Mutton Dressed As Lamb

I don't usually do this, but I was so dumbfounded by a casting call email I got in the office that I had to post it.



Did I miss any of the typos?

Books and Bugs

Books

A publicist sent me a book last spring, a book that I read, and rather liked, and then I never wrote about it, and now I feel bad because the author is DEAD. Anyway, I did like it, and it's called The Sandalwood Tree, and it's set in India, in two different eras (1947 and 1857) and it's a little bit mystery and a little bit love story and a little bit sub-continent Indian history, and I read it at the same time that I was reading The Secret Garden aloud to my kid, and of course the girl protagonist in The Secret Garden was an orphan who spent her early years in India and there was some odd resonance for me reading them both at the same time. So there you have it. I'm sorry Elle Newmark died before I got around to reading her book.

Bugs

In a fit of something or another, I signed up to do a Halloween party with glow-in-the-dark Zombie Hexbugs. We've had a huge amount of fun with the Hexbugs; they're a completely silly fun toy (even though they have batteries) and the cats are totally amused by them and I wish I had a better camera because watching the glow-in-the-dark bugs on the glow-in-the-dark track is kind of mesmerizing (and completely impossible to photograph with my iPhone). And when I say "we", I mean kids and grown-ups, friends and family, in addition to cats, have been enjoying them.

They also sent along some Hexbug Larvae - cunning little bugs with sensors that make them run away from things. Really, it's kind of amazing to think about the technology that goes into a TOY. You'd think we'd have figured out wireless electricity by now.



Next up, Banks.

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Disclosure: We received all the above mentioned stuff from various different publicists. No one paid me to write about any of it; guilt, though, forced me to.

Mix Match

When it comes to clothes for my kid, I'm pretty laissez-faire - to a point. I won't buy clothes with writing, I don't let any branded characters into the house, and pajamas have to be 100% cotton. If she wants to wear tights with holes and a purple skirt and several shirts layered together with a fake fur vest over the whole thing? So be it. She has a certain panache, and clothing is - to my mind - one of those battles not worth fighting.

It goes further: we talk about what's appropriate. You'll break your ankle in high heels, Ugg boots are too friggin' expensive for a kid whose feet are growing so fast (not to mention the fact that they're fugly). Belly buttons need to be covered up, unless you're on the beach in a two piece bathing suit. No, you cannot dress like a pop star; it's age-inappropriate.

In short, she can wear whatever she wants, within a fairly generous set of parameters.

* * * * * * * * *

Last month, the girl and I, along with a handful of other bloggers and tweenish girls, were invited to spend the afternoon in the showroom/offices of Little Miss Matched. The girls were sent off to "raid" the closets, while the moms heard about design development and the philosophy behind the brand. I confess that I was susceptible - it's why I accepted the invitation in the first place - because I really like their punchy bright mismatched products and I've been buying them for years.

We weren't disappointed. The girl had a great time trying on clothes, and I was kind of fascinated by the creative process. Sitting in a room with fabric swatches and magazine clips pinned everywhere was energizing. And the ethos of the company feels right - colorful clothes that foster individuality - what more could you want?

* * * * * * * * *

Little Miss Matched has decreed tomorrow - Friday 10/21 - to be Rock Your Socks day. And the best part about that? All this month, they are donating funds to support creative projects in schools via Donors Choose - with their gift card, I helped an elementary school teacher buy 15 ukuleles for her classroom.

* * * * * * * * *

Raising girls is hard. Navigating through issues like body image and peer pressure and pretty vs. smart is tricky. Having fun products out there like the mix and match 3 packs of colorful socks makes it a little easier. Besides, how awesome is she, all mixed and matched?

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Little Miss Matched fed us popcorn, and gave us some socks and other tchotchkes, as well as a $5 gift card to spend at Donors Choose. No one paid me to write this, and all the opinions are mine.

In Which I Declare Bankruptcy

Sputter, sputter, sputter.

Cranky, cranky, cranky.

