January Pondering

Normally, the first of the year is a very motivating time for me. I don't make a list of specific resolutions, but I do feel a sense of renewal and opportunity. I love cycles and change, so it seems very natural to me that the start of a new year should be a fresh start toward personal goals and growth.

This year, I still have that general feeling, but I'm not as motivated and energized as I usually am in January. That could have something to do with the solid week of rain, or the recurring lack of sleep I've experienced so far in '09, I guess. We had a very restful, relaxing Christmas break, though, so I should have enough in the reserves.

On one hand, I know that this year will hold some exciting changes for my family. We'll be trying to move houses (not cities yet), hopefully very soon. Genevieve will finally be weaned, bringing my nine (combined) years of nursing to a final and permanent close. She will also finish potty training, ending my relationship with diapers (not nearly as bitter-sweet an ending) until grandchildren come along.

On the other hand, I have some personal things that I know I need to work on that I am just not feeling. I have kept off twenty pounds for about a year and a half, but need to lose another 20, and yet I'm not doing anything. It's time to get back in the gym, but somehow I just haven't made it there yet. There are other, less tangible things that I know I need to work on, too, but somehow I'm just...not.

The Big C

Happy birthday Calvin. I can't believe you are eleven years old. Eleven! I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you are so grown up, since you sometimes act like the only adult in the house. You are the child who made me a mother and taught me the job. I couldn't have asked for a better teacher.

Why I Love Being Southern

Or, things I chatted about with the woman in line behind me while waiting to check out at Kroger this afternoon:

-Why it was so busy and why she didn't expect it to be
-The astonishing amount of food piled in my basket and why I needed to buy three loaves of bread at a time
-How long that giant pile of food would last us (about two weeks)
-How it's easier when kids get older, but then also not
-How hormonal her 12-year-old daughter is and how I dread my kids hitting puberty
-Divorce and how there is life after it
-How high her utility bill was and how my friend Stacey's high utility bill made hers look tiny
-How much we both hate the midtown Schnuck's and just cannot go there
-How you can't go in Kroghetto at night but how it's nice and uncrowded during the day
-How she was so hungry she was about to gnaw off her own arm
-How she should snag one of the warm rotisserie chickens right next to us and run off to hide and eat it, and how once when I was pregnant I wanted to hide in a closet with a whole chicken I'd just roasted so I could devour it all myself

Then as soon as it was my turn at the checkout, she and the woman behind her realized they had a mutual friend. Like you do in Memphis.

How I Spent my Christmas Vacation, by Sassy Molassy

Oh, hello there. Having a good holiday season? It's almost over; I realize my happy holiday wishes are somewhat belated. So sue me. I have a life!

Actually, I don't really. I am probably the laziest mother of four who ever lived. I'm cool with that. It saves me from having to drive kids to things like soccer practice. Anyway, we have been enjoying our very relaxed and lazy break. Having traveled to the wonderful Fachini family Thanksgiving in Georgia, we spent Christmas here in town. Christmas Eve was spent with my family of origin as is the tradition, although it was my sister's year to spend Christmas with her husband's family, so we did miss them. All I had to cook was homemade mac and cheese for the kids, and my first ever from-scratch cheesecake, which turned out beautifully if I do say so myself. I'm planning to eat the last of it in a little while, if you must know. And no, you can't have any.

The kids got some good loot, and then we came home for our annual viewing of It's a Wonderful Life and then off to bed so Santa could come. He brought more loot. Imagine that! The kids seemed very happy as Santa had answered their main wishes: for Calvin, a cell phone; for Joshua, a tribot; and for Somerset, a bike. Genevieve had no real requests so she got a Little People farm, which she could not care less about. That's okay though, as she is busy caring for the four or five baby dolls she received from various parties.

Tomorrow we plan to ring in the new year with a few of our closest friends. I love New Year's Eve, which puts me in the minority around here, but I will save that discussion for another post. Meanwhile, here are some pictures!

