Author name: Sandra Tayler

Howard and I were curled up watching a TV episode before bed when I heard thumping upstairs. I went to investigate and found Patches in the hall with blood all over his face. He was half asleep, confused, and alarmed at the red smears all over his hands. He was vigorously upset with our efforts to clean him off. Then further upset at any suggestion we had to make. It was only when we proved that the bleeding had stopped that he began to relax some.

It is hard to be logical at midnight. Logic is especially hard to come by when you’re holding your blood coated child who is shrieking in uncharacteristic ways. Mostly I was just managing the problem and reassuring Patches, but part of my brain was busily at work providing the direst possible causes for Patches’ nosebleed. Trying to create sinister connections between a sole spontaneous nosebleed and a couple of allergy attacks from other family members was convoluted at best.

Fortunately Patches reassured me by being his normal self once he was calm and demonstrably not bleeding anymore. He snuggled in my lap and watched the online trailers for Meet The Robinsons and Happy Feet. Then he snuggled closer as I tucked him into our bed to go back to sleep. He was out again within minutes.

I hope this nosebleed is a fluke rather than the beginning of a pattern.

I just came back from my first time being a Mom Helper in Gleek’s Kindergarten class. It was wonderful to me to see that they ALL wiggle and yell and wander around aimlessly when they should be doing other things. She fits right in, mostly. I wasn’t worried over nothing, but the fixes are much smaller than I was afraid they would be. Just knowing that I will be in her classroom once a week has brightened Gleek’s life considerably. She’s already counting down until my next Mom Helper day.

I think it also helped tremendously that I kept her home from school on Tuesday. She claimed to be sick that day. She wasn’t, but I knew that Monday was a perfectly awful day for her. The awful Monday on the tails of last week’s difficult school days was a bit too much. She really needed a home day to reset and relax. Specifically, she needed a day at home when her older siblings weren’t around to scold her for anything. Tuesday was wonderful and restful for us both. I didn’t have to negotiate kids in and out of the car multiple times and Gleek played happily with Patches for most of the day. On Wednesday she went back to school agreeably because she knew that the luncheon would be in full swing when she came home. Today she hardly even took time to say goodbye before she skipped happily into the building.

We only have 8 more school days before vacation. Hopefully Gleek will have happy ones with no further crises in them.

We’ve already embarked on that Christmas Season classic tradition known as The Countdown. Link carefully counted days and created a chain for himself. Each morning he tears off a loop and is that much closer to Christmas. Gleek also has a chain. She made hers in Kindergarten, but mostly she just forgets to tear off loops then we have to count and catch up. I don’t think Kiki has a counting system this year, although she usually does. Patches can’t count past five, so he doesn’t have one either.

This year I have my own count down going. But I’m not counting down to Christmas day, I’m counting down until our departure for my parent’s house in California. I’m really looking forward to this trip. I hope the weather cooperates and lets us go. It has been a long time since I’ve had an away-from-the-house vacation. I’m also looking forward to the chance to re-experience some of the tradtions that enriched my childhood years. I have 14 days to go. Fortunately I have plenty of events between now and then to keep my mind occupied. Between homework and ward (church congregation) parties and holiday programs and the holiday mailing rush, I have many many things to do every day.

But none of my many things to do have the same nailbiting stressfullness of the book mailing, so it’s all good.

On Sunday I inventoried everything that I have on hand for the kid’s Christmas. I collect stuff all year long at garage sales or dollar stores or stuff that neighbors are getting rid of. It all goes into this huge box I have in the storage room. Then as Christmas approaches I delve into the overstuffed box to determine which things will make an appearance this year, which things will be held against future Christmases or birthdays, and which things aren’t worth keeping at all. I’m always surprised at the quantity that falls into this third category. What was I thinking when I collected some of this junk?

Our Christmas budget is much larger than it was last year or the year before. For both of those years, our entire Christmas budget was under $100. This year after the sales of the books we have some more wiggle room. We’ve already spent five times that amount providing some of the games and shiny things that we just haven’t been able to afford for more than two years. Part of me feels glad that we are able to do this, part of me feels guilty for abandoning the frugal living principles that pulled us through the past two Christmases.

On the other hand this year I actually feel anticipation for Christmas day rather than fear that my hours and hours of scavenging will leave my kids disappointed at gift opening time. This year I know for certain that each child is getting at least two items which will cause wide-eyed delight. Some of these delight filled items came from my big box. Others came from Amazon.com in shiny new packaging. I don’t miss the nailbiting worry over Christmas giving. Instead I now worry about a slide into commercialism. I also worry about how much we are spending because, while we do have a cash flow, it just barely meets our needs. We need to not be stupid about spending money. This whole Schlock/Tayler Family edifice could still come crashing down if a book fails to sell well enough.

