Frenzied Daddy

I don’t think any of us (us in the family, not us in the world), really appreciated Ms Plank until this year. Ms Plank is the band teacher who has been teaching Miss B the clarinet for the past three years. For Miss B, this has been a chore. For us, it’s been a chore of “making” Miss B practice, and a chore of going to concerts.

( She’s gotten a lot better. )

Now that we’ve decided to transfer Miss B to a school without a band program and to let her stop taking band, I’ve been looking at what Ms Plank does- she’s there from an hour before school to work with a group of Jazz students. She takes them to competitions (and they place HIGHLY). She goes to the elementary “feeder” schools (where Miss B met her) and teaches kids there. She organizes concerts.

There was a guest conductor at the last concert and he reminded us that Miss B’s schools is an oasis of music here in PPS. And with PPS’s changes, budget shortfalls and redesign, I’m kind of worried about music as taught to our kids in schools.

But Miss B is going to a new school where she won’t be taught music. And after looking over all the benefits of teaching kids music (everything from improved scores in general, to improved math scores, to team-building, to humility and devotion), I’m wondering if, if I want to keep this learning going (or have Miss K learn the same things), if I should consider finding a music tutor or if I should just trust church choir to teach them these things?

and of course, if I even should worry about it. I mean, music classes?

Took Perrin to the Vet today. He couldn’t make it in last night from the yard, and this morning didn’t want to go out again. His hips were hurting pretty badly; he wasn’t eating, couldn’t walk. I didn’t notice how much he was drooling or panting when I made him move; by the time we got to the vet his pain was obvious. And he couldn’t walk on their slippery floor. A couple of injections later he was pain free.

Hard to convince myself his pain wasn’t my fault. I could have taken better care of him.

But I’m trying to remember that we had a great 10, 12 years with him. He came from the humane society, and if we had taken him back it would have been his third strike. We always said he knew this, because all he wanted to do was please us.

Sorry, can’t type; eyeballs are all sweaty.

Miss K got herself signed up for little league this spring. Well, ok, we signed her up, she didn’t have much to do about it. She loved her soccer class last year (was it last year?) and we’ve been anxiously waiting for another chance for her to run around playing some sports.

She’s not totally convinced yet. We’ve had about five practices and two actual games. She’s playing T-ball. Both games. someone has run into her. She didn’t like having a collision. And she’s not happy about having to wrestle the other kids for the ball. I mean, one kid hits the ball, it goes wobbling and bouncing through the infield and seven of nine kids on the team run for the ball and dogpile on it.

Not big on playing their zones. That’s ok, I wasn’t either One of my biggest team-sports failings.

She gets a turn to hit the ball off the tee every inning of three innings. And then she gets to run around the bases, but she has a hard time remembering to pay attention and run around the bases when the other kids hit their ball.

The whole team, though, is funny. Like friday night, when the ball went into the outfield, and five kids all “fell over” and put their legs straight up while they were chasing it. And today, when one of the at-plate team members kept leaving his base and instead of running to the next base he tried to catch the ball (in the pack of little leaguers).

I don’t know if K is having fun, but I sure am.

Last Thursday and Friday, Ms B got to see my morning ritual. Wake up Miss K, try to put clothes on me while she screams at me and tries to stop me. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so tiring. This is why when there’s someone else home I try to get them to get K ready for school. I think she and I are sort of locked into the same story every morning. She’s trained to throw an unholy fit, I try to keep my balance and eventually just start yelling, as I’m trained to do.

Ms B’s response was “Wow. Miss B didn’t do that…” Uh, yes, honey, she did. Kindergarten for both the girls was a horrible “get out of bed” time. And isn’t really a whole lot better when Miss B’s in 7th grade. It’s why I started the rule of “If you want to be on the computer before school, you need to be dressed, washed, and ready to go.” I don’t know what I’ve done to make it so bad, but I hate getting them out of bed.

What I have done is offer to take them to school in their pyjamas. (“offer” isn’t a strong enough word… threaten.. is more like it.) I got as far as getting B buckled into the car one morning before she finally decided that I was serious.

I know that at least part of my problem is that I wake them up suddenly, then they get thrown into clothes and rushed out of the house without so much as a good morning. So that’s my goal at least this week; to give miss K some “wake up” time. Ms B sometimes wonders why I like it so much when they go to bed “early.” — I think that they don’t get enough sleep, which leads to this too.

On the plus side, I only have a few more years of dragging them kicking and screaming out of bed. We should make the most of it.

Hope all your Easters are great. We’re not celebrating this year; most years I try to get egg dying kits and get the girls some chocolate, then hide the eggs in the yard and they can go find them. We worked through this with Miss B and then a few years with Miss K.

But you know something? They don’t eat the eggs, the eggs just sit, lonely, in the fridge waiting for some delicious egg salad to be made. I eat the egg salad. And the eggs. And I’ll eat the chocolate. They don’t need me to buy more chocolate, there’s almost always more in the house. Every year, we’re appreciative of the grandparents who send/deliver easter baskets. And I try to live up to what I think I “should” be doing. Well, let me tell ya, I’m not doing that any more.

