Drops of Awesome

Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson

Education

Lows and Highs

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I wrote this post a week ago.

This day could not figure out what it wanted. For a while things were great. The sister missionaries from our church stopped by and chatted and shared this amazing Christmas video with me and Wanda. Incidentally, Wanda cursed them in her prayer tonight by praying that they’d “grow big and strong” and “have great travels.” So she wants them to grow fat and leave, basically. Sad.

We got some stuff done. Men were no longer excavating my crawlspace and hauling hundreds of pounds of rock through my entire house to lower through a tiny hole in my hall closet. That was yesterday.

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It was cold but not freezing. There was snow on the ground but not the roads. This strange yellow orb was sending magical light rays down on us from the sky. I spent some fun time chatting with a friend today.

And then things sort of unraveled. There is just this sort of brain-slamming chaos that happens sometimes in the hour after everyone gets home from school. We need snacks and we need to share the stories from our day and everyone wants to hear about everyone else’s day while simultaneously telling about their own day and if we are five-years-old, we need to yell, “MOM! MOM! MOM!” into the wind every few minutes in hopes that anyone will pay attention to us ever.

If it’s a day like today, people lose their homework and procrastinate the rest and they ask you for some wood and a saw to make a quick catapult… for science. Eventually you decide you have to skip Cub Scouts because the homework is too big and too deep and too wide. And everyone cries. Because Cub Scouts is where the joy lives.

And through the tears and the mania and the MOM! MOM! MOM!-ing, you work to make dinner for your family and the family up the street whose mom is sick, only to get a text telling you that the dinner didn’t come soon enough so the whole family has already left for their evening activities and you KNEW you should have asked what time they needed dinner but you neglected to ask and you just want to dump the coconut chicken curry and naan bread out in the snow.

And then you realize that your problems are actually quite small and that you should be grateful that you have lovely children and you’re all in good health and your marriage is going strong and your careers are going well. You realize these things, but you don’t feel better. You just feel guilty because you shouldn’t be frustrated, but in that moment the day just really REALLY eats rocks.

That was my day today. And when Dan got home from work, I stood there in my un-earned stretchy pants. No yoga happened today, even though I was dressed up for it in case it somehow snuck up and attacked me from behind. And I unloaded on him about each and every straw that had contributed to my camel’s back injury. He listened. And then he left for his band rehearsal.

My internal Magic 8 Ball told me that its sources said no good would come of this night. But its sources were wrong.

Laylee, who had been madly reading her scriptures all night in an attempt to achieve a very aggressive, bribery-induced study goal emerged from her reading with a happy glow about her. And she made peace in our house.

She listened to Wanda while I worked with Magoo. Then I took Wanda up to bed and when I came down, Laylee was tenderly coaching Magoo through a written assignment. There is such a thing as coaching someone in a way that lets them know exactly how big of a moron they are with sighs and eye rolls and repeated reminders of your own personal brilliance in comparisson to their pitiful nine-year-old pea brain. This was not that. This was kind, gentle, encouraging study help, the kind of study help parenting dreams are made of.

For a second, I considered relieving her and taking over homework helper duty. Then I listened to them for a minute more and chose to sneak away and let the magic happen.

“That’s a great sentence, Buddy, but you already started one with that word in this paragraph. How could you say it a little differently? Perfect!”

When they had finished, Magoo proudly showed me the paper.

“I wrote this whole thing myself,” he beamed, “With a little help from Laylee.”

And she stood behind him grinning and giving me a thumbs up. Um? Angel choirs! If I could bottle that moment and uncork it next week when angel choirs are far far from my thoughts as I look at the way those two interact, I would shave my head in payment.

I apologized to the kids because, oh, yeah, I forgot to mention earlier, I had snapped at and yelled at and snapped at them again earlier in the night.

Laylee, still bearing a halo, smiled and said, “Of course you did. Anyone would. Your day was really stressful, mom.” WHA?

I asked Laylee if she thought her time reading the scriptures had made a difference in how she treated everyone tonight and her eyes got really big with understanding. “Yeah… I really think it did!”

Deal. Sealed. I love watching my kids choose things that make them happy.

And to think, only a few hours earlier my scalp had been going numb at the thought of all we had to do and the frustration, stress and chaos of my home. Parenting is a bipolar realm.

Hear Us Roar

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preschoolFirst day of preschool and they’re reading a dinosaur book. For the first week the teacher has the kids come in small groups so she can get to know them and help them feel comfortable with the routines. Wanda is on the mat with two little boys listening to a story about a dinosaur who goes to school.

