Bumblebee Sweet Potato

Seven years ago tonight, landisdad and I stood poised on the precipice of this great adventure. We knew that before 24 hours had passed, we would be parents for the first time.

Never did I imagine what it would be like. Happy birthday, to my calamari-eating, sleepover-having, wiggling, giggling, princess-imagining, sweet beautiful seven-year-old girl.

Happy Birthday, Bee!

I feel like I should have some kind of deep, insightful post after being away for so long. But it ain’t happening.

The thing I’ve been thinking about most lately (when I’ve had time to breathe between work and family commitments) is cars. Mostly that’s due to the fact that my trusty ‘99 wagon is now getting on in years, and starting to fail me. It’s little things right now–the cigarette lighter stopped working about six months ago, which is a pain because I can’t use my cell phone charger anymore. The glove box door has been, shall we say, quirky, for more than a few years. The driver’s side sun visor is flapping in the breeze. The number of crumbs that my children have littered it with over the years approaches a googolplex.

So I’ve been contemplating my next car, and along the way, reminiscing about cars gone by. In high school, I drove a bitchin’ Camaro. I truly loved that car, with its massive V-8 engine. Sure it fishtailed at the slightest hint of rain, which meant I had an accident exactly 11 days after I got it. But once I got the back weighted down with 100 pounds of counterweights I “borrowed” from my high school theater, it was all good. To this day, the only speeding ticket I’ve ever gotten (knock wood) was in that car, after my brother dared me to see if I could go over 100 on the New Jersey Turnpike. A costly error in judgment.

My parents had all kinds of crazy cars growing up. At one point, we had a huge Mercedes sedan, which was from some time in the late ’50s or early ’60s, when they were enormous, round metal automobiles –ours was a sort of forest green. I think that was my first experience with a leather interior–it had such a distinctive smell, musty and antique.

There was also a Triumph Spitfire, a Volkswagen Beetle, and an Oldsmobile Ciera, which is the first car I ever remember our family owning that was actually new off-the-lot. My parents let me and my brothers pick the interior color, which was a phenomenal amount of responsibility at the time. I’m pretty sure we ended up with something like ‘Sand.’ In addition to those fine vehicles, there was also the conversion van, which provided our home away from home on many camping trips.

This wagon is the first new car I’ve ever owned, and it will be the first car that my kids really remember (it’s known affectionately as The Mommy Car). There are several stickers from political causes or rallies on the dashboard, and the Bee demonstrated her early facility as a reader by reading some of them aloud.

So as I think about replacing my car, it’s hard to do without reflecting back over the long seven years we’ve had together. A pretty transformative time in my life–we bought the car when we left California, when I was five and a half months pregnant with the Bee. I’ve given it up to landisdad during both of my pregnancies–it wasn’t made for a heavily pregnant woman–and at this point, it’s in a semi-retired state. It doesn’t get to go on road trips any more–we mostly take landisdad’s car if we have to go anywhere far, to save wear and tear on the older car.

For my next car, I’m likely to buy a Prius, or some other kind of hybrid. I want a car that’s more environmentally responsible–I’m required to drive long distances for my job, and I don’t like the feeling that I’m destroying the atmosphere while I’m doing it. I wish that Detroit were building them, but I haven’t seen a sedan being produced by an American automaker, and frankly, I don’t have a driveway big enough for an SUV (nor do I particularly want one). I’ve wanted a massive white pickup truck for about fifteen years, since I had a coworker with one who was the epitome of cool, but that’s not a very practical choice for a mother of two.

I’m curious, what kinds of car memories do you have? Did you grow up in a family with quirky cars, or did everyone drive a hoopty? Or were you carless? Did you vacation by car, or road trip a lot as a young adult?

In the aftermath to Hurricane Katrina, I wrote a post about my frustration with the whole situation called “I will not yield to a politic of despair.” This is a sort of follow-up, since I’ve just finished reading Douglas Brinkley’s history of Katrina, The Great Deluge. In my original post, I posited that the history of Katrina might actually have a chance of being true, since so many of us watched it daily on the news, but that it would only happen if we demanded the truth, and didn’t let Bush and others cover it over as they so obviously wanted to do.

Watching the footage of Hurricane Katrina as it rolled out over the last week in August last year, I was changed utterly. Although I’ve always been a pointy-headed liberal, I mostly did agree with my friends on the right that the U.S. was a great country. I felt a lot of the time that it was a great country headed in the wrong direction, but I had faith that we could still get back on track. After watching thousands of my countrymen and -women struggle for survival in the aftermath of a predicted natural disaster, my belief in the U.S. was shaken to its roots.

The title of the post I wrote last year was taken from Dr. Martin Luther King’s last sermon, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” Reading this book, I was reminded of another line of that great oratory: “It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.” Katrina left thousands of New Orleanians bootstrapless, and then added insult to injury by making them swim, crawl, float, or wheel their loved ones in a shopping cart to reach safety.

