A Day in the Life

I am starting to think that November might be my favorite month of the year.  All these folks who I love, even though I have never met most of them in person, start to write again after long hiatuses.  It has been a long time since I have woken up and checked my bloglines before the coffee had finished brewing, but I have a good solid chunk of catching up on people’s lives to do.

Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand why most of my bloggy cohort doesn’t post much anymore.  Hey, I am a total blogging slacker.  It seems somewhat wrong to blog about the lives of a five year old and a seven year old the way I blogged about a six month old and an two year old.  And, honestly, my life has gotten filled with other things that eat up the majority of my navel-gazing time.

But still, I love November, and hearing from all my favorite peeps.

PS: Did you hear that Gina had her baby???

I have to send you off to read two posts, one by Kate of One Tired Ema and one by Jody from Raising WEG.  They both relate to my post today.  And yes, it is a rather self-indulgent post, and yes, I know I am lucky to have such problems.

We are spending the weekend in New York, C LOVES the symphony, and so I finally got my act together last year and bought some tickets to the Young Person’s Concerts.  I had meant to do it the year before, but had forgotten the cardinal rule of ticket buying in New York, if it involved bettering your child you had better buy the very first second tickets go on sale.  The concert itself was a bit disappointing from a grownup perspective, there was a LOT of talking and explaining and very little actual music playing.  C would have preferred more music as well, but he was still thrilled beyond belief to actually see the inside of Avery Fisher Hall after listening to broadcasts from there weekly for the last few years.

Coming into the city since we moved to the burbs has always made me sad, as every time I come back I get desperate to stay.  I miss the ability to walk out my door and have my choice of places to eat, things to see, people to watch.  I miss having exercise automatically built into my day thanks to all the walking city life demands.  I miss being able to run to the fruit stand on the corner for more bananas.  As a result of my disinterest in opening old wounds, I generally don’t suggest we venture in for any reason.

But?  Almost seven years after the fact?  I think I have finally adjusted to suburban life.  I came in, was happy to see the symphony, am looking forward to showing the kids Central Park, and will be just as happy to return home to my house and my real life.  I think part of it is that seven years later, pretty much everything familiar has changed.  The restaurants I used to eat at are all closed.  The last of my friends have left the city, and now that the kids are old enough that we would actually have to deal with the whole schooling issue, I find myself rather uninterested in shelling out $30,000 for a kindergarten education.

So, come Sunday afternoon I will happily head back to my suburban life, with very little interest in spending the next several weeks trolling NYC real estate listings.  I will not, however, happily head back to the every day grind of making the lunches, cleaning the house, doing the laundry, or trying to keep the chaos in control.  I was sure, absolutely sure that once both kids were in school for more than two hours a day, all of the drudgery would miraculous get easier.  “I will have time to  cook, clean, work out AND read!” I would think to myself all summer as I shlepped the kids to and from the pool, the park, the playdates.

Well, it is fall now, and I have made it to the gym exactly once.  In two months.  The house is still constantly in need of a good scrub, my cooking generally consists of dumping something in the crockpot or re-heating a not-so-yummy something from Trader Joe’s, and I haven’t read a book cover to cover since this summer.  I find myself saying things like “Well, NEXT year, when they are both at the same school….” but really?  That will buy me another hour, tops.  Of course it doesn’t help that I filled my schedule with various and sundry volunteer activities.  As my sister pointed out, I really have no one to blame but myself on that front.

So yes, while I am not at all interested in returning to my city life, my suburban life is not exactly anything to write home about.  One of these days I will figure this all out, maybe?

I seem to have developed a phobia to casting-on.  I spend hours drooling over patterns on Ravelry, printing them out and filing them neatly in my pattern binder.  I have a closet full of yarn and needles, yet I can’t remember the last time I actually cast on.  I’m not quite sure how the phobia developed, perhaps it was when I had to cast on 400 stitches THREE TIMES when I couldn’t quite figure out the first few rows of a pattern?  Perhaps it was when I realized I hadn’t finished a project since August sometime?  Regardless, there is no knitting happening right now, only drooling.  And yet, the majority of my holiday gifts (only 48 days left, OMG) involve knitting.  Clearly I need to get my tush in gear.  Or, head to the mall.

Any ideas how to overcome my phobia?  Perhaps a simple garter stitch something?

All this week C has half days of school while A has full ones, so he is taking the opportunity to have friends over as much as possible to take advantage of his sister-free state.  Today he and his friend did a play for me, Harvey Cantor and the Sorcerer’s Lizard, which involved dueling with (unsharpened) pencils and a riddle contest.  I had to try and keep a straight face through the entire production, it was just so cute.

The part that amused me the most, however, was watching C and this particular friend interact.  Unlike many of his other frequent guests, this particular child is as happy to compromise as C, and their conversations go something like this:

Friend K: “So I thought we could do it something like this, what do you think?”

C: “Oh!  Great idea!  But how about instead of doing it like that, we do it like this and then that?”

