A Few Love-Surging Things Scarlett Does At 17 Months:

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-- pretend she’s a dinosaur.

-- stomp her right foot in place of saying ‘no.’

-- make everyone in the room kiss her baby doll.

-- point to colors we ask her to find.

-- Compulsively stop crying, no matter how upset she is, when someone starts to sing.

-- Hold my hand when she walks somewhere. (I.E. is actually willing to walk next to me as an alternative to being in my arms. I LIKE THIS ABOUT HER.)

-- Go positively ape shit when you say, “I’m-a gonna get you-u!”

-- Laugh so hard that a screeching noise comes out when she tries to breath back in.

-- Drink from a regular cup without a lid.
(She has been practicing this one for MONTHS, much to my chagrin.)

-- Get SO EXCITED when I get her up in the morning or after a nap that she bounces up and down at the rails of her crib, shrieking. (I might love this about her most of all.)

-- Feed off of anyone’s excitement tenfold with a cherry on top. (Or this.)

-- Walk around with both her thumbs pressed into her armpits. I couldn’t tell you why, but it has got to be the cutest damned thing I have ever seen a baby do without knowing it was cute.

-- Prefer to play with gender opposite things like keys and cars, dump trucks and dinosaurs… She’s your basic tomboy, that way. Even her baby doll, whom she loves dearly, spends half it’s stage-time getting battered and abused by siblings in the name of making Scarlett laugh. Sure, kissing baby dolls is fun. But throwing them against a window? Now THAT is entertainment.

-- Mimic words beyond “binky” and “bottle” to say small phrases like, “what’s-at?” or “Where’da go?”

-- Hold a shrug while she looks around when she’s trying to find something.

-- Mimic singing, which is especially amusing because of the fact that she can’t actually say any of the words yet. (Even better: she looks around the room while she’s doing it like she’s trying to play it off, hoping no one will notice that she’s basically just mumbling if she bobs her head a lot and doesn’t look directly at anyone.)

-- Laugh. At. EVERYTHING.

-- Ask to brush her teeth exactly 300 times a day.

-- Unlike her brother at this age, not scare easily.**

-- Dip her face into bathtub bubbles and then look up with a beard and squeal, MOMMA!! at the top of her lungs so that I’ll take a picture.

-- Want to be passed from Spencer to me, to Spencer, to me, to Spencer, to me because she JUST. CAN’T. DECIDE. between us.

-- Point to her body parts. You can even make her fall over if you want to by asking her to point to her foot while she’s standing. It is hilarious. You have my permission.

-- Bring me (or point to) letters, chanting their sounds.

-- Pretend to read stories to herself in LIEU OF getting into and/or totally destroying stuff. (THIS ONE IS PRETTY COOL, TOO.)

-- Pull clothes out of her bottom two drawers and try to (I.E. fail completely at) putting them on herself.

-- Pat her belly whenever she’s naked.

-- Hold her hands behind her back and pace the room.

-- Blow on food - even food that’s supposed to be cold, before she takes a bite.

-- Throw herself to floor when she doesn’t get her way five minutes prior to, or following, a nap.

-- Say HI DADA!! Whenever she sees a trash truck.

-- Say HI POP-POP!! whenever she sees a man (whether he’s 25 or a 106; a hundred pounds sopping wet or as big around as a shopping mall Santa) with a white beard and a mustache. That is apparently the only prerequisite there is for being a pop-pop. (There are a lot of pop-pops in our bible stories. I have a hard time correcting her about it. That’s okay though.. Matthew thought our pastor was God until he was two.) J

-- Blow kisses whenever somebody says I love you, no matter how many times they say it.

-- Learn that if she sucks momma into an unassuming game of peek-a-boo before she leaves the room at bedtime, SHE IS TRAPPED. This damn kid is so quick to hide again that I’m always left with the only option of sneaking out when her face is under the blanket, anxiously waiting to pop-out -- and come on, that’s just mean.

-- Put her binky into another person’s mouth and then take it out backward using only her teeth. And then, of course, laugh so hard with the binky in her teeth that she falls backward, and laughs more.

An update on bubbles: Scarlett was introduced to bubbles like, 4 or 5 bathtimes ago (due to a complete oversight on my part... seriously, 16 months of being alive and this child has never had a BUBBLE bath??) and it turns out, she positively detested them. She even kept trying to climb out of the tub to get away. That has since changed. Now, she LOVES 'em.

**Okay, so, Scarlett fell down the stairs the other day, which I’m thinking is probably not a very big shock to anyone whose ever met a seventeen month old. We have done everything within our jurisdiction to keep this child off of those steps, but I swear it’s like she has the iron will of a teenager. If she wants to do it, SHE WILL FIND A WAY. Anyway, there was blood, like, everywhere. It looked so bad. As soon as I cleaned all of it away I touched her nose to see how tender it was, and she laughed so hard I could see all of her teeth. I was already starting to think she had a pretty sick sense of humor, but that put me over the edge.

(It’s cool though, I like that about her, too.)

Speaking of Scarlett’s sick sense of humor, a few days later, Mary dressed Matthew up in his army fatigue costume and the both of them used Halloween face paint to make themselves up like war zombies. (Only my kids, right?) Mary woke Scarlett up from her nap that way, and all Scarlett did was point to her gothed-out face in this drunken state of sleepiness and chirp: MAR-MIE! no less cheerily than she always does. When Matthew leapt at her a second later (with a plastic dagger, no less), roaring so loudly it hurt MY throat, Scarlett just laughed and roared back. Tough nut, that kid…

On that note, I realized recently that I’ve officially lost the ability to fathom what life must have been like before Scarlett was a part of our family. I know that it used to be that way -- that our family hugs had a different shape; that what we envisioned when we thought of love - of family - was smaller, less than what it is now; and that the energy of our home was a far cry from the kaleidoscopic entanglement of personality and mood and color that it is with her thrown into the mix… but I don’t see it anymore. It’s like it’s painted over completely by what we are now. If I try, I can remember that it used to be another color, our life, and I can even look at pictures of what it used to look like back then, but I’m forgetting. And when I do look back anymore, I think of every point in time in terms of before or after loving her happened to us.

　

She magnifies us, this little piece of sunshine we have now. Each one of us, so that everything about us is bigger, louder and brighter than it used to be. She bounces from one of us to the other, like light piercing glass. She took something that was beautiful just the way that it was and she made us somehow better. She reflects these little pieces of our personalities and she turns them into something of her own, so that we see it in a rainbow of colors on the wall. Accidentally perfect. She makes us take notice of each other a little more that way, forces us see each other a little more clearly, to appreciate each other for what it is exactly - good, bad, and unintentional - that we bring to the circle.

