Consumerist addiction

If I'm going to quit the whole consumer hamster wheel, it makes sense to examine the insane ways my money disappears from my wallet.

Let's examine.

Not too bad. Two filled compacts, one of Mary Kay products, one of Arbonne products. Total at this point: 9 eye shadows, 3 blushes.

Skin care. All Mary Kay. Daytime, nighttime, and exfoliant. I'm not horrified or embarassed yet.

Oops. Here's where we see something a little scary. 14 eyeshadows, 4 blushes, 3 eyeliners, 7 lipsticks/glosses, one foundation, one eyebrow wax. Yikes.

One bronzer, one powder, another foundation, a couple of concealers/highlighters, and another ten or so lipsticks. And a homemade lip balm in a tea container. Hey, at least I'm recycling!

Under the bathroom sink. Lots of products. Hair, body, face, etc.




And more products. 90% of them are lotions. Two hair conditioners, and some fantastic ducks!

Here it is. My shame. 14, yes FOURTEEN hair products. 7 of them are curl enhancers. Are they truly different from each other? Not really.

If I added up the cost of these products, even if I only added up what they're worth now (that they're half gone, 25% gone, etc.), I think I could feed my family for a month or more.

Do these products make me look or feel better? Do I use them

Honestly? No, no, and mostly, no. My hair responds best to a weekly shampoo, every-other-day conditioning, and a little massage oil. My skin prefers the soap I make out of chamomile flowers, sage, rosemary, lavender, and unscented Dove soap. I wear makeup MAYBE once a week (but I wore it daily when I worked outside the home).

Which means I obviously have a bit of a problem when it comes to acquisition of products. Part of my year of non-acquisition will be dedicated to not only not purchasing, but also using what I already have. It's clear that I have no business buying any kind of hair or skincare product for myself for quite a long time

I know I'm not alone here. What's your poison? Where do you spend money that doesn't make any kind of sense? What would make you change that pattern?

It's October!

And you know what that means, right?

31 days of pink!

I missed yesterday, but here's your daily dose.

Absurd

Bullet points to illustrate why being a mom is so much fun:

• When discussing my daughter's reading choices, I pretended to throw up in her mouth.
• On the way home from the grocery store, said daughter and I fantasized about awesome pet names. Since our current dogs are named Biscuit and Gravy, we decided their successors should be named Mr. Waffles and Beignet. But the true winner of awesome dog names is what she (at age 6) originally intended to name Biscuit: PUPCAKE! (The name was vetoed by my very heterosexual husband.)
• Being on instant message with the same daughter, discussing how the satellite wasn't working because it's raining. A transcript follows....

She: the satellite is out
me: Is raining
She: yes
is
me: right
sometimes the satellite doesn't likey the rain
She: ha ha
me: so yeah, that
She: Why are we chatting on gmail when we are in the same house?
me: good question
She: WE ARE LAZY BUMS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
crap i dont wanna be a lazy bum
me: then come downstairs, silly
I'm a wet lazy bum
She: ha ha did u just walk the dogs?

So apparently, we're lazy, I'm wet, and that's funny.

Boys will be boys?

Yesterday evening, I had dinner with my group of au pairs. We meet once a month - an opportunity for me to make sure they're all okay, and an opportunity for them to all be in the same place at the same time - and they usually go out afterward as a group.

These young women have a unique perspective about children, since they are full-time (for the most part) caregivers for children ranging in age from toddler to teenager. They entered the program with more childcare experience than many first-time parents have had. Individual au pairs have different motivations for joining the program (lack of jobs in their home country, a desire to improve their English, a desire to study in America, or, yes, the desire to marry an American), but they definitely all learn at least one thing while they're here: kids are a lot of work. Sort of like the show "The Baby Borrowers" but in a much more real-world setting.

When we get together, we talk about their lives - how they're getting along with host families, if they're experiencing homesickness, how school is going - but they often move the conversation to my life. Most of my au pairs have met my family at least once or twice (the kids have joined me for more than one monthly meeting), and they ask about the kids. I try to share one or two interesting stories and leave it at that.

Yesterday, my son became the topic of conversation quite unintentionally. We'd been talking about kids' movies, and one woman mentioned "Prince Caspian," which she'd loved (I did too). I told her about Alex's response to the movie, and the whole group was really intrigued.

See, Alex isn't one of those boys who loves violent movies and games. He's a gentle kid. His taste in video games is dominated by games that emphasize interpersonal relationships, especially the Sims games. He hasn't shown much interest in fighting games, and when he plays with friends, he's not the kid who instigates games based around violence.

And when we saw "Prince Caspian," he was weary of the battle scenes long before the movie was over. I remember sitting next to him and seeing him begin to squirm and look uncomfortable with what was going on onscreen.

Weeks later, just to drive the point home, all four of us saw the new American Girl movie about my daughter's favorite fictional character, Kit Kittredge. The movie was smart, interesting, and didn't include violence (although it definitely did include difficult subject matter, based as it was in the Great Depression). We knew Susie would love it, but we were pleased to hear Alex's review: "It was the best movie I've ever seen!"

He starts his week at summer camp today. It's his third year at this camp, and he thrives there, with the guitar and campfires and cooperative play. It's a gentle place, and it's good for his gentle spirit.


