Alexander is his middle name, after all

Poor Dash had a bad day.

There was a substitute teacher at school, so he didn't get to advance to a three-star math general, as he had been hoping he would. (The sub still knew about the spelling test they were due, though.) They didn't get to do their usual Fun Friday activities, and recess was cancelled becuase it was 99 degrees outside. (Really? I mean, it's 92 right now but I'd be surprised if it had been all the way up to 99 today.)

He also fell off his chair and hit another one with his cheek on the way down, which I'm sure was entirely not his fault and nothing to do with leaning back in a way not officially sanctioned by either his regular teacher or the sub, I bet.

Now I tell him that it's the nursery school picnic tonight but instead of my usual lemon scones (which he loves) I cruelly made rhubarb snacking cake, even though I know he won't eat any of that. (The fact that there will be plenty of cookies and/or cake that he will like is not holding much sway here.)

But the worst thing, from my point of view at least, was that at around 2pm I was getting Mabel a piece of toast, and thinking as I opened the new loaf bag that I hadn't seen a slice of bread yet today. Which meant maybe I hadn't made Dash's lunch. A quick consultation with his father revealed that neither did he. Usually one or other of us does, or it's realised and thrown together at the last moment before they walk out the door. Today the shock of Dash being ready to leave the house in good time apparently discombobulated us both so much that we forgot to think of lunch.

"Are you going to move to Australia?" I asked him, after apologizing for the oversight and hearing about all the other terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things that happened today.

"No. They say it happens there too."
_________

This crazy kid can't hold a grump for long. He just discovered that his top tooth is a tiny bit wobbly. He also has a lower tooth that's a tiny bit wobbly.

"I bet I'm the first person ever to have two teeth wobbly! This is the BEST DAY EVER!"

I tried to get a grumpy picture, but it didn't work

Why on earth did I not try this before?

Scene: Yesterday, getting into the car to go to school. I open the passenger door to put something on the seat. Mabel takes her chance to jump in the "wrong" way.

Me: Don't... oh, okay, fine, just don't squash my stuff in the bag there.

Mabel notices the bag and purposely smushes a fist down on top of the carefully ironed and folded clothes I'm bringing to the consignment store.

Me: Sigh.

Mabel switches direction and heads for the driver's seat instead of her own.

Me: [lightbulb moment] Mabel, don't sit in your seat.

Mabel looks at me, confused.

Me, more clearly: Mabel, whatever you do, you're not allowed to sit in your carseat. Don't come over here.

Mabel gives me a tiny grin and clambers very purposefully towards her seat. She sits down beautifully.

Me, doing up her straps: Don't sit here. You'd better not sit here.

...

We get to school and Mabel shows signs of reluctance.

Me, wondering if it can possibly keep working: You're not to go to school today. You'll be in big trouble if you go into that classroom.

She gets out of the car, eager to break a rule, and heads for the building, and down the corridor, having the time of her life as I call after her.

Me: Don't go inside. You'd better not go through that door...

And so on. Her courage failed her when it was time for me to leave, and I did have to read a story and then have her teacher peel her off me and distract her with snacktime plans (muffins!), but it worked amazingly well. 

Just something to keep in my arsenal and pull out only ocassionally, I think, in the hopes that it might save us all a meltdown some other day.

-----------------------

(I can't find a video clip, but here's the audio for exactly what this calls to mind, just to save anyone from having to go and look for it.)

Summer: QED

Reasons to hate the pool:

• My swimsuit
• My swimsuit with me in it
• My thighs
• The sun
• Sunscreen
• Splashes on my glasses
• Cold water
• Wet towels
• Bad hair

Reasons to love the pool:

• Happy children
• Hungry children
• Tired children

The pool wins.

Out like a lion

We have our second first-grade project. I use the word "we" advisedly, since five minutes ago his father was busy with protractor and ruler, lamenting our lack of compass, happily working out distances and angles to form a small pyramid out of cereal-box cardboard (I did suggest that one could probably just find a template on the internet, but he was clearly having fun) while the first-grader was upstairs helping his little sister throw raisins around her room.

