C is for Awesome

You made me believe that everything in my life had happened so that you could get here, and I was totally cool with that.



You gave me all my hardest work first, while I still had the energy for it, and then spoiled me with your ability to self direct.




You get sarcasm and know how to wield it, but you also know how to be kind. Or just plain silly.



Every time you ask if anyone wants the last roll/cookie/whatever before taking it for yourself, my heart swells with pride. You are the great and much-adored big brother.



And you always ask for mama's meatloaf for your birthday dinner. Happy birthday Calvin. You are my first and always baby.

10! 9! 8! 7! 6! 5! 4! 3! 2!

You may or may not have heard that the decade is ending. It has already been ten years since we partied like it was in fact 1999. I was 27 when the last decade ended, which seems impossibly young to me now. I had one child, a toddler, which also seems impossible. I had spent the last year of the nineties regaining my equilibrium and trying to assemble some sense of identity after the first year of motherhood threw me for a loop. I did okay, and it's a good thing, because the aughts had some surprises in store for me.

Would I write a letter, if I could, to 27 year old me to give her a heads up on the coming decade? If I did, what would it say? "In the next decade, you will have three more children, open and close a business that will destroy you financially, spend about 2/3 of the decade breastfeeding, gain 20 pounds, teach at three different schools, make new and lasting friendships with people who will become immeasurably important to you, reconnect with part of your past that was almost lost to you forever, take emotional risks that would terrify most people and be rewarded beyond your expectations, feel amazed on a daily basis that you managed to marry the perfect man, outgrow your house, abandon it for a bigger house that you love, read a lot of books but not write one (what are you waiting for?), survive life with a three year old four times (barely), and struggle with what feels like never-ending baby and toddlerhood, but through it all you will hold on to your intrinsically hopeful and optimistic nature. Mostly."

Maybe it would be more productive to write a letter to current me about the new decade. "Dear Sassy, I can't help but suggest that you get off your ass. Which, as you may have noticed, is barely fitting in those jeans. I'm just sayin'. But I don't just mean that you need to be physically less sedentary. You are coasting and you know it. You've always done this, and you know you feel better when you challenge yourself more. You should be writing. You should be approaching your job with more energy and creativity. Ditto for motherhood. Ten years from now you'll be pushing 50. What will you have to show for it?

Did you hear what I just said? Then why are you still sitting at the computer? Go!"

Alright, alright! Here's to the...whatever we're supposed to call this oddly numbered decade. Happy New Year to all of you. May the surprises of the next decade all be good ones.

She's Crafty

So I've been quiet lately. If you know me in real life, you know that quiet from me is often scary. But in blogworld, it just means I've been off living my life without stopping to navel gaze about it much. But let's face it, I can't go too long without seeing what's in there.

Right now, I'd have to say that what's in there are bits of yarn fluff and little scraps of cut paper. I'm not sure what kind of Martha-cloning experiment the government has secretly included me in, or if my moons have moved into...whatever house the craftiness lives in, but I can't stop making stuff. It's kind of freaking me out a little bit.

I've never been a crafter. It's all just a bit too precious for me, the scrapbooking and whatnot. I'm also not fidgety or a person who needs to be moving or doing something with my hands. I know I'm often brassy and loud, borderline obnoxious even, but I can also be very still and focused for long periods of time. And what I've always loved to sit and do, of course, is read. That has been my reason for not knitting or crocheting in the past--because if I'm going to sit there, I'm going to be reading a book.

Except now I'm not. I learned to crochet (again) over Thanksgiving almost by accident. SAM wanted to learn from my sister-in-law and/or mother-in-law while we were in Georgia for the holiday, so we got her hooked up with plenty of needles and yarn, and since I was right there I went ahead and learned too. I started trying to make a scarf, which was not very scarf-like and had very irregular edges. Once I had used up an entire skein of yarn, I looked at my three feet of wonky failure, laughed, and unraveled the whole thing. It felt very Zen. I was like those Buddhist monks who spend days making sand mandalas only to wipe them away upon completion. Except what they make is intricate and beautiful and what I'd made totally sucked, but whatever. You get what I mean. I got to looking around youtube and learned a new stitch or two and made about half a scarf out of that same yarn, alternating rows of fancy patterns.

Then took I it apart again because of weird edge issues. Finally I decided I was sick of looking at that yarn, switched to a cranberry red, and made this scarf. Success! (It looks prettier on SAM with her snazzy new leather jacket.)

