Play -- the verb -- in The Balance

It's all a balance, and sometimes I wonder if I'm teetering.

Yesterday, I played in the snow with the girls for over two hours, building a fort/snowslide:



It was tremendously fun. The snow cooperated like no other snow I've seen: It was perfectly sticky, but not slushy. If you needed to scoop up some snow to reinforce up one of your "blocks," well, it behaved like clean, white clay. It wasn't too cold. No one got bored. We all got lots of exercise.

Here's the thing: When was the last time I went out and played with the girls? I can't remember.

We go on hikes, sure. We do projects. We get Out and About as few others do. But we don't play together that much. No, their play time is my work time. And I guard that work time carefully.

I tell myself that this is good, that they have to learn to play together independently, without me. All true. But still, I realize that I have turned away from play. I'm really poor at pretend games, for instance, whereas they are masterful. They have a new fantasy game they play in the car, which they call the Phone Game. They have two of our old, broken cell phones. Madison plays the role of Mission Control giving verbal directions and clues to Ella, who is out in the field in some mystery adventure in a fairyland world. They describe to each other what is happening, as if they were on the phone.

It's an incredible thing to listen to from the front seat. They have such imagination, such mental agility... a facility with making up stuff on the fly that I can't come close to replicating. I even find it arduous to play with them, walking their dollhouse people through an adventure. I remember doing this with ease as a child, but now I think my inhibitions are totally in the way.

I never want them to lose this.

Almost three years ago, I wrote on this blog about how grateful I was that the girls still played "chirp and peep" with me. It's the one pretend game I'm still good at... I'm the Mommy Birdie and they're the Baby Birdies. The mommy birdie says "chirp" and the baby birdies say "peep." And do you know, we STILL do it. Sometimes we have an entire game of it when I'm snuggling them into bed, but sometimes it's just a quick chirp-and-peep check-in when we're out and about. It's our special language. When I want to say "I love you," I whisper to one of them, "chirp" and she whispers back, "peep."

I feel as though I've been too busy to incorporate enough play into what I do with them. Maybe we play "at school" -- and I guess we sort of do, I try to make it fun, and we usually have a good connection. But it's not the same as play-without-a-particular-point, which we did yesterday. I will admit that my mind kept drifting off into "shoulds" -- I should be doing my taxes, I should be reconciling my accounts, I should be writing reports, I should be doing laundry, I should be making dinner -- and I kept having to yank myself back to just BE.

Unscheduled time to just PLAY -- with the girls. It's a radical concept, and I'm not sure where it comes into The Balance.

Really looking forward to this

I played cello from age 8-20. I wasn't very good, but I wasn't bad, either. I certainly was no soloist. It wasn't even that I liked the music I made as an individual cellist; I could see where I lacked in ability and technique even back then. But I loved playing in orchestras. It is one of the few childhood/teen memories I have that remains completely unsullied by crap. I don't think I met one single crappy person who played in orchestras with me. And, I loved, truly loved, what we were able to create by working together. I think I felt this first when I was about 14 and playing Beethoven's "Mount of Olives." When I first read James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and my teacher taught us the concept of "epiphany," that was the experience to which I related the word.

Yesterday, I found out about a "string camp for adults" at Roberts Wesleyan College for four days in the summer. SCOR is meant not for performance professionals, but for people exactly like me: Those who either played a stringed instrument as a child but not as an adult, or who play for their own enjoyment as an adult. What a great concept! I love that there is a market for this kind of thing, and I just. can't. wait. Before I checked out the registration form, I thought to myself that I didn't care how expensive it was, I still wanted to do it. Yes, it's pricey, but what is the point of being middle-aged and having purchasing power if you can't put it toward something that makes you count the days between February and July, right? People travel from all over to come to it, and here it is, 20 minutes away.

And, it will make a great article, because, after all, the mission of KidsOutAndAbout.com is partly to inspire parents to demonstrate to their kids that learning and self improvement never stop. Tax deduction, here I come!

TRM Results

The area under the overhang used to contain the futon. Or, the futon FRAME to be exact; the futon made its way upstairs to the new mission-style futon because we weren't using this room down here much. I'm getting another futon mattress. Soon. Anyway, I kept whacking my head against that overhang. I hated that overhang. But now, we have a workspace there. The table top looks yellow-beige because it's reflecting the lights, but it's really white. Don't you just want to come over and work here?



