Life's been good to me so far

I'm so glad it's the weekend.

I hate waking up in the mornings, and it's been clear for the last couple of years that there is no (weekday) end in sight for as long as I have kids in the house. I am consciously setting up my future so that I can stay up at late as I want and totally avoid mornings, and that is not a joke. My ideal would be to see people for counseling/do a late shift in a mental health facility/teach classes, in the afternoons and evenings, and write at night. I have a personal life goal of not seeing 7 am for an entire decade.

For the last couple of weeks (summer schedule has been constantly in flux), my morning routine has been this nonsense involving waking Aaron up at 7:30, waking Isaac, Jake and Elise up at 8, getting Aaron to a carpooling point in town for his ride by 8:30, and having the little kids to music camp by 9. Somewhere in there I cook and serve some kind of breakfast and pack 4 lunches, and try to give out a lot of hugs and make sure nobody is forgetting anything. Then I come home and wake up Annie, have breakfast with her, and we talk about things she's supposed to get done that day. M, W and F I'm here with her. Tuesday and Thursday I go to college all day, and Grant is here working from home. College feels like a lot at the moment, because I had multiple papers due this week, am participating in a couple of research studies for extra credit, and next week is finals.

I'm also sick with something minor that involves a cough, which has made my coffee reliance reach new heights. The other day Grant laughed when he saw my huge mug and asked if I'm drinking from punch bowls, now.

The revamp of Annie's privileges and guidelines and all, that I mentioned a couple of entries back, is going pretty well. She's burning through a lot more math and science than usual, anyway. Monday when she was done with chores and regular assignments, we watched Slumdog Millionaire together, pausing periodically to convert rupees to dollars on my phone or explain some concept like what the Taj Mahal is. She loved it. It's the sort of thing I can only do when Aaron's out of the house because I am not ready to field the months of woe and sleeplessness when he finds out there are little kids living in trash piles and being purposely disfigured so that they can get more change from tourists :/ We also listened to and read this story on NPR about people in slums using Google Maps to make others aware of the realities of slums, and sometimes advocate for change.

I get really frustrated with how quick Annie is to just do nothing, if people are not on her to do shit, and also how quick she is to do things she is not supposed to, if for one damn minute we are not leaping to capital-C Consequences. She's already got that adolescent dichotomy down pat, where kids are uber helpful and proactive and resourceful OUT of the house but act like butt nuggets for their parents. At Girl Scout camp, she was stacking chairs and sweeping floors and helping little kids with crafts and singalongs all day every day. At derby she does anything Chuck and Vee (coaches) tell her to, for hours of sweaty, bruising relentlessness. This is the case with PATH enrichment classes and cello rehearsals - she is interested in all kinds of volunteer jobs, too. At home, she wants to do nothing.

This is actually one of my biggest areas of skepticism surrounding homeschool; the teenage battle between the adult self (that tends to come out in the world) and the baby self (that tends to dominate at home) really makes me want to drop her off with some other adults she'll be more eager to impress, more often. I hate hawk-watching and I hate nagging, a lot, as a parent. I mean all the kids to some degree try to get away with stuff that is not really ok if they can, but I think it seems more irritating with Ananda because she is so intelligent and well spoken that it seems avoidable (and intentional), in her case. It's also amped up significantly in the last 6 months, like ANYTHING she can manage to do - watching the next episode of a show she's into without asking or me seeming to notice, for instance, leads within one week to me realizing she's streaming whole seasons all day every day, and then trying to play dumb like, "What? You said this show is ok for me to watch" when I question it.

