Category: life

what I’ve been doing the last 4 days

The daycare where Theo goes (and where Phoebe goes 2 days a week) was closed this past Friday, and also today, as the provider was taking some vacation time. What this meant was that I was not going to be getting a lot of work done for a few days. It also meant something exceedingly rare: a 4-day stretch with Theo at home. Not in daycare, not travelling. And not sick, either. A combination of factors that may not have been experienced since he started full-time daycare over a year ago. I realized, with a combination of dread and resolve, that the time had come for…potty training.

(Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into details. At least not many.)

Our main motivating tool for this endeavor is a progress chart, linked to the promise of a bigger prize. Each successful potty usage gets a sticker on the chart, and a full chart gets a trip to a store pick out a toy.

On Friday morning, I printed out a new chart for Theo. (Actually, the same chart we used for Phoebe¹, courtesy of my digital hoarding tendencies.)

Phoebe got mopey when I made out a chart for Theo, as she realized that she wouldn’t be having a chart, and thus Theo was in position to be gaining a toy when she wasn’t. Seeing as I have been struggling to get Phoebe to practice violin, I thought maybe this was an opportunity:

Phoebe was quite pleased that she was on her way to a prize. She practiced enthusiastically that very morning, and again the next day.

Theo, it turns out, was good and ready to be using the potty. He earned many, many stickers on his first day. And by the end of his second day, he was well on his way to have a filled chart. This is, of course, fantastic.

Unless you are Phoebe.

If you happen to be Phoebe, this is a near tragedy. Because while Theo’s chart had 20-odd stickers, Phoebe’s had only 2. All Theo had to do for his stickers was pee in a pot, an achievement that he quickly learned to achieve quickly. Phoebe had to do somewhat more than this. It was not likely that she would be practicing her violin 10 times a day.

Phoebe does not like to be the one left behind.

Sensing that Phoebe was ready to give up on her chart and her new-found enthusiasm for practicing violin, I had a flash of inspiration:

Phoebe, observant girl that she is, realized that I would not likely outpace her with my chart. If she couldn’t be at the front of the race, at least she wouldn’t be bringing up the rear.

As you can see, I have yet to put any stickers on my chart. I made mine on Saturday, and it was a long and harrowing weekend of exaggerated cheerfulness and frequent handwashing. Then, as I mentioned, there was no daycare today. I do hope to start adding stickers. I think I’m going to have the requirement that I work on my own research for at least a solid hour to earn a sticker. Failing that, I may just have to reward myself for peeing in the potty.

I can’t say how well this will all go in the weeks to come. Theo heads back to daycare tomorrow, which may be great for my own chart, but likely to be a big setback for his. (We achieved success by having Theo not wear a diaper at all, but that won’t fly at daycare.) In the meantime, check out this measure of success:

Here is the toy Theo picked out for his first filled chart:


Molly, a yellow engine from Thomas & Friends. Our first train with a face.

I’m also very happy to say that Phoebe’s flurry of practice sessions also paid off, if not yet with a toy. Our violin teacher was pleased enough with her progress to say it was time for us to get Phoebe her first violin book. Phoebe was thrilled. She may even have described herself as “ecstatic.”

Moral of the story: peeing is not the only route to success.

¹ I’m still very entertained by my post “Standoff at the P. P. Corral,” which I wrote almost 3 years ago. I crack myself up.

n00b in the b00nies

Do you ever feel you’ve landed inside the plot of a novel? In the book in my head, I’ve always been the feisty heroine in an adventure tale, overcoming hardship with ingenuity, wit and grace. Lately, I have felt more the bumbling anti-hero. And I think this may be a tragicomedy.

After the Great Yard Sale Fiasco of 2011, I decided to regroup. After several rounds of donations, I still had excess stuff.

I decided to try Craigslist again.

Mind you, I’m rather wary of Craigslist. I know that some people have used it successfully, but I have heard plenty of horror stories. Or at least general annoyance stories. But I decided that it was worth a shot.

In addition to a few for-sale items, I listed a free futon mattress. I got an email response pretty quickly:

i would like to pick up or if i remember u r really close if u could drop it off either way works for me i’m in [town] were r u located?

No, I couldn’t “drop it off,” as “really close” in fact meant 40 minutes away. And I was giving the thing away. For free.

tomarow would b fine is there a way we could meet half way its about a 40 min drive it would only b 20 if we met up ?

