Drops of Awesome

Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson

Thoughts on Sarah Palin

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At the RNC Wednesday night, Rudy Guiliani said that no one would ever ask questions about a male candidate’s ability to juggle work and family. He cried sexism. Lots of people are pointing out the sexism inherent in these questions about McCain’s VP choice. And they’re right. It’s unbalanced. It’s sexist. But it’s valid. When a mother of young children enters a presidential race for the first time, these questions cannot be avoided.

Join me at Parenting.com to share your thoughts on Sarah Palin.


Read more at the Parenting Post

You Can Tell The Family Reunion’s Over When

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We recently got back from a family reunion in Montana where I spent 10 days hanging with my parents, 4 siblings, 2 siblings-in-law, 2 nieces, one nephew and 2 dogs in one house. It was a blast. However as the week drew to a close, I started noticing signs that it was time to pack it in and head home.

Here are the top 5 ways you can tell the family reunion is over:

1. All of your conversations degenerate into inside jokes, unfinished sentences and quotes from The Princess Bride and Star Wars.

2. You become so overcome with your niece’s cuteness that you start measuring suit-cases, looking for a place where she can comfortably stow away.

3. You come to realize that you’ve consumed every last morsel of food in the Billings area and have gotten almost too fat to fit in your van for the ride home.

4. After several nights with less than 5 hours of sleep because you can’t stand to be parted from all your best friends, you find yourself bursting into tears over an injustice in a card game and storming away from the table like a spoiled 5-year-old.

5. Your own children begin referring to you only as “Auntie Katie.”

fam-montana
So you can see the bangs in this picture, fresh from the religious hair salon. They don’t look their super-awesomest because I was more worried about getting one single picture of the whole family without either of the kids pulling crazy faces than I was about my hair. Alas. The price of motherhood.

That’s Me in the Corner

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That’s me in the hall. way. sending my daughter to kindergarten.

This week Laylee has a kindergarten “soft start.” Today she met with her teacher one-on-one for 20 minutes to discuss important matters like the sounds a “G” makes and whether or not she knows her own phone number.

From what I’ve heard, the teacher is an angel of heavenly joy and ever-lovin’ beauty blessedness. I’ve been hearing her name for 2 years, usually accompanied by sighs and gasps and mumbles about wonderfulness… absolutely amazingosity… and… freakin’ sainthood. I had more than one person tell me, “You have GOT to make sure Laylee gets in Mrs. Sweetsie’s class.” And I’d say, “Oh yeah? How do I make sure she gets in there?” And then they’d say, “Oh. You can’t. You can’t request a specific teacher but you’d better hope she gets in that class. Mrs. Sweetsie is an altruistic alchemist of magical teaching genius who belches fairy dust and has celestial light streaming from her fingertips. Having Timmy in her class has been the single best experience of my life. Good luck.”

So, needless to say although I’m going to say it anyway, I was more than pleased to find out Laylee had been put in her class. And she does seem like a keeper from the 20 minutes I spent with her today… er Laylee spent with her today while I filled out paperwork in the hallway outside the door and cried my eyes out because Laylee’s growing up so fast and for the love why did I ever stop breastfeeding her. If she were still on the teat, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t make me send her off into the world.

Not that anyone’s making me. I know I could homeschool but this feels like the right decision at the moment, even if it’s tearing my heart out through my left nostril. I sat in the hall filling out forms.

How many hours per day would you like to volunteer?
What bus will Laylee be taking home from school?
How many siblings does she have?
What are some of Laylee’s personality quirks or issues?
What is your biggest dream for her this school year?

And then I lost it. My dream for her? My dream for her? I have a dream. I have many actually. I dream that she will learn to stop calling me really loudly from the backseat of the car, only to mumble in an incoherent whisper once she has my attention. I dream that she will grow to love broccoli. I dream that she will ever begin a sentence to me without using the word “MOM!” at the front of it. I dream that she will learn things that thrill her and cause HER to dream big. I dream that she will grow in self esteem this year and have good friends who help her be better. I dream that she will always know how special she is and how much I love her.

