Two is like none.

As you've already noticed, Michael left for Seattle with Elizabeth on Friday. It's a special "Daddy and Me" trip we are trying to do with all the kids. Parker did his a couple years ago and we'll do Miranda hopefully this coming year.

I had the other two in schoolmates until 3 on Friday to give me a couple more hours of alone time since I wouldn't have any all weekend. I was very productive Friday morning, cleaning and doing laundry. I picked them up and after playing at home for a bit, we took Parker to swim team practice where they were doing relay races...something I knew Parker would enjoy. Then home again for dinner. Jenna was coming over that night (something I had arranged before I knew Michael would be out of town) and Susan and I were going to a movie. Then I remembered what Parker asked me when leaving school that day "Hey Mom, what is that big banner about a haunted house talking about?" The city of Piedmont sets up a haunted house in the recreation department and they make it non scary, medium scary, very scary and holy shit crap in your pants scary. The last day of medium scary was tonight at 6:30. I had heard it would be too scary for my age kids, but Parker really wanted to check it out despite my warnings of mummies, ghosts, and nightmares. After much hemming and hawing, we decided to go to it and arrived in what I thought was plenty of time at 6:20. There was no parking and a line down the block. Oy. I had already told Parker that if the line was too long, we would have to skip it and if anyone cried in the house, we would leave. So when he saw the line, he asked me over and over if we would make it. While in line I was texting Jenna that we would be late and Susan that we would have to see later movie. Both were flexible. It seemed like the whole town of Piedmont was there with kids swarming everywhere. Miranda ran around with some classmates, but Parker was a little shy and stayed with me. After 30 minutes, it was our turn and we went in. They both stayed close to me, but no one cried and when we left they said, "That wasn't that scary, Mom!"

Back at home, Jenna was there and Susan was about to arrive to get me. 10 minutes later, she called to ask if I could pick her up since her car was acting strange. I hopped in, and rushed to her house. We still made the movie and weren't even cursed with talkers.

Back at home, Jenna said the kids stayed up late, which I said was Ok and did well. About 30 minutes after she left Miranda woke up crying something she hadn't done in a while. She screamed out, 'I WANT TO GO HOME!' so I'm guessing the ghouls and ghosts affected her after all. I let her come in bed with me, as I suspected I would with Elizabeth being gone.

Saturday was filled with getting bday presents for friends, attending mini golf party, chilling at home and going to costume party at Ebba's. Both kids had to sleep with me last night which was fine with our big king size bed.

I got to sleep until 8:45 on Sunday while they watched the backyardigans (a show that is just plain strange). We had no plans except carving pumpkins which we did early on. Parker went to play at school with the neighbors and Miranda and I joined them after a bit. We had lunch out side, made chocolate chip cookies, roasted pumpkin seeds, cleaned the garage, re-arranged the playroom and generally had a delightful day.

Although Miranda and Parker did get on each other's nerves in the car once arguing about the lyrics to a made up song, over all, they were simply lovely the whole weekend.

Having just two kids, even as a single parent, is almost like having none.

Girly fun

Playing at the Lee family's private indoor park

A hanging contest with the Lees

Elizabeth won.

Fun with aunt Kackaleen

The main purpose of a hotel is the pool

At the gate

Elizabeth are heading to Seattle to visit family and friends, and are at the gate now, just waiting to board.

Angry bird sweatshirts

The kids have not really taken them off since the arrived. At school yesterday they were automatically the coolest kids on the playground.

Ticks

Parkers new repetitive tick is to touch his fingers to each other over and over. Tip to tip. I asked him why he does that and he said it's like playing the piano.

Parker gets his!

Happy, happy boy!!!!!

Balloons

The kids love to blow and play with balloons so when they discovered the left overs from the girls parties, they became obsessed asking me to tie endless amounts of balloons. I finally said this morning,

"I don't understand why I need to keep tying so many balloons! Why do you all need to have so many balloons blown up?"

Parker says, "Mom, everyone loves balloons. I mean, why wouldn't you love them?"

Happiness arrives in a box

Thanks Valoree!!!!!!

If you get a tree of apples...

I finally got a fruit picker. So I picked a ton of apples. Gave some away. Ate some. And made apple sauce with the rest. It was pretty damn good too.

Then I paid Parker a few bucks to pick up all the rotten apples that had fallen and the squirrels half ate. I think he must have picked up over 100 apples total. I also made him put them in the compost bin. He did a great job and was happy to earn the money.

