The Mighty Ladybugs

Elizabeth is currently in the midst of her first experience playing a team sport - community soccer. Her team is called the Ladybugs, and it is made up of kindergarten girls from four nearby elementary schools. They are all sweet, adorable little things and they get along very well. They are also all clearly pumped to play, and they have great team spirit. One of her team mates, upon finding out that their team was called the Ladybugs, immediately asked "What do Ladybugs destroy??"

Well, as it turns out... nothing.

These sweet, earnest little girls have played four games. In four games, they have scored one goal. In four games, they have had about thirty goals scored against them. It is truly heartbreaking to watch.

For the parents, that is. The girls mostly want to know what they're having for snack at the end of the game. And no matter what is going on on the field, their team mates are usually sitting on the sidelines chanting "LAY-DEE-BUGS! LAY-DEE-BUGS!" - seemingly without knowing that they are being utterly pummeled by the other team of adorable five year old girls.

Elizabeth, unsurprisingly, is not a very aggressive soccer player. She gets distracted a lot, and she doesn't run very fast. But she's always happy to get out on the field, and she usually remembers which direction she is supposed to kick the ball in - and at five, I think that's good enough for now. Most of her team is very similar. Her coach has a good attitude and so do the rest of the parents - the parents with our team, that is.

Gotta say though, I'm a little appalled by the behavior of some of the other parents on other teams. Too loud, too negative. Not in the spirit of everyone playing and having a good time. It's too bad, really. And it kind of turns your stomach at the end of a game to see kids jumping up and down screaming "WE WON! WE WON!" when your tired group of little girls would have been happy with even just one goal.

...You'll just have to forget I said that last part when the Ladybugs score another goal though, because I'm pretty sure all the parents will be jumping up and down celebrating. I bet if it was allowed, we'd bust out some champagne, too!

He's Two, What's Your Excuse?

Jacob and I made an excursion to the local toy store today. He wanted to play with the train table; I wanted to get started on ideas for Christmas - win-win. We go to this toy store often. They know us pretty well, and it's the kind of place where there are toys out for the kids to play with, and the atmosphere is very friendly.

Usually.

Today we shared our toy store experience with a wobbly old lady and a child who appeared to be her five year old great-great-great granddaughter (I may be exaggerating a little.) In his enthusiasm while getting from the train table to the toy work bench, Jacob accidentally bumped into the wobbly old lady. I apologized, she sniffed at me, and I decided to stay closer to Jacob than I might have otherwise, just to make sure he didn't bother her again.

Jacob played happily for several minutes. I made notes in my notebook about things I want to purchase for Christmas, and put in an order for a specific Playmobil set that I know Elizabeth is dying to have. I gave Jacob a five minute warning before I planned to leave. In the background, I heard the wobbly old lady give one of the clerks a bit of a hard time because they didn't have a toy doctor kit for sale - just dress up doctor clothes. Once I'd finished making my lists, I told Jacob it was time to go home for lunch.

Cue tantrum.

Jacob, understandably, does not like leaving the toy store. Frankly, neither do I. I'm thirty two and I still want to buy about 90% of what's for sale there. He ran away from me backwards, but I managed to catch him when he was distracted by the shiny rocks in the "pick your own bag of shiny rocks" display. As I hauled my screaming demon out of the store, he flailed, and landed a solid hit right to my face, nearly knocking my glasses off.

Wobbly old lady gasps in horror, and makes The Face.

You know what face I'm talking about. The Face that tells you that the person wearing it is thinking "Good god, woman - get control of your child. If you could call that shrieking hellbeast a child. You are the Worst Parent in the World."

I put my glasses back on, smiled pleasantly at her, and dragged my toddler out of the toy store. She never said a word to me, but The Face stays with you. Amazing how perfect strangers can really make you feel terrible about yourself. My initial inclination was to be embarrassed. I still kind of am.

But I'm also kind of angry. Lady, he is two. It was lunch time. I didn't roll over and bribe him with candy or a toy to get him out of the store. I took my lumps (literally) and hauled his little butt out of there. And you're still going to look at me like I'm everything that's wrong with modern parenting? Screw that.

There's some old advice about how we should always be gentle to each other, because everyone around us is fighting some sort of battle in their lives. Not only do I wholeheartedly agree in general, I think it's especially true for parents. I hope I am never so far removed from my parenting experiences that I can't step back for a second and have some sympathy for someone wrestling with a cranky toddler instead of putting on my judgey pants. You never know what trials someone else is living. And I'll be thankful that the only trial today (so far) has been a crabby two year old.

The Worst Thing About Adulthood

I was the child who wanted to Believe.

I believed in everything, ever so much longer than my peers. I believed in Santa Claus. I believed in unicorns, and dragons. I believed in Never Land. I believed in fairies. I believed in wishing on stars, in throwing pennies in fountains, in four leaf clovers. I believed in magic in every form.

