So far I’ve uncovered:

6 size 1 disposable diapers from my eldest’s short time in disposables

1 flannel 2T jacket

Size 0 left shoe, worn once for pictures

Information about recycling at our old home

A packet of unopened crayons suitable for school this year

Lots of random unsharpened pencils from various goody bags over the years

A peanut M and M that looks like a Teenage Mutant Ninja turtle

Can’t wait until school starts; with the kids out of the house I’ll probably find even more.

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Catching up, cousins “downloading” new things to each other Matrix-style (“I know kung-fu!”) and just generally hanging out without the rush and bustle of the everyday work routine. Dinner with this clutch of family, beach with another, and more to come. Summer isn’t long enough.

And of course, sitting down with a round of milk and cookies, because it’s three o’clock somewhere! I love milk and cookies time. But I think we all (adults included) need a nap time, too.

Going to be a bit quiet here the next few weeks as family season ends and school starts, plus I’ll be ripping out the website guts a bit so pardon the mess. :)

Happy last days of summer!

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So the hub sent me this interesting article this morning out of Scientific American. Swearing when you’re hurt does help, it seems. But only with pain – not frustration (darn) or on mechanical objects (double darn), or loose hemlines (yay staplers!).

But I need to save it for really bad dings, and I need to be less clumsy:

There is a catch, though: The more we swear, the less emotionally potent the words become, Stephens cautions. And without emotion, all that is left of a swearword is the word itself, unlikely to soothe anyone’s pain.

As for pain, it looks like nursing my kids during immunization jabs was the right thing to do. They’re good laughers, and we often reduce them to giggles as a distraction from the daily bumps and thuds that raise voices and little bruises. But they wiggle enough that it won’t do much good at shot time.

Last time through, I talked to them about it and promised them a rare treat – ice cream out at an ice cream shop. For next time, though, I’ve got another idea: topical anesthetic. We had it for one round at infancy, but it never occurred to me to do it for subsequent administrations. Then I read about a numbing cream (prescription, your doctor) I could apply ahead of time – brilliant, and why didn’t I think of it before?

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And we have space to shoot them off. Living on a zero lot line spot with no official “land” we are awfully close to the neighbors. Until I had cause to dig into it, it never occurred to me that we were technically moving to another “condo”, though it is a bit larger one than our last (we were in a 2br with little storage space before).

But! Our little city does have fireworks downtown, and we went again this year. Last year free shuttles were run, saving us the trouble of parking and walking forever. This year, we went back to the pick up point, but no shuttles were running. Darnit, because I really liked that service. Economy, I expect, is behind the decision not to run the shuttles.

But we found a space downtown and walked four blocks to the bridge. The kids were hot and tired, even at nine o’clock at night, so I broke out the sports drinks and stroller so they could lounge and watch the display from the zenith.

Nice show this year! They had rockets that blew into planets with a ring last year; this year they had planetoids with multiple rings that reminded me of a simple drawing of an atom. :) The kids liked the smiley faces and peace signs.

But the best part was walking back to the car. Someone decided to put on their own show, probably from the top of their building. It wasn’t as long as the official display, but it was pretty spectacular. Since we’d been on the bridge instead of the beach, we were pretty far from the rockets launched officially, but our proximity to the exit meant we were almost under the second display, ducking spent hardware and enjoying the glitter straight overhead.

The kids are still talking about it – I think because fireworks are more “real” to them now, both because of their age and how close we were. They could feel the fireworks – it wasn’t just a “far away movie screen” adventure. Very cool and reminded me of childhood neighborhood displays, standing near the launch site, smelling the chemicals, cheering the fire on. :)

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(For other WFMW posts, see the little linky!)

So I totally loved the concept presented last week by the WFMW host; one bag to grab and go for swimming sounds so … serene.

I think if we had enough swimsuits and fewer activities, we could manage it. But I’m perpetually behind on laundry and life, and I so far have sent my kid to summer camp with an Uncrustables sandwich every single day this break. That’s fifteen sandwiches I’ve not made or supervised him making. But I will get the kitchen tidy (soon!) and he can then make his own …. but I digress.

One kid has swimming two, sometimes three days a week. The other has six, sometimes seven days of swimming. And depending on my working-at-home schedule, one or both of them swims later in the day for extra practice. (I have *got* to get these kids water-safe!)

Helvetica can’t deal with her own swim gear, but will imitate Wolfie. Wolfie needs … reminding. So I rolled out my sewing machine and made an addition to the name tags I’d already put on their gear. Bowties. Continue Reading »

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But I don’t know anything yet. Won’t for weeks and weeks, if ever. Well, if they don’t call, they’re just not that into me. But you don’t know if you don’t try. And I found a Twitter page that might be useful for updates. :)

But I’m busy reliving the adventure part of traveling to NYC. :) Re-reading the YA books I grew up with, watching a second remake of The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler, and emailing everyone I met there. They just showed a scene shot in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; kind of makes me wish I’d dawdled there sometime instead of working the entire trip. Sometime I’ll take a leisurely trip there; but helping plan the invasion of big chunks of family here reminds me that there are many things to explore here.

