Madison and fitness

I was extremely proud of Madison this morning.

I've been doing a bit of running for the past month, mostly to try to get my legs used to it so they don't freeze up on Monday nights during softball games (which continue through August). It's worked, for the most part. During the last couple of games, I've had no problems.

It had occurred to me that this would be a great opportunity to get Madison to do a bit more exercise than she's doing. Madison is growing at a great clip... between January 2009 and April 2010, she grew four-and-a-half inches. I can barely keep her in pants that are long enough.

Throughout Madison's childhood, when she's grown, it's been first out, then up. She's never been what you call slim, but recently the "out" part has continued and hasn't slimmed down with the "up." Madison definitely inherited my body type rather than the long-and-lean Ross genes, and while I'm no skinny minnie I've never had an actual problem, so I wasn't worried about Madison.

But the girl loves the computer, and hanging around reading, and she's never met an ice cream cone she didn't love. This just-before-teen year time seems to me to be the time when habits are going to get established into the teen years and beyond, so I thought that this summer is could be the perfect time to get her actively exercising. I invited her to start running with me as soon as we got back from our big trip out west. She wasn't enthusiastic, but she wasn't really disinclined, either. I gave her the establish-the-routine-now-so-you-can-be-strong-and-healthy-for life talk, and if there's anything the child understands, it's theory. So she thought it would be a good thing to do.

You know what interfered? The child actually lost her sneakers last weekend after the 4th-of-July parade, and didn't find them until yesterday. So she didn't come out with me this past week. I didn't make a big deal of it, only let it seem like something that she'd like to do, when she found her sneakers.

Well, last night, she agreed to go out with me this morning. I found her at her computer this morning about half an hour after she got up. At which point, as you can imagine, she was NOT inclined to put on clothes and go exercise. She tried her best to argue me out of it, but I was persuasive, and off we went to Corbett's Glen, which is a nature trail a block away from our house, before David was even awake.

And here's the totally unexpected thing: The child was GOOD. So, so, so much better than I'd expected. Much better than ME, that's for sure -- I always get side cramps half a mile in and have to walk. But that kid let me set a fairly slow pace, and then kept going when I had to stop and walk a little...altogether going a bit more than a mile before stopping herself and letting me catch up. Boy, was she proud, as well she should have been.

"I can't believe it, but it looks like you've got Daddy's running genes," I told her down by the creek when we were skipping stones, before turning around and running home.

She repeated that like five times today to whoever would listen.

She wants to go out tomorrow, for a short run, before camp. She wants me to wake her at -- get this -- 7:15.

You know what's really got her? Madison is REALLY competitive. She absolutely adores the fact of beating the pants off me this morning. If that's what it takes to keep her going, that's fine by me.

Speaking of pants, she literally WAS wearing my running shorts. That was partly what got her out the door -- she didn't have anything approximating comfortable running shorts, so I tried her on an old pair of mine. Yes, they'd shrunk over the years, so they don't really fit me any more. But she was delighted that she was big enough to wear my old clothes. So, it was a day of a couple of firsts for her.

My job: to keep it all going. I will.

19 pages last week

So, I'm currently one quarter of the time into my month-wherein-the-girls-have-camp-and-so-I-have-silence, and I have one-quarter of the remaining work on Food Fights completely done. In short, I'm on track.

I think I'll be collapsing two of the remaining chapters into one, which this means I have completed 10 out of the 16 chapters. And, I've worked out a good deal of bits and pieces of the rest. Chapter 12 is a totally cool chapter, just too tempting not to work on...a chapter in which all of these seeds I sewed earlier on burst into bloom. Phrases kept blossoming in my mind, too, perfect dialogue for Chapter 12. So, I cheated and wrote some of it before knuckling down and working on Chapter 11. It was like dessert before dinner.

I'm right now in the middle of Chapter 11. It's going much faster than those always-dreaded middle chapters 8, 9, and 10. Chapter 11 has my main characters doing some very clever internet public relations to get their video to go viral, and boy, do I know about P.R. and the internet. So even though it's no Chapter 12, Chapter 11 is proving fun to write. And as soon as I finish it (Tuesday? Wednesday?) I'll really be in the end game.

Three pages

Three pages was enough for me to do today, instead of four, because I stopped at the end of a scene. I barely got these pages in under the wire, too much to do for work today, couldn't get focused on fiction. Ah, well, moderate success anyway. I'll try to keep up the pace tomorrow!

My will be done

Madison and Ella started Sleeping Beauty camp today and loved it. Yay! Never have I been so happy with a camp. For the first two weeks, it's 9am-12pm, and for the second two weeks (Alice in Wonderland) it's 9am-5pm.

