My Thirteen and His Age Thirteen

During the first week of school last week my middle son's eighth grade Language Arts teacher asked her students to interview a parent about his or her own memories from age 13.  He had some specific questions such as --

·         What was your favorite TV show?

·         What musical artists did you like?

·         What TV or movie star did you have a crush on?

·         What was your favorite candy bar?

·         What did you want to do as an adult?

·         What do you remember about your childhood home?

On that last question before waiting for an answer he interjected that he knew that one would be  hard to answer because he “ knew I moved frequently and had many different homes”.  For example, I’ve told the boys how I went into 7^th grade it was my seventh school.

When he asked me these questions, right away my answers were short, and with a frustrated tone such as “How should I remember that?”  or “I have no memory of that” and with the easy going good humor that he has, he’d answer, “I know, what does she expect these parents to be as young as just 25 years old or something”.  (Hmmm, anyway).  So I lightened up and told him what I remembered

Picturing where we lived that year I remembered Happy Days on TV, my first album that age was Elton John, I thought Leif Garrett was cute, I bought that square candy bar called Chunky, I wanted to be a writer, and I had my own room when I was little with a pretty red and pink floral bedspread.

Later that night the memories became more fluid and what I didn’t tell him is that when I was 13 I once saw my stepfather have a slugfest fight with my 15 year old brother while my mother stood there and watched and didn’t do anything and I heard screams and realized they were mine.

When I was 13 I started my period and apparently one day unbeknownst to me a tiny smear got on an armchair and my stepfather went into a rage with the seat cushion two inches from my face.  He had issues.

In my 8th grade year we lived in a tiny apartment yet I went to a private school with kids who lived in mansions (not all but those in my carpool certainly did) and a girl in our carpool actually had a butler drive us to school in a limo.  And made fun of my family. (fortunately I found great friends and we're friends today since age 13, especially one).

I was caught in two worlds between that world and the kids on my block.  Not knowing who to be I pretended I was newly arrived from France and spoke with an accent and tried to search for the correct English word when we spoke (I kept this up for a couple months then came clean and they still liked me—it was boys—obviously I was desperate for attention).  But I was me at school.

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The other night Hubs and I sat in our son’s language arts class as part of curriculum night and on the walls were poems the students wrote after interviewing a parent.  My middle son had put together the memories I shared into a poem called “Where I’m From”.

It was so hard not to cry while reading it.

Back at home I told him I loved his poem and that he did a great job.  I asked if he had a copy but he didn’t as the teacher likes them to write in class only.  I asked if he would eventually bring the printed poem home.  He said, “Are you going to blog about it?”

My kids don’t know exactly where I’m from but, but I think they get me.  Even though some of the memories aren’t the best, where I’m from makes me who I am and I'm proud of who my kids are.  And so glad not to be thirteen!

Baseball Season -- the Fifteen Year Old Son Edition

Our oldest son who's 15 is playing baseball on a recreation league for 15, 16 and 17 year olds (you know things are different when the boys you've seen for years are driving their families' vehicles to the park).

There are so many positives of children getting older (I need to remind myself of these things!) and one of them is sports.

It has been a while since we have arrived at the ball field and find out a piece of equipment has been forgotten at home.

The baseball games go by fast when boys can throw, hit, catch and make lots of double plays.

There is no assigned day for me to bring a drink and snacks for everyone.  Our son fills up his own water bottle at home and he knows to eat breakfast before we leave and knows we eat lunch later--end of story!  And I saw he brought his own bag of sunflower seeds for a snack.

The coach has older sons--in fact the coach has his college aged sons do the coaching most of the time--and there is no game ball that is given to a "star" player after the game.  They play as a team, right?

The parents are awesome--they introduce themselves, are friendly, and they watch the game!

The parents of this new team are smart.   We arrived for the first game this past Saturday at 10:30 a.m. it was already a scorcher.  And look what two families had already set up at our bleachers:



They brought canopies they popped open and set up over the bleachers and all of us parents of 13 boys had shade.  It was genius.

After I Got Tired of Job Hunting, I Tie Dyed

The kids are back in school, the Hubs is back in his classroom, and I have the house to myself.

Sometimes you read about bloggers who get envious of other women's blogs, reading about their lives and seeing their wonderful pictures.  I don't feel that way very often, but I did get that feeling the other day while surfing around LinkedIn.  That is the site where workers post info about themselves professionally, and usually in a resume format.  So I have spent many hours the past two weeks looking up people with whom I've formerly worked, people who've interviewed me this summer, people with whom I will speak with soon, and people who know people of all these types listed.  And everyone has a great existing job and better career path than me it seems.

