It’s the season for Field Day and end-of-year teacher gifts, and at my house, it’s time for birthday parties and graduations. It’s time for ballet recitals and sinus infections, for blooming baskets hanging on the front porch, for daydreams about the pool and making summer plans.

The seniors are saying goodbye, and the freshmen are moving forward, and I’m thinking about how much I’ll miss them. I’m thinking about new experiments to try next year, and wondering who my new students will be.

At the end of the school year, I usually have the same patterns in my thoughts and daydreams; I know I’ve written a version of this post before. But this year, the fall is more of a question mark than it has been in years. My girls will be in a new school for the first time in five years, and my husband will be out of school for the first time in four years. For the first time ever, my children will be students at the school where I teach.

This year has been an especially vivid one already, full of milestones and wonderful experiences. While I’m apprehensive about all the changes to come, it certainly won’t be boring!

Right now, right at this moment, I feel like I have a lot to be proud of from this first decade. My kids are healthy, strong girls. We’ve traveled and tried to introduce them to a lot of different experiences, as well as to the things we love the most, from Anne of Green Gables to Into the Woods and more. We’ve made countless healthy lunches, breakfasts, snacks and dinners, but we’ve also made cupcakes and cookies and eaten candy and hotdogs together. We’ve had Family Movie Nights and talks about nightmares, best friends, growing bodies and where babies come from. They have wonderful relationships with grandparents, aunts and uncles who love them, and we have friends who might as well be family. We’ve talked about education and how desperately important it is. They are city girls who have also been to the beach, the country and the mountains. They are kind and polite (most of the time), smart and feisty and funny (all of the time). They live with two parents who love them, and have worked really hard to be good spouses to each other and good parents at the same time.

I’ve spent a lot of the past few days and weeks and months worrying: how will I teach them what they need to know? Where should we send them to school? Where should we live? Will they be okay away from me? How can I help them be healthy and strong, in every possible way? How can I teach them to be caring and thoughtful, and how can I teach them to be independent? Now partly, this is because I am a worrier: always have been and probably always will be. But I think also, this is the difficulty of parenting: every small decision seems high-stakes, you desperately want to do a good job, but there’s no road map, and you may not know whether you made the right choices for years to come (or ever!). You will make mistakes, inevitably, and you will never get it exactly right.

The next ten years are going to bring bigger variations on these same questions, and the day will probably come when they both leave home. I know I will worry and second-guess myself along the way, and I may never know whether we made the best choices. But at this point, at the end of our first decade together, the most important task has been accomplished: both my girls know exactly how much I love them.

This summer, we are planning a Civil War Summer, to take advantage of all of the wonderful resources and sites that exist in the Maryland-Virginia-Pennsylvania area. Here are some of the plans we’ve made so far:

• reading Little Women and other Civil War themed books

• Journaling, which I thought of after being inspired by this entry on summer journaling

• visiting as many Civil War sites as we can, within reasonable driving distance

• Trying Civil War recipes, dyeing with vegetables, and other fun craft/home projects I can find

We took our Girl Scout troop on a walking tour of a beautiful historic neighborhood recently, and it revived my determination that my kids will experience the richness that our region has to offer. There are so many battlefields and parks within a day’s drive of us, and they have learned a lot about the history of our state this year in school, so it seems the perfect time.

I was filling out some paperwork recently for the upcoming school switch, and this line caught my attention: “Class of 2020.” That’s the year they will graduate from high school. How crazy is that? HIGH SCHOOL. I don’t know about you, but 2020 doesn’t actually seem all that far away.

In a few weeks, they will be ten. I’ve been a married mother of two for a decade now. Is this the reason that I’ve been feeling especially old lately, do you think?

Sigh.

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week 2006 (Photo credit: angegreene)

This weekend I had a fit of cooking and baking energy and made fudge krinkle cookies, applesauce banana bread, and a three-cheese pasta al forno for dinner on Sunday with homemade garlic bread. I finished with a citrus cake, baked in a tube pan and topped with a lemon-flavored powdered sugar glaze.

