Ministry of This and That

Sam gave me a firm summer assignment. Mom, please read Harry Potter 6 before we see the movie. He carefully gathered a stack of the series and lovingly left them beside my bed over a year ago but now he's serious and so, finally, am I. I've been devouring the series for the past month or so, in between some grown-up reads here and there.

I know I'm about 9 years late to the party but I've been having a blast, especially since I have such an enthusastic 10-year-old cheering section, his face examining mine with an expression very close to the one I wore when I took the girls to their first Boston Ballet performance (isn't this great? do you love it as much as I do? how about now? and now?).

All of the fantastic titles make me smile: Ministry of Magic. Improper Use of Magic Office. Department of Magical Transport. Muggle-Worthy Excuse Committee. They remind me of AA Milne and his Winnie the Pooh books with their Very Important Capitalized Terminology. And then I started thinking. What would my ministry be? Where would I be assigned?

Department of Excessive Procrastination?

Dust bunny patrol? (actually, I'd probably be arrested by them...)

Office of Realistic Optimists?

Committee of Joy and Enthusiasm Seekers?

Maybe simply this: Ministry of Happy Childhoods {for all}. Pretty much encapsulates every thing I'm doing right now, from mom to working with the teenage girls at church to school work and research. I think all of us parents would be there, toiling away as Childhood Engineers or some such.

What about you? Any ministries or departments you would envision for yourself?

And you're all invited to join Monty Python's Ministry of Funny Walks with me:

Now that would be a great job:

"I have a silly walk and I'd like a government grant to help me develop it"

A Post post

postboxes from Flickr group, via Ministry of Type

1.

I'm reading Roald Dahl's biography Boy aloud to the kids and found it endearing that he wrote to his mother every week for 32 years, from the first week (at age 9!) when he was sent to boarding school until her death. She kept all of those letters (more than 600 altogether) in piles bound with green tape in the original envelopes. It makes me long for old fashioned mail. What will we do without lovely piles of letters to read through? Will our emails survive?

Resolved: I'm going to send more real mail.

2.

If you have younger kids, you might like this pretty wonderful card table post office. Also check out the felt mail and mail bags. I wish my kids still wanted to make believe. Or, for the grown-up version, how about this fantastic 1880 post office wall?

As a compromise, I'm acting on an idea I saw ages ago: putting mailboxes inside the house (maybe one per person near their bedroom?) for leaving notes and papers. Or maybe one or two of these great Swedish mailboxes would do the trick. Let the secret admirer/complaint department/compliments/wish making begin!

3.

Finally, I cannot look at the sight of those glorious red postboxes without a surge of affection for G. When I was in London for six months and he was here in the US of A he was a devoted pen pal. He called, wrote or recorded something for me on tape Every Single Day. I wasn't quite as good about the frequency of return post but those red boxes temporarily held many of my dearest thoughts and fragilest hopes, on their way to him.

I wonder if they're selling one of those on eBay? {Hmm. Just found this.}

The better to see you with, my dear

Breaking news: Miss Maddy needs glasses.

She's had trouble reading the board at school and some difficulty reading music when she's playing the violin. I've been putting her off, thinking it was not a big deal. Apparently, no, she wasn't faking. (Oh yeah, I forgot. That was me when I was her age. Man, I desperately wanted glasses back then for some reason.) The eye doctor said her near-sightedness will get progressively worse until she's about 19. At least that's what I heard and noted.

Here's what Maddy heard:
Your eyes will get worse and worse until you're blind at age 19.

We straightened that out in the car, where she was remarkably calm when she commented "that's so weird that I'll be blind by the time I'm 19." I would have been weeping and wailing and gnashing teeth. "Why?! Why?! How will I live without reading or seeing movies or seeing my future babies' faces? I have only six years to see! I need to take up the piano and learn to sing! Can I call my friends and tell them the dramatic news and get lots of sympathy?"

Not Maddy. She took it in stride, filed it away, and off-handedly commented about it 20 minutes later.

Does it seem unfair to anyone else that age 13 is typically accompanied by a whole slew of corrective implements, just when your self esteem and awareness are at their most fragile? Headgear, check. Retainer, check. Braces, on deck. Glasses, coming right up. Luckily she wears them well and takes it all in stride.

Hands down

...the best Michael Jackson tribute yet. (Thanks to my brother Matt for sharing.)



(and then he added "doesn't this make you want to be Episcopalian?" since he is.)

Close, but no cod

{Preamble: I love our town. And our neighborhood. Just last Sunday we had a block party with kids running all around, live music under a tent (a neighborhood teen singing with her boyfriend on the guitar), tons of potluck goodness, and friendly neighborhood banter. It's a good place. We feel lucky to live here.

