When she has to go to work with me

Hypatia is now my little Tag-Along-Child, as we no longer have our nanny and Carbon is off at school. She wasn't thrilled at first, and the first two days that she had to be at work with me for 6 hour stretches we were both pretty frustrated by it.

Now I feel like we are hitting a stride. This is what her day at work with me looks like:



Playing with the toys I keep in my office right next to my desk.


In the church nursery, but what is she looking at?


Now that the construction noise is gone, we see things like this again - a deer calmly grazing the edge of the parking lot.



Playing in the new children's play yard. It will be even better when the treehouse gets built back there!

There is also a TV at church, so she can watch a movie every now and then. And today she didn't touch the preschool room with the art supplies, but that is available to her also. It's actually not a bad deal, I think.

Recognizing Religious Education this Sunday

Today was a very big day for me at church, and one part of that was our Religious Education Recognition Sunday, honoring our children, youth, and volunteer teachers. And they also stepped forward and honored me right back, so that felt very sweet and loving.

I read this quote as part of the service today:

I would like to share with you the words of William Ellery Channing:
The great end in religious education is not to stamp our minds irresistibly on the young, but to stir up their own; not to make them see with our eyes but to look inquiringly and steadily with their own; not to give them a definite amount of knowledge but to inspire a fervent love of truth; not to form an outward regularity but to touch inward springs …

That is the work I do, and a large part of why I love this job.

a few thoughts on sports

I am requiring both children to pick a sport from the YMCA offerings and follow through with it. It's a requirement because "be comfortable playing pick-up games" and "have lifelong fitness habits" are two items on my Goals List for the kids.

Following through is more of a challenge, because I myself am not comfortable with sports, especially anything involving a ball. I've never played any sport, but the kids need me to participate at games and practices and to go out and practice with them.

My husband didn't really do any sports either, having dropped out of baseball "when they took the T away", and he's not around enough to work with the kids anyway. So I have found myself the only Mom in a gym full of dad's trying to throw and catch a football with Hypatia. (A horrible experience, but it showed me I just need to play around with balls at home more)

I went out and bought a baseball mitt so I can try and play catch with Carbon. It's a bit frustrating, but Carbon's comment is "Mommy is really bad at baseball, but it's good that she's trying".

And that's all that I expect of the kids, so at least I'm modeling the idea. Carbon is not "sporty" so far, but that doesn't mean he can't get out and have fun and stay fit. It remains to be seen with Hypatia - she's actually pretty good and she's a fast little runner.

But we aren't looking to be "good at" sports, and I want to avoid unhealthy competition. This is about community, health, and fun, and that's the place that sports have in my priority list.

Lego Corporation at school

At Carbon's school, which is a Sudbury school, there are "corporations" that "own" and care for different areas of the school. For instance, there is an "Art Corporation", a "Music Corporation", a "Kitchen Corporation", etc. The corporation sets rules for who can use the materials and what they have to do to show capability, through a process called "getting certified". In this system, Carbon still hasn't managed to get certified to use the microwave at school, because he gets mixed up about what button does what.

After our trip to Legoland, Carbon was very excited by the idea of starting a Lego Corporation at school. He proposed it, and had a staff person help him write up a sort of charter. The school meeting voted and approved it. He was joined by two adults and a handful of other kids who also like legos a lot. He took more rubbermaid tubs to school and has been leading the charge to ask for donations of legos and funding from the school coffers to buy legos that the corporation will agree they want the most.

They set a date for a field trip to Toys R Us to look at legos and make a list of what they want to buy. But, unfortunately, Carbon ended up being the only kid who went on the field trip, which bummed him out a bit. Hopefully the lego corporation will regain a bit of its enthusiasm, but if not, it's already been a good process for Carbon.

What impresses me about this system is that it takes an interest - in Carbon's case his main interest is legos - and it gives it a real-world setting that is great practice and education for later life.

