Is This A Mid Life Crisis?

September 30, 2008

Last week I read what Susan wrote about being happy and it resonated with me. (Look a dreaded -ated word) Then my friend Journey Mama wrote about the same thing. Every time I think of these words she wrote: I sit and think about small regrettable things, it brings tears to my eyes.

That is precisely what I do at night when quiet has finally fallen over the house. When I have yelled at the ceiling for the last time. And people have decided to finally shut up and go to sleep.

When I consider how short tempered I was with one of my children, when a smile and a tiny bit of compassion would have been the better choice.

I think about the heavy sighs I let out and the moments that I felt I was being inconvenienced and how I let everyone know this with my actions.

I think about the words I didn’t say. The words I should have said. The missed opportunities for saying I love you, though one could argue that anytime is a fine time to tell the people around you that you love them.

I think of the moments that passed me by because I was trying to do that one last thing and my heart breaks a little.

My daughter told me today that I am a great cleaner. Please just stab me through the heart with my dull broom handle, I think it would hurt less.

I think of all the little ways I fail.

I think about what it means to be happy. Especially lately.

I am content. I suppose. I have many, many things to be thankful for. More things than I can count. I am not depressed. I am not UNhappy. I have moments where I laugh with my children or friends until I think my sides will burst. And moments where I am filled with so much love that it has no choice but to escape from my eyes like a safety valve. Though the tears of joy are awfully close to something else. What exactly, I am not sure.

I think the only way to describe it is the acute realization that this is it. This one shot at life is all we get and OH MY GOD it is passing me by. I was going to write just now that at the age of (almost)forty I am not where I imagined I would be at (almost)forty. I thought I would be wiser. That I would have it more together. I thought I would know, well, stuff. I also had no idea what gravity would do to a body.

But I realized, as I was typing, that I had no concept of forty way back when. That seemed so positively old that surely you must have already done most of what you wanted to do. And now you were just sitting back with your Geritol and Depends waiting for your dirt nap.

Instead I find that I am just faking it. I definitely know less than I thought I knew at twenty. And do you know what that means? At this rate I will NEVER know what the hell I am doing.

Maybe I need to start wearing my hair in a comb over, buy a convertible, and throw away all my disposable income on lap dances. It seems to work for men, right?

No Space For This Milestone in the Baby Book

September 29, 2008

Yesterday we were talking about Halloween and the kids were planning what they want to dress up as this year.

My oldest son casually says that he is too old for trick or treating. Which I guess he is. At 5′10 he kind of looms over the toddlers and small children. Last year he had said he was only going to see how happy his baby brother would be trick-or-treating. Something we both knew wasn’t entirely true.

But it was more the way he said it yesterday, like it was just completely matter of fact. I had thought he would have held on to this last vestige of childhood while I had to pry it away from him kicking and screaming.

“Will you come and walk around the neighborhood with us? You know to see the joy on your little brother’s face when he realizes he is getting free candy?”

“Uh, I think I will stay home. I can see the joy on his face when he comes home and shares his candy with me.”

So really I guess he has become the proverbial lazy teenager and realizes it will be less work for the candy to just come home to him.

Sweeeeeeet potato

September 25, 2008

Meet my latest obsession, the sweet potato.

And just in time because I have eaten myself sick of hummus, my previous obsession.

I used to only eat them at Thanksgiving, smothered with brown sugar and butter. So fattening and full of sugar that I would end up 20 pounds heavier and in a diabetic coma by the time I got up from the dining room table. Which is why I only made them once a year.

Eye

September 24, 2008

An Historic Day

Long gone are the diapers, the bottles, the sippy cups.

There are no outlet covers, cabinet locks, or stairways blocked by gates.

No more high chairs dragged around the room during meal times. No more infant car seats and baby carriers blocking the back door.

When I say time to go, people run to the car on their own volition. Sometimes they even carry my stuff for me.

Stuff that does not include a huge diaper bag, two changes of clothing, bibs, blankets and enough Cheerios to feed a daycare.

No more spit-up stained shirts or leaking milky breasts. (I was going to clarify that I just got rid of the milk, not the breasts, but as I look down at my chest I realize that no, I did actually get rid of the breasts.)

No more pacifiers worn on my finger like a ring.

Fare thee well little cribby.

After 14 years the last remnant of babyhood is gone.

(I feel the need to say that the room is a mess because it is being gutted and renovated.)

Porn and the Homeschooling Mom

September 23, 2008

(Whoops, comments are turned on now.)

For those who are uninitiated in the world of homeschooling, there are catalogs come in the mail. Gigantic catalogs filled with things to learn, books, crafts, items that promise to make my children smarter while they do little more than eat their Pop-Tarts, organic of course. Ahem.

The catalogs? I love them all. I have a stack of them on my bedside table, which I peruse nightly.

The hefty catalogs are my porn. I sit down with the catalogs, various colored highlighters, those sticky post it notes, and my fantasies. Oh and what fantasies they are. When the enormous Rainbow Resource catalog comes in the mail, all life as we know it in my house stops for several days while I drool over each and every one of it’s 1200+ pages.

“Ooooooh, I’d love this,” I say, my breath catching a little in my chest. I imagine my children and I making an authentic mummy out of a roaster chicken, various spices, and some salt. What a great learning experience that would be. And I am sure I can find a place to store that in my house for a few months. Reality = NOT.

