Parenting – Page 5 – Mom's Guide to the Galaxy

The most important step.

“What is the most important step a man can take?”

The first one.

That was my first thought upon reading the question in Oathbringer. As it turns out, that was the character’s initial response too. It made me think about some significant first steps I’ve taken in recent years.

Followed a friend into our graduate program. This was significant because it didn’t match either of our majors, though it was my minor. It was that or law school; I think I picked the right one for me. That was the first step in my career in Information Technology.
Picked up a flyer for a fan-run Chicagoland convention while I was at GenCon. That convention is long since defunct, but the effects linger – I met my gaming group, and ex-husband, because of that convention.
Signed our daughter up for karate. It seemed like something good for her to try, and she was interested in what little she had seen (err… Kung Fu Panda). There is certainly an element of luck that went with finding the right school, especially since we hadn’t been looking for one.
That first year when I decided to clear weeds out of the old garden patch and plant spinach. I’ll admit, I had no idea what I was getting into… vegetable gardening is addictive.

As it turns out, the answer was actually “The next step.” Those were, of course, significant too:

Interviewing with a Chicagoland company when I finished my graduate degree. Having a degree is lovely, finding a company that will hire you to work with it is even better. And it’s the reason I ended up in Chicagoland.
The second fan-run convention I attended in Chicagoland was Capricon. Not only is it a great convention, I’ve made friends for life at it. It was an excellent next step.
The next step at karate was getting me on the mat with her. And again after my accident. That worked out well, I pre-tested for first degree black belt last weekend.
Gardening has turned into a series of next steps for me. When I moved to my current house, I actually moved a raised bed set in before I moved furniture to the house. It was early June, which is already a late start for gardening, and it turned into a fabulous harvest.

According to my cats, my first step should be to feed them. My next step should be to feed them again. They’re about to be disappointed at least once.

Thoughts on Gilded Cage

One of the first book reviews I wrote was for Gilded Cage, almost eighteen months ago now. Despite eagerly anticipating the sequel, I lost sight of it, and just realized today that not only is it out, it’s already available in paperback. Used! Needless to say, I am ordering Tarnished City immediately, and I have a co-worker who will want to borrow it as soon as I’m done.

I thought I’d share the review this week. And eventually, I’m sure I’ll have something to say about the sequel.

REVIEW. First published October 15, 2016 (Booklist).

At first glance, the world seems familiar in Vic James’s novel, but that illusion is quickly dispelled. The monarchy has long since been destroyed; the British aristocracy replaced with Equals, people born with magical gifts who lord over the commoners with their powers. The story starts just before siblings Abi and Luke begin their ten years of slavery, which is mandated for all commoners (i.e., those without magic). Unexpectedly separated, they quickly learn how little they understood of the Equals as their views of the world shift. Luke adapts to life in a factory town by joining a rebellion, while Abi and the rest of the family live together but grow apart while serving a powerful family of Equals. Nobody emerges unscathed from their slavery years, as the Hadley family can attest after mere months of service. The twists and turns make this book hard to set down; a second read may reveal many details that readers might breeze past the first time through. Readers will eagerly await the rest of the trilogy started here.

It was a super blood blue moon!

Some mornings, I feel like I’m using a cattle prod to force a sloth into motion. “Get dressed! Come to breakfast! Finish eating!”

And then there are mornings like this Wednesday, when it was in an astronomy geek’s best interest to be up and moving. In this case, it was to see an eclipse, when we were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the super blue blood moon.

I first heard of blue moons in elementary school… “once in a blue moon, a new smurf is born.” Yes, really, I remember that episode, though their blue moons seem to be a bit too close together. Not surprisingly, my actual understanding of a blue moon – the second full moon in a calendar month (since 1946) or the “extra” full moon in a year with 13 – came much later.

Super blue blood moon — The super blue moon before the eclipse started.

What made it stunning was the “super” part – the moon looked larger than normal because of it’s proximity to the Earth. Amusingly, I just saw the technical name for a supermoon (perigee syzygy of the Earth-Moon-Sun system) as part of a trivia question earlier this week.

“Blood Moon” refers to the moon during a total lunar eclipse, so named because it can look red. I don’t think it look particularly red here. Unfortunately, it was also sinking in the horizon as the sun was rising, so most of my attempts to photograph the eclipse part are obscured by trees. It was awfully pretty, but not particularly photogenic, at least not on my point & click camera.

‘Tis the season

I spent a year abroad in college in the lovely, if somewhat dreary, city of Glasgow. It’s only dreary because of the overcast skies and rain, the people more than make up for it. I spent a decent number of weekends and holidays that year with newly found friends in Edinburgh, including Christmas Day.

I remember waking up that morning and finding my Christmas stocking, not in the living room near the tree, but on my bed with me. (Yes, I slept fairly soundly back then.) In all fairness, there was a large dog downstairs who might have gotten curious about the stockings had they been left in her reach. More surprisingly, as I reached into the stocking, I found that every gift in it was wrapped.

I think it was in high school when we noticed that our parents’ stockings had bare minimum content and started scrambling through our room on Christmas morning for assorted junk we could add to them. Most years, our stockings were about as random, it was just newer junk.

