From Twitter the other day:

Me: "Can we opt the kid outta the iLEAP?" Dan: "Don't think so. Property values in #nola depend on how well he does." Me: 8-P

It's not that I don't think the little guy will do well. On a personal level, I am annoyed at the miscommunication over what page he's supposed to be doing in the iLEAP workbooks and when it's due, sure. I just wish it weren't taking away the good time he spends really learning and getting enthusiastic about it - even the teacher commented on how much he enjoyed a recent lesson on volcanoes, something he'd been jazzed about when I picked him up from school one afternoon.

A recent carpool incident:
"Mom, I've got some baaaad news."
"Oh, well, what's the bad news? (aka, what iLEAP homework sin did you commit today?)"
"Well, they're having another fundraiser...next week...at the skating rink."
My 92% healed ankle throbs a little more than the dull rug-burn-under-the-skin feeling I have these days.
"Oh...uh...huh. When is it?"
"Next Thursday night."
Whew, choir practice night!
"Oh, I don't think we can go anyway, honey."

He then proceeded to read me the skating rink's liability policy, which was just what I thought - go into a crowd of people wearing your own personal set of eight wheels and break your bones at your own risk, with a "tough toenails" for emphasis somewhere in the fine print. Hey, the kid only stumbled over a couple of words. Not bad for a third grader.

One other thing I really appreciate when driving to the new location of the school? The nice man on Paris Avenue near Vista Park who waves enthusiastically at every car while walking his dog in the mornings. "Who are you waving to, Mom?" "Just wave, okay???" Thanks for the welcome, sir, whoever you are.

Fight the Bath Salts and the Suriname Toads...

...that is, SOPA and PIPA.

I'm doing this tomorrow in the hopes that the government won't be doing it to all of us permanently. Don't be surprised if you can't get to any content here. Instead, let your government representatives know what a bad idea regulating the internet to their extreme is.

New Orleans Slate tells us a story about a man in need:

Kweku Nyaawie grew up in Central Texas based mostly out of Austin. A carpenter and cabinet maker, he came to New Orleans with his brother to help out with reconstruction of homes damaged by the Federal Flood in late 2005. He saw the destruction first hand and continued to work and save his money. At some point he decided to stay. He wanted to contribute to the community, buy a house, make it a home not a speculation project and found the shotgun at 616 Port Street. It needed work, but he knew he was the guy who could do it. He looked for period architectural pieces, was painstaking in his research, checked the history of the house, delighted in knowing that he'd be the one to restore this little bit of New Orleans history with the added bonus of living in it. 

He got involved with the Community Garden Project in Treme and put his money and time into fixing the house. Long after the Poor Clares, the house had been purchased by a Mr. Frisbe, who lived there with his partner from 1977 until he passed away. His partner continued to live there until the storm. Kweku, or Ku as we all call him, bought it already needing repair in 2008. He loved working on the house and loved that it was exactly 100 years older than he was. When we moved here we knew him to say hello but never saw him because he was always at the Garden or working on that house. 

Then came the summer of 2010. As Ku was riding his bicycle on Dumaine Street in the Sixth Ward, a black sedan hit him. Hard. Knocked completely off the bike, he watched as the car sped away without even checking to see if Ku was alright. He headed to his girlfriend's house battered, bruised and scratched badly. He didn't go to the ER as he thought he was just healing from some bad road rash and deep bruises. Knowing him now, my guess is that he also figured he'd just tough it out and he'd be fine. Weeks went by. His back still hurt. Months went by. His back still hurt. Then in December 2010 he realized that his legs wouldn't quite support his 6'3” frame. He headed off to the doctor but realized that he couldn't get the help he'd need here in New Orleans, he couldn't work so money was also an issue (given that the bastard who hit him took off, there was no insurance money coming in to help with medical bills), so he made the decision to move back to Austin and his family. Those of us who knew him were worried as we didn't hear from him. 

