Bleueueueugh

OK, so on Saturday, I'm going to join in this fabulous blogging worldwide expat carnival thingy (it's here, in case you want to join in too), for which I need to write a post all about a marvelous aspect of my life in America - of which there are many. Trouble is, there is this really angry bleueueueueueueuegh feeling in me struggling to get out into a blog post, so I've got to let it free quickly, in time for normal 'not wrong, just different, yay for living in America' service to be resumed.

Here goes, then, with the bleueueueueueueueuegh Incredible Hulk anti-my-life-in-America bursting forth from my neatly buttoned oh-isn't-the-Midwest-just-the-place-to-be shirt.

STOP getting excited about St Patrick's day. You're not Irish. None of you. You might have ancestors who were Irish. That's not the same thing. And it's silly. If you don't wear green to school, other kids come up to you and pinch you. If you have a green dinosaur on your blue underpants, it doesn't count (looking at you, here, 10-yo - unless you really did show your underpants to all your fellow fourth graders, but I doubt you did). STOP selling green cookies, green chocolate, green everything, having people greeting customers at the door of the supermarket wearing green. It's silly. Stop it.

Stop being so competitive about sports. My daughter is 6. She wants to play soccer. I want her to have fun. I don't need her to be in a competitive league. I don't need her to have a team photo on 'picture day'. I don't want her to have a training session each week, and then a match at a variable time on a Saturday or Sunday. I don't want to build our week-ends round those matches. I don't want her to think that her soccer team is the be all and end all. I see that other people living here do want to do those things. What can I say? Bleueueueueueuueuegh!

You! Mr Sports Director of the local sports centre! Yes, I'm talking to YOU! When you have 16 girls aged 6 or 7 signed up for soccer, can't you SEE that it doesn't make sense to run a league? You are insisting on having 4 teams with 4 players in each. I have, politely and nicely, discussed with you on the phone how this isn't going to make for a successful experience. Kids get ill. Kids have other commitments at week-ends. Families have other priorities (well, some do). So sometimes there will be a team of 3 players or even 2 players. Can't you agree with me (and my daughter's team coach) that it would make a whole lot more sense to get the 16 girls together one evening a week, do training all together, split them into two teams, and play a game there and then. That way, we don't all have to trek out twice a week. That way, they will get a game, rather than turn out, only to find that the game is cancelled because not enough players have shown up. Four kids is not enough kids for five-a-side soccer. That isn't rocket science. I know you love leagues. I know you love competitive play. I know this is thinking outside the box in a very challenging and enormous way for you. But please, please, can't we just try my suggestion? Just once? You never know... it might work well. If it doesn't, then you can go back to your competitive league, where the coach is king, and picture day happens, and we end up with a winning team which gets a trophy, and runners up who get medals. But just this once, couldn't you just think a little sideyways?

Next rant point. Doughnuts are NOT breakfast food. Luckily, none of my children have breakfast at school. I see you have cereal and fruit on the menu, but I wouldn't trust my children not to go for the doughnuts. I wouldn't. Nor the 'strawberry toaster pastry'. I have to put that in quotation marks. Sorry. I just do.

And on the subject of school food, please don't make my 6 year old stand in the lunch line (what am I saying? the lunch QUEUE QUEUE QUEUE!) for half the allotted time, and then make her tip half her food in the trash because there isn't enough time left to eat it. Please. That one isn't rocket science either.

Bleueueueueueuegh. I had other things to say, but I just hit publish by mistake, so let's call it a day. A bleueueueueueueueueugh day.

The eyes have it

Enough already with the tea! (See how American I'm becoming. Not only do I know the lingo, but I can bring myself to express a sentiment that surely, surely no honest-to-goodness Brit would ever genuinely feel.) Yes, time to move the blog on to other matters. Life through the eyes of a first grade girl.