And so I quaver between fearing that we’ve spent too much and wishing we could spend more. Somehow I think that all parents do this every Christmas, no matter what their financial situation.

Today was a rough day all day long. Howard and I had some business/financial issues that absorbed large portions of brainspace and energy for most of the day. In addition to that Gleek had a really bad day at school. She spent most of Kindergarten time sitting in the Power Chair. The Power Chair is where you go sit until you regain your power to control yourself. Gleek doesn’t like the power chair. At all. Her dislike of school has escalated at an alarming rate this past week. Something is going awry there. Starting Thursday I’ll be volunteering in the classroom once per week. Maybe seeing her in the classroom will help me get a handle on where things are going wrong for her. Also I need to snuggle her into my lap for stories at least twice per day for the next while.

Link was emotionally volatile today because he didn’t get enough sleep last night. I put him in bed on time tonight, but last I checked he was still awake. I think I need to be charting his sleep to find the new patterns. I also need to be recording the exact time he gets his medication for comparison purposes and I need to be taking behavioral notes as well. I’ve been doing some of this, but a more focused approach is probably called for. The good news is that even when he was on the edge of tears he was able to form complete sentences to explain what was upsetting him. Without medication he goes completely nonverbal when he is upset. Since he can’t talk it out, he ends up suppressing it.

At dinner hour there was madness. There was howling and growling and property damage. (casualties not too serious, one pencil, one hole poked in a sheet, and a shattered burned out light bulb.) Curfews were stretched and consequences handed out. There were pants that needed changing, twice. There were strewn legos. On the heels of this chaos came homework time and bedtime.

It has not been a good mood day.

Thank goodness for wonderful neighbors. They showed up at our door and sang us carols. Then they gifted us hot chocolate mix and went off into the night. It is amazing how cooperative children get when the possibility of hot chocolate with marshmallows is in the future. Pajamas happened in no time at all. And once the chocolate was gone, they tripped merrily off to bed with only minimal begging for additional treats or favors.

Hopefully tomorrow contains more of the relaxed happiness I’ve been enjoying lately. I’ve grown addicted to that feeling. I missed it today.

I had a whole post planned about the Christmas inventory I did today. It was going to be entertaining and fun. I was going to enjoy writing it. Now it is 9 pm and I finally have time and quiet to write, only I’m too grumpy and tired from all the putting-kids-to-bed to write that post. Maybe I’ll get to write it tomorrow.

I shouldn’t complain. After all, I had vast swathes of free time this afternoon. I just filled them with inventory rather than with writing about doing inventory.

The free time came courtesy of our huge bin of legos. Way back when the very first sets of Star Wars legos made their appearance, Howard longed to own all of them. I aided and abetted this desire and so we used much of our disposable income on lego sets for several years. Then we realized that we were never going to catch up because they’d keep creating more sets. We also realized that we already had about a hojillion legos and didn’t need more than that. At the time our kids were too small to really play with legos. I remember one evening when we were building things when two-year-old Kiki pulled all the heads off of the lego men and lined them up on a flat green board like some sort of a head garden. Or perhaps it was a recreation of the French Revolution. Other than making head gardens, mostly the kids just scattered the legos without really building anything. But now they are old enough to construct. And now we do not have a lego eating baby or toddler in the house. So now is the time for us to put away the duplos and bring out the legos for every day use. The kids are thrilled with this prospect. I’m fairly certain that my vacuum cleaner will be less than thrilled as it eats all the tiny pieces that always get lost in the corners of the room. Hopefully it will be a happy switch and not one that has me ready to tear my hair out and throw all the legos away.

BUT the switch cannot be made until 1 pm on Wednesday after I finish hosting a church luncheon here at my house. The luncheon will have a variety of women and small children invading my house and some of them will not be lego safe. I’m looking forward to hosting this luncheon. It will give me motivation to clean all the corners of my house that I’ve been ignoring for the past several months.

So legos = good. Luncheon = good. Silence from upstairs where Gleek & Patches are in bed while Link is snacking and Kiki is reading = good. What was I grumpy about again?

I now have a matching pair of toy cupboards in my family room. They stand one on either side of the fireplace. They are a monument to order and cleanliness. They have plenty of space to house all of our toys. I have the sneaking suspicion that they will spend significant portions of time emptied of their contents. This is one of the drawbacks to having cupboards large enough for kids to play hide and seek in. Sigh.

I had a joyful surprise in my email last night. A friend that I love visiting with, but never seem to run into, discovered my blog here and emailed me. it turns out that she has her own blog. So now I can keep up with all her stuff conveniently from my computer. Perhaps this will serve as a reminder to me to actually call her and schedule that luncheon we always talk about having, but always forget to do. Her blog is very artsy and cool. After I’ve obtained permission, I’ll send all you fine folks over to look at it. It makes me remember how much I loved studying humanities in college. Someday I’ll have time to study it again I hope.

