Conversation overload

All the baby books discuss the quandary of the stay-at-home mother of an infant who is stuck in the house with a nonverbal entity all day and is desperate for conversation when her husband gets home. Very few of them deal with the what-goes-around-comes-around payback four years later, when the stay-at-home mom is stuck in the house all day with a preschooler who WILL NOT SHUT UP.

Eric has reached this stage now. He just talks all day long about this, that, the other, or nothing at all. Airplanes, sunsets, his math lesson, the cat, a cartoon he saw last week: They're all fair game for discussing repetitively for ten or fifteen minutes until the next topic comes up. I spend all day saying, "Uh huh ... yeah ... wow ... mmhmm." By the time Tommy gets home, I just want to put the kids to bed and enjoy the silence. (Of course, they're in the mood to play with Daddy and make noise.)

I remember Faith being in this constant-talking stage, and she's passed out the other side of it now; but I don't remember how long it took for her to go through it.

Pledge unit-of-time-of-unspecified-length

So, our PBS station finally wrapped up its latest pledge drive yesterday. Here's how the local newspaper's TV guide describes PBS pledge drive programming: "Acclaimed programming highlights a membership drive encouraging viewer support." Here's how I describe it: "We're going to keep showing the same interminable specials starring Andre Rieu, Rick Steves, and/or Celtic Woman, along with the same informercials by Dr. Wayne Dyer and Suze Orman, that we've been showing on pledge drives for the last decade and hold all the regular programming you actually watch hostage until you send us money."

I have to admit, I have fond memories from childhood of OETA's Festival, with B.J. Wexler and Richard Allen, or whatever the station director's name was, in tuxedos and asking for money. But back then, it was once a year and lasted like a week. Two weeks, tops. Now it seems like it's quarterly, and it goes on all month. And they take off all the kids' educational programming all afternoon to show the aforementioned Andre Rieu and Dr. Wayne Dyer, not to mention pre-empting "Keeping Up Appearances" in order to show "Behind the Scenes of British Comedy," you know, instead of actually showing British comedy. If it was once, fine, it's a special. The third or fourth time through in a month, it's just extortion.

The one bright spot this time around was the 25th anniversary concert of Les Miserables. Seeing it on the schedule, I didn't really register the number and assumed it was the 10th anniversary concert again, which is extremely well-done but, once again, seen it a million times. I accidentally flipped to it a few weeks ago and thought, "Wait, that looks like a different Valjean -- and I know the old Javert wasn't black!" So Faith and I sat down and watched some of it. The new Valjean was excellent, but the new Thenardier doesn't hold a candle to Alun Armstrong and one of the Jonas Brothers was pathetically out of his depths as Marius. Faith loved it and wants to go see it next time a tour comes through; Eric thought it was too long.

Why I am a bad mother

(with due respect to the Parenting chick)

After we picked up our tickets at the Day Out with Thomas, we began making the rounds: first the petting zoo, then the bounce house, then we came to a booth where they were applying temporary Thomas tattoos. The kids and I stood in line for those, while we sent Tommy to hold a place in line to get your picture taken with Sir Topham Hatt. Faith got a Thomas tattoo on her hand, while Eric got a Percy.

Well, it wasn't 20 minutes later when Eric forgot about his tattoo and wiped his face with the back of his hand. Half of Percy scraped off. Heartbroken tears ensued.

I could have gone back with him and stood in line for another tattoo. I seriously considered it. But I figured if they're so fragile, the new one will probably deteriorate pretty quickly, too. Definitely be gone by bathtime that night. Was it really worth going back and standing in line another fifteen or twenty minutes, just for him to go through losing it all over again? Wouldn't it be better, I asked myself, to get him through the loss now and not have to deal with it again? Well, that's what I decided. And, of course, more than three days (and baths) later, Faith's Thomas tattoo is still on the back of her hand. And every time I see it I feel guilty for not going back and getting another one for Eric. (Stupid stubborn tattoo of Faith's. And if hers has stayed on so long, why the heck did his rub off so easily?)