Our particular neighborhood is very normal and modest (it's unofficially known as "Mayberry" to townies). However, the larger town we're a part of is quaint, historic, and quite...affluent. Over the top, at times, in a low-key, money-is-no-big-deal way that only the ultra rich have. A certain famous Celtics basketball player calls it home. High school kids not only have their own cars, they drive awesome cars.

It presents interesting parenting challenges. Where growing up I used to envy my friends' Guess jeans, my kids envy their friends' four houses (this is not an exaggeration; one of Maddy's friends indeed has that many). At the very least, a LOT of people we know have a "place on the Cape" where they summer. Whereas we summer at home happily.}

Now for the amble:

Every time someone says they are going to the Cape, I always remember my first summer in the Boston area. Years before moving here for good, I came for a summer in high school to earn a little money and live with my aunt and uncle and cousins. I worked at McDonald's & made a few friends there, mostly college students home for the summer and high schoolers like me. Because I was from a small college town in Utah and younger than everyone else, I was kind of treated as the ditsy mascot, a role I constantly tried to rise above.

One Friday, in between chucking stale fries and serenading each other over the drive-thru headphones, we were discussing our weekend plans. Someone asked "what are you doing, Annie?"

I knew there was a special in-the-know name for where we were going so I gave it a try:

"We're going to The Cod!" I announced confidently.

Uh, the raucous laughter clued me in right away. Not the Cod. The Cape.

Ohhhhh.

So close and yet so wrong.

And, really, who would even want to go someplace called the Cod?

{Postamble: I hope I haven't told that story here before. Lately I worry about repeating myself. Shouldn't I be about 4 decades older before worrying about that?}

No. Way.

I have one, do you? A list of things you'd like to do before you die. A bucket list. Well, Maggie got some great news that's she's sharing today:

Take a look.

My response? NO. WAY!!!! I'm so happy for her.

But, on the other hand, what happens when you finish your bucket list decades before you're ready to die? I get a bit of a let down after every trip I take; I can only imagine the letdown after that. But I guess I'd be willing to give it a try :).

Note to self: go update bucket list. And, just in case, include some really fantastic things.

Summer launch

One of the advantages of getting out of school later than most of the rest of the country is I had time to peruse all of the summer ideas that other families were doing. I loved Jenny's (private blog) take on being productive in the mornings and leaving the afternoons for fun. I remember visiting Christie last summer and loving how her kids earn books each week (I think she has a bin full of new books she snagged at a book fair...right, C?).

We usually like to have some kind of structure (although flexible). I wanted to be able to set aside mornings to get work done on some research and writing I've commited to this summer and, at the same time, give some guidelines for the kids to get a few things done every day relatively unsupervised (and by unsupervised I mean un-nagged). I also wanted to provide some fun ideas to stave off the blahs and the floppies (as in, flopping on the couch, flopping on the floor, and whining). So this is what we've come up with.

Summer Bingo! Stacy described her Summer Bingo idea here and I was hooked (she even includes downloadable bingo forms and rules, which I adapted for my kids' ages and interests). After the kids do their beds, pick up their clothes, do a job and practicing, they can do activities on the Bingo sheet. Some are really fun, some are enriching or educational, some will help move the kids forward on goals (scouts, personal progress). They can earn tickets toward prizes every time they get "bingo" and, if they do the whole thing each week, some $ will be put toward their school clothes or something they're saving for. The best part is that it's self guided and it motivates them to get the essentials (work and practicing) done quickly.

click to enlarge^

Maddy and her best friend, Meg, have been helping as junior counselors for the Vacation Bible School here in town in the mornings. They got home and decided to do the "make something in the kitchen" option. {Mmm. Chocolate chip cookies...keep them away from me, please.}

Sam elected to do the most decadent item on the sheet first: one hour of video games. Figures!

Lauren is babysitting for a neighborhood family all week so she has yet to dive into the world of Summer Bingo.

For the afternoons, we've put together a list of activities and field trips we'd like to do together as often as we can. Our days will be just like a mullet: business up front, party in the back.

What are you doing this summer to stay occupied and sane?

I love it that

...the sky cleared this afternoon (after weeks of rain) enough for us to dash to White Pond, our favorite swimming spot. It was a nice respite, considering we have rain forecast for the rest of the week. Boo, hiss.

You be Jill, I'll be Kelly...Sabrina's up for grabs

If you were a girl and grew up where I did, chances are you played Charlie's Angels at recess. We would gather in the outside stairwell in front of the Boys' Entrance (a relic from when the girls and boys entered through different doors, I suppose) and cast the roles.

