Bumblebee Sweet Potato

I may not have much to say lately, but I did manage to make it home for twick-or-tweating tonight.

I present the enchanted witch, and George the Monkey.

I was going to write a post tonight, but I’m too busy being a bad mother.

Just ask the Bee.

Sigh.

I’ve had exactly three days off from work this month. And somehow, my daughter felt it was appropriate to call me “lazy” tonight because I wouldn’t get up and get her brush for her after she got out of the bath. Let’s just say it wasn’t the right choice, on her part.

Nine more days…

It sucks to work this hard, and miss my kids. It sucks even more to have come home and hear that, and to know that she’s just mad at me because I’ve been working so much.

I took the Bee to work with me yesterday. She had a laptop and some DVDs, and some books, and markers. She ate all the nutritious (not!) food that is normally available at a campaign office (doughnuts and pizza and chocolate chip cookies!). She was extremely well-behaved, and let me get done what I needed to get done.

I really enjoyed having her with me. I wish I could bring the Potato, though there’s no way he could have been calm for seven hours. But I know that having the kids at work with me is a pale reflection of spending real quality time with them.

I’m afraid I’m going to be light on the posting between now and the election.  About all I’ve got are some weekend vignettes. I keep having these things happen that make me think, “oh, I should blog about that!” and then I go off and have a conversation about persuasion mail for infrequent senior voters, and it drives the bloggable, cute things my kids are doing out of my head. Rest assured. They’re still doing cute things. Someday, I might even retain them.

•  This morning, landisdad and I were sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading the paper. The Potato went into the basement and puttered around for a little while. When he came back up, he opened the door, stuck his head out and said, “Do you guys think I’m a little goofball?” Needless to say, we cracked up.
• We (and by we I mean landisdad) finally finished (well, almost) painting the playroom in the basement, so we’ve moved a lot more of the kid stuff down there, including the kitchen. Both of our kids are obsessed with playing restaurant–usually the Potato is the cook and the Bee is a waiter. It’s the one game they can reliably play together without getting into a fight. The Bee made two different menus and cafe signs this weekend–one was for the Mango Tango, the other was the Kitty Kat Kafe. The cafe with the unfortunate initials has adorable cat stencils on the sign.
• I’d like to photoblog it, but last weekend we got a new printer. A printer which is networked into our wireless network (yay!). Unfortunately I haven’t figured out how to download the photos from the card reader in the printer over the wireless network (boo!). Hopefully, there will be more photoblogging soon. Oh HP, please help me to understand the mysteries of the networked printer!
• On the menu at the Mango Tango? If only I could scan it and show you. The Bee’s printing has gotten so much neater. It’s a full-day menu, serving breakfast, lunch & dinner. Also? Beer and wine. What does this say about my children’s parents?
• Finally, the Bee was playing school in my office yesterday. There’s an easel set up in there that has a chalkboard on one side, paper on the other. On the chalkboard was the following math problem: 5026 + 2050=7076. So far, all of the Bee’s math homework has consisted of things like: 9+3=12. I was pretty amazed, so I asked her about it this morning, curious if she understood the concept of carrying tens. She didn’t, and apparently she had added it starting from the left-hand side. Still, I was impressed.

where you just think, ‘god, these kids are going to bed in ten minutes, and then I can turn back into myself!’?

I’ve been quiet on the blog front lately, due to my extreme stress at work. I have to say that I’ve done a lot of really complicated campaigns in my life, but I’ve never felt so inadequate on a daily basis as I do working on this year’s election. On the one hand, there are a ton of important elections where victory is in reach. On the other, there’s me and my poor brain, trying to juggle six conference calls a day, keeping the mail program on track, training the staff, making sure that volunteers are recruited, the events are organized, and that everything is done legally.

I’ve probably spent more time talking to election lawyers in the last six weeks than I have talking to my husband. No, strike that, I definitely have.

I’m not one to be overly hopeful three weeks out from an election, but I have to say that I’m feeling extremely positive this year. I haven’t felt this good about an election since 1992, and part of my anxiety is directly related to the ‘92 election.

In ‘92, the group that I was working for endorsed a number of women Congressional candidates. I walked precincts for Anna Eshoo, Lynne Woolsey, and Barbara Boxer, among others. I remember driving up Rte. 101 from Palo Alto to San Francisco on election night with a couple of my coworkers. When George H.W. got on the radio to concede the election to Clinton, one of my coworkers stuck his head out the window, screaming with joy. It was the Year of the Woman, and many of us, in our estrogen-fueled way, decided to get some of our own back against the Senate, after the wretched Clarence Thomas affair.

After the election though, there was a huge lull in progressive organizing. Many people that I talked to thought Clinton would be winning us universal health care, keeping us out of wars, and letting gays in the military as soon as he took office. I was among a small minority (it seemed to me) who said, “hey, we’re glad this guy won, but he’s not our guy–let’s keep pushing him.”

I’m worried that after this year’s election, the same thing may happen. There is this tendency to assume that winning an election is the end game, but it’s really just the beginning. If we don’t have a plan to turn that election victory into actual victories on issues–things like raising the minimum wage, real health care reform, and a sane foreign policy, it’s going to feel pretty hollow.

As I was walking the Bee home from school the other day, she spotted a five dollar bill on the ground. She excitedly announced, “I found five dollars!” and a neighbor told her, “it must be your lucky day.”

I was surprised when she told me that she wanted to split the money between her bank account and her charity envelope. We had just deposited some money into her bank account, and had set up a system where she would put some money in an envelope for charity, and we would donate it when it got to be a reasonable amount. She told me that she’s tired of having money burn a hole in her pocket, and she’s been very focused on saving.

