The bigot and the bitches

This tweety bird night shirt is by far the trashiest piece of clothing I own.  I do love tweety bird, but that's not enough of a reason to buy and wear something hideous.  It's comfortable, and the kids love it, so it's eluded many a purge.  I happened to be wearing it on Friday OUTSIDE on my lawn as Toby and I waited for her ride to school.  I was dead-heading marigolds.  I didn't think too many people would see me.  Toby's ride got later and later.  I started to blame the lack of a chauffeur on my imprecise oral communication skills.

In a moment of incongruous initiative with regard to a possible "tardy" on Toby's  kindergarten record Tweety and I brazenly rallied Toby into the Minivan.  I was feeling OK about my parenting as we hurtled down Lincoln Drive until we hit traffic.  If one is late to Green Woods Charter School, one has to get out of the car and walk one's child to the front desk to sign a f-ing "tardy" slip. If I had to walk Toby the 200 yards to school barefoot in nothing but Tweety and my driving glasses, I would have had to withdraw all 3 of my kids from one of the best free schools in Philadelphia.  I was sweating; my heart rate went up.  Being the white trash mom of the bigot and the bitches was more than I could bear.  I got Toby in on time, so I stayed in my little Honda Odyssey cocoon, but I'll NEVER do that again.

Is Steel a bitch?  I'm sure her irritation is palpable when people are misbehaving in 2nd grade.  She and I heard about Jack Peter's first conduct referral of this year on Schloka's speaker phone.  (Schlocka is the Honda Odyssey)  Jack Peter hadn't said a thing when I'd left him at the house, but his teacher called while Steel and I drove to dance.  After listening to Mr. Sylvan's message on our booming surround sound, I said to Steel, with some exasperation, "What do you think will make Jack Peter stop screwing around in school???"  Steel said, "I think you need to beat him."
She definitely speaks her mind.  Deena discovered a note to her boys penned by Steel listing all of their infractions at JP's most recent birthday party.  These two are notorious in our house.  Steel and Owen fell in love at first sight when she was 5 and he was 7, but it's gone downhill ever since.  Toby and Coleman have hated each other on sight, and I'll probably be repeating this in a toast at their wedding.  However, Steel was walking on air tonight after the Benner boys left.    Steel had emphatically told Owen to "STOP!"  He'd looked her in the eyes, said, "OK" and handed over the spray-on hair color he was about to unleash upon her.  She was so tickled by her power and by his submission.  Steel is the one who pushes the hardest on my buttons.  You're all saying "BECAUSE SHE IS YOU." in your heads, but I didn't have her balls when I was 7; I certainly wouldn't have confronted a cute, raspy-voiced 9-year-old boy.

Toby, too, is having a hard time with suffering fools.  Maybe it's sexist to call either of them bitches; I'll call them both bitches in training.  Toby came home from aftercare IRATE on her 2nd day of kindergarten.  She'd held onto her ire for 3 hours.  Apparently, her teacher, Ms. Lowell, was drawing lines on the projector to discuss shorter versus longer.  She was doing it by hand which was fine until she got to the "equal" lines.  Toby fumed, Ms. Lowell and the entire class agreed that the lines were the same length when one was DEFINITELY longer than the other!!!!"  I know it's not right to contradict an adult, but she and everyone else were WRONG!  I jokingly e-mailed Ms. Lowell that night that there's an architect's daughter in the house, and she needs to start using a ruler. 

Toby was also incensed at her first soccer practice that a boy on the other team had PUSHED HER.  She might be too polite for team sports.  She was also unimpressed by Steel's description of their free range aftercare program.  Steel said, "I hope we get to run around in the woods today!"  Toby said, "You run around the woods?  Are there any ADULTS?"  Steel responded that no, there were just kids.  Toby, "Well than I'M NOT DOING IT!"

JP is the bigot.  Why?  Somehow on a playdate with Owen and Cole, they had come across a Utube video with the line, "Now there are 7 NIGGERS in my store!"  I still have no idea what they were watching.  JP waited until the first week of school to chant that line aloud IN FRONT OF THE HEADMASTER'S SON.  I was lead to believe that the headmaster was kind of a jerk.  Sadly I've had quite a few experiences with him, and he's been anything but.  The first was a phone call.  He was relaying an allegation about Jack Peter involving saliva and a female student in the bus line.  Mr. Masterson gave me an unbiased, "heads up" rendition of the situation and that was that.

My second Masterson phone call involved "google docs."  In 3rd grade they shared their writing via google docs.   JP figured out that he had an e-mail because he had a "google docs" account.  He started sending e-mails to his friends.  He started sending them to his enemies, as well.  He wrote one saying, "PLEASE DIE" to the girl who told his current girlfriend, Juliana, about his crush.  Mr. Masterson called and said that not only was he impressed that Jack Peter had discovered the e-mail capability but also that JP had changed his password.  Very few faculty members had managed to figure out changing their passwords.  Mr. Masterson admitted that it was Green Woods' responsibility to disable the e-mailing capabilities for 8 year olds.  When the "Please Die" part of  the illicit e-mail situation came up, Mr. Masterson said to me, "Well, as his lawyer, 'Please Die' is passive.  Had he written, I'm going to kill you. he'd be suspended."

A couple weeks later I had the pleasure of a another midday call from Mr. Masterson.  They had just discovered a google doc written by my son entitled BAD WORDS.  Jack Peter had listed the top 10 in Helvetica.  He'd then switched to a more Halloween-esque font to finish with the line, and don't forget CRAP!  One of those top 10 was NIGGER.  This was last spring.  When asked, he claimed he didn't know what the word meant, but he knew it was bad.  We'd punished him by making him write the definitions of all of the words while the girls got a movie night.

