(it's what makes me me)

I continue to embrace my inner jock:  I joined a gym!

A Gold’s membership comes with a “free” session with personal trainer and “free” nutrition analysis.  The idea that these things would actually be free in the high-pressure sales world of gyms is ridiculous, since of course, they are trying to sell trainer packages and computerized diet robots.

Yup, a computerized diet robot.  It’s called Vitabot and it was apparently created by Nasa.  It is, as a fellow gymgoer called it, “artificially intelligent.”

I hate diets.  I don’t like people telling me what to do (even if “people” is a book or piece of paper or fat gram-counting robot.)

I’m the least spontaneous person on earth but even I don’t like the idea that next Thursday at 3 p.m. I need to eat half an ounce of raw almonds and a 7 3/4″ banana.

I had my free training session, during which we set some goals.  I had a rough pregnancy with Jane and emerged feeling feeble and twiglike.  I want to be back at my pre-pregnancy weight which equals a gain of about ten pounds.

“…of muscle mass,” the trainer wrote down, almost like some sick, sadistic afterthought.

Because to achieve ten pounds of pure muscle mass (which do I even want?  I mean, oil me up and put me in a bodybuilding contest already, okay?), I have to lift weights like a she-beast.  I do enjoy lifting weights, (or just “lifting” as we athletic types call it), but I’m pretty chill about my routine.

This guy was talking about chest and back and shoulders and leg days and had me doing planks, (which I rocked thanks to yoga; who says yoga is not a great workout?), pull-ups, and various medicine ball tosses and lifts, all in a row with only the merest of breaks, timed to precision on his iphone.

I’m more at the level of ripping a two-page routine out of Fitness:  ”Get Your Beach Booty!” or “Lose the Mom Muffin-Top.”

But anyway…I did not sign up for training on day one.  I did, however, become very sore on day one.  About an hour later I had to sign something at the bank and my hand was still shaking.  Two days later my armpits felt like someone had scooped them out with melon ballers and it hurt to raise my arms to wash my hair.

Trainer had me come  back to meet my AI robot.  Vitabot is either brilliant or horrible.  I am reserving judgment.  Normally you have to pay for it but they’re giving me three months free.  They’re also giving me yet another free training session.  I think I am being wooed to sign up for training, and I’m not sure whether scooping my armpits out with melon ballers is helping or hurting.

So I have been Vitabotting this week.  It’s really distracting to my daily life which probably means I haven’t been paying nearly enough attention to what I’ve been eating.

I decided to do a few days of my “typical diet” to get an idea of what I’ve been doing so far.  Also some of Vitabot’s suggested meal plans are scary and I’m having trouble swallowing the idea that I am supposed to eat 2500 calories a day.  (Seriously!)

So because I’m not trying to eat particularly well, and I’m entering my actual food eaten very honestly, I have days where “Snack 2″ (I’m eating three meals and three snacks a day) is tortilla chips and wine.  (Or as we like to call it here in Wine Country, “Happy Hour.”)

Vitabot automatically updates everything from Z to zinc in real time as you enter it.  It also calculates a bunch of random stuff like manganese and copper.  It gives you an A-F letter grade for everything from calories to fats to sodium to individual vitamins and minerals, and tells you if you’re not getting an A because your meal plan is too low or too high.  What you’re supposed to do is create an ideal meal plan beforehand and eat everything on it, but like I said, I don’t like people telling me what to do.

So we’ll see.  I’m back with a trainer again tomorrow and I’m curious to see what body part he attacks and with which kitchen utensil.

The countdown clock is ticking away for Eva’s elementary school days.  Standardized testing is done (thank GOD) and now there’s a four-day week this week, four day week next week, and promotion week with its three half-days and  all the festivities.

Yesterday when I picked the girls up from Sunday school, I couldn’t find Eva.  I asked a boy where her class was.  ”It’s fifth grade,” I said.

“They’re over there eating ice cream,” he told me.

“No, those are the fourth graders.  Aren’t you in her class? Mrs Moll’s class.  You’re fifth graders, right?”

“We’re sixth graders now!  We changed benches!”

Turns out that mere moments before, the kids had done a “changing of the guard” type of ceremony where the kindergartners became first graders, first graders became second graders, and so forth, symbolized by moving to their next year’s seating area in the sanctuary.

