Homework and total lack of sympathy

My husband is a good sport about my teasing him for many things, mostly his age, his quick temper and his complete and total lack of patience. This post is inspired by the latter. Often I hear the common refrain of his impatience, usually out of earshot of the minor children, although I can't promise they've never heard their dad get angry with machines, traffic, chores or video games (to name but a few) and deliver a loud and indignant "Man, F**K this!"

Corey and I have shared this sentiment over homework. Not our own, but that of the children. I really know that I was not responsible for the element of work in elementary school that our boys are responsible for, and muffle your quips about the quality of the LaSalle parish school system. Jake, in the fourth grade, has had to build diaramas of recycled materials for science, write a one-page report on a current event every month in cursive, and tomorrow, for example, he has a one-page report and colored illustration due on a Catholic saint. In cursive, which he does not enjoy writing and does not begin or complete without multiple statements reminding us of that fact.

We develop our shortcuts where we can. For example, we construct the paragraph and I type it on the computer in a cursive font, which he then uses to transpose the paragraph with the proper heading and handwriting on looseleaf. It still takes him forever.

Plus, in the fourth grade, they test on every subject almost every week.

AND, we're dealing with an ADHD child whose medicine is wearing off right about the time he is collected from school in the afternoon. We try to get the homework started by 4 or 4:30, but even then, it's a struggle. He can't be left to his own devices to complete his homework. There is no safety from everything in the universe distracting him. The later the homework gets started, the longer it takes.

Landen is selective about everything, including his homework. He does not enjoy Reading or English, so homework or test-studying in those two subjects is a test in self-control on the part of the adult. Math and science he can take and complete with little or no input or direction from the adult at the table. He sometimes has projects, though not with the complexity or frequency of his fourth-grade brother.

In order for me, the single parent, to get the homework done, dinner on the table and clean butts in bed by 8 PM all by myself, I often have both of them doing homework together with me at the dining table. This is a Productive Child No-No, but I don't give a shit. I challenge any child specialist to spend the evening with me and suggest with any success how all of those goals can be met any other way. I get everybody's everything out of their backpacks and laid out in stacks in the order they are to be completed before I call them to the table to start on their homework. Some things they can do at the same time. Some things Landen has to go upstairs for Jake and I to finish alone and the same for things Landen needs quiet, undivided attention for. This is where my penchant for logistics comes in handy. We usually study for tests during and after dinner and over breakfast.

It is as well an oiled-machine can be when two of the participants are under the age of ten and the adult is almost always under duress and fighting the urge to yell "Man, F**K this" and write a note to the teachers that says "I did not have it in me to do this shit today, and I'm the only responsible one here. Give us a C and let's move on."

Although, Corey and I do not tag team homework time with better form or function as a pair. We did not do our own homework. We do not want to be doing their homework either. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that this is in the CON column of getting pregnant: the cost of daycare and doing f*cking homework in my 40s and 50s.

Throw in the special circumstances. Say, for example, your second-grader sprained his ankle and had to miss two days of school while you made double certain it was a sprain and taught him how to walk on crutches so he does not add insult to injury and fall and bust his face on the concrete at school. (I never used to think like this before this year, by the way. Corey was always the cautious one with them until they became my responsibility, and now I am one of those people who can see The Potential for Accident and Bloodshed in everything.)

The school sends home his work missed during these two days, which isn't that heavy. In fact, Jake's regular evening of homework and Landen's homework and make-up schoolwork take about the same amount of time. He did, however, miss two days of introduction and instruction on whatever the formal name for the kind of subtraction wherein you have to borrow from the tens column. Having a sister who is thinking about teaching math to junior high kids when she grows up is a worthless resource when she has to work.

It was during this process of my explaing to him how to do this advanced level of subtractions (in second grade?) that it became clear to me that 1) I am in the right profession and my childhood aspirations to be a teacher were best as the fleeting urges they turned out to be 2) my seven-year-old and I hit the "Man, F**K this" moment at about the same time in any endeavor and 3) a child can communicate that same sentiment to you without the foul language. Or, as in our case, no language at all.

