moar books!

I just came home from a routine Target run bearing a "small" stack of books "for my classroom" (okay, I don't really bring David Sedaris in for my seventh graders, it's true. But the others are all young adult books! That's responsible! I mean, it's practically like working--for the YA writer elissa as well as the teacher elissa! See? It's like working DOUBLE TIME!)

David gave me a Look. The same Look he gave me when we were young and adventurous and living on the road with our belongings all in the trunk of our car and my path brought me dangerously close to a bookstore. He didn't say it out loud, but there's a good chance he was thinking that a hefty stack of books was not, in fact, on the List. (The List is mandatory for all Target trips, for all the good it does...that store is pure evil.)

To be fair, David came home yesterday from the library book sale with a pretty hefty stack of his own...I don't honestly think I could live with a man who wasn't at least mostly okay with the fact that my interior decorating skills revolve around arranging bookshelves, crates of books, stacks of books, boxes of books, and a general scattering of books on all available surfaces. Granted, many of those books now feature colorful illustrations of animals wearing overalls, but hey, Monkey's pick at Barnes and Noble the last time we went was The Manchurian Candidate, so perhaps there's hope for the grown-up books to make a comeback soon to the main floor of our home!

So speaking of the library book sale...tomorrow's the day! The BAG SALE! A whole bag of books for only three dollars! A whole room just for MG and YA books...so what if I currently have four full bookcases and a rotating wire rack full of books in my classroom? I'm there.

draft two, in which she sharpens her machete...

So I know I write first drafts like a plague of vicious weeds--a blackberry tangle in the Pacific Northwest, perhaps.

My first pass of editing consists mainly of reading over paragraphs and thinking, "Why the hell is this even here?"

Delete.

Slash and burn.

I used to go in there all tentative--poking at the soil a little, trimming back adverbs. Now I'm more of a clear-cutter. I raze entire acres of this jungle draft. Acrid smoke billows up in my wake.

I'm ruthlessly ripping apart this scene. But I can see something, trickling down through the foliage. Sunshine.

Tiny tendrils of new words uncurl, all the more vivid green against the blank backdrop of my earlier demolition.

Draft Two, in progress. Ten of forty-six scenes are now pruned.

And just in time. I hear a Monkey waking from his nap upstairs.

performance anxiety

So all day yesterday I had this window open. Yeah, this window. The NEW POST window for the blog. I've got a lot to say, some pictures to show, you know. But nothing really...interesting.

Oh, god, not that old thought, I'd say. Delete.

You already told that story somewhere else.

Elsewhere in my online life, I've been talking with people about internet personas for writers. Like, the author website, the facebook page, the author blog, the interviews, you know. Your author brand. Branding yourself.

It all makes sense. Writing novels is not about only writing novels, or not if your goal is to publish novels. To sell novels.

An author's online presence can be huge. So okay. But that's scary. Here I am, puttering around on my little blog, thinking, but oh no! What if posting a picture of the Monkey after getting into a rumble at daycare:
makes people not want to read my books??!? (he was smacked in the face with a plastic train track, I guess? Monkey is badass.)

What if I post a bad review of a book on my LibraryThing account and make people not want to buy my book? Or not want to blurb my book? Or simply hate me forever? Do I need to stop reviewing books in order to not offend someone I'm trying to impress?

Or if there's a really strange blog at an address similar to my name, and people think it's me?

What if I say something OFF-BRAND?

HA.

So I've given it some thought, and I've decided I can't really handle having an "internet persona"--I'll just be a person on the internet. A person who sometimes is funny and sometimes is dull and sometimes posts cute pictures of her kid. And I have corners of the internet for being a mom and corners for being a writer and corners where I write my teaching blog, too. And places like this, where it all kind of comes together in a mish mash of me.

And here's a cool list I read a few weeks ago that talks about publicity and all the smart things writers should be doing as they write and sell a novel...I thought it was interesting and helpful,, and I bookmarked it for the time I may find myself farther down the list!

What You Can Do: Twelve Easy Steps

I liked that. Anyway.