Cousin Kyle got an American bulldog puppy for Christmas. Even though I do not like dogs and do not in anyway understand the desire to own a pet, she was sort of sweet in a puppy kind of way. For a couple of hours.


Somerset about to dive in at the grandparents'.


Genevieve enjoying many of her gifts simultaneously. (Some of them were hair accessories. Can you tell?)


Calvin checking out his new phone Christmas morning.


Smiley Christmas morning Calvin.


Christmas morning extravaganza!


Joshua cozying up to his new Tribot.

Christmas morning Monkey Bread.


Video chat with Nonna down in South Florida.

Lost and Found

Things I could not find this morning:

1. The will to get out of bed before hitting snooze for the fourth time
2. The pink travel mug
3. The lid to the blue travel mug
4. Any lid that fit any suitable container for my lunch
5. The words to convince my two year old that she would be much happier in bed than sitting in a daze on the counter watching me put on my makeup. ("I want your eyes to be pink, Mommy.)
6. Anything worth listening to on the radio
7. A wormhole that would save me from being five(ish...okay maybe closer to ten) minutes late for the eleventyninth day in a row.

Things I did find:

1. A snuggle before getting out of bed
2. A two-year old who just wanted to sleep sweetly on her mama's shoulder
3. An about-to-be-eleven-year-old who put his newly pulled tooth under his pillow just for old time's sake
4. The red travel mug that I filled with delicious hot tea with real cream
5. A container I thought would be too small for my lunch but wasn't
6. Pants that only needed a quick spin in the dryer to make them wearable
7. Matching, hole-free, new black socks, and in plain view
8. The already-graded pile of papers on my desk far outsizing the to-be-graded pile
9. Homemade chocolate-peanut clusters from a student and fellow-teacher's son (breakfast!)
10. That it's Wednesday of the last, short week before Christmas break

As always, the good far outweighs the bad. I really can't complain at all, can I?

Let me count the ways

Lately I'm noticing all the little ways in which my children are like me. It's an interesting experience, because in many ways they are not like me at all. And of course, sometimes they act like me in ways that are not at all good. This is different, though. I'm not talking about them being impatient and sarcastic and snippy with each other. I'm talking about little ways that show how they take after their ma.

Calvin: Has read the first four Harry Potter books in the past week or so. This is exciting to me on so many levels! I've waited for the day that he would read and enjoy these books that I adore, and it's finally here! It was also fun to sit at the table with a group of our friends as we all watched him sit and read without ceasing amid the whirlwind of activity that is the cocktail hour kids and even lift a plate out of toddler range with one hand while never tearing his eyes from the page. That's my boy! He also continues to demonstrate my tendency to eschew anything resembling a dry crust of bread/pizza/cookie edge, etc.

Joshua: Has always reminded me the most of myself as a child because he is just so clueless. The other night I went through his homework folder, and all his signed papers from the past two months were still sitting in there. When I was his age, I remember having no idea what was going on, ever. I was in my own little world, and so is he. The fact that I know where he gets it is what makes it okay. I grew out of it, and so will he. In the meantime, he's mostly just my happy-go-lucky little guy.

Somerset: Wants to do what she wants to do. The fact that you or I want her to do something different does not necessarily mean she's going to happily abandon her pursuit. This may be frustrating to me as a parent, but I also find it reassuring. I consider my willingness to tell other people that I do not care what they want me to do is one of the reasons I'm the happy person that I am, and I can only be glad if she possesses that particular tool. The flip side of that is that, like me, she also happens to be extremely sensitive to the people she does care about. Just when we think she's an incorrigible rebel, she can be devastated by a disapproving or angry statement from BD or me. And the way she cries when that happens is just 100% me with hurt feelings. It's heartbreaking.

