Where’s my sanity? October 16, 2007
Posted by spacemom in : Current Affairs, Parenting 101 , trackbackHmm, There is a theme lately….My sanity is gone. I think that is it!
Things, in general are going well at the Space House. We have made significant progress in several projects around the house. The railing for the downstairs stairwell is up and solid, so Jay’s Father can’t rip it out of the wall this time. The new light fixture over the main stairwell is up and filled with CFLs, so I don’t feel guilty about using it all of the time. Soleil’s new Elfa closet system is up and I love it!
I am still at a loss of what to do about school work. Soleil comes home with so much paper from school. I don’t want to recycle it all, I don’t want to keep it all. I don’t have time to scan it all for future generations. I just don’t know what to do? I also find little notes from the school mingling with her papers. Drives me batty! I often miss them and then miss the date. Just last night, I found the paper that the teacher sent home about teacher/parent conferences. It is due today. I filled it out at breakfast.
Luna did something that blew me away yesterday. She wrote her name! Yes! Her name is only 4 letters long, but she really did it! She wrote it out and got all of the letters correctly written, nothing backwards and in the right order. She has known how to spell her name, but to make the connection between the letters and writing it out? Not until yesterday!
I am trying to just enjoy where the kids are in life. Where Soleil is learning more and more to read. Where she calls up stairs when she is watching TV to ask for definitions. Where Luna is trying hard to learn how to read letters and make the sounds. I suspect she will be reading sooner than Soleil was, mostly because Soleil is teaching her too. I am enjoying watching them run and play, work out issues and just be. But it is hard. Parenting is so much harder than I thought. The time commitment is so huge. I mean, yeah, you know you are in this for the long run, but for the bathroom breaks too? OR overnights? Or never getting to sleep past 6:30am again in your life?
I just took a break from this post to talk to one of the scientists. She had breast cancer when Luna was 1, so I avoided her like the plague since Luna was often emitting green snot from various orifices. I just found out that she also had cancer of the fallopian tubes. This bites. I wish cancer would just go away. AWAY! Too many people have it, had it, etc. But we didn’t just talk about science and cancer. We talked about PEOPLE. How people who work together don’t KNOW each other. How that is hard. How stressed we all are. How women in particular are stressed in the workplace and in science in general.
And now my brain is on a different path….
Comments»
You do get to sleep past 6:30 eventually — I’ve actually gotten to sleep in until 9 or 10 on some weekends! Although for some reason, my big girl has been coming into my room in the middle of the night lately to inform me that her bed isn’t comfortable. I’m not sure what she thinks I can do about that at 2:45 in the morning …
For the mountains of school paper, I have a folder on the top shelf of my closet where I tuck away the noteworthy stuff. The rest gets pitched immediately. It gets easier to be selective as the child’s school career progresses: in kindergarten, I kept a lot more (baby’s first math paper!) but at this point, I’ve seen a *lot* of crafts and worksheets.
I also recommend going through the entire backpack and any folders in it every night. When G was in first grade, a mom came up to me at school one day and said “See you at the party on Saturday,” and I was all, “What party?” It turned out that G had gotten a birthday-party invitation two weeks before and it had been riding around in the bottom of her backpack ever since. Oops.
Also, congratulations to Luna on writing her name — that’s a fantastic achievement!
Wow, congratulations Luna, that’s huge!
And on the backpack thing, I go through Itai’s every night too. I’ve caught two invitations that way, and since they’re usually only delivered a few days before there’s not much room for error.
Take a picture! Crafts take up so much space so I take pictures of the kids holding them (making sure the camera shows the date on the photo). They then eventually get stored on a computer and when the kids wanted to show grandparents, etc., then it was easy to flash them up on the PC. Some have even been turned into screensavers! But the original objects d’ arte has long been discarded. As for workbooks, etc., I collect them in a pile and about twice a year go through and discard with the kids. Sometimes it is easier for them to throw away something than for me! And if there is a pile left over, it gets gone through just prior to the beginning of a new school year. Now I have just a couple of the more memorable items from the earlier school years, and a pile from last year that will be sorted once again next year. As time goes on, it does get easier to throw things away!
One note though, do keep the first piece of paper where Luna wrote her name. Be sure and date and notate it. It will be something you treasure and torture her with later!
I’m trying to institute a new regimen of “pick ONE picture to post on the fridge ONCE per week and all the rest gets tossed”. I don’t know how well it’s going to work. For some reason, the dotter has decided that *Tuesday* is the day for this; I was thinking (silly me!) of Friday, since that’s the day we get all the kiddo’s creations from the week at school.
I will third the idea of going through the entire backpack. Not only do you find things that are supposed to come home and inform you, you find out which things didn’t make it in to school (library books, notes to the teacher about paying for hot lunches, stuff like that).
Good on Luna!
And I wist for the days of sleeping in on the weekends. We have managed to get the dotter to hold on until almost 8, but there are limits…