I cried as I wrote down a couple of my dreams for her, none of which have anything to do with academics or book knowledge and then quickly wiped the tears away. I didn’t want to be THAT mom, although I’m pretty sure that nearly every first time kindergarten mom is THAT mom. It’s a special sorority of puddlehood that binds us all together.

And then I overheard Laylee and Mrs. Sweetsie talking in the next room.

Mrs S: So, what does your dad do for his job?
Laylee: He does all kinds of hilarious stuff and goes to parties.
*Mrs S: He just does fun things at work all day?
Laylee: Yeah. Oh man. This one time they took his boss and shoved his face in a BOWL OF WHIP CREAM!
Mrs S: And what does your mom do for work? Does she stay home with you or go somewhere else?
Laylee: Well sometimes for work she does gardening or just watches us kids and sometimes for work she types things on the computer so people will pay her money so she can buy us stuff.

I actually think she got my job pretty dead-on, minus the Cinderella triumvirate of the mending and the sewing and the laundry, and of course the Dr. Mario and the eating of the bonbons. It’s obvious who brings home the bacon in this family. While Dan’s off doing “hilarious stuff” and partying with whipped cream, I’m slaving away at home to make a few bucks. Sad!

Here’s a video of a work party a while back where Dan’s co-workers paid their boss $50 to let them dunk him in the creamy white goodness. Dan showed it to the kids and apparently it made quite an impression, erasing Laylee’s every memory of visiting him at MegaCorp, hearing about how he writes code all day and fixes bugs. No. Whipped cream is all-encompassing now. Not a bad job if you can get it.

*I’m not sure exactly what Mrs S replied. I was too busy listening for Laylee’s next enlightening tidbit of information to be added to our permanent file. I really think all teachers should write books about all the fascinating things their young students tell them about their home lives.

2-in-1 Beautifying my Spirit and Body

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In March I got the best haircut ever from a woman named Karina who my sister-in-law introduced me to in Utah. Although I’d never met her before, I instantly trusted her and she picked a new hair color for me and gave me bangs. And I loved them. And I was highly attractive. And I knew it.

And then a week or two passed and the bangs grew out and I was back in Seattle so I tried to cut them myself and then I put them up in a clip indefinitely. And then a couple of months passed and it appeared that the roots of my hair had not gotten the memo. They started to grow in this revolting dishwater blond color. Random.

So I’ve been limping along, dying my own hair all kinds of colors and stopping at random salons hoping for a good cut and being disappointed.

Then I went to visit my parents in Montana. On Saturday night I was begging my sister to take a whack at my bangs. To give her the courage to proceed, I decided to tell her all about how Karina is the only one who ever cuts my hair successfully and about how no one else could possibly measure up. She did not seem encouraged but she promised to try.

The next day was Sunday and I found myself sitting in my mom’s church congregation with all 5 of my siblings pretending to pay attention while we passed our children back and forth across the pews. And then I saw her. Several rows up in the center section of the chapel was KARINA THE HAIRDRESSER FROM UTAH. Seriously. I drove down from Seattle only to find my favorite Utah hair dresser in my parent’s church.

I leaned over to my sister Heather and whispered, “That’s HER. My hairdresser from Utah I’ve only met once and haven’t seen in 6 months. We will stop her after the meeting and ask her to tell you the secret of how she did my awesome bangs.”

So I did stop her and, dragging Heather along behind, I tore her away from the family she was visiting, re-introduced myself, introduced my sister and asked her to do an impromptu hair lesson. Although a bit taken aback at first, she was too rad not to help and started tugging at my hair and explaining to Heather how to make a proper line. Then she stopped.

“Oh, just go to the library and get a pair of scissors.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. I’ll meet you back here.”