Genevieve: Honestly at 2 1/2, her main Sassy-like personality trait is binge eating. That girl can put away the groceries! Oh, and she shows my preference for non-breakfast foods for breakfast. She woke up this morning asking for macaroni, but there was none in the fridge so she settled for Spaghettios. According to her Dad, she scarfed them down and chased them with a chocolate chip waffle. Unlike me, however, she often requests her food cold for the simple reason that she is too impatient to wait for the microwave. This is more like BD, whose mother says he would cry and beg "Don't cook it, don't cook it!" when she tried to heat his food. I, on the other hand, will not eat anything cold that is normally served hot. Blech! She also talks a lot. A. Lot.

Secretive-like

Recently SAM accused me of having a "secret food blog." I laughed and replied that it wasn't secret, I just didn't think she'd be interested in it because she doesn't cook. It's not even my blog--Rita created it and invited me to contribute. Lately I think my fellow contributors have gotten busy and I must be bored or cooking a lot or just thinking about food too much, because I seem to have become the main recipe poster of the moment.

It's not a fancy food blog, just basic stuff you can easily whip up with minimal cooking skills. But lest I be accused of hoarding food knowledge and building a secret food blog underground, I thought I'd share. Bon apetit!

Ravioli Day

I think I've said before that one of the things I loved about BD from the very beginning was his big Italian family and the fact that they all liked each other so much. Being from a small family myself, I found it fascinating that there were so many of them, and that they were all so themselves together, and that my cooly cynical teenaged boyfriend's face lit up like a little boy when he talked about upcoming get-togethers with all of them. It still does.

One of the traditions from BD's family that we have taken upon ourselves to pass on (ahem, aside from having lots of babies...), is the massive making of his great-grandparents' ravioli recipe each year before the holidays. We've expanded the tradition to include our friends, who truly are family to us. They are the aunts and uncles our kids will remember always having around (in addition to their real ones, of course), and their kids are the passel of cousins our family does not really have in abundance here in town. This past weekend, we all got together and made 58 dozen ravioli from scratch (I originally miscounted, but bagging them up revealed the true numbers). Thanks to Chip for the great pictures. I love ravioli day.

BD and SAM rolling out the dough and passing strips to the assemblers (with Shannon there to document)

Somerset working very diligently

Calvin preparing for the pickup tray.

Me being the pickup lady
Stacey and Jiro bonding over a ravioli moment

The group enjoying the fruits of their labor

Hillary Clinton reflects

This morning when I woke up I was
not The President, again. I lay in bed
pretending for just that last moment before
opening my eyes that it had happened. That
I was Her, the first, and that I was just about to
sit up, swing my legs over the bed and slide
my feet into the fuzzy presidential slippers.

I think that it is time I took up a hobby. Maybe
I'll go away, get a little cottage and grow things. What
is it that people grow when they do that? Orchids? Too
complicated. Rhubarb? Too...something. Where is the right
climate for cucumbers and mint?

I will let my hair grow long and
stop getting it colored. Or color it pink. I will get a bunch
of cats and let them go just shy of feral, knots of blind kittens
in baskets all the time. I will have a democracy of cats,
who will love me.

And Bill can't come.

Hope

This is the most inspiring collection of photographs of the president-elect that I have seen. Enjoy! Look at those crowds!

Facebook, long lines, and various other ramblings

Yesterday I stood in line for over two hours to vote early. I took a book, of course, so it wasn't too bad. A woman behind me held a four month old baby in her arms the whole entire time. I wished so badly that I'd had a sling or something in the car to loan her, but I just had my non-adjustable Hotsling, which would not have fit her. I also felt like I should offer to hold the baby for a bit, but that's always a little weird, isn't it? She and I and two other women in line chatted off and on the whole time, and I think we all wanted to help, but what if she didn't want strangers (as nice and normal as we all may have seemed) holding her baby? Then we'd all have to stand there together feeling awkward for the next hour. Oh well. I did eventually make it to the machines to cast my vote. Woo hoo! I really prefer to vote on election day, but BD is going to be interviewing people at polling places that day, so I figured I'd better go ahead and get it done. Now watch, on Tuesday the big story will be that everyone is in and out in twenty minutes.