In my adolescence, I believed in things like psychic powers and phenomena, in ghosts and afterlives. I read about indigo children and astrology and burned candles, imagining I could control the flames. I believed in all sorts of new age hippie crystal crap. My father even humored me once on a family vacation and took me on a tour of the vortexes in Sedona. I sat in them trying to feel the energy, scratching my name into the stone and leaving piles of pebbles in what I thought were meaningful arrangements. To his credit, he never made fun of me once (at least not to my face.)

When I started college, I believed I was a good student and that someday, I was going to be the best in the world at SOMETHING. I didn't know what yet, but I was going to get a Ph.D. and everyone was going to know my name. It took exactly one semester for me to realize, perhaps for the first time in my life, that it wasn't going to happen. I was not a notable student. My mediocre work ethic that had gotten me decent grades in high school earned me nothing but mediocre grades in college. Worse, when I realized that I needed to work harder - and did, harder than I ever had before - my results were still mediocre. I was never going to do well in college level math, and therefore I was never going to do well in college level science. When I turned my attention to literature, I discovered that literary theory made me want to throw myself off the campus bell tower. I settled for anthropology, which made me feel like I could do science but didn't actually require me to know any "hard" science like chemistry or physics. I thought I could make something of myself in animal behavior research, but my luck ran out when my primatology professor went on sabbatical during my junior and senior years, and I failed to impress the other animal behavior prof on campus (and honestly, his work with ground squirrels failed to impress me, too.)

There was a moment shortly before I finished my bachelor's degree when I was walking down North University Avenue in late fall, headed towards the museum. I don't know what it was about that day, or that moment, but as I passed the League and the Dental School and saw the museum building in front of me, imposing and impressive, it dawned on me. I was not going to get a Ph.D. I was not going to be the best at anything, in any field. The most I could hope for was being the best at my new job that they'd ever seen... and honestly, the woman in the position before me had set the bar pretty damn low.

For awhile, I had some delusions that I could be a major player in informal education. Then I attended some conferences, met a lot of people, and realized that there are two kinds of museum educators - the people in charge, and the people who actually do the work. My career is an excellent illustration of this. I could never get past being one of the people who actually does the work, and I wasn't even sure I wanted to - even if it gets other people fancy titles and fatter paychecks and gets me... here.

The older I get, the more I realize that there is pretty much nothing about me that's special or unique. I am never going to be notable for pretty much anything. And for a kid who wanted desperately to believe in something, ANYTHING, that would set her apart from the rest of the mundane... that's a pretty hard pill to swallow.

I thought being a parent would give me a chance to believe in something bigger than me again. And in a lot of ways, it has. But in so many others, it has brought every single one of my failures into sharp relief and provided endless reminders that I am not only nothing but average - sometimes I am barely adequate. Monetarily, I can barely provide my kids with a fraction of what I had in childhood. I realize this is situational and that a lot of my generation is stuck in the same boat because of what the world is like right now, but knowing that doesn't ease my anguish over it.

And to add insult to injury - on top of ALL THIS - I appear to be raising a skeptic. "But is it REAL???" is one of the most common questions Elizabeth asks. At five, I don't think I EVER would have questioned the reality of something I wanted to believe in - I just believed. She wants answers, and she wants them in detail. For the first time in perhaps my entire life, I am dreading Christmas. I am so afraid she is going to ask how Santa will get into our house when we don't have a chimney or a fireplace. On the one hand, there are plenty of acceptable explanations for this that won't necessarily hamper her ability to believe. But on the other... I'm 32 years old and my babies don't have a fireplace. Will my seemingly unrelated mundane failures somehow cost her the magic of belief? I don't know.

I still want to believe. It's just so much harder and more heartbreaking than it used to be.

Naptime is the New Happy Hour

I am starting to embrace the fact that I do most of my writing and reading when Jacob is napping (or supposed to be napping.) In my head, this is not the most effective use of those blissful few hours in the early afternoon when he is out of commission. For example, here are some things that I have recently told myself I would accomplish during nap time:

• Sorting old clothes to donate to Purple Heart
• Replacing the summer clothes with the fall/winter ones
• Dust. Dust. Dust.
• Laundry. Laundry. Laundry.
• Reorganizing the book/DVD/video game shelves
• Sorting toys
• Cleaning out any number of closets (why does this tiny condo have so many closets?!)

Guess how many of those things I've done during nap time? If you guessed zero - well, you'd be wrong because I actually did get together a Purple Heart donation during nap time last week. BUT. Most of it? Not at all. The best part is how I can justify it all. Dusting and laundry? Great chores to do while the kids are actually up and around because it's so easy to work around them. Switching out clothes? I'll wake him up if I'm in and out of the bedroom doing that. Sorting toys and cleaning out shelves and closets? Either too loud or too big a job to get done in two hours - and Dan would kill me if I had all the disc media strewn all over the house while either of the kids was around to get into it.

So I write instead, because if I don't, I can actually FEEL my brain atrophy. And hello, my Farmville crops aren't going to harvest themselves, you know.

Just kidding.

...Not really.