Bumblebee Sweet Potato

he’s 5 today.

Happy Birthday, Sweet Potato Boy!

Does anyone else have an almost-five-year-old boy who just can’t sit still?

I’m starting to really worry about how the Potato is going to do when he starts kindergarten in less than a month (ulp!). He is just not a kid who can sit still for any length of time. It’s not that he can’t concentrate on things–if you give him a pile of legos, he sits there (with his tongue sticking out–a sign that he’s focused) until he’s built a huge stack of whatever it is he’s dreamt up to build that day.

What he can’t do, however, is sit still while he’s doing it.

Or while he’s watching tv.

Or while he’s eating a meal.

Or while he’s listening to a story, or playing a game, or having a conversation, or even sleeping.

The kid is just a wiggler. A fidgeter. A squirmer.

He twitches, he jiggles, he’s basically a big bundle of energy that needs to keep moving.

The only thing that gives me hope that he’ll be okay in kindergarten, is that I know that the kindergarten teacher has three sons. Surely one of them was a wiggler too?

Also? the Potato will not have the same kindergarten teacher that the Bee did. I don’t think there’s anyone left reading this blog who read it back when the Bee was in kindergarten (with the possible exception of MetroDad–can’t remember–can you, MD?). Here’s a refresher, if you want to catch up.

When I turned 25 years old, I had a huge party out on Ocean Beach, in San Francisco. I had two other friends with birthdays near mine, and we shared joint festivities. There was a bonfire, and a couple of kegs. I have a hazy memory of the rest of it–most likely, illicit substances were consumed*.

Yesterday, I turned 40 and, though it’s trite to say, I don’t feel that much different than I did when I was 25. I’m having a party tomorrow night, and again, I’m celebrating with a friend (landisdad being the one to turn 40 today). Somehow, it won’t seem like the right party, since the friends I had when I was 25 won’t be there. The friends I had when I was first really succeeding at being an adult have always felt like my ‘real’ friends, even though I haven’t spoken to some of them in 12 years or more.

I’ve had a couple of people tell me, in the past week, how they didn’t really feel like a grown up until they turned 40. I confess, I don’t really feel that way, but maybe it just hasn’t hit me yet. I mean, when I was 32 I had a kid, a husband, a mortgage, a real job–what’s not adult about that?

At the same time, I don’t feel bad about turning 40–it does feel like a significant (but not significantly awful) milepost along the highway of life. I think it’s safe to say I’ve achieved a certain modicum of wisdom, without really having given up the ability to make an ass out of myself.

I guess there’s not too much more than I could ask than that. I don’t ever want to be the kind of person who takes my knowledge and experience too seriously. I mean, after all, my life could just as easily gone in a different direction, and I could have ended up in a different place, with a different guy, living a much-less satisfying existence. It would be beyond foolish to ascribe the modest success I’ve had–as a parent, as an adult, as a worker–to anything other than good luck and good timing.  I can’t say I’m hoping for 40 more years of that like–it seems too hubristic–but I can say I hope it will go on as long as I have to enjoy it.

*note to my children, if you’re reading this in the future–of course, they were not consumed by me!

When I was about 8 years old, I had super-long hair. One day, I decided to have it all cut off, and when I came home, I went searching for my best friend to show her my new haircut. I was walking down our street when I saw my best friend’s sister. Who thought I was a new boy in the neighborhood.

I was quite traumatized at the time, and I’ve evidently been carrying that around with me for the last 30+ years, because when the Bee told me two weeks ago that she wanted to get a major hair cut, I froze inside. I debated telling her that story for a long time, but in the end decided not to—because not everything is about me, after all, except here on my blog.

I did tell her that she should wait until after her musical was over, since she was supposed to wear her hair in a bun for that. We were talking about it in the dressing room yesterday with the woman who was doing her hair, who told her that she would probably feel ten pounds lighter after she got all that hair cut off.

Today, I took her to get it chopped off. She donated a huge, foot-long braid to Locks of Love. Here’s the before

and the after:

This weekend I’ve been reading Anne Enright’s The Gathering, and was struck by this observation in the novel:

“They are surprisingly tall–eight-year-olds. They are surprisingly like real people. Of course your own babies are always real to you, they are all there from the word go, but even strangers’ children look like proper people by the aged of eight…”

My Bee is looking more and more like a grown-up every day, and this new hairstyle has hastened the process considerably. She and I went out for ice cream on Friday night, after her performance, and the ice cream stand at the end of our street was full of the sixth-grade stars of the show. It was fairly terrifying to be around that much hormonal tweener-dom, not least because I was sitting there with the Bee, who was drinking in the big-girl-ness of it all.

I need more than three years to get ready for that. Can’t I just go back to the time when an eight-year-old looked like a big girl to her? Can’t we regress to toddlerhood? I’m not ready for cell phones and boys hanging around on their bikes, and talking about how eating too much ice cream makes you fat.

