First World Problems

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I have a lot of first world problems. I know that is an indicator of how lucky I am, that these are the things that are bothering me, and I know how badly other people have it. But I live in a town that pretty much revolves around White People’s Problems, and the Woe of Privilege, and ethnography is a murky business, people, and now I am in deep.

Luckily, I have a Bobcat parked on my back yard, to dig me back out again.

I asked the guys to leave the keys, so that I could get liquored up and go on a rampage, but they said ‘no’. Imagine that! So rude. But this Bobcat and I have a love/hate relationship, and I thought it would help us bond.

Love, because finally, our permits are in and we can start doing some of the improvements that take our backyard from a shadeless, soulless patch of dead grass to a spectacular little gem of a space, with a flagstone patio, new garage, new (tall) fencing, and some lovely landscaping. It is a small, small space, and I am tired of it looking like a piece of the moon.

Hate because it has taken so long to get the permits, and there was some delicate dancing between being able to schedule the concrete guys and the garage guys, and because no home improvement project ever goes smoothly. Hate because it is Memorial Day weekend, and I am going to have this parked in my yard for it. Hate because it is a long weekend and my kids are out of school and we finally have decent weather coming up, and no backyard to play in. Hate, because of the constant rain delays.

First world problems. I know, I know! But I just want all the work DONE. I am so tired of planning and scheduling and replanning and rescheduling, and filing for permits. It is just this massive thing weighing down my to-do list, and I can’t wait until the work is all done, and we can reseed the backyard and just enjoy the finished space. I just want to sit outside on my new patio, with a cocktail, and watch the kids run around. I am a woman of simple needs. Simple needs, and complex plans.

Reprogramming

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I read Katie’s post about having to re-teach some of the lessons her son is learning at school with particular interest, because I am also running into this, and having to do some reprogramming at home, something that is frustrating me to no end.

My childrens’ school is a K-8, and this year they won a grant to provide nutritional training as part of the curriculum. In theory, I support this, because I think America is a country that is so disconnected from food at this point that nobody even remembers what food that doesn’t have high-fructose corn syrup in it tastes like, and where it is easier and cheaper to eat crap than it is to eat healthy. But – in reality, I am so frustrated with the worksheets that my kids bring home every other day from this new program.

For the little ones, the emphasis is on ‘go foods’ and whoa foods’, a nice, simple little dumbing-down of eating strategy. There is no in-between, early on in the program – just foods that are ‘good’, and foods that are ‘bad’. Right away, this got me frustrated. Why are we training children to assign a moral state to food? Is the goal to create a nation of emotional eaters? I guess so!

But my biggest irritation is the idea that foods are just a simple yes/no decision. Whoa foods? You aren’t supposed to ever eat them. I already have very picky eaters, and for kids like mine, whose nutritional needs were unable to be met appropriately both prior to birth and afterward, all this program does is teach my children that everything I am teaching them, about intuitive eating, about grazing, about making informed choices based on personal needs, is wrong. Instead, many really good foods end up as Whoa foods, and many terrible foods are identified as Go foods, for very arbitrary reasons.  And, this program assumes that every child is struggling with their weight, or will be, and that that struggle will be that they will be too heavy, not too thin, and that their nutritional training should be akin to dieting choices, and that limiting fat intake is the most important strategy.

Unfortunately, it isn’t our strategy. My kids still drink full-fat milk, and eat full-fat and 2% cheese, partly because really good cheese doesn’t come in skim, and I want them to enjoy the buttery nuttiness of a good Havarti, the cream in Brie. I want them to eat real cheese, not processed skim milk cheese product. I want them to eat all the food – all of it – birthday cake, broccoli, warm whole-wheat bread, rich pasta sauce, the flavourful joy of a strawberry and spinach salad, and the flavourful joy of strawberry shortcake. We don’t make moral decisions about food, in this house. Instead, we group food into always, and sometimes. Always foods are all white milks and all non-processed cheese, any yoghurt in the house, all the fruits and veggies, nuts, whole wheat bread, peanut butter, eggs, enriched pastas, wild rice, any kind of meat or fish we can trick them into eating, and whole-grain crackers without high fructose corn syrup. Basically, all unprocessed foods, and some slightly processed but reasonably healthy foods, and peanut butter because my kids don’t get enough fat or protein in their diet.And because this list is the vast majority of what I serve my kids, they like it.

