Is this a good thing?

Emma's music class is working on a poster project, where they each research one of their favorite bands or musicians. As you can imagine in any group of 10-11 year olds, Katy Perry and Taylor Swift each have a group of girls researching them. They're doing the research at school, including listening to various tracks.

Yesterday after school, as Emma was starting on her homework, she said "God! I hate Taylor Swift. I can't stand to hear that song again. I swear, she's the new Justin Bieber! But I have to pretend it's okay so I don't insult all my friends."

The Onion ran this article recently. I'm pretty sure they had us in mind.

I am not amused.

This is what our yard and patio look like today:

Can you see, in this second picture, how the leaves are actually attacking the house?! I'm pretty sure they want in out of this rotten weather.

After teaching a class this morning, I came home to relax before my afternoon/evening classes.  I got completely soaked walking from my building to my car by the hurricane force winds that are blowing all our rain sideways, and drove home shivering with the heater on high. And yes, that was with an umbrella that may never work again. Once home, I realized that our pool was full of walnut leaves --really, it's amazing that there are so many on the ground in those pictures because I could have sworn I skimmed an entire tree's worth of leaves from the pool. Which I had to do in the rain, drenching any possible dry corner of clothing I had left.

So, now I'm in my second set of clothes, getting ready to head back out into the gale to meet with Emma's math teacher and then go to campus to teach a lab. The local meteorologists said the wind was going to die down, but they're obviously lying through their teeth.

Cleanliness is . . . .

Not Important, according to my daughter.

Every other evening, we battle about a shower. I just don't get it.

When I was her age, my mom wouldn't let us take daily showers. My mom is German, and didn't move to the States until she was 17, plus she's old :-)  She was born in 1929, and even when I did some work in grad school at the University of Edinburgh in the early 1990's, most European/British adults didn't shower every day. In addition to that, I have two sisters and a brother, we had a one-bathroom house, and lived on my dad's income. A professor in the humanities, even at a Big Ten University, didn't make much money and there aren't salary-boosting grants available for academics who are interested in translating Japanese philosophers. The water bill was an issue, as was making it to the end of the month with enough money to buy groceries. Hence, no daily showering for three teen girls and a young boy.

However, we were allowed to quickly wash our hair in the laundry sink (that makes it sound worse than it was), and between that and some washcloth work, I managed to feel clean daily. It was (and still is) important to me. If I don't take a shower on a day, I feel dirtier than I look. I don't care for it.

So, here I have a tween girl, who has had fairly strong BO for several years now (this is a characteristic I blame on her dad) and I still have to remind her to use deodorant every day. I have to fight hard to get her to shower every other day. She has fine hair (like her mom) and by the in-between day, it will hang in unwashed strands around her face. Over the last year she's developed acne, not in a bad way, but in a persistent way. I think if I could just get her to wash her face every day, that would probably go away. But her idea of washing her face is a quick swipe over some areas with a wet cotton round. It is not terribly effective.

I can't even decide if I should be pushing this battle. I do couch my arguments in terms of cleanliness, rather than the fact that her friends might not want to be near her if she looks greasy and smells worse. But I'm so tired. So, so, tired. Why does parenting have to be so tiring?  I can't even imagine what kind of a wreck I'd be if I actually had a difficult child!

So, do you guys face this same battle? Or is it just my child?

Pet Peeve

Okay, really I have a lot more than one, but today this one is really bugging me.

Why can't people pull into a parking space between the two lines? Is it really that hard? And I'm not talking about being a little closer to one line than the other. I'm not asking for perfection. But one really badly parked car screws it up for everyone, and that's just not neighborly.

Desk Accessories

Common Household Mom wrote a blog post about her desk space, and it made me finally take the picture I'd been meaning to take for a while, of a shelf right above my desk in my brand-spanking-new office.  

Last year in Emma's class, there was the requisite elementary school "prize jar". It contained pencils, erasers, some small puzzles, magnets, etc. She came home one day with a space-themed eraser, which she had picked out for me. She said she wasn't really all that interested in anything in the prize jar anymore, but she thought I'd like this eraser since my favorite class to teach is Geology of the Solar System. I liked it very much, so she proceeded to earn enough prizes (mostly for good behavior and being helpful) to get me the whole set. So now I have them proudly displayed on the shelf above my desk. 

I especially like the one who looks like he's dancing :-)

Stuff on my mind.