For while I was trying to explain how to subtract and borrow on the fourth worksheet we've done in the last two days familiarizing the child with the process, he bowed his head, put his thumb and pointer finger on each side of the bridge of his nose

then inhaled and let out a very long, very pronounced siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh. And then, and THEN, when I started to speak, Junior (which I've been calling him for about a month because his similarities to his father deserve the recognition) did not lift his head or his hand from his nose and delivered unto me with the remaining hand this

universal symbol for "shut the f**k up before I go off in here."

It is the seven-year old expression of his father's "Man, F**K this!" which I totally understood and respected.

I had been trying not to say it myself.

.....

Kicking off the holidays: overindulgence, tears and a pie on the floor

So I bought this fancy seats-six-but-extends-to-seat-eight table, which is the perfect size for our little family cottage. It took me weeks to pick out chairs, but I ended up with these. We are going to get upholstered host chairs at either end of the table, but I haven't been able to pick those out yet so I'll wait until the Spring.

Dad is still not 100%, which means he needs too much rest and has too little energy, and could not go on his traditional Thanksgiving deep-sea fishing trip. Cydney has to work on Friday, so she asked if we could do Thanksgiving at my house. For the first time in my whole entire life, my dad was agreeing to stay under my roof. I used what I already had on hand to convert my dining table into a cozy table setting for four.

The only word that can describe our holiday meal is gluttonous. We could have fed at least a dozen people with what we cooked for the four of us. No one was willing to do without any traditions, so we had all of it. We did choose to limit ourselves to a turkey breast, which I brined in the Pioneer Woman's turkey brine. The heavenly scent of apples, oranges, garlic, peppercorns and fresh rosemary lingered in the house for several days. The end result was that a brined turkey is astromically juicier and more flavorful than any turkey I've had served any other way. We also rubbed the bastard in butter AND injected it with a rosemary/orange/garlic compound butter several times in the three-hour cook time.

I bought a cooked spiral-cut ham and heated it in a molasses/brown sugar/butter/red pepper glaze.

Mother made cornbread dressing, which I don't eat.

Nor do I eat green bean casserole, but she cooked it too. Like I said, no one was willing to give up eating any of their holiday favorites.

I have tried many hash brown potato casserole recipes, but the best is the one I get from Arkansas Emily. She used to make it for me in DC, and hers is the only one that tastes right to me. It must be the corn flakes on top.

All that cooking made the dogs some kind of tired. Murphy collapsed by the kitchen door, where he could still see my every move.

Dixie had to have a little nap in the sun.

Cydney was responsible for dessert. Dad's favorite dessert is the lemon meringue pie his mother used to make for him. She would put extra lemon juice in because he liked it extra tart. We made it, clearly not stirring it enough because it never got solid, but Dad said it tasted like it was supposed to.

Too bad we dropped this bitch on its face that very afternoon, so all Dad got was one good piece.

I insisted on a second pie, because I don't like fruit pies and I was hosting. I asked for a French silk pie. The mixer had to mix this filling for about twenty minutes total. The recipe calls for three eggs, added individually, with five minutes of beating on medium after each egg. It was divine.

Friday evening after Cydney got off work, we took Dad's truck down to Louisiana Nursery and bought the Allbritton Family's Very First Real Tree for Their Very First Christmas in Their New House. It took longer to pick the tree than to agree to buy the house.

As of Saturday night (as the Tigers were losing their trip to the Sugar Bowl), the tree is up and the stockings are hung and the trashy C-9 bulbs that have been my holiday tradition since my first apartment alone are illuminating the sunroom. Still to come - the front door, the dining room and the boys' tree in their room.

A note about the holidays: I am extremely emotional. It started about twoo weeks before Thanksgiving and I suspect it will continue through the New Year. The day I discovered they had converted my favorite satellite radio station to holiday music, almost three weeks ago, I was well into "The Christmas Shoes" before I registered that my ears were being violated. You know the song? It's the one about the little boy who can't afford to buy his mom the pretty shoes he wants to give her for Christmas so she can be stunningly dressed when she goes to heaven. I had to get off the interstate and pull over to collect myself. It ravaged me, and I have not recovered.