Oh, and in case anyone is interested, I’ve enabled anonymous comments on my journal here. I realized that I want non livejournal users to be able to comment. This also allows random trolls and spammers to comment. I’m not sure how much of a problem it will be, hopefully not a problem at all.

A final point of interest for today is that our house has been invaded by latin pigs. Kiki has been joyfully using pig latin to communicate things with me without letting the other kids know what she is saying. Only, they can tell she’s saying things sneaky and they invariably want to know what she said. It tends to cause more interest than it keeps secrets. Also parsing hesitantly spoken pig latin is tiresome for me. Fortunately Link is starting to comprehend it, so soon they should be able to speak it to each other and leave me out of the loop.

It is fascinating to watch this folklore get passed from one child to another. They’ve also been teaching alternate versions of Jingle bells. The kids delightedly sing these versions as if they’re new, but I heard them and sang them when I was a child. The approved curriculum is not the only thing that is taught at school. These folkloric songs and rhymes have a life of their own as they are passed from one generation of children to the next. I took a folklore class in college that discussed this phenomenon. It was fascinating to think about. Now it is fascinating to see in action.

Today I feel accomplished. As of yesterday I finished an entire month of blogging every single day. It was my own private writing goal and I did it. I wanted to do it because when life gets busy/interesting that is exactly when I am least likely to write an entry. But those are exactly the times I’d like to have recorded for my own reference later. So as of the 30th I had 32 consecutive days. Then of course I missed December 1st by about 20 minutes, which makes my crowing about writing every day a bit ironic. Oh well. Can it count as yesterday if I haven’t slept yet?

Today I also rearranged my office. I did this with the wonderful and willing help of my friend raisinfish. We shuffled furniture around to create table space next to my desk. Now I actually have a space that I can work with. This makes me very glad indeed. I’m sure that within a week I will have piled things all over the wonderful open space, but I still believe that the arrangement will be much better. I probably should have taken before and after pictures, but I was in too much of a hurry to get the job done. Oh well.

Yesterday I purchased a pair of free standing cupboards which are destined to hold the toys in my family room. Last night I assembled one and placed toys in it. It looks so much better than what we had. I’m looking forward to getting the other one in place.

After almost two weeks of fairly aimless drifting I feel like I’m gaining control of the chaos again. It is a good feeling.

Today Howard and I loaded Itunes onto my computer and copied our joint music library there. The point of this is for me to be able to create a library of music that I like and can use without messing up Howard’s ratings and settings. So I’ve just killed an hour poking around to see what music is in there. I threw out things that I don’t like and discovered some old favorites. The point of all this is that eventually Howard will replace his current ipod with a newer version and I can have the old one. Then I can have music around the house even when Howard is elsewhere. I don’t know when the new ipod for Howard will happen. I wish it could be this Christmas, but we’ve already been too spendy and all the things that we’ve been “making do” are beginning to break and need replacing. Just today I had to replace the toy cupboard because the drawers on it completely broke. In fact I should be assembling those shelves rather than poking around our music library. Sigh. But music has so much less work involved.

Today Gleek had a tantrum over departing for school. Partly the problem was miscommunication between Howard and I over whether she is allowed to take toys in the car for the to-school trip. Howard ended up taking Kiki to school and swinging back by to pick up Gleek. After he left with Kiki, Gleek curled up on my bed into a little ball. “I don’t like school.” she told me in a small sad voice. “People call me crybaby.” I wanted so much to snuggle her into my lap and make it all better, but when I reached for her she fled from me. She didn’t flee far, she didn’t want to be held, but she didn’t want to be alone either. I asked her if there was anything else that she didn’t like about school. Apparently one day she was teased that the clothes she was wearing weren’t clothes at all, but pajamas. Also she doesn’t much like circle time. She says it is boring. I then asked what she likes about school. She brightened up for this part. She told about a girl who makes her laugh.

Trying to encourage this positive train of thought, I mentioned a project her class is working on. That was a huge error. It turns out that the project is supposed to be a surprise for me and for Howard. I’d seen the surprise and that seemed the end of everything for Gleek. She cried inconsolably while I racked my brain trying to think of a way to make things better. Inspiration hit, I grabbed Kiki and Link’s versions of this same project and showed them to Gleek. I told her how I was really looking forward to her project being done because then I could hang it on the wall with the one Kiki had done and the one that Link had done. We compared the two finished projects with hers which is in process. Then we quickly put the projects away so that it can still be a surprise for Howard.

Leaving for school was still hard for Gleek. I know that school is a hard place for her to be. She has to work very hard to control herself and follow rules while she is there. I also know that there are things about it that she really enjoys and loves. I know how she feels, because parenting is the same way every single day.