So one day I got sick of it, backed away from the computer, and tackled a tie dye project.  I went from no tie dye experience to owner of a tie dyed shirt in a matter of minutes.  I'm all spontaneous.

Actually I have had tie dye on the brain as something to do this summer along with the previously posted slip n' slide project.  I found some sites while Googling tie dye and I liked the idea of not having to buy anything to tie dye a shirt.  Of course I thought I'd do this project with at least one of my offspring but I ended up getting crafty alone.

Here's what I created alone in a matter of minutes:

First you go through your closet and drawers to find a black item of clothing.  I found this black t-shirt from Target.  You could use a different dark color if you wanted.

Then, to get this swirl pattern you put the shirt on the floor and use something like the handle of a butter knife or a dowel and place it in the middle of the shirt and slowly twirl it:

You then have all sorts of rubberbands ready.  When you take out your twirling instrument, you have to manually tuck around the sleeves.  Then you keep your shirt in the resulting pie shape and start wrapping rubberbands all around it like this:

Looks crazy, right?  I used maybe around twelve various-sized rubberbands.

Then I put a bucket into the sink and added bleach and warm water to it.  You want one part of bleach to 2 parts water.  So I just poured in the bleach to about an inch and eye-balled how much more water to add.  This is when I should have actually taken the show outside because the whole house smelled like bleach and the poor hamster may have gotten high from the fumes.  Learn from my impulsiveness.

Then you place your weird pie shaped, scrunched-up shirt into the bucket and jab it around with a utensil and flip it over.  Next thing I knew my shirt now looked brick-red and so was the water.  The shirt was submerged for about 7 minutes.  you wouldn't want it in any longer than that.  Five minutes may be best.

Take it out and rinse it off, removing the rubberbands in the sink.  I held it up and was most impressed with myself, and hung it outside to dry.

When the boys came home from school they were impressed too and the 13 year old and 10 year old want to try it.  Now I have a whole new plan of attack next time I visit the Goodwill.  Scarves!  Long sleeved shirts!  And there are other designs I'd like to try besides the swirl.

Here is where I got the idea and it has great photos--you just scroll halfway down page to click to each page.


And here is a site I just saw that shows how to fold the shirt like an accordian and then rubberband it bewteen two pieces of wood.

So, take that all you professionals on LinkedIn who are working at your great jobs right now as I sit here in my gym shorts, bra-less, eating a homemade, lemon-poppyseed muffin and getting ready to shower at noon.

P.S. I have moved up the rungs in my candidate-process for the good opportunity at the work from home job, after two-plus weeks of the recruiter getting back to me after my first two phone interviews with managers.  I have phone interview with head honcho in a couple days. Met with another good company this week and that went well too and am supposed to get called back in to meet the rest of the group.

Full Moon Saturday Night--It's the Sturgeon Moon

There's supposed to be good fishing under this August full moon and big fish in August always make me think of my three big fish who get bigger every summer. As Eldest stated in the beginning of the summer, " A kid grows a lot in summer due to all the sunshine and rest he gets unlike winter time--just like a plant."

I didn't take as many photos of the boys playing in the Atlantic Ocean this July as I usually do.  But Hubs and I did have some good chats while we watched them.  A couple of summers ago we were at the beach, Hubs and I in our chairs, and we watched as some girls stopped asked them what time it was and they told the girls they had no idea, and turned away and kept doing their thing.  The girls lingered for a bit.  Too funny--the boys had no clue.

This summer the boys are ages 15, 13 and 10 (almost 11).  We were at the beach right next to a summer surf camp.  There were no waves but they did have a huge blow up raft on which kids would climb up and jump off.  There was a day in which two young teen girls kept swimming closer and closer to the boys....who are still clueless.  Or maybe we parents on the beach are cramping their style.  Or maybe the 15 year old son has to first talk to a girl via Facebook or texting....unlike my day when a friend and I would see boys on the beach and we'd actually start up a conversation and hang out AND at age 13 get THEIR phone number and actually CALL THEM on the phone after saying hi to a parent. 

So a few weeks back after seeing the boys eyeball this fun-looking raft I said, "All you have to do is swim over and ask if you can climb up the raft too and I am 100% positive they would say, "Sure!"  Eldest told me not to "worry about his game".

Back up in land-locked Atlanta, when summer vacay was about over, the boys started talking about going to Six Flags again.  For the past five years it has been a tradition to go the last day of summer.  Well, this was because the boys would earn free tickets through a school reading program, and last year Six Flags reduced the entrance fee as well.  And all their friends would join and somehow I'd end up bringing lunch and drinks for 9 boys.  HOWEVER, after last year I decided my Six Flags attendance days were done and if the older two wanted to get dropped off and picked up that was OK.  Then I checked out the price.  $54.99 -- so even with the $15 off when you bring in a Coke can, $40.00 is too much.  So Eldest announced this (on Facebook of course) and no one wanted to do that.

