Out of sorts

Adrian is home sick today and is counting pages in the Harry Potter book series, having already organized his library once by the main background color, and once by the color of the printed title.

Him: "Mom, can you get me the 15th book in the Magic Treehouse series?"
Me: "..."
Him: "I think it's green."
Me: "......"
Him: "The words are greenish-yellow, I mean."
Me: "......... OK. Here it is. Wouldn't it be quicker to do it by number?"
Him: "However, I like it better this way."

(He is playing with conjunctions. I don't think he has the usage nailed down quite yet.)

These are some of his recent organizing projects:

-- Cutlery, by size.
-- Books, by color of title.
-- Lego Star Wars guys, alphabetically and somewhat by whim ("Jabba" vs. "Hutt").
-- Bath toys, by material.
-- Shirts, by background color.
-- Stuffies, by color and size.

In the classroom, I believe he also helped organize the library in the regular way (alpha by author).

While I respect and admire his passion, I do wish he would finish all of one project before walking 10 feet away and starting another. My poor spine is protesting all the stooping and scooping this spring. And yes, I do require him to clean up most of what he takes out; but I'm not quick enough to stop him from taking out more than he can get picked up before story time.

Now, if we could only channel his powers for good...

Good intentions

For the past few weeks, I've been meaning to do something nice for that lady on the corner.

Every school day -- always two, often four, sometimes six times a day -- I take a shortcut to and from our kids' school. This steep one-lane residential street cuts the drive from fifteen minutes to seven. For most of its quarter mile length, it's just wide enough for two cars to pass each other. If they are big cars, or one is a truck, you'd want to fold in your side mirrors.

Turning left downhill into the road, you have to go extra slowly because people coming up out of the road drive about 10 feet past the stop sign. (You can easily stall out if you stop at the line.) Thankfully, emerging traffic almost always turns right; there's a better shortcut for uphill left-turners.

Turning out of the road at the bottom toward school, you have to go extra slowly because people accelerate into the road from that direction to get traction. (It's grooved pavement, the pitch is that steep.)

Ideally, we would all look as far as possible into our turns to confirm our right of way, but around here, 85 percent of people are only thinking of themselves, their morning rush, their quarrelsome kids, whatever. So I always yield, and we get to school without incident.

After over 1,000 trips up and down the hill in the past two years, here's what I've noticed.

• I yield. It's in my nature; I want people to like me. Also, I do not live on that road; I am using it for my own benefit; if it were meant as a primary route it would be bigger, flatter, and better signed.
• Gardeners in pickups and housekeepers in old Corollas yield. I imagine it's easier than having people yell at them. Or maybe they're just courteous.
• Residents yield, though not happily.
• UPS drivers, FedEx trucks and mail carriers do NOT yield. They're busy and visible, and they know the roads. Besides, they are probably bringing you a box of something, like some Angry Birds plush toys, and it is in your best interest to let them pass.
• Women in luxury SUVs don't yield, period. They drive toward you in the middle of the road until you stop and move over, and if they have to stop, you get an icy stare and occasionally the finger.
• Men or women in minivans are a mixed bag; usually they squeeze all the way over but keep moving. Dog walkers in minivans do not yield. High school kids in minivans also do not yield.
• Older women in Priuses and younger women in SmartCars don't yield, because they need less than half the road in the first place.
• Tourists don't yield, but on the way by, you can usually help them find the road they were looking for. And because they didn't yield, the cars are so close that it is easy to reach through their window and show them on their map, in case they speak a language you don't know.
• Older men in sports cars don't take the shortcut, but if they did, they would cede a little of the middle ground and blast past you at 15mph over the limit.

In general, the people who use this shortcut are barely aware of oncoming traffic, never mind thinking of the residents. I'm on smiling terms with one lady, but since we got the new minivan last month, I hadn't managed to catch her eye to tell her it's me.

This woman -- Deborah, as it turns out -- lives in a small house at the top of the shortcut, on the uphill corner. Coming up out of the road to go home every day, I am nearly in her driveway. If she is backing out when I get to the top of the hill, we stop short and do the waving game, me trying to let her go first, and her trying to get me to just go. If she is out walking her dog when I get there, we are all startled and she leaps back into her yard. I wave again, apologetically, and send good thoughts into her carport. But I had never stopped to talk to her before.

Today, I saw her car in the driveway on the way to the market, so I got some flowers to leave for her as an acknowledgement that we -- I -- inconvenience her half a dozen times a week, endanger her dog, strip leaves from her bushes and wear out her pavement.

