Kids are a blessing. And also a pain in the ... tush. That's why a hilarious, tongue-in-cheek "test" on whether a couple is ready for parenthood is quickly going viral. Here are my top 5 favorite parenting preparation tips from the quiz (which was written by an anonymous British[?] blogger):

"Go to the supermarket. Arrange to have your salary directly paid to its head office." No big deal, right?

"Sing songs in the dark until 4 a.m.... Put the alarm on for 5 a.m. Get up when it goes off... Make breakfast... Keep this up for 5 years and LOOK CHEERFUL." Awesome.

"Buy a chocolate ice cream cone and put it in the glove compartment. Leave it there...Get a coin. Insert it into the CD player...Take a box of chocolate biscuits. Mash them into the back seat." Who doesn't love chocolate... everywhere?

"Repeat everything you say at least five times." Say again?

"Make a recording of someone shouting 'Mummy' repeatedly. Important notes: there must not be more than a four-second delay between each Mummy, and include occasional crescendos to the level of a supersonic jet." So special.

And that's just a taste of the "test." (The "Going for a Walk" and "Getting Ready for Work" tips are also great.) Any "Mummy" or mommy, or daddy should appreciate it. Any parents-to-be should, well, curl up in a ball and cry. HA! Just kidding. Sort of.

When you are actually ready for a bundle of joy (or another one), lots of great tips here.

P.S. -- Huge "thank you" to my parents.

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.

And look! The first post ever I wrote for the FE site. T. was four, and L.--how could it be? L. was only seven years old. Monday will be my last day here, so it seems fitting to put up my first post ever for my second-to-last-post.

Happy weekend!

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If you are a parent, or soon-to-be one, or will be one in the future, this has happened, or will happen to you one day:

You are standing in line at your local food store, as I was last week. Your just-turned four year-old is twisting and turning on her heels in the checkout line, singing in her sweet, slightly off-key voice and stopping every now and then to give your legs a squeeze and to pipe up, in her little voice, Mama I love you! The people around you smile to themselves as they listen to you, any anxieties they might have about the speed of the checkout clerk shelved temporarily as they enjoy the sweetness that follows your daughter everywhere she goes. An older woman in front of you—maybe in her upper 60s, or lower 70s, looks down fondly on the two of you and then reaches out to pat you gently on your arm.

Treasure her now while you can, she says, perhaps looking at you wistfully and knowingly over her bifocals. They grow up so fast!

I always smile right back when I hear this and I tell them I know, oh I certainly do know all about this, even though my daughter is four and my son--my first baby, the one who made me a mother--is now a contrary seven-year old, all loose teeth and arms and legs at right angles.

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.

This post was first published in March, 2008. I love going back and reading through old "house" posts. They give me a  chance to reclaim a lost part of myself, and my children's childhoods; plus, what better way to measure how far you've come on a journey, than by looking back at the starting point?

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Yesterday we had some friends come over for the afternoon, and they stayed for dinner. Because we went from ice and snow a week ago to 80-degree weather on Sunday, we headed out with them to a park we haven't been to in years. When we first moved to North Carolina, we rented a house for eight months in a neighborhood near the park. Those days now seem so far away, yet at the same time, close enough to touch. L. was only 13 months old when we first moved into the house--a blue two-story with cedar siding (and lots of woodpecker holes). I was a stay-at-home mom, trapped in suburbia for long, endless, often mind-numbing days without a car.

"What do you think about when you think about that old neighborhood?" my friend asked me in the car, on the way to the park.

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.”

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. 

T. had her first solo performance at school yesterday. She even slept in curlers the night before, so she could have real ringlets for the Big Day. Her class has been working on an "Expressions" project the past few weeks. The assignment was to pick a motto that best describes their values, write up a paragraph describing the motto, and telling why it is important to them, and then they could pick an artistic way to express themselves--through art, music, skits, dance, etc. T. saw the musical Annie (hence the wish for curly hair) on DVD over Christmas and fell in love with the story, and the song "Tomorrow." I think she loves it because the sentiment behind the song so matches her personality: think about tomorrow, look forward to the new day, and don't get weighed down by what goes wrong today. Her motto she picked was: "Don't let today take away your tomorrow" which is her creative variation on my favorite one: "Don't let yesterday take up too much of today"--advice I have to work hard at implementing in my own life. 

T. chose to sing the song "Tomorrow" for her Expressions project, and she's been practicing it for weeks now. L., in true big brother fashion, has gotten pretty good at running from the room with his hands over his ears as soon as he hears the first note of the song. I was so proud of T. yesterday for sitting nervously through over an hour of other children's performances, before she got to stand up on that stage on her own. I was so proud of her for having the courage to sing out the words of the song, without any background music, in front of an audience of her peers, and way too many grown-ups and teachers. I'm not sure I would have had the courage to do that at her age.

I'm reading my way through stacks of letters of introduction that my students wrote last week. While it's a lot of reading, I also enjoy these letters so much. Years ago I realized that if I wanted to get more from my students than a simple "Hi my name is _______ and I'm from ________" I would need to structure the letter assignment and provide them with actual categories to focus on, turning the letter into more of a social location assignment. Since I changed up the assignment, I've been rewarded with extremely detailed and moving letters from students describing--in may cases--challenges and tribulations that far exceed those that any young child or young adult should have to experience.

And so many of my students express, in their letters, what a thrill and relief it is to reinvent themselves by coming to college; to step out of their pasts, as if unzipping from an unwieldy and weighty skin.

I used to always tell my students to leave their baggage at the door when they came to class. Now I've come to realize that such words are too easy, too pat. For some young people, it might be a simple enough act to shrug off their pasts, but for many of my students, it certainly is not. They would have to dig too deep, gouge too painfully at the scars. In the end, your past is a part of you, no matter how you wish it wasn't. And while reinvention can be a life-changing, life-saving move for many, you do always have to acknowledge how much of your past has made you who you are today, even if just to guarantee you won't go back.

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I've been thinking a lot about reinvention. The other day I asked L. if he wanted to stop by his old elementary school to say hi to some of the teachers. He shook his head.