Not to delve into a big political discussion, because this is not that blog, but I recently experienced a big boom of people I went to high school with linking up on Facebook. In looking at their profiles, I couldn't help but notice that the vast majority of these people list themselves as "conservative Christian" and Republican. Neither of which, suffice it to say, comes anywhere close to the way I describe myself. I went all the way through elementary and high school with most of these people, so I guess that's why for some reason it surprises me to learn that they are all so different from me. Which is silly, really, because I in fact thought that everyone was Baptist until sixth grade, when I befriended a Jehova's Witness. And then all of us in our little cool girl clique proceeded to tell her that all her beliefs were wrong, that not believing in hell was crazy, and that her religion condoned way more racial mixing than we were led to believe was acceptable. I still want to find that girl and apologize to her. Thinking about her makes me cringe, not only because of our well-meaning bigotry and intolerance, (which were more often than not backed up by our teachers), but because it makes me think "Holy crap, the Jehovah's Witness was the crazy liberal in my world then?" I live in the buckle of the Bible Belt, after all, the city with more churches than gas staions, yada yada yada. I guess I'm just surprised because I grew up that way too, but I'm not that way now, and the path from there to here just seems so natural to me. To realize that the majority of my peers, kids I went to school with for up to ten years, exchanged classroom valentines with, went through puberty with, snuck out and ran around with, turned out so completely other than what I am...it just feels weird, and kind of depressing. It makes me realize how much I float along in my little liberal midtown(ish) bubble, forgetting I'm a blue dot in a sea of red.

I Hung One More Year on the Line

Yesterday was my 36th birthday, and it was wonderful. Between BD surprising me with a shiny new bike, SAM writing me a very nice birthday post and bringing me Chicken Tikka Masala and a lovely French Silk pie, and what felt like hundreds of birthday wishes on Facebook, I felt very loved and happy all day. Who cares if I'm now officially closer to 40 than 30? 36 is looking great so far.

Women's Work

I have a rather un-feminist confession to make: I have never liked the idea of having a man in my kitchen. All the husbands I knew who cooked seemed to get embroiled in these very elaborate recipes that involved blowtorches and trips to multiple specialty markets. Dinner seemed to run quite late on a regular basis, and the wives, between keeping the kids out of the way and then cleaning up the man mess, seemed to end up with as much work, if not more, as if they just cooked themselves. Not for me, I proclaimed.

I grew up cooking. By the time I was in high school, I knew how to make most of my mom's recipes and most days I at least got dinner started when I came home from school. I know how to buy groceries at the biggest grocery store I can find, stock the pantry, fridge, and freezer, and make dinner nightly based on whatever I have on hand. I can take a pot roast from deep freeze to table in one hour (thank you, inventor of the pressure cooker) and serve it up with mashed potatoes and gravy, a green veg, and rolls. I cook like a mom.

Before we had kids, I subscribed to Food and Wine and watched fancy cooking shows and went through phases of baking bread from scratch. I was an adventurous and creative cook, and I looked for opportunities to challenge my skills and cook for a group. But you know, when you cook dinner for nine people at least three nights a week, where's the challenge? Sadly, since the kids started coming, cooking has become less a thrill and more a chore. I've been in a rut.

But things have changed around chez Sassy. BD, he cooks! Since selling the shop and becoming a feelance writer based from home, he has gotten himself a cookbook and started making stuff out of it. I'm not sure if it's because he knows my feelings about the male cooking-as-major-project deal, or if it's just because he's very new to the kitchen, but so far he has stuck to basic-but-good dishes. And I must admit, it has been absolutely wonderful.

I'm not ready to give up cooking altogether, but not having to do it four or five nights a week is very relaxing. And surpisingly, I find myself thinking about branching out and trying new recipes instead of just auto-piloting the old staples. In the past week or so, I've made polenta dishes (cooking my own polenta, not using storebought) and tamales from scratch, much as I might have done ten years ago but would not have felt like doing a month ago. It's been fun. Having a man in the kitchen is not so bad after all! Especially if he happens to be wearing jeans and a black tshirt and have a dishtowel hanging from his back pocket.