I meant to leave a note with the flowers, but I didn't have a pen in the car; then I thought I'd leave them anonymously and hope it was a nice surprise. Then I thought, what if she is away for a week? She'll come home to some wilted flowers in stinky brown sludge, which would be a different kind of message all together. (I shared my plan with the florist, and while I was in the market paying, she stuffed a dozen extra flowers in the bouquet and gave me the vase for free. She agreed I should give them to the lady personally, for karma.)

Finally, vase in hand, I knocked on her door this morning. Her dog let her know I was at the door, and she came out.

"Yes?" she asked.

"You don't know me, but I'm a neighbor from up at Four Corners. I just wanted to bring you these as a thank you for tolerating all of us driving across your property every day on the way to school."

She smiled, we introduced ourselves, she explained she was used to it (grew up here, father in a local nursing home, mother died recently, she's actually in a little turmoil and a dark place she said, thinking of moving to Portland, closer to the grandkids, somewhere she can afford). I told her it's important to me that she knows I'm aware of her (exasperating drivers, unsafe speeds, non-mindfulness of others, realization that I'm going to drive on her road for another 5 years of elementary school). She hugged me and said thanks again for the flowers, I told her I'd look out for her every week, and we parted as friends.

As I drove the rest of the way home, I was feeling great. I had good feelings; the florist had good feelings; the lady on the corner -- Deborah -- had good feelings. This is why I sometimes go out of my way just to do something unexpected, something nice, I thought: because I know it might make a difference, make the world a little brighter.

Then I took one of the small twisty corners a little wide. I'm still getting used to the new minivan, I guess. There was a light green Prius coming toward me, five or six car lengths away. I moved off the center line, waved out the open window to acknowledge my mistake.

As she drove past, she screamed at me out her open window.

"You motherf*cker!"

Maybe someday I'll get her flowers, too.

Having mixed feelings

Adrian loves rainbows. He likes the colors, likes the order of the spectrum, likes the radiance. He especially loves them if they are glittery or sparkly.

So about six weeks ago, right before school started, we were in an art supply store and he and Nathan were choosing temporary tattoos. They had booklets of snakes, skulls, vines, glittery rainbow unicorns, pirates, and assorted traditional 'flash'.

Nathan, with very little hesitation, chose the skulls.

Adrian leafed through the display for eleven minutes.

He took out the glittery rainbow unicorns, put them back. Looked again at the snakes and pirates. Took out the snakes, came toward the counter. Turned back and put the snakes in the display.

Having known Adrian for 5 years and 11 months by that point, I was pretty sure what his mini crisis of conscience was about.

"Mom, can I choose whichever ones I want?"

"Of course." I was determined not to say anything leading or gender-biased.

Adrian looked through all of them again, then took out the glittery rainbow unicorns and brought them to the counter. (The clerk, bless his Modern Primitives heart, took a look at Adrian's choice and said, "Cool tattoos.") I paid for them and with very little fanfare, and we took them home.

When we got home, the boys got ready to put on their tattoos. Adrian chose his favorite -- a white unicorn with rainbow wings and a red mane and tail -- and as he was holding the sponge against his forearm, he brought up the decision himself.

"Mom, I had mixed-up feelings about these tattoos."

"Is that so?" (Suddenly I sound like my maternal grandmother, with vague, open-ended conversational elements!)

"Yeah. Do you know why I did?"

"Why?"

"I'm not sure. Because I was not sure if they were OK for boys." We haven't ever told him that some things are only for boys and some only for girls, but he's obviously been picking it up.

"Are you glad you chose them?"

"Yes! They're beautiful," he said, gazing at them in wonder. "I'm going to put them all on right now."

"Well then, they must be OK for boys. Because you're a boy, and you like them."

Sure enough, he was decorated on all four limbs and his belly by the first day of school. We hadn't really talked about the whole boy/girl appropriateness thing, but I did offer one suggestion. "Do you know one thing you coul say if someone asks why you chose those tattoos? You can say that rainbows are for anyone who likes colors." And we left it at that.

I don't know if Adrian's love of rainbows, hearts, unicorns and butterfly tattoos 'means' anything for the long term or not. But I do know that we love him, and we want him to be able to be himself -- unapologetically -- for as long as he can get away with it.

Look what the cat drug in!