In light of that, this year's nigger incident (chanting the line, "now there are 7 niggers in my store") was unforgivable because he no longer had the "I didn't know what it meant." excuse.  We made him write a report on Jackie Robinson, and I got to say repeatedly, "This is why we don't let you on the internet.  YOU CAN'T HANDLE IT!"
We thought that writing the report while the girls and the neighbors watched a movie would be enough of a punishment to squelch his enthusiasm for bad behavior, but a week later we got our first conduct referral phone call of 4th grade.  Jack Peter's teachers always start out serious, but it devolves, and then they're gushing about his wit, generosity, intelligence and creativity by the end of the call.  This conduct referral was for general horsing around in class.  Under "time of incident" his teacher had written, "ALL DAY"

This was JP's response to "dress down day"

In all interaction with school I am as obsequious and funny as I can possibly be.  I come from a long line of teachers, and I know I'm too self-involved to be one, so it breaks my heart and pisses me off when people are wretched to anyone working at a school.  Our school has a particularly efficient, smart, funny and hard-working administrator.  I could e-mail her at 10 pm and have a response by 11.  She's the one up at 5 in the morning dealing with snow days and transportation issues.  She also takes the time to send cute e-mails telling me she caught my son stopping to smell the Christmas wreaths.  She is directing traffic in the rain, getting copies of transcripts, and giving her lunch to a kid who's hungry.  

Every year, she has to liaison between the parents and the incompetent City of Philadelphia bus system.  This year she was verbally abused so many times that the principal had to send out a mass e-mail reminding parents that the administrator has NOTHING TO DO with the transportation issues and that all complaints should be going to the the district transportation coordinators.

I sent the administrator a "top ten list" of responses she should make to rude parents:

10. "Call the district.  If you're on hold for over 7 hours, you're eligible for a drawing.  The winner will get to have dinner at a Steven Starr restaurant of his or her choice with THE POPE!"

9. "After a recent study in childhood development, we've deduced that Green Woods kids are over-scheduled.  These long bus rides were created to give your children time to day dream."

8. "We are hoping Green Woods parents meet these transportation challenges with a family perusal of world news.  We want Green Woods students to understand that a 2 hour bus ride is mild when compared to a beheading"

7. "Oh come on!  You loved it.  You got to scroll through Facebook for two hours without having to answer any questions or do laundry."

6. "Green Woods is striving for an all-around education.  This includes survival-in-the-wild techniques.  The next time little Elvis feels he needs to pee while he's on the bus, encourage him to urinate in his water bottle and retain the contents for future use.  On back-to-school night, the PTA will be handing out little funnels to help the little girls with this endeavor."

5.  "We are sure that your catchment school will still accept little Elvis if the transportation issues are too much for your family.  His slot at Green Woods is a highly coveted item in Philadelphia"

4.  "This was an introduction to our "transportation software hacking boot camp!"  Your child has the opportunity to compete against the best and brightest city-employed engineers to devise a better system.  The winner will receive 5 TRAILBLAZERS!"

3. "These transportation hurdles were devised as testing opportunities.  Masterman and Harvard are no longer looking a standardized test scores.  They are using a "reality TV approach" to evaluating children in times of stress.  Let me assure you, Mrs. Cranky, Little Elvis is doing VERY WELL on these new tests."

2. "Just be glad your kid wasn't on bus number 98.  They sat on the bus for 4 hours and 37 minutes, and each and every one of them emerged from the bus with a head full of LICE!"

AND THE NUMBER ONE ANSWER to irate parents with transportation issues is:

1. "I hear they have FABULOUS schools right across the river in Lower Marion.  Have you considered MOVING?????"

I save my bitchiness for my poor husband.  Recently this worked out really well.  I'd been in charge of everything at home for a few days.  Tim returned and was trying to get together a pitch to a developer.  He wanted me to sit and listen to the presentation when I wanted to go to bed.  I listened.  It sucked.  I told him.  He stayed up until 5 revising it, and the meeting went really well.  Tim thanked me the next day and told me that I was the reason things had gone well.  That made me feel good...sort of.

Instead of making Tim Creme Brûlée for his 51st birthday, I bought a flan from the guys who sell them on the street for $5 in the Puerto Rican neighborhood.  It got a little dented in my bike panier, but it was flantastic in theory.

My bitchiness was unfurled again last Friday.  Tim had been gone for two weeks.  He'd threatened extending the two weeks to help his uncle prepare for his aunt's funeral.  Despite the tragedy of his aunt's death, I felt completely justified when I texted, "YOU NEED TO COME HOME AS SOON AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN," Someone else could help with the funeral; whereas no one was going to help here with the bigot and the bitches.  In a shocking turn of events ANOTHER aunt on his mom's side died 5 days later.  After 5 days home, he was going back to Canada for her funeral.  Incidentally, Steel probably isn't a bitch, but she might be a witch.  On the night that Patty, Aunt #1, died, Steel said at bed time, out of nowhere, "If Aunt Patty were our mom, she would spoil us all the time!"  She'd met Aunt Patty once in June.  Indeed Patty and Uncle Norman spoiled my kids rotten. I'd see them sneaking away with a posse of kids and Duty Free Toblerone bars the size of the kids' legs.  One can't help but think that Steel felt something from Patty on the night she died.

Friday is piano night.  We alternate between our house and Kathy's.  It was her night, and she suggested Tim and I go out to dinner instead of hang out with her and the kids.  (Kathy is divorced.  Perhaps that gave her insight on how necessary it was that we have 3 hours together before he flew away again.)  We went to happy hour and ordered a fancy gin drink.  It came, and he got a phone call.  He told me he HAD to take it.  It was from a colleage of 12 years ago whose son was in jail.  Could Tim go and bail out the 35-year-old son?  The charge was aggravated assault.  I'd never heard of this woman.  As far as I was concerned, her son could fester in jail while we enjoyed our gin Fizz.  It's funny how the thing that most attracts you most about someone when you marry them can infuriate you.  His generosity, energy and ability to handle a crisis are so attractive until it's everyone else's crisis he's attending to.  I told him he couldn't go.  We still don't know what would have happened because he was fighting me on that point when the woman called to say she'd gotten someone else to do it.  This white-trash, barefoot, tweety-bird-nightshirt-wearing bitch might've been arrested for aggravated assault if he'd left me at that bar...

or maybe my response would have been similar to Toby's if someone had taken away her first milkshake...

Time Suckers

Not only do I waste time gardening.  I also waste time arranging cut flowers from my garden.