He was busy. He spent nearly 14 months in therapy and is still on crutches with his legs still unable to support him. Although he's the most positive attitude guy in the world, he's also a proud man and a man who loves his house. He is unfortunately learning the lesson many of us learned after the storm: sometimes you gotta ask for help. 

A few weeks ago he got a letter from the City. A hearing. Blight. Neighbors complaining. (We're neighbors, we couldn't figure out who would complain knowing how hard he'd worked and knowing what had happened to him.) At the hearing it was discovered that one complaint had come from a doctor (a DOCTOR? Wouldn't he know how devastatingly long spinal cord injuries can take to heal?) because some vines had overgrown the fence and were interfering with his backyard garden. (This doctor is also the owner of a lot of property on our block.) Evidently Ku's next door neighbor, an absentee homeowner and an attorney who lives in the house intermittently, wanted Ku's house demolished. Ku was given a list of things that had to be fixed or a $500 a day fine would be levied.(Although he wouldn't probably bring it up, he's one of only 2 black property owners on the four sides of this block, and some of us, though not Ku, can't help but wonder if that's a part of these complaints.) 

Ku sat in an office chair for a week sanding the front of the house in order to get it ready for painting. Stand across from it and you can see how far the outer limit of his reach is, which frankly from a desk chair is impressive. Today he's working on the bricks that front the house from the sidewalk to the base of the house. Siding needs to be replaced for sure. His brother had been able to help for a while, but we heard he recently got a job so he's on his own for the moment and his next hearing is a week from today. 

I am asking anyone out there who can help, who can climb a ladder, sand, paint, write a letter, anything that can toss a road block into the $500 buck a day fine that he can't afford, to get in touch.

Read more here. The go-to email for NOLA Slate is river.dharma@gmail.com.

Humid City Supplemental

I just realized I left an unqualified declaration in my latest post over at Humid City...that of being "fairly fortunate" thus far in navigating the current "system of schools" obstacle course that is public education in New Orleans.

To be sure, I've been called a hypocrite for my stance on charterization. My son is attending classes at a charter school. We are fortunate in that we got him into the school and, more importantly, that it is doing right by him socially and educationally. We were also benefactors of damned good timing - we managed to shoe-horn him into his current school back in the spring of 2006, when, even then, the most a parent could do was to fill out the requisite forms, attend the required classroom tour and parent meetings, "and then you pray," one mother responded when a teacher asked about the no-guarantees admissions process. It was probably the last time any parent had to deal with a waitlist for the school due to the city's population still reeling from the effects of 8/29/2005. At that time, we also benefited from the little guy's pre-K3 tuition being paid for by the state, which is no longer happening for parents with 3-year-olds in New Orleans public schools.

But our fortunate position is subject to change. Our financial status could fall away, the next teacher might be unable or unwilling to reach our son or work with us to help him realize his potential, and we might not be able to put the time and effort into all the forms, all the school visits, and all the research it would take to get our son elsewhere without further jeopardizing an already sketchy economic state. Where would we go then? What could be done for him?

This is what I fear the most every day. And unfortunately, my fear is a reality for far too many. It's a reality of fewer jobs out there that will pull you out of economic dire straits and give you at least a prayer of raising a family right. It's a reality that can turn families onto or away from each other and explode in violence or pass away in a whimper of abandonment. And then the rug gets pulled out by the realities of what is ironically called "school choice." It is only choice when you can devote large chunks of your time to making sure said choice does not turn sour -  placing your child in a school that isn't even working for the children who are there, forget the ones that are coming in, is one big way all of this goes wrong. Another is when your child's special education needs get shoved aside because the school's performance numbers don't need the stress of accommodating a child that needs that extra attention. Trying to call out the state on what is required in its own laws isn't just a full-time job, it can be an exhausting obsession.

How much time do you have to devote to all of this and still raise a family again?

