In Which Squirrelboy is a College Student, And I'm Not Done Parenting, But Basically Done Blogging

Squirrelboy is now about halfway through his first semester of college. I won't give you details about how his experience has been because, well, he's an adult, and it just feels a little weird to post about his school experiences at this point.

When I started this blog my kids were in 3rd and 9th grade. Now Kittygirl is in 7th grade and Squirrelboy is a freshman in college. The blog was a great way to force myself to get back to writing regularly after a long hiatus. I was even able to help some people recognize dyslexia and/or ADHD in their kids. I helped some other people learn more about diabetes and get a taste of what it's like to live with diabetes.

But I think this blog has outlived its purpose. I may still post my Valentines Day reflections here because it's a nice way to share them with a wider range of people, but outside of that I don't plan to post anymore.

Here are my thoughts on signing off. Raising kids is hard. Raising kids with a disability of any kind is even harder. You know what's even harder, though? Actually having said disability. We can empathize with our kids. We can understand what they're going through in a way most outsiders can't. But in the end we still can't see into their hearts and minds. Even though I also have ADHD I still don't really know what it's like for Squirrelboy to have ADHD, let alone both ADHD and dyslexia. Even though I've done about a million site changes now and calculated about a billion carbs, I still don't actually know what it's like for Kittygirl to have diabetes. I, along with other parents of kids diagnosed at a young age, can relate better than any other nondiabetic but it's still not my body. 

As I said, parenting is hard. Life in general is hard if you get right down to it. But not every moment of every day. There's also a lot of joy if you look for it. Even the darkest night of the year eventually ends in dawn. Even the hardest time in your life eventually passes. It may leave you with scars, sort of akin to how you'll still have a bruise from running into the bed, post on said darkest night (ask me how I know), but it won't always be so dark.

And through all of it, God will still be good. I've been through my fair share of hard times, many (though not all) since becoming a parent. Sometimes I have seriously doubted that last sentence. I can see how you might. But I've held onto it and it's always proven true. It doesn't take away the hard stuff, but it's a tiny pinprick of light in what can sometimes be unbearably oppressive darkness.

So goodbye my five or six faithful readers. Maybe I'll see you next Valentines Day, maybe not. Take care, love your kids with all your might, and always remember the pinprick of light in the darkness. And just because I can't leave without a photo, here are Kittygirl and Squirrelboy on Parents Weekend at his college. Well, not actually at his college. We spent very little time on campus because we have no interest in football. We took a cave tour not far from campus, which is where this photo was taken.

In Which I Share a Valentine Reflection: Love in the Time of Covid

Just in case someone happens across this who has never read one of my previous Valentine homilies, here's a quick recap. A long time ago and a few states away (really more than half my lifetime ago now, boy I'm getting old) I was a woefully single college student planning to celebrate Valentine's Day as "Black [insert day of the week here]". At the eleventh hour I did an about face in my attitude and decided to use the day as an excuse to celebrate the love of family, the love of friends, and the love of God. This was decades before "Galentine's Day" or "Palentine's Day" were trending, so clearly I'm a genius innovator :) (also, how did I get so old ?). I sent an email to some friends encouraging them to do the same. Then I sent a similar email the next year and a tradition was born. The tradition has since evolved into an annual reflection on my faith and life, with some kind of tie in to Valentine's Day. As always, feel free to share if you're so inclined. And on to the message.....

Last year at this time I was typing my Valentine Homily on my phone with one finger. Fourteen days earlier I had broken my wrist at Kittygirl's skating birthday party. The lesson it taught me was to rely on others in ways I don't usually like to do. I naively thought at the time that breaking a bone at my daughter's birthday part would be the most notable party of my year. Little did I know what 2020 had in store for the world. 

We're now 11 months and one day past the first of the stay at home orders here in Kentucky. The last time my kids attended school in person was March 13th of last year. The last time I ate at a restaurant was March 5th of last year. I don't even remember the last time I watched a movie in a theater. My purse now always has several cloth masks in it at all times, with spares in my car. I obsessively tell Kittygirl not to touch things on the rare occasions I bring her with me to the store. We lost spring and summer plans in 2020, and spring break travel this year isn't looking wise either. Even summer plans are very lightly penciled in. We really have no idea from day to day what's going to happen, it seems. Oh, and just for fun, our nation went through some pretty serious political turmoil too. You know, because 2021 had to show up 2020 or something :).