I did not have any holiday traditions with Erin, but I know her holidays with her boys were thoroughly planned for maximum enjoyment of tradition, celebration and surprise. I have a lot of confidence in my own capacity for tradition, celebration and surprise, but I can't imagine that a little boy will not ache for his mom at Christmas, especially his first Christmas without her. Multiply that times two little boys. And the parents and sister and nieces and extended family and friends who will really struggle through this first holiday without her. The last two weeks of watching the seasonal movies I enjoy, like Home Alone and The Family Stone, which happen to be movies about mothers and sons and holidays, have ended with my body-shuddering uncontrollable sobs through the credits. When you accept someone else's children as your own, you take on the responsibility for hurting when they hurt. And you maybe wail big painful cries alone in your living room when you are reminded in song or movie about their little broken hearts missing their mama at Christmas.

An additional layer to my holiday melancholy: I think some of it is a mix of joy and emotional exhaustion from surviving this year of deployment. I can count on both hands how many days our patriarch has left before beginning his journey home to us. Even though we won't have him back with us for about two weeks after that, we're at 1st & Goal and it feels terrific. I can't believe I'm almost done with this life experience. When he's home I, like my Noble fir, can drop and settle.

.....

We anniverse.

Today is the two-year anniversary of our marriage. In our life together and our lives apart and our life together again, we have acquired the anniversary of many things. Our first kiss, last kiss and first kiss again. The day in 1995 when you told me you loved me, at the horror of me and your freshly-exed girlfriend. Our first date. Our last date. And if you're me, sentimental and romantic and lonely, it could be very sad to be thousands of miles away from your chosen one. In anticipation of this, I had thought maybe I would light candles and drink wine and watch our wedding video while listening to "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" on repeat.

Then I decided not to do that. I had a meeting today with someone who, while battling stomach cancer without insurance, works with the IV drug-using, drug addicted, imprisoned, homeless, hungry, HIV-positive populations in Baton Rouge. My husband isn't here, but we're healthy, clean, fed, sober (usually) and our kids are the same. We have a home and clean clothes and transportation. Being without my husband on our second anniversary is not tragic.

I decided I would cook dinner, grill it. You know how I love a kabob.

Chicken, red onions, red pepper and green pepper on a stick marinated in a sesame peanut sauce for three hours.

Cooked and yummy on our wedding plates!

There was going to be a salad with Greek dressing and crumbled goat cheese, but I forgot to get lettuce. Any minute now it's going to rain, and even if it wasn't, I don't want salad bad enough to go back to the store. We always have macaroni and cheese handy, so I made that.

But since Wilsons have to eat while we cook, there was fancy cheese - a soft cheese with green onions and garlic - and toasts.

 Oh, and wine.

And yesterday I made devil's food cake mix cookies, which you can eat with or without cream cheese icing and sprinkles.

You know I likes my sprinkles and icing.

But when I picked up the lid to the grill to put the kabobs on, it fell on my hand and burned us. It burns us!

Murphy has to be in pictures. He insists.

When I came home from work today, I had the most beautiful and ostentatious declaration of your undying affection sitting by the front door. In a crystal Lenox vase!

I love you, and I miss you. And we will have a rain-checked romantic anniversary dinner when you come home. In a month-ish.

Love,

Mrs. Allbritton (two l's and two t's. Two years of saying that down, sixty more to go.)

....

Starve a (Christmas) Fever

I have to make a declaration. I am opposed to Christmas before Thanksgiving on a moral level. I do not want to hear a Christmas song. I do not put up a decoration. I do not wrap a present. The day after Christmas, while everybody else is pounding the pavement and shelling out a year’s worth of credit card payments and Christmas club savings on Black Friday, I am working through the day and part of the night making my abode festive. Every year it gets bigger and sparklier and last year feathers were introduced.

There are a few exceptions to this rule. My mom has always requested that we submit our Christmas wish lists to her before Thanksgiving. I hit Hobby Lobby to get my wrapping paper and ribbon when it’s half off in the beginning of November. And you have to buy ornaments half off from Hobby Lobby in November because if you wait until December, the good ones are gone. I float through Red Door Interiors to decide what I cannot make it through the season without. Then I go home and spend all of November envisioning what is going to go where. And this year, because Santa is coming, I have already made a big online shopping spree and sent the stuff to my mom’s.

