Bethism #14

Beth was wondering today what kind of animal is purple. She wasn't coming up with any on her own, and Sarah was no help ("Um...a sheep can be purple!"), so I reminded her that we had seen a purple bird at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh.

Her response: "Get out of town! Birds come in purple?!?"

If you have a preschool-aged kid...

...and you live in my neck of the woods, you know how much we love our co-op preschool. Between the fresh batches of kid-concocted play dough every week, and the nature walks, and the Seuss-style phonics, and the cooking, and the free access to paint and glitter and other messy things that mommy doesn't allow on her living room rug, both kids are having a fabulous time. Scott and I (but Scott especially) get a kick out of our periodic parent-helper duties. And we like the vibe: lots of free play with interesting stuff, a multi-disciplinary, creative-inquiry-based curriculum, teachers and parents sitting down and listening to what the kids have to say.

If you're scouting out the best preschool for your kid next year, there's an open house next Saturday morning (Jan. 23rd) from 10 to noon. Kids welcome, of course. See the school's website for more info.

Say-ing #2

(Good grief, it's been a long time since I said I'd start posting "Say-ings" — the funny things Sarah says — must start doing more of these!)

Sesame Street is doing a "habitat" theme this season, beginning with a real estate agent trying to sell Big Bird a condo in sunnier climes. Today the girls were watching as the Muppets were trying to figure out where a camel's habitat is. A mountain, because its back looks like a mountain? A swamp?

Scott couldn't stand it. "Sarah and Beth, where does a camel live?"

Sarah: "In the nativity scene."

Happy Cyber Monday!

Woke up this morning to two rather energetic preschoolers and two rather enthusiastic reviews of some of my Etsy items on Familylicious. Scroll down a bit...look for the Teesies icon...you'll find 'em.

Now...to get said kids, a stack of phone books, and every spare string of white Christmas lights I can find over to the church by 9:30...'cause I'm spending a good chunk of the day decorating for the annual wreathmaking party. (I'm tempted to crash the rival event tomorrow night: "Manrichment," featuing a bunch of dads, a McDonald's playspace, and a Big Mac eating contest. Suppose I'd look a little out of place, though.)

Bethism #13

Out of the blue this morning at the breakfast table:

"Christmas is my favorite year of the week."

Good grief!

So here's just a snippet of my crazy week:

I'm basting tulle to the circle skirt of a Lucy van Pelt costume (the first of three — why did everyone want to be Lucy this year?), the plumber has finally fixed my tub drain (flood happened a month ago), and I should probably do something about the three baskets of clean laundry sitting on my living room floor before both ServiceMaster (to take care of the first wave of flood cleanup) and my visiting teachers arrive at 3:30. Oh, and preschool pickup time is at 3:00, and I should really make a run to the post office (to send off three tee shirts) and the Ben Franklin store (to buy more royal blue thread, for said Lucy costume) on my way home.

I am definitely going to need more cookies.

One of the cruel things about getting older

Apparently, I no longer qualify for the unofficial late-night cute girl discount at Kinko's.

Sigh.

It's all downhill from here.

Rant of the week

Costco. Seriously. Once a year or so, as you're checking out your oversized shopping cart full o' bulk items, there's an extra person standing with the cashier. He'll show you how much you spent at Costco in the last 12 months, and then try to sell you an executive membership that gives you cash back on purchases.

Today it was my turn. And for the second year in a row, the amount of money Costco's marketing department says I spent at the Mommy of All Warehouses is about $1200 more than I've actually spent. And THAT'S the part that bugs me.

See, I know how much money I've spent at Costco. I know this because I'm, well, rather anal-retentive, and also because I'm married to an accountant who likes to keep track of where we've spent all our money. So I can pull up Pocket Quicken on my Palm Pilot, do a quick report, and know to the penny how much I've spent there. (Okay, maybe not to the penny. I don't track what we spend on hot dogs and soft drinks. But then, since I don't have to have my membership card scanned when I pay cash for my completely unhealthy dinner, neither does Costco.)

This year (September 1, 2008 through August 31, 2009), my total: $3423.55 Costco's total:  around $4600.

(Note: Before you pass out from looking at those numbers, keep in mind that I buy almost everything in bulk. Bread and milk? Check. Frozen chicken? Check. Socks for my husband? Chocolate chips? Cereal? Diapers? Excedrin? Check. And then there's Scott and the whole DVD/electronics thing.)