Even with all of that, though, this year has been filled with a lot of good. I fell back in love with writing middle grade fiction and started taking it seriously. I finished two manuscripts and learned how to query agents. I found a community of writers in a similar place on the journey and also began to interact with writers on social media and learned that even the famous ones are more often than not completely normal and really nice people. 

I've enjoyed our Covid-enforced reduced and/or virtualized schedule. Many of the meetings I used to have to drive kids to are now on Zoom. There's no more "Let's make sure to get dinner on the table in time for the guys to leave for Boys Scouts!" There's "Hey, it's 6:59, better log onto to Boy Scout zoom". School starts later, and there's no commute to that either. Mr. Engineer has started to go work in the lab for at least a few hours most weeks, but there are still many days when no one has to leave the house and it's pretty great after having spent years feeling like we were constantly going from one thing to the next.

At the same time, I haven't always enjoyed our Covid-enforced togetherness. My introverted soul is thirsting for more time alone. I survive by taking walks alone most weekdays and grabbing some alone time when the kids are otherwise engaged or after they've gone to bed (Which is often way too late. Did I mention remote school starts later than in person school?).

Loving your family during forced togetherness isn't always easy. Who am I kidding? It isn't usually easy. If I have to tell the kids not to touch each other's couch cushions during online worship one more time my head just might explode. Yet I guarantee I'll do it again next week. And then again. Maybe at some point they'll learn to respect each others' space, but I'm not counting on it. What I AM counting on is that the kids will come out of this pandemic not having hated the time. We've done our best to make this ridiculously unprecedented season not horrible and, dare I say, sometimes actually really good. Our big plans got cancelled, but we did little fun things instead. We played more games. We had more movie nights. And we'll continue doing our best to make this time as good as we can until it's over (because, as much as I hate to say it, it'll be awhile).

Back in another life, when I was a graduate student in Hispanic literature, one of the many books by the master Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez that I was required to read was Love in the Time of Cholera. It really has almost no relevance to what I'm writing about today, but every once in awhile I need to pull out the degrees I don't use and dust them off. The one comparison I can draw is that the protagonist has an awful lot of patience. He literally waits decades after the love of his life marries someone else so that he can declare his love again after her husband dies. Now that's dedication for you. Love in the Time of Covid also requires a lot of patience. You may be patiently waiting for a vaccine appointment so that you can be one step closer to being able to see the loved ones you've had to be apart from during the pandemic. You may be patiently (or not so patiently some days) helping your kids engage with online school even though they're totally over it. You may be patiently donning that mask you're really sick of to go into your job that can't be done remotely.

After all the turmoil of this past year, pandemic-related, politically related, or personal, what I've always come back to is that more than anything else we need to give our fellow human beings love and grace. That doesn't mean people who wrong your or wrong society shouldn't be held accountable. What it does mean is that you're only hurting yourself if you focus your energy on hating them. Grieve the wrongs that are done to you or others. Take action when appropriate. But also look for the good. Look for the love. Look for the joy. It's there, sometimes in the most unexpected places.

In Which I Break Topic (Mostly) to Share My Love of Halloween

I love Halloween. I really, really love it. I'm not your run of the  mill Halloween lover who goes to all the haunted houses in the area and hosts and amazing haunted house on Halloween. I don't love blood, guts, monsters or vampires (well, I did read and enjoy the Twilight books). These pictures of my Halloween decorations should give you an idea of the version of Halloween that I love.

Ghosts and skeletons only make it into my Halloween bubble if they're cute. Black cats and bats are already cute, so they're good as far as I'm concerned. Evil witches, not so much. Cute kid witches, come on in. And witches from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, the more the merrier.

What I love most about Halloween is the permission to dress up. This is especially true for kids, but even adults can get away with it, especially if they're parents coordinating with their kids. When I was growing up in the 1980's, Halloween was one day. You chose a costume. In my case my mom then slaved over a sewing machine for quite a few evenings making said costume. You wore it a school  on October 31st for the Halloween parade. You went out into  your neighborhood that evening and trick or treated. Then it was over.