My family is fortunate yet I am uncomfortable in it. If the only comfort I can give a struggling parent who has been waitlisted for charters all over the place is "wait and see and keep trying," that's extremely cold. The state, with its recent election of a man younger than I to its highest education position (I told my grandmother, a veteran of teaching in Long Island, NY schools about John White's RSD appointment and she was appalled. "He's much too young and inexperienced," she said. ) is going to give too many parents positions on similar waitlists all over Louisiana, all in the name of covering its own ass when things go wrong or a charter doesn't meet expectations. The doors on fair and nearly free-with-your-taxpaying public education will be closing even faster than they already have been.

And this ranting is only from my vantage point as a lowly, imperfect parent. To get some clarification on some much greater implications of Louisiana's move towards charterization, head to G-Bitch.

Parenting Purgatories

If there's anything this past weekend has taught me, it's this...

Nothing has driven me to drink like parenthood has. NOTHING, I tell you.

It's not like one can choose the sex of their baby (not yet), but when I first found out I was going to have one, I initially thought it might be a girl. At 20 weeks gestation, I found out it was otherwise (hey, 50/50 chance). At the time, hormones amplified some of my more histrionic fixations and pronouncements, and, on observing how eager children's clothiers were to have 14-month-olds dress like J-Lo and Britney (aka, twentysomething skankdom), I was relieved that a boy was coming our way in another 20 weeks or so. "Look at this!" I'd holler, yanking my friends into the Children's Place just to show them the macrame halter tops for toddlers and shout a little more. "We used to have to scour thrift stores in our teenage years to dress like this, and now it's mainstream!!! And it's all PINK! What the hell????"

This past Saturday, I found a major downside to boys is dealing with the effects of team sports when they are no longer just a fun game. Granted, my son is most likely not going to be the next David Wright, but he likes baseball - or at least the idea of it he loves that is presented in The Sandlot. You know, the camaraderie among teammates that can possibly lead to some life lessons and lifelong friendships.

Problem is, he said something that alienated him from his teammates, caused the coach not to trust him, and I was the one chewed out for it.

I was in shock - suddenly I was a bad parent because my son said one (admittedly) dumb, selfish thing. I was made to feel smaller than small by a guy who was supposed to be a role model for 9-10-year-olds.   I was induced to worry that, because of one mistaken thing said by my just-turned-9-year-old, the kid would possibly never again have a future with his peers because he messed with team camaraderie. It still hits me even now, the dressing down I got from someone who only cared about winning (in what was supposed to be a noncompetitive off-season set of games) and not about the reasons why a kid might say such a thing. Title IX may have ensured that coaches like this appear in girls' sports as well, but there seems to be a much longer tradition of them trying to teach boys that winning isn't everything, it's the only thing, and with way less panache than Vince Lombardi. Verbally whaling on a nine-year-old for such a transgression is pretty damned bad, but going after me? Yeah, that really works...Thank God I have a levelheaded spouse who put it into better perspective for me and the little guy, but being on the other end of such wrath isn't easy no matter what age you are.

And, speaking of wrath...hell hath no fury like a community deciding to go completely bonkers over school renovations. As though a lawsuit against the city over the possible traffic much-needed construction work on a neighborhood school building will bring to the streets isn't bad enough, the school's parent listserv is going up in flames over the temporary school site. As far as the temporary site goes, I was pleasantly surprised at how nice it was, but then I saw it when it still looked like this:

Driving out to the new campus was also mostly traffic-free despite its Gentilly location being pretty far out from where we live on the gray brick road (although I'm told that will change once UNO is back in session). It was also still a sobering drive, as the site is surrounded by mostly empty lots, some too-new homes, some still-vacant gutted houses, a small shopping center struggling to get new tenants in, and a spanking new Holy Cross school campus relocated from its flooded-out former location in the Ninth Ward and built on the grounds of the now-demolished St Francis Cabrini church. So many ghosts of recent making are still being exorcised out there. I hope the kids' presence will help it all.

I also hope that the battles over this one school renovation being chronicled so well by a hyperlocal are not going to set a nasty precedent...but it's amazing what kinds of things can be seemingly justified by that phrase "For the children..." Trying to undo decades of damage done through neglect and outright theft from those same children should not be this fraught with insanity.

