Bumblebee Sweet Potato

1. So I finally got around to importing all the posts from the original version of my blog into this one. I was surprised by how easy it is–WordPress must have made some improvements, because when I first tried to do it, it involved all kinds of coding things I didn’t really understand, and this was a pretty painless process. The painful part is that I have to slowly reimport all the comments that were in Haloscan, because they didn’t come over when the Blogger content did.
2. One of the things I’ve been wondering since WordPress introduced Feed Stats is what RSS readers people are using to read my blog. It seems that the majority of you are using “Other,” and I can’t figure out what that is (it’s not Bloglines, which I use, or a browser RSS reader–what else is there?).
3. Here’s a blog etiquette question–how long does a blog have to be dormant before it’s polite to remove it from your blogroll? I’m hoping that some of these folks will come back to blogging, but it seems weird to keep linking to someone who hasn’t posted in three or four months.

I was sitting in our family room and blogging the other night when I heard the Potato calling from his bedroom.

“Monsters in my room!”

Also known as, jackets hung from pegs on his closet door.

The Bee didn’t have a really big monster phase. There were a few nights of bad dreams, but for the most part, our kids have not been struck by night terrors (knock wood). After I removed the jackets, the Potato went straight to sleep, and didn’t seem to remember it the next day.

When I was a kid, I was terrified of the Count on Sesame Street. I never wanted to get out of bed to go to the bathroom, because I was convinced that he lived under my bed, and would grab me by the ankles. Now, of course, the fears that keep me awake at night have less to do with purple puppets with bad accents, and more to do with anxieties about whether I finished the work I had to do that day, or what’s going on with one of the kids, or when I’ll ever find time to weed my garden.

What were you afraid of as a kid? What things keep you up when you should be sleeping now?

I think that the best days as a parent are the days that you get to act like a kid yourself. The Bee and I played hooky today, and went to the beach with her best friend, the Peony, and the Peony’s mom. There were some other members of the Peony’s family there, including a couple with a fifteen-month-old son.

I’m not that far away from having a fifteen-month-old myself, but let me tell you, I was pretty happy to be there with my almost seven-year-old. It’s a lot more fun to be at the beach with a kid who isn’t shoveling fistfuls of sand into her mouth.

The Bee and the Peony are at that perfect age where they can play by themselves, but they’re not yet ashamed to be seen in public with their mothers. The Bee even asked me to come in the ocean with her (and I managed not to grievously injure myself this year) to teach her how to use a bodyboard. We had a great time.

I started the day in a cranky mood, after spending all of last night being screamed at by both of my children while landisdad worked late. In fact, I didn’t really feel like taking the Bee to the beach, and only the fact that I had already promised Peony’s mom that we would go motivated me to get moving this morning.

But once we got on the road, and I had some coffee, I started to feel better, and by the time we were near the beach, the Bee and I were singing along to a cd and so engaged in conversation that I missed a turn and added an extra 20 minutes to our trip.

Miraculously, I didn’t even get one work-related call on my cell phone the whole day.

Hey, did you know there’s a kind of eczema you can get in your eye? Neither did I, but apparently that’s what’s been keeping my right eye from opening all the way for the last two months. Let me just say this. Squick.

On the plus side, the other thing that my doctor thought it might be was a tumor, so that kind of put it all in perspective for me. Eyedrops and ointments, here we come! Maybe even an unguent, if I’m really lucky…

On Saturday, the Bee told us that she was going to sing us a song that she wrote. She moved the coffee table to the side of the living room, and proceeded to sing a song that was at least as long as “Ina Gadda da Vida.” There got to be a point where landisdad and I couldn’t look at each other, because the hilarity was too close to the surface.

The story in the song involved her playing the part of the benevolent Princess of Jewels, and her wonderful life in the Jewel kingdom. The part that really got to me was when she described how the Queen of Jewels had become a servant when the Princess was born. The id of a seven-year-old girl is an interesting place to be.

The whole thing got me thinking about entitlement, and how we struggle to keep our kids from feeling like the world owes them everything they want. Some days, I feel like the only conversations that I have involve sentences like, “I only have two hands!” and “You’ll have to wait your turn!” Sentences that my own mother said over and over again.

My mom grew up in a huge family (think more than 10 kids). In her family, everyone worked all the time. The bigger kids took care of the little kids, until they got old enough to have real jobs. The little kids did chores and gardening. They all worked their way through college. In addition to the fact that she grew her own vegetables, and made her kids’ clothes, my grandmother was one of those people who naturally recycled, because it was cheaper than buying new. My mom and her siblings are notorious for saving Christmas wrapping paper. It takes them hours to open their presents, because they fold it up and smooth the tape to use it again another year.

I have three brothers, so my mom definitely didn’t go down the same route as her own mom in terms of family size. But she was the kind of mom who, when she was a SAHM, made our clothes and had a huge vegetable garden in the back yard. When I was little, a couple of her sisters would come to our house every summer to make enormous quantities of strawberry jam, on ridiculously hot days. She doesn’t recycle wrapping paper anymore (but I bet she’s still got a closetful), though I do get presents with tags made out of last year’s Christmas cards.