I have two main goals for July:

1) KidsOutAndAbout.com stuff includes preliminary work to get the new Albany KidsOutAndAbout.com site up and running, several reviews to write for the current KOA site, and more meetings and contacts here in Rochester to make some immediate cash.

2) But in addition to that, I will be able to dedicate actual, uninterrupted attention on:

Food Fights

Because come the end of July, it WILL be done. I swear.

I have 20 days plus weekends, minus one weekend in the middle where my friend Candace is bringing her three kids from Pennsylvania to visit. My requirement is four pages per day to finish it, then a solid week at the end to revise, before starting agent queries in August.

I can do it. Despite having a dentist appointment this morning, I got my four pages in today. And, I admit, I do love this book. My four reviewers from the conference gave me three enthusiastic thumbs-up and one lukewarm this-isn't-my-genre-so-I-don't-know-how-to-respond, so I'm fired up to finish it and get it published. I can see it, damn it. (I can also see the made-for-TV movie based on it, but I guess there's no need to get ahead of ourselves. On the other hand, as I always say, if I can take a little pleasure NOW from dreaming, why not do it? It's free. It's either have the pleasure now, or don't. I think I'll choose to have it.)

Leading ladies

Madison and Ella got the two leads in the first musical theater camp they're in at Stages this summer. The show is Sleeping Beauty. Ella is Princess Aurora (a.k.a. Briar Rose, a.k.a. Sleeping Beauty) and Madison is the evil sorceress Malificent. Wouldn't you know that for the first musical the girls are in together, one of them is trying to kill the other.

They're among the older members of the group (ages 6-10), and this is the same director Madison had for Schoolhouse Rock. The camp is Monday though Friday for two weeks starting this coming Monday, and they'll have performances on the second Friday evening and Saturday afternoon. It will be mostly parents and friends in the audience; this is no hifallutin production, though Stages does a MUCH better job than other production companies about nurturing the kids into doing as professional a performance as possible, even in a 2-week summer camp context. One nice thing is that an old high school friend of mine is coming up to visit with her three kids that weekend, so they'll get to see the show.

I wasn't in the least surprised that Madison got the part of Malificent. Misty, her director, practically had her typecast. They had auditions this past Tuesday night, and from the first aggressive "ARRRRGH!" Madison let out when she started reading for the part, she had the four adults in the audience in stitches.

That's right, only four adults in the audience. The director, the choreographer, the assistant directors, and...me. The rest of the parents were in the parent meeting, but to my surprise, Misty asked me to be one of the judges, along with herself, the choreographer, and the assistant director. "You're sensible, and I trust your judgment." Gee! She handed me a sheet and had me rank each kid from 1 to 5 on singing, dancing, and role reading. It was interesting, although it took me a bit to get the hang of quickly reading each child's name tag and grading him or her. Most of the kids didn't sing above a whisper, and only half in tune, so you can guess what kind of a show it's going to be. I think only Ella and Madison had actual singing/acting experience.

Which is why Ella got the part of the princess. She isn't a very *strong* singer (fortunately, she'll be miked), but she stays in tune very well and she was the only girl besides Madison (who was beautifully witchy and over the top) who read with expression when they were reading for roles. If there had been a stronger or clearer singer than Ella, she would have gotten it, but Ella will do fine. She has two solo songs.

A small wave of relief washed over me when I watched Ella read for the princess: I realized that Ella's reading has finally "arrived." A year ago, she would have faltered; she would have been too busy concentrating on sounding out the words to have had any expression in her voice. This year, she is fine. And she is reading The Secret Garden for book club, all on her own, without complaining. So there.

And Madison...my goodness, Madison will be GREAT as Malificent. I think she knows all of her lines already. She has three solo songs, and is delightfully cackly in each. She was relieved at not having to dance (she's wise enough to know that she's no dancer), and her stomp-around overbearing dramatic in-your-face loud kind of presence that so gets under my skin at times is perfect for Malificent. And at the end, she gets to have a sword fight with Prince Phillip, and die dramatically. The child is in her glory.

It's going to be a fun couple of weeks. And I get to get a lot DONE!

Preteens are a trip

Madison and I are in the Rocky Mountains together, in Jackson Hole, WY for the Jackson Hole Writers Conference.

It has been a fascinating trip, for the most part an absolute joy. We love this area. Madison especially loves the area, and has said repeatedly how much she wishes she could live here.

First, we flew to Bozeman, Montana on Monday. The traveling was perfect, an easy connection in Minneapolis. We got to Bozeman within 6 hours of leaving home. We stayed with my colleague Patrick and his family, which consists of 13- and just-10-year-old girls, and 8-year-old and 3-year-old boys. They live at the base of a mountain. They have a birch tree you (that is, the kids) can climb and get up on the roof.