Sweetness from my children

I love that my children are starting to turn around and be sweet and caring toward me. A baby can feel empathy, and may look at you with big googly eyes of love, but an older child can express their love in many ways.

On the crazy day, that I described in my last post, we stopped at the coffee shop for breakfast. The options for gluten free were cupcakes with lots of frosting or muffins. Of course, the kids wanted cupcakes, but I told them they had too much sugar for breakfast. The barrista, very sweetly and trying to be helpful, offered that they carry a breakfast cookie (she thought the name "cookie" would appeal more to my kids). She even got out their book to read off all the ingredients in the cookie to me to make sure the kids could eat it. So I bought two of those cookies.

Well, neither child liked the cookie. Hypatia was very upset and threw hers down in the car and refused to eat it. Carbon took a couple bites, said "it's not so bad, I like it" and then tucked it into his lunch box.

That night, when I was washing out his lunch box, the cookie was still in it. I said "Carbon, you didn't eat your cookie", and he answered "I didn't want to hurt your feelings any more right then, but I really didn't like that cookie".

He didn't want to hurt my feelings anymore.



Another example:

Last night Hypatia woke up in the middle of the night with a nightmare. Her dad was up, working, but I got up also to go put her back to bed. As I was lying in bed with her, rubbing her back, she calmed down and said "you should go back to bed, Mommy. Tomorrow we have to go to work and you need energy".

And here is how a person drowns under a pile of laundry ...

You know how you can drown under four inches of water? And you think, how did that person not just get up?

And then there is the person who can swim, who knows themself and what they are doing, and who does this all the time. But if they swim out too far, if they overestimate their strength, or if there is a freak wave or a storm, the experienced and the strong will still drown.

Enough with the metaphors.

Coming off our "three-day weekend" (never a reality for a person who works at a church but the rest of my family had a 3 day weekend), I had spent my normal Day Off (mondays) engaged in family activities and then taking advantage of a few sunny hours at home to work in my garden. The garden and yard work windows between heavy rain are so brief right now, that I have to go out and take advantage of any of them I can.

So we get to Tuesday, and I think I did enough on the holiday because I managed to do the weekly bathroom cleaning and take out the trash. And I have a plan for Tuesday, a plan that doesn't work.

We have no food in the house right now (should have gone shopping during the weekend instead of driving out of town to see my extended family), so I stop at a coffee shop to get the kids and me breakfast, then I drop Carbon off at school with a lunch packed of just green salad. Hypatia and I head off to Costco, but I forgot they don't open until 10am. So we head over to work (because I don't have any childcare for her anymore, so she has to go everywhere with me), and we get some good work done. I think I will leave in the afternoon and go do that shopping ... but then I get an email from the minister saying "I should have asked you earlier, but" ... and I need to be at a 1:45pm meeting with the minister and the music director. OK - lunch break and then go back.

I tried to make the most of a short lunch break and check something off my To Do List. My husband has been in real need of new clothing, but he can't/won't shop for himself. So he heads off to work in pants with a ripped knee and just points that out to me ... There was a sale in many of the stores at the mall, so on my short lunch break I bought mall food and picked up 6 pairs of boxer shorts, three button-up shirts and two pairs of pants (all for only $114, which I thought was great) for the husband.

Back at work, Hypatia is getting bored and it is a lot harder to properly work and make sure she doesn't bother anyone else or get in trouble ... but I finish out the day until 3pm when it is time to go pick Carbon up from school.

I pick him up, and I have an errand for work that is geographically between his school and the YMCA where the kids have swim class 1/2 hour after school. So I squeeze that work errand in, but with the two kids "helping" it takes long enough that we are just a bit late to swim class ...

I made a resolution to exercise more, so I am "supposed" to put the kids in playcare at the YMCA after their swim class (they want me to watch, and are not ready for me to just leave them swimming while I exercise at the same time). But last night there was a school potluck and annual meeting at Carbon's school, starting at 6pm. They got out of the showers at 5pm, but I still tried to squeeze a workout in ... 20 minutes on the treadmill and then I needed to change again and grab the kids ...

