school schedule

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Waiting Room Woolgathering

I am in a waiting room at the car place while my vehicle undergoes repairs for yet another recall. In fact, this is a re-recall because I already had this particular issue addressed a couple of years ago. Or, not addressed, apparently.

There is one other woman-presenting person in the waiting room with me. She just consented to a $160 tire alignment. I am 95% sure that the service member who came to speak with her referred to her as Suzanne, and the service person who checked me in already told me my car’s alignment failed. What are the chances that two Suzannes would both have failed tire alignments at the exact same time?!

It’s been kind of a rough start to the school year. Or maybe not rough so much as nonstop busy? None of it is BAD stuff; it’s all stuff that we’ve done or chosen on purpose. Well, except for the leak in our pool. No one wants that. I think it’s like this every year, and I simply block out the memory of the frenetic bustle of it all during the relative calm of the summer months. Annual or not, I currently feel like I’ve jumped into the middle of an ice-cold lake and I’m not that strong a swimmer.  

What I really want to be doing is spending my days walking, writing, and hanging out with my cat. That sounds like my ideal level of interpersonal interaction right about now.

Ignore the doorbell and the dishes and the laundry and the fact that you need to pick up your kid and the neighbor’s children from school and lie down with meeeeeeeeeee…

In practice, I’ve been spending an average of two hours a day in a school gymnasium, making conversation with other parents, cheering for our kids, and trying to stave off butt and back pain from the relentless discomfort of the bleachers. (This little purchase has helped quite a bit with the latter.) Or rushing to/waiting around my house to discuss various home maintenance and repair and improvement projects with a parade of vendors. Or scrolling aimlessly on my phone in an attempt to stay awake while my daughter finishes her homework (she hasn’t gone to bed before eleven a single time this school year). Or driving to or from school and/or sporting events. Or working on a volunteer project, which involves both in-person meetings and a group chat. I remain terrified of group chats.

This is all, like, totally normal parent and life stuff and yet I am feeling overwhelmed and overextended and wholly unsuited to any of it.

Let’s just hope this is all an ADJUSTMENT period, to which I will ADJUST. My kiddo, by the way – who is the one DOING THE SPORTS AND HOMEWORK which is quite a bit more strenuous than observing those things – seems to be handling everything with much more grace and much less whining than I am.

On the plus side, I have not cooked a single meal all week. On the minus side, I did buy ingredients to make a giant salad several days ago and I am pretty sure they are all gradually rotting into inedibility in my fridge.

There are five of us in the waiting room now. One of the staff members has chosen this very moment to vacuum the floor of the waiting room. Why now, buddy? It’s not like someone just spilled a bag of chip crumbs or anything. The floor looks perfectly clean. Is this a conscientious objection to the inanity of Jenna & Sheinelle, which I didn’t know was a show? Is it passive aggressive proof to his manager that he is Doing His Job? Puzzling.

Those of you with better memories and/or experience with middle school and high school kids, is this just… How Things Are? Carla goes to school, goes to sports, scarfs a quick and less-nutritionally-balanced-than-I’d-prefer dinner, immerses herself in homework, goes to bed, repeat. There is literally no time to do anything else. She doesn’t have a spare ten minutes to tidy her room or practice her instrument or go visit the neighbor dogs. The only time we talk is in the car or over a hasty meal of fast-food nuggets. We’ve been sacrificing a traditional breakfast in favor of a few more minutes of sleep, and she’s been eating ants on a log or drinking a smoothie in the car on the way to school. Our only “non productive” time is the five minutes of cat videos we watch together every morning, and the ten minutes I spend reading to her in bed every night.

(By the way, I am currently reading her this book, which I remember liking when I was a kid, although not enough to read any of the other books in the series. But I am finding it boring and kind of dumb???)

My husband thinks that it was like this for him when he was in school. My mom thinks it was like this for me when I was in school. But I have no recollection of doing three to five hours of schoolwork every night. Maybe in college, but even then, only when I had a paper due the next day. Three to five hours of schoolwork seems BONKERS, let alone doing it on top of two to three hours of Sports.

