Not Always Magical

And when the outings with the grandparents are over.

And the Fourth of July celebration has been extinguished.

 

Your mother makes you clean out this mess.

Just to keep us all a little grounded and a little humble.

An Aggravating Week: Part II

And so it was that during one of the more busy weeks I've had since diapers, my phone rang at work.

I knew the number.

Ugh.

"Hello...."

"Hi, Ms. Stub her?"

"Yes, this is Mrs. Stew brrr."

"Hi, this is so-and-so from Sienna Crossing Elementary.  I'm the school counselor."

(Oh, this was new.  I am used to hearing from principals.)

"Yes?"

And so she explained that she was reviewing the cultural awareness T-shirt pictures that all the kids in the school had been assigned as homework, and well there was Ben's.

"Mrs. Stuber, can you tell me what the cultural meaning of the skull is in the middle of the picture?"

(Oh.  Oh, dear.)

"No.  No I can't."

"Oh, well I was just thinking.   I mean, I can't hang it up with the others.  Unless maybe there was a cultural significance of the skull?"

My head reply: Well, it's a strange exercise.  These kids all live in sticky-sweet suburbia together.  They are all growing up as friends.  Why in Kindergarten are we choosing to make them all start picking out the differences amongst each other?  And so what if we are a family of pirates?  Why are you going to pick on us?

My verbal reply: "There's no significance.  I'm sure their father told them to just draw a picture.  Do we need to re-do it?"

Perking up: "Well, yes.  Yes, I think that's probably best."

"Okay, thank you. Just send it home."

The Stuber Family Turkey Project

Ben's assignment: disguise his turkey with his family (I guess to save him from becoming a feast).

Everyone pitched in, and while I admittedly generally feel annoyed by this kind of stuff wriggling its way into our evenings, this one was fun. They all had fun with their different tasks and were really proud to take it in to preschool the next day.

When Ben marched in the next morning, the first worker we met asked him about his turkey, and he started to describe everything we had done. And then Nicholas jumped in more loudly and more quickly to finish. Ben automatically shut down and let his brother take over.

Then Laura asked Nicholas to politely be quiet and let his brother finish.
Nicholas stood like a cartoon character ready to burst with the need to provide the presentation as Ben stepped-up and finished what he was saying with a smile and excitement that we rarely get to see.

I am SO glad they are in different classrooms in preschool, and I hope it continues on through all of their school days. No, I will insist it continues through all of their school days.

The Cupcake Incident

Pre-school cupcake parties.

I have opinions layering on opinions about birthday parties for toddlers/pre-schoolers and invitation lists and organized parties and then the pre-school cupcakes and goodie bags that you are nearly obligated to turn up with on your child's birthday. All that alone, there is this:

as I do the rounds before finding the children last night, picking up homework, seeing if everyone has had a green day or a red day, checking boxes for information sheets, I run across a single cupcake in Nicholas' box.

Phooey.

Time for a quick life lesson.

Here we go.

The maniacs spot me and come running. All eyes, except Ben's, are on the cupcake in my hand. Then I hand it to Nicholas, and the girls have a fit, and I explain the situation to the girls matter of factly. Alida doesn't let it go and falls in a heap. She cries the entire way out of the center; she cries getting into the car; she cries as we drive off.

After a short conversation where Nicholas lets me know the girls are upset because they didn't get to sit in the front seat and Ben corrects him to let him know that, in fact, Alida is crying because she wants a cupcake, this follows:

"I know. I'll split it in half and share it with you Alida!"

"Can I have some brother?" asks Elaine.

"Sure. I KNOW! We'll cut it in four halfs."

(I started the math lesson but decided to shut my mouth and let this play out.)

"But, Ben already had a cupcake so he doesn't get any," Nicholas declares.

"That's right," agrees Ben.

"Okay sisters but after dinner and mommy will cut it with the knife."

And do you know, that's exactly how it played out.

Free Range Parenting? Must We Brand Everything?

