break fast.

My workplace used to do all sorts of morale boosting stuff.  Staff appreciation days.  Little gifts with our pay checks.  Candles, candies. 

Little gifts.

Then it stopped. 

But we still had parties.  Birthday cakes.  Baby showers.  Moving upward and onward celebrations. 

Then eventually, layoff sendoffs. 
Awkward.
"Sorry about your job.  Here's some cake.  In a room full of decorations you'll recognize from every other event we've ever had in here.  We bought you a card at the Dollar General.  And we all contributed a couple bucks to stuff in there.  You know, since we all still get paychecks."
That dwindled too.  There aren't enough Friday afternoons in the year for everyone to get their own layoff sendoff.

Now the admin tries.  A Christmas Holiday Winter party celebration luncheon potluck
And today there is a breakfast.  A potluck breakfast.

There is lots of potluck stuff in social work.  And man alive, people can cook. 

Sometimes we eat to cope.
Sometimes we cook to eat.
Sometimes we cope alot.

Years ago there was a lady who worked with us who was an AMAZING cook.  Anything that came out of her kitchen would be gone in three minutes.  She owned a catering business, ran it out of her house.  AMAZING.  Cakes pies casseroles side dishes cookies main dishes candies.  You couldn't go wrong.

Then one day a grant came out from the City.  Something about home repairs for Philadelphia home owners who's homes were in serious disrepair.  It was along side the time when they were demolishing abandoned and dilapidated homes.  I guess it was cheaper to fix some of them than it was to buy them to knock them down. 

I love that you can raise a house, and also raze a house.  English is fun.

This woman applied for the grant.  And turned in her grant application to the office, as it had a better chance of getting in the right hands that way.  And the application wasn't in an envelope. 
And the application clearly stated that her house was next to an abandoned house.  And there were holes in her house that opened up into the abandoned house.  And rats and mice and roaches and centipedes poured into her house from the broken house.  And her son could climb in the holes and into the abandoned house.  Where there were rats and mice and roaches and centipedes.  And squatters.

And that pretty much put an end to me eating at potlucks.

I gave our secretary $10 and took the morning off. 
I hope everyone at the office is enjoying their breakfast.

ketchup.

I miss writing.  A lot.  So much so that I just typo'ed alot.

I could write about work.  But right now it is going that sort of way that if I'm not doing it, I don't want to be thinking about it.  As social service dollars fall away, families fall apart.  Taking away programs from grown ups who people don't necessarily like (crackheads and crazies and such) hurts so many children.  You know the crackheads and the crazies love to have a million babies.  Imagine what those babies are going through these days.
It's really sad what people do to other people.  What politicians do to children.  And then wonder why they grow up to be crackheads and crazies, just like their parents and grandparents and and and.

I could write about the weather.  I'm no good with temps under 75.  And temps are under 75.

I could write about my Upcoming! Vacation!.  But I think that puts my house at risk for breakins.
I'm going to (insert destination here) on (insert date here) and not coming back until (insert date here)!  I'm pretty excited, especially now that the trip is shaping up to be less (insert attraction here) and more (insert activity here). 
Or about my other Upcoming! Vacation! which will happen exactly (#) days after the first one.

I love having two things to look forward too.  Especially when work is work and weather is weather.

I could write about improv. We practice weekly, and have shows the first and last Saturday of each month, though that will probably be increasing as the months go by. There is a video camera installed in the theater now, so there should be some video sometime soon.


I could tell you how much I enjoy starting sentences and paragraphs with I, and how sometimes I edit things to take out the I's so I don't sound like a jerk.

I want to write about Jake and his school and his jokes and how fun he is lately, but I don't want to be a gushy momblogger.  But this kid?  Is hilarious.  And smart.  And a good buddy to have kicking around the house.  Remember how I was so worried about the pajama party?  Yeah, well, later that week on a non-pj party day, there was gross miscommunication between Dave and I on a morning I had to leave super early and Dave took Jake to school and Jake ended up going to school in his pajamas. 
His pajamas that he wore the night before.  His pajamas that weren't pajamas.  His pajamas that weren't pajamas but the clothes he wore the day before.  To school.
My boy was the boy who wore the same thing to school two days in a row.

Tonight to put off going to bed, Jake asked me deep questions.  That is such an awesome kid trick.  I don't know where they learn it, but they do.

Question 1: Mom, what is a soul?
Answer 1: um, erm, mumble jumble love, forever, essense of self, and so on and so forth.
Response 1: Mom, it's actually the bottom of your foot.  Your sole.  See?  Sole.  I was testing you.  Did you know your teeth are bones?

