8 Things Meme

Thanks to Sara for providing me with something fun to do!

Each player lists 8 facts/habits about themselves, then tags (up to) 8 more people for the meme.

1. I can’t see well in the dark, and get creeped out walking in the dark by myself. So every night, after we put JediBoy to bed, PisecoDad and I watch some dvd and then I coerce him into walking downstairs with me so I can pee before bed. Leaving the lights on downstairs is not enough, because I’d have to turn them off and be the last one downstairs in the dark.

2. When we adopt our daughter from Guatemala, we will keep her birth name as her first name. When we got our referral, PisecoDad was completely against this name - he just didn’t care for it. But as I watched the referral video over and over, I realized that I’d come to think of her by that name. So, as I sat in the van waiting for PisecoDad to get the $Really Big$ cashier’s check from the bank to send down and accept the referral, I realized that if we used a certain nickname from her name, it would remind PisecoDad of one of his favorite alternate universes. When he came out and heard my solution, he agreed immediately!(Bonus points to my friends IRL who will quickly figure that one out if they didn’t know it already - probably a race between Jody and Leigh!)

3. I don’t like to take showers, because I can’t stand the cold sensation when I open the curtain to get my towel and then stand there dripping. I take lots of showers in the summer, because that’s the only time the cold sensation feels good to me, especially in the evening before bed. The rest of the year I alternate between showers, with the furnace cranked really high for the 15 minutes I’m in there, and bubble baths. I think we need a heat lamp for the bathroom!

4. When PisecoDad proposed, he gave me the engagement ring his father had given his mother. (His father died when he was 4.) It fit without being resized, although I wear pretty small rings - size 5 1/2. We chose our wedding date (August 22) based on our own preferences and after we announced the date, his mother told us that August 22 had been their anniversary.

5. If you want more weird family coincidences, PisecoDad and I each have a Great-Aunt Amelia, our father’s mother’s sisters, who were each married to a Great-Uncle Bob. Or how about this one: our grandfathers (my paternal, his maternal) died on the same day in 1981. Oh yeah, our engagement was one long eye-goggling, jaw-dropping conversation.

6. I’m not allergic to anything (that I know of), but in the past year or two I’ve been unable to eat ice cream without getting a seriously disrupted digestive system. Sometimes, when I eat a small serving for dessert, with a big meal, I’m okay. But just going out for ice cream in the middle of the evening? Forget it. This is a major bummer, since PisecoDad would live on ice cream if given half the chance. Oddly enough, nothing else bothers me - I’m fine with milk and cheese. Just no ice cream. (Depeche Mode, anyone? and when I die, I expect to find him laughing)

7. I love to play board games (as you probably guessed from the BoardGameGeek sidebar - thanks again, Andrea!) but my favorites are anything that involve speedy reflexes. Spoons, Set, Egyptian Rat Screw? I’m all over it. Long, drawn out strategy games like chess, Risk, HeroScape? No way. I enjoy happy medium strategy games like Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico, but I don’t think I have enough silly party games in my life. You can never have enough silly party games. (Oops. Did I say that?)

8. Obviously, I now have to tell the “you can never have enough dice” story. When PisecoDad turned 23, I was recovering from a DVT and pulmonary embolism which had basically kept me stuck on the couch for two months. I was just starting to hobble around on crutches when Jody came up to celebrate the birthday with us. Since PisecoDad had made the mistake of saying both “you can never have enough dice” and “all I want for my birthday is something little” and I had lots of time to plan and, well, you all know dice are little… Jody, Nate and I each bought him 23 dice for his birthday. And we wrapped them. Individually. Some were masterpieces - Nate did a couple of the 4-sided dice with Hershey’s Kisses wrappers and even had the little papers sticking out. Some were in really, really big boxes with a bunch of packing paper. Some were in wrapping paper tubes and toilet paper tubes. The entire evening was very, very silly. And it’s not my only silly birthday wrapping story, but I’ve hit 8 facts and so I will stop.

I’ve seen that many of you have done this meme already, so I’ll tag Leigh, Jody, Paula and Ken. Anyone else who hasn’t played yet, jump in!

When is Good Enough Not Enough?

I have been trying on and off all afternoon to write a calm journal entry that will keep me from stepping on toes (of friends IRL) while at the same time venting my frustration and throwing out the topic to my HSJ friends to get a little support and commiseration. It’s not easy, and by this point I think I’m going to have to fling my hands up in despair.

So let me throw this one out as a question instead of an essay.

How do you cope with having IRL friends who make parenting decisions that make your heart cringe? (The operative word there is friends - people you love, not just parents you met at the playground.) Many of us in the HSJ community are strong advocates of attached parenting - breast is best, stay-at-home-parenting, and of course, given the nature of the board, homeschooling. Have you struggled with having a friend who - though exposed to your choices and lifestyle, and naturally rational and well-educated decisions (naturally!) - makes the opposite decisions? Or non-decisions - accepting things like formula, daycare and public school because that’s what everyone does and it must be good enough, and it’s easier anyway?

