Category: Parenting

We’re starting to get a little tired of it all: the midnight feedings, the neediness, the scratching and scrabbling, the nocturnal rambling.

It’s like we have a new baby in the house… but wait, we don’t have a new baby in the house. We have a relatively new pet, but he only bugs the girl he sleeps with. Our son, at 13, is finally (usually) sleeping through the night.

This is like the baby we didn’t ask for and we didn’t know was coming: We’ve got a lodger in the house, and he (or she) is not paying rent. On top of that, he’s a midnight partier.

I vote for “he.”

“He” is the new friend who has taken up residence in our wall. Not just any wall, mind you. We’ve heard them in the roof, in the corner of our office. But fer crying out loud, didja have to choose the wall at the head of our bed?

I was awoken last week to the sound of ripping. Apparently, although our friend had been living in there a while, it was redecoration time. He just didn’t like that insulation the way it was, and he was working on reupholstering. RIP! One of us awake. Scrabble, scrabble, crunch, crunch. We’re both awake.

I bang on the wall. He seems to settle down. Apparently, it wasn’t the right night for a party.

Good. Maybe he’ll move on.

Well, no. Our friend is a nightly visitor now. Apparently, he sleeps through the day, enjoying the comfy fiberglass decor. We go to bed with silence in the wall behind us. But sometime every night, he decides it’s time to have fun. He has loud dinner parties, dancing, and the ever-present redecoration of his apartment.

My husband has no plans to be outschemed by a rat. He set traps. Nothing. He banged on the wall. Our friend danced to the beat.

The other day he came home with an Amazon.com box. Later, he called me down to see the amazing scene. Snaked through an outlet hole in the wall, the miniature camera on a flexible extension reveals a fine nest full of nuts and other debris. But no one, apparently, is home.

Last night, the party started up again. RIP! Crunch, crunch. Scritchscritchscritchscritchscritch. My husband banged on the wall.  We groaned in frustration.

At least, when you have a baby, you have a sweet, cuddly thing during the day to remind you why you’re losing sleep.

This afternoon, I was walking through our bedroom, and I just couldn’t resist. I banged on the wall. I scratched. I thundered. I wished I had some insulation to rip.

“You hear me, rat? Keep it down in there! Go find somewhere else to live!”

The thing is, bad neighbors never seem to care when you’re a bad neighbor back to them. I could almost hear his thoughts.

“Hey, maybe those stupid, sleepy animals on the other side of this wall are more interesting than I thought.

Maybe tonight I’ll invite them to the party…”

I asked around to find out the very best Santa Cruz County fieldtrips. My correspondents’ comments are in quotes. I haven’t done all these, but they’re worth a try! Please leave more suggestions as comments below.

North coast:

• Wilder Ranch: Just north of Santa Cruz, learn how a ranch operated in the 19th century. Also, bring bikes and bike the trails up on the bluff.
• Swanton Berry Farm: Visit the farm, pick berries, pay by the pound, and eat them up!
• Pebble Beach: No, not the one south of us. And I’m fudging because I think this is in San Mateo County. This is a beach just south of Pescadero that is a true pebble beach. To get to the beach, go down on the north side of the parking lot. To access fabulous tidepooling, follow the path down on the south side of the parking lot.

San Lorenzo Valley:

• Quail Hollow Ranch: We love Quail Hollow. I wrote about it here and here. Aside from the planned activities, it’s just a great place for a hike.
• Henry Cowell State Redwoods: Henry Cowell is an excellent place to bring people who haven’t yet seen big redwoods but aren’t adventurous hikers. The main loop is super easy and includes a tree so big you can go inside it. For the more adventurous, find the various beaches and go for a swim in the river. In the fall, the Ohlone Festival is a fun cultural event.

Santa Cruz:

• City of Santa Cruz Dump: “Includes hands on recycling, a film and an art project making paper.”
• Neary Lagoon: “Wildlife inhabiting or visiting the refuge include mallard and wood ducks, pied billed grebes, a multitude of coots, the world’s meanest geese, several varieties of fish and the occasional great blue heron or hawk.”
• Life Lab: “We promote experiential learning for all ages through children’s camps, field trips, youth and internship programs, and teacher workshops. Drawing on over thirty years of work with students we have also created curricula and workshops for educators interested in bringing learning to life in gardens nationwide.”

Capitola/Aptos/Soquel:

• Pacific Migrations: The visitor center at New Brighton State Beach is really fantastic. Instead of having the usual wildlife and history displays, they have arranged everything according to the theme of migration—both animal and human.
• Nisene Marks State Park: Not a destination for many out-of-the-area folks, Nisene Marks is a really nice park for hiking and biking. If you have kids, the biking is fabulous, especially in the winter when cars aren’t allowed past the first gate. There’s a long, largely flat dirt/gravel/paved road you can follow. The cars are generally pretty respectful of bikes. The Old Growth Loop is a relatively easy hike that includes some old redwoods, including the wonderful twisted tree grove, where all the trees twisted into spirals trying to get at the sun as they grew.