Then I decided to try to make a hat. At first it seemed like I had done it, and really fast! In about an hour and a half I had something that was a little pointy at the top and a little loose and floppy at the bottom, but still I was all "Woohoo, I made a hat!" Then I immediately started making another one and for some reason it was a lot smaller. Like, too small for a baby. I went back and watched the youtube video and looked at the written instructions, and then I laughed and laughed because while I had gotten the really cute puff stitch right, I'd totally screwed up the actual hat-making part. So, once I again, I unraveled my work and started over. And I got it right! It was so satisfying. I made another one using a simpler stitch and made a cute pom pom to go on top.

Then of course I had to make a pom pom for the first hat, which I'd made for Genevieve, and she demanded that it also have a flower. So I learned to make a flower, and after five false starts, I made one and attached it. Now Genevieve won't wear the hat for some random reason that only makes sense to a chemically unbalanced three year old, but it looks really cute on Somerset, and once I finish the one I'm making to be the exact color reverse of this one, I bet Genevieve will want to wear it so she and her big sister can match.

Meanwhile my friend Kristin posted a video on facebook showing how to make really cool 3D snowflakes out of paper. I'd show you the video if I were not too lazy to look it up. Or maybe not, because it's more impressive if you don't know how relatively easy they are to make. As is my way, I ruined the first one I tried, although in fairness to myself, the step I messed up was really unclear in the instructions. So Kristin was nice enough to bring me some, which let me see my error, and then I made several, including a bi-colored one.

And then I guess the government upped the amount of whatever they are secretly adding to my food because I bought special paper and when our friends came over I announced that I had planned a craft for the kids. And then they all died of shock because we all know that A) I am tired of children and do not often choose to hang out with groups of them when I could be chatting with adults over a cocktail, and B) I don't do crafts. But I did, and we did (with a lot of help from the moms because my middle son led a rebellion of the mid-aged boys), and it looked like this (the crafting, not the rebellion. That looked like a pack of urchins led by a skinny boy with too-long hair and ripped jeans):

I also made goody bags for the kids: peppermint bark (success, lots of compliments), fudge from scratch (fail, didn't cook long enough, we're going to eat it warm with ice cream because it was too sticky and soft to cut), and chocolate-chip ginger bars (hard to say because I don't like ginger) and made them look all cute.

Somewhere in there SAM and BD worked really hard to help me make the house look like this so we could host the faculty Christmas party.

Now I ask you, who is this woman, and what has she done with Sassy?

The Rule of Threes

Sometime I should ask a numerologist or some other new agey type person to explain to me why the number three has been so significant in my life. It's something I've been aware of since I was a kid. I noticed it in big and little things, in ways both visual and practical. That I was the oldest of three children, that I saw objects in groupings of three everywhere I looked (often in the form of faces), that Jimmy Stewart wore a jersey with the number three on it in a scene from my favorite movie, that I had a ridiculous and ill-advised crush on the mohawked number 3 of the football team when I was a freshman in high school. Third grade was, for me, a horrific year, marring an otherwise happy and peaceful elementary career. My third pregnancy was ill-timed and shocking, beginning when my second baby was only five months old. I knew instinctively that three was not the right number of children for me to have, even though I thought for a time that it would happen that way. Until my third child turned three, in fact, and I got pregnant again. Not that three has always been a negative force in my life, but that's not what this post is about.

Right now the number three is manifesting itself in my life in two very difficult ways. One is that my three year old is making me insane, but I've said plenty about that and I'm working on it and that's not what I want to talk about right now. The other is that my current third grader is having some of the same difficulties that I had in third grade, which has always been my fear with my kids. My third grade teacher called my parents and told them I was well on my way to becoming a juvenile delinquent. I came home to my mom in tears and thought someone had died. (Inexplicably, I thought it must be my grandmother's little dog, Missy. Maybe I didn't want to think it was an actual person?) Joshua's issues aren't that extreme, but after he brought home an N in conduct on his progress report last week, I had an email exchange with his teacher. Apparently he talks too much, which isn't surprising, but she said he has become somewhat surly and defiant when asked to stop talking. He also disrupted a class-wide game until he was finally told to go sit down, at which point he said "Good!" Which is kind of funny, because my disasterous third grade rebellion was prompted by my teacher trying to make me play math Bingo. She kept putting a card on my desk, and I kept putting it on someone else's desk. A friend told me I should stop before I hurt her feelings, to which I replied scornfully "She doesn't have feelings. She's not a human being, she's just a teacher." Seriously. But see, I hated that teacher because she wouldn't put me in the highest reading group, where I knew I belonged. Joshua likes his teacher, and his defiance is less pronounced, but it's hard not to think he's just in the same kind of stage I must have been in at that age. Pre-adolescence. Good times!

