Sticks and Stars

One year old: Recently at the grocery store he was given a cookie in one of those little tissue-like papers they use to keep the doughnuts sanitary. After eating his cookie he put the paper to his face and then made a noise like he was blowing his nose. Of course, he has no idea how to blow his nose but he’s seen me doing it so much lately (my allergies are killing me) that he figured that was the thing to do with small white papers. He also likes to walk around the apartment “talking” on my cell phone. And he’s a dancing machine.

Four year old: Lately when I ask him to lay down he explains to me very earnestly that he can’t because his machines will get all out of order. One day when were driving home he patted his legs contentedly and commented that all his machines were working correctly. At my questioning he explained that his body is full of machines that make him work. There are small machines in his thighs and great big machines in his feet and factory machines in his knees and train machines in his arms. He says it with such endearing seriousness.

I’m feeling a little better today. I met with my therapist yesterday and he let me cry at him for about an hour and a half and helped me put things into perspective and then helped me come up with some good ideas as to how I can get some breaks. Ways always reveal themselves when I spend some time thinking and I am never as without resources as I feel. And as my therapist suggested, building even more resources into my life is a pretty critical venture at this point.

I worry that part of my emotiveness is due to the IUD I had inserted on Monday (Woohoo! Free sex for everyone!). It wasn’t supposed to affect me, the hormones were supposed to be barely more than topical, but still I worry. Hopefully if I am feeling extra progesteroney it’s just an initial, getting-used-to-it kind of deal, and all will level out. And there’s also a strong likelihood that I am nothing more than just really, really tired, because that is certainly also the case. Regardless, I am feeling better today, partly because I got a decent night of sleep last night, but particularly because I remembered that I have childcare all day on Monday. While it was tempting to consider taking the opportunity to really clean my apartment, I instead scheduled a breakfast date, a mid-day massage, an early afternoon lunch (by myself), and then a stint of sitting in the grass at a nearby park, shoes off, ipod on, book* in hand. I’m also going to make sure that my apartment is relatively tidy and that something is planned for dinner so that when I pick up my boys we can spend the evening happy and relaxed.

I managed to do a half-assed cleaning of my apartment last night, which also made me feel better, and I think I might spend this weekend doing some decluttering. Assorted closets and cupboards are getting a little unwieldy (and are weighing increasingly heavily on me) so it seems like time to get them organized. If you’re really lucky I just might post before and after photos as well. Please try to hold yourself back from obsessively checking back to my site for the first glimpse of said photos, although I know it will be difficult.

My ex leaves tomorrow (at least as far as I know) and we have nothing in place, nothing at all. I suggested a custody schedule that will allow him the increased time he wants with our four year old in combination with time with our one year old that will give me a week long break from children every so often (A week! By myself!) and while I have let my brain run away with fantasies of how I would spend said week, I’m guessing that it’s entirely too gloriously luxurious to actually happen. But I will continue to dream.

*I’m currently reading Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier and it is absolutely fascinating. The author examines women’s biology in great, great detail and debunks many myths and presents many interesting theories about why we are the way we are. Highly recommended (and especially for you, Kristina).

Something amazing has been happening for the past three nights. My little one has not woken me up in the middle of the night, has not woken me up in the early morning, and in fact, on a glorious potentially sleep-inable morning like this morning, he let me sleep in until the absolutely unheard of hour of 9:30. 9:30! Let me tell you folks, it’s been a long time since I have not witnessed the 6:00, 7:00 and 8:00 hours of a morning.

What’s brought about this fortuitous change? Well, he’s no longer sleeping in my bed.

I’ve been trying to transition him out of my bed for a really long time (where “trying” equals “thinking about it a lot with great frustration”) but it was the impending presence of far more interesting occupants that really spurred me into action. On the first night I tried getting him down in his brother’s room with no luck. I tried an air mattress, I tried the floor, I tried his brother’s mattress, but everything was different than my soft bed, so he just squirmed and wiggled and giggled and repeatedly crawled away. Eventually I moved him back to my bed where he immediately dropped off to sleep. At that point a light bulb popped on over my head and I realized that once he was asleep, I could move him back to his brother’s room, which is what I did.

That first night he woke up at about 1am and I had to nurse him back down, and then at 6am he was up gently knocking at the door to let me know he wanted out. But during the two nights since he has slept through the night and when he wakes up he just plays with toys until I eventually free him (I have no idea how long he’s been awake, but as long as he’s not crying, I figure it doesn’t really matter).

