Bored now

Sorry, once again, I've not written much. That's because I've been wandering the Seven Levels of Hell, also known as the car buying experience.

Be Back Later, once someone says another 500 masses for me. Thanks.

Don't Buy Crockpots

This is the culmination of a series of fruitless emails to Rival/Jardin Consumer Solutions, with reference to the last three dangerously homicidal appliances I purchased from their company. They offered me a whopping 25% off any New Rival Crockpot! to compensate for their fervent attempts to sever my feet with broken, steaming hot glass lids.

Thank you, but I really wasn't expecting anything. All I wanted to do was express my extreme dissatisfaction with your products. I really do not want to purchase another Rival product, even with such a fetching price reduction, because empirical evidence suggests that these Crockpots are programmed for destruction and mayhem. A fourth Crockpot might just be the one to actually achieve its objective and maim me or burn my house down.

Thanks for your time.

No fair!

I've had to wait months in order to have enough spare money to buy a tumbler. Once I get a tumbler, I can finish and polish my jewelry and it might be actually decent enough to sell. So I finally cough up the money, thinking, "Well, at least I might make some of it back if I can get the pieces out there."

Well, but no, of course not, because my order is on back order for three freaking weeks. And every other distributor (selling them at a reasonable price) is also out of them. WTF. Now it'll probably be well over a month before I actually get the damn thing, let alone polish my pieces.

Not like I can just make more pieces in the meantime, because I'm out of silver. Can't get more silver until I sell some pieces.

Today is a major drag.

Call the Wahmbulance

Seriously. This parenting crap is exhausting. I really feel like I would love to have just two or three days to veg continuously in a really flagrant manner. You know, staying in my pajamas all day, eating nothing but Nutella on white bread, reading, and taking extended naps.

We kept busy this weekend. I think. I barely remember it. I remember going to UU this morning (I always feel compelled to say "UU" rather than "church" because of churchy connotations I wish to avoid), being at the dojo twice yesterday, and a rather-stressful-but-not-as-bad-as-last-time mall trip.

I hate mall trips. Srsly.

This particular mall had a really cool play area for little kids. And we let the kids play there for a good long while, until some absolute asses allowed their clearly taller than 42" children to come bursting in and take over the place, completely oblivious to the smaller children who actually belonged there. Celyn got hurt at one point, but just out of my view, and though she sobbed and sobbed and sobbed she refused to tell me what was wrong.

You know how annoying that is? Because I really wanted an excuse to bust some heads in there, and she refused to say anything. A while later, after the fact, she murmured something about "...dat kid dat conked me," almost to herself.

"Oh, are you going to tell me what happened now?" I asked.

"Nevermind," she said, with this little eyeroll and sigh. As if to say, "Duh, Mom, jeez, just like, butt out, okay?" This kind of attitude from a two year old is maddening.

Meanwhile, Ani keeps hinting around about "mean kids" at kindergarten. But she follows up any remark with, "I don't want to talk about it." Um, then why did you bring it up? I was just sitting here, minding my own business, you know? Then I get stressed and I really have no idea what's going on. Especially in light of the fact that my own kid has done a few things in the last week that could easily be construed as "mean kid" behavior.

Also, my upcoming week is making me want to run away from home. I have to take the car at least four out of five days, and on two of those days, I will essentially be doing shitty surface road driving nearly all day long, against my will. For rough example:

8am: Take someone somewhere.
8:30am: Take someone somewhere else.
9:00am: Prearranged appointment.
11:00am: Leave to pick up someone.
12:15ish: Arrive home.
1:00pm: Give a kid a nap.
2:45pm: Leave to pick up someone else.
3:30pm: Arrive home? Hardly seems worthwhile when ...
5:00pm: Leave to pick up someone else.
6:00pm: Arrive home again.
7:30pm: Leave one last time for class.

This makes for one crappy day, let me just say. And I get to do it twice this week! YAY! This seems like a completely worthless waste of time. I can't even multitask when I'm driving the car. I'm just bored senseless and, 90% of the time, listening to one or more children yell or sing or say, "Mama? Mama? Mama? Mama? KNOCK KNOCK! Mama?! I said, KNOCK KNOCK!!"

Meanwhile, my giant horrible apparently reproducing asexually blobs of CSA produce are withering untouched in the kitchen.