At some point during our annual visits with Tim’s ambitious brother Mike in California, he asks me about expanding my business.  This year he brought up the success of the Heath tile company in Sausalito.  Apparently the couple who bought Heath has turned it into a 14-million-dollar, nationwide company.  One of my ambitions for this summer was to change the side on which I part my hair.  I’m trying to floss more, and I also would like to read to my youngest child more.  Neither of those goals has been met, but the part part has been accomplished.

Screw expansion.  I’m not the 3^rd world country I used to be in terms of ceramic output.  First of all, I can’t hire anyone because I spend most of my home life asking people if they’ve accomplished tasks.  The answer is usually “no,” so I nag, threaten and cajole.  If I have to do some menial tasks to avoid asking someone else to do it, so be it.  I can’t devote more time to work because all I want to do is garden.  I need to get a bumper sticker that says, “I’d rather be weeding!”  I'll put it right below the one that says, "I'd rather be potting!"  It sounds like I smoke a lot of marijuana.  Another garden-related time suck: Steel has started to write notes to the flower fairies, Dahlia, Pansy and I can’t remember the third.  We had tears over the weekend because those fairy bitches hadn’t responded in THREE DAYS! 

 I know it's probably beginner's luck, but doesn't that look AMAZING?!  My neighbors are actually starting to refer to me as "The Gardner" or "The Zinnia Lady."  I've also gotten some dismissive, "You know that they are all annuals, don't you?" comments.  I think I've got a line on some perennials for next year, so those nay sayers will have to kiss my Bee Balmed ass.

Then there’s my weird sense of thrift and sustainability.  How long do I spend going through bags of hand me downs looking for the next pile of clothes for each of my kids? It’s a challenging cost/benefit analysis when they complain about what I bring home from the loft at my studio and a new outfit at Target costs $10.  Kids’ clothes are so cheap it’s terrifying. Were they all sewn by little Jack Peters, Steels and Tobys in Bangladesh?  Speaking of Target, another way I waste time is looking at towels.  A few years ago I had the brilliant idea to buy white towels.  White towels would make our filthy home feel like a spa!  And they'd have the added benefit of ensuring that I would always have enough to do a full white load.  Tim's tube socks and the cloth napkins never filled it up.  To avoid a wasteful partial load, Tim would throw it all in with the colors and turn everything grey. Despite our having a separate laundry basket labeled by Steel in Sharpie (Wights) not one, but all 8 of our "new" white towels look like someone used them to wipe their ass with it and then hung it back on the rack.  I've never wanted a "nanny cam" before, but I'd love a towel cam.  It's so humiliating to give them to guests, but one cannot take a new towel purchase lightly.  There are amazon reviews to consult, mountains of terry at Target and Bed, Bath and Beyond to fondle, and maybe Ikea has amazing towels.

A rare trip to buy new clothes at Target...

Last year my new prescription sunglasses were stolen from my car the first night we were at our new house.  Have I replaced them?  No.  Going to the eye doctor is an out-of-the-question time suck, and I get a free pair of glasses every 2 years, so I might as well wait.  See how much time and money I save?  The other day after a harrowing car ride, I spent a good hour googling “fractalized vision” and assuming I had a brain tumor.  2013’s prescription sunglasses are in a swim bag somewhere.  The 2011 ones live in the car.  My research revealed that wearing glasses with an improper prescription can create weird geometric divisions in vision.  OK maybe a trip to the optometrist would have been a better use of my time.

My most Sisyphusian time sucker is the battle against wasting anything.  I justify it by claiming that I’m green.  I roll my eyes at Tim when he, once again, forgets to bring bags to the grocery store.  I seethe when he opens a new bag of salty snacks without finishing the stale, wretched ones lurking behind the cereal.  Bear in mind, my husband is actually trying to change the way buildings are built in this country.  Buildings create 75% of our greenhouse gasses.  There are optional tax incentives written into the briefs for subsidized housing dollars.  The subsidized housing market is so competitive that developers almost always go for the incentives, so the incentives essentially become unwritten policy.  Tim is trying and succeeding in getting 37 states to give points for 0-energy, passive house subsidized housing projects, so he deserves a fresh bag of pretzels.

Meanwhile, the girls went to a birthday party in March.  One of the games involved picking peanuts up off of the lawn.  The bags of peanuts were weighed, and the owner of the heaviest bag was given the first choice of the dollar store prizes on the prize table.  Toby was apoplectic because the Frozen pencil case went to a girl who picked up more peanuts.  I spent the car ride home bellowing about how it’s all crap that’s going to break and she shouldn’t be crying about cheap toys.  Both Toby's and Steel's bags of peanuts ended up in a bowl on the counter because I couldn’t throw them away.  No one in our family eats peanuts.  When I got sick of the bowl on the counter, I ignored Toby’s pleas to be read to and instead spent an hour shelling peanuts to turn them into weird, natural peanut butter.  No one ate that either.  Then I baked them into peanut butter cookies.  I tried to slip in some whole-wheat flour because I don't want to waste it even though no one likes that either.  The cookies got re-branded as “breakfast bars” and ended their lives in the stomach of Brittney’s less-than-discerning boyfriend at MIT.  I’m saving the world one peanut at a time.

I should at least be making a ton of pottery this summer because my kids are in camp for 6 weeks.  The camp day is 2 hours longer than their school day.  They go to subsidized inner city day camp.  It’s really cheap and great, but there are a lot of fancy camps out there.  I’ve started lying.  Steel is doing an AMAZING week of cairn-making camp.  It was her special treat because she did an overnight camp for a week in the Hamptons at Currency Manipulation Camp.  JP is doing a week of tattoo camp followed by a really interesting hedge fund management camp.  Toby is going to do a 6-week SAT preparedness camp, so we’re having a GREAT SUMMER!

Tattoo camp...

Maybe Toby should be preparing for the LSAT.  She said to me out of the blue the other day, “Mommy, what do you love most in the world?”  I got a little misty and told her that I love her, her siblings and Tim.  She then said, “How would you feel if you couldn’t have us?  If you had to watch us be with someone else?”  I was sort of horrified.  “Toby!  That would make me so sad!  Why would you say something like that?”  Triumphant she replied, “Mommy, that’s how we feel about MOVIES!”  She set me up to get all maudlin, and then she went in for the kill; she's 5!