It can be (to me) surprisingly hard to really draw a line in the sand. She is such a whole and complex person, standing there my same height, and we'll have been getting along great and she's so obviously distressed and distant and resentful when I force issues ("you have to ask to watch a show or movie so that I know you have all your chores and schoolwork done first and aren't turning into a mold-covered sloth, this is your warning that the next time it happens without asking your laptop is going in my closet for a week, blah blah blah"). I do it anyway, obviously, it can just blow as much for me as it does for her. Wednesday we had already taken so many things away to get her schoolwork back where it belongs, and her screen time under control, and then I was at this loss when it was DAY TWO of her "putting away the laundry", and hours in, after 3 warnings she was still just sitting out there trying to watch her brothers play or talk to Elise or look at a book or anything but actually sort the piles of clothes she was surrounded by. I had to have her put her phone in my bedroom for the next 24 hours AND threaten that she was not going to be going to meet her friends for lunch like she'd planned, if it wasn't done before a set timer went off, before she would even sigh and get on with it.

I feel like I need a giant spatula to slip under her and flip her onto her damned feet, sometimes.

She made me laugh so hard, the other afternoon. Aaron thought one of our chickens looked sick or something, and she (the hen) was looking kind of bad, but I thought she might be hot and we misted them all with water. I said, "Maybe she has some problem she was born with that we can't help, Aaron, or maybe she ate some bad bugs or developed an issue or who knows..." and Annie said, "Or maybe she's a chicken, and so she just drops dead randomly." I laughed SO hard. It's horrible, I know, but every chicken owner I know has the same issues (any random stray dog or cat or bird of prey or raccoon or ANYTHING wants to eat them, they are so stupid and try to run away from home often, if you don't dip baby chicks' beaks into any new water dish to show them the water they will just dehydrate, sometimes one suddenly kills another one - it's crazy). Aaron was scandalized, and she was like, "Aaron when we went to the feed store looking at chicks we saw a breed you HAVE to kill before it grows up, because they're bred to get so fat that their legs cannot support their weight by the time they're grown." Which is true, and also (really) horrible. I don't know, man.

Her lunch out with people was great. She has amazing friends that I really like and feel good about. I was thinking how fortunate she seems to have found such great WAY OLDER kids, since way older tend to be the only ones she relates to and acts comfortable with. This "lunch followed by pet store followed by Izzy's house" afternoon really underscores this - it was Francois and Izzy (siblings, 18 and 15), Joe (18), Mia (18) - and Annie (13. Barely). They are all teenagers we've known for at least a couple of years, and Izzy is the one in the group that Annie is closest with, but. I dunno. The age gap is going to start to close in the coming years because all the oldest TLC kids are going away to college. Her derby team is all 11-16 year olds, and she tends to hang out with a 10 year old at GMYS. *shrug*

I love that those 18 year olds, and the others she knows, have to study and go to class all the time because they're all in dual enrollment. Most of them also either work or volunteer. Because they're cool people she wants to be like, it's great motivating stuff when we talk about how important it is for her to get used to studying, more assignments, etc NOW.

She totally flipped tonight because we were talking about how she's going into the 8th grade this year, meaning she'll be (in her words) IN HIGH SCHOOL NEXT YEAR. She was slightly disturbed, I think :p

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I'm super fucking over our van at the moment, since the AC up front is broken - it works in the back, so the kids have AC, so we've never prioritized fixing it like we would if they were suffering. No, it's just us sweltering in the front on our own (and the smaller car has good AC), so we deal since there's always something we'd rather spend that couple hundred bucks on. There have been way too many times I find myself ripping my wind-tangled hair out brushing it or changing gross clothes as soon as I walk in the door, after being on the highway. It keeps being 97 degrees in the afternoons. The worst is when the pressure and humidity hit their peaks just before it rains. UGH. It's like being squeezed through some kind of vice, and then on the other side when it starts to pour we lose about 20 degrees in just a few minutes.

I took Ananda and Aaron to a new antique store that was pretty great, this afternoon. Here's a tumblr picture entry about it.