Sometimes foods are … everything else. Sometimes foods, and almost never foods. Birthday cake, doughnuts, chips, juice, etc. The good stuff. The stuff you want to eat, but don’t need to eat. Sometimes a cookie is just a good idea. Sometimes six cookies are a better one. Sometimes it is okay to have a slice of cake, some juice, or to fire up the fondue pot and get lost in some crusty french bread and hot Gruyére. You wouldn’t do it every day, or even every week. You wouldn’t want to. But no food is off-limits, morally bankrupt, or a guilty pleasure, if you have learned in advance that it is okay to eat things that aren’t super-healthy for you, as long as the vast majority of your diet is based in healthier choice-making. Nothing is a ‘no’ food. Instead, we recognize indulgence has its place, too, in life.

My kids are obsessed with pointing out ‘whoa’ foods, now, taught to do so at school. My diet coke? Whoa! Most cheese? Whoa!  Every cereal box in the cereal aisle, including the super-sugary ones? Go! No delineation of categories, at all. All bread is a Go food – white flour rolls, whole wheat toast, all the same thing. All juice is bad, and now my children feel badly when they ask for it. The last thing on earth I wanted my kids to have was a complex about food, or feelings of guilt about what they consume. Thanks so much, ‘nutrition curriculum’, for reinforcing disordered eating idealization on my 4 year olds. And thanks for doing so in a school where snacks are served every day, processed food, high fructose corn syrup snacks. My kids learned what Doritos were at  school, and Cheetos. So, thanks for that, too.

Spider Fairy Ballerinas

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Last week, ballet came to an end for the year. We picked our dance studio off of the internet, so I wasn’t expecting much from it, but it turns out, they really know how to put on a show, so I spent Mother’s Day morning in a beautiful theatre a few towns over, watching my little spider fairies dance.

The week before the performance was a technical rehearsal, which meant dropping the kids of at the stage door, in full makeup and regalia. This is still so new for us, this dropping off thing. Dropping off is for older kids, right? Not tiny babies like the ones I guess I don’t have any more. sniff. The girls wore shiny silver eyeshadow with dark navy eye liner, to match their outfits, and they loved it – another first, since I try to paint their faces every Hallowe’en, to no avail. Tech rehearsal really took it out of them: both were asleep when we got them home, at 5:30PM.

Lucky for us, we are the kind of ninjas who can carry a sleeping child in from the car and then wrestle her out of a tutu and tights and into her pajamas, without waking her up. She slept in the makeup though. It’s good practice for college.

Speaking of the makeup, when I bought it (because, oddly, I don’t have a lot of sparkly silver eyeshadow just hanging around the house), I also bought some makeup wipes, to remove it. But it turns out, nothing removes this stuff, so for a week, the kids were randomly pretty sparkly at school.

I did their eyes for the technical rehearsal, and when I walked across the parking lot and over to the stage door with one girl slung over my shoulder (as I do), another mom, with a daughter in another class, caught sight of my little girl’s sparkle-eyes, and then frantically waved at her daughter to come over, NOW! She pulled a huge makeup kit out of her huge mom-purse, a kit that folded open, and was the size of a family bible, crouched down in the parking lot, and grabbing an even more silvery bottle of glitter did a set of eyes on her kid that would not have been out of place at Moulin Rouge, all the time sighing to the woman next to her, and assuring her daughter (who is 5), to not worry, baby, because WE won’t be upstaged like THAT. Our kids aren’t even in the same class, so they won’t be on stage at the same time. And I only did it in the first place because I thought my daughters might like it, that it might make them feel super-fancy. That did not spare me the dirty looks,though. “How dare I try to upstage their little star!” was the general consensus, played out in a few sneers and some sighing. Competitive parenting, for the win!

