As you mean to go on

Resolutions and new beginnings just seem to go together, as do the concomitant disappointment when keeping them is more difficult -- the pounds won't come off, the photos don't get organized, those pesky weeds just keep coming up, and who said twelve pairs of mittens in a year was doable?

I've managed this in years past by not making resolutions, other than the most general: "Eat breakfast. Walk occasionally. Eat kale a lot."

This year, though, I'm brimming with them. Maybe it's tipping well into my final half of life; maybe it's not having a truly little child of my own any more (thank goodness for a new niece!) that's freeing up some space in my head. And this blog is part of that. While researching when we got the cats for a pet insurance application, not only did I discover when we got the cats, thanks to the blog, seeing the pictures of the kids and reading about what we were doing was so pleasurable and not having it was an actual ache. So I resolved to post at least one picture of one kid per day and blog something. Alas, that's only one thing I want to do.

Some of my plans involve the kids in other ways:


And, as any parent knows, rearing kids means limits. Screen time is an ongoing struggle here -- in fact, many things about this child are struggles. Rarely do parents blog honestly about their challenges with their children, and the line between exploitation and sugar-coating isn't easy to find. I hope that this year, we're going to unlock some of the more difficult puzzles with our son, even though paying for the professional help to do so is going to be painful.

I'm also embarking on a self-taught course of dog training. Mikey, who recently joined our family, was trained to be a show dog and not much else. He's big, and mouthy, and not quite sure what's expected of him. He's also very lovable.


I love the look he's giving the kid here. "Squirrel? You call that a squirrel? Take me outside!" In researching training methods, I've fallen completely for Karen Pryor and her positive reinforcement classical conditioning clicker training. Her Reaching the Animal Mind book provided hours of entertainment for us, and then gave me a place to start when Mikey came home. As I've delved more into training, I'm feeling overwhelmed, so finding this website with its structured instruction has been a boon. I think it might also save me a few hundred dollars in private training lessons.

So what else? Um, study Italian, teach my courses, keep homeschooling as effectively as I can, walk briskly a few times a week - that leg is still not at all run-able - do some yoga, keep decluttering the house, and oh, yes, knitting.

I started working on the second of the Norwegian Snail Mittens a few days ago:


This would be great almost-two-years-to-a-finished-object stuff if I didn't also bite the fit-bullet and do this:


And it's not done. That "first" mitten was just enough too tight around the thumb area to make it not up to snuff. In a moment of strength, I figured, "I can do this" and just started ripping. When I get down below the tight part, I'll set it back on the needles and start over. By then the "other first" mitten will be done, and I'll be halfway to the first pair done.

As I mean to go on, I mean.

Moments, not days

I was reading something another blogger posted about her kids today, generally saying that they were in a pretty easy phase right now. At first I reacted with, "Lucky her!" My kids are generally not what I would consider easy, but I'm probably not an easy or mellow or calm and centered person in general either.

We have our really bad days, days where everyone is cranky, there's lots of tears (some even the kids') and I lose my temper in some spectacular way. Most days aren't that bad, but usually they're not spectacularly good either.

When I started this whole homeschooling trip, lo these many years ago, I had lots of reasons. You could have sat me down and I could have elucidated them all. I had read every book, kept up with every discussion forum (called chat boards, then), and had lots of theories. With one child, these theories worked pretty well. We played, we mixed colors, we interacted with the world around us, we practically lived at the library, and when we weren't there, we were volunteering at our food co-op.

Then I had another baby, then another, and finally one more. Somewhere along the way I left most of those theories and an awful lot of those behaviors behind. Our homeschooling wasn't working for me any more, and so I started moving towards something that looks a little more like what I thought I'd never do: the "sit down and do it" school of homeschooling.

Oh, we don't salute the flag, and I don't have the kids call me "Mrs. So and So," and sitting in rows would be just silly. But they are expected to do far more academic work than I had thought, and earlier. It's not much easier on me, but at least it's not the kind of life where I was providing wonder after wonder and also doing all the clean-up. Now I get to fuss at them to do the clean-up.

So every morning, they're supposed to do a list of behaviors and their schoolwork, leaving our afternoon free for my meltdown outside activities like hikes, museums, classes, practices, etc. But then there are days like today, where Things 2 and 3 start off playing dominoes, and teach Thing 4, and then somewhere along the way they wander outside and ride bikes, and we fix the flat tire again, and then all of them play dominoes, and then they eat something snacky, and then I do some work while listening to them talk, and mention that they might want to put the yogurt back in the refrigerator, and then I watch them doing something, and before you know it, it's time for piano lessons and off we go.