A Reassess

I sit here at my blog most times these days at something of a loss for some long-form wordiness - aka, a substantial post.

It's been like this for a while, and it'd certainly be convenient to blame the diversion of those energies to my more frequent usage of Twitter and Facebook - but then I wouldn't be on those if they didn't help serve some sort of substantial need - or, most likely, serve an addiction to feedback. What I've found through recent huge amounts of time spent on those two platforms is that human-like virtual interactions gradually grew to be something I craved through the conduit that this blog initially was. It took me about a year to get to it, but once I did, it was one hell of an interactive community that peaked at about 2008 - which was, coincidentally, when most of the New Orleans blogpocheh I'd become acquainted with on- and offline got Twitter accounts and Facebook started its many annoying revampings that only seemed to draw more people to open accounts on it. Even now, while writing this, I have windows open on my desktop to Twitter and Facebook, where I check them periodically and respond to new tweets that come up and new posts on the Facebook news feed.

The key word in that last sentence is "respond."

Most of what bloggers tend to do is respond on a much larger scale than 140 characters (Twitter) or however many characters Facebook feed posts limit account holders to. As long as our freedom to do so - in the form of free server space someplace - is still there and we've got the urge to (mostly) rant, we'll be a-posting. As this particular space comes close to it's sixth blogiversary (January 16th!), though, I wonder at the many things that can turn even the most devoted bloggers away from frequent postings...

1) Stuff happens. Paying jobs and caring for one's family take precedence of parking one's butt in front of a computer to kvetch about the news of the day. Health problems appear - never has my grandpa's adage of "If you don't have your health, what have you got?" resonated with me more personally than it has in the past year. Just leaving the house for a diversion, a respite from a need for others to communicate with us almost virtually violently at times, is more of a thing in these tough days than dwelling too hard on too many troubles that may be beyond one's control.

2) Feed readers. I don't know how many of you have put the stuff your read online regularly into feed readers, but it does render many blog stats kinda useless. As it is, I'm paying much less attention to what Sitemeter's telling me anyhow. I've never been much interested in how I can sell this corner of the interwebs, the ads in the sidebar here being more of a concession to my husband's idea that all this time I spend at the keyboard be measured in some sort of monetary way. In the four years since I threw the code into my sidebar, I think it's garnered fractions of cents. All mah internetz are not fillin mah bank account.

3) User-friendliness in commenting suffers in the face of Twitter and Facebook. I have comment monitoring up for a reason: I'm not interested in spammers. Signing in with an account to comment and typing in random characters to post said comment and prove you are not a bot and have genuine interest in a discussion of what I say pales in comparison to the immediacy of Twitter, I'll admit. Which gets me to my reassessment of this particular weblog...

I don't know what the future's gonna bring for this space. I don't know what the future's going to bring for blogging in general. It still serves a need to go long-form, but in my particular case, it feels like I've gone back to the days when this was a diary that happened to be online and happened to have a comment section for some strange reason...except now more people who are not heavily online savvy can use the internet to do a simple search and use that information for their own ends, be it in attempting to judge prospective hires or in otherwise using that stuff learned about you against you. The controversies over SOPA legislation are also hinting that future attempts to regulate and sanitize the internet for Homeland Security's pleasure are not going to abate anytime soon. A door on virtual freedoms may be closing, and who knows if, where, or when a window will open?

Then again, perhaps my pessimism is being colored by my having to currently be in the strange, sad business of pain management for my only 80% healed ankle, the insanity surrounding the renovations to my son's school, and some other strange changes in my personal life.

When all is said and done, change is the only true constant.

_______________________________________________

So we're officially in another Carnival season in these parts...which means it's okay to have your king cake and eat it too - not to mention washing it down with some king cake vodka just to make things super-sweet.



Thanks, DJ Soul Sister.

