it’s almost a new year for red sea pedestrian types, so why not make a resolution? and hey, you don’t have to be a red sea pedestrian to get on this train, anyway.
i want to feel healthier. i want to feel better. i struggle with my health issues, and i realize that i need to be even stronger and tougher, as things are not getting any easier in life.
so here are my new year’s resolutions, and i hope i keep to the plan:
1) eat cleaner, simpler foods. sure, i can have a cheat meal now and again, but i need to eat better. no one else in this house needs to be following this regime, though it certainly would be beneficial for them. but i need to lay off their cookies and yummy stuff. and if i bite it, i’d better write it down. everything counts (in large amounts.) goal one: one cheat meal/week.
2) work out. i don’t need tiger dad at the gym to guilt me into coming back. and there will be days when i can’t get to the community center gym, so i just need to walk or run or do something else. if i don’t do it right after i take the boy to school, i never do it. so i need to kick my own ass and do something. and i know it’s boring, but some of these workouts must be weight training ones. goal one: as many as 5 days/week.
3) try to be more positive. (i know, i know, this coming from little miss self deprecation.) try to be less snarky. maybe it will rub off on my kids! seriously, this might be key.
anyway, i will try my best to not become pollyanna-ish ( could you see me doing that, anyway? really?) but i may start to chronicle my journey here.
and if anyone else is doing something similar, i could do with the support. feel free to weigh in (ha! i slay myself sometimes) in the comments. tips, workout mix suggestions, hell, anything as long as it is positive, feel free.
good ideas and wishes all count. especially in large amounts.
here’s a back-to-school equation for you: bad decisions + poor communication = really pissed off parents.
so arlington county public schools is a pretty awesome district. we moved here specifically for the schools, and we’ve been quite happy overall with our kids’ experiences. we’ve especially loved our elementary school, taylor elementary (go tigers!) the administration is open and receptive; the teachers have been caring; and so far, so good. my house is .9 miles from the school; and we are among the people situated closest to the school from out of our school bus stop pals. most are further away, certainly a mile or more. [pay attention to this info; there will be a test later. maybe.]
this summer, we received two letters from APS. the first letter from our superintendent, dated july 9, told us about first day packets (which we can now fill out online at the Student Info Center — yay, arlington! you answered some of my prayers!) also, it hinted at fun things to come in transportation land. APS apparently had hired consultants (motto: got a problem? if not, we’ll show you that you do!) to help figure out the nightmarish transportation conundrums facing a school system that is overcrowded and yet still growing. yes, changes were afoot:
“With the start of the school year this fall, we will be moving forward with the plans that the Office of Transportation has outlined. One of the first steps underway includes the implementation of bus‐routing software to help us plan routes that are more efficient so we can maximize the capacity of our bus fleet.
The second step that is critical to this plan is to serve students who are eligible to receive bus transportation services. As outlined in School Board policy, elementary school students who live more than one mile from school and secondary school students who live more than 1½ miles from school will receive bus transportation.
In early August, principals will be sending families of students who are eligible for transportation services a letter that will include their child’s bus stop and route. This addresses a critical safety concern for students who ride buses and allows us to better communicate and serve families when we may experience a delay or other changes in service.”
hmm. we’re .9 mile from school, but others are more than a mile. i hope we get that info soon, i thought. i will need to plan if my kid loses his school bus. it’s a 20 minute walk to school, barring he doesn’t get run down on North 31st Street (motto: Death Race 2000 wasn’t filmed here, but it could have been), or wiped out walking up our congested main street (the equivalent of 10 flights of stairs while carrying a 35+ pound backpack — yeah, yeah, you walked to school uphill in the snow both ways when you were young. hey, the 1970s called and wants your sad, fat ass back. would love to see some naysaying adults walk this walk with a backpack in either snow or 90+ degree weather during rush hour.) if i walk with him, that’s 80 minutes a day i have to carve out. daily. you know, from my bon-bon eating, soap opera-watching life as a stay-at-home mother. (isn’t that what we stay-at-home-moms do? oh yeah, i do have contract work. and, uh, i dunno. basically keeping things afloat. but i digress. per usual.)
