Tag Archives: family

Danny’s All Star Joint

My daughter and I have been hard at work on our Christmas 2013 video, which I will hopefully be able to post on Monday. Meanwhile, here’s a recording we made about five years ago, when my girl was three or four. I’ve added some photos and video to our very rough-around-the-edges Garage Band recording. Towards the end we both start cracking up. She gets fed up with my giggling and starts hiccuping to boot. I remember thinking at the time that we would eventually tackle it again and do a better recording. We never got around to it. Now, when I listen to this, the imperfections are exactly what I like best about it. It’s a pretty good reflection of our life – kind of a mess, really, but full of love and laughter.

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Weekend Snapshots 9

The theme of the weekend was: “Missed (But Not Really) Photo Opportunities…or: Clearly, I Need Professional Help”

Friday

I told my daughter she should dress up, because we would be heading straight to the boys’ recital and her dad’s concert right after school.

Seeing her stricken expression, I reconsidered my position, “Well, maybe you could change really quickly as soon as you get home from school.”

“Oh, good,” she said with palpable relief, “Because I’m pretty sure I’m going to be playing football today, and that can get really messy.”

My little football player:

The boys’ piano recital:

Colin’s concert:

Sadly, before I could get any photos of Colin, I had to bolt from the concert when I started feeling sick.

Saturday:

I felt much better after an early night and was able to help a little with “Ashton’s Birthday Wish.” This is a drive started by a remarkable boy, who decided that instead of having a birthday party, he would collect and distribute winter coats to people in need. His mom told me he was crushed that he couldn’t be there. He had just gotten out of a wheelchair after surgery, had overdone it, and was in terrible pain. This is when being crazy and always toting a big fat camera in my bulging purse pays off! I took a few pictures so she could share them with her son.

IMG_6817

Later that day, a couple of my son’s friends came over for a sleepover. The idea of three thirteen year old boys in the house at once had been terrifying to me, but it was surprisingly sane. It almost killed me not to take photos, but I managed to restrain myself in order to preserve my good relations with my son. (OK, it’s possible that I may have surreptitiously taken a few).

Sunday:

Our new washer and dryer were delivered. My son and I nerded out, watching the first load go through its cycle:

We had a few quiet moments this afternoon…

And then we went to Lessons and Carols, my favorite service of the year. My daughter was singing in the choir for the first time. I tried to resist the urge to take photos, because church policy forbids it. I failed.

It doesn’t really count as a violation of the policy if you take blurry pictures with your phone, right? Still, I was punished anyway, when my daughter rolled her eyes at me when she saw me taking photos.

The candlelight service was beautiful. People all around me were breaking down in tears. I was undone by this verse from In the Bleak Midwinter, a hymn set to a poem by Christina Rossetti:

Angels and archangels may have gathered there.
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air.
But his mother only in her maiden bliss,
Worshiped the beloved with a kiss.

Dale is in the house!

Dale Thomas, life of the party.

I crave peace and quiet, especially when I get home from work. But, in the immortal words of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards: “You can’t always get what you want.”

Yesterday when I got home, the kids were bouncing off the walls. The strange thing was that my normally quiet-as-a-lamb, ultra-responsible, rock-solid middle child was the instigator.

My son has always been a quiet child, who doesn’t talk much, and certainly never about himself. About a month ago, he brought home a semester’s worth of school work. At the bottom of the stack was the first assignment he had done for language arts: a typed, single-spaced letter that filled an entire page, introducing himself to his teacher.

“You should know that I am a very quiet kid. Every day my family has to tell me to speak up.”

“I am kind of athletic because I play soccer but other than that I run slow and I can’t do push ups very well.”

“What I like to do before school when I’m not trying to get ready really quick is to draw funny pictures and cartoons, which I share with my family. I like doing this because I love to make people laugh.”

“Some things you need to know about me is that I suffer from back pain. I assume its just long term affects of my limes disease, which I had about a year ago…So if you see me fidgeting a bit it’s just my back so don’t worry about it.”