Watsonville and south coast:

• Elkhorn Slough: Birds, otters, little sharks. Hiking, kayaking. Teachers must first complete a Teacher Workshop before bringing a class to the Reserve.
• Near the Slough: “We absolutely love going down to Moss Landing State Beach–not only are the waves often wilder and during the week NO ONE is there, but every time we have gone in the past year there is a large family of sea otters (about 30-50?) we can observe from really pretty close.  And then the sea lion colony can’t be beat!  We could watch this wildlife for hours.  And of course with the slough right there, such animal watching can easily be paired with a birding expedition there, which we have done and which was really fun.”
• The Farm: The Farm is a unique agricultural showcase. It consists of an agricultural education center, demonstration farm, produce stand and recreation destination. The Farm is designed to tell the story of contemporary farming amidst the majestic surroundings of California’s Central Coast.

Another cliché I’ve heard about parenting is how parents of kids with special needs talk about how brave and inspiring their kids are. It sounds like something people say just to make themselves feel better about how difficult their lives are. Then it happens to you.

My daughter declared yesterday that she must sign up for softball. She had said this before, and I had looked into it, then I hid the flyer someplace in my desk. But she said it again, with that determined face that said this was not something I could hope she’d forget. (Lots of parents say things like, “Oh, just ignore it. Your kid will forget about it.” They don’t have my kid!) So bright and early this morning, we were off to softball try-outs.

I have written about how my daughter loves soccer. But really, she loves all team sports. Not watching them on TV. Not watching other people playing them. She loves them for two reasons: Learning something new, and getting a uniform. Practices, as long as they include learning something new, are fine with her. Games? Well, as far as she’s concerned, games exist so you can get a uniform. She doesn’t seem to have any great competitive streak, just a hunger to learn to play all games and to collect as many uniforms and t-shirts as possible. In fact, she said the other day, she could dress only in Santa Cruz Soccer Camp t-shirts at this point. She was pretty proud of that.

The thing is, she’s never actually played softball. Since I attempted to forget about her interest in softball — though she’s been asking since last spring — we don’t own a softball. We own a glove because she saw one at the DLC Flea Market and begged to buy it. She didn’t even care that it’s pink! Have I mentioned that I abhor games that involve balls? When I was a child, my eyesight was very poor. When a ball was coming at me, it would split into two balls and I’d have to do eeny-meeny-miney-mo on it. I always lost.

But this is where the bravery and inspiration comes in: We get to the try-outs and she reveals that in spite of my reminders to bring “everything for softball and your riding lesson,” the glove was sitting on the bench in the front hall. Furthermore, all the other girls are out there warming up with their dads, and she’s got no glove, no ball, and her mom’s tendons scream every time a ball actually hits her glove (accidentally, of course).

But happily, she lines up with the other girls and waits her turn to show her stuff on a softball diamond (never set foot on one before). She is instructed that she’ll first catch a ground ball (she learned what that is from a Youtube video yesterday), then throw the ball to first base (that’s the one where all the people are waving their arms and saying, Good Catch! Throw it to me now!), then after three balls, run to first base.

Good thing we didn’t arrive any earlier, or she would have had to go first.

But the fact is, she did just fine. She watched about five girls ahead of her, girls who had clearly been playing softball since they were in the womb, and she was not discouraged. She marched out there with her borrowed glove and she got those ground balls just fine. She threw them so that…. eventually… they got to first base, and then she trotted off herself.

I know myself: When I’m going someplace I’ve never been before, to do something new with people I’ve never met before, and those people are most likely much more accomplished than I am, I get nervous. In fact, I try to find many reasons why I can’t go. Really, it’s not that I know that I’ll fail, but, uh, I really did need to, uh, refinish the floors that day.

Or something like that.

But my brave girl doesn’t think like that. Everything she does out in the world is a challenge. Each time she walks into a new room, people figure out really fast that she’s different, and their reactions have not always been positive. Adults usually try to cover up their dismay, but it shows. Other kids have said really nasty things right to her face. But she plows on and does what she wants to do.

I was sitting next to a dad and his small son. When my daughter stepped up, the boy said to his dad, “That’s a boy!”

“No,” I said, “That’s my daughter. She hates brushing long hair. She has never played softball before. But she’s here, and she’s doing it.”

So much for another cliché. She was brave, and she inspired me. What a gal!

Like all couples, my husband and I share stories about experiences we have shared, and we have whittled many of them down to a few words. Now that we have kids, the kids also get to take part in this… sometimes. We also have shorthand ways of talking about our experiences with our kids. (Once I’m sure it will have no weight anymore, I will explain one mysterious acronym our kids occasionally still hear: “DPT!”)