there’s no short-cut to school, unless you consider a wooded park behind our house. and anyone who knows kids knows that given the choice of walking down and up a long, boring, traffic-lined sidewalk with stinky cars all around or walking through a park, well, the park wins. only this park has no path directly to school from our neighborhood. imagine the boy, running first through my kindly neighbor’s yard to get to the park, then crossing the stream that runs through the park, and then, going through a heavily wooded, very hilly area to get to and from school each day! yee ha! only now imagine 20, 30 children doing that each day. and no, we don’t live in east boofoo, nowhereland. we are less than one mile from a major city.
so. not. safe.
and i’m digressing yet again.
fast forward your little time machine to early august. august 3 to be exact. and heeeeere’s another letter. oh goody. i’ll get some clarification, right?
Transportation Assignment Letters: Transportation Services will be mailing letters to the parents of APS students who
are eligible for bus transportation later this month. Please look for your letter in the mail the week of August 20. It will include your child’s bus route number, bus stop and pickup time. The lower portion of the letter includes a “voucher.” Please be sure to tear it off and have your child carry it and present it to the driver when boarding the bus.
Walker Letters: A separate letter will be mailed for children who live in the school “walk zone.” Bus transportation is available only for students who are eligible for transportation and have received a transportation “voucher” in the mail. Otherwise, we hope you will encourage your student to walk or bike to school – this is a healthier option and will also help our environment by reducing the number of cars transporting students to and from school. Information about biking or walking to school is available online at www.apsva.us/schoolwalkmaps or www.walkarlington.com.
whatwhatWHAT? so let me get this straight: you MAY BE taking away my child’s bus, but i won’t know until i receive a letter posted august 20th? seriously? half of arlington is on vacation in late august; we are tied to the congressional vacation schedule, and you people know it. so you are sending information that is critical at a time when tons of affected parties aren’t around? and even if they are, you are giving people roughly two weeks to figure out how exactly to collect their children from a school that is already wildly congested at pick-up time as is? there is no parking, people. it is a safety disaster that is nearly averted every single day of the year. and now, you are adding MORE CARS to the picture?
let me go to the Student Info Center. i’m SURE there will be answers there. let’s see… BC has a middle school bus assignment, which is good since her middle school is a 10-minute drive from here, and that’s with miss jerseygirl driver at the wheel. let’s have a look-see at jools’ info:
To School: Information cannot be found relating to how this student is transported to school.
From School: Information cannot be found relating to how this student is transported from school.
uhm, so let me get this straight. are you replacing buses with star trek transporters? because i don’t see a bus stop here. i don’t see anything here. i talk with a friend in another neighborhood, and she indicates that her former bussed students are now being designated as walkers.
this doesn’t look good.
so, i call the transportation answer center, the one proudly mentioned in one of the aforementioned letters. the one that’s supposed to help me, right? answers? the lady who answered the phone there had no answers for me. none.
so i went with some parents from a nearby-neighborhood who are in the same boat that i’m in. off we trekked to the APS school board meeting to learn about the new transportation plan. i listened carefully to what the director of transportation said. and i still have no answers. i *did* hear someone say that the children are getting bus PASSES to ride busses and not bus VOUCHERS (which, i believe, is what they were called in one of the aforementioned APS letters.) and all i kept thinking was, really? my kid can’t always remember to bring home his homework. how long do you think it will be before my kid loses THAT? (assuming he is even on a bus, that is.) i even got up to speak about my situation, and other concerned parents spoke, too. i understand that only certain schools are affected by losing some busstops. is it just that our school has more helicopter parents who recognized this and jumped on it? are we just canaries in the coal mine?
