High Five for Friday!

I thought about this post all week. Wrote a song about it. Like to hear it? Here it go. (If you were in high school in the nineties, somebody is beating a cowbell in your head right now. You know who else besides me was in high school in the nineties and who also writes a blog you should read religiously? Mrs. Emily Greenwald, née Hudspeth.) 

Link Party sponsored by Lauren at From My Grey Desk. 

1. House's First Hydrangea

Last year we did a bit of landscaping. This year I am not focusing on it because nothing that happens in the yard gives me the instant gratification I desire, so I am letting two years pass between landscaping looks before throwing tears and money at it. Again. Last spring we put in a hydrangea. Nevermind that everyone told me that hydrangeas are difficult to keep and I have the blackest thumb there is. I killed a cactus in college. But I was emboldened by my new homeownership status and the successful laying of sod, so I hauled Corey to the nursery to buy me a hydrangea. Then we made a bet that it would be dead in a month, and it did not die. Not only did it not die, but Saturday morning I left the house to run errands and had to stop and take a picture of my THRIVING pink hydrangea.

2. Having time to cook

Media and writers and nosy moms love to make you feel like a crappy parent if you give your kid processed foods, which I usually ignore in pursuit of an "everything in moderation" approach to filling the bellies of my kids. I did read in all my Tourette's research that kids whose brains have neurological impairments - like Tourette's or ADHD - are very responsive to articifial elements in foods. So I made the commitment to myself (not out loud where people could hear me and make me feel like a failure when I faltered) to focus on giving Jake natural foods. They would then be forced upon Landen by default. So I replaced the muffin mix with fresh-ingredient double chocolate muffins with whole grain flour and yogurt and the mac and cheese in a box with homemade mac and cheese. I structured my days to give the Gift of Natural Foods to my children at every meal I cooked at home this week.

The only downside is that buying the freshest ingredients and snacks without artifical colors, flavors or sweeteners is at least double what it costs to buy the vacuum-sealed crap.

3.  Signs of developing children

Tuesday night when the sun was shining upon his face, I noticed that Jake had a small red spot on his chin. It turned out to be a bug bite, but upon close inspection I could have sworn it was a pimple and I may have made a slightly-bigger-than-appropriate-or-necessary deal about what I thought was Baby's First Zit. In examining that, I noticed that the sun really lit up the hairs on his top lip, several of which are no longer baby fuzz and starting to turn into dark hairs. I may have put a little too much hoopla on that discovery as well. I realized that this whole "Taking Things Too Far" approach that I have is likely what keeps them from holding my hand in public or letting me play my music in the carpool line. I'm going to take advantage of them not knowing or caring that I have a blog and post pictures of them on the internet with embarrassing stories for public consumption and allow you to study this picture for dark hairs. I actually took a close-up macro photo of the hairs themselves, but he might stop the adoption if he found out I used that one with this story. 

4. Casey at the Bat

There was ease in Casey's manner as he stepped into his place;

There was pride in Casey's bearing and a smile on Casey's face.

And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,

No stranger in the crowd could doubt 'twas Casey at the bat.

His name's actually Landen, and there is no bigger gift to any of us than for him to earn people cheering his name in the stands of the Manship Y. The difference between my baseball player and the one in Edward Thayer's poem is that Landen Allbritton did not strike out. We played a make-up game on Tuesday evening. Boyfriend was up to bat twice. Boyfriend hit the ball both times. One time I was behind him taking pictures, so I did not see his face until he got to first base, at which point he tapped his helmet and was all bidness getting ready to take off to second. The second time I was facing him, and it was not wonder or awe or surprise when that bat connected to that machine-pitch ball. It was the look of truth. That time he got to third. Nothing that makes any sense comes out of your mouth when you're cheering your kid to a base after he's whacked a baseball. Pride in your child is something no one tells you is better than getting a raise or acing a final, but it really, really is. 