The day of the performance was excellent. We dropped them at the stage door again, and then wandered in to our assigned seating (Heaven!), in a theatre that doesn’t allow photography (Heaven, again!), so parents could do nothing but sit and watch their kids perform. No cameras or cell phones in the way, no flashing, just a sweet performance, from start to finish. The girls were so good – I was amazed! They knew their whole routine, mostly without even looking at the teacher prompting them from the first row of the audience, and they smiled and looked like they were having fun. It’s a win, and next week, we get their formal dance pictures (which were taken in costume, but without any makeup at all, because they are four), and a DVD of the performance. Love this dance studio!

The funniest part was that the performances were broken into three different 1 hour recitals, with parents attending one recital, based on age group. Ours was kids under 6, and then the seniors also performed at each recital. So we saw where dancers start – tentative tapping, no coordination, hilarious, being helped on and off the stage by teachers wearing head-to-toe black, to ‘hide’ from the audience, and then suddenly 8 graceful teenagers would swoop out, do some amazing, lyrical number, and then swoop back off stage. No sense of how you get from “itsy bitsy spider” to that, but it was nice to know that eventually, some of these kids might have a little talent.

Speaking of a little talent, the little girl whose mother sneered at me for trying to upstage her own daughter’s stage makeup had so much glitter on her body while onstage that I was afraid she might go super-nova and wipe out life on earth as we know it. She did not know her routine, and she did not look like she was having much fun up there. But she sure sparkled!

We are taking the summer off of ballet, and all other organized activities, except maybe a swim class once a week, as a relief from the summer heat. I can’t wait – the last month of constant activity was too much for us. I like life a little slower, and I like more time to colour pictures, take naps, and rule the playground.

Stamp Out Hunger

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Now that my kids are making the leap from preschoolers to actual people-like children, I find myself trying to figure out what to teach them next, and how. It sounds weird, but everything from 0-4 is mostly ‘how to stay alive’ skills, like holding your head up so that you don’t overbalance and smack it into the hardwood floor – again, mixed with practical lessons on how to not poop in your pants. But now, as we approach the magic age of five, the age at which your little preschooler transforms into just a kid, the lessons are bigger, less self-centric, harder to figure out.

I want my kids to start to see the world around them for what it is, and their place in making it better. I doubt this is an easy lesson for any parent to teach, but for us, it is a bit of a minefield, in part because my kids are from an area of the world in which good people routinely starve to death for no good reason, and where life isn’t something you get to take for granted on a daily basis. We are starting with hunger, because it is the easiest concept for little kids to understand, I think – we have all felt it, but not everyone can alleviate it as easily as we can. We talked about it last night, as a family, and the kids decorated Stamp Out Hunger bags to fill with food. My husband and I did a run to a grocery store yesterday afternoon, so that the kids could ‘shop’ from a selection of healthy foods laid out on the kitchen table. Healthy, and then some junk/comfort food – chocolate pudding, and Kraft Dinner. We let them each fill a bag, picking what they thought would be good for a person who didn’t have any food of their own, and they really went to town, carefully packing and repacking their bags.

I am not sure they fully understand it, yet, but it is a start. At the very least, they were pretty proud of being able to pick the food that went in their bags.

It got me thinking though, of how much of our lives are partitioned off from our children, hidden from their eyes. I have a tradition of giving a little bit to charity every month – random charities, sponsoring people at work for ‘-athons’, stuffing a $20 in the boot of a fireman collecting from drivers stopped at red lights, etc. But my kids don’t see any of that. They don’t see me fill out the form for someone’s breast cancer walk, or send a library a book from their Amazon wish list. And because they don’t see it, they don’t know how we try to integrate giving as a value in our own lives.

So this was our start. And I have to find more ways to do this – to show the kids some of our better choices in life, and find a way to connect them more to the notion of giving.