DO NOT WANT. This isn't how I was supposed to be spending my new little tiny blurbs of childfree time. (Just fwiw: I am not blaming anyone for our single car state, it's just an unfortunate circumstance that doesn't appear to be ending soon. Bah.)

And ... the first friendship drama

Yeah, well, that happened. My daughter told the neighbor girl she didn't want to be friends.

This is kind of hard for me. I talked to the mom, and we seem to be okay. It seems like she broke off the friendship pretty sensitively for a kid of 5. I would have preferred she talk to the girl directly about the actual issues as they came up, but she seemed to think that would be too hard. Objectively, logically, I think if she was really feeling bad in this girl's presence, then she did the right thing.

On the other hand, I could see that the other girl was hurt by it, and I can too readily empathize with her side of things. So my gut wants to react in sadness for the other girl, and despite my trying to keep a cool lid, I'm sure that I've probably let on that I feel bad about the whole thing. But I don't want her to think she did anything wrong; sometimes hurting someone's feelings in the course of asserting ourselves is unavoidable. As someone who struggled -- still struggles -- with asserting myself, fearing people's reactions, I can't disapprove. She wasn't mean about it, as far as I can tell, and I think a lot of kids put in the same position would either lash out or be avoidant. She knows that she doesn't have to be friends with M., but she does still have to be polite.

Still. Hate that we can't just all get along. I'm hoping it will blow over, or that they'll get to a point where Annika can tell M. what bothers her and why, and maybe they can work it out. I think part of it might just be overwhelm by a sheer amount of new kids and the demands of making new friends. She's super social, but it's an adjustment for anyone. Lots of adjustments all at once.

Heart wrenching, though: at the bus stop, the past two days in a row, M. tried to rush up to A. and take her hand, and A. wriggled it away insistently. I felt so acutely for both of them. :(

Still, she's showing signs so far of being her own kid, and I'm glad.

I'm becoming an obsessive bore

I've been talking people's ears off about the recess issue. Other mothers at the school seem to agree with me, people who are not at the school act aghast. Of course, I have no idea if they're just going along and thinking, "Nod, smile, don't upset the crazy woman, maybe she has a shooter." One mother of an older elem kid (2nd or 3rd?) said she knows people have brought up the issue before, one woman going so far as to set up an informal group of playground volunteer monitors.

This puts a whole different spin on it for me. Because it's suddenly not a total ignorance issue, it's more of a "this is not a priority for us," issue, imo. I think I am going to become a pain in the ass about this because research shows it should be a priority. A big one.

The kid herself, well, she's such a puzzle to me sometimes. She is just so different than I was and the problems she comes up with are not things I'd generally anticipate. Thus was the case when she wanted to have a chat last night before bed. She told me all manner of little things -- including why she didn't like her lunchbox -- and then dropped this one:

"I am trying to lose some of my friends. I just have too many now."

Yeah, that was not my biggest problem in kindergarten.

When I asked for elaboration, she explained that one little girl follows her everywhere, talks all the time so she can't get a word in edgewise, and always sits next to her so she can't sit next to any of her other new friends. I tried to be open-ended and let her do most of the talking and thus, coming up with some solutions, but it's going to be interesting to see how this one pans out. I hope they don't fall out, since this is the only girl her age who lives on our street, and who rides her bus, and whose mother I am just getting to know. I hope she just tries to gently talk to her as each issue comes up, which is one of the options we discussed.

She also said, "You know, kids are always coming up to me, wanting to talk to me, and be my friend, and sometimes I just want to do stuff!"

Again, this is not generally a problem I experienced.

On the OTHER hand, we've been going to the playground. And when there are "big" kids there, she wants to play with them. And if they say no, she fixates on it. She makes snarky remarks and hangs around and acts sulky or defiant, but also keeps trying. It makes me just feel so ... ugh. I hate to intervene, but I also don't want her playing with some of those bigger kids anyway, so I feel all conflicted. She kept shrugging off the idea of playing with the other 5 year old girl.

During our evening chat, she said, "That's why I want to lose some of these friends. I want to make big kid friends. I am growing and growing and I'm going to need friends big like me."

Pointing out the kids in her class were growing wasn't fruitful. I wonder if she feels more mature than her classmates, but I don't know how you figure that one out and if there's a fix for that anyway.

Phew. This is all very exhausting.

Getting in the Swing?