I’m pretty well acquainted with the money-burning hole myself, so I was happy to think that I can at least teach by rhetoric, if not by example. There’s been a lot of conversation within the second grade about bank accounts, and how much various classmates of the Bee have saved therein, and it’s likely that the spirit of competition is also motivating her saving behavior.

Unlike the Bee, when I find money I’m inclined to spend it immediately, even if it’s just ten dollars that I left in a coat pocket and forgot about for a month. There’s something that’s so rewarding about it. (Heh, ‘rewarding’!)

I did convince her that she should hang onto one dollar to spend however she wants (or to save in her piggy bank for our next trip to the store). She’s been saving her allowance too, though for what I’m not exactly sure. She only gets a dollar a week, so usually it takes her quite a while to buy something, even something relatively cheap. She can be disciplined about saving money, although she will complain and wheedle if it’s taking too long to set aside an appropriate sum.

The Potato doesn’t yet get an allowance, but he does have a piggy bank. We’ve had to move it to a shelf he can’t reach, due to his predilection for emptying out all of the coins and strewing them hither and yon in his room. I guess it’s just a different kind of saving.

Landisdad and the Potato came into the city to go to a museum today, and then they came by my office so we could have lunch. We had a fun time; neither of them had been to my office, since I (mostly) stopped telecommuting. The Potato was somewhat overwhelmed by the huge picture that the Bee had drawn on a piece of flip chart paper, that’s hanging on my door.

While we were eating, the Potato said, “we’re a lunch family.”

And then, “I don’t have a sister.”

Sigh. Guess the sibling rivalry hasn’t subsided yet.

I took the Bee roller skating yesterday. It was fun, and I’m not sure if there is any activity that can more quickly return me to middle school. Especially since they’re evidently still playing hits like Le Freak. Although given that the alternative seemed to be Beyonce’s “Ring the Alarm,” I guess I shouldn’t really complain. Plus, I had a true return to my Jersey girlhood, as the arcade at the skating rink included not only an air hockey table (Bee-1, Landismom-6) but also my favorite arcade game of all time, Skee-Ball.

We haven’t been skating for about five months, and the Bee had gotten a little rusty. It’s a lot harder to skate slowly, to keep pace with a girl who’s hugging the wall. My ankles were killing me at first, but by the end of the time we were there, she was doing great.

I really like skating with the Bee. I should do it more. There was a moment yesterday when I thought, “I should buy skates and we should do this every weekend!” But then reality struck, and I remembered that it really hurts to wear new skates, and I actually would have to skate in them every weekend for like a year before my feet stopped blistering. When I was in college, I had a teacher who had worked on the original Broadway production of Starlight Express, and he described to us the process of boiling skate boots that they had to go through once every three months or so, to break in the new boots for the dancers. I think I’ll stick with the rentals.

I worked the PTA used book sale today. Miraculously, I managed not to come home with an equal or greater amount of books than the ones I donated to the sale. I even found new homes for some of the books that I had donated, notably T. Berry Brazleton’s Touchpoints, a great book that I raved about to a woman who was about to become grandmother for the first time. I think my review, plus the fact that it was going for fifty cents, really did the trick.

I’m always interested to see the kinds of books that get donated for charity book sales. The Library Lady had a great post recently about the kinds of mistakes people make in donating books at her workplace–a post that was totally born out by my experience today. Does anyone really want a copy of AOL 7.0 for Dummies? Just how dumm must one be, to need an instruction manual for a version of AOL released in 2001?

I was filled with mixed feelings about the makeup of the book donations. I tend not to donate favorite books myself, but I’m still often surprised by the number of mystery and romance novels that grace these tables. I can’t decide if all of my neighbors are really big James Patterson fans, or if they’re just ridding themselves of their beach reading. But I guess the thing that makes a bestseller a bestseller is that it sells a lot of copies–I’m not really sure why I’m always surprised to see so many of them at these kinds of things. I thought about grabbing a bunch of stuff to take home and list on bookmooch, but in the end, I restrained myself. God knows, our house doesn’t need any more books, especially ones no one will ever read.

By the end of the sale, when we were just encouraging people to fill a bag for a dollar, I did convince a lovely threesome of elementary-to-tween sisters to take home Phillip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife, which none of them had ever read. I’m a huge Pullman fan, and was delighted to be able to introduce some new readers to his book, without having to actually give up my own.

My dream for retirement is to someday run a nice little used bookstore, full of cats and funky editions of Kurt Vonnegut novels. I’m always bummed out that there isn’t one in my town. With what’s been happening to independent bookstores lately, I’m not entirely sure that my dream will ever come to fruition (unless I hit the lottery first). Still, it’s nice to get in some practice.

I’m feeling really unhappy about the country that I’m bringing my kids up in right now. I was talking to a co-worker yesterday about it, and she made the point that it’s a sick society that preys on its own children. Over the last few weeks, there’s been the whole Mark Foley situation, where someone who purported to be protecting children was in fact preying on them. Then there’s been the two separate incidents of men taking school girls hostage, with sexual misdeeds in mind.

I’m very depressed about all these things, so I was really unhappy today to see this story.

I don’t want a war with Iran. I didn’t want a war with Iraq, or Afghanistan either, to be perfectly clear. I don’t think it’s making the world safer for my children–I think it’s making it worse.  And not just worse because it’s less safe with other countries–it’s less safe because we’re turning into an international bully, and when we do that, we’re sending a message that bullying behavior is okay.

That’s a bad message for adults to hear, and a worse message for kids growing up. We’re creating a completely militarized culture, and it’s my belief that by beating the drums for war, we tell kids that war is the normal state, not something that should be avoided at all costs.

So here’s my question for you, internets: how do you create a culture of peace at home, when live in a culture of war? How do you teach your children to resolve differences peacefully, when they don’t see the leaders of our country doing that?