By the time I got to the end of the letter, tears were rolling down my face. His letter was so sweet, gentle, honest, and open. It felt unbearably sad to me that I had gotten my best glimpse into my son’s inner life through a school assignment.

Lyme Disease did terrible things to my son. What was even more upsetting to me than the fact that he was suffering from aches and pains, was the change in his personality. He started acting like a grumpy old man and became even more uncommunicative than usual. I would have to say that even now, about a year and a half after he was first diagnosed, he still has not bounced back 100%.

Last night at the dinner table, however, he was unusually animated and jovial. His eyes were sparkling. His playful mood was infectious. His siblings were caught up in the novelty of his high spirits and were getting riled up.

“Who are you and what have you done with my son?” I asked him.

He held his hand out to me to shake and said, “Hello, I’m Dale Thomas and I’d like $13,000, no, let’s make that $15,000 dollars ransom for your son.”

Dale turned out to be quite a character: a slickster, a charmer, a merry hooligan, a man about town, a comedian, and a rabble-rouser all wrapped up into one…His siblings were spellbound and completely and utterly in his sway.

“Come on, eat your dinner,” I kept urging as the antics escalated to a feverish pitch.

“T might like chicken, but I don’t particularly care for it.”

I glared at T/Dale. He continued to pick at his plate, as he redoubled his efforts to keep his audience of two highly entertained. I kept having to ask the kids to calm down, take it down a few notches, be quiet…PLEASE!

As we were finally finishing up, I asked him to wipe the table after dinner.

“Aren’t you being rather rude, asking a guest to do chores?” T/Dale asked me with a mischievous grin.

The last straw was when the kids got so swept up by the highjinks, they started loudly drumming their feet. I lost it. I barked out a peremptory order for SILENCE!

That night I popped a couple Advil and crawled into bed. I finally had the peace and quiet I had wanted so desperately. I also had the time to reflect upon the evening and was stricken with remorse and filled with regret. Why couldn’t I have been more tolerant? Why did I have be such a buzzkill? Why hadn’t I played along with my son’s rare display of exuberance, rather than try to squelch it?

This morning I gave him a hug and apologized for having suppressed Dale so meanly.

“I’m sorry I was such a jerk about Dale. He was so much fun. Everyone was having such a good time and I ruined it by being so crabby. Do you think he might come back for a visit sometime?”

There was a twinkle in his eye as my son said, “He’s upstairs hanging out in my room. He may still be here when you get back from work.”

I hope so.

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Im/maturity

It can be tricky to have children who are at different developmental stages. Our conservative strategy for navigating these treacherous waters is to wade in only as far as would be knee-deep for our youngest child. Recently, for example, the kids watched Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, even though the boys would much rather have seen Gravity. A couple years ago I caught my daughter, who was then six years old, reading The Hunger Games, which I had gotten for her oldest brother. I snatched it away from her and told her she could read it when she was older.

The other day I asked my thirteen year old son, “When do you think T will be old enough to read The Hunger Games?”

“Well, to be honest, I think she’s old enough now.”

“Really? But she’s only a third grader.”

“Yeah, but to tell you the truth, she’s way more mature than I am now.”

“Seriously? You really think so?”

“Yeah. And when I realized that, it kind of ruined my day a little bit. But I’ve come to terms with it, and I’ve accepted it now.”

This may also explain why I’ve heard the thirteen year old say to his younger brother, “We have to be nice to T now, so she’ll let us play video games in her basement when we’re all adults.”

I’ll be back in a week…Happy weekend and Thanksgiving!

The Inferno

Life in our household has been full of stress and strife lately. I’ve been having terrifying nightmares, which continue to haunt me in my waking hours. Migraines keep grabbing me in a vise-like headlock. The pain, always concentrated in one throbbing eyeball, makes me clench my teeth as I wait out the four hours until I can pop three more Advil. To tell you the truth, lately there have been moments when I have wallowed in self-pity and dark despair. I’ve asked myself, “My God! What have I done to deserve this?”

