Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
|
|
| M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
|
|
Friday, May 16, 2008 Finally, they're listening to me. posted by M. Giant 11:06 AM 1 comments 1 Comments:Thank goodness! Thursday, May 15, 2008 Analyze This M. Small has known how to spell his name for going on two years now. One summer day in 2006, he and I were out on the deck when I picked up a piece of his sidewalk chalk and wrote the first letter of his name while pronouncing said letter. He immediately spelled out the rest of his name by himself. That's not to say he can write his name; when I gave him the chalk that day, the only thing he could seem to write out for himself was ///||\/(( Writing has continued to elude him, even as he's learned the entire alphabet, every letter by sight, and how to verbally spell out "mom" and "dad" and "no" and "Saturn V." There are a few letters that he can form by arranging sticks or straws on a flat surface, but skills to write a letter of his own just aren't there yet. At least not until he started school. Suddenly, last night, without warning, he wrote a couple of capital A's in pink chalk on the garage door. I think he might have been trying to spell his own name, but none of the other letters he formed are in it. I just don't think he's learned those letters yet, not that it kept him from trying. You know how people sometimes say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing?  So, do you think I should be worried that the my son's first written word is ANAL? Also, do you think I should hose down the garage door before people start showing up to answer the ad? I guess I've been posting public writings that embarrass him for the last three and a half years. A bit of turnabout seems only fair. posted by M. Giant 12:32 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:Delurking to comment because that's probably the funniest thing I've seen all week. M. Small is awesome.
Quick! Teach him to write 'OGY' and then show off how smart he is. Tuesday, May 13, 2008 Out of Sight Today during lunch I brought my glasses and my new prescription into the local wholesaler and asked if they could replace my scratched, outdated lenses with new ones. The lady behind the counter said they could, but they'd have to send them in somewhere and they wouldn't be back for at least two weeks. So I said, "*All righty," and handed them over. Sure, I don't have a backup pair, but how had could it be to go without for a while? After all, I never wore glasses at all before I was three. While I was at the store, I figured I might as well pick up some batteries. So I headed over to a black-and-copper blur to pick up a brick of double A's. It yelped and popped me upside the head. Probably shouldn't have worn that sweatshirt in the first place, lady. When I finally found the batteries, or at least a package of vitamin supplements that felt a lot like batteries, I got in line to check out. But instead of taking my credit card, the lady at the front of the line handed me a paper cup full of granola. Which, along with the glowing white clothes she was wearing, made me wonder if she was some kind of cultist. Someone directed me to the checkout lines, and I waited patiently, pressing my watch to my nose every five minutes or so in an effort to get someone to notice my impatience. Finally I spoke up to the dumpy individual in line in front of me: "Can you believe how slow this line is?" When he or she didn't respond, I tapped him or her on the shoulder and realized I was touching cardboard. I had been waiting in line behind a stack of discarded boxes blocking a closed lane. And I bet it didn't even have its credit card ready, either. I decided not to go to the bathroom. There's such a thing as pushing your luck. On the way out to the parking lot, I was tackled to the ground. Oops, forgot about the person at the exit who checks everyone's receipt with a highlighter. I had been wondering what that pink slash floating in the air had been. I've already told you how much I hate this store's parking lot, but today it was even worse. The wind was as harsh as ever, and it made it difficult for me to get a fix on my car's location. Every time I pressed the panic button on my key fob, the sound of my car alarm would either get distorted by the wind or drowned out entirely. And that was when I was in range, which was only about a quarter of the time. I was also lucky in that my office is a straight shot down the road from the store. All I had to do was drive slowly, keep one foot on the curb, and dismiss the honks of the ignorant Anglophobes who objected to the side of the street I was driving on. Parking was a little tricky -- I decided to park in the empty area at the top of the ramp so I wouldn't accidentally bump into someone's door getting out of the car. The parked vehicles I'd already blundered into while trying to drive past them were quite enough, I thought. Once inside the building, I finally got to test my theory that I can make it from the front door to my desk with my eyes closed. And I can. But that touchy prick with the personal space issues who's sitting in my chair is going to have to go. After feeling my way to an empty corner cubicle (or maybe it's an office, or the mailroom) I figured I could borrow for a few hours, I sat down and wrote this entry by feed. By expanding the text size to 500 parent, I was able to zero in on the red squiggly lines that abdicate a typo and illuminate all of them. Thank Golf for spell check. I’m not sure how I'm going to drive home, to be honest. I can almost read my cell phone screen if I hold it right in front of my face, so maybe I can figure out something using its GPS function on my cell phone. I really hope it has one. * Everything after this point in the entry is false. posted by M. Giant 11:53 AM 5 comments 5 Comments:
Oh my god. This is totally what would happen if I left my house without corrective lenses. Lying in bed, I can't read the big red numbers on the alarm clock with my glasses off. And the really sad thing is that I am far from the blindest person in my family.