She’s been really funny lately.  She told us that there’s no gravity in her head.  “There are chairs flying all over the place!”  She does have a chair fetish, so I’m not surprised.  I’m going to be sad when her legs can touch the floor when she’s on a chair.  Seeing her little legs parallel to the floor when she’s on the toilet almost mitigates the fact that she always chooses to have a really long poop when we’re at a restaurant and my food has just arrived.  She likes to make whimsical conversation while I ask every 2-3 minutes, “Are you finished yet?”  At North 3^rd she asked, “Mom, have you ever wanted to touch poop?”  I replied, “I’m sure most people probably do, just not enough to actually do it.”  She then said, “Freud says that playing with clay is actually an acceptable way to avoid the desire to touch your feces.”  I told her to hurry up and that we are more of a Jungian family anyway.  Back at the table,  I asked her if she was going to finish her potatoes and she said, “No, my mouth is bored with those potatoes.”  I wish my mouth would get bored with the heaping spoonfuls of Nutella I’ve been sneaking. 

(You know I'm kidding about Toby's knowledge of psychoanalysis, right?  I'm sure there are people out there who would reduce my life's work to a desire to play with feces, though.)

Liver, Lice and Lobelia

It's too late for me, but maybe Steel has a chance for nice skin

There was an incredible double rainbow encircling North Philly on my way to work.  I kept pulling over on my bike to tell people to look at it like some hippy rainbow ambassador.  Some looked at me with a bored, "Yeah, I saw it."  Others screamed out to neighbors and kids.  I was feeling a little self-conscious about my aggressive rainbow-awareness campaign, but I couldn't stop.  I don't have a spiritual life to speak of, so little marvels that bring people together are important to me.

Beautiful people are like rainbows.  Admiring them brings us all together.  I made the mistake once of asking Lauree Katz how she has such beautiful skin.  I was hoping for a quick shrug and an "I'm lucky, I guess!" accompanied by a dazzling, wrinkle-free smile.  Instead, her monologue started with the phrase, "I think I might have gotten a sunburn once when I was in my early twenties."  19 minutes later I had finished my drink, and she had just moved on from her elimination diet and cleansers to at-home mechanical exfoliators.  An epilogue of moisturizers and facial mists was to follow.  I should have stopped her at the sun burn part.  The diet wasn't going to happen, and if I was exhausted by the descriptions of her cleansing routine, then I wasn't going to take part in anything close.  I didn't think that I'd applied that sort of rigor to anything in my life, but I was wrong.

My newly-50 husband and newly-50 girlfriend have just undergone the preparations for their first colonoscopies.  I'm not interested.  You will have to do it! they insist.  No, I won't.  I can honestly start my anti-colonoscopy conversation with the words, "I think I might have skipped eating a daily MASSIVE salad a couple of times in my early 20's."  I could then go on to an exhaustive description of smoothies, herbal teas, and a processed-food-free diet.  My colon looks like Lauree Katz's face!  My liver probably looks like Ray Liotta's face, but we're working on that.  Heather told me my skin was looking great last Thursday evening after ballet.  I said, "Screw you!  that's NOT what I wanted to hear."  The problem was that I hadn't had a drink for 4 days.  My suspicions that my blotchy red skin might be related to my alcohol consumption have now been confirmed.  So now my vanity is on the line, and I HAVE to clean up my act.

If I can't drink alcohol to pep things up, then lice will do it for me.  We got the call after movie night.  Samantha and Nicholas had returned home.  Their mom texted both Tim and me, and after no response resorted to actually calling.  Nicholas had lice.  My kids experienced a mild form of Abu Ghraib.  I brought them one-at-a-time from a dead sleep into the bathroom with the brightest lights, and I picked at their sleep-bobbling heads.  My heart sank.  I sprayed some "Quick Nits" on them and sent them back to bed.  I thought I was handling it well until I tried to sleep.  I couldn't.  Tim couldn't see the 1000 nits on Steel, so he wasn't going to be able to tell me if my bottle-blond tresses were infected.  There have only been a few times when I felt too-old to have little kids.  The first was when I was too far-sighted to see the "you're pregnant" line on the pregnancy test, and the second was when my husband couldn't discern anything wrong with my infested children's hair.


Yes, I left the house like this.  That is a plastic bag on my head covering a stinky homeopathic lice treatment underneath my Elmer Fudd hunting cap.

The most annoying part of the whole thing was that I'd just changed their sheets.  I only change the kids' sheets if someone pees or pukes.  That hadn't happened since we'd moved.  Their beds are against walls, and one is a bunk bed.  It's a pain in the ass.  We were having guests.  Théo, who is 13, and his dad were coming from Montreal.  I changed the sheets because I was picturing 13-year-old Théo surveying the caked drool and boogers on their sheets and being so disgusted that he'd get a vasectomy as soon as he returned to his socialized Canadian medicine.  I didn't want that on my conscience.  The kids also sleep with about 26 blankets a piece.  I'd not gotten through that laundry and was going to have to do another mountain.  They'd only slept on the new sheets ONCE as opposed to their usual 423 nights.

Steel really makes a lice hair treatment look glamorous, doesn't she?

I lost my mind.  I internet searched.  I trolled through Amazon reviews.  I called hippy grocers.  Whole Foods only had 3 boxes of the the homeopathic remedy I'd settled on, so I made a fruitless tour of Philadelphia pharmacies on foot hoping for 2 more boxes.  One friend terrorized me with tales of upholstery nests and warned that for the next 3 weeks I needed to cover the backs of the car seats with plastic bags and change them daily.  I was ostracized by 2 other friends.  They told me I'd see them in the summer sometime maybe.  (This all happened in February.)  My husband told me I was freaking out, but when I explained that the kids CAN'T GO TO SCHOOL if they have even one nit, he got sucked into the hoovering frenzy.  He even cleaned the pencils out of the hoover and changed the bag so it did more than just make noise.  Karen told me that it's too cold for lice to live in the car, and that I should just throw blankets, stuffed animals and pillows outside in trash bags for a few nights.  She then said the only thing that works is the olive oil under a shower cap.  This was corroborated by Theo's French Canadian mom back in Montreal.  Karen made her kids watch the ENTIRE Star Wars series with the olive oil and shower caps, and that did it.


Toby rocked the lice treatment look, as well.

