Chutes and Ladders

My older two boys almost wore out my patience with the board games designed for three and four year olds many many years ago — the ones with no reading involved, no counting higher than six, much less strategizing, bluffing or showing off vocabulary (too much online scrabble this week. lying next to my husband at bed at night with both our laptops open. makes me feel really old and married.) I’m talking about games that really require one skill and one skill only, taking turns. Not a small skill to develop, but once you’ve got it — hard to find the challenge. Still, today, we had a a child over to play with the older boys and my four year old was disconsolate at being left out so when he begged for me to play a boardgame with him we...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Aug 4, 2007 | 1 comment

Breaking Up is Hard to Do…

I broke up with my kids’ violin teacher today. Not that I was seeing her socially, exactly. But then it felt really personal. No chance we’re still friends. I tried so hard to be diplomatic and express gratitude and respect while explaining we need something else right now. I had had a fantasy of going in for a final lesson with her (already paid for!) on Saturday with cards the kids had made and flowers, giving them a chance to say goodbye. But she’s very much convinced her way is the only way, and lay quite a trip on how I was betraying her and how much she has invested in me and my children (hey, I was the one writing checks!), and every point I had about what wasn’t working for me she argued prolifically, until I was left with a...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Aug 1, 2007 | 3 comments

Left and Bereft…

And my husband is off to New York again, a red-eye, leaving in about half an hour. I have been trying not to fall into the pattern where the day before he leaves I am tense, grouchy, and not even conscious of why until I realize I am wondering whether I will be able to hold it together while he’s gone, that I will be completely netless. Among the hardest things to leave in Dallas was the network of people whom I could comfortably easily ask for help, people whose kids I had watched at night when there was a trip to the emergency room for back pain, the child whose father was undergoing treatment for lymphoma and I could happily offer to take over her mother’s mornings working in the co-op preschool when she needed it, the economy of favors that...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jul 23, 2007 | 1 comment

Tired

I love and hate the structurelessness of these summer days, because I like seeing the patterns that emerge when they’re not imposed from outside. There are things that I am not exactly rigid about, but that are pretty much essential components of a complete day: writing in the morning, practicing with each of the three music students, time on the elliptical listening to my favorite podcasts, reading out loud to them before they go to bed… In my determination to make blogging a habit I find it works to set aside time after I get the kids in bed, though it is easy to spend way too much time playing onFacebook, reading other blogs, looking for a perfect sleeper sofa to go in my studio (in gleeful anticipation of October’s visit from my goddaughter...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jul 21, 2007 | 0 comments

Best of Intentions

I hate admitting it, but the produce drawer in my refrigerator is the measure of the gap between the way I mean to live my life, and the way my life actually goes — I am standing in the grocery store and think that I am finally going to convince the people in my household that kale is good food, and, um, time passes, and there’s this wilted green leaf at the bottom of the drawer until I feel so guilty opening the drawer that I start bypassing it altogether. Ecto, a program for composing blogs, had become the produce drawer of my computer. I’d think of clever titles, and maybe jot a sentence or two, run out of time, and the next time I sat down thinking I had a few spare minutes to write, I’d end up starting with a fresh idea, only I am...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Jul 11, 2007 | 4 comments