Light and Momentary

Seven

Quick, what were you doing on the morning of October 29, 1999?

I was resting in bed, with a delicious 9#6oz. Marty snuggled up beside me.  In that picture I am on top of the world and beyond exhausted.

Seven years later he is a kind-hearted and generous kid who plays a mean air guitar.  To the scrum of life with four boys he brings a welcome measure of patience and sensitivity. 

Last night I was tucking him in and I said, "This is your last night as a six-year-old."  He said, "I'm nervous about being seven.  It's the age of reason."  I kissed him and said, "Reason is a gift.  And you'll be a great seven-year-old."

That's Marty all over:  thoughtful, a little worried.  But this is Marty too, laughing in a summer rainstorm as his big brother splashes in a puddle.  "I love rain," he says, dripping wet.

Now I need to stop writing about him because I have a cake to bake, and seven candles to put on top.

Pictures!

So most of you are saying we should go blue for the porch.  The trouble is I do not love blue.  Weird, huh?  I'll keep thinking about it, though, and maybe blue will speak to me.  Here's a picture of the current color (the white parts will stay white, Summer).  Joe wanted to wear those goggles to the Mass for his brothers' baptism/first communion.  He settled for putting them on the instant it was over.

We aren't planning to paint the door.  Our front door is a Craftsman-ish kind of thing and the wood is in pretty good shape.  Here's a picture of the inside.  Please ignore the clothing in this picture.  It was Christmas Eve and we were dancing to Bruce Cockburn's Christmas album in between putting ornaments on the tree, and I guess we were just enjoying the season too much to attend to petty details like matching clothes.  Over on the right you can see one of the French doors between our living room and our little music room -- same idea as the front door.  I like them unpainted.

One more picture for good measure.  Today my niece is a year old.  She's my only niece and I wanted to do something special for her birthday instead of just sending a random hunk of plastic, so I made her an outfit. With flowered pants, because I do love flowered pants and none of my children will wear them -- imagine that.  I tried it on Pete to get the hems right, and discovered that something is funny about the sizing:  it's too big through the shoulders.  It might fit John Henry the steel-driving baby Lord Lord, but I think my niece will be swimming in it.  Here is a picture of Pete modeling it, with the hook and eye already undone because he does not have steel-driving shoulders.  It's the thought that counts, right?

Survey: Paint My Porch, Please

The painters are cruising along and the house is shaping up nicely.  The color is exactly what I wanted, the pale yellow of a stick of butter.  I keep seeing other yellow houses and thinking, "Nope, too bright."  Or, "Nope, too close to cream."  I'm like Goldlilocks, except it's my own house that's just right.  We have to pick a color for the porch, though, and I am looking for opinions.

I'd like something colorful but not crazy, and Elwood P. has strict ideas about what kind of colorful he finds acceptable.  "Maybe purple," I said, and he echoed, "Purple," much as if I had announced my plans to paint it myself using the adobo sauce from a can of chipotles.  Right now it is green with a fair amount of blue in it.  I am partial to the color but I'm not sure I want to keep it.

If you had a 1923 bungalow with pale yellow siding and white trim, what color would you paint your porch?

The Coffee Problem

It's not that complicated to make a pot of coffee, right?

1. Empty carafe.
2. Empty filter basket.
3. Put fresh water in reservoir.
4. Grind beans and dump in basket.
5. Press the button.

And yet somehow I have managed to botch the process innumerable times, leaving out one step or another.  I have on an online pal who calls it the coffee bootstrap problem -- you need caffeine to think clearly enough to make coffee.  I do it even when I'm off caffeine, though.

This morning the younger boys both woke up at half-past Lord-have-mercy (at least I think that's what the clock said; I'm pretty nearsighted though).  When I bowed to the inevitable and got up, I decided to make banana muffins for breakfast since I had some extra time.  I started the coffee and started the muffins, attempting to strike the right balance between welcoming toddler participation and keeping some portion of my kitchen unfloured.  "Oh, no!" said Joe.  (Look at that -- a poem.)  "Hot coffee is spilling." 

I had forgotten step 1, forgotten that my husband made a pot of coffee last night and it went mostly undrunk.  Just in case you wondered, a carafe with six cups of coffee inside it will not accommodate an additional eight cups.

The Midterm

My statistics midterm was this morning.  It was longer than I expected -- I was writing up until he called time.

My professor's emphasis is on writing about statistics.  He walks us through the math, but the exam didn't ask any questions like, "Explain the relationship between standard deviation and standard error."  It was mostly practical:  you have this body of data.  Do these results conform to the expected distribution?  Is there a relationship between variable A and variable B?  Write up your findings in APA format.  Ten questions like that, in eighty minutes.  (Eighty-five, really; he let us stay a little over.)

When I took stats for my master's degree, in 1994, we were still doing pencil and paper calculations.  Now it's almost all SPSS.  I don't quite trust SPSS (or maybe I don't quite trust myself to get the right numbers out of SPSS), but I didn't have the time to check the output beyond a quick once-over, just to make sure there weren't any glaring errors.

In 1994 I was turning in hand-written exams; today he had us open a Word file and pop in a header at the top with our names on it.  Our computers all have internet access, and we could use anything we wanted to on the computer as long as it wasn't connected to a live person at the other end.  (Google: okay. Google Talk: not okay.)

Fingers crossed -- we'll see how it turns out.

Pete wants to go outside and chase squirrels.  He is clicking his tongue at me in an irresistible imitation of a squirrel.  Enough blogging, he says.  All right then, Pete.

Indecisive

My two oldest sons are in school for the first time this year, in fourth and first grades, and the transition has gone pretty well.  They find the work easy but not boring, and the social adjustment has been smooth.  But I am annoyed just now.  More to the point, I am BUGged. 

