7 Quick Takes: Volume 44

I don't care if Monday's blue • Tuesday's grey and Wednesday too • Thursday I don't care about you • It's Friday, I'm in love.

And it's Friday, I'm writing Quick Takes.

~1~

Time to say goodbye to our 2011 Birthday Season!  Every Fall, we have 4 kid birthdays in 6 week.  The last one was a few weeks ago, but the party is officially tonight.  I am hosting four little girl guests for a sleepover.  There will be pizza.  There will be face painting.  There will be movie watching.  There will be cake.

There will be a tired mommy at the end.

Hopefully, there will be a happy 7 year old at the end, too.

And thus endeth the AIRY5 2011 birthdays.  If I start planning now, maybe the 2012 birthday season will go a bit more smoothly.

~2~

And this great advice letter made the rounds on Facebook this week; I've seen it before (it's been around since 2007), maybe you have too, but certainly, it's worth another read or two or ten.

Thankfully, I have no friends who have ever expressed the ignorance of the letter writer, who basically admits that she doesn't understand what a stay at home mother does all day or why a stay at home mother has less time for other people.  I've never heard someone be so blunt and clueless about the subject before.  So it's not really the in-your-face, take-that quality of Carolyn Hax's response that I enjoy, although that is pretty delightful.  Rather, it's the reminder to me of what I do all day long.  It's easy to forget what we moms are doing here, raising kids and such.  Stay at home dads (HM) too.  Anyway, everyone should read this, especially if you are in the trenches, wiping butts and noses, cleaning messes, doing laundry, negotiating toddler peace deals, and wondering where you put your sense of humor.

~3~

Obligatory halloween costume photos.

Jessie

Andy Samberg, Random Clown, Judy Jetson

Pajama Girl

~4~

I ♥ Stephen Colbert.  And Michael Pollan.  And food.  So this video clip?  Is golden.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Michael Pollan
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

~5~

If you live in the Bay Area, and you like nurseries and finding lovely native plants to stick in your garden, there is a little out of the way nursery you really must visit.  Native Here Nursery, which is part of the California Native Plant Society, is a fantastic small nursery located in Tilden Park.  Going to visit is like stepping into another world.  It's quiet and woodsy.  The plants are healthy and inviting.  You'll feel like you stumbled upon a well-kept secret.  And you can combine the trip with a hike in Tilden Park and a visit to the Botanic Gardens.  

You really must go.  

~6~

My kitchen, this morning.  Kid X turned around and shouted at Kid Y, for no reason:  "YOU'RE DUMB!"

Five minutes later, Kid Y walks into the living room and whacks Kid X, who responds with incredulity.  

Mom: "Well, if you shout at someone and tell them they are dumb, you should expect them to be unhappy with you.  It's not surprising she would lash out at you."

Kid X: "Oh come on.  That was five whole minutes ago.  And she already hit me for that!"

Oh, well, in that case, it makes no sense whatsoever.  

Sigh.  Kid logic makes me crazy.

~7~

And one more little Halloween gem for your enjoyment.  This Shouts and Murmurs column appeared in the Oct. 24th 2011 New Yorker magazine.   I think you will enjoy it.

* * *

Please go visit Conversion Diary, the host of 7 Quick Takes, visit the links of 7 Quick Takers playing along, and through out some comments.

* * * 

7 Quick Takes: Volume 42

Well, another Friday has arrived.  Honestly, I'm not sure that's a good thing.  It's soccer season, so Friday just means it's my day to cattle prod the kids into getting ready for their games on Saturday.  By the time I close my eyes tonight, I will need to know the precise location of 6 pairs of soccer socks, 7 jerseys, four pairs of shorts, and two sets of team warm-ups.  Not to mention cleats, shin guards, and water bottles.  And since I'm not supposed to be doing things for the kids that they can do themselves (whatever), this Finding of Things will take forever.

Remember when Fridays were actually relaxing?  Yeah, neither do I.

But here's a relaxing thing to do!  Click over to Conversion Diary, our 7 Quick Takes host; click a few more times to peruse some of the other bloggers who are Quick Taking today, and by gosh -- leave a comment.  Comments are good.