My colleague and his wife have a more laid-back approach than I do to parenting, but they're in a rural area where they can afford to let the kids run wild and explore. Also, both of them work from home, so it's been necessary to train the kids not to bother them while they're working. When they're working, it's close to benevolent neglect, but when they are engaged with the kids, they're really engaged. So it has resulted in a lovely independent family of rugged outdoors-ish kids who are extremely outgoing, polite, and very happily well-behaved. The parents are people who assume that the kids will entertain themselves and be common-sensical about things like putting on sunscreen and eating enough and looking out for one another, and they generally do. Madison is much shyer than they are, but they soon kind of enveloped her in their camaraderie. She spent two days on their roof and up the mountain, getting a bit sunburned, not eating quite enough because they're healthfoodies and we are not, and not sleeping near enough because it stayed light until 10pm Mountain time. I got to work with Patrick...good work, solid work, planning-for-KOA-expansion kind of work (Albany's next! Get ready, Albany!) that solidified our plans for the immediate future.

One thing that David and I noticed independently -- by Monday night or Tuesday morning -- is that when Madison and Ella are apart from each other and getting solid one-on-one time with us, life is radically different. More relaxed. More cheerful. More independent. In fact, they seem much more mature, more... well... themselves.

This phenomenon was so palpable it was startling, and David and I both commented on it on the phone. It continued for me all the way through Wednesday morning. Madison and I left Montana and drove down through Yellowstone (which is about 2 hours from Bozeman, a beautiful drive through Gallatin National Forest).

Almost just as soon as we'd left my colleague's house, Madison CRASHED. It was so weird... she collapsed back into her regular, cranky-ish preteen self. I knew what it was, mostly... it was a sleep issue, and an excitement issue, and the fact that she'd been attentively on best behavior for several days. She was low on sleep -- still is, in fact. It's hard to sleep in unfamiliar beds, in exciting surroundings. But boy, did she crash, so much so that I had to fight to keep the disappointment from manifesting itself in me.

After a beautiful day in Yellowstone (that was punctuated a bit by her deciding that the thermals unnerved her) that involved lots of water, wildlife, gorgeous views, and even a grizzly bear as seen from afar, we wound up south of Yellowstone in the Grand Teton mountains. We stayed in a "resort" on Wednesday night that is really a motel masquerading as a resort. That's a story unto itself, actually. The room looked pretty nice and new, but I found the mouse glue trap in the room disconcerting, to say the least. I woke up at 5am seriously convinced that there was a mouse in our room, but the scratching and snuffling may have been something else, maybe the air conditioning system or pipes. The "resort" didn't really take me seriously about a mouse, as nothing was in the trap. I was kind of hoping for a refund. They won't get a good review when I write them up.

But Thursday morning, we went for a horseback trail ride, just the two of us, a lovely young guide named Sammi, and an eager dog named Tuff. Even though on the way there, she was apprehensive and filled to the brim with negativity (deliberately talking herself into anxiety), Madison loved the ride. Her horse was named Sweetheart and mine was Shilo. We splashed through creeks in Grand Teton National Forest, we saw wonderful views of snow-covered 13-ers, we smelled majestic pine forests, and we were mostly reverently silent.

And then...we rolled into Jackson Hole, got ourselves signed in to the conference, and started chatting with the organizer. I had told Madison that people would take her seriously here; they'd ask her what she liked to write. We talked about what she would say. And sure enough, that's the first thing that the lovely young lady organizer did. And Madison, who was admittedly low on sleep and in need of a solid lunch, got totally tongue-tied. She didn't look Nicole in the eye, she mumbled, she said "like" in the one paragraph she did say more times than I cared to count, and basically came off like an awkward little disengaged kid. She even argued somewhat scowlingly with me in front of Nicole when I said that she'd been writing some great essays ("only one, Mom, and it wasn't great").

Yikeroo.

Anyway, some food cheered her up, and she has generally enjoyed the day-and-a-half we've had in the conference so far. She's glad we're here, she understands the talks for the most part, she thoroughly enjoyed the panel that had some literary agents discussing what they did and the publishing process, and she was FANTASTIC in a small group workshop about finding voice in writing for young adults. (Seriously, her insights were valuable, totally in the same class as the rest of the participants. I was really proud.) But she definitely feels like a fish out of water, and though her disposition has improved, she's just not able to relax in front of other people. And she's oddly silent, even at meals, which are just with me.

