Learn from the Past, Live in the Present, Prepare for the Future

Some days I long for the time when I no longer get puked on, peed on, pooped on, drooled on or snotted on. That Shangri-La-like future when no one head-butts me by accident or tries to climb me as if I am a human-shaped ladder or piece of playground equipment. The golden days when the only daily hygiene tasks I perform are my own. The moment of zen no one insists on joining me in the bathroom. The tender moment when I no longer get fishhooked while trying to snuggle. The relaxing mealtime when no one, upon deciding they do not, after all, like the food they are eating, removes the partially-masticated mass from their mouth with their fingers and expects me to take it in mine to relieve them of it. Right. Now. When I am not expected to lift or carry anyone on a routine basis. When no one needs me to wipe anything. When I finally feel like my whole life no longer smells like shit, and I mean actual shit, not a metaphor for anything.*

But the day will come when I can't lift or carry them. When no one will let me pick out their clothes. No one will want me to hold them on my lap in the rocking chair and sing to them before bed. At some point not only will they not need me to help them with grooming, they won't ask my permission -- or even my opinion -- before getting a haircut (or tattoo or piercing). So when parenting gets rough, I try to think of the coming days as an incentive to cherish the ones I have now.

My own dad has a philosophy about parenting: that it reflects the relationships in the business sector. When your kids are babies, you're a line worker. You're on the factory floor every day. You're so essential, the place couldn't run without you. If you don't do it, it doesn't get done.

When they get a little older, you're more of a foreman. You provide direct supervision, but they do most of the actual work themselves. You set up the framework or system for what needs done, but your kids take care of it on their own.

Then, as teenagers, you eventually become upper management. Oh, you still call the shots, but if you're good at your job you don't micromanage or concern yourself with minutiae. If you've fulfilled your role well, then they will do the same.

Finally, when your kids are adults, you become a consultant. They only call you in on special projects when they want your expertise. They may listen to your advice, but ultimately the decisions they make and the lives they lead are their own.

There are ways to keep your children dependent on you for longer than necessary, but frankly, that's not the kind of mother, or person, that I am. My sister-in-law picked out the clothes my nephew wore each day until he was well into high school. By contrast, by the time I was in high school, I was doing all my own laundry. (By choice. My single dad, who I lived with, had seriously f-ed up a couple of my things and was forbidden to wash anything of mine after that.) I guess I was just raised that, once you can do for yourself, you do it. That independence is a virtue unto itself.

I'm aware that before I know it, I'll be less of a necessity and more of an accessory in their lives. I know it's true, though right now it's hard to believe, that I won't be mired here in wiping hell, feeling constantly distracted and running behind, forever. So for now, I'm trying to learn to relax and enjoy my time on the floor.


*Actually, it would be a simile, right? Using like or as to compare something?

Couldn't See the Forest For the Trees

I've mentioned before that we live in the woods. Our house is remote, in the sense that it's difficult to get to (our driveway is half a mile long, steep and unpaved; UPS won't attempt it) and very secluded (we have no curtains or window coverings in any rooms except the kids, and there only because they nap and go to bed before dark half the year; we don't need window coverings because no one can see our house).


But it's also not remote (what the hell is the antonym to "remote?" for Pete's sake?), in the sense that we are minutes from a grocery store, from a nearby highway, from "town," and not even that far from a mall. I drive only half an hour to work. The Hubster, less than ten minutes.

So we have a great balance between rural and suburban (I won't go so far as to say urban, although I can get to urban in under an hour). We're remote enough that people are surprised to find that we don't have a septic tank or a well, but we are just connected enough that we don't have a septic tank or a well.* (In fact, the only public utilities that we are too far removed to get are cable and non-wireless broadband.) I like to call it the best of both worlds.

My point -- and I do have one -- is that this summer we've been trying to carve just a little more civilization out of our woods. We've been in this house just over five years, but haven't been able to really garden, or do any landscaping, or much outside at all, because our acreage has been, from my inexpert calculations, 98.666666666666667% wooded. However, a couple of weeks ago we (finally) paid an excavator to clear about an acre of the woods close to the house, so we are now only -- again, I'm not a math teacher -- about 93.33333333333333% wooded. But that, as Robert Frost said in one of my all-time favorite poems, has made all the difference.

Anyway, my sub-point here is that the past few weeks I've been busy dealing with a) mud, b) dirt, c) sticks, d) branches, e) felled trees, f) other organic debris, and g) yard work (like roto-tilling, grading, raking, seeding, watering, etc, etc.)**, which has resulted in h) lots of beer drinking after dark and i) being too bloody j) busy or k) tired to post.


* We don't have septic or a well because of the crazee people that built our house, spared no expense, and then lived here only two short years before they sold it to us. Maybe someday I'll tell you more about that wackiness.
**And ohsweetmotherofarnold we have about two more years of this to do.