So I went to the library and asked the cute ladies for the sharpest pair of scissors they had. They went through the drawer testing each set. “What are you gonna do, stab someone?”

“No… Um… I just need to cut something very precisely.”

I whisked Karina off to the bathroom where she cut my bangs with paper scissors while the rest of my family headed off to Sunday School. Heather stayed with me and stood in the bathroom with her hands cupped under my chin to catch the hair clippings as they fell.

Either she didn’t catch them all or I sprouted a unibrow in a way-too-short period of time. Luckily I was able to brush it away and my bangs looked fab and I flitted off to my next meeting.

I think next Sunday I’ll stop by the children’s nursery and see if anyone’s willing to minister to me in the form of a mani-pedi.

Learning

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little-man3
Life is full of learning. Magoo has a lot of learning to do. I’ve provided some crucial nuggets of information for him over at Parenting.com [read more]

Portraits

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abby-cutoutMy friend Susan is an amazing artist who paints portraits on commission. Her work is beautiful and original, the final product being actual art with style, rather than a simple reproduction of an image. If you’ve ever wanted an artistic rendering of your kids and you like her style, check out her site. She’s currently taking orders.

Don’t Hesitate

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This summer the time seems to have spiraled out of control. I can’t possibly do all the fun things that are presenting themselves at every turn, let alone the boring lame chore-type things.

Last week we had a really fun visit from Dan’s aunt and uncle and 8 of their kids. They stayed for 3 days during which time we saw every site there is to see in the Greater Seattle Area. We had a blast hanging out with them and cooking food for their 5 voracious and appreciative teenage boys. I so love cooking for people who eat more than 2 teaspoons of their meal and who repeatedly tell me what a fabulous cook I am.

Well, as you can imagine, things were crazy. Laylee and Magoo were wired and hero-worshipful of the cousins and we were WAY off schedule. Complicate that with the fact that my life-sustaining device of communication and organization bit the big one right before they arrived and I was pretty much adrift in a tide of vacationism.

I’d ordered peaches weeks before in a bulk group order run by a very organized woman. She had spreadsheets and a process. She gave each person a pickup time that Thursday and told us we needed to be precisely punctual in order to get our fruit. If we did not come and get our fruit, we would jeopardize future bulk fruit orders. Very serious business, all of it.

So, my pickup time was 9:20am on the Thursday that the relatives were visiting. My digital calendar with the handy reminders was laying black-screened on the counter like a technological dead fish. I’d forgotten about the peaches I’d ordered. I’d forgotten that it was Thursday. I’d forgotten that my name was Kathryn and how many children I had.

Right as we were about to leave for sightseeing, about 9:40am, I was browsing my email when I noticed the alert about the peaches. “Don’t let me forget to pick up the fruit on Thursday, okay?”

“It is Thursday!”

“What?!”

So I began running around the house like a headless poultry, grabbing the kids under each arm, making plans to meet up with everyone later and muttering about how Fruit Lady was gonna find me and kill me in my sleep. Then the phone rang.

It was my friend Linda, who I hadn’t seen in months. She was picking up her fruit and noticed my name on the list. She thought things must be crazy for me at home with 2 little kids and wondered if I wanted her to buy my fruit and bring it to my house.

It seems like a small thing but I got teary-eyed, grateful that she’d thought of me, grateful that she didn’t shrug off the thought but called me and offered to help. It was just one more entry in my mental list of examples of why you should never hesitate when the thought pops into your head that you could do something to help someone else out.

The list includes people who brought me dinner when they had no idea I was having trouble, people who stopped by randomly to say hi only to find I was trapped at home with sick kids and then offered to do a quick grocery run for me. Last week, I was having a tough time in blog land, sick of writing, sick of being criticized for the personal thoughts I send out into the interwebs. Not even knowing this, one of my bloggy friends wrote a way-too-kind post about how much she loves my site and it gave me just the boost I needed to keep writing.

My point. Don’t hesitate. I have never regretted doing something nice for someone.