5. My fabric closet

The closet under my stairs is quickly becoming storage for all the fabrics I have left over from various projects or are storing until I am ready to deploy them to their particular projects. 

The blue lattice one is an outdoor fabric that I am using to re-cover a chair in the boys' room. The outdoor qualification is key for this room. The red medallion print is a woven upholstery fabric by Robert Allen that I am using for a slipcover to the ottoman in the living room, which I am paying an expert to create. Though my fabric actually has red squares, the geometric chenille fabric is what we are using for a new slipcover for the chair in the living room. I could not find a photo of it on the internet, and I bought what my online store had left in stock. Finally, the linen stripe is the new fabric for the curtains in my bedroom, to continue bringing that room into adulthood. They all arrived this week!

So concludes my second High Five For Friday post, which was just 0.001% less fun than the inaugural one. Like that one, this could not come to a satisfying close without a Completely Gratuitous Photo of my dog. 

You Brought What to School?

When you have children, you try so hard to teach them to make good decisions when you are not with them.

You teach them that integrity means doing the right thing when no one is looking.

You teach them to have confidence in and respect for themselves.

You help them learn self-worth and believe they are a worthy friend.

You teach them the value of a dollar and try to start them down the road to better spending habits than the ones you have.

My Landen Allbritton blew all that sh!t out of the water this week, when he snuck out of the house with $20 of his allowance to pay some kid on the playground to be his friend.

An important point to make about Landen in this story is that he wants everybody to like him. Every damn body. And he can be a little aggressive in those pursuits, and that usually results in at least half of the third grade not wanting to play with him. Landen's best friends cycle in and out. He's not on speaking terms with most of the kids who came to his birthday party. A set of kids who wanted nothing to do with him six months ago have asked to be waitlisted to the next birthday party.

Now, apparently all these little enterprising third graders have formed "companies" that sell paper toys to their peers. There are company "owners," who employ the kids who are good at making paper toys. Then there are the "sellers" who go out and peddle the paper toys to kids on the playground. Index cards serve as the currency for these exchanges. I do not know who came up with this scheme, and I hate him, so I hope it was not my kid.

Not true, because we do teach our children that hating is wrong.

Except when it isn't.

On Tuesday, Landen could not get any of the other kids to be part of his company, so some loanshark-in-the-making offered to staff Landen's company for $20 in cash. Which means that when he came home on Tuesday, he was plotting to sneak that money out of my house on Wednesday morning, which he did.

We do not teach quantity of friends. We teach quality of them. And I'm fairly certain that there are many imprisoned politicians who will attest to the fact that the kind of friends you have to pay are not truly the kind of friends you want.

A teacher witnessed the money changing hands and shut down the deal. Landen went into hysterics about how much trouble he was going to get in when he got home for sneaking money out of our house, so he was sent to the assistant principal. The woman is now very familiar with us and our family, and she seemed delighted to be calling just to tell me one of my sons was not in trouble.

When he got home, I told him that a) Not everyone is going to like him, but we do not have to beg people to be our friend; b) that he should only spend money on things he will be able to hold in his hand a week from now; c) that paying someone to do what you want them to is a felony; and d) do not ever think that I will not find out, because I always will. In this case, I know how much money is in that wallet and when he turned up short on his next trip to Target, he would have been busted anyway. He did manage to get out an "Even though it was my money!" justification.

At this point in the year - after the Allbritton boys have fought each other, slapped and kicked other students, flipped the bird, forged a signature and been suspended - you really hope that when the school calls, it is because someone has vomited or is bleeding. They are able to make light of this, because when I answered the phone, the assistant principal told me straight out the gate that no one was in trouble. They were concerned about why Landen would think he needed to pay people to be his friend. It's just heartbreaking if you think about it like that.

I am concerned that I've got one practicing the white collar crime of forgery and one practicing bribery, both unsuccessfully I should point out, and that all those episodes of "Beyond Scared Straight" we watched may have been a smooth waste of time.

