Livingston, I Presume

Give me an "A"!

When I was growing up, I was nerdy enough to really look forward to report card days. (*cough* *Hermione Granger!* *cough*) Still, even though I was always relatively certain what grades I would find, I never stopped being nervous when I opened the little sleeve. Even in college I would hold my breath until I saw what was inside. Imagine my surprise to find myself feeling the exact same way when Connery came home with his first report card yesterday. I didn't want to breathe before reading it! As it turned out, it was a great report card, and we discussed it with him before dinner, giving him praise and encouragement. Then we got him some ice cream.

I remember getting some report card "presents", but I also know that the idea of rewarding kids for good grades is controversial. The good grade should be its own reward, or so the argument goes. The counter-argument, I presume, is something about good grades being worthwhile regardless of the motivation. I fall in the middle, I guess, just as I do on most parenting controversies. (Me? Wishy washy? Absolutely, when it comes to these kinds of things.) I have already seen that Connery is motivated to do well in school, and I don't have a problem giving him a little something extra for working hard. I'm probably not going to be the kind of parent who pays my kids for "A" grades, but I don't think Dairy Queen is out of line.

What about you? Do you reward your kids for good grades? Were you rewarded?

You say lost, I say misplaced

I love the library. I also hate the library.

We are blessed here in Livingston with a wonderful library--one of the original Carnegie libraries, built in 1904:

"There were only a few public libraries in the world in 1881 when Andrew Carnegie began to promote the establishment of free public libraries to make a means of self-education available to the nation’s changing workforce. He eventually spent over $56 million to build 2,509 libraries throughout the English-speaking world."

So thank you, Andrew Carnegie, whose name was in my youth pronounced CAR-nuh-ghee but has now morphed to car-NAY-ghee for no reason I can discern.

The Livingston library opened a very nice new addition shortly after we moved here, and we have wiled away many an hour in its children's room. Unfortunately, I have also spent many unhappy hours wondering where in the hell a book that we checked out has disappeared to. Most recently we have weathered the disappearance of an Eric Carle book that we checked out for Emerson. I suspect she has hidden it to prevent our returning it. Frankly, I didn't think it was that good. The character development was weak and the surprise ending? Well, let's just say that O. Henry would not have been impressed. But she loved it, we lost it, and now we will end up buying a new copy for the library.

I have been reminded of this parental failing each and every morning via a new library service whereby they send you a helpful email reminder. "ITEM OVERDUE!" the email subject line reads, and I sink lower in my chair and hit the delete button as fast as I can.

I try to be a responsible library consumer. I really do. And in my life I've only ever had to buy one book for a library because I lost it. But that's mainly dumb luck. One day I came upstairs to the checkout desk to find two librarians talking about the tragedy of a book that had been found facedown in the gutter. It was a children's book about ducks. "Who would do such a thing?" I thought to myself. "Probably teenagers attacking some defenseless child for his lunch money." Turned out  that the last person to check out the book was...me. It had fallen out of my stroller when I was packing it up and heading home. I tried to kill the duckie book. They've never really looked at me the same way.

My cred was not at all enhanced when I showed up a couple of months back to pay for a book that Connery had checked out that I was sure I had lost. "Nope," the same librarian said. "Someone turned that in after it was left at a coffee shop." *ulp* Nice work, mom.

And just as I was finishing up this post? Chip bounded in to the office holding that Eric Carle book. It had been buried under some suitcases in our bedroom. All's well that ends well or just another reason why I should stick to reading books at the library? Could be difficult with the novels, but it's probably safer.

Halloween (NaBloPoMo Post 1)

Although I've been tempted before, I've never actually taken the National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) challenge. This year, that all changes:

So that means I'll be doing my level best to get in here every day in November, even when I'd rather be watching cheesy TV, to spout off about all thing Livingstonian. This morning I can direct you to Lynn Weaver's unparalleled LIvingston 365 site, where the talented Ms. W. has been taking and posting a different photo of Livingston every day this year. For Halloween, she captured the unbelievable Halloween costume of Chad Petrulis, owner of Chadz coffee house downtown. For all of you out there who think you had an elaborate or creative costume, well, you might have, but you didn't beat Chad.