"She wanted to sleep on beans," Dash said by way of explanation.

He has to make an animal out of 3-D shapes, the better to exhibit his understanding of angles, vertices, and sides, and also his knowledge of our natural world. He was quite gung-ho when he came home with the instructions, and has been busily stockpiling items from the recycling ever since, but showed some reluctance to actually get down to working out which shapes would go together, and how, to form whatever animal he wanted to make, which he said was a lion.

"I'm waiting for another toilet roll," he said every time I asked him how the lion was going to manifest.

When we finally had five empty toilet rolls - one for a very fat tail as well as four legs - he did a slapdash job of sticking things together with a lot of tape. His sister took the tape and started an animal hospital, putting plaster casts on the legs of all her teddies. We haven't much tape left any more.

Then I noted that he needs to use at least three different shapes and his lion was made of one cylindrical ice-cream tub, two cylindrical bottle caps (eyes) and five cylindrical toilet rolls. He added a square tissue-box head. Thus it stayed for two days, until I wondered out loud a few dozen times how it was ever going to look more like a lion and what the third 3-D shape would be.

Writing the accompanying text

The paint came out today. I hate painting with the children more than I hate baking with them. This is why I send them to school, so they can make this mess on someone else's time (and table, and floor). We did it outside on the deck and it still made an unholy mess and left me twitching in the corner. He disassembled the lion (so much for all that tape) and tried to paint it, but the writing on the boxes showed through, so instead we painted some sheets of paper yellow to cover the boxes with.

We were still one shape short, though, which is when I came up with the pyramid idea and his father put it into action. I'm not sure if it's going to be a nose or a tail-end; maybe the student himself will have some input at this point.

But I feel I'm falling short of my lofty plans to have no input at all in Dash's school projects. If we're getting this involved at this point, what will be expected of us by the time he's doing science-fair baking-soda volcanoes, or decoding genomes, or whatever the kids are expected to accomplish these days? It's the sort of thing that makes me wish we could all just unschool, let the kids follow their interests, let them earn a crust doing something that makes them happy, make them self-motivated and entrepreneurial. I don't know exactly how you grow an entrepreneur, but I'm pretty sure it's not by bugging them to paint sheets of paper yellow and making pyramids for them.

So now I'm just going to sit here in the other room until I stop twitching, while his father helps him put the lion together.

Note the mismatched-on-purpose eyes. I think it's the Lalaloopsy influence.

Agnes, elsewhere

I wrote a teeny piece of flash fiction, once upon a time, and then I sent it to the lovely Carmel Harrington, who just happens to be running a competition for such things right now.

Agnes

My basket held a packet of pasta shells and a jar of pesto along with the bottle of red, only because it’s polite to keep up the appearance of dinner when you invite a friend over to gossip for the evening. I was about to make an offhand comment to the woman in front of me, but somehow the words changed in my mouth.

‘Holy f*ck, it’s Agnes the Bearded Lady!’

Go here to read the rest, and if you like it, I'll remind you to vote after June 1st.

End of an Ergo

I'm giving you a little break so you can catch up on all my past posts, and all the other things going on around the Internet, whatever they may be. At least, apparently that's what I'm doing. But in the meantime, a few bullets to get me out of this bloggy doldrum:

• I dusted off and gussied up my resume (which mostly meant changing all the fonts so they looked less 2004 and more 2013 to my non-graphic-designer eye; maybe it just made the whole thing look different to me and therefore as if it must have new information even though it doesn't, much) and sent it to someone who expressed an interest. So that was nice. I will now proceed to freak out about all the free time I don't have even though nothing has happened yet.
• We had visitors, which was lovely and gave my deeply ingrained Internet addiction a little break. I'm also re-reading the His Dark Materials trilogy, which is exciting enough to get me away from the computer from time to time.
• I have given away, sorted out, and designated for donation the last of the baby clothes. Even more finally, I am selling the Ergo. (And the Moby, if anyone wants it.) I put them on a local mailing list yesterday afternoon and by 6pm I had three offers for the Ergo. I think it will be taken today. I used it daily for, I'd say, four years in total, and apart from some fading it's in perfect condition, not a stitch out of place. Those things are built to last, and if you're looking for a baby carrier I can't recommend it highly enough.

