Silicon Valley Moms Blog

House-shabby

I’m living in a house we moved into more than 10 years ago. Seven months pregnant at the time, with money too tight to carry two houses for even a week or two to get floors refinished or painting done, we simply said it’s all good enough for now, arranged our existing furniture to fit as best we could, and started unpacking boxes. I did paint the walls a few years later (easy stuff, I ignored the woodwork and ceilings, which are hard). And this past year I repainted a couple of rooms when we moved my office into the “dining room” and gave each kid a private room.

But mostly, nothing has changed since we moved in, except to break. The stove lost a burner, the dishwasher is dead. The area rugs, moved in from our previous house, are shabby; the slipcovers on the couches are faded and starting to tear. The woodwork paint is freckled with chips.

The guinea pig campaign

Mischa wants a guinea pig. I get why. We got two cats a couple of years ago, but because I developed an allergy to cats, they are garage/outdoor cats; they can’t come in his room or sleep in his bed. He loves cuddling soft fuzzy things, he has more stuffed animals than I can count and sleeps with most of them. And guinea pigs are soft and cuddly and could stay in his room (but not, I am quick to point out, in his bed).

I don’t want a guinea pig. I don’t want more critters to take care of, more mess, more nagging to do (don’t you dare turn on that TV until you clean the cage). I know he means well, and he swears he’ll do all the work, but he’s ten, he’ll get busy and distracted and his room will smell like a barn even before puberty strikes.

He’s good at working us parents, though. He went to the library and got books about guinea pigs; he’s started cleaning the cats’ litter as soon as he gets up in the morning (and then making sure I notice, “mom, did you see how clean the litter is?”). And he never stops the campaign. I say, “Hey, your sneakers are falling apart,” and he responds, “Yeah, I need new sneakers and a guinea pig.” We see a calico cat walk by and he tells me, “When I get a guinea pig I want a calico one.” I take him grocery shopping and he informs me, “Guinea pigs like broccoli.”

How the California Supreme Court made an honest woman out of me, same-sex marriage, and the Prop 8 campaign

There’s a time during the preschool years when kids get fascinated by weddings. Maybe they see a wedding party on the steps of a local church, and stop to watch the pageantry. Maybe they page through their parents’ wedding album while mom or dad is on the phone or folding laundry. Maybe one of their classmates actually gets to be that cute flower girl or ring bearer in a wedding, or maybe they attend a wedding themselves. But definitely, around age three or so, they are into weddings. They play pretend wedding; my daughter at that age insisted on being a bride for Halloween.

And they have lots of questions about weddings. One question my son had at that age (quite a few years ago now) was “Can boys marry boys?”

Now if you’ve got a three-year-old in the house, you know that while three-year-olds have a lot of questions, they don’t have patience for long answers. And since he hit me with this question as I came through the gate at preschool pickup, I didn’t have a lot of time to think about an answer. I quickly considered the possible response, “Well, boys can fall in love with other boys, and be families together, but they can’t get married.” If I said that, he’d obviously ask, “Why not?” and I didn’t have a short answer for that one. Or, truthfully, even a long one that made any sense.

So I lied. “Yes, boys can marry boys."

“Then I’m going to marry my best friend,” he told me, satisfied. I found out later the discussion in preschool that day was about who was going to marry who, his classmates were determined to pair  everyone up, and he needed to come up with a name, fast. His classmates were perfectly happy to match boys with boys, just as long as every kid had someone to marry, so his problem was solved.

The Halloween art show

I’m not sure how it got started, the Halloween art display. Some traditions are like that. You do something once when your kids are little, not giving it a lot of thought, and the next year you find out that your kids filed it as a tradition, and you are now required to continue this little thing forever.

More than a few traditions snuck up on us like that. There’s making chocolates with cousins for Christmas; I like that one. There’s the gingerbread house; who knew a Costco impulse buy would have me scraping royal icing off every household surface every December.

And some traditions I tried to create didn’t stick. I did a Chinese moon ceremony for a couple of years after reading about it in a children’s book; my kids went along with it, but when I missed it one year never noticed, so we dropped that one.

But they won’t let me skip the Halloween art show. It started back when I had one kid in 2nd grade, one in preschool, and was on maternity leave with my third child. I’d never been that great about displaying kids art. I save some of it, I actually bought frames for a selection (still have to put it in the frames, that project is about 5 years dusty), stick a few pictures up on walls with tape, but I don’t have one of those lines with clips dedicated to a rotating art show; I don’t photograph the kids holding their latest creation, I don’t turn my favorites into greeting cards for grandparent gifts. Mostly, I admire it briefly and toss it into a pile to be sorted through whenever it threatens to take over my office; I stash some in portfolios in the attic and mostly never take it out again.

Forget soccer, what I really want to be is a surfer mom

It’s fall, and that means that I’m a reluctant soccer mom. I’ve got two kids playing AYSO soccer. Around here, that’s soccer lite; two practices a week, one local game every Saturday, let the coach know if you’re not going to be around, it’s OK, he won’t yell. I did two seasons as a CYSA soccer mom—overnight travel to tournaments, paid professional trainers, better have a 105 fever if you’re missing a practice—way too hard core; let’s just say I didn’t twist my daughter’s arm to stick with it, or encourage my son to go that direction when he got to be CYSA age.