Day Out with Thomas

We took Faith and Eric to ride on Thomas the Tank Engine on Saturday. It was our second time at Day Out with Thomas, but this venue was closer to home than the one we went to in fall of 2009; that was an all-day road trip going and getting back. We were able to spend just the afternoon this time. The kids still had the T-shirts (and cap!) from last time, so they fit in with the train-outfitted crowd.

They had bounce houses (see below), a petting zoo, bands, a magic act, and various other activities besides the train ride which is the main attraction. The one in 2009 was a more rural setting and in the fall besides, so it was a more scenic ride; the scenery on this trip included several people's backyards, some ratty apartment complexes, and the interstate before it got out to countryside just starting to green up. I think not driving for 7 hours was a worthwhile trade-off, though.

What other people are apparently reading now

I was at Barnes & Noble the other day and was surprised to see three shelves in the young adult section marked "Teen Paranormal Romance." Really? Three shelves' worth? I know the Twilight Saga is a big deal and all, and I guess I should have expected it, seeing all the Harry Potter knock-offs that blossomed after J.K. Rowling hit it big, but three shelves? Even Harry Potter and his imitators didn't get their own shelf signage, as I remember: "Boy Wizard Adventures?"

Honestly, it's a good thing I was a "tween" before the term "tween" existed. Once I exhausted Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Anne Rice (and she had a lot fewer installments in her vampire series then), there was very little left for me to worry my mother by obsessively reading.

What we're reading now

Faith has finished Little House in the Big Woods and started Little House on the Prairie. For all the feel-good Americana of the series, I've more and more affected over time by the overall tragedy of the Ingalls family. Pa and the family are so happy in book 2 on the prairie -- he says it's the finest place he's ever lived -- and then it turns out that their homestead is 3 miles over the line into Indian Territory and they have to pack up and leave the home they built with their own hands and hoped to live in forevermore and all their neighbors, Mr. Edwards and the Scotts. If they'd never had to leave, Mary might not have contracted the scarlet fever that took her sight and changed her from the pretty eldest daughter into a lifelong invalid, the independent life Michael Landon's TV series foisted on her in an effort to empower the disabled aside. As light a tone as Laura uses to paint her story, the Ingalls family just never gets to stop struggling. I suppose that's what makes it nonfiction, though.

Eric is enjoying some Thomas the Tank Engine early readers. He read Thomas and the Jet Engine to Mawmaw last week, which is the first time he's read to anyone but me.

As for me, I've started making quite a bit of headway through my magazine stack. I'm caught up on my biweeklies and monthlies and am now working through my backlog of bimonthlies, dating back to December/January issues. (By the by, did you know that all the really hip magazines don't have "editors," anymore? I assumed that the Parenting chick's column was a rotating staff-member thing, as it was in the standard "editor's column" location, but her title didn't read editor. She is, though, apparently, but her official title isn't "editor in chief" but "director, print content, strategy and design." Editor-in-chief sounds way tougher. Can you see J. Jonah Jameson allowing himself to be rebranded as "director, print content, strategy and design" of the Daily Bugle?) I'm anxious to get rid of them, as I got some fun new books for my birthday, not to mention Christmas. :P I'm going to give myself permission to forget about The Pickwick Papers for now and get back to it later. It's been almost a year since I've read a real book, and I want to read something I'll enjoy, not just something I'll be glad to see the last page of.

Why I will be letting my "Parenting" subscription lapse

Really, now that I've got past the new mom/stages of development years, the Parenting magazines only feed my feelings of contempt for modern family philosophy, and I don't think I need any encouragement to feel smug and superior.

From the pages of the February issue of "Parenting: School Years":

• The editorial from a random staff member congratulating herself on being a "good mother" because she doesn't let her six-year-old watch "Real Housewives" and doesn't introduce her dates to her son. Well, have a hero cookie. Is this how far we've lowered the parenting bar? Or merely the unavoidable endgame of the self-esteem movement? I refrained from running down pedestrians today. Does that make me Mother Teresa?


• A promo for a new book, ostensibly on parenting, by Brooke Burke entitled The Naked Mom. The author herself is on the cover posing nude. Yes, yes, everything's "covered," but still, to whom is this book being marketed? Is this a new trend? Will the latest edition of Miss Manners' etiquette guide feature her on the cover au naturel? Or does nudity merely sell parenting books? One hopes Drs. Brazelton and Sears can resist.