(sorry. i love the police.)
anyway, i am left perplexed. this process never involved me or any parents i know. it is greatness thrust upon us, with very little time to make arrangements. this is not a matter of people being too lazy to walk. some of these kids will be walking down major streets with no sidewalks. some of these kids will be crossing streets where cars don’t even stop when a school bus has it’s flashing red lights on (North 31st Street, I’m looking at YOU.) according to the transportation director’s remarks last night at the meeting, the school district has added 1000 new students to its rolls this year but 0 new busses. Zero. Zilch. (maybe, children WILL be using star trek transporters to get to and from homeroom.) and, to paraphrase a quote that sage of sages bart simpson, he was proud of it, man.
it just takes one little kid to become road pizza and then your big ol’ cost savings on a bus goes out the window, folks.
can’t wait for these infamous bus/walker letters to get received. i bet when other parents discover — SURPRISE! — that their little kids are now walkers that there will be more gnashing of teeth, shock and awe.
in the meantime, i feel like APS is taking people like me for a ride.
here you have frugal mama (check out her site.) she has some neat recipes and ideas. she also has some lovely photos of her beautiful children. i’m sure she’s a really excellent mom, and i don’t take issue with that end of things. such a clean, nicely-decorated house! such well-scrubbed kids! and how big of her — she saves money by sending her children to the public schools. that’s what passes for down-to-earth, you know.
there’s this wonderful fantasy moms, especially urban ones, foster: the one about the simple life where they grow their veggies for the kids, watch little to no TV, and have this contained existence over which they have perfect control. this seems to be the idea this mom blogger is perpetuating. la la la — see my house, organized with categorized mason jars, toys all contained in container store containers, my kids eating natural veggies and fruits from the farmers market. pinterest feeds on this sort of thing; i’m guilty of harboring the fantasy myself at times. and who doesn’t want to spend more time with their family? (okay, let me rephrase that: who doesn’t want to spend more quality time with their families?) however, as a mom (and a blogger since 2002, long before most of these mommy bloggers were mommies, i would add), i find some aspects of this existence head-scratchingly irritating.
for starters, i cannot bring myself to take any sort of financial advice from a woman who has no retirement savings. unless she expects her children to come circle Marmee and support her in her old age, she’d better start contemplating that idea or else hope that these frugal ideas get kicked into high gear for her future blog where she extols the virtues of being a frugal senior citizen (with hopefully no medical issues to speak of.) i don’t know how fashionable it will be to eat cat food while waiting for your social security check to come in.
secondly, life can be controlled (to a certain point) until kids hit their teen years, when pop culture and hormones intermingle in such a way where you may ultimately be making the choice: have your kid conform to your TV-free lifestyle (not that TV is a treasure, but put yourself in the shoes of the average teen) and be ostracized socially, or relent and let those new demons into the home. lady, do you remember middle school? it’s tough enough because everyone is different (and different, as we all know, is so horrible at that age) — but you might be setting your kids up to be sitting alone in the library at lunchtime… well, maybe they won’t be alone. they may have the tiger moms’ kids in there, though they’ll be too busy studying to talk to your kids.
you don’t go grocery shopping anymore; you do all your shopping online with amazon prime. i know that’s a tip that will work well for folks on food stamps.
finally, how freaking frugal are you, really, when you can afford a house in NW DC and afford renovations? Why not move into a less tony area and see how much you enjoy the perks of frugality. not saying that frugality isn’t a noble idea. but I do wonder about this patina of elegance that this sort of idea has gotten these days. it’s a frugality that appears to come straight out of a Pottery Barn ad. like your home decor.
let’s call this all what it is: upper-middle-class fluffy fantasy of slowing down your family life. that’s nice if you can afford it. unfortunately, a lot of people in this world cannot. they are actually working to earn money for things, and not just $1000 tables (which you just had to have. hopefully, you aren’t one of those who frowns on welfare families who buy things that are frills when they cannot even afford the necessities.)
it’s awfully easy to be frugal when you have money.
yesterday morning, i woke up to my favorite newscasters sharing the info that the susan g. komen foundation had decided to no longer provide funding to planned parenthood because of their relatively-new policy of not giving funding to any grantees currently under investigation. i first thought to myself, wow. this can’t possibly be a smart public relations move. and my second thought?
