A Cat’s Tale

Yesterday was my daughter’s birthday party. She turned five a few days before. After all the stress and worry I put myself through, it actually went well. Even the cake looked pretty good. I could have gotten a much prettier one from a bakery, of course, but where’s the fun in that?

Anyway, I’ve been generally feeling like I am floundering, both in homeschooling and in life. I get overwhelmed and I just don’t keep on top of things the way I want. Other moms in this area don’t usually have birthday parties at home. It’s Not Done. If for some reason a person does have one at home, they hire entertainment. Even for babies, parties are held in restaurants or play spaces with programmed activities. Every single party we’ve had has been at home. This year I was planning to have a skating party. There is an ice rink close by and they have party rooms, and I thought it would be fun to have a party there since Bunny loves to ice skate.

But January is so full that I never managed to make that plan happen. And we had a great time anyway, probably better than if we’d gone to a skating rink. So I have to reconsider the wisdom of those fancier parties.

Also, as part of the party we had the kids do a treasure hunt. My kid read the clues aloud as they found them and had the cognitive flexibility to figure out how to look for the clues. She did have the ‘home team’ advantage going for her, but I was still proud of her.

Bottom line is, however badly I’m doing, dd si still learning better with me than her equally smart friends are in our local oft-touted preschool program.

April may be the cruelest month, but January is the busiest. There’s New Years, the getting of late holiday gifts, my mother’s birthday, my daughter’s birthday followed the next day by my stepdaughter’s birthday, and the class I teach at Cherry Hill Seminary begins this month as well.

That’s three birthday presents, two to three parties, and some technical glitches, all while at least one of us generally has a cold or flu.

My daughter, Bunny, turned five yesterday. Because of my desire to buy things not made in China, she got a lot of books for Yule, and she got more books for her birthday. She likes books, but she also likes games, toys and dolls, and I am very much afraid that her holidays have sucked AND that its entirely my fault. As the icing on the proverbial cake, I was planning to order her a cake this year. But you have to order them a week ahead, and her party is tomorrow. I remembered this yesterday.

Early in the day, in a complete panic, I bought a carousel bundt cake pan online. That will be here today. It’s not Dora, but it could made to be, and I thought a carousel cake would be adorable. Then I found pictures of the finished cake. It’s ugly, and it can’t be frosted because you lose the detailing. Can you imagine getting your kid an ugly cake with no frosting for their fifth birthday? Talk about a birthday to remember!

In a flurry of last-minute guilt and panic, I tried to order several things from Amazon to be overnighted so I could make a Dora castle cake in time. I also wanted to order a magical shoe cottage (a plastic dollhouse shaped like a boot and complete with fairies and furniture). And I could have purchased all of that, but even overnight it wouldn’t arrive till at least Monday.

So nix on that. What’s the point of calling it next day delivery if it isn’t?

Today I need to schlepp Bunny and I out into the winter and shop.

So dd4 has a bump on her side. It started out looking like a bug bite, but it’s gotten progressively bigger and redder. Thanksgiving day I decided I need to get her to a doctor, but of course no one was open for the next 4 days. On that next Monday I took her to a nearby ped–not our regular one, because he’s a schlepp away and the weather wasn’t nice. I’ve been to this other place once before and wasn’t terribly impressed, but whatever, I can’t be too choosy.

The doc came in and started asking dd questions about what she does in school. The ped was writing while talking, and I couldn’t tell whether she was writing about this or something else. So I interjected that I hs. She took that in stride and began asking dd what she studies. Dd said she didn’t know. So I again interrupted and asked her what we’d done that morning, hadn’t we painted, hadn’t we done math, etc. The ped was *still* writing.

I felt so defensive. I felt like if dd didn’t answer well it would go on her *permanent record* in the office of a pediatrician I don’t intend to see again. Like she might call child welfare and turn me in for educational neglect of my preschooler, in a state where school isn’t required till she turns 6 anyway.

It was ridiculous. She was probably just making conversation anyway while she wrote about other things. And even if she wasn’t, what was she going to do? How could she evaluate anything based on 2 questions to a kid who was a stranger to her? And what expertise does she have in evaluating educational progress anyway?

Just by reading that, you can tell I’m *still* nervous about it.

After all was said and done, I left more anxious and a little poorer than I come in, and it turned out the ped had no clue what was wrong with my dd anyway. She told me to go see a dermatologist. Gee thanks.

To forestall the questions, I couldn’t find an open dermatologist so I abused the ER and it took the hospital pediatrician about half a second to diagnose it as a staph infection. Maybe if that doctor worried more about her education and less about my child’s, she’d have figured that out the day before.

Last night I had another nightmare. It’s always the same basic dream, only the details change. It’s the Mom Dream.

When my daughter was born I had it nearly every night for at least a year, maybe two. These days I’m down to a few nights a month. Invariably, in this dream, something dreadful happens to my daughter–and invariably it’s my fault. Usually I lose her in a crowd. Last night I, in a fit of dream logic, was allowing her to play across a busy street from me amidst a ton of pedestrians. I wasn’t watching her, my mind was on a friend (rest assured I only behave this way in my dreams). When I realized I couldn’t see or hear her anymore, I crossed the street to find her. And couldn’t. I woke up in a panic, realized it was just another dream, and tried to get back to sleep. I had a continuation of the same damn dream and decided that 4 am was a good time to get out of bed after all.

This morning we went to the park to play. We were kicking a ball around. I was several feet from her because we were kicking the ball pretty hard. She missed it and ran after it. It rolled towards the open park gate. I started to jog after her and yelled at her to stop. I wasn’t really worried–my girl knows not to leave the park no matter what.

She didn’t stop.

The gate opens onto a corner where two streets intersect. I shifted from a jog to a full tilt run and began screaming at her to STOP!

Eyes on her beloved pink flower ball, she kept on going. The ball was rolling right into the intersection and so was my four year old. I was too far behind and too slow to catch her. Thank goodness she caught the ball; it’s the only reason she stopped. She was perhaps a foot and a half from the curb when I caught up to her.

I’m still shaking. And I’m really not looking forward to telling her dad.