Apropos of yesterday's post

I was rather amused that all of the children's television we watched today was pirate themed. Disney channel had a marathon of "Jake and the Neverland Pirates" and NickJr pulled out all of the pirate episodes of their shows they had. It's kind of amazing that thanks to the Internet, it's now possible to not only create your own silly holidays, but have them catch on to the point that major television networks are observing them.

Plus: a touch spoilery list of character descriptions for the movie which gives some good plot information.

I'm getting pretty darn excited about the upcoming Muppet movie. I admit, I'm fairly easy when it comes to the Muppets, but even so, I've haven't felt the need to rewatch much of what they've made from about Muppets from Space on. There seemed to be a long dry period where studio executives knew that the Muppets were a great source of cash, but didn't know how to find the right people to milk it. But in the past couple years, they're really started to put out some good stuff, starting with the viral videos and now (while I hesitate to judge anything based on previews), the previews for the new movie look not just good, but spot-on, like the people who made it really get what made the Muppets great.

The answer, of course, is that they needed to find some Gen-Xers who grew up with the Muppets and truly loved them. And now (I hope) it seems we have what Jim Henson finally dreamed of: people who understand the heart and soul of the Muppets with the colossal Disney marketing machine behind it. Because say what you will about Disney, they know how to promote and distribute the hell out of a product. There has been no danger of any old Muppet material languishing in obscurity once Disney got their money-making hands on it. So: we now have a full dvd library of Muppets to show our children, and Disney Channel's incessant promotion has gotten K really excited about the upcoming movie, which makes me very happy, because I think it would kill me to have to get a babysitter to go see a children's movie.

First week

Week one of school has come and gone, leaving us mostly intact. Our workload is really light right now, and almost everything we're doing is review from last year, so the only real challenge has been to keep K interested. I've taken to doing things like telling her if she can pass the quiz at the end of the math lesson, she can skip the lesson. Because somehow it doesn't seem like a worthwhile use of either of our time to review counting to ten with a child who has been counting over a hundred for over a year. To my surprise, Science has gotten off to a poor start. Although perhaps not so surprising when you consider of all of the world of exciting, hands-on topics available in the universe of science education, they opted to start six-year-olds out with a rousing discussion of classification and the scientific method. Whoopee. I believe tomorrow we talk about safety. Be still my heart. Part of the reason things went poorly is that we started out last Tuesday watching a video from BrainPopJr (a website she loves), which, while it was on the scientific method, used magnets as the sample experiment to illustrate it. So she got really excited about magnets, only to have me open the textbook and attempt to interest her in talking about classifying animals, along with a discussion of the various things scientists do that made their jobs sound very dull indeed (Did you know scientists observe and record their findings? And communicate? Doesn't that sound like exactly what you were interested in when you were six? Yes! It's non-stop science excitement over here, I tell you). They sent us safety goggles, for crying out loud, so I'm taking that as a promise that science will start to get more hands-on and interesting. One very pleasant surprise has been how well FastForward, a set of reading computer games, has been going. It was a huge struggle to get K to do it last year. We finally wound up sitting with her the entire time, working the mouse for her and chivvying her endlessly. As a bribe, her teacher allowed us to let her skip one day a week, and we still struggled to finish the allotted amount every week. But now? She's doing it mostly on her own, with no complaint. To my great shock, she actually wants to do it every morning. There's one game we need to work the mouse on because it moves so quickly that even we have trouble responding quickly enough. And there are a couple games where I look over her shoulder and help talk her through some of the questions because I think she will learn more by my coaching her through finding the correct answer than getting the answer wrong on her own without any explanation as to why it was wrong. Plus, she's much more likely to stay interested if she's doing well, and I'm not about to mess with this sudden miracle turnaround in attitude. So one week down, going fairly well. Here's hoping for more of the same this week, hopefully trending in the more interesting and more challenging.

First day of school!