I keep spiraling about Carla’s commitments. The spiral starts with: This is too much! This school isn’t right for Carla! Something must be wrong, either with the teachers or with Carla’s ability to do the work! Should I email the teachers? The principal? Should I encourage Carla to email the teachers? The principal? Should I make her quit Sports?

Then eventually (sometimes with help from my much chiller husband) the spiral makes its way around to this: But Carla seems to be doing okay. She’s tired, sure, but isn’t that true of ALL teenagers, EVERYWHERE? The other parents I’ve talked to say their kids are doing similar amounts of homework, and going to bed similarly late. And none of them are pulling their kids out of school or making them quit the team or marching into the principal’s office demanding Action. And Carla really seems to enjoy Sports! She’s getting better, she seems to be making a positive contribution to the team. The physical activity is certainly good for her. As is the social interaction. She seems to be completing her homework, even if it’s late when she finishes it. Her grades are fine, so far. And her own father says that this is How It Was even back in the golden era of the nineteen-nineties.

The calm doesn’t last particularly long, though. It doesn’t help that I am also getting less sleep than I prefer, and I’m much busier than I prefer. Maybe once those things resolve (will they resolve?) I will be more zen about Carla’s level of busyness.

Speaking of being more zen: The last time I posted here, which was eons and eons ago, I mentioned my fret about feeding the sports team. THANK YOU for pointing out that doing such a thing is inadvisable. I spent the first three weeks of school not signing up, and simply taking Carla some nourishment to eat between games. She eats WRAPS now, can you believe it? Ham, tomato, and lettuce. (I wrap the tomato and lettuce in the ham, so they don’t soggify the tortilla.) (Yes, we have decided to throw caution to the wind and get back on the lettuce train.) Other parents have been signing up to provide sustenance, and I have been observing what they bring. They are not bringing dinner, they are bringing SNACKS. I can totally bring snacks for the team. That’s much less daunting than providing an entire meal. Thanks for talking me down, internet.

And there’s the service guy who checked me in. My car is done, and so is this post.

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Dinners This Week

What makes meal planning even MORE fun? Meal planning when you have a brand new afterschool activity to adjust to, and a time change to adjust to, and semi-surprise houseguests!

Dinners for the Week of March 8-15

  • Oven Roasted Chicken Shawarma: I often feel like I need to come up with something new! and different! for people who’ve eaten at my table before. Well, I don’t think I’ve served this to guests before. I plan to serve it with broccoli and couscous, which are my favorite accompaniments.
  • Slow Cooker BBQ Pulled Pork with Coleslaw: And then again, sometimes I just make things we’ve all had so many times we’re well and sick of them. But I NEED a crockpot meal one night this week, and this one is easy, and we haven’t had it in awhile. Maybe I’ll grab some green beans to amp up the veggie quotient?
  • Balsamic Chicken and Mushrooms: Not quite sure what to serve with this one. Maybe some asparagus?

Yes, I realize this is only three meals. But we didn’t eat the chicken paprikas last week, so that’s up for grabs again this week. And we’re going out for dinner one night. And I am hoping we have at least SOME leftovers.

What are you eating this week?

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Some Quick Bullets, Mainly About the Kitten

We have welcomed our new housemate!!!!!

By the way, it is Very Difficult to do anything at all when you have a kitten. He is quite darling and very distracting. Case in point: it has taken me three days to get this poor excuse for a post into WordPress.

He is what I consider to be the platonic ideal of a cat. He is playful and weird and does that thing where he will be walking sedately and then will suddenly take off for reasons known only to him. And yet he is also incredibly cuddly, and will sit on or beside his humans for hours, purring loudly. He has had no trouble identifying and using his litter box, he is already starting to come when we call him. He seems to prefer being in the same room as his humans, although he does enjoy exploring the house. He is friendly and cheerful and not easily startled. He loves to play with toys, especially these silly little crinkly mylar balls – two of which are already lost forever underneath our oven. He loves to look outside. He seems to prefer sleeping on his back, fluffy tummy bared.