• A promo for a new feminist, anti-princess book with a cutesy graphic on which princesses the editorial staff approves of and which it condemns. No surprise, Ariel and Aurora get dissed ... as does Buttercup of "The Princess Bride" for "agree[ing] to marry sinister Prince Humperdinck right after her boyfriend Westley disappears." "Right after," four years later, whatever, right? (Don't pick on "The Princess Bride," people!)


• An article on sick days encouraging moms not to miss work if their child's not actually in the emergency room: "Gunky noses and hacking coughs are par for the course in classrooms during winter." Watch out, Doesn't-Introduce-Dates Mom; there's another entrant in the running for the Best-Mom-Ever award!


• An item admitting that "it's hard not to scowl when you catch your darling little boy brandishing his string cheese like a sword," even though "experts now say" it won't make him grow up into a serial killer. Snippy momlet on Facebook begs to differ: "War and violence are a big problem these days, so we shouldn't be making light of it." Yes, war and violence are a big problem "these days" -- as opposed to when, exactly? The Pax Romana? Way to have a sense of historical perspective.

Or maybe I'm just snarky because I didn't get to the magazine in time to enter all the monthly giveaways that expired February 15th....

Sugar blast from the past

So, I was at the store yesterday with my $1 off 3 Kellogg's cereals coupon, trying to pick out which cereals to buy with it. I had just got done with some Mini-Wheats and wasn't in the mood for more of those, so I went looking for the Cinnabon cereal Tommy likes.

Right next to the boxes of Cinnabon cereal was Honey Smacks. I literally had not eaten Honey Smacks since I was a kid, but I thought, "Hey, those sound pretty good."

Of course, back when I was eating Honey Smacks semi-regularly, they were still called Super Sugar Smacks, a refreshingly honest title. It said, This is a sweetened cereal your kids will like. Yes, it's part of a 'balanced breakfast,' but only if you serve it with milk, juice, and toast, which -- let's face it -- is a 'balanced breakfast' without the cereal.

Did the recipe even change when the marketing people got to them? I mean, where is honey on the ingredients list? Fourth, behind sugar (ingredient number one, thank you) and corn syrup, and ahead of only hydrogenated soybean oil, salt, caramel color and soy lecithin. You could just as fairly call these things Hydrogenated Soybean Oil Smacks, if we're honest; it's certainly less forthcoming than the former name which came right out and admitted, This is sugar in a box! Anyone else think they just added an extraneous dollop of honey so they could make them sound more nutritious?

It's touching to see that Dig 'Em the Frog is still on the front of the box, outdated '70's slang and all. That has to be one of the most random spokescartoons in the business. I mean, Kellogg's didn't even try, did they? There's not even any attempt to create a tangential link between the spokesanimal and the product. What does a frog have to with "smacks" or honey or, indeed, sugar? It's like their marketing division just spun a random Wheel o' Animals: Okay, Frosted Flakes gets .... the tiger, and Sugar Smacks gets .... the frog! Well, that's an honest day's work. Let's go play a round of golf!

Anyway, Eric likes them, but he's going to have to fight me for the rest of the box.

Snooze button

So, here's how I woke up this morning -- and most mornings.

Never having been a morning person, I stay in bed while Tommy gets up and goes to work. The kids used always to be up before he left the house, but "springing forward" for Daylight Savings Time has thrown them off their game so he gets some quiet time in the mornings for now.

Faith can turn on PBS and open Poptart wrappers, so the kids get up and do their own morning thing, as well. However, their own morning thing quickly escalates into fighting ... over toys, over which side of the couch they're sitting on, over who knows what. So my morning alarm generally involves screaming. Eric is louder than Faith; I generally hear him call her the worst name he can think of, which is "nincompoop." (I don't know where he heard it, but I'm sure he latched on to it due to the final syllable.) Then they chase each other around the house, yelling, until I get up, turn off the TV, and send them to their rooms.

