One Cobble at a Time

This morning I decided to treat myself to sausage mcgriddles on the way home from dropping kids at school. Patches was in the car with me, so I planned to get him one too. I also decided to bring one home for Howard. We pulled up to the drive through window to Patches delight. He loves to buy food to take home. Instantly from the back seat there was a littany of “They sell hambuwgews? I want a hambuwgew!” I shushed him and placed an order for 4 sausage mcgriddles. Patches was paying attention because he switched to asking for mcgriddles.
“I want a mcgwiddle!”
I was relieved that we weren’t going to have an upset over the lack of hamburgers at 10 am. “That’s good, because I have one for you.”
In a matter of fact voice Patches announced. “You have fouw.”
I was suprised that he’d paid such close attention. “That’s right. I have four. One for you, and one for me, and one for Daddy.”
I couldn’t see Patches face because I was driving, but his tone of voice made very clear that he was not at all fooled my attempted misdirection. “That’s fwee.” He informed me.
I suddenly felt a need to explain further. “The extra one is for me because I am super hungry.” There was a brief silence then Patches announced:
“I’m super hungwy.”
I think I answered with something along the lines of him needing to finish his first one and then we would see about others. He thought for a moment then asked
“Can mine be extwa?”
“Sure, yours can be extra.”
“Then we will have two extwas. One for you and one for me.”

So we took home our mcgriddles and ate up all the extras.

Once again it is 3:30 Monday afternoon. I’m tired. I’m frazzled. I feel like the day is gone and I’ve accomplished nothing. This feeling is common on Monday afternoons. I spend from 7 am until 9 am getting kids fed, dressed, and out the door for school. Patches has gymnastics at 9:15 and I usually use that hour for errands. Then I bring him home for an hour. Then we go fetch Gleek from school. Then 30 minutes later I take Gleek to gymnastics. Then I drive straight to Link’s school to pick him up. Then home for 30 minutes. Then I pick up Gleek. Then home for 15 minutes. After picking up Kiki it takes me about 30 minutes to feel settled here at home and mentally ready to do something. Voila! It is now 3:30.

If my only goal for the day was to meet the needs of the kids, this list of things done would be just fine. But Monday comes after Sunday. On Sunday I honor the sabbath and do not work. I don’t usually get businessy things done on Saturday either. This means I have a two day backlog on shipping out books. I feel like I should be getting that done first thing, but I don’t. There is also the inevitable backlog of housework and laundry which occurs after our day of rest. I get up in the morning on Monday and already feel like I’ve fallen behind.

Recognizing this pattern has caused me to make some shifts in our family schedule starting in January. I’ve moved Patches gym lesson to another day. Gleek and Link are both dropping out of gym so that they can take an art class together at their school. I have to volunteer for this class, but it sandwiches nicely between Link’s pick up and Kiki’s pick up. At least this way when I have home time I can just be at home rather than having to run out constantly to drop off or pick up.

I hope it will be enough better that I can finish out the remaining 5 months of school. I look ahead blissfully to the time next fall when Kiki will ride the bus to junior high. Link and Gleek will be dropped off/picked up at the same time. Instead of making 5 trips daily our family will be down to 2 trips, or less if the kids walk home.

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned/complained about all of this before. But somehow reminding myself that it won’t last forever helps me to deal with it now.

During the month of November I had a goal to write a blog entry every day. I met that goal. In doing so I seem to have created something of a habit. I’m not complaining. I like having a daily reason to focus my writing capabilities on some topic or another. However to help me out on those days when I would stare at the blank screen at a loss for what to write, I created a list of possible blog topics. I called it my Blogable list. The list was written on post-it notes and stuck to the cupboard door of my computer hutch. I still have the list and I keep adding to it. Somehow the list keeps getting longer rather than shorter.

Several months ago I went back and reread all of my teenage journals. There were many of them filled with endless chatter about peers and my feelings about relationships and my ponderings on my self worth and who I wanted to become and religious musings. 95% of my journals covered these topics. I hardly ever mentioned things I did with my family. I never mentioned schoolwork or my teachers even though they were huge in my life at the time. I never mentioned the things I was learning. As I read back I saw these huge gaps and wished that my teenage self had had a Blogable list so that she could have been reminded of the other things that there were to write about.

I remember those frustrating gaps in my teenage journals and I wonder what gaps am I leaving in this online journal today. I can’t see the gaps from where I’m standing, just as my teenage self didn’t see her gaps. So I am enlisting all of your eyes. Are there things I have mentioned in passing that you’d like to hear more about? Are there things that I completely fail to mention because they seem obvious to me, but aren’t to you? Are there questions you’ve been wanting to ask and have answered? If there are, leave them in the comments below. I’ll add these things to my Blogable list. I give no guarantees that I’ll actually respond to all of the comments. This is a public journal and there are some things that I’m leaving out very deliberately. However it is possible that you’ll provide me with impetus and material to write some entries that will entertain us all.

In each day I only have so much energy to make kids do stuff. On school days I focus on making them get ready for school and making them to homework. On Sunday I concentrate on making them get ready for church and making them behave themselves during church. Since teaching my kids to clean house is part of my parental duties, only Saturday is left for making the house clean. So on Saturday’s I make kids clean house. The problem with this schedule is that I rarely get a break from making them do stuff and they rarely get a break from having to do stuff.

I can’t just let the housework go. That results in a cluttered house and crankiness from everyone. But maybe if I expend just a little bit more energy on weekdays, there won’t be as much housework to do on Saturdays. Maybe I’ll take one Saturday a month and let us all goof off all day. As it stands I’ve been letting us all take a break from school by making us all clean house. When I put it that way, it doesn’t sound like a break at all.

More thought is necessary here.

I’d been occupied in my office for quite a while when I became aware of all the quietness upstairs. The house is pretty quiet when the older three are at school, but usually I can hear Patches clunking or thumping or playing some kind of a game. I went to find out what the total silence meant. I found Patches very carefully cutting up an old flyer sent home from the school. Cutting is an activity I generally try to supervise because kids often get …creative… when left alone with a pair of scissors. In this case no damage was done, so I calmly stepped forward to Patches to ask what he was doing.

“I’m cutting words.” He informed me. I saw that he had indeed carefully cut a strip of words from the page. I then noticed that he was further rendering the strip of words into individual letters. This flier was in a 12 point font and Patches was carefully rendering the entire half page into individual letters. He had already accumulated quite a little pile.
“Are those your words?” I asked pointing to the pile.
“Yeah. It’s a pile for the alphabet song.”

This kid amazes me. He’s three and a half. Where did he get that much patience and persistence?

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.