One Cobble at a Time

The other day Link brought home two plastic vials from school. At the time he brought them home one was filled with blue sand and the other was filled with multi-colored gravel. I’m still not clear on how he acquired them except that they were give-aways as part of a class party. I’m also not clear on what happened to the sand and gravel because after that first appearance they’ve been filled with a variety of other things. Link has carried them around in his pockets and filled them with what ever struck his fancy. They’ve been filled with water, soap, beads, and slips of paper at various times. This morning at breakfast I saw him carefully filling one with milk from his bowl of cheerios. (He used a medicine dropper.)

This evening I entered the kitchen to check on Link’s homework status. He was all finished and had run downstairs to play. I picked up the papers to put in his homework folder and my eyes fell on one of the vials. It was filled with pale yellow liquid. My brain stuttered trying to find something, besides the obvious, that this liquid could be. I left the vial sitting on the table and called down stairs to ask Link what was in the vial. His grin told me all I needed to know. He was very pleased with himself for collecting his own urine sample.

I required him to empty and wash the vial. He did, pleased with himself for grossing out his mom.

Nothing says “Good Morning!” like emergency laundry and carpet cleaning at 4 am. This is especially exciting when there was already emergency laundry from a different child at midnight. Kiki and Patches have both been quarantined for stomach flu. I suspect that Kiki will not be pleased to learn that stomach flu still does not excuse her from the pile of homework which she has to complete and turn in by tomorrow. I’ve been doing failure analysis to figure out how we got into this situation with Kiki.

My fault: I was aware that Kiki was claiming far less homework than she should have had. I did not dig to find out what was going on. I get weekly grade reports mailed to me, for the last month I’ve been busy and filing them to look at “later.”

The teacher’s fault: She is weak on follow through. She frequently creates assignments which fall by the wayside and never actually come due. This means that if Kiki doesn’t hear about an assignment she’s learned that she may not have to do it at all. Several times the teacher has instituted consequences for late work. The consequences are enforced for awhile, but then the teacher gets distracted and forgets about them. This also affects me. When regular notes don’t come home, I have no idea whether it is because Kiki didn’t bring it to me or because the teacher neglected to make one.

Kiki’s fault: She assumes that if she hasn’t heard about an assignment, that it isn’t due yet. It does not occur to her that overdue assignments no longer get mentioned. She doesn’t lie about homework, but often “forgets” to bring things home. She inflates the importance of assignments she likes and deflates the importance of ones that she doesn’t. Notes from school frequently go missing. Completed homework will sit in Kiki’s backpack and she doesn’t turn it in.

So the analysis shows me where the gaps are, but doesn’t tell me who should step up to fill it. I could do it, but I’ve been trying to step out of the student/teacher loop. Kiki needs to manage teachers and assignments without my constant intervention.

When I was twelve-years-old I was very involved in my church youth group. We had planned a spaghetti dinner as a service for a family in our ward. All the girls made dinner and dressed up in italian style clothing to serve the dinner. My assignment was to bring a salad. I arrived at the dinner excited for the evening. I had spent a long time getting ready. I was enthusiastic about the clothing I was wearing, but I completely forgot to bring the salad. I can’t remember why I forgot it. I can’t remember what excuses I attempted to offer. I do remember clearly the adult leader scolding me and telling me that my excuses didn’t matter, what mattered was that there was no salad when there needed to be one. She also spoke about taking responsibility for mistakes rather than trying to excuse ourselves from them.

I have never forgotten that even. It was one of those small moments that truly shape a life. Ever since that day I have been reluctant to offer excuses for my failures. I try to accept responsibility for things-gone-wrong rather than to dodge it. Sometimes I take this too far and blame myself for things which aren’t truly my doing. I’ve also learned that the purpose of an excuse is to make people more understanding of the failure, not to deny responsibility Many times as I take responsibility I have a fleeting memory of that youth group leader and I am grateful to her. She taught me what I’d never learned from my parents although they tried to teach it often.

These last few days Kiki has been learning a hard lesson about getting work done when it is due rather than letting it pile up. I’ve had to be very firm and not allow her to play. We still have today and tomorrow to get through before it is too late. If we can emerge from these exhausting days with a lesson learned, then they will have been worth it. Perhaps today’s misery will prevent misery and bad grades in high school. I hope so, but I can never tell if the lesson that my child is learning is the one that I intended to teach. I can never tell if we are having a defining moment that the child will draw upon time and again or if it is a moment that will roll right out of memory and be forgotten.

After taking Kiki through heavy traffic and construction zones all the way down to Provo where she got immunized, I then hauled her back home and made her do homework until bedtime. She was not pleased with me. Hopefully this experience combined with Saturday’s experience and the experience I expect tomorrow and Wednesday will teach Kiki not to dodge homework all term and then try to get it all done in four days. Fortunately Janci came to the rescue again. She sat with Kiki all afternoon and kept her on task when Kiki distracted herself every 30-60 seconds.