Since we've been in our house for three years now, I've started to get a little restless with some of the design choices we made. The children's bedrooms are the most recent focus of my dissatisfaction. We helped Susie's room grow up a little bit by swapping out her old, white furniture with the furniture we've been using in our bedroom (which was in my grandmother's bedroom since the middle of the last century). Making those changes for her, however, just pushed the point home that Alex's room was in need of even more drastic changes.

I consulted with him to see what he wanted for his room. When we originally moved into the house, he was really fascinated by maps, so we had chosen fabrics that emphasized geography.

This time, he wants a Hollywood theme. We have some decorations that we use for our annual Oscar party; those will work well in his room. And I have ideas for the window treatments that will emulate the curtains around a movie screen.

This weekend, Craig and I took a spin through a few different stores, looking for items that might work in Alex's room. A quick glance through the aisles of children's furnishings at Target showed us that the world of retail still thinks there are only a few things that boys need: sports, cowboys, and camoflauge. (And the "girl" side of the aisle was no better, with its emphasis on pink and flowers - none of which I eschew, but it seems awfully limiting.)

I had the same frustration when I was buying clothes for my children when they were little. Boys' clothes had the same motifs as the bedding: bugs and sports. Items for girls were decidedly pretty, with precious florals or ladybugs, and predominately pink. (And those were the ones without Disney or other characters.)

Raising a child who doesn't quite fit within the culturally-dictated norms is interesting. It takes creativity. And I wouldn't trade it for anything.


edited to add: I found the most fantastic curtains at IKEA a few weeks later...they're red velvet! I bought four panels, two of which I'll turn into valances, thus leaving two panels to curtain his windows, and the valances to bridge the wallspace between, thereby creating a "movie screen" between the two windows. He was THRILLED when he saw them. Now I just need to get to sewing and finding adequate curtain rods.

The experiment, continued

Or, more truthfully, discontinued.

Due to circumstances well beyond my control, we gave up on the non-driving experiment. Maybe I'm a wimp, but I couldn't figure out how to help my boss move out of his apartment without cranking up the minivan. And I couldn't figure out how to purchase food and liquor for his going-away party without driving.

So yes, we drove during not-driving-week. About 4 miles in all. Which still isn't bad, but it means the experiment failed this time.

But I don't think this failure proves terribly much. How often, in a person's lifetime, does one's manager develop serious visa problems and have to leave the country with 20 days' notice? I'm thinking it's a once in a lifetime thing. (And I'm not going to say much about it except that I hate it and I've cried more about this situation than I've cried over any work situation in the last nine years. He's fantastic and I adore his wife and I'm going to miss them horribly and I have some anxiety about what's going to happen next at work.)


New topic.

The kids are back from their week in northwest Arkansas, and I must say, they're a lot of fun. I can't honestly say that I miss them all that much when they're gone (mainly because we keep ourselves busy and don't have much opportunity to miss them), but I love it when they're home. The girl and I spent much of yesterday afternoon and evening cuddling on the couch, after she emerged from email land and got sucked into the movie I was halfway watching (I was halfway sleeping). We were both tired, and I think she was needing some Mom time.

A few years ago, I wouldn't have let her watch "First Knight," because it deals with the Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot story, which is a bit, well, adult with the whole forbidden love thing. But I also clearly remember being about her age and wishing with all my heart that my parents would let me see "Excalibur" when it came out in the theater. (They considered my request seriously, even went to see the movie, and then denied my appeals. I saw it years later and "Meh", but I saw their point.) But "First Knight" is PG-13, and the love story part was quite tame, and the battle gore didn't bother her in the Narnia movies, so I decided it wasn't inappropriate.

What was funny was how she fell into watching the movie. She had come into the living room to tell me that the phone was for me, but then she sat down just because she wasn't doing anything else. At first she just glanced at the screen, but then I caught her getting interested. And then she was so interested that she asked me to pause the movie when she went to the kitchen for a snack. We talked about what was going on (she's never seen "Camelot" but has seen "The Sword and the Stone" so she was a little familiar with the story) and we both predicted when things were about to go sour.

And then it was over, but we found the second half of "Talladega Nights," which the kids and I think is hilarious but Craig thinks is incredibly stupid. By this time, Alex had joined us and watched it with us (although he was heartily disappointed that the dinner table scene, particularly the "spider monkey" line, had already taken place).

Watching my children watch movies gives me a great view inside their minds. I can tell a lot by what makes them laugh in comedies or what gets their attention in adventure movies. Alex doesn't enjoy battle scenes (and, as a result, didn't much love "Prince Caspian") but loves goofy comedy (and has become a fan of Nick at Night sitcom reruns). The girl is starting to "get" adult humor, and watching her laugh at off-color jokes makes the jokes much funnier to me. The laugh is different. It's like she knows that she "shouldn't" be laughing, but she can't help it.

They're home for a week, then it's off to Michigan for three weeks. I know Craig and I will enjoy the change of pace that occurs when we're child-free, but I also know we'll be happy to have them return. The laughter most of all.

Eleven years, three days

So here's the thing.

My baby isn't a baby.

