flea

I am feeling alienated and detached from everything in life right now.

It's hard.

Remember when I used to do "24 hours in my life" posts when they were babies? OMG the non-sleeping. They (mostly - Dillo had a night terror 2 nights ago at midnight) sleep through the night now, but we are still always exhausted. Here's why:

6 am: I get up and make coffee.
6:10-6:15 am: I wake up everyone else in the house. Note: it is pitch dark.
6:15-6:30: mr. flea and kids eat breakfast at the table. Casper drinks cafe latte and eats dry cheerios; Dillo has bran flakes (for the iron) with milk. I make my lunch and get dressed and stuff.
6:30: Casper gets dressed and packs her backpack. Lunches are made the night before. Check before leaving the house: books and homework, lunch, keys, phone.
6:40-6:45: Casper and I leave the house, walk to the bus stop. Still pitch dark. Currently nice view of Jupiter and Venus.
6:55: Casper's bus comes. I go home again. Meanwhile mr. flea had probably yelled "Just brush your teeth" at least 5 times at Dillo.
7:10: Dillo, mr. flea and I all leave to walk to Dillo's bus stop.
7:20: Dillo's bus comes. I walk to my bus stop. mr. flea goes home.
7:30: Casper is at school in math class. I catch my bus.
8:00: I am at work. Dillo arrives at school, which starts at 8:15.
8:30: I am not positive, but my guess is mr. flea does not leave for work until about this time. He is not a morning person. If he doesn't have Dad chauffeur jobs in the afternoon, he often walks. It's 1.2 miles, residential.
2:30: Casper's school lets out. Most days she comes straight home on the bus, getting home around 3:10. She does some homework and lazes around.
2:45: Dillo's school lets out. He takes the but to the Rec Center around the corner from us, arriving about 3:30.
5:00: I leave work.
5:40: I get to the Rec Center and pick up Dillo.
5:50: Everyone but mr. flea is home, and dinner is underway, as well as homework and such.
6:15: mr. flea is usually home by now. We eat dinner.
6:30-8:00: homework and stuff. Then at at, have snack, pack lunches, start getting to bed routine. Goal is to be in bed reading by 8:30 (both kids).
9:00: lights out for kids. I usually go to sleep by 9:30 and mr. flea is often up until 11.

This fall, Tuesdays Casper takes the bus to the university for dance class at 4:45, and I get off my bus early and meet here there, and we go home on the bus together after dance, at 6:45. Meanwhile, mr. flea picks up Dillo, feeds him, and gets him to soccer practice very far away by 6:30. They get home at 8. Homework is a nightmare on Tuesdays. Wednesdays I work late so mr. flea does all the evening stuff solo. Thursdays Dillo has soccer practice but Casper is free. Fridays Casper has dance, and Dillo and I have piano lessons, from 6:45-7:45 at the university. mr. flea usually drops us all off and picks us up.

So basically, I am gone from home 6:40am-5:50pm. That's a long time.

The Social Security top baby names list has arrived: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/index.html

Note that Charlotte is up to 10, but after Princess Charlotte Elizabeth Diana, I am sure it will rise next year. (I am surprised the Windsors chose such a trendy name; my (hypothetical) money was on Alice.)

Dillo's name is slowly falling at 204; Casper's name continues to skyrocket and is at 16 (was 88 in 2003 when we named her; happily the nickname she uses is 460); I am still slowly rising around 400 and mr. flea is steady at #7, after decades in the top.

I think everything is from the Hearthsong catalog. Last year was MUCH cuter.

1. Squad copter
2. Space age crystals
3. 10 in 1 super set
4. huggle pod
5. Hexbug - crab
6. Plasma Ball
7. Sipfy Mini Luge
8. GBOP
9. Slackline with training line
10. remote control Hamer Head

Dillo has always processed stuff at bedtime, talking out new thing he's learned. I have memories of him saying, "Ess Tee Oh Pee STOP," right before falling alseep, and a long conversation about place value in arithmetic. We still lie in bed with him before he falls asleep (yes, he's 7), but mr. flea almost always does it now. Last night both kids were still awake when I got home at 9:30 so I visited a very coughy Casper, and then Dillo cried and acted left out, so I went to lie with him too. I got him to stop crying and lie quietly and eventually he started saying, "I have an albus shirt. Albus Dumbledore has an albus beard." Then, "White shirt mine is, not my shirt is white." Yes, he's taking latin (the whole school has it an an elective), and yes, they're doing colors and he is trying to sort out why latin word order is not like English word order and maybe getting the glimmerings of noun cases.

Today Casper left school as a walker, met up with 3 6th grade girls (2 the other girls on her soccer team) and they walked to the public library (about a block away, through a very preppy posh shopping district) and did their homework. Then a parent picked them up and took them to one family's house and fed them, and took them to soccer.

Everything was fine, of course, but we had no contact (not that we were expecting any) from school drop-off at 9am to soccer pick up. I am a little bit like, "My Baby!" and kind of pleased that this was no big deal. Casper said the 6th graders did tend to imply she was a bit of a baby, but she thinks they thought she was only in 4th grade, not 5th. They seem like nice girls.

Dillo, for his part, asked for a spelling test tonight at snack time. Because mr. flea was helping Casper study her spelling words Monday night, and he was all boastful that HE could spell those words. (Which he can. His spelling instincts are pretty good, while hers are abysmal, although he did get caught up with "goat" this afternoon (he tried "gote" and thought that seemed wrong, but couldn't decide what was right so he stopped at chickens.) He's getting gifted testing on Oct. 5 to see if he can get into the gifted program, and I am a little worried. It's a CogAt test, which he had in K and just missed the gifted cutoff (95%ile). But if he doesn't make it this round they also take results from the content-based grade level tests he'll take later this year, and I suspect he will ace those.