Better luck next week

All my blog posts this week have been pathetic, I admit it. I'm just barely scraping by, and by the time I get the kids in bed and start thinking, "Darn it, I've got to put something on the blog before I go collapse into bed," I'm pretty close to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to energy and creativity. Tonight is, sadly, no exception. Hopefully I will be feeling better by Monday. Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Compulsory post

Sick, with whatever it was the kids had over the weekend: runny nose, headache, low fever, muscle aches. No wonder they were so whiny. :P

Equal time

And, just so Eric doesn't feel left out, here's a picture of him sleeping on his Pillow Pet.

Back to life, back to reality

You can tell the kids are better because they're back to fighting and bickering with each other all day. Once again, our walls ring with "Stop touching me!," "Stop following me!," and "Stop looking at me!" How long before they're sick again? ;)

(Faith asleep on the floor, in quieter, sicker days)

Dr. Mom

Kids are still sick, and now my throat's getting scratchy. Had to go to the store for more cold medicine Sunday night, so I went ahead and did the weekly grocery shopping I'd usually do today then, which was a nice stress-reliever on what's usually a hectic day. Personally, I don't think the cold medicine does a thing about their symptoms, but one can't discount the placebo effect. You tell a whiny, sick child, "Come take your medicine and you'll feel better," and they generally quiet down way before anything beyond grape flavoring can get into their bloodstream.

Tommy used to laugh at me when Faith was little because any time she stubbed her toe, scraped her knee, had a tummy ache, or any other complaint, I would tell her to go lie down on the couch and drink some cold water and she'd feel better. He protested that it couldn't possibly make her feel better, and I would counter that it certainly wouldn't make her feel worse. If she thought she would feel better, she generally would feel better after a while -- especially since there wasn't really anything wrong with her in the first place. It's magic!

Missed it by THAT much

Missed midnight, but I'm not in bed yet so I can still interpret it as "today." Both kids are sick with a fever, runny nose & cough. Cleaned the garage today (we take everything out once a year and have to justify putting it back in vs. getting rid of it) and did our taxes tonight. Fun, fun!

Gharials!

Here's the gharials we watched at the zoo! I forgot I took a picture of them. Our zoo used only to have a pair of them, but since they opened the new herpetarium, they've gotten two more females from the San Diego Zoo. That's a soft-shell turtle underneath the male gharial. We watched them too and timed how long they could go before coming up for another breath of air: approximately 30 minutes. They'd go up, stick their noses above the water, then go back to the bottom and rebury themselves in the sand.

Zoo school again

Saturday was the second session of zoo school this year. Eric made the handprint elephant above, which is very clever (thumb as truck, fingers as legs, palm as head and ear).

Despite the later date, this weekend was much colder than the February session. Instead of wandering the zoo, Tommy and I took refuge in the cafe and watched gharials and water turtles swimming through the plate glass window. I took a stack of magazines and managed to skim through 4 of them, plus the day's newspaper, before the kids' classes were over. I'd like to say I'm making progress through my stack (and, well, I guess technically I am, at least in the sense that I'm not falling further behind), but the stack is not getting any less stack-y. In the meantime, of course, I keep seeing books I want to read, so my to-be-read shelf has expanded to two shelves now.

Birthday girl

In honor of my birthday, I hereby give myself the day off from blogging. ;)

Synergy?

I mentioned that Eric has been reading The Big Honey Hunt and Faith is in Little House in the Big Woods. I read through the Berenstain Bears book with Eric three days in a row before I picked up the Little House book to flip through while Faith told me about the chapter "Summertime." I noticed something very familiar about one of the illustrations.

Here is the picture of the bee tree from The Big Honey Hunt:

And here is a picture of a bear eating honey from a bee tree in Little House in the Big Woods:

I have never actually seen bees living in a hollow tree, so I guess it's possible that bee trees generally look this much alike. But I can't help but wonder if the Berenstains, writing and illustrating in 1962, were influenced by Garth Williams's illustrations for the Little House series, circa 1953.

What's wrong with the world?

from "Rebel of the Public Square: Neuhaus the Writer" by Benjamin Domenech in The City Spring 2009 issue:

"...when asked by The Times to write an essay on the theme 'What's Wrong With the World?', the infamously loquacious Chesterton's response was a letter reading in its entirety:

Dear Sirs,

I am.