I don’t know what would fill the place in our hearts where the stone rolled away from the cave where Jesus lay. Maybe Shaun of the Dead? OR some other fun zombie movie (can’t be too scary, Miss K would throw a fit). And next week I’ll make sure to pick up some Easter Candy. I hear Ms B likes the malted milk eggs.

Have a great Sunday, and try to stay at least partly dry. And watch for the risen dead.

No game tomorrow. Well, with the rolling thunderstorms, hail storms, and buckets of rain, I’m sure you’re as shocked as I am. Oh, sure, it’s 40 degrees outside, and the rain is torrential, but surely my kid wants to get as muddy as the pro-ballers get.

Doesn’t she?

And don’t worry; I’ll be uploading photos as soon as I get some. Some great photos of her hitting a ball and running around in the mud.

You know, it’s hard to keep my momentum when 75% of my comments look like “nice blog. Btw, visit hot-viagra.com!”

Trying something new this year. Miss K has been signed up for t-ball, You might remember that Miss B tried baseball too and hated it. Miss K is different; she’s a different kid. She’s taking to that teeball like, um, a cat takes to tunafish. Run around? Hit a ball? She’s delighted.

I’ll have to post some pictures.

On the other hand, Miss B is thrilled that I’ve purchased tickets to Kumoricon. She thinks she’s going to sew a costume and cosplay. But if she’s going to sew a costume it’s going to be straight construction of a t-tunic and trews. Maybe some pretty trim. Cosplay; faugh.

In a semi-related thing, the girls got cheap foam swords from Michaels’ craft store and beat the snot out of each other with them. I had to take them away and show them the wrist snap and how to lunge. Now we have a broken sword and I think replacing it with boffers would be a good idea. Anyone remember the particular width of the inner pipe in a boffer construction?

So, for reasons I won’t go into, I had to come clean with my daughter this morning.

“Honey, the only reason I had kids was for science fair projects. I go to Michaels’ (arts and craft supply store) and just pick up and hold the solar system model packages, and then put them back on the shelf. And I do it again with the dioramas. I just want to make science fun; and I can’t.”

Hopefully I put enough pathos into my delivery (These are real tears!!) that it sank in. I’m the guy who took three AP science courses his senior year in High School. I’ve had some fan-fricking-tastic science teachers and I loved the stuff; chemistry, biology, physics, even the geology we did for the “Natural History of Oregon” class. Ms Dexter, Mr Carlsen, Mr Sauer, I’m lookin at you. On the other hand, Mr Keupker (AP Calculus) can go jump in the Willamette.

I told her we could split up water in to H2 and O2. She thought that meant just boiling it (no). And I described how we could do it and then demonstrate that these were those specific gasses. We talked about some other science projects she could do in the two weeks she has remaining before this project is due. We talked about how to find out what her teacher is expecting, and that I wanted his rubrick to come home with her tonight.

Do you know any good science fair projects? Have any good science stories?

My favorite might be telling Peter Gunn to “hay feel this little white pellet… feel that slipperyness? (it was Sodium Hydroxide) … That’s your skin dissolving. You might want to wash that off…” … No, wait, that’s not my favorite.

Sometimes when I walk from the car to the office, I go past a huge child care place, down on first and oak (and second and oak, it takes up most of the first floor of this particular building). I like to watch the kids playing in there. One day, as I marched past, head down so I didn’t get rain in my eyes, I noticed something strange. There was one boy and two girls away from the rest of the kids, kind of tucked around behind a wooden play set. The girls were facing the boy and he was facing them. Behind them was the window past which I was walking purposefully, behind him was the wooden play thing. Kitchen? Yeah maybe a play kitchen. The teachers were on the other side of the room doing something with the rest of the kids and hadn’t noticed anything amiss.

The look on the boy’s face sent me back; way back to when I was cross country skiing* in Anchorage…

I went past a friend’s house. Her name was Katrina. We were freshmen in High School together. She was cute and I liked to pass notes back and forth with her in Social Studies. And, uh, math. Maybe some in english too. Bah, I liked flirting with her, and she never said “get lost.” The main problem was that I had a girlfriend at the time, Stacy. Stacy was pretty much my first “real girlfriend.” The first girl I kissed, and meant it. She went to a different school though, and Katrina was closer to home. As I passed her house, Katrina came out and waved me to a stop. She invited me into her garage where we could “talk” without her parents butting into our conversation. I took off the skiis, put them and the poles up against the wall (leaving would be more of a production now than just running off). And I went into the dark garage with Katrina, not knowing what to expect, but thinking it couldn’t be too bad.

This is where I learned that Katrina and Stacy knew each other. A sinking feeling, then some fifteen or thirty minutes of “discussion,” after which I was supposed to “choose.” And then, of course, both of them telling me to go away and not talk to either of them any more. I knew it was a foregone conclusion when I found Stacy at Katrinas. The Jig, as they say, was up.

The look on this poor kid’s face looked just like I imagine mine did when I was cornered like a dirty, lying, dog-faced, two-timing rat.

So, some advice for you, kid. Hang tough. Apologize to the women and hold your head high. Don’t make unnecessary choices. It’s not really “either x or y” — it’s more likely “neither” than “both.”

* Don’t mistake me. We didn’t get to ski a lot in Anchorage. I just happened to be tooling around on my skis.