Football nights

I never quite understood why my parents seemed to regard certain recreational activities as work—going to the beach, when it was only a forty-five minute drive away, for example. Now that I have attained their ancient stature, I see a little better that every trip to the beach involves packing bathing suits and clean clothes to change into afterwards and towels and sand shovels and buckets and snacks and drinks in the cooler, good grief. Not to mention the sand in the car and the laundry afterwards. But even when it’s a low-key thing, I’m starting to understand why basically my parents seemed to really enjoy sitting on the couch after dinner.

We went to a Rolling Hills High football game last night, which we used to do all the time until we had Will. We generally get there late, since the games seem so maddeningly long if you’re there for the whole thing—I’m happy if we time it to arrive just before halftime, myself. Then we can listen to the band and watch the marchers swing those bright flags around, watch a bit of the game, and still head out early before the traffic picks up—unless the game is close, of course. I do love watching when one of those boys breaks away from the crowd, streaking across the field for the touch down, that wonderful long run that almost never happens anywhere else except high school football games.

But it’s so much more complicated with little kids. Last night William either wanted to be held all night—why do they make those bleachers so hard??—or later after the crowd cleared out a bit, he wanted to jump up and down the bleachers—and why do they have to make them out of concrete? It didn’t help that we sat on the very last row of the faculty nosebleed section, with this giant chain link fence looming behind us, a perfect view of the very far away ground below, complete with quite fascinating very tiny cars. I knew perfectly well that Will could never get over that fence, that he’d never even try, but still I found it rather nerve-wracking. It must be a residual I-know-there’s-a-cave-bear-somewhere-around-this-water-hole instinct.

Fortunately some generous souls—probably the booster club—sponsor a snack station for the faculty in the press box, so we were able to divert Will from jumping around the stands with potato chips and a seemingly endless supply of ice water with those tiny pebbly ice cubes that are so wonderful to drink. And even the one drink he finally did knock over after all the warnings didn’t actually spill on the people sitting in front of us.

Laura spent most of the game reading her library book, looking up whenever people started yelling to ask whether we’d scored. She took off for a bit to hang out with one of her friends, while Chris wandered around at intervals all night, a king greeted by his adoring subjects—those high school kids love to see their teachers outside of class. I sat with one of our friends, who at one point left her four-year old with us to take her two-year to the bathroom (who no doubt wouldn’t go before they left home). She seemed to disappear for ages, finally coming back after hauling that baby down and then back up again all those stadium steps because she didn’t know the press box also has a bathroom the faculty can use.

We had a good time, and our team—in that classic high school football way—obliterated the opposing team, thirty-something to zero. Will came home with one of those thunderstix souvenirs the ROTC give out, the two-foot balloon baseball bats so entertaining for beating people over the head with. I took a picture of Laura and her friend with the friend’s cell phone camera, which I embarrassingly enough had to be instructed in the use of. We came home, I threw in a load of laundry for good measure, and then we got everybody in the bed, but this morning I feel like—well, I feel like I was beaten over the head all night with a two-foot inflatable bat. Imagine that.

Toddler milestones

Look how complex William’s stick people are becoming! This portrait of the artist’s mother represents her washing dishes. “That was hard working on you,” William said.

Normal dirty words

When I picked Laura up today, she bounced into the car just dying to tell me about the really cool movie they watched at school today, even though it had some bad words. “What movie? What bad words?” I asked, thinking to myself, “Good Lord, they’re only in the fifth grade! What’s that teacher doing?” Turns out they watched some western to see the landscape, as they’re studying ranching and the westward expansion, the Homestead Act, and all that good stuff. I wondered, just a bit, why, if they were watching the movie only for the landscape, the teacher felt compelled to warn them that they would hear some of these proverbial “bad words” and then play those sections—why not just mute the sound?

Not that I have a problem with bad words, per se, being a fan and collector of words both good, bad, and hard to pronounce. And it’s certainly not as if Laura’s never watched a movie at home that included any slightly profane language. Or said any herself. One of my sister-in-law’s favorite stories comes from when Laura was about Will’s age, when she was watching The Little Rascals with my mother. The kids were trying to pull up some blinds or something, over and over, and as they kept messing up, Laura pronounced in this very solemn and matter of fact way her judgment on their efforts: “Damn.” We’re neither prudes nor innocents. But still. Why exactly are they doing this in class?

“What bad words?” I repeated.

“The a-word and the h-word,” Laura said, still juggling her bookbag and seat belt. “Just the normal dirty words. The ones you always hear.” Oh dear. And then we both were laughing.

I missed my opportunity for the Real Parenting Lesson of the day, though, because she went on to tell me that while she did in fact hear the a- and h-words, they didn’t get to the part of the movie that had the f-word, and what exactly was the n-word?

