Old-tyme lemonade summer

Summers were very long in Michigan. And hot. You live in California and you think you know about heat? OK, so you may be inland and log hundred degree days as often as we coastal folks have fog, but you have dry heat. You have air conditioning. Close your eyes and take yourselves back to the “good” old days of my youth…

The mercury rises to 90, but the humidity is at 99. You walk something like a monkey, your arms held out from your sides, your legs bowed so that your thighs can’t touch. It’s hot. It’s really, really hot. But there’s no beautiful clear blue western sky. It’s hazy. Hot, hazy, and there’s no view. There’s no wind. You’re wearing as little clothing as it’s legal to wear in these parts, but still you’re hot. Halter tops can’t change that.

One of your friends got air-conditioning recently, but that was exotic. To get air-conditioning, the rest of us ride our bikes to the supermarket or drugstore. We cruise the aisles, pretending we’re there to buy something.

Problem is, we have to ride our bikes back home. And it’s hot. So what do we do?

Lemonade stand!

Today my kids made six dollars while I worked. First I had to meet with a client (and a fellow mom) whom I’d completely forgotten about last week. I was feeling bad about that, but what can I do? When I’m with my kids, I can’t seem to remember anything. So I told her, yes, come on by and I’ll stick my kids in front of a video. But instead, the six-year-old started a lemonade stand, and as soon as the ten-year-old saw the cold, hard cash, he was in as well. (He wants an iPod!)

They sold lemonade all through that meeting. My client left (she was paying me and my kids – she bought a cup for herself). They ran out of lemonade and a neighbor came by with a bunch more lemons to juice. So they made more and were back outside. I called another client and had a phone meeting while I watched and listened out the upstairs front window.

It may not have been specifically educational, but today was the sort of summer I had as a kid. My mother likes to remark how different parenting is these days, and one of the major differences she sees is that we play with our kids. “We didn’t play with kids,” she said. “We just shooed you outside and figured you’d entertain yourselves.”

So today I was channeling my mother. And it was good. My kids scammed all the neighbors (though I guess 25 cents for a lemonade isn’t so bad), had fun, and I got lots of work done. This is what summer was like when I was a kid.

Though much less hot. In coastal California, instead of selling lemonade in the summertime, perhaps they should sell hot cider. We’ve got a summer chill going on here that warrants sitting inside shivering under a blanket. But I respect my kids’ entrepreneurial spirit, and I definitely appreciated their leaving me along to tie up loose ends before we embark on our next road trip.

And it was, actually, educational. They made money, and it wasn’t even from our lemons.

Pay to play doesn't pay

I’m working on an article about a fabulous new program that’s happening at Aptos High. Those of you in the PVUSD district might remember vaguely, years ago when money seemed to flow rather than get spit out in spurts of IOUs, that we voted for a bond measure that upgraded the facilities at Aptos High. They are now reaping the benefits: a state-of-the-art facility serving as a home to the performing arts and indoor sports such as wrestling.

The years when we actually sent money to schools are fading from our memories, though, with today’s situation: PVUSD, now that Aptos High has their beautiful new facility, has cut funding for athletics 100%. How can they do that? you might ask. What is high school without athletics? Well, apparently the bright minds behind this decision think that it’s OK to ask the parents who can afford it to pay, and to tell the parents who can’t that they’ll be taken care of.

There are lots of problems with this approach, the most fundamental being the definition of public education. If we are to have public education in this country, it must be free and available to all. As Thomas Jefferson pointed out, we can’t have a democracy if our people aren’t educated. And every single study and observation since the founding of this country makes it clear that every dollar invested in public education saves us many dollars: educated people are less likely to be unemployed, less likely to be in prison, less likely to be unhealthy, and on and on. If it were possible to add up all the dollars we save by educating our population, perhaps decisions like cutting education wouldn’t be so easy to pass off.

But OK, what about those who say that education is about the three R’s, and everything else should be optional? What the heck does wrestling have to do with getting a good education? According to Aptos High’s wrestling coach, Reggie Roberts, it has everything to do with it for some at-risk kids. During the school day, he’s a teacher for kids in special ed who are having a very hard time getting through school. After school, he becomes the guy that some of them come to for life lessons that end up helping them with school. “Non-core curriculum” is what keeps lots of kids coming to school at all.

The third defense of making kids pay to play is that the wealthier families can make up the money that the poorer families can’t pay. But this goes against what public education is about: letting all families participate on equal ground. I was talking to a friend whose husband is from a low-income Mexican-American family, and she expressed surprise that they didn’t realize that families like his would never admit that they needed to take charity from other families. Even though the payment is called a “donation,” they know charity when they see it. Their son, had pay-to-play been the rule when he was at school, would have been out on the street learning lessons from other kids rather than at sports practice learning self-discipline, respect, and all those other life lessons that kids learn in athletics.

The state budget being hammered out as I write is probably going to exacerbate these problems. The state is poised to grab money from schools and counties — the very public institutions that can least afford to let it go. This situation is just plain crazy, and needs to be fixed. But not by taking everything from the public schools that makes them worth going to. With NCLB and the high school exit exam, we’ve got to give kids something to look forward to at school!

King Tut!

King TutI just finished putting together a field trip for my daughter’s homeschool group to visit King Tut at the deYoung in San Francisco. I remember when I was young and King Tut came on his first US visit. Time Magazine ran a big cover story, and it was Egypt-mania amongst all the kids I knew.

Of course, I grew up in a place that King Tut would never deign to visit. Northern Midwest, middle of nowhere. My husband is from New York City (Flatbush, to be exact), and he grew up with being able to take a bus, or even walk or bike, over a bridge to see the most fabulous stuff of the world. For me, King Tut was everything Michigan was not: exotic, wealthy, mysterious, and very, very old. It didn’t occur to me that I’d ever get to visit him. But I dreamed of going to California, and decided that college was my ticket there.

California, here I come!

My kids have things that I never even thought possible, the least of which is fresh vegetables in the wintertime. Of course, these days they have those even in Michigan, but they’re largely imported from California. Like their movies, their favorite websites, a lot of their music, and most of their movies. I grew up with a culture of appreciating the other and disdaining what I had. It’s sometimes a weird feeling to realize that my kids are growing up in a place that I dreamed about.

My husband and I marvel sometimes that we’re here, on one of the most beautiful coasts in the world. We know that our kids have no perspective about this, but still, we’re inclined sometimes to say to them, “Do you know how lucky you are to live here? Do you know how amazing this place is?”

They don’t, but we do.

King Tut!

OK, I have probably admitted this before, but when I moved to Santa Cruz I didn’t realize how far from civilization, as I defined it (i.e. San Francisco), I had moved. The other place I lived longterm was Palo Alto, 45 minutes and a whole world away from San Francisco. But when I didn’t have a car, I could jump on the train. And when I did, I’d zip up 280 to find culture, art, and people with good taste (OK, and bad taste) in clothing.

Santa Cruz is far enough away from San Francisco that you can’t make an easy day of going there, especially with kids. I have come to realize that this is precisely why Santa Cruz is a cool place to live and, for example, Pacifica is not. If I lived in Pacifica, I’d be up in SF with my kids whenever I wanted culture. Down here in Santa Cruz, we have to make our own culture. Which is why we have a culture.

But we do not have King Tut. Can you tell I’m looking forward to this? And so is my daughter. We went to the Friends of the Santa Cruz Public Libraries book sale (one of the best SC events of the year), and she found a book about Egyptian art. “Can I get this?” she asked. Good Homeschooling Mama said, Of course, darling, if you think it would be interesting. Like the Good Homeschooling Girl that she is, she’s kept it in the car and read it from cover to cover. So when I opened up the paper one day and said, Hey, King Tut is coming, she said, I know who that is — he’s in my book!

The one thing that’s more fun than doing a cool thing ourselves is doing a cool thing with friends, so we rounded up some of the usual suspects and we’re off to SF to visit the King. I figure I should probably find that song on the Internet and play it for my kids. There’s no way they can imagine the Tut mania of my day; their childhood is one of connectivity and masses of information. Mine was a childhood of long, hot (or freezing) days, a glossy magazine coming each week to bring the outside world in. Where I lived, you couldn’t stand at the ocean’s edge and see forever; you couldn’t get the world’s most exotic foods at your grocery store; you couldn’t even see a movie right when it was released. You learned to wait and to dream, and your dreams made things bigger than they really were.

When I dreamed of California, it was something more fabulous than it’s turned out to be. But when I dreamed of King Tut, he was only in glossy 2 dimensions. I’m guessing that the real thing will be all the better for the waiting.

Roughing it, sorta

Last night, way later than either child’s bedtime, we returned home from a camping trip with friends. It was fun, exhausting, thrilling, and exasperating.

Pretty much like parenting, right?

The amazing thing is, my kids are ten and six, and this was the first time I’ve gone camping with them. I have lots of excuses. Bad back (x-ray techs and MRI operators probably use my films as a gag gift for their friends), difficult kids (overcome for at least part of the time by giving in to DVDs in the car), a love of clean beds and well-cooked food.

But my kids love camping, and I wanted to go to places you can’t really get to know without camping in them. I love getting to know a place in depth, rather than the surface-scratching you do from car windows and vista points. I’m the sort of person who hates traveling but loves having traveled. I love getting home and thinking about the place, the experiences I had, and how it affected me.

So away we went. We had pretty much no gear but what my husband had left from his backpacking days, so I borrowed bits of this and that from family and friends. I didn’t have the slightest idea how to put up a tent. I spent untold hours trying to figure out the dinner I would cook (we each took one evening of our three evenings at camp), deciding on something then changing again and again.

There was a lot I wasn’t going to get my head around until I got there. I’m a spectacularly bad packer, having ended up in the high desert without a light long-sleeved shirt, in hotels with pools without my bathing suit, and in San Diego and Florida without a sweater (air conditioning and heavy fog not anticipated). This time I swore I would get it right, and going in the car does give you the advantage of being able to (theoretically) pack everything but the kitchen sink. They said it would be hot, so I packed shorts for the kids (but forgot them for me). They said it would be freezing at night, so I packed coats for us all (they stayed in the car the whole time). We were warned of flash thunderstorms, so my friends assured me that the emergency ponchos we hauled around in our backpacks for three days kept them at bay.

We ended up having a fabulous time. The kids got unbelievably dirty, and I let them be dirty, though at one point I did find a baby wipe and put each one in a headlock so I wouldn’t have to look at their schmutzy faces. We enjoyed the unfamiliar flora and fauna, especially the cute little mountain chipmunks that would stand up and look at us with great interest. We swam and hiked and climbed. My son cut his ankle. My daughter got eaten alive by mosquitoes (I tell her she is the world’s sweetest 6-year-old, and apparently mosquitoes agree!).

My friend laughed and said that she had discovered my secret, that I’m a clean freak. But when I offered her the bucket stocked with shampoo and conditioner and pointed her toward the faucet I’d found that was a comfortable height off the ground for bending one’s head under it and washing, I noticed she didn’t hesitate! My other friend said she’d just take the bucket to rinse herself off, but didn’t protest when I gave her the shampoo, too.

The things I liked about our trip was the intimacy of being with my kids in a tent. The newness of a lifestyle that we were borrowing for a few days. The longer periods where the adults could actually talk without a kid interrupting, needing something. Kids need less when there’s a lake, interesting bugs, friends, kayaks, dirt between their toes, funny chipmunks, tents to hide in, logs to climb on.

The things I didn’t like were pretty much the stuff of life: never having exactly what I needed when I needed it, wishing I’d bought a different water jug, the many little disasters that are strung throughout a child’s day that we needed to patch over and make right. And yes, there was the dirt, but today we spent much of the day disposing of that, getting our stuff separated from our friend’s, cleaning out the car, rinsing off dusty shoes. Someone once said to me that every time she goes on a vacation with her family, she needs another vacation after it to get over the family vacation. One of my friends is on summer holiday, so she got back to a laid-back life. But the other friend and I were back to work today, shuffling our kids’ needs between what we had to do and what we wanted to do and what we were trying to avoid doing.

It’s a funny thing to do: you throw aside everything that is your life, all the stuff you think you need every day, pack together the necessities (along with the warm jackets you’ll not need at all), and head away to someplace you know little about. You pitch your tent and find yourself with new neighbors, new dirt, an air mattress that leaks, disappearing forks, a smoky fire, and someone tramping by your tent, back and forth, all night long.

I can’t help but wonder what the chipmunks think. I guess they think we’re jealous, and we’re just trying to get a little piece of what they have every day.

Another saga of Busy Mommy

So I wrote a couple of days ago, or was that yesterday, about being overly busy. When I get overly busy, two things happen: One is that I cease remembering people’s names and other proper nouns. It’s like that’s the part of my brain that gets wiped to store excess information. When I’m really busy, I see someone I know well and I say, “Hi, uh, hm, yeah…you!” The other thing that happens is that I completely lose track of time. So here I am.

I wrote a while back about how great my daughter’s soccer camp had gone when she dropped in for a couple of impromptu sessions. Longtime readers of this blog know that my daughter is homeschooled precisely because it’s extremely difficult for her to follow a program for a full day, or even a half day, without some sort of blow-up happening. So when I signed her up for soccer camp, we did the little try-out version: two two-hour sessions. It went really well, and they said we could come back again and do the same thing.

Then we got home and my daughter asked, “If I do the full camp, will I get the yellow t-shirt?”

OK, so my daughter is pretty unusual in some ways, but she is a six-year-old girl, and it’s all about the wardrobe. “Well, yes, I suppose you would,” I answered. “And would you buy me cleats and shin guards?” “Well, I suppose I’d have to.”

“I want to do A Full Week of soccer camp,” she announced. And so it was.

This is the week, and she has been doing fabulously well. So have I, and so has her brother. It’s hard for a big kid to have a little sister with special needs. She hogs much of the attention and all of the homeschooling time from Mommy. So my ten-year-old and I have been relishing our time to sit next to each other, work on our projects, and talk or not talk.

My daughter has been incredibly happy, completely plugged into soccer camp. She’s come home elated, hoarse-voiced, and full of advice on how to play soccer.

I decided to write an article about the camp on my Examiner page (which is about half the reason I’m Busy Mommy this week — I’m only supposed to post three times per week, but…). As an Examiner, I’m supposed to write in the third person, but I can still follow my passions! So there it is. Santa Cruz Soccer, two thumbs up. If your kid is difficult, if your kid is easy, or if your kid is just a kid, it’s a great place to be.

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