This week was spring break, and mr. flea took Friday off and we went down to Mammoth Cave National Park, in KY. It's about a 3 hour drive, via Louisville. Friday we got there at about 2pm (they're on Central time) and set up camp in the very nice park campground. We headed over to the Visitors' Center and luckily got tickets to the self-guided tour of the cave from the Historic entrance right before they stopped selling them at 3pm. There would have been some unhappy kids if we had not gotten into the cave on Friday. The self-guided tour is actually rather dinky, but for the first day it was good enough. mr. flea managed to hit his head on the cave roof. Friday evening we went to a presentation by a ranger in the amphitheater after dinner, and this day's subject was animals in the cave, illustrated by a bunch of really great and often startling photos by the ranger's husband. Some actual animals helpfully showed up, including deer concealing themselves very well in the dusk, and bats flying overhead.

It was our chilliest night ever camping, probably down to about 40, but everyone was plenty warm in the tent. It was getting out of bed that was a little more problematic. But we made it out to the Cedar Sink trailhead at 8:45 for a hike with a ranger billed as Wildflowers and Water. This particular ranger was much more into the latter than the former, and mr. flea talked to him quite about about the hydrology of the region; a large area of farmland outside the park is karstic topography, dimpled like a golf ball, and it all drains into the cave. Apparently the park has had good success working with farmers to reduce water-borne pollutants. There were some wildflowers, but not as many as are usual for the date as we've had a cold spring. We saw some trillums and trout lilies, and the ranger said that in a week the sink area would be in full bloom. The sink itself is huge and an underground river surfaces in it. The kids listened well to the ranger, even Dillo who was quite serious.

We drove out of the park to a little town - really, an intersection - called Pig, KY, where the chocolate pie at the Porky Pig Diner had been recommended. Sadly for the children the pie-maker relied rather heavily on cool whip, which was not to their taste, but mr. flea was perfectly happy. We had a lazy lunch at camp and worked on the Junior Ranger booklets we'd picked up the previous evening, a great program they apparently have at 400 National Parks but don't always advertise well (we heard about it and asked here). Great age-appropriate workbook activities drawing on various displays and presentations. Then, with great excitement, off to the Visitor's Center for a 1:30 New Entrance tour. We went by bus to the New Entrance, with our headlamps at the ready. The first stage is a long descent, mostly very wet, on very narrow metal staircases (good non-slip treads, though) through vertical shafts. Then there's some slow up and downs through horizontal tubes - some eroded directly by past water flow, others with broken edges where the rock was weakened by water and broke off. The last section of this tour includes the Frozen Niagara room, the only area of the cave with stalactites, stalagmites, drapery, and flow rock. As we were about to leave we saw a single tiny bat (brown bat?) hanging near the Frozen Niagara entrance. We also saw cave crickets thoughout.

The kids loved it, and we thought it was pretty good, too. They got their Junior Ranger badges, and we did quesadillas over the fire, and the kids took up whittling in pursuit of the perfect marshmallow stick. Casper proved very good at starting fires both nights - she did Friday's nearly by herself - and Dillo was very eager to help but had a lot of trouble the whole trip with impulse control and listening to safety directions (he ran out into a road with his binoculars once, without even looking, which I'd had said was very unlike him!)

Saturday night was warmer, and Sunday we did the short ranger-led walk on Slavery at Mammoth Cave and then headed home.

Things I'd like to remember for future trips: a hatchet and a whisk broom would be useful; we need to find the sleeping mats and water bottle that are lost in our house somewhere; we should make out a Kaper chart like the Girl Scout do to make the kids help out more with camp chores.

New Year's has turned into a difficult holiday for me the last few years. Instead of a happy taking stock and striving for new accomplishments in the coming year, it tends to be "sum up all your failures of the year, and oh by the way the things you plan to resolve are exactly the same things you resolved and failed at the last 4 years in a row." What the hell kind of holiday is that?

It's exacerbated by the fact that most of the most active people I follow on twitter (classics and digital humanities types) are currently attending national conferences (AIA/APA, MLA, and AHA are all this weekend) and I feel like a professional failure. I know that in the long term the odds of my career continuing and being satisfactory are good, but I am having a hard time keeping my eye on the long term. On a day-to-day basis I am keeping busy (personally), and keeping an oar in professionally (I attended two by-invitation professional meetings this year, was asked to review grant proposals for a prestigious funding body, and have been asked to develop a summer week-long course). But every couple of weeks I have panics that I don't actually have a JOB and may never again. Work and busy-ness is nice, but so is money, everyday feedback, coworkers, and professional esteem.

The year overall was good. The kids are attending a school that is better for them than last year's, and they are doing well. They are good kids. mr. flea is happy at work and seems well-regarded, and this year managed to become An International Expert in His Field (was invited to lecture in China.) Me not working means less stress on me and everybody, and we've dealt just fine with the lower income. Our house in Georgia is rented through July, and maybe it will sell this spring. We've set up 529 college funds for the kids, thanks to some family generosity. We have nice things, a safe and warm and fairly pleasant place to live, plenty to eat, and more wealth and security as the average family. I am not a failure; I am doing my best to balance what's good for my family and myself in the face of a challenging economy and the stresses of middle-class life. Right?

Dillo: If Mitt Romney wins we'll have to move...
mr. flea: Why would we have to move?
Dillo: Because he's going to shut down the EPA.

He has, in fact, threatened to do so - at one point in the primaries every single candidate was vowing s/he'd shut down the EPA - but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't actually do it.

Dillo and I are in his bed, discussing the teachers at his school.
me: So, of all the teachers and the other grownups who work at your school, who is your favorite?
Dillo: My favorite is the lady who works in the library in the mornings, and arranges the books.

(That lady is me.)