Here’s the thing. I have a beautiful child, who is intelligent, creative, talented, funny, sensitive, generous, and kind. He has always marched to the beat of his own drum, and I admire and respect him for it. To be honest though, I have to admit that I’ve also regularly engaged in epic battles with him because of this. We all have to function and live in a world of rules and deadlines and norms, I reason to myself. And so I try to coax and cram and bash my square peg son into the round hole over and over again. I do this out of love and concern for his future happiness, but all the good intentions in the world can’t transform it into a pleasant experience, or even a reasonable endeavor.

In school, children are assessed in ways that may make sense for most, but not for those who do their homework, and then routinely forget to turn it in or lose it between home and school. They don’t work for kids who can’t remember to bring home their textbook to study for the quiz they have to take the next day. The standard assessments simply can’t capture the abilities and gifts of children, whose minds crackle with intelligence, but shut off when confronted with boring, routine tasks. It can be exhilarating to parent such a child, but truth be told: at times it can also be thoroughly exhausting and demoralizing.

A couple nights ago, my son managed to finish his homework, take his shower, and practice his piano pieces at a godly hour. At the beginning of the school year we had optimistically stated that his bed time would be 9:30. Lately, bed time has been whenever we tell him he simply can’t work any longer on whatever paper, project, problem set, lab, or translation is due the next day, because it’s already 10:30, 11, or past midnight. On that blessed night, all of these tasks were done and there was a still a little time to spare before bedtime. It was a miracle.

My son and I looked at each other awkardly, uncertainly, not quite knowing how to handle this unexpected turn of events. This usually would be about the time when I would trot out a fist shaking “You can do it! Shake it out!” lecture à la Bela Karolyi, or a “Pull it together and FOCUS, kid!” lecture or the: “My head is going to explode if we keep having this same argument” lecture or the “Just crank it out, please, I’m begging you for the love of all things holy: just. crank. it. out” lecture, or the “Think, really think if there’s anything else you’ve forgotten that you need to be working on right now” lecture. You get the picture. That night, there was no need for any of those lectures.

“Well…are you heading to bed then?” I finally asked.

“I think I’ll stay down here and just talk with you a little, if that’s ok with you” he replied as he settled himself on the couch at my side. He hastened to add, “NOT about school or homework or anything like that. Let’s just chat.”

We did just that. When he finally did head to bed, I heard him say as he rounded the corner, “Oh, I forgot something.”

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! My heart sank and I tensed up as I waited to hear him tell me what important assignment he had forgotten he had to do. And then he came back into the family room where I was sitting, because what he had forgotten was to give me a goodnight hug.

As I hugged this extraordinary child, I thought to myself, “My God! What have I done to deserve this?” These moments of grace remind me why I would walk through fire for this boy. We’ll walk through this Inferno together and there will be love and light at the other end. Amen.

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Country Bumpkins

On Friday afternoon I pulled into the pick up line at Nicholas’ school and settled down to wait for him. Soon I spotted him running towards me with his gigantic backpack slung over his shoulder and a huge grin on his face.

“Rooooaaaad trip!” I whooped as he opened the car door and got in.

It’s been a rough month for us, replete with the usual heavy doses of teen and parental angst, handwringing and recriminations. School has been stressful and that stress has bled into our home life. Too many of our interactions lately have revolved around nagging and arguing about schoolwork. We were both glad to escape from all of that, if only for a weekend.

Once we established the happy fact that Nicholas would NOT be dragging his backpack to Wisconsin, we relaxed into the hour and a half drive to Richmond International Airport. This is the first year my son has been able to sit next to me in the passenger seat, rather than in one of the back seats. It felt great to be chatting side by side, at the very beginning of our trip to visit our friends.

Dinner at Richmond Airport

Dinner at Richmond Airport

We switched planes in Detroit. As we made our way to the gate, we passed through this tunnel:

“We seriously need to have one of these in our house. You have to take a video of this!” Nicholas insisted.

“You know what Grandma would say if she saw us videotaping this?” I asked Nicholas as I complied with his request.

“What would she say?” he asked.

“She’d call us a couple of chonoms.”

“What does that mean?”

“Chonom is Korean for country bumpkin.”