I've been thinking a lot about charity we can get involved with as a family, today. Over the last few months I've heard (directly and indirectly) about childhood hunger in our county several times - basically, lots of kids are ONLY reliably eating free breakfast and lunch, at school, and/or their families struggle big time with bills during summer vacation because they have to buy those additional meals. This is something that I'm trying to address with as much sensitivity as possible, with the little kids, since they are having recurring issues with other kids begging for snacks out of their packed lunches at music camp (which also has a free lunch option for people who qualify, that about half the kids there are using). Isaac and Elise both also felt bad for kids who didn't have snacks for snack time in school, last year, and would sometimes take extra for friends. Obviously I cannot always afford to feed every kid in town, but the newspaper ran something not long ago with a long list of food distributors and I think I'm going to call around and see what is needed and how I can include the kids in helping to fill some of those gaps. For now I am proud of them for no longer complaining about being sick of clementines and pistachios and granola bars, and probably giving in more than I really should when they ask to take extra for other people.

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I've been having this wack existential crisis bullshit. I don't know what my deal is, but I lie down in bed at night and just get so crushingly sad and feel so freaked out, thinking of how each of my kids are mortal and every single person I know is going to die eventually, and...it's terrible. I move away from Grant's body, imagining it rotting one day, as it is really going to. It's terrible! I can have a great day and still end up reading myself to sleep after I stop crying, just to distract me. On the one hand I think I'm crazy, and on the other hand I think we're all crazy, like - HOW is it that EVERYONE isn't ALWAYS having a crisis about the fact that we're all going to die?! And it can happen anytime?! I understand that it's not productive, but not how we don't do it regardless.

I think the biggest reason I am an Anne Rice fan is that Lestat, one of her most ongoing and recurring characters, had this huge mortality freakout while he was still human that perfectly captured the fears and feelings and melodramatic poetry I already had, then (at 15ish) about time, and death, and impermanence, and...it's like a swelling, desperate longing in the background and a cresting panic in the foreground, all silent in your brain as everything goes on as usual around you, until the sight of a lone tree in a field makes you burst into tears and you don't even know why.

Ananda, for instance, was a baby. A little baby. The other night I laid down with Elise on her bed in their room for awhile, because she wanted me to, and just lying in that very teenage bedroom that Ananda has completely taken dictatorship over - dim with the shifting light of a lava lamp and some emo ass nice music on, with shit all over the walls - took me back to it being ME experiencing everything in the world for the first time, and I see how fast Annie will be through the other side of it, and then my head explodes.

Not helping: Adrian, A&A's good friend from PATH, just fell 20 feet off some cliff and broke both of his lower leg bones (tibia and fibula) - they snapped totally in half, the x-rays are brutal. He spent the afternoon in surgery and now has titanium pins in his leg for the next 6-12 months. Poor Cybele (his mom) was posting the pictures of him lying there on a stretcher, surrounded by paramedics, on facebook, from where she was ACROSS THE COUNTRY (Adrian has been staying at his grandparents' house for a couple of weeks).
AND, a girl from Ananda's roller derby team has been out sick a lot these past months, and is now admitted to Miami Children's Hospital. We don't know what's wrong yet, just that she has had to have fluid drained from her brain and isn't getting out right away :/ Teammates are all meeting up there tomorrow morning, to visit and bring her things...

Those situations were both today, though. My cresting crisis has been all week, and I don't know what's stirring it up.

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I'm also trying to have nice, soft feet for the first time in my life. I've typically been barefoot or in flip flops all day erryday, since I was toddlin' along in a diaper, and I usually have really thick callouses that I consider beneficial and a-ok. I can walk around outside and it doesn't hurt, which is cool. Nothing hurts my feet, which almost never seem sweaty or smell bad, since they are encased in their own natural leather, as it were. I have never understood foot fetishes or the idea that your feet, the things you walk on the ground with, are supposed to be pretty. They're feet! Why do you want them all raw and vulnerable? I make fun of Grant for having "tender vittles" (which is actually a kind of cat food). We do too many rocky beaches where the sand is a million degrees!