Todays Itinerary

5:00am Teach spin class
5:30-6:30 Lead Bootcamp with Sara
7am to 8am- Make lunches, take shower, get kids ready for school, make sure Parker remember gourds, two library books and to practice before we left, deal with Miranda's ongoing hissy fits
8am to 8:30 take kids to school, ensure gourds and library books actually get to school
8:30-10am drive to Berkeley Bowl, shop, return home, put stuff away
10:20 Volunteer in Parker's class for computer lab
11:45 Pick up girls and Lily, playdate du jour.
12:00 Deal with Miranda's continued hissy fit about nothing
1:00 Make rice crispie treats with girls
1:30 Say goodbye to Lily
1:45 Say goodbye to Miranda who has clay class with Quinn
2-3 Clean house, do dishes, rotate laundry including couch cushions (yuck)
3:15 Say goodbye to Elizabeth who got picked up for Gymnastics by Lindsay
3:30 Miranda and Quinn return. Ashley and I pick lots of apple from apple tree
4:00 Say hello to Parker and Luka, returning from playdate at his house
4:15 Say goodbye to Luka
4:20 Say hello to Brady, over for playdate number 2 for Parker
4:30 Say goodbye to Quinn, who is coming back tomorrow to make applesauce
5:30 Take Brady home. Tell his mom the news that he kicked a ball into dining room window causing glass to go flying everywhere.
6:00 Elizabeth and Michael home
6:30 Dinner. Meatloaf was under-cooked. Gross.
6:45 Distribute rice crispie treats
7pm Michael puts girls to bed since Parker is now a mess (no duh)
7:05 Glass repair man arrives.
7:15 Parker has recovered and is doing reading homework.
7:30 Parker starts watching Wheel of Fortune.
And now 7:42....Glass repair man almost done, Parker almost ready for bed, and you can stick a fork in me.

Alone time.

Elizabeth is sitting outside alone studying trees and singing this land is your land.

That weird kid

Standard Response.

Michael took the kids out to dinner tonight. I'm trying to watch what I eat for the next couple months to lose a few pounds so dinner at Fentons wouldn't be super great for me.

He texted me a picture of Parker at dinner looking extremely strange with the text, "When did he get so weird?"

I responded, "It's unclear, but I blame Amy."

Pumpkin patch

Two kitties

Playdates

Elizabeth said she wanted to have Lily over.
So I asked Lily's mom when she could come over.
She said Friday.
But Elizabeth was already going on a playdate to Emma's on Friday scheduled because Miranda was over last week and we like to keep things even.
So I asked Miranda if she liked Lily.
She did so Lily came over today.
Elizabeth is at Emma's house.
I drop Lily off and pick Elizabeth up in 30 minutes.
At that time I'll get Parker who is having a playdate with Ronan.
Parker had a playdate with Zoe and Ronan on Wednesday, but that was not enough time so we did another one.
Monday, Lily will be coming over again to hang with Elizabeth
Parker will be having Brady and Jack ZN over after he returns from playing with Luka.

Seriously. This is my life. I almost need a spreadsheet to track it all.

No exit.

Parker had a playdate today with a boy in his class named Stellan. Stellan is the kinda of kid that doesn't play tag with the other boys, brings in things like venus fly traps to school, and reads books like Gulliver's Travels. On top of all that, he is very short and talks with a bit of a lisp.

Parker thinks he's great.

So today when they were discussing what kind of Halloween candy they like, I asked him what he was gonna be for Halloween.

He replied, "Sartre."

I pause, thinking that it is totally possible that he actually said Sartre, but then repeated him to confirm and said, "Sartre? Like the French Philosopher?"

Then he said, "No, a SHARK!"

Which made a little bit more sense.

After about an hour..

They got the shot.
Parker was the 5th smallest kid so he is down on the ground.

Waiting for swim team photo

GPS

Last night Michael and I attended a meeting of the Piedmont Gifted Parents Support club. It's a non profit club that advocates for gifted kids and provides education for their parents. They also fund professional development classes for the teachers.

I thought we would be the lameos there with not much to say and more questions than answers, but apparently I was wrong. After some introductory stuff, we broke into groups according to our kids age. All the other parents at the table weren't really sure if their kids were gifted and the schools weren't doing anything for their apparent advanced abilities. I told them all about what they are doing for Parker and they were very impressed and asked lots of questions. We did learn that they officially test kids for gate in 3rd grade, but that even if he "gets in", not much will change in terms of how he is handled in class.

Michael texted me during the meeting that "he hated everyone here." Later he explained that he thought these parents were there because they "wanted" to have a gifted kid as some sort of ego boost, but their examples of why they thought the kid was gifted was totally lame. "He can play bey blades for an hour!"

Not sure if we'll go back to any of them, but I'm glad we went to get the lay of the land and find out how lucky we are to have gotten Parker's teacher Mrs. Sears. I sent her an email saying as much.