One of the things I have done as a person on the internet is make friends, and last week I got to spend some time with some of the people from my online writing group, which was really cool. We all got in the minivan and took the kids to see some bears at a bear sanctuary way back in the woods. I was expecting something very roadside attractionish--a couple of tame bears maybe, but it turned out to be pretty amazing!The only complication was a minor temper tantrum when Monkey decided that he *really* wanted to touch the bears. I mean, we all did. He threw himself about in my arms for a while, wanting to get down off the platform we were on.

"I want get down and touch them!"

"I know, baby. But you can't touch the bears. They're wild animals, and they might hurt you."

"I WON'T TOUCH 'EM I JUST WANT TO SEE THEY SOFT!"

Uh huh. Here he is pouting.Yes, he was clean when we left the house. Or mostly.

Okay, now I've really got to do some editing.

a tangential slalom course of a post

I go through these jags where I listen almost exclusively to Minnesota Public Radio when I'm driving my car, and I'm in one right now. If you were to see me driving somewhere, you'd probably be able to tell. I might be chuckling. I might be nodding thoughtfully. Most likely, though, my car will be parked and inexplicably idling at my destination--the children straining at their seatbelts while I shush them.

So yesterday I hopped into the car (I keep calling it that, but it's really a mini-van, sighhhh) to pick up the boys from a morning at daycare while I was writing, and this Harvard psychologist, Dan Gilbert, was speaking about happiness, or more specifically, why people mess up so much when trying to predict what will make them happy. A long time ago, I remembered watching this video of a shorter talk he did at some other...ideas thingy...because I remembered the interesting experiments he did with a photography course.

Short story is that he had college students take a bunch of meaningful pictures and create two beautiful prints, and then they had to choose one to keep and one to leave with the instructor. Half the students were told that they could change their minds in four days and switch pictures, and the other half were told that they had to choose and it was a final decision. In the end, the people who had an opportunity to change their minds were less happy with the pictures than the people without that chance. Like, a lot less happy.

Then he asked a new group of students which group they would rather be in, and over sixty percent of them chose to be in the group with the choice. They chose the class that would eventually make them unhappy with their photo.

This was interesting.

I started thinking about shopping, about the difference between the way I shop and the way D. shops. First, I make decisions and then I don't look back. Let's say I'm looking for a new pair of shoes to wear to work. I'll go to the shoe store, find my size, look around at all the options, try on a few pairs if I don't already have a tantrumming toddler, pick one, buy it, and I'm done. Those other shoes that I didn't buy? They aren't in my head anymore, unless I've made mental plans to come back for them after I've earned another pair of shoes or something.

David does pretty much the opposite. He will scour shoe stores for several weeks, repeatedly going in and trying on different pairs. He will research the finalists thoroughly on the internet. He'll read reviews of the shoes. He'll go back and try them on again. He'll pit the stores against each other to get a better price (seriously, he does this all the time, not necessarily with shoes, but I wouldn't put it past him). Finally, he'll make his selection, but much of the time it's a close decision, and he may waver a couple of times as he works through all the pros and cons of each.

The next thing is that I don't do returns. So let's just say I don't like shoes when I get home. They actually pinch a little. Wow, I didn't realize they made that weird little sighing sound every time I take a step. That will be awkward while I'm creeping around my classroom. I totally didn't notice that they made my feet look so boxy. Boxy doesn't really look good on my feet. I shrug and tuck them in my closet. Give them away to someone. Possibly I have slightly pinching, boxy, sighing feet for a while until I have a chance and the funds to try again. But it doesn't really occur to me to bring them back. I don't know why...I just feel like it's a lot of trouble. I made the choice, no big deal. I don't usually feel unhappy about the shoes. Shoes are great, but I'm not going to go crazy over a pair of shoes.

D. comes home from shopping and doesn't take the tags off of things until he's certain. Really certain. And then maybe he'll sleep on it. I guess I can't speak to his happiness with those final purchases, but from my point of view, it seems like if he realizes that there's a flaw in his purchase, he's more likely to wonder about that other option...maybe I should have bought that other one...I saw that one review about this on their website, but everyone else said it was fine...it seems a little like agonizing, to me.

