Walking It Out

Hey y'all,

This has very little to do with you, and instead is all about me.

As 2015 began, I realized I had a lot of unnecessary stress in my life. And it wasn't the kind of stress that can be productive - I mean, I'm not an elected official going to bed fretting about how I'm going to improve the situation in the Middle East. I'm a mom who was waking up in the middle of the night irritated by what a girl I haven't seen since the 10th grade posted about the measles vaccine on Facebook. I mean, that's the kind of thing that didn't/doesn't even need to be on my radar. I didn't feel particularly healthy, and I just felt mentally exhausted all the time. 

So I started making incremental changes that soon paid big dividends. Over the years, I'd gotten myself subscribed to dozens of e-mail lists; it seemed every store in America was e-mailing me every day about a sale. So Step One was unsubscribing to all of those. 30 fewer e-mails a day in the inbox. Great.  I've all but quit Facebook... Cute pictures of my friends and their kiddos? Great. A constant stream of news stories about everything that was wrong in every quarter of the world? Not great - for me. 

Then I got one of those Fitbit fitness tracker/watch thingies and a hipster headband and I started walking. At first, my goal was 10,000 steps a day. Then some of my friends also got the Fitbit and we could sync our walks on our phones and challenge each other and joke with each other as we exercised. Every week, we do a "Workweek Hustle" challenge to see which one of us can take the most steps from Mon-Fri, and the winner gets to pick a prize. Because my perky friend Julie won a few weeks ago, we're all scheduled to karaoke tonight at a bowling alley. Awful. 

Then your dad gave me some earphones and I figured out how to put comedy albums and podcasts on my phone, and now I walk around town listening to "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" on NPR and giggling to myself. Or listening to the great interviews on Nerdist.  Or books on tape that I'd been meaning to get to for years. Or just talking to Peg Peg as I hustle around town. I'm walking about 7-10 miles a day lately. Since I started tracking my walks on Dec 1st, I've accomplished this:

I went two months (I think) without taking a single picture. I had taken so many photos between Oct and Dec of last year that the photographer portion of my brain was fried and I just needed to set my camera aside for a while. Instead, I started gradually taking photos with my phone on my walks - more to entertain myself than anything else. Then, just to kinda share my love of Missoula and its various nooks and crannies, I started posting the photos on Instagram. (If you're an Instagram kind of person, you can find me here).

I have no idea if this is all going to last, but in the meantime, I'm happier, healthier, more centered, and constantly on the lookout for things I can jettison from my life in order to make me more focused and present. 

There's probably more New Agey/self helpy words in that last sentence than I've used in my whole life. 

Love,

Mom

Q, R, S, T, U, B...

Dear Hagen,

I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have become your sister's trained monkey. You guys play so well together these days, because she concocts these elaborate scenarios and then gives you your line reading - "What if you said, 'I can't go under that bridge - there's a troll down there?'" - and you mimic it exactly. Recently, she's added musical performances to your repertoire; she sings a little and then points to you when it's your time to chime in. She is Gladys Knight and you are all the Pips.

Your dad and I have decided to let all this slide, because:

1) It doesn't seem to bother you.
2) You're actually learning songs in record time.
3) One day, you are going to be the World's Most Patient Husband (and your sister will turn up at all your romantic anniversary dinners to remind your future spouse, "I taught him that!")

Love,
Mom

School Pictures

Hey y'all,

Months ago, Laney came home with a cheesy little info packet about school pictures. Your dad thought it was ridiculous that I was even considering paying for school pictures, since you're already possibly the most over-photographed children in the world. But school pictures seem like one of those awful rites of passage that everyone must endure, so I signed Laney up for the cheapest option ($20), just so we could say we did. 

Peg Peg likes to complain about her school pictures. She says that Granny Jack would always curl her hair with bobby pins the night before, so her hair always looked ridiculous in her pictures. Granny Jack always acts like she doesn't know what Peg is talking about, but last night, I found these pictures:

Woo-wee.

Laney, I decided we would keep things simple; you could pick out any shirt you wanted, and I wouldn't curl your hair. You're absolutely beautiful, inside and out, and there's no way to make you look like less than a million bucks. What could possibly go wrong, yada yada yada. 

This is what we got back, and I have to be honest - it made me laugh out loud:

Just so weird and awkward and sweaty and orange (not you, the picture). I don't know who that girl is, but it's not you.

So I put up an backdrop in our living room and we had a little re-shoot.

As the guy on the rental car commercial says, "I'm not a control freak. I'm a control enthusiast."

I took the school pictures at Hagen's preschool, and on Hagen's picture day, he decided that he was not Hagen, he was a lion, and would only pose as such. I probably have a dozen photos on my hard drive now that are variations on Lion, roaring.

