May 20, 2003

• I'm Going to Atlanta -

  
  

  I've been humming a little ditty to the tune of going to the chapel ~ 'going to Atlanta and I'm gonna get ______" only I can't thing of a good fill in for the blank.  Nothing funny comes to mind, and if it's not funny, why bother?  Well, it is a catchy tune and there's a chance if I hum it often enough, something will occur to me.  

  
  

  But, yes, in real life I am going to Atlanta for Memorial Day weekend.  I'll be visiting with friends, and doing some work, but mostly I expect to have fun.  I only made it about an hour on my "don't eat anything more than one grapefruit per day" diet plan yesterday, so it's unlikely that I'll lose the five pounds I'd like to drop before I get there.  I don't know why those five pounds are so important.  (Pause while the little voice in the back of my mind argues with me about that last statement.)  Okay, maybe I have a hint of why I'd like to be done with them.  See Fugitive has lost 65 pounds, so I figure if she can lose that much, SURELY I could lose five stinking measly pounds. 

  
  

  Did I mention that Fugitive will be there?  Oh, yes.  She's coming to Atlanta on entirely different business.  So we are planning to touch base while we're there.  Not just touch base, I'm planning to meet her at her hotel and swim.  In a swim suit.  In a swimsuit that will reveal that I have NOT lost the five stinking pounds I want to lose. 

  
  

  I have no idea what Tim and the boys will be doing while I'm out of town.  Last time I left them for the weekend, Tim took one look into their room and declared that it was Home Ec seminar time.  I'm trying to supervise them (okay, I'm bullying them) into getting their room cleaned up before I leave.  So he'll have to go to Plan B.  The boys are hoping it will involve bowling.  I know that technically it's a weekend, but I expect they will also do some kind of lessons while I'm gone.  We've figured out that days without lessons are days in which the boys have too much time on their hands to fill with mischief. 

  
  

  The kids and I are winding down the school year, which doesn't mean that we are closing our books but rather that we are moving into the next phase.  We've just about completed the textbooks, so we will be moving into the kind of study that I generally think of as "extracurricular" for the summer months.  Music and art dominate with nature studies a close second.  We are also doing free form kinds of learning arising from the situations of everyday life.  Right now I'm focusing on the why behind our health and hygiene rules.  It's one thing to tell a kid, "you must wash your hands before you eat", it's another thing entirely to do a scrape and let the kid view the germs from his own hand under the microscope.

  
  

  Yesterday, for example, we had to run to the store and the kids asked for a new breakfast cereal.  They started in with their assault on Mom's standards.  "The cousins have Crunchy Choco Sugar Bombs at THEIR house!"  And the ever popular, "This box has a PRIZE in it!"  I looked into their conniving little eyes and thought of a different way to do it.  I showed them the nutrition label.  They've been working with gram weights in math so they have a rough idea of how much a gram is.  I told them they had to pick a cereal with fewer than 10 grams of sugar per serving.  They whooped it up certain that 10 grams was such a huge amount that well, they expected that virtually every cereal on the aisle would be acceptable.  Then they started looking at the boxes.  14 grams, 16 grams, 13 grams, nothing was fitting Mom's standard. 

  
  

  I didn't hurry them, I let them see for themselves how difficult it was to find a cereal that wasn't mostly sugar.  They finally chose Honey Bunches of Oats (6 grams per serving).  I like that one (it also has 1.5 grams of fat as opposed to many other cereals with three and four times that amount).  I would probably have headed for it straight away under normal circumstances, but then they would have argued all the way to the checkout, trying to persuade me that just this once it wouldn't hurt to have a cereal comprised of 50% sugar by weight. 

  
  

  This morning (of course) they didn't want to have cereal for breakfast.  Michael helped me make biscuits which we served with sliced strawberries, shortcake style.  Now I'm back thinking about food again.  This could be why I can't seem to drop those pounds.  My cousin reminded me yesterday that I still have three weeks before we hit the beach, and I should surely be able to lose the weight by then. 

  
  

  We had a good talk, I haven't talked to her or heard from her in a couple months.  So it was nice to catch up.  She expressed her envy that Fugitive and I will get to see each other with no kids, no husbands, no distractions.  Then she asked, "How is it that you convince Tim to babysit while you do these things?"  That was bad enough, but then she said, "Don't you feel guilty leaving them for the weekend?"

  
  

  I felt my eye twitch. 

  
  

  Tim and I see it this way.  Our children have two parents.  Whenever Tim is alone with the kids, it isn't babysitting, it's parenting.  So when I have something to do, the question is not whether Tim is available to babysit.  The question is whether Tim is available period.  Unless he has a work obligation that will interfere, his availability for parenting is assumed.  My kids are not being neglected or deprived in anyway due to the fact that both their parents have interests and obligations that frequently require their father, and occasionally require their mother, to be away from them.   

  
  

  So I'm going to Atlanta.

  • 11:07 am
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