In other words, fifth grade is history.

“Eva’s out back playing messy gaga.”

Okay, whatever THAT was, I was sure Eva was absolutely not playing it.

I found Jane, arms covered with butterfly and princess paints, and we went out back, where as I suspected, Eva and a few other girls were sitting in the shade against the wall while all of the boys and most of  the girls played some type of “steal the plate” game with hands covered in paint.  If you’re blue, you try to stop red from sneaking over the line and grabbing your plate.  It seemed to mostly be boys against girls and the girls were socializing so the reds (boys) were winning.

Eva didn’t want to get messy, but Jane immediately grabbed the smallest t-shirt she could find from the pile of extras and ran up to the youth group director with her hands out to get loaded up with paint.

She joined the girls, of course, but facing off against a field of paint-spattered fifth sixth grade boys, chickened out.  That got Eva and the remaining girls off the wall and out on the field where everyone got covered in paint.  And a good time was had by all.

As the minivan hit the highway, I asked them if they were excited to be in higher grades next year.

If you ask them, they seem overtly blase about it (though I’m sure there’s a whole internal “process” taking place.)

“Fifth grade is good, but I like sixth grade because the food is better.”

Huh?

Yup, if you want to lure kids into liking your activities, you really need to step it up on the food.  (Case in point:  the DI team’s favorite memory is the time I spontaneously took them to a bagel shop.)

Middle school has Icees.  First grade has “maple waffles.”  (Which are horrible, but to Jane, who has not had cafeteria lunch yet since kindergartners don’t eat lunch on campus, sound like a mysteriously special treat.)

Icees, of course, are symbolic of independence.  Eva wants to have five or six or even seven different teachers.  She wants to bring money in her backpack and decide what to buy at recess  nutrition.

We are now in a time of transition, though, and the next month could be rocky.  Our carpool kids are getting older.  Schedules might change.  We may lose some but as I remind the kids, for every one we lose, I’m sure we’ll gain two.  My car does seat eight, you know.

Half (or more!) of Eva’s Girl Scout troop are quitting.  Eva has been in this troop since first grade, and while the co-leader has changed, she’s always had the same main leader.  They’ve gained a few new girls over the years but the core group has pretty much remained the same.  Now the leader’s daughter is quitting and I will be the new leader.

New leader, half of the girls gone: but everything’s going to be totally the same, right?

No way!  We’ll have some old girls, some new girls, and I’ll have to figure out a way to lure them with the food.  (Ditto for DI.)

Eva has been so exhausted lately. We’ve been burning our candles at both ends, running around all over the place and staying up way too late.  She was up sick most of Thursday night into the wee hours of Friday morning.  She was feverish and shaky, and while she normally is an easy sick kid, this time she didn’t want me to leave her side.  She just wanted me to sit next to her.

We sat up most of the night watching back-to-back episodes of Breaking the Magician’s Code.  In the morning she permitted me to leave to buy white bread, purple Gatorade, and Bop Magazine.

She tried to sleep but she’d just toss and turn and moan and groan.  When I tried to ask her what, specifically, was wrong, she couldn’t tell me.

That night she slept fourteen hours and only got up because she was hungry.  She ate a hearty meal, slept, got up, ate another hearty meal, and was fine.

I know she was sick physically but I also think she was sick internally, emotionally.  It’s being in a time of transition that is tearing her apart.  This end of the school year is harder than previous ones (which also were emotional times for her) because of leaving elementary school.  She’s excited to go, and looking forward to changes, but at the same time, it’s hard.

The last end of school that felt like this was the year she skipped a grade.  On the last day of first grade, she met a new girl we’d seen around the neighborhood.  Though it was June, it was a “June gloom” type of day and the sun never really came out.  The two of them started riding their bikes in an oval around the perimeter of the basketball courts near our house.  A couple of other kids joined them and it was like Mad Max.  And damned if she didn’t ride for five or six hours out there.  They weren’t talking to each other or laughing or chanting, “No more pencils no more books,” either. They were grim-faced and determined, riding in their never-ending circle, processing the transition.

If they need to do something similar this year, I’ll let them.  Only now that I’ve been through it before, I know what to expect, and that the agita of transition doesn’t last forever.  Maybe I’ll bring popsicles.

After all these years…I’m going to be a Girl Scout troop leader.