Then you went to lunch, spilled spaghetti on your clothes, changed into some old play clothes, took a nap, and came back as a human boy:

I had forgotten about all of this until last night when I found those pictures of my mama and realized I needed to come up with a blog post that would give me an excuse to put them online for the world to enjoy. You're welcome, world!

Love,
Mom

Happy Birthday, Hagen

Dear Hagen,

Two days after Christmas, you turned three. 

Determined not to let this birthday sneak up on me, I started soliciting your input about possible birthday activities weeks in advance. And this is how it finally went down:

Mom: Hagen, do you want to have a party?

Hagen: No t'anks. 

Mom: No pinata? No games?

Hagen: No. 

Mom: You want to go to the Carousel?

Hagen: No. 

Mom: The library?

Hagen: No.

Mom: The gymnastics place?

Hagen: No. 'ont want to imnassics. 

Mom: Well, I know you don't like swimming or sledding or skiing, and you're too small for the bounce house place. Hell, I don't know...want to just invite your friend Finley over and play blocks and have a piece of cake and call it a day?

Hagen: Yeah. OK. 

So that's just what we did. 

And just like you, it was low-key, special and perfectly fun. 

Love,

Mom

Sledding & Shady Pines

Dear Hagen,

When Peg and Tex were here, we all loaded up to go sledding. Now, if I asked the average person to guess who would enjoy this trip the least, the smart money would probably be on the southern contingent, specifically my mother who once visited us in May and wore my bathrobe over her clothes and sat in my car to do her crossword puzzles so she could run the seat warmers. 

But those people would be wrong! Because the real answer is that no one hates going outside in the cold more than you. We parked at the ski hill, and I opened the car door to get you out, and you said, "Don' wanna sled. 'et's just go eat."

Every morning at our house this winter, we've gotten you ready for school and put on your coat and opened the front door, and you've dropped to the ground with some version of, "No, mama! Is too snowing!" Or - my favorite - "Is crazy out dere." I pick you up at school at the end of the day, and your teachers say, "Did you know Hagen doesn't like to go outside?" "Who do you think you're telling?" I ask. 

But we went through the motions and we bundled you up and thought if you just rode down the hill on the inner tube with Dad one time, you would love it.

Instead, what happened was your dad put you in his lap and sailed down the hill with you, as you yelled out loud and clear, "THIS IS NOT MY CHOICE!" followed by "THAT WAS NOT MY CHOICE!" Obviously, we're not going to make you sled against your will, so back in the car you went. 

Your sister takes a more welcoming view of the snow. 

There was a hit show in the 80's called "The Golden Girls," and on it, the character Dorothy used to always threaten to take her mom back to the old folks' home by looking at her and saying, "Shady Pines, Ma." At the ski hill, Peg Peg asked me, "Well, if Hagen doesn't like to go outside and he doesn't like the snow and he won't ski or sled, what DOES he like?" "Hmmm.." I considered. "He likes working on puzzles and getting up late and taking naps and regular snacks and lying on the couch watching TV and small building projects that he can work on alone and cranking the thermostat up to 80, and quiet rooms where he can concentrate." Shady Pines, we decided, might be the perfect place for Hagen to hang out during the day, in lieu of preschool. 

If you're reading this and you're a member of the Frazer United Methodist Church Senior Friends group, please sign Hagen up for your next bus trip and let me know what I owe you. 

Love,

Mom

Hooky

Dear Laney,

Every Wednesday morning, I volunteer to work in your kindergarten classroom. I adore your teacher and your classmates are a hoot and I really like helping out. Usually, I sit at a table in the back of the classroom and call kids over in groups of 3 or 4 for a little extra practice with language skills. We make up fun spelling and rhyming games and I get to use my drama degree, if only for an hour a week with five year-olds. 

This is some of what I have observed by doing this:

Children enter kindergarten with a wide range of abilities. There are kids in your class who don't know their alphabet, and there are kids who can read. A LOT of your teacher's time is taken up by responding to the children's basic needs: some kids come in not having eaten, some kids forget to bring a coat. Ms. Hosman makes sure everyone is fed and warm, and then gets to start her lessons. There are 19 kids in your class, plus two additional special needs students who join the class every morning with their helper. But there is only one Ms. Hosman. I say all of this, because it occurred to me as I was working with a super-sweet kiddo the other day who didn't know how to write his name that there must be well-meaning parents out there who think that simply by putting their kid on the bus, they're doing everything they need to do to guarantee their child learns everything s/he's supposed to know. On a generous day, I would say those parents are naive - maybe that's the way it worked back in the late 70s, but it isn't now. On an average day, though, I am less charitable and go home thinking they're out of their damn minds. 21 children, each with a different skill set, each taught in the same room by the same teacher, who should be making a million dollars a year but is instead making 1/30 of that, while buying her own supplies for the classroom. It's just...ugh.