I came up with a plan that I've been coveting: make a super sized Slip-N-Slide in our yard and have a cook-out.  I went to Home Depot and bought a double roll of plastic sheeting--it was 10 ft x 25 ft each (I wanted a slide about 50 feet long), and a box of 4 inch nails.  It was about $20 for both these items. I had to first get the green light clearance from Hubs who is not into anything that resembles yard destruction.  I think he chewed off his nails last Saturday during this event.  He watched from the window as the boys and I picked up any pine cones or sticks from the area, unrolled the plastic and made a hem on the edges and hammered in the nails about every three feet.

Here is the Slip-N-Slide action:

And yes, it did ruin the grass and create a major mud hole, but it was fun.  One boy went home to get the blow-up float out of his pool and four of them rode that and it was the Backyard Flume Ride instead of the Log Ride at Six Flags.

Hope you enjoy this Saturday's Full Moon and that it involves staying cool, playing in the water, catching fish or eating fish (we're making fish and vegetable foil packets on the grill)!

More deets on the making of the slide: 

The backyard is on a slant which made it more fun and easy for the pool float.  The first plastic sheet was placed about one foot over the second one with several nails on each side at that point.  The backyard hose was long enough to reach the top of the slip 'n slide and was left on.  Squirt baby shampoo at the top now and then (we used the whole bottle after an hour) to help and no tears in eyes.  There was one injury with a 15 yr old boy who cut his palm slightly on a root toward bottom of slide.  Grass at bottom turned to mud so I added a couple of those vinyl picnic table cloths at bottom.

Interview Adventures

Hubs is now on day two of officially being back-to-work as a teacher. So after 8 weeks of neither one of us needing  an alarm we are now back to using an alarm.

One day last week I needed the alarm due to a 9:00 job interview. For a company seems to be a little cultish. I was told that when they hire someone they want to be 100% sure of the fit and they don’t ever want a new employee to leave.  I had visions of The Firm by John Grisham.   I can tell by their interview questions that they’re super concerned with their new hire fitting in and getting along. And the next step is to have me take a personality test – which I did yesterday and that sucker was 132 questions long!  Toward the end it asked the same question like 16 times but in different ways.  Not a fan of company owners and managers trying to figure out how an employee will fit into the role by taking a "personality" test. Maybe I wouldn't mind it so much if I didn't feel like they were all drinking the Kool-Aid.

Another firm—the complete opposite in style as they are more interested in how I would service the clients and could potentially work from home (pls keep your fingers crossed for me) --  does phone interviews only.  I have “passed” several steps and moved from an initial phone call with the recruiter who found me, then weeks later the process moved along with another recruiter from same company calling me to set up an official recruiter call.  Then a few days later I spoke to a manager, then two days later another manager and next I’ll hear from the recruiter #2 again and then if all is still a go then I’d have a phone interview with a higher-up manager and then I don’t know what happens after that except that my 15 year old son may be graduating high school by then.

Back to now having to get up from an alarm—I may point out that I don’t need to be anywhere, but since Hubs does now, I wake up too.  Which would be fine, in fact it would be great to get my day started before the three boys get up so I can get some things done quietly such as write job interview thank yous and make job search phone calls and online applying and creative ways to pay bills.

And ideally I'd get a good night's sleep, which is not happening.  Because Hubs is waking me up after I have fallen sleep, hours before anyone needs to get up.  It's getting on my nerves.  One night he got up because he thought he heard a noise downstairs.  Last night it was because he woke up and wondered if he had closed the garage doors.  I wake up when he opens our bedroom door. 

The really crazy one was last weekend when he woke me up at 7:00 a.m. to tell me he was shaving off his “devil’s beard” because he felt like it was suffocating him.  There was no alarm clock involved.  Just some bad dream he was having.  See, when we went out West that dry air made our formerly humidity-filled skin dry out and made shaving his face painful so in early June on the road trip he started growing a beard.  I liked it and the boys liked it.  Eldest told him he was rocking the beard.  

Some people he works with saw it last week and they liked it.  I figured he would shave it before meeting his students and parents soon.  I did not figure he would announce to me at 7:00 a.m. on a Sunday that he really must shave it off at that moment.  I do have a photo from the 4^th of July and for that I am glad.  

I am not a frequent medicine-taker, but last night I seriously thought about taking a Benedryl at night now and then.   Because I must get my sleep to be ready -- one never knows when new interviews pop up and to be ready for more same questions such as: what are you most proud of......what are your weaknesses.........what are five words your friends would use to describe you! 

