Josie and I had a great time this morning at our neighborhood association’s annual “Bike Blitz.” And because Noah was at t-ball while we bought his bike, she’s convinced that it belongs to her.
May 222010
May 222010
When I told my friend Madelaine that I was going back to school, one of her comments was how nice it is to go to school when you are an adult, because you just DO the things that are necessary to get an A.
It is true that I take my academic work more seriously now than I did as a young person. Back then, there were so many attractive distractions, and — as I suspect was also true for Madelaine — I was smart enough to be able to coast and skim and do pretty well in classes as long as I did a few bursts of hard work.
This past semester was different.
I was taking 2 of the required pre-requisite courses for the Ph.D. in Information Studies. The material was all new to me, and I wanted to do well. (When classes began, I hadn’t even been admitted yet!)
That’s not to say there have been no moments of doubt, or weeks that were better than or worse than others. In one class, I struggled with the paper — and indeed, that was the difference between an A and an A-. (In the end, the paper was good, only 30% too long.) (And in my opinion, read too much like a 6000 word blog post with research.)
In the other class, we had a big group project, and my fellow students weren’t front-loading the work in that class as much as I was. But in the end, they came through 100%. Our digital library of Wisconsin Children’s Authors & Illustrators turned out to be incredibly cool.
And now, I’m settling in to pack and move this summer, just like I did when I was a regular student!
Yes…I buried the lead. We have an accepted offer on a house!
Really.
You see, as we contemplate how to fit our family into various houses that we have attempted to buy or are considering buying, we’ve also been contemplating furniture changes — some critical, some needed, some we’d like to make.
At one point, a bunk bed for the kids was on the table.
Somehow in the course of my internet research, I found this breathtaking fantasy bunk bed from CedarWorks. (This is not paid advertising, my only material relationship with CedarWorks is that they sent me a catalog in the mail. After I asked for one online.)
I needed the catalog because the web site doesn’t have any prices. You can design your own fantasy playset or bed and ask them to send you a quote by email, but you can’t actually see that an adorable bubble shelf wall-panel for your bunk bed costs $175. (Not for the bunk bed; for one of the panels that makes it kind of a bunk-bed playhouse. That’s a heckuva lot more.) (CedarWorks? Please come join the 21st Century; it’s very nice here! Let us see the prices online. Please. We can handle the truth. And if you’d like some help communicating with Mommybloggers or other social media, we should talk.)
That’s also my only complaint about their web site. They have the coolest online design tool ever, where you can configure a playset or loft bed or the bunk bed of your dreams.
Do not ask how much time I spent playing with that tool. Or how many imaginary beds I saved, or whether or not they were REALLY for Noah & Josie. (Or for 9 year old bookworm Liza.)
Seriously. My new lottery-winning fantasy involves these CedarWorks Rhapsody “playbeds” for both children. Ahem. Maybe they will let me play or read in there with them.
For Noah, I’m daydreaming about the fire pole exit, a climbing wall panel, and a nice private nook area where he can go when he needs his “Don’t look at me!” space.
For Josie, my fantasy involves a slide exit with a hiding nook underneath, flowers you can peek through, and those adorable bubble-shelves I mentioned above.
Possibly both of them get chalkboard panels in this fantasy. If I could make it look nice.
Nine year old Liza would have been all about the reading nooks, with as much hiding ability as possible.
I’ll let you know if I win the lottery and can move these daydreams into reality. But even if that never happens, I’m enjoying my children’s furniture fantasy quite a bit.
May 182010
You should be able to comment without being tortured by WordPress. Sorry for the inconvenience — when I moved back, I didn’t check the default settings of anything.
Dear Noah,
You turned 4 years and 3 months old 5 days ago. It has been a crazy month, but things are calming down now, at least for a moment.
This month, you’ve become obsessed with fast food restaurants. This is a little bit embarrassing at after-school pickup, when you have loudly asked if we can go to Burger King every single day this week. You go to a school, after all, where parents are asked not to bring cake for birthdays, but a “healthy snack.” And when I say no, you correctly whine that we never go to Burger King.
(We do occasionally go to the Other Big Fast Food Chain and you are a very big fan of the dragon toys, yes 2 of them, that you got with meals there.)
You are also solidly in the developmental phase where you are aware that you might be being judged, and maybe found wanting in some way, so you announce multiple times each day, “Don’t look at me!”
That one is tricky. Sometimes you say it in the middle of the room, or while blocking a hallway we are trying to traverse. Other times you say it after we’ve spent 5 minutes nagging you into the bathroom to brush your teeth, and another 2 trying to get you to actually brush them. We are suspicious that if we stop looking at you, you will immediately go back to playing with some toy instead of brushing your teeth.
You are right on the edge of reading. You can sound out words, but you get impatient after 1 or 2. You’ve memorized the Star Wars book we bought you, and nightly “read” it by reciting the text from memory — with about 90% accuracy, and a little extra prompting near the end. You are so sweetly shy and proud of yourself for “reading” the whole book “all by myself with no help.”
I think you might be developing into a serious intellectual geek. (Note: I don’t say this as a bad thing!)
The reason is mainly because you get unbelievably impatient with people who tell you things you already know. For the non-geek population, this is often called “making conversation.” We know that you know it is raining, for example. The socially correct response to, “Wow, it looks really wet out this morning,” is not “I know that already!” but rather something like, “It sure does!” or “I like rain so I can splash in the puddles.”
