I’ve been helping in Jachin’s class two days a week since he started back into public school. Normally I go in two mornings a week for 2 1/2 hours at a time. I spend hours in front of the copy machine, grade piles of homework, and work one-on-one with the kids who are really behind. And I mean, really behind. Jachin is in third grade, and like in any classroom, there is a huge academic curve. Some kids read on a fifth grade level, some kids can barely read at all. For some, English is a second language and learning seems 10x harder. Some kids already know multiplication, and some don’t know basic addition facts.

For a couple of months now, I have worked for many hours with 2 kids in particular; kids who don’t know off the top of their heads that 8+5=13. I’ve been trying to simultaneously teach them basic facts along with the concepts of “carrying” and “borrowing”. I gave them flash cards to work with over the holidays, telling them that when they could bring the cards back in and do them for me, I would have a prize for them. But no luck yet.

This morning I spent a couple of hours grading the end of the period math tests while Miss C filled in report cards. The one sweet little kid that I’ve spent dozens of hours tutoring missed every. single. problem. I also learned today that he can’t tell time on a clock, let alone tell you what time it will be in two hours. I cried. Literally… tears. Miss C told me that I was making a difference, even if it didn’t seem like it. But she cried, too… because next week the class is starting into multiplication, and there are still a couple kids who don’t know very basic addition. They will fall farther behind. They will get no help at home. Miss C asked me how she was supposed to pass these kids on to 4th grade, and wondered how they ever got past 2nd.

I had no answers for her. I’m only a mom. I got to selfishly go home at lunch time to try to forget about it all and focus on my own kids. But Miss C is there every day, trying to teach kids who seem to be everything but completely unteachable. She takes it home and wraps herself up in it. Sleeps with it. Goes in the next day to do it all over again.

And I don’t know how to help.

In the space of quiet and lack of answers, we wiped our tears and kept grading. I grew sick of looking at red ink.

As per my New Year’s goals, I’m crafting a short story for the Highlights Fiction Contest. The theme is “a story set in the future”. I’ve found that it helps to have a five year old muse living at your house; she’s a treasure trove of ideas about how the world will be in the future. I can’t give any specifics (or my muse will freak out) but our story involves really tasty fruit and the colonization of other planets. I know you’re dying to read it… it’s a winner.

Last night I caught the cool new show on Fit TV called “Shimmy”. The idea is that you can get fantastic abs and hips by belly dancing; and while they had the one token skinny girl, most of the dancers had plumpish middles and awesome moves. It was refreshing to see normal, curvy bodies being portrayed (successfully) as super-sexy. And while I started out just passively watching the show while I cooked dinner in the kitchen, by the end of the 30 minutes I was doing “snakes arms” and “beautiful eyes looking at you” in my reindeer pajama pants. Sexy, it was not. But everyone has to start somewhere.

Shimmy with me, Tuesday evenings.

Jon got busy shoveling the yard today.

Yeah, you heard me. Shoveling the yard.

I was confused at first, too. But when he does seemingly crazy things, I don’t ask a whole lotta questions. I just roll with it. The outcome was this, though:

A dual entry igloo. Real Eskimos never had it so good. I made three separate attempts to have my kids narrate a video blog, giving a guided tour of the igloo. But all three instances ended in yelling and tears and accusations that one child was getting more face time in the video than the other child. They’re real divas, the pair of ‘em.

But dang, they are cute when they get along. These cute pictures were taken several minutes before Jachin gave Zoe a snowball line-drive to the face.

After the tears start, I stop taking pictures. That’s the only way I can look back 30 years from now and remember what fantastic, well-behaved children I have. It’s all about the denial and selective memory.

more pics up on flickr.

What do I do in my spare time? What types of things float my boat? Since (I imagined that) you asked, I’m all too happy to share.

This catalog came in the mail the other day, and I’ve been furiously planning and plotting and adding up the price of seed packets ever since.

I’m obsessed with my future garden. Right now it’s just a big dirt area in the corner of the yard (currently inhabited by a half-dead plum tree, 5 neighbor cats, and a roughly made fire pit), but I affectionately refer to it as “the garden area”. I have big plans for this spot, come spring. Tomatoes, berry bushes, grape vines, peppers, cukes (that’s gardener slang for cucumbers), and maybe even some luffa. Yeah, you heard me: Luffa! Like, the sweet n’ scratchy bath sponges you buy at the store. Did you know that you can grow them and eat them? Or dry them and make your own bath sponges??… for about 3x the price you can purchase them at WalMart. I know! Totally not economical, but sweet, huh? I’ve also been eyeing backyard composters; the rolly kind that you can spin. Yep, by next summer my backyard will either look like the garden of Eden or a jungle-ish compost heap. It’s really too soon to tell.

The other thing I’ve been doing a lot is watching these:

Did I mention that my husband enables my Star Trek habit? He does. What a sweetheart. He got me the entire collection of Star Trek movies and I’m moving my way backwards from Nemesis. I watched First Contact three times, though, because it’s my favorite.

Anyhoo, garden planning and Star Trek. That’s where I’m at. Possibly a little weird, but that’s why you love me.

A list of my New Year’s Goals:

1) “All things in wisdom and order”. Get my house organized.

2) With the waves of ideas and images that have been crashing against the shores of the right side of my brain, there’s a novel (dare I say the word “series”?) in there just waiting to be put down in writing. Finish that first novel, woman. For the love…

And stop driving around daydreaming, missing freeway exits because you are imagining a new race of animal/people and dreaming up the name of their world, and just write it down already. Or get on some good focus-enhancing medication.

3) Get pregnant. On purpose.

4) Start submitting articles and stories to children’s magazines again.

