Class Notes

Yesterday I was convinced that Will went to school without his underwear on. This would be typical, as Will hates wearing underwear. He is a sensitive boy who likes the tags cut out of his tee shirts and his socks pulled up just so. Underwear rubs him the wrong way, so to speak.

I came to the conclusion that my boy was sans undies when I took some laundry up to his room after I'd dropped the boys off at school. There, on his bed, where I'd laid out his clothes first thing in the morning, was a lone pair of navy blue, knit boxers. Curses! I cursed through clenched teeth, foiled again!

When I picked him up from school, I waited til we were out of earshot of the other kindergarteners and their moms to chastise him. "What did Dr. Wilks say about wearing underwear? Remember what happens if you get hit by a ball in a sensitive area?"

He claimed innocence, swore he was appropriately clad. And sure enough, when we got home, I did the underwear check and there were a pair of navy blue, knit boxers (he has several pairs). "I got them out of my drawer," he explained. "I didn't see any underwear on my bed."

The funny thing is, I was sort of disappointed by his underwear righteousness. I had been robbed of a funny story--The Day Will Went to School Without His Underwear. But I was also proud. My son actually sought his underwear out when he couldn't find any with the rest of his clothes. What a fine young man he's turning into!

***

Carpool. Sigh.

We carpool with another family on the next block. Two boys, the same age as my boys. The problem is with the older child, whom we shall call Adolph, for no particular reason. He is as unpleasant of a child as I've ever met. Gets in the car without so much as a hello, even after I say in my most cheerful voice (which scares my own children, who wonder who this strange woman in the front seat is and what she did with their real mother), "Good morning, Adolph! How nice to see you! How are you this morning?!"

No response. I say it again. I repeat myself several times until I get the barest of responses. When I drop the kids off at school, I chirp, "Have a great day, Adolph!" No reply whatsoever.

When he does talk in the car, it is to reprimand my sons or to tell his brother to shut up. He's incredibly bossy, a know-it-all. He's really quite horrible.

My only defense is this forced, over the top cheerfulness.I know it is torture to him, the fingernails scraping down the chalkboard of his life, and I can get away with it because I'm a mom and I'm supposed to be disgustingly cheerful in the morning.

I'm sure I'll be writing more about Adolph, as I'm driving most mornings and sooner or later I will break and end up swerving off the road, leaping out of the car, and choking him within an inch of his life. I promise to give you all the grisly details.

***

This is the boys' third day of school. I've been trying to tidy up the house before they get home so that it seems a warm and comforting place to them upon their arrival, a sanctuary, a safe and healing place. Do you think kids--boys especially--register that their house is neat and orderly when they come home? At least subconsciously? Or should I quit cleaning up and spend more time reading novels and doing my nails? I hate to think all the cleaning and tidying is for naught--and of course am always looking for an excuse to stop doing it.

***

The joy of Will: he tells me what he does all day. Dropping off Jack at school is like dropping him into a black hole where apparently nothing ever happens. Will's day is full of events and he's happy to share. After two days of school, there's clearly a character in his class, a boy named Sam who drew a picture of a secret agent in science class the first day of school instead of drawing something from nature. Yesterday, Sam walked in PE instead of running. He was playing Secret Agent Man again, according to Will. Will just shakes his head when telling me about Sam. Is this kid crazy or what, he wants to know. And why does he wear a Superman cape to school? Doesn't he know he's not supposed to do that?

I love the Sams of the world, but I have to say that at this point in my life it's nice to have a Will, who will draw a picture of a tree, some birds and a mountain when asked to come up with a nature scene, who runs really, really fast in PE, and who wears a baseball shirt to school, not a superman cape. I worried so much about Jack when he started kindergarten, because he was an odd bird who wouldn't talk to the other kids but instead sat in the reading corner and read to his heart's delight. I don't worry so much about Will, who is odd in his own right, but who talks, plays, draws and generally behaves like a typical kindergartener. Quite frankly, it's a relief.

Desperate E-Mail

Dear Fellow Room Parent:

Thank you so much for calling on Sunday to introduce yourself. Although during our conversation it became clear we will be competing for the title of Least Organized Room Parent at Our Fine School, I think we will have fun working together, forgetting things, losing lists, and scrambling at the very last minute to get one more parent chaperone for the field trip to the Waste Management Plant because it turns out we need five drivers instead of four.

I am so interested in this notion of yours that we should have a class party sometime in the next couple of weeks, perhaps at a swim club or in somebody's backyard. I have casually mentioned the idea of having a party to several friends, both OFS parents and regular joes off the street. The general consensus seems to be that there may be worse ideas floating around--say, sending some of our cuter preschool kids on a peacekeeping mission to Georgian territory--but the idea of having a class party is quite impressively bad.

