Finding My Way...

I only have a kitchen because it came with the house...

I found recipe cards recently that said that, and I had to buy them for myself. I am not a good cook. I don't enjoy cooking, which means I don't do much to get better. I like to bake, but only if I am in the mood. Mostly because I hate to clean up.

I am a substitute teacher for the rest of this school year, which means I generally only work a couple of days a week. However in November and December I worked several weeks for one teacher, and for the first time in about 13 years, I was working a forty hour week. I hate to cook under normal circumstances. Exhausted after teaching kindergarten all day? I did NOT want to cook! I think I spent half of my subbing salary on the take out we ate that month. I managed a few good meals, most from the crock pot.

Next school year, I hope to be teaching full-time. This means I need a plan to keep away from the take out, or I will weigh 700 pounds in short order. I need to figure out some resources for freezer cooking and crock pot cooking to keep us eating in a fairly healthy way.

I like A Year of Slow Cooking, and I own the first cookbook. In visiting the site to get the link for this blog post, I noticed there is a second book out. Somewhere, buried deep in my Iomega storage drive is a file a friend sent me a couple of years ago with tips and recipes for freezer cooking. I think I'm going to need more than that. What tips do you have or resources can you point me to that will help me get a handle on simplifying the dreaded chore of cooking dinner?

Miss Popularity

Today I was folding the laundry and I came across Em's shirt from the Broadway show Wicked. It is pink and simply says "Popular" across the front. That prompted some humming of this catchy tune. Here are some excerpts:

Popular!
You're gonna be popular!
I'll teach you the proper ploys
When you talk to boys
Little ways to flirt and flounce
I'll show you what shoes to wear
How to fix your hair
Everything that really counts

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When I see depressing creatures
With unprepossessing features
I remind them on their own behalf
To think of 
Celebrated heads of state or
Specially great communicators
Did they have brains or knowledge?
Don't make me laugh!
They were popular! Please -
It's all about popular!
It's not about aptitude
It's the way you're viewed
So it's very shrewd to be
Very very popular
Like me!

Now, my daughter is 10, and in the dreaded fifth grade. The year the drama begins. The year it starts to mean more and more to be "popular." My kid is well-liked, and she's a pip, but I'm not sure that she's popular. And I can't decided if that bothers me or not.

I was an unpopular kid in school. I got good grades, I liked school and my Grandmother sewed most of my clothes. Actually, it's a wonder I didn't eat dirt more on the playground. I recently turned 40 and I still claim that eighth grade was the WORST year of my LIFE. I ticked off the wrong person, and she made it her mission to hurt and humiliate me every chance she could. As soon as I hit puberty I chunked up big time, and never slimmed down again. When you go through that experience, you think you want it different for your daughter. You hope upon hope that your daughter will be popular and not experience the same moments that crushed your fragile self-esteem when you were younger.

Yet I look around at the popular kids in her grade and I am unimpressed by some of them! Some are growing up way too fast and they have "boyfriends" and they are holding hands. They are TEN! Others are snobby and cliquey, and the stereotypical popular girls. If that is what it takes to be popular, then I don't want that for her either!

Just sedate me for the next 8 years, ok?

Dreaming of India...

For much of today I thought it was really Friday the 13th and someone just hadn't told me. I had to cancel our vet appointment because the cats would shred me before they would let me crate them. I had invited friends to attend a workshop with me at nearby Colonial Williamsburg, but they were out of tickets by 9:15am.

At any rate, after a few more minor setbacks in my day, my mind started to think about going on vacation. We have a timeshare week banked, so I was perusing RCI.com to look for an exchange vacation or a last minute steal. After 45 minutes of looking for someplace to take Emily in December to see snow (no luck unless I want to fly to Colorado), or a place for she and I to road trip to over Spring Break (very boring options), my mind went to fantasyland. I started a new search and clicked Asia instead of USA. On the Google Map there was one lone red marker on the Indian Subcontinent. It was in a GORGEOUS beach town on the southwestern coast of India, called Goa. One look at the photos in the PDF brochure, and I was ready to pack!

Goa was where we took our first family vacation with Emily. She was just 9 months old and we still had only temporary custody of her. Therefore we could not leave the country to travel to Bangkok as planned, but needed to remain in India. We got permission to fly a couple of hours south to Goa. A former Portuguese colony, there is a strong Catholic presence there in an otherwise overwhelming Hindu society. I wish I could say we explored the area while we were there, but Barry and I were diagnosed with mononucleosis just before we left, and we slept through most of the trip. The beach was beautiful, and we napped in cork hammocks out in a courtyard that overlooked the Arabian Sea. Emily dipped her baby toes in that sea, and had her first swim in the pool at the Taj resort where we stayed.

So it was nice to fantasize about Spring Break in India...until I went to Northwest and checked out airfares. Oof. That's about all I can say. Oof. And Spring Break isn't even a good time to go to India. At least in Delhi it was a notoriously HOT time of year! So back to reality and back to Tuesday the 8th, hopefully no longer a Friday the 13th in disguise...

The plagues of homework and an evil mommy...

I am currently taking a break from cleaning out a corner of the office. In a few minutes, when I am finished, I plan to bring a desk sized folding table in from the garage, wipe it down and create a study desk for my daughter. She will hate it. She will glare at me. She will whine. She will stall. I will want to shoot myself. It's gotta happen.

