What There's Time For

On My Plate

The movers come in less than two weeks and I think I'm opting myself into the do-most-of-the-clearing-out-while-unpacking mode this time.  I mean, I'm trying to avoid it.  But only sort of.

This morning, in an effort that could maybe be categorized as working towards putting virtual life in order before the main computer gets packed up, I made some small changes to the look of Cross It Off!

Not an improvement, you say?  What?!

Yeah, it won't actually ship looking like that.  I put it here only so you can have a good laugh with me over how much I don't understand Bezier curves.  It's so hilarious to type out a bunch of math and point-plotting and then finally hit "Run" and see something that mangled appear on the screen.  Ha ha!

Luckily, I've found a simpler way to do it.  Hoping to submit binary tonight.

In the meantime, a new book has arrived in the mail:

I am dying to read it cover to cover (more too bad for organizing before the move!) and I hope some of you might be reading it, too?  Can we discuss it?  In person or in the comments or in email?  I'm looking forward to having myself explained to me.  And then taking issue with the whole thing.  Or something.  ;)

The book is Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity, by Emily Matchar and everything I read about it says it's going to be a fascinating read.

The Boring Truth

There was a night recently when I put the kids to bed and Mr. P didn't stay there. I knew he was up, but I had the kitchen to clean and didn't want to fight over bedtime, so I ignored him.

Eventually, he poked his head quietly over the top of the couch and said seriously, "I've been watching you from behind the chair and it looks like every night you just have a boring night."

And what did he mean by that?

"You were just wiping the table and the chairs."

Did that surprise him?

"Yes."

So what did he think I did after he went to bed?

"I thought you, like, had more dinner and had fun."

How disappointing to uncover the truth!

To his credit, he then offered to help me clean. I did thank him. Then I sent him back to bed. Because at 9 pm, I pretty much just want to be left alone to wipe the chairs and tables.

Moving

So, grad school kind of got in the way of a lot of my initial enthusiastic plans for cozying up this particular place.  I did, just before Christmas, make a fitted oil cloth* cover for the kitchen table and a valance for that window which I flatter myself made a nice combination.  (You can't really tell, but the blue in the valance is a near perfect match for the blue on the table legs.)

(Bonus glimpse of the Easter decor we still have hanging — Shmoogie's eggs and Mr. P's kind of disturbing bunny, which scared Shmoogie when she first saw it, but which Mr. P insists is a "nice" bunny, but "not an Easter bunny, Mommy."  Whoops.  Also, what good is a table without a dog under it?)

I was quite happy with the way that project turned out, as you can maybe tell.  But I think I never got around to blogging it (or did I and I forgot?  you have no idea what grad school did to my mind...) because I thought it would make a good tutorial, so I was saving it.  And it would have made a good tutorial — check out Jess's take on it at Craftiness Is Not Optional (she even has the same pattern of oil cloth! in red!).  :)  I used plain bias binding as a casing and put cotton cord through it, which then cinched up to make the cover fitted.  I did have to put a thumbtack in the middle of each side (under the table) to get things as nice and taught as I wanted.

Happily, I think the new place we're moving into this summer, on the other side of the country, has a similar kind of "breakfast" area (which we eat all our meals at, even with company — I can't really handle the idea of two different places to eat in the house, especially if one of them is carpeted**), so I might be able to just move the whole setup and feel like some decorating effort actually survived this iteration of upheaval.  :)

* "Oil cloth" is such an annoying term because it's a lie.  Or, not entirely, maybe, since plastic comes from oil?  But I always imagined there was some "real" oil cloth out there that was actually cloth treated with oil (which, actually, there is, and ehow says you can make it yourself, but I'm not sure I'd want to make a permanent table cloth out of it).  This is the PVC kind, with some woven something giving it some extra stability.  It does NOT have the icky fuzzy backing, though.  I hate the fuzzy backing and those kinds usually have really thin fragile plastic.

** Best thing about the new house??  The entire thing is floored in LINOLEUM.  Which is a word I have loved since the age of three because of the way Bert sings it in the La La La song about the letter L, which you should be able to hear on YouTube, but which my browser doesn't want to let me hear right now, so I can't fully vouch for that link.

Knows What She Wants

Shmoogie wanted popsicles last week so we froze two cups of juice. Now we must make popsicles every day, early enough in the day that they are ready to eat when Mr. P gets home from school, or else Shmoogie will wail. And Shmoogie's wail is really, really painful.

One of these tipped over three seconds after the photo and the buzz lightyear costume you have a glimpse of had to come off for a rinse.

Ends

The remnants left after making 30 heart shaped jam sandwiches for Shmoogie's school picnic fill a 9X13" pan. I'm thinking make a baked frenchtoast casserole thing? But who will eat it all?

Jesus Knits Babies in Suburbia

Shmoogie loves her preschool and her preschool tells her that Jesus loves her and so Shmoogie is pretty fascinated by Jesus.

Just the other day, she was lamenting that Jesus is not alive anymore because she would have liked to see him. I asked what she would have liked to say to Jesus if she met him, and she told me she wouldn't say anything, she'd just look at him.

I'm sure Jesus wouldn't have been creeped out by that at all. Probably happened all the time, actually, little kids staring at him, saying nothing.

Shmoogie is also lately very very into pretend play. Especially if she can rope an adult into playing with her. This afternoon, she had me playing house. She was my neighbor and I was visiting and she had a baby so my kids (at first I said I had none, but she wasn't down with that) had to stay outside. They got to come in eventually, but then we were back to the topic of how many kids there were and Shmoogie was again dissatisfied. We needed another girl.

"Jesus lives in this world, actually, and I can go ask him to make another girl."

Oh!?

"Yeah, for our family."

She arranged some blocks on the floor and informed me, "Ok, the car's all ready. Do you want to come with me to go see Jesus?"