My first thought had been that we should try to enclose the entire area, floor to overhang, with back-to-back tall cabinets. But the quotations I had gotten for custom-building cabinets were expensive, and to my mind not worth it. Then I had Mike the Ukrainian in, and he suggested that to save money I could *buy* tall cabinets, put them under the overhang, and he'd trim them in. That sounded good, but I couldn't find anything to fit, either online or locally. Then it hit me: I could use those Closet-Maid 31.5" cabinets (I already had a couple) and put a table on top of them for a workspace! So I just had to purchase four more and arrange them back-to-back.

Then, I visited ReHouse -- an architectural salvage store -- in Rochester, and found a perfect-sized flat door for $10. I went to the Home Depot on Saturday night, and lucked into Brian. Brian, whom I never met before, but whom I now know intimately -- I know all about how a customer banged a door into his left hand in November and broke two of his left knuckles, I know the name of his PA who is helping him get over the injury, I know what radio stations he listens to. Oh, yes, it's good to be female when one has a project in the Home Depot.

Anyway, Brian suggested that to cover the table, instead of using the countertop laminate I was planning ($45 per 4 x 8 sheet and hard to cut), I use the same dry-erase whiteboard that I was purchasing to replace the current dry-erase boards in the frames that the kids had written on long ago with permanent marker (only $12 for a 4' x 8' piece) to cover the table. Brian expertly measured and sliced everything for me. He spent an hour mitering corners for me in two kinds of trim. I expertly admired his work.

And these photos are the result! I still have to find a way to anchor the countertop to the wall, and I still have to find the oomph to take apart the whiteboard frames (not in the photo) so the kids can have dry-erase boards.

And I still have to do my taxes. Maybe I'll use the Cool New Workspace.

P.S. The ultimate triumph: One of those cabinets underneath is EMPTY! That's right... I was able to purge and organize enough that we have room to spare! And everyone knows where everything goes! I keep looking around doing the Happy Dance.

Jazz and toleration

Yesterday afternoon, we took the girls to see a jazz quintet called the Jeremy Pelt Quintet. The group was brought to Rochester by a local small company called Exodus to Jazz, and they packed one of the ballrooms at the downtown Radisson. We went as David's birthday gift.

The group was really good, for what it was, which was more bee-bop than traditional jazz. You could hear the bee-bop end of Miles Davis in there. The thing is, bee-bop isn't particularly our thing, but the Quintet was technically very good and transmitted the sense of fun they had playing it to the audience. I loved their slower ballads.

I had mentioned the show on the radio on Friday morning, and the producer sent me an email telling me that he had reserved us a table, which was nice of him. In one of those common-in-Rochester coincidences, it turns out that the producer's wife works down the hall from David, so they recognized each other.

The girls were the only kids in the audience. (I guess that's usual for these things, but I'm trying to change it!) They tolerated it well. Ella didn't need to tolerate it, actually, she positively liked it. She's a jazz-Latin-rock-and-roll girl, while Madison is emerging as a classical aficionado. But Madison was very polite, and I was proud of them. Now I know we can take them anywhere. I wish I could take Ella to their next show, which is called "Gabriel Alegria and the Afro-Peruvian Sextet," but it starts at 8pm on a Friday night and she'd never make it through.

I am *mostly* finished with TRM. I still need to find an inexpensive futon mattress for the futon, but we showed David our new schoolroom last night. He was impressed. Will post photos soon.

The TRM Wall

I am finding I have hit an unexpected wall during TRM (Total Reorganization Mode).

The schoolroom looks great. So great that all I want to do is sit in it and USE it. But I'm not done. That's the problem. I have stuff in OTHER rooms of the house that need to be sorted and put away or thrown away. I have 600 books that need to be sorted and distributed to the six charities for which Schoolhouse Rock sponsored the book drive. I have a huge stack of my own stuff to be filed -- oh, sure, it LOOKS fairly neat sitting in a high-sided black basked under my desk, but it will take some work to get it done. And I have to find some way to anchor to the wall the door-covered-in-dry-erase-board-with-fancy-trim-on-top-of-six-short-cabinets that has become an awesome new workspace for me and the girls.

And then there will be taxes.

Sigh.

Better get to it. I think I'll have some John Rutter playing on YouTube to get me in a serene and mellow mood.

This afternoon, the four of us are going to see the Jeremy Pelt Quintet (jazz, featuring trumpeter Jeremy Pelt) downtown. My goal is to have it all done by 3:30, before we leave.

Bootstraps

When you hit a slump, you have to put your head down and plow through it.

And then, if possible, you mix it up a little.

We've been so busy what with Schoolhouse Rock and all of the activities, and I've been so busy getting the new version of KidsOutAndAbout.com going (release date of April. April, damn it. It's going to be April) that we hit a kind of slump.