Agonizing =/= Happiness.

So Gilbert talked about how choice--freedom--makes people less happy. Because you can wonder about whether you made the right choice? Because you also have the freedom of regretting the choices?

Oh, dear. This is not what this post was supposed to be about. Warning! Tangent! Where did it start? *traces back*

AHA!

Second paragraph. A likely place for a tangent to crop up.

What I meant to write about was the tiny snippet of the Aspen talk aired on MPR that was about CHILDREN. And how they make us less happy. I believe his three reasons that we still think of our children as sources of joy were Armani socks, Heroin, and Baseball. Maybe I'll blather on about that tomorrow. Or maybe there will be another tangent. What was I talking about?

infer what you will...

Jabber, coming home to find me sweeping the house,

(yes, sweetheart, we are expecting company, why do you ask?)

looks around excitedly.

"Where did you put all the new toys I haven't seen in forever?"

I finished!

I wrote the ending of the first draft of novel number four, A Tangled Web! It's almost 1:30 in the morning, but I'm on the edge of singing and dancing!

Now.

I will read through it and see how much crap it is made of! And then I will revise!

But first I will sleep. Whee!

Little House in the Big Chaos

So I bought a number of new skirts on Friday (shopping downtown was a part of our Friday Date Afternoon), and this morning I had to hand wash them in the tub before I can wear them.

I admit, I do not always wash my clothing before wearing it (and in fact there may have been a time in my life where doing laundry was such a pain in the ass that I bought new underwear rather than wash the ones I had...yes, I know, I could have washed them in the sink, but if you haven't figured out by now how lazy I am when it comes to cleaning stuff, you're a lost cause), but this particular store has a very lovely smell that I can handle smelling for about twelve minutes before it makes my head feel like it has been violated by an ice auger.

(please do not make any wild assumptions about my writing ability based on that sentence, thx.)

Anyway. So I'm hunched over the tub, my hands ice cold and raw, my back straining under the weight of all that heavy, stinky fabric, and I'm reminded of the book the boys and I are reading--that lovely classic Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I started thinking about how Ma washed all their clothes in a couple of washtubs with water hauled up from the creek bottom all the way up to the prairie. How Pa had suggested that she go down and wash the clothes in the river like the Indians did, spreading them on the rocks to dry. How she had been offended and insisted she would do the wash like civilized people do. How much more work that seemed to Jabber and Monkey and me when we read about it.

(Incidentally, I'm very interested in any great non-fiction book suggestions on Native Americans, since this book is generating a lot of discussion among Curiouser and Curiouser...)

Yesterday afternoon Jabber and Monkey and I made cornbread, just like Ma. "Hey, Mama, let's play Little House," said Jabber.

"Little House onna Pare-Ee!" shouted Monkey, jumping all crazy on the top of the step-stool.

"Okay," I said. "I will be Ma." (I lack imagination.)

"Can I be Laura?" asked the Jabberwock, jumping too, though from a sensible floor-level.

"Sure," I said.

"Okay! I'll be Laura, and Monkey can be...." Jabber looked over at Monkey, who was sitting on the kitchen floor shaking his head from the fall off the step-stool--a little rattled but trying not to let it show. "Well, I guess I'm Mary, 'cause I'm the biggest. And Monkey can be...."

It all started to fall apart. He looked up at me. "Can Monkey be Mary but still I'm the biggest?"

"Laura's the most interesting, isn't she?" I said.

He nodded. "Mary isn't very much fun," he said.

"Yeah. Maybe Monkey could be Baby Carrie."

"Yeah. And then I can still boss him."

"Well--"

"MOOOOOONNNNNKEEEEY!" Jabber chased him into the next room. "YOU'RE BABY CARRIE AND YOU CAN'T WALK. YOU JUST LIE THERE AND BE BORING!"

PSA

The words,

"Mommmm! Monkey doesn't have any pants on!"

shouted from the second floor

seldom mean anything good.

to the washerwoman go the spoils

It's an unwritten rule, of course, that the person responsible for sorting and washing and hanging and folding and putting away the laundry gets to keep anything s/he finds in the pockets.