Eleven years ago, Craig and I brought a baby home from the hospital. I would be lying if I said she was a tiny baby - she wasn't, at a round eight pounds, five ounces, nineteen inches long - but she was the smallest one I'd ever held. And also the first one that I'd made. It was kind of a big deal, at least to us.

Eleven years and three days have passed quickly. We've watched her learn to crawl, then walk, then run. We've tracked her vocabulary until her words were to numerous to count. We witnessed as she learned her ABCs and numbers and colors. We helped her learn to write her name and admired her scribbled pictures.

And we've helped her with book reports and science projects. We've attended piano recitals and choir concerts. We've experimented with hair colors and hosted sleepovers and read book after book at her bedside, and sung "Puff the Magic Dragon" too many times to count.

And now she's become this gorgeous young woman, almost as tall as I, wearing shoes bigger than mine, with blossoming curves and more and more glimpses of the woman she's becoming.

I find myself alternating between sadness and infatuation with her new beauty.

When I use the word sadness, it's only because I don't know a better word. I'm not sad that she's growing up. No, quite the contrary. I enjoy the present Susie so much - and I wouldn't trade her for her toddler, or preschooler, or early elementary self. The sadness is more that this, the wonder that is her maidenhood, will end all too soon.

And when I mention beauty, I feel a need to justify it. Because I don't really mean, at least not entirely, physical beauty. Sure, as her mother, I think she's the prettiest girl ever to walk this earth, and I'd be happy to fight you if you say otherwise, but that's not really what has me so ensnared.

No, what has me so smitten is deeper. She has a beauty that shines through her eyes. She's so very alive. So vital. So funny. So alert. So confident. So graceful. So willing, and able, to negotiate the confusing maze that is tween-ness.

The girl has skills. She's good at the social thing. She's good at music. She's a great student. She's got the entire church wrapped around her finger, and has since she was a toddler. She's healthy, smart, and funny. She's the perfect sister, and the perfect daughter.

And she's reaching the age where it's becoming hard to write about her. She knows I'm writing, and she hasn't protested. But I feel a greater need to give her some privacy. Potty training stories are cute and funny, but her life is now hers, much more than it's mine.

I also, more than I ever have, feel that I need to protect her from the world. She's entering rocky territory. Sure, she'll handle it fine. She handles rocky territory like a mountain goat. But I don't want her to ever tell me that I made her life more difficult by writing about her on the internet.

So Susie will no longer be a major character in this blog. I can't say she won't be around, even in photos. She's too funny, too engaging, too amazing, for me to never mention. And she's too photogenic to leave out.

But she's growing up. And I respect who she's becoming. I have a feeling she'll be one of my favorite women, one day. All too soon.

Science fair

I just finished my portion of Susie's science fair project.

Let that sink in for a moment.

See, these science fair projects are serious business. Last year, Susie and two friends teamed up to do a pretty good experiment (the effects of different liquids on tooth enamel), and they took third place. I'm convinced that they would have taken first if I had been more proactive and helped them more with the graphic design of the project.

This year, Susie has a new partner and a new topic. The two girls chose nutrition as their topic (at my suggestion...after all, I have good resources at work), and their experiment was good: for one week, they ate a typical diet and kept a food diary. For week two, they first planned a "balanced" diet based on the recommendations at www.mypyramid.gov (good stuff there, by the way), then kept a food diary again. The food diary was input (mostly by them, but also by me) into www.my-calorie-counter.com, a good-enough site that calculates calories, fiber, fat, and the like.

My portion of the project involved taking that data and feeding it into an Excel spreadsheet, then creating a zillion graphs depicting the recommended calories, fat grams, etc., comparing them to the actual calories, etc., consumed, then overlaying the percentage above or below the RDA the girls consumed.

I learned something that I didn't tell the girls. True, it's not a scientific sample, but the results played out as I expected. Susie, as a middle-class white kid with post-graduate-school-educated parents, had a pretty darn good diet in her "control" week. Her nutritional intake was very similar in weeks one and two. Her partner, on the other hand, is economically disadvantaged, African American, and has a less-than-stable family situation. I don't know her mother's educational attainment, but I suspect it's minimal based on the contact I've had with her. And this girl's diet? Is a mess. It's almost a textbook diet for how to get heart disease, an epidemic health problem in the lower income African American community. Her sodium intake is generally 2-3 times the recommended daily limit. Her sugar intake is high. Her saturated fat is high. Her fiber consumption is about half of what it should be.

But what's most disturbing about her results is that her intake of "bad" stuff (fat, saturated fat, sodium, sugar) was markedly WORSE during the Food Pyramid week. I'm not sure why. Perhaps her mother was not able to provide a balanced diet that adhered to the eating plan the girls had designed. I know her mother did not understand the plan, because she called me last Sunday evening, after I'd dropped the child off at home, asking me, "What is this mess she just handed me?" The "mess" was her daughter's food chart. I went over the project with her, explaining the experiment and what they were trying to accomplish. I explained portioning and what foods needed to be consumed in what quantities. The family does not have a computer, so I couldn't direct her to a website.

