I’ve not been blogging in a while.  I am pretty busy– if you didn’t know I have added "preschool teacher" to my hat rack.  And so I present to you the knowledge I am gleaning from this experience.

Question:

Dear Miss Stephanie,

My kid scissors keep disappearing.  How can I find them?

-Cutless in Chicago

Dear Cutless,

Put the remaing scissors up high and out of the sight of your children.  The people will soon need to cut things, and the missing scissors will mysteriously reappear.  Put these away promptly until all the lost pairs are found.

Miss Stephanie 

Question:

Dear Miss Stephanie,

I am thinking about starting a preschool, because I already have a million other things going on in my life and totally want to add one more thing.  What is your best advice on this matter?

Kind of Crazy in the Suburbs

Dear You-will-want-to-stab-yourself,

Don’t.

Miss Stephanie 

Got your attention, eh?

Seriously, though.  Yesterday was one of those kind of days that made me understand why living in a commune or something would appeal to a person.  With three kids under 6 and too much house to take care of, I get kind of lonely sometimes.  I don’t really want to drag them places because they are so much work when I do, I’d rather just stay home.  

But it get’s lonely.

It would be nice to have a few other ladies around just kind of all the time to chat with, to share household duties with even spar with just to create some drama.  It would be nice to have extra hands around. Imagine this conversation:

Me: Hey wife number two, and three, can you watch the children so I can go get a pedicure?

Wife #2: There’s a lot of children between the three of us.

Me: And there’s two of you, I am sure you can handle it.  Besides, Joan up the street has like 15 kids and her husband only has one wife, so I know between the two of you 12 kids is like nothing.

Wife #3: I get to go tomorrow, right?

Me: (knowing dinner would be ready and the house would be clean when I get back) Sure.  See ya in a few hours! 

Yeah, that’d be nice. 

P.S. No comments about how in real life polygamy stinks and all the alleged abuse and all of that.  I get that.  I am being totally facetious. 

So say the people.  We were making pumpkin chocolate chip cookies tonight, and when it came time to blend, both Sugar and Engineer suggested getting a stool so they could watch and also laugh.  And sure enough as soon as I started the mixer, they both spontaneously erupted with canned laughter. 

I never realized that making cookies was so funny.

I guess it’s been a long time since I was 5. 

It’s Engineer’s fourth day of kindergarten, his second day of riding the bus and the novelty has officially worn off. 

He told me today that he didn’t want to go back.

My momma-loves-her-little-boy for ten seconds contemplated homeschool and then the real me told him to suck it up.  Okay, well, I didn’t say it like that.

Turns out part of the reason he is so done is that he got in trouble today.  In Engineer’s class you see, when they don’t "make their day" by following the rules they get their frog taken down.  And here the lad is chatting with me about how he took his own frog down because he didn’t want it up there anymore because he doesn’t want to go to school.

So like any suspicious parent, I checked his bag and found the teacher note saying he didn’t make his day.  Why?  What was the issue?  After several requests from the teacher to get him to complete his work he responded by yelling and crying and thus disrupted the students.  This is of course, typical behavior for the boy with large emotions.  The boy with no in between level.

 I sure hope she can do a better job of gettting him to simmer down, because I’ve sure had a heck of a time with it.

The trip pics and stuff are coming, I promise!  But until then– a quaint story about how some grown-ups surprisingly still act.

So I was with my kids at music class today and as usual they were not particularly well behaved.  I actually felt they did better than they have in past classes, but there was the typical running around at inappropriate times and all of that.  They tend to feed off of each other, so even though Engineer and Spider are normally well behaved, if they see Sugar being a goob, they follow suit. I’ve  apologized profusely to the teacher several times and she always says the same thing, "Your kids are good.  They don’t scream or cry– that’s the kind of thing I don’t like.  Your kids are fine."

So today, rather than trying to constantly chide them and reign them in and leave class all mad, I just kind of shrugged my shoulders and I stepped in only when I felt they were acting age inappropriate.