BD and I sat down with him last night to talk about whatever is going on with him. It's not just the school stuff. While he often seems happy and fine, he can become enraged and almost violent at the drop of a hat. On ravioli day when he unkindly told one of the younger kids to go away while he played with Satchel and Jiro, I took him aside and asked him how he would feel if someone treated him that way. He replied, predictably "Everyone does treat me that way." I guess this "no one likes me, everyone hates me" syndrome is a middle child thing? Because there is absolutely no evidence that it is true. His teacher noticed the same thing, noting that Joshua had expressed those same feelings to her, even though he has many friends in school and is always included in their play. I explained to her that Joshua's two main refrains are the aforementiond "no one likes me" and also "I never get to have/do anything fun." The second is because we won't buy him video games. The travesty! Meanest parents ever! Yesterday when he was supposed to write about what he's thankful for, he told his teacher that he didn't know what to write because "I have nothing."

When we talked to him, we told him he wasn't in trouble, although he will be if he continues to be disrespectful to his teacher and bring home bad conduct grades. We told him we love him and want him to be happy, but that he needs to understand that we make decisions about what he can and can't have/do based on what we think is best for him, because that is our job, and that even though he won't always like those decisions, that's life and he has to accept it and move on. I couldn't resist offering to take him downtown to Porter Leath orphanage if he wants to see what it looks like when a child really has nothing. Maybe I should. A little holiday volunteer work would probably be good for the whole family. He cried and denied that anything is wrong, but he didn't say much else. I pulled him over into my lap and stroked his hair while we talked. Hopefully it helped. I guess we'll see.

Bookish

I have a review up on The Shelf Life Blog. It's a review of Her Fearful Symmetry, the new book by Audrey Niffeneger. She wrote The Time Traveler's Wife, which I loved, but unfortunately I did not love this book. I loved things about it, but then it turned on me.

Right now I'm about 150 pages into an 864 page book, Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. So far I'm enjoying it. It doesn't move too fast, but I guess if you've got 864 pages in which to tell your tale, you can afford to take your time with it.

In my senior English classes we're reading a few of The Canterbury Tales, which the students always enjoy. They love "The Pardoner's Tale" especially. In eleventh grade, we're reading The Crucible, which I love and haven't been able to teach since my student teaching, because that was the last time I taught American lit. The kids like it too. There's nothing like having a student read out Abigail's lines "...Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring you a pointy reckoning that will shudder you. And you know I can do it..." and hearing the rest of the class draw in breath and go "Oooh!" Everyone loves a bad girl.

What does it say about me...

That there is a part of me that would totally wear this coat.

37

Since today is my birthday and I'm now 37 whole entire years old*, it seems like I should write something about that. You know, reflect, reminisce, that sort of thing.

But sometimes it's hard to talk about all this senseless beauty without feeling like you are over there making sarcastic gagging motions, you know? Because my life, it is beautiful, and I've told you as much many times. The litany: amazing husband, incredible romantic marriage, love, love, love, beautiful, healthy kids, smart-funny-great friends, work I care about, my fortunate health. A superstitious person would say I was jinxing myself, but I am defiantly optimistic.




That's not to say I can't do better. Not in the life I have, but in the way I live it and appreciate it. I haven't been taking great care of myself. This morning as I showered, I told myself that I will lose 20 pounds before I turn 38. It's not just about the jeans I can't snap or the extra chins, either. This is the only body I have, and if it's going to take me all the way to 100, as I intend, then I need to get it into better shape and keep it there. I don't need to be a size 2 or even a 4 or 6, but I need to be strong. Time to start using that gym membership that has been languishing since the pool closed for the season. There are other things I need to work on--all that usual staying in the moment, not wishing time away kind of stuff. I'm trying. The three-ness of my youngest child is just about to kill me, but I am trying. Instead of wishing to go into a coma for the next ten or so years until they're all old enough to want nothing to do with me, I'm down to just wishing to fast forward the next six months until Genevieve is four. That's progress, right?

So happy birthday to me. I already got to enjoy a great birthday date that involved a babysitter, Indian food that made me hum and do the happy food dance in my seat, pool playing, and beer, and tonight I get to enjoy the household tradition of choosing my birthday dinner. BD is grilling me steak. Rare.




*I was thinking I was going to be 38, but then I remembered that BD is 39 and he's never just one digit older than I am. That's what happens when you get old--you forget your own age!