Almost everyone wanted to be beautiful Jill, played by Farrah Fawcett on the t.v. show. There would be long queen-bee-ish negotiations resulting in one happy girl and several stomping away in a snit. For some reason (conflict avoidance?), I consistently opted for Kelly, who seemed pretty enough and smart enough but not extraordinarily so on either count. Somehow Sabrina was always the booby (ha!) prize role--was she too brainy or was it the page-boy haircut? Her sharper-edged voice? We would conscript a nearby boy into playing Bosley and we were set to fight crime and, more importantly, to run with our hair flowing behind us, catch boys, and wrap them up with our jump ropes.

But first! I almost forgot the most important part. Someone would recite the opening lines:

Once upon a time there were three little girls

who went to the police academy

and they were assigned very hazardous duties

but I took them away from all that

and now they work for me

my name

is Charlie

And make the all-important, gun-toting pose:

Please tell me I'm not the only one. I think in our young girl minds, we were all three women: the beautiful one, the smart one, the classy one. At least we believed it was in our future, when we reached the magical grown-up years. Probably whole feminist studies dissertations could be written on the messages we received and internalized.

I outgrew Farrah Fawcett as a role model before I left Wilson School (but in jr. high I totally had those sneakers she's wearing in the photo below). Since then I've rarely given her another thought. This isn't an "O Captain, My Captain" moment, really. But her death still makes me kind of sad, albeit in a selfish oh-no-not-my-childhood-icons/I-must-be-getting-old way. She was someone's mom, someone's sweetheart, and she seemed to handle her health ordeal with a great amount of courage.

And I kind of feel bad that she had to go on the same day as MJ. Talk about being upstaged.

That's all I wanted to say.

A kind of postmodern memento mori

and reminder to myself to carpe diem.

"I try, and I made it"

I've been looking around for a little motivation since my get-up-and-go seems to have gotten-up-and-gone.

How about this? A 14-year-old Malawian who built a windmill from a library book, using a broken bicycle, some pipes and poles.

I am inspired by his quiet I-can-do-this spirit.

The power of books + individuals.

So inspiring.

Yay for people.

Here's his blog if you want to see what has happened in the last two years, including sending his sister to school; what a good brother. [And now I have a good response when I get the inevitable "I'm bored" from my kids: go build an electricity-making windmill!]

p.s. TED is one of my favorite sources for inspiration and motivation and interestingness. Have you discovered it? Here's the blurb from their website:

"TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes) [or less]"

They have archived most of the talks over the years so you could spend days listening to short talks by designers or novelists or educators or musicians. What with all of the free time I'm sure you have.

Off kilter

Something's amiss when I get this in the mail

before the kids even get out for summer vacation.

Or put on their new swimsuits.

Four more days (and counting)!

Both of my daughters are heavily ensconced in studying for finals

all the way through Thursday.

On the other hand, Mother Nature has cooperated by giving us entirely UNsummery weather.

The better to study for tests, my dear.

Life shopping

My childhood best friend Shelly and I used to take the Sears catalog and "call" an item on every page spread.
"Oh! I call the green shimmery dress..."
"Well, I get the leopard print pajamas..."
on and on through the whole book, through lingerie (interesting and educational!) and power tools (I call the riding lawnmower!) and jewelry (where subtle and understated was not in our vocabulary).

Then we'd shut the book and go climb trees and pretend Donny Osmond was our boyfriend. (We were good at sharing him.) The wanting of things didn't get in the way of living our real lives; it was just a game of choosing and figuring out what we liked. We knew we couldn't have everything in there but we knew what we'd choose if we were given a choice of wigs, that's for sure.

* * *

Recently it has come to my attention that I have been treating my forays into blogland like a catalog of regrets and longing, thinking wistfully that I would love to have everyone else's life but my own

{oh! I wish I had...

a newborn baby with sweet eyelashes...

a fabulous closet of shoes...

a big happy brood of six children...

a marathon-running body...

a fixer-upper cottage in France...

a career as an actress on Broadway...

a flair for dressing with just the right knack...

exquisite phototaking talents...

a bestselling novel...

a husband who works from home...

big jolly dinners with extended family who live nearby...

an obsession with cleanliness (or at least a very clean house)...

such a hilarious way of writing about life...

etcetera...}

When I should be treating these views as a fascinating museum of lives and a chance to celebrate differentness and sameness, to say "good for her" and "well done" and "I feel for you."

{Okay, with the secret hope that you have dustbunnies sometimes, too}

I like my life. I do.

It's constructed out of a series of choices and silly luck (both good and bad) and trade-offs.

Yours is too. I like that about all of us.