Now, hold that thought.

In this class is a little boy and his nanny.  The nanny is infamous among my fellow music class goers for being loud, bossy and generally obnoxious.  She talks really loud, answers her cell phone in class and tries to overcorrect her little "charge" when she thinks he’s not doing the activities right.  She’s really not that bad, honestly, but she does strike me as someone who is a little attention starved.  As I made that realization today in class, I actually started to feel a little bad for her.

That is until she made her snarky comment to me.

Return to the previous thought that my children were not models of behaviour this day.  

And so she says to me, without eye contact, without ever a proper introduction, "What class are you going to be in in the fall?"

And me, sensing what was coming, feeling that pit in my stomache and not wanting to have a conversation with her told her that I didn’t know.  Eh.  Her reply?  

"Because I don’t want to be in the same class as you."

Hi, my name is Stephanie.  I am a real person and I have feelings too.  Didn’t your mama teach you if you can’t say nothing nice, don’t say nothing at all?

If someone had said something like that to me back in my postpartum depression days where I was already feeling low and sinking, and frustrated with my children, I would have been downward spiraling.  As it is, I got that shaky feeling that I get when someone makes an attack on my individual person and then I shrugged it off.  I was a little appalled at her lack of tact, but I don’t even know her, and I don’t really care.  I am actually sort of relieved because it means I won’t have to be in her class either!

It just is weird to me that grown ups still act that way.  It doesn’t bother me that she wants to be in a different class than me and my children.  I can’t really say that I blame her as I am not sure I’d want to be in my class either if I was someone else.  But really isn’t that something she should have just brought up with the teacher?  (Which she did, by the way, very loudly while I was still in the room.)  Did she think she was doing me a service by subtlely telling me that she thought I needed to up the parenting skills?  That it would help me in some way by making sure I knew that my kids were obnoxious in class?  Or do you think she just likes being snarky?

Well, whatever.  Today is a new day.  I am so over it.  But it sure is a good thing I am a grown up at least.  Because my inner teenager came up with some choice follow up conversation. 

Have you ever played Lego Star Wars?  The video game?  We love it so much at our house that sometimes the children act it out during their times of imaginative play.  Of course, they act out many video games– Super Smash Brothers, Cloning Clyde, Caster.  Sugar is always the princess character, Engineer the hero, and Spider is some lame-ish sidekick, like R2-D2. And somedays like yesterday, they pretend that they are in a video game and the main characters are themselves.

Now before I go on (I promise I am headed somewhere here) it needs to be noted that Lego Star Wars the video game has all kind of characters you can choose to play.  The main characters, of course are those you need to complete the game’s requirements, but if you have a lot of gold, you can buy characters.  Fun but useless characters like jawas or cantina performers.  Yesterday while the children were acting out their own game, the following conversation ensued:

Eng: Okay, we’ve got Sugar character, Engineer character and Spider character.
Sug: What about Mommy?
Eng: No, you have to buy her.
Me: (understanding what this implies) You have to buy me?
Eng: Yes.
Sug: Okay, let’s buy her.
Eng: No, I only want players that are going to WIN.

Do you know what this means?  He thinks his mama’s a loser.  Or maybe he just thinks I can’t win, like I don’t finish what I start.  Like I stink at cleaning the house.  Like I am bad a video games?  Like I am lame in so many countless throw-another-jawa-on-the-fire ways.  (Maybe I am reading too much into this?)  I am so not having any of that.

Oh, it’s on Little Man.  Bring it.  Bring it on. You are about to see just what this Mama can do.

Every morning that Charming leaves before the children wake up, he comes into our room, says goodbye and requests that I not forget to say morning prayers with the children.  It always makes me think Qui-Gon Jin’s last request in Star Wars Episode 1– "promise me you’ll train the boy…"  Something to smile about I guess.