Friend K: “Yeah!  And then we could do xy and z as well!”

C: “YES!”

The final result?  They spent the entire three hours planning and complimenting each other and then scurried about to actual produce a play that bore no resemblance to the hours of discussion ahead of time.  At the end of the day?  “It was the BEST. DAY. EVER.”

Friend K is welcome anytime.  And I am not just saying that because I got three loads of laundry folded while waiting for the production to commence.

• Tis one of my least favorite days, the first day that Daylight Savings is gone.  We were up waaaayyy too early this morning.  Exactly when do you think it isn’t my problem if the kids are up at an unreasonable hour?  I had all intentions of sending off to the TV without me this morning, but by 5:55 they were both in tears, so that plan went out the window.
• If I have any advice for new parents it is “Buy a king-sized bed if you have any interest in letting your child(ren) spend any time snuggling in there.”  Because once they get beyond 3 months or so?  A queen is just. not. big. enough.  Especially if you have tossers and turners.
• Halloween is finally over for another year.  I cannot wait to get the decorations back up to the attic.  A was Dorothy this year, because she wanted the red sparkly Target shoes, and C was Obi Wan Kenobi as he wanted a light-saber so he could duel with his best friend.  We were all about the accessories this year.
• I didn’t clear out of church quickly enough after choir practice one day, and, as a result, found myself choir mom for the year.  Which means that I am going to spend the morning trying to keep 20 K, 1st, and 2nd graders from a) tripping over their robes, b) in some semblance of a line as the process into church and c) quiet in church for way too long a period of time.  This is AFTER they have had who knows how much candy for breakfast.  As while my children have been told that if they even THINK about asking for candy before noon, it will all belong to me, I am sure that many of the parents out there are bribing their children with candy to be quiet this morning.  Gah.
• Next week is a total waste of a school week, three “1/2 days” because of parent/teacher conferences and then two days off for “the teachers convention,”  except I have never actually know a teacher who has gone to said convention.  Coming off of a wasted day because of the Halloween festivities and headed into Thanksgiving week, I sort of feel like they should just throw up their hands and declare November mid-term break or something.  At least then I wouldn’t have to spend the month getting everyone to school on time.
• I am incredibly far behind on my holiday knitting.  I somewhat fear that even if I knit continuously between now and the big day, I still won’t finish everything I have started, and am starting to pick up some “extra” things that could be tasked as teacher gifts if need be.  Anyone have any good ideas for teacher gifts this year?
• I didn’t sign up for NaBloPoMo this year.  But may make a half-hearted effort to slog through the month, if only to distract myself from Farmville, which is an incredibly addictive game with no redeeming benefits what-so-ever.  Well, except for the fact that it can keep C happily occupied for a large chunk of time.  He seems to have inherited my love of mindless activity.  A, on the other hand, feels the need to be productive most of the time.  It will serve her will in life.
• With that, I am off to feed my children and gear up for a fun-filled morning of crowd control.  Wish me luck…

I’ve stated before that I tend to be rather rigid when it comes to my children’s sleep routines.  I’ve progressed (slowly) to the point where I make exceptions (on weekends) for fun events, trips, or parties to their pretty standard 7pm bedtime.  Not that they always fall asleep at 7pm, of course, but by 7pm we are almost always in pajamas, snuggled up reading.  Sometimes, if they are tired, they will be asleep by 7:15, other nights they have been known to read in bed until 8.  Either way works, and they are pretty good about self-regulating their own sleep needs.  People laugh (hard) at me when I say that my 2nd grader goes to bed a 7, but the child then sleeps until 7:30, 7:45 most days.  He clearly needs the sleep.  And those who know him well can tell INSTANTLY when he is sleep deprived.

Against my better judgment this year, I signed C up for an activity at the library once a week that runs until 8pm.  It starts at 6, and I struck a deal with him that he could go, as long as we were out of the library and back home no later than 7:15, which of course really means 7:30.  And the day after said activity have been rough to date, but manageable, so I have allowed said activity to continue.  And then, last night, I had to be at A’s school at 7pm.  So I requested the assistance of a friend whose child also attends the activity that is scheduled way to late in the day for my taste, and she happily agreed to shuttle C home with her son.  Lovely.  Except when I arrived home at 8:20, he had just walked in the door.  And by the time C was asleep, it was TWO HOURS after his bedtime.

I didn’t freak out, much.  I shrugged and said “We will recover from this.  LOTS of 2nd graders go to bed at 9pm, this is SO not a big deal, it will prove me wrong once and for all and we will move on from my obsession with bedtimes.”  I patted myself on the back and declared myself cured.  At 8:10 this morning, I dragged C out of bed, threw clothes on him and handed him an English muffin, banana, and cheese slice to eat in the car on the five minute drive to school.  He cried from the moment I woke him up to the moment I dropped him off.  I happily went about my day, proud that I had finally overcome my fear of an altered bedtime schedule and confident that he would arrive home and prove that we had finally moved to a happy bedtime place.  I picked him up from school at 3pm and arrived home five minutes later to find a message from his teacher requesting a call back.  At which point in time she informed me that C had spent an hour and a half staring at a piece of paper instead of writing five sentences about his favorite sandwich, and then burst into tears and had to be sent to the nurse to calm down.

