Life, In A Nutshell

I don't think I'm alone in this, but periodically, my parents come to visit, and for some reason this can be very stressful.  Don't get me wrong, my parents are great--they're helpful, supportive, flexible, and interested in everything we do.  They are skillful and experienced with children, they are capable and creative problem-solvers, and they know how to do, fix, or build almost anything.  But in spite of this--or maybe because of it--there is a certain amount of pressure surrounding the parent visit.  I want the house to be clean and the children well-behaved.  I want the food to be delicious, the beds to be comfortable, and the schedule to run smoothly.  And I want to make it look easy, like we're not really going to any trouble.  Like this is the daily norm.  Like we know what we're doing and we've got everything under control.

All of this, however, is much easier said than done, especially if your parents, like mine, live far enough away that a visit often entails an overnight stay.  We might be able to hold it together for a couple of hours, but getting through dinner, showers, bedtime, and breakfast without incident is practically impossible.  It's almost guaranteed that at multiple times during the visit, there will be a situation in which I have clearly lost control of my children, my household, and possibly my life.  At which point my wise, supportive, helpful parents will helpfully offer advice on how I could resolve said situation and even avoid it in future.  Nevertheless, I was determined that this week's visit, this 16-hour window, would be my moment for success.  We would be calm, cool, collected, and competent.  Really.

And I have to say, everything started off so well.  My checklist was looking good.  Clean floors, clean kids' rooms, clean bathrooms.  Clean kitchen, clean oven.  Clean trash can.  Dinner in the slow cooker, so no last-minute rush to the table.  Laundry sorted, folded, put away.  Kid's bikes in the shed, everyone dressed in something decent, kids' chores done.  Grocery trip to make sure there's food in the house and we're not out of anything I can think of.  Homemade dessert chilling in the fridge, spare room cleaned and bed made. 

All that remained was to make one required trip to ferry the younger one to an appointment and drop off the friend of the older one who'd stayed over the previous night, arriving back home just in time.  While I was thus occupied, my husband had only to finish taking down the Christmas decorations and get them to the attic.  (Yep.  That's right.  Wanna make something of it?)  We were on the home stretch.  How could anything go wrong?

About 15 minutes before departure time, however, as the boys were quietly playing board games in their room, I suddenly heard a loud crashing noise.  Followed by a minute or two of complete silence, an exchange of child voices, and the ominous approach of a sobbing 8-year-old, who, as far as I could decipher, seemed to be telling me something about a broken window and his brother's trombone.

The full story turned out to be as follows:  The older boys, in order to make room on the floor for their two sleeping bags, gangly pre-teen bodies, and large game board with attending pieces, had moved furniture and objects off to the side of the bedroom.  This included the trombone in its hard-shell case, which takes up a lot of real estate--it had even been stood up on the flat end of the case, to minimize the amount of floor space required to accommodate it.  The younger one, in his wiggly glee at being allowed in his older brother's bedroom to watch the game in progress, had unwittingly bumped into the standing trombone case, knocking it off balance.  The trombone teetered, tilted, and fell directly in the middle of the adjacent window pane.  Our old, single-pane window shattered with an impressive crash into possibly a million pieces.  (The trombone, which is covered by an expensive protection agreement, of course was unharmed.)

I still needed to leave the house immediately and be gone for the duration of our appointment.  My husband, having time to solve only one problem before parents were incoming, chose the Christmas decorations.  (Thank goodness.)  So when my parents arrived, my son's room was full of broken glass and a brisk, freezing wind.  My husband was attempting to implement a temporary solution with plastic sheeting and tape.  The children were running through the house and up and down the stairs, repeatedly ejecting the cats, who required only 2.9 seconds after breakage to discover that the window frame was empty and they could get into the house.  I was trying to figure out how to wash my son's pillow, the game board, and assorted other items that one of the cats, in the excitement of the chase, had elected to pee all over.  My son's carpet reeked of Resolve and cat urine.  My mother, to her credit, said mildly, "What happened to your window?"  And I replied in a very calm, cool, and collected fashion, "Oh, the usual.  A trombone went through it."

It actually turned out not to be so bad.  My dad provided tape, labor, and a remarkable amount of restraint to help my husband make the window airtight.  The cats were returned to their perches on the porch.  My mother made no comment at all on the window situation, was complimentary of the dinner I served (which of course had turned to glue in the slow cooker while the cat/window rodeo was in progress), and had no helpful advice or comments to offer on anything else at all.  Except that I need to bleach my cutting board.

Oh well.  Maybe next time.

