The Best Years of Our Lives

Notes from the road, written after our first day (blogger locked me out of the blog last night and I couldn't post these then):

• OK, this was only a day, and it only occasionally felt like a year, but I lost count of how many times Curious Girl and I listened to "The Best Years..." from the Shrek soundtrack. I figured if she was happy, I was happy. And we were both happy. Shrek had some darn fine driving music.
  
• CG does have an ability to entertain herself. We didn't even play music for the first 2 hours of the drive--she was very busy talking to the cats, singing to herself, and doing Important Things on her Dora the Explorer lap desk I found at a used bookstore.
• The trip was really lots of fun, except for the last 20 minutes of whiny wondering if we were at the hotel yet, and the 20 minutes of tears associated with The Tragic Accident of Beloved Baby Blankie. She made a tiny cut in the blanket when she was cutting strips of paper. I think it's repairable.
• CG gave the cats awards (foam stickers on their cat carriers) because they were so good in the car. She also made up a game involving stickers and points for spotting cars ("Mama! look on the other side of the road. There are a lot of cars there. I know you can find a red one. You can!"). Keeping track of my points, stickers, and eligibility for prizes she was designing took up a lot of time back there in the rear of the car.
• Really, it was the valium. I shudder to think what the drive would be like without the cats on valium. The cats are now taking up most of the king-sized bed in our hotel room (this sociability also due to the 1/2 dose of valium I gave them earlier this evening).
• I had to adjudicate one argument between Curious Girl and Baby Sis, but eventually, Baby Sis helped CG with her coloring homework and all was fine. At the hotel, I met Belle in the elevator, and we magically got transported to Belle's castle to sleep. CG never goes anywhere without imagination.
• We went swimming in the hotel pool when we got here. There was a little girl watching us swim, and she exclaimed to CG, "You are a beautiful mermaid! I know you are! You're a mermaid!" CG is quite delightful in water, it is true.
• We at lunch at the Restaurant of Ronald McD. I told CG she designate one day of our trip for such a meal, and she was pretty darn happy about it. (me, I realized that eating a fil3t o' f!sh sandwich once every 20 years is too frequent.) But for dinner, she picked Japanese, and we had sushi and udon soup.
• All our stuff is on the truck. Actually two trucks, as the ridiculously large truck the movers brought didn't hold all our stuff. And this after we have downsized! Ridiculous.
• Younger cat is seriously picking on Elder (Very Aged) Cat. That is no fun.
  
• At the dinner restaurant, there was a fountain. CG wanted a penny, but all I had were quarters, and I didn't want to sacrifice quarters for the fountain. "Have an imaginary penny," I said. She demurred, and I sadly thought that reality was crashing her fantasy world. "I can throw it?" she asked, though, reconsidering. "Imaginary pennies can make real wishes. Take this imaginary penny and throw it." Off she went, and came back somewhat outraged: "I made a wish and it didn't come!" What had she wished for? "I wished for Mommy to be here, and she didn't come!" I said wishes don't always come true right away, but we'll see Mommy soon. Just a few more days.

Now I'm visiting friends, and will take the weekend to relax and let CG get some energy out (while Politica toils on the new house, which is getting our stuff delivered in the morning. yikes!)

Randomness

• 45 boxes of books have the movers thinking our shipment will be overweight
• Overhead last night: "If you put your finger up your nose, you have to wash your hands before you touch the baby."
• Also overheard last night: "I think it will be fun to meet new people."
• The driver told me that reverends have the most books of anyone he moves. Reverends also have the lousiest furniture, he says, but that's OK because they don't seem to care about their furniture. But they do love their books. Songbird and Rev. Dr. Mom, any comments on that score?
• Curious Girl is registered for kindergarten. Her teacher's name is kind of fancy. And our new street address is on Ornamental Tree Variety Terrace. When I told her the teacher's name, she said, "Oooh, fancy! I guess Germany likes fancy words. Maybe Fancy Nancy lives there."
  
• I have about 60 thank you notes to write, which are clearly not getting written before I move.
• I just drafted the last report I need to write.
• The house looks a lot bigger with stuff moving out. As the movers take things, I'm discovering little chocolate easter eggs. A colleage had given me a bag for Curious Girl, and she found them and organized an easter egg hunt the other morning. We repeatedly divided them, hid them, and then searched for each others' eggs. Except she kept forgetting how many she had hid. Which is handy, because I'm a little hungry.
• Curious Girl and Neighbor Girl have opened a lemonade stand. Lemonade is free to movers, but they wanted $10 from me. I gave them .30 each, and they said OK. CG has been dying to have a lemonade stand, so I'm glad she's having one today.
  
• I'm having dinner with Mississippi Friend and Curly Haired Cousin tonight. I don't want to say good bye. I have really, really good friends here, and I am really, really going to miss them. I wish I could be more eloquent on this point, but I can't. This part sucks. At least we get to visit Historian Friend on the way to Germany (she's usually here, but is somewhere on the way, with her kids. Yay!)
  
• But I do want to get on with all this. At breakfast, CG said, "Yay! we're moving tomorrow!" It feels good, now, just to be getting on with it.
• Politica and contractors are making great strides on the house, which is getting nicer by the hour. I'm very proud of Politica for handling the house on her own.
• Let's hope valium-laced kitties are happy travelers.
• Elswhere is moving now, too. Let's hope we all have good moving karma.
  