Madison has never been great at physical coordination, but it's gone out the window. She wants to hold my hand while she walks along or stands next to me, but it's not simply a friendly thing, it's a draggy thing, as though she can't quite use her own body to keep upright or move along. It's a bit weird, I tell you, and I am hard-pressed not to be annoyed. I know it's because there is so much going on in her head that she's not paying attention to her body. But the fact is, she's got to pay attention to her body, because that's part of being an autonomous human. And also because when she doesn't, she's got almost an autistic-like affect going...and she's definitely not autistic.

Sorry, you're seeing my struggle here. It's unfair for me to be impatient with my lovely child, of whom I'm expecting perhaps more than is in her power to give under the circumstances, and I guess I'm working it through on the page.

Anyway, the writing conference is definitely the right thing to have done. It has stretched her in ways nothing else could, and for the most part she has met the challenge happily. It's the first of what I'm sure will be many conferences, and I'm sure she'll get much more relaxed as she practices and as time takes its natural course.

"Oh, yeah, I've been doing this a long time," she'll say, casually, when she's a famous author in 15 years or so. "My mom started taking me to writing conferences when I was just 10, so it's kind of bred in me. That Jackson Hole trip, that was just the start. Once she won Newbery Medal in 2011, then we really started traveling together. That mother of mine, she showed me the world."

Taking time out from working for the important task of old-age injury

Who blogs when there's work to be done? Oh, right, that would be me. On the other hand, I've been over-the-top busy the last four weeks with the launch of the new KOA site.

But tonight, I blog. Why? I can do nothing else but muse over the following absurd facts:

1) I am 41, and someone ought to have informed me of this important fact because

2) I was utterly unprepared for it this evening when

3) I attempted to play competitive softball on the radio station's team.

I played 2nd base. I love 2nd base. I am good at 2nd base. So there we were, at the TOP of the FREAKING FIRST INNING of the first game of the season, and WARM 101.3 was out in the field. Grounder between first and second. Naturally, I launched myself to the left toward the ball, like any normal person who hasn't played on a baseball team in 18 years. I did not trip. I did not fall. I did not slide. No, I simply went for the ball, and got the ball. Quickly. Calmly. All business-like. The way softball amongst 30- 40- and 50-year-olds is meant to be played.

Now, I told everyone that I had pulled my left quad muscle. This is true, but not the whole truth. The truth is that this normal, everyday launch to the left had sent my left quad, my left gluteal, AND my right quad all simultaneously into spasm. The left quad was the worst, so that's the only one I reported. I literally didn't know where to limp. So I kind of limped left. Now, they needed 5 girls to play on the team for the game to count, and I was the 5th girl. There was no wimping out. So I spent the rest of the 7 innings alternately trying to stretch and pound my various extremities back from the brink, keeping a cheerful face while they (the extremities, not the DJs) screamed at me. But hey, I walked three times and hit a single my last time up, so I didn't do a bad job after all.

There is no crying in baseball, so I saved it for when I got home. David walked in on me. "My god, what's the matter?" he asked, really worried. "I'm F-f-f-forty-one years old," I said, between sobs. He gave me a lot more sympathy than I deserved, considering he's 52.

Four ibuprofens and a hot bath later, I'm feeling better. I crave a single-malt scotch but don't dare try to leave the bed to make its acquaintance personally. I'm not asleep yet because I've convinced myself that if I stay awake, it puts off what tomorrow will feel like. Ya think?

This week in Rochester

I:

Launched the new KidsOutAndAbout.com

Dealt with fallout as KidsOutAndAbout.com crashed due to four times the expected stress on the server

Turned 41

Barely kept up with feeding and clothing the new baby (found lots of niggly little problems with the web site, helped organizations get their listings up and running, sold a couple of upgrades)

Accepted congratulations

Got rejected from a publisher for The Frontier Team

Couldn't sleep

Let the house go to hell temporarily

Let the kids do lots of independent work

Went on the radio twice

Picked up my cello from the shop where it was being repaired

Took a heavenly half-hour with Madison and played cello with her as she practiced viola

Realized that playing cello really is like riding a bicycle, except now I understand what music is about much better than I did 25 years ago.

Breathed sometimes, ate sporadically

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It's all in the service of a new and improved work life, but I could never keep up this pace forever.

This week in the Ross house

Ella had two birthday parties. I will try to find some time to write up a review for each of them. Someday. I have lovely photos, I think. At some point I'll download them from the camera.

Ella got reading glasses. She is very happy with them, so much so that she likes to walk around wearing them. Just looking at her doing that makes me dizzy. We'll see if they have some kind of beneficial impact on her desire to read. I'd settle for a psychological impact.