Tomorrow, school starts up again and we get back into a routine. I've been enjoying the reduced workload, but I think it will be good for us to have some more structure. Part of me wishes I were shoving K out the door tomorrow, but I have to admit I don't miss school mornings from last fall one tiny bit. Since we can't afford any daycare, we will be learning how to do school with Alec around full time. I'm hoping we can take heavy advantage of the fact that he is a rare sort of toddler that wants a morning nap. Looking at our current workload, we should be able to get everything done in a couple hours. Apparently we will add more stuff in later, but right now, we just have the basics - science, reading, 'rithmetic and fainting in coils (or Fast Forward, our nemesis from last year, a dreadfully tedious and slightly creepy reading computer game). And the stuff we add in will be things like music, art and phys ed, which will be much easier to do with a toddler around. Well, music and phys ed at least. The toddler's "help" with art projects is rarely appreciated by his sister. The school room is... useable, mostly. We will continue to chip away at the crap infesting our basement. It's much better than it was two months ago, at least.

Water, water everywhere

I think Irene has mostly passed. We had a wet day, followed by a more exciting hour or so in the evening where the power surged a couple times, and now we're down to a middling sort of rain. People on Facebook were talking about tornado warnings, but they had passed by and I think it was for the western suburbs anyway. A couple more inches of rain forecast, but then there's SUN tomorrow. I wonder if all of the government buildings that were closed will be open after all. B was supposed to work tomorrow, before the state of emergency, which leaves me wondering if work will be back on.

So we got off pretty lightly, all things considered. I'm deeply grateful that we're not still in our old house, where the garage always took on water when it rained because it was on a downslope. During heavy rains, it would seep in through the basement door and on one memorable occasion, water started coming through the back of the garage wall into the utility room. Right under the litter boxes. There's nothing like the threat of spilled litter getting turned into concrete to keep you frantically mopping.

In any case, if this is the worst hurricane we get for the next fifty years, we will be very lucky.

Updates

We've had rolling waves of visitors over the past couple weeks. First my best friend Sarah and husband, then my mother and her aide, then my aunt and uncle came down from Connecticut to help celebrate my mother's birthday. All delightful, of course, but very tiring by the end and making me want to crawl into my cave of introversion. Not conducive to posting, is what I'm saying. But life keeps going on, not necessarily in a very exciting way:

* We finally made it back to the urologist, and it has been determined K isn't completely emptying her bladder when she pees. So we're going back for some biofeedback sessions to try and train her to empty it better, and FINALLY have daily antibiotics.

* School is starting up again in two weeks. Fortunately, having my mother visit spurred us to muck out the basement and uncover the pile of boxes we called a school room. It wasn't the vision of organization and loveliness I had in mind, but both the family room and school room are now usable. We have a big box of school supplies and textbooks from our cyber school, which caused great excitement. It included goggles for science experiments, which alarms me a touch and thrills K no end. If you hear about any alarming explosions, you should probably check our house first.

* Our 11th wedding anniversary was two weeks ago and we didn't remember until the next day. I confess, the romance does wane a touch. The fact that the 11th anniversary is the steel anniversary didn't help matters. Although I suppose it would have been a good excuse to get each other swords. B's birthday was yesterday, and we DID remember that on the day, at least. He still didn't get a sword, although he did get Legos.

* Alec appears to be in a language development period again and is adding words and phrases at a great rate. I think "graham cracker" is my current favorite. Sometimes he will sit and obliging repeat words after us, and sometimes he decides to be two and answers any request of "Can you say x?" with "No!" And then we ask "Can you say 'I am not your performing monkey?'" and he grins and says "Eek eek eek!"

2 cars / Cars 2

So after only two years of talking about getting a bigger car, we finally got all of our ducks in a row and went out on a Tuesday night and bought a 2008 Mazda5. We left on vacation three days later and oh goodness, it was the right choice. We came home with a bunch more stuff than we left with, and despite that, we could still see out the back window! Crazy!

The best way I can describe this car is that it's a cross between a minivan and a station wagon. It's about the same size and cargo space as a station wagon, but has a third row that can be folded up when grandparents are visiting. While I don't think I'd like to go on a three-day road-trip with six people in the car, it did work fine for trips to the beach as long as the short people were in the back row. It also has passenger doors like a minivans as well as seats that are higher up. I'm really enjoying not having to lean down to buckle children in.