Honestly, lice really wasn't that bad.  Toby and I never had it to begin with.  I was panicking as I combed her after her first treatment. More nits appeared to appear every time I combed.  It finally dawned on me that I was ripping her scalp apart.  The treatment had given her dandruff.  Jack Peter opted to be shaved because the stinky treatment and the shower caps freaked him out.  Steel was our only issue.  I do a series of repetitive tasks for a living.  Combing through her hair and manually pulling nits off of each strand while she read Beezus and Ramona and complained about her neck hurting wasn't fun, but it's in my skill set.  Someone told the school nurse that we had been infected.  I'm still wondering who although maybe they just check every sibling of a kid with a newly shaved head.  The nurse went through Steel's hair with popsicle sticks and told her that her mom did a good job.

I think I might have gone this route had I found any nits on me.

We've also survived our first contact with standardized tests.  I loved standardized tests when I was little.  I didn't have to listen to the teacher.  The craftsperson in me got to fill in the bubbles artfully and thoroughly, and I usually knew the answers.  I was also comfortable guessing if I didn't know.  I got a call from Jack Peter's teacher on a Friday.  It was a make-up call for the parent-teacher conference I'd missed because of a snow day.  I was expecting it to be a perfunctory, "he was getting squirrely before the spring break, but we're back on track" call.  He'd brought home a few "conduct referrals" before the spring break.  Steel usually coincided these slips home with "trailblazers."  Her timing was verging on cruel.

(Steel, if you're reading this and you're 30, and you're wondering why we didn't make a big deal over all of your school triumphs; it's because your brother was always trumping you by making lewd gestures with his water bottle in front of a teacher with no sense of humor or forgetting to turn in 2 homework assignments a week.  I'm sorry, Steel, but you've hopefully surmounted our neglect and become the amazing human being you were always destined to be-and not the bitter drug addict that bad parenting might have elicited.)

Instead his teacher told me that she'd used up every trick in her bag to deal with his impulse-control issues.  She'd given him fiddling toys; she'd given him leadership positions; she'd punished him.
Some things had worked for a bit, but nothing had stuck.  She was terrified that Jack Peter would get himself booted from the standardized tests.  He's gonna finish a half-hour early on each section and not be able to resist the temptation of getting up and chatting with another kid who HASN'T finished the test!  She wanted me to talk to his pediatrician.  I told her that I knew that there were people out there who would consider medicating a kid like JP, but that I was not one of those people.  She agreed, and admitted that she'd usually recommend dietary changes, but What he eats is perfect! She skeptically suggested that caffeine might have a counter-intuitive effect on him, and that we might try that.  She figured a pediatrician might have some more tricks in his bag.  I lost it for a couple days, and then I calmed down.  Our pediatrician asked me a few questions about Jack Peter and told me he sounds FINE.  So, we ran around the block 3 times or saluted the sun 3 times on all 7 of the mornings he was to be tested, and he only got protein for breakfast.  It went fine.  It probably would have gone fine without those precautions.  Tim gave him a Coke before one of his baseball games to test the caffeine theory, and Jack Peter assured him that he felt REALLY FOCUSED!  Of course he was.

Jack Peter announced after the tests that he FINALLY has a girlfriend.  We got daily updates on his note passing with Juliana.  Mom! I said, 'Missed me! missed me! Now you gotta KISS me!' when we were playing dodge ball in gym, and she ran towards me and pretended to kiss me!  This air-kissing Juliana is seems very sophisticated.  Sadly, she's not the one who wrote him a hand-drawn Valentine of a unicorn pooping a rainbow that inside, described him as the most "ENTERGETIC" person she'd known.  (Entertaining and energetic????) At least we know he doesn't lack confidence.  I think Julianna is a head taller than he is, and his first love note to her was, "ADMIT IT; YOU LIKE ME!"  "I just want my kid to be happy"  is the cloying phrase parents claim.  Jack Peter is inherently happy.  Our job is done.  Our expectations for him and his performance is the issue.  If I can squelch them, we'll all be fine.

So the 2-5 drinks I have every night to pep things up need to stop if I'm going to look anything like Lauree Katz.  Major crises haven't turned out to be so bad, so what do I do to make life interesting?  I suppose I could become an exercise freak.  People who exercise intensively seem to be really excited by it.  It also becomes something they ALWAYS have an excuse to do.  It's got lofty status on the parental "me time" lists.  Exercisers can bow out of many an unpleasant task.  "I have to go WORK OUT" they say, and people nod in affirmation.  No one ever says, "Screw you!  You need to stick around and help organize this bake sale."  Being lazy and not working out can turn into a viable excuse for bad behavior.  "Sorry I'm being an asshole.  I just haven't had time to WORK OUT in a couple of days."

I've tried getting disproportionately upset about stupid people out of boredom.  It's fun for a while.  A woman ordered a set of cups.  She was very specific about the glazes she wanted.  I should have said that I didn't think she'd like them, but I didn't.  She kept them for 2 weeks and then had her daughter call and leave a 12 minute message about how my pottery has such great energy and these cups didn't.  I wrote an e-mail to her personal assistant telling her to just send them back.  I'd had to liaison multiple times with the daughter and the personal assistant and was over the whole situation.  Of course two of the cups broke in shipping because they weren't packed properly.  None of this was particularly interesting until the woman decided to write an e-mail on her own.  In it she asked me if I might just be able to glue the broken cups, so she didn't have to pay me for them.  I was mad at her for a day, but then it got old.

I've decided to get excited about Lobelia.  We have essentially moved to the suburbs, and I want to do nothing more than grow flowers.  Planting flowers is like glazing pottery.  It's for optimists.  I have such visions of glory when I plant seeds.  I've been combing the internet for bright flowering things "for the novice gardener."  My husband is obsessing about creating right angles with planters and edging to give our property "clean boundaries," and I'm messing them all up with WAY TOO MANY flowers.  My new procrastination method is weeding.  It's all coincided with our listening to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House on the Prairie series.   Screaming "ACT LIKE LAURA AND MARY!!!!"  is my new parenting technique.