Oh dear, the dog has been in the garage all day and we really need to go home and let her out to pee ...

Oh dear, I don't have food to take to the potluck ... Yay - it's "produce Happy Hour" (50%off ) at the neighborhood grocery store, I'll just take fruit ...

Arriving 20 minutes late to the school potluck, we find hardly anyone there and no real food. Fruit for dinner. More parents arrive at 7pm, having been confused about the potluck versus the meeting start times ... my husband also arrives at 7:30 having come straight from work. There were 13 items on the agenda, and this was supposed to take One Hour. Nope. Shortly after 9pm, I cannot keep the kids up any later. We leave, but my husband stays to provide quorum for voting on the annual budget and all that.

The kids are wired, so I stick a science video from the library in the machine and I go in to wash the dishes. It's amazing to me that in a day where we ate No Meals at home there are still a pile of dirty dishes to wash. I get the kids in their jammies and teeth brushed and read a bedtime story, and off to bed. My husband gets home, and we do a little dance about we are each starving, but there's no food in the house, and it's after 10pm, and we should just go to bed hungry. He ends up making me toast and eating nothing himself.

We start talking about the school meeting, but it degenerates into an argument about whether to do preschool for the girl next year, the differences between preschool and daycare, whether it is worth it for me to work at all, why he just defers to me as the "subject matter expert", whether he should, and how p**s*d I get when he says stuff like "do whatever you want to do, I don't have the time for all this minutia". We talked it through, but now it's 11pm.

He needed to get up at 5am. At 6am this morning he woke me up as he was dressing. The shirts I got him were too tight. They were his old size, but he's gained a lot of weight. Great - a boomerang errand because now I'll have to take those in to return them. But now he's in a nasty mood, and he swears a lot about not having anything to wear, he can't untangle some cord he needs off his desk so he just throws it down and says "F*** it".

I thought about going back to sleep, but can't after that. As I get up, he comes back to ask me where something else is. I don't know ... it turns out he had it still packed in his bag from our vacation ... he is mad it's raining hard and he'll be soaked by the time he gets to work because his motorcycle gear hasn't been rainproofed or repaired. I start looking for solutions and trying to help him, but he's just mad and depressed and Nothing Is Going To Make It Better. Life just sucks and he wants to stomp around and complain about it.

I'm emotionally charged after he leaves, but right as I go to do my morning yoga Hypatia wakes up crying from a nightmare. Then my alarm clock goes off ... Oh look, it's time for me to be awake.

So here I am, and I am very much in danger of drowning, because I have swum out too far. Today I need to go in to work - there is a lot for me to get done before Sunday. I want and intend to exercise (because I am trying to take better care of myself and Be Happy) but squeezing the time out seems like such an indulgence when I also need to go shopping for food and cook dinner. Oh, and I want/need to go to a memorial service for a congregant tonight, but I'm still playing message-tag with my sister-in-law about watching the kids for me ...

And I clearly need to iron some of his old shirts for him and do something to deal with clothing for my husband to wear to work for the rest of the week.

A person can drown under all this, with 3 mostly helpless humans relying on me to cloth and feed and clean up after them, a full-time job to do, and all the rest.

The Happiness Project

I am currently reading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. There is also a blog that I am following now. Although the special one-year project is a concept that I think is very stale at this point, I like Gretchen, and I relate to her and her efforts to live a better life.

I think I would like to launch my own Happiness Project, but I'm not sure yet what form it will take. So far, I've been reading and journaling, and I've come up with a list of things that are important to my happiness:

• Health
• Family, Friends, Love (connection to others)
• Purpose and Principles
• Order and Cleanliness
• Reading, Learning, and Thinking
• Nature
• (good) Food and Drink
• Beauty
• Creativity
• Gratitude
• Spirit and Mindfulness
• Connection, Attachment, a feeling of Roots

Where will I go with this? We'll see.