“What if a dinosaur came to our preschool?” the teacher asks.

“They can’t. All the dinosaurs are dead,” one four-year-old boy pipes up.

FACT.

The story continues until they get to a part where the dinosaur roars. The teacher asks the kids to roar like a dinosaur. The boys both give nice, cute little roars.

Wanda, on the other hand, has spent the last two years working out with me and my online fitness coach Erik, who believes in the release that comes from letting go with a soul-felt, visceral roar after each workout. These are roars that make your neighbors call 9-1-1, roars that release every pent up feeling in your body, roars that make a poor, unsuspecting preschool teacher startle-jump, eyes wide, her hair flying out behind her like Beyonce in a music video with one of those giant fans blowing while you wonder, “Where is all that wind coming from?”

Yeah. That happened. We’re the Thompsons. That’s how we do.

We really do. Especially me. I often feel like I have that giant fan effect on people I talk to and work with. When I was recently asked to take a turn being the Primary President at church (this involves doing some administrative tasks and teaching the kids), I spent the first two weeks on turbo speed, scaring the stuffing out of the other leaders I work with. I calmed down. A bit. But I go zero to super-annoying very quickly and I have to work hard to keep myself in check.

With this book project, it’s something I struggle with. While my publisher is working on releasing around forty books this year, I’ve just got the one and I have so many ideas spinning around my head, speaking engagements, updating the website, Drops of Awesome umbrellas, charitable giving, book signings, giveaways, interviews, CREATING A MOVEMENT OF AWESOME, squirrel!

I don’t have the money, time or energy to execute half the things I think would be awesome for this book, but I can sure rapid-fire email or talk the CEO’s ear off about them.

Right now, thanks to my amazing readers and friends, the journal is doing so well that we sold out the first print run within two days of release day. This is amazing and exciting and also, WHERE ARE THE BOOKS?!

Answer = The books are at the workshop even now, but the next run won’t be in your hands until mid-October. It’s sort of an exciting problem to have since when Familius asked me a couple of months ago how many I thought we’d sell, I said, “Ummm… At least fifty?”

But it is still a problem and I’m sorry we couldn’t see into the future well enough to keep up with demand. In the meantime, they’re keeping the price at 40% off retail on Familius.com for the next 30 days while the books are printed. So ordering now, especially if you’re looking for Christmas gifts, or other bulk orders, will ensure that you get them at the beginning of the next rush and with the discounted price.

Also, in the meantime, I’m working on a little Drops of Awesome shop. Stay tuned for updates. Fun things are coming.

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This Big Yellow Car Came and Took My Children

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Well, it starts. School. More specifically middle school. Queue the silent scream. This person is far too old and far too tween-ular for my liking. I still like her, but like I said, the silent scream.

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Things take longer in the morning when your destination is middle school. You have to panic because your curls “look weird” and then you have to de-weird them. You have to wear lipstick for the first time. That’s right people, LIPSTICK, because you are old and mature and… SILENT SCREAM.

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In middle school you wear runners bigger than your entire body was when it exited your mother’s womb and a backpack that is heavier than your current body weight. You have to check and recheck your backpack and ask your mom to walk you to the bus stop on the first day, only to get to the bus stop and realize, “Hey. Why is my MOM here?!”

So this is her back-to-school bus picture. From behind the trees. With Laylee super tiny because I didn’t have a razzi lens on my Windows Phone camera.

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She will do great. Me too. At least the screams are currently silent.

Then there is Magoo. He has never cared about fashion. Or, I should make a correction, he has always cared about fashion just enough to know that he wanted no part of it. The look of horror he gave me last year when I suggested he wear a button-up shirt to school picture day curled my toes.

“Why can’t I just wear an Angry Birds shirt like a normal person?”

He doesn’t want to stand out, doesn’t want to be uncomfortable, doesn’t want to be seen as someone who cares about what he’s wearing.

But then this year we took him to H&M for back to school shopping and somehow this happened:

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It was love at first sight and I found myself spending three times more on a pair of jeans for him than I ever had before. Because when a person who wears track pants and a logo t-shirt every day of his life begs you to let him look like a Newsie the first day of school, you say, “How high?” and jump up to that cash register. (This only works when you are employed, which we are. Yay! I’ll be blogging about that soon.)

Even Dan agreed. We needed to buy the outfit for our sudden fashionist-o. But then he asked, “Do you think he’ll really have the guts to wear it the first day of school?”