As I said, first thing was head down and try to plow through it.

But now I'm in Total Reorganization Mode. Specifically, the basement (school room that we haven't spent time in because it's been too cold and it's just become a dumping ground) and Ella's bedroom. And the books.

It's Winter Break here in Rochester, and the girls don't want to "do school." We WILL do school later this week, but right now all of the printers are disconnected because of Total Reorganization Mode so I can't print out their to-do sheets. Good excuse. So this morning they'll help me organize and then we'll go see The Lightning Thief movie. Tomorrow we're doing something called the Challenger Mission at the Rochester Museum & Science Center, which has the kids (and two parents, including myself) run a simulated space shuttle mission. And then Thursday afternoon we'll go play laser tag and roller skate at Horizon Fun FX.

But back to reorganization.

Oh, and hey, I was on the local news last night. Here's the link.

I am practicing. No no no no no.

I mean: No thank you. I am flattered to have been asked, it really is an honor. I am always glad to help in a limited capacity. But no.

No, I can't serve on another nonprofit arts organization board of directors.

Make sure I don't give in, people. Help me be strong.

Racing

I think you could describe the pace of our life lately as "racing" -- fulfilling, yes, but definitely racing.

I've been doing okay on making sure the girls get enough academic practice at things. They're both making some progress on math. I'm in a period where we're practicing some more basic skills there so that they'll be able to make some bigger leaps soon. (Madison is practicing the mechanics of isolating a single variable in equations like (1/4x - 28)/3 = 4. Ella is working on borrowing with unlike fractions, as in 7 1/6 - 1 4/5.)

I guess the biggest academic news, one that is a real relief to me, is that Madison can suddenly just spell, well and accurately. I am positive that this is not because I've been diligent about the word lists in Romalda Spaulding's The Writing Road to Reading (although indeed I've been more diligent this year than I have in years past). No, I'm positive that it's because of all of the writing she has been doing. She hates the little red squiggly underlining that Word does when one misspells a word, and she's taken pains to correct it, and to notice the good spelling, each time. The beauty of this is that it happened completely naturally, and without much effort on her part. YAY YAY YAY. I'd been questioning my decision, for the past while, to leave her be on spelling. While it's true that she would have spelled better much sooner had I forced the issue, WHO CARES? She is there now. The girl is 10, can spell, can write, and is HAPPY.

The lesson is learned.

Tonight, Ella cried because she had to put away her chapter book (yes, another one of those blasted fairy books) before she finished it. Yes! She cared! She wanted to keep reading! I will take these baby steps where I can get them. Wouldn't it be wonderful if by the age of 10 Ella is a voracious reader? Maybe it can just happen naturally, as Madison's spelling did.

But back to racing. Madison's Schoolhouse Rock performances went great this past weekend, and we have one more weekend to go. Due to my sending out last-minute press releases on Sunday morning, which basically read, "If it's a slow news day here in Rochester, please consider sending a videographer over to the Auditorium Center, especially if he or she is a child of the 70s," we got both News 8 and News 10 to film the kids and put the show on the nightly news. That should finish up bringing them in for next weekend. (At least I hope.) Here is a photo of the cast doing "Circulation." Madison is in green.


This week, we're still racing. I am on the Fickle 93.3 bowling team for "Bowl for the Cure" next Friday evening, and this morning Marti (the DJ) and I practiced at Bowl-a-Roll. Then we raced over to bring Ella to another of Adrienne's fabulous "Picturing America for Homeschoolers" sessions at the Webster Library (this one was on the Brooklyn Bridge). I would have raced to bring Madison to writing class in between, but she is quite congested from a cold that developed this weekend, and I figured that the rest of the parents would prefer that my kid not be blowing her nose in close quarters next to the 6 other kids in the class, sharing pencils and the like. So we raced to BJs and other errands instead, and raced home and finished our academic work for the day.

Tomorrow, a school concert with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra in the morning, then back home for schoolwork/my work and instrument practice, then flute lessons, dance lessons, and a final run-through rehearsal for Schoolhouse Rock.

My fingers are too tired to type out the rest of the week's schedule, but suffice it to say that a large part of my mental energy is avoiding burnout. Really looking forward to next week when things slow down just a little!

I've been working really, really hard on the development of the new KidsOutAndAbout.com web site so I can expand this year and achieve World Domination next year. Can I give you the coolest sneak peek into the new design? Here it is:

Don't do this

If out of the blue you have a weird dream about a casual friend of yours... you know, the nice lady with the cute kids and sweet husband... to the effect that she's suddenly divorced and at a play with her new boyfriend... don't send her a Facebook message saying, "Hahahaha, I had this crazy dream last night, you'll never believe it..."

