Anne Spollen's Blog, page 4

Halloween Choice

My kids change their Halloween ideas a few times before settling on one costume. It's kind of a ritual that they go through. Well, I should say Emma and Philip do this. They always loved costumes, dressing up, all that stuff when they were little. Christopher wore a Batman suit as his sole foray into dress up world, and every Halloween he knew what he wanted to be by Labor Day and he stuck to it. Of course, his particular weirdness was to eat all of his Halloween candy on Halloween night and well...you sort of know the rest if you've ever run a highly necessary wash at 3 am.
But not being able to make linear decisions is genetic. Emma and I went into the basement to look at all the Halloween stuff we had lying around. I saw a bunch of coats in a box and remembered the coat drive for the homeless. I was trying on a coat that I once really loved: this red, wool coat with big buttons that I haven't worn since I was maybe 25. I thought I looked pretty good when Emma looked over and said, "Wow, Mom, you look just like Clifford in that." In case you haven't traveled with the under 12 crowd recently, this is Clifford:

I put the coat in the box. Then Emma announced what she wanted to be for Halloween. "I need a new wig," she said, "since Snooki has long, black hair."This is my interpretation of Snooki: 

Needless to say, I got judgmental. The Jersey Shore is everywhere around here, particularly since we live at the Jersey Shore, only here's the thing: they act and speak just like people from North Jersey or Brooklyn or Staten Island do. They don't act at all like the folks down here who spend a lot of time quilting and quadding and thinking about ducks. After explaining to Emma all the reasons why she shouldn't go out dressed as her, she shrugged and said, "That's my final decision."
I appealed to Philip. "You talk to her," I said, "since she'll listen more to you." I was going on and on about what a terrible role model she is, how I was not happy, and he looked at me and smiled. "You don't get it all, Mom. You act like this is serious. It's Halloween.""Yes, but...""You're acting like she's going to be Snooki as a career or something. Emma thinks Snooki is a joke. She laughs when she sees her clothes. She's going out as her to make fun of the whole thing."I was thinking about what he said when Emma walked in, her face red. "Philip, there is no way you are going out as that.""As what?" I had been so preoccupied with Emma's choice that I hadn't asked Philip about his."A clown," she wailed. "An evil clown. I can't stand clowns. I won't go in the parade with you if you do this. Clowns are like my worst nighmare."I'm fairly certain neither one will budge about their costume choice. This should be an interesting Halloween.
Maybe I should dig out my old favorite coat and just get a pair of big red ears. 

Getting to be That Time

About two weeks ago, this was "our" beach, but now it's definitely getting to be Halloween around here. Right after Emma's birthday, in late August, my kids start talking about costumes, and today we are going to start figuring out how to make them. I know it's more than a month away, but already our neighborhood is all orange and golden and there are plastic tombstones jutting out of lawns, lots of hay bales, and those gigantic blow up things that flatten out in a way each morning that is...

Teens Read Too Blog Visit

I'm blog hopping again, today over at Jen Wardrip's great teen blog, Teens Read Too. Stop by for a chance to win a signed copy of Light Beneath Ferns or The Shape of Water. She has tons of great interviews and all kind of interesting links. Hope to see you there!

Late Summer, Odds and Ends and Non Hurricanes

I haven't been on the computer in so long that I had to use a DustBuster and damp rags to get BabyCat's hair off the keyboard. She is so weird; she loves nothing more than a nap on a nearby keyboard. There's a bed and a comfy chair not far from this keyboard, so that kind of doesn't add up. But that's the nature of cats: they resent assumptions.
This is such a strange time here, calendar wise. I'm not wild about the ten days or so before school starts. Being a teacher and having three kids as ...

It's Almost Over and....???

Last night, the bog near our house had that Keatsian autumnal look - all misty and spiritual. I had a nice poetic moment of gazing at the bog while the kids stood there very quietly - so peaceful and poetic. That was just moments before I had to pull Mazy away from eating a fresh load of her favorite appetizer - goose poop. With bogs comes geese, and with geese comes...well.

But the end is drawing near. Emma's birthday decorations went up today (from Emma, "My birthday is more of a season than...

Slanguage

Was it Confuscius who said, "She who attempts to do three rooms at once will only do one room at a time despite many lists"?


Maybe that was a Russian aphorism, but I am here to say: IT IS VERY TRUE. And because there is stuff all over the place in this house and it's weird, crazy hot and swampishly humid outside, I need to avoid both my writing work and the housework. So I've been keeping a new list: one of words that are new to me but not new to the under 18 set. 


For those of you who are...

Revisions

Right now, because I am almost entirely crazy, I promised all three of my kids that I would help them re-do their rooms - at the same time. In fairness to my sanity, when we moved here, it was a DIY job, with chairs and bureaus shoved into corners at 2 am so we could unearth the box storing the clean underwear. Things have sort of remained that way, and now the kids are pretty much due actual furniture that remotely matches and  they can fit into.

[image error] Rooms are really important to teenagers. I'm ...

Of Bums and Blogs

Another kitten picture that I really like. We should probably stop calling them "the kittens" at this point, since they just turned a year, but they may be stuck with that name in the way BabyCat is now two or three years old and still BabyCat. (She was feral so the shelter couldn't be exactly sure of her age)

I have been a total blog bum, sort of like the kitten picture, and a bum in many other ways for the past couple of weeks. I went down to Long Island for a few days and left Dad in charge...

Post Graduation

That's Coco, one of the kittens Emma got last year. She's a lot bigger now, but I still think she is one of the world's cutest cat sleepers. Maybe her posture is a metaphor for the end of the school year. Kids seem so exhausted by the end of June.
 Christopher didn't get much of a chance to relax. He graduated and at eight o'clock the morning after his graduation, he began a college summer program. Remember I'm the mom who always told the kids they could sleep over OUR house; I never really l...

Nothing

I have been doing a whole lot of nothing for the past few days, and I don't even feel guilty about it. Well, maybe not nothing.

I've been cleaning up the house and baking and planning for Christopher's graduation party, potting plants and planting squash and tomatoes, and building a fire pit in the back yard. So I have been doing stuff, but not the usual, frantic grading of papers and running around that I normally do. I have to say it's wonderful. I finally got to the library, the dentist, a...