And now...my takes.

~1~

I have been watching Little T "skip" for months now.  Except she hasn't actually been skipping, just doing some weird little shuffle and saying: "Mommy, watch me skip!"

So yesterday, I decided it was time to teach her to do the real thing.  Hand in hand, we mastered the art of the step-hop, step-hop, and then skipped around Sutter's Fort in Sacramento with her two sisters and a fun friend.  And you know what?  I remembered how much fun skipping is.  It's almost like flying, like dancing and flying, and it's very hard not to smile while you are doing it.

And then, today's Writer's Almanac featured the poem Skipping, by Robert Morgan.  I do not have permission to reprint it here, but Garrison Keillor does, so click over to WA's site to read it.  Discovering that poem in my inbox the day after my first skipping in many years and Little T's first true skipping ever was...serendipitous.  Enjoy the poem!

~2~

I wish my kids were more interested in the Greek and Roman roots of English words.  I know, that sounds geeky.  But I can't help it...I wish I could entice them to play around with words and figure out how they fit together like puzzles.

Not gonna happen.

~3~

Halloween is looming.  I am not a fan of this particular holiday.  Too much work for very little pay-off.  In fact, I'm not sure these kids really are turning over all the Snickers they haul home, and even if they are, it just doesn't compensate for the headache that is costuming five children and riding the wave and crash of five sugar highs.  But it's coming.  So I'm preparing.  This year, we are outfitting the following costumes:

• Andy Samberg;
• Funky Clown (nearly done...just need a rainbow wig);
• Jane Jetson (help!);
• Crazy Pajama Girl (easy peasy!);
• and Darth Vader.  For Little T, of course.

Wake me up on All Saints Day, please.

~4~

And speaking of getting Halloweeny, if you need an easy craft idea, do what I did: go visit Secret Agent Josephine!  Click over there to see what inspired me to do this little activity with my girls yesterday while my boys were at math tutoring:

I don't have any good pictures of them in completed form...but Secret Agent Josephine has some great ones, so do click that link up above.

~5~

6 Flags Discovery Kingdom is having this dealy-bop where K-6th grade students can earn a free park ticket if they do extra, non-school related reading.   Nice, right?  I've got a reluctant reader who salivates every time we drive by that place, so this sounded perfect to me.  And that's despite the fact that I detest amusement parks and will have to be either sedated or armed with a flask to spend an entire day at one.

But get this.  The requirements?  Read for 6 hours.  6 itty-bitty, eensy weensy hours.  Between now and March 2012.

SERIOUSLY?  I'm all for achievable goals, but 6 hours of reading in 6 months?  Really?  Do we really need to aim that low?  If I'm going to spend a day at a place like 6 Flags, I'd kind of like the kids to earn that free ticket with something a tad more substantial.  Ya' think they'll hate me when I tell them I'm upping it just for them?

Yeah, I think so too.

~6~

So homeschooling has been a little bumpy this year.  But we had a good week, so yesterday evening, I asked my son if he had had a good day, a good week.  He said yes, and then we had a brief conversation about how homeschooling is maybe not such a bad thing.  I thought that was the end of it.

But later that night, just as the house was settling into sleep, he came back to me and said: "Mom, you know what else I like better about homeschooling?"

Ah, I thought, it's happening!  The positive side is sinking in!  The magic is taking hold!

We don't have to eat those deli sandwiches you used to buy for our school lunches.  I hated those things.  They were gross.

Reality check, mom.

~7~

Raising chickens is popular around here.  I have a few friends who keep chickens in their backyards, and so I've been lucky enough to learn the difference between a store bought egg and a farm fresh one. Much like garden tomatoes and their store-bought bland counterpart, farm fresh eggs make you feel like you are eating eggs as God intended.  They are that good.

I am quite happy that other people are following this trend and that occasionally I get to reap some of the benefits.  I have sometimes felt tugged towards chicken-keeping myself, but I snap out of it quickly when I realize that the last thing I need is more little lives to keep track of.  I couldn't even manage zucchini this year, and zucchinis don't have mouths.

