What There's Time For

Play

We've had this really cool book, The LEGO Ideas Book,* for a while.  Mr. P obsesses over the space chapter, but I love the "micro models" — buildings, bridges, even some space ships, made with the smallest pieces but suggesting something much more complex than they are.

Friday night.  It's bedtime, but Mr. P is asking me to open up the LEGO bag.  It suddenly strikes me that a huge joy of having slightly older kids and also not being in grad school anymore is that I can open up the LEGOs, even though it's bedtime, and maybe I can even play for a little while, too.  It was fun.  I recommend it.  :)

*(Going to BrickFair last year was also really fun and inspiring.)

Footnote to Monday

A recent monologue from Mr. P:  "Mom?  In your next school, um, when you go to school again, or in your next job or what you do?  Just try not to get a D-minus, OK?  'Cause that's the worst grade.  That's really bad."

Sounds like he'd probably forgive me, though, huh?

Bedtime Changes Again

Twilight extends well into the bedtime hour these days and Shmoogie and Mr. P are extending their ability to stay awake.

Where once we read and sang and left them in peace, we now read and sing and stay with them in peace (always a question whether Shmoogie will fall asleep before Daddy starts to snore, though).

Except now, all of a sudden, it's not so peaceful.

Daddy is trying to tell a story in the dimming quiet bedroom, but he keeps dropping off to sleep.  Shmoogie pokes him, then yells in his ear, "DADDY!!  WHY AREN'T YOU TELLING ME A STORY??"  He tries, falls asleep again, and the cycle repeats.

Until Shmoogie gets bored and strikes up a conversation with her brother in the upper bunk.  "Tyler won't play with me at school," she says, or something to that effect.

"If Tyler won't play with you very much, you shouldn't be friends anymore," her brother answers, his voice full of concern and wisdom, as if he absolutely never ever could be the boy that calls her "stinky poopy head!" pretty much every morning as soon as she wakes up.

They converse with increasing enthusiasm as I sit there in the dark, astounded and apparently unnoticed, listening to them chattering away over the gentle snoring of Mr. Right.

Done

So, I graduated.  And now I feel really strange.  Strangely strange in enough ways that I could write quite a lot of angsty self-involved rubbish, but I really don't want to.

But one thing I've come to see with alarming clarity over the past year and a half — the one thing I want to talk about today — is that being in school has a very real impact on my mental state.  Mostly not a good one.

I know that's not what I'm supposed to say right now.  And I don't mean to say that I regret having gone back or that I don't think it was worthwhile.  I've learned a lot about computer science (and relearned a lot that I'd forgotten), I now have a credential that might be useful someday and gives me a bit more confidence, in any case.  And I've learned a lot about myself, and I've learned a lot about other people and academic culture and, dare I say, human society in general.

Here's the thing, though.  After being a stay-at-home mom for several years and being out of school for much longer, I went back to school fired up about learning, ready to take on the challenge as my own person, the person that I felt I had become in the intervening years away from grades and tests and constant measuring up.  A person who believed in being brave and not worrying about asking dumb questions and not caring about the grade or whether anyone thought I was smart, just caring about learning the most I could.  All too quickly, though, I felt myself pulling back.  Getting protective, not wanting to look stupid, abandoning my initial "It is a victory and a privilege simply to be here!  It will be a victory simply to graduate!" and moving uncomfortably close to the old clawing whispers, "What if they find out I don't fully understand X?  That I never took Y?  That I haven't heard of Z?" or, most simply, "I'm not perfect at this or even the best at this... why am I here?"

I was stunned at how quickly the structure and culture of being in school brought back that kind of miserable, destructive attitude.  An attitude which I detest and yet still could not fully free myself from.  Although at least this time, with more life experience behind me, I could see it for what it was.

It's been particularly unnerving to be observing this in myself at the same time as Mr. P was going through his first year of public school.  Watching him learn to read and write has been amazing (though I continue to feel it would have been a lot less painful and just as amazing, although a bit later, if it wasn't pushed so hard).  Watching him beginning to internalize conformity to "the right" way of doing things has been disheartening.  Hearing him refuse to practice his handwriting because "I'm not good at this!" or tearfully say things like "I'm the worst in the class!" (because he had not yet had a turn to be "Star of the Week", an "honor" which is actually randomly assigned; it took some real effort to convince him of that) has been quite hard.

I don't know if the answer is to give up on school, though I sympathize with many of those arguments.  I do know school desperately needs to be something quite different than what it is now (and has been for generations).

 

(Final note, just because it's interesting:  The automatically suggested links that my blogging engince pops up as I type a post have gone through quite a strange progression while I wrote this, with especially disappointing suggestions as soon as typed "stay-at-home mom".)

The Luxury of Time

I thought I would finish school and just keep going at a steady clip. Clean the whole house in two days, write some code, get the children off the tv, write two blog posts a day, organize all the papers, all that stuff.

I'll tell you what wasn't on my list: baking bread. And yet I have baked so much bread.

Welcome home, myself maybe wants to say to myself. Welcome back to time for homey luxuries. Have a bun -- they're warm and soft and delicious.

Just make sure you keep your shoes on; the floor is still filthy.

A Type of Spider

"What type of spider is that, Mommy?" Shmoogie wants to know.

"I don't know honey, it's just a spider."

She is exasperated, "It HAS to be SOME type of spider!"

Mommy's patience thins a little, too, "Yes, it IS! I just don't know WHICH!"

He's Drawing!

And loving it! Daddy got him this great creative doodle book and I don't know if Mr. P is most thrilled that he can read most of the simple prompts or that there are no rules about coloring inside the lines or that his sister doesn't have such a book (and very much wants one). But he is thrilled.

For the boy who loved chalk and markers as a two-year-old and then nearly stopped drawing for three years out of frustration, this is a big deal.

And look, although he did just the other day illustrate himself "pooping on the carpet" (before the book), today he is drawing a garden. With flowers and, later, a fence and a house.

The Chief Perk of Immortality

Mr. P has unbuckled himself while I am driving, so I deliver a stern speech threatening death in a car accident.

Mr. P: "But you never have an accident."

Shmoogie: (slightly tremulous) "I don't ever want to die!"

Mr. P: (excited) "You know, Shmoogie, if you never died, you would get to see what species comes next [after humans]!"

So Many Words

For the third or fourth time, I am trying to print this blog. I've switched services, because the one I was using was incapable of interpreting my clicks this morning. And I'm mostly happy so far with Blurb, which lets you download a desktop application to work with and then upload the final product. And they bind it, because that's something I don't have time for now.

It worked fine, though slow (and a bit silly in photo placement for the sake of space efficiency, but I've decided not to care), for the first year, which you may (probably not, but maybe) recall was only 5 months because I started in August. That came to 106 pages.

It's choking on year two, which could well be 300 pages? I don't know.

The point is, I'm supposed to be cleaning the 18 months of neglect off every room of the house so that I am not mortified tomorrow when the moving company comes to estimate how much crap we own, but instead I'm sitting in front of my computer waiting to see if it will die again.

I figure that will be a clue that I need to break full years up into two volumes.

How could I have written so much???

When I Grow Up

"When I grow up," proclaims Shmoogie at bedtime, "I'm going to be a teacher."

I tell her she would make a wonderful teacher.

"Yeah," she agrees, "And I would do art and be at my school and everybody would see how tall I was."

I will decorate this post with this picture of "a rose" (the scribbles are "leaves"), a recent work of the future tall art teacher which I've been meaning to share: