The week that was

So in spite of the fact that last week I had two children in school every day, any frittering away of time on my own I might have done was purely symbolic.

• Monday was Labor Day, of course, so that didn't count.
• On Tuesday, Dash went to school and so did Mabel, but then I spent most of the morning sorting out paperwork in the nursery school's office, as part of my board committment this year. (Last year I was in charge of housekeeping, which as you can imagine was not really my forte, but gave me a foot in the door. This year I have sidestepped into "Membership", which means I get to do filing and pester people about submitting their forms in a timely fashion. Next year I aim to rise to the exalted heights of Secretary, when I will be allowed to take minutes.)
• On Wednesday, I was co-oping in Mabel's classroom.
• On Thursday, I had to do some more paperwork.
• On Friday, I finished up the paperwork by double-checking exactly who was still delinquent with which forms and signatures, and ran away to the optician's to get the nose-pads replaced on my glasses.

Yes, it was just that exciting.

I also dropped into Old Navy while waiting for the optician's to open and picked up a pair of chinos, but that's neither here nor there.

My point is that I've barely begun to live, freedom-wise. Today I went go to Safeway and hung out a load of laundry, and that pretty much took up all the two and a half hours I had before it was time to go and get child #1 again. When I thought I was going to fit in freelancing I don't know.

You are here

Don't think I'm not writing. I am writing. You're just not seeing it. I have no fewer than four posts at the draft stage that just aren't coming out of it, because they're not working for one reason or another. Too boring, too uninteresting, too irrelevant, too not-quite-saying-what-I'm-trying-to-say.

I know Mabel is tired today because she's spent an indordinate amount of time rolling round on the floor and chewing on non-food objects. Also because it's only 1.20 and it feels like it should be much later. As early as 9.30 this morning she had installed herself on the sofa with all the cusions, numerous blankets, a bath towel and a dragon doorstop (from IKEA; you probably have one too) and asked me to turn on the TV because she was tiiiiiired.

She's tired because I went to a meeting last night and even though she was well ready to fall asleep at 7pm, because I wasn't there with the magic boobies, she was still wide awake at 8.45 when I got home. She'd had the books, she'd had the stories, she'd been lain down with, she'd been left alone ... she has no idea how to go to sleep without the magic boobies. Not yesterday, anyway, even though she's done it before, and she goes back to sleep in the middle of the night very well these days. (I DIDN'T SAY THAT STOP LOOKING AT ME FATE HERE'S A CHICKEN I SACRIFICED EARLIER.)

It's lovely having Dash back at school now that we're used to it and the homework gets started straight away. I've even cleaned a couple of things and baked a couple of things, so it looks like I'm getting out of my doldrums and back to normal.

It will be even more lovely next week when Mabel is back at school too, at least until the existential angst starts to get me. In between, we have the local Labor Day Festival (that's "festible" to my children) to get through/enjoy, with duties to be discharged for both the nursery school and the elementary school as well as many rides to be ridden on and oh look it's going to be 90 degrees on Saturday. Lovely.

So that's where we are. Where are you?

Note to self: Do not mess with a good thing

For a minute there I was about to be the next great culinary genius. Alas*, fate threw a spanner in my works and I'm just another failed chef. For now. Let me take a moment out of what I'm supposed to be doing, which is trying to work out how my spreadsheet of all the housekeeping jobs at the nursery school just fails to tally with the list of all the families at the nursery school, to tell you about it.

*This reminds me that I have to mention that Monkey has started saying "Behold!" in his games of superhero-before-bedtime. I heard it for the first time last night, but B says it's a regular utterance now. Maybe Thor says it in The Avengers; he talks a bit funny sometimes. (Also also, and clearly I'm procrastinating on the spreadsheet even more than I thought, given all these tangents, I do love that Mabel can tell me that Odin is Thor's daddy and Loki is his brother who is not nice. I don't care that she's getting it all from a cartoon series that also includes Iron Man and The Hulk. It will win her a pub quiz in later life, I'm sure of it.)

Where was I? Oh yes, culinary. Genius. Me. Yup.

Last week I made sweet potato pancakes for lunch one day, and nobody ate them but me, because my children are heathen ingrates with cardboard where they should have palates (and don't tell me that heathen is irrelevant there, because I'm sure it's not; and they are, because we're raising them to be). B didn't eat them either, because I ate my share and quickly froze the rest for safekeeping. Then I had two a day for the next week, with syrup, instead of toast for my breakfast. They were yummy. I suspected they could be made even better for one by using half wholemeal flour the next time instead of all white flour. I promise to try that next time.

Today, I looked at the half-can of pumpkin puree and the buttermilk that needs using up in the fridge, and decided that I was perfectly well able to make up my own delicious Wholewheat-Buttermilk-Pumpkin Pancake mixture, riffing off the sweet-potato one and the Alton Brown recipe that's my basic standard. As I threw together a cup of this and a pinch of that, I mused on my future as the latest big food blogger, who could whip up delicious baked goods using no more than her intellect and her innate baker's soul.

However. There's a reason I am happy to throw food in a pot and call it dinner without consulting a book, but tend to stick to the letter of the recipe when baking. It works better that way. My batter was was a bit stiff. No matter - just stir in another quarter cup of pumpkin. Plop it in the pan and wait for the bubbles to let me know it's time to flip. No bubbles. Flip it anyway. Golden brown with a hint of orange: the perfect autumnal pancake. They'd be soft and yielding, slightly spicy, crisp on the outside, just waiting for communion with maple syrup to acheive pancake nirvana...

No. Not really. Mabel was not interested. The finished articles, while edible, were a bit too heavy, a bit too doughy, a bit too bland, a bit too not much good. They reminded me of the sort of thing sailors used to pack on long trips to the end of the world. Dense. Stodgy. Full of nutrients.

I will channel my father and eat them up rather than waste them, but I'll do it with the help of a lot of syrup, and if they're really not hitting any spots at all, I give myself permission to chuck them out. Next time, I'll just make pumpkin bread again. Maybe I can turn it into muffins. I think I could safely manage that. Probably.

Giants

Mabel woke up last night at 2.30 and wanted to go downstairs and get a doll. I knew this was a ploy, because I'm astute that way even in the small hours of the morning, and also because she'd mentioned earlier that she was scared of giants and that her dollhouse looked like one.

Monkey, sensitive soul that he is, had gone a few bouts with bad dreams and night fears by this age, so while I had been happy that Mabel so far seemed immune, I hadn't counted my chickens. I think it's a maturity thing, really, to start distinguishing fact from fiction and have an imagination wide enough to encompass things you didn't even want to imagine. It's not surprising when they spend half the day in imaginary play - and you only have to give Mabel any two items - forks, crayons, shoes - to find her turning them into a mother and baby and voicing their dialogue -  that when they go to bed it's sometimes hard to turn it off.

I could sort of see what she meant about the dollhouse: it's a simple wooden one with a pitched roof, and the big windows on either side look, in the half-light, like huge eyes in a big head. I moved it downstairs today. But last night I just took her to our bedroom rather than try to convince her that the giants only wanted ice-cream and would happily take directions to Target and go away again. There, she finally nursed back to sleep and took up most of B's side of the bed. Sorry, honey.

This morning I'd sort of forgotten about the night's shenanigans, and I sent Mabel off to play with friends while I helped get the nursery school ready for tomorrow's meet-your-teacher sessions; because I am, as we must remember, the housekeeping chair this year. So far I've mostly shown up, but I'm not sure I've been of much practical use beyond reminding the other parents to sign in. I suppose I do know a little better than the new parents where a few things are kept, but so far mostly I've shown a startling lack of initiative.

Mabel headed off to the giant sandbox (aka volleyball court) happily enough in the caravan of laden strollers, strewing goldfish crackers as they went, but a mere hour later I had a call to say that she was very sad and perhaps should come back to me. As I brought her back inside I asked, "Did you have fun with your friends?"
"I don't like my friends." A wail of despair.
"Oh. That's a pity, since they're all going to be in your class next week."

I think it was just the fatigue talking. I took her home early and she was napping by 12.45. Another hour or so on the sofa (she watched Mr Rogers, I read my book, she nursed; we were both content) and she was back to her usual happy self, excited about going to nursery school and all the snacks she might eat there.

Then again, it's possible that she too has a few start-of-school nerves that are manifesting themselves one way or another. When Mabel was on the way, Monkey had dreams about giants too. My children, with their literal metaphors.

Parental involvement

I keep trying to write amusingly about Mabel's latest sleep regression (let's call it; it involves a nighttime cough and at least one molar), but it just turns into a long-winded whine. I should probably take a different tack.

I attended a nursery school meeting last night and found myself volunteering for a board position for next year. It's a co-op school, which means it's run by the parents, and the ultra-sexy position of housekeeping chair has been vacant for all of this year. It's not so much that I decided the school could do with my firm hand and expert sweeping motion, but more that I have an idea what this entails, it's pretty simple, and I felt it was about time for me to step up and help out a bit more than we've done to date.

Every family has to take on a role every year, but some are more time-consuming than others. Last year I volunteered to be librarian, which I thought had a nice literary ring to it. I imagined myself cataloguing books during quiet evenings, perhaps taking home a few well-loved volumes to mend, carefully re-shelving and tidying. It sounded ideal. In the event, it was less so, as my small and increasingly mobile appendage (Mabel) made it very hard to spend even a few minutes every week re-shelving books without having them all pulled out again at the bottom of the stack. The catalogue belonged to a teacher who was reluctant to give it up, and nobody really explained things to me, with the result that I spent ten minutes blithely distributing school library books in the bins containing the public library books, and then a fraught half hour trying to fish them out again.

Before I set off for this September's member meeting, I asked B what he thought we should sign up for this year, since being librarian had turned out to be such a bust. He was disappointed - evidently he has literary aspirations too - and said that if I took on the same job again, he'd be responsible for the tasks. So I happily and pointedly put his name down against Librarian instead of mine, to the confusion of the director, and to date he's done more or less as much for the job as I did.

So I felt we were due. After three years as a member, I understand the basics of the housekeeping position - helping to organise the twice-yearly cleaning workshops, showing up for most or some of those days, and arranging and reminding parents of their commitments (everyone signs up for one housekeeping job during the year - you might be laundering dress-up clothes in March, or cleaning toys in October, or organizing the medical kit twice a year - it's pretty simple). And I'll get to - I mean, have to - attend monthly board meetings. I think I can manage that. So long as nobody wants to see the state of my house before giving me the job.

When Monkey started at the school three years ago, the August cleaning workshop was actually the first time I interacted as a member of the co-op. (There's a new-member meeting in June, but we'd been away.) I was seven months pregnant and really quite enjoyed a two-hour window of something totally different: being toddler-free and chatting to another incoming parent while we wrestled with sticky green paper and a bookshelf. This August, I'll be able to welcome new members and give them their introduction to the nitty gritty of some of the things that joining the school entails: messing around with duct tape, cleaning paintbrushes, and sorting out boxes of tiny foam shapes, to name a few.