Oh, Ergo. The fun times we had.

• By which I mean that the baby train has left and I am not on it and I'm finally fine with that. (Disclaimer here so that writing this sentence does not immediately cause me to accidentally conceive. We do not intend to procreate any further, that's all.)

• Bedtime has taken a turn for the worse. It's not fun. I do not like chasing Mabel around the street in her nightgown after stories because she's not tired (except she is, so much) and as a result her second-favourite Barbie is now reposing in the recycling bin. I suppose I'll take it out, but it's the first time I've actually been forced to take such a drastic step. Or lost my temper enough to go through with it, I suppose.
• I hope it's a phase, because the rest of my life isn't looking much like a good time if it's not.

Pedicure

One wholly superficial thing that tends to make an otherwise nice-looking man less attractive to me is long fingernails. Long dirty fingernails are, of course, worse. I had a huge crush on a guy in college until I noticed his nails, and that - happily for me because I was more insignificant than a gnat in his eyes and he was probably a total asshole anyway - put the kybosh on the crush. I was once again able to attend my Greek and Roman Civilization tutorial without blushing furiously and fumbling my pen the entire time.

So when I met B the B, I was happy to see that his fingernails were perfectly groomed. Not long at all. Maybe a tiny bit on the short side, to be honest, but whatever, there is no too short. Unless you're talking about my History teacher in high school who used to bite his so low that they were painful to look at. (No crush there either. Not a hint of one. Good teacher, though.)

So anyway, B and I had probably been married quite a while before I realised that he never clipped or cut or filed his fingernails. "What do you do?" I asked, mystified. "I bite them off," he replied. They don't look bitten. They just look neat. I never see him biting them. I decided that I could live with this, and decided to pretend we'd never had that conversation.

Trouble is, apparently it's genetic. Dash lets me cut his nails very nicely now that he's, you know, seven; though for the first few years of his life I carried the nail clippers with me and would give him a manicure whenever he dropped off in the carseat. Mabel, on the other hand, is a whole other kettle of keratin.

When she was a baby, I suppose I managed to cut her nails as required every now and then, but since the age of about two she's been biting them, just like her father does. They're too short, but they don't look gnawed, exactly. I tell her she'll pull off too much and hurt herself, but it hasn't happened yet.

She also bites her toenails.

I suppose some day in the distant future she'll want to wear nail polish enough to stop herself biting, or else her joints will seize up in old age and she won't be able to get her toes to her teeth any more. In the meantime, this is just one fight I'm not really fighting.

She'll probably blame me when her boyfriend dumps her for doing it, though.

The momentous and the mundane

Oh, dinner, how you tease me with your needing to be made, every single damn night, unless I was organized and made lots the night before, which works well with winter dinners like chilli and lasagne but somehow rarely manages to cut it in the summer, when I have all these leaves and tomatoes and things.

I don't know what we're eating, don't bug me. There's hours yet to dinner time. Well, one hour, maybe. Dash has a baseball game to which his father will take him, and Mabel and I are on track for an early bedtime, seeing as how yesterday was one of those thankfully-not-common nights when I held her for several hours because she has a phlegmy cough (sorry, were you eating?) and was borderline feverish and I felt she needed to be propped up in bed but couldn't engineer that unless she was actually on me. Which is not so conducive to me sleeping either. It was like old times with a snurfly newborn. Except she didn't nurse. Which really is quite lovely and amazing, because it would have been a lot more tedious this time last year (or even a few months ago) when she'd have been latched on all night as well.

And you know, the funny thing is that she seems (seems, I say, not counting any chickens) to be dropping the morning nurse as well, the only one we have left, the one she was so adamant to keep. A few non-standard mornings have distracted her from remembering at the point when she normally would, and it's possible - just possible - that we will have weaned at four-and-a-half after all. Which is nicely matching her brother's age of weaning, and let me emphasize this may mean that I will soon be no longer lactating for the first time in seven years. Seven straight years. That's a long time. For all I know, my boobs might schlurrpp themselves into tiny fried eggs when they figure out what's going on. Or, more probably into the sort of things I could helpfully roll up before stuffing into a bra. Sigh.

