Monthly Archives: May 2010

I can’t do this much longer…

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I know, I am not allowed to complain. I need to be upbeat, get everything done and be the person who can do it all.

But I can’t.

Dr. Jay has been ill since Thursday. He’s running a low grade fever. He isn’t supposed to get fevers. tell that to his body. He is sick and tired. I have been doing all of the activities with the girls. I am very tired and worn. I have little patience. I need sleep. But that isn’t happening.

I know I can’t complain. I am supposed to just do. But right now, I need to close my eyes and rest

I am really hating May and June this year.

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I remember the good old days, when I had two kids in daycare and dreamed about them going to school. What a fool I was!

I have so many things to deal with this month and next:

  • Luna has an ice skating competition mid-June. She now has to learn her routine with 3 extra lessons. Two of these lessons mean I am taking her away from school for 1 hour. I feel terrible about pulling her from school, but then I figure there are only 16 days left.. She’ll be fine, right? Right? (here’s where you tell me she’ll be FINE)
  • Soleil has her violin recital the first weekend of June. She is missing her next lesson because of Memorial Day. So we’ve rescheduled a lesson for next Wed. I’ll have to figure out my work schedule for that day.
  • We had our big Girl Scout encampment this month. And Luna’s troop had a Butterfly garden event.
  • Birthday parties. Luna’s is coming up. She ends school right before her birthday. And we have 4 parties that we either have gone to or will be going to before school ends.
  • Ice skating for Luna continues until June 21. Hockey clinic for Soleil continues until June 13, Soccer for both ends June 12, violin ends June 7(I hope) and piano somewhere around June 19.
  • The Pan Mass Challenge bike ride for kids is June 19.
  • We have tickets to a Red Sox game and Jimmy Buffet! The same week! Gah!
  • Teaching my kids that the phrase "What the heck!?" is only acceptable if little green aliens land in our yard and not acceptable to say when you are told it is dinner time.
  • Finally, the week school ends, we are cruising off to NC to visit my parents and to celebrate Luna’s 6th birthday. We need a little time away…

 

Coming soon…How to lose oneself while living the life you dreamed or "Now what?"

Lunar Tides

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We are going through a very rough patch with Luna right now. She has always been a very external emotional person. She takes her anger out on other people, she exercises her lungs often and well, and she fails to comprehend that other people have emotions too. Ah- the joys of being 5.

Okay, maybe I am being too harsh on that last one. All children under 6 have no concept of selfishness. The universe still revolves around them. We tell them to share, we talk about how our friends feel when we are selfish, but the truth is, the cognitive abilities of young children are just not there to work well with empathy. I know this. Wait, my BRAIN knows this. The parent who is holding the doorknob of her door while she is grabbing the handle and screaming "I…AM…CALM…I…WANT…TV!" at the top of her lungs wants her to figure this out NOW!

She was the biter in the toddler classroom. When her friends upset her, she would just go for the jugular, or the hand. She liked biting hands or shoulders. We had to hold her tightly to prevent her from biting us. She would sometimes calm and then when I hugged her, she would bite my shoulder. It took a long time, months, of working on getting her to use words instead of teeth or hands to explain her displeasure.

Now, I feel like we are back at square one. Soleil feels ignored, but she is a wonderfully empathic person. She was built with empathy and her issues were trying to balance her selfish nature with her empathy. Until she was 6, the selfish would win out and her concerns of others would fall down. Somewhere, in her summer she turned 6, there was a rapid change. I can only hope that this happens to Luna as well.

Luna turns 6 in 1 month. We’re torn between thinking "She’s only 5" and "damn it! She’s almost finished kindergarten" and even her teacher points out that she is one of the least sharing and immature about sharing in her class. It’s hard to find her. And I know SHE is having trouble finding her. I KNOW in my heart that she wants to learn how to calm. We are giving her lots of tools, but I don’t know if she understands what angers her.

I mentioned this issue on face book (in 1 sentence form) and someone commented that screaming was not allowed in her house. I would love to know how to do that. We already take away privileges if she screams. We have natural consequences (I can’t read as long of a book if she spends 15 minutes screaming. That’s 15 minutes I can’t read). We try to appeal to her selfish nature. It hasn’t been working.

We had different issues with Soleil at this age. But now? We have to focus on Luna. And that is hard. So hard to teach her who she is and how to calm down.

Let’s see…

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The end of the school year always get crazy. Even before the kids were in school, work got crazy. Now we get a full brunt of madness!

We had the spring concert at the elementary school today. We have Luna’s 6 year old checkup (ah!). We have finished Hebrew school for the year. We have soccer and hockey and piano this weekend, but these should be done mid-June. Luna has an ice skating competetion coming up June 13. She’s actually skating to music! Eek!