The kids get BUG slips when they are Being Unusually Good.  They can cash in BUG slips for prizes, and this is the source of my annoyance.  On Friday my oldest, Alex, came home and announced that he had collected a bag of candy at morning assembly, followed by four different prizes (he chose four different suckers, which he ate in rapid succession) from one of his teachers. 

So of course I'm glad he's succeeding.  Of course I'm glad the teachers want to encourage success.  But I'm worried about his teeth and I'm wondering if no one at school has heard about the childhood obesity crisis and philosophically I'm way over on the Alfie Kohn side of the spectrum when it comes to thinking about motivation.  (I can't link directly to the article, but you can go to this page and scroll down to the "Parenting Magazines" section to read an article called "The Case Against Gold Stars" if you're so inclined.)

My MIL was here on Friday and she was outraged.  I should write to the principal, she thinks.  I should complain vociferously.  I'm not convinced.  But I'm still bugged.

Scrape scrape scrape scrape

We live in a 1920s frame house.  We knew when we bought it that it would need to be painted in the not-too-distant future, and we started getting estimates back in the spring.  The painters are prepping this week and I am trying to remain calm.

(Whenever I think about remaining calm, I remember my advisor from my master's program.  He was a very intense man, and his approach to relaxation techniques in therapy was to lean into a client and urge him, with furrowed brow, "REMAIN CALM."  Soothing it was not.)

We have some lead paint to deal with, and we've been talking for a long time now about how to manage it safely.  The painters were supposed to scrape while the paint was wet, to cut down on the dust.  I'm still worried.  Do you think they'd mind if I followed them around in a hazmat suit, spritzing the siding with water as they worked?  They were supposed to shop-vac all the mess at the end of each day, but yesterday they did a less than thorough job with brooms instead.  Today they're working by the doors, so I'll need to request a more exacting clean-up if they take the same tack again.  Right now there's no way in that's not strewn with paint chips.

My friend in the neighborhood, who also likes old houses but freaks out about lead, was talking me down earlier.  Be fanatical about hand-washing, she said, and about taking shoes off inside.  Give the boys calcium supplements at night and iron supplements in the morning, so that they'll just excrete any lead they take in instead of absorbing it.  Don't panic.

REMAIN CALM, as my professor would have said.  It's going to be a pretty creamy yellow when they're done.  (Glad Yellow, it's called -- an appropriate color for the Gladly house, no?)  I just wish we could jump from here to there without the mess and bother in between.

Statsblogging

My stats professor is a character.  I don't know exactly what sort of person I expected to be drawn to a quantitative psychology professorship, but I wasn't expecting the sort of person who knits himself enormous emerald and purple striped sweaters.  Or the sort of person who would answer his own question ("Why shouldn't we decide after the fact whether to use a one- or two-tailed hypothesis test?") by wheeling around and announcing fiercely, "Because if we do we'll rot in hell!"  Or the sort of person who would lay his hand on his heart and say, "The central limit theorem is a precious, precious gift."

I wonder what sort of midterm that sort of stats professor will give -- he announced today that it will be next Tuesday.  I haven't taken a midterm since 1994.  Eek.

I gave Pete a cracker and the tub of Rondele to dip it in while I wrote this post.  Maybe that wasn't the best idea I ever had.  Oh, argh, I was going to post a picture but the camera and the computer aren't on speaking terms at the moment.  You'll have to imagine the Rondele wreckage until I can arrange a rapprochement.  Which won't be until after I get the toddler and his high chair cleaned up, and the 4yo's urgent neeeed for a Lego-building partner satisfied.

UPDATE:  Only minimal camera-computer diplomacy was required.

Thoughts from a 5K

Inspired by Moxie and Carmen and DoctorMama, I ran a 5K this morning.  I ran it slowly (37:11, to be precise.  "Were you last?" my husband asked me.  Harrumph.  I was not last.), but I ran the whole thing.

The winner finished right in front of me.  He lapped me -- we ran two loops around the homecoming parade route and he crossed the finish line just before I finished my first lap.  When we all took off and I saw how much faster the other runners were going, I thought about just giving up and running home.  I thought about taking a short cut at about 2.25 miles.  But I told myself, "Humble is good."

I am not at all sore or tired, which I'll take as a good sign.  I think I'll try another one next month.  Next time, 36 minutes!  Perhaps I'll crack the fourth percentile.  A person's got to have goals, you know.

About Joe

Joe is 4.  He came home from preschool a couple of weeks ago begging for a Ben 10 watch, like the one another boy had.  "He gave me a turn with it!" said Joe.

"Wasn't that nice of him?" I said.  "Did you say thank you?"

"I told him our address."

"So he could come and play?"

"So his mother could deliver the Ben 10 watch to me."

...We're working on the manners thing.

He's been asking and asking if he could please please have a Ben 10 watch of his own, so today we went to Toys R Us with a gift card.  "Wow!" said Joe, cruising the aisles.  "I never knew I always wanted all this stuff!"

Somewhere the TRU marketing team is high-fiving over that one.

When in Doubt, Blog.

So I am feeling a little overwhelmed today.  Pete was unhappy last night (eyeteeth, scourge of the toddler-mama's existence) and awake during the time when I had planned to do my stats assignment.  He fell asleep with the babysitter -- only 15 minutes but it meant I didn't get time to write while Joe was at preschool.  I've been trying to learn about the effect of the fats in human milk on early brain development, and there's a lot to find out.  There's dinner to make and shin guards to find before soccer practice.  But...I'm starting a new blog instead.  Hello out there.