Last weekened T. and I, accompanied by two neighborhood friends, went to a performance of The Sound of Music, put on by a local college. I had taken T. to one play before--Peter Pan. She was young then, about four years old, and while she still remembers the play, it's one thing to see a play at four, and quite another to see it when you are eight, and you love musicals, and you wake up each morning belting out songs from Annie, or The Sound of Music, and your new favorite book is Theater Shoes, by Noel Streatfeild.

I hadn't been to a theatrical production in ages. I might have been as excited as T., and when the lights went dark, and the curtain rustled a little in that magical hold-your-breath moment before it was raised, I had to give T.'s arm a little excited squeeze.

There were good parts, and not-so-good parts. One of the actors had clearly strained his voice over the previous days of performing (we were at the last show), and Maria seemed tired and too-serious ("Mama," T. whispered to me right before the intermission, "Maria is supposed to be happy"). But I don't think T. minded at all and, in the end, I didn't mind one bit, either.

After we dropped our friends off at their house, I pulled away, and looked in the rearview mirror just in time to see T.'s face dissolve into tears.

"What's wrong?" I asked in alarm.

She was so sad that it was over--that performance she'd been waiting for so long, that she'd scored the days leading up to it off on her wall calendar. It was done, the magic faded, and in its wake just a rainy, ordinary Sunday evening.

This one was always a favorite of mine, even if I'd forgotten I'd written it, actually, until just the other day!

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A blogger friend of mine wrote the other day about a recent study out there claiming that parenthood does not, in fact, bring joy and fulfillment,  that children are a source of misery and stress, and that raising them is a "lifelong challenge to your mental health." Where the data for this study came from is anyone's guess, actually, but I thought a lot about it yesterday--and about my blogger friend's counterpost as I sat during morning remarks at the faculty "development" workshops I attended. (I developed many thoughts during these workshops, so it was all good--mission accomplished.) I tend to think about my kids a lot when I'm at these workshops, because they're held three times/year in the same room in the same building. The first one I ever attended was when T. was a small baby, and every two hours I excused myself to go into the over-air-conditioned restroom to pump milk. I'd sit on the toilet seat with the pump attached to me and listen thoughtfully to the whirr-whirr and wonder what on earth I was doing there, perched on a toilet lid, pumping milk in a cramped stall.

Some of my most treasured posts have been the ones I wrote about my Greek grandparents, and my childhood summer days spent in Greece. I am compliing them together, and hoping to do something with them one day. Writing about my grandparents--especially my grandmother--brings me close to them again. I think I can smell my grandmother's kitchen, see her smile, bask in how good it felt to nestle into her embrace. My grandmother's body was a coming home place to me; one hug from her bridged the gap made from a year away, and all those days were swept up into one, as if no time at all had passed from one summer to the next. 

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I think what I will miss the most about my job here at FE, is the space in which to write about my amazing students. I feel incredibly privileged to have the chance to work with them.

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Yesterday I was standing in the hallway at work, fumbling as usual for the keys to my office and a young woman rounded the corner, a chubby-cheeked baby in her arms. I recognized her immediately as one of the students I taught about a year ago--one of the students from this class. She'd been pregnant then--clearly with the little guy she held in her arms.

"Student S.!" I said in surprise. "So good to see you!"

We caught up a little on things--I found out she had taken a semester off after her pregnancy, and she's back now, thank goodness. I have wondered about her from time to time, because she'd promised to visit soon after her baby was born and she never did. I often wonder about my students, especially the ones who make an impact on me (whether negatively or positively). I feel compelled to know their stories, to wonder after them when they're gone; often I worry about them, the way a mother might. And the ones who disappear? They really haunt me. I was happy to see her on the college campus again--happy she brought her son by for a visit.

One Saturday morning a couple of years ago, a spectacular day by all counts: cool like a March day, but with warming sunshine--summer sun, not early spring sun--I sat on the back porch with my dad and watched the kids painting. My dad brought out a few blank “canvases” for them (pieces of flat boards you can buy from Home Depot—they’re really meant to put under vinyl flooring, but my dad buys them, cuts them to canvas size, and they are perfect for painting on) and the kids were creating abstract art masterpieces. I watched L. dab on stripes of green, blue and orange paint. He gave T. an impromptu lesson on abstract art painting as he worked and she got right down to the business of creating a painting of fireworks, with one T.-turned-grown-up-woman standing in the middle of it all.

Then she changed it. It wasn’t fireworks, but a hectic and spectacular scene of her own life—projected somewhere into the future again: a life of colors, and splashes of light, and lots of sun, of course.

“And there’s me,” she said, “standing in the middle.”

“Don’t take offense, T.” L. chimed in (he used to blurt out quite bluntly just what he thought of someone’s work and we have, through lots of coaching, taught him to preface his remarks—if he must make them—with “don’t take offense but…”)

“Don’t take offense T., but I don’t see that in your picture at all.”

“That’s what makes it abstract,” I pointed out.

On Sunday T. and I spent almost two hours making stained glass hearts for Valentine's Day, for T. to pass out to her class. We made these last year, too, and I'd forgotten just how much work was involved! They turned out beautifully, though. If you don't mind the multiple steps involved--cutting heart shapes out of wax paper, peeling and "grating" crayons, ironing the hearts so the crayons melt (make sure you cover the heart with a dishtowel first), then these hearts are unique and so fun to do. We used a hole punch to punch a hole in each one, threaded a piece of yarn through, and added a colorful bead for extra decoration.