My costume? Well, I continued my streak by going as a slightly harried, 30-something mother of two. It's scary because it's so realistic.

Honestly, I admire the people who go all-out for Halloween, but I'm just not into it--for myself. (I love dressing my kids up and decorating the house!) Maybe it's because costuming my body is not the easiest thing, or because I resent the tenor of some costumes but I think much of it has to do with my fuddy-duddy feeling that Halloween is for kids.

I'm the grown-up grousing because there is a gaggle of 16-year-old barely costumed boys on my porch shaking me down for candy. I'll smile like crazy and act scared for the tiny vampires and Buzz Lightyears and even the slightly older kids, but once they hit 13 or 14, they're cut off (in my head--I mean, I always give them the damn candy). Older than that and they're likely to be tempted to grab my son's jack o'lantern and smash it on the sidewalk or throw eggs at our cars or do other not-funny-at-all "tricks." I'm not quite sure when I became the crazy old lady yelling at "those damn kids!" but there you go. It's all part of my very convincing costume.

Happy Halloween and happier November, everyone! Here's a bonus shot of my kids, who went as a ninja and a devil. Appropriate somehow:

Getting things in place

We moved up our move-in date and got most of the "stuff of life" transported to the new house over the weekend. We had some great help from my friend Melissa's husband, Mark, and his big truck on Saturday morning. He's an engineer, and I've decided that all my future moves will require the service of an engineer, preferably a cheerful and helpful one like Mark.

We slept in the house on Saturday and Sunday, which would have worked better if 1) the previous owners had left us some damn curtain rods, 2) our cat were not a total freak, and 3) we hadn't removed the side from Connery's bed in an attempt to make him a new big-boy bed. The first night was OK, probably by virtue of our sheer exhaustion (although the yowling cat was a big distraction), but last night all hell broke loose.

At 12:30  a.m., Connery fell out of his big-boy bed. He wasn't hurt, but he certainly was scared. That was Sotek's signal to re-commence the yowling that is somehow necessary to acclimatize one's feline self to a new space. At 3:00 a.m., Connery fell out again. Worse yet, the binkies were totally AWOL, necessitating an all-points search complete with flood lights and naked floor-crawling. We then put boxes by the side of his bed to prevent future falls.

The cat was totally up by this point, wandering around the sleeping areas meowing pitifully until I locked her in the laundry room with her litter box. She then decided that scratching the under-door carpet strip would be a good diversion. The sound of cat claws in carpet is nearly as bad as her yowling, so I let her out at about 4:30. By 5 a.m. (Sunrise! Good morning! You have NO CURTAINS!), she was back in our room with the meowing again. At one point, she and Chip were engaged in a charming snore-yowl duet that when something like this:

MEEEEEEEOOOOW...HONK-SHU...MEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOW...HONK-SHU...MEEEEEEEEEOOOOW...HONK-
SHU...

That was 5:30. The alarm went off at 6.

That's life at chez moi currently. On the plus side, the kitchen is lovely in the morning, all cool wafting breezes and sunshine AND we remembered the salt and pepper last night, so we got to spice our breakfast. Oh, and we're moving the washer and dryer this morning, and should have the phone and Internet in the new place by tomorrow. Hooray!

Moving hell

I am giving the person designing my personal hell excellent ammunition this week. It's pretty clear all he/she will have to do to immerse me in torment for eternity is set up a scenario in which I have to move every few weeks. Of course, I will not be allowed to move in this hell until I have unpacked the boxes and settled in. Only when settling is complete will I be forced to pack everything up again and devise modes of transport for said stuff and then move them again and start over.

I'm not really very complicated, which will make things easy for the hell designer. The same things always enrage me. Throw in a few cut-off calls with the phone company as I try to transfer service, a run-in at U-Haul, and the discovery of a treasure trove of unfiltered material possessions that have to be sorted and I will be truly in my own personal hell.

Ah, yes. Moving. It's fun for the whole family!