Who would pass that up? I did have to change my seat and buckle myself in, but soon we were on our way.

"Ok, we're at Jesus's house. We parked in his driveway, his car is over there," she pointed helpfully, then got out of the car and went over to what I guess was the front door.

"Ding dong!" She waited, then Jesus must have answered the door, so she said, "Hi! Can we have another girl for us?"

She filled in his answer, "Yes!"

And turned back to me, "He said yes!"

The interesting thing is that I hadn't really considered where we'd go from here. But Shmoogie had no problem with that.

"He's making it now," she told me, as she stood awkwardly in his yard. "It's going to take a long time," she let me know, "For her blood. Because she's going to be as big as me! She's going to be three and a half!"

We discussed this for a little while. The usual sizes and ages of new babies and all that.

This became boring and it was time for another status update, "He's making her with his knitting. Because that's how people get made."

Soon, much to my surprise, Jesus actually handed over the new baby girl, a tiny baby girl, Shmoogie insisted. A tiny baby girl puppy, which she soon cuddled into her neck with a look of motherly bliss on her face.

Play

We've had this really cool book, The LEGO Ideas Book,* for a while.  Mr. P obsesses over the space chapter, but I love the "micro models" — buildings, bridges, even some space ships, made with the smallest pieces but suggesting something much more complex than they are.

Friday night.  It's bedtime, but Mr. P is asking me to open up the LEGO bag.  It suddenly strikes me that a huge joy of having slightly older kids and also not being in grad school anymore is that I can open up the LEGOs, even though it's bedtime, and maybe I can even play for a little while, too.  It was fun.  I recommend it.  :)

*(Going to BrickFair last year was also really fun and inspiring.)

Footnote to Monday

A recent monologue from Mr. P:  "Mom?  In your next school, um, when you go to school again, or in your next job or what you do?  Just try not to get a D-minus, OK?  'Cause that's the worst grade.  That's really bad."

Sounds like he'd probably forgive me, though, huh?

Bedtime Changes Again

Twilight extends well into the bedtime hour these days and Shmoogie and Mr. P are extending their ability to stay awake.

Where once we read and sang and left them in peace, we now read and sing and stay with them in peace (always a question whether Shmoogie will fall asleep before Daddy starts to snore, though).

Except now, all of a sudden, it's not so peaceful.

Daddy is trying to tell a story in the dimming quiet bedroom, but he keeps dropping off to sleep.  Shmoogie pokes him, then yells in his ear, "DADDY!!  WHY AREN'T YOU TELLING ME A STORY??"  He tries, falls asleep again, and the cycle repeats.

Until Shmoogie gets bored and strikes up a conversation with her brother in the upper bunk.  "Tyler won't play with me at school," she says, or something to that effect.

"If Tyler won't play with you very much, you shouldn't be friends anymore," her brother answers, his voice full of concern and wisdom, as if he absolutely never ever could be the boy that calls her "stinky poopy head!" pretty much every morning as soon as she wakes up.

They converse with increasing enthusiasm as I sit there in the dark, astounded and apparently unnoticed, listening to them chattering away over the gentle snoring of Mr. Right.

Done

So, I graduated.  And now I feel really strange.  Strangely strange in enough ways that I could write quite a lot of angsty self-involved rubbish, but I really don't want to.

But one thing I've come to see with alarming clarity over the past year and a half — the one thing I want to talk about today — is that being in school has a very real impact on my mental state.  Mostly not a good one.

I know that's not what I'm supposed to say right now.  And I don't mean to say that I regret having gone back or that I don't think it was worthwhile.  I've learned a lot about computer science (and relearned a lot that I'd forgotten), I now have a credential that might be useful someday and gives me a bit more confidence, in any case.  And I've learned a lot about myself, and I've learned a lot about other people and academic culture and, dare I say, human society in general.

Here's the thing, though.  After being a stay-at-home mom for several years and being out of school for much longer, I went back to school fired up about learning, ready to take on the challenge as my own person, the person that I felt I had become in the intervening years away from grades and tests and constant measuring up.  A person who believed in being brave and not worrying about asking dumb questions and not caring about the grade or whether anyone thought I was smart, just caring about learning the most I could.  All too quickly, though, I felt myself pulling back.  Getting protective, not wanting to look stupid, abandoning my initial "It is a victory and a privilege simply to be here!  It will be a victory simply to graduate!" and moving uncomfortably close to the old clawing whispers, "What if they find out I don't fully understand X?  That I never took Y?  That I haven't heard of Z?" or, most simply, "I'm not perfect at this or even the best at this... why am I here?"

I was stunned at how quickly the structure and culture of being in school brought back that kind of miserable, destructive attitude.  An attitude which I detest and yet still could not fully free myself from.  Although at least this time, with more life experience behind me, I could see it for what it was.

It's been particularly unnerving to be observing this in myself at the same time as Mr. P was going through his first year of public school.  Watching him learn to read and write has been amazing (though I continue to feel it would have been a lot less painful and just as amazing, although a bit later, if it wasn't pushed so hard).  Watching him beginning to internalize conformity to "the right" way of doing things has been disheartening.  Hearing him refuse to practice his handwriting because "I'm not good at this!" or tearfully say things like "I'm the worst in the class!" (because he had not yet had a turn to be "Star of the Week", an "honor" which is actually randomly assigned; it took some real effort to convince him of that) has been quite hard.

I don't know if the answer is to give up on school, though I sympathize with many of those arguments.  I do know school desperately needs to be something quite different than what it is now (and has been for generations).

 

(Final note, just because it's interesting:  The automatically suggested links that my blogging engince pops up as I type a post have gone through quite a strange progression while I wrote this, with especially disappointing suggestions as soon as typed "stay-at-home mom".)