I had no idea but I was willing to take the gamble. And it paid off. He is even now on the bus to learning land, dressed like someone who’s misplaced his street urchin boy band. Out of two kids at his bus stop this morning, only two of them gave him a hard time for wearing suspenders. So that’s something.

I don’t care. The cuteness cannot be stood for.

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I had a moment this morning where I was praying over my breakfast and it ended up being a way long prayer about the kids and school and all of my wants and desires for them. It’s swallow-you-up raw, that surge of emotion you get when you think about your kids and their happiness and future. I can’t express in words how badly I want them to be happy.

And off they go into the breach and I start the countdown to summer all over again. I will miss my friends.

If Anne Studied Electrical Engineering in Fifth Grade

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My daughter Laylee – with an “e” – is mighty flowery in her language and I love to read it. She was asked to write a paragraph about her reaction to her experience studying electricity. To my pallet, it tastes a bit like Anne Shirley with just a pinch of Dickens. It goes like this:

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My reactions to this electricity unit had no imperious direction. In fact, they were quite decidedly mixed. At first I was panting with eagerness to begin. That feeling continued in our hands-on activities, more excitement welling up til I nearly burst. Unfortunately, my enjoyment diminished slightly when we sat down to informational videos and reading logs, only to be replenished at the next experiment. I think the assignment with the most controversial moods was the electric house, as you might’ve suspected. Again, I started out thrilled with such a weighty project, only to feel that weight a burden instead of a boon; a huge amount of stress. As I proceeded, straining to complete my wiring in the space of a day, I alternated between surprise, triumph, and despair as my lights flickered and died, then wavered back to life. With all this, I’m not really sure of my reaction to it, but I learned a lot and either way am glad we did it.

When she says the electrical work took “the space of a day”, she is serious, like a WHOLE day and her mood ranged from excitement to boredom to full-on meltdown. I’m not sure if she stopped for lunch. She went solid from morning until night.

The house turned out cool. She wired a four room doll house with lights, but instead of using conventional lighting, she chose to light the house with paper flames to look like it had been set on fire. My little verbose pyromaniac. Like mother, like daughter.

Just Draw a Doggone Dragon

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For the first time ever, Magoo has a teacher who is requiring participation in the PTA art competition, Reflections. It’s always been optional for him in the past and when he said he wasn’t interested, I said a quiet prayer of thanks not to have one more thing to mount on styrofoam board and told him that was just fine with me.

Laylee, on the other hand, ALWAYS does reflections. Sometimes she does art, sometimes poetry, and one year she composed a song because, “Hardly anyone does songs, Mom. I decided this was the easiest way to make it to State.” This year, she is using the shotgun approach, entering a piece in pretty much every artistic discipline.

Then there’s Magoo. I asked him what he wants to do and he said, “Make a movie.”

Now, I majored in film in college and still aspire to pick up where I left off and direct documentaries when I grow up, after my kids grow up. However, I was not thrilled with this choice. There are a few reasons for this.

1. The entry is due in four weeks.
2. He has never shot footage of anything other than his own tonsils as he pretends to eat the video camera.
3. He has never used video editing software before.
4. And this is the big one – HE WANTS THE FILM TO BE A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT OUR FAMILY A CAPELLA GROUP.

We love a capella. Our whole family loves it. We have not been able to get enough of Vocal Point since they were on The Sing-Off. (GO COUGS!)

And every time we listen to one of their songs and my sweet, adorable and betimes suspiciously-close-to-tone-deaf children sing along with the various parts, I talk about how one day we will have our own VonThompson Family A Capella group. I’m a little bit serious about this, but mostly kidding and I don’t dwell too much on logistics, like the fact that all the females in our family are altos or four-year-olds, and all the males in our family are Dan and Magoo.

Magoo can do a mean hi-hat sound and his beatbox skills grow stronger every day… but the actual formation of the group at this juncture is premature at best, deranged at worst. Making a documentary about the process, which ends with a video of our family performing an a capella version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller? Where all filming, editing, and planning needs to be done by this person?

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Oh, sweet mercy!

The problem is not that it will be bad and he’ll feel rejected when he doesn’t make it to State. The problems is that it will be what it will be and he will make it to state because what other third grader is making a film OF THEIR NON-EXISTENT FAMILY A CAPELLA GROUP for their project when they could do a pencil sketch of a dragon and put their dear mother out of her misery?

