The Eclectic Mix

Day one of the new school year. It means that we now fully and officially have a ninth grader and two fifth graders in the house full-time.

The day started normally for a school day, everyone getting up and getting ready for the day. I took Patrick to his bus stop near Jenni’s school, and Jenni saw the girls down the block to catch their bus.

By all reports, all went well for the day. Patrick’s school was just open today for the incoming freshmen, so that they could get acclimated to the school before all 2,400 students descend upon it tomorrow. It’ll be interesting to see what he thinks with that many people scurrying through the halls there, because he’s never been in a school that large–last year, the school had classes just as large, but with only two grades in the school, there were only about 900 kids there.

The girls moved on to new teachers, and have in fact moved up to the third floor of their school, after having spent their whole career there on the second floor. And things are changing for them–Hannah complained, albeit briefly, that when she gets homework, it will be due the next day. But their school is changing, taking on a greater focus on the arts, so they’ve got puppetry, dance and theatre classes mixed in with band and their regular subjects. I’m anxious to see how the year turns out and how the girls take to it, because we’ve got decisions to make about the future for them. But for now, they’re happy and excited about the year.

But the wheels (pardon the pun) came off the day for all of them on the way home: Patrick actually missed his bus to get home…or back to Jenni’s school to wait for me to get them after work. So I needed to leave early to get him and take him home. And the girls had their bus break down on the way home. Half an hour later, a replacement bus picked them up and got them home.

So we’re off and running into our new adventures at school. As long as the buses cooperate. We’ll keep you informed.

See you tomorrow.

I’m a little tired right now. It’s been a busy, go-go-go week, with something happening every night.

Monday: karate. Tuesday: Patrick’s court of honor at scouts. Wednesday: a nephew spent the night. Thursday: preparing meals at Feed My Starving Children. Tonight: family movie night at Sunrise.

The days haven’t cooperated much either.

Within the span of 20 hours, I got to pack up my desk at work and move the stuff and the desk sections themselves about 5 feet, then back again. Why? Because the cube wall that formed one side of my cube at work needed to be shortened by 9 inches so it came into compliance with the rest of our area. As a result, I haven’t done much work on my trouble tickets since about 3 Thursday afternoon.

And somehow, I feel like I’ve got more crap after the shuffle than I did before. I don’t think that’s possible, but it sure seems that way.

The summer is supposed to slow down. You know, the “lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.” It’s the first week of summer, as marked by a family with kids in school, and the throttle has been full open all week so far. And it continues non-stop until sometime next week.

Patrick has an event tomorrow morning (Saturday) to pack for his servant trip for church. He leaves Monday morning for a week in Chicago. And fortunately, he’ll have some time to do the tourist thing in addition to the servant thing. So I think it’ll be a lot of fun for him.

Then, tomorrow afternoon and evening, we go to the wedding of someone Jenni and I have practically watched grow up at Mt. Carmel. It’ll be fun, but the more I think about it, the more I realize it’s just another one of those markers on the road of growing older.

Sunday is Father’s Day, and we’ll celebrate with mom and dad and a Greek dinner (sorry, but I’m not sure which I’m looking forward to more…). But of course, there’s church in the morning, and Jenni and the kids have youth group in the evening.

Monday, Patrick departs, the girls start Girl Scout day camp for a week, and I may collapse in a gelatinous mass on the floor. Or not. I don’t know if I’ll have the time.

With me luck.

See you tomorrow.

All three of the kids are done with their respective years now. They all finished on Friday. Patrick had what probably amounted to the first real finals he’d ever had during the week. And the girls had what most elementary schools seem to be doing these days: slow down to a crawl for the week and don’t really take on any new work.

As a result, we technically no longer have a pair of fourth-graders and an eighth-grader in the house. Patrick is now, really, terrifyingly, and quite positively, a high school student. The girls are fifth graders: approaching the end of their time at their school before we move them to Roseville to follow their brother.

I remember my excitement about both the start of school and the end of school. Both days that would never quite seem to come soon enough from the perspective of the other end. The start of school meant some new clothes, new notebooks, pencils and pens, maybe even a new backpack, new shoes, and a return to something that was different than what usually became the monotony of the summer.

The end of school meant unbridled vistas of possibility. I could sleep in, or wake up early. I could play after breakfast. Or play and then have breakfast. Biking to the store for candy in the middle of the day. And not having to do homework or be compelled to read.

Oh, wait. I had my parents as parents. They compelled us…Oh, how they compelled us.

You know my parents, the reference librarians who insisted on not actually telling my sister and I the answer to a quantifiable question, and instead would fire back with the terse “go look it up.” Dad had an Encyclopedia Brittanica set in his library that probably had 20 volumes, but I believed it was written sometime before the talkies came out. There would be frustrating times when searching for something I needed to research would result in no entry in the damned set, and I’d curse their age, assuming that my research goal of oxygen or fire or Nova Scotia probably didn’t exist when the damned thing went to press. Then he had one of those monolithic dictionaries: nearly as thick as it was wide, and weighing probably around 20 pounds. Flipping through the dictionary became a chore to itself, as you’d find eighteen pages between “point” and “pointless.”

Frankly, as a kid, I would have killed for Google. But back to the point.