The Inaugural "High Five For Friday" Post

If you read my blog and have not yet aquainted yourself with my best friend Emily who is still my high school bestie, you are remiss. And if you want to BE pretty or STAY pretty, you need to read it regularly, because she tells you how to do it at your house if you cannot get yourself to Richmond to see her in person. She told me this week that she had started doing these "High Five for Friday" posts that she was turned on to by this lifestyle blog she reads called From My Grey Desk. Now, I do not read too many lifestyle blogs. Mostly because my lifestyle falls by the wayside while I read blogs about How to Make My House LOOK 'Spensive and How to Not Be One of Those Parents Who Hates Their Children. But the premise of this is that every Friday, we write about our five favorite things of the past week. Go read Emily's, and then come back and read mine.

1. The Reverend of Rock

On Saturday, we watched my husband, the licensed minister who is not at all spiritual, perform a wedding ceremony. His roommate from Iraq got married and because he and his now-wife are truly people who must want to push my husband to Be All That He Can Be, they asked him to officiate. He did a wonderful job, but I could not tell you a thing he said, except for the two jokes I wrote. Because I sat in the back with the boys. And because I cannot really listen to anything he says when I get to look at him in his fancy uniform. I really would not mind if he became the go-to minister for soldier weddings, because I do love a wedding. Though my dates to these shindigs hate sitting still. All three of them. But one of them loves cake and was the first person in line for the groom's cake, actually eating the piece the groom should have cut for himself. The other one dances with wild abandon, even when he knows no one.

2. Landen makes it to second.

Saturday was Landen's first baseball game since 2010. My kids are growing up YMCA kids, between sports and summer camp. My idea of a great way to start a Saturday is not going and sitting in the grass or hot bleachers in the mid-morning sun, but my baby not only hit the ball, he got to second base. He also looks tremendous in baseball pants, because he has the best hiney on the YMCA Cubs machine-pitch baseball team. It's great for his confidence, because he is not the worst one on the team. He also has quite the arm, though apparently no aim. He can throw it over anybody. My second favorite part of the first game was when all the boys were throwing sticks and balls at a lizard at the top of the dugout and my monkey Landen climbed right up to the top of the fence (not this one in the picture) and ushered that lizard to safety.

3. Our bookcase got some style. 

I do not really like bookcases as a piece of furniture. I prefer built-in shelving. My husband loves books, like, they are His Precious. Even though he has a Kindle, he still buys hardcover books. We often get admonish for not caring for our books appropriately. And not only do we not have built-in shelving anywhere but the linen closet upstairs, we are sans funds to install them custom built to my specifications. So, we have stand alone bookcases. Which have, up until this week, been disastrous. When I posted pictures of the new bedroom, my design-savvy aunt in California commented on the sad, unstyled, unstylish state of the bookshelf in my bedroom. So I threw away all the book jackets and did some organization, and now it looks like this. I am almost convinced that the back of this particular piece of furniture needs to be painted, so I'll likely add that to my list. Everything without jackets and arranged by color makes me hawt, and we are steadily chugging along to improve the chic factor in our bedroom.

4. Jake is diagnosed.

On Tuesday, Jake was diagnosed with Tourette's Syndrome. This is neurological, genetic, and you do not have to scream obscenities to be diagnosed with it. Jake currently has three motor tics and two vocal tics, neither of which involve words. It's very rare for children to outgrow Tourette's completely, so we are stuck with this particular condition for the rest of our lives. We are still trying to absorb everything that this means and will then move into the stage where we kick Tourette's ass and let it have a very minimal affect on Jake's life and our family. We are now warriors. It happened to all of us overnight.

So how, then, does something like this end up on a list of favorites? First of all, there is nothing we can do to make this go away, and accepting helplessness can be very empowering. We will never be able to make Jake a Child Who Does Not Have Tourette's Syndrome, but we will teach him, and ourselves, to accept, to improve and to believe. Second, hearing that my child has Tourette's removed many of the notions I had about things that I could teach Jake to do better, and his inability to succeed at those things was very frustrating and made me very impatient. In just a few minutes, with just a few words, I became more patient. With both of my children.