Last week I made $8.00, no lie. Not bad for fourteen hours of work.

Now, I suppose it's the difference between asking David to collect his dirty clothing for me like I did today and simply going into the bedroom and scooping up all of his clothing off the floor (even digging it out from under the bed!) like I did last time, but today the spoils of my labor consist only of one orange toy car, a dime, a rubber wheel, and a pink plastic drink sword.

I'm sorely disappointed.

save it

Yesterday I read CDP's post in which she describes her son struggling with some of the same issues Jabber has struggled with regarding banks. Specifically, the idea of a savings account.

For a child who was thrust almost three years ago into a perpetual state of acute possession-awareness ("Don't let Monkey get my stuff, Mom!"), handing over the cash and coin, which he has been carefully threading through the slot in his porcelain piggy bank all his life, is not easy. I mean, this is literally his life savings. Why would he possibly want to give all of that away, to some lady he's never met before at a place we had to drive across town to get to?

"But what if I want my money back?" was his biggest question.

We've been doing mini-math lessons for most of the summer--Jabber's been learning to write his numbers, tell time, use a calendar, and count by fives and tens. We've been practicing by counting the money in his piggy bank. And although he has a lot of money, we decided to start with depositing forty dollars into this mystical and poorly-explained place called the bank.

Jabber agreed to open his first savings account.

So we get to the bank (the name and location of which shall be kept top secret, for security reasons but also because you know who you are, lady. More on that in a bit.). David and Monkey are with us this time (not like the last time we tried this and I forgot Jabber's social security number), so Jabber and I take a seat at the woman's wide desk and start answering her questions. Jabber answers like a champ: He tells her his full name and then writes it clearly on a form she had him fill out. He tells her my full name and his dad's full name. He points out his "sosha scurty" number and lists each of the digits for her. He repeats his phone number three times while she enters the information into her computer. He counts out his money carefully--three tens and two fives--and although he stumbles a little between $30 and $35, he gets it the second time through.

"And what's your address?" she asks.

Jabber spits out his phone number again.

"Oh, no, sweetie," she says, flashing a weird look at me. What was that look? "I mean, what street do you live on?"

"Oh," he says, and he tells her the street and also mentions the avenue that we are close to.

"But what is the house number?"

He shakes his head. He can't remember.

She gives me that look, again, and now I get it. It's disapproval. Judgment. "You're five, right?" she says to Jabber. "It's about time for you to learn your address. Before you go to school. That's very, very important." She gives me a final pointed look.

He nods, and the moment is gone. We finish up with the savings account, but now I'm irritated.

Save it, lady. Save the judgment. He knows his name, his parents' names, our phone number, and the two streets that intersect 25 feet from his front door.

This was such a tiny incident, but I found myself still annoyed by the attitude hours later while David and I were cleaning up from dinner. He said something, and I reacted, and then I said, "You know, maybe I'm too sensitive. Did you know I was seriously angry at that lady at the bank today when she made it sound like I was the worst parent on the face of the earth because Jabber didn't know his house number? Was I imagining that? Am I reading too much into people's innocent comments? Am I putting more pressure on myself as a parent that is just imaginary stuff?"

David laughed and shook his head. "No," he said. "She was just a bitch."

Do you actually, like, write?

I had a couple of hours of daycare yesterday morning, time for me to write, and I thought I'd try to figure out what I actually did during that time. To be fair, I did write about 2,000 words on my WIP (the Twelfth Night with talking seagulls YA story set here in my home city), but that's only a fraction of what "writing time" means for me.

So yesterday morning, I:

• read through my subscriptions to various writing-related blogs, noting items of interest to share with my online writing group
• discovered a newer agent to query and entered her information into my query spreadsheet for The Dharma Bum Business.
• discovered via the blogosphere that one of my favorite agents (I mean, favorite in the sense that I enjoy reading blog posts she writes and interviews she conducts...it's strange how writing becomes sort of a spectator sport at times!) is open for some types of submissions for the next month, and hey, my project fits one of those types!
• researched both of those agents for submission guidelines, etc.
  