I always swore I’d never do it, but here I am.  I actually am feeling really excited about it.  I submitted my application, had a phone interview, and did a training.  Now I’m waiting for my background check to clear (fingers crossed!) and have to find a CPR class.  Then I’ll be good to go.

One thing I’m a little nervous about is taking on more of a leadership role in cookie sales.  I am not afraid to say I’ve never been that into selling the cookies.  We always just wind up with a million boxes here at home.

I had the idea to freeze some so I can have cookies during an unexpected time, like September or October, when we’ll all have forgotten our cookie fatigue and nothing will sound better than a Thin Mint or two.

But cookie fatigue notwithstanding, no box of cookies is safe at our house.

One of the downsides to both of us working for the same firm (i.e. ourselves, or rather, we are both employees of our own firm*) is that we will sometimes have work travel at the same time.

Scott travels kind of a lot for work and I’m not a big traveler, though I’ll go places because I don’t ever want to miss out in life just because I’m not a big traveler.

One of those “can’t miss” travel opportunities came up recently.  We have young kids, so this is a bit of a juggle.  It’s a juggle that thousands of women do all the time, but it’s new to us so I had to figure it out.

Turns out, our beloved longtime sitter (who started babysitting for us at age 11 and is now in college) is moving out of state with her family.  In fact, when I called to ask if she was available to try out an overnight with the girls, she said their moving weekend is the very weekend we need her.

Damn.

So I asked around, and that’s the beauty of living in a city like Temecula.  Everyone knows everyone.  We have over 100,000 residents and but I just keep bumping into the same 50 or so over and over again.

I found a great, perfect sitter.  She is a college student whose parents still live a few blocks from us.  She attended our neighborhood schools and now is a college  student.  She’ll be home on break during the time we need her.  She even has previous nanny experience.  We met her, and she’s  great.  Whew.

Booked her, for a possibly outrageous sum.  Arranged to board our other, more difficult child:  the dog.  He’ll be whooping it up with his buddies at Dogtopia.  (My preferred Cool Dog is always booked lately!  She limits the number of dogs she can take so it’s hard to get in.)  Booked plane flights, hotel rooms, and I even got my new Holiday 2011 luggage tag from my uncle’s patch company.

Cousin Mary’s dachshund Tugboat was on last year’s luggage tag.  Here is the new one with a different employee’s dog:

Then came the email today: the seminar we were planning to attend has been cancelled.  Cancelled!  I cannot believe it.  When a not-traveler makes plans, they tend to be engraved in stone.

Here’s the part I love, though.  The seminar was to be in Twinsburg, Ohio.  There’s not much in Twinsburg, though every year they have a big twins festival.

This is why Scott is cool.  He writes, “Want to go and just hang out in Cleveland for the weekend?”

It’s Cleveland!  But then again, people who are from Cleveland seem to love Cleveland, and there’s the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and Drew Carey, and I’m sure a bunch of other stuff (though a query about vegetarian restaurants in Cleveland on Trip Advisor brought up an ominously small number of responses.)

And the funny (and kinda cool) thing is that I think we are going to go.  If I were married to any other type of man, we’d quietly cancel the trip and sit at home flipping channels.  But Scott is such a nut, and I mean that in the best possible way.  He is the guy who will take his wife to Cleveland for the weekend and have the best, most rocking good time.

Yup, he’s kinda cool like that.

*  Though Scott would probably say he’s my boss

We all want our kids to be scrupulously honest, right? I had a “teaching moment” a couple of weeks ago in the aftermath of our elementary school carnival jellybean counting contest cheating scandal.

It all started innocently enough. To keep the kids enthusiastic about Destination Imagination, and also to spread the word to via photocopied flyers (which nobody picked up — memo to self for future carnivals), I decided to have a booth at the Paloma annual carnival.

There had been talk way back in March about performing their solution (a four minute skit), but some of the kids couldn’t make it. Also in the month and a half from tournament to carnival, the costumes had been manhandled quite a bit. Dry ice, while fun, makes me nervous. (And the one kid on our team who is really, really into dry ice — to the point where he asked for some for his birthday — couldn’t be there.) Also we had to (literally) break our PVC pipe set stand into pieces so we could fit everyone and the equipment in the car to drive home.