We now return to our regularly scheduled program

I've needed to get back to a workout routine since, ah, the baby was born, but I've been finding it difficult. It shouldn't be. We have a gym in our house. On our lower floor is what what was probably meant as a bedroom, but one tucked far away from all the other daily living and sleeping spaces in the house. With the full bathroom across the hall, it may have been intended by the builder to be a guest space, but because it's next to the basement, we decided to convert it to our gym. We have a lot of equipment that in our old house was in the unfinished basement, a dark, damp and loveless space that we were looking forward to escaping. So when we moved into this house, we repainted that secluded room, replaced the carpeting with a rubber floor and installed our treadmill, free weights (power rack, lat machine, seated calf raise, dumbbell and plate racks) and the rest of our accessories. Best of all, we hung a television and DVD player on the wall, in clear view of the treadmill.*

Originally, the free weights were mine (go figure) and the treadmill was the Hubster's, but as it's hard to mountain bike during bad weather or with a child, I eventually came around to the idea that running was great cardio. Plus, it gave me the chance to watch DVDs of television series I loved, something I would normally not take the time to sit down and do (although I own quite a few series). A few years ago, after running through the seasons of Northern Exposure**, I started on Firefly. I was a die hard Joss Whedon fan, but for some reason had never caught more than 15 minutes of it while it was on the air (add me to one of the many people to blame for the show's cancellation). As I watched an episode per run, I fell head over heels in love with the series, but after only half of its single season, I stopped running and working out due to my pregnancy quest and fertility meds. So I also stopped watching Firefly as an inducement to get me back to the gym as soon as possible.

Two years later, I'm back.


When I started running again a few weeks ago, I pulled out my old running journal (the ubiquitous steno pad) and noticed that, other than one 30-minute session of walking last summer, it had been a bloody long time since I'd run at all. It had been so long I had to re-learn how to program the treadmill. And there were more obstacles to a successful workout than just that.


Seriously, the Hubster has been running amidst this? I told him that this was further proof that men do not care about aesthetics and without women they would all live in houses with plywood floors, unpainted drywall and lawn furniture. His response? "That's not true. I'm not the one who started using the gym as a storage space for a Christmas tree and all those other decorations and shit."

I couldn't bear maneuvering around that, but I want to be back in my usual sized clothing by summer's end, so I cleaned up. Then I started lifting and running again. Adding insult to injury is that when our treadmill is turned on, it has a question for you.

1 from Negative Lane on Vimeo.

It's been a couple of weeks now. I've finally finished Firefly. I think I like it better than Buffy, Angel, Dr. Horrible or Dollhouse. And I love those a lot. Also, the Hubster bought me Serenity on BluRay as part of my anniversary gift (which I made him watch already, even though he hasn't watched the series). My review? Wow.

It's good to be back. But with Firefly finished, what TV series should I watch next? I can rent just about anything from Netflix, but it's got to be something fast paced and compelling enough to hold my attention. I also like one hour shows best, because I usually run from 40 minutes to an hour, depending on my program that week. Any suggestions?



*Disclaimer: I absolutely do not watch TV when I lift, because lifting requires me to pay more attention to what I'm doing. If I don't stay focused, it's a crappy workout. But while running, focusing on TV helps get me in the zone (as lame as that expression is) and since I can program my treadmill, it does all the thinking for me.
**The greatest television show that ever was. Seriously.

Grammar Police

I do not pretend to have perfect grammar or even an unusually superior command of the English language. (After all, I am the History Goddess, not the English/Language Arts Goddess). I am guilty of grammatical misdeeds myself, to be certain. Two big ones that came up while I was writing my graduate thesis: I like to start sentences with "But" and "And" and I have a serious comma fetish. (Come on, what sentence couldn't use a few more commas?) Also, I've been know to end a sentence or a thousand with a preposition (pure laziness, I admit). So what follows may be a little hypocritical, but it's my Rant of the Week nonetheless.

I've seen this dozens of places in the past year and I just can't take it any longer. This has entered my top five grammatical pets peeves, rounding out the list that includes what I like to call the "errant apostrophe" (the various misuses of its/it's and your/you're), superfluous quotation marks*, people who use the noun bath as a verb**, and saying "all intensive purposes" instead of "all intents and purposes."

My newest hatin'? "Phased." As in, "I wasn't phased when my mother told me she was really an alien sent to Earth to learn human customs." It's fazed, people. You weren't not phased (carried out systematically), you were not fazed ("disturbed or disconcerted").***

F.A.Z.E.D.

Thank you.

Free Tip of the Day: People who write should, first and foremost, read. It's the single best way to improve your grammar and vocabulary. Read. A lot. Read anything, but, please, not just blogs. Read books and published things that have been edited.



*Quotation marks do not signify emphasis, people. Underline, bold and italics serve those purposes. There are a variety of correct uses, but none apply to being used on the word "sale" on an advertisement for your store. (However, they are correct when used on the word "sale" in this sentence and the previous one, as I am referring to the word itself. )
**The verb form is bathe.
***Disclaimer: The grammar in this sentence? Not sure.