This is not what I was going to say, but is it ever? Stream of consciousness, baby.

Oh, I know.

There are only thirteen and a half days left of school before summer. Hold me.

Gratuitous photo of Mabel, hiding around the corner the more safely to watch a scary part of The Princess Bride.

Exposition

So what happens nowadays (by which I mean this week, probably; my memory is short and constantly renewing itself) is that every few mornings I put on my sexxay workout gear and I flit around the house doing the normal before-school morning things like eating cereal and making Dash's lunch and nagging people to get dressed and checking my Facebook in case something important happened on the Internet overnight. The children are slightly confused: "What are those jeans?" Dash asked me this morning.

And then I bring Mabel to school and then sometimes I actually do something like exercise and other times I have what my cousins taught me is called a French workout, when you dress for the gym but don't go. And they should know, because they live in California where you have to at least pretend to go to the gym.

The something like exercise I'm tending towards at the moment is a 20-minute "extreme burn" pilates workout DVD. It doesn't sound like much, especially when you realise that extreme burn is an extreme exaggeration (except for my abs, which, ouch), but it's more than nothing and I think that's the point.

I've also been known to take a bike ride or even just a brisk evening walk lately, since my Stupid Toe won't let me run any more. (It's much better. I don't even notice it, unless I try to run half a mile or so, and then I start limping, which is unpleasant and makes me grumpy and despondent.) I loved the yoga class I went to a few times in the new year, but it takes too much of a chunk out of my brief, brief window of morning. By the time I'd got home and showered it was time to go straight back down and pick up Mabel, because she's all done with formal education at 11.30 every morning. And formal education has about had it with her by then too.

The prospect of going to BlogHer bang smack in the middle of the summer is actually more of a motivator than the idea of the local swimming pool opening up at the end of this month. My swimsuit, after all, is stretchy, and I've basically got into the habit of switching off all my mortification circuits on entry, as a self-defence mechanism. Anyway, all the other people I run into there are similarly uncovered, and we're mostly all imperfect one way or another.

But BlogHer is another story: I'll be meeting a whole passel of new people, mostly women, all of us trying to make the best first impression possible but look like we didn't have to try very hard because we always look this way. I won't lie - it's a scary notion. But in reality it will probably end up much like the swimming pool - we're all imperfect, and we'll all focus on the pretty, whether it's someone else's shoes or their necklace or their smile that lights up the room.

I'm really quite excited about BlogHer, you know. Apart from giving me a little more impetus to get fit(ter) and a rock solid excuse to buy some new clothes, I have a cool and lovely roomie whom I'm looking forward to getting to know a bit better, and for the first time since I've had children, I'm going to be doing something that's just for me. For three whole days.

It's a milestone of sorts. I don't know exactly what I expect to get out of it - I'm not fired up about any particular conference session, though I may learn great things or hear great people at whatever ones I end up attending. I'm not dying to get spectacularly drunk at any of the parties (though it may happen). I'm just looking to expand my blogging network a bit, meet some new people who like the same sort of things I do, get some new readers, and - most of all - take a step towards establishing who I am when I'm not being someone's mom.

It's been a long time coming. It's going to be good.

Rule of blog

There's this thing about blogging. A sort of an unwritten rule. If something's going wrong in your life, you're not allowed blog about it until you've fixed it. If you do, you're just a whiner and you're bringing everyone down and that's depressing and nobody will want to read about it.

Or else, which is sometimes worse, you do blog about it, just this once, and everyone thinks you were asking for advice, which you may or may not have been doing but you're going to get it anyway, and nothing makes you feel more of a big fat failure than lots of helpful advice telling you to do the things you know you should do, but the whole point was that you don't want to do them, or you can't for whatever reason that may or may not be basically laziness or disinclination. Like if I said "Waahh, my sentences are too long," and you said, "Well, there's this great thing called a full stop," and I said, "But I don't wanna stop it there, I just wanted to whine for a minute."