Weekends around our house were unique when compared to those of my friends. A “drive” with dad frequently meant a trip to some old-looking town to photograph buildings which to the untrained eye of youth looked dilapidated and in desperate need of a bulldozer. And if it happened to rain on a weekend day, we would either find ourselves at a museum or a library.

And at the library, we would be strongly encouraged, or perhaps even ordered, to check out multiple books. In fact, one summer, I actually somehow came into an agreement with my parents to produce a research paper by the end of the summer. In retrospect, I realize now I was probably hoodwinked through some amazingly cunning plan. But that summer, I produced my paper, highlighting the various parts and operation of an internal combustion engine.

If I were to do it now, though, judging by what my kids do frequently, I’d make a Powerpoint presentation.

Ah, summers!

See you tomorrow.

Tomorrow’s always a new day.

At least, that’s what “they” say. You know “them”: those who make sayings that are overly general yet specific enough to make some veiled point that also applies to almost any situation you may find yourself in.

But it’s true. Tomorrow is always a new day. Today might have been great or lousy, difficult or easy, and tomorrow does its level best to wipe today off the map and start again.

No, today wasn’t my finest hour. Tired, headachy, achy, annoyed for no particular reason, short tempered, grumpy. And it wasn’t a great day for that to happen–relatives over for dinner. But tomorrow, I can start over and try to make it a better day.

But today was one of those milestone days: the girls–my daughters–went out with their mom and aunt and got their first bras. As a dad, I don’t know quite what to think of this. Boys don’t get the same kind of ritual to mark their growth and development. Heck, very little marks our change from boy to…well, older boy. Girls seem to get the long end of the stick there. So I have very little point of reference to draw upon to either be enthusiastic or scared silly. Right now, I’m leaning toward the scared silly, if for no other reason than they’re one step closer to being teenage girls, and I’ve known enough teenage girls to know I should be scared silly. And the problem is that I’m not sure if I should be scared of the teenage girls or the teenage boys. Unfortunately, imprisonment of one’s own children is kind of frowned upon by society.

Otherwise, I fired up the deep fryer again for a burger and homemade fries and onion rings dinner night for the assembled clan. Sure, the fries take a lot of time to produce–cutting, soaking for an hour or two, then frying once in smallish batches, then a second fry after a cooling off period to crisp them up–but they are so much better than most fries you can get anywhere. And fortunately, the afternoon-long rain finally stopped just in time to fire up the grill, because grilled burgers really are so much better than pan fried…Must be the fire.

And my mood finally started breaking after 9 tonight. Kinda crappy that it hung around like a dark cloud over my head all day, but maybe tomorrow will be a new and better day.

See you tomorrow.

As I’ve said before, it’s hard not to treat the girls–Hannah and Zoe, that is, two distinct individuals–as, well, distinct individuals.

But as they approach their 10th birthday, I’m going to do the good parent thing and highlight their strengths and who each of them are.

For those of you who don’t actually know it, Hannah was born 13 minutes before Zoe, so technically, she’s my middle child. While her current favorite word is “idiot” (something we’re trying to break her of), I think she’s the more well spoken of the two: when she isn’t frustrated or angry, she’s never at a loss for words, and there are times that they sound much beyond her years or experience. She’s the one who can start a paragraph with “Okay, dad…” and proceed to illustrate some event or something she saw with a very complete word picture.

Hannah’s also very smart, and frustratingly finds the loopholes in my rules that I’ll impose on them. She’s a heck of a reader, and has been known to knock off an entire actual chapter book (granted, at a upper elementary or junior high level) in just a couple of days. She flashes back and forth between being a girly-girl and a tomboy, and has been known to do it over the course of minutes. She’s got a Bohemian sense of style, unabashedly combining boots with shorts, stripes with plaids, and incongruous colors in ways that she can pull off, just because she’s so darned cute doing it. She’s planned and deliberate in nearly everything she does.

She’s the one with the freckles on her face that we had used as the giveaway to others so they could tell the difference between Hannah and her sister. But for a while now, she’s had a different hairdo, so she’s been “the one with the short hair.”

Zoe is artistic, more soft spoken, but just as direct. I always know where I stand with her at any given time, whether she’s telling me or not. And since I’m her father, I’m usually not standing very well with her…

She acts, a lot of the time lately, like the more grown up one, frequently striking a pose that screams “teenager,” and it takes almost all of my resolve not to yell at her to stop doing that. You know the pose: arms crossed, one leg straight, and the other at an angle out to her side. And a glare on her face that would stop traffic. And it’s usually aimed at me.

She’s the artist of the pair. Though both of them like to draw, Zoe’s got the flair and the patience and seems to have more of the technical ability. She’s a quick study at math, also likes reading, but not to the extent that Hannah does.

She’s the one with long hair, the love of pink, and, I fear, the one who will bring home boyfriends by the armful. But that’s also what more impulsive people do, and she sure seems very impulsive. She’s the social butterfly and sometime ringleader. She can be the director and master of ceremonies. And when she’s with her friends, I always like watching her interact with them because she just becomes someone else.

So there you go. Introduction or reintroduction. Let me know what you see in them in the comments.

Nine years and 364 days.

More tomorrow.