particular bronx cheers go to this woman and this woman, both of whom are right-to-lifers who apparently care moreabout a blastocyst than a real, living human being, as blogger southernbeale shared in a righteous rant. who knows — they could be pressuring other cancer charities as well. here’s hoping those charities don’t bow to this sort of pressure.
i’m just delighted to see people taking the opportunity to send pledges to planned parenthood. many are asking that their donation be sent in honor of the susan g. komen race for the cure, which ensures that their honoree will get a lovely card from planned parenthood. i’m sure it’s suitable for framing. (i’d frame it, anyway.) in one day, over $600k rolled in to planned parenthood. so hey, all you right-to-lifers — you’d better start coughing up some cash to support SGK now.
yes, yes, they are a private nonprofit. they are entitled to give money to any organizations they want. but see, there are all these people who have dedicated time and energy toward fundraising for this behemoth of a group. those adorable ladies in pink who walk miles and miles and collect dollars upon dollars to help in the fight against breast cancer. they’re not going to shill for you anymore. they were willing to raise gazillions of dollars for you when you were a fighter for the cure. now, you’re apparently a fighter for the cure — for anti-abortion folks, only.
(note to karen handel: you’d better start your serious outreach to the teaparty types. like, yesterday.)
and another thing: people aren’t going to be buying pink shit anymore. corporate sponsors don’t like when you up and change your mission like that. they get jumpy. more importantly to them, their investors sometimes get a bit jumpy. and you know the expression: money talks, and bullshit walks. those corporate sponsors will walk right out of your big-ass, multimillion-dollar pink tent.
and now people are learning more about your history. as for me, after reading lots of material, i have come to the conclusion that you’ve turned into a big-ol’ marketing machine. fuck the cure — instead, let’s market our organization. to paraphrase from one of my political heroes, it’s about the brand, stupid. that, and our executive paychecks and possibly our political clout.
don’t misunderstand me: i’m willing to listen about how your organization’s dollars have actually funded any sort of progress towards a cure. my mother lost both breasts to breast cancer, so believe-you-me, i am VERY interested in progress toward a cure. give me a holler when you’ve got that info.
in the meantime, what you have here is a brand, a brand supported by marketing and marketing and more marketing. and honey, lots of marketing dollars will shrivel up drier than a witch’s, well, you know what body part i’m talkin’ ’bout. SOMEONE’S got to pay all the lawyers and nancy brinker’s and karen handel’s and all those other folks’ salaries.
…because her mama trained her properly, that’s why.
no, she’s not waiting in that way. or at least, not what you folks might think. this is a pet peeve of mine, and on this last day of NaBloPoMo, i thought i would end on a cranky note. (cos that is what folks expect of me.)
i am a carpool queen. i shuttle kids here, i shuttle them there, mama wreke shuttles kids everywhere. as a stay-at-home mom, i tend to take on rides in the early afternoon, when a lot of my kids’ friends’ parents are still working or quite possibly sitting in traffic somewhere, cooling their heels.
i don’t mind it, really. i get some of my best material listening to the kids talk. i’ve learned more about which boys are awful, which girls are snooty, which kids are kind, and which people should just be avoided at all costs. i’ve listened to silly-ass knock-knock jokes, i’ve listened to retellings of some pretty nasty pop music lyrics. sure, i make the kids listen to whatever is on my mp3 player, though anything with NSFW lyrics gets the fast-forward treatment. i don’t care whether my kids hear these things, but i suspect the rest of the world would be upset if johnny or janie listened to some of the finer verbage from panic at the disco. like, say, this:
anyway, my kids are trained from the get-go: when someone is picking you up, you wait at the appointed time by the window and watch for your ride. when they come, you shout out and let me know, and then you proceed directly to the car. people are kind enough to give you a ride, and you need to be kind and not make everyone else late by dallying.
apparently, though, this concept is not common knowledge. i can’t tell you how many times my kids and i have to come to people’s doors and knock and collect them. worse than that, though, are the times when the person isn’t ready, and when i mean not ready, i don’t mean that someone had to suddenly hit the loo before leaving. i get that, and i’m actually okay with that. but i have had situations where the person had to finish homework, finish texting someone, or finish talking to someone on the phone. and, in all of these cases, the people weren’t immediately trying to wrap things up, either; they were taking all the time in the world.