5. KG is back on TV.

I have been waiting months for Kathy Griffin to get back on television regularly. Tonight, she came back to Bravo with a weekly late night TV show. Our family already has a lot of TV to watch, but this is EXACTLY the thing I need to record for Saturday mornings, before anybody else wakes up and before my cooking shows start. She's snarky. She's smart. She has no shame. She's my kind of people.

Photo from Bravo's Kathy website.

This concludes our inaugural H54F. I really enjoyed the recap. I love me a numbered list. I like the assignment to capture my favorite things in photos as they are happening to me so that I can tell you all about them later. I managed to do (almost) an entire blog post of great things without posting another picture of my dog. What the hell. Just try to resist sharing THIS with the world:

Lessons in Painting and Emergency Preparedness

When we bought the house, the master bedroom was a lovely shade of neutral, the kind of color that all the magazines tell you to paint your room. The walls were dark and there is no direct natural light, which made the room darker. I have often wondered how much it costs to put windows into walls, because sunlight filtered through the sunroom into my bedroom is really not like any light at all. I told Corey that we were going to have to paint the bedroom because I could feel the Seasonal Affective Disorder coming on mighty strong, and was told "Corey don't paint."

Sometimes he only speaks in Third Person Cro Magnon.

Darkness before furniture. The carpet probably does not help.

Darkness and bad lighting for photography.

Abort the mission I did not, because that is not my style, so one day on an unspecial trip to Lowe's, I picked up a quart of semi-gloss decorator's white andd started on the trim. I painted all the baseboards and door trim I could reach without moving furniture. When that was done, I bought some sample pots and picked myself a wall color - Edgecomb Gray by Benjamin Moore. Then, in half-hour increments, I started cutting in around the baseboard and the doors.

When Corey asked me what I was doing and why I was doing it like this, I told him that my intention was to get the hard part - the cutting in - out of the way so that I only had to ask him to roll the walls and the ceiling, and...

He agreed.

So Easter weekend, Friday and Saturday looked like this.

I did all the cutting in and the trim painting and Corey did all the rolling. Edgecomb Gray is about three shades lighter than what we had before. It is not gray but it is not tan. It is both and neither. The room is big and everything required two coats. I cannot say how long it took to do the painting, because I had done 75% of the white trim in 30-minute productive bursts for two weeks. We worked for about seven hours on Friday and about six hours on Saturday on the whole room - moving furniture, cleaning, painting, etc.

We used satin paint on the walls and did the moulding in the same color but gloss. The ceiling was a mix of 75% classic white and 25% Edgecomb Gray. The house already has high ceilings but using the same color for the trim and a lighter tone on the ceiling makes the room feel like it does not have a ceiling. You do not notice it. I highly recommend this trick for illusioning high ceilings.

The picture of Corey rolling the walls is the best illustration of the change in color, but here's a comparison that you do not have to scroll for:

We also splurged for new doorknobs. I had thought that handle knobs are too much flourish for my traditional style, but it's just the right amount of sophistication. At $30 per door, it is going to take a while for all the doors in the house to have knobs that match these.

I have been playing with the light settings on my camera, and got this picture, which is probably the most accurate as far as demonstrating what color Edgecomb Gray actually is.

I never show you one whole wall of my bedroom because there are two wingback chairs of which one is always covered in clothes and one stacked with pillows. There is also a bookshelf full of items that has yet to be styled. And I do not have the art right. You can wait. I have big plans to redo the curtains in a sensational stripe I found that matches the bedding exactly, and I am thinking I will likely use remnants to help the art on that side of the room.