Husband and I are very short-sighted. Physically, not metaphorically. Well, probably metaphorically as well, since we moved to America with neither the intention of staying long-term, nor any return strategy. Americans call it 'near-sighted' if you're talking about eyes, and 'short-sighted' if you're talking about a plan. I think we Brits use 'short-sighted' for both. I don't think we really use the term 'near-sighted'. Oh my goodness, the tolerance that you lovely Bloggy Peeps have for the useless trivia on this blog never fails to astound me.

Anyway, any old way, where was I? Yes. Husband and I are both short-sighted, so no surprise then, that our oldest is already in glasses (he of the perfect teeth, but you can't hope to have everything). 10-yo, has good eyesight, but 6-yo has been complaining about having blurry vision, so I thought we should get her eyes tested. I did take the blurry vision with a pinch of salt though, since there's no evidence that she can't see perfectly well (and her teacher confirmed this). It also just so happens that her best friend's Dad is an optician (or whatever the longer, more complicated term that we're meant to use these days is) and her best friend has just got glasses.

In fact it turns out that glasses are all the rage for girls in first grade. They are desirable, sought after, coveted, fashionable. We have come a long way since my day, when glasses were to be dreaded, and delayed until no amount of screwing up of your eyes could get you to make out the teacher's scrawl on the blackboard. But then glasses are so much better. No more those heavy lenses in unattractive NHS plastic frames, where your only choice was pink, blue, white or tortoiseshell. These days, glasses are lightweight, comfortable, attractive - easy on the eyes in all senses.

So we went along to the optician, and 6-yo had the full range of tests, one small part of which, these days, is reading some letters off a display. When it got to that part, 6-yo managed the big letter at the top confidently, and then stopped. The optician clicked to make the chart bigger... and then bigger... and then bigger... but even when the letters were all huge, 6-yo sat in silence. "Uh oh", I thought, "she's foxing. She really does want to wear glasses. How are we going to get past this?" The optician tried another set of letters, and again, 6-yo managed the first letter, but stalled at the second row, and sat in silence, no matter how much larger the optician made them. She tried one more chart. Still the same pattern - the reading of the first letter and then no more. At this point, 6-yo gave a small shrug and said "I don't think I know these words".

Because in first grade, they're still doing words like about, and under, and should, and they haven't got onto more difficult ones like zfdax, and lvceno. Shame on them.

Well, it turned out that 6-yo has a very slight prescription, but only very slight. The nice optician said they could certainly make up glasses for us, but he said that quite honestly, our best bet was to go to Claire's in the mall, where you can buy non-prescription glasses for $10.00. So that's what we did (and in fact they were $8.50). The upside of this strategy is that we have saved probably a couple of hundred dollars. The downside is that 6-yo now knows of the existence of Claire's, a knowledge which so far I had deliberately kept away from her innocent mind. However, that aside, it was a happy solution. The frames are dark blue, with tiny flowers on them. 6-yo is thrilled with them, and I nearly die of cute attack every time she puts them on. She wears them to school, having sworn me to secrecy on the fact that they're non-prescription (which is the term we prefer to the unkind and metaphysically incorrect 'not real'). She's made a sneaky discovery since she's had them. Turns out that at least one other bespectacled first grade girl is wearing non-prescriptions too. Sshhh...

2010 in pictures

So there's a free ticket being given away for Cybermummy 2011. I don't know which side of the Atlantic I'll be this summer, but against the possibility that I might be in England, I'm going to enter. The competition is 'Your 2010 in Pictures'. You can post either a single picture, or a montage. You can see all the entries here.

OK... So... My 2010 in pictures. I've been browsing back through my photos of the year, and the trouble is, I don't post pictures of my kids or myself, and it would be too boring to sum up the year in nature shots, so I was a bit stuck. But then I found a few that 6-yo took. She is very interested in photography, and is saving up her pocket money and Christmas money for a camera of her own. We occasionally let her use ours, as a special treat, and back in January 2010, she took these. I'm calling them "Barbie meets Postman Pat".

Here's the first in the series. It's Alexa from Barbie in The Diamond Castle. For those of you who are not familiar with the film, it's a heart-warming tale of how two sisters, who live together in a cottage in the countryside growing flowers to sell in the market, come across a magic mirror, in which a Muse called Melody is trapped. Melody entreats them to help, and they set out on a quest which is... you know what? If you are not familiar with the film, relax and count yourself lucky.