As we walked home from the ice cream place, we talked about whether she would still be willing to go to the ice cream stand with me when she was in sixth grade, or if she would be wanting to hang out with her friends and talk about boys. She admitted that, while boys are gross now, she might want to talk about them when she’s in sixth grade, and would not want me around for that, and I told her that when I was in sixth grade, I talked to my friends about boys (”eww, Mom, gross!”), and that I didn’t want to talk to my mother about it either.

I also told her that she might decide that she liked girls instead, and that would be fine too, then we talked a little bit about the lesbians that we know, and how liking girls that way is just as normal as liking boys. She said it’s okay to have a little crush on someone when you’re in third grade, but not to really like them. I asked her if she had a crush on anyone and she hesitated, but then said no.

Ulp.

Today she’s playing dress-up with her brother. Tomorrow, she’ll be asking for the car keys.

I’m going to register my little Potato for kindergarten tomorrow. Sniff!

Tonight, I had to take him to the doctor to get his paperwork filled out, and that required six shots! Six!

Poor little man, I wasn’t the only one sniffling.

We’ve had a couple of run-ins with bullying in the past week.

On Thursday evening, while I was out with the Potato, a neighbor stopped by to tell landisdad that the Bee had upset his kindergartener daughter during the after-school program that day. It seems that the Bee and a 2nd grade girl had been ‘grading’ the younger kids on their artwork, and had given this girl an F-minus (with a really absurdly large number of minuses). Landisdad talked to her about it, and she initially gave the ‘it was just a game’ answer, and then admitted that what they had done was hurtful. She wrote a note of apology to the girl, and gave it to her the next day.

Then on Saturday, the Bee had rehearsal. I went to pick her up at the end, and overheard the directors telling all the kids that they are heretofore banned from bringing Nintendo DSes to rehearsal, and that any found there would be confiscated and returned only to a parent. The DS, evidently, has some kind of IM-like chatting capability, where one can send a message–or forward a sent message–to others in the room who have the game.

It seems that some of the kids had been hijacking other kids’ screen names, and ‘anonymously’ writing snotty things about the people who were onstage at the time. As we left, the Bee told me that she and two other girls had been the ones who reported it, although as she said, “I’m sure the teachers already knew about it, since the whole room was buzzing about it.” (One of her friends had had her screen name hijacked and abused in this manner.)

It’s the first experience of this kind of high-tech bullying that either of us have experienced in person, and it made me really happy that we haven’t given in to the Bee’s pleading for a DS. I told the Bee that she did the right thing by reporting it to a teacher. Then, of course, she asked me for a DS again.

It’s an odd perspective, to have the two experiences of bullying so close together, one perpetrated by my kid and one reported by her. It makes me think that the practical existence of the bully is not one that is entirely one-sided–except in extreme circumstances, no one is a bully all the time.

But anyone can be a bully in a moment. The trick is to teach our kids that those moments aren’t acceptable, not that they themselves are unacceptable.

The Bee has been cast in the chorus of her first community theater production. Our town has a children’s theater program for kids from grades 3 to 6, so this is the first year she’s been eligible to do it. Her teacher is one of the directors, and she and her best friend the Peony auditioned together a few weeks ago.

I was a little worried about her being disappointed if she didn’t get a speaking part–especially after she was in the holiday play at school, and kept wishing one of the other kids would get sick, so she could do their part too. We had several conversations about how it was unusual for third graders to get lines, and she’s been totally fine with it.

I picked her up after rehearsal today, and she told me, “I’m glad I didn’t get a part this year and I’m just in the chorus.”

“How come sweetie?”

“Because this way, I get to just learn how to be in a play, without having to remember all those lines and stuff.  And next year, maybe I’ll get a little part, and then when I’m in fifth grade, I can get a bigger part, and then in sixth grade, I can get a really big part. But I’ll have earned it.”

This is her first major extra-curricular activity–she hasn’t yet played a sport or anything–so I was happy to know that she understood the value of just working and practicing, and not being a star right away.

The Potato, of late, has taken to telling me how much he hates me. I know it’s a part of growing up, although not as cute a part as some other things. It’s getting a little old, I’ve got to say.

This morning, he told me he hated me about 16 times, starting with right after he climbed into my bed and asked me what kind of snack I had produced for him that day. (I started bringing up a small snack for him to start the day with, right around the time he decided to start waking up at 5:15 a.m. and demanding breakfast.)

I, sadly, had forgotten to bring a snack upstairs the night before. Sentence was pronounced.

Later, he told me again, when I asked him to go upstairs and get dressed for school.

I’m trying to hear it as, “in twenty years, I’ll love you, Mom.”

But it’s hard to hear through the hatin’

The day I knew would arrive is here.

My 4.5 year-old has bested my high score on a computer game.

I thought I had another year or two before this would occur.