I talked to the girls today about their results as I was creating the charts. I was gentle when I told Susie's friend about the issues in her diet. I explained that she needed to look at product nutritional labels when she and her mom went to the grocery store. And I beat my favorite dead horse. Lunchables? Are the worst thing in the world that kids can eat. Except maybe rat poison.

The girls did a great job writing up their findings. And I'm about to head to the office to print all these beautiful charts (in color), as well as some pages from the food pyramid site. They'll put the whole thing together and (hopefully) win a prize next week.

I hope they learned something. And make changes accordingly. As they wrote in their report, "It's hard not to eat too much salt and sugar."

Bullet point update

I've neglected my blog lately, but haven't had anything to write about, really. So here's a bullet point update.

• My kids did a great job in their respective performances at the school's holiday program. Alex and Susie both had more than one thing to do, so Craig and I remained engaged in the action pretty much the whole time. Susie has made good progress on the cello, and Alex amazed all of us with his mad hip-hop dancing skillz. He also received his award for coming in second place in the art contest, so it was a good evening all around.
  
• We did almost all our holiday shopping in one fell swoop yesterday. In the rain. And the cold. But we were done, and home, by 3 p.m., which made for a nice relaxing evening with the visiting in-laws. Barbeque was consumed, basketball was watched, and all was well.
  
• My daughter is mired in some pretty crazy pre-teen girl drama with a friend who moved away about two years ago. They have an email group, along with a few other girls (and I get copied on all the emails), and the last few days have been, well, high-traffic. And pissy. It's a hint, I think, of the years to come. I alternate between being amused and feeling sorry for the girls. Email is a hard way to communicate, even without hormones flaring. Not sure if I need to intervene yet, but I'm glad my daughter put me on the distribution list, just so I can see what's going on.
  
• The lack of television, due to the writers' strike, is beginning to make a difference in my life. And after tonight it'll be even worse, I'm afraid (season finales of Dexter and Survivor). Please, networks, get this sorted out. It's looking pretty bleak for January.
  
• It's unreasonably cold today. But it sort of got me in the holiday spirit. Go figure.

Annnnnnnd, that's all.

NaBloPoMo: A Triumph

Well, maybe a little melodramatic. Triumph? Okay, fine. Success.

In other news, I dragged myself and my daughter to see a documentary last night. I was a little stunned at the tiny, tiny crowd (when we sat down, we doubled the audience, but a few others straggled in, making an audience of about ten, including the panelists for the discussion afterward.

The film was short, about 30 minutes, consisting of adolescent and pre-adolescent girls talking about the media. It was filmed in 2000, so some of the pop-culture references are a little dated (back then, Britney Spears was still considered a role model - the daughter and I just giggled and giggled over that one), but most of the content carried more general themes, some of which I could remember experiencing at that age. The gist of it being that the media creates some physical expectations of what girls are supposed to look like, and it's impossible to look like that, and that catch-22 sacrifices some self-esteem in these girls.

Susie was interested and engaged during the movie, and vigorously nodded when I asked her if the girls in her Girl Scout troop would be interested in watching it sometime. I, however, was more engaged in the panel discussion afterward. I haven't flexed my feminist theory muscles many times in the past few years, and it was nice to be in a room with feminists who engage in such discussion frequently. I heard my voice saying phrases like "dominant paradigm" and I was a little stunned.

Even more stunned when the two panelists approached me after the discussion and asked for my contact information so we could continue the conversation and some of it was applicable in their research and I think I might have glazed over at this point because of the sheer happiness.

I had found my people.

I didn't know how much I had missed them.

So ladies, please, hurry up and call me. I need you in my life.

And that, my friends, is my final post for November. I have posted every day. I have bored myself, and probably you, occasionally, but I've also dug inside and found a few bits of gold. Thank you for the comments and the emails and the awesomeness. While I started out writing this for me, I've found myself thinking of you more and more as I write. I know some of you in person, even more of you online, and it's awfully gratifying to see loyal readers stopping by to see what this dorky girl is up to.

I do not promise daily posts in December, but I do expect to continue writing most weekdays.

Peace out, and bring on the holiday decorations!

Miscellaneous

In lieu of a real post, here's a recap of recent happenings.

Susie and I dyed our hair pink on Friday night in preparation for Race for the Cure. Hers looks the same as when we did it before, and mine doesn't look pink. Just brighter red than usual. Nobody even seemed to notice it, which means (a) it's extremely subtle or (b) everyone thinks it looks horrible and they're too nice (or stunned) to say anything.

My extremely impromptu costume for our church's auction fundraiser/Halloween party wound up winning in the "Best Monster" category. And I even got a trophy! Which is an awesome turnaround from the past few years. I was a zombie roller derby girl (but I substituted Doc Martins for rollerskates, because I didn't want to die for real).

But alas, the trophy I truly coveted remains out of my grasp. In the second annual chili smackdown, the chili I worked so hard to perfect (and yes, it was amazing) didn't even place. And the winner? Was the same woman who won last year. My kids, however, won their age division for the pumpkin they decorated. I'll try to get some pictures up later.

There's probably a life lesson in there somewhere about trying too hard and being spontaneous and "in the moment" but I'm mostly slightly bummed that I forgot to take pictures of important stuff this weekend: Race for the Cure, which had tons of great photo moments, the auction, and the prep of the chili, because it would have been great on my other blog. Maybe next year.