The day was also filled with other assorted chaos. I was tired and snappish with my kids all afternoon because I was not happy about immunizations or piles of homework either.

At least I made some progress on my current story and I was able to say some useful things to a writer friend. That felt good.

One week ago today I had a bucket full of flowers in my kitchen. They were the remnants of the portrait session. Flowers are beautiful, even sitting in a bucket of water. I loved having them there. But there were so many flowers that I knew I needed to share them rather than keeping them all for myself. I selected a few and put them in a vase for me to enjoy. I took a few more and put them in a vase in my girls’ room. A third batch went to Janci who went with me for the portrait session. The last of the daffodils went into a vase in my bathroom. I still had far too many flowers. I pulled out three mason jars and divided the remaining flowers between them. Then all that was left to do was decide who I should give the flowers to.

I looked at those three jars of flowers and pondered all the people in my life I might want to thank. I very quickly realized that I simply didn’t have enough flowers to thank them all. I eventually decided to give flowers to two women whom I suspect have been having a hard time lately. I’m not sure that they are because we don’t talk that much, but even if they aren’t they would be made happier by a gift of flowers. The third jar went to Kiki’s friend because Kiki really wanted the chance to give flowers to a friend.

All this past week I’ve been loving having cut flowers in the house. It makes me want to grow millions of flowers so that I can always have flowers in my house. Also giving flowers away was so much fun, that I want to do it again. I want to grow millions of flowers so that I can cut them and give them away as the mood strikes me. There are so many women nearby who could use a gift of flowers.

Today I looked at my vase of flowers and realized that half of them have wilted. The other half were still beautiful. I thought of a neighbor I saw walking down the street yesterday. She was wiping her eyes when I saw her. I don’t know if it was an allergy or if she was crying. I thought of this neighbor and realized that she is one of those wonderful quiet people who go through life doing good things and never getting thanked. I took the flowers that were still beautiful and put them in a jar. I added a few of the early daffodils from my yard and a stalk of hyacinths. I wrote her a note and delivered it all to her house. I’ll miss having the flowers here, but she’ll love having them there.

I want to have more flowers so I can give them away.

The end of the term is Thursday. Yesterday Kiki came home with a note that details exactly how much homework she hasn’t done during the last two months. We spent all day today working on it. Fortunately for my sanity and Kiki’s well-being my friend Janci came over to tutor and referee. There are still piles of homework to be done. I am not looking forward to making her do it. At. All.

Oh and Patches threw up. on me.

Not the best of days. Thank goodness for friends and cookies.

My friend Janci loaned me Veronica Mars season 1. I’m hooked. The show features compact storytelling where past events mesh with current events to unravel a murder. Mix into that teenage angst and you’ve got a great story where all the threads twine around each other. The story is all about the people and how they are affected by past events and by the choices that they are making now. The good news is that season one is self contained. When I’m done I can stop. The bad news is that I have 5 disks to go. Or maybe that is also good news because I have hours of fun story ahead of me. I just need to make sure that I don’t watch Veronica Mars when I should be doing other things.

Today I walked home from school with Link. He asked me to walk with him. I left Kiki in charge of Gleek and Patches while I walked over to the school. Link met me with a wide smile. He was so happy to see me that he skipped along bouncing over cracks and lines and any other excuse he could have to go vertical as well as horizontal. I recognized the mood, there are times where I just feel like skipping and dancing. Sometimes I do skip and dance, sometimes fear of social censure prevents me from doing it. But Link has no such fears. He bounced. Then when he slowed down a little, he held my hand. I’m pretty sure that isn’t typical for a 9 year old boy to voluntarily walk down the street holding hands with his mother, but Link loved it. I think he remains the snuggliest of my kids. He was the one I rocked to sleep most often. The others wouldn’t sit still long enough. On the way home Link chattered about the walk. He pointed out the place he likes to cut through someone’s yard. He showed me the mailbox that looks like a birdhouse. He showed me the wobbly fence. He showed me the poles which he like to pretend to bump into. He also told me stories about events which happened with neighborhood kids along this same walk. Walking home has been good for him. I’m glad I got to share it a little today.

Today was also the day I dug through all the boxes of clothing in the garage. I sorted through to figure out what clothing I have waiting for my kids. Gleek and Patches are pretty well set for the next several years. Link and Kiki don’t have much waiting for them. Since money is looking like it is going to tighten back up for awhile, I need to keep my eyes open for good sources of clothing for these two. I probably need to be hitting the dollar days at Savers again. I haven’t been for awhile.

I finally put the finishing touches on my website. Or more accurately, my brother-in-law randytayler finished it for me. He set up an extremely cool web system where I can edit text and add things without understanding a bit of html, php, or ftp stuff. There may be other acronyms involved, but I don’t know them. So big thanks go out to Randy.

The site is pretty simple. Part of me is loathe to open it to the public without spending more hours finding the exact perfect graphics and fonts and such. But honestly that is just window dressing. What is important about the website is the words, and those are all there.

So without further ado:

http://sandra.tayler.com/

When Kiki was four years old parenting was still new. I was constantly amazed at her intelligence. I spent hours nurturing that intelligence by playing alphabet games and putting together puzzles. I made sure that she was in an academic preschool which focused on learning to read.

When Link was four years old he was developmentally delayed. I played hours of alphabet games with him trying to help him catch up to his peers. I created special learning boxes full of developmental games to help teach concepts such as colors and story sequence. I had photo flash cards to teach him the names of family members because he wasn’t just picking them up on his own. I made sure he was in a preschool which had a large playground so that he had space to play in between the harder learning times.

When Gleek was four years old Howard had just left Novell. Money was extremely tight. I could not afford to put Gleek into preschool, so I banded together with some other mothers and we created one. Every sixth week preschool was at my house and I spent hours preparing lessons and activities. I watched Gleek carefully to see how she was reacting to the group experience. I intervened a lot to make sure that she stayed under control. I talked a lot with the other moms to help them know how to handle her.

Now Patches is four years old and my life is very different. I am very different. For the other three kids my whole focus was on parenting, now I am working. Granted, I am working from home, but there is still necessary business work which has to be done. Patches is ready to learn letters. He is ready for alphabet games. But I am not ready. I’ve played all the alphabet games. They bore me. I know I need to do it for Patches, but no sooner do I sit down to play with him, and part of my brain starts running through all the other tasks which I need to get done. Patches doesn’t get my full attention the way the other kids did at this age. I worry about that. I wonder if that is why he sometimes gets so whiny and insistent. Maybe he has to be whiny and insistent because it is the only way to make sure that mommy pays attention. Negative attention is better than half-attention or no-attention.

This coming fall Patches will be the right age for preschool. I am undecided about what to do. Part of me thinks that I should just teach him myself. That I should schedule a little school time into each day. That would give him the full attention for awhile. But it wouldn’t give him social interaction with peers. And will I really do it? When it is just me and him, it is so easy for me to get distracted and work instead of giving Patches his time. All too often the quiet mornings with the other three in school are spent with Howard in his office, me in mine, and Patches left to play by himself. Lots of days he doesn’t mind, but other times he wanders into my office every five minutes because he’s bored. Then he gets growled at because he breaks my train of thought.

Another option would be to put him into a preschool program. But money is still tight and a good preschool isn’t cheap. Also I’m not eager to add more pick-ups and drop-offs to my fall schedule which currently looks blissfully clear. On the other hand it would be good for him to relate to a teacher who isn’t me and I might be nicer to him if I have a scheduled break. Theoretically I could get all the work done while he is gone and give him my full attention when he gets home. But will I do that? Or will I just bring him home and disappear back into my office?

Life for Patches growing up is always going to be different than for the other kids. He is always going to have a mom who is experienced parenting whatever stage of life he as at. By the time Patches gets there, it is all old news to me. I have to remember that it isn’t old news to him. He is excited about learning letters. He really wants to be able to learn to write. For him these things are new and wonderful. I need to slow down to preschool speed for him. I need to give him more of me.

Have I mentioned that Gleek is doing much better at school? Well, she has. Part of the difference was the emotional break through that she made when she realized that holding grudges was giving her bad dreams. Since then we’ve spent lots of times talking about feelings and about things that happened at school. We identify all the mads and then we let them all fly away into space. The other part of the difference is that Gleek now has her own desk rather than having to share a table with 5 other children. This little bit of personal space makes a huge difference for her.

Link is also doing well in school, but he has been missing his friend who moved away. He has been missing this friend lots this past week. We arranged for the friend to come and sleep over last Friday which helped…until the friend had to go home the next day. Unfortunately there isn’t much I can do for Link except hold him and agree that it is hard. We both know that while we’ll continue to have occasional visits with Friend, it will never be the same as having him live two houses down. It makes me sad to see Link so sad. I just hold tight while he cries and try to make sure he has other friends to play with.

Kiki is getting very excited to go to Junior High next year. We just registered her for her classes and she is thrilled that she will finally get to learn how to play the Clarinet. We even got the mouth piece fixed so that she can start practicing how to make noises with it. Howard is less than thrilled at the prospect of having a beginning clarinetist in the house, but he’ll live. Kiki is also enjoying school right now because her class is preparing to put on a couple of abridged Shakespeare plays. She gets to be the Narrator for Macbeth and a small part in Much Ado About Nothing.

Patches has begun to learn his letters. So far we’ve covered A and B. He loves to sit with worksheet pages and carefully trace all the letters. Then he’ll carefully cut them all out. He can spend hours doing these two things which makes getting work done a lot easier for me. And then there are days like today where all he wants is for me to sit next to him and snuggle but I really have to get accounting done. Not so happy. I need to be nicer to him this evening to make up for it.