Over the years, Halloween has crept its way backwards so that at this point it has basically taken over the whole month of October. I think this is awesome, because that means there are a lot more opportunities to dress up. Squirrelboy has never loved picking a costume and dressing up on the level that I do. Every Halloween he chose a costume, often a pretty creative one, wore it on Halloween and possible to one other event, and called it good. This year, his first year in high school, he has decided that he's done with trick or treating and will stay at our house to hand out treats. I suppose it's an inevitable part of growing up, but I trick or treated through my junior year of high school, so it makes me a little sad.

Kittygirl, at 8, is nowhere near being done trick or treating, and she's a girl after my own heart when it comes to her love for costumes. She attends at least one Halloween even every weekend during October, and she wants to wear a different costume for every one. So far this month she has been Ginny Weasley (this is what she'll use on Halloween), a black cat, Anne of Green Gables, and Squirrel Girl. This is costume week at gymnastics, and this afternoon she'll go as an elf in the following ensemble:

This is just Christmas clothes with the addition of a Santa hat. Her favorite Christmas themed costume of mine was when, at five, she pulled together a Christmas fairy outfit. She used a Christmas dress and wings with Christmas decorations taped to them. It was awesome.

Mr. Engineer is even less into dressing up than Squirrelboy, but we've managed to talk him into participating in a handful of family costumes. The two main ones were the two years we attended Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party at Disney World. The first time was ten years ago when Squirrelboy was 4 and Kittygirl was just a dream. Squirrelboy was obsessed with a Playhouse Disney (now known as Disney Junior) show called My Friends Tigger and Pooh. In the show, Pooh and Tigger run a detective agency with a little girl named Darby. They call themselves the Super Sleuths. In my version of the backstory, Darby is Christopher Robin's daughter, but that's actually mentioned in the show. We found a Tigger costume at a consignment sale and added a t-shirt from Goodwill with the Super Sleuth symbol on it. Yet again, with the help of Goodwill, I found a yellow outfit I could turn into a Pooh costume for Mr. Engineer, again with a secondhand Tshirt with the Super Sleuth symbol. Darby was the easiest. I just had to find some clothes that resembled her typical outfit. Everyone knew who we were and it was a ton of fun.

On our second visit to Mickey's party, Kittygirl was four and Squirrelboy was six. That year we veered from the Disney theme and had two pairs of historical literary characters. Kittygirl and I went as Mary and Caroline Ingalls, thanks to my  mom's great seamstress skills. Mr. Engineer and Squirrelboy's costumes need a bit more of an explanation. There's an amazing series of graphic novels about American history by an author named Nathan Hale entitled Nathan Hale's hazardous tales. In the first book, the spy Nathan Hale is on the gallows and speaks his famous last words, "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country." In doing so, he inserts himself into the history book, quite literally. The gallows turns into a big history book, swallows him up, and spits him back out having imparted the knowledge all future American history to him. The rest of the series is Nathan  Hale telling the hangman stories from American history to delay his execution. They're amazing, especially for reluctant readers including dyslexics who can read but get overwhelmed by a lot of text on the page (see there, I DID tie this into the theme for the month :)). Squirrelboy, of course, dressed as Nathan Hale and Mr. Engineer went as the hangman.

The one thing I do not love about Halloween is spending large amounts of money on costumes. Given that Kittygirl wears anywhere from 4-8 costumes every October you might presume that that's exactly what I do, but you would be wrong. I limit the costume buying to one costume per year, and everything else needs to be pulled together with things we already own. This year for Kitty girl I bought a red wig (actually intended as an Anna wig from Frozen II) and that was all. To be Ginny Weasley Kittygirl is adding the wand we bought at Universal Orlando this summer and a Gryffindor robe Squirrelboy wore to be Harry Potter at her age (that year, incidentally, was the best sibling match year ever - two year old Kittygirl was a Hogwarts owl). The cat ears and tale are from her costume bin, bought cheaply one year after Halloween. She used the red wig and wore an old fashioned looking dress to be Anne. Squirrel Girl was accomplished with a brown dress, brown boots, a furry brown best, and squirrel ears and tale that were Squirrelboy's main costume a couple years ago.

I've always loved Halloween and dressing up. However, it has taken on even more meaning during my years of parenting, and especially during my struggles parenting kids with invisible disabilities. Halloween, and the whole Halloween season, is one more opportunity to seize joy and to help my children have beautiful memories of their childhoods even amid the struggles they've also had.

These two memes sum up my attitude really well. I don't always do it as well as I usually do in October, but I want to not let our challenges make me or my children bitter. A big part of doing this is to choose joy.