Real Estate: Stress Edition

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Faithful readers know that I bought a house last summer, before I put my old place on the market, because I love paying property taxes so much that I wanted to do it at two addresses at the same time. And because everybody knows that buying a new place before selling your old place is just good business sense (ha!) And then it took us forever to move out fully, because we are idiots, and then it took longer and longer to clean it up and get it ready to be on the market because we just did not want to go back there. We are moving forward kind of people. Also, it is very disheartening to fix the flaws you lived with just fine because you were too lazy to fix them, just because apparently buyers will be aghast at the horror of those same flaws and run screaming from them.

But we finally got it ready, and hooked up with a realtor, who walked through the place, pointed out everything that was wrong with it and unfixable, and complained about the lack of parking. He was quick to tell us he didn’t like the size of the kitchen, the street parking situation, or the lack of another bathroom. It was a little surreal, because he couldn’t find anything to like about the property, but was quick to tell us what would make it hard to sell. Dude, you are a salesman. This is your job. No property is perfect, and it is your job to make the buyers see the positives, and help them overcome any negatives. Is this a normal practice for realtors, to point out the flaws you can’t fix?  Needless to say, we didn’t hire him. The giant rooms, sweeping expanse of windows, and 12 foot ceilings? He couldn’t see it.

But then … ugh. We were back at square one. After we regrouped from our meeting with Captain Negativity, we met with another realtor, one who came in and commented on everything right with the place, and who gave us a very doable list of stuff she wanted us to fix (that was actually fixable!) before we listed. Paint touch ups, some cleaning, adding in a little furniture. Doable stuff. Stuff we expected to do. None of Captain Negative’s ‘Can you put in a second bathroom’ nonsense.  We were so thrilled that we signed with her and off we puttered, cleaning up the baseboards, weeding the front garden, and then …. on the MLS we went.

Real estate right now is crazy, people. Crazy! We fielded several ‘almost offers’, but the first one on paper was full-ask, with a pre-approved mortgage. I died a little. 4 days from listing to signed offer.

But nothing goes smoothly, does it? Turns out, the mortgage business, and banking in general, has forgotten how this whole ‘buying a house’ thing works. Pre-approval means nothing. Sure, our buyers were pre-approved, but now they might not be able to actually get a mortgage from the company that approved them to get the mortgage. Does that make sense to you? No? Me, either. They love the place, we would love to sell it to them, and somehow, it is becoming increasingly evident that that can’t happen. And I am sad, not just because I obviously would like to sell it and have that be one thing off my massive to-do list, but also because this apartment is just such a heavenly place to live, and I love the idea of it going to someone who feels the same way about it. We kept the windows wide open 9 months of the year, while we lived here, and it felt like living in a giant tree-house, an oasis in the middle of a big city. And I think the people that made the offer felt it, too – the peacefulness of the space. So now we are all praying to the mortgage Gods that it works out, because otherwise, we have to cancel the contract and start again.

 

Go Win Something Pretty

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On an online forum that I frequent, there is a thread titled, Get It Off Your List, and it is about finishing that one thing that is hanging around on your to-do list that nags at you, drags you down a bit, blocks you from getting anything else accomplished, and is an eat your frog de-motivator. So, today, I am going to go eat my frog, and leave you instead with some fun links elsewhere, to other people, people who aren’t giant procrastinators, who already ate their damned frogs, and now are producing awesome content online.

Jillian Lauren is giving away some gorgeous scarves on her blog. Handmade in Ethiopia, a place where learning to weave can be a pathway out of crushing poverty, she is partnering with Connected In Hope, an organization that helps weavers sell their goods in the US. It is a great project, and the scarves are lovely, so go win one.

Beth, at Remarkably Domestic has the cutest tutorial in how to make a fairy castle for your garden, something I plan to do as soon as I eat my frog, and Design Mom thinks I might be able to make my own dish towels, which I might try, but only if I can use letter stamps that spell out ‘Do Your Own Dishes’.

I was delighted to find someone who dislikes Gwyneth Paltrow as much as I do, and another who is as baffled by all the cat stuff on Pinterest as I am. Now, if Becky would just update, my online reading life would be complete. Maybe she forgot to eat her frog, too.