It’s the cake that stands out to me, though, because I baked it for the annual Teacher Appreciation Luncheon the PTA at my girls’ school holds each year, in honor of Teacher Appreciation Week. This year, the luncheon was held a little early because the school’s annual spring festival is on May 12. I’ve participated in both of these events for the past five years, but since my girls are changing school in the fall, this will be the last time I participate in either.

On the one hand, my life will be easier next year, logistically, and I’m looking forward to this big change for our family. On the other hand, however, my children have had excellent teachers at their current school, and we’ve found a wonderful community of parents and families there. We have tried to show our appreciation of the teachers in different ways throughout our time there, by volunteering in the classroom, sending in donations of supplies from paper towels to posterboard to pencils, and by purchasing books for all my girls’ teachers, current and former, at the Scholastic Book Fair each year. We try to show our appreciation of the community by volunteering at events like movie nights, field days, bake sales and book fairs.

While I have an array of fears about next year, one recent fear is that my girls’ current and former teachers and school community will think we are leaving because we are pissed off about public schools. My kids have had great teachers, and I hope they know how much we have appreciated them over the years. We are not leaving for any reason having to do with teachers, employees, or the treatment my children have received, and we are definitely open to returning to the public school system at some point in the future, if that turns out to be best for our girls.

There are certainly valid reasons to be pissed off with schools, and there are systemic and pervasive problems in many of our school systems, as well as how we think (and spend) nationally about education.The number of students in the average public school classroom, for example, is a big philosophical problem for me. But at the same time, there are thousands of teachers, employees and administrators who are doing their best to work within flawed systems for the good of the students they interact with every day. Are there bad apples in the bunch? Of course. Are there employees who take advantage of the flaws in the system? Sadly, of course. But that should not distract our attention away from the employees who are dedicating their lives to our kids, or from the systems that need to be reformed.

Related articles

• Printable Teacher Appreciation Card (bedifferentactnormal.com)

This year, the first two items on their list? Squeezing out an entire tube of toothpaste and pulling every tissue out of a box of tissues, both inspired by different Ramona books. They were super excited when I said that we could definitely do both of these things this summer.

Small pleasures from my own small treasures, indeed.

Top 10 Pastry Chefs (Photo credit: Stacie Joy for CTTC)

As my husband graduates from law school this summer, career transitions are definitely on his mind. While he preps his resume and drafts cover letters, we’ve also been trading jokey emails back and forth about the big abrupt career shifts we might also make, in an alternate universe.

So far today, he’s settled on cowboy, but FBI agent has popped up before, based probably on too many episodes of Criminal Minds and viewings of Silence of the Lambs. For me, today, it’s pastry chef, perhaps inspired by too many viewings of Top Chef Just Desserts, but also on the satisfaction that baking brings me. I also daydream about running a small storefront bakery, full of pies and cookies, cakes and doughnuts.

I don’t expect him to take up horseback riding or cattle ranching, and I will probably never know how to make a showpiece out of crystallized sugar or chocolate. But I’m sure we’re not alone in daydreaming about lives that seem to be the total opposite of the ones we are living now.

How about you? What’s your parallel life career?

Blogging has been a wonderful tool and definitely made me a better writer, but for me, it’s never been a confessional-style journaling tool. I’m not a blood-and-guts kind of blogger, preferring to save my most revealing moments for longer-form work. I’ve published poems and essays about my life, but that’s not what blogging has ever been about for me, even though I knew it would limit me as far as popularity. I don’t see this as “emotionally shut down,” but simply as self-awareness about what I want blogging to be, and how I want to function as a writer. I want you, my readers, to feel like you know me, but not like you know all of me.

So the poems I’ve been writing, which are all attempts to capture certain moments or emotions, have really been valuable to me, personally and as a writer. As a poet, I like some of what I’m coming up with, but even more, I’m finding some of that release that every diarist knows, when we hit upon the exact right word that expresses what we’re feeling, and our soul feels a little lighter. It’s a nice combination, and I’m trying to think of ways to keep it going after my month is over. I know Poetic Asides does a Wednesday Poetry Prompt, and I’m wondering what else I might be able to find.