Hmmm…I’m giving something away to a total stranger, and you are asking me to drive 40 minutes (round trip) to give it to you? On the other hand, this would mean that I wouldn’t need to give said total stranger our address. I decided that since our grocery store was 10 minutes in that direction, and I had to go grocery shopping anyhow, I could meet him halfway.

He also wrote:

do u txt ? if yes txt me to set something up with me

Actually, I don’t really text. I have a relic of a cell phone, and I am slow and incompetent at it. However, I didn’t want to admit this. I sent him a txt.

No, really, it was a text. I am txt illiterate.

I painstakingly tapped out a few short lines using my numeric keypad. Several minutes later, after proof-reading and editing, I sent the text.

He responded within 30 seconds.

After several more similar back-and-forths, we agreed to meet at a school parking lot halfway between our towns.

I don’t want you to think that I was writing out full paragraphs or anything. I didn’t even include any parentheticals or subordinate clauses. There were several instances where I let capitalization slide, and even once where I left out a comma. Because I’m hip like that.

I found myself rather amused, and even slightly charmed, by the exchange. Here was this kid, likely half my age, who was fluent in a written language that I could decipher, but was otherwise pretty alien to me. Meanwhile, he must have found my own writing to be very formal and old-fashioned. The equivalent of how I might feel about a hand-written letter from an elderly aunt. I imagined myself sitting at an antique secretary with a sheet of stationery, dipping my pen in the inkwell, using my most careful cursive:

Dear Sir,

As regards your previous inquiry, I would be amenable to arranging our rendezvous at a point that is located in between our two places of residence. I suggest that it would be most suitable to determine a location with adequate space that we might easily station our vehicles within close proximity to each other, perhaps a sizeable place of commerce or educational institution, that we may most advantageously complete our transaction.

I hope that you will forgive the brevity of this missive, but I am presently due to deliver a platter of petits fours for the fornightly meeting of the Ladies’ Auxiliary Horticultural Society, and further I must hasten to catch the postman on his daily rounds.

Warmest regards,
Mrs. Bottomham-Pantsbury

Fast forward to this morning. John helped me shove the futon in the car. It was too big for the trunk, and we didn’t want to remove the carseats, so we lay it across the tops of the carseats. We had to have both back windows open.

At 9:56 a.m, I got another text:

Still good for today at 1130 right?

“Save for unforeseen obstacles, I shall be there as pre-arranged, fine sir.”

Ok ty c u latterZ

I got a phone call shortly before leaving, so I was running a bit late. I spent 5 minutes composing a text saying I was running 5 minutes late.

At 11:35 sharp, I found the school. The parking lot was conspicuously devoid of compact cars of the type mentioned by my text buddy. After a few minutes, I sent a text. At 11:47, the guy called to say he’d overslept. (Dude, you texted me at 10 am! Whatevs.) The guy was really apologetic and said he felt like crap for doing this to me. He said he could be there in 20 minutes. Not really enjoying the thought of another 20 minutes sitting in the hot sun in the abandoned school parking lot with a futon sticking out of my windows, I suggested I could drive out 10 minutes further and meet him midway. The trouble was, there looked to be exactly nothing between the two towns. No, that’s not true. There was a state forest. I couldn’t really see arranging to meet with a strange guy in the middle of the woods. (Well, I could see the headlines.) But I had the damn futon in the car, and I’d gone this far. I was either handing it off to him, or abandoning it in the school parking lot. I don’t litter, so I offered to drive the extra 10 minutes. Making the new driving total 80 minutes roundtrip.

It might not surprise you to learn that I arrived at the designated shopping center first. But the guy did show up. I helped him transfer the futon, and he even gave me $5.00 for gas. (If not for the $5.00, I would have felt totally scammed. As it is, I only feel partially scammed.)

So that’s how things are going with Project Get Rid of Stuff. Several hours of my time wasted and close to a couple of gallons of gas. To give the futon away. For free. To a complete stranger.

(Next up, do you want to hear about my adventures as an Amazon Marketplace seller?)

looking through the glass

Just as I was getting ready to go pick up the kids this afternoon, I took a drink of water. Looking through my glass as I drank, I thought, as I often do, how cool the distortions looked. I had a couple minutes to spare, so I thought I’d see if I could capture what I was seeing.

Here is the glass on the counter. I used this to gauge the distance for focusing on the bottom of the glass.

Then I held up the glass to look out the window.

I love how changing the angle of the glass a bit changes the scene. (Especially with that big drip of water rolling around in the glass…)

Just about everything looks more interesting. Case in point: the dirty dishes in the sink.