How do you balance your friendship with the conviction that the best is worth working for, and good enough is not enough for our children?

Sigh. Even this entry feels like it’s said too much. (FWIW, the friends in question are NOT frequent readers of this blog. As far as I know, they’ve never read it, but they do know it exists and might happen across it in the future since the address is in the sig file on my email…)

What I Need…

The meme making the rounds is to type in your name at Google - “[name] needs” - and post the top five results. According to Google, I need…

…to be taken with a grain of salt.
…to do garbage collection.
…your help to destroy asteroids and secure Sector 7!
…to be underinflated in order to make her posable.
…74 beads to make a necklace.

(Hat tip to Clare at Playing It By Ear!)

ETA:

My husband needs…
…a forever home with no other cats. (True, he’s allergic)
…a place to stay this weekend.
…five of your company’s top personal marketing consultants.
…winding up.
…to give some warning to his passengers before ripping around the island. (Yes, there was the time he bottomed out the boat and ruined the prop on the backside of the island!)

My son needs…
…an intervention.
…Old Spice. (Little boys are stinky, but not that stinky!)
…TV shows like Tyra Banks.
…to soup up revenues.
…to jolt Canadians.

My daughter needs…
…a bed that’s stiff as a board for her bad back.
…her buddy around.
…you to help her convert the metric measurements to ASM measurements. (Absolutely! Every time we get an emailed medical, I have to convert her length and head circumference from centimeters to inches.)
…to meet a man.
…to be engaged a bit more and things got better with time.

Quick, Write a Recap!

I have much more to say than I can possibly squeeze into the twelve minutes before my part of our bedtime routine. Many thanks, as we’ve all been saying, go to Andrea for hanging on and bringing the site back. I missed blogging and reading your blogs, and I too have been intrigued with the question of whether blogging detracts from our “real” lives (takes time away) or adds to them (attention and discussion lend meaning).

We’ve had some news about the adoption - just that we’ve finally entered the solicitor general’s office which used to take 6-9 weeks but is currently running at about 12 weeks. It means we’ll probably get our “out” in August and travel in September. I’m glad we’re finally in PGN and will take all the good thoughts, positive energy, prayers and crossed fingers you want to send my way that we can get through faster than the norm. We had new pictures today which are wonderful to see but make me wish I could be there with her now.

JediBoy has been great, and, of course, tossing off wonderful thoughts and clever ideas faster than I could blog them. We’ve kept busy with our many sports (soccer, t-ball, bowling) and good times with our friends. Last night, we sadly came home from our weekend in paradise…

Leaves

The sun and wind were so enticing today… JediBoy spent a big chunk of the day outside. First he played on the porch, where he has a mini “workbench” set up, made of cinder blocks and plywood, where he saws Styrofoam pieces with his plastic saw and then hammers golf tees into them. It’s such an easy but SAFE outlet for his interest in construction and tools - something he can do without supervision. We’ve had this work area set up since he was about 2 1/2 and he still loves it, at almost 5.

Then he was deeply interested in leaves, and in finding all the different kinds of leaves in our yard. Here’s his first collection from this morning:

As I helped him find some more leaves - to reach the leaves from our maple trees - I suggested we make a sun picture with them. It was a little too windy to work perfectly, and I haven’t bought a batch of actual sunprint paper this year, so we made do with black construction paper. Here’s our print:

The white splotch is from his later activity, the over-eager hoeing of the patch of not-shrub in front of the house. (That’s the place where I had a shrub, until I left for a week several years ago and returned to find out that my industrious husband, his brother, and an oh-so-helpful friend had RIPPED IT OUT hoping to find the spot where water was coming into the basement. Three years later, I still have a bare patch of dirt there, where JediBoy parks his wagon and Cozy Coupe, and water still comes into the basement during heavy rain seasons. But I’m not bitter.)

The Music’s Playing…

One week later, I’ve got my big Mother’s Day present. It’s shiny. It’s happy, people. I have finally made it to the 21st century a mere 7 years late and now have a cd player in my van. (I know, I know, just in time for everyone else to be listening to their iPods…) This is monumental.

The Puppini Sisters were the first in. I drove and used the remote (a remote in my van! whee!) as we went out to dinner - then I let JediBoy use the remote on the way home. At first, he was switching songs every 15 seconds, but settled on “Mr. Sandman.” After a moment, he piped up…

Aren’t you going to sing along?

How could I deny a request like that? Ah, Mister Sandman, bring me a dream!