One of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson, explains the difference between young geeks and older geeks in his book Cryptonomicon. Young geeks, he says, consider declarative sentences acts of aggression, implying that you are telling them something they don’t already know. Older geeks know, either that you are making conversation, or that sometimes people just need to say things out loud in order to think them through.
You also love to tell jokes; so far, I’m sorry to say, none of them have actually made sense. (Why did the chicken cross the eyeball? To get to the other eyeball!) That doesn’t stop you from telling them with enthusiasm, or us from laughing.
Today, you started T-Ball. This Mommy is so proud and excited. We took pictures of the two of you getting ready to go this morning. She says you were the fastest 4 year old running the bases during the warm-up, and that you were also faster than lots of the 5 year olds. You glowed with pride when she told me that.
We love you, Noah.
love,
That Mommy
Last weekend, I read Piper Kerman’s new book Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison
Piper Kerman is a Smith alumna who made some very bad judgments not long after graduation, traveling the world in the company of some big time heroin traffickers and money launderers. She didn’t deal or use drugs, but in a legal sense, she was part of a criminal conspiracy to move drugs around the world to sell them. After not too long, sherealized what a bad idea it was, extricated herself from the situation, and got on with her life.
Several years later, the past caught up with her, and Kerman was arrested. Eventually she pled guilty to money laundering. Sentencing was delayed by something like 6 years, so 10 years after she removed herself from the drug trafficking conspiracy, she was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison.
In a nutshell, Piper Kerman is a very talented writer, writing an emotionally compelling, well-researched, surprising, and personal account of an experience totally outside my day to day world, and I’m guessing outside of yours, too.
I think any reader whose youthful indiscretions include the use of any kind of illegal drugs — not necessarily trafficking or money laundering! — imagines how they might have handled the situations Kerman experiences. Not just the facts of prison life, but the emotional challenges she goes through, like telling your grandparents, finding a job, maintaining a romantic relationships, etc.
This story is amazing.
What is amazing is not that well-educated, upper middle class women can exercise bad judgment, or even that they can get caught and be held accountable for their actions.
What is amazing is how well Kerman tells her story, weaving in the sociological realities of how the prison system works, how race and class interact in women’s prisons differently from men’s prisons, the petty ways that the staff demonstrate their power over prisoners, how that uniquely affects women, and how the women in prison relate to, look out for, and help one another.
The book is anything but dry. Kerman tells the story from her heart, not flinching away from her own emotional roller-coaster ride, addressing her own struggles, humiliations, and sources of satisfaction. The pictures she paints of the women she met are equally unflinching, and at the same time, compassionate.
Some of the things that happen in the book are horrifying. Some of the policies and practices Kerman describes are reprehensible. For example: If a woman in federal prison makes a sexual assault complaint against a guard, she gets sent to a segregation unit — put in isolation for her own safety. She loses her prison job, her ability to spend time with her friends, and in many cases, her ability to have visitors from outside.
In other words, for reporting a sexual assault, a female prisoner loses all possible sources of comfort and is herself placed in a status within the prison that is normally used to punish people. (This doesn’t happen in the book, but Kerman’s prison work boss, an employee of the prison, does engage in aggressive, sexually inappropriate behavior towards her; she makes an informal complaint as part of her effort to get a new prison job, explaining to the reader why she doesn’t make a more formal complaint.)
In the interest of full disclosure, I know Piper Kerman personally. We were classmates at Smith, and we ran in overlapping social circles. In fact, I may be one of the few people outside of Piper’s youthful inner circle who knew how restless and in search of adventure she was.
During the end of our sophomore year, one of our close mutual friends had something of a major mental breakdown, and left school. Then another mutual friend left school too. When Piper decided to follow suit, I vividly remember her coming to tell me. I thought she was joking at first, and I know she was worried about my reaction. I gave her a hard time, although I was sort of joking.
Piper and I didn’t stay in touch after college, although the miracle of social media changes things and we are again friendly. (And her roommate from Smith is someone Jill and I both follow on Twitter: @cherylcoward.)
I am quietly amused by the fact that when we were in college, I thought of Piper as someone a little too cool for me. The insight into her personality that the book provides casts that in a different light, and makes me so relieved that my own restlessness and desire for adventure took me in such a different direction.
May 042010
Dear Josie,
On Saturday, you were 20 months old.
Over the last month, you’ve become even more articulate, and also a dedicated reader. You ask for books even in your sleep, and sometimes you even quote from your current favorite while sleeping. If there is something cuter than you announcing, “No more monkeys!” in your sleep, I don’t know what it is. Your favorite book is “5 Little Monkeys,” but you’ll read anything. Tonight at dinner, you enthusiastically “read” the two segments of text on my t-shirt. (It really reads, “Real women don’t drink light beer,” and “New Glarus Brewing Co. Your versions included more “no!”s.
You are still a beautiful princess whoops-a-daisy, and we still love you.
love,
That Mommy
You’ve adopted a very sweet, if somewhat passive-aggressive, way of making requests. Daily you announce things like, “I like milk!” “I like sandwich!” or “I like bo-bots!” (Robots — the stacking robot block toys are still a big hit, but you get very angry when I hook them together at funny angles. You want them stacked up in a column or lined up in a row.)
The last 2 weeks, you’ve taken your adjustment to your new school to a new level. The honeymoon and novelty are over, you feel comfortable and safe, so now you can let me know that you would rather hang out with me. By yelling and crying when I leave.
You have also become very interested in other people’s behavior and emotions. When Noah cries, you tell us he’s sad. When he gets in trouble for not listening or following directions, you tell us he’s naughty. People on TV are often sad, or ok, or naughty.
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