Yeah, I haven’t posted in a whole week. Life got in the way. I’m out of the house for almost 11 hours a day, the girl needs to be read to every night, the laundry has to get done, the volunteer obligations seem to be increasing geometrically, and though I steal time for Twitter and Facebook and Klout-mockery while I’m eating my lukewarm (because I don’t have the patience to give the microwave more than a minute) soup, blog posts don’t always get written.

Not that they aren’t running through my head, oh no, they do that, all the time – like when I’m walking down the sidewalk between my office and the subway station, or lying in bed wishing I were asleep. It’s just that they don’t write themselves – the device that sucks the words out of the grey matter and magically spits them, correctly punctuated, out into the intertubular wilderness, that device has not yet been made.

It’s compounded, this lack of blog posts, because most of the posts that are rattling around in my skull want some thought, some attention, some care. I don’t want to come off half-cocked; I want my ideas presented as polished, tidy, neat little unassailable packages. Because, they deserve that, whether it’s embryos or not-for-profit governance or the goddam PTA or factory farmed pork or Bon’s eloquent post about social media.

Then, see, there’s a whole other category of posts that I feel I should write, about things that are sitting around in my house because I directly or indirectly willed them to be there, and I have guilt about the fact that I haven’t turned my thoughts to said objects.

And let’s go on, while we’re at it, because there are a slew of posts in draft – where I actually got as far as opening up a NEW POST window in Blogger and dumping in a sentence or a link for later. We’ll pretend I never mentioned them, shall we?

So. A manifesto. Or a declaration of bankruptcy.

• Today, I will delete all of the draft posts.
• Tomorrow, I will “review” a few things that are gnawing at me. I use “review” lightly – I may not do more than mention them.
• Friday, I will unsubscribe (as best as possible) from all of the lists wherein people tempt me with things and books.
• And Saturday, I will turn off all electronic devices, buckle my seat belt, and breathe.

And next week? All bets are off.

Wordless Wednesday: Photo Shoot

I was calling out to her "think about your teacher, think about me, think about your cats" - she hammed it up all the way through.



Later, she got bored.

And why yes, she was out in the woods in a purple skirt, pink tights and hiking boots.

What Is A Perfect School Anyway?

Despite the fact that I rail about my kid's school a bunch, I should shut up. Really. We have it lucky. Yes, we chose the town we live in because it has a good school system (and chose the house because I can walk to the train station). Yes, we put our child in a daycare program that morphed into a Montessori preschool. Yes, we read to her every single night. I didn't really need to read Peg Tyre's The Good School; I'm already there.

But I did read it, and I liked it a lot - so much so that I reached out to Peg's publicist and asked for a copy to give away. Because I know there are a lot of troubled schools and dysfunctional school systems out there, and this book can help you find a way to make a difference and/or choose the right school for your kid.

Peg isn't preachy, she's not mired in rubrics and jargon. In a conversational and methodical way, she walks through many issues surrounding pre-K through high school education. She skewers standardized testing in a way that non-educators will understand. She advocates for recess, because it helps kids think better. She talks about class sizes, the importance of scientifically based reading instruction, and why good teachers matter. The book is laced with interviews with parents and educators, anecdotes about good and bad school situations, and plenty of hard evidence about best practices. At the end of most of the chapters is a list of "take aways" - bullet points summarizing the main ideas in the chapter. And the last section is a synopsis - what makes a good school and why there are no perfect schools.

If you're interested in reading it, I have that aforementioned copy to give away. Leave me a comment by day's end on Tuesday 10/11 and tell me how you think it could help you. I'll pick a name out of something hat-like and you'll get a copy anon. Oh, and make sure your email address is enabled in your profile OR in the comment.

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Disclosure: Nope, no one paid me to tell you any of this. I did get a free copy of the book for my own use, because I offhandly mentioned to the publicist that I was reading a copy from the public library. By sending me a copy, he got the library copy back into circulation - that's a good thing, right? Should I also tell you that my husband went to elementary school AND college with Peg? That's probably irrelevant, and in no way influenced my opinion, but it is part of why the book was on my radar screen.