So instead, I provided a boatload of jellybeans in an old-fashioned penny candy jar. I fondly remember many “count the number of jelly beans” contests from my own childhood. It seemed like such a wholesome, lovely way to spend an afternoon.

I bought a bunch of 70% off Easter candy at Walmart and stocked the jar. I had a pleasant hour or so of counting followed by two days of mindless snacking. Each time I snacked, I crossed out the former number of jelly beans and added in the new one.

At some point, Eva saw the number. I’d already told our girls that they weren’t allowed to submit a guess because of the “appearance of impropriety” involved. They were drowning in their own Easter candy plus we knew they’d be surrounded by carnival food all day so it wasn’t a big deal.

But somewhere along the line, and totally unbeknownst to me, Eva told a friend the magic number. Then that friend told a friend, who also told a friend, and thus a cheating scandal was born.

In Eva’s defense, she says the number she told was the original number, not the post-post-post-snacking number. But still.

For one thing, people tend to guess way, way low on these jelly bean jar challenges. (If you ever find yourself in a jelly bean guessing contest, my advice is to guess high.) The real number was in the 1100s, and most people (adults and kids of all ages) were guessing in the 400s or 500s. A couple of kindergartners guessed thirty hundred or so but the only people who were remotely close were kids who seemed to know Eva. They weren’t DI team members, but they were friends of DI team members.

I tell everyone, “I’ll announce the winning guesser on Monday morning by bringing the jar in to your class at school!”

I figured it would be fun and exciting.

Then I got to thinking the teachers wouldn’t appreciate some kid having a gigantic candy jar in class all day so decided on my own to do the winner’s jar presentation in the last few minutes before the end of the school day.

The winner was a fifth grade boy and I arrived at his classroom with my jar. The kids who’d worked the booth the day of the carnival had been playing with pipe cleaners and it was covered with many beautiful pipe cleaner flowers and bumblebees, and I must say, it looked very enticing.

But just as I was opening the door to the classroom, the winner’s mom stopped me. “I need to talk to you!!!!”

Turns out, her son had been fed the winning number by a friend of a friend of Eva. The winning guesser had had a horrible weekend, maybe the worst of his life, in which he’d agonized the entire time and confessed all to his parents. Then right at the beginning of the school day he’d gone to the principal and confessed to her. (She was probably like, “What are you talking about?” since it wasn’t like this jelly bean counting contest was an officially sanctioned school activity. I was just a random lady at a card table at a school carnival.)

Not a single other kid said word one to me, or anyone else. Nobody else agonized or even gave it a second though other than this one boy.

I explained to Eva that if ever in the future there is anything he’s involved in, my first thought will be, “I trust him! He’s totally beyond reproach in his honesty.”

I want people to think that when they hear of my kids. We talked about how this boy risked so much to be honest. He risked pissing off his friends, getting in trouble with his parents or the school, being embarrassed, and not getting a prize.

I quickly racked my brain for the only kid who seemed not to have been involved in the scandal, gave her the jar, and she was shocked and thrilled.

We talked a lot about this incident around the house and I even thought about it more and brought it up again anew two days later. I worry that lessons you TELL kids don’t sink in like lessons they can learn firsthand. I guess it’s an ongoing process.

Meanwhile, the scandal, such that it was, immediately died down with no repercussions. It did, however, stick with me, and I am still brainstorming how to get more mileage out of it as a teachable moment.

I’m shocked to not be dragging more today. On Friday night Eva had a slumber party for her tenth birthday and at the peak of the festivities we had fourteen girls here.

There were many highlights but what stood out was our first T.P.’ing.

Oh, how our house was T.P.’d so many times over the years! My younger sister and I were five grades apart in school so her T.P. years began while mine were in full swing.

The thing now here in suburbia is to be “spooned” or “forked” which is where they plant those little white plastic spoons/forks all over your lawn.

Our T.P.’ing wasn’t that sophisticated. It was just two somewhat amateurishly thrown rolls of Charmin draped over one of the big trees in the front yard. They also did my car, which I’d left parked in the driveway. Jane thought the tree was funny but when she saw the car, she got mad. (That’s her ride! You don’t mess with the minivan.)

The girls pranked a neighbor boy who is in their grade, and after Eva saw the front yard, she said, “I guess we’re even.”