If we had a steady diet of days like this, it would, in fact, make me crazy(er). I don't deal well with lots of self-directed play, even spectacularly learning-filled play. And the only reason I can deal today is that the kitchen started out clean since last night and we'd worked hard together yesterday to clean off floors so we have open, inviting places to play today. Then I realize how well Thing 1 is doing in her high-pressure math course, and that while they're playing happily together they're also learning how to communicate positively with each other, and there is probably time enough for math and spelling, even later today. They may not be easy for days, but there are moments as golden as the light in autumn.

So when Thing 4 says, "Now can we make hot chocolate?" I think, well, yeah, we can. But I'm clever enough to list the pick-ups that lie between them and the cocoa.

Superpowers

Meg quite reasonably offered to change the subject -- and I think that's a good thing.

So, something that's been knocking around upstairs for a while now. One of the truly unpleasant characteristics I practice is that of judging other people. Like losing my temper, it seems to happen in a flash, without conscious thought.

I'm most aware of it when I'm brought up short -- when my judgments are proved wrong, or shortsighted, or the role they play in my life (probably shoring up my battered ego) is made crystal clear.

What brought this to mind powerfully the other day was me listening to some conversations between some of the moms in the homeschooling group. The group is overwhelmingly stay-at-home female, although many fathers participate actively at home, and many of the moms, like me, work at paid jobs in addition to wrangling their children toward educated, engaged adulthood. I tuned in to overhear one mom saying, "Oh, I used to make performance raku pieces. Some steamed, some whistled, some exploded. We had people wear goggles for the last kind."

And the conversation meandered on from there.

I sat in my folding chair, just stunned. I know these people had lives before they wandered into my park days, really I do. But I think it's my fear that my "before" life and my "now" life are relatively uninteresting and in many ways fall greatly short of my "potential" that makes me assume that these moms are just their surfaces -- moms. And, I am greatly ashamed to say, moms who aren't always scintillating to me, either.

So I could feel my worldview rocking. It's happened before, but I wanted to hold onto that dislocation this time. Anything that makes me less likely to discount someone else's fascinating layers, or at least the possibility that they have them, is a good thing. I don't know where I got the idea that I'm all that and a bag of chips, and the fear that I'm not, unless no one else is. But I'm ashamed to carry it around.

In addition to dropping the down-view of others, I've got to get a more realistic view of myself, I think. Neither comparing up or down, just sitting with who I am and what I do and somehow allowing it to be enough.

It's going to be hard.

So, when it gets really difficult, I can meditate on my One True Superpower. I can do something easily, routinely, and gracefully, which few (almost none) members of my household can do.


Yes. I change the toilet paper roll.

I should have stayed in bed

Except I was having nightmares this morning. Thing 1 is still in bed, despite having made an appearance at the top of the stairs to "prove" that she was up. Best go rouse her again.

Suffice it to say that this wasn't the kind of morning that made me glad to be alive, glad to be homeschooling. I managed to get a full frontal vent out in a letter to my dear friend, but the bare bones went something like: "empty dishwasher, start breakfast, hang load of laundry, interrupt laundry to mediate screaming fight between Things 3 & 4 (Thing 4 has only communicated by yelling for two days now -- she's clearly sick but I hate this manifestation), get called back inside because Thing 4 has knocked bowl of scrambled eggs onto the floor, breaking bowl and strewing egg, clean that up, finish hanging laundry, start another load because, well, there's egg everywhere on the clothes she was wearing plus the mopping cloth, feed kids, call Thing 1, get schoolwork out, try to get Thing 3 to do his schoolwork, deal with Thing 4 who wants to write on the dry erase board while we're spelling, wants to shout randomly, call Thing 1, give leftover eggs to the dog, guiltily send the younger two downstairs to watch a video and get out of my hair so I can do spelling and writing with Thing 2, call Thing 1, water the fowl, empty the dishwater onto the compost bin, retrieve the spoons from the compost bin, demand that Thing 1 show up, send her back upstairs to change the cat litter, say I'm not making a second breakfast for children who didn't eat their first one, tell Thing 1 to come inside if she's not going to go change the cat box, tell the rest that I only want to hear, 'How can I help?' coming out of their mouths, despair about it ever getting any better around here, and so on."

Oh well, at least I can knit some more on that second mitten I started to match the badly-done first one even though I didn't actually have the first page of the pattern with me. I'm done with the second welt and into the cuff portion. Knitting will make me feel as though I'm actually achieving something instead of shoveling during a snowstorm. Hooray!


Or, you know, not.

That will teach me to think I remember how many stitches to cast on. Sigh.

Fevered

Summer feels well and truly gone.

I know that Labor Day is a traditional "end of summer" marker for most people, but we don't really notice that. It's more subtle. We'll not stop doing things like swimming at the lakes -- homeschooling means that we can get wet any time the temperature cooperates. (The children have a very different idea of what that temperature is than I do.)