One of our oldest comes from when I first moved to Santa Cruz to be closer to my husband. The “love commute,” as we called it, was wearing us down. I was finally fulfilling my dream of living in San Francisco, but there was no way my husband was leaving Santa Cruz. So I moved south. I didn’t know anyone here, and since my husband worked OTH (over the hill) in Silicon Valley, he only had a few friends here, as well. Soon after I moved here, he found out that someone he had worked with was living here with his wife, and we arranged to go on a little adventure together. Upon arriving at the Capitola Wharf, where our adventure started, his wife looked at us and asked, “So who is the Organizing Energy in your family?”

She said it with those capital letters. We thought it was very funny, very California (as two transplants), and rather New Age-y. It was all of those, but it also got to an essential truth: Some of us have Organizing Energy. We can use our powers for good, but there is also a Dark Side.

As you have probably guessed, I am the Organizing Energy in our family. It’s really best not to have two OEs in one family, at least, not two adults. You can’t choose what kind of kids you’ll get, but from my point of view, you can always hope you’ll get a little OE there as well.

This winter break I am allowing my children free rein on the computers while I indulge my OE: So far I have reorganized our homeschooling supplies (oh, so satisfying to Get Rid Of) and prepared two of our garden beds. I also made more headway on transferring all my recipes to the wonderful Evernote. I am hoping to get to the bookshelves, and perhaps even to the CDs we don’t listen to because they’re all on our music server.

Now, I know that some of you are envious, because you tell me so. Moms with wistful looks on their faces tell me that they have been aching to get at that closet or that play room. Moms are amazed that I can find time to organize when there’s so much else to be done! But here’s the Dark Side of OE: sometimes it keeps you from doing what you really want to be doing. It can also, though this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, drive your children insane.

The Dark Side is what happens when I walk in the door, having dropped a kid off somewhere, with some set time in which to do something meaningful. Each child gets one morning a week of solo homeschooling, when I am supposed to be focusing just on that child. And occasionally (though less and less often), I get time when I’m at home all by myself.

I walk in that door, all ready to get started on the meaningful work I have chosen. I will have a mental list of all that needs to be accomplished, and then it’s all dashed from my mind when I open the door and my OE is assaulted by the scene within our living room. Days’ worth of mail piled on a table. Shoes strewn across the floor. My daughters’ dress up clothes, dropped as she shed them while walking toward the car. That stack of books I meant to look through. All the magazines I had piled next to me the last time I got a chance to sit on the couch and read magazines. The breakfast dishes, some still on the table.

The Dark Side of my OE starts to talk to me: You can’t really plan to homeschool your child in this mess, can you? How will you ever know what’s worth reading if you don’t go through those magazines? Perhaps there’s something important in that stack of mail. If you don’t do the breakfast dishes now, they’ll pile up at lunch, and then how will you ever get dinner on the table?

Then my OE talks through me to my child. Couldja do a little better at clearing your breakfast dishes next time? Did you really have to strew tiny clippings from plastic drinking straws all over the house? When I asked you to put away your laundry, did you really think I meant put it away on the floor of your room?

My kids are used to this. They weather it somewhat like we took in tornadoes when I was a kid: Oh, here it comes again. I think the basement should be safe.

And I get over it. I am like an alcoholic who has gotten past the stage of acknowledging her disease. I’m at the stage where I watch myself driving myself crazy by trying to get my life organized and think, Wow, I really should be doing something more meaningful with my time. Eventually, I do enough to soothe my OE into submission, my kids come crawling out from under the house, and we can get on with the messy business of life.

I have only one regret: No matter how I patiently teach them (“Isn’t it so much nicer to be able to access all your toys rather than have piles of them to sort through?”), badger them (“Please please please when I come upstairs let me not see that mess I asked you to clean up three hours ago”), and bribe them (“Will you keep that table cleared off if I PAY you?”), my kids seem to have inherited not one scrap of OE. Organization, for them, remains that thing they find most annoying about their mom. Someday, I’m guessing, they’ll have to go off and find a spouse to bring some OE into their lives.

If they don’t, I just can’t imagine what will become of them. My OE shudders at the thought that they will never, ever wake up and know that today—no matter whether they planned to find the cure for cancer or be the first human to step on Mar— is the day they really need to clean out the linen closet. And what kind of life would that be?

PS: My Santa Cruz friends should consider doing a little indulging of their organizing energy for a good cause. The Discovery Learning Center is having a big Flea Market as a benefit, and we’re looking for donations of your gently used toys, books, sports equipment, or other items you think other families would love to own. Visit the DLC to find out days when you can drop off stuff for our sale. And visit our sale on January 21!