Don't do it. Take it from me. Just. keep. quiet.

If I had bet on this, I would have lost

"We're not in a big rush. We'll pause," Pelosi said. "We have to know what our possibilities are."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/01/21/pelosi-votes-pass-senate-health-house/

Juggling two shows as of this week

Ella is now Jellyfish #1 in a show The Little Mermaid, for ages 4-9.

Rehearsals start Thursday and are every Thursday evening through the end of March.

I'm having her do this partly because she wants to, and partly to see for myself what this program is like.

Hope she gets a decent costume. She's all about the costumes, that girl.

Pre-puberty

I think we can count pre-puberty as officially hitting our household last week. If this is PRE-puberty, well, let's just say that while I think I know how I'm going to handle puberty with the girls, this will be a good study-and-plan period with plenty of material.

She's 10.36 years old, just for the record.

Hold on to your hats, it's going to be a wild 6-or-7-year ride!

Weird finger thing

Okay, so this really weird thing has started happening with two of the fingers on my left hand: At odd moments whose similarity I can't determine, the top half of the either my index finger or my middle finger will go all yellowish and whitish and become numb. When this happens, I of course focus on the finger and try to get more blood to circulate into it. I can't tell whether that works, or if I had just waited the five minutes that it takes to force more blood into my finger that would work just as well. It doesn't just happen out in the cold, although the first time it happened, it was when I was hanging Christmas ornaments outside in Nature's Refrigerator (a.k.a. Rochester). It also doesn't happen just when I'm typing, although it DOES happen when I'm typing sometimes.

It's quite annoying.

So if someone knows that this is a sign of...well...something, please let me know. I've never heard of it happening.

I'm going to start exercising more. At least, if I have some kind of circulation problem, that can only help, right?

The bug has bitten Ella

Ella went over to watch Madison's rehearsal for Schoolhouse Rock on Saturday. She loved watching the rehearsal, she knows every song, and is fascinated by the whole process.

She came along with us tonight. Two-and-a-half hours. She has charmed the music director, who had her sitting next to the piano turning pages and singing. She wishes she had auditioned (even though it's for ages 10-16, technically she could have because there is another 8-year-old in the play), but she has the whole thing in perspective. She just likes breathing the atmosphere, I think. She has informed me that she'd like to go to every single rehearsal, just to watch, and be a part of it in that way.

Guess we know what I'll be doing for the next 9 or 10 years. "Theater mom" suits me just fine, especially if we stick with theater companies that have people running them who are as nice and capable as these folks.

10-year-old's bio

I had to write a little "bio" for the program for Madison's upcoming performance of Schoolhouse Rock Live at Stages.

It was due yesterday, so of course I wrote it at 11:00 last night. You know those little program blurbs, right? They always start off like this: "Jane Jones is thrilled to be back at Stages once again after having taken a brief sabbatical to appear on Broadway as Annie..." I decided that no bio of a child of MINE is starting "Madison Ross is thrilled" or "Madison Ross is delighted." But it's not as though she has lots of acting credits worth mentioning. So what to say?

Here's what I came up with:

Madison Ross (Ensemble) is a home-schooled fifth grader from Brighton. Schoolhouse Rock is Madison's first Stages show, and she describes the experience with lots of adjectives: Exciting, energizing, electric, thrilling, challenging, and fun. She studies musical theater with John Barthelmes at Spotlight Theatre Arts in Fairport, and plays piano, flute, and viola. Madison loves writing, reading, and computer programming, and hopes someday to be a science fiction writer.

Two potential issues made me hesitate before hitting the Send button:

1) I have technically never heard Madison Ross tell anyone that she wants to be a science fiction writer.

2) Madison Ross is currently in an argumentative phase. Granted, this is about a 10-year-and-counting phase, but it's gotten to where if you say there is about a foot of snow on the ground she'll be outside with a ruler trying to prove you wrong before you can say "six curse word degrees."

I hit the Send button. I figured that the volunteer doing the program wasn't going to send it to press at 9am today, and that it was fixable if suddenly the child told me that she was planning on a career as a televangelist or something.

I read it to her this morning. She listened without interrupting to object (!), blinked twice, said reflectively, "Science fiction writer. Huh. That sounds about right," and went back to what she was doing.

Okay then.

