Neighborhood-Kids All Local. All for Kids. All the Time.

We have been taken over by name-brand mania in our house. Names like Aeropostale, Hollister, and Abercrombie. Leah tosses these brands into her conversations like they’re familiar friends, when, really, they are distant relatives who would laugh at her plebian togs if they could. Everything is “cute” these days (if she deems it such), and she longs to have names plastered across her chest. Preferably one of the above-mentioned. It’s almost as if finishing fifth grade triggered some kind of clothing hormone. All the girls have it. And the ones who don’t are falling behind fast.

Leah is going into sixth grade at one of the public middle schools and her awareness of what’s cool/not cool has become the focus of her young life. Unfortunately for her, she has a mother who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about fashion, although once in a while, she—her mother—thinks maybe she should do something about her Value Village wardrobe. My sister-in-law and teen-age nieces feel sorry for Leah, can’t help chuckling that she loves fashion when her mother hates spending money on clothes. I figure it’s the cycle of life—whatever it is your parents hate or ignore or aren’t even aware of becomes a bit of an obsession. (For me, it’s new furniture.)

It’s not that I don’t like nice clothes, and for the record, I do not deny Leah. I just don’t like spending boatloads of money on things that will be yesterday’s news in six months. But I still remember the young lust for certain clothes that comes with being a middle schooler, so I indulge her as much as budget allows (and she gets a dose of my views on advertising and everyone looking the same and what fits into the budget). Today, we headed to Plato’s Closet, the new consignment teen chain in Bellingham. Leah’s little figure isn’t there for many of the tight T-shirts (thankfully), but we found a couple of sweatshirts she liked. And then off to Target for inexpensive jeans. My daughter has inherited a certain amount of my thrift and says she would rather spend her money on name-brand sweatshirts than jeans.

I have a thing about conspicuous names on clothing—it almost makes me twitchy, especially in places like Plato’s Closet, where Hollister sweatshirts have their own rack (and cost $22 second-hand so I’m guessing they’re $50 new). I much prefer a little insignia placed somewhere no one will notice, and I’ve told Leah as much. But if she wants to wear Aeropostale—which she does—and it’s on massive sale or she can find it second-hand, I’ve decided I will let her.

When we get home after our shopping trip, she's so excited about her new duds, she drags her unsuspecting eight-year-old brother into her room to show them all off. He dutifully sits for the fashion line-up.

“If you were a girl, Ty, would you like this?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” he says. He watches her pull out her various new shirts and comments where necessary when she asks what he thinks. “Hey, Leah, watch this. This is how a crab would walk if it had just four legs.”

I find myself chuckling in the dining room at her desperate attempts to get someone, anyone, to care as much as she does. Even though I have a hard time spending money on looking good (hmm, maybe I could learn something from Leah), and I don't like splashy names on clothes, I do find Leah's enthusiasm pretty contagious. I'm glad she's so excited about school, even if it's mostly about what she's going to wear. It could be a whole lot worse. 

So, here’s a way to get your kid’s bedroom cleaned up: let her paint a wall after she cleans it. And we came up with this even before Randy Pausch died on July 25. In case you don’t know, he was a computer-science professer at Carnegie Mellon University with pancreatic cancer who advocated, among other things, letting your kids paint their bedroom walls. I didn't find this out till after he died and after painting the wall. And all at once, the wall feels bigger now than a mere painting project. It feels like a tribute.

Leah was so stoked about the idea, she spent a whole day—and I’m not kidding—going through her stuff and putting it away or sorting it into one of three bags: recycle, toss, give away. Suddenly we could see the floor. And she admitted she actually liked it that way. Till now, she’s always maintained she prefers her room “messy” (read: disaster zone). I'm telling you, Randy (is that too familiar?) must have been onto something with the bedroom painting. 

We went to the paint store and she chose all shades of blue swatches, and when we got home she taped them up on the wall and studied them for a day. She settled on a deep cobalt. “I want to paint polka dots on top,” she said. Polka dots? Right away I was wondering about the work involved, the days of drying time, but she had it all figured out. “We’ll sponge them on. It won’t take long.” Martha Stewart would be proud.

Two days later, her wall was blue. We traced chalk circles around a plate, and we sponged lime green, white, and turquoise polka dots. (The latter two from our basement stash.) After the paint was dry, we wiped off the chalk marks, and she had textured polka dots that remind us of snowballs.