Question 2: Mom, can you tell me all about Black History?
Answer 1: um, erm, mumble jumble, slavery, freedom, oppression, inventions, essense of self, and so on and so forth.
Response 2:  Mom, is there a such thing as White History?  Because I'm a little worried that we come from nowhere and nothing and nobody and we are responsible for planting the seeds of the history of white people and that's a really big job.

Jake, Jake, Jacob.  Who will only be four years old for three more weeks.

He will probably lose a tooth when he's five.  Not that any are loose now, but I think that's when kids lose teeth.  I ate my first tooth I lost.  Swallowed it with my cinnamon toast.  I was worried the Tooth Fairy would have to reach up my butt to get it out.  My parents never said she wouldn't have to.
Also, my grandmother died the same day, and I thought I saw the Tooth Fairy that night, but I still wonder if it was my grandma.  Coming to say goodbye. 

I love a good ghost story.

I could update about the inner turmoil I'm having with finding a kindergarten after they scrambled the catchment areas on us since we moved here.  Switching us from one of the best public elementary schools to one of the worst.  We've already gotten one rejection letter from a Charter School.  One down.

I started watching Lost!  It's a show about a plane crash.  And an island.  And I like it a whole lot more since finding out that I'm not supposed to know what is going on.  Because I was lost.  That's not a pun.  I felt really stupid and wondered if I was so pre-occupied with life that I couldn't even understand television.  But then I learned it's not me, it's Lost.

I'm taking classes at work.  One on Teens.  One on Trauma.  Luckily it's on work time and work dollar, but there is lots of homework about brain function and emoneurophysiopsychobio stuff.  LOTS.  And after these are done, I start the second level of the Trauma class and the second level of an Understanding Anger class.  I took the first part a few years ago.  I learned that I was angry.  Which doesn't sound all that groundbreaking, but I was surprised. 

And that's about it.  Well, it's not, but that's about it for now, for here.  I think I'm going to schedule in some writing time. Get back into it.  Block out a lunchtime or something. 

Plus, it's one more reason to skip the gym.

I sat in on a parenting class a few weeks ago and the topic was:
(in jargon)
-improving parents' ability to identify, express, process and manage feelings such as anger, stress, loss, grief and guilt
-increasing parents' understanding of varied approaches to positive parenting including discipline, setting structure, child rearing, conflict resolution and problem-solving
-increasing parents' knowledge of nurturing and responsive parenting interactions, including empathy, caring, and respect for self and others.
(in lay terms)
should you let your boy cry or should you tell him to sack up and be a man?

Those top three things are three of the six objectives of all parenting programs funded under the parenting program for which I work.
That bottom one thing is something that haunts parents of boychildren everywhere.

The class was broken into two parts.
Part one:
Do we let our sons cry?  Do we set emotional standards for our boys that we wouldn't hold our daughters to?  Are boys allowed to be upset?  Emotional?  Sad?  Weak? Where do we draw the line?
Like most of our classes, the majority of parents were moms with a few dads thrown in.  Most admitted to being harsher on their sons than their daughters.  The ban on crying starts when their sons are toddlers, some said when their sons are preschoolers, but not many.  I'm guessing it's a common age.  No matter who you are, where you live.
"It's important that we teach our boys to be men", they said.  "We can't raise them in this world to be soft.  To be vulnerable.  To be pussies."

Part two:
Ladies, what do you look for in a partner?  A husband?  A male friend?
Hands flew up.  Someone who is in touch with himself.  Someone who is in touch with me.  With my children.  With our children.  Someone who isn't hard.  Isn't grizzled.  Isn't street.
Men, what do you wish you would have gotten from your fathers when you were young?
Hands didn't fly up.  Eyes teared up.
Understanding
Love
Empathy
Sympathy
Affection
Feeling
Emotion
Patience

Part important:
When are we going to start raising our boys to be the men we wish the men in our lives to be?

The Valentine's Day pajama party went off without a hitch.  Jake wore his pajamas that were a little too big and the world didn't shatter around his slippered feet.

He took his nineteen carefully-written, sticker-sealed, Disney-Pixar, faux-foiled Valentines to school and passed them out to all his little friends. 
And brought home nineteen bags of candy and trinkets and parent-designed pieces of puppy love.

Sandwich bags full of candy.  From each child.  More candy than he brought home from trick-or-treating.  For a school that doesn't allow outside food to be brought in, there sure was a lot of outside food brought in.

