I'm ready for February

I know an awful lot of people who were quite happy to shake the dust of last year and jump into this one. I, on the other hand, have not been too pleased with January, which will be going out on the same sour note it has been playing for weeks.

True, it hasn't been all bad. I did get my ring, after all. And my little brother came to visit. But people are getting me down with all their nonsense.

• I really need to get my child development book out and find out whether it is just seven year-olds in general or mine specifically that are such a pain in the ass. Add to that not knowing what to do about him and the nightmare that is the school bus, and parenting does not top my list of fun activities.
• Despite my reassurances to myself, this PTA stuff just really weighs on me. And even though part of me knows that 3 months isn't a very long time, it seems like an eternity until I can get out of this gig.
• A certain person in our family has been unwell for quite a long time, and things are looking particularly grim these days. And because of the nature of the situation, it is a very draining experience.
• Dorian's school has announced that they will be going sledding every Tuesday for the whole month of February, thereby messing up one of only 2 days a week that he goes, because of course they want drivers and chaperones for these little excursions.
• And I get to end the month with Jeremy leaving on a business trip for 4 days to floody California. At least I'm not dealing with poopy 10 month-old twins alone like that brave soul Mr. Listmaker.

You know, I learned from my nature program puppet show that chipmunks are dormant through the winter, lying on a pile of seeds they collected, waking only to take a little nibble here and there and fall back asleep. Doesn't that sound grand?

Still sportin' a mane

Well, suffice to say I am still Treasurer of the PTA. After a 2 and a half hour meeting, I couldn't really find a way to bow out gracefully, so here I am: still with my big blue book. However, there is no more fundraising happening for the rest of the year and that is my biggest complaint, so I couldn't exactly play that particular card. Everything else we have planned is the community building stuff that I wanted us to focus on in the first place. And I really only have to make it to the beginning of May when the next elections are held, so I'm just going to tough it out.

*muffled sob*

I'm not dead and the computer isn't broken.

I just haven't felt much like blogging lately. I'm trying to wind down from all the PTA rigmarole and remember what to do when I'm not counting other people's money and having meetings and answering endless emails. (Hint: it involves laundry. And having coffee with Amanda while we both fight falling asleep in our armchairs.)

Not having all that to do certainly doesn't mean that I'm not busy, but it has been a more positive kind of busy-ness. Like the boys' birthdays happening last Friday and today. 7 and 4 is a little crazy to think about, but sounds about right. And Rob's birthday falls in the middle, so it has been a week of birthday celebrations, including a trip to the Montshire Museum on Saturday.

Poor DeeDee has been a little under the weather. Friday he was very sensitive and a little snippy. And Saturday he slept until 10am! (I'm not sure when I will stop thinking that oversleeping is a sure indication of my children's deaths, but if I don't get over it soon I'll have quite a time when they are teenagers.) He was healthy and happy when he did finally wake up and was fine Sunday and Monday. But this morning he didn't want to wake up for school and fell asleep again before dinner and then at 6:30 announced it was time for bed. (He did find time to open his presents first.) He doesn't have a fever or anything, but has complained of some leg pain and a headache, and I wouldn't put it past him to be growing again.

Sebastian has been doing well and we had a good parent teacher conference yesterday, which was much better than the other four where either his teachers didn't know what to do with him, didn't think he belonged in their class, or provoked me into an argument. He even won a little prize at All School Sing for doing some extra math problems, so he was excited by that.

I have been trying to fit in the knitting time and am about 10 rows from finishing the first sleeve on my sweater, just have the toe to complete on the first mystery sock, and finished the knitting for the purse and purchased the lining fabric and buttons and just need to buckle down and get it done. Of course, all that has been interrupted by another design for the store. So I am also in the middle of a lacy cowl done in this yarn.

And Jeremy is up to his usual nonsense, monkeying up the English language. In one day he managed to admonish the children to use a "food towel" (napkin) and to ask why all my "hair bops" (rubber bands) were lying around.

As Dorian would say, "The End. That's it."

What do accountants get paid?

Whatever it is, it probably isn't enough and is certainly more than the $0 I made after spending 8 hours today dealing with the money from the raffle/Halloween event. My money counting muscles hurt, the numbers stopped making sense around 3:00 and my hands will probably never come clean.