And possibly the most (or least) noteworthy event of the weekend: I found my first gray hair yesterday. And the kids laughed.

If you see me tomorrow

I'll look a little more like my daughter than usual.

It's October, which means it's Breast Cancer Awareness month. I've worn pink every day this month, and tomorrow is our local Race for the Cure. It's my daughter's second race (she was an infant in arms for the first one), and my son has also decided to join us. We'll be getting up at o'dark-thirty to drive across town to join other folks in raising money and awareness to fight this disease that impacts one in nine women. Some of those women are related to my daughter, which means this disease hits awfully close to home.

Despite the awesomeness demonstrated by my sweet boy in wanting to participate, he won't be joining us in the bathroom tonight when we dye our hair pink.

Please donate to the cause. Every little bit helps!

Busy weekend + dead laptop = no posting

The laptop is sick. Hopefully the nerd herd at the big box retailer in the suburbs can fix it. The power supply is not talking nicely to the computer, and the battery is dead. So no pictures. No posts on my cooking blog, even though I have tons of great pictures ready to narrate. Everyone please take a moment of silence, praying for the speedy and inexpensive healing of the laptop.

Even if the laptop had been well all weekend, I very well may not have posted. We stayed busy, with adventure after adventure.


I spent Saturday morning doing research for NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month). I don't know if I'll really be able to write the required 50,000 words to "win", but I'm going to give it a good try. (The laptop, of course, is a necessary ingredient. Can't lug the desktop when we go out of town, and writing longhand sounds like torture.) I'm planning to write a historical novel inspired by a large collection of family correspondence that was transcribed by a distant cousin. Most of the letters are from the Civil War era, and I found myself chuckling and laughing out loud at some of them. I think the snarkyness? Comes from my mom's side of the family. There was some serious snark going on.

After reading hundreds of pages of Civil War letters, it was time to get dressed and do something outdoors, given the perfect weather. So we all suited up in comfortable clothes and hit the three-mile hiking trail at Shelby Forest. It's a challenging trail with lots of ups and downs (surprising, yes, since we're in the Mississippi Delta). I can tell that working out is doing good, because I wasn't a bit sore the next day.

But the day wasn't finished yet! The next planned event was a fancy night out with a girlfriend (drinks! the opera! fancy!), so I showered and started getting ready. Thank goodness I put on some clothes, because somehow (seriously, I don't know how) the front door was open and the dogs escaped and there was a ten-minute dog-chasing frenzy (which has, strangely, been followed by a period of uncharacteristic mellowness on the part of our big, hyper dog...not sure what happened but she's better for it), all of which would have been a nightmare in a towel or bathrobe. I got dressed in the nick of time, and my buddy and I hit the town in grand style. Drinks were great, the opera was great, all's well.

And then? As if the weekend hadn't been busy enough?

Sunday gets bullet points.

• Blah blah church blah blah potluck blah blah recruited to sing in the choir that day since there were no altos and I already knew the music blah blah.
• Shopping with local blogger turned IRL gal pal! She was extremely helpful in finding a dress for me to wear to the much-anticipated wedding of my brother and his hot blonde girlfriend. It's a good sign that I'm picking out my own dress because every time I've worn a bridesmaid's dress the couple has gotten divorced within five years. Yes, I'm the nuptial kiss of death. Hopefully my daughter does not carry the curse, as she's a junior bridesmaid.
• Daughter's girl scout re-dedication (and investiture, for the new girls), which is always jarring, especially since some of these girls are well into puberty. And I've known them since they were three. I promise I didn't sing "Sunrise, Sunset" out loud, but it was really hard not to.
• And we drove home and I made dinner (Swedish meatballs! My mom's recipe! I've never done that before! Alex loved them!)
• Read, watched TV, and went to bed.

I guess you probably didn't need that last bullet, but I didn't want you to think we all just vanished into the mist after dinner. Maybe I should add that I did a load of laundry and washed dishes. No? Too bad I can't post a picture.

Three of five

Slouching Mom's third question, in a series of five.

Susie is on the cusp of adolescence. Are you ready? Is she ready?

Slouching Mom's got adolescence on her mind, I think. Her son, who is right between my children, is just starting to seem a little less like a little boy and more like a little man. I've been dealing with this situation a little longer (maybe a lot longer, because girls truly do start growing up before boys) and no longer find it shocking.

To be honest, I'm loving the beginning of adolescence, from my vantage point, anyway. Susie is a very sensible, down-to-earth girl who doesn't generate much drama. The physical changes of puberty have been explained to her (in our church's sexuality education program, but also by me, and in a fantastic book that every girl should get when she turns nine, The Care & Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls) and she seems to embrace those changes. When she noticed that her body was changing, she asked me if it was possible for us to go bra shopping. In the same tone she would use if she needed new shoes.

We've also talked about the emotional changes. We started that conversation when she was just a tiny little girl, when she caught me crying as I read Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. She asked me why I was crying and I told her that it made me sad to think that one day she would be so grouchy and mean and wouldn't like me very much, but that those things are pretty normal when girls get to be that age. She sweetly hugged me and looked into my eyes and told me, "I'll try not to be like that." And I knew that she, in her four-going-on-forty wisdom, indeed would try.