We don't lend anyone our Costco membership card. (Seriously. Who would we lend it to? Everyone we know shops at Costco.) We don't pay cash for anything we buy there. Absolutely everything shows up in Quicken. So there are only two reasons that Costco's numbers shouldn't match my numbers, allowing for a few errors. 1) Someone in the marketing department is consciously adding to everyone's yearly total in order to convince them they need to buy an executive membership, or 2) Someone in the marketing department is too dumb to run a simple database query. Either way, that someone should be fired.

Place of residence

Scott was practicing his southern accent tonight in anticipation of dessert. "We need some paaaah," he told the girls. "Tell yo' mommy we need some paaaaaah."

I said, "Sarah, tell your daddy that we live in Boston, not Atlanta, and that he's being inappropriate."

Sarah: "Daddy, we wiv in Boston, not inappwopwiate."

Scott: "Well, that's true. I don't live in Appropriate."

I believe this is a rite of childhood passage

So...apparently Beth swallowed a hair clip a few days ago. (Why "apparently"? She complained about her throat hurting; I asked her why; she said she thought there was a clip stuck in it; I asked if she'd put a clip in her mouth; she said no; later that night she was worried about the clip being inside her.)

If it's actually inside her, it's one of those little itty bitty roundish plastic things with little tiny plastic teeth that don't even work in Sarah's hair any more. So I'm not worried. But Beth was concerned that the clip was giving her a headache. So Scott just sat her down to watch the Schoolhouse Rock "I'm a Machine" video on YouTube. I think she's a bit less concerned than she was. At least she knows it hasn't been sucked up into her brain.

This is why I love Sesame Street

Quotes like this:

"Nothing says 'Sesame Street' like an eight-foot bird singing the alphabet."

— Leela, new(ish) person on Sesame Street

Beth has been putting 2 and 2 together...

...and getting 22.

No, really.

All summer long she's been looking at numbers. We're driving in the car and she calls out, "Mom, what is a 6 and 5?"

"Sixty-five, honey," I tell her.

Two-digit numbers mastered, she's to the point now where she can semi-reliably figure out three-digit numbers. "A 3 and a 2 and a 8 spells three hundred twenty-eight," she announces. Or, occasionally, "A 6 and a 6 and a 7 spells sixty sixty-seven." This usually makes her mom crack up, and may be impairing my driving.

I wish I had the base 10 blocks from my mom's old second-grade classroom. It would make explaining the ideas of hundreds, tens and ones so much easier. Maybe I'll pick up some graph paper the next time I'm at the office supply store.

And it turns out that Beth has a rather serious competitive streak. Two weeks ago her friend Josh was the spotlight kid at church. His dad said, "One of the neat things about Josh is that he can count to forty-ten. For your older kids, that means fifty."

The next morning Beth was busy ensuring she could count past 50. She made it to 100 before the system broke down — it's hard for her to understand that the next number is 101, not 200. To be fair, the competitive streak didn't go quite as far as telling Josh she can count higher than he can (though, knowing Josh, he's probably way past forty-ten at the moment). She just needed to know she could do it.

(Don't ask me which parent this tendency came from. Apparently it's in her genes from both sides of the family.)

Sarah is convinced...

...at this moment, that the local baseball team is the Bread Sox.

Managerial Accounting

Two celebrations today:

1. Scott's birthday. (Cheese omelettes! Bike gear! A terribly tacky sunburst clock that the kids adore! Mint chocolate chip ice cream sandwiches!)


2. My Etsy shop is finally in the black. It's only by $46.35, and it's only an illusion (I've been paid up front for a large order that I don't yet have supplies for, and I technically should have an "unearned revenue" line item), but it's nice to have a positive number somewhere on the books.

And, may I just say — in spite of my fear that Scott will use this as an opportunity to reiterate his belief that deep down everyone wants to be an accountant — I have a rather entertaining spreadsheet going on. I was shocked (well, and annoyed that I hadn't come up with the idea first) to learn last week that there's someone on Etsy who actually sells spreadsheets set up to handle Etsyans' accounts. Through Etsy, of course, which is in some ways its own economic closed system.