She is this quietly brilliant, incredible force among us. I love that about her.
　

　

　

Loving Our Kids, Even When They're Super Annoying To Everyone Else.

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My son is reaching a point in his life where the fact that he’s capable of annoying other people is becoming pretty clear.

It’s a milestone, really. It means that he’s branching out into the world, reaching for the sky in his own brave direction, even against the winds of opposition. He’s no longer just an extension of my branch on the family tree; a reflection of what I’ll allow. He’s becoming his own branch altogether. It means that when he does something annoying, people don’t get irritated with me for allowing it, they get irritated with him for doing it.

Maybe it’s just the Momma Bear in me, that animalistic dimension of the brain all of us seem to inherit upon entry into motherhood, but I don’t take kindly to people getting annoyed with my son. I can’t imagine that I ever really will. It’s strange, too, because Heaven knows that kid can annoy the piss out of me once in a while. Maybe it’s because I know that not far at all underneath of whatever thin layer of contempt I might have for his more aggravating habits, there is a deep and fiercely devoted appreciation for all that he is. Maybe, I kind of feel like the people who don’t love him as achingly much as I do haven’t earned the right to react or think negatively toward him at all, ever, under any circumstances. Maybe that’s irrational. Maybe that’s downright impossible. But I’m pretty confident that on some level, it’s how we all feel, isn’t it?

Like when someone gets uppity about your mom. Except way worse because if your mom really wanted to, she could fend for herself. (And let’s be real, she probably isn’t entirely innocent, anyway. Am I right?)



I don’t talk about this as much as I’d love to, but Matthew could sight-read the word Tyrannosaurus when he was two, and pretty much mastered all the basics of phonemic awareness the following year. We’ve been plugging away at the Reading Eggs program (riding free promo codes for all we can - man, I love the internet) for a little over two months now, and he’s progressed through five maps, completing something like (wow) I guess 50 lessons entirely on his own. 86 including the ones he tested over when we first signed up.

Matthew loves to read -- I’m willing to bet more than even the average bookworm three times his age. And that makes perfect sense because he’s grown up in a pretty bookish environment. I’m currently reading Gone With The Wind, which is about the size of three Bibles put together; Mary’s always had a book in her hand, even if only out of school-assigned obligation; and even though Spencer admittedly doesn’t even like to read, he’ll compulsively burry his nose three feet deep in a car manual (or something mind-numbingly man-ish like that) for days on end in preparation for a weekend project. Even before he was born, I compensated for being pregnant fresh out of college with only a part-time job to show for myself by reading anything I could to my sweet, ballooning belly. I read to him long novels out of Oprah’s Book Club with strong words and deep moral entanglements. I read to him novice chapter books like Junie B. Jones and Flat Stanley from Mary’s backpack. I read the ingredients on shampoo bottles in the shower. I read picture books illustrated by Eric Carle, and I read to him about how to nurture healthy independence in the cantankerous years of boyhood by authors with fifteen degrees in child psychology.

So it didn’t surprise me when Matthew slipped into toddler hood, clutching hard to a love of words. He wasn’t unlike me that way, and I am about as plainly ordinary a person as it gets. But then he also, (be still my beating heart) turned out to be like a right brained sage for his age, and is up everyday before the sun just to paint pictures of the things that he dreams. Everyday. At four he’s already motivating me to get off my ass and paint if it’s what I wake up wanting to do. It’s as if he took this natural inheritance of everything that I loved and just ran with it as far and fast as he could go, as soon as he was capable. And he has always been precociously capable.

He still stutters when he’s overly excited and takes about eighteen and a half minutes to tell four seconds of actual story, (in other words, he’s still four) but Matthew’s use of language is definitely a little offbeat. His everyday vocabulary is peppered with phrases like “speaking of which,” and words like “unintentionally.” Once, after Matthew said some kind of word that made me and my husband both stop what we were doing to look at each other, I was told “If you don’t stop teaching him stuff you’re going to turn him into a weirdo..” in a tone that conveyed pretty clearly that my husband was only halfway joking. “Seriously?” I said. “What do you think we do, sit around reading the dictionary?” I don’t teach him this stuff. It’s just how he talks.

As his mom, I think it’s incredible. As his dad, Spencer knows other people are gonna think it’s weird.

Mary already thinks he’s a complete nerd, and as his sister, was the first to find anything he did anything but awesome. Whenever she’s practically hogtied into having to read something for school that she doesn’t want to, Matthew will hover over her shoulder on the couch, going ON!… AND!…. BUT!… ABOUT!… THEN!… WHY!… THE!, picking out words he recognizes while she’s trying to read. Obviously, that’s annoying. And as Mary’s mom, too, I can sympathize with how she feels. But even her getting annoyed with him kind of rubs me the wrong way. The thought of someone else, who doesn’t otherwise adore him the way that I know she does (even if mostly in secret) makes me want to claw them to death like an angry bear.

Up until now the few little quirks he did have never really surfaced enough to attract any kind of attention outside the family though. (He pulls friends out of his rear end like it’s just supposed to be that easy for everyone.) But now they do.

The other day I had to pull him away from this adorable little girl who was almost certainly going to kick him in the testicles for implying that she was dumb. She tried to dance alongside him when he started fearlessly singing a song he’d memorized from this CD we picked up at the library once called Dinosaur Rock, which has the word “transmogrified” in the chorus. Only, when she couldn’t, for the life of her, pronounce “transmogrified”, he grabbed her by the arm and repeated the word to her real slow, like she was a caveman. You know, the kind of thing that any self-respecting girl would knee a boy in the chestnuts for.

And I just keep thinking that soon he’ll be in school. Soon, I’ll be releasing him, my gorgeous little bundle of blue eyes and brazenness into the wild world of kindergarten, amongst children and teachers alike who don’t love his every idiosyncrasy the way his momma does. And sometimes I wonder if I owe it to him to… I don’t know, I guess “knock him down a few pegs.”

To be clear, I never will. It’s just not in my genetic-mommy-make-up to do, and I can own up to that. There’s nothing - short of my other children and maybe mocha flavored coffee creamer- that I love the way that I love everything that he is. He’s as right brained as he is left brained and he’s as tough as he is tender. He dances the way you’re supposed to when nobody’s watching, even when everyone’s watching. He’s everything I knew I wanted in a kid ten years before I ever thought of having any. If it’s my job to hold him back from believing with every fiber of his being that he is anything less than outstandingly perfect, then I have no shot at being a totally competent mother.





Matthew's unreasonably enthusiastic reaction to some scientist talking about states of matter.