Then I grabbed this stray wine glass from the counter, where it’s been sitting for no good reason ever since its failed appearance at the yard sale fiasco.

I was thinking about dropping it off with my next donation run, but I may have to use it for a few more photos, first.

‘Cause, ooooh, swirly!

(I’ve been trying to catch my breath, and get caught up with things beyond breathing. It was a crazy couple of weeks with lots of time away from home. We are back home for a bit.)

lessons

Here are some scenes from my violin lesson.

(There’s a story behind these photos, but I can’t get into it now, since it’s almost midnight, and I have to get up early in the morning to pry two overtired children out of bed to get them to daycare and preschool so that I can head to a lab meeting that I talked my bosses into scheduling for tomorrow since I couldn’t make the Tuesday meeting in person and I was sure we’d be back from my in-laws’ by Wednesday at the latest, and I need to get to bed since I’m tired after a long day involving packing up two stir crazy children and driving with them over 4 hours, much of which included stop-and-go traffic, only to get home half an hour before needing to leave for the violin lesson, which was rescheduled from Monday, and still needing to get the children to eat dinner before leaving for the violin lesson and half of dinner ended up being graham crackers in the car, which sounds like an intriguing name for a dish, kind of like pigs in a blanket, and I’m so tired right now that I think I’m starting to see things since I’m pretty sure we didn’t have a large floating guinea pig in the house when we left last week.)

sharing a chair

One of my regular pursuits is to try to get a good picture with both Phoebe and Theo. They are often like bouncing atoms, rarely at rest at the same place at the same time. Today at lunch, they were fighting over a particular chair at the kitchen table. I have no idea why that chair. But then they finally agreed that they could sit in the chair together. Oh, the cuteness! I had to get a picture! Of course, my hands were full as I headed towards the table. I turned around to set aside the plates of food I’d been about to serve and pulled my iPod out of my pocket. As soon as I had the camera pointed in the right direction, though, Phoebe decided she was over the moment. She ran off. However, we were able to talk her back to the table, and amazingly, both of them stayed put (without glue or other restraining devices!) while I aimed the iPod camera at them. Rejoice! There was much cuteness to be had. (Not shown, though, are the shots of the kids with food hanging out of their mouths.)

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(I do find myself wishing I’d grabbed for my real camera, since the iPod photos are so grainy. Instagram filters are fun and all, but I’m pretty sure I’ll grow tired of them…)

of spoons and spools

We are down at my in-laws’ again this weekend. I realized that I typically take a lot of pictures when we are here. Here are some reasons why:

  • When we come down here, I go into travel mode. Because we don’t have childcare when we visit, I don’t typically expect to do much work. This seems to lead to a bit of a sense of vacation, even though I am usually still busy all day with the kids and helping out my in-laws with meals and such. But I keep my camera handy!
  • The yard here is more amenable to playing outside. (We live in the woods at home, and if there is no breeze, our yard can be ridiculously buggy.) It’s nice to take pictures of the kids out with natural light. (For that matter, the light inside is also better. Living in the woods as we do, our house is often pretty shady.)
  • The inside of the house is much less chaotic than our own home. I can take pictures of the kids without being annoyed that the background is dominated by gigantic piles of papers or toys or whatnots. (It’s the whatnots at home that bug me especially, with their annoying whatnottishness.)
  • There are lots of different odds and ends here than are at our house. (I feel like, especially with project 365, I have pretty well tapped our house for subject matter.)

Case in point: there is a rack of spools of thread in the basement, right by a very classic looking sewing machine. I’ve also frequently found myself taking pictures of utensils and housewares. Not that we don’t have housewares at home, but they are different ones. Our spoons have different shapes. So, yes, I took a photo of the spoons in the silverware drawer.

So I posted my spools on Instagram, with the caption “Spools.” Then I posted my spoons, with the caption “Spoons.” And it pleased me well to notice at that point that they were only one letter off. Naturally, I tried to think of other things that started with “spoo,” but there were no spooks or spoofs readily available to photograph. I did, however, take a photo of this juice glass, which I think I will have to dub a spoob. Or maybe spoop. Spoot? You be the judge.

Spools.

Spoons.