Tim and I had a marriage moment in the garden.  Somehow all of our kids had vanished into the neighbor's house, and he and I were actually trying to do the same thing at the same time.  It was so romantic.  Both of us are usually furtively shirking our childcare duties to check e-mail or get some work done.  It was such a joy to be working together on the same project.  I suppose we could be working together on raising our children, but children are so unbearable we have to pass the baton rather than run with it together.

Worksheets and Surgery

Steel refused to let me come into her bed and snuggle her after I'd done surgery on my index finger.  I was excited to show her because she'd asked about puss THAT morning.  What an educational coup!  I didn't expect her to want nothing to do with me afterwards.  That finger had been killing me for 3 days.  It was throbbing the way things do in cartoons.  It was a Halloween-costume-making injury.  The aerosol foam adhesive must've gotten under my nail and infected.  The finishing of the costumes actually helped.  Puss oozed out of the right side of the nail from the pressure of using the finger to spray paint the costumes.  After alcohol had been administered, I submerged the left side of the fingernail in a peroxide bath and punctured it with a needle.  I guess we can take surgeon off of the list of possible outcomes for Steel.  Healthcare, in general, is out of the question.  She can't bear to be around anyone who might be sick or have been sick anytime in the past year.  She's also terrified of Ebola or she pretends to be when she wants me to change the radio from NPR to pop music.

Steel does have to do something that involves moving her body and completing tasks.  I was hoping for surgeon because that seems to be the most world-changing,  smart-requiring and lucrative version of standing and completing tasks.  Pottery or cooking might work.  I have a friend who doesn't love entertaining.  She's great at it, but she was lamenting to me, "You just move seamlessly through food preparation and hostessing!"  I replied, "If I weren't chopping shit and "cleaning as I go," I'd be on the porch (if my porch weren't a death-defying half-porch because my husband has stopped working on it) drunk and smoking because my manic chopping energy wouldn't have an outlet.  Deena, you're a THINKER!  Food prep and the cleaning up afterwards is not for you!"  My dad is the same.  He was watching me make pots on my mom's deck.  After a few minutes, he asked with an incredulous squint, "DE-ah, (dear with a thick New England accent) can't you PAY someone to do that for you?"  Just recently another friend (in marketing) asked me when I could get my business to the point that I could focus entirely on marketing and pay someone to make the pots for me.


It's not that Tim stopped working on the deck so much as he started working on this enormous tree house.  He's at a stopping point with both because the cedar siding his heart desires for finishing both projects is really expensive, so we have half a deck half a tree house.  Whenever we meet people in our new neighborhood and we give our address, people respond with, "THE ONE WITH THE TREE HOUSE????"

I think Steel is smarter, deeper and more "big picture" than I am or ever was, but she shares that manic "If I enjoy doing it once, then I'll happily do it 100 times" mentality and the energy to go with it.  Moms who don't have their kids in posh Montessori-esque hippy schools but want to, focus some of their ire on worksheets.  At a public school, a teacher who has 27 kids to deal with will give the smart ones worksheets, freeing him or herself to focus on the kids that need help.  Smart kids like Jack Peter complete the worksheets as fast as possible in order to direct their attention on a book or on misbehaving.  Smart kids like Steel color in those pumpkins perfectly sit back with pride admiring their craft-maybe tweaking the stem of the pumpkin with a dash of chartreuse before asking for another worksheet.  On her birthday Steel was so elated about her day at school, I had to ask why she was in such a good mood.  "Mom! We did TWELVE worksheets today!!!"  "Go girl!  I made 47 cups!"  High fives all around.  (Her mood was not so good that didn't inform me that I'd embarrassed her by showing up to read in my wenchy pirate costume to read to the class.  I couldn't resist.  I got it at Marshall's the day after Halloween in 2012 for $5.)

We did have our first Halloween party for Steel; it's her actual birthday.  I was stressed about the logistics of throwing a Halloween party.  Does everyone go trick or treating en masse?  Do we skip trick or treating and just have a scavenger hunt?  Will any of her friends from the old hood venture out to Mt. Airy?  Will anyone leave their own places for her party?  I could feel my neighbor, Abby's incredulity at the lengths I was taking to ensure Steel's birthday bliss.  I'd thrown a surprise 50th for Tim the month before, and Toby's blowout was 2 weeks prior, so she'd probably been hearing about way to much party planning.  When Abby asked what to get Steel for her birthday, I couldn't help but text back, "Go to her birthday website.  It's www.steelturns7.com.  You can see what's left on the registry."  I was happy when I got back a quick, "lol."  I don't know why I was worried.  There was alcohol, glow sticks and way too much candy.  How could it not have been ok?

Steel was a very low maintenance "super model" for Halloween.  I applaud her genius.  Not only did she save me another pussy finger injury, but also she got herself a whole new outfit by saying she needed it for her Halloween costume.

Jack Peter will never be low-maintenance on any level...

Toby was a rock.

Back to NPR, I'm starting to worry about Terry Gross.  She's letting Dave Davies fill in for her an awful lot.  I'm sensing an illness, and I think it might be serious.  Maybe I missed my calling with healthcare.  I self-diagnose as well as intuiting disaster for radio personalities.  I'm generally really healthy, so subtle things set off alarms.  I've discovered that my ear wax no longer smells good to me.  This could be one of two things:  I've got pottery-related cancer/silicosis that is affecting my ears, nose and throat area, and it's just the beginning of my demise.  OR I drink too much, and my liver isn't managing to clean things up as well as it used to.  A third option is that I made the poor choice of introducing Jack Peter to the "Wet Willie."  What the HELL was I thinking???  There is nothing worse than dirty little boy finger in dirty little boy mouth inserted into my dirty big girl ear.  I rarely let him do it, so options 1 and 2 are the most likely.  I have also noticed that I have grown intolerant of cinnamon.  I used to like cinnamon.  I still do, but it can only be about 2 parts per billion.  I thought it was my mom's overdoing it on her apple pie, but it happened at a fancy restaurant too.  This could only be a symptom of two things: either I'm dying of a pottery-related lung disease or I drink too much and my body is so overwhelmed by its daily filtering job that it can't handle anything odd, like cinnamon.  A chiropractor blames everything on the mis-alignment of the spine.  I blame things on clay and alcohol.