Anyway. There are two reasons I am conducting this soft experiment now, which thus far involves ped eggs, foot files, heal cream, oil, lotion and (gag) socks.

1.) For the last couple of years, my feet have taken their traditional leathery reptillian qualities to new levels, that are gettin annoying. I get actual deep CRACKS on my heels now, if I don't try not to, which cause irritating problems by catching on the sheets and causing my tights to run, that I am not into. That sharp dinosaur shit is also not nice on the calves of anyone trying to sleep. I don't know why my dumb skin couldn't leave well enough alone.

2.) Ever since I got shin splints in New York, Grant periodically gives me pretty amazing foot rubs that make my eyes roll back in my head. And, I discovered at some point over the last year's worth of mornings, that I wake up with really sensitive and almost erogenous feet. I find myself rubbing the arches, aka the only parts with semi-normal nerve endings, all around the top of the opposite foot and my sheets, thinking, "What the heck is going on here? Why is this so awesome?" I have an online friend who is far more brazenly open than I am about sex on her blog(s), who talked about actually managing to have an orgasm from rubbing the soles of her feet on her bedsheets for a long and patient enough time. I want in on this weird action I didn't know existed. I at least want some full sensation foot rubs.

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I made some peach cobbler tonight that I was pretty happy with. We ate it with coconut (So Delicious) vanilla ice cream. Om. Jake actually said to me, "Mom, thank you so much for making this dessert. I really appreciate you cooking this." Elise added, "I've never eaten anything this good in my entire life."

My last week was characterized in many ways by our fridge being broken. It's kind of unreal what an upset to life it was. Financially, ugh, it was awful tossing hundreds of dollars in food in the trash (after a day of bizarre hodge podge "don't let things go to waste!!" eating) - and then buying by the meal for a family of 7 is so crazily expensive. I spent what I usually would on three weeks worth of groceries. Finally, going shopping today with it fixed, I was starting from scratch and had to spend way more than normal to replenish. My sister was absolutely wonderful despite having an (attachment parented) infant, an (intense) toddler and a (high needs) preschooler; she came over with everything necessary and helped cook us dinner one night, brought me $40 out of the blue another day because she unexpectedly won money from a scratch-off, and then today when we were talking about shopping on the phone she had me run by her house for her surplus carrots, celery, butter and olive oil...apparently shopping in bulk for a smaller, younger family yields "extra," a concept I'm unfamiliar with.

I still spent $705 at BJ's today...despite $50 worth of coupons...but we'll come to that later.

Logistically, I was going to the store 1-3 times per day, starting first thing in the morning before kids were up, as well as dealing with lovely side effects like the cooler I filled with ice leaking all over our dining room, and scrubbing out our fridge and freezer which STANK once they'd been sealed up room temperature for 2 days. There was also the 2 hour google-a-thon researching what we could do to fix it...because we really could not afford to call someone out, at all -

Which is partially because of things like how we had to have the van and the car at Goodyear TWICE EACH last month, and still the car has NO AC O_O - and we got a letter on the front door one day, saying the city had detected a huge spike in our water consumption due to a 3 gallon per minute leak on our side that we were responsible for both fixing, and paying for the inflated use bill they'd be sending us...that one was enough to send a cold chill down my spine. THREE GALLONS PER MINUTE? Luckily we have a plumber neighbor who helped us out...and luckily they know us at Goodyear and the biggest car repair bill...was able to be put on a payment plan. Suffice to say it is not a happy money time.

Grant is also working extreme hours, with his extreme commute, so for the most part I'm on my own with the kids. And, this week, the fridge.

Which is why I feel like some kind of awesome fucking ninja because I was able to diagnose our problem (pull-out bottom freezer was off track, leading to an insufficient seal when closed, causing the compressor to go crazy and freeze through all the pipes and tubes), do the initial experimental cure (get the fridge unplugged and then watch as, sure enough, copious amounts of gross water pooled under it over the next 24 hours), and then put the freezer back together properly so that it wouldn't happen again.