A spoo_.

portrait of girl with violin

Phoebe and I have now had 7 violin lessons together, and things are going a bit better than the first lesson. We managed to switch to Monday evening, which is much easier, as Phoebe doesn’t have a karate class on Mondays. It’s still been a bit rocky, though. Really, the early stage of learning the violin is not all that exciting. (Well, I suppose there might be different ways of teaching. But Phoebe is learning to do things right. In fact, she’s learning to do them better than I do. I have learned that the way I hold my bow is not entirely correct. ) At this point, the focus is still on how to properly hold and position the bow and violin. It’s been pretty hard to figure out when and how to get Phoebe to practice. The novelty has worn off a bit, and she gets pretty loopy at the end of the day. Plus it’s hard to fit in one more thing to do before bedtime.

On the other hand, I’ve managed to find time to practice, myself. And I’ve been really enjoying it. We have still been working on a book that I used before, from maybe a year or two into my lessons. It’s review, but it’s still challenging, and I’m learning (or relearning) from it. The pace has felt slower, and I like it. I’ve never really been in a hurry learning the violin, as I don’t have any particular goals. (I don’t expect, for example, to ever join an orchestra.) I just like making music. My teacher has had a tendency to push me faster than I really feel the need to, and I suspect that much of this is because most of her other students are eager to get to some sort of destination. I’m just along for the ride.

The lessons themselves have still been a bit of a mixed bag. We’ve figured out a system that works pretty well. Phoebe gets the first half hour lesson, and I wait out in the hallway (which is what other parents of students typically do) and have some time to myself. (It’s not quite peace and quiet, though, as the music store where we have lessons usually has a lot going on. People trying out instruments, and whatnot, and lots of people coming and going.) Then I go in for my half hour lesson, and Phoebe stays in the room and plays games or draws on my iPad. It’s been tricky sometimes as Phoebe will ask me questions, and sometimes talk to me when I’m in the middle of playing. And then tonight we had to interrupt my lesson to run to use the bathroom, because I noticed that Phoebe was bouncing. But overall things have worked enough such that I feel like Phoebe and I are both getting lessons.



Phoebe was being a bit of a goofball when I asked to take her picture after our lesson. An adorable goofball, though.

for want of some socks

I had another good day at the conference, and then an unanticipated dinner out with some lovely people, most of whom I just met. I only just got home a bit before midnight. (So, yeah. This daily posting business isn’t working so well right now.)

The definite downside to today was the unreasonably painful blisters I now have on my feet, which can be attributed both to Sox and lack of socks. You see, I neglected to check the Red Sox schedule before planning out my day at the conference, and realized too late that my planned arrival time to see a friend’s talk was right around the start of a game at Fenway. I rushed out as early as I could manage, hoping that parking would still be okay. However, I had to park about a mile away from the conference. That would have been fine, as I was early for my friend’s talk. However, I had foolishly chosen to wear newish shoes without socks, in a misguided attempt to look both somewhat presentable and somewhat summery. Had I been able to park close to the conference, I probably would have been fine. Or had I worn socks. As it was, my feet started to blister quite quickly, and by the time I purchased bandaids, and later even socks, the damage was already done. I was pretty much hobbling by the end of the evening, and even walked around without shoes for quite a bit. (I would like to note that while you may be imagining that I was wearing some sort of impractical girly shoes with heels or some such, those of you who know me in person probably won’t be surprised to learn that my shoes looked comfortable. They were deceitful shoes.)

Also, I forgot to bring my camera into town with me. I got a new iPod touch (with built in cameras) for my birthday, so I did at least take a few shots for project 365, but they were all pretty lame. I like this one from yesterday better.

Even though the conference is still going on the next 2 days, I’ve pretty much decided not to go in. I have a lot of things I need to get done, and I’m pretty wiped out from all the commuting.

Better late than never?

I managed to let a whole day go by without posting, going by calendar dates. (Not that anyone but me is likely to be keeping track of my goal to post daily this month.) I didn’t forget to post, but I was too tied up. Seeing I’m still up, what the heck, I’ll post something before I go to bed.

I had a great day at the conference today. (The parade, while not rained on, didn’t cause traffic or parking problems, so that was a relief.) I saw my friend’s talk, as well as another session with a whole bunch of cool talks on vowel mergers. (I bet you can’t wait to hear what that was all about!) This evening, I met up with a bunch of friends for dinner, most of whom I almost never see. (One of whom lives out of the country now.) We ate at a really great Afghani restaurant. (I’d never had Afghani food before. It was delicious.) After dinner, several of us headed to a pub across the street. I hung out and chatted with friends till after 11:00, which isn’t something that happens often these days. (Of course, I’ll probably regret tonight’s late hours in the morning when the under 6 set wants to hang out with me.)

Wow, this is a really boring post. But what can I say? It’s after 1 and I’m tired.

Look, here’s a picture: