Wonder

The (former) teenager turns 21 today. That seems both impossible and...well, mostly impossible. I am hoping that this year will bring him happiness and maturity. The degree to which he embraces common sense will likely dictate how that turns out.

All in all, life is pretty good. Summer is ending, school starts for the boys tomorrow. They are 4th graders, which is almost as impossible as my stepson being 21. They are excited. We are hoping this year will be better for Owen and that Aidan will find his people in his new gifted class.

Now is the time of year that I question all my life choices and crave change even if everything is fine. I'm trying to ride it out until winter suppresses all motivation. Pretty soon we'll wake up and tomorrow will be Christmas.

And I have an inexplicable urge to watch The Wonder Years.

Shiny Days

It's already the end of the very first week of school. Seriously, I don't think I'm being premature by suggesting that we start our Christmas lists at the rate things seem to go these days.

The boys are happy little third graders. They are in separate classes just like last year and they're handling the whole back-to-school transition like seasoned pros. I'm happy for them.

I did take one step closer to my dream of putting them in a bubble where no one can corrupt or traumatize them by pulling them off the school bus in the afternoons this year. Owen was having a hard time toward the end of last year - kids would get him riled up and he'd meltdown and yell at the bus driver, who I'm sure was well-meaning, but clearly not trained to calm or discipline children - especially children with special needs.

Actually, the even better reason to pull them off the bus was all the shit they were learning from the troublemakers. Swearing, general hoodlum-ism...I wish I could say there was rock 'n' roll, but instead there was top 40 radio, which is essentially a lesson in getting drunk and having sex. Ok, I realize all of that made me sound very old, but seriously...no elementary age kid should be calling people "sexy mama." It's disturbing. 

So now we pick them up after school and they love it and hooray for doing anything to help preserve their innocence for just a little longer. (Not that we don't let them listen to top 40 radio, but at least when I'm with them I can treat them to lectures on how it's not actually cool to go get drunk at the club and leer at women every night...I'm pretty sure they have no idea what I'm talking about and probably very little interest in the lyrics on the songs, but it's good practice for all of us.)

In other good news, I think my annual need to make radical change and question every life decision in the fall is passing...although it's not even actually fall yet, so I guess I might just be having a good day. I'll take it.

In the time it took me to write this blog post, I could have folded the laundry

School is approaching. Today I made the boys try on all of their long pants and discovered that Owen just barely fits into two pairs, while Aidan now has 9 pairs to himself, thanks to the 1.5 inch height difference.

It drives me crazy that all the pants still fit their skinny little waists, but they always end up too short. Even the ones that still fit Aidan probably won't make it through the winter. I think I'm going to open a store called "Beanpole" that will sell pants that are adjustable in the width and length...yes, those will be very stylish pants. My mom has suggested we take the hippie route and just add fabric onto the bottoms of the pant legs...again, very stylish. *Sigh*

Am I the only one who fantasizes every year about letting them have approximately three pairs of pants and three shirts and just letting them rotate through them until they wear out? It just feels like then we'd really be getting our money's worth.

I don't think my kids would be bothered by wearing the same thing day after day - although Aidan is a bit of a budding clothes horse - but the obstacle to this plan is really the simple fact that I don't, or more accurately, won't do laundry every two days.

Nope, apparently I'd prefer that they always own enough clothing to create equally towering piles of both dirty and clean laundry. Sometimes I think they don't even really need dressers since they are nearly always having to dig through the basket of clean laundry to find some component of their outfit. I mean really, if they didn't even have dressers, I couldn't feel bad about not getting around to folding the laundry, right?

Hmmm...three outfits, no dresser. That could be the name of my new simple living movement. It will focus on simplifying your life purely to decrease household chores and the guilt associated with not keeping up with those chores.

It's gonna be huge.