She loves it. It did turn out well, I must say. We made a good team. Me, the work horse, Leah, the visionary. Best of all, she has become room-proud and doesn’t let clutter build up (which, now that I know about Randy, kind of pales as the point).

Ty is inspired and is asking when we can paint his room in polka dots. All the walls, not just one. I’m still waiting for him to start tidying the clutter.  But we may do it anyway just to honor Randy's memory. 

Ty learned some valuable lessons today in his quest for a PlayStation 1 controller. In case you’re not up to speed with electronics (I’m only just coming out of my cave), PS1 is the original and is considered prehistoric. I learned this about a month ago. I’m sure Ty’s electronically inclined friends think he’s way uncool. He knows this to a point, but he’s so happy to be part of the craze, he doesn’t care. (A friend of his the other day said, “Your mom doesn’t let you play T games?” [That’s “Teen” to the uninitiated.] “That sucks.” Really? Am I that out of touch?)

I wasn't happy about the PS1 acquisition, in case you were wondering. Ty bought the whole shebang plus games at a neighbor’s garage sale in June. I didn’t find out until late that afternoon because he was so sure I would be furious. I wasn’t, but I wasn’t happy. When it comes to virtual life, I’m a self-confessed Luddite. Oh, we love You Tube around here, and I watch trailers on Blockbuster.com, but I am not into boys—and it’s mostly boys—spending hours on end trying to control a race car, or shooting Star Wars characters, or even snowboarding. Half an hour is barely okay with me, and at other people’s houses, I have no idea what parents allow or if they care. Around here, I make Ty read for half an hour to earn equal time. He can also do math, but he always chooses reading and usually easy reading at that. 

Anyway, Ty decided he needed a second controller (for his friends that will never get to play video games here), and he decided pawn shops were the way to go. I told him we would not drive around and that he would need to make some phone calls first, and he would need to do the talking. Bless his heart, he did. He learned about the Yellow pages, how to say thank you at the end of the call (no, you don’t just hang up), and how to check off the shops that don’t have what you need.

At last he located a shop that had a controller. I had promised him I would take him, so off we went. He paid exactly $3 of his allowance money (I likely paid at least $8 in gas but oh well), and I told him he could test it at home to see if it worked. He was ecstatic.

Alas, we think it doesn’t work. He tried it every which way but all the images just sat there, waiting for a functioning controller. His disappointment was palpable, but he didn’t even mention the loss of $3 or expect that maybe I could pay for it. He knew it was truly his bad luck. And when I told him we couldn’t return it to the pawn shop (could we?), he just sighed.

In an effort to bolster his frayed euphoria, I suggested Craig’s List. Like, as in posting a want ad. “I’ll bet you get someone who wants to give it to you, Ty,” I said. He was skeptical, but we posted an ad—our first ever foray into Craig’s List—and then he went off to his grandma’s for the weekend. (And what we’re doing without the kids is another topic unto itself.)

Lo and behold, I got a call and an email within the hour. Both parties have PS1 controllers to give away. Ty will be thrilled when he finds out. Now I’m just a little worried we may be inundated before the weekend is out.

Last night I was a mean mother. I made my kids go to an All-Comers track meet. Made them. If you don’t know about these, they’re track meets for all ages, held at Civic Field every Monday evening, 6-9pm, and they're a lot of fun. Anyway, between trips, working at horse camp, and laziness, we’ve only been to one this summer. Last summer, I think we went to all of them because my kids think they’re a blast. Or they used to, anyway.

You’d have thought I was dipping Ty’s toes in hot oil when I said we were going. Admittedly, I did drag him away from playing with the neighbor kid to go, and he didn’t see the sense in that. I don’t blame him. I did wonder at my own motives because, according to all the books, after all, unstructured play is the absolute best thing you can give young kids. Leah claimed to be tired, but I told her the best way to get energy was to make energy, or something along those lines. She'll probably quote me when she's 30. 

My motivation? Purely financial. No need for my kids to win or, you know, have a good time. Nope. I was just trying to get something out of our season pass that we paid for back in June, and until last night, had used exactly once. I even told my kids as much. I said, “If you go tonight and run one race, I won’t make you go for the rest of the summer.” (Is this as sick as it sounds?) Of course, along the way I was counting on kiddie epiphanies, realizations of “hey, yeah, I love this sport.”

Instead, Ty cried so much he hyperventilated, that catchy tri-breath thing that kids do when they’ve cried too long. I felt bad and told him he didn’t have to run after all, he just had to come because he couldn’t stay home alone. He was so upset when we arrived at Civic that he went off grocery shopping with Dad while Leah and I scouted for her friends. Alas, none to be found. None who were running, anyway. And I could feel her enthusiasm, the little she’d conjured, ebbing away. Why are we here again? That’s right—to get our money’s worth.