For the first time in four years, my bed is empty! Of course, I have to sleep with my door open and certain small furry mammals take that as a sign that I am welcoming them back in, but I have no qualms about shoving them away when they get a little too snuggly. (And also, one night of the three did find my bed occupied by another much larger, much less furry mammal, but I’ll spare you the wall-shaking, neighbor disturbing, ultimately bed-breaking details).

Now the issue is how to maintain this arrangement. My four year old comes back today, more or less for good this time, and his falling asleep patterns are much different than those of his little brother. His little brother goes to bed around 8pm and sleeps through the night. My four year old goes to his room around 8pm but stays awake playing and watching movies until about 11pm. Playing and movie watching are not conducive to the sleep of the little brother, but even if I told him he had to lay quietly in his bed in the dark, he’s four and so that would last about three minutes before he got up to start playing, likely tripping over his brother along the way. My brain is racing to come up with options because now that I’ve had a taste of this freedom I am not letting it slip away. (And besides, I’m pretty sure the larger, less furry mammal will be making a return visit to my bedroom and I will allow no barriers to come between me and more neighbor disturbing.)

I just officially accepted the new position.

I talked to both the person currently doing the job (who is, perhaps, the prettiest boy alive. I am so sad that I will no longer have opportunity to gaze at his slightly scruffy visage) as well as the person who previously held the position and they both gave me interesting, although quite divergent, information that really helped make up my mind (or cement my decision rather, since my mind was pretty much made up from the moment the IS director told me that Pretty Boy was leaving).

Pretty Boy is not at all geeky and has no desire to be (blasphemy!). He liked the position in the beginning but then once he’d mastered SQL, he became bored and felt like there was really nowhere to go. The thing he liked most about the position was that he got to work with people from all over our agency (I could absolutely care less about that).

Techie Boy (who held the position previously) is geeky and ultimately gave up the position because he wanted something geekier. He too got bored once he mastered the SQL, but when he heard that I was ultimately interested in programming, his eyes lit up and he said he thought this position was an excellent place to start with much opportunity to head in that direction.

I’m so glad I talked to both of them. I was originally going to talk only to Pretty Boy (because I didn’t know that Techie Boy had also held the position) and after I was done talking to him I was worried about my future, that I’d be entertained for three months and then stuck in absolute boredom (much like my current job but with lower pay). But Techie Boy reassured me. Indeed, I might be bored after three months, but it sounds like opportunities for expansion will abound.

My supervisor will be pissed when she gets back from vacation on Monday. She’s been joking about IS stealing me away from her, but I don’t think she really thought it would happen.

For anyone who doesn’t know, what I do in my daily worklife is manage government contracts. I play with data and write reports, I apply to renew grants, I make sure that the assorted projects run by my employer are in compliance with the pages and pages and pages (and pages) of rules we are required to follow. It’s a good job, one that I like and am good at, and of the entirety of the 250 or so positions at my agency, it’s definitely one of the top choices in terms of the position I’d choose if the Executive Director was to walk me to the swell of a hill that somehow managed to overlook the entirety of my large and diverse and dispersed agency and say, “Sarah, all this could be yours, take your pick,” while sweeping his arm across the landscape.

But if I could truly choose any position at my agency, any position at all, there’s one in IS that I’ve had my eye on since I returned to this agency back in January. I don’t know what the title is but the person in the position does nothing but write code all day. I interact with him a lot because he writes queries to get me the data I need from our massive client database and I envy him his job and read his code longingly. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I love code and the thought of getting to code all day is one that makes me a little weak in the knees. This guy isn’t a programmer like the other code monkeys in IS, he just writes queries and the like, so it’s not even that big of a leap (well, okay, maybe it is a *little* bit of a big leap given my entire lack of coding knowledge and experience) to imagine myself in the position, but I still like to dream about it.

Ten minutes ago the director of  our IS department came and asked if he could talk to me privately. Lately I’ve been working far less and reading blogs/reading online novels/IMing far more than usual (not because I’m a lazy slug, but because I don’t actually have work to be doing) and so I tensed my shoulders in expectation of a gentle rebuke about my personal computer usage. But no. Instead he pulled me into his office, closed the door, informed me that the guy in my dream position is leaving unexpectedly and offered me the job.

Let me repeat that folks. He offered me the job. He didn’t let me know that it was open so that I could apply, he didn’t ask me if I might know anyone who would be interested, he told me he thought I would be awesome in the position and offered it to me.

HE FUCKING OFFERED ME THE JOB, PEOPLE!

I am in shock. I am in dancing-around-the-office-grinning-so-wide-my-cheeks-hurt shock.

