Light and Momentary

Conversation

[We drive by a garage sale featuring a giant triceratops.]

That is indescribably awesome.

    You are categorically forbidden to bring that thing home.

But it is made of awesome.

    You are categorically forbidden to bring that thing home.

I would keep it in my room. [NB: The room in question is about 50 square feet. Tiny tiny tiny.]

    You are categorically forbidden to bring that thing home.

I could hang it from the ceiling.

    You are categorically forbidden to bring that thing home.

I could get rid of my bed.

    You are categorically forbidden to bring that thing home.

I could put my bed in diagonally so I had room for it.

    You are categorically forbidden to bring that thing home.

This must mean that you hate America.

    Can I blog this conversation?

If I can have the triceratops.

    When you stoop to bribery, you lose the right to determine what I write about you on my blog.

Okay, you can blog this.

    Thanks.

But why do you hate America?

Still crunchy after all these years

Bearing-Erin wrote a fun post about how her former crunchy self and her current crunchy self align, and I've been thinking about it this weekend. I had very strong opinions about the right way to do things when I was expecting my first child, and I fear my 1996 self would not entirely approve of my 2011 self. My 2011 self thinks my 1996 self was perhaps a wee bit uptight.

Still Crunchy

• Long-haul breastfeeding
• No commercial baby food -- baby-friendly table food instead
• Co-sleeping. (Stella sleeps alone until she wakes up, and co-sleeps thereafter.)
• Babywearing
• NFP (ditto what Erin said)

Even Crunchier

• I've learned a lot about gentle discipline since 1996. My kids know that I expect to be listened to, and I know not to flip out if they need to be reminded. Mostly.
• Homebirth FTW. No placentophagy, though.
• I grow (some of) my own veggies and herbs.
• I have a little compost heap.
• We can afford to buy some organic food and humanely raised eggs now.

Decrunchified And Okay With It

• Farewell, homeschooling.
• Cloth:disposable diaper ratio runs about 20:1 right now.
• My 2yo goes to preschool (a lovely, lovely preschool where kindness reigns and where she loves to be, but 1996 me would have been appalled).
• The reason she goes to preschool is that I work part-time.
• I'm thinking about applying for a full-time job for next year. (1996 Jamie frantically attempts to ward off the evil eye. 1996 Jamie had drunk deeply of the Kippley Kool-Aid, which drew a straight line between maternal employment and teen suicide.)
• I use the childcare room at the gym. And on Wednesday? I went to pick up Stella and she said she'd like to stay longer. 1996 Jamie would have seen this as a certain sign of bonding failure.

Borrowing Erin's Classification of Theoretically Committed, But No Longer Able To Figure Out How To Do It, Ergo Constant Feelings of Inadequacy

• "No TV or videos for kids under six" -- if you had told me that in 2011 my 2yo would routinely spend more time in an evening watching videos than being read to, I might have thought my future self should be shot before she could head down such a path of destruction.
• "We don't eat that much sugar or packaged food" -- I used to look upon breakfast cereal with scorn, and now my kids eat it ~4 days/week. For about a 2-year stretch my pantry contained no white flour, no white rice, no white sugar -- now, not so much. On the upside, I cook a lot more veggies than I did in 1996.

I think I am happier as a mother now that I'm not so worried about living up to somebody else's standards. I think a lot (A LOT) about the employment question. But-- I love my job. My kids are generally happy in school and at home. The house is not very tidy, but then it wasn't very tidy in 1996 either.

Too Many Words

On Monday I met up with a couple of friends for coffee, a welcome oasis of grown-up conversation in a season that has been mostly packed with mom tasks and work tasks. My friend Jenny and I were talking about writing in books: she never does it, while I do it a lot. How else would I remember my favorite quotes? Or those sudden flashes of insight? (Of course I only write in my own books. If you lend me a book I will do my recording in a little notebook of my own.) Jenny and I agree on a lot of things, but as I was explaining the joys of returning to the copy of Paradise Lost that I bought when I was eighteen, knowing that the black ink is from intro to Western lit and the green ink is from my survey course on 17th- and 18th-century lit and the blue ink is from the upper-level Milton class -- well, Jenny looked at me as if I were telling her she ought to get an eyelid tattoo.

But the delights of this habit of mine were reinforced a few days later, when I was skimming through my copy of Motor Speech Disorders (a frequent companion these days) and came across this note from 2007 in the margin: "some of us have deficits there!" It was in reference to a sentence I would have overlooked otherwise: "Linguistic planning requires...the ability to discard from active processing utterances that have already been formulated and executed."

A quirk of mine is that I love public speaking: I get a huge charge out of it. But after I give a talk, I always hear it playing back in my head again and again. Was that phrasing all right? Should I have cracked that joke in another spot? Lecturing twice a week means that I have my own words running through my head all the time-- practicing beforehand, and the involuntary replay afterward. I'm not very good at discarding from active processing, and the effect is that I'm tired of the sound of my own voice.

So this is just a quick post to say hi. Teaching this class is taking more time and mental energy than I would have imagined. I think it's a good sign that I'm feeling worried about the lecture I'll give ten days from now instead of the lecture I'll give Monday. I'm being summoned to read Pippi Longstocking right now. I don't think there are notes in its margin yet. Do you take notes in your books? And do your own words ever keep playing in your head? I could use a mute button.

Seven Quick Takes: Ultra-Speedy Version

1. Two weeks into the semester, and I love it except when I'm beating back my anxiety with a figurative broom. The students are responsive and engaged; they ask a ton of questions and they laugh in the right places. I'm doing better with pacing my lectures and I'm feeling less overwhelmed.
2. School is going better than I expected for the kids. My first-grader is really enjoying his teacher; my fourth-grader who has often been restless in the classroom tells me every day that he really likes school this year. The transitions to junior high and high school seem to be going well also, though I haven't checked grades online to see if the teachers' perceptions square with my kids' perceptions.
3. This business of being able to check my kids' grades from my own living room-- I'm not a fan. My parents had NO IDEA what was going on with me at school, and I think there's much to be said for letting kids be responsible for their own schoolwork. Thoughts?
4. Item: the schools have banned all homemade treats. If your child has a birthday or you want to contribute to the Halloween party, you must bring in individually wrapped treats with nutritional labels. And yeah, I get it that allergies can be a problem, and that some people are careless about food safety in their home kitchens, but are HoHos really the kind of thing our kids need to be eating more of? My boys have so enjoyed being able to choose the treat I'll bake for them to share with their classmates, cupcakes with real chocolate and real eggs and some sneaky whole wheat pastry flour. Plus I have this Baking = Love thing wired deep inside me. Love ≠ Buying HoHos. I do not approve, she said grumpily.
5. You know what else makes me shake my head, and perhaps my cane, in fetching get-off-my-lawn fashion? My kids need a signed waiver in order to bike to and from soccer practice. There is SO much to be said, if you ask me, for teaching kids to get around on their own, to navigate their neighborhoods, to be responsible for getting themselves places on time -- as well as for reducing gas consumption and time spent elbowing siblings in the back of the van while mom gets progressively shriller. The form from the soccer league says "We do not encourage players biking to and from practice." Harrumph, she harrumphed grumpily. Two of my boys have soccer practices that are easy biking distance from our house, most of it along a beautiful paved bike trail. They're biking, dang it, no matter what the league encourages.
6. Tomorrow my husband is taking the four boys on a bus trip with Scouts. They'll be gone from 5:15 in the morning until about 10:15 at night, so it'll just be Stella and me here in town all day. I bet you a dollar she'll be up for the day when they leave at 5:15.
7. Which means I should get to bed pronto. G'night.

More quick takes.