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Thursday, April 01, 2010

some people's opinions about literature

I really, really want to do a books post but I don't have time today. Instead, this little snippet:

Kids took a break from bickering to discuss the book Claire is reading (The Mysterious Benedict Society).

LT: So who dies in that book, Claire?

Claire: Nobody. [ed. note: oops. Spoiler.]

LT: But, wait, what's it about?

Claire: Spies.

LT: But people die in spy books!

I: Not kids' spy books.

LT: BOOO-ring.

In other kidlit news, the Fuse #8 blog is down to Number 8 in its 100 Children's Chapter Books countdown. THE TENSION! It is KILLING ME! Just like a person in a spy book, right?

Monday, March 08, 2010

highly effective habits of very dramatic people

C is preparing for 4-H Presentation Day this weekend, at which she will present an interpretive reading of the passage from Anne of Green Gables wherein Marilla and Anne meet for the first time, and Anne finds out that they don't want her because she's not a boy. I am (among many other positions including nurse, nutritionist, teacher, spiritual guide, and taskmaster) my daughter's drama coach, so I was helping her along a bit with her reading:

I: All right, here's what I want you to imagine. We've built a beautiful barn, and fenced in our whole acreage, and bought hay and grain, and we go with the horse trailer to the breeder's farm, and you hug your new horse and love her and give her a name, and we bring her home and turn her loose in the barn and then a sheriff's deputy comes and tells us that we have to take her back because you can't have horses here. That is how Anne is feeling right now; she was getting everything she ever wanted her whole life but now she's just figured out that she doesn't get to have it after all.

C: OK.

I: Ready?

C: Yes. "'You don't want me? You don't want me because--'" [racking, uncontrollable, whole-body sobs.]

 It took five minutes for her to be ready to try again. When she's on Broadway, she'll have to come up with some kind of Method-Lite or she'll never be able to make it through a performance.

Thursday, April 30, 2009

I'm a bad, bad blogger.

But then we knew that.

But this is REALLY bad, because I totally neglected to do my son's birthday post and now he'll think I don't love him. MY BOY TURNED THIRTEEN.

I can say that now without my voice shaking but it took practice. THIRTEEN is awfully close to EIGHTEEN which is awfully close to NOT NEEDING HIS MOM ANYMORE AND MOVING AWAY. And obviously we want him to reach this stage, all in good time of course, because that's what's natural and good and the way God ordained things to be and will make him happy and us too but FIVE YEARS ARE VERY SHORT. So I'm hugging him a lot lately, to store up against that looming day when I'll have to call him and have him drive to my house from his house in order for me to be able to give him a hug. I even kiss his cheek when I can catch him off-guard.

A little premature, you're thinking? Come on, Rachel, the kid's only thirteen, it's not like he's heading off for college across the country next week, you say? I will remind you that FIVE YEARS. They are VERY SHORT. For example:

I have been blogging (such as it is, lately) for six years and that has felt like nothing.

Five years ago LT was eight and I thought he was SO big and grown-up and that was not very long ago at all.

Every year goes by faster than the year before. When LT was born, 5 years was roughly 1/4th of my life. Now it's roughly 1/7th. By the time he's 18 it'll be 1/8th or so.

Remember the year 2000? Does that feel like a long time ago to you? Nearly TWICE five years, people.
What about Claire, you say? You'll still have Claire at home? Yes, but NINE YEARS AREN'T VERY LONG EITHER.

So I think I'm justified in having a wee little bit of a freakout. Now if you'll excuse me, I think he's soundly enough asleep that I'll be able to smooch his face without having him wake up and wipe it off, so I have to go now.

Monday, April 06, 2009

Other things have been growing too.

Well, we've joked about having a betting pool for when this would happen, but it's too late now. (I always guessed he'd be 13. But you know, if I was still 5 8 3/8" like I SWEAR I used to be, I'd have been right, most likely. Barely.) Anybody want to put in for which week of his 13th year he'll pass up his Daddy at 5' 10 1/2"?

