Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

But what about my kid?

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You’ve seen it and you hate it. You swear you’re never going to do it. When you get right down to it though, you can’t help yourself.

You always compare your kids against the other ones.

The other day we visited my sister and her kids, and they gave me a birthday present for Simon. (He’s a year! An entire year! How did that happen?) The card was signed with the cousins’ names, and Madeline, the almost-4-year-old, had written the names. An ungainly, wobbly scrawl, but legible.

Sophia’s written a couple of letters on her own, but mostly by accident, I think. I told myself, she doesn’t need to write yet. But still…I got a little flicker of “Does this mean anything?” down in my stomach.

Then today we ran into a mom and a 3.5 year old in the park, and the two girls played together some with Simon while I talked to the mom. (Another adult. Whoo hoo.) I asked her about her daughter’s preschool and she told me how impressed she was with them: her daughter could count up to 13, she knew all her shapes and colors, and she knew most of her letters, although sometimes she didn’t recognize one…

Ha! I thought. Sophia counts up to twenty all the time and she’s doing rudimentary addition and subtraction (particularly when it comes to figuring out how many cookies everyone gets). She not only knows her letters, but one of her favorite activities at P.F. Chang’s (if you give her half a chance, Sophia is happy to tell you that “P.F. Chang’s is my favorite restaurant”) is to take everyone’s chopsticks and form letters with them.

This comparison thing is not only a bad idea but it’s lethal. Lethal and endemic. Constant testing, constant comparison. “You’ve got to do better in school! You’ve got to keep your GPA high! You’ve got to make a lot of money!”

Of course, I’m lucky enough to have gotten the two best kids ever, so that’s okay. But what if I hadn’t?

75 my butt

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According to weather.com, it’s 75 in Cupertino right now. According to me, weather.com should get out of the weather business. I took the kids to a park this morning and thought we were all going to get heat stroke. I put Simon in the sand under the jungle gym (where there’s shade), and instead of running off like she normally would, Sophia stayed right with us. In the shade.

This has been a tough week.

We finally got air conditioning in the apartment (on the third day—if they hadn’t fixed it by then I was going to check into a hotel and let Darin work it out with Apple). But the apartment is on the third floor of the building with no elevator (haven’t these people heard of the Americans with Disabilities Act? it’s a new building!), and lugging my 25-pound sack of potatoes (named “Simon”) up and down the stairs multiple times a day isn’t going to happen. So when we leave the apartment in the morning, I have to find stuff for us to do until we go back in the late afternoon and wait for Daddy to get home.

This has turned out to be somewhat harder than I was expecting it would be.

For one thing—I know this is minor, but it’s indicative—where do I take the kids for lunch? If it weren’t for that three flights of stairs (six, actually, because each flight is divided into two sections), I might take them home, but I’m not doing that. So I have to find restaurants, and after a while the idea of giving your kids chicken fingers and french fries again begins to turn your stomach. So that’s been an adventure.

Haven’t found a preschool. Haven’t found a babysitter. Haven’t even gotten together with one of the groups of mommies I know is in the area (my fault—I lost the numbers and have to get them again).

We’ve had majorly ugly escrow-fu this week that I will discuss once the doctor says my blood pressure has regularized.

So, it’s been tough. I know that overall it’s worth it and in a few months I’ll be saying, “Yes, yes, I remember that slight hiccup in the road, nothing major.” But right now—things are hot all over.

(Oh, I forgot one thing: Simon has started walking! And now we’re in a place with no babyproofing. He careens all over the place, inordinately proud of himself. I can’t wait until we’re in the new house and he can learn the fine art of walking on grass!)

I’ll post again soon, I promise

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I just ran into a little snafu today. We checked into the corporate apartment, finally (a day later than we had originally planned, which is a long, excruciating, and ultimately not very interesting story) and discovered our Internet connection wasn’t working.

So today, after arranging to get someone to fix the air conditioning (which wasn’t working, so the place was 80 degrees last night at 10pm, which is especially exciting with two kids), I called to find out about the Internet hookup.

Short answer: $150 for the two weeks we’ll be in the apartment…and they can’t install it until the middle of next week anyhow.

So: no Internet on hand (quick: sign of the Apocalypse or no?), and I’m currently logging on by parking outside my brother-in-law’s apartment and hopping on his bandwidth. Which I can do maybe twice a day, with kids in the back screaming, “Hey! We want your attention right now!”

I’ll work on a few extremely exciting entries to make up for this shortfall.