I am concerned about the cat's recent slaughter spree. It was one thing when he brought in the odd mole, mouse, chipmunk or sparrow. But he's honing his mad 'lite predating skills, and he caught a rabbit last weekend. (Dean got him to drop it and it stopped screaming and ran away.) Then this morning, we let him out for a minute and he came back in with this full-grown male quail. It's stiff, cold, and dead and although I'm no Crime Scene Investigator, I posit that it was a found object rather than one of Midnight's victims. But still.

After calling my lifeline (thank you, Cynthia!), we've decided to bury the quail in the yard. I can't just lob it into the neighbor's bushes like the baby mouse, and Wildcare San Rafael doesn't want it because it's not orphaned, injured or rare. But as it's the California State Bird, we don't just want to put it out with the trash -- we feel that a little ceremony may be called for.

My bigger though less immediate question is, should we keep the cats inside? They're thriving with this indoor/outdoor lifestyle. Smoky is happy and rolls around on the gravel and in the dust, eating grass. Midnight is sleek and lithe and is so very pleased with himself and happy to be giving us presents. But what if he drags a baby skunk into our living room, or a fawn? And what is our obligation to not further decimate the songbird population of northern California? How many moles are enough moles out there, and is it OK for us to use these cats as mouse-and-rat-proofing machines?

I don't have answers to these questions. I'll probably settle on inaction-as-action, like with most of my parenting: let the cats out because they like it and because if they don't get to go out, they'll drive us crazy with their meowing and try to kill us by tying our shoelaces together as we walk. So if we get anything else really interesting brought into the house, I'll post another picture.

How no-waste is the no-waste lunch?

Apropos of nothing except the frustration of non-stop housework, I was wondering: How no-waste is the no-waste lunch, really? How does the production, transportation and disposal of 100 plastic ziplock sandwich bags compare in energy and resource consumption to the production, transportation, washing, replacement and ultimate disposal of our many metal, plastic, fabric and glass reusable containers?

Between me and the 2 boys, I make and pack 8 lunches and about a dozen snacks a week for consumption outside our home. Each lunch or snack averages 5 reusable containers, including beverage containers. So, let's see, that's about 100 container-uses over a 7 day period. But we don't have 100 containers, we only have about fifteen. So every day (2 days at most), we have to run them through the dishwasher or hand-wash and dry them. And the cloth napkins and lunchboxes also need to be cleaned, either by hand or in the laundry. And on the odd day that it's NOT a full laundry load or dishwasher load, that seems wasteful as well.

And as I'm making the no-waste lunch, I find myself challenged -- am I really limiting waste all together, or am I just limiting the amount of waste the school has to cope with? We buy almost nothing in bulk. We don't have a Costco membership, and we don't bake our own crackers or cookies or bread. I buy sliced cheese but not individually wrapped, but virtually everything else comes in a package for freshness. So I get the lunchboxes and containers, open the foods -- and put the resulting cheese stick sleeves, yogurt containers, granola bar wrappers, apple cores, etc. in our own garbage.

I'm not saying it's not important. I'm just saying that I don't feel as rabidly anti-wrappers as it seems I'm meant to. Especially when almost nothing is available for convenient purchase or preparation or lasting freshness except stuff in a whole lot of packaging.

I'd bake treats at home only our oven isn't safe, and I'd work on getting that fixed, only I have to get back and wash out all our reusable containers in time for the boys to bring their no-waste lunch to school tomorrow.

Hum a few bars...

For the last few days, I've had several They Might Be Giants songs repeating in my brain. They're there when I wake up, there as I'm playing Legos with the boys, there in the car. (At least the actual CD is in the car too, so I can drive out one song with one of the others.)

All our current favorites are from their newest CD, "Here Comes Science." The CD comes with a fabulous DVD of the same songs, animated in a variety of styles. (We bought it at a local bookstore, but it's also available from iTunes. Not sure how iTunes handles the video component.)

The addition of video is great for us, because it provides two different ways to remember the lyrics, and if there's one thing I can't stand, it's having a song stuck in my head and having to hum-tiddle-um-tum half the lyrics because I don't actually know them.

All the songs are great, but the boys' most-requested favorites are:

• "Roy G. Biv" -- a catchy tune about the spectrum of light.
• "The Bloodmobile" -- especially the bit about the white blood cells being soldiers who fight infectious germs.
• "Electric Car" -- a melodic number with a cute video of forest and farm animals being driven around in no-emissions vehicles.
  