It's been a busy few days. Friday I picked up Ani early from school for the joyful experience of having her finger lanced and drained and starting on a ten day course of antibiotics. Whee.

Saturday, shoe shopping for two restless little girls at a busy mall. Again, I say, whee. At least they both now have sturdy, brown, Go With Anything Mary Janes that fit for the next three weeks or so. Ani is really due for an ill-timed growth spurt of the feet, since she's been a size 10 for ages.

Sunday, I went to church because Annika made me. Seriously, she's been bugging me for months, because we drive by the church every time we go to karate. We hadn't been going because I've had a Sunday morning standing coffee date for the past, oh, year or so.

It was a little lesson in reality for her, though, because as it was the first day of church school for the calendar year, all the kids started out in the chapel to stay until there was a teacher introduction and blessing, and that was, in my opinion, really protracted. It was as if the people handling the bits before and up to that point had no idea that there would be gaggles of restless children in the pews, wiggling and fidgeting and saying repeatedly, "Is it done yet? Is it done yet? Is it done yet?"

Finally, Ani went to her class and C went to nursery. She loved nursery. Ani, on the other hand, expected to just go play, but at her age, she has an actual class, and as far as she could tell, all they did was learn the "rules" and make a nametag.

It's hard to be 5, and discover that organized things are a lot less fun than they rightfully should be. She opined many times this weekend that preschool was a lot better than real school has been. Yep, that's the silly bureaucratic world we live in, darling. Where "lessons" are more important than "play" even though kids learn better through play. Screw research, anyway. [/sarcasm]

I wasn't terribly impressed with either the friendliness or the general sense of organization, myself. They both still want to go back, and truthfully, I'm not sure there are any better options in this 'burb anyway. We'll keep trying for a while.

So, to counteract all the sitting -- which is becoming quite a theme -- we got a frapuccino to share and went to the park for an hour. We also agreed that if she was going to keep missing out on outdoor recess at school, we would make it a priority to go outside for an hour every day after school.

Meanwhile, I'm trying fervently to get into the swing of FlyLady. I've printed out the things that feel relevant and helpful (no way am I signing up for the email badgering, which also smacks of clutter imo) and trying to get settled into those routines. I won't lie, it kind of pisses me off to, say, mop at 8:00am right after I'm finally alone in the house, but I do feel a lot less stressed when the kids are home, knowing I've already done quite a bit and don't have to keep shooing them away in order to do Yet Another Chore. (Then again, having them gone at all facilitates this ... if they're home all the time, I don't get anything done at any time without doing that.)

And I'm thankful it's not 89° today like it was yesterday, because I finally feel like cooking or doing anything that might generate heat, like moving. Now I'm going to get the kid off the bus and make some autumnal snack, like popcorn. Yum.

A super quick update I don't have time for

(Which is to say, I am sure I should be doing something more concretely productive. Anyway.)

Cel stayed home from preschool yesterday "sick" (fever, no other symptoms) so it threw me off routine. Which, my routine is very tenuous as it is. So I'm trying to figure out a loose daily schedule that will keep me on track and also allow some fun to be "built in." Kid fun, that is.

One recess, as of yesterday, in one week of school. Not really happy about that.

Allowed her to buy lunch on pizza day. A happy surprise: she didn't like it, and asked me to keep packing her lunch. Yay!

This morning, she woke up with an infected hangnail. She groaned, and said, "Well, I guess I have two choices: get a bandaid, or quit school."

I raised my eyebrows. "Okay. So which do you think you'd prefer?"

"Bandaid," she stated resolutely. "If I quit school, I'd be terrified."

Ok then, so homeschooling is still off the drawing board.

I joined the PTA. Oh, I'm sure the fabric of the universe is beginning to unravel somewhere.

Staying home with Celyn is a vastly different experience than staying home with Annika was/is. They're so different. Celyn putters around, she occupies herself, she's happy with almost anything we do. Annika is much more of a Type A, "let's go let's do hurry go faster why don't we EVER we only went 8 places today!" kind of kid. Which is exhausting for me, because it's so completely opposite from me. I think I could spend a whole afternoon pondering while I stared off into space and be totally happy with that. Not every day, mind you.

I think Celyn and I might be able to do some of the activities I had originally planned to do with Annika at the same age, until it became apparent she wanted nothing to do with most of them. So we'll see. Things are changing, and it could be pretty interesting all around.