Posts for the Days to Come

We are really, truly moving. Politica is on the road; Curious Girl and I will be setting off in a week, taking the slow road to Germany. I'm running down the list of things to do before we go, and blogging all kinds of things in my head. As most of you probably can't read my mind, here's a glimpse at the mental blogging chez Granola:

• Jesus and the Jonas Brothers: a post about all the things CG is learning out there in the world with little help from me
• The Long Goodbye: what it's like to leave a place you've lived a while, with links back to a post by Elswhere in which she links to this amazing moving video of someone saying goodbye to his New York neighborhood.
• My Vulcan Resonator: a post about children, anger, and parental feelings. Musings and questions about how to be angry with a kid, how to help kids deal with anger, and what's the next best thing to the cone of silence when your kid is itching for a fight.
• Marriage Matters, and Lambda Legal is a wonderful organization. In June, Lambda filed suit on behalf of a woman whose partner collapsed on a cruise ship in Miami; at the hospital, she and their children were kept from their partner/mother for more than 8 hours, and after she died, both the county and state refused to release the death certificate to the family (despite the immediate faxing of the health care proxy).
  

Working, Mothering, and Success

Those of you who enjoyed Curious Girl's last observation about what makes a good department chair might be interested in this conversation, which took place in the family bathroom at the pool:

Curious Girl: I don't like this bathroom (gesturing at puddle on floor and various stray pieces of toilet paper, the kind that always appear in pool bathrooms on busy summer days). It's too litter-y.
Me: Well, lots of people are here today, and it's hard to keep a bathroom clean when so many people are using it. (I notice she's done with her business.) Here, dry your hands before you pull down the toilet paper--that way it won't shred in your hands like it did last time.
Curious Girl: Mama, that is such a good idea you had! What a good idea! That is because you are an apartment chair. You are right about everything. You are right all the time, because you are an apartment chair.
Me: Actually, sweetie, I'm not right all the time. I make mistakes. I just try to learn from them and do better next time.
CG: You are the best apartment chair!

So what does make a good department chair? It's certainly not the ability to be right all the time! I've spent some time this summer doing some hard writing--a few documents that had to be written regarding some issues that some of us didn't handle very well (in some cases, that us is me; in other cases, that us is other people; in some cases, the us is a combination of me and other people). The documents I've written are all different (not to mention unbloggable in their specificity), but all attempt to look ahead and imagine ways that similar future situations might be handled with different effects. One reason I am a good chair, I think, is my ability to step back from situations (even those where I'm part of a mess up) and imagine ways they could play out differently. Good chairs need to be able to see administrative and personnel possibilities, thinking about different ways to move groups toward a goal. Good chairs need to advocate for their department and their colleagues--which means sometimes, pushing people, and other times, getting out of the way.

It certainly doesn't mean being right all the time, but I trust it's OK that I'm rather tickled at the impression Curious Girl has developed about my acumen. And it's true, a good apartment chair does have the opportunity to introduce little tweaks to the system that just might keep things from shredding during use. Not such a bad outcome for a day.

Yo, Yo!

Early in her pregnancy, when Ianqui was thinking about a nom-de-blog for her baby, she saw a news item about yo evolving as a gender-neutral pronoun. It became the perfect blogname for the baby, and when she announced it, I thought, a) “how cool! bookmark that news item for future teaching use” and b) “Yo, Yo!” would be a great name for a blog post. Great title, but what to follow it? Recommendations for good children’s music (starting with Dan Zanes’ Family Dance, which contains “Yo Yo, Sweet Yo Yo”) or good books (starting with Chris Raschka’s Yo! Yes! and Ring! Yo! leading into Irene Smalls' Don’t Say Ain’t, the beginning of a list of kids’ books that are about language)? I couldn’t get those ideas to go anywhere…but I realized that the best baby shower game I’ve ever played is a great way to welcome Yo, and it’s in keeping with the title-in-search-of-content and Ianqui's carbon-footprint-reducing ethos (a game that generates no stuff!). Now that Yo has arrived, it’s a fine day to teach you all the best baby shower game ever—and Ianqui and Super G can pass the results on to Yo whenever they want. There are already tons of happy comments over at Ianqui's own posts on the subject, and I suppose Ianqui won't be blog-reading quite so frequently. But some of you might want to play along here, and I trust Ianqui won't mind an uninvited burst of bloggy enthusiasm for her wee one.

I learned this game when Uncle Quiet and Tante Mississippi were expecting Curly Haired Cousin, and their department threw a shower, so it has especially sweet memories for me. We also played it at Historian Friend’s shower. In real life, you’d use index cards, one for each guest, numbered 1 to however many you need for everyone present. On this post, we can just use the order of comments. All you have to do is tell a memory from your life from the age on your card/comment position (or something about what your world was like, if you don't remember anything from that year) and then make a wish for Yo for when Yo turns that age (so if you have card #7, or are commenter #7 on this post, you’d tell a memory from when you were 7, and offer a wish for Yo for when Yo is 7). I’ll do age one in the first comment, and anyone else who wants to join in can just do two, three, four, whatever. This is a cool way to learn a little more about other people; it’s interesting to see what different childhoods were like and what kinds of different wishes people offer, corresponding to different ages.

So Yo, Yo! Some wishes for you to soak up are in the comments. Welcome to the world.