Christmas is my crack and I am jonesing for it early this year. Yesterday evening after work I went to the nursery by our subdivision and walked around for 40 minutes feeling and sniffing and shaking Christmas trees. I am getting a real tree this year, even though we’ll be at my mom’s for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. My little apartment tree is six feet tall. I may put it up next year in the sunroom with ornaments the boys make. In my house, the ceiling in the living room is 9.5 feet tall, so I need AT LEAST an eight-foot tree. Don’t try to stop me. And the ornaments can only be red, white or silver.

I also had to get stockings for the boys this year, which I ordered. And some bubble lights for my mantle. My mom always had bubble lights on our mantle and our piano growing up, and I want to give the gift of bubble lights to the boys.

Alas, there is sadness here. I have vowed to limit my Christmas-decorating budget this year, of all years. The year I buy a house with a banister that needs some garland and bows. The year I have a front door with windows on each side that need the same wreaths as the one on the door. The year I have four posts on my front porch that are crying to be wrapped with lights. The year I have a sidewalk leading up to my porch that longs to be illuminated with themed path lights. Or a mantle that needs a big sparkly wreath hanging above it. Oh, the despair.

And by the way, Oprah’s Favorite Things, only the best televised event of LIFE, aired today. She gave away diamonds, purses, 3D televisions, clothes, cameras, and everybody got a customized frigging closet and a cruise on the biggest cruise ship in the world. People are fanning themselves and crying. One man literally fell out in the floor. It’s the last one she’ll ever do. My dream of getting to be in the audience for an Oprah’s Favorite Things episode died today, but many of these things make it only my own personal Christmas wish list. (Not TVs and diamonds and cruises. Oh my.)

Back to my Christmas fever (which Oprah exacerbates.) I cannot wait for Friday. One week from today I will be putting up my decorations. One week and one day from today I will be loading my car down with the additional decorations in my budget. But it won’t be enough. I’ll post pictures and you’ll see them and ask yourself, “how in the holy hell does she think she could put more decorations in that house.”

One day, it will look like the pictures of Southern Living's "86 Christmas Decorating Ideas."

It can be done. Oh yes, it can be done.

.....

La Creme de la NOT Creme

Whether I am very successful at parenting or completely in over my head is redefined every few minutes. Landen tells me I am The Best and The Worst multiple times every day and Jake usually seconds the motion. Today I told him I was going to put him up for adoption, and he said "Great! I would love to be adopted." We were Skyping Corey at the time, and he just shook his head and laughed. Same response to the boys running in circles around the couch for four minutes straight, which flies in the face of our "no running in the house" rule.

If you want to be The Worst, here are some things I've found successful in helping you achieve that.

1. Made them bathe themselves with 42 baby wipes after the Great Near-Flood in our bathroom Monday night

2. Sent Landen to school dressed for Santa pictures without the form or the money to take Santa pictures.

3. Refused to give Landen a snack at 10 pm tonight, sticking to my warning that should he choose not to eat his dinner, there would be nothing prepared for him when he decided to be hungry around bedtime. I was still The Worst for this, even though he ate ice cream on the couch at 8:30.

4. Will not let them have sugar-filled drinks or snacks after 5 PM.

5. Only let them have 30 minutes of TV before bed, which is the standing rule here.

6. Deny them tokens for not doing what they were supposed to do.

7. Deny them anything I can think of when I have to repeat myself four times to have my instructions followed.

I am The Worst when I abide my our house rules and force them to do the same.

This week I was The Best when I:

1. Delivered them the Sideswipe and Rampage Transformers that I happened to scoop up in the check out lane at TJ Maxx the week before. Those are two we never saw in the toy aisles during our frequent trips to Target. I gave them to Landen and he screamed "Oh Sweet Mary of Christ!" or something borderline blasphemous-yet-hilarious before running up the stairs to their room, screaming his joy at Jake.

2. Made two stops when one wanted Taco Bell and one wanted Sonic on our way home from Landen's First Reconciliation Thursday night.

3. Ordered pizza for lunch today.

4. Bought two more Transformers and How to Train Your Dragon on Bluray tonight.

5. Let them eat ice cream in coffee cups on the sofa while they watched the movie. The only place children are usually allowed to eat or drink here is in the kitchen or at the dining room table.

