Professor Mom

Aliki
Chronicles the life of a mom, teacher, and writer trying to stay sane amid the chaos of daily life.

archives

August 31, 2010
Forty-one
That's me today: forty-one. If you've been reading faithfully for some time, you might remember I had a really hard time turning forty last year. I also had a hard time turning thirty-nine the year before. But this year--this year forty-one doesn't feel so bad. Friends told me last year that turning that milestone birthday would feel difficult, but that the years after that wouldn't feel as bad--they'd settle around me, one friend advised me, like a soft, familiar pair of pants--the pair you love to change into after a long day at work. One friend told me that her forties have been her best...
Birthdays
August 30, 2010
Forbidden fruits
We went to two parties in one day on Saturday--two pool parties. They were both at different pools and they both featured kids and adults having a good time. They also both featured bowls of those radioactive-colored Utz orange cheese balls--you know, the ones you feel drawn to even though you know something that orange just can't be good for you (unless it's an actual orange). It was funny because I hadn't seen those puffy cheese balls in awhile and there they were, at two different parties in two different parts of town. It was also interesting how the children were drawn to the cheese...
Children, Dads, Food for Thought, Moms, Parenting, Vegetarianism
August 27, 2010
Necessary losses
In the car yesterday, riding home from a dentist's appointment, L. and I got to talking about "the old days." "This is really nice," L. said to me. "You know, just you and me spending time together, like it used to be." "I love doing this," I told him. "I really miss how that used to be," L. said. "Do you miss it, too?" Oh, L., how I miss it. How I miss it with every fiber of my being. And I told him so. L. wanted to know if he'd have "time off" between elementary school and middle school; not just the summer, but a whole year, maybe, like it used to be, a long, long time ago when L. was very...
Children, Dads, Growing Up Is Hard to Do, Moms, Parenting, Social & Emotional Issues, Unbearable Lightness
August 26, 2010
My dues
Some years ago, around semester-planning time, the former department chair of mine (no longer at my college), sent the traditional e-mail out to faculty asking for their preferred schedules for that next semester. I dutifully sent mine off, and a few days later received a short e-mail back from her. In it, she stated that I didn't have the "right" to make specific schedule requests because I hadn't "paid my dues" yet. Those were her exact words. I still have the e-mail. Sometimes you are so floored by people's responses to things that you can't even process the words. My mind was stuck on the...
Children. Moms, Juggling, Parenting, Teaching, Work
August 25, 2010
First day, first grade
My littlest child, my last child, my youngest, is headed off to first grade today. All around the blogisphere this week, and next, moms and dads everywhere are surely writing wistful/happy/teary/celebratory posts about this time of the year. It's a time for mixed emotions--relief that the long, unstructured summer days have come to an end; sadness and regret that the long, unstructured summer days have come to an end. Joy over this new milestone--a new grade, a new school year; nostalgia for the last one. Every parent celebrates this new school year, and every parent mourns it, too. I...
Children, Dads, Growing Up Is Hard to Do, Milestones, Moms, Parenting, School Daze
August 24, 2010
Bag of tricks: thirteen ways to raise a READER
Have you seen this? I was in the library with the kids the other day, waiting for L. to secure all the books on the oil industry he could carry out of there, and I saw that someone had framed "Thirteen Ways to Raise a Nonreader" and set it out on one of the bookshelves. I had to look closely: how to raise a nonreader? Coincidentally, last week I had the usual first-day-of-class discussion with my students on reading versus nonreading. I asked them: "How many of you consider yourselves readers?" Some hands shot up. "How many of you remember being read to when you were younger?" Fewer hands,...
Books, Children, Dads, Family, Moms, Parenting, Teaching
August 23, 2010
The well-traveled herbs
The last trip Scott and I made to Greece without kids, a year before I became pregnant with L., we brought back a huge bouquet of mountain oregano, picked from the fields outside the village where my parents have a summer house. We crammed the bouquet into our carry-on bag, without thinking about how strong dried oregano might smell in all its crumbling glory, inside the front pocket of a backpack. We had a day-long stopover in London, and decided to check our bags in lockers at the airport, so we could walk around the city. Scott had never been to London before and I will always jump at...