Food for Thought

From Pundit Kitchen.

School's Out

It's the first day of summer break, the start of eleven weeks off from school. Since teachers sometimes get grief about having summers "off," I thought I'd make a list of all the things I have to accomplish in the next eleven weeks:

Medical Appointments:

• Doctor's appointment for me to get back on my usual prescriptions (asthma, allergies, etc) that I stop while pregnant/breastfeeding
• Goose's one year check-up
• Dentist appointment for me
• Dentist appointment for Monk (first time)
• Eye doctor for me: I need new glasses and contacts (last ones are pre-Monk in age)
  
• Find a new allergy doctor for me, since my last one moved his practice (to the beach!) just as I got pregnant with Monk
• Possibly take the kids to the allergy doctor, too, since I'm seeing some signs of allergies
  
• Vet appointments for all the critters at my house (five)
  

Other Appointments:

• Have house appraised as part of refinancing our mortgage
  
• Make arrangements for the satellite TV guy to come; we need some upgrades on equipment, including another DVR (one for the master bedroom; the living room one is filled with every Jack's Big Music Show episode, as well as a smattering of just about every other worthwhile children's TV shows)
• Find an exterminator. (Live in the woods and you get bugs, people. Lots and lots of bugs. Bugs of all kinds, some merely creepy but others that can do actual damage to your property.)
• Have excavators come to give estimates on clearing and leveling some of the woods next to the house, so we can build a shed/outbuilding of some kind and also a playset for the kids
  

Trips:

• No, I'm not going to BlogHer this year. Bah.
• I do have a conference in Washington, D.C. for history teachers, though. That should be fun in my "talk nerdy to me" way.
  
• We are taking a vacation this year, yay! Friends of ours (who we often do weekends away with) asked us to go to the beach with their family for a week.
  
• We're also planning on starting to do some camping again, including hosting a kids' campout for all our friends in our own woods.
  

Miscellaneous activities that I don't have time or energy for during the school year:

• Work out/run/bike. (Still need to lose 11 pregnancy pounds.)
  
• Gymnastics classes for Monk. He took some last fall which he loved, but even making it there once a week almost proved to much for me at the time, baby and all.
  
• Photography class
  
• Photoshop class or seminar, possibly
  
• Post-production work on about 3,000 photos I've taken since Christmas
  
• Yard work: vegetable garden, general landscaping, clearing brush, cutting grass, ugh...
  
• House cleaning: The whole house, basement to attic
  
• Organizing: The whole house, basement to attic
  
• Take sixty bagillion garbage bags and boxes of stuff to goodwill
• Visit or have lunch with friends I never get to see
  
• Shop for clothes; everything I own is either a) too big, b) too small, c) too out of fashion, or d) threadbare from not falling into category a, b or c and being overused. (I've hardly bought anything in the past four years other than maternity clothes)
  
• Car maintenance, repair & cleaning (the Cheerios alone in my car would make a man weep)
  
• Take just about everything to the dry cleaners, in stages so it doesn't bankrupt me
  
• Shop for school stuff I need for next year
  
• Plan lessons for next school year

In between all this, I will spend a lot of time with my kids. They still go to daycare two days a week so that I can accomplish all that stuff, but also for socialization and swimming lessons.

Teachers don't get vacation days to take throughout the school year. Other than summer, we can't take days off during the week (other than sick days and three personal days for the whole year that we have to save for funerals or other emergencies). That means everything else that people in the private sector easily take a few hours or a half day to accomplish, we save up to do in the summer. I'm already booked nearly solid between tomorrow (first doctor's appointment) and the first day of school in mid-August.

Now THIS is poetic:

Getting my period on my son's first birthday. Surprise! Gah.

Happy Birthday, Goose!

This morning, during Goose's now-only-once-a-day morning nursing session, he bit me. Hard. Twice. It's almost as if he knows that tomorrow, the milk bar closes for good. Poetic, no?

A year later and I still haven't written his birth story. I do intend to write it, it's just that I have no bloody idea what happened to my notes. The detailed notes we made sure to take so I wouldn't have to try to remember all the tiny details. So I didn't try to remember all the tiny details. And I don't remember all the tiny details. I know the notes are somewhere in the house, but when we packed stuff for storage and moved other things around in the creation of Goose's nursery, the steno pad they were on got packed away. It would be easy to find if steno pads weren't my medium of choice for every list and note I write. So, somewhere among the 27,000 partially used steno pads in my house, are Goose's birth notes. I am just. that. organized.

In lieu of an exciting, but woefully overdue, birth story or really any other relevant update, I'll just post a couple of photos -- you know: blog baby bling -- I took last week of the boys in the woods around our house.


(Cherish the pics of my kids as the rare things they are, 'cause you never know when they might disappear!)