My husband and I take turns going to the games. (If it’s before 8 am, I figure it’s his turn, I don’t like cold, and 8 am on a fall day even in Silicon Valley is pretty chilly.) I bring my green canvas chair with the built in cup holder,  sit with the other parents on the sidelines and cheer the kids on as they take the ball down the field, occasionally wincing when two kids collide or one takes a ball in the face. I tell my kids not to go for headers; yeah, they look cool and the crowd oohs and aahs, but this isn’t the world cup, I’d rather their little brains not get bounced into their skulls if they can possibly avoid it.

Obviously, I wouldn’t cut it as a hockey mom. Cheering for collisions and the sound of bodies crunching? I don’t think so. Sitting on hard benches instead of a reasonably comfortable chair? Not for me. And then there’s that chilly air, indoors or out.

What I really want to be is a surfer mom.

I'm done with goodie bags and party favors

I’ve thrown some pretty amazing birthday parties in my day. The Harry Potter birthday back when there was only one Harry Potter book and no Harry Potter gear for purchase was pretty amazing. It took weeks of preparation: figuring out how to play quidditch with black water balloons and brooms, spray-painting eggs gold to represent the golden switch, going to several stores to find the ingredients to make gak for potions class. The Japanese party was pretty impressive too; and again took weeks of preparation, ordering blank fans online for hand painting, scouring Asian markets in Cupertino for party favors.

Because, of course, you couldn’t have a party without a goodie bag or party favor; every year these seemed to get more elaborate. We quickly abandoned the little bag full of plastic toys and candies; for beach-themed parties I’d hand out buckets and shovels, for slumber parties I’d buy a bunch of flashlights, for garden parties we’d give plants in little pots.

It was creative, and fun, and it felt like the time spent with the kids planning their dream parties was really quality time, though at this point, their memories of all of it are pretty faded. It was also hectic and exhausting.

I’m in a Philadelphia

Some people know Philadelphia as a city. To others, it is a metaphysical black hole. Let me explain.

Lately, it seems, I can’t get anything done right, at least the first time. This is happening at work and at home. I’m madly researching an article on deadline and manage to come up with a bit of new information that completely sinks the article. Over. Killed. Dead enough that I have to throw out four days of research and start out with a completely new topic.

I buy a new comforter at Ikea because I think it would make me happy to have a bigger, fluffier, cozier poof on my bed; I take it home and open it, and find out that it has this weird hard zipper running right up the middle. I go to return it, and have to spend an hour at the store complaining my way up the management ladder to get a refund because I opened the package. Duh, that's how I found out about the weird zipper.

I go into the high school registrar to find out how to get a class reported on the school transcript, thinking I could take 10 minutes in person and deal with it, but now I’m a week and seven people into the process and am close to concluding it can’t be done.

I figure out a brilliant solution to feeding my kids dinner on a day in which they have tight activities schedule and have to eat at three very different and very precise times—I decide to sauté a bunch of vegetables and grate cheese ahead of time so I can do the short order cook thing and quickly produce omelets as needed. The plan works until my husband comes home from what I thought was a dinner meeting, sees the vegetables in the bowl and cheese on the cutting board and eats them, meaning I have to pull all the vegetables out of the refrigerator and start chopping again for another do-over.

Individually, all minor annoyances. But add them to a long list of similar frustrations, and it adds up.

A routine vacation

There was at time that I considered vacations as opportunities for adventure—go to a new country, meet new people, have new experiences—new, new, new.

But these days, my favorite vacation of the year, our August trip to the Jersey Shore, is a celebration of routine. A routine that is completely different from the one we have at home, but one we all know by heart. And since it’s such a well-worn groove, it’s easy to settle into; for me, that’s a prescription for instant relaxation.

Stupid school tricks

Sometimes, the logic of middle school administrators completely escapes me. Here’s the latest example of reasoning that doesn’t work for me.

Problem: The giant, heavy, backpacks carried by middleschoolers.

OK, I agree with that. Backpacks are a huge problem. My 68-pound kid was carrying a 30-plus-pound backpack; last time she crashed her bike her backpack dragged her into upside-down turtle position, and she couldn’t do much more than flail her legs and arms. Parents have been complaining about the backpack problem for years, and it just gets worse. Every teacher wants kids to have a dedicated set of notebooks for that teacher’s class, spiral bound and binders both, along with some books, though, thankfully, the heaviest texts stay home. Then there is the fancy calculator that is required, the colored pencils, highlighters, white board markers, etc etc. “I left that at home because my backpack was too heavy” doesn’t count as a valid excuse for not being prepared.

Hell Week is only the beginning

Monday: Forms forms forms. The kids and my husband did stacks of forms Sunday night (somehow I squeaked out of this chore this year), but more kept materializing. And the forms had to be handed in to the various school administration before the end of the day today. Then there was that short (read-two hours) meeting of the theatre boosters board. Dinner was late.

Tuesday: First day of school. It started out idyllic, the craziness of the previous day old news. The kids picked out their first day of school clothes the night before, they were up early so we would have time to take our traditional photos, ready for school ahead of schedule. It was a gorgeous sunny morning; the air sparkled. My oldest joined the stream of teens walking and biking down our street towards the high school; my middle child jumped on her bike for the ride to middle school. And my husband and I walked our youngest to elementary school, watching him as he clustered with friends on the playground. We waved to him as he walked into the classroom, then I scurried off to the back-to-school coffee, an hour of catching up with friends while chugging Peet’s coffee and munching Hobee’s coffee cake.