We spent the weekend going through boxes that were packed way back in the summer of 2000, in Amherst, Massachusetts, on the 5th floor of Coolidge Hall at the University of Massachusetts. I could almost hear the cicadas and smell the undergraduates as we went through the many wonderful and highly valuable things that we not only thought fit to pack but also to pay to put in storage for the four and a half years that we were in Prague. Oh, Internet, the wonders. Many, many half-burned candles. (Because heaven knows it's impossible to find candles anywhere in the United States.) A plastic storage bin full of ill-fitting undergarments. Computer software that was never used and is no longer compatible with any computers currently being made today. Seventeen-year-old t-shirts. Notes from every class taken in graduate school. Training manuals sufficient to start a Residence Life program in our garage. Travel guides to Bulgaria from 1996.

I only wish I were exaggerating.

Of the 20 to 25 decrepit, battle-hardened boxes in our big pile, six shiny new boxes of salvageable items remain. The local charity shop came to pick up another huge pile, and the Livingston City Dump will get the rest. Why we couldn't have done this in Amherst is a question I'm trying not to ask myself.

I will say that my dear friend, Shannon, did try to get me to be more ruthless that summer. The sainted woman has moved me twice--she's an expert, having moved more or less once a year in her childhood--and each time has tried to impress upon me her never-fail method of cutting out the extraneous things that will make you smack yourself on the forehead when you unpack them later. I regret to say that it is a lesson it took me far too long to learn. (It's no wonder she moved to Alaska--how better to have plausible deniability when I call for moving help?)

In my defense, I've come up with a new theory that a person has to be in a very specific psychological space to be able to get rid of things. There's a reason that Life Laundry was so fascinating to watch. It's because it goes against most people's nature to get rid of things. We assign value to things because of who gave them to us or where we got them. It's so rare that stuff is just stuff. That's why we could throw so much away now--after six years in a box, who remembers half of this stuff anyway? How can I remember the value I assigned to it?

Lucky for me, that seemed to be mostly true. I did have a few last-minute "rescues"--and Connery found a lot of things in our throwaway piles that he thought redeemable. So the cycle begins again. I can pledge, this time at least, that we will pack no candles.

Oh, and we close on the house next Wednesday.

From old to ancient

Things that make you feel old?

Your "baby" brother hitting the quarter-century mark.

Things that make you feel ancient?

Your "baby" brother getting engaged!

Seriously, though, I'm thrilled that Alex and Kari are planning to be married. I haven't yet gotten to spend a lot of time with Kari and Hannah, but the time we have had together has been good. Hannah and Connery get along really well, and I love seeing how happy Alex and Kari are together. I'm so happy for the three of them!

Much better, thank you

Dad is on the mend, finally, after the emergency surgery and enough collective worry on the part of his family and friends to keep 100 Titanics afloat. I even called in the major reinforcements on Friday--Mary and Chris--because I just needed to talk with some people who have known me and my family since I was in early elementary school. I'm always grateful at these times that I had the kind of childhood that allows me to still have friends who first met me when we were both 4. Chip, who grew up in all kinds of different places, thinks its a little odd (but perhaps secretly cool) that I can summon up these people going back 30 years or more.

We were hoping that Connery and I would be able to stay into the week, but The Boy woke up with a cough this morning, which would have meant potential contagion and the unappealing prospect of dealing with a sick toddler without the normal arsenal of the familiar. So we came home this afternoon. Both Chip and I were so tired that neither of us should have been driving. Connery refused to nap during the trip. Perhaps we should teach him to drive so that we could have caught a few winks.

Updates large and small

Thanks to everyone who has asked about my dad. He's recovering well in the hospital after a silent heart attack last Thursday and a bout with a chronic digestive problem. I'll just say that I have no desire to blog about this. It's too scary to put it all into words, and so I'm currently enjoying my time on that Egyptian river.

I did call the man who was angered by my column, and he was quite reasonable. No harm done.

I got another assignment for a major national women's publication, which makes me very happy.

Connery has been fairly cooperative, at least as far as two-year-olds go. I was able to control him with a moderate degree of success in the grocery store by using a trip to the library as leverage. May he always be motivated by books!