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• Poetry and Pockets! (pm27.wordpress.com)
• An Interview with James Dewar, Poet (cherylandrews.wordpress.com)

None of your clothes look good to you any more at this point in the school year. You try on and discard three different outfits while your husband snores peacefully. You realize that you’re running really late and run downstairs to find that you’re out of lunchbox materials, according to your accusatory children. You send a quick email to the school secretary. You run back upstairs, and curse the day.

You find a halfway decent outfit that doesn’t make you shudder at the sight of yourself. You fix your hair and makeup and remember that you’re out of perfume, which always makes you feel uncomfortable, like going out in public without your false teeth would (you imagine). You wake up your husband and pick a petty bitter fight with him. You always have to do everything and this one time can’t he even help you?! He finally agrees to take the children to school and pick up lunch stuff on the way. Don’t be late, you snarl, they already sent us a letter about lateness! (Don’t do it that way, that’s stupid, do it this way!) Don’t let them be late!

You change your sweater. He lurches downstairs and shuffles the kids into the car. You run downstairs and then clatter back upstairs for a barrette, then downstairs, then you grab a snack bar for breakfast and accept that there’s no time to pack a sensible lunch. You leave the house, finally. You run back inside when you realize you’ve left your laptop. You run back outside and try to dodge, for the second time, the large overgrown bushes on either side of the front porch steps. They shower droplets of rain on you and you realize that the day is even chillier than you thought. Sandals might have been a mistake, but it’s already too late. The bushes will have to wait until later too.

Finally, you make it to school. You unpack yourself, check your emails, realize that you have more grading left to do than you thought. You realize you’re going to feel behind and discombobulated all day. You have Poptarts for lunch.

It’s Monday.

A US Milky Way candy bar, broken in half to show contents. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My daughter Lucy was feeling nervous last week about beginning a new activity, and I heard myself saying, “Well, we could always go to Coldstone afterwards to help make you feel better, if you want.” The more I thought about it later, the more it began to bother me, both how that was my instant response, and how I phrased it to my growing young girl

While I have never really struggled with my weight, I have spent a lot of time over the recent years thinking about my own food and eating habits and how I’d like to do some things differently. I struggled to quit caffeinated soda, and now I’ve tackled trying to eliminate soda altogether. I have struggled with exercising regularly and eating more vegetables, and I have done so many stops-and-starts that I get frustrated and discouraged, but keep trying to start again.

Sure, I’m concerned with my own health, but one of the driving motivations is that I want my daughters to have better health habits than I do. That’s why we bribed them to add vegetables to their diet, and that’s why I drive one to ballet and the other to rock-climbing and insist on semi-regular family hikes and walks. I want them to have better ideas about how to care for themselves than I feel like I often do.

Recently, this has been on my mind in terms of my tendency to eat emotionally, or “feed my feelings,” as I’ve seen other people call it. I know I’m by no means alone in this habit, but it still seems like a good one to be more aware and reflective about, if I can manage it. Some experts see it as a problem if you’re trying to lose weight, while others believe that emotional eating can help you stay slender as long as you choose something you really want and focus deliberately on enjoying it, without overeating or starting with an empty stomach. This last approach makes sense to me: it’s not that I think Coldstone is evil, or that I’m worried about obesity. I’ll never deny my love of classic comfort food or make my girls feel like it’s not okay to go out for a celebratory cone or slice of cheesecake. But when I “feed my feelings,” often what I used to reach for is potato chips, soda or a candy bar,  none of which actually ever made me feel much better. Eating an entire medium-sized bag of chips now makes me feel sick, and wolfing down a candy bar after a stressful day doesn’t relieve much stress. I don’t want my own kids to rely on this pattern regardless of what their weight may or may not be, and I want them to know how to feed their emotional hunger in other ways.

In all honesty, I feel like “feeding my feelings” is a habit I have eroded steadily as I’ve grown older, but there is still enough of it left that I worry about my girls feeling the same way. I ended up taking my girls out for dinner so we could talk and enjoy some pizza before Lucy’s activity instead, and teaching her some deep-breathing patterns she could try to help calm herself down that day, and I think those were the right approaches to take, approaches that I think will be more useful in the future than an instant application of ice cream would have been. For the future, I hope to help them both (as well as myself) keep building their emotional toolbox, and filling it with plenty of strategies–plus a little comfort food along the way.

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