Getting Things Done

I'm not sure that I have anything to add, but I need to say it anyway. The first computer I owned was a Macintosh, bought in 1985, for about $2500 – which would be about $5000 in today’s dollars. It had two floppy drives (one of which was an external add-on) and no hard drive, and a tiny 9” black & white monitor. The dot matrix Imagewriter II and an old-fashioned modem – the kind you snuggled your telephone handset into – completed my technology holdings.

I met my now husband shortly thereafter, and he – with the chip still implanted in his brain from the 2 years he’d spent working at IBM – he dissed my Mac as a toy.

Bit by byte, he was won over, and today, our house is thoroughly populated with iMacs and a MacBook and iPods and iPhones and an iPad, and we’re networked to the gills with Apple TVs and Airport Expresses, and iTunes is the soundtrack to our life. Yeah, we’ve swallowed the Kool-Aid.

This morning, I read David Pogue's eulogy of Steve Jobs, and was struck by something. Pogue talks about out how Jobs "refused to go with the flow" and swam upstream "in pursuit of an unshakable vision" - he did what he wanted to do, without pandering to focus groups or politics. And in a way, it's like Robert Moses, who - though never elected to public office - rebuilt the New York City metropolitan area in many ways, through sheer force of personality. Not everything he did was good - in fact, a lot was downright evil - but he built an enduring infrastructure and gave us fabulous public beaches. But the thing is, despite whether your final decision on Moses is good or bad, he got things done.

Singular visionaries are rare birds.

Greek Myths and Everyday Life

I had a book of Greek myths when I was a kid, and I remember loving it. So not too long ago, we got the girl a copy of the D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, and last month I read it to her. I love reading to her, but sometimes it starts to feel like a slog. Not with this; I was as enthusiastic about getting to the next adventure as she was.

For me, it was a great refresher on all of those characters and concepts that are around us every day and in so many books. For her, there was plenty of excitement, and lots of "text to self" connection.

I read wistfully about Niobe, whose 14 children were killed by Apollo and Artemis, breaking her heart - "She wept for so long that the gods at last took pity on her and changed her into unfeeling rock." - and I missed Niobe yet again.

Did you know of the wily nature of Sisyphus? He tricked Hades, twice! When he finally ended up in the underworld for good, he was set to work pushing that boulder up the hill, over and over again, sisyphean - like picking up your messy room again and again and again.

We learned that Achilles was "invulnerable except for his heel by which his mother held him over the fire", and I pointed out that that's why the back of your ankle is called the achilles tendon.

Echo, echo, echo. Punished by Hera for being a chatterbox, Echo couldn't form her own words, but "could only repeat the words of others" - and that's where echoes come from.

And you know how you find piles of rocks in the woods, guiding you along the way? Hermes is inside them. He'd killed a servant of Hera's, and she called all the gods together to judge him - "those who found Hermes guilty of a crime were to throw their pebbles at Hera's feet, those who found him innocent were to throw their pebbles at his feet." He was buried in a heap of pebbles, and even today, stands in all of those cairns we've found in the woods.

Atalanta was abandoned in the wilderness, but "she did not perish, for a she-bear heard her cries and carried her gently to her den, nursed her, and raised her with her cubs". And the girl told me Oh, Mama, that's just like Princess Mononoke, who was raised by a wolf-god.

The Persphone / Demeter tale was one we knew from an old Disney short called The Goddess of Spring, which is about 10 minutes long and worth watching on YouTube.

Cerberus and centaurs are both present in the Harry Potter books. Pegasus we know well - (s)he's on the ceiling at Grand Central, and on every Mobil station around.

My old phrygian cap even made an appearance - I knew what it was, from art and gall bladders - I hadn't known that it was King Midas's. See, Apollo gave Midas ass's ears, to ridicule him, and ever after, Midas wore a "tall, peaked cap on his head to hide his long ears".

And for me, the once-upon-a-time music major/flute player, I loved remembering all the tales I know from their musical settings, like Orpheus & Eurydice in Monteverdi's Orfeo. (And then I detoured to Dido & Aeneas, and the snicker-out-loud-when-you're-18 aria that starts off "When I am laid". It's actually "when I am laid in earth", but...well, 18 year old college students?)