By the time she asked this question, we were turning onto the big busy road into Rolling Hills, where I really have to pay attention if we’d like to avoid being flattened by a log truck, and while I am certainly prepared to discuss the n-word and its implications, given that I teach Huckleberry Finn and Frederick Douglass pretty regularly, I’d really rather not do this in traffic with a three-year old repeating key words afterwards at random intervals and possibly later in company. And I’m guessing the fact that she didn’t ask about the f-word means she’s heard it, also a matter of some concern, I’ll confess. So I asked her to wait until we got home and ask the question again. With cooking dinner, Laura’s friend Molly calling, getting out the terracotta jack-o-lanterns, bathtime and paper grading . . . well, Laura’s been asleep but I’m still up thinking about the question I didn’t answer.

Yet.

And last week she was asking for a definition of virgin. I guess we’re in for it now.

Scratchy’s body

I wish I had a Scratchy. William has several—once Barbie dolls, or Polly Pockets, or My Little Ponies, all his Scratchies have hair. Laura has some serious problems keeping her things safe, since any doll with hair is fair play as far as William is concerned. You might think that at some point the fundamental life lesson of “keep your favorite stuff stashed up too high for the baby to reach” might kick in, but apparently not. Barbie Princess of the Nile always ends up on the floor. Gravity seems to overwhelm our household every time.

Scratchy substitutes, I’m afraid to say, for my hair, if not my actual loving presence. As Will gets bigger and I get less patient, sometimes I think if I have his hands twisting my hair up again another second I will just scream. So our various manifestations of Scratchy have probably saved my sanity, and she’s certainly kept Will from pulling out all his own hair. He takes such comfort in her. No baby blankets or dilapidated stuffed animals for this boy, nope—he needs Barbie with dreads.

The long-term favorite Scratchy is about as tall as my hand, with a huge outsized head with two bright orange ponytails. Scratchy always ends up nude, assuming she starts out with clothes, and this one is as Barbieesque in figure as you can get, with these strange painted-on white panties (no fake bra, mind you). Scratchy’s easily separated head is her most interesting attribute, though. We’ll be walking along at Target when Scratchy’s body falls off; Will skips along with Scratchy’s hair still firmly in hand, her wide blue-eyed disembodied head dangling in his sweet little hand, while one of us follows along behind him, scooping up the body to the occasional accompanying exclamation of dismay from the casual passerby. We never even blink at our regular body retrieval duty. Even the kids at Will’s school now just let us know where the body fell.

As creepy as I objectively recognize Scratchy to be, well, we don’t leave home without her. And we usually don’t even notice the oddness of Scratchy’s bodiless head, even when you can hear the little bit of broken neck still rattling around in there. I imagine Will’s kindergarten teachers will find him a tactile learner, one of those kids who has to cut out circles and squares before being able to fully understand the attributes of shapes. He certainly loves puzzles. For now, though, he’ll sit with Scratchy, still sucking those two fingers, his other hand rubbing one of her locks between his fingers, back and forth, back and forth, entering some baby Zen state of nirvana. Grown people use drugs for this, I swear. And I can’t help watching him, occasionally rubbing Scratchy’s hair myself, but failing to feel what he does, wishing I had some way with only my fingers to calm myself, to slow the universe, to be a child again.

Social studies drama

From: Lisa
To: Ms. H
Date: Thursday - October 13, 2005 8:15 AM
Subject: social studies sheet

Ms. H, Laura just called to say she couldn't find her social studies homework in her bookbag and asked me to look for it at home. I have looked, and I don't believe it's here; I think it must be stuck somewhere odd in the pages of her big notebook.

I was going to email you about this assignment anyway. We've been fairly busy nights this week, and she was planning to do her social studies assignment Wednesday night. Unfortunately she left her book, and we didn't realize it until after school had closed. Chris actually drove up to Orange Elementary about 6:10 but the woman who runs the after-school program wouldn't let them back to the classroom to get the book. We did call around and find somebody who had the four questions from the textbook, so we looked up several web pages on the Homestead Act and did the worksheet using that, but I'm sure quite a number of the answers aren't what they should've been if she'd read the chapter. At any rate, this is one of those accept the consequences lessons, I guess (although I couldn't quite bring myself to send her to school with none of it done). We did fuss at her about it, so I think she's appropriately sorry (which I hope would prevent her from doing it again, but somehow...).

Would you please ask her to look more carefully in her bookbag for the paper? I'm leaving now for work, so I can't look again, but I have gone over the house pretty thoroughly. If she can't find it, is it possible for her to get an extra copy of the assignment and we'll redo it (correctly) tonight? I know you would have to take off for lateness, if it's even allowed to turn work like that in late.

Anyhow, sorry this is so long.
Thanks.
Lisa

PS. She just called again to say she found it. I thought I'd go ahead and send this so you'd know what was going on with the answers--although I'm sure you could figure it out on your own! :)
Thanks again.

Decisions, decisions

We are fully immersed in the pre-Halloween costume wrangling. We’d settled on Laura as Princess Leia, until she thought maybe it’d be more fun to be Harry Potter’s friend Hermione Granger. Every single year she thinks she wants to be Hermione, and every single year she changes her mind. Except this year, when now she thinks maybe she’d like to be Hermoine after all. Naturally this year you couldn’t find a Harry Potter costume if your life depended on it.