One weird thing is an odd mix of really sophisticated and really cheap features. For instance, the heating system allows us to set a target temperature, and the car will adjust the fan as needed to get to the target. On the other hand, the headlights don't turn on automatically, so for the first time in nearly ten years, we have to remember to turn on the headlights when it starts to get dark and turn them off when we get out of the car. There are other small amenities lacking, like no power outlets. It's odd. But all in all, we're pretty happy.

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K is a big fan of the Pixar movie Cars, so it was a given that we would take her to see Cars 2, especially since it was coming out right after her birthday. We wound up seeing it twice - I took just her on a weekday afternoon when Alec was at the babysitter, and then she really wanted to take my mother to see it, so we all went while we were in Michigan.

I should say that overall, I liked it very much. It's funny, a good spy movie parody and of course has fantastic animation and all of the little fun Pixar touches. There are ways I liked it a lot more than the first movie, since sports movies tend to bore me and I couldn't actually predict the entire plot of this movie from the first ten minutes unlike Cars.

That said, there's something about Cars 2 that really bothers me.
Big spoilers ahead for Cars 2
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The main villains in the movie are lemons: models of cars like the Ford Pinto that have terrible motors and parts and break down all of the time. It's really not a wonder why lemons would become bitter enough to become villains. Everyone, including the heroes, views them with utter contempt and feels free to make fun of them to their faces and discriminate against them.

I recognize that the cosmology of the Cars world doesn't bear close examination, since it's about as tightly knit together as a chain-link fence. Still, it's hard not to see how creating a world where characters with bodies that don't work well are worthless and objects of contempt doesn't send a message - intentional or not - about disability and people with disabilities.

The thing that really bothers me is that it's really unnecessary to the story. These days, simply owning an oil company makes you a villain and the prospect of sitting on a huge oil deposit while not wanting the world to turn to alternative fuels is plenty of motivation for the plot. How the lemons deal with how they're viewed by others is clearly set up to contrast how Mater comes to accept himself for who he is despite how he is viewed by the rest of the world, but it's not really a good comparison. It's clear that Mater has always been accepted and valued in Radiator Springs and it's only once he spends, what, a week in the outside world that he realizes people see him as an idiot and maybe 24 hours elapse between that realization and his deciding he can like himself anyway. Compare that to spending your entire life being treated like that and being discriminated against. Also, Mater has spent his life towing lemons around and feeling superior to them, so he's not really in a position to tell them he knows just how they feel. It's sort of like saying, "Well, I've always been tone-deaf, so I totally know what it's like for you to have spent your life in a wheelchair!"

I'm fairly certain that Pixar didn't want to send the message that people with physical disabilities are worthless, but we often say things that send messages we didn't mean them to. I'm also much less willing to give a children's movie a pass on these things, because children are excellent at picking up subtext whether it's the subtext we wanting them to read or not, and unlike adults, they're still learning about society and peoples' places in it. Children with disabilities especially don't need to see a movie that sends that message.

I don't know. I don't have any ringing condemnations, just disappointment that Pixar once again has made an excellent movie with some stuff that really bothers me (I have some issues with The Incredibles as well). I'll probably still let K watch Cars 2 when it comes out on dvd and I'll probably spend a lot of time talking about disabilities to counteract it. It's not as satisfying an answer as declaring that we're boycotting Pixar forevermore, but more realistic.

Harry Potter and Tigger too

I spent Thursday at the movies - I took the kids to Winnie the Pooh in the afternoon, and we adults went to Harry Potter that evening. What can I say? The high was 101, and while we had Harry Potter planned for a while, taking the kids to a movie sounded like a great way to spend the afternoon, given that ticket prices go up significantly on Fridays and we really needed to go to Ikea wednesday (incidentally, I discovered last summer that if you live close enough to one, Ikea is a great way to spend an afternoon - cheap lunch, and hour of free child care for K to have fun in the ball pit while Alec and I hang out in the children's department where they obligingly have samples of all of their toys set out to play with, not to mention lots of drawers and cabinet doors to open).