I do not normally stop to appreciate refrigeration unless we've just had a hurricane. And there is a possible one on the way - that would hit while my husband is out of the state for his job - and so I'm familiarizing myself with our shutters and lining up a mental list of people to call if I need help.

Anyway, I really appreciate my fridge right now. It seems especially luxurious, being sparkling clean on the inside and only filled with brand new things we really wanted in there.

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I've been devoting a lot of mental energy, research, conversation, paperwork and calls/emails to the kids' educations for the coming year, too. I'm outsourcing more than I ever have before, but I feel really good about each of them getting stuff that's really tailored to their best interests. I also feel some level of relief that I'm not solely responsible for all of it, especially since the coming school year features my surgery.

Ananda - Staying homeschooled, but now with Marine Science, U.S. Government, Latin and guitar online via Florida Virtual Schools K-12 program, which is a pretty cool resource. She'll have teachers she's emailing and talking to on the phone and be responsible for turning in a certain amount of work per week, which for guitar will include audio and video recording. The science course has a lot of multimedia content, library reading and a field trip. She's using Grant's guitar for this. We're sticking with Kumon math, since she loves it, and will be focusing most of language arts on book reports and analyses, since she reads constantly. She was able to audition into GMYS's Young Mozarts during camp this summer, so I'm trying to figure out some wild way to get a freakin' cello of her own now (they're only provided by GMYS during the preparatory classes and beginner camps). There are some rent to own programs in the area that might work...sort of...since I'm gonna make them. I'm also making her take long walks and bike rides with me often because she can get really, reeeeally sedentary if I let her. I'm on the lookout for a PE program for her, actually, much to her dismay.

Aaron - Staying homeschooled, but doing Earth Science, U.S. Government, latin and (standard 6th grade) math online via Virtual School. I've been stocking him up throughout the summer with reading he likes, so he can do more writing for me based off of it - Aaron hates fiction but loves poetry, comics and general nonfiction. Right now he has a lot of new Shel Silverstein and Calvin and Hobbes, a thick stack of National Geographic back issues, and a few other odd things (like the Book of Useful Information). He's been promised science experiments and will be auditioning for Young Sousas and Concert Band with GMYS later this month, on flute. He also wants to take their new percussion prep class, and we're still up in the air about him dancing. I'm planning to make him utilize his camera and YouTube account, as well, in several different ways.

Isaac is going to third grade at a local charter school. He's extremely happy to have been placed in a combined 2nd and 3rd grade class with his friend Naja (Kristin's daughter), and one of their two teachers comes very well recommended (don't know the other one). He's going to keep playing violin with GMYS, and is supposed to start counseling again in October (grant funding/rotating sessions and breaks thing...).

Jake is doing 1st grade at home. He's very academically advanced and really creative with his time, and so at 6 I don't plan on doing a ton of structured stuff with him. We have some new BrainQuest and Kumon books we'll work through together, and we'll talk and go out places and all the things we always do. I am trying to get him into martial arts; he does NOT want to do music anymore, and is really eager to do that instead. I've found a place funded by the Children's Trust, which kind of blows my mind - they fund GMYS, and the Institute where Isaac's been evaluated and gotten counseling, AND this? If my books ever get big and I am rolling in cash, they're gonna get a whole lot of it. These martial arts classes still cost money, but it's extremely reasonable.