Spreadsheet, though. For my own sanity, I've been keeping track of my stock — it's nerve-wracking to have someone buy a 3-6 month baby onesie, only to learn that I just destroyed the last one in that size in an ironing incident (why oh why didn't I test the new transfer paper on something in a different size?). And of course I have to compare my data from Etsy with my data from PayPal. And I have to keep track of which suppliers offer which items at which prices (including shipping). Oh, and I should be keeping track of mileage. And to price items I really should have a page to keep track of the real costs to make them, list them, and conduct transactions through PayPal.... As I said, it's entertaining. Amusing, even.

All those managerial accounting assignments I helped Scott grade? The semester I tried to keep my eyelids propped open during a graduate financial analysis class? Time well spent. As of today there are nine tabs at the bottom of my spreadsheet.

And there are five clear 66-quart storage boxes in my office (and — full disclosure — at least four more in the attic) full of onesies, T-shirts, mailing supplies, ready-to-ship blankets, and lots and lots of fabric. Mounds of fabric, even. A big fat folder on my hard drive (yes, and backed up to an external drive) with shirt designs and product photos. I'd end this post with a nice pithy wrap-up, but I'm as unsure of where the post is going as I am of where the Etsy thing is going. Awfully entertaining, though.

Great quotes from Gigi

So my baby sister is doing her public health rotation in nursing school this semester, and she's not looking forward to it. The girl likes adrenaline, which means she likes working trauma, and instead of dealing with head wounds she's going to be giving hearing tests to Head Start kids all over the city.

Best part of the conversation?

"I like people best when they're bleeding and have a tube shoved down their throats."

65.6% yes

That's the result on the town's vote on our new elementary school, hurrah. We moved into this town two years ago, in large part because the schools are supposed to be excellent, and got our first rude awakening in the form of an article in the local newspaper about students being sent home from school again due to heating problems.

The existing school, part of which is the remnants of the town's old high school (built in the '30s and partially destroyed by fire), is a funny cobbled-together mishmash of steam heat and hot water heat. The old section, including the office and gym, frequently has to have an air conditioner running to keep the staff cool enough to work, while at the same time the kids in the classroom wing don't bother to take off their hats and mittens when they come to school. If it gets bad enough, the kids get sent home. (It actually got bad enough at one point that the floor of the school lobby had to be repaired when the steam heat cracked the floor tiles.) Oh, and the "new" hot-water system that heats the classrooms is corroded — valves literally snap off when touched. This is where I'm supposed to send my kids? Really?

So it turns out the building is bad enough to qualify for state funds, and our turn on the list came up this year. But the town had to approve a property tax increase to pay for the rest of the building costs, and that's where things got tricky (bad economic climate, aging town population, smaller percentage of households with school-age children, etc.). How can you ask a bunch of cash-strapped elderly taxpayers who don't have children who will even attend the school to pay for a new building? ...But they voted yes, 3,849 of 'em, and though Beth will most likely spend kindergarten in a modular classroom on the high school lawn, she'll get to walk to first grade. And my favorite thing about the new school design? They're using geothermal heat instead of steam or hot water. Woohoo!

New rule

Beth is in little-girl heaven: she's taking a ballet class with her buddy Camryn. And it isn't just any ballet class — it's a princess tea party ballet class. Oh, the tutus!

Thanks to these two little friends, though, their teacher had to institute a new rule:

No kissing in dance class.

Heard around here tonight

Scott: "Beth, you can't hit somebody just because they won't give you kisses. It's counterproductive."

and

Scott, singing to Sarah: "Rockabye baby, in the tree top..."

"I'm NOT A BABY!"

*Sniff*

So my favorite parenting magazine, Wondertime, just stopped publication. And I'm sad. Why is it that the annoying "Ten Ways to Tell if Your Toddler Has a Rare and Frightening Disease" magazines are doing just fine, and the one magazine with well-written, thoughtful articles (and really amazing photographs, to boot) about the day-to-day parenting of young children made it less than four years?

Betsy, 2009

I've been reading "B" Is for Betsy to Beth. It's our first foray into a chapter book (other than Ursula LeGuin's Tom Mouse, which is a picture book/chapter book hybrid and is perfectly delightful), and since it was one of my favorites as a kid, well....

She loves it.

I'm realizing just how old that book is! I remember thinking as a kid in the 1970s that it was old-fashioned — maybe written about the time my mom was in school — but it's older than that. Betsy started first grade in 1939, which puts her a year ahead of my dad in school.

And yet...we live in a town where it's perfectly plausible that a little girl would walk past a flower shop and a railroad station to get to school.