“She’d be totally right. We are a couple of chonoms getting all excited about the light show. Oooo! Now let’s videotape this fountain!”:

We finally arrived in Madison, bedraggled and exhausted from our travels, but so happy to see our friends waiting for us in the lobby.

More on our trip tomorrow…

Speaking of jeans…

Yesterday’s post was inspired by my daughter. This is her wearing her first pair of jeans. It was the first and last pair of jeans she would wear for the next eight years of her life:

Nobody puts baby in the corner

When she got old enough to express her own clothing preferences, she became a strictly yoga pants kind of girl. Last weekend when we were out and about getting some things for my oldest son, (who outgrows his clothes approximately every two weeks), she told me she wanted to give jeans another try. Here she is modeling her second pair of jeans:

Sassy, no?

Happy Weekend, Everyone!

Wrangler

When we were children and my parents still hadn’t been in America very long, there were certain cultural short circuits that had to be sorted out. Some customs of the country were so foreign as to seem outlandish to my parents. Sleepovers, for example, made no sense at all to them. When we’d ask if we could spend the night at a friend’s house their faces would register astonishment. They would ask, “Why would you do that? What’s wrong with your own bed at home?” Trick or Treating was another concept they found bizarre. They were mortified by the idea that their children would dress up in costumes to go begging door to door for candy.  And then there was the issue of  jeans. For many years this particular article of clothing did not exist in our wardrobes, because my parents insisted that it would be disrespectful to our teachers to wear jeans to school.

They finally realized that the dress code was different in the States, when they had their first parent teacher conference with my little brother Teddy’s kindergarten teacher. Teddy’s teacher had a long shaggy beard, he often tucked a daisy into his grey mane behind his ear, and he always wore a pair of denim overalls to school. Faced with this incontrovertible evidence, my parents had to concede that wearing jeans to school would be acceptable. It still wasn’t smooth sailing, by any means. My mom decided that rather than buying jeans, she would make them for us. She threw herself wholeheartedly into the project. She even used red thread along the seams and to stitch artful, free-form designs on the back pockets. To give you an idea of how successful we thought this particular DIY experiment was, we would choose to wear our velvet upholstery pantsuit ensembles rather than the homemade jeans.

One day the inconceivable happened. This man, my father, aka the Easter Island Head:

Dad

…emerged from his room wearing a pair of jeans. For a moment the earth stood still. We all stared, blinking, dumbfounded, our mouths agape. And then my sister broke the silence when she started singing under her breath, “Here comes Wrangler. He’s one tough customer. He knows what he likes, when he sees it.”

English as a Second Language

I had a conversation with my son this weekend and it was as if he were talking in a foreign language.

While I could more or less understand the individual words, I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying at all. It got me thinking about how confusing it must have sometimes been for my parents, for whom English is a second language, when they talked with us.

My mother began studying English when she knew she would be joining my father, who had come to America to embark on the first of many degrees. She still recalls the stilted and unnatural intonation of the recordings she would listen to over and over again: “I am a boy. I am a girl.” She never stopped working on improving her English. In later years, she always had an old paperback copy of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style stashed in her purse to study whenever she had a free moment. She read it so many times, it eventually had to be held together with a rubber band. The spareness of her Strunk and White-influenced English was enriched by the ornate language of the 19th century novels she also loved to read. From reading Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, for example, she talks about “countenances” rather than “faces.” But it’s her adoption of more modern colloquial expressions that always takes us by surprise. I was once driving her somewhere when she discovered that she had been sitting on my sunglasses.

“Oh! I was wondering what was poking my butt!” she said.

I started cackling.

“What?” she said with a grin, “Should I have said, ‘I was wondering what was pricking my ass?!'”

After all his long years of study and the countless hours he’s spent poring over philsophical tomes, my dad lightly bandies about words like hermeneutics and teleological with the Korean accent he’s never lost. As children, our own native English skills would be called into service from time to time to edit articles he’d written. I still die a thousand deaths whenever I think of the time I changed all his “Platonics” into “Platoics” in one of his articles. Callow adolescent that I was, what did I know of philosophy? I hadn’t yet gained the wisdom to know that I knew nothing. Native speaker that I am, I will never know the meanings of half the words that are part of my dad’s lexicon.