That being said, she has definitely become more sensitive as she's approached puberty. It's easier to rub her the wrong way. It's easier to make her cry. It's easier to get on her nerves. Fortunately for me, it's easy for me to bring her back to the sun.

She's always been my golden child. As a tot, her skin would develop a beautiful golden tan in the summer, while her hair was highlighted from playing outside. She looked like she was made of gold to me. Her disposition was sunny, her laughter infectious.

As she's grown, she's retained that sunny disposition and delightful laugh. Her skin still tans, but it no longer stretches over chubby baby skin. Long, strong limbs have grown from those chubby arms and legs I remember so well, only ten years before. Her hair no longer bleaches blonde from the summer sun, probably because of the purple, blue, or pink streaks we've applied. A few little bumps have scattered on her face, reminding me of my own face, years ago, but also of that newborn acne she had only a few weeks after her birth. (I remember reading in one of the many baby books I read that newborn acne is a protective rash because it keeps parents from taking their baby all around and showing them off. I wonder if adolescent acne isn't protective in a similar way...keeping those fragile tweens from being too perfect too soon.)

Her brain is different, too. Keener in ways. Understanding jokes better. Making jokes better. Making connections. Even understanding the difference in how I explain a math problem and how her teacher explains a math problem (and knowing that if she has a problem with math, that she should ask me for help because she understands my explanations). She understands social obligations better, and has taken it upon herself (she and another girl at school) to help the two boys in the class who have learning problems.

She's also started noticing cars and has some strong feelings about BMW convertibles. Don't even ask me where this comes from. A strange recessive gene is the best I can imagine.

It's interesting territory. I wouldn't trade these years for anything.

What every girl should know

I spent part of Saturday morning imparting some wisdom to my daughter. I was in the mood for one of those "big talks", and she's at the right age for such talks, but she quickly informed me that the sexuality education she's taken at church has left her with no questions or concerns. Yay church, but boo! Because I kind of feel like I missed out on a good one.

So instead we did the monthly internet safety refresher. She already knows the rules and can recite them to me, but I still insist on talking about it every month.

But I realized that it wasn't enough to have that talk. I want to have these deep discussions with my daughter, to teach her the secrets of womanhood, at least as I understand it. Which means I need to figure out what those secrets are. So bear with me as I attempt to clarify my thoughts.

1. Every girl should have at least one gay guy friend. And more than one is even better. And if one of them manages a Victoria's Secret store, even better. (Free bras, ladies. Free bras.) (Yes, this is a shout-out. You know who you are.) And cultivating gay-dar is equally important, because there is genuine heartbreak to be experienced by girls who fall for gay guys (not my own experience, but I've seen some friends go through hell on that one). Plus, when she's at a convention in Vegas and 99.99% of the attendees are women but there's one gay guy who would make a great date for the rest of the conference, she'll find him easily. And she'll have more fun than anyone else. (That one is from experience.) (But I think I'll share all that advice a little later, like junior high or even maybe senior high. Fifth grade is a little young to start accumulating gays. Probably. Maybe I should ask around to see if that's too young.) Maybe I should just buy all the seasons of "Will and Grace" on DVD and watch them with her. That would drive the point home, right?

2. Every girl should have a great friend who "gets" her. (I think Susie has one already. She's lucky. And email and nationwide minutes make the distance from Memphis to Nashville not very long.)

3. Condition the ends, shampoo the roots. Unless your hair is curly like mine. Then condition all of it. And only shampoo when it's literally dirty.

4. Wear clothes that make you feel good. If you feel good, you probably look good. Or at least you look comfortable, which is almost the same thing. That being said, however, it's usually wise to overdress instead of underdress, especially if you aren't sure what to wear.

5. Be nice. There's little to be gained by catty behavior, even though girls seem to enjoy participating in it.

I'll add to this list periodically. And I'm taking suggestions for more items.

Am I Liberated?

A few weekends ago, while the children were playing and having a great time, I was cleaning out drawers in my bedroom. I was cleaning out closets. While the children were upstairs watching a movie, I was surfing the intarwebs, looking for ideas for new curtains. My husband called me out on it, telling me how single-minded I can be when I'm working on a project. And that the single-mindedness, especially when it relates to window treatments, makes me lousy company. (Oh, and yes, because you asked, I did find the solution to my window covering issues. I can't wait.)


Giving myself over to this domain, the traditionally-female sphere of house and home, is something that I do in cycles, complete with manias of embroidery, quilting, and knitting. I haven't identified the pattern or frequency (it's not seasonal), nor the stimulus, but something pushes me to obsess about the house every year or two. And obsess I do. It's a little comforting to know I'm not alone in this obsession (maybe it's explained by astrology? nope...just checked and my horoscope today pretty much tells me to get a life: You need to get outside and reconnect with nature in some way. Hiking or gardening would be perfect, but it can be anything that feels right and doesn't require hours of abstract analysis to complete.).