Brinkley doesn’t pull a lot of punches in the book. It is meticulously well-researched (check out the hour-by-hour timeline at the end), and while there are many everyday people lauded as heroes, none of the three major political figures (Mayor Nagin, Governor Blanco, President Bush) involved comes off particularly well. Brinkely documents a chain of bad decisions–some merely misguided (Blanco), some outright dangerous (Bush), some born out of bad faith (Nagin).

Interspersed with the bad decisions made by those at nearly all levels of government (go Coast Guard! you folks did the right thing!) are many, many personal stories of those who survived and those who didn’t. Brinkley makes a point to document not only those who died in the storm and its aftereffects, but also to chronicle what happened to some of the survivors, including some who succumbed to Katrina-related stress. I made the mistake of bringing it with me on a plane–while it’s “unputdownable,” I think I freaked out my seatmate a little by crying while reading some of the more moving chapters.

If you’re still looking for ways to help the survivors, check out this link (but act fast). If you want a great, touching read that you’ll be thinking about for days to come, check out The Great Deluge.

I’m really tired of going to the Bee’s school to volunteer, and having a teacher pull me aside to tell me something potentially negative about my kid. The next time we’re having a discussion about volunteer recruitment at the PTA, I’m going to need to bring this one up. Because guess what? I don’t take an hour off from work in the middle of the day because you asked me to so that I can be blindsided.

If that shit is important, you need to schedule a meeting with me. Send me an email. Hell, just write a note on a piece of paper and send it home in her backpack.

Do not, however, drop a bombshell on me by crooking your finger and murmuring to me outside your classroom, while my daughter sits there practicing addition with 18 other kids. It’s disrespectful of my time, and instead of leading me to a place where I might calmly discuss the issue, it just makes me fume.

I’m sooooo glad to be home. It’s hard to be away for almost five days. When I got home yesterday, the Bee was taking a nap, and the Potato was having quiet time. I immediately disrupted the quiet time, but left the Bee asleep, though that was very hard. I just wanted to hug both of my kids for like an hour.

We had a kind of quiet day today, just a trip to the park, and some errands. And a lot of tickling.

I thought I’d give a report-back on my post of last weekend. Seems like it partially worked, and partially didn’t work, during the week that I was away. Today, the fighting had definitely decreased, but I’m not sure if it’s just because the kids are relieved that I was finally home or what. We did end up reading two extra stories (one per kid) and having extra tv. Last night though, the Potato had to go to bed early due to his disruptive behavior.

While I was gone, I called home to talk to them every night except the first one. Landisdad reported that the Potato stood at our back door for two straight nights, whimpering, “Mommeeeee.” That’s hard to hear. I really don’t like being away for that long, but this is the one event of the year that I just can’t miss. The thing that makes it hardest is that there are some people (who have to be there for less time) that ended up bringing their kids. But single parenting while working for five days (and long days, at that) just wasn’t going to work for me this year.

Still on my trip, ah the beauty of timed blogging! On Tuesday, I blogged about some of my favorite web tools. Today’s post is more content-oriented.

• BlackCommentator.com is one of my favorite political sites on the web. Fans of Condoleeza Rice should keep moving. I’ve been reading this site for a number of years (2002? 2003? something like that), and it just keeps getting better and better.

• MotherTalkers.com. I burned out on DailyKos during the 2004 election cycle–this site (part of the KosMedia family) gives me back what I lost when I stopped reading Kos (but waaaaaay less testosterone).

• And speaking of election years, if you’re trying to figure out who’s giving all that money away to politicians, check out this site. I like the fact that it has so many different searchable databases.

• The BlogHer blog is not one that I read every day, but I’ve found some wonderful blogs through surfing around their directories, and reading entries by their fabulous editors.

• Sure, you’re probably already reading chip’s blog, daddychip, with his lyrical odes to the memory of raising small children (may we all have such perspective someday). But are you reading his political blog, daddychip2? Other than the fact that’s it’s too dern infrequent, I have no complaints. More, chip, more!

I’m about to go out of town for a few days, and probably won’t have much time to blog while I’m away. To entertain you in my absence, I present a random array of links. Enjoy!

• FreeMacWare.com. If you’re a mac user, you simply must visit the Free Mac Ware site. It’s a great source of free applications, and if you download their widget, you can keep track of their updates from your dashboard. I can kill a lot of free time surfing around their site and downloading things.

• Things like coconutWiFi, which puts a little icon into the top of your screen to show if you’re near an open wireless signal. It also tells you if there’s a protected wireless signal in range (which is helpful for people like me who sometimes work out of other people’s offices).

• I’ve also been spending a lot of time lately on Endicia’s Picture It Postage, a site that lets you buy stamps that have pictures from your own personal photo collection on them. This year, instead of the ubiquitous Santa stamps, I’ll be sending my holiday cards with a stamp that has a picture of my kids at the zoo on it. The interface makes ordering very easy, and if you don’t want recognizable pictures going through the USPS, you can pixellate, crystallize, do sepia effects, etc.