I am preschool teacher by trade, but I've largely been a stay-at-home-mom since Emily came home to us at age 5 months. She loved school and learning through kindergarten and I loved teaching her and helping in her classes. Then first grade came, and real work began.  We were both out of our comfort zone and it all fell apart.

I will summarize the last four years by telling you that a child who loved kindergarten and spent August begging to start first grade was crying and having stomach aches by October. We got a diagnosis of mild dysgraphia, and motor integration issues. We've learned to work with that. It has improved a little over the years, but every time things get better, school gets harder and we struggle to catch up again.

Now add pre-pubescence...a creative child who can live in disorganized squalor...a child who "forgets" things all the time...a child who never thinks things are her fault. That's where we are now. Her interim came back a week ago and it did not reflect the work of my daughter who made AB honor roll all of last year. I come to find she has told me every day for a week her homework is done, yet she did not complete her math log one single day last week. It was a hard week, a crazy week. She is in the school play and it was tech week. But you can't just skip homework and hope it will go away and you won't have to do it.

So the study desk downstairs, in the office, on the main floor of the house, in a high traffic area. I have e-mailed with her teacher, and we are meeting to strategize ways to help Emily be more successful. I will will be devising ways to force her to be more accountable. And while I have reminded her numerous times in the last 24-48 hours that I love her no matter what her grades are, I will also be telling her that my job is to teach her how to manage school and homework in order to be successful. 

It's going to be a tense week around here...

Oh! My virgin ears!

I know I have sheltered my daughter. At age 10 she's seen only a handful of PG movies, never mind a PG-13 or R. I screen her music, and upload playlists to her iPod. She entered 5th grade this year, and it seems like someone has opened Pandora's Box of Profanity!

When Em was in first grade we were having dinner with my Mom one night and Emily announced that someone in her class had "said the 's' word" at school that day. My Mom's eyes got wide and I chuckled, knowing full well that to Em, the "s word" was shut up or stupid. I can't say the same any more.

At the end of last year, Emily learned the word b!tch from a girl in her class told a boy he was one. Should you be allowed to use the bad words if you don't even know how to do it properly? This same charm school dropout was caught by me this summer calling someone a "butt-muncher" in a group of kids that ranged in age from 4 to 10. Emily was called a b!tch a few weeks ago by a boy in her class that was mad that she won a game in math class.

The other day in carpool, the girls were trying to share earbuds to listen to one girl's iPod. I offered to use my cassette adapter to play it through the car radio for all to hear. That was fine through the sweet Taylor Swift song, but a few moments later "Boom Boom Pow" by the Black Eyed Peas came on, and I was mortified to hear:

Project 365

You can see the little link up there to my Project 365 blog.  I did well for a little while...ok a couple of weeks anyways.  By the end of January I had fallen firmly off the bandwagon.  I have thought several times about restarting, but the mild OCD in me requires a special date (like January 1st!) to begin a project like this.

Today was the first day of school.  The first day of a year of another sort, and I have spent the morning pondering the possibility of making this the first day of a second try at 365 photos.  Plus I have a cute photo already for the first day!

Geocaching 101

Several years ago B and I talked about this neat activity called "geocaching."  We bought a GPS, I created an account at www.geocaching.com and we imagined we get more outdoorsy by taking hikes to find these caches.  Somehow that didn't happen...well, for another four years or so, anyways!

At the beginning of the summer a friend on LM posted asking questions about geocaching.  I took a few moments to explain it, and linked her over to geocaching.com and that rekindled my interest in caching.  I printed out some local caches near us here, and just after school got out for the summer, we found our first cache near Jamestown.  So far this summer, we have hunted 16 caches and found 11 of them.  Em has not shown great interest in caching.  I think it's the heat and bugs, I think she'll enjoy cool weather caching better.  B and I really love it though, and we've had some fun finds.

Here's a short video clip that introduces you to geocaching:

Have you done any geocaching?  Tell me about your favorite cache!

Wax Museum

A recent assignment of Em's had her choosing a biography to read and report on.  She chose Harriet Tubman.  There was a written report and an oral report required.  The oral reports were presented to parents and other classes through a "wax museum."  The kids created "buttons" from colored paper and taped them to the themselves or the floor in front of them.  When people came by and "pushed" their button they came to life and gave their 20-30 second spiel.  I recorded about a dozen of Em's classmates and friends, but for privacy purposes, I will only share my own kidlet here. :o)

Wax Museum @ Yahoo! Video

Mom! I was on TV!

That's what my daughter exclaimed when she came home from the McWane Science Center the day after Thanksgiving.  She and all of her cousins went to check out all of the awesome hands-on exhibits they have there.  The local Fox affilite reports the weather from there periodically, and Em and her cousins made it into the studio for the first part of the broadcast!  That's her cousin RJ declaring "they grow up so fast." (rehearsed) She declared she wanted a DS for Christmas, and her cousin Henry clams up when they get to him (not rehearsed).  She has other assorted cousins all through the audience, I think about a dozen from our group were in there!

Advent Conspiracy

Angie finds the best stuff, and she is constantly feeding my soul.  She is a blessing to me.  I am sharing this, which I learned about on her blog.

Tomorrow I plan to share this with my daughter and ask her to help me brainstorm ways to make this a part of our Christmas this year.