Character Sketches, Children, Cooking, Family, Greece, Memories, Parenting
August 20, 2010
Gifts
I made it through the first week of classes. I didn't doubt that I would, really, but it's been a tough week. I've been running on not-enough-sleep, and I tend to forget, over the summer, just how much hard work it is to stand up in front of classes again. I also have a head cold. Despite all this, it doesn't take long for me to remember how much I love this time of the year. I love walking across campus and seeing old and familiar faces--students from this past summer, and from semesters ago, too. I love to hear them call my name (I love that they still remember my name!), and I love to walk...
Children, Family, Juggling, Parenting, Work
August 19, 2010
By proxy
The parents in our Asperger's Support Group have an inside sort of joke between ourselves: it's called "Asperger's/anxiety/fill-in-the-blank-by-proxy" and we use it to jokingly refer to the behaviors of siblings that mimic those of their brothers and sisters who are on the spectrum. The by-proxy phenomenon happens a lot among younger siblings--a younger brother, for instance, may watch his older brother and develop some of the same rigid behavior patterns. A younger sister might absorb some of her brother's anxieties about any number of things, and take them on as her own. T. has been...
Growing Up Is Hard to Do, Parenting, School Daze, Siblings, Social & Emotional Issues, Special Needs
August 18, 2010
Amdo bread
We eat a lot of bread in this family--rightly or wrongly. I know bread is full of carbs, but I grew up with bread as a mainstay of almost every meal. In Greece, dinner isn't complete unless it comes with a basket of warm bread--crusty on the outside, and sublimely doughy on the inside. Bread is perfect for mopping up savory juices, and for blending the flavors as you eat. Bread is, after all, a staple of life. It's also the case that L. is an avid bread eater. He follows some unwritten yet almost universal rule of many kids on the spectrum with sensory issues in that he gravitates towards...
Baking, Books, Cooking, Food for Thought, Parenting, Recipes
August 17, 2010
Stages
I was checking my mailbox on Friday when my neighbor pulled up alongside our driveway and rolled down her window. We chatted for a few minutes. L. was in the house and I'd had to walk away, because I was close to snapping point. It had been a rough, tough school pick-up and car ride home--L. was a grouchy mess. And when I say grouchy, I mean GROUCHY. I've been doing a lot of walking away lately, and I'm not proud of it. When my kids were younger people used to always tell me how patient I was, although I know for a fact I wasn't always patient. Still, when your kids are babies you tend to...
Children, Growing Up Is Hard to Do, Lessons to Live By, Parenting, Social & Emotional Issues
August 16, 2010
Memory box
Scott and I spent another weekend systematically de-cluttering around us. Last weekend I tackled my closet and the messy piles of shoes. I'm a person who likes a system for organizing the odds and ends of life; I love keeping things in their respective bins and boxes. Maybe I like a tidy life--I like the different parts of my life--past and present--to be in order, so I can find what I'm looking for, when I'm looking for it. This is how I keep my memories, too. I imagine them in boxes in my brain. Memories of childhood, for instance, in an enormous golden bin; memories of my children's infant...
Children, Growing Up Is Hard to Do, Italy, Memories, Parenting, Travel
August 13, 2010
Friends near and far
One of the things that occupied a great part of my mind on Tuesday, was a piece of news we got from some friends and neighbors of ours, parents of T.'s BFF (best friend forever) from school, S. S., they told us, wouldn't be coming back to T.'s school this fall. The news hit me like a ton of bricks, and my heart plunged for T., for she dearly loves her friend S. This news would be, I just knew, one of the first major friend-related disappointments of her young life. Later, after dinner, when L. had bounded away from the table, I took T. onto my lap. We told her the news, that S. would still...
Books, Children, Parenting, Social & Emotional Issues, Unbearable Lightness
August 12, 2010
Detour
L.'s been coming home from school all week long with stacks and stacks of library books: four or five books or more each day. I think he's got eighteen out now since the start of the week. "Are you sure you're supposed to have all these books?" I asked him one afternoon. "Oh yes," he replied. "Fifth graders can check out as many books as they want." Hmmmm....I thought. Really? Another day I asked, "Are you sure you're supposed to go to the library every day?" "Oh yes," he said. "No one told me I couldn't." For L., a rule isn't a rule unless someone explicitly tells him it is. More often than...
Children, Parenting, School Daze, Somebody Pinch Me
August 11, 2010
The lady in white
One day last week, T. and I stopped into a bakery/sandwich shop downtown for a quick bite. It was part of a Mama/T. afternoon out we had planned for some weeks. The sandwich shop is a popular lunch place, but we got there around 11:30, and easily found a booth by the window for the two of us. After about thirty minutes, the lunchtime crowd rolled in, and the family in the booth in front of us left. A well-dressed couple moved in to hawk the table, while the family gathered their belongings and left. The couple seemed a little out-of-place--the woman was extremely well-dressed, in a white lacy...