But why do I feel a little guilty about this? Why do I think that I should be doing something more "important"? Is it because I see something lesser, something trivial in "female" domesticity? Now we're back to my women's studies days, the days when I could write a ten-page research paper, complete with footnotes, in three hours, using words I honestly don't know anymore (yes, I found some of my old term papers in all that cleaning and, in reading them, honestly didn't understand them! Because I am apparently killing my brain cells at an amazing pace! Woot!). I can discuss essentialism. I can argue either side. And I can tell you that I always had an intellectual tension with de Beauvoir because her argument against essentialism seemed to me dismissive of the feminine. (See? I can still say smart stuff.) De Beauvoir's insistence that male "transcendence" is superior to female "immanence", in statements like, "The woman who is shut up in immanence endeavors to hold man in that prison also; thus that prison will be confused with the world, and woman will no longer suffer from being confined there: mother, wife, sweetheart are the jailers," just pissed me off in college, and I don't like it any better today. What if I, a "liberated" woman, choose to revel in my immanence? What if transcendence is of no interest to me? Am I imprisoned? I don't feel imprisoned.


What's wrong with the feminine, the immanent? I'll admit upfront that I've not kept up with feminist theory since college, so my reading list only includes titles pre-1992. I remember really, really disliking Camille Paglia when she first hit the scene, telling us that if women had been in charge, we would never have progressed, as a species, to the lofty heights of the Renaissance or Modernism or any of those other things I loved so much in my college days. I disagreed, my twenty-year-old self, secure in the thought that women's softness, our sweetness, our gentleness, was simply enculturation. Camille was saying that if women were in charge we'd still be in mud huts; I countered that if women were in charge, they'd be the same as men, just with different anatomy, and that the roles would simply have reversed, based on who's in power and who's not. (Which meant that I was also guilty of dismissing the feminine, in my certainty that it was no more than a "bad habit" that girls learned as they grew up.)


But I guess that having children and living a few more years in our world has had an effect on my feminism.


These days, I see clearly that girls and boys are not the same. They're sometimes as different as cats and gerbils. But sometimes they're more alike than different. And mothers and fathers are different in how they relate to their children. Women and men are different in the workplace.


I also see that the world of women, the domestic sphere, isn't so bad. We live there, after all. Providing my family with a comfortable, attractive home is a way I demonstrate my love for them. Sometimes it's even a way I express whatever artistic intentions I still have. (And, when people come over and ooh and aah about how pretty, cozy, or whatever other positive adjective they use to describe my house, it feeds my ego a little. And I'm okay with that.) Cooking, cleaning, raising children, changing diapers: it's all hard, honest work. I would never say it's only work to be done by women (fortunately, Craig and I agree on that one), but it's traditionally been in the sphere of women.

Is it unliberated for me to want to make our house a lovely home? Is it unliberated to want window treatments that do what I want them to do (open from the top AND the bottom)? I don't think so. I think it's part of being human, whether female or male. And if knitting and quilting and making dinner and moving furniture makes me happy, then who cares? And seriously, these window treatments are so cool! Let's liberate the windows!

What now?

I'm just coming off a busy few weeks, with a busy week coming up, but I see some blank spaces in my calendar in the not-too-distant future. Bringing that together with my to-do list makes for a perfect meld. That white space in the calendar shall not be spent on bon-bons on the chaise lounge. Especially because I don't have a chaise lounge.

No, I've got projects to do. Projects involving sewing machines and paintbrushes. We've lived in our house two years now, which is long enough for it to look "lived in." And, since we worked with a decorator to select our flooring and paint and all that other stuff, we're not quite ready to scrap the colors, so it's time to touch-up whatever the magic eraser can't fix.

But please understand that this is entirely at odds with every fiber of my being.

Because my name is Kaleigh and I'm addicted to redecorating.

The only thing (besides the potential for guilt at undoing the decorator's great work, and my love of her work, and my love of the compliments we hear all the time about our house....wow, that's a lot of things, really) standing in the way of me scrapping things and redecorating with all new colors is that amazingly tall (and unreachable) piece of wall over the stairs. When I look at the stairway walls and grumble about the handprints and how we should have chosen a different color or semi-gloss paint or something, I look up and say, "There's no way in hell I'll ever paint that."

So no redecorating because I'm easily daunted and don't handle guilt well. Oh, and because I really like things the way they are.

But, and not just to prove there is a reason for this post, because so far all I've said is that I'm going to touch up the paint and maybe do a little sewing and who the hell writes four paragraphs about that when a couple of bullet points would have done nicely, I do think there is something to this whole, "It's been two years and it's time to do something to change up the space." When I was a kid I rearranged my bedroom furniture every few months. In our old house I changed things around a lot, too, not just rearranging furniture but repainting, often doing new curtains as well, every two or three years. And I did fall deeply in love with a particular color combination right after we had committed to a different (and very beautiful) color scheme. And that color combination sometimes jumps in my head and gets stuck for a few days.

So yeah, it's time to look around the house and see how I can spruce it up without undoing what makes it work.

And maybe once I hit those spots with a paintbrush I'll get all this out of my system and vote for bon-bons instead. Even if I don't have that chaise lounge.

Pink

The girl and I had a little punk-rock mother-daughter bonding. (Yes, we're mother and daughter, but no, it would be a big fat lie to say that we're at all punk rock.) (But we fake it sometimes.)