     Rob and I made it through a mostly boring faculty development day only to pick Emma up from school and take her with us back to campus for a faculty meeting where the contract negotiating committee could update us on how the Board of Trustees of the college is not actually negotiating. Our committee has already agreed to a pay freeze, so the impasse is over an extremely steep increase in what we pay for health insurance which would also penalize employees with families more than employees without families. The committee members were told by a Board member that health care is "elective". Having a family is "elective". How often you see a doctor is "elective". Yes, that was a depressing meeting.

      I'm reading a book called Good Girls Don't Get Fat by Robyn Silverman. It's all about how young girls begin to hate themselves because they're not thin. I'm reading this book because I worry a lot about avoiding this issue with Emma. When I went through puberty, I gained weight, wasn't as interested in exercise, and began to devour fiction which meant a lot of sitting around.  I spent middle school and high school embarrassed about a body that was really only a little overweight, convinced that I was hideous. And hideous equated to worthless, in a world where your only value was in how you looked. God, I hated high school.  :-)

     I was just like Emma before puberty --skinny as a beanpole and could eat anything.  But when I look back now, at pictures and memories, I actually was only a bit chubby after puberty. I still biked and walked everywhere (my family had one car, and it wasn't going to be used to take us kids places!) so it's not like I wasn't getting any exercise.  And yet, I was convinced that I was fat and ugly. 

     Emma will be 11 in two months, and is beginning to fill out --meaning she's getting hips, her butt is getting rounded, and her legs are getting thicker. She's always been a skinny kid, and now she's beginning to look more female, with some actual curves and padding.  She doesn't talk trash about her body --in fact,  she still seems pretty unaware of how her body looks, which I love.  But it's hard for me to pinpoint when I became dissatisfied with my body --what was it that made me stop appreciating my body for the fact that it worked so well, and started judging it only on what it looked like?

     I'm hoping this book might help me avoid saying or doing anything detrimental, and help me know what to say and do to support her as she travels through the transition. I don't want her to repeat my experience.

Expecting

This morning, as Emma and I walked out to the car to go to her play rehearsal, she took a peek at the fairy house near the garage, to see how it was holding up. Lo and behold, it has become a nursery!

She's hard to see in this photo, but her egg sac isn't!  Right next to the fairy swing, too.

It was a bit hard to get a good picture, because she kept moving around and around the egg sac.

In this last one you can really see her colors.  Soon we'll have lots of new garden spiders -that is one big egg sac! Emma thought that perhaps the fairy's would've preferred her to pick a different site for her nursery :-)

Fund Raising Trash

As I've mentioned, Emma attends a small, secular, private school (Spectrum Progressive School). It's a great school, but like all schools, it suffers from the fund raising malaise. That is, instead of telling us what tuition actually costs up front, it sets tuition at a certain percentage of the actual cost of educating a child, and then hassles parents to raise the remaining funds during the rest of the year. This means hitting up everyone you know to buy trash they don't need so a small percentage of that can go to the school.

For many years now, it's been the Sally Foster wrapping paper fund raiser. This year, it's the Charleston Wrap fund raiser --likely the same business with a new name, so we'll all feel refreshed and peppy about looking through the catalog and harassing our friends and relatives to buy junk. Additionally, there are prizes for the children who sell the most junk. This is not the only problematic fund raiser --there's the Fun Fair, where kids play games to earn tokens to buy trashy plastic stuff they are done with the next day, and there are cookie-dough fund raisers, where we get to encourage our friends to buy processed food that isn't good for them. There are obvious problems with this mentality, so today I wrote this letter and sent it in to school.

"Hi (name of Director),

We would like to express again that we would really prefer it if our tuition bill reflected the actual cost of tuition, rather than trying to make some of it up by selling stuff.

We feel it’s environmentally irresponsible to promote fundraisers that encourage people to buy more things they don’t need.  We also feel uncomfortable with the reward/prize concept for the children –selling the most stuff doesn’t seem like a goal worth aiming for, or one that a school should be promoting.

For these reasons we will not be participating in the Charleston Wrap fundraiser. Instead, we’ve enclosed a check for $50.00 as a donation to Spectrum. We hope that Spectrum’s Board and Staff will consider discontinuing fundraisers that contribute so much waste material to the world’s already over-flowing garbage dumps."

Unfortunately, I'm sure it will fall on deaf ears.