING AT ME ALL DAY LONG AND ALSO FIGHTING AND SCREAMING AND KNOCKING THINGS OVER.

I found SUCH a haul. And shut UP, Jane, I AM TOO decluttering.

Wall-E comforters, not particularly exciting to ME since I prefer the nice-even-for-adults comforters I bought long ago that never get used because they’re too hard to wash if they get peed on, but Rob and William lovvvvvvvvve Wall-E and think he is the cutest! ever! and the comforters are cheap and thin so maybe they’ll fit in the washing machine. Anyway, they were 75% off, so $7-something each and worth the no-doubt temporary thrill.

Unders, 50% off. I bought a few packs, and I’ll buy more if they go to 75% off.

My co-aunt bought this shirt for our co-niece, and it is such a cute shirt you can not even believe it. So I bought it for Elizabeth too, so she and her cousin can match. It was $6 on sale down from $7, and it was the last one in 5T.

Two rugs to put in the mud room. One for wiping boots (foreground) and one for….stepping on and looking pretty (midground). (The light one with rings on it in the background was part of the household already.) 75% off, so the boot mat was $5 and the runner was $15 (doesn’t $60 seem a little high for a 2×5 Target runner? Maybe that’s why it was on clearance).

These Qubemates things are also for the mudroom, for backpacks and instruments and mittens and lunch boxes and homework and things. We need a system that can work for two kids, then four kids, then five kids, then back down the ladder until it’s only one kid, and it would be nice if it were a system that could then be broken up later and used in other parts of the household. So I chose this system, where the pieces fit together and you can get a unit with an adjustable/removable shelf, or with a door, or with two drawers.

But OMG expensive! My plan was to wait for them to go on sale, and buy a unit or two each time, because the shelf one is the cheapest and those are $25 EACH, and the other kinds are $30 and $35 but I forget which is which. I guess the drawers must be the most expensive. Last night when I went, Target had run out of a sale item and was offering an instant substitute of the Qubemate with a shelf, so I bought four of them at $16.24 each. That was still wicked expensive to lay that kind of money down in a chunk, but it was $35 less than they would have been at regular price.

Pencil cases and mechanical pencils for later in the year when someone loses one. 75% off.

Cloth napkins for care packages, 75% off. One set is Simply Shabby Chic and has lace edges la-di-dah. The other set is the Target Home brand and I like the aqua color.

Pretty bins! I think fabric-covered bins are kind of dumb because they’re impossible to clean, but they’re so! pretty!, and they were 75% off, and I love them.

This is the correct way to eat Sugar Babies:

1. Put one Sugar Baby in mouth. Chew until integrity of jellybean-like exterior/interior is lost, and the graininess has become prominent—roughly 10-15 chews.

2. Introduce a second Sugar Baby. It will take fewer chews for the mixture to be predominantly grainy again. Chew until the feeling is less “chewing on yummy grainy candy” and more “can’t get a grip with teeth and will need to swallow it soon”—roughly 25-30 additional chews. Add another Sugar Baby.

3. Continue in this manner until either the jaw or the palate desires a break, at which point cease adding Sugar Babies and swallow when natural to do so.

4. Rest. Use tongue to discover and remove small Sugar Baby deposits from teeth.

5. When ready, resume with step 1.

Just like last time, I am finding it challenging to write a post that doesn’t look bad next to a Dead Cat post. In fact, I LOOKED UP what I did last time because I was hoping it would be an idea I could use again. But no: last time I wrote MORE about the dead cat, and then I wrote about my mother-in-law. Ack. She’s coming in less than two weeks, and I don’t want to talk about it this time.

Oh, how about a little Tidying Update? I got rid of all the rest of my dolls. Remember I had something like eighteen of them plus tons of clothes, and I went through and got rid of about half of it, and this time I went through and got rid of all the rest, keeping aside only a few outfits for Elizabeth’s doll. I tried to keep a selection with high play-value: one snow outfit, one swim suit, one set of pajamas, one hospital johnny, several pretty dresses, several basic play outfits. The dolls and outfits I got rid of are going to one of my mom’s friends who arranges to give dolls to kids who are in bad situations (in a shelter for abused women/children, lost all their things to a fire, etc.).

This was one of my most massive declutters, so it’s too bad all that stuff was just in the basement: it does free up a ton of basement storage, but it doesn’t make the living area look different/better. It was four large Rubbermaid bins, plus a three-drawered unit. Now it fits in one small Sterilite bin (except for the doll). There’s a little space left in the bin, so I’m thinking “bin-full” will be our doll clothing limit: if the bin is full and we want another doll outfit, we have to get rid of something first.

I should have posed this so it looked more impressive, rather than stacking the bins (only three of them) in a small-looking pile. Well, anyway, those are three of the four Rubbermaid bins and the three-drawer unit in the background, showing the former Doll Territory; and in the foreground, the one doll (Elizabeth’s—not one of mine) and her small bin of clothes.

I had a decluttering DREAM where I was throwing out a bunch of candles and feeling happy about it, so then when I got up I DID throw away some candles. But I got muddled because I do want SOME candles in case of power outage, but the ones that would be best for that (contained in jars) are scented, and scented is not so nice hour after hour. But does this mean I should keep the unscented one shaped like a rabbit? How about the unscented one shaped like a pumpkin? Maybe I should buy candles specifically for a power outage and get rid of all the others? Tidy People, advise!