Sincerely yours,

G.K. Chesterton"

"Math class is hard." -- Barbie

(Seriously, would anyone even remember Voice Chip Barbie said that twenty years ago if people hadn't raised such a ruckus about it being anti-feminist? Thanks to the news stories and protests and threats of boycotts, I will go to my grave knowing that Barbie once thought math class was hard rather than letting the doll fall into the nameless morass of theme Barbies with Golden Dreams Barbie, Peaches n' Cream Barbie, Sun-Lovin' Malibu Barbie, and the rest.)

Thursday is math day at our house, and I have to admit we're making some progress. (I used to think math would kill the both of us, but now I think grammar might.) Faith can go through her addition & subtraction fact flashcards only missing two or three, and she knows how to carry and borrow from the upper places. She has a Barbie-worthy block, however, with money. I keep telling her that money is just numbers that you add and subtract like any other numbers, but she keeps convincing herself that 'money is hard,' which dissuades her from approaching it with enough confindence.

Eric, on the other hand, loves his math workbook, a fact which I attribute not to gender differences but to the fact that he's still at the crayon-intensive stage of math, where he's coloring the kites yellow because there are three of them and only two yo-yos so it's the larger group.

What we're reading now

It's notable only because it took all day to get Eric through The Big Honey Hunt. I let them dawdle too much this morning, and he was already a little tired when we started on it. When he's tired, he's truculent, and when he's truculent, he glances at a word, seizes on a few key letters, and then tries to guess what it is instead of actually reading it. Sloppy guesswork is one of the quickest ways to try my patience; by the time he'd read "are" for "ate," "log" for "lot," and "start" for "store," we were only on page 2, and he was crying.

When I was teaching Faith to read and she got upset and crying, I would send her to her room until she could calm down. She could never stand being off by herself and would quiet down and come out to try again pretty quickly. That doesn't work with Eric. When I would send him to his room, he would just start playing with toys and happily stay in there, so when he starts crying during a lesson, I make him stay on the couch until he calms down. Of course, crying plus couch plus already tired equalled him crying himself to sleep and napping most of the afternoon away. When he finally woke up, we still had The Big Honey Hunt to master. Usually, when we read a new book, he has to read it twice through, but both of our patience was shot long before the last page. He'll have to read it twice tomorrow and the next day, but hopefully it won't be as daunting as his first time through cold.

Faith is reading Little House in the Big Woods to tie in nicely with her American history on the pioneers and westward expansion. As for me, my pile of magazines is growing again. My problem is that my dad sends all his magazines up the street to me when he's done with them. He's retired and has nothing to do all day so is starved for reading material; me, I feel like I have to at least skim through anything that comes in the house, even though I don't have the time for it and barely make it through the newspaper. (Some days I don't; last weekend, I ended up reading 4 days' news at once.) I ought to just segregate the stuff he sends for a while and see if I could keep up reading only the magazines I subscribe to. Well, I might not keep up exactly, but I'll bet I wouldn't keep falling farther behind.

What daily blogging has taught me

So, after two months of blogging every weekday, I've learned mostly that my life needs to get a lot more interesting to keep up this kind of pace. If it weren't for my backlog of unblogged events from 2010, I'd be scraping closer to the bottom of the barrel than I am already. Assuming I survive this year without any significant backsliding, I'm definitely going to have to downgrade my commitment to two to three times a week for 2012.

Also, that I need to take advantage of time I can grab on weekends to pre-blog. Cheating? Maybe. But without it, you end up with a lot more instances of a random photo of the kids or lame paragraph stuck up at 11:45 PM. I actually do jot down ideas for blogs ahead of time, but unless I go ahead and type up at least a paragraph or two, all my keen ideas never get used because I'm too tired to write them up when I suddenly realize as I'm about to go to bed that I haven't blogged yet today.

Comments. Commenters are great. They let you know that there's someone out there reading all this stuff on occasion and hold you accountable when you think that maybe no one will notice if you fall behind for a week. That's mostly Becky, which is fitting since her blog is the one that convinced me to give this a try in the first place. Thanks, Beck! The rest of you (if there are any more of you), leave a comment sometime! Keeps me honest.