Boys in Cars

I went to take my 15 year old son to a friend's house the other day and of course he wanted to drive the car this is what he looked like waiting when I got to my car:

Ha-ha!  That was him when he was two years old and he sat in my passenger seat one day and posed for me--I remember it exactly.


Fast forward thirteen more years and this is what he looks like behind the wheel.

 I have realized that just as I am not a good passenger in an airplane I am not a good passenger in the car.  What if I have to grab the wheel?

Here is what we need to do so I can take some baby steps.  Hubs took our son first off to a large parking lot on a few occasions before they ever hit the road.  My son looked shocked and amazed when I suggested that I take him to the parking lot, because he feels he has already done the parking lot scenario -- but it wasn't with me.  I need training there!

Last night Hubs took our son and 3 of his friends to play 9 holes of golf (he dropped them off).  But he let our son drive and the other 3 boys did not say a word nor did our son.  Guess they were all busy concentrating (our son is the last of his peers to get a learner's permit with a June birthday).  Never in a million years am I ready to have him drive with 3 other kids in the car and on a busy street.  We really need to hit that parking lot tomorrow.

Cooking, Growing and Driving

I'm feeling much better than I was on my downer day the other day--and thank you for the positive, wonderful comments.  Seems like every day something promising happens--I had Youngest son and his friend at a community pool and although I was sweltering in a chair I was able to be out of the house and read a good book and the phone rang from a recruiter.  I had a great phone interview with a recruiter and in a few days I move on the next step by speaking with the hiring manager of the company.

In the meantime I am enjoying hanging out with the guys.

(Here they are standing on Four Corners of NM, AZ, CO and Utah  in early June, part of the trip of their first week before I joined them for the 2nd and 3rd week).

A few months ago my middle son told me one evening that his day doesn't feel all in order until I get home from work.  I'm the glue.

I'm also the cook.  Just the other day I was on a walk with Hubs and it was getting late--close to 7:00 p.m. and I said that we needed to get home so I could get dinner going because dinner these days seems to be very much a big deal to the boys.  We've always had dinner at the table but what I mean is these boys really think about dinner (and dessert) every day.  We got home and when Middle Son came into the kitchen he told me that dinner time is now his favorite part of the day.

(Middle and Youngest son on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon before I joined the boys on the trip.  This is one of the tamer photos--Hubs told them they'd do the most challenging photos at that time and not on the later part of the trip where I'd be there.  When they went the winds were over 40 mph).

Every so often I will cook black beans in the crock pot and when they are done I will have some to use then and some to freeze in a couple of plastic bags or containers in the freezer.  I rinse a bag of black beans and then put them into the crock pot with water about an inch higher than the beans.  I'll add a can of Rotel tomatoes with seasoning or a small jar of whatever salsa I may have, maybe add some onions, maybe some peppers, salt and pepper and cumin. I add more water as needed as they cook on low for several hours and they're done when the beans are soft.  We add some on our burritos, or I make black bean and corn salad with chopped tomato, cuke, green onions and cumin and red wine vinegar and oil.  I just take out a frozen container, zap it a little in the microwave and turn it into this corn salad if I need to bring a dish to someone's house--with tortilla chips.

There's a grocery store nearby with organic chicken that is always going on sale.  I bought two the other day.  One went into the crock pot with its skin removed and with rosemary and thyme put inside and on top of it.  Later I deboned it and the chicken will be made into a pot pie or a pasta and broccoli casserole with my own white/cheese sauce.  I cut up the other chicken into pieces and put my own barbeque sauce on top and baked it.  The chicken's back went into a saucepan with a little onion, celery and thyme and about 4-5 cups of water and I cooked it for a little while and made broth.  The broth usually goes into the freezer in a plastic container but I have it in the fridge since later today I am making a corn and potato and fish (frozen fillets) chowder. 

So, the boys are now verbose about what's for dinner and what they love and it will be interesting to see in the years ahead what they request when they come back home to visit.  But first steps first......Eldest has been driving this past month now that he has a learner's permit.  But not with me till last night.  Hubs has been going with him in the Suburban and also an old, little truck we have that is stick shift (which he doesn't like but we see it as useful and it may be his school vehicle in a year).  Last night after dinner Hubs asked if I wanted to take out Eldest in my car and I said no.  So they went out for a little bit and then when they returned Hubs told me that Eldest wanted to drive with me.  Middle son thought it would be funny to film this from the back seat but that didn't happen.  So I reluctantly went.  It is amazing how fast 30 to 35 mph seems when your baby is at the wheel.  Fortunately a Saturday night is quiet on the streets around here, as Eldest turned right on a red without stopping at all.  I am now about to take him to a new friend's house and he is asking if he can drive there.  Baby steps for me now......