June is the New December: Parents' Busiest Time of the Year

End of the season parties for sports teams.

End of the year bashes/barbecues at school.

End of the year school award ceremonies.

End of the year soirees for other extra curricular activities.

End of the year concerts/performances.

Gifts/thank you notes for the teachers, coaches and after-school activity supervisors.

Birthday parties.

Last-minute school projects.

Sports tryouts/evaluations for next fall's teams.

Making (or buying, shhh!) baked goods for one (or more) of those end of the year events.

Father's Day. (It's THIS Sunday!)

Did I forget anything, other than the fact that I still have to bring the kids shopping for Father's Day? I'm constantly forgetting something. It's that time of year, to forget stuff thereby requiring me to make a mad dash to the house of the person who's collecting money for a gift for the soccer coach (or for a class gift, etc.).

It's racing to the mall for a four-hour odyssey (seriously) of trying to help your teenage daughter to find the right bathing suit for the pool party, tomorrow, because last year's version so doesn't fit any more.

It's realizing that your eldest son's soccer game has been rescheduled (for the second time) on the same night as your youngest son's band concert. (And your youngest son, you notice minutes before you have to leave for the concert, has outgrown his "good" pants and you have to pilfer some from your oldest son's closet without him noticing because he'd be annoyed.) It's then realizing that your daughter's make-up soccer game is slated for the same night as your eldest son's band concert. Of course it is.

It's scurrying about for the components of a solar oven for your grade schooler's project as well as trying to find time when he can work on the project with another student. And it's due this week, the week of all the concerts, make-up games and parties. Plus your daughter has an orthodontist appointment to get her palate extender removed and braces placed upon her teeth, at the same time she has a math and a science test and she's freaking out about it all.

While December may be insane with all the pressure for holiday perfection and a mammoth quantity of shopping to tackle, I think the end of the school year has now surpassed it in terms of busyness. The month of June is packed with sweet, melancholy moments that make parents proud -- the sad end of things, the culmination of a year or a season's worth of work -- all at the same time.

Then *poof!* it's summer and all of it comes to a jarring end. And the kids complain, with nary a trace of irony, that there's nothing to do and they're bored.

A Long Week of Melodrama: iPod Through Laundry, Running Over a Xylophone, Tryouts & Dress Shopping

One of my friends has likened my family to the Dunphys from Modern Family and, after several antics this week, that sounds about right . . .

Clean iPod

The Girl left her iPod in her jeans pocket. Again. It went through the laundry (both washer and dryer). Again.

As The Spouse and I tried to go to sleep last night, I heard loud banging inside the cycling dryer which I suspected was likely someone’s iPod. The Spouse groaned, hauled himself out of bed and went downstairs to see if I was right. When he came back, he had The Girl’s super-hot/fresh-from-the-dryer iPod in his hands. He added that he’d found a rock rattling around insider dryer as well. No clue who was carrying a rock around in his or her pants. But I don't think I want to know.

This morning the iPod was able to keep a charge and play music, but the screen looked a little funky. How many times 1) Is this going to happen in our house (there have been four other incidents of iPods in the laundry prior to this one) and 2) How much washing and drying can an iPod take before it dies a sad little death?

Dragging Things Out

Things were a tad chaotic on Wednesday morning as I was scrambling, trying to get the kids ready for me to drive them to school early so The Youngest Boy could make his before-school band lessons. In the chaos, The Youngest Boy rolled his ginormous xylophone – in its brand, spankin’ new bag that was a pain in the neck for The Spouse to get from the music store folks as the other bag's wheels were busted – out into the garage and left it behind my SUV. And didn’t tell anybody.

I, of course, had no freakin’ idea that the pricey instrument was back there and proceeded to exit out of the driveway once all three kids were safely buckled in. It was only the frantic waving and shouting of my next door neighbor, “There’s something under your car!” that got me to stop, get out of the car and see the xylophone under the vehicle.

Luckily, only the new bag was damaged in the incident, though it looks as though a rabid animal went at it in a fury. When I told The Spouse about my dragging the xylophone down the driveway, I heard his head explode over the phone lines. And this was all before I'd had my coffee. Not pretty.