(Today's photos helpfully taken by Claire. Baby photo taken by my brother Toney.)

April 6, 2009. He is fifteen days shy of his thirteenth birthday, and a quarter-inch taller than his mom at 5' 8 1/8". A historic day! :)

April 6th, 2009. Left-hand side is on my head; right-hand side is on LT's.

LT and his mama, April 1996. I LOVE THIS PICTURE.

Monday, July 14, 2008

ok, so this is so pitiful.

Yesterday I drove a little over three hours each way in a borrowed van to drop off eight boys ages 12-16 at Scout camp. You know, I have to wonder: why don't they put Scout camps in nice, accessible places? I mean, come on, I live in the mountains and have for my whole life; I know that there are plenty of private, secluded places that aren't separated from civilization by twenty or thirty miles of harrowing, mostly-single-lane switchbacks going down cliffs into a ravine to a river and then back up the other side. It was funny, actually, because when my brother recruited me to do the driving -- out of desperation, mind you, since the person who was going to drive was ill and T had a prior commitment -- I made a rawther large stink about how I would prefer not to go via this one locally notorious bendy grade, but wanted to take the very slightly longer but much straighter (and more scenic, because the bendy grade is also very ugly, in a scrub-brush-and-bare-dirt kind of way) route through the valley. And then the last hour of the trip, unavoidable no matter what route we took, was like something you'd see in a cartoon involving a camp trailer and Daisy Duck, much more nerve-wracking and nausea-inducing (which turned out not to be an issue for any of the boys in my care, praise the Lord) than anything little old Bagby Grade could dish out. My brother was highly amused at the irony of the situation, I assure you.

Really, the drive was fun and interesting and the vanload of boys were pleasantly conversant in all kinds of topics ranging from film adaptations of books to the absence of transitional forms in the fossil record to the cyclical nature of global climate change. On the way back I was by myself, and I listened to three hours of Elizabeth Von Arnim's The Enchanted April (excellent Librivox recording here), which made the time go faster, but didn't alleviate the sadness of the fact that my boy is going to be gone for an entire week. I've been mentally preparing myself for this for months. I'm mostly past worrying that he'll be excluded by the other boys and have a terrible time (this is my own issues talking, mostly, and I realize that), and I'm OK with the fact that he'll probably get homesick at first because this is just something that people have to go through sometime, and I've never been really concerned that he'll get lost or anything frightening like that, because he's very cautious and deliberate by nature. Now I'm just faced with the reality of his absence for seven long days. This may sound silly (after all, hello, he's TWELVE; he's not exactly a needy little preschooler), but he's never been away from home for more than two nights, and we're all feeling it. He had better brace himself for a substantial onslaught of hugs when he gets home whether he wants them or not.

Monday, June 09, 2008

syntactic felicity

You don't want to make C mad. Here is a brief sampling of the hail of impromptu insults she flung at her brother in the space of about ten seconds after he beat her rather unkindly at Waterworks (there were more, but we can't remember them):

You are a pecan with two arms and two legs that can talk!
You are a pecan chopped up in a pecan pie!
You drowning little fishie!
You flabbergasting baboon!

and the pièce de résistance:

You are a boiled baloney and baboon sandwich!

It's hard to reprimand her when I'm laughing like that.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

we are not immune.

If these are not the very first words you've ever read in my blog, you probably already know that my school years were not happy socially, especially in elementary school and let's not forget seventh grade which was, if possible, even worse than sixth grade, but I'm not sure that IS possible. And if these ARE the first words you've ever read in my blog, you know this now. So if I were to tell you that I take my kids to a homeschooling moms' Bible study where the moms study and talk while the kids (a substantial number of them, maybe... fifteen? twenty?... most of whom the kids know from Sunday School and AWANA) run around outside and play, and that the kids there had, in the two times we've gone, been mean to my children in various ways, you might have some idea that it would maybe break my heart a little. Or a lot.