• reread the first seven pages of TDBB that I include in my query letters with an eye to polish it up even more.
• added a comma, removed an adverb
• took away the comma
• used a thesaurus briefly
• deleted the whole sentence that used to be home to the adverb
• followed a complicated process of saving as text to, one hopes, preserve the formatting when pasting the sample pages into an email (this process was maybe seventy-five and a half steps long and involved some burnt offerings and at least a dozen languages)
• personalized my query letter
• sent four queries and updated my color-coded spreadsheet
• read several agent threads on a writing forum as research and updated spreadsheet
• noticed that my google reader showed that several agents had updated their blogs
• read blogs
• made coffee
• opened notes file for WIP and read through the summary of scenes I have left to write.
• realized that the last time I was writing, I completely and shamelessly veered away from the "outline".
• adjusted "outline". (okay, so the actual words I wrote were: "Oh no, I just realized this will all fall apart after that last scene, so...figure it out, all right? fix this. make it clever and shit.")
• made toast to go with second cup of coffee
• wrote 100 words of WIP
• whined to writing group about how hard it was
• posted excerpt, received praise
• wrote another 100 words
• checked email, found a rejection
• cried
• updated spreadsheet
• reread query letter, trying to figure out what was wrong with it
• took a spin over to Query Shark to look at query letters that *had* to be worse than mine. Instead, the entry is an example of a perfectly awesome query that I sure wish were mine
• found that as usual, queries sort of all look the same to me, especially after I read a few in a row
  
• got a headache
  
• cancelled tentative plans to become a literary agent's assistant
  
• wrote 500 words of WIP in a fit of pure, unadulterated genius
• read a tutorial on synopsis-writing, and then another one
  
• tried to start a synopsis
  
• banged head repeatedly into desk
• searched cupboard for jelly beans
• sent myself a test email to make sure it wasn't malfunctioning
  
• checked clock, found only thirty minutes remaining before I had to leave to pick up the kids
• read over the last 700 words of WIP, found them to be utter crap
• deleted and wrote 1000 serviceable first draft words
• whined to writing group about how hard it was
• checked clock, found that I was now going to be late to pick up the kids
• sped away in the minivan like SuperMom, except unshowered and tardy and with no plans for lunch.
  

sometimes it's enough just to be adorable.

write now

I realize that I haven't talked about much in my life lately other than the kids and their shenanigans. This is a main purpose of the blog, of course, but I used to give a little more context of life outside of the mom part of me.

Part of that is that I started writing about writing in a super secret friend-locked lj so I can whine wallow in self-pity post excerpts of my works-in-progress for my four or five friends. It seems like novel-writing is something I'm insistent on doing, despite any logic or reason, and starting this blog was largely responsible for my return to regular, productive writing.

Since starting the blog, I've become a part of an amazing online writing community (many of whom are also blogging here), and I've also finished two novels and drafted 43k words on novel number 4! This current WIP--a young adult contemporary fantasy book that combines Shakespeare's Twelfth Night with A Wrinkle in Time and talking seagulls--has been a particularly enjoyable romp to draft after the more serious journey toward completion (or what can ever serve as completion, with a piece of writing...*polishes, polishes, polishes*)of TDBB, novel number three.

But the fact is, novel three is complete, and even though I periodically hate it in that "How could I ever have thought myself a writer!" kind of way, I really feel that this book is the strongest thing I've written. The periodic hatred crops up, I think, because the book inside my head, the book of my ambitions, is never exactly what emerges. But sometimes what emerges is actually more beautiful, in its own way. Whatever may be the case, the time has almost come to start querying this one. Which I have started doing--cautiously, selectively--even though I swore I was going to wait until closer to fall...or for the economy to pick up...or for the right stars to align...

It's just that doing this is really scary. And it makes for a lot of doubt. And dread. And hope.

But mostly doubt.

So I'm cautiously, selectively beginning. Researching agents. Getting critiques on my query letter. Writing a synopsis. Thinking about how to answer difficult questions about the book. Searching for books that have a similar style, a similar feel, a similar marketing plan.