Trying Tryouts

The middle schoolers just wrapped up two tryout sessions a piece in their efforts to attempt to make their respective seventh grade travel basketball teams. What has that meant for the Picket Fence Post family? Lots of dropping one kid off, returning to pick that kid up then dropping the second one off, later driving back to pick up the second one, sometimes having to leave dinner on the table and drag The Youngest Boy with me while I cart his siblings around. One night, The Eldest Boy had a soccer practice, raced home, showered, changed and went to hoops tryouts, came home and worked on homework. (The Spouse has been partially available to lend a transportation hand.)

Now the wait begins. Did they make a travel team or did they get cut? (Last year one of them made a travel team, the other didn’t.) If they made it, are any of their friends on the team?

Another big question this year: Coaching. The Spouse has volunteered to coach for both kids should they make the travel teams. *smacking hand on forehead* I don’t know whether to hope they make it or hope that they don't so I'll have a mildly less stressful winter. (If the kids don't make the travel teams, they'll still play in-town hoops. If you make a travel team, you have to play on both that travel team AND an in-town team. Yes, I know, we're crazy for even letting them tryout.)

Dressing the Daughter

Thank God for a helpful salesclerk (yes there are still a few of them out there) at a department store at a nearby mall. Without her help I doubt I would’ve found a dress for The Girl to wear to the bat mitzvah she’ll be attending this weekend, without having some big argument with her or without enduring oodles of tension like the icy vibe I got from another mother-daughter combo who were shopping at the same time we were.

The dress department salesclerk selected a bunch of cute dresses – ones I would’ve never in a million years picked out because I had trouble envisioning The Girl inside of any of them – for The Girl to try on. It was stunning to see her in grown-up dresses, and totally rock them by the way.

I credit the saleswoman’s spot-on taste with saving the day and getting us out of the store in under an hour. (I'm not a big shopping kinda gal, unless it's a bookstore.) The next hour was spent locating black flats, a cute (but cheap) purse and silvery nail polish. And although we didn’t find a little shrug to wear over her dress, I was pleasantly relieved that we were able to achieve any success at all.

But I’ll be holding my breath until she’s all dressed and at the party. As for The Spouse, he’ll be holding his breath until she arrives back home from the party.

Leaf Me Alone

The wretched Leaf Project has finally ended as my middle schoolers handed in their thick binders filled with leaves taped down and inserted into plastic sleeves next to neatly typed classifications and descriptions.

Though The Eldest Boy had been working on this thing for weeks, he only finished it up late last night, after getting home from his basketball tryouts. At around 9:30 p.m. he proudly presented it to The Spouse and I, as I crankily paused Grey’s Anatomy and looked it over. If we'd found big mistakes, the kid would've been up way too late to fix them. However there were none.

The Girl, who also finished up her project yesterday after we'd driven to a neighbor's house to pick one last leaf from a tree before going dress shopping, almost left the thing at home this morning, which would've resulted in a frantic call to yours truly begging me to bring the binder in to school. Luckily I asked her where her Leaf Project was before she got into the car – the kids all had to be driven to school every day this week (!). At least her binder wasn’t left on the ground behind the car. It wouldn’t have fared as well as the xylophone.

Image credits: Amazon.com, West Music and Norman Rockwell/Arcadia Youth Basketball.

Falling to Pieces Over the Leaf Project

The seventh graders have a big assignment. Big. It’s called the Leaf Project.

Here’s what it is in a nutshell: Collect a few dozen leaves of different varieties. Identify the tree from whence the leaves came. Press those leaves. Mount the leaves in a book, along with info about the leaves. Hand it in.

Sounds simple, right?

Not so fast.

Neither The Spouse nor I had heard anything about this seventh grade Leaf Project until just before we walked into the science teacher’s classroom on Curriculum Night when another dad asked us how our kids were coming along with the project.

“What ‘Leaf Project?’” I asked.