5) Talk kinder to my family. Keep those freak outs in check.

New Year’s Eve was three days ago… and yet I didn’t take a break from the festivities right at midnight to sit and blog about them. In fact, I waited a whole three days to let it all marinate into a perfect post.

(Not really. I’ve just been lazy, and I’m finally sitting down to tell you about it.)

On any other night of the year, I am up until midnight, flipping through channels, punching my pillow into a comfortable blob, and obsessing about how I can’t get to sleep. On New Year’s Eve, however, staying up until midnight is expected, and therefore it becomes a very hard thing to do. In fact, I felt myself getting drowsy around 5:30pm.

To keep ourselves chipper and awake, we decided to spend the evening “doing something” to speed up the time until midnight. We decided to take the kids (and one of the sweet little neighbor kids, Cade) to see the worst movie in the world… err, I mean, the whimsical childhood treat entitled “The Water Horse”…. which coincidentally just happens to be the worst movie in the world. Seriously. This movie only served to s-l-o-w, t-i-m-e, d-o-w-n until midnight came. In fact, time may have actually reversed itself at some point during that movie. Probably right about the same point at which I looked sideways and saw Jon sitting there trying to figure out a way to kill himself using only the materials available to him: a candy bar wrapper and a large beverage cup. I suggested he stab his eyes out with the drinking straw, then he would at least cease to be “ocular-ly” offended by this crappy movie. He’d still have to sit through the plodding dialog, though. And wow, there was lots of it. Make no mistake, parents: this is more of a WWII period piece than kid movie. I will waste no further time on this, but Booooooo, Hisssssss, on the Water Horse.

After the fun drive home from the movies (where we all made fun of it. The movie’s new name is “The Water Biscuit”), we came home and played Scrabble. Since Zoe is only 5 and has a limited Scrabble ability, we decided to nix most of the Scrabble rules. Proper nouns were okay… in fact, even fake words were okay, as long as you could pronounce them and give a fake definition. Jachin laid “Titaly” and informed us it was Italy’s neighbor; Jon started to ask if the women in Titaly had any distinguishing physical characteristics… but I stopped him mid-question. Several turns later I laid the word “onion” directly in front of “titaly”, creating a new culinary delight.

This may be the sweetest Scrabble board I’ve ever seen assembled.

 After the game, the kids went to chill out in front of the TV to watch “TeenNick” shows, which slays me. Jachin’s favorite show is “Drake and Josh”, and when Jachin watches it, he cracks up equally at the slapstick physical comedy and the kissing jokes. He can’t possibly get the kissing jokes. He’s 8. The fact that he thinks he can identify with this show has me miffed. Then there’s the jazzy intro to the show “Zoey 101″ where they play a rockin’ song and show teenagers laughing and hanging out; Jachin tells me about how he can’t wait to be a teenager so he can have fun all of the time. Life will be a party. He and his friends will spend all day just laughing about everything and hanging out. Because that’s what teenagers do! I tell him that Zoey 101 is being cancelled because the REAL 16 year old girl who plays Zoey is pregnant. Party time! Being a teenager RULZ!

(I know, I’m a real killjoy)

By 11pm, the kids were getting tired and there was a lot of whining. We had decided earlier in the day to begin our new tradition of “Midnight Breakfast”, but that would mean we would actually have to keep the kids up another hour. We decided, instead, to have Midnight Breakfast at 11:20 and then by the time we had eaten, rinsed dishes, and turned on the TV, the ball would be almost dropping.  Jon put on his chef hat and he and Zoe made crepes.

 It was an awesome breakfast. Jachin said that he was storing up lots of calories before his 10 hour hibernation.

At 11:54, Jon decided that it would be a good idea to have a final “airing of grievances”. And, were he kidding, it would have been funny and all. But he wasn’t really kidding. He told me that it hurt his feelings that I was using the purse that my mom got me for Christmas instead of the one he and Zoe picked out for me for our anniversary. This, 6 minutes before the New Year. I wanted to wring his neck at midnight. However, because this absurd conversation occurred before midnight, I can honestly say that we have yet to have an argument this year. Which sounds nice.

At midnight, everyone kissed and drank a little bubbly (bubbly in our house is the Martinelli’s Sparkling Cider) and watched the neighbors set off the illegal fireworks they’d been storing in their garage since July. Then we all went to bed. Midnight felt like 4am. But even as tired as I was, I climbed into bed and punched the pillow, and couldn’t go to sleep for quite some time.

Some things are the same every year.

For months I’ve been eyeballing the domain name “SuzyG.com”. When I first checked it’s availability, I was amazed that it was even open; but like a moron, I didn’t actually register it. I went back to godaddy.com every few weeks and checked it, finding that it was still sitting there waiting for me to register it and do something amazing with it. I dreamed about all of the great stuff I would do with it. It would be a store, a brand… I would eventually move my blog over to the shorter — and cooler — name. But still, I never actually registered it. I couldn’t bring my cheap arse to hand over the $8.99 to make it officially mine.

Tonight Jon sat looking for cool domain names for his great new idea (he gets a great new idea every few days). I said, “While you’re at it, register SuzyG.com before someone actually takes it.”

Someone registered it on December 30th. Two friggin days ago. And when you go to the page, it’s on a “parked” page, meaning no one will ever actually do anything with it.

I almost cried.

Godaddy.com gave me a helpful list of other domains I may like… but they all stunk. I mean, sure, I could register SuzyG.TV… but then I’d have to get a TV show, or at least an agent or something, and that just really sounds like a lot of work.

In my heart SuzyG was already mine; I’d dreamed — and daydreamed — about it. But it wasn’t to be.

A moment of silence please.