 

 

So Vain

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Thanks to the dog, and some bad luck, I have to replace two dental crowns, which are on front teeth,and rather than match that fancy new dental work to my very average looking teeth, the dentist suggested I do a whitening treatment, first, to have a prettier smile. This is great news, because I was just thinking that there is nothing on earth I love more than spending thousands and thousands of dollars on reaffirming my already well-entrenched dental phobia.  Since I am not really the cosmetic enhancing type, I had never done this before, but after we ascertained that I am too dental phobic to get Zoomed, he came up with a home kit.

The instructions alone make me cringe. You put these big green molds in your mouth, then suck on them, to adhere the whitening tape inside them to your teeth, and push the whitening goop up and around each tooth. I was warned my teeth might be a little sensitive afterward. I was not warned that the moment these things went on my teeth I would start to drool like a Dogue de bordeaux. I was not warned that instantly, a giant pool of saliva that I can neither swallow nor actively spit out would form, rendering me instantly disgusting. For 20 minutes, I just sat with my face wrapped in a hand towel, while drool poured out of my mouth, and I moaned in pain. So pretty. So very, very pretty.

The moaning was because I also wasn’t warned about how the hydrogen peroxide in these things would burn. Not in an, “Oh, this isn’t great, but I am adult,and can certainly deal with something unpleasant,” sort of way. More in an, “OH MY GOD MY LIPS ARE BURNING OFF” manner. Apparently, swelling follows the burning part, and now, from the nose down and the chin up, I look like the bastard love child of Lisa Rinna, and a few Real Housewives. It is bad. So bad. I can’t suck water through a straw, or chew without biting something inflamed, or smile.

I should stop, right? But I kept pushing through this crap for 8 applications now, and  I am just at a point where I am just starting to see some whitening, so how can I stop now? Just because my lips are peeling off my face, and the salivary glands under my tongue is so swollen I can’t swallow anything, and my gums are bleeding, and I sort of want to cry every time I take one of these kits out of the fridge, that is no excuse for quitting, right? What am I, some sort of quitter? Some sort of quitter who would privilege the ability to eat and talk over the having of slightly whiter teeth?

I am no quitter. I might be a hideous-lipped beast right now, a complete horror-fest, face-wise, but I am no quitter. And if it takes looking this bad for weeks on end, just for an end result of looking slightly better, well, that seems like a perfectly logical course of action. Because I am an idiot.

 

 

Burying the Lede (instead of leading with profanity)

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I feel like I have to preface this story with an observation. Bear with me.

You know how, when you socialize with a group of couples, that there are always different dynamics at play in their personal relationships that bleed out in social situations? Like, the super-lovey newlyweds who can’t keep their hands off each other at the dinner table, or the couple that finish each other’s sentences, always? And sometimes, there is that other couple, that couple that is just outright mean to and about each other throughout every conversation, but pretend that all that hostility and hatred is some form of kidding around with each other, and they explain it away as ‘that is just how we joke around’, but it isn’t ever funny, and whenever one of them opens their mouth, you kind of cringe and start looking away and pretending to have a lot of business involving your bread roll and the napkin on your lap, while the husband refers to his wife as a fat heifer, or the wife cracks jokes about her husband’s impotence? You know – those people.

Yeah. We aren’t those people, I swear. But we do have a select few insider jokes as a couple that, if they were said out loud in front of witnesses, would sound so terrible, and border on sounding like one of those couples. This story is one of them.

It all started with our Xmas cards after we had kids, and one of those stupid married-people fights we were having about the cards, and how we couldn’t get one decent picture of both kids to put on it, and how ridiculously large our Xmas card list was getting, and it sort of all came to a head when we had to give the printer some pithy little phrase to include inside of our cards, a phrase that can’t include the word ‘Christmas’ or read in a way that assumes the receiver’s religion has a winter holiday, or indeed, that the receiver has any kind of religion at all, because our list is a pretty diverse set of people. Good Heavens, those first Christmas cards are such serious business, aren’t they? I felt like we were disarming the cold war single-handedly, while solving global warming, making those cards.

