School's Out for Summer

When we're not busy with swimming lessons, being fun-mommy-for-the-summer and singing Alice Cooper lyrics, maybe we'll blog.  

Maybe.  Keep coming by, though, and we'll do our best.  

Uhhh, and the Prefix "Pre" Means What?

(or, from the "no comment" department:)

Preschool Readiness

Prepare your preschooler for the upcoming year.  After an exciting summer, this class is a fun yet structured way to insure that your child transitions to his/her preschool environment with ease.  This class will use a variety of school-related activities such as circle time, music and movement, and arts and crafts to help your child prepare for the structure and demands of preschool.  Skills addressed will include appropriate classroom behavior, attention, fine motor skill development and peer interaction.  Get your preschooler geared up for the upcoming year by teaching him/her the necessary skills for preschool success!

Ages 2.5 - early 4

Price - 240$ per child

My Transformation into a Pod Person is Now Complete

One of the great sadnesses in Elder Girleen's life, in fact, her largest cross to bear, is that we possess neither a satellite dish or cable TV, which means we don't get the Disney Channel.  Since we don't have the Disney Channel, she can't watch Hannah Montana.  Two years ago I'd never even heard of Hannah Montana, and I'm still not entirely clear on all the details, but I think you can watch Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel.  I'm not sure. 

Hannah Montana is often mentioned in the same breath as High School Musical, but Elder Girleen tells me they are different phenomena.  I know that my ignorance in these matters is about the same as if, thirty years ago, my own mother had turned to me and asked if the B-52s and Devo were the same band. While she put air quotes around the word band,  so that I'd know that she considered what I was listening to music only in the loosest sense of the word.  

Actually it's not exactly the same, because I cared about this sort of thing when I was thirteen, and Elder Girleen is... six.  

But Hannah Montana is the bomb, as anybody reading this already knows.  At Elder Girleen's elementary school, which — multicultural, scruffy, arty —can sometimes resemble the school in the movie Fame, kids are welcome to sign up to perform at the school-wide Morning Meeting after announcements and the Pledge of Allegiance (after their offering has been vetted by the principal, of course), and about a week ago, Elder Girleen came home and announced that she and several friends would be performing today and her dad and I had better be there.  

We won't even go into the fact that I have a hard time grasping that my elder daughter, who, as far as I'm concerned, was still in diapers just yesterday, now has an entire social life that I know nothing about.  (They practiced this?  They've arranged for music?  But they can't even feed themselves!)

The main thing is that this morning, Elder Girleen and three friends climbed up on the stage in the auditorium in their school and when they announced that they were going to sing a Hannah Montana song, the entire student body groaned appreciatively with one voice, as if those four six-year-old girls had just gotten up there and announced that they were going to give away free ice cream.  

That's the power of Miley Cyrus.  The librarian took the CD they handed her, found the track they wanted, and away they went.  They'd even made up choreography.  Or maybe they hadn't, maybe they were mimicking choreography one of them saw on the Disney Channel, but since we don't have the Disney Channel, I don't know that, and let me tell you, a choreographed dance is that much more meaningful to a parent if you think your own child came up with the moves.

The song they sang was "This is the Life," which until the moment they opened up their mouths, I would have considered a prime throw-away bit of bubble gum pop. 

The chorus goes like this:

This is the life!  Hold on tight!

And this is the dream

It's all I need!

You never know where you'll find it

And I'm gonna take my time, yeah

I'm still getting it right

This is the life

Elder Girleen stood up on the stage and sang her heart out, and what was pablum magically became profound, at least for about two minutes.  

This is the life.   

Hold on tight.   

 

  

  

Weather Reports: Spring and Siblings

Mid-May.  How did we get here so fast?  The trees to be seen from the curve of the window arabesque-and-reverse in the cold front, or what passes for one this time of year, blown in last night. Newly-leaved; as graceful as girls in spring dresses.  

Mid-May. The blackberries fingering the ditches are laden with knot-like white blossoms.

Mid-May.  A couple of weeks ago I retrieved from the attic and unpacked the box labelled Clothes: Age 3, so that Younger Girleen would have shorts and skirts and sundresses for the summer. Sitting on the floor of her room unfolding them was like thumbing through a photograph album:  oh, the dress Elder Girleen was wearing the night she had her first S'more, that week we spent at the beach...the skirt that arrived in the mail from Godmother M... When Elder Girleen was three, she might as well have been seven:  I had no frame of reference but younger:  three-years-old and she seemed grown-up, enormous.  

At the same age, Younger Girleen is still a baby.  So little!  We carry her around like she's a newborn. Those hand-me-down clothes seem so diminutive, so "cute."*

I was an older sibling myself, and I found my parents' laxness regarding my younger brother such a bitter pill to swallow!  I mean, the first PG movie I got to see in the theatre was The Bad News Bears — I was probably eleven.  My brother, a mere 8 1/2 at the time:  what was the first PG movie he ever saw?  Bad News Bears.  I undertook a careful accounting and the results were clear:  he got to be the baby but at the same exact time he got all the perks that should have gone only to me, being older.  No fair!

 Yesterday, I was putting away clean laundry and discovered a stash, a cache, at the back of Elder Girleen's underwear drawer.  There, carefully tucked at the back, were at least half of the 3T skirts and shirts I'd unpacked for Younger Girleen two weeks ago.  

But these are too little for you, I pointed out to Elder Girleen (secretly impressed by the extent of her subterfuge).

But I LOVE them, she said.  They were my baby clothes.  

I thought of the way teams retire jerseys in commemoration.  They were yours, I agreed and closed the drawer, letting them stay there, an homage to her younger self.    

*I would say that girl's clothes reach the pinnacle of cuteness at size 3T.   

  

Days, of the Motherhood Variety

Sometimes it's easy for me to forget that a blog is a narrative construct as much as any other form of writing that might come down the pike, that it's as shaped and whittled in certain directions as personal essay or short fiction.  To keep a blog may not be art, but it certainly is craft ... and once you start crafting something, you snip and darn and leave things on the cutting room floor.  

But in service of keeping it real, I submit the following "stuff" that's ended up on my cutting room floor lately

• The Husband, having started a new job, now leaves the house at 7 a.m. and returns to it at 7 p.m.  This is not abnormal, this is, in fact, life-and-how-we-live-it for most of America; but I am reeling from our family's new math:  if he sleeps the requisite eight hours, and spends an hour getting ready in the morning, that leaves three hours for him to live the rest of his life in.  And as his home life consists of less, mine consists of more:  more racing kids to schools, more emptying and loading the dishwasher, more errand running, more guilt, more feeling like I seldom converse with anyone over six.  This sounds like kvetching and it is, and wrinkles in the family schedule always iron themselves out, but it's struck me that most people would not consider this "quality time." And this is all the time that most American families have got.  (And our family is blessedly middle-class. Where does that leave single parents, those taking care of aging parents themselves, the blue-collar?)

• Younger Girleen has been laid low by another bout with some sort of toddler ick.

• That means she's napping right now; that also means that she was up at one a.m., three a.m., four a.m., five a.m., and five forty-five a.m.  She went to sleep at 6:20, but by then it was only 25 minutes until Elder Girleen had to get up, so I just gave up.  
• More power to all those folks out there using the internet to figure out how and when to potty-train by the signs:  starting on an auspicious date has given us mishaps just about everywhere you can think of (and if you want to feel sorry for yourself, being on hands and knees cleaning up human feces gives you the perfect venue, let me tell you).
  

In the midst of a week where most of my business ended up on the cutting room floor so to speak, being neither pretty nor finely-crafted nor literary nor interesting (instead it was just Life, warts (or poop) and all,  I took a break for a few minutes and checked a friend's blog, which led me to click a link, which led me to learn about a book called The Mother's Guide to Self-Renewal.

