I’m the one behind the camera
I was just looking through some family photos for a picture of myself for an avatar (hello, string of prepositional phrases!), and I am realizing that I am only rarely in a photo by myself. I suppose it’s because I’m the one with the camera. But I did run across this rather amusing picture, taken when C was about 75 days old. I guess the camera caught me by surprise?
Kids say the darndest things
I don’t know where it came from, but last night C called me “Daddy Bird.” She’s been in a really cuddly, cute, wonderful phase lately, and I can’t tell you how wonderful it is. So she was giving me a big hug right before I put her to bed, and she said “I love you, Daddy Bird.”
This morning, I was goofing off with C and wearing her Nemo hat, and it wasn’t so out-of-the-blue for her to call me “Daddy Nemo,” but it was fun.
The so-called terrible twos are marked by fit pitching and screaming stubbornness. Just a minute ago, C flopped on the floor beside me, crying fake tears because I couldn’t make Wonder Pets magically arrive on the television on her demand. But now – 60 seconds later – she is standing in the middle of the room, singing some unknown song at the top of her lungs.
And it’s best for her to learn now that she won’t always get what she wants, believe me. She will get much less sympathy later in life.
There are some unpleasantries to the terrible twos, but most of it is wonderful, and that’s the way I’ll always remember it. You can keep your terrible twos; I’ll stick to the too cute twos, thankyouverymuch.
Makes me happy
If I had my druthers
Today I find myself sitting at home studying, or trying to make myself study. Studying is always made more difficult for me by competing druthers. I sit here, trying to focus on my notes, or trying to solve problems, and I think “music … book … fireplace … Waffle House … anything!”
I was briefly in the history graduate program at UT, an ill-fated venture, and I remember being so miserable that I was intensely jealous of my father digging potatoes out back. Digging potatoes, for those not in the know, is just about the most miserable thing you can do in a garden. And I don’t even care for fresh potatoes (they make lousy french fries). It was truly a sign that I was in the wrong place – that and the fact that I’m horribly allergic to dust, and therefore allergic to studying history.
Anyway, I’m trying to make myself focus when I’d rather be doing anything else, but I very much don’t want to dig potatoes, so at least there’s that.
I don’t know if this kind of quality appeals to potential clients or not, but it does make the employees happier.
Here at our office, which is a small family firm dating back to the ’40s, we have a playroom and a full-time nanny (my mom) for C and her four-year-old cousin, A. My grandfather would roll over in his grave. The kids often make noise, they run, they play, they get messy and get the office messy.
And this morning, they spent more than an hour in the bathtub, just getting out a moment ago.
Talk about job perks.
I’m frustrated. My dishwasher, which I completely rely on, is kaput. It’s not washing, and I spent 45 minutes trying to figure out why.
Then I gave up and decided to watch the Simpsons, one of my favorite things on tv, although I haven’t watched it in ages. And I’m still waiting for it. Two minutes of Simpsons leads to five minutes of commercials. It’s sick. And I will pass on network tv from now on.
Overheard from a toddler
I’m not sure whom she was talking to, but it wasn’t me. Very likely it was her foot or hand.
First we need mama to get the remote, then I can watch wonder pets in my little bed. We’ll be right back, ok?
Let’s go wake mama up and get Wonderpets. Then I’m going to put my glove on and get Wonderpets.
I don’t know; I don’t kill things
Actually, I’ve been known to kill mice, rats, and any number of bugs. Don’t get me started on mosquitoes, either. But while I’m all for eating meat, I’m not big on killing them myself. It’s not that I wouldn’t, it’s just that my hobbies tend more towards books and music. I’m all about bacon, but being an American in 2009 means I do your taxes, you make my shoes, and someone else can take care of the pigs.
“I don’t kill things” was my response to E earlier after he asked whether a gun he was eying would be good for “big game,” whatever that means. E is an all-American Boy, with a capital B. Right now he is at basketball practice because football season ended. At other times he can be found playing lacrosse, and he’ll dabble in just about any other sport he comes across.
And part of E being an all-American Boy is obsessing over weapons, knives and guns especially. It’s easy to get caught up in the violence of it, but that would be wrong and unfair. After all, lots of people have guns and love to hunt. And I myself have – I kid you not – a briefcase of knives, although it’s nowhere near as impressive as my dad’s knife briefcase.
When I was E’s age, I loved to imagine I was at war. I drew scenes of violence on the front of my bulletin at church (but I didn’t fidget!). And I asked for weapons for Christmas every year. Does the jolly fat guy bring weapons on that happiest of days? Yes, Virginia, he does. Joy, love, peace, and a new knife that could get you suspended if you accidentally brought it to school.
So no, I don’t kill things. But I’m not going to be casting the first stone.
Storing digital photos
If you regularly read my blog, you probably realize that I take a lot of photos. Because of the advent of the digital camera, I went from an extremely occasional photographer to being somewhat obsessed with capturing everything. Hell, it’s not uncommon for me to take more than a hundred photos before lunch. What can I say? C is a cutie pie. And I like being the one to memorialize anything, as long as I care about the people. And as long as everyone realizes that just because I like taking pictures doesn’t mean I’m good at it. I guess I should take a class.