• Bookins.com and bookmooch.com. In a perfect world, these two sites would merge and the resulting site would have the best of both. Bookins has a better system for mailing (endicia, again), but bookmooch has a lot more flexibility in adding books to your wishlist. Plus, with every book worth one point, you’re a lot more likely to eventually earn that copy of The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (which is worth 16 practically-unattainable points on bookins, for some reason). Of course, if that did happen, I’d probably never get rid of some of the dogs I have on my trade list now (what do you mean you don’t want a copy of The Ultimate Baby Name Book from 1999?).

• Box.net. If you’re in the market for 1 GB of free online storage, you can’t go wrong here. I’ve been using this with a few co-workers to share data on a specific project, and the free version’s worked pretty well for us.

• GoogleCalendar. I admit, I resisted the call of the online calendar until very recently. But the clean design and ease of sharing (okay, I had to make him reactivate his gmail account) means that landisdad and I don’t have to spend our days calling each other to figure out who’s picking up which kid. I figure this is good practice for when we’ve got two kids and three activities going at once (happily, this day has yet to arrive. Procrastination works!)

I’ll have a similar post about the content side of my web-time-wasting in a day or so.

There’s been a lot of fighting around here recently. A lot of fighting. Sibling fighting. Kids fighting parents. Parents fighting, well, large glasses of scotch.

Today, landisdad and I took extreme measures.

We called our first family meeting. Unfortunately, we’re not very creative, so we had to crib the agenda from a Berenstain Bears story. We made a similar chart. What can I say?

• Calling names: dust the family room
• Using bad language: wash the kitchen table
• Throwing things: clean the bathroom sinks
• Hitting/pushing/etc.: weed the garden for 20 minutes
• Refusing a time out: dust the living room
• Threatening to hurt someone: pick up toys in the basement
• Sharing: get a sticker on the family fun chart
• Getting along for a whole day: extra half-hour of tv
• Using words, calmly, to tell someone you’re angry: extra story at bedtime

I also made the kids sign a piece of paper that says, “Our family will try as hard as we can to treat each other with love and respect.” Sort of a mission statement, if you will.

So far, we’ve got a cleaner family room, spick-and-span sinks, and and a slightly less-weedy front yard (happily, it’s the end of summer, so not much is left living except the mums and the asters). The Potato, guilty on all counts. Both of the kids did manage to earn an extra story for tonight, though, and the Bee helped the Potato accomplish most of his chores.

What we didn’t have was any major outbursts from the Bee, which was sort of my main goal.

We’ll have to see what happens over the long haul. One of the most important things I’ve learned from parenting is that any discipline strategy can work in the short term, on sheer novelty value if nothing else. I’m tired of dishing out punishments that are both a) too punitive and b) too ineffective. It’s made me think about work, and how kids used to have to do so much more of it. Not in an “in my day” kind of way, but way, way, back in the day. The Bee’s a little young, but only a little, to have been sent into the mines, or the sweatshop, or to milk Old Bessie. I bet those kids came home too tired to fight with each other.

I’m inspired to write this post by Jo(e)’s description of her back-to-school shopping. Yes, it really is like that. I love her creative solution to the red binder problem.

I had to work late last night, so I didn’t get to have much conversation with the Bee about her day at school–I got home just in time to put the kids to bed. Landisdad had concert tickets, so he skated out the door, and I settled myself down with the lovely pile of papers from the school, still with that first day smell. There were three notes from the Bee’s new 2nd grade teacher. The first two were about encouraging the kids to read for at least 15 minutes every night (not exactly something we struggle with here). It was the third one that made me shake my head ruefully as I read Jo(e)’s post:

Dear Second Grade Parents,

Our new math program is off and running! The second lesson requires coins to be sent in for each child. I know this is short notice! However, if possible, please send your child to school with the following in a zip lock bag:

• 20 pennies
• 5 nickels
• 10 dimes
• 4 quarters

This coin bag will go in your child’s math “tool box.”

Thank you, Mrs. Y

Points to the first person who can guess how long it told me to assemble said coins.

Extra points to the person who can predict what the Bee said about this lesson, when asked this evening.

Today was the Bee’s first day of second grade. She was extremely happy to see her friends, and excited at the challenge of a new year, although she’s spent the last couple of days telling us how she was worried, because she didn’t know multiplication yet, and thought she was supposed to know it in second grade. We had a few conversations about how the point of school is to learn things you don’t already know, but she seemed conflicted about it, until landisdad told her that it’s rude if you already know everything the teacher has to teach you. She seemed to accept that, although I’m not sure I get the logic myself.

I was a little weepy on the way into school. It’s been odd this year, because for the first time, I wasn’t the primary person getting the Bee ready to go to school. Since he’s been laid off, it was landisdad who took her back-to-school shopping, and listened to her change her mind 37 times about what to wear on the first day. She packed her own bag for school, and I didn’t even look into it to make sure all her supplies were in there.

I’m not upset that landisdad got to do those things–I think it’s great that he did, and that she’s growing up enough to really be doing her own thing, too. It’s just that with the passing of each year, I’m a little farther away from having babies. I love that my kids are growing up, I love that my husband is the kind of dad that does things that some guys would consider to be “mom’s job.” I just wish I could keep my kids small a little while longer.