Of the things I enjoyed, I think I liked the variety of Mexican food, the art supply stores and the Highline Park most of all. In a few years the kids will be old enough to read my little Manhattan-specific reading list (Remember me to Harold Square!) and maybe we’ll either plan a trip to re-create that adventure or plan one of our own.

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I think I’m too uptight a parent. My kids have never gotten into catsup, or Vaseline, or diaper cream, or Triple Paste and smeared it everywhere. The permanent markers are carefully stashed away from little fingers, and we’ve had “talks” as they’ve gotten older about “parent” things and “kid” things. The last time the youngest found “parent scissors” lying around, she picked them up correctly and safely, trotted up the stairs, and turned them over to me, as I sat at my desk in the bedroom we converted to a home office.

As they’ve gotten older, though, we’ve started to relax a bit. We’ll occasionally find a washable-marker scribbled kid. We’ve stopped asking every 30 minutes if they need bathroom breaks. We actually sit in the other room as they bathe, doors open, ears listening for trouble. The hard years are over, we think; it’s time to relax.

A recent planned-to-be-rushed morning turned into a relaxing morning at home; lazy day of laundry and laughter, keeping our PJs on instead of racing to swim class, exercise class, play dates at the YMCA. As I sat at my computer, catching up on correspondence, I heard the pitter-patter of little feet and a voice announcing to the world, “I need to go potty!” The toilet seat in the next room clanked and I smiled.

Phew, I thought. I’m so glad we’re at this stage, where the kids are finally really all self-contained and trained. Then she added, “There’s poop on my legs.” Continue Reading »

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Back in the day, even after video games came on the scene, we were board game fans at our house. Mostly thinking and planning an counting games; Monopoly (back when there was only one edition!), Operation, Sorry!, Life, Scrabble, Yahtzee.

One game we wanted to play was Hungry Hungry Hippo, but it never ended up in our stash. I wonder if my parents saw no value in a game designed to slam pieces of plastic around; I saw that as it’s charm. It teased us between afternoon cartoons; looked a fun and exciting way to pass the time. But by the time we actually got to play it – yawn. Made me glad to not have spent allowance money on it, though I was glad we saved up for and bought Cathedral. An old version of an older game, we could spend hours playing that game, even into our teen years.

Now I see shuffleboard and curling have made a comeback in a revised version of Sorry! – you slide your pieces in and at a target, bumping others out of the way. Makes sense and a great way for kids to work on their fine motor skills; but I don’t know how long attention it will hold for the five to eight set. But its a way to get families gaming together, spending time together. In a hopefully friendly competitive way; games are great for learning.

So here I am, out of practice at blogging, and I don’t remember how to wrap things up, or even what my point was (I’ve got some kind of bug of doom that’s kept me on the sick list most of this week). But in one fevered moment Helter Skelter came on the radio and I had to wonder if the Beatles were playing Snakes and Ladders when they wrote that one … and what songs about other board games would be. Or other appreciations – BattleShip Haiku?

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A few years ago the valentine card nightmare began. Get list of kid names. Write up cards. Have young child decorate with stickers or make other mark upon card. Keep doing yoga breathing, understanding it does not have to be perfect.

This year … not so much. The teachers encouraged us to let the kids write up the cards; decorating the envelopes and doing the names. Which is fine. I’m all for planning to let the kids do it. But the kid with the shaky block handwriting is not going to fit a four-syllable name on a 2” by 3” card (yes, I measured those superhero cards) by any stretch of the imagination.

On the one hand, the notes say “let the kids write the name on the envelopes”. That is, parents, back off, let the kids do this! Fine, I say. But there are no envelopes. Not anymore. So what to do? I stretched reality and mounted the little hologram superheroes on a big decorative page that accommodates my beginner’s shaky hand.

While the eldest is practicing his handwriting, the youngest is moping around, touching everything, intensely interested, and genuinely feeling left out. The night as been punctuated with my interjecting “Stop that!” and “No touch!” and “Leave it alone!” between card-addressing instructions.

She finally finds something to do. Lie on the couch with a harmonica. Since this is infinitely more enjoyable than pushing her fingers away from scissors and markers and other valendentia, I shut my yap and try not to laugh, wishing I had a recording device nearby.

“I can’t …”

(blow in and out on harmonica)

I think she’s got a talent, people. I really do.

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Err, rather, astronomy. :) Well, actually ):.

A great big

):

Crescent moon and “stars” that look like a frowny face. Mooooooom, the universe is making faces at me!

But we had fun watching them and talking about stars versus planets, created light versus reflected light. Jupiter and Venus are paired near the moon again this evening. We missed the February convergence, but were prepared for this one.

The last few nights have been filled with naturewalks, discussions about stars, and moons, and planets, and comets and meteors; all manner of universal matter. Finally, tonight we saw two planets peeking at us as we sat on the car trunk as the clouds to cleared from our view.

Get up, get out there, just past sunset. A pretty show that won’t be back in the southwest skies for a while.

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