All of that is kind of a tangent, though, because here's what I wanted to talk about:

Yesterday, I went into school with you as I do every Wednesday morning, and discovered you had a substitute teacher. And she was just so...unpleasant. The way I see it, it's okay to be ill-prepared OR mean, but you can't be both. Don't have a plan, but you're nice about it? Okay! Mean as a snake but organized as a German car factory? Alrighty then! But figuring out how to take attendance for half an hour while the kids sit in a 90 degree room still in their coats and hats and gloves and snow pants? Not okay! The sub, I should note, was missing an arm. Which could totally have been a non-issue, had she not growled, "You've probably noticed I only have one arm. I'm going to wait 'til everyone gets on the rug in a circle so I can tell everybody about it at one time." That's when the morning started to feel like Kindergarten as directed by David Lynch. 

The morning was such a hot mess that the special needs helper whispered to me, "If I had a kid in this class, I might think about signing her out and taking her home." So we went up to the office and I signed you out "Reason: Questionable Sub."

Then I moved some meetings around and decided we would play hooky together and see if we could do some independent learning. 

We walked downtown, sounding out the names of the streets we passed. 

We met your dad for lunch at the sushi place, where we talked about Japan and practiced using chopsticks and you ate a plate of tempura bigger than your head. 

We kept walking to the Missoula Museum of Art, where you loved this sculpture/installation of beams made of millions of squares of newspaper stuck together. (The sign said you could walk on them if you removed your shoes first.)

I asked you to pick your favorite piece of art in the whole museum and tell me why it was your favorite. You picked this portrait...something about it being "bright."

Then we stopped for ice cream on the way home.

It was a perfect Mom and Laney day. Obviously, we're privileged to be able to able to spend this time together and be able to go on these adventures. And I'm super lucky to have a daughter who's so much fun to hang out with - Dad said we seemed like two grown-ups having a day on the town.

We'll just have to make our own guesses on how that lady lost that arm.

Love,
Mom

Christmas

Hey y'all, 

Your grandparents from Arkansas came out right before Christmas to spend the holiday with us. When they are at their house, they enjoy a sterile haven of quiet. When they are at our house, they get to enjoy compressed mayhem at volume 80 with bonus Play Doh in the carpet. 

To get ready for the holiday, Peg Peg and Laney made cookies. 

You know when you're packing for a trip and you're so busy or stressed, you can't really focus on what's going into the suitcase, and then you sit on the plane and finally take a breath and think, "It's possible I just packed 13 shirts and no pants?" That's kind of how Christmas shopping was for me... I'd been so busy in December with the commercials I'd been working on that on Christmas Eve, when I pulled out all the gifts I'd hidden, I was quite certain I was going to discover that I'd bought one person a hundred presents and another person zero. Luckily, it didn't matter because Hagen is quite happy to get one thing, play with it all day and leave everything else wrapped under the tree. 

As in, "Oh, cool! I got a whistle. We can be done here."

Not so with Laney. Laney would happily open her presents, your presents, and the neighbor's presents. She wants to open the prop presents under the fake trees at department stores.

Wrapped it herself. So proud. 

Santa brought Laney a bike. Laney didn't seem to care, so Peg Peg took it for a spin. 

By far, the most memorable present of the morning was the karaoke machine that Grandpops sent us from Missouri. Dad was Laney's duet partner, Hagen sang back-up, and Tex worked the spot. 

Earlier in the month, Grandpops had emailed me, looking for a gift idea for Laney. We had a correspondence that went something like this:

Sunday, November 30, 2014 10:46 AM

I can't believe I'm suggesting this, because it's like throwing gasoline on a fire, but I think Laney would get a kick out of a karaoke machine. BUT PLEASE NOTE: If you go this route, you must also send along booze her her parents. -Brooke

Sunday, November 30, 2014 6:00PM

Better tell me quick what y'all like to drink. -Joe

Sunday, November 30, 2014 6:24 PM

If we're looking at a 5 year-old belting songs from Frozen with a plugged-in microphone and a light show?   Moonshine.  -Brooke

And lo, it came to pass:

They're fun in Missouri. We haven't tried this yet but if it turns out that it's undrinkable, I can always use it to remove my nail polish. 

Merry Christmas, one and all. Like it says in the Bible: Crank up the showtunes and pass the moonshine. 

Love,

Mom