While Leah went off to cheer on younger friends in their races, I found parent friends I hadn’t seen all summer. This was pretty much why I was here—that and the money thing. And it was worth it. Through one friend, I met a Spanish family touring the U.S. for two months. We had a great chat about points of interest in Washington and traveling abroad with kids. Their daughter is just Leah’s age, and the two girls ended up running the 100 meters together (Leah’s token race for me). Their daughter won the race by a couple yards, with Leah in hot pursuit. The girl was ecstatic, clearly having the time of her life, and I took to watching her run because she was such a happy kid. Vicarious parenting, if you will. We didn’t stay for the 200 meters, but I’d love to have seen her run it. 

When Ty and Curt came back from shopping, it was clear Ty had undergone a mental shift, and what do you know, he was ready to run. He even had fun doing it.
Heading home, I thanked the kids for humoring me, and I told them they were off the hook for the rest of the summer. “What?” said Ty. “But I like running. I want to go to another meet.”
 

Let me just say I’m not keen on horse riding. But somehow I ended up on the back of one at Canyon Corral while we were in Yellowstone. Granted, it was totally geared for mainstream greenhorns. You plod along a trail for an hour, and the hardest thing you do is lift your horse’s head away from the grass it keeps trying to eat. For Leah, who is spending the summer working at a stable and helping run horse camps, who loves nothing better than to canter around a field all afternoon, and whose favorite smell is horse manure, it was downright boring. For me, not.

Before we set out, Jessica, the head cowgirl, sat us down—about 15 of us—for a few pointers. Which mainly consisted of trotting out all the stories of people falling off while they were fiddling with their cameras (hence, no cameras allowed) or when their horses spooked because someone’s baseball cap blew off (no caps allowed either). “Also,” she said, “normally horses need to have a little space, but we ask that you keep these horses nose to tail because bison have been known to charge our line-up.”

Well, that’s just great. (And partway through the ride, I learned my husband’s horse actually had a scar from being gored by a bison. I did not need to know that.) Here’s the truth: The last time I was on a horse, at 12, it didn’t go well. I was just sitting on my horse, minding my own business, but I was also holding the reigns of a second horse while my two friends were trying to round up a third horse who’d escaped his corral. The horse whose reigns I was holding brushed against the horse I was sitting on and next thing I knew, I was flying through the air. Right after I hit the ground, something very big rolled on me. Only momentarily, mind you, but it was enough to knock the wind out of me, and when I finally could breathe, my ribs hurt like a mother. In fact, taking a deep breath of any kind hurt for six months.

So, when one of the horses at Canyon got a watering hose wrapped around his foot and freaked, I was not happy. This was while the cowboys were helping folks up onto their horses. The kids, about six of them, were all down at the other end of the corral and didn’t even notice, but the two horses near me already had mounted riders, and those horses got agitated and it was clear neither rider knew what to do to calm them. I was still on the ground between the fence and my horse, not far from the agitated horses. But all the employees were busy trying to get the hose off the horse’s hoof, and left the “riders” to figure out their horses on their own, while Hosey careened around, flicking its leg out behind itself. My horse kept shifting closer to me, while I meanwhile was eyeballing an escape route through the split-rail fence if he got too close. I did not need squashed ribs again.

And here’s the thing about horse riding: you’re not supposed to let your horse know you’re nervous, because “they can tell,” everyone says. So even if the cowboys can’t tell, my horse surely can, and how am I supposed to fake it? And that in itself is stressful. By the time I got on my horse I was completely pretending I wanted to be here. But they did give me a super mellow horse, who did nothing more than twitch his skin to rid himself of mosquitoes, so maybe they did know, after all.

The ride itself was beautiful, through open, rolling country (I kept my eye open for bison, of course). But we also rode on a narrower trail directly next to a canyon edge (ah, so that’s why they call it Canyon). I don’t know if other people were nervous, too, but I noticed that the only people talking were the kids. Maybe the adults were meditating on the views. I, myself, was so busy not looking down and praying no one would be stung by a bee while we were a foot away from the edge that I had a hard time taking in anything.

But we made it back to the corral without any mishaps, and I wondered if Jessica had made up those stories. Still, I was so relieved to swing off my horse at the end of the ride that I’m thinking I might sit out the horse riding next time.