To switch gears just a little bit, for Matthew’s fourth birthday Spencer and I took the kids to The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. There was a live chemistry show going on in the main lobby that Mary said came to her school once. It was about matter and molecules and stuff you learn about in like I don’t know, fourth or fifth grade usually, so we tried to walk past to the next exhibit but Matthew stopped us, too enraptured to move.

He learned about molecules when he learned about transmogrification - which is just a fancy word for the way the molecules of dinosaur bones were rearranged over time, turning them to stone. So he was interested.

A week or so later I found him out in the living room, standing between the coffee table and his entire cache of teddy bears and stuffed animals, lined in a row like an audience. He was wearing his dad’s oversized work gloves and Hot Wheels sunglasses which he was pretending were safety goggles and mitts for handling liquid nitrogen. He had an arsenal of kitchen and craft supplies spread along the coffee table behind him like an exhibition of “highly scientific technologies” (his words, hand to God), and he was putting on a Live Chemistry Show of his very own!

He let me sit in on his audience that day and take a thousand pictures but ONLY because it’s what I did during the real show. Whenever I raised my hand to answer one of his half-witted questions, he’d slap his little mitts together in that lightly authoritative way men usually do and say things like, “EXACTLY!” or “OH! SO CLOSE!” or “Lady! Let someone else have a turn, would ya!?”

I sat there that day, totally enamored by this colossal capacity he has to imagine the world at his fingertips -- to see the world in such a refreshing, obtainable way -- cracking up at his priceless, dearly unassuming precocity and periodically snapping photos of it. And I thought to myself: This is how I will remember Matthew turning four. More fondly than anything else, I think I will remember him being so fascinated by even the things he doesn’t completely understand that he has fun just imagining that he does.

Mary, of course, thought that this was the dumbest thing she’d ever heard.

To the rest of the world, he’ll be a lot of things. And I’ll do my best to tie up the loose ends of his peculiarities, things that might alienate him from having a healthy social well-roundedness -- (Hell hath no fury like a woman’s scorn, son. If you imply that a girl who might otherwise be charmed by your moves to the dinosaur rock is DUMB, she will probably think you’re a jackass.) But to me, he will always be perfect.

Oh, he’ll be a jackass and a weirdo and a defiant pain my ass, sure. Probably even more so with age. But the definition of perfect extended to include him on the day that he was born… because he’s my boy, and that’s just what motherhood does to our definition of words.

Am I right or am I right?

The Lost Art of Being An Aunt.

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Once upon a time, I was an aunt. But that feels like it was a really long time ago.

My first niece was born when I was a teenager, and before I had kids of my own or a car to drive, she was my world. Whenever my boyfriends would come to the house with me one of the first things we’d always do is find my girl Ry-Ry and play with her on the floor. She lived on my hip until she was too big to carry around that way, and even then I’d lift her up off the ground to hug her about a trillion times a minute, not caring what it did to my back. Before I had kids, she was the reason I loved shopping at Christmas. She was the only thing that made me want to hang out at home before I moved out. And after I did, she was the reason I looked forward to visiting.

Then I had kids of my own, and around the same time I swear my brothers started a competition over who could have the most daughters in an attempt to make just one son.

You’d think that by now I’d have the credentials of a professional at being an aunt. Between the combining of our two families through marriage, my husband and I have eleven little people who call us Aunt ‘Licia and Uncle Joe/Spencer when they see us. Eleven little tykes to attend birthday parties for. Eleven little quirts to hug when it’s time to say goodbye on a special occasion. Eleven little people, who, in all unfortunate honesty have become little more to us over the years than playmates for our own, more important kids.

For a lot of reasons that make enough sense for other people to understand, the part of me that used to take pride in being an aunt kind of fell off the grid the day I was handed a baby of my own and taught how to put my breast in it’s mouth to keep him alive. A lot of things changed that day, and I guess, looking back, it’s easy to see why my being a nurturing influence to someone else’s responsibility fell back into the realm of things my new priority blurred. (New baby’s have a knack for breaking into a person’s life by screwing up all of their bygone priorities and forcing them to make new ones that revolve around them.) By the time I probably could have scrounged together enough cash or time or patience to accommodate a weekend tagalong for my own crew there were nieces and nephews cropping up by the litter, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it for all of them.

But if I’m honest with myself, I know that it didn’t really change with having a new baby. It changed with being a step mom.

Growing up I had this aunt - who actually wasn’t really my aunt, but just one of those people you grow up calling “aunt” and never really bother to ask how it is that you’re actually related - and once a year she’d take my brothers and I for a whole week while my parents vacationed in Florida. We’d look forward to it so much that it never even occurred to us that we weren’t really “vacationing” too. She’d take us mini-golfing and out to the movies; She’d spoil us with fast food in the afternoons and then have a freezer packed full of our favorite ice creams waiting for us back at the house. We’d pull back into the neighborhood after dark and she’d be all like, “Okay guys, here’s your option: you can either take a bath before bed, or just hop in the pool for a while. Up to you!” I have a pretty lucid memory of sitting at her kitchen table, all warm from getting back into my clothes after a swim and doing a paint by number with her dog, Sammy at my feet. I remember thinking that doing something like that at my own house would have been boring - the kind of thing you save for a rainy day, but her house was always so sunlit and welcoming that it made everything you did feel better than it normally would.

Back when I was a teenager, that’s how I pictured being an aunt, paving my way to my niece’s heart in trips to the park and cups of Rita’s Water Ice. I wasn’t even old enough to take Little Ryan anywhere but the places we could walk to from my parents’ house, and she already loved me like the sun shined directly out of my ass. I couldn’t imagine how much better things would get when I was old enough to drive and had a place of my own to call on for slumber parties.

　

Right before the end of my second year in college, Spencer started picking me up from school with his daughter in arm, and before any of us really knew what was happening, I had moved in. The early stages of being a step mom were a lot like being an aunt; dependant on looking cool and being fun because that’s pretty much all you have to offer. All that I knew about how to nurture and love a child (which wasn’t much yet) came from the little experience I had at being an aunt. All of my earthly capacity to do those things shifted rightly onto Mary.

She became the one I ripped ticket stubs with and shared French fries next to and stopped the ice cream man for. Once, when Mary still fit into her 101 Dalmations nightgown, we had Ryan spend the night. The two of them had a blast together even though Ryan was two years younger, but she held onto me so tightly the whole time and exclaimed so incessantly over how much she adored me that a few hours into the sleepover Mary started crying because she thought I loved Ryan more than her. Mary didn’t want to hug me that much, but she didn’t want me hugging that much on someone else either, and I understood. It wasn’t a conscious decision or anything, but after that my relationship with Ryan came a little undone, because to some extent I think it had to.