The second in the series features Barbie in an evening gown which 6-yo designed herself. Do you like the tasteful single green flower on the front? She looks a little disheveled, in an after-the-party kind of a way.

Photo number three shows Barbie in more casual attire.

I'm titling the next one "Barbie prepares to bite off Pat's nose".

Here is Hallowe'en Barbie. That fire is perilously close to her dress. No wonder her hair is standing on end.

And as a finale, here is the complete Barbie line-up. Postman Pat, it's your lucky day. What would Mrs Goggins make of it all? Reverend Timms, control yourself.


So why do these pictures sum up my 2010? Well, I can think of so many reasons. First, there's my growing girl. She was 5-yo and a Kindergartener when she took these pictures, and now she's 6-yo and a big First Grader. She knows her months of the year, and has no need for this jigsaw puzzle any more. I have no idea why she used the puzzle as a backdrop for her Barbie parade, and I marvel at the ingenuity and creativity that is a child. I love the mystery of their small minds.

Then there's the intelligent juxtaposition of our Englishness and Americanness. "Barbie meets Postman Pat" sums it up so perfectly. Look at her, all glamorous and movie star. And look at him, all homeliness and cups of tea in the post office. This is brilliantly chosen symbolism of a childhood split emotionally between Britain and America. The composition is significant too. 6-yo hardly knows who Postman Pat is. He's the man in this jigsaw puzzle, but she doesn't see him on television or lunchboxes, in magazines and colouring books. He's there in the background, but he's not part of the activity of her life, as Barbie is. The composition of the photos perfectly reflects the reality.

The photos speak to me of our fourth year in the US completed, and the continuing erosion of our familiarity with British life. There's Barbie in her Hallowe'en dress. We hardly knew what Hallowe'en was, four years ago, and now we are past masters at choosing costumes and knowing which streets in our neighborhood are good for trick or treating. Meanwhile, the puzzle shows Reverend Timms carefully putting together his harvest festival display, Bonfire Night in November, children dancing round a Maypole. These are celebrations of which 6-yo knows nothing (though the Maypole? Really? Does anyone still do that?) Does that make me sad? Yes, of course it still does. But I have also found out that it's ok to let those things go. And as time goes by, I know that my children will make sense in the future of this strange split identity that they are acquiring, because I see them doing it in the present. We spent the summer in the UK, and they loved every minute of it. They are proud of their nationality, but they love life here in America too. Their maturity and their confidence in this astonishes me.

Yes. I think this is a good way to sum up 2010.

By the way, I haven't fixed, cropped or edited any of the photos in any way. They are exactly as 6-yo took them.

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Crismis

So this is Crismis. Or that’s what it says on the calendar on my kitchen wall. Written by 6-yo way back last January, when she was a mere Kindergartener, and she went through the calendar painstakingly writing in birthdays and holidays in letters larger than the space allowed. Of course now she is a First Grader, she would know how to write Crismis properly. That’s what a year does for you. And when we went swimming yesterday, she insisted that I use the Winnie the Pooh towel, which is too babyish for her now, though it was a favourite in the summer. Time passes and things change.

If I were feeling in a philosophical mood, I would reflect that this has been a year of two halves for me. It started badly, with that trip, when Husband was head-hunted and it all came to naught. Then I don’t really remember much about the spring, except I couldn’t really get back in the groove, and I was truly fed up with people telling me to be gentle with myself and not expect too much of myself, and that getting over a major trauma like cancer would take time. Don’t you just hate it when you know the answers, and people keep telling you them, and it doesn’t make the darnedest bit of difference?

The year’s half time was our trip to the UK, which was lovely. I remember day after day in the sunshine in my mother’s garden, trips to beaches, a very hot visit to Paris, walks on the North York Moors, resting and recuperating. There were tears in the gardens of Grosvenor Square, sprung out of the sheer frustration and anguish involved in getting through the US visa system. I remember that.