GRRRRRR!
i get that stuff happens, and so when it does, i don’t get annoyed or upset. but i have noticed as of late that there are recurrences of these sorts of events with the same folks. it really burns me up. am i supposed to be teaching the kids that they need to stop what they’re doing and get in the car if they have any intention of getting to point B? then, of course, i will get the rep as the mean-ass mom who scares all her kids’ friends.
wow. i have been struggling to write something every day for a whole month, courtesy of NaBloPoMo. i have actually done this bloggy endeavour now for several years, but this year, it has been tough going. this year, i decided to not to use a theme, probably to the dismay of everyone out there who reads this. in previous years, i have spent the month happily skewering 70’s or ’80s music, pet peeves, and all sorts of other things. somehow, it takes less effort to criticize things than it does to create something.
not that i c a n ‘t create something.
but it’s not as easy now for so many reasons. when i started this blog, almost 10 years ago (yes, it’s true), i mostly threw a combination of funny memes up as well as tales of my one, then two, children. now, memes end up on my FB page when they end up anywhere; and it gets increasingly tough to write about the kids because both they and their friends are old enough to read and surf teh internetz. once they put two and two together, they’ll realize that them there’s some good fodder in here, if you’re willing to dig. (note to all current mommy bloggers — one day, your children will hate you for writing about their toilet training/bed wetting/nose picking/etc. i’m glad i never went down that path.)
so, with my favorite topics somewhat off-limits, i have to either tilt at windmills, review concerts and music, or simply blather about the weather. well, maybe i don’t do the latter, but i suspect some of my navel-gazing may seem that way to some people… in which case, let me share my two most hated (by others) works with you.
2) my feelings about the song wildfire, which, i must tell you, i still firmly believe, even if loads of people disagree with me and send me hate mail over (which continues to come on my old site, so if you’d like to see a total stranger call me an anus, click here.)
anyway, one more day of the bataan death blog march. hoping i have enough steam to cross the finish line.
does anyone know whatever happened to andrew ridgeley? does anyone know what andrew ridgeley contributed to wham or this song or anything in general? i often imagine he is the character hugh grant played in the movie music and lyrics, although in ridgeley’s case, as a guy who probably had talent but who was overshadowed and then overlooked. i imagine it’s hard to shine when george stay out of public loos michael is your singing partner.
ah, but remember them in their fluffy-haired heydey? remember the choose life shirts that were so huge and were also made, at the time, in day-glo, neon colors? i had too much self-respect to wear one (and i, the queen of malaprops, did not want to be confused with an anti-abortion activist by wearing that message, not that i choose death, but still.) oh, they were doe-eyed and adorable. and those teeny-tiny shorts? these guys were too sweet to be real.
and this song. admit it — you hear it start, and you want to dance. you don’t want anyone to know that you want to dance, but it is absolutely infectious, and maybe not in a good way, but there it is. it has a bouncy horn section to go along with it’s bouncy beat, and george’s smooth vocals carry you away into some sort of confectionary moment.
but poor andrew. after racing cars and solo work that didn’t go anywhere, you wonder not whether he has any dart boards with george michael’s face on them, but just how many.
i’ve written before about jools and his BFF M, who decided to marry when they were in kindergarten and then decided to be BFFs instead last year. she is so very sweet to him and seems to understand him in a way that no one else seems to do.
today, M and jools had a playdate. jools thought about changing his shirt before he went; he wanted to look (his) best, he said, though he wouldn’t elaborate. when we were getting into the car, he ran suddenly back into the car. he ran back out about a minute later. when i asked him what he did, he told me that he had taken a piece of candy from his halloween bag for M and one for him. if he had done that for anyone else, i think i would have wondered about ulterior motives; but when it comes to M, i know he just simply adores her.
anyway, after i picked him up from the playdate, i asked him what they did. we just spun around and around, he said, and we had a snack.