“Oooooooh, look at this,” I say. I imagine constructing the entire war of 1812 out of paper mache, dryer lint, and pipe cleaners. Who would NOT want to do that? Reality = Uh, me.

“Oh my word!” I harass my husband while he pretends to be asleep because he knows better than to discuss my crazy world with me. We can construct DNA chains out of gum drops and toothpicks! Maybe using those disgusting green ones to show various mutations, or something. Clearly I need to learn this too. Reality = Step away from the candy.

Luckily I am not crazy enough to have lost all rational thought and reasoning. Usually I can pass these types of things over. Not that these types of projects are inherently bad things to do, if you enjoy them and more importantly your children do.

It’s the smaller types of things now that I have trouble with. They promise great things and I have trouble not falling for their insidious promises. The things that promise to help your child “see math in a new exciting way” or promise to make your child love studying grammar, without them even knowing they are studying it. Or the huge magnetic wall chart where we can track our daily weather for the year and feed the budding meteorologist in us all. When really, how many ways are there to make memorizing your multiplication tables exciting? And a notebook, pen, wall thermometer and eyes are all you really need to track the weather daily.

At this point though, nine years (HOLY COW WHERE HAS TIME GONE??) into my homeschooling journey, I realize where my strengths and weaknesses lie. I realize that everything that sounds cool and educational to me, might very well not be to the children. And that lots of these so called educational projects are a huge pain in the ass and time suck.

People ask me all the time, “How do you make your kids do _____?” (fill in the blank) The thing is I don’t make my children do anything. I don’t think you can. Their education is very much theirs, not mine. There are things that I want them to accomplish, obviously, but I consider it my job to make it interesting enough that they do not balk at doing it. If there is a concept or a subject that my children are bored with, the onus is on me to change that. It means that I am not doing my job properly and need to approach the topic in a new way.

That doesn’t mean I do not embark on projects that I really should know better than attempting by now.

cough ::building an Egyptian pyramid out of sugar cubes:: cough

It’s just that now I can usually distinguish between the things that would be beneficial for my children, and those things that are better left to my bedroom, my highlighter, and my active imagination.

Lilliputians vs the Giants

September 21, 2008

Sometimes size does matter.

But it didn’t stop them from getting back on the line.

And it didn’t stop them from getting up after they were knocked down.

But man, I think there must be a nuclear reactor near-by because these 8 and 9 yr old kids were huge.

Hello there

September 20, 2008

I feel a lot like this frog lately. One minute just hopping around, happily living my life, the next thinking, “What the hell is going on?”

My 7yr old son found this little frog in our yard today. After loving him precariously close to death, the kids let him go. They hope to find him again another day.

Personally, based on the frog’s expression, I think he has smartened up.

Completely unrelated…

Mir is auctioning off a Wii at her site. All the money goes to her children’s school. Every single cent. So if you were thinking of buying a Wii and want to contribute to a good cause, go on over.

It is tax deductible. Maybe. I don’t know. I am not a CPA. But it sounds like it should be, right? Then again I thought I knew about building permits so you best consult some sort of professional rather than tell the IRS hey some woman said I could deduct this on her blog. But go on over and bid anyway. I would bid, but I already have one and let me tell you, they are so much fun.

In another unrelated segue…

Crazy Dad was given a warning that should he ever behave in that manner again he would be banned from the field, and all games whether home or away. Instead of facing the coaches and parents he dropped his son off to practice waaaaay before it started and left him there alone at the field. Then had someone else pick him up when practice was over. This caused one parent to ask, “Who is the pu$$ie now?”

Who indeed.

I don’t think he meant Josie and the Pussycats

September 18, 2008

I have a PANTRY! Finally.

I searched my hard drive and don’t have a before photo of this pantry. Which is odd since I obsessively photograph everything. But when we bought the house, and the following four years, the way too small refrigerator lived in here. It matched all the rest of the impossibly small appliances that this house had to offer. Why anyone would put their refrigerator in a closet is beyond me.

Awhile ago I posted over at Mighty Junior as a guest editor. I was asked to pick about ten things that I liked. I only found five things on the entire internet that I liked. I am not sure what that says about me. I am highly selective? I am picky? I am decidedly not hip or cool?

Anyway, if you want to see what five things I like click on the link. The baby book I picked is stunning. If this book were available when I was pregnant with my oldest son it is definitely the one I would have chosen to buy and not fill out.

And in more football parent, holy shit who ARE these people, news… the crazy Dad lost his ever loving mind today because he thought some of the other kids were roughing up his kid. Which , hello, it is football, not choir.

He stormed over to a group of 8 and 9 yr old LITTLE BOYS and called them f-ing faggots and threatened them. Then he called them the “p” word and screamed at the coaches for awhile. All while using the f-word more than I thought humanly possible. It was beyond anything I have ever experienced in youth sports and I thought I had experienced it all. To their credit the coaches, all eleventy-million of them, kept their cool and calmly told him to stop using foul language in front of the kids and to stop screaming. Not that it did much.

No wonder parents are drinking at the field. It is beginning to make sense now. Where is my hip flask?

What makes it even sadder is what all of this will do to his kid.

My kids thought the entire incident was a little frightening and upon getting in the van my 7 yr old said,”Were those really bad swear words? Because I haven’t even heard some of those!”

On the other hand, my oldest son’s team continues to play and practice completely drama free.

Summer’s Last Gasp

September 17, 2008