2 weeks? Really? WOW. er... glasses. This entry made me lol several times. Thanks, dude!
You must have the same stupid insurance I do, where they have to send them out to the insurance company's lab to make the lenses, hence the two-week wait (which turned out to actually be less than a week for me last month). Always good to have the back-up glasses for when they want to take your frames away. An old pair or a cheap pair of "one hour" lenses and cheap fraimes to get you through waiting for the quality stuff. Sunday, May 11, 2008 Graduation Last Wednesday I picked up M. Small from school for the first time. I met one of his teachers, who really likes him. "He's so good and quiet, and he plays nice, and he always puts everything away," she said. "Oh, I didn't make myself clear," I clarified. "I'm M. Small's dad." But no, there was no confusion. That's who he is at school, and I probably shouldn't complain. Anyway, he's clearly adapting well. He's going three days a week, but still going to his old day care on Thursdays to ease the transition (Fridays continue to be Mom and M. Small days). It's Trash and I who need to work harder to adapt. It's not just that the new place is a lot further away than the day care place (not that this is hard, with the day care place seven blocks from our house) and we have to remember to pack his lunch the day before. It's that he's in school, and he's expected to be there. Like, the guy who runs the place forgot that he doesn't come in on Fridays, and he called the house to see where he was. And that's not all. Next Thursday is a big graduation ceremony at the school. Unlike us, a lot of the other parents apparently don't use Montessori as a year-round day care center, and when the school year ends next week, that'll be the last day for some of the kids. When Mr. N. called on Friday, he was very clear that M. Small was expected there that day. We thought it was a little weird that our son is supposed to graduate from Montessori three weeks after starting it, but then he's always been a little ahead of schedule. Still, it's weird. We're used to being able to call up the Day Care Lady at 9:30 on a Thursday and saying, yeah, M. Small isn't coming in today. And also not yesterday, which we forgot to tell you. She doesn't care -- she gets paid the same and it's not like she has a curriculum going on. Hearing from his school about when he's supposed to be there makes it feel like he's just a tiny bit less…ours. You know? But that's okay. He'll graduate next Thursday and we'll go back to normal. posted by M. Giant 9:13 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:Isn't it funny how kids can be so different at school and at home? I used to think they were talking about someone else's child at school, that they had mixed me up with another child's parent. I didn't recognize the sweet, cooperative, neat, sharing child they described; they didn't recognize the kicking, fighting, biting attitude-filled little heck-raiser I described. We called them Home Boy and School Boy (with his name instead of Boy). My mom is a kindergarten teacher, and she calls some kids "Road Angels and Home Devils."