oh, he added, we decided that when we have kids, we are gonna let them eat all the junk food they want as long as they don’t get sick.
today, we hit the comedy place in ballston where there was to be a special improv show for kids. BS got some half-price ticket special, which made it even better. (top that off with a buy-one, get-one-free coupon from cold stone creamery and it was even better.) maybe because it was thanksgiving day weekend, but there were literally two other families there (and they were related to each other), so it wasn’t exactly a packed house. this is a shame, really, as the two people running the show did a great job rassling people and humor and keeping it at a disney-level of appropriateness…
which wasn’t easy considering our family. when they asked for something you talk about at the dinner table, the other family yelled out: turkey! we yelled out: politics! when they asked what’s something in your garage, i yelled out: jimmy hoffa! jools, not to be outdone, yelled out: a crime scene!
it’s moments like these where i am super-glad that no one from the division of youth and family services attends these things.
the other family was overly-hammy, which did get annoying to me after awhile. they apparently have been to these things many, MANY times before, sort of comedy groupies. (we’d been to grown-up comedy nights here before we had kids.) but again, if they hadn’t been there, it would have been all us, all the time. and their spirit was fun, so i shouldn’t gripe much.
as an aside, the boy neglected to eat lunch. and now, as it was 3pm and he was separated from video games, he realized he was hungry. he wanted to hit the concessions stand, but sadly, no one was staffing it. he wanted to check back, and he asked us whether he could go to confessions. that teachable moment alone was worth the price of admission.
anyway, we all ended up on stage at different times. i was an utter failure, playing some sort of charades-type game with julian and two other little boys. we were trying to convince the actor who was not in-the-know that we were running a debate, impersonating people from the big bang theory, with podiums that were actually guillotines. all without uttering a single word. (no, i am not making this up. and i am not on any meds that you might think i would be off at this particular juncture.) jools knew BBT, but the other two? not sure.
speaking of jools, i think he has a future in stand-up. both he and the girl were able to make up jokes on the fly during one exercise, and they both did a great job. but the boy’s delivery?
it’s not just something you use to get yourself stuff… it’s hours of fun, too!
today’s theme is money and how it can provide hours of activities for the whole family! (it is, after all, black friday.) BC started me down this thrilling path by deciding that it would be fun to experience black friday! don’t you want to hit tyson’s corner center at ungodly o’clock? sure. i know i did.
i told her that despite the mall opening at midnight, i would not be triapsing there at that time. we settled on waking up at 5:30am and hitting the mall then. and hit it hard we did. girlfriend, you see, needs new clothes. and there were some specials that would be too hard to pass up. two pairs of jeans, one skirt, two camis, three shirts, and one pair of sweats later, we did quite well. (i also did well on two cashmere sweaters at macy’s which i had been stalking for two months. a crazy sale price plus a coupon made it something i could finally do. (yeah, i use coupons. so what?)) also two pairs of dockers for BS, and the only person who got bupkes on this trip was jools. (not for lack of trying: we hit the gamestop, but it didn’t have a lot of there there for him. at least, notthat was on sale, anyway.)
the ladies at vera bradley were a little cuckoo, i would say. they were pretty clueless and the sale items we wanted weren’t there. ladies, step away from the paisley.
so what’s even more fun with money? looking into a piggy bank that i’ve had since i was in high school and seeing which quarters are now collectibles in jools’ book. and that’s what we did. wow, the boy exclaimed, a quarter from 1968! that’s really old, isn’t it??
uhm.
anyway, we found a bicentennial quarter, a coin from greece (also 1968!), a shekel, and all sorts of stuff… including some pretty gnarly-looking pennies. which leads us to fun with money part three: let’s learn about oxidation! i found a little piece called chemistry fun with pennies and mixed up a little vinegar-salt mixture. the boy threw in a bunch of pennies, a quarter, and a dime for good measure. we’re still waiting to see what happens, though the pennies seem to be improving…marginally.
in other news, my fingers have this awful vinegar/old metal smell. i guess i officially smell like money.