The new KidsOutAndAbout.com (here's a sneak peek of the test site for the five of you who read this blog) has really been coming together. It is a thing of utter beauty. We launch this coming Wednesday, I hope hope hope. I'm pretty sure we will.

I started to sell the web site upgrade space this week. We're accepting "advertising" in the sense that we give everyone a free organization listing, which they can upgrade to 1) Give themselves a lovely web page within the new KOA site and 2) Increase their standing in the search results when they appear. So far, with little effort, I now have $2000 in hand and about $3000 more on the immediate way, including a big contract that I sold to the YMCA. Can't wait really to start selling this thing.

Last night, we went to see the Ying Quartet. We brought the girls. They're our favorite string quartet. It was a lovely concert.

This afternoon was the annual Imagine RIT community event, during which the Rochester Institute of Technology opens its doors to kids and families with hundreds of free things to do that are oriented toward science, technology, math, and culture. A terrific festival, my favorite, I think. I found myself wishing our young friends Max and Henry had been in town, they would have loved it. Though there was so much, and so crowded, that it was absolutely impossible to do more than 1/4 of the festival in an afternoon. Like Epcot Center, only free.

Tomorrow, KidsOutAndAbout.com has a table at Healthy Hero Day at the Rochester Red Wings game; we were invited to participate by the YMCA. Then we zip over mid-afternoon to the girls' concert in which the Bach Children's Chorus sings with the Greece (NY) Choral Society in the the GCS's 40th anniversary concert.

I wonder how long it's been since I actually cooked a real dinner. It's been at least 10 days. Now I know how the Other Half lives -- the half in which both parents work and everyone is running around. I'm glad that for the most part I've been able to keep the girls doing normal schoolwork. Soon, soon, this will be over and we can settle back into a normal pace.

Another agent full MS request

I just hit the Send button on an email to an agent in New York City who requested the full manuscript of The Frontier Team. I found myself wishing there was an atheist equivalent of prayer.

This agent requested not only the manuscript, but also a synopsis, a bio, and a marketing statement. I had the synopsis already, but it took a couple of days for me to whip up and polish a bio and a marketing statement.

I was introduced to this agent by one of her current clients, whose work is also middle-grade (ages 8-12) and whose protagonists are also home schooled. His stuff hasn't sold in the 18 months in which she has been his agent... but it also sounds as though he has laid off on the writing a bit, so it's hard to tell. I like his stuff, though I think my work is marginally better than his. (Of course, who doesn't think that about his or her own book?) More important, I'm a marketing and P.R. goddess, and he's just an insurance agent or something. ;-) In any case, I am a lot more plugged-in and serious about the whole deal than he is, so I think there is a better-than-average chance she will accept me. This is my most solid lead yet.

The other agent who has my manuscript hasn't gotten back to me yet. (This is the guy who graduated from Penn in 1990, the year before I did.) It's been 6 weeks out of the 8 weeks he gave himself, so I hope it's soon. This most recent agent asked for exclusivity if possible, and it felt good to tell her that I regretted that I couldn't offer her exclusivity because another agent was reading the manuscript, but that I would notify her immediately if he offered representation so she could read it and make a decision. Wouldn't it be awesome if I got *two* offers, now?

I went out on a limb a little bit in my cover letter to this second one... I gave her a sense of my other works-in-progress, with a detailed hook for Food Fights:

Fed up with her father’s obsessive control of her diet as he hops from food fad to food fad, 11-year-old Georgia launches her own personal War for Dietary Independence. As she marshals the army of evidence and experts to support her, Georgia realizes that she is fighting not just her father, but a well-armed food culture. As media hype spirals the war out of control and deepens the rift in Georgia’s family, she realizes that most people believe what they want to believe instead of thinking carefully before forming an opinion. Can she focus her father on the facts, or will his food fixations keep them apart forever?

I realize that this agent hadn't requested any of that information; I hope that rather than distracting her from The Frontier Team, it shows that I'm serious about churning out work that will allow her to make money. We'll see if it pays off.

Pre-teen music

Madison has started writing pre-teen love songs about breakup.

There are no boys in the picture, yet, she's only 10, but she's already picturing the angst.

Sample line:

"You're dead, you're gone, you ain't comin' back to me..."

She says she's going to write a whole musical. Oy.

20 years my own me

Twenty years ago this month, I found out I'd received a $3000 grant from the Institute for Humane Studies to be applied toward my senior year of college.

Twenty years ago today, I picked up the phone and told my father that he needn't bother with me again.