Then the second half began with the arrival of my green card, and a job in a toy shop. Morale improved. I was busy. It’s easier to make good use of time at home, when you’re not at home all the time. All three children made happy starts to the school year. I joined the church choir, remembered how very much I love choral singing, and wondered why I’ve done so little of it over the past ten years. We celebrated Thanksgiving in Colorado, which has become something of an annual tradition. I spent a week-end in Chicago with five other British bloggers living in the US, leaving Husband to look after the children and pass a kidney stone (or not pass a kidney stone, as it turned out – it had to be blasted apart a week later). That man is a saint.

In terms of blogging, well, I was a finalist in the MADs awards, in the category ‘Best Writer’, and now it seems I’m a finalist in the BMB Brilliance in Blogging list, in the category ‘Inspirational’. Ooh, get me. The blogging highlight of the year for me was reading out a blog post at Cyber Mummy. I loved doing that. I was really nervous, truth be told. Given that it was an emotional topic, my youngest child’s first day at school, I wasn’t sure I would make it through without tears, so I’d given a copy to a friend in the front who could take over if necessary. Be prepared, as they say in the boy scouts (although I’ve never actually been a boy scout, so I don’t know for sure that that’s what they say). Reading that post reflected how I like to think my blog plays out in the blogosphere. Some members of the audience had never read my blog, so for them, the post would have been an interesting commentary on school life in America through an English woman’s eyes. All the audience at Cyber Mummy were mums (or dads), so the post would have tapped into some of the feelings that all mothers experience from time to time, when our children move on and grow up. The specific interest and the general appeal - a good balance in a post. But there were some people, who have followed my blog through thick and thin, and for them, the post was loaded with significance. They would remember that my daughter started school in the middle of my 12 weeks of chemotherapy, and that it was only by the fortunate chance of where the date fell in the 3-week cycle, that I was well enough to take her. They knew how important that was to me. They knew that at the back of my mind were thoughts not only of her first day at school, but where I would be for her last day of school. I spotted tears at the front table. I love that about blogging – the way we all connect in different ways, and on different levels. It’s a rich web of interactions.

Enough about blogging. Another year has gone by. The tree is decorated. The wicker reindeer is on the front lawn, bedecked in lights. The organic turkey will be collected tomorrow. The egg nog is in the fridge. So this is Crismis.

Does parental experience count for anything?

You'd think that 13 years of being a parent would count for something. It appears not. That is why, with Husband away this week, the following things happened.

1. I was pondering to myself how some things do get easier, and reminiscing silently how one of the children always used to be ill whenever Husband went away, and how once I even booked a doctor's appointment in advance - which I did then need (or perhaps I was just proving my point), but how they seemed to have grown out of being ill so much. This is known as TEMPTING FATE, and as a parent, you don't do it. We all know that. It's in Chapter 1 of all the baby books.
2. I have not had my antennae tuned recently. We all know that parents need fully-functioning antenna, which can pick up any hint of a "wouldn't you just know it" story before it becomes reality. For the week Husband is away, I am working on Monday and Tuesday, and the boys are off school on Thursday and Friday. This leaves Wednesday as the one day for me, me, me. So when 6-yo creeps into my bed at 5.00am on Wednesday morning, complaining of a tummy ache, why do I not see where this is going? Why do I operate my mind-over-matter strategy on her, saying "I'll get the bucket and we'll put it by the bed, but YOU'RE NOT GOING TO BE SICK"? And then in the morning, when she hasn't been sick and says she's feeling a bit better, but has a temperature of a little over 99, why do I optimistically say "oh, we'll take it again in an hour... it'll probably go down... people often have a slightly raised temperature first thing in the morning" and not remember that that's just when you're ovulating, which, at 6 years old, she probably isn't?
3. When we are driving home from taking the boys to school, and 6-yo announces "I'm going to be sick", I reply "but we're nearly home, very very nearly home, I can see the house, just hold on ONE minute". Yup. That's what I said. Even the most inept parent knows that when a child says "I'm going to be sick", the correct answer isn't any sentence including the words "just hold on". We all know that stopping the car is the only workable strategy at this point, and who cares about the neighbour's lawn?
4. I didn't have a receptacle of any description to hand in the car. Any decent parent has a plastic bag or two in the car, don't they? In the few seconds available to me, I looked at the box of tissues, and wondered if she could be sick tidily into the little window at the top of it. I even looked at her adored dry erase board, and wondered if she could hold it horizontal and keep it level, as a sort of vomit-receiving tray (though I knew this would be cruel beyond measure - she loves that dry erase board so much). So as I sped up the road, the best I could do was to say "open the window - if you're being sick, do it out of the window", forgetting that those stupid electric windows in the back of the car don't open all the way down.