　

This past weekend I finally committed to having Ryan for a sleepover again, and I wanted it to be perfect. Right before we left for the skating rink on Friday night my brother called me to thank me for taking her and he said I didn’t know how much he appreciated me doing this for her. “Yeah, no problem. I’m really happy to have her,” I said, but he stopped me. No, he said, you don’t understand. He told me about how she’s going through kind of a difficult time recently and that to her, spending time with me again just really means the world.

　

　

The next day after pancakes, two of Ryan’s little sisters came with her parents to pick her up. Matthew freaked! I couldn’t get his jacket and shoes on fast enough - in fact he ran out the door with them still in his hand, promising me he’d put them on himself on the front step. The three of them ran around the yard, pretending to be dinosaurs and spy kids and fairies, chasing bubbles, tripping over each other, yielding fallen branches and digging with them at the base of the tree. I asked them to pose for a picture real quick, and without any hesitation in the world, the two of them stopped and clung to each other like kittens to the branch of a tree. They were grinning hurriedly but uninhibited, impatient to get on with their adventure.

Suddenly I didn’t feel so bad for the relationship I had with the them, different as it may be. They don’t have me the same way Ryan used to before I had kids. Truth is, they probably never completely will. But Ryan also never had the relationship her little sisters get to have with their cousins. At least not yet.

My hope is that we can find a better fit for everyone. That Ryan and Mary can grow up relating to each other more comfortably as the two years between them get smaller with the perspective of age. And that I can find a place for all of my dozen nieces and nephews to fit without feeling cramped or obligated to be just because I married their dad’s brother or because I’m Matthew’s mom. I want to be the fun aunt who gets to take them to do things that their parents aren’t allowed to because it plainly says so right in the Good Mom’s Handbook. I want to be the one that they can call when they’re older to be like, DUDE, my mom is being such a BITCH! so that I can talk some sense into them under the guise of being totally on their side. If nothing else, I want to be the kind of aunt that the teenager in me looked forward to being the day that Little Ryan came into the world, stealing away the very first piece of my untapped heart.

　

…Maybe I should get a pool.

All the cool aunts have a pool.



Are you a cool aunt or a crappy one, like me? Has motherhood changed your relationship with other kids in the family you used to be close with? Has it made you closer? What kind of relationship do (or do you hope) your kids have with their cousins?

So Yesterday I Smiled When...

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In other news, Scarlett opened an envelope successfully for the first time, ever. I was really kind of impressed.

Can I just unload on you for a second?

It has been really, really hard to catch a break around here recently.

Whenever I sit down to write anymore I find myself just wanting to kind of dump it all into one, big, messy, totally unorganized I-don’t-even-give-a-shit post. I feel like maybe if I do that, just once, my head won’t be such a foggy, preoccupied mess. Maybe I’ll be able to unwind… the way writing in this thing used to help me to do. The thing that stops me from doing it is just remembering how badly I want this place here to represent us impartially. It feels disingenuous to gripe about how much is going wrong, when so much of what I’m choosing not to write about is actually going well. It feels just as insincere to write about holiday crafts and trips to the museum for Matthew’s birthday, though, when what I really want to write is HOLY MOTHER OF FUCKING GOD IF SCARLETT SHOVES HER HAND INTO UNFLUSHED TOILET WATER ONE MORE FREAKING TIME I’M GOING TO LOSE IT!!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not angry with my kids. But being this edgy is a new experience for me - a humbling, discouraging, draining experience - that I kind of need a break from talking about. Even on here. Which is part of why I haven’t. The other part is because I’m busy fishing tampons out of bathwater and peanut butter out of hair.

Yesterday wasn’t any different, either. But because I know this blog could probably use a little nudge in the direction of cheerful, I thought I’d reflect on a few small pieces of the day that actually made me smile, instead. Really smile. If only just to remind myself that I haven’t forgotten how. And kiddos? If you ever read this someday: to let you know that even in the thick of your most unhinging behaviors, you are still no less the reason I do.




So, yesterday I smiled when:


1.) Matthew woke up and said, “Mom, I need paper and paintbrushes. I have pictures in my head I need to get out.”

2.) Scarlett literally caused so much of a mess yesterday within a ten minute window of time that I couldn’t even help myself from laughing until I almost peed. I had to break down and give her a SECOND BATH that day because of the incurable amount of jam streaked through her freshly dried hair. Then? For the second time this month she pulled an entire waste basket of empty tampon applicators into her own bathtub water. This child is a disaster zone. I must have laughed for like ten minutes, without breathing, while I pulled them out. I have never felt so crazy in my life.

3.) Matthew helped Scarlett up when she fell and I heard him say, “There you are, my beautiful girl…”

4.) The skating center ran out of the skates that could have the wheels locked down a little for beginners during Matthew’s lesson, so he had to use skates that were incredibly difficult for him to balance on. It was really discouraging to him because he’s been doing these lessons for a really long time, and really thought he had it pretty much nailed. He absolutely refused to get overwhelmed, though, despite the fact that he must have fallen at least 600 times. To top it off, when we left he complimented another kid on how great they were. He is really growing into a boy of significant character... I have a feeling four will be a good year for him.

5.) Scarlett danced to the Hokey Pokey during the skating lesson, trying seriously hard to make her body do exactly what it was supposed to. She looked so hilariously befuddled I couldn’t even look at her without doubling over. Seriously, it was painful. This kid is such a nut.

6.) My hair looked awesome. All day. (Matthew would beg to differ. See #8.)

7.) Matthew helped me pick out a Valentine’s Day card and some chocolates for Mary at the store. It put an obvious, little pep in her step after school.

8.) Matthew tells me I’m beautiful all of the time, but he genuinely hates my new haircut. Yesterday, I asked him how he got to be so clever and he said it’s because whenever he turns a number [has a birthday], his brain grows, making him smarter. I told him that I was about to turn a new number soon and that I wondered if my brain would grow. He said: “No mommy, you will get more beautiful.” (Awww…. I said.) Then he added, “Because hopefully your hair will grow some more, finally.” L J

9.) As soon as the kids and I were done writing our valentine cards to mail off to the grandparents, we found valentine’s for each of the kids in our own mailbox from mom-mom and pop-pop Stucky! The kids were totally psyched to each open their own card (even Scarlett!) and find five bucks inside. Matthew even read his, entirely on his own, without even letting me TRY to help him on the really tricky words. (‘Cause and XOXO look an awful lot like cactus and socks to a novice reader, but he eventually got them!)

