growing up again?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I have felt the need to blog less and less frequently. I think that’s because I don’t want to admit that the time for blogging has possibly passed, and I’m just riding a trend too long.

So here’s my counter-argument.

I started this blog in 2005, when I was the mom of a kindergartener and an eighteen-month-old. While I’ve always had a full-time job, I was tele-commuting then, in a job I had very recently gotten. My kids were young, and my life revolved around them. I spent large parts of every day thinking about them, and about the choices that I was making that affected them

And now it’s four years later, and they’ve grown up some. They’re much more self-sufficient, although not, of course, fully grown. While I still spend a lot of time thinking about them, and talking about them with their father and my friends, I feel less often like the choices that I’m making will unmake or be the making of them. There is a foundation that has been laid for their lives, and while I worry about the walls being straight, I don’t feel like one simple decision will cause the house to be less-than-true.

It seems to me, that just as there are stages of growing up for kids, there are stages of growing up for parents. I feel, to a certain extent, like I’m growing up as a mother.

 

kid theft

The Bee has a nemesis. They’ve been in the same class since kindergarten–the blessing and curse of a small school being that you can never get away from your enemy.

Landisdad and I had a long talk this evening during dinner with the Bee about the fact that her nemesis has stolen stuff from her recently. Not big stuff–things like a pen, a highlighter, her calculator. The Bee, to her credit, has not freaked out about it, though she is upset.

She saw the girl using her highlighter yesterday, and confronted her about it. The girl denied that it belonged to the Bee, but the assistant teacher was in the room, and backed her up. I think she’s given up hope of getting the pen back, but she really wants the calculator, although she didn’t have any proof that the girl had taken that.

Until today, when she saw it in the girl’s desk.

We asked her if she wanted to tell the teacher about it, and she said no. She doesn’t want to rat out her classmate, so we talked about some strategies for confronting the girl directly, and not getting upset if she lied again. We told her that she should ask her for the calculator back in front of other kids, since it would be good to have witnesses, if the situation got heated. And landisdad role-played with her what she should do if the other girl started yelling at her.

I’m more and more irritated by this girl every year, and can’t wait until she and the Bee are in middle school, and can keep their distance from each other more easily. I’m sure that there will be other girls, in other futures, with other problems, but this one can get gone, as far as I’m concerned.

rainy weekend

We’re having a pretty laid-back weekend here at chez landis. The various soccer games were rained out yesterday, so we sat around, bundled up, watching TV yesterday morning, then took a field trip into the nearby natural history museum in the afternoon. Today, landisdad went out for bagels in the morning, and we’re just kind of lazing around, doing some chores.

The unseasonable cold is forcing us to cocoon a little bit, and it’s nice. This has been a very active fall, and it’s nice to have a slow, easy weekend.

a note to my friends on the campaign side of the world

As regular readers of this blog know, I have a job that involves working in electoral politics from time to time. Here’s a tip for those folks who are not parents, and choose to work in politics:

If you are a political campaign manager, and you are trying to get my attention and/or support for your candidate, do not send me an email telling me that you live across the street from my kids’ school. It creeps me out, and makes me MUCH less likely to support your candidate. Also, it makes me worry that my daughter might not come home from her safety post someday.

I’m just sayin’.

scenes from a successful slumber party

Girls crashed on the couch, after “not sleeping at all!”

We got the sit & spin out of the basement for a two-year-old who attended—she had no interested in it, but the Potato (seen here dressed as the Boy in Black) found hours of entertainment in whirling it around.

10 Years Ago Today 2

…landisdad and I walked into a hospital as a couple of adults, and walked out as parents. (All right, that was actually 10 years from two days from now, but that’s somewhat less poetic.)

Happy Birthday, darling Bee.

I never thought that you would be almost as tall as I am, by the time you were 10 years old.

I didn’t know that you would be the kind of kid who eats her dessert as slowly as possible, in order to wring every bite of enjoyment out of it.

I knew that you would be a reader (how could you not be? you’re my daughter!), but I never knew how awesome it would be to see you reading at your safety post, every morning.

I never knew you would be such a good singer.

I didn’t know that you would love soccer, even this year when you have to be on a team with boys.

I never knew that I would worry about you every single day of the rest of my life.

I didn’t know that I would be proud of you every single day for the rest of my life.

Thank you for being the best 10-year-old girl in the Western Hemisphere. Have a wonderful birthday, Bee, and may it be followed by a wonderful year.

10 years ago today…

my cat killed a sparrow in the kitchen. The sparrow flew through our window during Hurricane Floyd seeking a place of safety, only to be snapped out of the air, dead before it hit the floor, by our cat, Hank, the killingest cat of all time.

Why do I remember this so vividly?

It was the Bee’s due date.

more on the basement

Long-time readers of this blog may remember when we got our basement finished. Way back then, I wanted to paint part of the wall as a chalkboard–we had a chalkboard in my basement growing up, and I always found it fun to play around with, especially when playing school, or Dungeons & Dragons. It took a couple of years, but I finally got around to it–and this is what’s waiting for my kids when they get home today. Although, of course, they don’t have chalkboards in school any more. Maybe I should have gotten some whiteboard paint…

First Day, 2009

back to school

For the first time in living memory (well, at least my living memory), school starts before Labor Day this year. The superintendent of our district realized last year that if school started after Labor Day, the kids would still be going in the last week of June, so he decided to break a decades-long tradition in our town.

I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now.

We had a kid-therapy session today, and the therapist suggested that we have a talk with the teacher about the Bee’s issues, which have come to be identified as a sort-of OCD-ishness. During the session, we went to the play therapy room, and the Bee and the Potato both had to make up a scene about the first day of school. The Potato’s involved a police helicopter and a T-Rex (god help me). The Bee’s involved going to a circus, a carnival, and finding buried treasure, which the class all shared. They both had ten minutes to pull their scenes together–the Potato finished his in about 2 minutes, while the Bee used up her whole time, and was still putting on the finishing touches while the Potato was telling us about his first day.

My work life is about to heat up again, too, and I’m worried that the combination of school starting and me being gone more is going to cause the Bee to have a setback. I just wish we could hold on to summer for one more week.