So serves me right, eh? Forty-five minutes wiping vomit off the inside of the window, the inside of the door, the seat belt, the car seat, the car seat cover, the floor, and out of the retracting cup-holder and all its niftily designed little hinges for which no doubt some studious Japanese designer received great credit from his superiors, because none of them thought "this flips shut very neatly, but I wonder how easy it would be to clean vomit out of all the small crevices".

But there's one thing I HAVE learnt as a parent, and it is this. There is NO SHAME in putting the tv on when you have a poorly child, in order to buy you time to write a blog post. So I guess 13 years do count for something.

[Stephen Hawking, by the way. The bad taste joke in the last post...]

Double trouble

We've just been to a music program (concert) in which 13-yo was performing. One of the songs that the eighth grade choir sang was from the witches in Macbeth.

"Double, double, toil and trouble
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble."

When we got home, 6-yo was asking me about it, wanting to know what the words were.

"Why were the witches singing about toilet trouble?" she wondered.

Talking of phrases which get you wondering, she and 9-yo often say "on accident" instead of "by accident". Husband and I have started correcting them. Up till now, it's been one of those family phrases that we fondly think is rather sweet, but the time comes when the need for correct parlance trumps parental doting. It's been a very hard habit to break. Husband and I assumed that they were saying "on accident" because of the parallel with "on purpose", or possibly because "it was an accident" could be construed as "it was on accident". Either way, it sounds odd to us, and we just thought it was wrong usage.

But... in the past couple of weeks, I've heard "on accident" three times - on one occasion it was a child, but on the next two, it was adults (albeit young things).

Is this becoming current usage? Is it an Americanism, or have you heard it over the other side of the Pond?

Last year, this year

Last year, I drove 5-yo to school on her first day. I have photos of her getting ready to leave, the sky so dark that it could almost be night. The heavens opened, and it rained as if Noah had built his ark in the neighborhood. We were soaked.

This year, I walked 6-yo to school. She had been up for more than two hours, and ready for nearly one. Walking seemed a good way of using up twenty of the remaining minutes. It was a lovely morning, sunny but not yet hot. She told me she had a tummy ache, and I asked if it was really a pain, or if it felt like butterflies. She said, yes, butterflies, so I talked about nerves, and how they would go as soon as she got started at school. "Do you remember in the summer, I went to a conference, and I was reading something out in front of a big lot of people? Well, I had butterflies then, but they went away as soon as I started. It'll be like that when you get to school." She wondered why people say they have butterflies in their tummies, and not birds, and we agreed that birds would probably feel rather heavier.

Last year, I didn't know a soul at this school (she's at a different one to her brothers). If I'm honest, I didn't really want to know any. Getting to know new parents, new teachers, new children seemed just another exhausting thing to add to the exhausting list.

This year, what a pleasure to see familiar faces, to exchange a few sentences about the summer and add "we'll have to catch up". On the way home I passed a friend, out with her twin babies in their stroller, before the day got too hot. We talked, but only briefly, because the babies wanted to be on the move.

Last year, I was so pleased that the first day of school fell towards the end of the 3-week chemotherapy cycle. It seemed so important to take my daughter to school, though of course she could have gone with her daddy. He'd already been to the enrolment and open day. I had to drive. Twenty minutes there on foot, and twenty minutes back, would have been far too much.