The alcohol I blame on my children.  Eternal drudgery punctuated by moments of extreme chaos and others of unbelievable cuteness requires anesthesia.  Toby is coming out with the great one-liners these days.  She was talking about being fat.  She normally revels in her chubbiness as does the rest of the world.  Her dad got a little worried on this occasion and said, "Toby, you're not FAT!  You're PERFECT!"  She looked at him smiling and said, "Dada!  I can be fat and perfect!"  Yes, she can.  She also has a very healthy attitude towards competition.  "I don't care who wins unless I win."  How smart is that?  She also said to me the other day, "Mama, you're just a little bit not taller than Althea!"  (Althea is a statuesque new teacher at school.)  I think that one is going to come in handy.  "Guys, you're all just a little bit not going to get movie night; you can turn this around!"

Tim and Toby, sadly, have a lot of car time these days.  He's in charge of taking her to school 40 minutes away and picks her up a couple days a week as well.  He constantly laments that every minute of their ride isn't being recorded.  He got this one down, though.
Toby, "Dada, When I grow up I want to make it illegal for people to die."
Dada, "Why?"
Toby, "Because I don't want you or Mama or Willa or Jack Peter or Steel to die."
Dada, "Well you know that if you were a nurse or a doctor, you could help people live longer."
Toby, "Yeah!  That's a great idea, but Dada, can I be more than one thing?"
Dada, "Sure, what else do you want to be?"
Toby, "A rockstar and a babysitter."
Dada, "Why a rockstar?"
Toby, "Cause I just do, and I'm always making my own songs up, and rockstars are good singers."
Dada, "Why a babysitter?"
Toby, "So that moms and dads don't have to spend all their time with their kids.  Actually I also want to be a policewoman."
Dada, "Why?"
Toby, "So that I can keep people from hurting each other in fights, but if they do get hurt, I can help them as a doctor.  Oh! and I also want to be a karate instructor so I can help people get strong."

Jack Peter's life is also tedium interrupted by bright moments of ecstasy when he's allowed to play Minecraft. This happens less than once a week.  I felt compelled to mention this state of ongoing frustration to his teacher in the "things you might want to know about my kid" column.  I don't even know why I'm so stingy with the screen time, but then his old art teacher recommends him and Steel for a scholarship to this cool Saturday art class at Moore College of Art or his current teacher asks if she can spend a lunch a week with him and the other strong reader in his class doing extra reading work, and I attribute all of this to his not having screen time.  (I can add "too much screen time" to my list of diagnoses when I start my new healthcare career.)

Moore College of Art is right by Logan Square.  It was kind of fun to play in the fountain.  I was loving these pictures until I noticed that it was Saturday afternoon and Jack Peter was still wearing the gym clothes he wore to school on Friday, slept in and then wore to class on Saturday. 

Steel made this little angel at Moore.  The teacher was so blown away, and Steel had been talking about it for weeks.  At the little art opening some disaster transpired, and the angel fell apart.  We have since glued it, but Steel didn't freak out at all.  I never know with her.  She will LOSE HER SHIT over dessert or nail polish, and then be fine with something I consider much more tears-worthy.

Most parents are wrestling with the drudgery/chaos binary, but friends who held at one child are really starting to show signs of restored equilibrium.  One of my friends is an aesthetician who runs her own super-trendy salon.  One child was all she could manage.  I used to love watching her discomfort at my house when the crafts would get pulled out before the lunch plates were cleared or vice versa.  She'd continue to chat, but I could tell she was freaking out. Her beautiful eyes would dart around the room, briefly settling on rogue piles of glitter, as they were trying to meet mine.  It's been taking a lot to rattle her lately.  Luca, her kid got into a good Quaker school, and dresses, cleans, feeds herself.  At that insane birthday party of Toby's Kelley and I were having a perfectly relaxed conversation.  Undone by Kelley's cool, I found myself sticking the little jewels that Toby had freed from her present pile onto my eyelids without a mirror during the entire conversation.  Kelley finally said, "Are you doing that on PURPOSE???"  Sadly, I was.  I was missing seeing that "how is Liz functioning in this bedlam?" look.  It took a complete assault on her aesthetic senses to crack that newly calm veneer.

Another one-child Kelly is posting things on Facebook about running marathons and going on fun vacations.  She looks like she's in her 20's again; she's RADIANT!  Less than a year ago she was spending the evening of a snow day drinking wine with me mentally wrecked from having spent an entire work day with her ONE child.  I could feel good that I was equally harried, but I'd been with 3 kids.  This new calm Kelly and I were sitting at a torturesome birthday party at an apple orchard last month.  The entirety of urban Philadelphia had chosen that day to venture out into the Siberia-esque suburbs to get a pumpkin.  A bunch of balloons tied to the bench on which we were sitting was blowing erratically into my face an body.  I honestly hadn't noticed it.  She finally said, "Isn't that driving you crazy?"  "What? oh that?  I guess so?!"  Looking at her horrified I said, "Do you think those balloons are a metaphor for my entire existence?"  Her manicured eyebrows raised sympathetically as she nodded her assent.


I suppose another person might be annoyed by many aspects of my life.  I did finally snap on our cheap fridge.  I felt like I was playing a game of  Jenga every time I had to take something out of it, and the whole top half was lightly freezing things.  I told my husband that we should get a nice fridge in lieu of Christmas presents.  He did still get me Christmas presents which made me feel bad.  The best one was dim-able incandescent bulbs.  It was actually a present for him because I can't deal with bright ceiling lights.  He hasn't been able to see anything inside our house in the afternoon since daylight savings time ended.  So much for the Leed platinum green people we used to be.  We also just bought a massive Ford F150 truck because it made sense tax-wise.  We're dumping that Mini Cooper.  Screw the environment!


Jack Peter let me cut his hair on Thanksgiving for his Nanny.  The surfer look was driving his mom and Tim completely crazy.

zombies and cake wrecks

Jack Peter went to the haunted house at the Eastern State Penitentiary last night.  His best friend's family took him.  It's supposed to be REALLY terrifying.  I dispelled the apparition of a a whining Jack Peter running into our room at all hours until he goes to college, and I agreed with some trepidation.  When I was small, I went into a cheesy haunted house at a little traveling fair in Manchester-by-the-sea.  It featured a poorly-executed paper mache hand coming out of a toilet which plagues me to this day.  I used to pee so fast in the night, and then I'd hit the threshold of my bedroom from the hall and hurl myself the remaining 5 feet into my bed.  I was trying to avoid the snakes and lobsters my Dad told me were under my bed.  It was a similar thing to walking on the cracks on the sidewalk.  I knew and know that treading on them will not, in fact, break Susie's back, but I still avoid them if I can. 