So while we all want to remain human and mortal and real in the eyes of our readers, we also want to present our best faces, the public ones - or semi-public - wherein if we get things wrong we then figure it out and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, by jimminy, and our lives get better because we're Doing It Right, and what's more, You Can Too.

It's a bit of a no-win situation, to be honest. You want to be cheerful, you don't want your readers to leave in droves because every time they click over to your blog you're whinging on about that thing again, and if they wanted to hear whinging they could go talk to their own four-year-olds thank you very much. On the other hand, you don't want to be one of those insufferable bloggers who has the perfect decor and the perfect children and the perfect life and the perfect housekeeping skills because we all hate those people. And if you only blog about the perfect and ignore the imperfect, that's as good as pretending to be perfect, which is just as bad only duplicitous as well.

I have nothing wise to say on this subject. It's just something I've thought lately. A blogger narrates their story as they choose, it's our prerogative. We are unreliable narrators, of course, because we can't see ourselves from above, and because we can't tell everything even if we wanted to. As a reader, you takes what you gets, and you build a picture that might be true or false or somewhere in between. You impose your own expectations and assumptions and irrational likes and dislikes on what I've said, and I have no control over what you end up with. That's your prerogative.

And somewhere way back along the line, all we wanted to do was pass the time, writer and reader both. Life is complicated.

Decimal

Dash couldn't sleep last night, so he requested a notebook and a pencil and wrote a book. As you do. Then he fell asleep for a few minutes and dreamed that theives came in and stole his pages, and woke up in a fright. I had to lie down with him for aaages to get him back to sleep, and by then it was my bedtime and the 3:10 to Yuma is going to have to wait for another day. (Which is okay with me. It's one of those "We should probably see it" films. Is it any good, really? Have you watched it?)

Anyway, this is his book, all three pages plus cover:

 Ten is a Grat Nomber by [redacted]

 My favorite nomber is 10. 10 is a good nomb[er] becus it is the first 2 nomberd nomber.

Nombers are grate but i'd say 10 is better out of them all. 1 to 100 is not all.

Nombers go on forever, but I stil think 10 is better.

I can't wait for the next thrilling instalment. I think he displays a grasp of the concept of infinity and a general liking for digits that I find admirable, though I'm not sure why he says "better" all the time instead of "best." I also note that his literary inclination is not towards fiction.

I told him how to spell "favorite" (the American way, to my chagrin) and to put another t in better, but the rest (as you can tell) is all his own work. He has the vaguest of understandings that I used to have a job in the outside world and of what it was, so he asked me, "And tomorrow, will you do that thing you used to do, in the library or wherever it was...?" He meant would I edit it. I said I would.

************

Some time after Christmas, homework stopped being the royal pain in the ass it had been. Mostly because I stopped caring so much, and therefore stopped bugging him to do it when I thought he should be doing it. He does his homework every night, usually not until Mabel has been taken upstairs to bed and is therefore no longer a distraction. It doesn't take long. Then we go through his spelling words either orally or by typing them into SpellingCity.com and letting him take a test on the computer, which is a great attraction. And he does his twenty minutes' reading with us at bedtime, before or after stories.

It's all very low pressure and I'm fine with that. I can see that his writing has got neater, his punctuation is pretty good, and some weeks he gets 100 percent in his spelling test. His reading level has leapt from a 12 (on the DRA scale) at the beginning of the year to a 24 this month. (Which sounded spectacular to me until I heard that some other kid went from 12 to 40. What an overacheiver. Sheesh.) But things are moving in the right direction and nobody is stressed out, and that makes me happy.

So all in all, first grade turns out to have been just fine.

Happy camper

I'm filling in summer camp forms for the children. I want them to take Mabel as well as her brother, so I'm just going to leave some sections of hers blank, I think.

You can figure out for yourselves which parts of this I'm not really submitting.