Good times.

Metal or bamboo?

The knitting needles may have to become a weapon now that I have found out that a certain insane person in charge of a certain crazy event thinks I'm not doing anything even though I have wasted both of my free mornings this week doing shit for her. And I already have an hour tomorrow to look forward to as well as Monday morning. She's lucky I don't know the first thing about how to fire bomb a house.

I knit so I don't kill people

This is a somewhat popular slogan amongst knitters, and it has never been more true for me than lately as my stress level continues to rise. But I won't mention the PTA or the out of control event we are throwing this weekend or the fact that I haven't had a day off in over a month. No, I'll just show you my handiwork. Because even though I am sure a knitting needle would make an awesome murder weapon, I don't want to get blood on my wool.

My mystery sock:

I do wish that the yarn weren't quite so stripy so that the pattern would be more visible, but I like the pattern so much that I will probably knit it again in a color that shows it off a little better. The second clue took me almost the whole week to complete because it was a longer section and I didn't set aside a lot of time for it, but I finished the third clue in one day. I like how the fake cables and the ribbing continue down the heel. I'm really happy I started this project.

My sweater:

The heathery gray simplicity of this knit sort of depresses me, especially since it has been reflecting our weather for the week, but I'm sure that what is not so fun about it to knit is exactly what will make it a staple of my wardrobe. So now I'm on a search for an interesting edge for the cuffs and the bottom, so I can spice it up a little bit.

And, finally, a purse:

Kaci gave me this yarn from her trip to Ireland and I decided a long time ago that I would use it for a bag of some sort. I found a pattern yesterday while I was working and started knitting last night during Mad Men. I have 4 more rows for this piece which will be the front. What I thought was cute in the pattern book is looking suspiciously like underwear. But I'm going to ignore that and keep going. I'm sure when it is finished it won't look like it belongs over a cloth diaper.

Is it wrong of me to be happy that our raffle didn't sell a single ticket over the weekend so that, instead of counting money for the PTA, I am sitting on my couch in an empty house enjoying a cup of coffee?

I didn't think so.

The knitting is the only thing keeping me sane

I think the only way to make my life more hectic right now would be moving. So thank goodness I'm not doing that, even if there is a cardboard box in the background of the picture.

No, I'm just busy regretting ever joining the PTA or a cooperative preschool. And having wonderful, interesting children who feel the need to do things to make their lives more wonderful and interesting, like soccer and spelling team and such. Doesn't the world know I just want to wear my slippers and eat chocolate? Ha!

But I digress... I have gotten as far as I can get with my mystery sock until the next clue arrives on Thursday. Here is the cuff, with a background of sweet peas from Christine who brought a little Spring back to my life this early Fall:

The colors are 10x more intense than that, but I couldn't get them to photograph better. Think peacock. And I tried to photograph the (3rd) start of my top down raglan sweater, but it is not so impressive at this point, being gray and 3 inches long. (Insert joke here.)

Yes, I have fallen off the face of the earth. Why do you ask?

Remember when I told a fellow board member what was what about how I wanted nothing to do with a certain event? Well, the event apparently is not letting me go so easily. Poor Hott Mama, wanted by diminutive Hispanics and overlarge fundraisers alike... I have been spending the last week sifting through an average of 15 emails a day on this mind-numbing topic, at least several of which require some response on my part.

Today, though, I got to escape to my hobby job and ignore that shit for 6 solid hours. I also managed to:

• finish that bulky baby sweater*.
• use the sample to sell 2 copies of the pattern and enough yarn for 3 versions.
• help some people with their knitting troubles.
• assist a woman in a one-person fashion show of all the adult-sized samples in the store.
• sell 5 out of the 6 skeins of this yarn that we had in stock.
• have the exact same conversation with the 3 different women who bought that yarn about how those yarns usually are more red, but the ones they bought were blue, green, or white.
• start knitting a sheep, which sounds a little backwards I know, but it should be cute when it's done.
• make more in sales than it cost the owner to pay me to be there all day which is more than I can say for last week.

And now it is time to fall asleep in front of Mad Men so that I can wake up refreshed and ready to perform the newest installment of nature puppet shows in the morning.