Now, I don't advocate just simply, on a whim, telling your parent to take a hike for the rest of his life. But, let's face it, some people are crummy. It is sometimes clear that one's life will be objectively better if one eliminates the poisonous people from it, and that was the case for me. My family were just not the kind of people you'd want to know. They weren't rampantly destructive people, they weren't dramatically evil, no one beat me or anything. But all of them -- father, sister, mother -- were people who just sucked the joy out of life and the energy out of you.

When was just shy of 21, I figured that I had about 80 years left to create good stuff, to make the world a better place while I experience all of the wonderfulness that is possible here on earth. And then I'd die. I realized back then that a life spent bending to other people's negativity is precious, precious time and energy wasted. Did I want to sacrifice that to people who were just, you know, ICKY? Did I want to spend time with them instead of with people who were smart, warm, generous, productive and good? No. I'd had enough of that for the first 20 years.

Fortunately, we live in a free and mobile society where it's possible to have nothing to do with bad people. Nevertheless, it can be a very difficult thing to do if the people are your family. You can KNOW that you shouldn't have anything to do with a person, but lack the strength to unseat yourself.

It wasn't hard to do with my father, as he didn't have actual positive qualities to balance out the negative ones. It was a harder thing to give my sister The Choice 5 years later, to treat me well or not to treat me at all. (Mind you, it wasn't harder in one way: The actual experience of interacting with her was quite miserable. But it was very hard psychologically to accept that there was what Madeline L'Engle called a Might-Have-Been in A Swiftly Tilting Planet: There was a time before my sister got twisted as a result of the worst qualities of my parents and society, a time when she might have grown into a nice and smart person. I mourned that it hadn't happened, and I still do. I'd have liked to have had a sister as an adult.) But my sister chose "Not At All," and my mother did the same thing 5 years after that.

My parents and sister were hostile to the very idea of talking about our problems and the need for them to be addressed. (I really did try with my mother and my sister. My father was too far removed for engagement.) If instead they had been people dedicated to reason, it would have been a different story. Even if I disagreed with them (and goodness knows I disagreed with almost everything those people held near and dear), in that case shunning instead of engaging would have been the wrong move.

So it's an odd set of anniversaries this month, 20 years without my father, 10 years without my mother. It was important to make the breaks before anyone got old or sick -- it had to be a clear choice they were making when they were healthy and vigorous, because obviously I'm not going to abandon someone suddenly in an hour of need. But as a culture, we just don't have a blueprint for doing this. Almost no one does. It's not accepted. It's generated some odd looks when medical professionals have asked, "Are your parents still alive?" and I reply, "I assume so." (Of course, I don't do this with casual acquaintances because I don't want to put them in an awkward position. I just say "yes" because I expect I'd have heard through the family grapevine if my mother had died...one cousin is still in touch with her.)

Anyway, the important thing is that as hard as it was at the time, it was indubitably the RIGHT THING TO DO. I'm pretty good at imagining alternative universes; I can imagine, almost visually and certainly viscerally, the drag on my life and happiness if I were to have had to have these people in my life, and my kids' lives. UGH.

One of the greatest benefits of my having done this, I think, is that Madison and Ella will know, forever and ever in no uncertain terms, that what we do with crappy people is we TURN OUR BACK ON THEM and life gets better. I'm a living example of just how good life can be when we do this. There will be no ambiguity for them about the desirability of doing so, and they'll know they will always have my support when they do. Unfortunately, as we all know, there will be plenty of opportunities for them to practice this principle. We've got their backs.

Those Scholastic people do it right

This week, we visited New York City for a special author book signing. Madison is nuts about the 39 Clues series published by Scholastic, and I heard about a special event at Bank Street Books, a kids' bookstore at Columbia: Three of the authors of this 10-book series (each of these three has written two books in the series) were there: Jude Watson, Peter Lerangis, and Gordon Korman. They each gave about a 10-minute talk that was very engaging for both kids and adults, and then they signed the books.

Also there was Japanese Public Television (apparently there is a big 39 Clues fan base in Japan), and they interviewed Madison, who of course was her articulate self. Everyone there (the authors, the BSB people, and the Scholastic people) was very impressed that we were there all the way from Rochester. Here is a little video clip I took of Gordon Korman:



Here is Jude Watson, author of Book 4 (Beyond the Grave) and Book 6 (In Too Deep), describing the secret meeting where the Scholastic editors first presented her with the proposal to write for the series:




And here are some photos:

Waiting on the floor before the event, Madison made a little friend, Melba, who lives on Long Island:


Madison and Melba each won backpacks in a drawing:


The authors (left to right: Jude Watson, Peter Lerangis, and Gordon Korman) sign Madison's books. Madison talked with Gordon Korman about possibly doing a podcast interview with him.