We are actually finishing the school year with a trip to my parents. They want us to visit once a year, so I prefer the last week of June. The weather is nicer and not too hot, the kids don’t stress about school and we can all just try to relax. This year, I only have the trip to North Carolina (where I may meet S of pot and kettle) and a trip to Disney at the end of the summer because Dr. Jay has a work meeting in Seattle. The rest of the summer? Home. I will plan a whale watch, a trip to the local amusement park, a trip to the Boston Harbor Islands, a canoe trip. But it will all be home. Ah…..

 

What is your summer shaping up to be?

Blue skies?

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Today is busy!

Birthday party, last day of Temple School, Girl Scout Parent Meeting and start packing for Girl Scout camping weekend for the girls. Our town does a town wide encampment. This year, both girls are going during the day! And Soleil is staying overnight! This means Dr. Jay and I have an entire day to ourselves! At home! With no kids!  I am so giddy. We’ve never had more than 20 minutes except for a few days that we took off work together.

In the meantime, work is normal, overloaded.

Girl Scouts are closing down for the year, and we are getting mighty overwhelmed with end of the year activities. I am desperate for summer. I need the quieter weekends, the calm of the steady camp weeks, the ice cream…

What are you looking forward to this year?

More to write!

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I’ve been accepted as an editor over at Type-A-Mom for the working mothers community. How exciting! I hope this helps me verbalize my own issues with work, the conflicts of being a parent and an employee. I want to understand (for myself) when those roles are not mutually exclusive and when they are to be separated.

I have been wanting to work on my writing for a while, but this gets difficult. I can’t find time at nights, I have little time during the days and I can’t seem to find a time that is neither night nor day. I will try to find a fine line and write something up at home tonight. Or not!! I have a ton of clean up to do, laundry to get reset and Girl Scout patches to sew onto two uniforms! 

I wonder how many moms do get caught in our current culture clash. How do you be a productive worker and a caring and present mother? Can you do both? What happens when your job is like mine, 9-5 doesn’t exist. When the spacecraft calls, we jump! When a far away galaxy has a sudden gamma ray burst and an astronomer requests that we move our telescope to observe it, we have to respond, sometimes within 24 hours or less to change the plans to deal with this. I am on call 7 days out of 3 to 4 weeks. The lead of our group drops out of the rotation every few times, so I can be on call with only 14 days off in between.

How do I parent when these situations arise? I remember in January, I was on the couch, telephone on my side, computer on my lap and Soleil woke up and wandered out to the couch. I was dealing with a situation where our instrument had rebooted and we didn’t understand why. It was 6 am. I let her curl up with me and I explained what I was looking at, how I knew there was a problem, and then explained that Mom might have to be pretty busy that day. Turns out I didn’t, but my multiple roles clashed there.

Oh, I am getting excited! This is going to be a trip!

progression

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On the thyroid front, I got my latest numbers and I am still hypo, 3.96. However, I am far more stable with the new set of meds. We just have to mess with the doses now.

On the weight loss front, I am down a total of 5.4lbs. Of course, it wouldn’t be so low if I hadn’t been ill over the weekend. There is something to be said for puking your guts out. At first I thought it was the bad water supply, (The main water supply to Boston had a major break and most communities had the possibility of contaminated water). however, our town switched to well water quickly and we were safe. I am still AMAZED at how stupid people can be.

The issue was that we had to switch to a secondary water supply that is filtered, but not treated to remove bacteria. Of course, it is the time of year that geese seem to take dumps everywhere, so there is a real possibility of having e coli and other bacteria in the untreated water. What to do? Panic and run out to the store and buy all of the bottled water you can! Or- suck it up and just boil a few gallons at a time and use that. Hello? A rapid boil for 5 minutes will kill about every microorganism out there. That’s what you can do if you are unsure of water safety. Not go and collect a ton of new bottles to toss in the trash.

Work marches on. Less stress here despite more software bugs.

I appreciate the comments on homework. I did print out some math sheets for Soleil and she gobbled them up. She showed me what she was being taught, and I showed her some simple tricks. I also explained how the method she is using requires her to memorize subtractions of a single digit from the numbers 19 through 10. She got that. For the longest time she’s been fighting memorizing those math facts. Now she sees the importance of them.

I really wish I could push for less homework. Even Luna came home with new homework this week. A bingo game where she needs to learn seeing groups of objects as numbers without counting each one. Oy… I quizzed Soleil on her spelling questions at dinner last night. When she got annoyed about "connect" and the "ct" sound, I explained that if she gets the idea of "ct" in her head, then she can spell "detect, select, collect" etc. I think I will keep spelling up over the summer too.

I forget that kids forget things over the summer, even if they are bright.

 Here’s hoping my food stays down today!