Now, let's be clear and say that homeschooled-kid-with-mom-in-the-next-room "being mean" is not quite on the level of three-hundred-kids-on-the-playground-and-one-has-Rachel-Germs "being mean". And it's handled much differently once authority figures catch on. Last time we were there, two weeks ago, the girls, led by the two cute little alpha-females in the group, told C to wait outside a gate while they went in a paddock to "get things ready" for part of an elaborate game of pretend they had going on, and then they just let her sit out there and never called her to come in. (OK, my heart just constricted AGAIN.) Within half an hour of our arrival home, before C had even told me much of what had gone on, one girl's mother had called to allow her daughter to apologize to mine, and the other did the same the next morning, just as I was on my way to the phone -- literally -- to call her. So yes, dealt with differently, but still oh so painful. This week C says the girls were very nice to her -- although in watching her run around with them she still had an 'outsidish' kind of look -- but it was LT's turn. The boys -- these boys are preteens, by the way -- played hide and seek. From him. Without telling him that was what they were going to do. He is taking this far less hard than I (internally) am, but still, he doesn't like it.

Did I pass some kind of Socially Unacceptable gene on to my children? Are they just "the new kids", and they don't fit in yet but they will soon? How many times should a mother let her children experience this kind of thing before she concludes that the world is simply not fit for associating with and steps decorously away from it? I tell you, it makes me want to circle the wagons and just keep them home where nobody will ever hurt them like that, even though I know that's not really the best idea in the long run. I know this is my own history speaking, and my own Issues rearing their ugly heads. Home was my haven, but I just couldn't stay there all the time, no matter how much I wished I could. My kids... could, theoretically. I know, I know, it wouldn't be healthy and we need to find ways to work through these kinds of troubles in a constructive way and all that, but right now my injured-mama-bear self just instinctively wants to pull them in close and keep them away from a cruel childish world that is out there just waiting to break their hearts like it broke mine for so long.

Monday, February 04, 2008

four things

Thing one:

Crate training proceeds apace. I can see a tiny light of sanity at the end of the tunnel. (This dog, T points out, has cost us more than a vacation to the beach would have. More than we spent on our first child in his first, oh, three or four years of life. More than I could have reasonably spent in an absolutely dizzying expedition to a bookstore. Or, to get all practical and also to tie in a reference to my other current obsession, possibly more than it would cost to have our driveway graded. She had better plan on saving someone's life, Lassie-fashion, at some point.)

She has just emerged with a very guilty expression from my bedroom. I had better not find any dog-logs in there, missy.

Thing two:
C is sick. She is puky, and flushed but so far not feverish. Poor princess. Here's hoping it's a 12-hour bug. (And also that I don't get it, because tomorrow is a Very Important Night in history class, and also who would take the dog out to poop?)

Thing three:
looklooklooklooklooklooklook:

Not even a single solitary chance of rain. BLISS. I am no longer a person who loves winter. I cannot wait for spring. Heck, I cannot wait until I'm taking the dog for a walk at 8:30 in the evening in a tank top and capris, instead of freezing my toes off in my jammies, jacket, and canvas shoes taking her out for her morning potty. (seriously, we will need some more moisture before the annual drought sets in or we'll all catch on fire around Labor Day. But a break is going to be very very nice.)



Thing four:

HEE.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

is this... heaven?

First the dog, and then THIS:

I mean, what more do kids need?

(This was before breakfast. It's pitiful and patchy and ugly now.)

(Also: holy cow, that boy is growing.)

Friday, November 09, 2007

relief

The doctor says it's a keloid scar, slightly inflamed. Completely harmless, although we're to watch it in case it turns out she's wrong, and it starts oozing or anything sinister like that. It's already getting slightly smaller, so odds of that are slim. Thank you all for praying and caring.

This was good enough news that the fact that my beautiful Dart has started spewing oil from its innards for some completely undiagnosable reason (this, in case you were unsure, is a Very Bad Thing) is almost insignificant by comparison.

(Poor T... the guy never gets a rest. He is the one who hired himself as the family mechanic, though.)

kids Archives | Page 1 of 9

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