It's just that the pace has changed. I sat down with my calendar and penciled in all of the commitments that I knew of so far -- and odds are good that I'm missing a few. I've even tried to start using my Yahoo! calendar as email reminders might actually prompt me to get to the paper calendar and confirm. I hate it when my distractability causes me to go to an event at the wrong time or place, or worse, miss it completely. It doesn't help that August and September are the birthday months around here -- what is it, holiday celebrations or something? So I have to remember all of the attendant activities around those, which lately include intricate cards made of duct tape. Not by me, fortunately.

I'm wrapping up old classes -- two out of three are graded and "in the can," and I've set up for my new ones which begin next week, so there has been a lot of caretaking and preparing. I'm trying to remember to knit, and to sit at the spinning wheel and feel the thinness of the yarn I'm making flow across my fingers. Some days I have to actually say out loud, "This is not wasting time. Making yarn is important, as important as washing dishes, at least." Guess who's fighting her worthiness demons lately?

We also had my nephews overnight this past week. That is a big couple of days of activity -- two more children, stair-stepped in with mine, agewise, and close enough to jostle for precedence like siblings.

The bill is coming due for some of us.

Thing 1 or the nephews brought home some sort of cold virus last week. My eldest deals with things by being quiet and taking care of herself, and strewing the house with tissues (eeeeewwww). I may resort to taping bags to her wrists so she always has a place to put them. I know she's working on it, though, because when reminded, she either uses a bag or gathers swiftly.

I'm not catching a cold, even though my nose and head beg to differ. I'm feeling okay, so maybe it is a mild form that I have some sort of immunity to. This morning was a really strong, swift set of sprints. Something must be going well, because I had two good 3.5 mile runs this week, and the last interval today felt as though I was being pulled toward the end of that sycamore "tunnel" I run down, or as though I was a subway car on a track. Quite a rush.

The other kids seem okay, just maybe a little under the weather.

But Thing 4 only has three years' worth of immune responses under her belt. I knew she was sick, because she sounds like an aging starlet who's smoked for years, and because when we played puppies today, she asked to be taken to the vet. Unlike the puppy named Sandy, having her nails trimmed isn't going to fix her today.

This afternoon, we were lying on the couch since we'd done most of the big work today demanded, and she was flopping around and sounding very unhappy. She also felt cold, and wanted a sweater, then a blanket.

I'm not the fastest-thinking mother in the world, but it finally dawned on me -- I felt her forehead. She's running enough of a fever to feel badly. Reminds me of the time we threw a big party and Thing 2 was so sick that she would wander out from our bedroom to the party room, then fall asleep on one of us, and we'd put her back in bed, and an hour and a half later, she'd repeat the performance. I think she slept about 20 hours that day.

The laptop screen shielded her face from my view when it dawned on me that she wasn't moving so much and had stopped "talking."


I hope this sleep restored her and the fever and she can work together to build a good immune response for other colds.

I have not had too much of picking

Our "school year" has started. What it's looked like so far is a wonderful "bat overnight," where we camped out at a local regional park and talked about bats and made gliders to illustrate principles of flight and played with sticks and looked for bats and watched bats wheel and dive and listened to stories around a campfire and ate marshmallows and played with little siblings and the parents laughed and talked and went to get good coffee in the morning because, hey, if you're camping in a city known for good food, why not?

One of the nicest parts of the overnight was that some folks who weren't in the homeschooling group came -- some without kids, but with a kid-like substitute.

She was a hit.


And the first day of "book work" went okay -- spelling, math, reading lessons, and some history of the labor movement in the United States. Mother Jones, anyone? Guess who's interested in that? I'm so excited I can hardly function. Reminds me a little bit of my friend and her enthusiastic learning style. There are so many fascinating spots right around where we live where workers and employers clashed, often violently, to secure the rights my children take for granted. As a parent educator, I also get to interrogate my own understanding of history and current events and try very hard to move beyond less-helpful dualisms like "good/bad," or "noble/money-grubbing" and look at how power corrupts almost everyone who wields it, historically.

Of course, no late-summer day would be complete without a trip to get more blackberries. New friends came, and a lovely afternoon of wishing I had a harvest hover craft ensued. Fourteen cups of the lovelies are right now tucked into the downstairs chest freezer awaiting the alchemy of the jam pot.

In classic family style, I ignored the pain in one of my toes the entire afternoon. I must have hit it on something, I assumed. It wasn't until I'd gotten home and changed my clothes that I found the dagger-like blackberry thorn under my toenail. Hmmm. Maybe a high pain tolerance isn't always a good thing.

And since it's Tuesday, it's farmer's market, tea, and poetry day. I think I'll read this one, in honor of yesterday's harvest:

After Apple Picking

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

-- Robert Frost

It's going to be a good year.