He looked at me quizzically as we took our places behind the desks. It was during the science teacher’s presentation that we learned about the Leaf Project. She said she’d be taking the students around the school grounds a few times to ID trees. We just needed to give them a reference book to help them classify the trees, something I bought the day after Curriculum Night.

Still, it sounded fairly easy enough. No need to stress out.

Then I received an e-mail from a kind parent inviting my kids to a session with a forester from town who had volunteered to conduct a session with seventh graders at a student’s home, but my seventh graders wouldn’t be able to make it. And the Leaf Project became the subject of ample, anxious chatter at the sidelines of soccer games among the seventh grade parents.

My kids started freaking out over it and worrying, insisting that the only place they could search for leaves was on the school grounds, as long as I bring them to the school and hang around in my car waiting for them. On two different afternoons when I was supposed to be working.

“Why can’t you just go in the woods in the back of our house?” I asked them, irritated that they were asking me to truck them around as though my schedule was irrelevant.

“We can’t,” they said, protesting that there aren’t enough different kinds of trees in our woods. The only place to look, they were convinced, is at school.

“Why would we waste all that work we did?” The Eldest Boy asked, referring to the school leaf walks where the trees have already been identified.

“Why, you can’t just go outside?” I still didn’t get it, why they couldn’t just go into the woods and ID trees and leaves near us.

Then yesterday, The Eldest Boy and The Girl asked if they could stay late after school with their teacher and go on another leaf collection walk and take a late bus home. I said, “Sure,” as that option seemed preferable to me spending two afternoons hanging out in the school parking lot waiting for them. Then my daughter inexplicably decided not to stick around after school so she could get her own personal leaf time on Thursday, when the kids had the day off from school (for the Jewish New Year, which we’ll be celebrating on Sunday), and have The Spouse or me bring her to the school grounds while we wait for her.

However it poured last night (I tend to think it was the collective tears of crushed Red Sox fans). All the leaves are now wet. But since The Girl waited, she’s going to have to tromp through the dampness, collect and dry out the leaves.

Damned Leaf Project.

Notes from the Grade 4 Invention Convention

We here at the Picket Fence Post household thought we'd be able to breathe easier when the fourth grade Invention Convention concluded (although the hockey season is still ongoing, but that's another matter). And at first we did.

The Youngest Boy did well this afternoon explaining to the parents who attended the Invention Convention how his creation, the "Dog-O-Feeder," works: You train your dog (in this case our dog Max) to press on the wooden lever, which will lift the clear plastic square in front of the hole in the plastic container filled with food allowing the dry kibble to tumble out.

That Dog-O-Feeder represents a whole lot of sweat and a mess o'drama, mostly experienced by The Spouse, whom The Youngest Boy preferred to help him with the school project.

But alas, just when I thought all was well with the world and the stress levels were dropping, the Dog-O-Feeder broke: When The Youngest Boy took his invention out of the car seconds after we got home, the paper bag into which I'd placed it, which was wet from the rain, broke and part of the plastic on the invention snapped off. More drama.

Feeling guilty that the bag broke, I tried to immediately smooth things over by cravenly passing the buck and promising that The Spouse would repair it when he gets home from work, even though I'm sure he thought he was all done with using his power tools until the next school project.

Notes from the Picket Fence Post Homestead: Pet Grooming, School Projects, Shorts Obsession & 'Wimpy Kid' 2

Max Gets Groomed

Our dog Max was in dire need of a haircut. His hair had grown so long that when I was out walking him in our neighborhood recently, a woman remarked that he looked like a really short sheep on a leash. And she was right.

However bringing a dog with extremely thick hair like our Havanese/Wheaten Terrier to the groomer’s can be tricky because no matter how many times you try to make sure that you’ve combed through your dog’s hair (with a comb) with some degree of regularity, there’s inevitably a knot or a mat (or several) somewhere on his fuzzy body. And when the groomer finds it later she'll make you feel like a negligent pet owner for not attending to it.