• Child's likes and dislikes: Likes: active play, imaginary play. Dislikes: You, probably.
• Enjoys these physical activities: Climbing (trees, onto the top of the car), bike riding (barefoot), balancing precariously and swinging upside down over concrete surfaces.
• My child has difficulty with these activities: Cleaning up, being polite to authority figures.
• Things my child might need help with: Drying/dressing after swimming.
• Fears and concerns of the participant: That you might not operate entirely according to her wishes.
• Specific behavioural concerns: That she might be horrible to everyone.
• Triggers of the specific behavioural concerns: Crossing her in any way, thwarting her will, etc.
• What behavioural techniques have been successful that can be maintained during the program? Flagrant bribery with new dolls, Barbies, trips to Target, ice cream. 

I tell myself that she's perfectly fine (mostly) at school and camp is just like school only more fun (probably). She'll be a model camper.

Right?

(And I'll get two weeks of six blessed hours' peace Every Day.)

Do they have s'mores at camp?

Four point five cake

Saturday was Mabel's four-and-a-halfth birthday. I like to make a bit of a thing about half birthdays, because a year is a long time to wait, and also Cake, any excuse for; and because sometimes I can make it into enough of a milestone in their minds that they'll do something, or start doing something, or stop doing something, just because now they're whatever-and-a-half.

So Mabel is no longer having boo(b) in the evening. At all. This is great.
Also, she is going to start trying to wipe herself after a poo. All I'm asking is that she tries, that she's willing to give it a go, which will be a lot better than the point-blank refusal I've had up to now. And she has been trying, since Saturday. So that's great too.

On the other hand, she had a fit of the screaming collywobbles at drop-off this morning, and I very much hope that's not indicative of how four point five is going to go. I know it's a tough age and I'm prepared for some backsliding in behaviour and/or willingness to try new things, but I would really like to be able to bring her to school without the clawing and the screaming and the tearing at my heart, because it's nice when that doesn't happen.

Oh well. Onwards to five, which everyone agrees is The Golden Age, rivalled only by eight.

More importantly, cake.

I made half a batch of Burnt Butter Brown Sugar cupcakes (Nigella, How to be a Domestic Goddess) topped with Dark Chocolate Icing (Darina Allen, Easy Entertaining), and they were, if I say it myself, rather gorgeous. I haven't done the brown butter thing before even though Smitten Kitchen and others have been raving about it for a while. It was really easy and I'm pretty sure that's what I have to thank for the fact that these buns are still moist and soft two days later.

(I know, why on earth do we still have any two days later? That will be remedied, don't worry.)

Disappearing pizza and itchy fingers

I'm starting to get itchy fingers. I think I'm at one of those Points In My Life.

See, here I am churning out acres of verbiage - garb(i)age verbiage perhaps, but still - every day, and I seem to have a surprising amount of time to do it in, once I ignore the siren songs of cleaning the bathrooms and vacuuming the playroom and paying attention to my quite self-sufficient younger child; which is hard but, you know, I love you all so I do it.

However. I can't help thinking all this energy in my fingertips could be put into something more, well, I hate to be crass, but lucrative. Or meaningful or fulfilling or something. Not that this isn't... oh, you know what I mean. If some of the time I did something I was paid for, then I could pay someone else to clean the house now and then, and then I could continue to ignore the housework with impunity. It's a glorious tiny circle of capitalism.

Yesterday (this seems like a detour but bear with me, it'll get relevant), my dinner plans went a little off kilter, and B offered to pick up pizza on his way home. Which was lovely, except that when I tried to order online from our local pizzeria, it had disappeared from the Internet. It had also disappeared from the phone network, as the number listed brought me to the next town over's Domino's, and then the man on the other end couldn't hear me anyway. 

Fine, I said snottily, and made carbonara, which is what I should have done to begin with.

And then when I was asking local friends where our Domino's had gone, someone humorously suggested that I should rent the now-empty location and start a cafe from which I could sell my home-baked goods.

It is indicative of my state of mind that I almost considered considering it seriously.

In one way, it's lovely. I mean, the idea that yes, I could do this, that even though I'm not the entrepreneur "type" and that I've never considered being a small-business owner, I could probably do it in real life. My life is not over just because I've had kids. I never opened the second-hand bookstore/coffee shop I've been musing about since I was twenty before I had childrnen, but that doesn't mean I can't do it afterwards. Maybe it's something to do with the headlights of the oncoming forty that makes me so cavalier in my assumptions, but I do actually think I could.