So there we were, at least 2 weeks late on getting these damned cards printed, and the days were running into printing dates that meant that nobody in my family would even get the card before the holidays because they all live in other countries, and we were both blaming each other for everything wrong with these cards at that point, and incidentally, every other thing that ever went wrong with a project we had to do undertake jointly, and from there to everything wrong in the world today, and nobody was going to back down from this one, this epic Holiday Fight From Hell, when my husband brought up that we still hadn’t cut the list down to a manageable size, and he didn’t even recognize half the names on it, and we still did not have a phrase to print inside of them, and I snapped back that we should just be honest and have our cards printed to say, “Happy Christmas, Asshole”.

We did not do that, but it did disarm the battle, and to this day, it has become a code phrase between us, a shorthand to remind us to stay on the same team, and on odd holidays since then, one or the other of us will wish each other a “Happy Birthday, asshole”, or “Happy Valentine’s Day, asshole”. It is just such an awful, awful word to pair with anything celebratory that you cannot help but laugh.

So … my wedding anniversary and my husband’s birthday are the same day, thus insuring I forget both every year. But this year, I had a plan – a funny plan. Since we are super over-scheduled this month, and also have just undertaken a huge renovation on the new house (and therefore are super broke), this isn’t the year for the grand gesture, the big present, the wow moment, and I decided instead that it would be funny if I bought him a supermarket cake, and had them ice the phrase, “Happy Birthday, Asshole” on the top. But it turns out, not one bakery I contacted would do it. Apparently, even though I explained it was a silly inside joke, and he would love it, it is such an offensive idea that two bakeries said no outright, and one spent an extra ten minutes trying to anoint me with some old-fashioned Christian guilt about it.

I guess it’s cool with them that every cake I have ever gotten has had my name misspelled on it, but one swear word and everybody had to put down their frosting and get all judgmental and sanctimonious. Our anniversary and his birthday coincided with swim practice for the kids, so as we roasted in the hot chlorinated air of the pool’s viewing deck, I told my husband how bakery assistants all over town were firmly on Team Him, and nobody was willing to swear on his birthday cake, and he started laughing, and …

reader, I swear, this is how I know we are made to be married to each other …

he said, “I know. I couldn’t get them to write, ‘Happy Anniversary, Asshole’ on a cake for you, either.” And with that kind ofyuánfèn, what could I do, gentle reader, but swoon? We are just the 21st century Gift of the Magi, every day, around here.

So, I made my husband a mix cake from a box. And here is the worst part of the story – I don’t know what happened to it, but this was, hands’ down, the worst cake and frosting we have ever eaten, ever. Not just in the expected ‘from a box’ sort of way. the whole thing fell apart while being iced, slowly sliding in different directions, while the frosting from a can, rock hard at room temperature, ripped the top off of it and balled into little chunks of icing. Gamely, we tried to eat it, but … reader, I don’t say this lightly, but … it has to be thrown out. It is inedible. I never thought there was such a thing as bad cake, but there is, and I made one, and the best part of this whole story is, if I could have just gotten a cake that said, “Happy Birthday, Asshole” at least it would have tasted good.

 

Dreams and Manipulations

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Yesterday was cold, wet, and miserable, and while the kids were packed away at PreK, I turned to my spouse and asked him what he wanted for lunch, a loaded question, because if I don’t ask him, it means I am just making him something. Asking him is secret marriage code for suggesting he go out in the rain and pick up some takeaway food for us. He hemmed and hawed a bit, but finally, I won by walking away, and then turning as if he had said something and saying, “Oh, yeah! Did you just say 5 Guys Burgers? That is a great idea!” Reader, he had said no such thing, but once the suggestion was out there, it was almost impossible not to act on it, which is why we ended up stuffing our faces with burgers and friesyesterday afternoon while catching up on some DVR’d comedies.

Not bad for a Tuesday.