10.) Spencer came home from work with roses, a card, beer, a movie and grocery bags filled with stuff for him to cook ME a steak dinner with brussel sprouts. He said that the only stipulation was that the kids go to bed early, and Mary stay up to eat with us… 1.) because she loves steak, too, and 2.) because she’s also his valentine. …Melt my little heart… He even picked up a carton of my favorite ice cream for dessert, and a carton of hers, too! (I should mention that we NEVER get to watch movies anymore. Or T.V, period. We get up so early that sometimes it’s a struggle just to make it to our bedroom after dinner before we fall asleep. Suffering the grocery store and cooking dinner after a long day of work, plus staying up late to watch a movie with me afterward was like, a mega-awesome treat.) Totally made my day.

11.) During dinner Spencer told me that Matthew broke his heart in the best way, ever. He said that he apologized to Matthew when he got home from work for losing his patience with him the night before and sending him to bed, crying. Matthew said, ‘That’s okay Daddy. When I’m upset I just get a good book and read to myself until I feel better. Last night I was really sad, so I had to read my robot book like, two times. But then I was fine.’

12.) After that, we talked a little bit about how we can basically fuck up seven ways to Sunday raising these kids and they will still be awesome, almost as if to spite us. “I love that about them,” I said. And he agreed.

The Dream.

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I fell asleep monstrously sick last night.

…Just sick enough to trigger another one, even though it hasn’t been four days since the last time.

I’ve noticed that anytime I feel off, it happens. If the temperature suddenly rises in the night and I start to sweat in my sleep; if there was an argument the night before and we never quite set things perfectly straight. Once I had a really rigorous workout that left all of my core muscles so sore I couldn’t cough without wincing, and if I held my arms out in front of me, my fingertips would tremble. In the dream I was doubled over, sick to my stomach from all of the crying. I said something really melodramatic about being terrible for caring about my body at all when he couldn’t even have his. I felt bad for working out. I walked upstairs to get a drink of water when I came out of it wide awake and sweating, and every muscle in my body felt like it was working really hard to keep me up. That’s when I realized what it was that was making them happen.

In the light of day, nothing about the accident bothers me. It’s not even weird for us to laugh about it – the “knack,” we call it, that he has for evading death. It’s happened twice in less than two years. I joke that if he died tomorrow, I wouldn’t even be surprised. “Yeah, yeah… sad and all… but not surprised.” I still call him an ass when he’s being an ass. I still forget to kiss him goodbye sometimes if I’m busy, because I don’t feel like I have to question if he’ll ever be back. In fact, when words like neurosurgeon, or MRI, or motorcycle accident expose themselves within our day-to-day conversations with other people, it’s sometimes hard for me to even wrap the meanings of such wild, theatrical things around an image of my own husband. For the most part, it’s almost as if it happened to another family entirely - somebody else’s Spencer, and I’m just passing on what I heard had happened from them.

But then every few weeks, the dream that he is not alive anymore manifests itself -- heavy, and still, and quiet over my thoughts, as if it is something that just constantly exists in the back of my mind and is only revealing itself, instead of making an entrance. And for a few hours out of my existence, I taste the experience of bearing a life, empty of him, as if it’s exactly what I do every single day. It’s awful. It’s so awful.  But it isn’t a nightmare. Nightmares are terrifying, and to be terrified, you have to have something bad to anticipate. In this dream, the worst is done. He is already gone; he has been for weeks upon weeks by now, and what I’m living out is just a very, very poisoned state of being. It isn’t like any dream of death I’ve ever had before. It isn’t typically a very dramatic scene that I walk into. And it isn’t dark and dismal to start. My kids are all surrounding me, and I’m almost never without a chaperone because both sides of the family are still flooding in to help with whatever they can. They’re always smiling. And I can smile around them too.

I don’t feel like I cry every day or anything. But I feel distinctly nasally, itchy-eyed, thirsty, heavy-headed… just, all the time  – even when I’m otherwise feeling pretty even-keeled. It’s as if the aftereffects of crying are just a chronic condition I’ll live with for the rest of my life, even if I never actually cry at all.

I feel okay enough to get by now, okay enough to make light of all the ways that he wasn’t perfect when he was alive… I just feel knocked off balance, the way that you do when you’re sick, but you try to keep up with doing things the way you normally would, anyway.

I hear myself telling people every time that I barely have time to think about it, really, because I’m so caught up with tending to the all the normal things that haven’t stopped needing to be done just because he died. The baby stills throws most of her food to the floor every time she eats, and that needs to be cleaned up right away or she’ll get into it as soon as she gets down. Matthew still tries to wonder off in other directions at the store if I take my eyes off of him for even a second. He still puts up a fight when I call him back to my side. Still causes scenes just about everywhere we go. And Mary still comes home from school almost every day, so rambunctious and moody that it takes all of the patience I have just to put up with it, much less navigate my every choice of words around… especially with everything else I have going on. Then I sigh, the same way I do when I’m not dreaming, and I realize that I’m beginning to rant. In my dream, I can talk about it like it was just something that happened, just something that made everything harder. Of course it’s sad. But everyone already knows that -- they’re sad too, so I don’t talk about it all the time. I feel like I’m getting to a place where it’s good to just try to stay above it as often as I can, holding my face away from it, like a smell I’m trying to avoid, or like I’m up very, very high and trying my best not to look down, because looking at it won’t change the fact that it’s there, and it’s not like any of us could ever successfully ignore it.

The only emotional thing I tell them – and I tell them this just about every time I have the dream – is that I’ve forgotten how to play with the kids. I can laugh at stuff with them, and I can tickle them and kiss them and take them to places that are fun, but I haven’t figured out how to really enjoy them the way that I used to. Or how to be enjoyable to them. It’s like we’re detached. I still love them, but I can’t completely reach them anymore. I don’t even know if that makes any sense. I don’t think I’ve ever read that anywhere or seen it on a movie. And I’ve never lost anyone I was ever really close to, so I don’t know why that feeling is one I so strongly relate to the thought of losing Spencer. But for some reason, it’s what I feel every few weeks when that dream reoccurs.

And then I go back to being normal, making a joke, or telling them that we’re fine, (really believe it) and that it’s probably just a normal part of grieving.

Then after a while, somewhere in there, a little ways in, after everything else has been a steady rock-bottom ride, but something I could handle almost comfortably, I start to cry. And it doesn’t feel like it’s something I’ve been living with, it feels like it just, just happened. I’m choking for air. I double over. I lean into someone. I fall apart, completely, crying as if it’s the only way I can suck up any oxygen at all. Being loud. I cry so hard that everything in me feels ugly. I can’t believe it’s real.     I can’t believe it’s real.      I can’t believe it’s real.

And then I wake up. And he’s upstairs making breakfast. I can’t see him, but I can hear his boots on the floor. I can hear his eggs crackling over the bottom left burner of the stove, and the spatula scraping the pan. I can hear him clearing his throat. He sounds a little congested, like me. And just like that, life is back to normal.  

None of it was real.