By Thursday, May 08, 2008 War of Attrition We've hated the carpet that came with this house ever since we bought it, sixteen years ago. Okay, that's an exaggeration. Before we moved everything in, we had it professionally steam-cleaned and it looked pretty good. For a few weeks. Then we realized that we were probably going to have to break down and buy a vacuum cleaner. But even that wasn't going to keep it looking nice for more than a few days after our increasingly frequent visits from the guys with the van and the big hose. Tearing out the carpet in the study six years ago was liberating. Doing it in the living room four years ago was also liberating. By that timeline, we were probably due to take care of the back bedroom two years ago, but we had a one-and-a-half-year-old back then and the only liberation we were getting in that period of our lives was naptime. But this past Sunday, I talked Trash into taking on that final room with me. Normally she's the one who motivates us to do these big household projects, whereas I would rather sit around and read or watch movies or play computer games than spend my weekend renovating the garage, or fixing an electrical outlet, or unloading the dishwasher. But as I pointed out to her on Sunday, we're going to have visitors for the next few weekends, plus Sunday was a nice, warm sunny day, perfect for taking all the shit out of that room through the back door and piling it on the deck for a few hours. That did it. So by ten o'clock, the spare bed was in pieces in the living room, and the rest of the furniture from that room was piled on the deck along with about half of M. Small's toys. Trash and I tore the carpet out, leaving the back door open so we could keep an eye on the kid in the backyard (or, more accurately, call out to the next-door neighbor every few minutes to make sure he wasn't bugging her too much). I only slashed my thumb on a rusty carpet tack once in the process of getting the carpet out of there, and Trash was almost entirely uninjured. Even better, after almost a week without experiencing any symptoms, I'm fairly confident that my tetanus shots were up to date after all. Except I kind of tricked Trash. I had more or less implied that we'd just take out the carpet and be done. But before we moved everything back in, I wanted to also take the carpet out of the closet, fix the closet door that's been sticking (a sawdust-intensive process), paint the inch of newly-exposed puke-beige baseboard between the floor and where the carpet used to be, and then sweep and Swiffer the hardwood (which, by the way, is in the best shape of any room we've done this to). Anyway, short story long, it was late afternoon and all that stuff was still out on the deck. We were kind of putting off the restocking, you see, each for reasons of our own. Trash wanted to leave the bed out and replace it with the futon and frame. The only problem with that plan was that we own neither a futon nor a frame. Whereas I was procrastinating because my usual laziness had reasserted itself. But a neighbor family up the street happened to stop by, and when they wondered if the sight of all our crap out and exposed to the elements meant that we were being evicted, we both abandoned our reservations and loaded everything back in. Well, we abandoned them temporarily. Which is to say that Trash is still looking for futons on Craigslist and I'm still lazy. But I'm still declaring victory, because as of now, every bit of that hateful, awful, depressing, stain-magnet carpet is out of our house forever. Except for one scrap in the basement. I'm keeping that for the cats to pee on. posted by M. Giant 8:53 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
"Normally she's the one who motivates us to do these big household projects"
By I just don't understand the point of wall to wall carpeting. Congrats on ridding yourself of it. Monday, May 05, 2008 First Day M. Small picked out his own lunchbox for school. It's plastic and shaped like a ladybug. If a kid makes fun of M. Small's lunchbox today, I will bury it in that kid's head. Which will be okay, because M. Small will probably want a different lunchbox anyway. Yes, it's M. Small's first day of Montessori school. We knew this day was coming, and so did M. Small. That didn't make it any easier for us. Trash and me, I mean. M. Small was just fine. We went together to drop him off, because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to handle it. It was hard enough watching him jauntily snag his lunchbox off the center island without being asked and trundle towards the car like he's been doing this every morning. "Look at him!" Trash and I whispered to each other. "Doesn't he realize this is killing us? Couldn't he take pity on us and act a little worried?" I'm not sure why this feels harder than his first day at day care. Maybe we just don't remember that as well, because it was three years ago and we were sleep-deprived. Or maybe it was because back then he was a powerless blob who experienced the world as one might experience a particularly chaotic screensaver and today he's a person who can walk around and tells us what he's thinking about and what he's feeling and what each stage of a Saturn V rocket does. He chattered happily in the car the whole way there. He did ask me to carry his lunchbox into the school, but while we waited outside to be let in, he told us he was excited. And then, inside, he kind of wandered around quietly, not sure what to do with the three or four other kids who were already there. The early-shift teacher showed him his new locker, into which he wanted to put everything he had. He put the toy jet he'd brought in there. He tried to put his lunchbox in there. He took off his sweatshirt and put it in there. I think he would have happily gone home to get more stuff to put in there if we'd offered. He'll probably want to pack a suitcase tomorrow. While Trash talked to the teacher about logistics and business stuff, I squatted down and quietly talked to M. Small. "Are you nervous?" I asked. "Yes," he said, barely audibly. "That's okay. New situations are always nervous, and this is really new. I know you'll do great. I'm so proud of you." "Okay." He wasn't crying when Trash and I left, but his solemn blue eyes were fixed on us as the door closed behind us. The crying took place after the door was shut. And I couldn't even tell you if there was any crying on his side of the door. It was 8:00 a.m. It was going to be a long day. Trash called me on my cell phone at 8:15. "I'm going to go get him," she said. "Not if I get him first," I responded. Eventually we talked each other down. But it's still going to be a long day. posted by M. Giant 11:20 AM 14 comments 14 Comments:Hang in there guys!