* Whether the "bulky" refers to the weight of the yarn or of the child is anyone's guess. The finished product certainly looked like it was designed to accommodate Humpty Dumpty, Jr.

After today, I should never have to do PTA again. Ever.

But y'all know I will, so let's not pretend. Basically, though, I went in for a tangentially related PTA experience from 9-9:30am and then went back to the school where I was in 3 consecutive meetings from 5:30-8:45pm. That is not an exaggeration, and I barely had time for the one pee break I took.

Overall, our first public meeting went well. We only went over by about 5 minutes and the attendees were positive and interested. So that was good.

The only dicey part came when one member of our board decided to not only accuse us all of not appreciating her enough, but also decided to imply that I personally would not be doing enough for the school if I chose not to help her with her fundraiser.

That's when I finally got to tell her what's what (in a mostly respectful way) and totally shut her down. My dear friend who is also the secretary told me I "toed the line" a little bit in the way I handled the situation, but whatever. She's just lucky I left my knitting needles at home.

Another school year begins...

And it is abundantly clear that I learned absolutely nothing last year. In the space of a half hour "Meet and Greet" I have embroiled myself in doing the healthy snack again and upping my puppet show quotient from 4 to 8. That is on top of the treasurer duties which keep piling up and doesn't include whatever chore I will be assigned by Dorian's cooperative preschool. And I decided to take a job in addition to this?!

I never should have disappointed Cortney in this way

She said she'd never have a friend who belonged to the PTA, and even though she promised me we'd still be friends even though I allowed myself to become treasurer of the organization, I know a little part of her love for me died that day. As well it should have, since I was clearly demonstrating that I was a person with no sense, totally blind to reason.

The two hour meeting the other night actually lasted 2 and a half hours and would have gone longer had I not announced that it must have been after 9 at that point and discussions were devolving into committee level detail. A vodka cranberry later, I was on the verge of quitting. However, I did make a commitment and I don't like to be a quitter, so the only solution that I could see was to air my grievances to the rest of the board.

This resulted in a shit storm of approximately 10 million emails back and forth-- some defensive, some productive, all tiresome (including mine). And now we get to have another meeting immediately before the meeting that we are scheduled, according to the bylaws, to have a meeting immediately after.

All of this just makes me realize that I should just be doing what I enjoy and actually impacts the students, like puppet shows about snowflakes, and not what makes me frustrated, like sitting through seemingly endless meetings about fundraising which was the part I thought we should be spending less time on, not more.

Why didn't I focus more on clinging to a friend 3000 miles away instead of my misguided do-goodery? Because I am a fool.

It's finally summer...

It is hot. So hot that even though I am feeling excessively lazy and a smidgen burnt out on sand these days, I got everything together to take the kids to the lake. Well, everything except Dorian's sandwich which I managed to leave on the counter instead of bringing for his lunch. You can imagine how disappointed he was that I was forced to buy him a hot dog.

I even got in the water pretty much first thing instead of postponing because (not enough sun/too windy/needed a Dr. Pepper first/too lazy). But after each child had his respective breakdown (lost plastic man/slipped underwater), it was clearly time to return home.

Now I just get to stew until it's time to go to a fucking midsummer PTA meeting from 7-9pm. Why, oh why, did I get myself into this?

My work here is done. Well, almost. I mean... sort of.

Today was the last All School Sing of the school year. Rock and Roll. Outside. I helped one of Sebastian's classmates win the dance contest. It was fun.

Then I went to a 2 hour (reduced from 3) meeting of the mostly new and slightly improved PTA board of which I am now Treasurer. It went reasonably smoothly and I only said "Keep It Simple Stupid" once and cussed 3 times, so it was better than I expected. Especially since I didn't cuss at anyone. I am currently under the impression that, after meeting with the former treasurer next week to get the lowdown on the books, I don't have to do anything PTA related until mid-August.

Tomorrow is my last healthy snack day of the year. And Friday is the last day of school until August 31. I am picking up the boy and we are kicking off the summer right and proper.

(Try not to remind me about how I will have 2 kids on my hands and lots of chauffeuring to camps. I am keeping my eyes on the sipping Dr. Pepper lakeside aspect of summer...)