I knew for a fact when Max was dropped off at the groomer's that he had some tangles near his hindquarters. When I'd attempted to comb them out, he’d growled and physically resisted, so I’d wound up giving up or enlisted someone's help to remove the mats with scissors because it was easier and quicker.

Well Max got his much needed grooming this week and the groomer was kind, though she did mention, as she raised her eyebrows slightly, that he had some mats and that “someone” had obviously been cutting them out, making his hair uneven. At least she didn’t shame me as much as other groomers have in the past.

School Projects from Hell

All three of the Picket Fence Post kids are in the midst of working on school projects. And, frankly, I'm starting to feel a bit stressed out about all of it as I’m dreading the inevitable melodrama that has accompanied these sorts of things in the past.

The Girl just completed a series of trials to determine in which liquid a Tylenol capsule would dissolve the quickest: Orange juice, grapefruit juice or lemonade. She collected all her data and is putting them into a spreadsheet as I write this blog entry. And she’s still got a long way to go in completing her tri-fold display board. The whole project is due Tuesday. What’s the over/under on whether she’ll get it finished without parental harassment and/or drama?

Meanwhile, her twin brother has also been running trials to see whether the temperature of the water inside a water balloon will affect whether and at what height from the ground it breaks. (He was channeling his inner Calvin & Hobbes when he devised this project.) He has already completed his data spreadsheet but has yet to start his tri-fold display board. When I suggested to him this morning (after he slept until 11!!) that he start working on it, he replied, “Later.” I predict major drama in the near future given that his project is also due Tuesday.

As for The Youngest Boy, he is supposed to invent something that uses a "simple machine." His big idea is to create a dog food feeder that he wants to teach our dog Max how to use in time for his school's Invention Convention, for which the item and a tri-fold display board are supposed to be completed. However he’s hit several snags. His original prototype was completely unrealistic (it involved taping a shoebox to a table, before it was filled with dog food). Then, at my urging, he revised it and concocted a more workable design but The Spouse refuses to get the supplies the kid says he needs until the kid comes up with a physical prototype. However The Youngest Boy says he needs supplies to make a prototype. Meanwhile, I’m going to go buy ear plugs so I don’t have to listen to the two of them continue to bicker about which should come first.

What is It With Kids & Shorts?

Every day this week . . . I repeat, every day this week, either The Spouse or I have gotten embroiled in a gigantic argument with The Youngest Boy over the fact that he insists upon wearing shorts to school like everyone else.

Now keep in mind that during the past week, it snowed twice and the temps were largely stuck in the 30s and 40s, yet the kid still harangued us for being power-mad parents who made him wear long pants. (*insert sinister cackle here*) Every day, multiple times a day, it's, "Why can't I wear shorts?"

This morning when it was in the 30s, I allowed The Youngest to don shorts (along with a short sleeve shirt and a jacket) when he went to play outside. (It was a moment of weakness because I was working on a column that was already past my deadline and I didn’t want to hear him whine any longer about the damned shorts.) He came inside some 20 minutes later, freezing cold, telling me his hands were so chilled that he felt like they were “burning.” He wanted me to help him warm up, but just his hands though, he assured me, as he said his legs (which were ice cold to the touch) were just fine, thank you very much.

About two hours later, The Spouse and The Youngest Boy were arguing about the exact outside temperature after I’d told The Youngest Boy that I wouldn’t let him go outside again in those shorts. It was 42 degrees.

Since The Youngest Boy claims other kids are going to school wearing shorts, and I've seen some of them when I've dropped him off at school, I ask you, are you having the same issue with your kid(s) regarding wearing shorts when it's snowing outside?

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules



The Picket Fence Post kids are all jazzed up about seeing the second installment of the Wimpy Kid series, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules.

The first movie was okay, they were sufficiently entertained, but they agreed that it didn’t hold a candle to the actual book which was much, much funnier. After the original movie, we all decided that our favorite character is Rowley, not the self-absorbed and morally ambiguous Greg who seems much crueler in the movie than he did in the book.

Wonder if the second film will be even a fraction as amusing as its original source material which had me laughing out loud when I read it with The Eldest Son?