We checked out a real winner while at the library, and I will try to post a review. The book is called I Wanna Iguana, written by Karen Kaufman Orloff and illustrated by David Catrow. Connery would read it day and night if we would let him stay up that long. I also checked out Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad for myself after losing my battle with Bill Clinton. (It was interesting, really, but in three weeks I ought to be able to get farther than the 1992 presidential elections. Not a GAP dress in sight by the time I needed to return it. As it was, I owe a $.40 late fee just because I had to read far enough to get to the actual first election win.)

It's also been surreal to read the news. From the Cheney shooting to Bush threatening his first veto to make sure we put out ports in the hands of the United Arab Emirates, I sometimes feel as if we have landed in some kind of alternate Bizarro land, where up is down and treason is patriotism. Still, it's good to know that in the grand scheme of things, the biggest threat facing the United States is *not* lax port security, bird flu, ever-widening civil strife that we helped to create in Iraq, or the rampant rise of theocracy and fundamentalism around the world. It's gay people making lifelong commitments to each other and to children who would otherwise have no parents. Oh, and it's women who have to make the wrenching choice of whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term.

And maybe Bode Miller.

And now for some real news

Mainly, I've not been blogging because I've been working. Last week was supposed to be set aside for finishing up an article for Distinctly Montana, but the Business to Business issue out this week refused to die. I got a lot done on the DM article, but it didn't quite set me up for this week as I had hoped. Oh well. It's always better to be busy.

We've also been stressing about my dad's condition. Without going into not-ready-for-Internet details, I'll just say that he's been sicker than I've ever known him to be, and that's not a very comfortable thing. He seems to be on the mend, but it doesn't make the nerves go away. We're supposed to travel to their place this weekend, and I'm going to be glad to be able to see him myself. My mom does a great job of keeping me updated about everything, but it's not easy for her to be the chief conveyer of all information on things dad-related either. And I know she's worried, which makes me even more worried. Champion worriers, we Rosenleaf women.

In other news, Connery has decided to end the satan-spawn impersonation, much to our relief. Of course it could start up again at any moment, but for now, he's being mildly cooperative, which really beats the alternative.

On Saturday we took him to his first orchestra concert, courtesy of the Bozeman Symphony Orchestra. He seemed to enjoy it, although his favorite part was getting to try out the instruments after the concert with his dad, Mr. Ex-Brass Player. Connery and I went out to try the "Instrument Petting Zoo" before the concert, but he was intimidated by the friendly zookeepers, and I don't know one end of a trombone from another. After the concert, Chip asked some of the helpers if he could handle the instruments, and Connery got to help Daddy play, which seemed more to his liking.

I can't quite believe it's Valentine's Day tomorrow. I don't think I've ever been so unprepared. We may put off our celebration entirely until we get to Great Falls this weekend.

The most versatile lyric around

Throughout Connery's babyhood, I have made up a lot of songs. Generally but not always they involve bodily functions and are designed to distract him while I take care of the business end of a diaper. Some past hits include: "Butt Cream!" (sung to the tune of Batman), "Cream and Powder" (sung to the tune of Clementine), "Conneryman" (sung to the tune of Spiderman), and "One Fish, Two Fish" (sung to the tune of Fishheads).

I think this desire to make songs our own stems from my mother's teachings. She made up songs all the time, even into my adolescent years. Over Thanksgiving we were recalling The Period Song, which she made up for me when I was struggling with the early nuisances of womanhood (I won't quote the whole thing, but I will say that the money lyric involves "Sealy Posturepedic-ling").

All of our previous Connery Hit Parade favorites have faded into obscurity, however, now that we have discovered the magical lyrics that fit neatly into the tune of nearly every song: Stinky Booty, Stinky Butt. These words work with "Twinkle, Twinkle", "Clementine", and "Rock Me, Amadeus", among other quality melodic selections. Today, we started a round with the "Frere Jacques" tune. Connery really liked that one, singing along quite competently with both parts. I got some of it on digital recording, footage that I trust will be invaluable when he wants to start dating.