Nobody Knows Anything

Got an unusual comment from Christina the other day:

You were a joy to read… before twitter. Now, not so much. Seriously, have you not better things to say?

Well, the Twitter is basically a way to have something to say, frankly. I suppose everyone who’d be interested in my tweets have probably added me to their own Twitter lists, so I could probably stop posting them here. (I’m DianePatterson on Twitter, btw, in case you’re looking for me.)

But to answer your question: at the moment I haven’t found a particular raison d’être for this blog. Many of the things I’d like to talk about really aren’t fair for me to talk about much (for instance: my kids—yeah, I know, I win some kind of Mom-points for finally figuring that out) and others are just…well…

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There comes a time in every parent’s life where they realize they have lost control of their little kid. For me, this was when Sophia earned her purple belt in taekwando a few weeks ago.

  
“You want me to go to bed WHEN?”

Yesterday the Possummomma posted about a woman who said:

The school is supposed to give the kids a healthy lunch. So what that
there’s fact and sugar or chemicals. It’s food. We’re a working
class family that can’t afford to fix a good lunch for the two dollars I give
the kids for school lunch. The kids wouldn’t eat fruits and veggies anyway. When am I supposed to make these lunches? I work. Besides that it’s not my responsibility to go out of my way to make lunches that the school must give by law.

To which my only reaction can possibly be:

My brain reads “So what that there’s [fat] and sugar or chemicals” and it ’splodes a little. What on Earth do you mean, So what? Are you the one in charge or not? Are you the one modeling behavior for your kids, or are you not? On what planet is it not your responsibility?

(In case you didn’t look at the webpage in question, in response to this declaration, the Possummomma shows her how to fix a good, healthy lunch for under two dollars.)

And with fruits and veggies: I honestly can only guess she’s never given them to her kids. My kids won’t eat everything — they won’t even eat all the things they used to eat. (Sophia the girl who could eat an entire bunch of asparagus when she was two won’t even touch the stuff now.) But we still offer them a variety of foods and they have favorite fruits and veggies despite being picky.

One of the key things I decided on early was that I was not going to be a short-order cook. There are a few choices for breakfast on school mornings — not as many as I’d like, but we tend to be rushing around in the morning and I keep the menu simple. I offer them a few choices for their lunch: they can pick what kind of sandwich they want or a thermos of soup, plus a fruit and maybe a snack. For dinner, I serve one meal. They can eat some of what’s put on the table, or they can pass and wait for breakfast in the morning. Strangely enough, they usually end up eating some or all of what I’ve served. Not always, and probably not with as much variety as I’d like. (For instance, they’ll usually have some of whatever starch I serve.) But they know they’re not getting anything else instead.

One good book worth checking out on the subject is Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children by Ann Cooper and Lisa Holmes. And a quick glance through Amazon shows a number of books on the subject: Brown Bag Success: Making Healthy Lunches Your Kids Won’t Trade, The Top 100 Recipes for a Healthy Lunchbox, and The Healthy Lunchbox. Several of which turn out to be available at my local library, so I’m going to pick a few up and check them out.

I know it can be a pain in the ass to find out everything about everything, but please: this is your body, and your kids’ bodies. You take charge of what goes into them, okay?

It’s Halloween, you’re 7, and you’re too sick to go trick-or-treating.

Tonight, I told the kids they had to get into bed. 

I reminded them of why it’s important to get a good night’s sleep. ”This morning I had two sleepy kids I couldn’t get out of bed for love nor money,” I said.  

Sophia’s mouth dropped open. “You didn’t offer us money!”  

As soon as I could make myself stop laughing, I sent her upstairs to bed. 

The kids’ obsession recently has been World of Warcraft, to the point where they were continuously fighting over who got to play. “You played last! It’s my turn!” “No, you played! It’s mine!” (This is how they play: they start a character, do all the intro quests, lose interest, start another character. Sophia has shown great fortitude in getting a character all the way to level 15.) So, finally I came up with this rule: Sophia was born on an even day, so she plays on even days; Simon was born on an odd day, so he plays on odd days; only Mommy gets to play on the 31st.

And this plan, almost unbelievably, seemed to work out just fine.

My current obsession has been Doctor Who. The third season has been playing here, and I love it so much that, while I can pass on watching anything until a few days have gone by, Friday night I am right there in front of the TV. (Albeit, after it’s TiVo’d—can’t stand commercials.) I have recently become so into it I a)joined NetFlix (nope, hadn’t been a member before) and b)queued the first two seasons to watch at home. I’d never seen any of the Christopher Eccleston ones, and we missed about half of season two.

The day my first NetFlix movies arrived Sophia had a friend over, and they were off playing in her room, while Simon stayed with me. He, of course, wanted to play World of Warcraft, but it wasn’t his day. So I said, “Hey, wanna watch Doctor Who with me?” We snuggled on the couch and I put the first disc in. And it was hilarious—FTW: “If you’re a space alien, how come you sound like you’re from the North?” “Lots of planets have a North!” (Eccleston has a northern British accent you could cut with a chain saw). Simon thought it was the greatest thing ever.

The next day Simon said, “Can we watch another one?” and Sophia said, “Another what?” So she sat down to watch the Doctor and Rose get into various messes.

The day after that, when I got home with the kids, the first thing they asked was, “Can we watch another Doctor Who?” No one mentioned World of Warcraft. It was somewhat blissful. Of course, now my DVDs have run out and I have to get the next set post-haste.

But when the Doctor’s in the house…no Warcraft! Yes!