So this morning, after a nightmare filled sleep (I think I am watching this show a little too much) I get this request and then 30 minutes later the girls are in my room requesting, not prayers, but breakfast.  We are working hard on getting the people to ask before they get food, but they seem to never ask when I am able to do it, and always ask while I am asleep.  Anyway.  For about 20 minutes they snuggled in my bed, kicked each other and drew pictures on my back.  When I was finally not a zombie Sugar asked a funny question.

"Why do you have squishy dots on your back?"

I have moles.  Who doesn’t?  But why would she call them moles when squishy dots is a much better descriptor.  Is there a suggestion box for that somewhere?  New, better, medical terms suggestions?

 Anyway.

So then we made muffins for breakfast.  Spider immediately wanted butter on hers.  She then proceeded to eat a piece, request more butter, eat a piece, and request more butter until her muffin was gone.  And when it was gone, I went in to clean the kitchen.

And when I cam back, she had found something else to eat:

Yes, that is butter in her squishy little hand.  And yes that is a butter knife in her mouth.  I’m a terriblt mother, I know.  How was your Monday morning? 

I am so not joking.

Thursday night we went to a local farmer’s market and then to dinner.  On the five minute drive home that night, Sugar fell asleep– not having peed in several hours and with cherry stains on her cream colored dress. I was bummed I wouldn’t be able to use my mad stain removal skills until morning, but glad we had one less child to try and force to sleep that night.

Of course, the combination of Sugar not having peed recently, and an ill placed, holey matress protector assured that she would pee the bed in the night. At 5:45 she woke up from the accident and after following the protocol, I tossed her clothes in the sink, unrinsed and we went back to bed.

At around 9 am I figured it was time to get at the stain removal.

Only there were no more stains.

The pee bleached them away. 

Isn’t that the weirdest thing ever?  And slightly gross?  Anyone ever have a similar experience? 

…Or "garage sale finds cost more than you paid for them."

Here’s the deal– I think freecycle total rocks.  Free stuff is great– most of the time.  If you are getting something for free that you really need/want/are dying to have then whoopee! you have arrived.  But you need to know one thing about free stuff– it is rarely, actually free.

Example 1: I recently acquired a freecycled ceiling fan.  Thinking it would be hot around here sometime (joke’s on me and everyone else in Seattle) I felt it would be good to have one in the house.  After significant driving to pick up the fan, I immediately went out and purchased supplies to repaint the "treasure" that now sits in a box in my garage.  I have also noticed some missing wiring that will need to be replaced if it is even possible to do so.  Cost so far: $10 and counting.

Not free.

Example 2: I bought an Oreck vacuum at a garage sale for $30 and also got a free handvac from someone else.  Vaccuum bags anyone?  That little steal just doubled in price.

Not as cheap as I thought it was.

I keep seeing things on the freecycle that I think would be great for me, and I keep re-evaluating the actual cost.  King sized mattress?  I’ve always wanted one, but I don’t have box springs or King sized bedding or a place to put my perfectly fine queen sized bed.  Gas grill?  Oh, well, I don’t have a propane tank.  Size 2 designer dress? Can’t afford the personal trainer, darnit.  

Seriously.  The free?  Not so much.   

Free is good, my friends, it often is.  However, I would advise that you Freecycle wisely. 

(And have you ever noticed how people want their c-r-a-p picked up immediately?  That always cracks me up.) 

I grew up here in the Rainy Place.  I love the rain. I love listening to it.  Watching it.  It makes me want to curl up with a bookand a blanket and eat popcorn. Of course, when I was a kid, that would have been a great thing to do on the weekend, or after school when there was no other obligations.  On a regular Monday though Friday day, Mom kicked me off to school, rain or not, and I was fine with that.

But now as an adult, day after day, it rains.  The kids are out of preschool.  I have no playdates, and a gallon of gas costs more than a watermelon.  I’ve got no mom (ok, I’m here) in my house telling me to get off my bum and get moving.  And as much as I love the rain, I am withering.

Too much water tends to drown things.

I need the sun, and I need it now. 

I never knew I was so much like a sunflower.