William AKA Batman AKA Naked Boy can’t quite seem to make up his mind either. He still runs around wearing his Batman cape and mask (and often nothing else), but since I’ve started thinking I might be a cowgirl, suddenly he thinks he might like to be a cowboy. Who’d have thought! Maybe I can round up some pseudo suede for vests—I think we both have hats already. Since he’ll change his mind another five times before the party, it’s hard to get too worked up about it. Laura used to change her mind—and her costume—even during the party. He’ll be something before the end.

My wool shawl

Today’s really our first fall weather—cool 60s, overcast, a flock of Canadian geese wandering around the grass outside Will’s school this afternoon. I wore my wool shawl, which I adore, but which is also very high maintenance when you’re trying to pump gas or pick up little people or carry in all their five thousand multiplication tests and drawings of Spiderman. Pick up a paper, swing the shawl back around. Pick up William, grab the shawl before it falls on the ground. Still, I love wearing that shawl, wrapping it around my shoulders, letting it slip to my elbows, shrugging it up again, the feeling of fall.

Imperfections in the universe

My sweet little Will has been a budding obsessive compulsive boy ever since he first gained motor control of his hands; one went straight to either his hair or mine, and the other to his mouth. Three years later, they’re still there, although occasionally he lets them loose for other activities. This week it’s been drawing at school. Every afternoon the kids come in from their rampaging around the playground, sweaty and wild-haired and sandy from the giant sand-house, and while they wait for their parents to pick them up, they spend the last half hour of the day doing fine-motor control activities—putting together Lego puzzles, tracing stencils, drawing shapes. So last week Will learned how to make circles and something mostly resembling a triangle, and this week he drew his first person. A little frowny, but pretty darn good.



I can look at the drawing and see his process, a big circle followed by a line, but doesn’t it look like they’re covering the reproductive cycle here?



My favorite this week has been his illustrated story about “scary stairs.”



The obsessive compulsive part of this is how upset he gets when he doesn’t get it right. He will just freak right out about messing up that triangle. Saturday morning he got out his Pooh coloring book and was going to color some bees, which should be yellow, he decided, but he just couldn’t bring himself to put the crayon on the page. I can’t do it, he kept insisting, and then he’d come to me and ask me to color it right. It’s as if he can only scribble on a page when it’s blank—if it has lines, or if he’s expected to produce something specific, it’s all over.

We had this same problem with his tennis shoes the other day. He had these cute little velcro strap Nikes, handy dandy for taking on and off all by himself, and he has really about worn them to a nub. I guess we must have bought them a size too big waiting on the usual post-shoe-purchase growth spurt. I had felt for his toes once or twice to make sure they’re weren’t scrunched up in there, but the shoes still seemed to fit—they just looked ratty. But then the velcro started to separate from the strap, at first just enough that the strap would poke out over the edge of the shoe a bit, but later enough that he couldn’t really fasten that strap by himself easily anymore. He was getting worried about it, but still in a low-key sort of way.

Chris tried safety-pinning the bits together, semi-successfully, but really I just made myself a mental note, get Will some new shoes. One morning last week, as we rushed around in our usual pre-school chaos, I was yelling at Laura for losing her lunch money check and not telling me for a week. She’d waited to mention it until she’d run up a negative balance so high they wouldn’t even give her IOUs anymore, just the dry bread crumbs (or maybe peanut butter sandwich) they give the poor indebted kids. Then I hear this blood-curdling scream from the living room, where Chris was helping Will get dressed, and sure enough, the velcro and strap had bid each other adieu. Because the kids have to wear closed toe shoes to school, and because it’s the end of summer and we haven’t bought new fall shoes yet, his only other shoes were sandals, and he had to wear the “busted” shoes. Chris pinned them again, but Will didn’t settle down until I promised, really really promised, that I would pick him up early and take him to buy new shoes that very day. Which, needless to say, I did.

I understand all about the difficulty of delayed gratification, and if that were it, it wouldn’t trouble me so. But, broken shoes aside, it just kills me to watch my boy stop himself from coloring at the ripe old age of three, especially when he’s so creative. I tried once coloring outside the lines myself for him, after which he went ballistic—that’s not right. I’m afraid he’s inherited my powerful and disabling sense that things need to be right in the universe, which I’ve finally learned after almost forty years is a state you never ever reach. Naturally this hasn’t stopped me from working towards it, which might be OK if I hadn’t passed down the gene. Fortunately he’s not quite ready for therapy yet—probably he’ll have to get close to forty like his mother—and he doesn’t have these little episodes about many things, but wow, when they hit, they measure eight or nine on the Richter scale. All kids have temper tantrums, and I’m betting Will pitches one tonight, when I take off the fake tattoo he’s currently sporting, but a kid who worries about coloring—well, one more thing to add to my list of imperfections in the universe.

Girlfriend

Laura’s latest self-portrait.

What William said

"Mommy, my tricycle had a spider web on it. I have to get a new one. "
Whoops. Guess gross consumerism has finally ruled our roost.