Top 10 Things I Hope School is Teaching My Kid

1.  Learn to think.  You might have the wrong answer now, but high-level critical thinking will get you to the right answer in the end.

2.  Learn to learn.  It's not just automatic--among other things, it requires intellectual curiosity, tolerance for risk-taking, and perseverance.

3.  What you know, or know how to do, is not as important as who you are.  Approach your education with that guiding principle in mind.

4.  Your brain, like every other muscle in your body, will grow stronger, faster, and better with regular exercise--the more strenuous the effort, the greater the result.  In other words, smart is what you make it.

5.  The person ultimately responsible for you is you.

6.  Failing at a difficult task means you're an ambitious, confident risk-taker who's willing to accept a challenge on your way to the top.  Not an apathetic, incompetent loser who's willing to do nothing on your way to the bottom.

7.  The people surrounding you here will no doubt have and express their own opinions about who you are.  These judgements say more about the other people than they do about you.  You are not required to accept these opinions or adopt them as your own.  You will not be surrounded by these people forever.

8.  Not everything you have to learn or do will be fun.  Some things will be difficult, frustrating, boring, or have no immediately obvious benefit.  This does not necessarily mean they won't prove valuable to you in the future.

9.  Not everything you have to learn or do will have value on its own, either now or in the future, but it may be the cost of reaching some other worthwhile goal.  Sometimes, if you want to ride the bus, you have to buy a ticket.  Even if the ticket just seems like a worthless piece of paper.

10.  You can do it.  We're behind you all the way.

Money-Making Scheme #2: Donating Plasma

OK, so I know it sounds extreme, but there was an ad in the classifieds asking for plasma donors.  It said, "Make up to $125 this week."  We did the math.  There are two of us.  We can buy a lot of groceries or electricity for $250 we can make this week.  So we looked into it.

It turns out that it's not as extreme as you'd think.  There is a local donation center that operates year-round, and the process is fairly simple.  I always thought that it was painful, or medically difficult, but the truth is that it's neither.  It's basically just like giving blood, except that it takes quite a bit longer.  Potential donors have to submit to a routine physical, including a blood test.  After you've passed this step, you just make an appointment to donate, go in, get hooked up, and sit quietly for a bit while your blood is drawn and processed.  Once the blood is removed, the plasma will be separated and set aside, and a sterile saline solution will be used to replace it.  When that's done, the blood will simply be put back.  That's right, put back.  (I've actually had a similar procedure before, surprisingly, so my blood has already been removed and put back--I figured that one more time wouldn't hurt it.)

Our conclusion was that donating plasma is easy and basically painless, and not only that, it's actually a great way to help others.  Plus, of course, they pay you.  So we agreed to make appointments and go together, probably "next week."

And then the tax refund arrived.  And we all breathed a great sigh of relief and abandoned Money-Making Scheme #2--at least for now.

Some Things I Would Do If I Wasn't So Tired

1.  Go upstairs and clean my bedroom.  And I mean actually clean it, not just hang up the articles of clothing that are randomly strewn around and then wash my hands of the rest of it and walk out.  Sort through the strange and unrelated collection of items that are on top of my dresser.  Go through the box of stuff that my mom brought me from my childhood bedroom closet and probably throw most of it out.  Vacuum that tiny strip of carpet behind the headboard of the bed.  Keep going until it's really finished.

2.  Read some of the non-fiction books that are in my stack.  The fiction ones always get pulled to the top of the pile, because, let's face it, they are an enjoyable escape from reality that doesn't require too much brainpower.  But there are currently three others, at least one of which is work-related, which have been languishing there for quite some time while I try to muster the concentration to tackle them.

3.  Pay bills.  This one I will eventually do, obviously, or I would be sitting in a darkened house with no internet connection right now, unable to type this blog post.  But I really should do it promptly and proactively, on payday, before it's a matter of absolute urgency.  Instead I will sit on my rear, staring vacantly at TV, until the impending threat of late fees and other penalties has me shelling out an extra $2.75 for the privilege of paying instantly over the phone at 11:42 pm on the due date.

4.  Pack a lunch to take to work.  Rather than routinely getting by on some combination of Cheez-Its, stale bagels, and Dove chocolates, because I'm not going to do it in the morning before work either.

5.  Deal with some of those annoying, minor administrative tasks from work.  I've got emails that need to be sorted and archived, papers that need to be filed, documentation of completed projects that should have been submitted a month ago.  I'd get paid for the time I spend tidying it all up.  But I just don't want to.

6.  There are probably more, but in order to list them I'd have to actually think hard enough to come up with them.  Anyway, tackling the first five is probably enough to keep me busy for a while.