Elise is attending Kindergarten at the same school as Isaac (and our friends Darrien and Naja, and some of our neighbors, and some of her preschool class...) - it's until 2 instead of 3 like normal school. I wish they offered a half day option, but as it is they do have a lot of early release days throughout the year that are half days (I think I counted 16 on the calendar?). She's also going to start ballet through - GET THIS - a free local outreach of the Thomas Armour Youth Ballet, i.e. the MIAMI CONSERVATORY, like, how is this free and local? The Miami Conservatory is extremely prestigious! And, up in Miami! Anyway, Kristin found out about this and Naj has been going and loving it. Elise has been talking whimsically about ballet for 6 months now, mostly just because it's pretty, and I'm sure she'll have fun. She's also sticking with violin and will be going to those weekly prep classes with Isaac now that she's 5 (she's in beginner GMYS camp with Isaac and Jake right now and doing really well, though she's been home sick mostly cuddling with me and Annie, nursing and reading books for the past two days due to some feverish illness she caught there).

I'm doing my last semester at Miami Dade College this fall, graduating in December. And, we're gonna be continuing with TLC and PATH. We are probably starting the ball rolling to move sometime soon, but it's gonna be a slow rolling ball that involves decisions about selling the house, actually selling a house in this market, finding a new place, etc...I don't expect this to be upon us before New Years at the very earliest, if then. Surgery in the Spring, and I'm applying to UM and FIU to start in the fall of 2013.

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Ananda and Aaron and I sat around the dining table for an hour or so the other night, talking about personality. How so much of it is innate - I was cracking them up with examples of how each of the kids in this family is still so much like they were as an infant, and they were filling me on an episode of Radiolab they listened to with Grant on dna in pregnancy and personality formation - how they think it's really interesting, how exposure to radiation changes your dna and can, thus, change your personality.

I was telling them how after I got out of the hospital last, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was "different." That I thought and felt differently about many things than I had before, far beyond PTSD symptoms. It's harder for me to concentrate now, and yet I have to concentrate much more to accomplish things that didn't use to require focus. My belief systems are different, partially because the whole experience left me questioning everything, down to my identity and the purpose of my life.

There came a point when I started researching sepsis and brain damage, and found tons and tons of information because that is a real thing - an infection travelling through your blood stream means there are a bunch of dangerous bacterium flowing through your brain and trying to take over, just like every other part of your body. Apparently many people have much worse trouble than I do with this; I mean I can still wonder about it, research it, understand what's going on and then make a relevant blog post.

These things are hard to quantify, obviously - we're all getting older and growing and changing as people all the time. But life - not aspects of it, LIFE - feels different to me, now. Since then.

I was telling the kids how I remember very clearly how satisfied and fulfilled I was by cooking big breakfasts and lunches, baking for tea and changing and washing diapers, reading to everyone and sitting by the bathtub while kids played. But I don't feel satisfied and fulfilled that way, anymore. I feel bored out of my mind in the house a lot of the time, restless and angsty, or I get really frustrated with my inability to create structure from thin air without accountability and just waste hours and hours for weeks unless I force myself into some kind of outside-the-house thing. It isn't depression; I'm very happy out of the house doing things and sometimes I'm having a good time, here, too - sometimes a really great time, but...my joy comes from different places, now.

Sepsis brain damage, that's a big thing to consider or take on, I mean...ok...maybe being forced to stop having kids, or maybe my existing kids getting bigger, or maybe so much time doing the same things until it was wearisome, or even having a lot of my autonomy as a mother threatened and taken away (through enforced separation, the inability to lift, etc) have altered my perceptions. Maybe it's all these things!

But Ananda and Aaron knew exactly what I was talking about and thought it made an awful lot of sense. Which is a little sad, and makes me stop and ponder how TERRIBLY TRAGIC and awful it would seem to "old me," that new me is...different. But new me, being different, is pretty ok with the change.

Grant nodded like it wasn't even a surprise as we talked about this, saying "Yeah you're a totally different person," as though that's just very obvious.


Sometimes, here on Livejournal, I worry that I'm going to be disappointing or at least disillusioning to my long term readers - I feel like an imposter in certain ways. But, it is what it is.


I have tons more to say, but my eyes are nearly crossing from tiredness AND my sister has completely distracted me via facebook chat :p