...The radical freedom my daughter embraced created a form of imprisonment for me. Even though Marissa assured me I had nothing to do with her choice, for that year and a half she was away, I was locked in the feeling that I had failed her. The sense of safety I had provided at home clearly hadn’t been enough. 

Or maybe my vision of her future was what she ran from. I had said, stay in school, get a job, buy a house, and you’ll retire securely, even though that hadn’t worked out for me. When she said she wanted to break free, at first I gripped tight, imposed new rules and higher expectations. I insisted that she turn away from wildness, even in this wild time. Eventually... I loosened the reins and trusted to fate. Neither approach brought her back. Marissa said she was going toward something I wouldn’t, couldn’t, understand. After a year of trying, I see that she is right. This life she and her friends led was not worse than I imagined, but it was more dangerous than I had wanted to believe. I can describe it, but understanding still eludes me. 

I read Danelle Morton's article on the eight killed in the December 28, 2010 warehouse fire and am still struggling with my reactions and the responses of others to the sympathy she exhibits for the dead and her attempts to understand why they made the choices that lead to their deaths in a fiery inferno that likely resulted from their attempts to keep warm on an icy cold night. The knee-jerk impulse for us all - myself included - is to roundly condemn these kids for being there in the first place. Raised in good homes by the families' accounts (though there may be some things they aren't sharing), who in their right minds would think that family conflicts during the teenage years could get so bad that hopping trains and engaging in Darwinian-like struggles for day-to-day survival could be a viable option?

It rid the world of some extra weight. What would kids like that ever contribute to society anyhow? Cruel, yet comforting (on some level) thoughts, designed to insulate oneself from the idea that it could ever happen to one's family. The scarier thing to contemplate, after all, is that it could and does happen indiscriminately. You could still do everything you're supposed to do as a family in rearing your kids and they could still choose that kind of life...and, short of having them committed to some sort of institution against their will, you'd be stuck in the same kind of limbo Morton describes, forced to trust fate will somehow keep smiling upon your kids as they embrace body and soul this idea of freedom that is so far outside what most of us think of when we contemplate the same thing - familiar, but far out.

I guess there are times when I could've gone the same way myself, most notably when I ran right out of grade school around 4th or 5th grade in frustration with the near-constant bullying I got from my peers and got as far as the railroad tracks down the block before realizing I'd make a terrible runaway. Any frustrations I had with my family as a teenager - and believe me, there were many - were mostly neutralized by a strong sense I had of simply tolerating it all because I'd be out of the house before I knew it. It was, in the end, the values I had and a sense of guilt over hurting my parents' feelings too much that held me out of the life of a traveler. I didn't want to do anything drastic that would kill my family emotionally. Not until I was out of their house, anyway.

I look at my son who is now halfway to eighteen and I wonder about the choices he will make, and the kind of world we currently have a hand in creating that might give him the impression that being a traveler is a good idea. Would it be in rebellion at how much we are spending our lives plugged into technology? In recoil at how much we pay and pay and pay in health care, education, and overall homage to consumerism? Or would it be as simple as we'd be cramping his style and, in the face of a serious lack of coming-of-age rituals and/or starter employment for young adults, he'd rather hop a train and squat in an abandoned home? Yes, my fears are colored by this past year's events worldwide, which constantly drive home that this world needs a lot of work. But is the best way to help it all along found in completely dropping out of it all in this way? I don't know, I can't bring myself to willingly find out, and I don't know what I'd do if my not-so-little guy decided to take that path. What I do know is that if things don't change in another nine years priority-wise for our entire country, more of our kids will head down that no-holds-barred road with only our love - if these kids even have it (horrible to contemplate, but some households are like that) - to prepare them for any uncertainties.

No one is completely blameless in any of the business that led to eight people dying in an abandoned warehouse over a year ago. At those tragic times, it is simply driven home how little control we have over the decisions of others, no matter how much we care for the decision-makers themselves. We can only lay some foundations, set some good examples, and stay alert for the possibility that these wild souls will return in one way or another - and, if they do, our doors and hearts will be open to what they bring.