Let's be honest with one another: the only reason you want to plan a party is because you have friends in other classes who have planned parties, and they started planning these little parties in mid-June. You are feeling the pressure one often feels in the face of unparalleled insanity masking itself as hypercompetence. Please don't do this to yourself--or, more to the point, to me.

Rest assured, having a class party will not win us any points with the other parents in Room 204. In fact, it will start the year off on a sour note as we are booed and hissed at Back to School Night when we announce each and every Room 204 family will have to sacrifice yet another freaking weekend afternoon to School Unity and unbelievably tedious small talk.

So let's not do this, shall we? Instead, let's be rebels, iconoclasts, trend setters. "Our class doesn't party," we'll tell all the Martha Stewart wannabes around OFS. "Our class kicks academic butt." Let's make a reputation as the hardass room parents, the no nonsense gals. We will be remembered for it--and, yes, loved.

Please. I'm begging you.

Signed,
Your Fellow Room Parent

This is Just to Say

I would like to announce that for the second year in a row I have failed to fill out the proper paperwork for After School Car Pool Pick up at Our Fine School. That means that when I go to Jack's classroom's open house on Tuesday, I will not be handed a marigold yellow sign that has Jack's name and classroom printed on it along with the members of our car pool. The teacher's assistant will take this opportunity to raise an eyebrow at me or sigh a small sigh of exasperation. Didn't I know I was to have handed in the paperwork weeks ago?

Well, yeah, sort of. But here's the problem. Instead of sending me a form in the mail to be filled out and sent back to Our Fine School's lovely administrative assistant, they sent me an e-mail. "For important information about the 2008-09 school year, please go to ourfineschool.org."

I am not capable of taking that step, largely because I know that it isn't a single step, it is a multitude of steps. I must take the steps downstairs to my husband's study and dig around in his morass of papers and gas receipts to find the letter from Our Fine School instructing us how to log on to ourfineschool.org. Then I will have to take the steps back upstairs, attempt to log on, and then attempt to track down the forms where you write down your kid's name and the names of all the other kids you'll be picking up after school.

Finding these forms can not be done logically or intuitively on ourfineschool.org. It only happens magically, under a full moon, with Mercury rising.

Back when Jack was in second grade, the folks at Our Fine School simply mailed the forms with the 300 other pages of material they send you at the beginning of August. Why they stopped this practice, other than to thwart my attempts to car pool, I have no idea. But it was a mistake. Send me a form in the mail to fill out and send back to you, I'll do it, and I'll do it on time, for one simple reason: I buy very cool stamps and I like to use them. I am like a five-year-old girl in a new party dress when it comes to stamps. I believe everyone looks at my stamped mail and thinks, 'The person who used these stamps is interesting and creative, and I wish I knew her.'

There is no love to be had from going to ourfineschool.org. Nobody's grandmother is waiting for me there, smiling and murmuring, "Oh, look at those shoes she has on and that pretty dress--why, she looks so grown up!" There is only heartbreak as you wander around the Web site wondering where those stupid forms are hiding.

So on Tuesday, I will have to admit to the unsmiling teacher's assistant that I had no luck finding the forms and laugh nervously, saying, "I guess you're hearing that from all the parents, huh?" And she'll look at me disapprovingly and say, "No, everyone else's parents got their forms in on time."

You know what's going to make her really unhappy? When she finds out that I'm the room parent this year.

That maniacal laughing you hear is mine.

The Neighborhood Post

Just today (or was it yesterday--I don't know the time difference between the States and Australia), Tracy gave me this lovely award. I'm very pleased and touched. There are rules involved--I'm supposed to pass the award on; the only problem being almost everyone I would pass it on to already has it!--which I will post below.

But first, I want to ponder. I'm so intrigued by this online neighborhood I find myself in. I haven't quite figured out what it all means yet, but it does seem meaningful to me. There appears to be a battalion of women--domestic types, homemaker types, crafty types--who get up in the morning, get the kids off to school or settled in with some sort of project, then grab their cup of coffee and go visiting.

At least that's what I do, and I know a lot of people reading this do it too. I drink my coffee and check in with my online friends. How are Kate's kids doing in their new school down in Adelaide? What sort of art has Victoria made this week? Will Heather be knitting or ruminating today (she does both so beautifully)? Whatever happened with the tree that fell down in Tracy's yard? Did the neighbors pay to have it removed? I need to know!

The crazy thing is, I feel like I know these women. Do I? Not the way I know Amy, Danielle and Kathryn, no. But in some way, some important way, I feel the answer is yes. You can know someone by what they have to say about their lives and the way they say it, and you can care about them. Perhaps you can't know them as fully as the people who are physically present in your life, but you can feel connected to them in a way that feels real to me.