A variety of minor bitches

1) I ordered shoes twice from a big shoe etailer. The first ones didn't fit, and I returned them for store credit. The second batch (I got two for the same store credit, plus an extra $15) didn't fit either. This time I requested my money back. Except, apparently, I only get that $15 back, because once store credit, always store credit?

Except, they haven't processed that monetarily huge part of the return, even though both returns were sent in the same box. What?

2) I ordered shoes for Cel from a different shoe etailer. I got free shipping for buying over $50. Except, hey, the shoes don't fit. Now, they want me to mail them back, and send them an extra $5 to ship them again. What? Maybe I'll just take my money back, instead, fyvm.

So as of right now, I'm out almost $200, and no shoes.

3) I sent a bitchy email to Rival, the Crockpot company, after my third Crockpot in a decade fell apart from minor use. The first one threw sparks and short circuited. Two and three both had their lid handles break while I was using them, dropping the steaming hot lids at my feet.

So I send them this bitchy email to tell them this, and they reply, essentially, in order to help me, they will require the product number, the date number, the date of purchase and the location of purchase. Despite this being a Major Pain in the Ass, I was able to locate most of this information. How will this help me? I have no idea, because I doubt they'll do anything about it. Consumer boards are rife with complaints about Rival's customer service and product quality. Yay.

All of these minor things in one day have put me into a very bad mood. Thank goodness I have a sushi date tonight. Sushi and a glass of wine might salvage this whole day's worth of customer disservice.

Another Random Braindump

So, some other things infecting my brain lately ...

My kid has informed me that she did not have recess on the playground at all in the first three days of school. Why? She didn't know. Don't you think kindergartners, especially, should get fresh-air-work-out-your-willies time every day? The weather was beautiful last week, if a tad hot, so what gives?

Secondly, why do school lunches suck so bad? Why does an elementary school need to sell ice cream every day? What could possibly be the benefit of that? Why do all the menus seem suspiciously like the same menus I had when I was in school, oh, nearly 30 years ago? Pizza, tater tots, fried chicken fingers, etc. So all that yammering about health and food and child obesity is just noise?

(Don't worry; I am packing her lunches.)

She also came home with the (I hope confused) impression that there was a hidden camera in the cafeteria, and somehow this was related to a child who only ate two bites of their grilled cheese and then went to get ice cream, and that was not allowed.

Where do I start with that? First, is a grilled cheese really that much healthier than an ice cream? That's kind of like saying you have to finish your joint before you're allowed to do a line. Secondly, why on earth would it ever be necessary to tell kindergartners there is a hidden camera in the cafeteria? That's so ... Orwellian.

These ideas were glommed onto a description of getting to meet the principal, so I have to assume it was something she said. I have a lot of things to ask on Open House night, to be sure.

She came home with this little rulebook on Friday, which she can't read, which is only a benefit in my estimation. It was laden with "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots" and had no inclusiveness in the tone at all. For example, I would suggest "Be respectful to all teachers and other adults," might be amended to, "We will all treat each other with respect." Like, the adults have to respect the kids as well, yo.

So all of my initial concerns about public school are creeping back in, with a nagging idea that it might not really be that much different from ye olde days of yore as I had hoped, despite all the correct advertising. And if my kinetic extrovert is really not going to get much recess and have to be quiet much of the time, then it's not really going to meet her needs.

Not drawing any conclusions just yet, but I am feeling wary. What bothers me most, I suppose, is that none of these things seem to bother anyone else.

Some Signs of Stress

Oh, it's interesting, jah. My darling adorable daughter loves kindergarten, and tells me enthusiastically, and bounces out of bed and onto the bus to go, but she does come home tired and a tad overstimulated and suddenly picking up some subversive little behaviors.

The first day, at dinner, she abruptly tossed a piece of tortilla across the table at me.

Yesterday, she was manhandling her little sister a little bit too roughly.

Today, she threw her popsicle stick on the floor, told me she "hated" an idea of mine, and then pinched her sister. When I sent her to her room, she told me I was a "doofus" because I sent her to her room for five minutes, apparently because the appropriate time out for hurting was ten minutes.

All I can say to that is, now who's the doofus?