When I called the vet to make our kitten’s first appointment, the (very kind and friendly) person I spoke to asked for his name, and then said, “Oh my god, my cat’s name is Leonardo, too!” And then he added, “We named him after ALL the Leonardos.” But then he could only think of two – DiCaprio and DaVinci. Are there other Leonardos? I mean, there’s the Ninja Turtle. But I’m pretty sure that’s a mononym in the spirit of Cher/Beyonce/Sting, right? Anyway, I’m trying to get the nickname Lenny to stick, but my husband and child are resisting with all their might and they might be wearing me down. I already have to scroll through my parents’ cat’s name and their dog’s name before I come up with Lenny, and with my kid saying her chosen nickname constantly… I don’t think I can keep it up. Lenny may end up being his blog name, which is a surprising benefit of having a blog. Perhaps I should have chosen a blog name for Carla instead of reserving them for potential future children.  (Edith and Eloise were my top contenders.) 

Pre- and now even peri- (intra-?) kitten, I have been sleeping pretty well – waking up only once-ish per night and falling back to sleep pretty quickly. Because sleep is normally a major challenge, I wanted to note for Future Me that sometimes it’s not. Is it because I am taking all the supplements right now? (Magnesium, B6, B12, iron, vitamin D – okay, so not all all but more than I was taking which was nothing.) The other thing I will note is that I am still tired. If I sit down, I will fall asleep. So either there’s something going on that we have not yet tested for (all my labs are totally normal, and my at-home sleep study showed no evidence of apnea), or – and this is my personal theory – being tired is just How It Is, and maybe I notice it more now because I am less busy.

 

My kid is still in school, but summertime is imminent and I Am Pumped. I am looking forward to more leisurely mornings, to spending time outside, to forcing encouraging my child to read through bribery the thrill of the vast literary canon.

On the cooking front, I am in one of those phases where I cannot think of a single food I want to eat, let alone make. We’re depending a lot on leftovers of the few things my husband suggests and/or takeout. To make matters more complicated, after such a long, damp, cool spring, we have suddenly been skyrocketed into the 80s and it’s too hot to turn on the oven. My air fryer makes a mean piece of salmon though.

Oh – okay, more about the kitten. 

So far, I have had itchy eyes but no other allergic reactions to the cat. And I could just as easily attribute my itchy eyes to the increase in pollen outside. 

Let’s see. Are there any negatives about having a cat? I mean, I can’t do anything unless I shut him away in his temporary room. But that’s not annoying as of yet. He does, of course, occasionally scratch the furniture which is not ideal. But I was expecting that, and we are also working on it. It took me all of two days to release my deeply-held conviction that I would never ever welcome a cat tree into my home; now we have a cat tree. He gets carsick, which is sad. Oh – he is obsessed with my houseplants, so I have temporarily relocated them to higher places and may need to re-home some of them. (Why are so many houseplants toxic???) He is also obsessed with climbing on the kitchen table, and then immediately shoving his entire head into whichever water glass is sitting there unattended. 

He has absolutely no grace. I thought cats were supposed to be agile and graceful and have good balance and land on their feet, but Lenny is unaware of these stereotypes. He leaps at things and misjudges the distance. He flops over on things with edges (cat tree, chair seat, ottoman) and falls off them. He trots along the back of the couch and slips off every few steps. I even asked the vet about it; she seemed unconcerned. Perhaps kittens are the equivalent of toddlers, lurching around drunkenly until they fully understand what it means to walk.  

One of my writing partners came over to meet Lenny and, ostensibly, to write. Focusing on our projects was… bordering on impossible. She suggested I get him his own computer. 

If it’s not entirely clear, I love him. He is perfection.