My Mother's Day gift to myself is going to be to look at the downloadable fourth chapter.  And I dunno... if you're down in the trenches scrubbing the floor this week, this might help.  

Sometimes "online" connectivity is like a visit to a really good thrift store:  when you least expect it, you find a shirt that fits you perfect, and it only cost a quarter!

Topics of Pressing Interest

By revealing the following, I may run the risk of alienating my tiny readership so completely that none of you ever visit again — although I suppose if you're still with me by this point, you're probably in this for the long haul — but because this blog is in part about the elevation of trivia to high art, I can't help myself.  

SoI have a confession to make.  The technological wonders of the internet allow me to "see" exactly what search string leads people to end up on my blog.  

Don't worry — who exactly you are, I have no idea, unless you choose to comment.  But if you arrived here by happenstance, by typing words into Google or whatever search engine you favor, I can be privy to those search words.  

The necessary aside at this point would have to be that at least 99.9 of the people who end up visiting this blog because of a google search click away from it in less time that it takes to type this sentence.  

So what is the most burning reference question facing the world today?  It's not "mom sex," though the number of folks with that on their minds would astound you.  

It's potty training by the signs.  

Celebrating the esoteric, one click at a time.  You gotta hand it to the innernets.

One for the Mommy Olympics, or: Too Much Information

It's a parenting truism to say that every and each child in the world is unique, but it's a truism along the lines of people saying "wow, you're life is really going to change," when your bulging belly first begins to reveal that you are pregnant with your first child.  Simple statements both,right?  No — they contain worlds  of complexity.  You think your world's going to change?  You can't even imagine.  No child is like any other?  Why do you think in generations past unskilled, less patient parents than we are sometimes resorted to telling their offspring:  you're no child of mine? 

Elder Girleen and Younger Girleen bear a family resemblance to each other both emotionally and physically, but in a lot of ways they're as different as night and day, and discovering these differences has been a joyful part of the parenthood journey.  When Elder Girleen gets stressed, she gets revv'd up.  When Younger Girleen gets stressed, she falls asleep.  See?  Every child is different.  

But before Younger Girleen's arrival in our lives, my main experience with dealing with the after effects of certain sorts of stomach-related accidents consisted only of owning a cat prone to hairballs.  There's probably a nicer way to put this, but I can't think of it right now:  Younger Girleen is affectionately known around our house as "Our Little Puker." Vomit down the cleavage is a necessary part of motherhood, and I'm happy to say it's not as scarring as you might think.

On Thursday, as sort of a cherry on top of a sundae of a tough week,   Younger Girleen started throwing up all over the back seat of my car while we were stuck in what seemed at the time to be THE WORST ATLANTA TRAFFIC EVER.  We inched forward, she puked, we inched forward, she puked.

The car is her favorite place to engage in this behavior, and first time it ever happened the mopping-up operations almost broke me.  The car seat, the buckles, the sister's car seat, the back of the front seat, the mother, the child!  All over the only new car (now no longer new) I will probably ever own in my life!  And then, the ordeal of putting the car seat cover and buckles back into the car seat frame once they were clean.  It took me almost an hour.  

I realize I've just told you more than you ever had any interest in knowing about my life.  I may have just relegated Younger Girleen to years  of therapy on down the road.  But to who else can I broadcast my pride over the mastery of a new skill but you?

I pulled off the road, stripped a three-year-old, wiped and redressed her with aplomb.  And just now, I put the complication of a Britax car seat cover and its parachute-like array of buckles back together in about 2 minutes tops.  And as I did so, I wondered why did this ever seem hard?  

The feeling of satisfaction was kin to the sort you have when you realize your exercise regimen has taken you from walking one mile to running five.  Or from lifting hand-weights to benchpressing ... whatever... amount.  

I may not be able to benchpress my body weight but I'm a dab hand at the messy side of motherhood, and that must be good for something, right?