There is, of course, one downside. And no, it’s not that this new job would likely cut into my blog/novel reading, IMing time (although that’s likely true). There’s a pay cut involved. And although they haven’t given me the numbers yet, it could be as high as $8K less than what I make now and it’s very likely to be at least $4K-6K less. I only recently found myself at a place where I’m actually brining in more money than I’m sending back out, and a pay cut like that will send me right back to stressful, verging-on-impossible budgetland.

But how can I say no to this amazing opportunity?? The chance to write code all day with the opportunity to grow into real programming? I admit that while my brain is full of many wide ranging possible dream for the future, this is certainly one that I never, ever expected to be facing.

Updated: Woohoo! The anticipated pay cut will only be about $3K. I can totally do that.

AmericanFamily’s recent postings on her family’s schooling dilemmas have gotten me thinking about my own 4.5 year old and his own upcoming schooling (and my own dilemmas). The story thus far, for those who haven’t been playing along at home, is that I initially planned to homeschool my boys. Not because I want them protected from the evil sinful world that is public education, but because I hated my own schooling, was immensely bored by it, and feel like it sucked any love of learning right out of me, something that I’m only beginning to recover from at age 30. I love the thought of creating a learning environment for my boys where they get to take the reins, where they get to determine what they learn and I am merely the facilitator, the one doing mad google searches to find endless resources with which to encourage their learning processes.

But alas, my work schedule (and the fact that I have to work at all) is not likely to allow such a venture. And in all honesty, while I like (love) the thought of homeschooling my boys, I’m a little afraid that the actual doing of it might exceed my…dedication? I’m definitely more of a low maintenance parent and I worry that such intensive involvement might actually be beyond me…at least while they’re little.

My more recent thinking directed me toward public school until they’re 12, at which point they’d be old enough to stay home alone, at which point I could pull them out of school and then set them up with some largely self-directed homeschooling, with my assistance available on evenings and weekends. Although this might sounds a little too unsupervised for some, I think that with some reasonable guidelines and expectations, as well as a good number of resources at their disposal, this could actually be very good for them in terms of fostering independence and responsibility for their own outcomes.

As my four year old approaches school age I’ve been thinking about school on and off but I didn’t really start thinking about it directly until my ex requested custody of him so that he could expose him to a supposedly better public schooling system. I was caught off guard with the whole topic and had to catch up quickly. I naively hoped that my ex might be willing to consider private school but since his primary argument for taking our son was based on a supposedly superior public school district, he refused, so I stopped even thinking about anything other than public schooling.

I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with this decision but I figured that there are a wide enough range of public schools in my urban setting that surely I can find something that will be a good fit and that won’t squelch him too much and that will provide adequate resources for a child who, if genetics hold, is likely to need more of a challenge than the “average” student. But the more I look at the schools and the more I learn about public schooling in general, the much less comfortable I feel. Right now he’s enrolled to begin Head Start in the fall (because it’s free and his dad wants him in a preschool setting…and I’m fine with that) but I can’t shake the unpleasant feeling that Head Start exists not only to help certain kids prepare for kindergarten by giving them a leg up, but it also serves to squish down those square pegs who might not otherwise fit into the round hole of public education.

My four year old is a smart kid, but he’s also very active and very inquisitive. I can’t even remotely kid myself that any teacher trying to manage at least twenty other kids is going to take the time to answer his millions of questions, even if s/he wanted to. I can’t imagine it’s going to be okay for him to bounce around the classroom, flitting from one task to another as his interest is flagged by something new. And the worst part is that the only option in terms of managing a classroom that is likely to have more than one bright, energetic, inquisitive four year old is to find some way to get them to sit down and shut up. At the very worst he will be labeled a problem child if he won’t. The thought of my four year old learning that he is wrong to ask questions and explore makes me feel ill.

So I’ve decided that regardless of what my ex wants, I’m putting private school back on the table. This fall I’ll be researching them all, taking many school tours and ultimately figuring out what will be the best match, and if that turns out to be a private school, so be it. And if I have to find a way to pay for every penny myself, well so be that too (luckily I will qualify for plenty of financial aid, so I don’t anticipate that tuition will cost much more than what I currently pay for daycare).

In terms of next year, I think I’ve found a nice Montessori program to supplant Head Start as a good place to stash my four year old until I manage to wend my way through the larger education maze. It’s reasonably priced and although it’s even farther away than my daycare (where my one year old would continue to reside), it’s not too far from said daycare, so it wouldn’t be too much trouble to drop off one, then the other, then hop on my bus to work. Of course, “reasonably priced” means that it’s going to cost well over twice what I currently pay…and that’s assuming his dad is willing to kick in his half too. But overall I think it will be worth the investment. According to his dad (who is, admittedly, a less than trustworthy source, our four year old loves his current Montessori program and I can’t say that he feels similarly for his daycare.