While I was conferencing with the teacher via phone, C was curled up on the couch crying again and begging to go to bed.  Which couldn’t happen because, hello, he needed to do his homework, plus the extra work assigned by the teacher to try and address the issue of his apparently lack of interest in completing his schoolwork in a timely manner.  Three hours later, I threw up my hands, sent C to bed, poured myself a hefty glass of wine and sent a lovely email to the mothers of C’s friends announcing that our evenings at the library were over.

My GOD, when does it get easier?  And do ya suppose I will ever live down my reputation as a bedtime fanatic?

• School started.  And we made it through the first day without a phone call from the school nurse, a new milestone! Yippee!
• I did, however, receive a call from C’s teacher after school; apparently he spent a portion of the afternoon in tears.  Sigh.
• On the upside, after the first day he has managed to hold it together until we get to the car before he bursts into tears.  Again, progress.
• A, on the other hand, has taken to full-day school like a champ, and her only complaint so far is that the teacher has not yet taught her to read.  In fact: “She hasn’t even TRIED, Mommy!”
• I was indeed correct, C ADORES his young, hip teacher.  The one who did. his classwork. for him.  Because he was too busy chatting to get it done in a timely manner and she wanted to catch him up to the rest of the class.  I do believe that Mrs. Fun and Hip and I will need to have a chat about my son’s strengths and weaknesses sooner rather than later.  Because really?  What he needs to learn in second grade is to do. his. work. when asked to do so rather when it is convenient to him.
• Today was our initiation in the the hell that is weekend sports, C had baseball from 11-1, A had soccer from 2-3 and then gymnastics from 5-6:30.  Thankfully, baseball was canceled due to the rain, so we were eased into things a bit.
• I kept telling M that this was only the beginning, in the spring we will apparently be adding lacrosse and softball into the mix.  Who ARE these children?  Clearly not mine as my sporting activities were limited to those forced upon me by my respective schools.
• I have been knitting, knitting, knitting, yet I can’t seem to finish a project.  As soon as I reach a point where I need to pay attention to a pattern, I find myself moving on to another project.  One of these days I need to buckle down and finish something before I forget where I am on all these unfinished projects and they languish in my bag forever.

Back to menu planning.  For real.  I pinky swear…

Saturday – Pulled Pork Sandwiches

Sunday – Baked Ziti

Monday – Roast Chicken

Tuesday – Kale, Sweet Potato, and White Bean Soup

Wednesday – Leftovers

Thursday – Homemade Pizza

Friday – Take out

• We are back from Maine.
• It was possibly the best. summer. ever.  Right up until the point that we left Maine.
• I am fairly confident that we will be spending every moment possible in Maine next summer.  Because the hanging around NJ without: a) a beach a block away b) friends to play on said beach c) the ability to walk/bike to ice cream/pizza/lollipops/playground/tennis has gotten really old really quickly.
• C finally got his class assignment for 2nd grade.  He is thrilled, I am less so.  Yet again, he got the young, fun teacher.  I love my son dearly, but he does not need the young, fun teacher.  He needs the mean one.  Plus, they placed him with his best friend.  Which means that he is going to spend yet another school year chatting away during class time instead of actually trying to learn something.
• On the upside, he is convinced that school is the best. thing. ever.
• A starts full-day kindergarten next week.  How can that be possible?
• I’ll be back next week, maybe.

As of 9am tomorrow, I am (hopefully) on my fourth trip to New England in as many months.  The car is not yet packed, I have misplaced about half of the VERY IMPORTANT THINGS that MUST COME WITH US, and both children are still wide awake, anticipating the joy that is three weeks at the beach surrounded by adoring aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins.  Please God, let us make it there safely, and if you are feeling overly generous, please make it stop raining.

I will post a picture of the packed car at some point, as let me tell you, it ain’t pretty.  There is a 50/50 chance that the bag of library books isn’t making it.  At least my mother has agreed that perhaps a library card might be in order, given the fact that C is devoring two to three books a day.  Next on the list to be cut?  Art projects.  Because I am sure that there is somplace in Maine where on can buy art supplies.

What is not exiting the car?  My yarn stash.  Not that I am taking all of it mind you, but last summer I finished two sweaters in two weeks.  This year I am taking along enough yarn for one pair of socks, two hats, one pair of mittens, and one stuffed mermaid.  I am hoping that it is sunny, so I won’t actually run through all of that in three weeks.  If I do, I may just have to make an emergency trip to a LYS in Maine.  Rough, I know.

Now I am off to bed, as I am sure that an eight+ hour drive with two small children requires a solid eight hours of rest.  At least we have the Muppet Show on DVD to keep us entertained…