Outsmarted

Driving home in the van last week:

JediBoy: Is the lion the king of the jungle?
PisecoMom: Sure, yep, you bet.
JediBoy: Is there jungle in the grassland?
PisecoMom: (realization dawning) Er, no…
JediBoy: How does that work? The lion lives in the grassland, right?
PisecoMom: (fully outwitted) Um, yes… oh, look! A bulldozer!

Sometimes changing the subject is my only way out.

—

In the theater, waiting for Shrek 3 to start. JediBoy had already looked at the Shrek 3 books at the bookstore and so he knew King Arthur was in this one. He was saying that he was so excited to see King Arthur, so I asked him what his favorite part of the Arthur story was.

No simple sword in the stone for my boy. What I got was:

Silly Percival, who dragged Sir Bowengard around the field on a farm horse… Sir Lamorak and Sir Lancelot found Percival, and what did they see? Percival dragging the body of Bowengard around the field. ‘Excuse me,’ said Lamorak, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I’m trying to get this fellow’s armor off, but I can’t get it off him,’ said Percival. ‘It’s belted and buckled onto him. Let me help you. By the way, what’s your name?’ ‘Percival.’ ‘I have a brother named Pervical,’ sighed Sir Lamorak. Percival thought to himself: This is my brother! He will look at me in this, this willow outfit that I’m just changing out of, he would be embarrassed to think that this is his brother. ‘Thank you for the armor!’ he said. He leaped upon Sir Bowengard’s great horse and he rode off…

Jim Weiss, anyone? This turned from a retelling into an almost word-for-word recitation, complete with inflections and accents… how will I ever keep up with this boy?

$12.50

A great morning’s garage saling. Not just a nice time, or one good find. Great! Ah, I love this feeling, you know? So often I go out, spend the morning searching and driving, and I find a few things to buy, but I don’t feel completely satisfied. Something’s niggling inside, asking if all that trouble was worth the finds. Nothing in my pile to make my heart sing.

Today we came home and I felt very satisfied. Happy. Even smug. The things we found were in nice shape, at good prices, and made us very happy to have them. Here’s what our pile looks like:

JediBoy spent $2.25 buying an orange and black squirt gun, a faux-Lego police car set, and five books: a board book version of Snow White, a Mickey Mouse pop-up book, In a Dark, Dark Room by Alvin Schwartz and two Junie B. Jones books (I admit neither of us have ever opened a Junie B. Jones book so I don’t have any idea what’s in store for us - beyond the fact that she seems to be widely read and the star of a very, very big series). I usually give him four dollar bills and four quarters, but today I was a little low on cash so I gave him two of each instead. He knows he can buy anything he wants with that money, no questions asked.

I spent $10.25. I bought:
-the first three Lemony Snicket books
-two hardback I Spy books
-the Penny Whistle book of birthday party ideas
-a math game from Scholastic called Sum Swamp
-the kids’ game Taboo Junior (which was unplayed - the cards were still wrapped)
-a travel version of Crocodile Dentist - he played that game when he was in the hospital in October 2005, and remembered that when we saw it at the sale today!
-a small monster/robot/mini-pet toy that JediBoy asked for but didn’t have the money left to buy
-for $3 the big set of Great Adventures pirates - the boat and a small island and accessories - this was the purchase that absolutely thrilled JediBoy, and he’s playing with it now
-a free wooden potty chair, perfect to take up north with us next weekend - the cabin has one bathroom downstairs and the steps are a little steep & dark for him in the middle of the night - it will be easier to just have a potty near the bed!

It feels good to get really good books and toys that he loves and something useful…

After saling we met Calvin and his Mom (to discover their real names stop by and visit her!) at Chuck E Cheese for an hour and a half of fun and games.

Now we’re gearing up for an evening transfer - I have to take JediBoy to the soccer field where PisecoDad will meet us and take charge of soccer while I dash home and suit up for a choir performance. Wish us luck!

Happily Busy

We’ve had quite a week. PisecoDad’s mini-vacation (Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of last week) was more than glorious. We took the time, together and in various pairings, to really focus on each other, and on the happiness we can bring. Sometimes that gets overlooked in the hustle of life and we wind up not communicating well. Father-son trips to two different zoos and a children’s museum, as well as daily naps, soccer practice and a game, and bowling night helped JediBoy feel loved and paid-attention-to again and let PisecoDad reconnect and relearn to see life from a four-year-old’s perspective. It was So Nice.

Things have been a little tenser since he went back to work on Monday, but are slowly relaxing again. I don’t think JediBoy has ever really understood that his dad doesn’t WANT to leave him behind every day, but has a job that isn’t flexible like that. I think he was a little afraid that things would go back to exactly the way they were before the mini-break, and is slowly opening himself to hope that things will stay better.