So the eggs are one benefit.  The other is watching chicks grow.  We stopped at a friends the other day and my girls got to spend some time with the chicks.

If you have chance to visit a farm and hold a baby chick, do it.  It's fun for all!  And if you haven't tasted a farm fresh egg, then I have news for you: you don't really know what an egg tastes like.  Thanks Kelli for the peek into urban homesteading!

* * *

Another Halloween. . .

. . .has come and gone.

I try to love Halloween, really I do, but it's hard. As in "I'm tryin' Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard." (Name that movie!)

I like the idea of dressing up and I like helping my kids assemble costumes. But I'm a dreadful procrastinator, and I'm usually stressed out about some key element of a costume right down to the last minute. I hate that.

This year, the pirate was easy and fun and ready ahead of time. Ditto for Cleopatra. The monkey, thanks to my extended village, turned out to be extremely easy, if a little down to the wire. The Grim Reaper -- easy...but I couldn't let go of the nagging voice in my head that kept saying: "Really? That's what you want to be? You can't think of something more fun? And less...deathly?"

I know, I know, 9-year old boys like that stuff. I'm not a 9-year old boy, though. I think I was sufficiently supportive of his choice that he did not suffer any ill effects from a disapproving mother, so no worries there. He did add his own creative flare; when the mask we found for him ended up featuring blue horns, he changed the name of his costume to The Blue Horned Reaper. Cool.

But Michael Jackson had me in knots right up to the last minute. Most of the costume was easy to find, in our own closets or at the local thrift store. But everyone was out of the white sequined glove in kids' sizes, and the adult size was huge. I tried a last minute home-made solution, which was utterly pathetic.

So then, with the school parade starting at 12:30, I found myself at the Party Store at 11:45, fighting the urge to kiss the employee when she came up with one huge MJ glove. From there, it was dash to school, hand off the glove, fit it to the kid's hand with a rubber band and a couple of safety pins, collapse in relief that everything worked out. All good. Mother nearly dead.

The other reason I hate Halloween is that my kids go bananas. That's a lot of bananas. Everything about Halloween is just a little too hyped up and intense for me. I'm a simple girl, I like simple things, and the rigamarole of these Uber-Events gets me down.

All that said, we actually had a great time trick-or-treating with friends, and they made the evening really fun for me and for my kids. I didn't even need a flask!

Here they are from youngest to oldest:


The Little Monkey

Cleopatra

The Pirate Anne Bonny

The Blue Horned Reaper

(A photo resistant) Michael Jackson


Close the history books on this one. Bring on the Holidays.

* * *

Halloween Madness

My goodness, who knew that Halloween could be so exhausting? I've been through a few of these holidays over the past five years, but apparently, I wasn't prepared. I don't mean the costumes -- those I had taken care of, or enough that I didn't have much to do the day before Halloween. Let's see, Tuesday had me making a fancy gold "R" bling necklace for my Brazilian soccer star, gluing Cinderella medallions on a pair of cloppy shoes, cutting the feet out of a 9-months monkey costume, so it would fit my 13-month-old, making a pirate flag...and a few other things I can't remember.

But that's not what did me in. What did me in was the Halloween parties at school, the over-the-top excitement in anticipation of trick-or-treating, the scheduling -- who is taking whom where and when do they need to be picked up -- the trick-or-treating, and finally, attempting to combat the sugar high of four hyped-up, strung-out candy junkies. Oh, and then being there to pick up the pieces when the high ended and the four little junkies crashed in various piles around the house. One little junkie just stood in the bathroom openly weeping because he was too tired to brush his sugar-crusted teeth.

My well-trained children have been handing over all of the Snickers bars to their mother, proof that I must be doing something right!

And here they are:


We start with Ronaldinho, perhaps the greatest soccer player in the world. He's a Brazilian futbol celebrity, not, as this picture might suggest, a 10 year old named Tiffany from Connecticut:



Next, we have Jack Sparrow, albeit not the one from the Disney store (or whatever company makes it). Cenzo told everyone he was dressing up as Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Carribean. He got suspicious when his best buddy at school came to the parade in the "official" Jack Sparrow get-up. He mulled that over for a few minutes, until his buddy handed over some extra beard for Cenzo to tape to his face. It's amazing what a little facial hair will do for a young boy. Or maybe any male, actually.