I guess I don't have any great insights about my online neighborhood, other than I'm glad to be here, and that I feel like the people whose blogs I visit are friends--and overwhelmingly Australian, an added treat! So thanks for coming by to visit. You're always welcome here.

Oh: the rules:

- Only 5 people are allowed to receive this award.
- 4 of them followers of your blog.
- One has to be new to your blog and live in another part of the world.
- You must link back to whoever gave you the award.

If you're reading this, consider yourself awarded. Mazel Tov!

Stupid Cake Day

It was a rookie mistake. I pulled the cake out of the oven, set it on the rack, and two minutes later decided it was time to take it out of the pan.

Now, anyone who's ever baked a cake knows the score: you leave the cake to cool in its pan for ten minutes. You give it a chance to settle down, chill out, get used to its new environment. Under no circumstances do you disturb it while it's in that fragile, right-out-of-oven state of mind.

Only I did. I was having a Stupid Cake Day. I seem to have these frequently. Stupid Cake Days are different from Forgot to Grease the Pan days. Not greasing the pan is just momentary forgetfulness. Dumping a hot cake out of its pan is just, well, stupid. You know better. It seems almost willful, like you're just daring the laws of gravity to do their thing.

Well, gravity always does its thing, and a hot cake taken out of its pan prematurely will always wilt, then fall apart into a Rorschach test of chocolate crumbs. All you can do is stand there and yell, "Stupid, stupid, stupid!" The kids run downstairs, wondering what the dog did this time.

The good news is: kids will eat chocolate cake no matter what state of disarray they find it in. So, as it turns out, will husbands. The dog would also be happy to oblige, but that's the last thing you need in this situation: stupid cake and a dog throwing up all over your freshly cleaned carpet.

In case you're wondering, the cake tasted good. All 500 pieces of it.

Post Deleted

I just deleted a post. It's one that took a long time to write, not that it was particularly earth-shattering. It was about how some people irritate you and it's a drag, while other people irritate you and it's kind of fun. But it went on and on, and after I'd finished it, I thought to myself, 'You're starting to sound like a crank. People at the farmers' market irritate you and now people who e-mail you with requests to sponsor them on their Walks to Save Everything and Everyone in the World irritate you. Who doesn't irritate you?'

Well, I am highly irritable, it's true. I am judgmental and irritable and not that much fun to be around until I've had my morning coffee. But a lot of people delight me. I just wanted to make that clear. I find many people delightful. I am a crank, but I am a soft-hearted, sentimental crank who is delighted by all sorts of people and any number of dogs. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Menu Plan Monday

Monday: Zucchini stuffed with Pistou, served with a quasi-ratatouille (pasta with a sauce of diced tomato and sauted onion and garlic), and homemade rustic bread

Tuesday: Tuna Pasta Salad, with broccoli, artichoke hearts, snow peas and red pepper

Wednesday: Leftover Tuna Pasta Salad

Thursday: Scallops with mushrooms and spinach, served with homemade rustic bread

Friday: Tomatoes stuffed with pasta and mozzarella

Saturday: Pizza for the kids, out to dinner for me and the man (!)

***

The stuffed zucchini and stuffed tomato dishes are from recipes I found last week in the New York Times food section. Mark Bittmann (author of How to Cook Everything) had an article about a vegetarian restaurant in France. Apparently, the French have not warmed up to vegetarianism in general, but this restaurant is supposed to change their minds about going meatless. Both recipes sounded great. I'm going to do a side of pasta just in case the zucchini doesn't quite work out--if it comes out of the oven looking a bit underwhelming, I can just chop it up and mix it in with the pasta.

***

This week's easy recipe is the Tuna Pasta Salad. It does involve a fair bit of chopping, but it's a cold salad so you can make it early in the day. I often make this if I have an early evening meeting or need a two-night meal. For instance, this week on Tuesday, Jack has tae kwon do at 5:45, so I'll make the salad sometime Tuesday morning and be happy in the knowledge that I don't have to rush in the door at 6:45 to get cooking. On Wednesday, my book group is meeting at my house, so it will be nice to have dinner already made, saving a big kitchen clean-up right before everyone's supposed to come over.

Tuna Pasta Salad

Dressing:

1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 balsamic vinegar
1 TBS mayonnaise
1/2 TBS Dijon mustard
1/2 tsp sugar

Salad:

12 oz. rotini
one can tuna, drained
one bunch of broccoli crowns, cut into florets (and steamed for a few minutes, if you don't like raw broccoli)
one 14-oz can quartered artichoke hearts
one red pepper chopped
2-3 cups snow peas

Cook pasta according to directions. Drain and run under cold water to cool, then transfer to a large bowl. Prepare dressing, then pour over pasta and mix well. Stir in tuna and vegetables. Refrigerate until ready to serve.