In other Parker news, he got this book out of the library on the body and it must have some measurement stuff in it too because this morning he was running around screaming Mommy! Mommy! like someone had gotten hurt, but when he finally found me he said, "Mom did you know that if you poured all the milk out of the bottle and replaced it with 32 cups of water, it would be totally full!?!?!?" Then he made a chart of all the volume conversions. Teaspoons to tablespoons to ounces to cups to pints and up and up. He was very happy.

He must be gifted. ;)

Race Weekend

While Michael was dealing with emergency room visits, I was in Healdsburg enjoying a lot of fun, a lot of friends, a lot of hot tubbing and a lot of miles. I ran the race with my friend Sara, who was doing her first half marathon. (this is my fourth for you new blog readers). We had trained together and I knew I wanted to run with her. I was worried one of us would feel really bad or really good, but we both were able to stick together and it was great to finish with her. Here we are about to sprint the last 100 feet or so.



The house I found for the 16 of us turned out to be completely funky. It was a big property with four houses on it. We had two of them and it worked our well despite the funk. One example of the oddness of it all was that there was a tree in our kitchen.



Some of the folks did a 30, 66 or 100 mile bike ride the day before, but I skipped that and enjoyed the hot tub, sleeping in and hanging out. I shared a bed with my fabulous boot camp leader, Kym. Before falling asleep one night, we learned new things about each other including that we both had brothers named David and that she is a twin and her twin sister was killed in a car accident when she was 15. Devastating. She ran the race with me and Sara too even though it was incredibly slow for her. That is just the kind of gal she is.

Anyway, it was a good time and a good race and it's good to be home.

Sunday with the girls

Parker had a birthday party at the Albany bowl, so after dropping him off the gals and I tried out a new park with a giant slide, followed by lunch at a Hawaiian BBQ joint.

To find the park I used google street view to assess the options, which is how I found this awesome giant slide, which was a big hit.

Late night adventure

Elizabeth woke up at 1:30am unable to breathe. She has been asthmatic since she was a baby, so it was no surprise, but it was still scary.

She was really fighting to breathe, and her albuterol puffer didn't have an effect, nor did sitting outside, which I didn't want to do much because she was making an ungodly racket. But she really couldn't breathe, so there was nothing for the single dad to do but roust the other kids out of bed and have a family adventure to the emergency room.

Miranda and Parker were both understandably distraught to be woken up, and then stuck in a car next to a nearly hysterical and heaving Elizabeth. But miraculously, they really held it together and stayed pretty calm.

I zipped us over to Kaiser, and discovered that when you show up with three kids in their jammies, one fighting to breathe, you get to skip security and bypass triage entirely. We were led immediately to a room, and at once there were about 5 people running around helping Elizabeth, including within just a few minutes, a doctor.

There was some confusion about her records, which wasn't made any easier by my not having her kaiser card, but they figured who she was, and her history, and then they gave her a shot of a steroid which would reduce the inflammation and allow her to breathe. They also had her wear a mask piping oxygen mixed with sterile water mist.

The other kids were real troupers. I was expecting full meltdowns, but it was just the opposite. Once they woke up, Parker and Miranda just went with the flow. A nurse found some coloring books, they did that for a while, and they took turns playing angry birds, and were generally just a delight. The nurse brought juice boxes and graham cracker, and they had a nice snack.

Elizabeth was pretty unhappy about the shot, and was generally pretty overwhelmed, but once the meds kicked in and her breathing got easier, she turned around and was fine. She did some coloring, too, and had a snack with the other kids.

Overall, we were there for about two and a half hours, before the doc came and told me that it was actually croup, not asthma, which is why the albuterol didn't help. So evidently there's nothing to do if she wakes up again tomorrow night. Cool air and a humidifier is all.

As emergency room visits go, I've had far worse.

Three minutes of dancing

When Parker was born we had a camera that could only take 3 minutes of video, so I used to take 3-minute episodes of whatever he happened to be doing. We have since gotten a camera that takes longer video, and the 3-minute format has fallen out of use, but I decided to do a three minute episode tonight, when the girls were putting on a show for me.

The segment below is what followed a fairly lengthy exhibition on creative hula hoop use, but the footage below covers the better part of the portion of the program devoted to dance. The 3-minute episodes tend to be a format that only a parent can love, and I love this one, boring as it is. You can judge for yourself.

Running in Healdsburg

Going to Healdsburg tomorrow for another half marathon. This time with 15 of my closest work out buddies. Rented a house for the weekend, on a river for all of us. Should be a good time. Except for the 13.1 miles, of course.

Michael is being single dad so I can do this. Thanks Michael!

Cross your fingers for me Sunday morning.

Smiling kids

Lesson

Parker explaining multiplication to Elizabeth is funny.

Cousins on Couch

October 2011


October 2006