We have done a lot of talking and exploring about insects this week. I’d made a solo trip to the local parent/teacher store and picked up a few cool things:

-the book 1001 Bugs to Spot is a great look-and-find book (a genre JediBoy loves) which subtly teaches the names of all kinds of insects and arachnids by having you search for 5 emperor dragonflies, 6 hairy weevils, 4 giant millipedes and so on

-the “6ix-sided Bug Puzzle” is a set of cubes that can be rearranged to make six different puzzles - showing the life cycles of an ant, darkling beetle, silkworm moth, ladybug, painted lady butterfly, and praying mantis - the puzzles were a little hard for JediBoy to visualize but he enjoyed doing them together with me

-plastic toys for the life cycle of an ant including a pile of eggs, a pile of larvae, one big pupa and an ant - these were a huge hit and JediBoy played through the life cycle dozens of times telling a little story as he went along

-sunglasses that look like praying mantis eyes that even have flip-aside prismatic lenses to let him choose whether or not to have “true compound eye vision”

Looking at these new toys helped us get through our day on Monday! JediBoy also saw the Praying Mantis kit in the Steve Spangler catalog and is really pushing to get one. He’s fascinated with the praying mantis right now. We cut down several tent caterpillar tents from our trees and saved a few of the caterpillars to raise.

Monday night, I had one foot out the door to go to my choir rehearsal when JediBoy wailed that he wanted to go too! He doesn’t like for anyone there to talk to him or even look at him, but he loves to be there to watch them and listen to the music. He took his Leapster and a couple Richard Scarry books and parked himself under a table for the first hour of rehearsal. Then he came over to me and asked how I knew when I should sing and when only the men would sing. I quickly whispered a few of the basics of reading music to him - what whole rests look like - and ran my finger along the music, keeping my place, for a song so he could follow along. Then, he was suddenly droopy and he turned around to rest his head on my shoulder. Just as we finished singing “So Long, Farewell” he fell fast asleep. I had the joy of holding him on my lap for the next hour… when he was small enough to sleep in the sling I put him to sleep that way every week at rehearsal. It had been a long time since he fell asleep there!

Yesterday we worked more on organizing the basement and getting rid of lots of stuff. We even had one woman come by to take some of our kids’ books for the school library she works at, and JediBoy was thrilled to finally have a “customer” for his porch sale. He made more price tags for the boxes of books, which ranged from 12 cents to $10,000,000.10.

Today he finished his Hooked on Phonics Kindergarten set and immediately wanted to start in on the First Grade set, so he worked on learning some blends and reading a story using lots of ch- words. He is very motivated and keeps saying, “When we get to the end of the Red Workbook, I can read all the books on my shelf!” Here I was thinking we wouldn’t do any more phonics pages until after Memorial Day, but he didn’t take so much as a minute off between the two sets!

After that, we went over to N’s house to meet some more homeschooling friends and dye some playsilks. JediBoy wanted his entirely green “so I can be Link.” I made the other small silk entirely blue (does this surprise anyone?) and we brought home two larger ones to dye on our own. It was a very good experience, just to let the kids have the one small activity (it doesn’t take long at all to do) and then play on their own. The moms stood and sat around in various combinations and talked about everything - extended breastfeeding, homeschooling vs unschooling vs “relaxed schooling,” kids who chose to go to public / private school this year, families where the mom is pulling her kids out of public school one at a time, how to create a free school locally and what we’d want it to look like, our own families and the way we were raised, girls and boys and personality differences, local programs for homeschoolers that for some reason aren’t held during the “school day” and on and on. It was a good chance to be together and I hope we do it more often (hint, hint, Leigh!).

We came home mid-afternoon to rest before soccer practice, which has now been cancelled due to rain. Now we get to rethink our evening’s plans… hmm…

Poetry?

I have only a moment before turning back into Soccer Mom to jot down this conversation.

During our snuggles-in-bed yesterday morning, somehow I got to singing “Yankee Doodle.”  I think it was because JediBoy was on my lap and I was bouncing him, so I sang through “Trot, Trot to Boston Town” and “Father and Mother and Uncle John” and I was trying to think of other horse songs.  So here I am singing “Yankee Doodle,” and I get to the line

stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni

and for the first time, JediBoy pulled the line out of the song and realized it doesn’t make sense to him.  He asked me, “What does that mean?” and I answered his question with more questions, you know - What do you think it means?  Why would somebody say that?  etc.  His solution?

It must be poetry.  That rhymes.

And with a satisfied nod, he left that subject behind and rolled over to tickle PisecoDad.  Obviously, in his mind, poetry doesn’t have to make sense as long as it rhymes.  (PisecoSis??)

PisecoDad has been reading him Lewis Carroll poetry at night, starting with Jabberwocky and then sampling some others.  And Jabberwocky?  It doesn’t always make sense, but it does rhyme.

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Oh, and don’t forget to sign up for the Mother’s Day prizes over at 5 Minutes for Mom!