Stupid over-achieving parents.  Contributing to the detriment of my Jacob's teeth and my waistline.

Dammit.

Jake didn't care that he didn't give out candy, he was just happy to get some.  I don't care that he didn't give out candy, I'm just happy that I can take the Reese's before anyone else sees them.

Being a mom and the primary curator of the kitchen has its perks.

Valentine's Day, in the can

More video of me and my improv team, Asteroid!

The ! is part of our name.  Not part of the sentence.

More video of me and my improv team, Asteroid!!

Click here for the You Tube version.

And here is the Facebook view:


I hope all of you have an amazing and love-filled Valentine's Day weekend. 
Heck, I hope all of you have an amazing and love-filled life.

When I get upset about something or stressed out or I want to deny that reality exists, I focus on some minute detail of nothingness and drill it into the ground as if it is a major life event.

Enter Jake's pajama party at school next week.

Now, we aren't so much a pajama family.  Too often, bedtime routines fall by the wayside and we sleep where we fall.
Most times we fall in our clothes.

We have sweatpants.
And t-shirts.
But we aren't so much a pajama family as a family who enjoys a good set of eating clothes.

Someone was nice and gave Jake a pair of jams for Christmas, but they are too big and I don't know if they are all that class(room worth)y.

So what do I do?  Do I go buy him a pair?  No.  I just can't.
I can't spend dollars on something that is just for show.  Something that will just sit in a drawer/laundry pile.
Do I let him wear his sweats?  No.
No one should ever leave the house without beltloops.
Plus, lots of kids wear sweatpants to school every day and someone will think I'm a negligent mother who failed to look at the school calendar.

BTW, when is the official cutoff line for sweatpants in school?
Because as far back as I can remember, sweatpants kids are, well, they are the kids that wear sweatpants to school.

I shudder.

One time in second grade, a girl accidentally wore her pajamas to school.  Rather, her brother's pajamas.  She cried and cried and was red as a beet all day, and no one teased her because we all felt really bad for her.
She is the same girl that on Guidance Counselor in the Classroom Day, when the GC brought a pencil box and told us that inside we'd find an image of the most important person in the world, and after we guessed our little guesses (President Reagan! The teacher! Mork!) we lined up and looked in that box.  One by one.  And when it was her turn, she looked inside- the box held a mirror- and ran out of the room gasping for breath.
She always smelled like animals.
No one ever teased her about that, either.
No one ever teased her about much, but no one ever was real friendly to her either.
I think of her all the time.

So what am I to do?  Pajamas pajamas pajamas.  I guess maybe I'll throw a hem in the ones that are too big and call it a day.

Also?
The kids are supposed to wear slippers.
Jake's slippers?
Dirty McQueens that should be relegated to the scrap yard.
Dirty McQueens that make taking your shoes off in the house moot because these things are so gross that you may as well just track in whatever it is you stepped in outside because it can't be worse than what is stuck to the bottom of the Dirty McQueens.

My kid is about to become the pigpen of the class.  I just know it.
And I'm about to become the pigpen mom.

These are the types of things I never thought about when I thought about what to think about Jake going to school.

I love to make soup on Sundays.  Fry down the onion and celery and maybe garlic and toss whatever is in the fridge into the stockpot and let it cook for a couple hours.  Makes the whole house smell amazing and makes food for a week.

Bowl after bowl after bowl of soup. 
Ssssoooooooouuppppppppp.
Same soup again and again and again and again.

So I came up with a solution.  I call it Soup That is Based on that Story in the Bible Where the Lady Keeps Taking a Coin from Her Purse or Maybe it was Wheat from a Sack or Water from a Well or Fish from a Barrel but the Purse/Sack/Well/Barrel Never Runs Empty but Whatever the Story is, My Brain Automatically Tells Me it's Pickles from a Jar, Most Likely because I Haven't Heard nor Read the Story in Thirty Years and I Loved Pickles as a Small Child and I'm Not Motivated to Check the Facts because I don't Care because it's the Moral that Counts.

-or-

"Pickle Soup"

Pickle Soup is simple.  You start with the basic-est of basic soup on Sunday, and then every day you add something else so it's a little different each time you eat it.

Today I made potato soup.  Tomorrow I'll probably add broccoli.  Cheese the next day.  Then carrots the following.  A can of corn.  Dice up those tomatoes.  The halfabagga frozen peas that's in the back of the freezer.  Some crab, maybe.

It's a good way to use up what you have, eat something that doesn't come off a lunch truck, feel creative in the kitchen, and make up your own bible stories upon which to base your life.