But there's plenty of time for that, and right now it's not actually what I want to do. I think if I had to bake for a job rather than enjoyment, I'd very soon get sick of churning out the goods. Not to mention all the headaches that go with owning a small business. Not at the moment, thank you, though I won't write it off forever.

On the other hand, it seems like I do have a little time on hand and maybe I could actually do something else with it. I could start small and look for some freelance editing work. What I'd really like is for someone to pay me to write, but then I'd have to work out what it was I was going to write, or write things other people tell me to, and I'm not certain how to do either of those. I do want to capital-W Write Something, but I can't do that while Mabel's flitting around the house begging every five minutes to watch My Little Pony on my computer or actually putting on Sesame Street in the background. That particular project will have to keep growing at the snail's pace it's coming along at, for the moment, if I want it to be any good.

----

And then I had to go and, you know, actually parent or something, and make dinner and take in the laundry, and in between I checked my LinkedIn profile to make sure it didn't have any misspellings and then I put out the word on Facebook and Twitter that I am, in fact, in the market for some freelance proofreading, copy editing, taking words and making them prettier/clearer/correcter*. 

Sure, what's the worst that can happen? I'm deluged with offers and have to turn people down? Or nothing at all. I think I can cope with both eventualities, but something in between would be ideal.

*Not actually a word. I do know that, don't worry.

SuperDash

I'm sure it's uncool to admit this, but I'm sort of totally besotted with my seven-year-old just now. Maybe it's because I picked up a couple of new things for him at Target yesterday and he's finally now wearing trousers that come past his ankles, along with a groovy navy hoodie, but he looks like a whole new - big - kid to me. A handsome, smart (in the good way), sensible (mostly), listening (sometimes), cool quirky individual with a personality all of his own.

He hums to himself and sings choruses of his own composing, he pitches and catches and bike-rides at high speeds, he reads and writes (albeit reluctantly), he loves math homework. I gave him a joke book for his birthday, as I had a hunch that if anything could get him reading it would be a bunch of cheesy, predictable, corny jokes - and indeed, he labours through each one, sometimes needs the punchline explained, and then appreciates the heck out of each and every old chestnut.

Have new coat, will wear

He won't be kissed any more, and any goodnight kiss I might happen to land on him is quickly swiped off and sent back to me. But if I have to wake him up for school - I never thought the day would come, for my 5am two-year-old, but it has - I plant a good few smackers on his warm sleepy cheek and he grins through his dreams and can't muster the energy to push me off. Hugs are still okay, even awake, and he'll still surprisingly hold a hand.

He can't see me with a camera without hamming it up to the nth degree, which is why I have a lot of photos of superhero poses and cheesy grins and not many of his bright handsome face looking the way it should. He's lost and gained two bottom teeth, and the gap where he knocked out one top tooth in babyhood finally looks right, though the replacement isn't poking through just yet. He looks like his father, like my mother's brothers when they were young; not like me that I can see, but others can, they say. His eyes are blue, his shins are bruised, and he always seems to need a haircut.

He's miraculous, hilarious, and totally irritating. He's irrational, loud, stubborn, infuriating, and a pain in the neck, but his heart, I think, is in the right place. He plays gently with the younger kids, until he forgets and shows off. He adores and tolerates his rambunctious little sister and puts up with her nonsense and her imperious demands for the one corner of the sofa that everyone wants, and he knows exactly how to push her buttons until she screams and stomps off in high dudgeon.

He was an obsessive three-year-old, deeply devoted to Spider-Man and constantly wanting to make machines and have us build things for him out of cardboard. His obsessions have levelled off as his interests have expanded and his abilities have caught up with his imaginings, but he still devotes a lot of thought to inventions he's planning and characters he's inhabiting. He just has other outlets now, his own internal life and friends at school and things I'm not involved in, just as it should be. That's what we've been preparing him for, after all.

I'm not saying he's Done or anything, but he seems to be coming along quite nicely. And I like him a lot where he is right now.