August 31, 2005

next time, I will bring my own Lysol

Once I came out of my Benadryl haze today, I realized that I hadn’t written anything about how Henry is doing in school and how happy he is and how happy WE are and how much we love his teacher and how she got him to touch a slice of orange to his tongue last week and what a great place this is for all of us. And honestly I was going to do it this afternoon.

But then I decided that it would be fun to stop at the bookstore on the way home from school and play for a while. We were there for forty five minutes. We made THREE trips to the restroom (which, by the way, is NOT CLEAN, not even the women’s room, which is why I’m not naming the bookstore). First Henry has to go potty. So we plod off to the bathroom and he tries to poop. No luck. Back to the children’s section and the train. Then he announces that he thinks he might have had an accident but he isn’t sure and will I check? And I say NOT HERE, so we go BACK to the third-world women’s room (no accident, but he is all whacked out from his allergies and not eating lunch at school. Oh, and waking up at 4:30 this morning to ask me to play with him. Stuff like that). He sits on the potty while Charlie touches EVERYTHING. We wash our hands (a whole production in itself) and return to the kids section. We collect some Halloween books and sit down to read, and sure enough, Charlie has a poopy diaper. Which he tris to blame on another child playing nearby. A complete stranger, even! So we go BACK to the the hazmat restroom and change the diaper (which is a nightmare as Charlie is WAAAAAYYYY too big for the plastic changing table and whines the ENTIRE time about how much his back hurts. Boo hoo, learn to use the potty, boy! And stop whining). While I was changing him, I insisted that Henry try AGAIN to use the potty. Which he did (try, that is). And we washed up AGAIN and headed back out.

And no sooner had we settled down to read than Henry said, ‘Oh no! I think I need to go poop.’

That was it. I’d had it. I couldn’t bring myself to go BACK in that bathroom, and I was at all out of Kind Patient Mommy Voice. We came home. The boys are watching TV and I am cursing myself for having eaten all the Poppycock. Although I think that what I really need is a martini.

But school is going just great!

August 30, 2005

Christopher Plummer called it ‘The Sound of Mucous’

I hate The Sound of Music.

There, I’ve said it, I feel better now. Ahhh.

Charlie has been asking to watch it, and you know that I would rather put the kids in front of TV than actually have to PLAY with them, so I’ve been obliging (no, not really, but by 5:00 I am all preschoolered out, and it’s a good excuse to eat more Poppycock) and we have been revelling in the lovely tones of Julie Andrews and those kids. Ugh, THOSE KIDS. I hear those voices and I want to throw up (which, by the way, Julie Andrews DID, a couple of times, filming that opening scene, the one where she spins around on the mountain. Too much spinning, too much helicopter-mounted camera, too much Rodgers and Hammerstein).

I used to loooooove this movie; the singing, the dancing, the costumes, the beautiful views of Austria. But now it just irritates the holy hell out of me. We have probably seen it a thousand times in the last three years, I kid you not.* My children know every song and every step of choreography. Henry can recite most of the dialogue. And the other night, Wade was pointing out that every outdoor scene in the first half of the film is framed to include a mountain. Watch for it–it’s there. Then we started talking about what the mountain might represent (the Captain’s Austrian nationalism? Maria’s Catholicism? everyone’s thinly-veiled horniness?) and Henry shushed us. ‘I can’t hear them talking!’ he lamented. Sigh.

Henry had an intense Sound of Music obssession when he was three. He liked to pretend that he was Maria, which included dressing up; he would bring me a receiving blanket and a binder clip and ask me to make him a ‘blankie dress’ (we actually had to make a rule that the ‘blankie dress’ was for home ONLY; he wanted to wear it everywhere, which freaked Wade out. I was just annoyed because the binder clip fell off every ten seconds and had to be put back on again, which was too much work for me). Once he was ‘dressed,’ he would spin around in our family room until he fell down. Or he would renact the ‘I Have Confidence’ song (which was written for the film and is a crime against the original score). He would insist that I be Liesl and Wade be the Mother Superior. We were glad when he outgrew that phase.

Charlie is a more conventional movie viewer; he sits on the sofa with his binkit and sucks his thumb and snuggles and eats Poppycock and says things like, ‘Look, Mommy, a FOUNTAIN! Do you see it?’ It would be so cute if we were watching ANYTHING ELSE. But this movie drives me batty.

Why? you ask. The implausibility! I don’t mean the musical convention of everyone bursting into song and dance at the slightest provocation; I mean things like Maria’s shock that Captain Von Trapp and his first wife had seven children. Come on, this is the 30s! They’re Catholic! OF COURSE they had seven children (I think, in real life, they had more like nine; then the Captain and Maria went on to have three or six or ten more. Something like that). Or that we never see Maria do a single educational thing with those kids. That’s what governesses did–taught. Yes, I know, it messes up the flow of the musical. Whatever.

But my real complaint is this: I have a difficult time finding things that will occupy both my three-year-old and my five-year-old. But Maria is able to engage everyone from five-year-old Gretel to 16-year-old Liesl (who is one rainstorm away from being either a single mother or an Aryan Youth recruit, by the way) with this singing thing? I don’t buy it. And it annoys me to no end.

My favorite character, these days, is the Baroness Schraeder (the sexy one, who ALMOST marries the Captain), if only because she utters what has become one of my favorite movie lines ever: ‘Haven’t you ever heard of a little thing called boarding school?’ Ahhh, the old days. So wonderful.

*The boys have actually only seen the first half of the movie, up to the point where Maria runs away to the Abby because she’s hot for the Captain. I just can’t face explaining the Nazis to my kids, not yet. Wade has shown them the last minute or so, when they are crossing the Alps, and every once in a while the boys ask to see the Von Trapps ‘go hiking.’ Like they were out for a picnic and not running for their lives. And you think they would have put some long pants on Kurt and Friedrich when they fled the Nazis, wouldn’t you? But no. Just one more thing that annoys me.

August 28, 2005

this post should come with some kind of Geek Alert tag

I was trying to think of something other than my children to write about today, and hooray! Educat, knowing what a book nerd I am, has tagged me with this fun reading meme (meme meme meme–it’s like some kind of chanting mantra). Remember when I kept threatening a lecture on the History of the English Novel? Well here it is!

1. Number of books I have owned: Fewer than there are stars in the sky (but only by a few dozen, I think).

2. Last book I bought: Quirky Kids, by Perri Klass and Eileen Costello.

3. Last book I completed: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, for about the 3,000 time. This summer I’ve been reading around in lots of books about ADHD and autistic spectrum disorders; those are not books I really ‘finish’ so much as look into and consider and return to and consider and . . . you see what I mean. But Elizabeth and Darcy always keep me going to the final page.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me: Oh, THIS I can do. But you may want to get yourself a drink before I get started.

Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Easily the most beautiful novel I have ever read. I wept the first two (yes, TWO) times I read it–once on an airplane, how embarassing–because the language is so poetic and moving. And unlike the film, which is all about sex (not that that is a BAD thing, especially when Ralph Fiennes is involved), the novel is about identity and race and class and the post-colonial sense of Self. It is just a beautiful beautiful novel.

Jane Austen’s Persuasion. This was the first Austen novel I read (although it was the last novel Austen wrote). I read it in college and again in graduate school, and over and over since then. Austen’s technique is remarkable, and the characters are complex and engaging. I wrote my first successful grad school essay on this novel, for a class in literary theory, which I was certain would be my downfall; instead, it was the beginning of my complicated relationship with genre studies and reader-response theory (yeah, whatever lady, get back to the novels).

Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Or The History of a Young Lady. Published in seven individual volumes between 1747 and 1748, this is the longest novel ever written in English. The Penguin paperback edition is 1534 pages long. The basic plot is this: Clarissa Harlowe, the daughter of a rising middle-class family, is engaged to Robert Lovelace, a rake with good connections. Her family choose him for her husband, but then learn that he is of questionable character and break off the engagement, all without consulting Clarissa. Clarissa, meanwhile, has fallen in love with Lovelace and is persuaded to run away with him (or is kidnapped by him, depending on how you read the scene). And that’s just the first few pages! The rest of the novel follows Clarissa’s fruitless efforts to reconcile with her family, Lovelace’s plots to seduce her, and, eventually, their deaths. Doesn’t it sound like FUN? Okay, so why do I love this novel so much . . . because it is the Mt. Everest of English novels, because what Richardson does in this particular novel is essential to The Novel as we know it today, because it was the cornerstone of the Dissertation I Never Finished. And because really, it IS a fun read, if you happen to be a complete freak of an eighteenth-century studies geek. Like me! Whoo hoo.

Francis Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sydney Biddulph, which is unfortunately our of print (sigh of relief from readers). This is like a little tiny version of Clarissa, really; Sydney is also engaged to the wrong man, also has no choice in the matter, also falls in love with him–but marries someone else, out of duty, and arranges for her true love to marry the mother of his illegitimate baby. Years later, the two cross paths again, and, thinking that they are both at liberty (her husband is dead, he thinks he has killed his wife–don’t ask), they are married. But then, oops, turns out his wife isn’t dead and . . . so on and so on. This was the novel I wrote my LAST successful paper on in grad school; it was the first chapter of the dissertation. And I riled a bunch of people up at a conference one time with a paper about sex and duty in the early English novel, using this novel. Again, great fun was had by all!

D. B. Johnson’s Henry Works. Any book that teaches my children that the mundane is the stuff of great literature is important in this house.

5. Five bloggers I am passing this on to: I will be surprised if five people are still READING at this point. Or if five people will ever return to this site again. But please, feel free to tag yourselves–I KNOW for a fact that some of you (you know who you are) are big readers. And let us know that you are sharing, so we can all see what you read.

And then go get yourselves a copy of Clarissa! Did I mention that it’s an epistolary novel? Told all in letters. Yep. Sounds even better now, doesn’t it?