I'm just relearning that lesson about shutting the book, walking away, and living my own life.

{And cheering you on while you live yours.}

Trudging toward deadlines

I've been chipping away at a couple of deadlines that are looming this week and next, trying to inoculate against the procrastination that can be my default [de fault?] mode.

But, oh, those deadlines!

Actually, oy, the distractions!

I resemble this:

Unfortunately, now I have another thing to add to my distractions: post-it-note art creation. And, of course, youtube surfing.

found via

Lost, in translation

I'm a little bit in love with Jorge Garcia's blog. [He plays Hurley on Lost.] 

He writes short little day-in-the-life entries about his lost shoe, the oversized hotel key, the polar bears at the zoo, or strange menu items he encounters. [He seems pretty Hurleyesque to me.]  Check it out here.

High {in}fidelity

I must admit: I've been cheating on you, blog.

I've been tweeting.
I know, I know. I'm sorry!
It's not you, it's me. (And now the not-following-the-crowd-silly-snob in me insists on noting that I've been on Twitter for over a year, long before all of these recent press flurries about it. There, n-f-t-c-s-s Annie, are you happy?)

It's been difficult to write blog entries lately, for a variety of reasons, but somehow the little twitter tweets with their 140 character limit have been a welcome recipient of my spare thoughts (and much less time consuming!).

We just keep getting shorter and pithier, don't we? First letters, then phone calls, then emails, then blogs, then facebook, then twitter. With some texting thrown in there somewhere. I'm not sure exactly how I feel about this progression (regression?) but I do know I've become a convert to this newest thing. I like knowing what others are up to. It satisfies the curious-about-life-and-others me. Plus you get information lightning fast.

Anyway, here are some pretty mundane descriptions of what I've been up to lately:

2. On the bright side=my migraine last night made me go to bed at 7:30 and now I feel pretty great.about 4 hours ago from TwitterGadget
3. listening to Sam practice the piano. It takes much longer to convince him to practice than it does for him to actually do it.about 21 hours ago from TwitterGadget
4. I'm so glad I didn't buy an iphone on Saturday...I want the new one on June 19! http://www.apple.com/iphone/5:36 PM Jun 8th from TwitterGadget
5. Just made all of the phone calls on my list (dr., dentist, plumber, eye dr., you name it I called them). Now I deserve a reward, right?3:44 PM Jun 8th from TwitterGadget
6. gym-->working at home-->listening to Little Joy-->walk dog-->lunch at neighborhood shop.11:33 AM Jun 8th from TwitterGadget
7. Dessert for dinner: what's not to like about angel food cake, lemon curd, strawberries and whipped cream?5:39 PM Jun 7th from TwitterGadget
8. already looking forward to my Sunday nap.7:16 AM Jun 7th from TwitterGadget
9. I'm pretty sure the lecture I just gave my daughter about not procrastinating was really aimed at myself.5:46 PM Jun 6th from TwitterGadget
10. this might be iphone day...3:16 PM Jun 6th from TwitterGadget
11. fresh mozzarella and tomato salad = lunch bliss1:53 PM Jun 5th from TwitterGadget
12. @bridgetrawlins congrats to him! that's huge.5:19 PM Jun 4th from TwitterGadget in reply to bridgetrawlins
13. Reading parts of Obama's speech to my kids and chatting about it. I love that we can have these conversations (@ ages 10, 13, 15).5:19 PM Jun 4th from TwitterGadget
14. Now there's a bad day at work for someone:http://bit.ly/J48MQ9:19 PM Jun 2nd from web
15. Stooping to McDonalds for dinner tonight. My apologies, Supersize Me book.6:43 PM Jun 1st from web
16. Off to meet my friend Jess at the lovely Nashoba Brooks Bakery. Nice way to welcome the weekend, even if it *is* raining.9:51 AM May 29th from web
17. taking Louie to the vet this morning. I'm not a fan of the "bringing a sample" part.7:44 AM May 29th from web
18. watching the national spelling bee with my kids. Cause we're cool like that.8:03 PM May 28th from web
19. Up way too early this morning. If you can't sleep at 4:30 a.m. does it still count as insomnia?7:32 AM May 27th from web
20. You know what's a good sound? Listening to your kids doing the dishes in the next room, dancing/singing to the TingTings & Paul Oakenfold7:56 PM May 26th from web
    
    

So do you twitter? 

If yes--> I'd love to follow you...just leave your [twitter]name in the comments. 

If you don't but are intrigued---> give it a shot!

If you don't and are repelled by the idea-->Just forget I said anything at all.  And sorry!--I'm sure my boring list of tweets did nothing to entice you.)