Next, we have Cinderella. This girl is a stud. Not only does she look fabulous, she wore shoes that rubbed the skin off of two of her toes, and yet, she refused to take them off. After all, they did have Cinderella medallions on them: she was not about to abandon them. She only stopped trick-or-treating because her bucket got too heavy, not because her toes were bleeding or anything.



And finally, little ladybug. Most of the day, she carried her costume with her, so stroller-treating was a step in the right direction.



No photo of the monkey. We had a diaper malfunction which rendered the costume definitely un-photograph-able. I came this close to cutting the damn thing off of the child, rather than wrangle with what she did to it. Gross.

At the end of the evening, I was so tired I felt like I'd been hit by a mack truck. Next year, I'm trick-or-treating with a flask. Why should the kids have all the fun?

Store Bought Spiderman

My kids and I were discussing Halloween this morning on the way to school. This is a 12-month conversation at our house; my children's plans for Halloween begin every year on November 1. Last year, my boys' costumes were AWESOME. Homemade from stuff we had around the house, a couple of trips to the local thrift store, a dash to the craft store, and one bottle of yellow fabric dye. I have great memories of Halloween costume making when I was little, and a deep sense that any costume worth its salt is NOT store bought. Half (or more) of the fun is creating an ass-a-kickerata costume from "scratch." Last year, my kids were on board with this. See the picture -- it speaks volumes:



This year, however, they have asked specifically for STORE BOUGHT COSTUMES. This is how they put it, even before they told me what they want to be. "We want store bought costumes." What, do they lie in their bunkbeds and come up with this stuff in partnership? I can just hear it: "Mom is probably gonna try to push that homemade junk on us again this year, so we gotta hit her early and be absolutely clear. OK, united front: we want store bought." And their oh-so-convincing reason for wanting store bought costumes? Because everyone else has them. (My husand's response to this was: "So did you tell them that everyone else eats sugary crap and watches mindless brain-sapping drivel, too?" Poor guy, he doesn't realize this is EXACTLY what my oldest son means when he says: "I need a new family.")

Sigh. This makes me wistful. I want them to be excited about putting together a costume as a family activity. I want to be given the challenge of coming up with a totally awesome spiderman with my bare hands and a glue gun, one that blows the Target version outta the water! My sons? They want the security and sureness of a packaged promise. My 5 year old daughter wants to be Minnie Mouse, and I bet she'll let me build her a great costume, so I've still got that.

Last year, my son's homemade Woody costume won him a prize at his school parade. He was thrilled. Even so, he was surrounded by store bought x-men, and power rangers, and spidermen, and other menacing superheroes. This is the kind of thing that revs me up for a rant about the blandness and emptiness of our culture. What happened to creativity? What happened to imagination? Why must Disney (or other mass-media/entertainment visigoth) dictate what my children like? Lordy, I sound like my own parents. And we all know that few things strike fear in our hearts more than that right there!

I should be thankful. That I can go to Target or wherever, buy a package, and save myself the time and trouble of creating costumes myself. I certainly could use the time in some other fashion. But no, I sit here, trying to think of clever ways to trick my children into thinking that they would actually prefer to be something cool like a dolphin or a box of popcorn or an aquarium full of salt-water fish. I just love it when they go nuts with ideas and imagination, and it seems like Halloween is the perfect time to do this...so why don't my kids agree? Guess they want to fit in, just like we all do, eh?

So we'll see. If past years are any indication, they will change their minds about their costumes 3.5 times in the next four weeks. They can't change their minds past October 15th, though, or mom bursts a blood vessel. Something tells me STORE BOUGHT is not going to be one of the things that changes. Different package, same security.

Thank God for Minnie Mouse. Anyone out there got a pair of ears they're not using?

ps: Addendum to this post: Apparently, imagination is alive and well, and I needn't worry. My almost nine year old suggested to me today that I go as Jane Goodall for Halloween, and dress up my 2 and 1 year old as monkeys. I just might take this suggestion...