Anyway, the problem is that I have nearly twenty gigabytes of photographs on this computer, and this computer only has a 110 gig hard drive. I do send all of my photos to smugmug, but I’ve never been comfortable with deleting them after I upload them, even though I know they’d send them back to me on dvd if I wanted it (and gave them $). Plus, smugmug stores their files on Amazon’s servers, so it’s not like they’re not with a trustworthy name. Still, I just can’t bring myself to do what I need to do.
And I don’t want to buy an external harddrive, because I don’t want to lay down $100 on something that could easily fail or be stolen. Or be dropped. It seems like a safer bet to spend money on “the cloud” taking care of your storage for you.
So that’s why I signed up for a Jungle Disk account a few weeks ago. They’ve got a nifty feature where you can use their service as a network drive. As long as you’re online, your data stored on the network drive will feel like it’s on your computer. Abracadabra, presto chango, no need to keep storing stuff forever on your harddrive. Instead, my photos are stored twice on the cloud, once by Amazon and once by Rackspace.
The funny thing is it’s still hard to ditch the hard drive, and I’ve yet to do it. I think it’s because I feel better knowing I can see the drive my stuff is on, even though it might not be the best place for it.
I just need to make that leap, right?
I am no fan of private school
Having been raised in public school in a public school neighborhood – the sole kid who went to private school did so because his priest informed his mom that he would be going to parochial school – I have numerous misgivings about private school. If I were honest with myself, I’d probably have to admit that some of my misgivings are really prejudices. There might even be a bit of jealousy thrown in. Luckily, I’m not honest with myself.
I did go to a private college, and those were four incredibly happy years that I’ll be paying off for another twenty. I frequently dream that I’m back in college and wake feeling sad. Private college is kind of like private school, I think, except better. So I can see that there must be some pros to private school: small class sizes, high percentages of teachers who care, compared to public school, fewer teachers who went to school to avoid the draft … the list could go on and on.
Nevertheless, I remain rather unimpressed with private schools. After all, I went to a public school from kindergarten through high school, and here I am today writing this post. I haven’t spent even one night in jail, and I’ve yet to inject even a single, solitary drop of heroin into my eyeballs. Right or left.
Private schools are nice and all, but they’re not perfect. And they’re not necessarily that much better than public schools, despite the advantages. My elementary school was in a poor part of town, for example. It was – this is true – built as a “temporary” school back in the 70’s. A temporary school. In a permanent community. It’s still there today, and I won’t contradict the cynic who suggests that has something to do with the socioeconomic status of the voters in the area. But I simply can’t imagine that there is a single private elementary school in town that provides a better experience than the one I had. I also still dream of that school, just like I still dream about college, although when I wake I’m glad to have been dreaming. Puberty was unpleasant once; I’d rather not repeat it.
But with private school, there’s stuff like this that Katie went through earlier this week:
It was already dark outside and the school felt thoroughly deserted. I walked into the cafeteria, where the last three kids and one or two aftercare workers were hanging out, waiting for the neglectful working moms. As I walked in, I could see the look of disapproval on one of the aftercare worker’s faces. I tried to ignore it.
I approached E, who was sitting at a table, and in a cheery voice that belied my tiredness, asked him to gather up his things. As he did, the aftercare worker with the disapproving mien approached me, and told me that E had been loud during the study hall period of aftercare. I turned to E, who had his things ready by now and was waiting to leave, and I asked him to apologize for his behavior. But before he said a word, the aftercare lady turned to him and said in a tone of voice CLEARLY intended to convey that what she was about to say was actually for me, and not for E, “That’s okay E. All of us at the school understand that it’s REALLY, REALLY HARD to behave when you are so tired of your mother leaving you in aftercare so late.”
I’m not going to go into detail about what I think about this poor woman, although I will say that I am somewhat amused by the crazy hypocrisy in her statement. Even if she doesn’t have kids, she has a weird double standard. And I can only assume that the other kids who were still there had parents just as terrible as E’s.
One difference between my elementary school and E’s was the daily train of vans at my school, lining up to take kids to the daycare centers where many of my classmates spent the time between when school ended and when their parent(s) got home from work. I never had to go to daycare, but I did spend time at neighbors’ houses after school instead of mine. And there was a period when I had a key to the house and would spend some time alone at home every day. I don’t think I ever got upset that my mom couldn’t always pick me up at school every day and take me to get a cherry Icee, but I was very aware of how lucky I was that my mom was a teacher and got summers off.
Meanwhile, my step-kids get upset about staying at their posh school an extra hour or two before Katie can get off work and pick them up. Not that I blame them, and it certainly isn’t their “fault” that they feel this way, anyway. It’s just that they’re in the minority at their school, where, like most private schools in our area, few moms work. And all they can see is that their friends’ moms don’t work, so why should theirs?
It really makes me frustrated, because there’s no way I can explain to them how truly lucky they are. And if I even try, I end up saying something ridiculously along the lines of “kids these days don’t know how good they’ve got it.” So instead I sit there, biting my lip and explaining one more time that their mom does work and will work and that’s just life even if they don’t like it. And then I say a mental prayer for Katie, who I’m sure feels slapped in the face every time the kids complain that she has to work.
And maybe they’d still feel this way if they went to the schools where I went, but I don’t think so. The pros of private school likely outweigh the cons, but the cons sure can be unpleasant. I just hope we can find some middle ground for C when she gets old enough. I understand that the neighborhood school for our gentrified part of town is a Montessori school a few miles away, and I’m not sure that I’m ok with that.