By Hey, we're in sync...today is Miss Kelly's first day of daycare. We're where you were three years ago! Hugs all around. "That's okay. New situations are always nervous, and this is really new. I know you'll do great. I'm so proud of you.".....these are words you will utter for the next 12 years! I am a longtime reader, and love reading your blog, and this post made me cry. My "baby" graduates high school in 3 weeks; it does not get any easier! Best of luck and congrats on this newest milestone in his life!
By
Ohhh man, this made me cry. Beautiful post.
By
Don't worry--I've got a friend with two girls in Montessori pre-school, and the girls LOVE it. (You're in MN, right? It's the one up in Shoreview.) They come home talking about the "work" they did that day and the kids they played with and the songs they sang. It helped my friend get over the separation anxiety pretty quickly, knowing that her kids were having such a good time.
By
Our 5 year old basically left us in the dust when she started pre-k 2 years ago. If he's in school isn't it about time to upgrade his nickname to M.Edium?
Awwwwww mannnnn... I just had a flash. I hope you all survived the first day and had a tearless morning. I of course having just read your blog of yesterday have done enough crying for you and the Mrs. Add my tears to those of "me at 6:02am". Now, please to post and tell us how it went!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
By
Aw I was all set to be melancholy and sweet with you and then I saw KG's comment and I can't stop giggling!
Aw, he'll do great, and so will you!
I remember the first time the wife and I left our daughter with "strangers"...
By I didn’t go to daycare or any pre-K school, so I was very excited for Kindergarten. I got up that first morning and put on my dress, but couldn’t zip it up in the back. So I just put my jacket on over it and decided I would ask my teacher to help me. I went next door to meet up with the kids who were going to walk with me to school, but they weren’t ready, so I carried on alone. I was just getting to the school when my mom showed up, opened the car door and growled “Get in the car.” I guess Kindergarten didn’t start at 6 a.m.
By Thursday, May 01, 2008 Green Telecommuting Of all the things I like about my current day job, my favorite would have to be the fact that I get to work at home on Wednesday. It's not only convenient, it's a huge moneysaver. And it's good for the planet as well. Here's how: When I telecommute, I don't have to drive to work. That means that I save money on gas, and reduce my carbon footprint, all at the same time. This became even more true when I stopped idling my car in the driveway all day just in case I was called into the office for an emergency. I don't have to dress up to work at home. I can be just as productive in my pajamas, or in the previous day's clothes. This means we don't have to do as much laundry (which saves money on our gas and water bill) or buy as many clothes (which are expensive, and which I hate doing). I also save money on our electricity by fully recharging my laptop at work the day before and then using the battery to do my work at home. This also has a twofold benefit: I'm able to work until about 11:30 in the morning or so before my battery punks out, and then I spend the rest of the day napping. Which, again, reduces my carbon footprint. It's now getting nice enough that I can work outside on the back deck during the day. I just bring my laptop out, borrow the neighbors' wireless connection (it's not stealing if they know I'm doing it), and do my thing. That's not really economically or environmentally advantageous; I just like it. Another cost benefit of working at home is the absence of vending machines tempting me with their overpriced, overpackaged wares. If I get hungry, I can just raid our own pantry. Which is free. I would go even further, but since Trash usually works at home on Wednesdays as well, she insists that I flush the toilet every time I use it. I just hope she'll still be able to look our son in the eye when he's old enough to ask, "Mommy, what did you do to save the environment?" posted by M. Giant 8:31 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
Working outside lets you save electricity and keep an eye on all that nature you're saving. It also promotes physical well-being since you have to walk back into the house for supplies. Unless you're working in the middle of a veggie garden, in which case you can just graze.
By
If it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down. 
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
