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

So, we’re at the end of the first week of school, and already my kids have each missed a day due to illness. Ty missed the first day, staying home to watch movies and veg out while his fever ran its course. Leah stayed home yesterday, her second day of middle school (when locker assignments were made, no less), and lay on the couch, staring at the ceiling.

Today, they both went off to school, and I felt a corresponding energy lift—like my brain was finally free to relax, focus, and engage with what I wanted to engage with (work, actually, but focusing on work without kids hanging over your shoulder is fun. Well, that, and I like my work).

I guess the upside to the bad colds is Leah was forced to relax about locker partners and who it would be and where her locker would be and what the combination would be. Not everyone relaxes in this situation, of course, but she actually did, much to my surprise (she’s the type who plans down to the last detail), and I think reconciling with the unknown was a good thing for her. Plus she got the locker issue resolved today, and all is well.

My kids don’t get home until 3:45 this year. Wow. I feel like a free woman. And I also see just how fleeting it all is. Ty will be a middle schooler in three years. Leah will be a high schooler in three years. She will be graduating high school in seven years. Seven years. In ten years…okay, you see where I’m going. I’ll stop.
 

Today, I got to listen to a tantrum at a check-out counter, and inside I bowed down to the growing-up gods and said “thank you, thank you, thank you for getting me past that stage.” I have this experience a lot these days when I am at the library or at the grocery store or a restaurant. My heart goes out to the parents enduring the rage because I have so been there. (And not to say we won’t go there again—I see the potential, but it will likely involve heavy door slamming within the confines of our own home).

It happened at Target. I was there with my two kids and one of Ty’s friends, who dutifully came along on our errands so he could get out of his mom’s errands (because, after all, if you’re with a friend, the errands aren’t quite so painful).

Anyway, I let the boys hang in the toy department while Leah and I were in another area and they were happier than pigs in…well, you know. When I went to round them up them, I noticed a mom and her two daughters also trying to escape the toy department without anything in hand. The mom was, at any rate. At a rapid pace.

Next thing I knew, her younger daughter, maybe about five, was charging down the aisle after her mother with something in her hand and huge tears rolling down her face. “I waaannnnttttt thhiiissss,” she was wailing. The mom, to her credit, kept moving and didn’t even stop to talk about it.

About fifteen minutes later, we were at the check-out counter, and we could hear the same girl sobbing loudly at another counter. Except for this girl’s tears, you could have heard a pin drop. Everyone was listening, and the woman in front of me turned to Leah and said, “I’ll bet you didn’t cry like that.” Uh, wrong.

The thing was the kid wasn’t angry so much as utterly heartbroken, and panicked that she really wasn’t going to get this thing (and she wasn’t—her mom silently paid, knowing she was being stared at by the masses, trying not to feel completely humiliated, and then headed for the exit with her younger daughter left behind to follow when she was ready, which turned out to be immediately in a flurry of escalated wails). I really felt sorry for the kid. And I felt sorry for the mom, too, and I can imagine tonight’s conversation and the eye rolling with her husband when the kids are in bed. 

But I was impressed. That mom had such grace. I know I wasn’t that together, and I’m ever so grateful my kids are the ages they are because I don't think I could do it again.  
 

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. 

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.

I’ve just returned from the last-day-of-school assembly, which featured a slide show of the kids and the many events that took place this year, as well as a send-off for the fifth graders. Each fifth grader received a certificate, kind words, and many rounds of applause. Afterward, they lined up in the hall outside the cafeteria to receive congratulatory handshakes from all the kids, the teachers, and the fifth grade parents, who were specially invited to watch this rite of passage.

My daughter is one of those fifth graders. For about an hour longer. She is very much looking forward to the new horizons of middle school, and with the busyness of this week’s end-of-the-year celebrations, she isn’t focused on the finality of this good-bye. But of course her mother is.

As I write this, I am recalling a visit with my grandmother about 8 years back when my son was a baby and Leah a toddler prone to violent tantrums. I was awash in diapers, baby food, dirty dishes, tears, and broken nights, and often I was ready to snap. But on that cloudy morning, not unlike today, as I chatted with my 91-year-old grandmother, who was debilitated by bad hearing, macular degeneration so advanced she couldn’t see faces at all, and the general malaise of a 91-year-old body, and yet still able to laugh at a funny story and cuddle a squirming baby, she said something that has stuck with me. 

She said, “These are the best years of your life. These are the golden years. ”

This from a woman who had lived her life, a very full life, and who was closer to the end than either of us knew. Who had more perspective than I’ll ever have, and who could see more clearly than I could where I was in my life with my babies.

Whenever I am passing through the entrance to a new phase of my children’s lives, as I am today, I think of her and those words, and how fast our parenting years move.

And I wish she could have been there today to clap for Leah. She would have been so pleased and proud.

These are the best years of our lives.