Winnie the Pooh (no cut for spoilers because really, it's Winnie the Pooh) was very sweet and a surprising throwback to the original 70s Many Adventure of Winnie the Pooh, the one where they simply animated stories from the books, with the cute addition of including the book and interaction with the animator in the story. You know, the good ones before they started simply beating A.A. Milne's corpse repeatedly to see how much more money might fall out of his pockets. Today's movie had the same animation style of the Shephard backgrounds with the more Disneyfied style of characters, plotlines taken from the books (although they went off in different directions from the books, but not in a way that seemed out of character for the books), and even 70s Disney style music and a cute animated short that made me think I was sitting on a square of carpet in my elementary school gym on one of the days they decided to troop us in to show us cartoons for a treat. It got two thumbs and two feet (she was literally leaping with excitement as I bought the tickets) from K, and I certainly recommend it with children in the 2 to 6 age range who need to get out of the heat.

Harry Potter was simply fantastic. It made me cry in several spots and always seemed true to the spirit of the book.
Inserting spoiler space because there are most definitely spoilers and while Blogger is able to put a cut in, it's hella complicated:
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Watching Lily Potter desperately tell her son how much she loves him as she waits to die - oof. This isn't the first time that being a parent has made these books and movies hit me harder (end of Goblet of Fire, for instance) but this one was the strongest for that. It's one of those things about having children - the idea of dying starts to not bother you so much about not being able to live anymore as the idea of leaving your children behind helpless without you.

There were changes in the final battle, but I felt they were all appropriate to make the action more cinematic. And don't shoot me, but I think it actually improved on the books in one place - one of my big problems with the book was how Snape gave his memories to Harry without any clue about why they're important, and then Harry just decides to go browse through them in the middle of the battle because he's so darn depressed. The movie's decision to have Snape say more (and thank you, Voldemort, for deciding to kill Snape in a way that would let him linger instead of your customary method of execution that kills people instantly - supervillain syndrome strikes again, I suppose), and to have Harry look at them in the lull between battles made a lot more sense.

So all in all, a good end to the series and definitely worth the babysitting money.

Home!

Since Thursday night, actually. We headed out the evening of Friday the 1st, got to my mother's the next day, went up to b's parents' the next Wednesday and the starting wending our way back home the next Monday, with stops in Lafayette and Columbus. It was fantastic. We went to the beach, made sand castles and had a cookout. Alec sat straight down in Lake Michigan and laughed with glee while the surf did its best to knock him over. We saw family and friends and watched our children play with their similarly-aged cousins. We enjoyed copious amount of vacation ice cream. We saw two movies in the theater (one with children, one without. Too bad we got home just before Harry Potter came out, because my desire to see Green Lantern in the theater was never that big). We slept and slept. A lot. One morning, we even didn't have to get up with our son when he decided 5:30 was a great time to be up for the day.

I'm not sure I can communicate what the vacation was like without talking about why I quit the online job. The shorthand version, of course, is that working 35 hours a week and homeschooling was slowly killing me. But that doesn't give the full flavor. I was busy with children all day, so I had to work late into the night. Then I had to get up with the children at a normal time most mornings. We couldn't do anything in the evening because I had to work. B had to do all evening childcare and I couldn't help, even when I wanted to. I had no time to do anything, because even when I had some spare time, I was completely bone-deep exhausted.

So almost three weeks later of not working late into the night every evening, it's hard to convey just how relaxing it has been. I'm feeling actual ambition again to get things done. Like finally cleaning up the basement (the fact we have houseguests coming in three weeks is also a good impetus for that). Or exercise, something that's fallen shamefully by the wayside in the past year. I'm also trying this new thing where I take care of things right away instead of letting them pile up. Like I immediately scrape off the high chair tray and wash it off instead of leaving it to fester on the counter, or put things away. Crazy!

I've been working on this post for four days, so maybe I should just post it and start slowly writing about other stuff tomorrow. Because I have time now to do that sort of thing. It's good to be home.

So! Since last Tuesday, we have:
-bought a car
-quit my online job
-driven to Michigan.

So just a regular, boring week. We're at my mother's right now, but we're driving up to B's parents' tomorrow, where there is only dial-up Internet. So I will update more when we're back in the land of wi-fi and expand a bit on the above. Hopefully now that I'm only working one job, I'll find a lot more time to update regularly.