For the most part things went surprisingly smoothly. “Old Man Grossman” kept yelling from upstairs, “Keep it down!” which we all though was funny though he was serious.

I had one little quandary when one of the girls suddenly left. It was almost 2 a.m. and Eva came up to our room. “Mom, M__ just went home.”

Huh? How did she “go home”? She can’t just leave.

I totally get that not everyone sleeps over. For various reasons, whether preference, early morning commitments, or whatever, some girls went home at various times throughout the night. Prearranged times, though, which I’d discussed with the parents beforehand. This was obviously totally not acceptable. I didn’t think there was any “funny business” going on with this girl, but it also was highly irregular and troublesome.

So even though it was almost 2:00 a.m., I pulled out my trust Room Parent list and called her house. The girl answered and I asked, “Is everything okay?” She said yes, and then I asked to talk to her mom, but she said her mom was asleep. Which seemed questionable but what can you do? So then I asked how she got home and she said her sister picked her up (apparently not noticing that our front yard was covered in toilet paper), which made sense since her sister had dropped her off. I spoke to the sister who was very apologetic and we clarified that everything was fine. Whew.

So that was pretty much the only glitch. We talked about it and I told the girls that she probably was concerned about spending the night away from home and that they shouldn’t say anything on Monday to embarrass her. They are a compassionate bunch and I’m sure it’ll be fine.

We played some mini golf and I handed out prizes to the best scorer (a girl who got all 1s and 2s on every hole?! How is that even possible) and the worst scorer.

We played a bunch of Just Dance 3, which I must say is the best of the Just Dances. It has Price Tag on it, and I don’t care how bubblegum-y it is; I love it. I danced my ass off to it and at one point I looked up and out of the corner of my eye saw one of Eva’s classmates, bless her heart, watching me dance and she was just trying so hard not to laugh. I don’t care! “I don’t care about the price tag; I just want to make the world dance.”

It also has Barbra Streisand, which is the easiest dance of the game and also the catchiest and potentially most annoying. (We’re not there yet, though. Still like it.) Eva told my mother-in-law about it and at first she thought the girls were dancing to real Barbra Streisand songs.

The girls beat me hands down in Just Dance 3 though in my defense I did have wine. “My parents never drink wine if they’re going to be going somewhere, Mrs Grossman.”

(This stuff is totally drummed into kids’ heads from a very young age.)

“Where am I going? It’s midnight and we’re at a slumber party.”

“You may need to drive on an emergency basis.”

Kids.

Today is Eva’s birthday!

Woo hoo….double digits!

But instead of doing the typical blog thing of writing a reflective, introspective review of what the past decade of motherhood has meant to me, I am in a cold PANIC because in mere hours we are going to have fourteen girls running around slumber partying.

House is not as tidy as I’d like but it’s not horrible either, so it’ll have to do. Today I’m prioritizing sanity and mental well-being over housework.

On the plus side, most of the girls are walking home with Eva, so their parents aren’t going to be here to drop the girls off, and why would I spend a beautiful, sunny Friday vacuuming for a bunch of ten year olds? By the time their parents pick them up tomorrow, they’d be surrpised to NOT see the house messy.

In addition to the immediate party panic is the deeper, slower-dawning realization that Eva is growing up. Her adulthood is looming.

She’s heading into middle school in the fall and all of the advice and opinions about which schools to attend are so confusing. It sounds crazy but some of the decisions she makes now, at age 10, will have actual, real ramifications for her entire educational path and possibly even future career. She is growing into even more autonomy about her studies as she gets older, but it’s a huge responsibility being the one to provide her with information and resources.

Today she turns ten, and tomorrow she’s taking a babysitting class at a local hospital. The girl was able to buy a Kindle Fire for herself last night because she’s a good saver. (Almost half of it was birthday money but the rest was by the sweat of her own brow.) I am guessing once she starts earning babysitting money, she’ll be hooked.

Of course a birthday ending in “0″ for our child means Scott and I are getting older. I found myself watching You Tube videos of Botox. I learned that they call the lines I want done the “elevens” because that’s what they look like, sitting there between your eyebrows. At tennis today we talked about colonoscopies. Two women who graduated one year ahead of me in high school were comparing notes on Facebook about their grandchildren.

I find aging so strange. Mentally I’m still 25. I hope I can drag my body along for the ride for a good long time.