Holiday stocking & wrapped gifts — Oooh, wrapped stuff on a stocking.

I don’t remember anything in that Edinburgh stocking being junk. Fun and unnecessary, perhaps… I mean, does a college student really need Lego? (In my defense, I owned no Lego at all until that year. OMG, Lego Thor is awesome!) That year reshaped how I thought of Christmas stockings, and has certainly influenced the type of items that are seen in them at my house.

Here we are at the holidays again, and I found myself reminiscing about that year… and wrapping just about everything. Perhaps I should make some Yorkshire pudding this year too. Happy holidays!

Exploring new possibilities

I usually peer in the window, then wander off. It’s safer that way. But I was spotted and invited in, so I took a chance.

It feels like speed dating – is that still a thing? – where you rush in and meet everybody with at most a couple minutes to grasp each personality before moving onto the next. It’s not as structured, it just seems pointless to backtrack if your first impression is that you won’t click. Or that the rest of the household won’t click.

June and Diane — We’re either sleeping or in motion; we will not look at the camera for you.

My girls have fairly aggressive personalities. They’re not outright hostile, simply a handful, and I won’t subject a timid personality to that. I’m also not sure how they’d react if I brought someone new home. We walked out of PetSmart without adopting another cat.

It’s been over two years since we lost our third cat, Mungojerrie, at the ripe old age of 19. Well, our first cat really, since he was the oldest. I adopted him at 10 weeks old, along with his brother, Rumpelteazer. (Yes, they lived up to their names.) We had lost Rumpel to cancer eight years before. At the time, we had a third cat, Missy, who almost became friends with Mungo before she passed away. When we lost her, he was lonely, howling for attention in the middle of the night until we (quickly) conceded and adopted Diane, our beautiful black and white cat.

A few months later, we had a brief, and tragic, interlude with Marianna, a cat who gave the most wonderful hugs, but didn’t absorb salt properly into her system. This caused her to pursue odd food sources, including climbing into a garbage can for some French fries that had been thrown out. She was a strange one.

After losing her, we adopted June, our polydactyl tortoise shell (she’s a Hemingway cat… an extra toe on each front paw). She was a young mother, being adopted out at the same time as her “kittens” (they were as large as her already, and she’s not particularly small), and she rounded out the family perfectly.

This was the first time since we Mungo passed away that I’ve stepped into the room to meet the adoptable cats. I’m not sure we need a third cat, or that we’re ready for one, but there was a cute Siamese I wanted to meet. As it turns out, he was sweet, but too shy for this house. Maybe next time.

Birthday Party Planning

There isn’t one right way to plan a kid’s birthday party; every child is different, so every party should be too. Every party planner is different too. I like having a theme to plan towards, and luckily, my daughter is willing to work with that. Some years, deciding on the theme is a chore in itself, though her eleventh birthday was super easy to pick – that had to be Harry Potter themed. (I suspect her 111th birthday will have a Lord of the Rings theme, though I also suspect I won’t be available to celebrate it.)

The hardest part about making these dragon handouts was finding the large eggs.

Some themes only affect the party favors, such as the year we handed out crocheted dragons. The rabbit theme impacted the food too, I served carrot cake, along with the traditional banana bread mini-donuts that I’m required to make for every birthday party. Carrot cake happens to be my favorite cake, so I had actually suggested it for a couple years before the theme finally

This dementor made the mistake of showing up at a wizard party with a Hawaiian theme.

Harry Potter had the most elaborate planning, with a home-made dementor piñata, a castle cake pan, and a lathe where kids could customize their own wooden wands during the party. There was even a golden snitch being hidden repeatedly; each time it was found, the house was awarded points, and it was hidden again. The planning started more than a year in advance, with bits and pieces coming together as we added the Hawaiian aspect (for a summer birthday) and came up with the different activities.

I don’t think you need many organized activities at a party – once they have an idea or two, kids will generally keep themselves entertained. And the adults can relax while they do that (except, of course, if you’re the adult supervising the lathe).

This year’s theme took a while to pick, we finally settled on a party at Brookfield Zoo, which is one of the two large zoos in the Chicagoland area. There are playgrounds for the younger kids, educational information for the bigger ones, and an awesome selection of animals for everybody to see.

I made good use of our zoo membership, visiting multiple times earlier in the summer so I could gather clues for a scavenger hunt. I took tons of photos of educations signs that I normally wouldn’t have, just so I could review the information at home while planning the hunt. Cassandra suggested having a word scramble from the answers, so I went with that idea. I briefly considered giving more clues than letters needed for the word scramble, then decided not to be that mean… this time.

As a bonus, I printed up Brookfield Zoo Bingo cards, so the teams worked together on the scavenger hunt and separately on their Bingo cards. The one downside we hit was the time limit – I told people to be back at our picnic area in an hour. Some of the Bingo cards were fairly thoroughly marked off, but in that time, only one person finished more than half the hunt; I included clues from opposite sides of the zoo. This one really takes two hours… try it, if you’d like. Brookfield Zoo Scavenger Hunt (Answers available on request.)