My dad’s English is also nuanced with phrases snatched from more popular sources, and especially from the television shows that he sometimes watched with us when we were children. His discourse is peppered with phrases like “Aw, shooks.” Thanks to some old cartoon, he says “meeses” instead of “mice.” When my incessant  prattling got too unbearable, he’d interrupt me midstream, waggle his thumb and say like some hoodlum in an old gangster movie, “Hey. Get lost, will ya?” or sometimes just, “Shaddup, will ya?”

The substandard language his own children used also added to the linguistic confusion. I’m ashamed to admit that my brother and I went through a regrettable phase when we used to call each other “booger.” My dad bore it for as long as he could, and then one day he pulled us aside. “Adrienne, Teddy,” he said gravely, “I don’t want you to use that word anymore.” He heroically soldiered on, though it was clear that each word he uttered was causing him pain, “I know you don’t realize it, but it has sexual connotations.” Teddy and I were mystified and also a little horrified as we tried to imagine what kind of monstrous sexual perversion could take place via the nostril. It was only years later that we learned the word he had thought we were saying…bugger.

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Best weekend ever

Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby

From “April Rain Song,” by Langston Hughes

It’s been cold and grey and wet for three days straight, but I still maintain that it was a beautiful weekend. Because of the rain, my daughter’s soccer practice on Friday was canceled, her game on Saturday was canceled, and my son’s soccer tournament that had been scheduled for Saturday AND Sunday in Richmond was CANCELED! Each text or email announcing the cancellation of these events sent me into a paroxysm of unseemly jubilation. Theoretically speaking, (if I happened to be the kind of person to engage in embarrassing self-revelation), it’s possible that there may have been some fist-pumping, jiggety-jigging in place, and squeals of delight.

What fabulous things did I do with all of that time that was handed to me like a precious gift on a silver platter? We went to the grocery store to buy the pumpkin my oldest son needed for a school project. We went to the shoe store to buy much-needed new sneakers for the younger two. We went to the music store to get my daughter’s violin bow repaired. We went to the pet store to buy the only food that doesn’t make the dogs puke foamy yellow bile all over the carpets. (Always the carpets, never – God forbid – on the far easier to clean tile or hardwood). We took my daughter to get her hair cut. We went to Jiffy Lube. (Every 3,000 miles? More like every 10,000+ miles…). I got caught up on laundry, etc. etc. And yes, a million times YES! It was really and truly:  fabulous.

I didn’t take many photos this weekend, but I did record a couple snapshots in my mind to share with you. They are somewhat related insofar as they both involve food and the sweet, innocent thoughtfulness of children.

On Friday, the Helping Hands group I co-lead met for our first session of the year. This fall, our third and fourth grade kids are organizing a school-wide food drive for the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank. A friend who works at the bank came to talk to us about the problem of hunger in our own community. We discussed how hunger makes people crabby and makes it difficult to concentrate and to work or study. The most powerful moment of the talk came when she told us that the bank serves 26,000 people a month. To give us an idea of how many people that is, she had us visualize a line of people starting from downtown Charlottesville stretching all the way up Route 29 for 8 miles to the airport. This startling image made a big impression on us all. My friend was about to leave after her presentation when one of our students ran up to her and handed her a fistful of coins, all the money she had in her pocket, as a gift to the food bank. It was a lovely moment.

And then there was this moment that revealed to me that my daughter had also absorbed the message about the problem of hunger. On Sunday my husband was feeling a little grumpy and I asked my daughter what we should do to cheer him up. She suggested earnestly: “Maybe we could put a hunk of Jarlsburg (his favorite kind of cheese) under his pillow!”

Finally, I leave you with one actual snapshot from this weekend. This was taken during a brief break on Saturday, when instead of playing/watching soccer, we were checking items off our my list of errands at breakneck speed. First, observe the expressions on the faces of my husband and children. Now look very closely at my reflection in the window. Can you see the maniacal grin pasted on my face?

“What the heck is she so happy about?”

See? Best weekend ever!