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Archives from 2002-2006

This Monday was school picture day for the kids and so I dug out the only vaguely presentable button-down shirts they own and hovered nearby at breakfast to repeatedly swab them down before peanut butter made it way onto their collars and I practically transported them to class in hermetically-sealed bubbles, bobbing and weaving with tissues in hand and snatching markers out of their sight and demanding that they be careful with the chocolate milk for the love of god, and of course when I picked them up the teachers were all, oh sorry, pictures have been rescheduled for tomorrow. So all I can say the filthy hobo-children wearing ill-fitting Marvel-themed shirts in Tuesday’s picture would have looked a LOT better if everything had happened when it was supposed to and THAT’S why it’s important to stick to a PLAN, dammit.

Anyway, judge me if you must, but I totally bribed Riley ahead of time and promised him a new Transformer if he would behave for the photo session, because he often gets all weird when a camera looms into view, flapping an exasperated hand and burying his face in a pillow until I feel like a particularly obnoxious paparazzo (“Hey Sandra! Tell us what you think about Jessie’s Nazi-loving trashcooter mistress!”).

It may be that he has some lingering bad memories about traumatic school pictures from the past, too. I’m not sure.

(By the way, all the picture forms now let us choose the backdrop, possibly as a result of mass protest against the Infamous Turtle Theme of 2007.)

I’d forgotten about the promised Transformer but Riley sure as shit didn’t, practically tackling me as soon as he got in the door to announce that not only had he been good for the photographer, he’d helped Dylan be good too, and can we go to the store NOW NOW NOW how about NOW?

So now my kid has a new Bumblebee Transformer which has already had its arm snap off and requires parental intervention at least fifty times per hour to help put the fucking arm back on again because MOM HE NEEDS TO TRANSFORM RIGHT NOW TO HELP OCTOMUS FIGHT MEGATRON and it’ll be a couple weeks before we even see those photos so who knows what he did for the camera? He could have done this:

Or this:

It doesn’t really matter, I suppose. However they turn out, there’s usually an inherent awesomeness to school photos precisely for the fact that they are almost always ridiculous:

Still, I learned an important lesson about bribery: it helps if you tie it to a quantifiable result, because otherwise what you’re really teaching your kid is the art of subterfuge.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about school lately, starting with the chin-scratcher of whether or not Riley should start kindergarten this fall, and moving right into a mostly-uninformed and knee-jerky sort of freakout about what his experience will be like once he does start public school, which is kind of a stupid thing to worry about at the moment because man, our future is nebulous lately in the Magic Eight Ball REPLY HAZY TRY AGAIN sense, and it’s anyone’s guess what we’ll be doing a year or so from now. Will we be here? Living elsewhere? Selling plasma? Rolling in gold ingots? CANNOT PREDICT NOW ASK AGAIN LATER.

Still, I enjoy a good pointless fret session (see also: zombies, Large Creepy Things Partially Submerged in Water, the unhappy results of the pinch test on the back of my hand), so I’ve been worrying about What Will Happen If We Aren’t Happy With Our Public School and then I looked up tuition information for some local private schools and I died, the end.

(Honestly, I didn’t think anything could be more expensive than our daycare school, but ha ha ha ha HAAA. Wrong.)

In other education-related musings that require an actual resolution of some kind, I’m trying to decide if I should sign up for a math class this summer or not. On the one hand, I definitely should, because I have a lot of catching up to do in that subject; on the other hand, this semester’s nutrition class has been fascinating but also kind of a lot of work, and I am giddy at the thought of a break from studying and homework and evening classes during the best time of the year in the Northwest. There are a lot of races and events I want to participate in, and I would love to feel free to focus on training and enjoying the long days instead of being tied to a textbook once the kids go to bed each night. On the other other hand, maybe pre-algebra math doesn’t require a lot of studying and high-volume memorization? Like not as bad as the biochemistry stuff from this quarter, right? Or is it? Or will it be a lot of repetitive assignments and worksheets that take just as much time as remembering what the fuck a Krebs cycle is and I’ll feel too guilty to go for that long bike ride because what if I don’t get an A in class OH MY GOD?

Basically I’m feeling like we should all just live in the woods and wear badger pelts and teach our children how do the badger-skinning and leave the complicated complexities of the modern world to the inevitable robot overlords. Who’s with me? Badger looks soft.

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