And speaking of Orpheus, the girl loved learning that there was a muse called Calliope, because her second grade teacher was named Kalliope.

And of course, reading of war victory by Trojan horse sent us to Monty Python:



The moral of my story? Reread your Greek myths; they are more enchanting than you remember.

True Story

Can you imagine being in a custody dispute with the other parent of your child(ren)? And worse, being broke and on the other side of the country?

I can't. It's just unfathomable.

My parents had one of those old-fashioned divorces, where he paid child support and alimony, and saw his kids a couple of times a year. My mother had custody, period, end of story. My father had another life, another wife. Custody just wasn't an issue, and he never tried to shirk his responsibility to pay what he owed.

In a way, I know we were lucky. Jennifer Schmitt is not so lucky; she's living a nightmare.

You may know Jennifer from her blog A Road with a View, or her old blog Thursday Drive. You may know her work - for example, she designed Emily Rosenbaum's website. Or maybe you saw her on Schmutzie's Five Star Friday.

In August, Jennifer's children's father took their two children from Maryland to Arizona for what was supposed to be a two week visit. He never brought the children back. It is the first time these children, ages 12 and 10, have ever been separated from their mother. And she found out - on the day they were expected back home - via a text message that he had already enrolled them in school.

Before August, he hadn’t seen them for over a year - by choice.

Jennifer and her children are now separated by over 2300 miles and she needs our help — now. She's is stranded in Maryland without steady financial support or income. She needs to move to Arizona and hire an attorney to help her enforce the previously agreed upon court decree that outlines the conditions on custody of the children and financial support.

Please, if you have any money to spare, help reunite Jennifer with her children. If you go to Go Fund Me, you can read the whole story and see where she needs to use the money, and contribute right there.

For Jennifer, I thank you.

Another Nightgown

Once upon a time, for years and years in fact, I slept naked. But shortly before I was due to give birth to the child who is now about to turn eight, it occurred to me that I might want to own a nightgown so that I wouldn't be freezing when up in the middle of the night with a nursing baby. So I bought a nightgown. I got a nice cotton nightgown from Hanna Andersson, with buttons down almost to the waist. It wasn't intended as a nursing gown, but it worked perfectly.

Eight years later, and some other nightgowns in the arsenal, because I have an occasional prudishness about sleeping naked when the child comes climbing in so often, the original nightgown is threadbare. The right elbow is worn through, there are pinpoint holes here and there, and the band of one cuff is about two-thirds off. It's time. So I bought a new one - almost the same, but longer, with different stripes. And I packed the old one and took it to Cape Cod, thinking instead of vacation underwear, it could be vacation nightgown, and I'd just leave it hanging on the line at the rented house.

The girl stopped me as I headed out with the clothes pins. "But Mama, you have to keep it!" She knows I bought it right before I had her, she knows I nursed her in it. She knows, and so I packed it again.

Maybe I'll bronze it.

Wordless Wednesday: In A Violin Case

I'll Miss You, Dear.

The other day, an acquaintance died. Suddenly. At 63. I've not yet heard why.

I'd met him at my last job - he was the thoroughly idiosyncratic outside accountant. He'd come in, schmooze his way through the office, and return to his stunningly "oh-my-god-where-is-the-floor" messy office. A dear. He knew, within moments of our first meeting, that it was the wrong job for me. And he proceeded to call me, weekly, for the next year, to tell me about other jobs, until finally he told me about the job I have now - a place I've been for more than 15 years.

He was good people. From his disheveled perch in the accounting office, he informally brokered tickets and jobs. We'd talk from time to time - he let me know about other jobs (on a less frequent basis), he sent a present when my baby was born, and he called once to ask me where to have dinner on a second date. Like I would know?

But last I'd heard, he had a steady girlfriend.

And now he's gone.

Dear disheveled auditor, thank you. For finding me my job, for being your quirky self, for breathing fresh air into the stuffy world of accounting.

Peace.

Double Negatives

Yesterday, I managed to say "I don't have no money" without it being grammatically incorrect.