X-posted at Humid City

Indulge me, please. I gotta post this about Bushwick's own House of Soul, which has now hung around for ten years. Gotta love where the Amy Winehouse Back To Black platinum record is in the house, too:



What can I say? I still wanna be Sharon Jones when I grow up.

My brain is full these days, and I kinda need a bit of a dumping thing to happen, so here goes:

It's simply too, too easy for me to be on Twitter. I have a serious habit that is enabled by my trusty Droid, and I have to face up to being able to "stop anytime I want" as being the ultimate in personal delusions. I think I recently pledged to form a Carnival subkrewe through it, for crying out loud - in light of Will Ferrell being named as this year's Bacchus, a few of us speculated as to why Christopher Walken was never tapped for that bastion of celebrity Carnival royalty. He would be the most badass Bacchus ever...but he deserves his own twisted legions. Think of the debut of the Walken Krewe: a bunch of stylishly dressed marchers with these sorts of moves. Throwing cowbells of their own. Perhaps a watch or two. Or just engaging in some subtly and not-so subtly dirty old man antics. Perhaps all the Walkens can do the suave Bond villain thing, psychotically destroying carnival even as they participate in it. The possibilities are nearly endless at this point...

I look for distractions - the more powerful, the better - to mainly take my mind off the pains of my ankle getting used to the lace-up brace I'm supposed to be wearing (and I do wear it, for the most part, if I'm going to be walking around. The physical therapists I've had couldn't believe I hadn't tried some walking without Das Boot before the brace, but I want it so that I don't want to deal with this ever again if I can help it.) I've fallen into listening to lots of music again, with the help of many music streaming sites and apps - it's been like discovering college radio plus some of the best indie record stores all over again. It's mind-blowing, the amount of music that is currently readily available at your fingertips if you are web-savvy and have little fear of exploring what these sources have to offer. It's a world that places even greater emphasis on a plethora of individual opinions over the tastemaking of a select few, which consequently contributes to the number of ways certain institutions like the Grammy awards and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee choices can be bashed, not to mention which top music lists may matter more than others. Some things never really change.

What I wish would change for the better would be how we consider education. Yeah, yeah, same ol' same ol' from me...I should just give up any feelings of concern over schools destined to fail, schools in the process of having staff jump ship in anticipation of their closure, and the pratfalls of semi-autonomy and just let it go because current proponents of community involvement in and local leadership of the schools have already had their chance. When even some of my own basic assumptions about education and the supposed importance of the socializing elements of it are called into question, however, I wonder. Maybe we should do away with teachers if they don't value creativity. Maybe parents should avoid the very institution that is the public or private school if continued bullying cannot even be countered by those meant to guide the children in that environment (I know if my own parents had thought similarly about my grade school experience, seven years of my life might have gone very differently.). And let's all turn back time and forget about birthing any more babies while we're at it.

All of this makes my head spin almost as much as this holiday "wreath" I saw at a too-spiffy-looking new bagel place in town:

Good bagels. Questionable decor.

Pardon me while I go see a brass band making a horse buck it like a...well, a horse, of course.

This year, I had one of these on my cake.



It would've been nice if we'd been told about that wire to cut off the bazillions of times the thing was playing "Happy Birthday." The following ensued instead.



This doesn't happen every time we go to our pal Edie's house to watch the Saints games, but it was fun. And now we know what to do when we can't shut "Happy Birthday" off.

And Das Boot is finally off my ankle. But this lace-up ankle brace I have on now is giving me strong deja-vu.  Like getting used to Das Bootie. Urrrrrgh.

Well, hello, mangling of any and all rock n' roll genres in the name of a Jewish holiday! How are you this morning? You're moving like Jagger? Really?

 

I don't wanna say what you sound like.