You Say It's Your Birthday

A very hAPpy birthday to my girl SAM.

More fun with words

I'm enjoying the feedback from my words post and am still processing. In the meantime, I'm following Rita through the Johari Window. Click on that and follow the directions to help fill in my window, then make your own and link me to it.

The Sound of Silence

In The Writer on Her Work, Volume 2, Joy Williams talks about feeling suspicious of a reader's praise by saying "Words, you know, they're around. They get used a lot."

Lately I have become suspicious of my own facility with words. It has occured to me that I think in complete sentences, and while this thought made me happy when it first dawned on me, now I'm not so sure.

This isn't just about my notorious talkativeness, because I believe I have reined that in quite a bit and it rarely gets away from me anymore. It's more about the internal thought processes that aren't necessarily tied to speech. I'm starting to wonder if words are holding my thoughts prisoner.

I don't know why this never occured to me before. I intentionally avoided teaching my children to read before kindergarten because of the theory that the process shapes their thinking into more rigid patterns. (This was a very popular idea among the Existentialist crowd, many of whom advocated waiting until kids were 8 or 9 before allowing them to read.) Three of my four children showed themselves to be highly verbal from infancy, and I wanted to give them time to develop their other facilities. I never worried that they would have trouble with words. I wanted them to focus on what came less naturally: being creative, musical, physically adroit. But I never thought about myself in those terms.

Today as I was reading a friend's blog, I came across these quotes from Ekhart Tolle's A New Earth. I'm not a New Agey spiritual kind of person, but the quotes struck me especially hard:

"Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. You don't know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg."

and

"The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you."

Ouch.

It's funny how we can never see clearly when it comes to ourselves. Recently a student of mine who is also a very serious art student wrote in an essay about feeling that she is not as creative as she was a year ago. I suggested in my comments that she spark her creativity by doing things she wouldn't normally do and pushing herself out of her comfort zone a little bit. Maybe that's what I should do, too.

It has never been lost on me that I get a little thrill from being moved to tears for unfathomable reasons. I like it when a piece of instrumental music has an emotional effect on me, or when I see or experience something that stirs up feelings that I can't logically connect to the impetus. I guess I've always understood in a vague, peripheral part of my mind why that might be. And now I've noticed that my ever-morphing daydreams about escaping my children for a few days have taken a new form. I dream of a few days alone, without words. No talking, no reading, no writing. It might sound extreme, but I feel like my brain needs retraining, and rest.

Weekend Update, sadly still not starring Tina Fey

Sometimes instead of not blogging because I'm busy or lazy, I'm not blogging because I'm having too much fun to stop and tell you how much fun I'm having. This weekend was one of those times.

For starters, BD had a real, actual, two-day weekend! He has worked Saturdays for the past eight years or so, but that's all over now. His excitement over the prospect of having a real weekend was almost as adorable as watching him walk around the house in my robe.

Saturday was the much anticipated Rock-n-Romp starring (as far as I'm concerned, anyway) Garrison Starr. After years of whining about why didn't I have a Garrison Starr CD, I got to buy one directly from her. A CD always sounds better when it was put in your hand by the artist herself, don't you think? See pictures of us having a fabulous time here.
Yesterday I went to the Midsouth Fair with my kids, minus the youngest, and my parents. I rode a lot of rides, ate food on a stick, and got so tired from walking around in the hot sun for five hours that I am back to being too lazy to tell you much more about it.

Hello, I Must Be Going

Beeep: Sassy can't come to the blog right now because she is touring the seventh circle of grading hell. In fact it's possible that she's only recording this message as a means to avoid reading month-old essays. If you really, really miss her, you can visit her here. (She thinks she looks like Petunia in the last picture, but she doesn't want Chip to go back to being afraid to post her picture.) Otherwise, please leave a message.

