Doug: “Why are you so stressed?”
Me: “I have a million things to get done and most of them feel like pulling a rabbit out of a hat.”
Doug: “Why don’t you narrow the list down a bit.”
Me: “Well, there are three things that absolutely, positively must get done in the next two days.”
Doug: “Okay. No problem. I’ll help and it will get done.”

Twenty-four hours later with none of the three done:
Doug: “Umm, what ONE thing needs to get done?”

In a large family, the Equilibrium Principle states that the number of your own children going to sleep at other people’s houses is balanced by the reverse reaction of other people’s children coming to sleep at your house. The number of children in the household remains constant. Exceptions to this rule occur on birthdays and anniversaries.

Thanksgiving meal conversation topics in order of appearance: recipes and cooking, cranberries, relatives with cancer, newspapers vs the Internet, Mumbai, Twitter, books, old people, guns, children, video games, riding lawn mowers and Christmas.

Amy is going through a very annoying sleep avoidance phase. Every single night she uses all the traditional excuses to avoid bed and then she creates some new reasons to stall. If Amy is to be believed, every night at bedtime she is suddenly starving to death, dying of thirst, hot, cold, itchy and in need of the bathroom. She wants someone to read to her and she wants to read to them. She can’t sleep alone, in her bed, in her room and in her jammies. She is afraid of the color black. There is someone knocking on her window. The room is too quiet and the room is too noisy. The wrong toys are in her bed and there are both too many and too few stuffed animals. Last night, the black widow spiders were going to crawl in her bed. I told her that was silly. “Don’t you know that it’s the Brown Recluse spiders which will bite you in your sleep?” Not really. I rolled my eyes and tossed her back in her bed for the millionth time. Where does she get this stuff? I’m NEVER ridiculous.

I write on School Matters, too.

In theory, school projects are a good idea. Instead of just spending weeks learning that A+B=C, students make something that applies the concept. In reality, the projects are almost always done primarily by parents while children watch them and listen to an endless lecture about why they are doing this or that. “…and what do you call this process?” I’m not admitting that I do more than my share of my children’s school projects. I am just acknowledging that for every child you have, you are going to repeat elementary and middle school yourself. Okay, maybe not every child. Some children (cough, Sarah, cough) are so independent and self motivated that they insist on doing everything themselves and the result is better than the parent could have assisted creating. Other children have to be dragged tooth and nail to finish school projects.

Our children are so far apart in age that you would think new lesson plans and assignments would be given to each of them. You would be mistaken. The kindergartner is doing the same things that every one of her older siblings did. I should whine that new technology needs to be utilized better each year. Instead, I must confess that it is a relief to do a project a second, third and fourth time. The first time you get a project assigned, you spend most of the time on it just trying to decide what and how. During this process, you get frustrated at your child’s complete inability to apply their newly learned skill. “Didn’t you just learn this?” Eventually, you dig in to make something and end up realizing the problems with your plan sometime after the stores have closed for the day. Compromises are made to just get done so that parent and child can actually get some sleep before the next day arrives. The SECOND time you get the same project assigned, you send the child to the basement to study the older sibling’s project. Then, you breeze through the project. “If you do it that way, it will do this instead of that.” We are now experts on leaf collections, proportionally accurate solar system measurements, edible cells, cell organelle detectors, Flat Stanley and a dozen other standard school projects. Sometimes, we even get lucky with other school activities. If your child tells you at bedtime that they want to be an Indian at school the next morning, take a dozen safety pins to a Daniel Boone costume, add a headband and poof! Recycled costume. Sometimes, life is easy. And fun.

I love caller ID. Without even picking up the phone, I see one of the children’s schools on the ID and I know something is wrong. Is it the middle school? Noah must be having a nosebleed. Is it the high school? Sarah must have lost her cell phone. Is it the elementary school? Maybe Amy is sick or hurt or missed the bus or one of the many other mini-calamities that have befallen Amy at school this year. This week, it was Amy’s teacher calling. When the words “I need to tell you about something that happened today” are spoken by your child’s teacher, it’s not good. This was one of those calls.

The way the teacher told the story, a parent was reading a book to the class and the children were sitting on the floor in front of the parent reader. The parent reader stopped reading and said, “That’s NOT appropriate behavior.” Amy was sitting next to a little boy and they had hands in each others’ laps. Not just in laps, but very purposely in an anatomically gender related area. We were appalled. “Why? Why would Amy do this?” The teacher reassured us that she didn’t think Amy was forced to do this. We were not reassured. The rest of the day we were deer-in-headlights dysfunctional. Finally, Amy came home from school and the Spanish Inquisition began.

Amy’s story made things much clearer although equally perplexing. There were no hands in her lap. However, her hand was in the little boy’s lap because “he put it there and was using both of his hands to keep it there. He had to turn his card four times, but I didn’t get in trouble ’cause it wasn’t my fault.” Umm, I still don’t understand why she was allowing this to happen. I’m a little curious why the little boy was doing this. It would be helpful if the teacher had told us that this boy just hadn’t grown out of that toddler “use it as a handle” stage. I guess she could have told us something less comforting to explain the behavior, but still, I have five children and I’ve never gotten a call like this before. Since I’m pretty sure that Sarah told Amy to punch the boy next time he tries anything, I expect we’ll be getting another call from the teacher soon.

One of the middle school teachers told the class that the United States is THE most racist country in the world. I tried to imagine what criteria was used to make this assessment. Clearly, sexism didn’t factor into the equation at all, because women and girls in other countries are routinely raped, mutilated, killed, bought and sold. Genocide must not count against a country. I guess it is based on the sheer number of times “I’m not a racist, but” is uttered in a single day.