On Earth day, we accidentally planted a tree. A Magnolia tree, which is something I have always wanted. In elementary school, when other little girls were scribbling band names and Mrs. Thomas Mapother Cruise into their notebooks, over and over again, I was planning gardens – formal gardens, french gardens, english gardens, tulip gardens, vegetable gardens, acres of gardens, in coloured pencil and conté crayon. And now that we have a little house, we get to do stuff like … plant a Magnolia tree.Naturally, the day after Earth Day, we saw snow flurries. Poor little tree. I hope she doesn’t do the sensible thing in this stupidly cold Spring we are having and just give up and curl back into the earth.

I love Magnolias for many reasons, and one of them is because I am nuts about the art of Amy Ross, whose animal/plant hybrids remind me of the kind of dreams one should have while dozing contentedly in a hammock on a warm summer day. Dreamy and light, her magnolia series is just fabulous. I have a few of them, and want all of them.

People, this is my life. Takeout burgers and gardening. It could be so much worse.

 

 

Hoping for the Dullest Weekend, Ever.

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The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But these jeans were only a month old!

I told myself, when I started blogging again, that I wouldn’t talk about work (boring), or current events (everyone has an opinion; no need to share them). But this week is kicking my ass, and making me want to curl up into a little ball in the middle of my bed and just not move for a while. Like, a few years worth of ‘while’, lying completely still and motionless. And without thoughts. That’s normal, right?

Speaking of normal, this past Sunday was the deadline for kindergarten applications, which means I am spending this week haunting our mailbox for our official letter. We are hoping the kids’ got into a selective enrollment school, whose PTA website I have scoured thoroughly, and whose denizens I have judged to be the kind of people who drink top shelf liquor for no reason and really care about education (good), but might be helicopter parents who are overly invested in their kids’ experiences in life (bad). PTA at this school could be a full time job and/or a byzantine political nightmare, but the academic and social resources offered there are beyond anything in the regular school system.

But… but. Always a but. We started the kids in baseball this week, and it turns out everyone on their team either is currently, or slated to attend, our neighbourhood elementary school, and I met some of the moms and really liked them. You know when people are just nice, in that decent sort of way that makes you feel happy for just having met them? That kind of nice. The chill kind of people that make PTA kind of a fun thing to volunteer for.  And those would be our parent friends if we stuck with the neighbourhood school. So now I don’t know what we want, or what our options are, and somewhere, on its way to me, is a letter that tells me that all the ridiculous of the kindergarten process is officially over, and we have been sorted, Hogwarts-style, into an academic academy for the next 6 years.

My anxiety level about this school thing is off the charts, in part because, with a six weeks left in the school year, we are starting to feel pretty pushed out of our old school. Lots of parents who all seem to have accidentally lost our contact information when they realized we moved to a new town, albeit one just scant blocks away from school property. The school officials know we aren’t coming back, but they keep asking! It is a delicate dance, these conversations. I don’t want to tell them why we aren’t coming back, because my kids are still there, and I want them to be coddled and adored. And the school wants us back, but I suspect only for our tuition money. We went to a school event this past week, where I practiced what might be my greatest social skill (eavesdropping), and where I picked up some huge gossip about why the principal is leaving, and how the PTA has become a house divided, as two large Irish families fight for dominance and control over it. That might be it’s own entry in the next few days, the massive politicking and strategery going on to wrest control and enact change in …. oh, yes. A small parochial elementary school with less than 100 students. Oh, power. Oh, glory!

IN other, stress-related news, our old house officially went on the market this week, and so far, I am obsessively checking RedFin, to see how many strangers have favourited it. So far? Seven! We are practically giving it away, and hopefully someone walks in, feels the fabulous karma we left behind, and buys it immediately. When our realtor sent us the photos, we feel in love with it. Amazing what a wide angle lens and a lot of cleaning up can do to make a place look way, way better than it ever did when you lived in it.

That is our week, in a nutshell. Baseball, school letters, real estate. A giant basket of first-world problems that make me ashamed of how low some of my late night hopes are aimed.