“Bruh Tee” and Other 16 Month Old Nonsense.

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Everyday she raids my cabinets of pots and squeals at my feet until I hand her a spoon. Then she takes them to the coffee table and pretends to stir soup. Every few seconds, she grabs one of my candles and takes a drink from it.



 I love this picture for so many reasons.

One day, Scarlett decided she wanted to draw outside. Needless to say, I haven’t been upset about it.

Scarlett has always had this really illogical habit of learning new words -- practicing them, MASTERING them -- and then promptly and systematically forgetting that they had ever even existed. At any given time in her life she has consistently kept a vocabulary of about two to three words. As soon as she’d learn a new word, the last one was out, never to be heard from again -- even when prompted and reminded and begged for a comeback. It wasn’t until very recently that she started actually accumulating words, which is still a pretty slow go.

Right now, she has more than she’s ever had before at one time. Here’s the rundown:

Mommy: Mama!

Daddy: Dada!

Mary: Mammy!

Matthew: Mat-mat!

Milo: Meow!

Baby (her baby doll): Babby!

Brush Teeth: Bruh Tee!
--- (Scarlett’s favorite activity in the universe, THE UNIVERSE, above playing with dump trucks or pulling every book off of the mid-level shelf at the library or even sticking her fingers in the mouths of younger babies, is brushing her teeth. She is pretty much in a constant state of brushing her teeth around the house, taking breaks a few times a day only to eat and sleep and play outside. She says this one a lot.)
Bread: Breh!

Blueberries: Boo Bay!

Bottle: Bob-bye!

Oatmeal: Oapmee!

Pizza: Peet-see!

Thank You: Dane Doo!

Please: Peas!

For the record, “please” and “thank you” have been said maybe a dozen times collectively in the past four months, and please has since been replaced with the act of slamming her hands down on stuff, and then twisting herself around in a knot on the floor, squealing like a pig being stabbed in the gut. Meanwhile “brush teeth” and “pizza” are said, hands down, more than mommy and daddy and Milo, combined.

On that note, I love how accurate an illustration this is of her capricious personality. Basically all we hear from her all day long are requests to have her teeth brushed and to be fed pizza, peppered intermittently with wild, shrieking laughter, and great, big, growly dinosaur roars. Then again, she hasn’t even woken up yet, and Lord knows there’s no telling what today will bring with this one. Just a few days ago her favorite things were eating chicken and spinach and dancing to the Hokey Pokey. Now when you offer her the chance to do either, all grinny and exaggerated about it, she cries for a toothbrush.

She may not exactly be the linguist her brother was at this age, - or the one her intense (dude, I’m talking INTENSE) love of letters led us to believe that she might be - but she is certainly shaping up to have quite the character. And really, when you can mimic a dying pig like this one can, who needs decipherable language anyway.. Right?

Just The Way We Were.

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In unrelated news: I am trying to teach Scarlett to eat with a spoon. Still.

I was kind of wondering why she hadn’t asked before, but on the way to her conference it came out: “Why are you reading all of my stuff all of a sudden?” It wasn’t her usual ‘I’m just curious’ tone. She was getting pissed. I didn’t sympathize, but I understood.

“Because you’re eleven.” I say, my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel. “If you have something private to say, you can say it to yourself in your journal without any fear of it ever being read. You aren’t allowed to be writing notes in class anyway, so those aren’t subject to a right to privacy. And when I trusted you to come to me with messages that I should know about that you received on your iPod, you didn’t. You took that trust and instead of turning it into something beneficial, you chose to take a route that landed you here. I can’t blame you completely. I misjudged what you were ready for.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I know…” with heavy-hearted, downcast eyes. (Hm, I think. Progress.) Then she hits me with it. “But you’re like, the only parent I know of all my friends who does stuff like that… you’re like, stalking me.” She says the words like they’re a bug she’s flicking away from her. Disapprovingly.

Before I even know what I’m doing, I check my mirrors and I pull the car to the shoulder. Her eyes bulge at me like she’s a little afraid I might kick her out of the car.

“Your friends aren’t bad people,” I start. I’m not yelling, but there’s a distinct urgency in my tone. “But for one reason or another, they’ve been robbed of something very vital to a happy, healthy life. The ability to know self-respect. I know that to you that’s just a word right now -- But it’s what makes the difference between good people, Mary, and the people who grow up to behave like scum - because it’s the only skill in life they have to fall back on, and who walk through life spreading their scum onto the rest of the world like a disease, building it up to look like something better than self-respect. As far as I’m concerned, the people you “know” are sick with ignorance. They aren’t my responsibility, but you are. And right now, I’m failing you; when I mislead you to believe that at eleven years old you have the right to behave like a piece of trash without my getting involved unless I had your permission -- I was no better than every other ignorant parent of a scummy kid in this school. You guys are rotting away in here right now, and you don’t even know it. You guys are babies, all caught up in trying so hard to be something so ugly, something so far from what you actually are, something that you would never want to be if you knew what it really was.

So if you want to measure my parenting strategies against those of your friends’ parents, than by all means, honey, be my guest. It’s not that I don’t care what they do. It’s that I am actively striving to do something different.

And I hope I achieve it, too. I really do. Because something tells me that whether I ever get through to you or not, you’ll spend sixth grade being more of a ‘parent’ to your friends than their actual parents will. And I won’t be making that mistake with you.”

I drove off after that, and she wasn’t quiet, but it didn’t feel like we were on opposing teams anymore. I always thought that when I had these kinds of moments with my children that they’d be more staged, more strategized; that I’d have some kind of preparation before me to draw from, and that I’d know exactly what I was going to say more than half a nanosecond before it slid from my lips onto the open ears of my children. But I didn’t.

I tried to think back on Parenting With Love and Logic and How To Raise Confident Girls, and all that other crap literature taking space on the bookshelf above my bed, (*These books are not actually crap.) but it was like trying to birth Scarlett after I’d read all of those articles and books on managing labor pain without an epidural. In my very hour of need - the moment of truth, all of it ditched me. All of it. I thought of a million don’ts that all seemed to make so much sense in the calm of the afternoons I spent reading them, but I couldn’t remember what a single one of them actually was.

　

　

I wasn’t even sure that what I was saying wasn’t coming off as a little too derogatory. (Maybe calling them “sick” was a little much. And did I really use the old ‘they aren’t my responsibility’ line? Couldn’t I have done better than that?) You know how you walk away from a confrontation sometimes suddenly enlightened by a dozen more effective things you could have said instead, just ten minutes too late? That’s half of the feeling I was hit with. Except without the perfect, punchy lines. Just the awareness that I could have probably done better.

“Stalking her…” I thought, pulling into the school. Jeeze.