Even though I had to go up and down on a ladder more times that my ass cheeks or my fear of stairs was comfortable with, we are really happy with how much lighter the room is. And what a good job we did painting like grown folks. Our handyman quoted us $450 plus paint to do it for us, and we spent $250 buying the paint and all painting supplies. Now that we have the rollers, pans, brushes, etc. our next painting adventure (the boys' room) will be less costly.

What Allbritton family project would be complete without a small level of disaster? Certainly not this one. Despite his cantankerous objections to fooling with anything electrical, I convinced Corey that he could change the power outlets and light switches from bisque to white. And, I am not just saying this to temper his bruised ego, the wiring in our house is wonky. We have ceiling fans not hooked up to switches and switches that do nothing. So we were non-plussed when changing out three light switches cost us the power to outlets in two rooms and the carport. Two different professional visits later yielded a diagnosis of a broken wire in a bad splice in one of the light boxes, and it just so happened to be the one and only wire supplying juice to the master bedroom, sunroom and caport outlets.

Five nights in the guest room and $115 later, power has been restored to the outlets and I will never get Corey to touch a switch or plate or outlet ever again. This is the second time he's tried it and the second time it has gone awry and I cannot convince him that it's not him, it's the house.

Bonus: I did learn that if he ever electrocutes himself, I should hit him with a chair. That may not be exactly what he said, so do not rely on this safety measure at home, but that's what I heard and the advice has now been seared into my emergency knowledge bank. The title of this post is not meant to tease you with disclosures of family emergencies, but to provide a teaching moment. Because the extent of my knowledge of What To Do When Someone Is Being Electrocuted was not to touch them. I have many skills. Safety may not be my strongest skillset.

The Good, the Bad and the Rock Wall

When I look back on this blog, I notice that I go through bouts of non-posting. I have not felt interesting this month, so I have not felt inspired to write. I am also too tired to be introspective and witty. The third, final and probably most true excuse is that I got an iPad for my birthday. It is my precious. It is with me almost always, and you cannot blog from it. Then y’all started asking for new blogs, and I felt selfish and indulgent for being so focused on my precious.

At night I put my iPad in my face and read all my favorite blogs. One of them, Momastery, posted recently about the honest challenges of not enjoying motherhood, and I have really been mulling that over this month. I have been given this abundant blessing in the form of wee Allbritton brothers to love and raise, and oh my, we love each other. But every ounce – every. single. ounce. – of that blessing is met with an equal amount of challenge. There are no freebies here.

Do these look like the faces of evil easy?

We’ve got Jake, who is a boy so full of love I think that his need to give affection could only be satiated were he able to crawl inside you and love you from the inside out. He has to hug all of us, even Murphy, before he leaves the room. He is so smart, so interesting, so loyal and when he gets some height on him, the little girls are going to lose their minds. I know this. He’s also got ADHD, major anxiety and some Asperger traits, so he’s a little odd. And he loses control of his emotions and reacts disproportionately and there’s only so much leeway you’ll get at the Catholic school before they send you home on a mandatory three-day break. Challenge.

I do not know what kind of parents this kid has who let him leave the house without fixing his hair.

My Landen sees the world in black and white. Meals and desserts. Hot or cold. Bedtime or awake time. Football month or baseball month. It will not be long before he starts to realize and worse, have a reaction to, how odd his older brother is. Landen comes on strong, runs at you at full speed, screaming, mouth open, eyes wide and just when you panic thinking he’s going to hit you and knock you flat on your back, he stops short and hugs you so hard around the neck you see stars. He does this to us. I’ve seen him greet his friends this way. Murphy has yelped. Landen has high confidence and he is almost always confident that you are wrong and he is right and he cannot wait to tell you why. Challenge.

This is as close to skateboarding as this kid is allowed to get.

