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When a child is missing, hollering her name all over the house is a good place to start. It stops being useful when the pitch and fear in the holler start an adrenaline rush which damp out thought. It would have been much better for me to alert Howard that Gleek was missing so that we could start a systematic search. Fortunately he heard the pitch of fear in my calls and started to calmly look in likely places. Kiki also responded with calm thought and went to ask our backyard neighbor. This was perfect because the backyard neighbor was the one who located Gleek in another neighbor’s back yard.

Gleek was missing a total of about 15 minutes; 10 minutes before I noticed she was gone, 5 minutes of searching.

We had a family conference discussing the importance of always notifying a parent of where you are going. I have carefully tried to not take out the post adrenaline crankies on the kids. Gleek is grounded from friends tomorrow.

I just wish I’d reacted more effectively.

One of the blogs that I read is Woulda Coulda Shoulda by Mir. I love the way she shares her life. She entertains me and makes me cry alternately. I enjoy her posts and I’m always dissapointed when she misses the occasional day. She recently got married and moved from New England to Georgia. Today her post was about the experience of having children living right in her neighborhood. She’s not used to it. She’s especially not used to having what she calls “feral children” living nearby. These are the kids who always show up asking to play, asking to be fed, needing attention, and the parents seem to be nowhere around.

I read Mir’s post and I almost commented. That is unusual for me because I’m a lurker by nature. I wanted to share the joy that I have found living in a neighborhood full of children. I love that my kids can trot themselves two houses away to play with a friend. I love that these friends come over here as well. But then I realized that my spouting about my neighborhood wouldn’t be all that helpful to Mir. The situations are very different. My neighborhood is full of kids whose parents keep track of them. I know most of these parents. I know that if little Charlie shows up at my door to ask to play with Gleek, he probably did so without telling his mom where he went and that I need to send him home to ask his mom first. I know that if little Lucy shows up at my door I need to step out and wave to her mom who is standing on the porch waiting for me to do just that. There is a whole network of relationships built up over 9 years of living in the same place with mostly the same people. There are houses where my kids are not allowed to play because I don’t trust the level of supervision there. There are houses where I’ll let my kids play during the day, but I’d never consider a sleep over. I know which houses welcome kids who show up at the door and which houses really prefer to recieve a call first.

We do have some feral kids in the neighborhood, but there are enough families around that we can take care of them. I am not shy about stating the rules for my house and bouncing a kid who can’t follow the rules. It hasn’t been much of a problem. Mostly children who are feral are so glad to find a structured place that they’ll happily follow rules in order to be allowed to stay and to be fed. It does get annoying sometimes. Non-feral children get annoying sometimes. Even my own kids are sometimes annoying. But My House, My Rules, seems to work pretty well.

I wonder if I lived next door to Mir whether she would consider my kids feral. I know that my kids try to invite themselves over frequently. I know that they ask for food in other people’s homes. I try to teach them to be polite and not invite themselves, but it is hard. I feed neighbor kids all the time and have just kind of assumed that’s normal around here. Do other people look at my occasionally ragamuffin kids and wonder where their parents are? I think we fit in here in Utah. We aren’t the over protective family nor the permissive one. I wonder how different it would be in a place that is not Utah.

I think that while the definition of “good parent” is probably pretty much the same all over the country, the expression of it can be drastically different. There are people who do not believe they can be a good parent unless they buy their child designer clothes and a private education. There are people who believe that good parents fill their child’s time with activities. There are people who believe that good parents don’t over schedule their kids. Each community develops a consensus about how children should be raised. (Note: not all neighborhoods are communities. “Community” implies a network of relationships between the people. Some neighborhoods are just places where people happen to live next door. My neighborhood is very much a community with all the benefits and frustrations that small communities always embody.) My parenting style fits my community’s image of “good parent.” But if I were to change communities I might not find so much acceptance and that would be hard.

I believe that Mir will sort it out. That she’ll be able to establish boundaries and build the relationships she needs to be happy in her new home. I just hope that the community into which she has moved is flexible enough to accept her for who she is and that they can see she is a good parent even if it is expressed differently from the ways they are accustomed to.

Saturday I felt like everything was awful. Yesterday things were normalizing. Today I feel great. I’ve been happy and optimistic. I spent time just talking to the kids instead of avoiding them. I actually did a real bedtime for what feels like the first time since school got out. This meant snack and stories and individual time for each of the kids. It was good. I need to do it more often. I need to start it about an hour earlier.

Today I love my house and my kids and my life. If this is some kind of a mad bungee thing then I’m going to dig in my fingers and hold on right here until the cord gets good and stretched out so that I don’t have to snap back the other direction at all.

Every so often I realize that my kids have changed. While I wasn’t looking they began thinking new thoughts and the new thoughts change their behaviors.

Kiki’s shift into the land of teenager has made her a lot touchier. For awhile the touchiness was emotional, but lately it has been physical. She is much more prone to come up and hug me for no reason. She gives back-rubs. She tickles her siblings. Since this is the kind of attention that Gleek thrives on, the relationship between my two girls has improved a lot.

Gleek has been calmer and happier lately. She is more secure in her relationship with Kiki. But she is also happier in her relationship with Howard. She has been turning to him a lot more lately for comfort and other things she needs. Howard in return has been snugglier with her. It makes me glad.

All the news can’t be good. Link has begun treating Patches as an annoying little brother. He has begun defending his toys and objecting when Patches wants to tag along in games. Link wants to play games that Patches can’t yet comprehend. Patches non-comprehension leads him to “ruin” the game.

Patches doesn’t seem to have turned a corner. I’m hoping that he’ll soon turn the corner so that he gets himself to the toilet on time every time. I’ve been waiting for that corner for over a year now. Sigh. I think Patches needs more positive attention from me. More snuggly story reading is probably in order.

Last night I pulled out my planner and wrote a list of all the things I needed to get done today. I’ve done almost all of it. I love days like this when I get it all done. I only worked for about an hour on the schlock book, but the layout guy did contact me. Now I know we’re ready to really start rolling on Monday. Between now and then I need to start scanning in all the art images that we’ll need. That will be hours of work, I’m sure. Also slated for tomorrow are fixing a toilet and fixing the gate to our backyard. So another busy day ahead.

All that I have left on my to do list today is to write 500 words of fiction. I’ve given myself this little assignment so that the fiction doesn’t get lost entirely in the glut of Schlock book and business tasks. Obviously I can write more if the inspiration strikes, but the minimum is to keep me doing it. If you want to get good at something, do it every day.

One of the things I did this afternoon was to take the kids swimming. We were there at the same time as our backyard nieghbors, so all the kids had people to play with. That was fun for them. It was also fun for me because I had someone to talk to instead of being bored.

Having my two nephews here instead of one Kiki changes the dynamic of the family. Mostly it means lots of joyful shrieking as three boys play video games. But another change became apparent when it came time to put the kids to bed. Obviously the two nephews wanted to sleep in Link’s room. They bracket him in age. Patches shares that room, so he obviously was going to sleep in there as well. This left Gleek, the lone girl. Gleek did not want to be left out, so I simply threw some foam pads down on the floor and let them all sleep there.

Getting them all to fall asleep is something of a challenge. They want to romp, I want them to sleep. So both nights so far have involved thumping and complaining and slamming of doors and shrieks and stolen pillows, and dire threats that I WILL separate them if they don’t settle down. Eventually they do fall asleep. When they do, I sneak in and look at them all. They’re all sprawled and variously piled like an adorable litter of puppies. And like puppies, they’re ready to go again the next day.