Character Sketches, Children, Lessons to Live By, Moms, Parenting
August 10, 2010
Taking stock (again)
I spent all day yesterday in faculty workshops and meetings, listening to presentations, and staring at numerous PowerPoint slides, until they all blurred into one. I won't lie and say I had a blast, but I won't lie either and say that a part of me wasn't happy to put on professional clothes again, and be Teacher Me, to mingle with colleagues and friends, and to feel the excitement over a new semester begin to grow around me. Still, it was bittersweet, as it always is. I snuck away during a break after lunch and called Scott. T. has a mini camp this week, and I needed to know how drop-off...
Juggling, Moms, Parenting, Social & Emotional Issues, Students, Teaching, Work
August 9, 2010
Fitting
It's back-to-work day for me today. I woke up at 3:00 am on Saturday night--something I seldom do. I felt weighed down and worried about something--not anything in particular, but a mixed bag of anxiety about L., and about T.'s upcoming school year; about the emotional and physical well-being of my children, with a dose of work worries thrown in for good measure. My emotions around my return to work at the end of the summer break always follow a cyclical pattern--Mama guilt and Mama fears about how my kids will do when I'm gone from them all day; fears that trample a well-worn path around my...
Character Sketches, Children, Growing Up Is Hard to Do, Lessons to Live By, Moms, Parenting
August 6, 2010
Friday snaphsot
Yesterday, as Scott and I were fixing lunch in the kitchen, we overheard T. reading out loud to herself in the other room. She's all about reading out loud this summer--I'm not sure she's ever read a book silently to herself since her reading skills took off this past spring. "I'll miss hearing her read out loud when she goes back to school," Scott said, giving voice to my very thoughts. Hearing T. read out loud has been such a part of our lives this summer. She reads in her room, the family room, the kitchen, even in the bathroom. I don't think I could ever tire of hearing the sweet...
Baking, Children, Cooking, Food for Thought, Parenting, Reading, Recipes
August 5, 2010
The project
On our way back from Maryland and D.C. this past weekend, Scott and I decided we would spend this week--my last week before going back to work on Monday--on a room-by-room de-cluttering and cleaning project. My husband is the grand master of coming up with such projects. He likes systematic projects--ones with finite ending points but with rewarding outcomes. We would, he proposed, spend an hour each day on a different room. We'd clean, and repair anything in that room that needed repairing. It would be a great project to do together--the three of us, in this last week before our schedules...
Childhood Memories, Children, Family, Lessons to Live By, Parenting
August 4, 2010
TLC
On Monday afternoon, right after lunch, and right after Scott and I set up T. with an episode of Martha Speaks for a quiet rest time, and right after I'd settled into my "writing chair" with my MacBook, ready, at long last, to seize a sliver of peace and get some writing done, the phone rang. Of course. Isn't that always the case? It was L.'s school. He had a stomachache and a headache and wanted to talk with me. We spent a good 10 minutes discussing all his symptoms until the kind and patient front desk lady thought enough was enough and she took the phone away. "What should I do?" she asked...
Anxiety, Children, Moms, Parenting, School Daze, Special Needs
August 3, 2010
The whole truth
This weekend we attended the wedding of two men who have known and loved each other for many years now, and who celebrated this love in front of family and friends. The kids have known these two men as a couple for some time now; when they say the name of one, the name of the other always follows. They can't really remember a time when the two weren't together. Weeks ago, when we were driving somewhere in the van, we told the kids we were going to Washington, D.C. to celebrate this wedding. L. asked, incredulously: "They're getting married on the same day?" and then, immediately-- "who are...
Children, Dads, Marriage, Moms, Parenting, Social & Emotional Issues
August 2, 2010
The stuff we remember
I think most parents will agree that there are good travel days with kids, and bad travel days. Some trips go so smoothly you want to pinch yourself: your kids entertain themselves nicely in the backseat, barely argue, and you and your spouse manage to have some good chunks of meaningful (or not even meaningful) conversation along the way. It's so great to have older kids, you tell yourself, remembering those painful trips from years ago when you had to contort your body in extreme ways in order to nurse your unhappy infant while she was still buckled into the car seat. But then there are...
Dads, Moms, Parenting, Road trips, Summer, Travel with Children