And I should be excited about this. I majored in docu-freakin-mentary film production, for the love of Pete’s Humongous Reptile! Alas. I am not.

But when I tried to dissuade him, he shed tears, like actual moisture dripping from his ocular cavities. Now, what can I do? What would Martin Scorsese’s mom have done? I guess I teach him how to storyboard and get Wanda into some emergency voice lessons. She turned four earlier this month. Maybe she could be our soprano.

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Photobomb

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It felt like a betrayal of pencils and chalk and teachers’ mugs full of bad coffee. This year, for the first time ever, I did not order school pictures for my kids.

I have a camera larger than a VW Bug, I thought. I’ve totally got this.

We haven’t had great luck with school pictures in the past and they cost more money than my collection of Boy Band MP3s, which, not to brag, is extensive. It was a win-win because I could save money, get better pictures, and feel like a sort of awesome hipster photographer mom because I took them myself with my own neck-strapped paparazzi device.

It ended up that the pictures were WAY cheaper than usual. The cost was zero dollars because I did not take them. Oops.

There are pictures of my kids on my cell phone so we will remember that they were alive this year, just not with perfectly coiffed hair or facial expressions that say, Someone just told me to smile while I’m surrounded by big white umbrellas and a mottled blue vinyl backdrop.

Well, Dan knew we weren’t doing pictures so he was confused when he came home from work one day and found a school photo package envelope sitting on the kitchen counter with Magoo’s name on it.

“What’s this?” he said, picking it up. “I thought we weren’t ordering school pictures.”

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“Wait. What? Why are all of Magoo’s school pictures actually pictures of you?”

PHOTOBOMB!

“I snuck into Magoo’s school, waited in the photographer’s black supply trunk for hours with nothing but the birds, angry, angry birds to keep me company. I bided my time and just as the photographer commanded him to smile, I burst from concealment and jumped in front of the camera. ‘Boo-ya! PHOTO-BOMBED, CHUMP!’”

“No, seriously. Why are you in his pictures?”

“They take pictures of all the school volunteers so they can make us name badges and they… um… sent mine home with Magoo so they had to put his name on the package.”

I think Dan found that explanation slightly disappointing. Didn’t we all?

“Oh,” he said.

But, the good news is, I do have my own child ID cards now from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. So, if Dan ever loses me in a mosh pit or a sea of clearance purses at Macy’s, he’ll have an easier time helping the police track me down.

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Blueberries for Wanda

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The school year started and my two oldest are both gone all day. I wasn’t happy to see them go. I felt sort of mad, like the school was kidnapping them or something. And then suddenly we had the house to ourselves, me and Wanda.

I had a church meeting. I put Wanda down for an early meltdown-induced nap. I made corn bread and thawed meat for our chili tonight. I baked bread and picked a few pounds of blueberries at a farm a few miles down the road and then I took Wanda for a walk. I played the songs I wanted on the stereo and nobody used the toilet and forgot to flush.

If the school’s going to kidnap my kids and educate them, at least I was able to distract myself with a surge of domestical energy. It was one of those days you just want to repeat over and over again.

My favorite part of the day was picking berries. Wanda and I wandered up and down the rows of fruit, each with our own bucket. She’d venture off and circle around to find me again, plopping berries into her mouth from the trees, the ground and my bucket. Unlike Little Sal, she never accidentally started following a mama bear around the field and she was not wearing overalls.

Blueberry picker

Learning Can Be Fun

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“My five-year-old is struggling with writing. Well, he’s not so much struggling as he just hates it and thinks it’s a waste of time because it is in no way related to video games.”

Read more about how I’ve convinced him that writing can be fun on the Mom Congress blog at Parenting.com

Do I Look Busier to You?

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So I said I was lost in fiction, working on a novel I plan to finish by this summer. This is true. Then I started blogging more here because I have so many words inside me that I need to get out.

I still blog Wednesdays at the Parenting Post because it is for fun.

And starting today I’ll be blogging all education all the time over at Parenting.com’s Mom Congress blog. I love Mom Congress. It’s Parenting’s education advocacy initiative. Each year 51 moms from across the United States are selected to come to Washington, D.C., talk education policy and GET IT DONE. These are strong, powerful women who are passionate about making a difference in education.

I’m really excited to glom on to their hard work and initiative and learn and contribute what I can. If you have any great ideas for topics I can cover in education, I’d love to hear your thoughts. It would also be lovely to have some friendly faces come visit me over there on my first day.