Everyone experiences this at some point. I guess it was our turn.

We had our first incident today with Madison receiving disgusting email. I knew it was going to happen eventually. Fortunately, she was perfectly calm about it.

Her writing partner friend is a nice 13-year-old homeschooled girl who has a 12-year-old brother who is also a friend of my girls. Both of mine take several classes with both of them.

Madison and Regan, the girl, have been working very hard on a writing project and have been phoning and emailing each other back and forth several times each day. Regan's brother, though a nice enough little guy, is on the ACTIVE end of the ADD scale...even *I* am happy when he has taken sufficient medication; I can barely keep up with him, otherwise. He's been somewhat disruptive of the girls' trying to work together, in that just-turned-12-year-old-boy kind of energetic way.

This afternoon, when I was not home, Madison began receiving filthy-languaged emails from Regan's account. She had never seen some of these words before..."f***face" being among them, to give you a sense of what was being sent. She was appalled, but not particularly excited about it. She really hates foul language and NEVER uses it, and knew that Regan could not have meant to have sent it.

David was livid. He had that "my-lovely-innocent-baby-has-been-harmed-so-someone-should-die" look on his face. They had known it couldn't be Regan, so they thought it might be her brother. David had never met the family, so it was natural for him to jump to that conclusion. But as soon as I came home and read the emails, I knew it couldn't be the boy... TOTALLY not his style, and if he wanted to offend anyone, he would be a lot more creative than that, he has a very active mind. And I didn't think even he would know those words. Plus, it wasn't addressed TO anyone, not Madison or anyone. My conclusion is that it had to have been hacked, so I called the family and left a message to that effect.

They looked into it and came to their own easy conclusion: Regan had been emailing Madison from the YMCA and remembered she had left the account open by mistake. Some idiot teenager then got his jollies by emailing that stuff to the one person on Regan's email address book.

The kids' dad told me that they have a program on the kids' computer which automatically emails everything they type over to an archive. He checked it to be absolutely certain before they called me, but the computer hadn't even been on this afternoon.

David still wanted to put the perp through the wall, but we were both quite relieved that the problem seems to be over, and that it wasn't what David and Madison had feared it might be.

Several milestones for Madison

This is the week wherein Madison

a) Discovered the telephone. She is working on a writing project with her friend Reagan and has been writing with her while they talk on the phone about the project, several times each day.

Sigh. As if the bra last month weren't enough, now she's in the Phone Phase which I assume will last, oh, all her life.

b) Got new glasses. She had had the same purple wire frames for two years, BJ's frames. She had endlessly fiddled with them to the extent that they became crooked and it made her a little odd to look at -- it wasn't significantly crooked so you'd notice directly that something was amiss, but it would give her a slightly goofy cast to her face, and you'd almost unconsciously wonder whether her expression was a little off. Well, she had been complaining that her visual acuity had decreased, so I finally got her to the eye doctor on Monday. Her left eye has caught up with her right eye in terms of how fast it's declining; she's -2.5 in her left eye and -2.75 in her right eye. Sigh. Anyway, it was a good opportunity to get her new glasses, and you can bet that I steered her to plastic frames that can't be bent instead of wire frames that can. She looks pretty cool.

"Wow, you've got J-Lo frames," said the optometrist's assistant when we picked them up yesterday.

Madison looked at her blankly.

"Jennifer Lopez," the woman tried again. Still nothing from Madison.

"She's a famous singer," the woman explained. "She has a line of eyewear like what she wears."

"Oh," said Madison.

c) Discovered that she's going to come with me to the Rocky Mountain Writer's Conference in Jackson Hole, WY in late June. Madison is thrilled. The conference has a special price for writing teens who accompany their writing parents; I wrote to them explaining that I had a rising 6th-grader who takes her writing seriously and would like to attend. Here was their note back:

We'd be happy to have your 11-year-old come on the Parent/Teen registration. I wish I'd had the opportunity when I was her age. I think she'll have a great time, being treated as an equal and a professional be other writers. It will make our conference better too. We'll have a couple of students below 15. I'm not sure if there will be any others as young as 11. But, if she takes her writing seriously, she'll learn a lot.
Write if you have more questions.

It was a "yippee" moment. I need to visit with my web site designers in Montana at the beginning of the summer anyway, so we'll fly into Montana on Monday June 21, drive down through Yellowstone to Jackson Hole on the 23rd, and be at the conference for Thursday-Sunday and fly back home from Montana on Monday. A week for just the two of us! I can't wait.