…

The conference was brutal, it really was. She spent most of it slunk down into her chair, her long legs climbing out from under the desk, and hands over her face in defeat. Once in a while, when a teacher or I would say something directly to her, she’d peek at us through a slit in her fingers and nod her head abidingly. We were tough on her, but the truth had to come out into the open; she’s not headed in a very good direction, and we need to see a change. We didn’t baby her feelings, but we did let her know, without question, that we were on her side. This was a team effort -- it wasn’t going to move a muscle without a lot of effort from her, but we’d be there for her every step of the way. (You know, all that parent/teacher stuff.)

We walked out to the car through the parking lot with my arm over her shoulder, both in kind of a strangely high spirit. We picked up some ice cream bars on the way home and we got started on some very important business. The business of talking. Just talking.

All this week we’ve stuck to our guns about the new routine. Today, we’re six chapters into Dear Zoe -- a book I picked up for her at a consignment shop down the street last year, but after skimming it myself once I got home, decided she wasn’t ready for. The main character, a fifteen year old named Tess, starts smoking weed with her boyfriend and at the end loses her virginity -- even if they stop halfway through. It’s a short, easy read, but it’s heavy. Do I necessarily think that she’s ready for this kind of material? No, I don’t. But we live in a world where she needs to be - whether I like it or not. At least this I can be a part of.

There’s a part in the book where Tess talks about her step dad. A part that in the thirty-seven seconds or so it might have taken to read, changed a big part of my life.

“David is the disciplinarian, the one who makes me rub some of the makeup off my face, the one who’s saving for my college education. He never got to hold me when I was a baby, and he’d never been a dad before he met mom so I think he just thought it was his job to make rules… I don’t think he really knew how to be a dad until Em came along, and by then the way we were with each other was just the way that we were… I really believe he was doing his best with me when we all moved in together. He can’t help it if his best is better now, or that loving a new daughter can’t change how he is with me… It’s not tragic or anything. It’s just the way it is.”

It was something I related to so heavily, it felt like my very life had been pinned exactly into words. It took one of the most complicated dynamics of my life - my relationship with my stepdaughter - and, like a slap in the face, turned it into something so simple, so obvious, that it made me feel stupid. Even though Tess’ step dad loves her a lot, and even though Mary and I have more than what a typical step-family has, I knew that from that day on, I wanted to change the script with Mary and I. I can’t go back in time and rock her to sleep or watch Disney movies a thousand times over, the way Philip Beard describes Tess’ step dad wanting to do so accurately. But I can be more than what I was, even if it takes a little more effort. Even if it takes a lot.

I feel like this whole experience with Mary recently is another slap in the face kind of wake up call. Something I needed as much as she did. When we were walking to the conference on Tuesday, I saw one of those cheesy, motivational posters outside of a classroom window. If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten. I pinned it in my brain, thinking lightly, that’s a good one to remind my children of once in a while… yeah, I like that. When Mary and I got to that familiar description of Tess’ relationship with her step dad that same afternoon, I realized how befitting that hokey, motivational saying was to my own situation with her.

Because I felt distinctly different on that day. Distinctly unstuck from the discription that had pinned me down  so well a year before.

I can't promise that I'll be a better parent from here on out indefinitely, or that I'll know all of the perfect things to say even when practically giftwrapped the perfect opportunity to say them, or that I'll even notice every glaringly obvious mistake I make staring me right in the face, but I can promise that 'just the way that we are' will never be good enough for us.

I am failing at that, too.

Still. :-)

Pardon The Mess.

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Our Family Is Under Construction. 

I’m always telling other people I “complain” to about my children that I’m only venting. I’ve learned from experience that kids at almost any age cycle through stages and phases so quickly that there’s never reason to fret for long about any one thing. You always figure it out (more or less), and by the time that you do, there’s something new going on to shift your focus anyway. “When I bitch,” I tell them, “take it all with a grain of salt. I know we’ll be fine.”


Recently, all of my children’s most difficult behavioral challenges to date have lined up on my ass like a solar eclipse. To compound matters on an epic scale I never prepared for, Spencer and I aren’t at our strongest. We’re gradually learning to live with the hard reality that the damage done to the frontal lobe of his brain - the part of the mind that controls certain aspects of personality - in the accident, left an impression on him that doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere. Compared to what we could have been dealing with today as a result of the accident in September, this (a permanent change in his personality and demeanor) sounded like a piece of cake I didn’t mind taking on at all. But it’s proving to be a challenge on the both of us. We’re putting in double-time the effort lately, not just in what we put into the kids, but in the one thing we’ve never had to before -- us.


Just when I was starting to think that things couldn’t get any more difficult, they did. And although I won’t go into detail about it on here, I’m perfectly willing to admit that it’s something I feel in over my head dealing with a little. (Okay. Maybe a lot, but it’s getting better.) The thing itself was big. But the more important problem that it opened my eyes to was colossal. For one punch-gut moment, everything else was put into perspective -- but not the refreshing kind of perspective, where mountains turn into tiny, suddenly manageable grains of sand. No, this was the kind of perspective that made me see with effervescent clarity that every mountain in front of me is even more worth the climb than I thought it was before. And it was about to get harder.


Mary needs to put more effort into the direction her life is going, I agreed with Spencer, but more importantly, WE need to put more effort into it. If we don’t go out of our way to show that we give a shit -I MEAN- crap, then we can’t expect her to. She isn’t an adult. She needs this stuff spelled out for her in all capital letters. YOU ARE WORTH THIS TO US.


Our biggest issue is that spending time with the other two kids is almost impossible not to do. But I still go the extra mile to make sure that the time I have with them is time spent somehow contributing to the enrichment of their lives. The only television Matthew watches are the movies we watch together (something we usually plan a full day in advance, at that). I ask people to buy my son books in place of more toys on his birthdays and my son is quick to remind me, even in the presence of company if we forgot to hold hands and bow our heads to say “morning” or “lunch-time” prayers. I see to it that Scarlett gets to stretch her legs and breathe in fresh air, even in the dead of winter, because (even though I hate the cold, myself, like you wouldn’t believe) I believe these are things that are good for the soul, and even at sixteen months old, her soul is worth the moon and the stars to me. I raise my kids a little differently than other people I know, and I’m sure than even the people who love me dearly roll their eyes at some of the cornier, over-the-top ideals I hold onto in regard to my little ones, but quite frankly, my kids mean more to me than they do so I don’t care.


But, really, what do we do for Mary? I mean, what do we really go out of our way to enthusiastically do for her, just to enrich her life? When I thought about it, the truth is, I had a hard time coming up with anything I was truly proud of.