I brought him home in the Mini cooper.  It's rare that we sit side-by-side in a car.  Rare because it's illegal, but it made for an intimate conversation.  He told me that it was THE BEST thing he'd ever done in his life.  At some point after exhaustive descriptions of toilets and zombies he said, "I am going to give Steel a big hug when I get home!"  "Why?  She's going to be asleep anyway."  "Because she gave me this dinosaur egg necklace."  Toby just had a MASSIVE birthday party to ring in her 5th year.  There were 27 children there.  I only know this because we had it at a tumbling place where you pay per kid.  Somehow the 3 tumbling attendants managed a believable head count.  I didn't notice that Toby had left the tumbling melee to rip open all of her presents saving me the trouble of pretending I was going to keep track and write thank-you notes.  I always write mean texts to moms who send thank-yous.  It's clear that they are all trying to make me feel like the wretched example that I am.  She got so many presents that Steel had to step in and help her by taking all of the coolest ones.  Steel had given JP permission to wear one of the prize beads in a make-your-own necklace kit.  He was positive that the bead had saved him from something at the haunted house.  Pissing himself?  crying?  puking?

The girls were not asleep when we got back.  They had jerry rigged a blanket into a functioning hammock by weaving it into the wire frame of the top bunk of the bunk bed.  It could hold both of them without failing, so it was a pretty impressive engineering feat, but I was not going to let either or both of them sleep in it.  They asked as soon as Jack Peter and I tip-toed into the room.  We're definitely at the stage that kids ask until they get the answer they want to hear.  If the mailman tells them they can have time on the iPad, it trumps any previous negative reactions to the query from parents, uncles and grandparents.  Tim had told them no, so they were going to try it on with me.  Jack Peter summoned Steel from the bed.  She got out, and he gave her a massive hug.  A visible jolt of pure ecstasy rippled through Steel's body as she returned his affection.  I know that we all worship the ground each other walks on, but to see such a tangible manifestation of their mutual love was pure joy for me.  He told her that the "egg" had saved him.  She looked at him through her very few teeth and said, "Huh?"  Literally,  She said, "Huh?"  He explained, and she nodded attempting to exude an  omniscient aura that would say, "Yes, that's why I stole that from Toby and let you wear it.."

It's so lovely that Toby's favorite presents are from both of her Grandmothers.  The horse is from Carol, and the skirts (turned horse blankets) are from Susie.  I've mentioned before that my kids are a hideous combination.  One loves legos and pokemon cards.  One loves crafts...especially beads and rainbow loom bands, and one loves MASSIVE things like horses, strollers, doll beds, rocking horses, swing sets and chairs.  The end result is that there is big and little shit everywhere in our house.  

JP got a massive bowl of bacon...Toby gets a massive bowl of "wacamole. " Sadly she no longer calls it that...sniff :(

Toby's birthday was a blur.  The most remarkable part of the night for me was Tim's entrance with the cake wreck.  I had made 4 sheets of Duncan Hines vanilla cake.  They were cooked to perfection because now we have a really cheap GE oven/stove that not only lights every burner on the stove but actually maintains an even temperature throughout the oven.  Our previous super-expensive stove did neither.  I am having the same relationship with my cheap GE dishwasher.  It takes an hour and cleans our dishes as opposed to the Miele, Bosch and fancy Spanish ones that took 5 hours to not clean our dishes, and the Bosch one required that I lay each piece of flatware individually on an annoying 3rd rack at the top.  I don't arrange flatware in the drawer.  I can't tell you how much it annoyed me to have to arrange it for the fucking dishwasher.  Anyway, I'd organized the whole party and made all the food.  Tim was going to decorate the cake with the kids and get the cake and the kids to the party.  I still don't know what happened, but the buttercream mortar did not hold.  Neither Toby nor I care about things like that, so it wasn't a crisis, but my poor Virgo husband was so MAD.  Little did he know that his cake wreck would create my favorite part of the night.  A wrecked cake is an obvious invitation to sneak a bit.  Kids will only do what they think they can get away with, so every kid who passed by this cake took fingers full way before the birthday song.  Watching this little girl, Sylvia furtively cover herself in cake actually took the cake.  Initially she put a dainty index finger full of buttercream on her lips like lip gloss.  That was so sensually pleasing that she allowed herself 3 fingers full on the next pass.  I so wish I'd been filming, but I was as mesmerized by watching her as she was by slowly, but surely, covering herself in butter cream frosting.    

These stills are great, but they don't show how far she went....

This birthday marks the end of an era....I somehow got ahold of this plastic food transporting thing.  It could perfectly hold 30 of any pastry.  30 is the magic number at daycare.  30 is also the magic number at school if you count teacher and teaching assistant, but my kids' school doesn't allow sweets, so my days of making and transporting 30 sweets for a birthday are officially over.  Tim's joy at not having this object anywhere in the house is probably more powerful than my sadness that the "making cupcakes for the class on birthdays is over."   I've replaced it with our new tupperware system...Mr. Lids.  Thank you, cousin Patty.  My marriage has been saved by my husband's  newfound acumen with food storage.

Toby really knows how to dress for the birthday chair.  I thought she'd come home looking like Courtney Love after the Rainbow cupcakes, but some wise teacher made her change into a more sensible ensemble for the reception of her turning-5 event.

I don't have images of Toby doing amazing tumbling feats in her new golden tutu that nanny got her for her party, but I do have this image of her in her birthday crown.  The other day she was lamenting that she only had a turning-4 birthday crown (She's worn it regularly for the entire year)  As she was complaining, I received the RSVP from the crown maker asking what Toby would want for her turning-5 birthday.  That sort of serendipity makes me so happy.

 I also love the serendipity of someone catching Tim looking very manly in the piñata chaos.

 JP was the one to break it open.  Watch out Mt. Airy baseball....