I don’t make clothes, and I don’t cook, but our kids do learn lessons about the time it takes to make food from their dad. I do garden, although it’s mostly ornamental, save for a few tomatoes. I feel as if we’re constantly searching for ways to teach our kids the value of the things that they want, especially because we’re consumers, not producers, for the most part. I don’t remember this being something that I was consciously ‘taught’ by my parents, but it was hard not to learn, growing up in that environment. I feel as if I have to be much more conscious about imparting this knowledge to my kids than my parents or grandparents did.

What do you do, to temper the overweening privilege that kids are born with? How do you teach your kids that they can’t always get what they want, even if they are the Princess of Jewels?

The summer that I turned 21 was a tremendously important one in my reading life. Thanks to the fact that I had found a paid internship that also provided housing, I had the ability to spend almost all my cash on books. About halfway through the summer, I started working nights only, which left me the whole day to read and screw around in Boise.

In an incredible combination of good luck, good choosing, and a great independent bookstore, over that summer I read for the first time Love in the Time of Cholera, the collected works of W.B. Yeats, the Iliad, and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, among others. Lots of my reading that summer was directed by reviews in the Times Book Review–that wasn’t the case for the McMurtry book though. But I was intrigued by the idea of a western novel that had won the Pulitzer.

I loved Lonesome Dove, and it led me to read all of McMurtry’s earlier work. I’ve continued to be a fan over the years, and have read everything he’s published since then. Patsy in Moving On might be one of my favorite female characters ever written by a man. Now, however, I think the time has come for me to take a break.

There’ve been disappointments over the years. But I just finished reading his latest novel, Telegraph Days, and it is by far the worst thing he’s ever written. Yowza, was it bad. I couldn’t even keep track of the number of random characters that were introduced to no apparent purpose. And the main character has a terrible habit of referring to men’s erections as ’stiffies,’ which rang so incredibly false.

Larry, was it the pressure of working on this book while doing Brokeback Mountain? I would have waited another six months to get a better book.

Last night, I had to work late. When I got home, landisdad told me the following story:

Landisdad and the Potato were going to daycare, when the Potato demanded that landisdad drive faster.

Landisdad: “Are you the boss, Potato?”

Potato: “No.”

Landisdad: “Am I the boss?”

Potato: “No.”

Landisdad: “Is mommy the boss?”

Potato: “No”

Landisdad: “Who’s the boss?”

Potato: “The Bee.” (tee hee hee)

She was, evidently, glad to hear it.

I went to a meeting today with a bunch of high school students, and for the first time, I started to wonder what my kids will be like in high school. I found this really interesting article on high school subcultures on Wikipedia. I love my kids at the ages they’re at right now, but I’m very curious about what they’ll be like when they’re older.

Will the Bee be a Queen Bee? the Potato a punk? Will they be rockers or revolutionaries or skaters?

I just can’t wait to find out.

I took the kids to a barbecue at a friend’s house yesterday afternoon, and a work acquaintance of mine who was at the party told me that she had never realized I had kids. I was surprised to hear it, because I feel like I talk about my kids all the time, and I told her so. Then she floored me by saying, “yeah, I guess I thought you worked too much to have kids.”

I wasn’t really sure how to take it. My initial reaction was to be pissed off–this isn’t someone that I know particularly well, nor do I do a lot of work with her. I sort of joked it off by saying, “yeah, I’m sure the Bee would agree with you.” In retrospect, I’m not exactly sure why I got pissed off. After all, I had just spent the previous three days on a business trip, and had been thinking the exact same thing myself.

There’s a part of me that wants to believe that time spent on the road has no effect on my kids. Then there’s the part of me that knows that when I come home and the Bee writes me a note the next day that says, “I love my mom, she is the best!” that she’s partly doing that out of anxiety. (Although I am, of course, the best.)
I can’t stop going on the road for my job, but I can limit it as much as possible. It’s not that I want to give it up entirely, but I have spent far too much time working this summer. When I got into the kind of work that I do now, I almost always had a slow period in the summer, but lately it seems to have drifted away, and in some ways, the summers are more stressful than other times of the year.

I think one of the main reasons that I was so floored by this woman’s comment was because I do a lot of work with our mutual friend (who was hosting the party), and I spend an awful lot of time saying no to that friend. Over the course of the spring and summer, I’ve been refusing to go to an awful lot of meetings that she’s involved in, just because they happen after the normal business day has ended. I don’t mind working late, but usually it involves typing on my laptop after the kids are in bed, not sitting in a meeting when I could be having dinner with them.

When I was 25 and a half years old, I was a pretty heavy smoker. About six months before my birthday, I decided that I was going to quit smoking the day after my 26th birthday. I psyched myself up about it, and I smoked about a pack of cigarettes on my birthday, but I did quit the next day. Landisdad and I had just started dating, and he was really supportive, up to and including chewing on licorice root, a truly vile substance that my hippie roommate had recommended. In the intervening 12 years, I’ve smoked one cigarette.

Last week, I had a bunch of routine blood work done, and I got the results tonight. For the first time ever, I have borderline high cholesterol. It’s not a dangerous level, it’s just something to keep an eye on, and of course, I have to make some dietary changes.

So goodbye, cheese. Goodbye pizza. Goodbye ice cream, and butter, and full fat lattes. I don’t have six months to psych myself up to quitting you, and it’s gonna be hard.

It’s been fun, eating all that fat.

But not as fun as living to see my kids graduate from college, and get married, and have babies of their own, and spoiling the shit out of those babies.