I’ve made a million excuses for it over the course of the past year, too. I mean, she’s never around, first of all. She sleeps in until noon on the weekends (which - even though I’m not particularly fond of, I realize that not everyone is going to like waking up at the crack of dawn like I do, and I try to give her room to be her own person… at least that’s what I told myself I was doing). And on the weekdays she goes to school, and stays after for band one day a week. By the time she gets home and finishes her homework (or wakes up), she has chores that she just tries to blow through as fast as she can so that she has time to spend with her friends. And spending time outside of the house is important. She needs fresh air and exercise and healthy socialization. And Lord knows the kid is grounded so often that even I relish the opportunities she has to enjoy a little freedom.


But it’s not like we neglected her either … I mean, we started limiting the amount of time she slept-over away from the house on the weekends so that we could spend more time with her ourselves… we wouldn’t let her have a cell phone or a face book account and she wasn’t allowed to wear make-up to school… and last week when she had a day off from school I even had my mom watch Scarlett so that I could take her and Matthew out for a nice, sit-down lunch date! I thought I was really on top of things… at least as much as I had reason to be.


But I realize now that Mary’s not as well-adjusted as I thought that she was. Although it doesn’t necessarily come without effort to her, she usually ends every school year on the Honor Roll. But her grades are in the toilet right now, and getting worse. To the unsuspecting outsider, Mary looks like she farts self-esteem in her sleep. Her self-assuredness is what I’ve always esteemed her for, but I realize now - after the “thing” that went down earlier this week, in a domino effect that led to a long, hard series of recognitions - that self-esteem doesn’t mean to her what it should. To her it means being better than her friends are at pretending they’re all something they aren’t. Tough and Stupid.


Starting two days ago, I told each member of my family that we’re raising the bar. Among the new house rules are a few set aside specifically for Mary:


1.) Friends. 
Until her grades improve, Mary has an hour and a half to gallivant with her friends outside of the house after school. (Provided she’s done nothing to have that privilege taken away.) And no more than that.

The fact is, Mary goes to school everyday with kids who are being brought up to behave like scum. Point Blank. When eleven-year-old girls text message each other about how awesome it is to smoke weed and think that it’s fun to pass notes about how people in school think that they’re “pregnit” with their “ex’s” baby -- something in their lives, somewhere has gone horribly awry, and unfortunately, right now, these are the breed of children my daughter socializes with seven hours out of everyday. But at home, her friends are awesome. Especially her best friend, who she hangs out with everyday after school, and whom I don’t even mind her working on homework with together. In fact, I have a hard time grounding Mary from Kait altogether because I think she’s such a positive influence, among so much other negativity. But right now, we’re losing our kid to her friends at an intolerable age, and she needs us in her life often enough to compete.


2.) The T.V., my phone, the computer, and that IPOD? That thing she can’t begin a text-messaging conversation with, without use of the word “bitch?” It’s mine. (I’m stoked.) The rest? Gone. For how long? Count on it being indefinitely, I told her. Because they’ll be collecting dust in the storage room until I can think of any good reasons for her to have each one, individually.


2.) Make-up is trashed. All of it. Period.
 For the record, I think make-up is awesome, and I buy it for her myself. She’s at an age where she should be able to have fun experimenting with it at slumber parties or even wearing a little bit out to the occasional school dance. It is not for sneaking off into the bathroom at school to let her friends (the same class of friend who steal cigarettes from their parents and text people pictures labeled, “wanna see a pic of this guy I fucking made out with last night??”) paint her face, as if her mothers not going to notice those ridiculous raccoon eyes, smudged with sweaty mascara the second she walks in the door. I told her bluntly the day we packed it all up, even what she got for Christmas, “I’m not doing you any favors allowing you to believe that you look even remotely attractive walking the halls of sixth grade painted up like a hooker whose been crying because you don’t know how to apply it. It just looks sad. And gross.” When I feel like she’s learned to fully appreciate the freedom and beauty of a fresh, clean face first, (which is totally on me to make happen) then I’ll be happy to teach her myself.


3.) Mary and her dad will go out to dinner, just the two of them, at least once a month. More if we have the extra cash lying around, but at least that often.


4.) Mary and I will spend 30 minutes a day reading a book together (her choice, she had dozens..) just like we used to when she was younger and such a thing was mandatory for school. It was something we both used to really enjoy and there’s no reason it can’t be enjoyed now too. We stopped doing this when she turned nine because it just felt a little over-the-top to keep making her coming in early so that we could take turns reading aloud to one another. But I think what Mary needs in her life right now is a little over-the-top corny -- so that’s exactly where we’re going.


5.) Mary will be in the house to help cook and serve dinner with me every night.
She’s been wanting to learn how to cook and I’ve been wanting to teach her, but we rarely seem to both feel like it at the same time. Besides, I could use the help, she could use the sense of purpose, and we could BOTH use the quality time.


6.) Compass Learning.
Her teachers and I signed her up for a tutoring program that’s designed like a game, and tailored to each student-in-need’s specific problem areas within a given subject. (Hers is math. She dropped 60 points on the State Test from the beginning of the year - when the whole idea is to go up. Less because she truly struggles with the subject and more because she’s admitted to spending the majority of that class in particular passing notes to her friends -- when she isn’t caught up in the distraction of fighting with them. But she has some major catching-up to do.) She’s coming out of clarinet (which is something she’s wanted to do for a while anyway) to work on the program at school over that period, and she’ll do it for twenty minutes after she comes in for the night at home, too.


7.) Notes.
If she passes notes in school, she better hide it like hell from me. I took a look through her drawers one day, trying to find her brother’s medicated chap stick and in the biggest of all her vanity drawers, upward of like sixty notes, all folded into little squares just spilled out onto the floor as soon as I rolled it out. Never mind what she’s talking to her friends about, and that the language she’s using is deplorable -- with all of her time spent writing and responding to asinine notes about how to say the phrase, “suck my dick” in Spanish, it’s no wonder she’s not learning anything! For every single note I find from here on out, I get to pick a piece of clothing from her closet to donate. And you better believe I’ll be going straight for the American Eagle tops and skinny jeans first.

　

　

I don’t normally use this space to write about Mary. It’s a blog about our younger kids, mostly, because I’ve always felt like at her age, Mary deserved more privacy than that. Besides the fact that I’m questioning her right to the amount of privacy we’ve allowed her to have up until this point -- We’ve been instilling these new set of rules for three days now, and so far, every part of it has been incredible. Not just because I feel like it’s making a different for her, but because she’s enjoyed it. We all needed this. We really did. And I know that this shift in focus for us is going to lead to more good things I’m going to really want to remember.


I’d love to hear some input. How have you gone (or do you plan to go) the extra mile to instill family values into your own children. Any constructive advice? Believe me, I am all ears.