I’ve spent most of what seems like the past several months but probably was just the past few days celebrating Sophia’s 7th birthday. (SEVEN? Is this fair? Is this true? Good lord!) We had the family party. We had the kids’ party. Today was the school’s party. All hail, Sophia! Seven!

(My God, the time goes fast.)

My birthday’s in August. I never had a party. Darin’s birthday is right before Christmas. He really never had a party.

Simon is tired of preschool. As in, we have a fight every day about going. Of course, when it comes time to get him at the end of the day, he doesn’t want to go home, he wants to stay and play. I’ve tried to explain that preschool is all about the playing and kindergarten (which he wants to go to NOW) is all about the school. He doesn’t believe this. Sophia has snack-recess AND lunch-recess, so clearly going to school is the best choice.

He has also taught himself to read.

We’d noticed he was picking up a few words here and there. For over a year his favorite word has been EXIT, because he could read it on signs everywhere. But lately the pace of acquisition has picked up, until finally he started reading his favorite Blue’s Clues book to me. And he isn’t reading from memorization either (he’s had several books completely memorized for a while now). Now I point to a word and he can either read it or begin to sound it out. When he hasn’t a clue he shakes his head until I help him out.

He isn’t quite so thrilled with reading that he’s doing it on his own, but he is clearly pleased with himself to have figured it out.

No wonder he wants to be in kindergarten NOW.

I still think he’s going to be surprised when it’s not all recess.

Before we had them, Darin opined that our kids’ main mode of communication would be “banter.” And lo:

Earlier this week, I left the kids with Darin so I could go to Playwriting class. I had left some stuff at home for him to make dinner, but rather than do that he took them out to dinner at a local restaurant. The next day, I asked Sophia how Daddy liked dinner.

“Oh, he had a blast,” she said. “By the way? That was sarcasm.”

Just like that.

(Apparently both kids acted up and were cranky and out of control rather than, you know, eating dinner. There is a reason that we don’t go out to dinner if we can’t be at a restaurant by 5:30.)

I am afeared.

Darin and I can’t decide: is Simon confused or being very, very funny?

He insists on referring to his forehead as his “three-head.”

Of course, he may simply have noticed it cracks us up each and every time.

The big highlight of the past few days has been the Endless Sixth Birthday Celebration of someone who can’t possibly be 6, because didn’t I just take her home from the hospital?

(I could not get her to smile for a photo. I took lots of solo pictures of her, and in every one she looks more solemn than this. Most of the time she has a smile as bright as the sun on her, but apparently not for pictures Mommy takes.)

Sophia is 6 now, as she will be happy to tell you. In fact, her birthday has been the main subject of her conversation for the past two weeks. (Didn’t I used to have a little girl who’d run away at the sound of “Happy Birthday” being sung? Those days: over.) She’s wearing one of her new dresses to school today (”So that everyone can see how pretty I am”).

We had Birthday Week around here, because Sophia had last week off from school (and for some reason I hadn’t written Winter Break down on my calendar…errrrgggg), so we hung out together and did lots of things, including lots of things she wanted to do. On Friday, her actual birthday, I asked what she wanted for dinner, provided it wasn’t Chicken Dinosaurs, because that’s not a food for a family dinner. She announced she wanted roasted chicken legs, baked potatoes, and asparagus. She didn’t eat much of it, but I was happy that she knows enough about our dinner requirements to ask for those things. She didn’t even seem to mind that I didn’t have cake for her for after dinner.

Which was fine, because on Saturday we had her birthday party at Bamboola (an indoor playground place, with an arcade, a kid-habitrail, dress-up area, make-up area, water play area) with friends from Kindergarten and friends from preschool, and she seemed to have a complete blast. Periodically one of the kids would stop by me and ask, “Where’s Sophia?” I’d shrug and say, “I think she went thataway.” We had pizza and ice cream cake and everyone seemed to go home very happy.

Today is her party at school, so in preparation I made cupcakes — yes, from scratch. Sophia helped me. Well, she helped me a) taste the cupcakes, b) frost the cupcakes, and, oh yes, c) taste the frosting. In pretty much that order too.

I wanted to try out my new cake decorating kit, which is why the chocolate frosting is in a swirl, whereas the pink frosting has been ladled on. I made pink, purple, and blue frosting for her to decorate with, and before I let her loose with the cupcakes I wrapped her in my cooking apron. I expected she’d slather each cupcake with tons of frosting (see “frosting: tasting of,” above), but instead she’d put a reasonable amount on a cupcake and pronounce it done. She was so excited that her friends were going to get to have her cupcakes at school.

She’s writing (a lot — I gave her her own journal and she writes sentences in it), she’s painting, she can’t wait for us to assemble her birthday bike so she can ride around. (The front fork of the bike we bought at Target is too narrow, so I couldn’t put it together. We have to take the whole thing back. I said, “Hon, can we go to REI and buy one that’s already made?”) Most of the time she’s a great friend and playmate to her little brother, who thinks the world of her. Her kindergarten teacher says that not only is she very bright, but she’s one of the nicest kids in the class, friends with everyone. In fact, the teacher often pairs her with one of the kids who’s the most difficult to get along with, because Sophia deals with him just fine.

Currently, when she grows up, she wants to be a teacher and a mommy, and if you don’t think I’m seriously flattered by that, boy, do you have a lot to learn.

Six! My little girl is six! The years are so short. There are definitely times I wish my kids had a dial, so I could dial them back to when they were just little babies, to experience that once again, but since I can’t, I’m extraordinarily happy with the kids I have today. Even if one of them won’t smile for the camera.