6. Gave them an extra 15 minutes of TV before bed on Wednesday night, but really only because I got them washed and into bed ten minutes early.

7. Allowed them to drink my G2.

8. Let them sleep 30 minutes later on Friday morning and stopped at McDonald's for lunch.

Basically, I am The Best when I am lazy or spend money on them.

It's amazing how fleeting these moments of Bestness and Worstness are. Dudes can flip on a dime from one to the other. Landen held on to the Santa picture thing for a couple days, but I agreed that I was The Worst for that shit. However, the best moment is better than five bad moments. No matter what, Jake tells me he loves me seventeen times a day and Landen gives me a lingering neck squeeze when I tuck him in, so I guess overall, I'm not so bad either.

.....

Waterworks. Or it doesn't.

Monday evening, around 7:30, I sent Jake upstairs to get himself in the bath tub while I cleaned the kitchen. Suddenly there was a loud pop and Jake came running out of the bathroom bukkid nekkid. He had turned and turned the hot water handle until the the whole thing came out of the wall and water was shooting in a straight line out of the hole in the wall where the handle used to be. I called my dad, who was off at a Knights of Columbus meeting, and therefore unreachable. I then called Justin, who said he was coming over.

In the time those events transpired, my bathtub communicated to me that the drain was not equipped to drink as much water as the bathtub was capable of holding, and we were coming perilously close to flooding the bathroom. How to turn off the water from the hot water heater did not immediately present itself to me upon visual inspection of the apparatus. We have a closet upstairs that we keeped locked, because the floor is unfinished and parts of the air conditioner, some circuit breakers and some pipes are in it. I had some initial trouble locating the key to that closet in the junk drawer, which is already unmanageable after two months in this house. Once I got the door open, I had no idea what I was looking for so that was pointless.

I am nothing if not calmly responsive in an emergency, so I did the only thing I could think of:

1. I yelled at the boys to get the dog and get out of the bathroom.

2. I climbed into their almost-overflowing bathtub in full pajamas

3. I pulled the shower curtain

4. I shoved the hot water handle back into the hole in the wall to stop the water and let the tub drain.

When you shove something into a hole spewing water, the water will vacate the hole with much force at all different angles before letting the something you are shoving stop the flow.

After a few minutes, Justin called to say that he and his brother were on their way over, but I definitely needed to call RotoRooter. The bathtub was only about half full of water, so I released my grip on the handle and allowed the water to come forth again. I called RotoRooter and waited for someone to call me back. The urge to cry was creeping up. Jake had not dressed himself and was roaming the house wrapped in a towel, so I got him dressed again. In this short amount of time, the need for me to get back in the bathtub had returned, so I sent the boys downstairs to wait for Justin while I repeated the plugging procedure. While I was in the tub, the RotoRooter guy called to let me know that he was thirty minutes away and it would be $175 per hour, two hour minimum, not including travel time. I told him to wait.

F*ck my life.

Justin and his brother arrived and came upstairs. When they came into the bathroom, I warned Justin that I was, like my water, about to open up full throttle. The guys scrambled around the various closets upstairs and the water stopped coming out of the wall. When I stepped out of the bathroom, Landen brought his mother's pocket watch upstairs to me, broken. Jake had given it to him to play with, and they broke the door off at the little hinge. As I sat down on Landen's bed to ineffectively communicate the wrongness of playing with something they know is not a toy and the seriousness of its brokenness, my eyes were watering and my voice was shaking. Justin poked his head out of the bathroom to tell me that he had fixed it and the boys could bathe, and asked me if I needed him to stay. I assured him I was very grateful and was fine to bathe the boys and get them into bed. He offered to stay, even if just for five minutes, so I could go off and have a minute to myself. He barely finished the sentence before I was scrambling down the steps and throwing myself face first onto my bedroom floor to sob and wail. My Ugly Cry.

It ain't that cute.

The impeccably-timed phone call from my dad came about 90 seconds into that outburst. He told me welcome to homeownership and shared with me that the bathroom ceiling collapsed on my mother a couple weeks ago. I reminded him that Mother wasn't home alone with a collapsed ceiling and two young children because her husband was 7,000 miles away. Corey doesn't know anything about plumbing, but at least he could've stayed in the bathtub while I made the phone calls or Googled "how to turn off water."