And for now, I'm hoping to finish up this first draft of the new book before going back to work in an un-counted number of days. So there's my writing update, and now for a while anyway, it will probably be back to kid antics and parentingfail.

Three Funnies, or Three for the Baby Book

A big part of why I started keeping this blog was so that I could capture some of these fleeting moments, allowing me to go back and look at them years later and remember the joys and tribulations of this period of my life--things I won't remember because honestly I'm pretty much exhausted all the time and anyway, I can't really remember yesterday.

Except that's a lie; all three of these events happened yesterday, but I actually TOOK NOTES in my little notebook so that I would remember to write about them.

I spent the majority of the day hanging out with Monkey, since Jabber spent the day with Dad. Monkey and I had our last swimming sessions, and he really wiggles like a little minnow. Afterward, since we didn't have to pick up Jabber right away from daycare, we went to a nearby coffee shop for some lunch. He's a fun lunch date because he talks to everyone he isn't giving the stinkeye stare to.

Aside: Monkey divides the whole world into two groups: people you talk to and people you glare at. It doesn't really seem to have any rhyme or reason. My sister-in-law: total stinkeye stare. One of the news anchors David works with? Also a stinkeye. Swimming teachers? (to keep this slightly on topic) Stinkeyes one and all.

Random guy in line at the coffee shop? Monkey decides to call him Daddy. "DADDY! THERE'S MY DADDY!" he yells, so that everyone in the coffee shop can hear. The guy looks nothing like David. It is confusing.

It is all resolved, but not until everyone in the vicinity is paying attention. All of the people in the coffee shop are people you talk to, I guess.

Later, after a non-existant nap. Elissa at the edge of collapse. Monkey insistently repeats the same, unintelligible phrase, over and over.

"POPPONDAWAH! POPPONDAWAH!"

I am clueless. He stomps over to the stereo and pushes the button to open it, growling in frustration and cranky fatigue. "POPPONDAWAH!" He points at a CD that has a bunch of kids' songs on it. I push play.

The first song is "100 Bottles of POP ON THE WALL." Gotcha.

And last night, Jabber and I are bonding over some Ramona the Pest. I ask him if he would like to be Ramona's friend. He gives me this incredulous look. "But, MOM," he says. "Why would I want a friction friendship?"

What? Well, nobody wants friction in their friendships, really. "But what do you mean?" I say.

"A friction for a friend! Ramona Quimby is...friction." He starts to look uncertain.

"OH! FICTION!" Haha, yes. "Good job on the genre," I say.

"Lasagna?" he says.

books and books and books

Jabber has started a LibraryThing account, and he is going to be rating and reviewing all of the books that we read together as our bedtime stories (he says he will rate and review his favorites of the picture books, but mostly only chapter books). It's funny because so far he has rated them all with five stars. I think he's just so enthralled with stories, they are just the most wonderful thing for him. We've read a lot of great books in the last year or so, and right now we are reading Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary. Even Monkey comes running up happily when it's time for "More 'Mona, Mama!"

So tonight's chapter was about mud. And trouble. And Jabber could hardly stand to listen, though he begged me not to stop.

Ramona got shiny, new red rubber boots and found herself unable to resist a construction site filled with gooey-wet mud. Jabber was on the edge of his seat, even flipping over and over on the bed listening to me, covering his ears and his eyes and his mouth. “I can’t look! I can’t listen!” he shouted.

“What are you expecting to happen?” I asked him.

He shrieked as loudly as he could. “SHE’S GOING TO GET STUCK IN THE MUD!”

We tentatively read on, and then sure enough! Ramona got stuck in the mud. Jabber shook his head and groaned. He wondered aloud, with his hands clasped all earnest and worried-like, "Will she get in big trouble? Is Miss Binney going to be mad at her? Will the construction guys come along and RUN RIGHT OVER HER?"

His relief, at the end, when Ramona and her boots are safe, and she hollers to Henry Huggins that she's going to marry him (with her pink worm engagement ring), was palpable. He sagged against me, sighing in happiness. He really likes Ramona, but she’s way spunkier than he is, so she makes all these choices that really worry him.