Rabble Rouser

My school district is in budget crisis. There are a multitude of reasons for that, but the main two are declining enrollment and an ignorant city council that recently forced huge cuts which they justified by saving the average property owner approximately $8 in property taxes (really, I'm not just being snarky. Eight. Dollars. A year.) because, you know, what does a crime-ridden, floundering city need with educated children? Makes 'em uppity, all that book learnin'.

As a result of the declining enrollment, about 70 teachers are being laid off. Normally these "surplussed" teachers would just get moved from a school with lower enrollment to one with too many students for the current staffing level. Apparently, this year we're not so much with the latter. At my school, we lost a single science teacher because our numbers are down for the first time in several years. At this time last year, we got eight additional teachers who had been surplussed from other schools.

As a result of the budget cuts, over 100 non-teaching positions, both filled and vacant, are being eliminated. 40 of those are within the school board and are held by licensed teachers. Those 40 people now have the option, under our MEA-negotiated contract, to "bump" teachers with lesser seniority from their positions.

As a teacher, I'm not that worried about being bumped because I have ten years in the system, and within my department there are probably five teachers less senior than I. (Of course I don't want to see any of them go, though.) But as a parent, this really gets my hackles up. I have three children in a single elementary school in this district. All three of them love their teachers. Calvin, the fifth grader, is especially enamored of his main teacher this year. What if he got bumped by some bitter old hag who left the classroom because she grew to hate the sight of children after thirty years of teaching them? I find myself hoping that this teacher's disability (he is legally blind and active in organizations that lobby for the rights of the visually impaired) will secure his place. Joshua's main teacher is experienced and has won prestigious awards, so she's probably safe. But both of Somerset's teachers are young and have only been teaching for a few years. Will they be bumped? Or, to put it another way, will I have to organize a protest and go raise hell at the board?

I have refused to join the teachers' union every year that I have taught. I'm not opposed to unions in general--I think that workers should have the right to organize and that they should be protected from the arbitrary whims of management. I don't believe that loyal employees with solid histories in their jobs should be systematically replaced by younger, cheaper versions of themselves. I do not, however, believe in closed shops because no one should ever be forced to join any organization, ever, under any circumstances. And I have a specific problem with the MEA: they act as though the school system exists to employ teachers, and I believe that it exists to educate children. It's as simple as that.

It is not in the best interest of children to disrupt their education once the school year is in progress. Teachers and students have spent six weeks establishing procedures and good work habits, getting to know each other, and building the trust that is essential for real learning to take place. Yanking that security out from under them is wrong and could be disasterous in the lives of individual children.

I said as much to a colleague in the library earlier, and she looked at me as if I had three heads. I like this person and we chat each day in the library while in mutual exile from our rooms (we all have floating teachers in our rooms during our planning periods), but the fact that she used to be an MEA area rep somehow never came up before. Oops. I told her why I'd never joined the union and she said "That's fine unless people are trying to plan their lives. You have ten years; if you got surplussed, you wouldn't bump someone else?" And honestly, that's a tough question. I teach high school and those kids are used to being shuffled around and having their schedules changed multiple times, and I might be better at my job than less experienced teachers, and I need my paycheck, so yes, I see that. My students would already be affected by my having been surplussed, because their schedules would change and they'd be crammed into classes already in progress. I think that's different from people who chose to leave the classroom to take a cushy board job. And ultimately, if I had to I'd just find another job. That's life, right? No other business guarantees perpetual employment. Teachers enjoy more job security than most professionals would ever dream of, but sometimes even we will have to suck it up.

1.5 seconds of fame

My little family was on the news! We're about 1 minute 47 seconds in. Aren't we cute? We all look annoyed because the people who redid the shell would not stop talking for 45 minutes, in spite of impending rain that did in fact begin the minute the first musician hit the stage. Oh well.

http://www.wreg.com/Global/story.asp?s=8956174