Speech at 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall

If you take a worthwhile 42 minutes to watch Alan Charles Kors' speech to the Atlas Network at the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall last year, you can imagine what it was like to be a student in his class 20 years ago, or, I imagine, now. In the classroom, though, he only spoke of the history of others' ideas and their importance to political and social development, not of his own ideology. It was over sandwiches at the deli on 38th Street that students could appreciate Kors the Man.

Alan Charles Kors - Freedom Dinner 2009 Keynote from Atlas Network on Vimeo.

Give it a rest

The whole family wants Madison to give "God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman" a rest. Even Eastern Orthodox Christmas is past, for pity's sake. We hear it on the flute, piano, viola. She sings it in the car. Thank goodness she doesn't play any other instruments.

Of course, it's playing on a continuous loop in all of our minds as a result.

Ode to Winter

I never write poems.

Well, almost never.

Tonight, though, I was inspired to write this

Ode to Winter in Rochester

Being a publisher has its advantages. Namely, you can write any old thing and get it published.

I really do like this one, though.

A photo and a dedication

In youth, I had crappy parents.

In college, I had great parents, although I'm pretty sure they didn't know it at the time. And they weren't technically mine.

I was a rather depressed and brainy teen who was not taught anything about how to make my way in the world. This was not surprising, because I had parents who didn't know what they were doing. I think the brains saved me, though: When I got to college, I decided that what was required was a total makeover. What had those people done wrong, and what could I do better?

My sophomore year at Penn, I took an intellectual history course with Alan Kors, and after that started working on other projects with him. It was the early days of resistance to the invasion of the universities by politically correct thought reformers, and Alan was on the good side of that. His work ultimately resulted in the forming of FIRE (Freedom and Individual Rights in Education).

As much value as Alan was to me intellectually, it was nothing compared to what talking with him and watching him with his family did for me personally. Here was a guy who GOT IT; the first person I'd met whose ethics of respect for individual liberty were consistent through and through: politically, in professional dealings, and with his family and students. His kids (preteens at the time) were happy, healthy, intelligent young people. I watched how he talked with them. I learned all about his reasonable setting of rules and boundaries that let them flourish. I saw how an atheist taught his kids to be good people, the best. He was the first person to show me Chris Brockman's book What About Gods. I learned. I didn't forget. Once when I was there, Alan had his daughter Samantha tell me their family motto ("Don't take shit"), which profoundly changed the way I looked at the world. Three small words told me how to become a much happier person. I wanted my future kids to turn out just like the Kors kids.

We Rosses visited the Kors family at their home in PA last week; it was the first time Alan had met David, Madison, and Ella (although when the kids were babies we'd had lunch with Erika in Philly). Best of all, their daughter Samantha, now grown and with two baby girls of her own, was there with her family.

Madison and Ella LOVED Alan and Erika. The girls talked, they listened, they joked, and Alan clowned around with them. And, most significantly, Samantha noticed. My girls are the same distance apart in age as her babies, and she told both me and Erika that she wanted HER girls to turn out just like MY girls. "How do I do that?" she asked me. How gratifying that was. It was simple justice to be able to tell her about how I'm largely following in the pattern of her own parents.

The whole experience did make me realize, for a few minutes, what the girls are missing by not having grandparents. But I didn't dwell on what can't be helped. The girls are a lot better off for not having to deal with MY parents as grandparents, and as for David's parents, who would have been terrific, they unfortunately passed away long ago.

David took this photo of me, Alan, Erika, Ella, and Madison:



I hope I look like Erika when I'M in my late 50s.

I do love that man profoundly. It would have been too sappy and undignified really to show him the depths of my gratitude, but I'm pretty sure he got the general picture.

A milestone

I'm not going so far as to hope right now, but I just told Ella that her "half-hour-with-the-book" portion of school had run over.

"Can I just finish the story?" she asked. "It won't take me too long."

This is a first. Seriously. I know she's 8-almost-9, but the child simply doesn't (yet) like reading for pleasure. The rest of us will all all be sitting around reading for pleasure, and she'll be doing anything but. I'm holding out hope, of course, that this will change, that she's simply a late bloomer on this one. There is so much in the world of books for her to discover and enjoy, and I want her to get in the habit of doing so frequently.

Unfortunately, what Ella has going against her is that she's L-A-Z-Y. She can do most things she needs to do with little discomfort, and resents putting in effort. Not sure what I can do about this kind of thing except make sure she does what she needs to do, and push her to where she's expending some effort but not to where she positively resents the amount of work.

Today's can't-put-down story was one of those Rainbow Fairy books I hate. But I'll take it, with pleasure.