Reading aloud with Jabberwock is my favorite thing to do.

the serious business of learning

Jabber got an activity book about dinosaurs from the dollar bin at Target, and tonight he worked on a couple pages. He designed his own dino, and we talked about why we don’t know what color dinos are. This led us to have a pretty good discussion about rotting, about what is organic material and what happens to it when it decomposes. The whole discussion came into play a while later when we were hauling the compost bucket to the hardware store. We opened the compost bucket and experienced rotting with all our senses. Talk about hands-on science.

We've been pretending that we're at school lately, having "lessons" in each subject, since Jabber is pretty hesitant about the whole idea of going to school. He thinks (probably correctly) that he will have a hard time sitting still and paying attention. I worry that his perfectionism will make him anxious and unable to move forward on things, so we're working on having a "practice sheet" to make him feel like the stakes aren't quite as high the first time around (he gets sort of a little bit terrified at the thought of messing up a workbook page or a drawing or what have you...), and having a place to practice helps out a lot. Good thing to know, to be able to mention to his teacher.

We also got a little dry-erase board from the dollar bin at Target that has handwriting lines on it. You know, with the red line on the bottom, and dotted lines in the middle, and a blue line at the top? Jabber LOVES it. We're working pretty hard on learning the right way to form his lowercase letters and how to keep them in the lines. He loves it because he knows if he screws up, he can just wipe it off easily and start over. Then, once he has mastered it on the white board, he has no problem writing it on his real page.

Tonight we had "Phys Ed Class" by going for a walk/gallop/sashay with the compost bucket down past the road construction to the bin behind the hardware store. On the way back, Jabber spontaneously pulled all of his limbs and brain into concert and LEARNED TO SKIP. It was terrific, and we skipped hand-in-hand until he said, "Mom. I'm out with my breath!" But he was so happy and felt so important and grown up to have finally found his body coordinated enough to do what his brain was telling him to do. A very big day around here, indeed.

Guest Blogger: Jabberwock Talks...

This is Jabber, your guest blogger for the day, and he is going to talk to you about building a robot. Here, in case you are interested, is a photo series he worked on yesterday. More of his work should be showing up over the course of the summer.

This is my robot, and this is the first robot I've ever made. I don't know how to make any more robots, so this will be the last one I ever make, too.

Here are the steps to making my robot. First, I got a blue lunch bag. Also some construction paper. Mine was already cut up into pieces. Next, I got some glue and scissors from a grown-up. Last I glued pieces from my jet onto the lunch bag. I drew pictures of different things like the Statue of Liberty and towers and in the back I drawed buttons on it.

The coolest part was where I got to fold up the robot arms.

I think my robot is pretty cool. That's all that I think about my robot.

old news, mom...

So Jabber and I were hanging out during Monkey's naptime reading our new books, and we were enjoying a little Ramona the Pest, which was one of his read-aloud picks this time around. I admit to gently encouraging the book, as it's about Ramona at age five, going to kindergarten for the first time, and Jabber is getting increasingly curious and apprehensive about kindergarten, which is to be expected.

So we're reading about Ramona's first day, and I'm explaining things like what it means to sit "for the present" and what "the dawnzer lee light" might be so the two of us can kind of giggle at Ramona and her silly naivete...

...and we get to the part where Ramona sees this boy, Davy, and instantly she decides that she would like to kiss him. I can't remember exactly how our conversation started, but essentially Jabber confessed to kissing Cute Girl from Daycare.

"Oh, did you kiss her on the cheek?" I asked.

"No, on the lips," he said, and his little mouth tweaked up at the corners like he wanted to smile but wasn't quite sure if that was cool or not. "I mean, Cute Girl's the one who said to kiss her on the lips."

We read a little more Ramona, and then the following exchange:

Me: So you kissed CuteGirl? Why?
Jabber: She told me to.
Me: So she told you to kiss her, and you just did?
Jabber: Seemed fun. She's the one who said it was to be on the lips.
Me: *cannot speak because she's holding back a laugh*
Jabber: I mean, half the time she doesn't even like me, Mom. But when she tells me to kiss her, I just do it.