• "What Is a Shooting Star?" -- Adrian requests this one be sung at bedtime, and since it's in part a "round", it's good practice for his musical ear. Note: It's hard to sing a "round" with a sleepy 5-year-old.
• "What Does the Sun Shine?" and the next one in order, "Why Does the Sun Really Shine?" -- both of which have great lyrics. The first one goes on about "The sun is a mass / Of incandescent gas / A gigantic nuclear furnace..." and the second one challenges, "The sun is a miasma / Of incandescent plasma / Forget what you've been told in the past..." Gotta love a self-referencing children's album.
  

I so agree with the theories that singing information can make it more memorable and digestible. And if this album had been available when I was a child, I would have loved it as much as our boys do now. I didn't learn that the sun is about 93,000,000 miles away from earth until this year, but I won't forget it now! I didn't realize that learning about photosynthesis could be engaging and fun! Or that elephants are mostly made of four elements (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen)!

With this science CD following the 1-2-3s and A-B-Cs albums, who knows what's next for TMBG... but if they cover history or literature, I'm going to buy them, memorize them, and then go back in time and re-take that 8th grade final exam.

The worst word in the world

Our family is pretty free with the eff word. We don't use it every day -- not even every week -- but once a month or so, someone will hit their thumb with a hammer, or drop some toast on the kitchen floor, and let it fly.

I have mixed feelings about this -- on the one hand, it's a very useful word to know, as it expands the conversational range if you know how to use it appropriately. But on the other hand, there's a chance you'll actually offend someone if they're uncomfortable with hearing the word. Or that you'll have to do 30 pushups at the gym if it slips out under duress. And there's a very good chance you'll earn the disapproval of the PTA moms if they find out, even if you're self-deprecating about it.

The earliest I remember Nathan saying the eff word was while he and Adrian were sitting at our old kitchen counter at Ethel Ave. That would make Nathan not quite two, and Adrian was almost four. I had prepared bagels with cream cheese, and as I was placing Nathan's plate on the counter in front of him, the bagel slipped off. Predictably, it fell cream-cheese-side-down on the linoleum. "F***," said Nathan, looking down at the bagel. Couldn't have said it better myself. I didn't have a strong reaction to the word, assuming that the more I made of it, the more it would be heard.

Flash forward half a year. The boys and I were at our favorite joint, M&G Burgers. Nathan (2-and-a-half) and Adrian (4-and-a-half) were having ice cream. Adrian already had his, and he was sitting on a high stool to eat it; I was bringing one over for Nathan. Before I could get to Adrian, he took an extra-forceful lick, knocking the ice cream part down onto the floor. Nathan looked down at the ice cream, and, without missing a beat, announced "Dat was a f***ing mess." There weren't any other moms present, thank goodness, but the high school boys sitting at the next table nearly wet themselves with laughter. Again, I didn't make a big deal of the incident (although we did get Adrian a fresh cone).

Nathan doesn't say the word all the time. But it's definitely his go-to expletive in times of stress. Take this example from last year: the boys and I were at school for Science Night. Afterward, they played in the sandbox with some kindergarten friends. It was getting late, and although it was warm, the boys had been using the water feature and their clothes were wet.

When it was time for us to go, Adrian (being 5, and having more perspective) came out through the school with me toward the car. Nathan (being 3) lagged behind, angry that we had to stop, and uncomfortable in his clammy, wet shirt. We got through the school OK, but as I called to Nathan to come along with us to the sidewalk, he planted his feet, clenched his fists, and screamed from the front steps of the school, "I want dis stupid f***ing shirt off RIGHT NOW!" Again, thank goodness there were no witnesses. If anyone heard it from inside school, they were kind enough not to mention it to me afterward.

So, I must like living dangerously, because I made the mistake a few months ago of telling the boys that there is an even worse word, as judged by American culture. You probably know what it is. Even in our darkest moments, it's not a word we use in our family. I mean, I have a potty mouth, but this word just doesn't feel right in there. In fact, I think the last time I said it out loud was in high school, when I had just learned it and was joking around with some girlfriends. Or, come to think of it, I may have used it against my sister in our teenage years. (Sorry, Sarey!)

But when we were talking about appropriate words and the boys asked if the eff word was the worst word in the world, I had to be truthful.

No, I said, it wasn't. There was a worse word in our culture.

Would I tell them?

No, I absolutely would not. And neither would Daddy. But someday they would hear it, and they would come to one of us and ask if THAT was the worst word, and we would tell them that's the one, and explain what it is and why it's offensive, and that would be that.

Is the word 'poopy'?

No.

Is it 'doody head'?

No.

Is it 'wiener'?

No! Now stop asking.

Is it...

Hey, who wants to go to M&G for ice cream?