Photographic evidence that I'm a "cool mom."

The sensitive type

I've been clocking an uncharacteristic amount of overtime lately at work. We're short on staff right now and everyone is sharing the load, with as little grumbling as possible. Since I'm on the clock (which was a shock to my ego at first, but less so as I learned the Corporation's culture...lots of people higher on the ladder than I are also on the clock), my paychecks have increased over the past few weeks, and since I'm a true Taurus, that's enough incentive for me to grumble very little about this state of affairs.

My children, however, especially the female one who is looking puberty right in the eye, know nothing of paychecks and time-and-a-half and the cost of furniture and electricity and house payments. They are not pleased with this state of affairs. Not one little bit.

Add to two twelve-hour days (which see me return home at their bedtime) an evening meeting at church, and you've got a grouchy daughter.

Susie has always been physically affectionate, almost too much. When she was a toddler, she fell asleep in her bed with me next to her, she clutching my arm, teddy-bear style. If I tried to remove my arm from her grasp, she would say, "I want yours arm." Insistently. And I gave it back. She's a very tactile child, and still loves nothing more than rubbing the top of my arm with the back of her hand. Her pleasure is doubled if my skin is cool. Over the years, I've tried, unsuccessfully, to cure her of this habit that sometimes seems like a compulsion. We've tried silky blankets, stuffed animals, even real animals. But my arm (and her father's arm, and her brother's arm) is the most attractive thing in the world to her. When she rubs, she often sucks her tongue, which tells me that she's returning to an infant-like state of mind when she does this. (She rubbed my arm when she nursed as a baby.)

The thing with me working so much is that she's not getting the amount and type of love she needs from me. She needs at least twenty minutes a day of close physical contact. And for the past few weeks, she hasn't gotten this, at least not on a daily basis, from me.

On Wednesday morning, as I was leaving for work (I leave about half an hour before they leave for school), I reminded the kids that I was working late and would see them at bedtime. I also mentioned that I had a meeting on Thursday. The poor girl crumpled. I quickly tried to save the moment by telling her that I would be all hers on Friday evening, but that was too far away for it to be any consolation.

Much as the arm rubbing irritates me, I know that it soothes her. I know that she's riding increasingly choppy waves, physically, mentally, socially. And if a little bit of cool skin caressed by the back of her hand feels like a life raft, I need to let her have that.

And hopefully, even though I like the extra money, this stretch of overtime is finite.

Slumber party update

First of all, I apologize for the cliffhanger. I really didn't mean to leave people in the dark about the Friday night party.

The party went very, very well. Honestly, it went much better than I expected. Does that mean there was no drama? Um, nope. But it was manageable drama, and it resulted from a bad allergy attack, not conflict.

Without saying too much, the friend we were most concerned about, M_, has a few issues that she comes by pretty honestly. One of those issues is a pretty intense reaction when someone else seems ill (really, it seems to me, any symptom of illness is enough to make her upset or frightened). The apparent cause of this is not my story to tell. But I get it.

So, the party is going along great. Craig made a cake in honor of the occasion.



I picked up pizza and made lemonade. They had their plates of pizza ready in time to count down the final thirty seconds before the international premier of High School Musical 2.



They all loved the movie and sang along with the songs (don't ask me how they already knew the songs when it was the premier of the movie...I guess they're smart like that), then they went upstairs and played the High School Musical 2 board game that Craig bought.

And then one of the girls had an allergy attack, with stuffy nose and a bit of dizziness. Turns out she was sitting in the chair that my little dog uses for naps, and since she doesn't have pets, she didn't know that she just might be allergic. 800 boxes of tissues, a few tears, and a dose of Benadryl later, she was fine (and the first to fall asleep). But sensitive M_ got very worried and got weepy and scared. So at one point, Craig and I were tag-teaming, me comforting the allergy girl (who very emphatically did not want me to take her home, but was crying a bit and not feeling well) and he reassuring M_.

But really, that was just ten or fifteen minutes out of a slumber party that started right after school and ended, for some of the kids, twenty-four hours later.

So I guess we can't swear off slumber parties quite yet.

Continuing Saga

Update.

Susie made her phone calls to invite friends yesterday, after I got home from work. I overheard her talking to the difficult friend, M_, and it sounded like a good, productive conversation.

After Craig got home from a meeting, the three of us talked about it, and she (distractedly - she was watching TV) told us what had happened.

Susie:
M_, I know this might hurt your feelings, but I have to say this. You know how you seem to have problems when you come to sleepovers? I want you to know that G_ is probably coming, and I know you and she argue a lot. If you can't handle it, maybe you should just come for the party and not the sleepover.

M_:
I can handle it.

Susie:
Okay then.

Obviously paraphrased.

The whole thing fascinates me, because while we did throw around a few ideas for how to handle this the night before, we never reached agreement as to the best way to proceed. And when we had that conversation, Susie told me that (a) she didn't think that was a conversation to have on the phone, and (b) she wanted me, and maybe M_'s mother, to be there.

Something changed overnight apparently, because she figured out how she was going to say it (I suspect she had written out some bullet points) and that it was going to be on the phone.

I'll update again, after the party, to let you know how it all works out.