I would like to think it is a return to common sense,

but somehow I think they are merely introducing a new marketing strategy.

Time Article Here

How We Got Here: Overparenting had been around long before Douglas MacArthur's mom Pinky moved with him to West Point in 1899 and took an apartment near the campus, supposedly so she could watch him with a telescope to be sure he was studying. But in the 1990s something dramatic happened, and the needle went way past the red line. From peace and prosperity, there arose fear and anxiety; crime went down, yet parents stopped letting kids out of their sight; the percentage of kids walking or biking to school dropped from 41% in 1969 to 13% in 2001. Death by injury has dropped more than 50% since 1980, yet parents lobbied to take the jungle gyms out of playgrounds, and strollers suddenly needed the warning label "Remove Child Before Folding." Among 6-to-8-year-olds, free playtime dropped 25% from 1981 to '97, and homework more than doubled. Bookstores offered Brain Foods for Kids: Over 100 Recipes to Boost Your Child's Intelligence. The state of Georgia sent every newborn home with the CD Build Your Baby's Brain Through the Power of Music, after researchers claimed to have discovered that listening to Mozart could temporarily help raise IQ scores by as many as 9 points. By the time the frenzy had reached its peak, colleges were installing "Hi, Mom!" webcams in common areas, and employers like Ernst & Young were creating "parent packs" for recruits to give Mom and Dad, since they were involved in negotiating salary and benefits.

Dude We're Done

Attached please find the result of your third attempt to fix our laptop computer, which obviously failed. My husband, who is in graduate school and works full time and travels often for the National Guard, has spent more than three day’s worth of his personal time in online chats trying to fix this, waiting at our home to receive packages for this, and traveling to drop-off centers to return this computer and pick up replacement parts. The final return of the computer with two notes, one that said it had been fixed and another that said it had not been fixed along with some piece of the computer floating around in the box was particularly aggravating. But it was not nearly as bewildering as the part where one of the notes said that the repair center we sent the computer to did not have the necessary equipment available to repair the computer.

Please do not call our home or our cell phones or our work numbers any more unless there is some actual news to share with us. Along with having to deal with this problem, by escalating it we have apparently been put on a call list to be pestered, which is also aggravating the situation and wasting our time even more fully.

The only acceptable solution we can imagine at this point is either the arrival of a repair person on our doorstep with all of the necessary tools to fix this particular computer or the arrival on our doorstep of a new computer to replace this one.

Sincerely, blah blah.

Since Dell's solution was to have someone call and try to teach us how to re-image our computer, we are now done with them. I was particularly impressed with the four messages they left on our home phone during a work day because, you know, we hang out at home during the work week. We are now officially Mac people.

My Pre-schoolers

Yesterday my boys joined the ranks at daycare of what they call "pre-schoolers." Transition is complete, and they are off and running. There hasn't been a single potty training accident at school since we started wearing big boy pants a month ago, there is handwriting curriculum, and Benjamin exclaims at least once a day now that he is a "big boy." Stop. Did I just say handwriting curriculum? Are you kidding? They are 2! I know, not for long, but technically they are still 2! Yet here they come every day with sheets from school where they have been tracing letters. They purposefully sing the alphabet. They count things. Last night Benjamin was looking at a shark book and explained that the whale shark does not have big teeth. (I'm so proud of my shark lover--he may have got some coaching along the way...)

And then this. As we picked up our mound of papers yesterday (really daycare, we don't need two of every announcement for their class and four of every announcement for the daycare. We just don't.), out fell two envelopes. Our first birthday party invitations. After I finished snickering because the party was for Jack and we were to RSVP to Jill (I take my amusement where I can), I started wondering who in this mass of people was Jack? They've been in this class officially for one day, who is Jack? Was I supposed to learn every one's name that fast? The boys have only recently started referring to their classmates by name and the girls are still "baby."

And then I noticed the date of the party. Oh good, we'll be out of town. My blood pressure over my many opinions on this issue can lower. For now at least.