My husband had to do a double take - he thought that his lovely wife had uncharacteristically erred, until he thought it through all the way. I'd offered the girl "all the money in my wallet" to try a pickled mushroom. She countered with "you probably have no money", to which I replied "I don't have no money" - I knew there was something, I just didn't know how much.

Luckily, I didn't have to hand over what turned out to be $18, as she declined the mushroom altogether.

Would you eat a pickled mushroom on promise of something more than "no money", or would you need to know the dollar amount in advance?

Flat Stanley

The first grade classes at our daughter's school do a Flat Stanley project every year. You know Flat Stanley, right? He's a kid who gets accidentally squished to two dimensions, which turns out to be sort of cool because he can slip under doors and travel in a mailing envelope. The school project has the kids make their own Flat Stanley, write a letter to someone, and mail their Stanley off on an adventure.

Me being me, I suggested that the girlie send her Flat Stanley to a State Department friend of mine who was then in Ethiopia. So she did. We got some wonderful emails and photos from Ethiopia:

Sorry for the many delays of Flat Stanley - he has had some adventures, though. We went to a track meet at the International Community School in Addis Ababa. Stanley had a tour of the school, looked at a Tukle, the traditional round Ethiopian house, and hung out in a garden, including a banana tree. The running track here is the best running rack in East Africa, and is a track where the Ethiopian Olympic team frequently trains.

Then they went to Sabahar, a silk weaving place started by friends of ours, where local extract and weave silk at fair wages. Stanley got to hang out with some silk worms and mulberry leaves - the silk worms seemed happy with Stanley and did take any bites out of him - they only eat the leaves!

Stanley got lost for a little while - we had hoped to send him home during a recent visit back to the US, but he got lost in our stuff, so instead we took him traveling some more with us in Ethiopia. A couple weeks ago, we traveled to Axum and Lalibela, Ethiopia. Axum has these huge obelisks called "stellae" that were built over 600 years ago. The churches at Lalibela are often thought to be the 8th wonder of the world - buildings carved out of rock since the 1200's. Look these places up - they're pretty cool.

We may get some other traveling with Stanley done - then finally Stanley should be ready to head home - sorry it's long after the end of the school year, but I hope you enjoy seeing some of his travels!

Stanley didn't come home. And a year went by, and the girlie was now a second grader, and she saw all the Flat Stanleys go up on the bulletin boards in the first grade hallway, and she got teary. Where's my Flat Stanley? Oh, out having adventures, I said, he'll be home one day.

And then Maternal Dementia posted about their Flat Stanley going missing, and I felt better. Except that she was able to clone theirs, with the full acquiescence of her child, because Stanley had been lost In Their Very House, so I didn't really feel better. But I knew in my heart of hearts that Stanley was going to turn up.

And you know what? Stanley just came home, after 18 months of international travel. I do believe he's the best traveled Stanley ever sent out from that school - having gone to Virginia, then Ethiopia, then Pennsylvania, then back to Ethiopia, and then to New Jersey, and now back to New York. He's just exhausted, and terribly thin, but we're all so pleased to have him back. I think he'll stay home for a while.

But we're definitely going to have to fatten him up. Luckily, there's an Ethiopian restaurant in the next town. He'll probably like that.

Wordless Wednesday: Birthday

Today would have been my mother's 76th birthday. She dearly loved the beach, the ocean, and when we were up at the Cape, I gathered pebbles and wrote her name on an unsullied stretch of smoothly packed sand. I imagine that it pleased her.

Tuesday Parentexting

In a fit of optimism, because we've never tried to communicate this way, I texted my 76 year old father when we arrived in Newport a few weeks ago. (I knew he was in a meeting, and didn't want to interrupt with a phone call.)



He answered me 16 days later.

I think maybe texting isn't going to be the way.

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P.S. Mental P Mama posts parentexts every Tuesday. But hers are with her kids, not her older parents!

True Confessions

Don't ask me why, but I was reading Town & Country not too long ago - fluff, you know, upper crust fluff - it was in the waiting room where I was getting a mammogram. I was distinctly amused to find in it an article* about stealing soap from hotels, with the subhead What is it about hotel soaps that inspires such avarice among even the most sensible of people? I mean, really, did you think that the readers of Town & Country would bother to pilfer the amenities?