This year, I was happy to walk, as I've put on quite a few pounds while on holiday, and I'm needing to lose weight. Needing to lose weight! Ah, that's a sign of life returning to normal, if there ever was one.

Last year, I wore a cap.

This year, one of the other mothers greeted me with "you've changed your hair". I was a bit flummoxed as to what to say, and ended up with "well, it's grown!". I was secretly rather pleased she didn't instantly remember the cap and the reason for it.

Last year, I had two chemo sessions to go. I didn't know the third would be the worst. Probably just as well. I was dreading starting on Tamoxifen, and getting used to the idea of being on a drug for years seemed a huge mental hurdle. Huge.

This year, I forgot to take the Tamoxifen tablet this morning, but that's just because we're out of routine and not properly unpacked, and my pill box isn't in its usual place. Being on a drug seems a tiny thing. I was lucky with the side effects. Lots of people are on long-term medication. It's a very safe drug. Been around for years. No big deal. Not any more.

Last year, my biggest fear (which I couldn't bring myself to write down in black and white - though I did try) was that I would lose myself. That was it. Whenever anyone talked about losing my hair, I'd hear a voice inside saying "and you might lose yourself". I'd lost little bits of my body, and the steroids during the first chemo session made me feel like I was losing my mind. I didn't seem to be doing much. If you take away body, mind, and role, it doesn't feel like much is left. I wondered if somehow the bit that is the essence of me would evaporate, and I'd never get it back.

This year, I look back and see that I did not lose myself. I am here. I am me. (Actually, I was all along.) I can even write about that.

And now it's time to go and pick 6-yo up. I wonder how her day has been.

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P... p... p... pick up a costume

“Kindergarten is producing a movie, and your child is going to be a … penguin” said the note.

I have to confess I quite enjoy the costumes bit of being a parent. Sometimes not. I’m certainly not an “I wish it could be Hallowe’en every day” kind of a girl. But in small doses, I can enjoy putting together a costume now and again. My prowess extends from the tooth fairy (easy) to Martin Luther King Jr (difficult).

A penguin isn’t that bad. Trust me. Just follow these eight easy steps.

1. Get cancer. Have chemo. Lose your hair. Buy a black hat. Grow your hair back, so that you no longer need the hat on a daily basis.
2. Make friends with someone slightly eccentric, who gives you a large bottle of yellow craft paint saying “I don’t need this any more, but you have kids, you might find a use for it”. Put paint in cupboard.
3. Three years later, remember the paint, and its location. (This is by far the most difficult step in making the costume. If your expertise doesn’t reach to this feat of memory, you can always go to a shop and buy some. Less emotionally satisfying, but a similar result.)
4. Paint yellow penguin beak on brim of black hat. Squish with elastic band. When child says she can’t tolerate the elastic band across her forehead, remove elastic band and discover that the brim remains bent into pleasing beak shape on its own.
5. Find black pyjama bottoms that older sibling has grown out of.
6. Find your own favourite black fleece top and say “I’m sure nothing will happen to it. It’ll be fine.” Turn up the sleeves a good few inches.
   
7. Spawn genius older child (you have to do this bit a few years in advance) who says “Hey, Mom, you could use those swimming flippers for the feet”. If you don’t want the added expense of the extra child, and the subsequent swimming lessons with a teacher who requires flippers, you could purchase yellow socks. But then you'd also have to purchase black pyjama bottoms (see 6).
8. Spend 25 cents in Wal-Mart on a piece of white felt, for chest and eyes.

And ta-da! There’s your penguin.

Easter Interlude

I was going to write about our garage sale, but instead I thought I'd offer you these thoughts on Easter. They are by 6-yo (for 5-yo is no more; she had a birthday last week). She sat down at the computer and decided she wanted to learn to type. So I taught her the shift key, the space bar, the backspace, and the enter key, and left her to it. This is what she wrote:

The Easter Bunny bings eggs

It is difrint culrz

Thau can be yellow or thau can be pink;

The Easte Bunny is white;

Happy Easter;

And echoing 6-yo, may I wish you all a very Happy Easter.

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