They can remember to buckle their seatbelt when they get in the car but “forget” they are not supposed to touch each other, make noises or play catch in the backseat. They can remember to wash their hands after they use the bathroom but “forget” to flush the toilet. They remember to put their plates in the sink but “forget” to close their mouths when they chew. Every single day they come in the door, they yell for me like they’ve come home to an empty house, not a parent on the phone working upstairs in her office. They feed the cat but “forget” to fill her water bowl. They spray their whole entire head with the water bottle but only comb the right, leaving water droplets dangling from matted strands of bedhead on the front, left and back. Challenge.

Recently we spent a bit at a big park on a Saturday afternoon and the boys each paid $5 of their hard-earned money to try their luck at the rock wall. Both of them love to climb, and they are fairly successful in trees. Both of them got about five feet up on their first tries, not being able to see the easiest notch or nub on the wall to grab on to and having their fingers cramp already. They wanted to un-harness and go watch the skateboarders, but Corey and I insisted that they nut up and try again.

You would think that at less than sixty pounds, Jake could just scoot on up the rock wall. This boy is a thinker, and he conducts a full assessment of his surroundings before deciding what hand or foot to move. This will serve him well later, but on the rock wall it means he holds on to one spot and makes his feet and hands mighty tired. Not sustainable. The second try on the rock wall, he made it about eight feet before getting stuck and flustered and dropping off.

Landen made it a little bit higher than Jake did, but he's carrying a good twenty pounds more than Jake is, so it takes much more energy for him to get hoisted up to the next spot. Both of them said the words "quit" and "too hard" in the same sentence, and Corey and I got prickly about it. We always strongly advise against quitting, and we might push and pressure our kids to finish more than other parents might. We gave the spiel about everything being hard, that nothing worth doing is easy and that everything you stick with and see through is rewarding. When their fingers are burning holding on to the wall, we cannot react punitively when they quit, but we can lead them to the knowledge that finishing feels way better than quitting does. And hope that they learn how to push themselves, even if it is to finish something they never want to do again.

So here I find myself on my own proverbial rock wall. I have less money. I get less sleep. I find myself saying the same things over again, making the same corrections to manners and behaviors day after day. To be honest, I'm not sure that these pre-tween ages are a very pretty color on me. I feel older. I'm certain I look like I'm struggling. They probably call me the Kracken when I'm not within earshot. I can see in their faces they wonder what happened to the version of me that was fun. And really, it would be so lovely to just stop working so hard at this, to stop being the Insistence of What's Right all the time, to stop trying force tiny people with partly-developed brains to trust in concepts they cannot make sense of at their ages. I would certainly like me better if I got to declare this - the mothering of pre-tweenagers - to be too hard and just dropped on off this wall.

The peaceful, clean-slate attitude I clutch in a death-grip when I climb the stairs to wake them up is dealt a defeating blow every morning when we argue about who is wearing which style uniform shirt or what sleeve length is appropriate for what temperature. Or whether or not someone has to pee. Or when I open their closet and see the disaster that was shoved in there upon instruction to clean their room the night before. Our pantry is never stocked with the correct item for breakfast, even though I buy what they request. Inevitably one of us is no longer on speaking terms by the time we load the car to drive to school.

It's okay. This 8-12 age range is not my favorite. I do not have to like it to do it well and make something of it. I approach every day with the fervor I would anything I want to turn out successful in the end. Not with much patience, but with much love and with an abundance of hope that in ten years there will be a sign or a verbal affirmation that this approach was the right one and that daughters-in-law will benefit from these boys being raised by the Kracken.  

I also know that I am going to outlive the Big Guy and if I am going to spend my twilight years with any amount of dignity and comfort, I have to be someone they will want to still be around when they are older.

My boys are good boys. They have the DNA and part-raising of a very, very kind mother with a great big, light-filled heart. They have the quick wit and smarts of their dad. And they have me, stable, routine and determined to give them an ordinary life amidst extra-unordinary circumstances. I know they will grow up to be good men, good fathers, good husbands and that they will never end up on a therapist's couch complaining that they never knew they were loved.

But y'all, I have no earthly clue what state I'll be in when these good grown men get here.