11 and 11/12s

I'm not sure what happened, but in the last few days I've been pleasantly surprised at the capabilities of the girl child. On Friday, she spent 1.5 hours folding household laundry. On Saturday, she got annoyed at me and just to spite me, she cleaned the whole kitchen. Then this morning (and without being angry at me), she did 90% of the shoveling -- moving crunchy, icy snow in bitter temps. In my current world, I don't feel terribly well supported and my reserves are running very low after a particularly stressful term. Kid help is most welcome. Kid help that is not coerced is priceless.

Bribery

I struggle with the boy, I do. Anything I tell him, be it things he needs to do or merely information (such as the time of day), he interprets as "bossing" him around. He refuses to change his underwear, brush his teeth, unpack his backpack or do even the most minor chore without saying charming things such as "you can't make me," "you're not giving me my freedom," or, my personal favorite, "why do I have to do everything around here!" The school crossing guard told me yesterday that O is "so smart, but that boy is cheeky." Yep, 'fraid so.

Anyway, I'm done with it. The pattern came on slowly enough, but I'm doing my best to step back from it (and hopefully change it) with a three prong approach. One, is to just not engage. I tell him the things that need to be told (such as we are leaving in 5 minutes) and I don't react/engage with the fuss that comes back at me. Two, I hold him to the consequences of his actions (a tactic otherwise called "being a hardass"). If he is outrageously rude, he has to leave. I'm not available to be yelled at. This policy has even resulted in him being left home from E's last soccer game. He wouldn't brush his teeth, which I believe is a basic requirement for being ready to go out in the world, so I left him at home. He fussed and cried, but he called me later to apologize for not getting himself ready. Huh. Wow, it worked!

The third prong of my new approach came to me yesterday when I was avoiding life by taking a turn through the PTO Thrift Shop. Books were on sale for half off and I wanted to pull a few for the girl, since the school library is being packed up for the pending renovations, and I'm just not getting her to the public library often enough. I found her a small stack, a book for me (Life of Pi) and then came across a whole stash of Star Wars graphic novels and chapter books. In the game section, I also found a complete Battleship game! Rather than dump these treasures on them all at once I let them pick one book after helping with a school walking audit yesterday.

This morning I woke up to find O making his own lunch. He had already tidied the living room. He pitched in emptying the dishwasher. And he brushed his teeth. Oh yeah, he got another book. I need to go back and buy the rest of those Star Wars books. What was I thinking leaving some on the shelf????

I'm saving Battleship for a big weekend of yard work...

"A Day On" or "Girl with Sledgehammer"

As has become our tradition, E and I spent much of this Marin Luther King, Jr. Day volunteering. She has always had a special affinity for this holiday since she was born on MLK day in 1999, but more than that, she has embraced both the history and the message of day.




After many years of her asking, I finally signed us up to work with Motor City Blight Busters this year. I was reluctant to take a kid to tear down crack houses, but now that she is the ripe old age of 10 (read: I was late in signing us up and this was all that was left!), I thought we would give it a try. MCBB is located in Old Redford, where every 6th or so house seems to be abandoned -- there is plenty of work to do. Our job today (probably to E's great disappointment) was to not tear down a house, but rather to clear out a small warehouse a block off Grand River so that it could be renovated and used as a childcare center.



We started out inside, shoveling up the debris left behind when the last folks -- people who the neighbors said only came and went in the middle of the night -- decamped. We found lots of evidence of a business (invoices and such) but also plenty of evidence that folks had been living in the basement (shoes, exercise videos, school books, underwear, etc). Lots of volunteers with axes and shovels made for too much dust and too many heavy tools being flung about, so E and I shifted to outside work... hauling out load after load of debris, clearing the junk after others smashed up old furniture/building materials. E eyed the sledgehammer but didn't ask. When the other smashers had wandered off and the flow of debris cans had slowed, I encouraged her to do her best at destroying an old rocking chair. She loved it. Later she had me carry a sledgehammer over to an old shed so she could do some work on that.

And so it begins...

The Minor Kitchen Overhaul '08

When we first looked at this house, there were two things that jumped out at me as "must be changed" items in an otherwise acceptable house.


The first was the big bathroom: a crooked light fixture over the vanity, a huge medicine cabinet that stuck out from the wall and had a very worn finish, and a terrible combination of green sponge painting and ivy wall paper borders put up in unusual places. It took 3 years, but I finally tore out the worst of the stuff, repaired the ceiling, repainted, and replaced the mirror, light, and vanity hardware. It is not stunning, but the room does not horrify me whenever I enter it.



The other "must go" item was the kitchen wallpaper: a color co-ordinated combination of flowered paper, plaid paper, and a border of large flowers... all in hues of rose, green, and country blue. I dislike wallpaper intensely. And that plaid section? Aack. If you don't know this about me already, you should: I HATE plaid. But for six years I have lived with the wallpaper. We put up lots of kid art to cover the big expanses of wall and learned to live with it. You see, once you start messing with the kitchen, it raises all sorts of questions about new cabinets, retrofitted old ones, moving appliances, new flooring, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. and that made my brain spin. We didn't have the money or energy to rip it all out, so we just did nothing.



Well today -- with kids on vacation from school and eager to help (at least for a while) -- I finally tackled the wallpaper. Andy came by and joined in. We finished 2 1/2 walls. I'm slightly freaked by the amount of work still to be done, but I'm excited about the possibility of finally having just a nice solid color of paint (that I chose) on the walls and fresh paint on the trim. Even though I did go out to Ikea today and allow some fantasy kitchens to enter my brain, I'm going to keep this project rather small -- just paint, new shelves, new window treatments, ceiling fan replacement, and a new hutch (cabinet? cupboard? still looking for the right piece) for returnables and lunch boxes to land. We can do more later. Who wants to help paint cabinets this spring????