I confess. I always take the soap. And the shampoo and conditioner and lotion. And sometimes the shower caps. It's like a little souvenir. And occasionally, if it's a swank hotel, it's a really nice little souvenir. Of late, I've been using conditioner from the Del Coronado - I open the bottle and the citrusy-coconuty scent wafts me back to San Diego. And I'm at the tail end of a bottle of Bulgari body lotion from the Four Seasons in New York - I slather it on my legs and think wistfully about the big suite we hung out in for my mother-in-law's birthday. Yeah, sometimes you get something truly indifferent, but the seven year old doesn't care what her conditioner smells like.

I don't travel enough for my soap acquisitions to make much of a difference. But my father? He travels all the time. And he takes the soap too. (I guess it runs in the family.) And because he travels so much, it starts to accumulate, so when I go to visit, I steal his pilfered soap from him. It's getting complicated, right?

But here's the true confession, the one I can't believe I'm about to share. I take all of the little bottles of shampoo, and I pour them all into one big one. It's some crazy Yankee frugality mixed with a bit of stick-it-to-the-man.

I can't remember the last time I bought shampoo.




*I'd link to the article, but I can't find it anywhere; Town & Country doesn't seem to have entered the digital age. USA Today summarized it, though.

Shoe Friday - Vintage

There were always dress-up shoes at Granny's house. Somewhere, there are pictures of me in these very shoes, which came home with us one day. They almost fit the seven year old, though they're a size 7AAA. I've no idea whose they were. My mother? My grandmother? A lady with a delicate, small foot.

Wordless Wednesday: Spiderweb

(Don't embiggen the picture, it's not a very good picture, because I took it outside at night with my cellphone. But as we were sitting on the deck eating dinner one night, the outdoor light with the motion-sensor came on, for reasons unknown, and bang, the spiderweb was all lit up. If the light hadn't turned on just like that, we'd have missed the spiderweb. And it was huge, and its spider was in the middle of it, and I didn't even think to go looking for the actual camera, not that it's all that much better than the cellphone camera, because what if, I don't know, something happened and I missed it?)

A Little Charity, and a Rant about Scent

You may recall my post-Blogher post, in which I mentioned that P&G handed out no swag, but instead promised to mail a box to your house. Said box arrived last week, full of full-sized products to try. Lots of the things in the box were products that I've no interest in trying (washing machine cleaner) or just don't need (tampons and pads) or don't ever use (mascara).

Happily, though, the box came the day before our local fire department was doing a supplies drive for people upstate affected by Hurricane Irene. So I repacked about half of the things and delivered Tampax tampons, Always pads, Olay facial cloths, two Cover Girl mascaras, Ivory body wash, two kinds of Febreze, the aforementioned Tide washing machine cleaner, Downy Unstopables, and some Pantene Curly "damage repair ampoules" down to the collection point at the farmer's market.

So, P&G, thank you for helping me to help some other people. Someone whose basement had two feet of water in it is likely to appreciate the Febreze. And someone whose whole house washed away may well be in need of the pick-me-up provided by a new mascara.

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<rant>Okay, okay. I have to poke it with a stick. Downy Unstopables? 1) They spelled it wrong; it should be "unstoppable". 2) Why? Why would you want to dump little pellets in the wash, to add fragrance to your laundry, fragrance that according to the promo language on the Downy website is supposed "to keep active wear, towels, and other fabrics smelling “wow” right up until the next wash." Huh? It's such a persistent odor embedded in your clothing that it lasts through the wash, through the dryer cycle, into the closet, and the whole while you're wearing that shirt? What the hell is in it? Why would I want to do that to my clothes and my nose? To be fair, I'm probably the wrong person for it - I never use air fresheners because I'd rather smell a fart for the few minutes before it dissipates than have possibly dangerous artificial chemicals wafting through my house, I use unscented deodorant, and the laundry detergent I use is so lightly scented that there's no odor left if I run the load through the dryer. But still. Downy presumably saw a need. Why?</rant>