I've never been a big fan of time out in general, and didn't use it routinely for anything for a long time, but I now see that she has times where, even as an off-the-chart extrovert, she does need to be alone to wind down. And, she's tired. New schedule, long day, 7 hours' worth of having to behave and whatnot.

Nevertheless.

It's hard to be both gentle and firm. I'm trying to do that, because I feel like it's normal and to be expected and the poor kid's undergoing a big change. On the other hand, I can't let her get away with acting like a jerk. Period.

I will note, however, that it's a lot easier to be gentle when I've had a nice long break from the fighting and the spazzing and the complaining. So I'm not sure whether to be glad it's Friday, or sorry it's not Monday.

I have more things to say about school, some of them snarky and subversive, but I'll save those for later, since I'm already about 12 hours late in posting this.

What a Day

The kids came home, all happy and whatnot. Cel was bubbling over with tales of "gul," and what she did there, and how much she liked her (new) teachers. Ani got off the bus looking sweaty and tired (why is it so fecking hot out? why?) and otherwise completely nonchalant. I tried not to pry, she told me a few things, and later she asked for help writing an "I Love You" note to her teacher and said, "I can't wait to go back to SCHOOL TOMORROW!"

So I guess it went well.

There was also much tiredness, and a few spillover crying tantrums. Cel took a two hour nap and then stayed up against our will until 9:30pm (gack), but Ani was out cold by 8pm on the button.

I'm reeling a little bit, experiencing the reality of not being in contact with my child at all from 7:45am to 2:30pm, especially in this day and age where, when something crosses my mind, I call someone or email them or text them. Instantly. Now I can't even check with my kid to see if she's ok. Weird.

And also, the reality of this "every day" thing. We've always done two day a week preschool, and I don't regret that, but oh my god. Every. Single. Day?

On the positive side, I got a ton of work done while they were gone, and felt so much more competent and patient and compassionate by the time they got home. So the rest of the evening went smoothly. Except for the Celyn refusing to fall asleep thing while I had a ton of dirty dishes waiting in the sink. (Hello? Landlady? FIX MY DISHWASHER!) Otherwise, it was a very smooth day.

I cried a few more times, and expect to have some more cries left in me, but it's ok. A lot of that is just baggage. Have I mentioned already that I cried my whole first day of kindergarten? And cried every first day of school up through 6th? (I did get more discreet as time went on.) I was just SO nervous and afraid and uneasy, and it took a long time, every single year, to get over it. Even after that, I don't ever remember waking up and being like, "School! YES!"

I'm glad she's not like that. Neither kid seems to be. I'm so grateful. A lot of my kindergarten angst is just imagining her experiencing it the way I did, which is fanciful and completely unlikely, since she's just not like that. I was crushed if someone so much as giggled at me. This kid made it a point to tell off some teenagers at the block party.

So, yeah. Very different people. I guess she didn't inherit my depressed.as.fuck gene. Yay!

Got to go wrap while I can still prop my eyelids open. Cel is home with me the next two days. I now envision my productivity as being measurable by equations:

P = E/(4a + 2c)³

(I'm not a scientist, but I play one on TV! The TV in my mind ... on syndication.)

Sadness

Both of the kids are gone. I am sad.

Not so much about Celyn, because she's at preschool and she's been there already, so it's not unfamiliar, and she'll be home by lunch. But Annika! She had to get on that big bus! She's so little! Her backpack is as big as she is, and half as heavy. Will she get hungry? (She refused to eat breakfast.) Will she be able to open her lunch? Will it spill inside her backpack? Will it leak? Will the papers I sent with her make it where they need to go? Will she feel sad? Will she feel scared? Oh jesus, I forgot to get a record of her MMR shot last week and send that in with her. Will they send her home? Dammit. Will everyone be nice to her? She's only five years old!

Well, yes, her presence at home all the time lately has been driving me up a wall, and I know in the greater scheme of things, we all needed this, but I'm still sad anyway. Wasn't she JUST BORN? Wah!

I used to be a blogger ...

I can't blog lately. Just can't. There is too much going on, I don't have enough time, and when I pop open a Create Post window, my brain gridlocks. There are too many topics jostling for attention in my head right now. Such as school starting tomorrow. Having the kids around 24/7 for the last month. Block party. House issues. Trying to plan a vacation. Making jewelry. Too. Much!

Proof positive, this has been open for ages, and I've only gotten one crappy paragraph out.

Someday, I will blog again. I hope.