Childish Things

When you spend a good chunk of your morning on Twitter debating the validity of a few choice phrases with Nicholas Payton and some of our Twitter followers, things are gonna go, well, downhill. Specifically, all the way back to my college days when we art students took out our frustrations in the all-day foundation studios at the ice rink tormenting anyone from the opposite team who happened to find himself in the penalty box, cheering on the Zamboni man, and shooting off the occasional bottle rocket while the college's president happened to be in attendance (oops).

What's especially funny is that a version of these t-shirts used to be hard to come by, and now they're sold in the college store, along with those of the basketball team that was formed after I graduated.

These days, I'm definitely feeling my past. Part of it is certainly my son turning nine today - another part of it is seeing how much I get het up over things I swore I'd never go nuts over if/when I had a kid. It all paints my husband as the optimist and me as the pessimist - hey, at least I married well in that regard. 

"He can't seem to really focus," I said to Dan on hearing one of the little guy's inner-yet-spoken-aloud monologues in progress instead of the subdued sound of pencil against paper completing his homework. 

"Oh, he can sure focus on books he likes and LEGOs he wants to build," Dan replied. "It's all about what he wants to focus on. He's perfectly capable," he said with a smile.

"And you really want to have more kids?"

"We've already made all the mistakes we're going to make, right?"

"But with another, we'd probably be making different mistakes," I said grumpily.

"Fail, then fail again differently, huh?" Dan shook his head.

Okay, so my reproductive system isn't exactly screaming for one last chance - and if it is, I can't hear it over my constant mantra of "Kids are a crapshoot." For every person who walks up to me and asks if I'm going to have another as though I've found the Angelic Child Formula with the little guy (it's so easy to fool people when you resemble Macaulay Culkin in "Home Alone" and you have a sense of humor to match), I have to restrain myself a little more from detailing how much I dread a developmental phase in his and my roads that will suddenly make me and Dan "the enemy" somehow. Until that day, though....

I don't brag about this kiddo of mine too much because 1) I'm biased and 2) I tend to roll my eyes some when others do it concerning their kids (I've been working on 2). Like you wouldn't believe.). However, he's a bright little character who once asked a friend if her stuffed panda was snake intolerant. 

Although he has problems picking up after himself and seems to have inherited my husband's inability to really look for things he needs to find (I think it's a Y-chromosome thing, anyhow. Try looking under things, guys.), there's a good heart in there that is curious about the way the world works - it's a curiosity that I wish I could explore more with him, but things in our house already resemble one giant science experiment...perhaps we can get going on that crystal-growing kit soon. What the hell, another addition to the mess. 

He loves baseball, and I wish I could get the damned Das Boot off my ankle so that I could drive him to one of his fall ball practices or games just to see him getting into it. He loves to dance - in fact, this past Halloween, he danced so much to the live band at the neighborhood party he neglected the candy part of the night, much to Dan's yen-for-chocolate chagrin. He also gets very conscious of rules for certain things, and about abiding by those rules: "We can't use the internet on this homework, Mom!" he admonishes me when it comes to another of his research projects (we probably deserve some of that considering how we showed our displeasure with one of his assigned subjects). "That's my character," I say.

But wow, the general intolerance for bright guys like him is increasing out there in the big ol' world. The pressures to conform may not be as great in some ways and in some places - and we're already on the wrong side of a lot of it anyhow due to our Judaism - but I worry for the kiddo as he gets older and the schooling situations change, which they will. At the same time, I know these are battles that he has to largely muddle through himself, as we all had to in our childhoods, but I don't want to be completely indifferent. The impulse to throw up my hands and unleash a string of curses over it all is nearly overpowering - but I largely leave the cursing in front of the little guy to Dan.

We're not totally ready to put away childish things in our house, at any rate. It's still worth it to giggle with the kid over the Katrina refrigerator-esque scene in The Muppets where the Swedish Chef simply takes a torch to the moldy Muppet things inside. If that's some kind of liberal/lefty bias, well, fine. I personally find it more childish not to have a sense of humor.

Happy 9th birthday, little man.