I'm doing laundry now, so I have to go. Gotta fold all those little tiny kindergarten uniforms I just washed. Maybe I should check the pockets for condoms? Yikes. :P

This moment of momfail...

I have become a nagger. A ranter. A yeller. A font of negativity.

I have become that woman who rattles about the house flinging toys irritably in the direction of toyboxes while muttering things at a variety of volume levels--most of them sarcastic and an embarrassingly large number of them including the words "ungrateful" and "bend over backwards for you."

I have become a person who delivers long, angry monologues to a two-year-old. Who very obviously has no idea what I'm talking about anymore and clearly cannot remember the incident I'm ranting about.

I have become a mother who is out of patience, out of hope, out of tricks. Out of control.

This isn't meant to be a sad post, a poor-me post, really. I haven't ever really felt like being a mom is a competition. I'm not really interested in what my friends and neighbors think of me as a mom, as long as they keep it to themselves. I'm just interested in finding a way to actually enjoy being around my kids more often, to feel competent in my own right at being a parent. To feel like my kids are presentable--no, not in their appearance (so what if there's old oatmeal in Monkey's hair and Jabber has a snotty nose?), but in the more important things. Are they well-behaved in public? (No.) Do they have good manners? (No.) Are they, in general, kind to each other and other children? (No.) Do they listen to me when I try to keep them safe? (No.)

I know things aren't as bad as they seem. I know there are phases and extenuating circumstances. I know there are people raising twice as many, three times as many kids as me who are probably way more stressed out than I. I know I could definitely be screwing them up worse than I am.

But it's still no good. I feel like every moment I am with them (when they are awake) turns into a screaming match or a power struggle or a complete breakdown of everything good. I feel like I can't take them anywhere by myself, which makes me feel completely helpless and trapped here. When I do take them places--places I think will be a fun outing for us as a family--it ends up being a miserable disaster because they won't listen and be good and be safe, and then we get back to the nagging, the ranting, the yelling, the spouting of negativity. I don't know what to do.

So I'll just wait. And hope that eventually this too will pass. (And whine, I guess...)

Okay. Sometimes they're cute; I'll admit it. So here are two cute things they said lately to lighten this horribly negative and hopeless confessional of a post that I should really just delete.

One, I was talking to Monkey and used the word "frankly"--not exactly in most two-year-olds' vocabularies, I admit, but whatever, I'm not so good at speaking simply. So I said something like, "Well, frankly, I'm a bit surprised you managed to find that permanent marker and destroy yet another item that is precious to me in the four minutes it took me to shower." And he, indignant as only a toddler can be, stomped his tiny foot and said, "My name isn't FRANK! It's MONKEY!"

And two, (this one had David and I giggling for a while) Jabber was bouncing around the house, bored and determined that he should be watching television or something else we had forbidden at the moment, and he said, "There's nothing to do in this whole and tired house!" Well! I'd be tired too if I were almost a hundred years old and had to contain two fiery little boys, too!

I mean, I'm only 33, and they exhaust the hell out of me.

up to our ears in hats...

We have a lot of hats.

Hats are awesome...they keep the sun off, they keep my ears warm, they keep the world from seeing that I still haven't washed my hair today. (Sadly, they cannot hide the fact that I'm not yet wearing actual pants...)

They also sort of drive me nuts, in that cluttery, never-to-be-found-in-the-same-place kind of way. Most mornings this school year, there's a distinct possibility of me actually getting to school on time, if only I had been able to locate all of the proper hats at the proper time. Our hat collection is impressive. Our organizational system for the hats is not.

In fact, it may be slightly telling to reveal that after that photo, I shoved the majority of those hats back on a shelf sandwiched in between a stray mukluk and a basket full of old batteries and pens that don't work.

I could have a hat storage area, maybe, like a hall closet or a mudroom. Except we don't have either of those, so the hats just sort of flutter down off of heads somewhere in the vicinity of the front door and then filter from there out into the home--landing on various hooks, chair backs, radiators, shelves, floors, and sometimes even toyboxes.

Truthfully, I'm sort of scared to store them too close to each other. What if they multiply?