Tuesday was a total pisser. You can't cry that hard and have a good day the next day. Plus I sent Landen to school all dressed for Santa pictures but forgot to send the form and the money to take Santa pictures, so all he got was a lousy pencil. I was dubbed The Worst all day on Tuesday. We as a collective unit had made a full-recovery and I was The Best on Thursday, for Taco Bell for dinner and Harry Potter before bed.

One thing I know for sure about this year - everything would be better if only my husband were here. That probably wasn't true in 2009 and will be disputed in 2011, but in 2010, that's what I know for sure.

.....

Halloween and weddings and appliances, oh my!

Last weekend was Halloween. This was the first time I've been trick-or-treating in probably eighteen years. I think I quit going to houses and started hanging out on the porch with my mom handing out candy when I was 12-ish. Two weeks ago I took the boys to the Halloween superstore by our house. Jake was going to be a warlock until he found the last remaining Dastan (Prince of Persia) costume. It took Landen twenty-five emmeffing minutes to pick his costume. He decided to be a werewolf, I think because his brother is currently obsessed with werewolves and he wanted Jake to think his costume was cool.

This costume actually came with sleeves that I had to cut off because Dastan's clothes in the movie are sleeveless.

I'm terrified. Aren't you?

We trick-or-treated in Shenandoah with their cousins Casie (cowgirl riding a dinosaur) and Cailyn (Daphne).

The Saturday night before Halloween, my cousin Dustin got married in Bunkie and we hauled up, dressed in our best, for the festivities. I even bought a new dress, which is the first non-house, non-child related purchase I've made since July or August. The boys bitched about having to dress up, but they were the model of perfect behavior in church. I think the candy bar at the wedding reception made the trip worthwhile for them. I know I enjoyed the sour straws I slipped in my purse and ate on the way home. Nerds rope? Yes. Gumballs? Several. Hershey's nuggest? I love it. The food was great, but we left before the cake was cut. Jake and Landen got in a fight a little after 9:00, and were asleep in the car on the way home by 9:20.

I know, right. Couldn't you just die?

Jake is doing so much better at school. Thank you Strattera. He's raising his hand to answer questions in class, making eye contact with his teachers, exhibiting much less anxiety and agression. They still have to redirect him during class - it's hard for him to pay attention for long periods of time - but a simple tap on his desk or his shoulder does the trick. I put these pictures on Facebook, and people have responded that they can tell a difference in how Jake is feeling by the way he's looking.

Landen is Landen. We're struggling to get him to apply himself in reading and English with the enthusiasm that he gives to math and science. The consensus is that Landen does not enjoy reading and English and is therefore disinclined to put anything more than what comes naturally in those subjects. There are consequences for poor grades - a D will get your Xbox taken away, even in second grade, but his privileges were restored (temporarily) when he brought home a C in reading and a B in English.

The countdown begins for the return trip home. They would frown upon me putting details on the blog, but he will be home in plenty of time for Christmas. Not in enough time to help me put up Christmas decorations, shop for or wrap any presents or help Santa get his gifts together. But he will be home to open presents and be Santa! No mail after the 15th of November, so his final care package is being sent to him today. Our two-year anniversary is this month, and I think I'll celebrate with a facial.

The house is perfection. This morning they brought me a new washer and dryer - pretty and shiny and white with bells and whistles. Seriously, they sing a little tune when the load is done washing or drying. It's the most precious thing ever. Corey wanted one of those front-load washers. The maintenance on those involves monthly cleaning of the gasket, the filter and the drum and draining it every three months. He wanted it, and he's agreed to take on the extra maintenance. Secret of the Allbritton household: we don't do each other's laundry. He doesn't like the way I fold shirts. He dries everything, even his jeans, and I do not. So man and wife do not mix their laundry. Either of us will wash the boys clothes when we wash ours. I do towels and sheets.

Just a few details about how we make shit work around here. There is no rhyme or reason how I do it around here all by me lonesome. Sometimes I am wildly successful and have much to be proud of. Sometimes I almost flood my bathroom and can do nothing but cry and call my sister's boyfriend. That's a traumatic blog post, and it's taking me a while to write it. Stay tuned.

..........