pant, pant, pant

I really have no love for these mid-September last-Harrah-of-summer heat waves. I have no love for hummidity in August, but I accept it. It's August on the east coast, ergo, it is humid. But by mid-September I expect some relief. And I don't mean from the air conditioner. So, I am grouchy today. Because it was HUMID and it was HOT and it was SEPTEMBER 15!

On the upside, it was a day where much was accomplished. I can't say anything much was FINISHED, but it was a day of promising beginnings. Having accepted that we were keeping the enormous Ethan Allen living room set that I got at auction the other day for next to nothing, I called Jill this morning and asked her to help me assemble the hutch and move bookshelves around in the living room to make room for it. She did so, and then tentatively offered some design advice. I'd put the piece here and she said it would look better there. It *would* look better there, but that opened a whole new can of worms with the remaining bookshelves, and I had decided I would solve that problem the day I could afford to trash the four el cheapo Target bookshelves (that have to be bolted to the wall just to stay upright. I don't mean they'll lean forward and fall on their face. I mean that they'll collapse sideways due to the damage this humidity is doing to their cardboard core.) and replace them with inexpensive but at least they'll stand up by themselves matching IKEA bookshelves.

Then I pointed to the stagnant pile of unhung pictures that have been leaning against the wall in the living room since the end of April. Jill has the honor of having more pieces of art and framed photographs on her walls than ANYONE else I know. I've been to the Hirshhorn and the National Museum of Art and MOMA and a dozen other art museums and I'm thinking that Jill could give them all a run for their money -- all in her 2500 sq feet of historic old house. But the amazing thing, once you get past the sheer numbers, is that it's all so wonderfully arranged. Unlike most houses I walk into, I really do spend time just looking at the pieces of art, the photographs -- the walls invite you to. So, I wanted her to help me figure out where the rest of photos should go.

Jill said she could but she'd have to, um, take down all the existing pictures first and put them where they REALLY should go. I offered to go find a nail puller. So she went home and came back with a full picture-hanging kit. She ripped picture stands off the back of frames that had no hooks and added hooks. We swapped out some pictures so that more deserving pictures could have the better frames. She offered to go home and get some of her pieces that she doesn't actually have wall space for anymore and bring them over so I could have MORE stuff on the walls!

I thought that was very funny. And, as soon as I get a chance, I'll take the kids over there and see what she has.

The most interesting thing to me about all of it was that she said most people hang their stuff too high on the wall. Most of what she took down she re-hung in some new location at a lower level.

The pictures themselves clearly LOVED having her there. Old, tired photographs seemed to literally leap off the shelves. As she worked, I started seeing piles of frames tucked away on a shelf I hadn't noticed in months. The photos in standing frames crammed three layers thick jumped up and down and demanded to be considered for wall space. An old photograph of Max and the twins at Disneyland seemed to suddenly wiggle out from under a pile of homeschooling materials and demanded to be noticed. About the same time, a collage of photos printed on plain paper of a trip to the zoo many years ago, admitted that it had faded and lost most of its color and volunteered to give up its frame. It truly did seem like Toy Story among the picture frames.

Only about a third of the frames were hung before it was 2:50 and she had to skeddadle home to go mother her girls. But she promised to come back soon and hang the rest. They all lay propped against the wall that she staked out for them. They still look VERY happy and excited. They can't wait for her to come back.

I only had an hour after she left to put a few things in order. Oh, I should mention here, that I spent last night regorganizing his homeschooling stuff and fine tuning the schedule now that preschool has started and it's time to get into a really nice rut. It took about two hours but I even got the schedule laminated, hole-punched, and on a binder ring before midnight. So today we flipped to the Tuesday, Thursday card on the ring and Max *loved* the little time limits I'd put in parenthesis after each subject area. It's as if in knowing by when he was supposed to be done, that the task suddenly seemed so much smaller. OH! It's only 20 minutes of math is it! Well, pshaw, that's no time at all! Zip, zoom. That's done, Ma! What's next? And we had the most enjoyable morning of homeschooling in about a month. No dwaddling, no attitude. Just read, do, gloat, move on. We took a long break while Jill was here, but still got everything done in time for Max to get to go to his friend's house to play (after his friend got home from school).

Then it was off to Max's weekly group piano lesson. I'm supposed to sit in on it, too -- because it's Suzuki oriented. But when I suggested to the teacher that Max might have to miss the lesson because I didn't have a sitter for the twins, she scoffed at the idea -- she cracks me up. She said, in her usual theme of "you baby that boy too much" that its not mandatory for the mom to be there (mind you, the week before her theme was that the parents really SHOULD be there and be involved in the group lesson) and that the moms who WERE there for the whole lesson were "the moms of the little kids. Max is not a little kid."

I can't tell you how WONDERFUL it is to be seen as an overprotective worrywart of a mother who OBVIOUSLY doesn't give her son enough freedom. It is MUCH more fun than being the overwhelmed mother of infant twins who OBVIOUSLY must be neglecting her older son entirely since he's such a horrific discipline problem and probably has ADHD and she probably feeds him twinkies and lets him stay up all night and that's why he acts like that. Or, she's just a nincompoop who has never bothered to teach him to behave in a civilized manner. Being THAT mother wasn't much fun. So I brought him home to give him some more time under a higher level of LOVING supervision and we appear to have made great strides because lately I've heard that he's really a pretty great kid. (Well, I knew that, because he was never really that much trouble at home at all. It was group situations that triggered the falling apart.)

So I packed up his piano stuff and gave him the eye and told him to behave and I dropped him off at piano. And the twins and I went off to drop off two over-sized blankets at the cleaners and then headed over to Micheals to get two beads that I needed to finish up a project, and then we went back and sat in the music academy parking lot and the twins watched a movie and I knitted and we waited. And he came out, happy, had a great time, confessed to goofing off some in a matter-of-fact way, but promised that it was no more so than anyone else in the class (I can count on the kid to be truthful, by and large, so I do expect that he's reporting things accurately) and again I felt some relief. I can handle behavior "within the range of normal." I don't NEED perfection. Pick some other kid to be the homeschool poster child. I'm not your missionary. I just want normal, regular, ordinary. We can raise the bar next year if we want. For now, five months into our life here in our PA home, I'm basking in having hit the goal we set when we brought him home at the end of first grade. Ordinary.

Anyway, after piano we drove to football. I spoke with one of the team moms about this and that, told Max I'd be back around 7ish, and took the twins home for an hour. We had dinner, I checked email for the first time today, and then we headed back for an hour at the playground that is next to the football field.

Once we were all home again the boys were all restored to civilized levels of cleanliness (and no water on the floor, yay!) I put *most* of the displaced books back on their respective bookshelves, and then I did some paying work. Now, back to the paying work. (And sulking because I didn't get a goodnight call from Chris the traveling husband. But he's fine, right? Not in a ditch? A girl worries.)