When I was clicking back through past Valentine's Day posts, I came across the one I pasted below, and I had to smile. There is nothing like feeling sorry for yourself on Valentine's Day because you're sick, and tired, and the entire world, it seems, is telling you to look (and feel) sexy, well-rested, and happy.

Which I don't feel this year, either, because it's the middle of February and I'm sick, and tired, also. But I am happy, and thankful, for all the love in my life, because there is so much of it. I can't ask for much more, truly--that's what Valentine's Day means to me.

Happy Valentine's Day!

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This was from Valentine's Day 2008...

Each Monday I take both kids to T.’s gymnastics class. We get there about 25 minutes early and T. uses the time before her class to work on her homework. L. spends most of his time on his beloved iPod, despite my best efforts. There is no WiFi at gymnastics (why?), but we can usually poach off free WiFi from a nearby business. Usually. This Monday, though, for reasons we couldn't understand, L.’s iPod would not pick up the WiFi, while mine did.

This was what Scott and I call a setback. We started using that term years ago, mainly to lighten the mood whenever L. encountered one of them. Setbacks have never been good, and L. depends on things going just the way he expects them to go. When all is well in his world, and he’s well-fed, content, and well-rested, he has learned to move through setbacks much better than in the old days, when one could derail him for hours. But things have been rocky lately and he is even more dependent on things being just so.

And they weren’t just so on Monday. I told L. I would let him have my iPod when I was done helping T. with her math, but this wasn’t enough. He was extremely frustrated with the situation; what was supposed to be working wasn’t. He went around and around about it while I tried to deflect him with calm, patient words.

Then I noticed a mom across from us making a raised eyebrow face in our direction. Here it comes, I thought.

“There isn’t actually any WiFi here,” she said.

I gave her a thin smile. “We can usually get it,” I told her. “But it’s not working right today.”

The lady fixed a look on L., who was still venting about the lack of WiFi. “There isn’t actually any WiFi here,” she said again. “So there’s no use getting mad.”

 And speaking of House Rules...

I've also been thinking a lot lately about House Rules of a different sort--or, namely, about how they are often not followed at our house, despite having many of them. We had a lot more success with House Rules when the kids were toddlers. Rules like don't touch the outlets, or no climbing on the tables, or don't walk out the front door without a grown-up, orno chewing on toys that don't fit into the end of a toilet paper tube. Those rules were all easier to enforce in the old days, when the kids wore diapers and listened to us. The rules were all concrete and there were pretty clear cause-and-effect outcomes to not following them. But something happens to House Rules when your kids get older. Not only are they more difficult to enforce, but they begin to deal with behaviors and issues that are more ambiguous than the toddler transgressions--things like "talking back" and "being ugly," or violating people's need for privacy, or fibbing to get out of a consequence. These nuanced changes to parents' expectations of how kids should or shouldn't behave can be difficult for kids to understand; hence the need for House Rules.

Our House Rules can be divided up into several categories. There are the House Rules that are basic and fairly simple to understand, like these:

I don't often rant about a book I don't like because, as a writer, a part of me is always sensitive to the feelings of the person who wrote the book, even if I will never meet them, and they will never read my rant.  But I've been bothered by a book I finished this past weekend and sometimes when things bother me, they stay with me longer then they should--writing about them is often the only way to send them packing.

A few weeks ago a friend asked me whether I'd read this book by Jodi Picoult. I hadn't read any book by Picoult, actually, so I told her no. The particular book my friend asked about is about a young man with Asperger's, who ends up charged with a murder. I just wondered what you'd think about it, my friend said casually, in a way that implied that there would be something to think about.

So last week I stopped by the library and checked out the book. I read it in only a few sittings, but I found my desire to keep reading it waning each time I opened the book. 

I'm going to use this Friday post space to gush proudly here about how L. is on his school's Battle of the Books team. A couple of months ago in the van on the way to pick up T. he casually mentioned that he had gone to a BOB informational meeting at lunch.

"Oh really?" My heart jumped. Careful, I thought. Don't be too pushy. Don't get too excited or nosey about this. Sometimes L. trying something is like coming up on a wild animal in the bushes. If you make a sound, or move too quickly, he'll scurry away quick as a flash.

But L. continued to go to the practice meetings, and he tried out for the 6th grade class team and made it! His team placed second in the finals for his school and, encouraged by this, he went on to try out for the schoolwide team. This was big. Really, really big.

And he made it!

Now he'll get to compete countywide this month, and he stays after school for practices and everything. The other night I was telling someone on the phone about his BOB success. "He decided to do it all on his own," I told my friend. After I hung up with her L., who has supersonic hearing and hears every little conversation anywhere in the house, came out of the office looking a little sheepish.

"You know," he said. "I didn't decide ALL on my own," he admitted.

"That's okay," I said. "What do you mean?"

He'd gone to the first informational meeting, he told me, because he had been looking for a way to get out of eating in the cafeteria that afternoon.

"It was hot dog day," he said. "I hate the smell of the cafeteria on hot dog day."