Well, I MUST wait, and that's a good thing, because it means that Food Fights must be complete by June 24th. It will be, I swear it. Just let me get this site launched and I can work on it like hell in May and June. It's written in my head already, just need the last 2/3 of it down on paper.

Getting close to LAUNCH

Have you ever worked on a project for more than 2 years, and then seen it come to fruition? There's nothing quite like that feeling. I'm in the middle of that right now with the new KidsOutAndAbout.com site design and platform. It's scheduled to be launched at the end of April, and I think we're going to make the deadline.

The first 19 months of effort on this 28-month effort had to be abandoned. I went down the wrong path, and wasted a couple of tens of thousands of dollars. I bought the wrong software platform, "worked" with people who couldn't care less and didn't really listen to what I needed, outsourced some of the custom work to India because I couldn't afford it here, went to a seminar in New Hampshire... and got nowhere. That system was really meant for people who had an IT staff.

But last summer, the company that hosts my current site was reorganizing at just the time I needed to switch directions, and offered me the opportunity to hire them to build the site from scratch, in an open-source software platform called Drupal. I have worked with these people for about 8 years. I always liked working with them, but it took a little bit of oomph for me to jettison all that I'd invested in the other project. As soon as I made the decision, I felt that warm glow of relief that told me I'd done the right thing.

This definitely ranks among the best business decisions I've ever made. Planning was in the fall, programming started in earnest in December. I worked like heck at my regular consulting business for the second part of last year and the last several months so that I could put all I made back into this software development. And I am working like heck nowadays with what they've already put into the site, making the content ready for launch. I'm thinking April 28.

We're actually farther along than I thought we'd be at this point. The programming team has taken my ideas and my general logic and made it into so much more than I ever envisioned. Not only will I be able to extend KOA to other cities and manage it all here from Rochester, but it will let me make money almost without trying. Organizations that post their activities or resources to KOA will be easily led through how to upgrade their free listings with graphics, logos, mission statements, Facebook and Twitter links... and they'll be able to see these enhanced listings. They can design their enhancements, play around with them, then if they want that to be what everyone sees, they just CLICK to purchase that enhanced listing through PayPal/credit card, for basically pocket change per month.

I've never before worked with a small, dedicated team of brilliant people who all work fabulously together and will put their brains toward creating something that will really succeed, much less something that I designed. I've always worked alone. Since being burned about a decade ago, I've always thought it was best to work alone. But this...this is an amazing experience. For example, last week, one of the programmers suggested a small alteration that will end up saving me tons of time and reduce the amount we'd have to spend on sales efforts. It will make it much more obvious to the organizations how they can enhance their listings, without needing to get the KOA admins involved at all.

I'd almost pay all of the money I'm paying them for this sort of experience alone, even if it doesn't end up making any money. But it will. Look out, America. First Rochester, then (later this year if all seems to be working well) Buffalo and Albany, then moving onward and outward. There are some great folks I've been talking with casually who are interested in serving as editors, and this excites me. It's an entirely new model for web sites... not just a calendar of events, but a richly guided tour that celebrates the great stuff in each community, that promotes cultural literacy, that gives parents easy access to the tools to help their kids learn to think.

And makes me rich? Maybe. That'd be nice. (Anyway for me, "rich" is probably a lot less than what other people would call rich.) More important, it will be a real positive mark on the world. And, it will be a LOT of fun to manage.

The girls think I have the best job in the world. I do. And I think it's only going to get better.

David's WSJ letter to the editor

David has a letter to the editor in today's Wall Street Journal, responding to Chester Finn's op-ed last week advocating Saturday school and a lengthier school year. Finn is a former assistant secretary at the Department of Education.

Here is the original article.

Outlook for Monday: Death and taxes a certainty

My broker was depressed on Friday, called me, and advised me to reduce the percentage I have in the market because he was convinced this travesty would happen.

I drank too much champagne last night so I would have to go to bed early and be unaware of it all.

Now I'm up.

Now I have to finish doing my taxes.

If you have something to the cheer me up, now's the time, bring it on.

Ode to Joy

The piece, planned in advance was "Ode to Joy." It really was.



Henry, Madison, Max, and Ella

Photos

Today, we went and had "photos with the bunnies," which we did five years ago. I wrote an article about it. Because the photographer does this every year and when I link to it I get a fair number of hits, I thought it would be a good idea to update the article and take the kids this year. The kids get to play with live, snuggly bunnies while being photographed.

The photographer was a little late today, so while Madison was getting changed, I took some very-amateur photos of Ella fooling around on the set -- sans live bunnies, of course. Wish I could have gotten some of Madison, but the photographer showed up before she was finished getting dressed.




Here's a nice photo of Madison with me on the couch: