Socal Mom

No More "Spiders"

This was one of THOSE mornings.

You know, the ones where you have to nag and beg and cajole and threaten physical harm to get your child out of bed.

To be honest, we haven't had too many mornings like that lately. When Megan started middle school, I bought her a nice radio alarm clock with a docking station for her iPod. And as the only way she can manage her homework load along with her schedule is to do it early, she has usually been up for hours by the time I start fumbling in the kitchen for the coffee maker.

But Tuesdays are the only day of the week when she DOESN'T have gymnastics or Hebrew school in the afternoon and evening, so she managed to finish her homework before the start of "American Idol" last night.  And so she set her alarm for a relatively late 6:00 a.m...

...and stayed in bed. After about five minutes, when I didn't hear any movement out of her room, I went in to rouse her. "I meant to set it for 6:30," she moaned. "Please turn the light back off."

I complied.

At 6:30, I went back in to get her up. "Can I have five more minutes?" she pleaded.

At 6:40, I walked back in; saw that she was finally upright. I walked away.

When the clock displayed 7:00, I realized that I hadn't been hearing any noise in the bathroom. Sure enough, Megan had crawled right back into bed. We were running out of time.

I sat on the bed and gave her a nudge. "We have to leave for school in half an hour."

She groaned again.

Until recently, I would deal with this by "bringing out the big gun" -- The Tickle Spider.

You see, when she was little, we had this little game. I would walk my hand up her arm to her head, and tell her it was "The Good Spider." But often, it would turn out that the Good Spider was being impersonated by his evil twin, the Tickle Spider, who would then attack her in the belly and get her laughing.

My daughter and I are both EXTREMELY ticklish, and for me, being tickled is excruciating. But Megan's weird. She LIKES being tickled. And so I found the Tickle Spider to be a very useful tool to get her out of bed in the morning.

But no more. Megan is now 12, and doesn't feel like playing with "spiders" any longer.

I love the way she's maturing into a thoughtful, responsible, caring proto-adult. I am SO PROUD of her I could burst.

But I miss my baby girl.

And I've gotta find a new way to get her out of bed!

And So A New Chapter Begins

The day was planned with the precision of a full-scale invasion.

"Have you packed your book bag?"

"Check."

"The English assignments you did over the summer?"

"Check."

"Your uniform?"

"Check." (It was laid out on her floor.)

"Including your new bra?"

"Do I really have to wear that thing?"

"You will be dressing and undressing in front of a lot of other girls for gym class. So I think you do."

[sullenly] "Okay. Check."

"Did you brush your teeth the way the orthodontist told you? Is your alarm set for 6:00 a.m.? "

"Check. Check."

And with that, I kissed my baby girl good night. This morning, she would start her new life as a middle schooler.

"Will you walk me in tomorrow?" she asked sleepily.

I didn't think she would want that. When I was her age and beginning junior high, I wanted to get as far away from my parents as possible.

"Of course I will." Anything she wants.

Except leaving the camera at home. I have taken her picture on the first day of school ever since her very first day of school. She doesn't like it.

"Look, we're across the street. No one can see us. Let me take it now."

She scowled through several shots before she finally cracked a smile large enough to see the new braces she acquired five days ago. This certainly has been a week for milestones.

As we approached the school, I noticed other parents walking their kids in. "Those must be the other sixth graders," I said. Megan grunted.

I pointed to a dad who was carrying a really large camera. "Look, he's embarrassing his kid, too!" I said.

I always tell her that as her parent, it is my job to embarrass her. And I must be a very good parent, because I am so successful at it.

Once in the school grounds, we ran into another of her friends. Together, we looked up their homerooms. My daughter is upset; everyone she knows is together in a different room. Of course, they will all be making new friends -- I'm just grateful we got into this school where she will have good buddies to hang out with during breaks and lunch.

The school has just undergone a major earthquake renovation and the hall with the homerooms was closed when we visited for orientation last week, so Megan asked me to help her find her room. I know this school pretty well, having attended here myself 37 years ago. The administration hallway has pictures of graduating classes going all the way to when the school opened back in 1966 (I was the class of 1970). On our two previous visits, we lingered over my class photo for a while, until we found the 14-year-old version of myself, staring sullenly into the camera.

"That was so long ago, your picture is in black and white!" Megan marveled.

Yes, it was a very long time ago. I've been through so much since then.

My daughter's new adventure starts now.

The First Fight of Summer

The school put on a first rate culmination program for the fifth grade. Too bad I don't have any good photos to post here. One reason is that the kids were lined up in alpha order (instead of by height), so views of my little gymnast were blocked by all the tall kids who surrounded her. So I'm posting this photo of Megan from last week, before we took her to her Fifth Grade Dance.

"They're too young for this," my husband fumed when he found out that a dance was one of the activities.

I assured him that at this age, the girls would all be dancing with each other while the boys watched from the sidelines -- but they would come back telling us they had fun. And they did.

The culmination had a Hawaiian theme. The kids had spent weeks learning songs like "Pineapple Princess" and "Hooky Lau." But they also studied the history of our 50th state, and conveyed the idea that "Aloha" means farewell (to elementary school) as well as hello (middle school). Megan was one of several kids who had written short poems that were recited through the program. I was also surprised to find out that she was one of about five kids who had earned a gold President's Education Award.

But the highlight of the program for me was when the kids came out to the audience to present leis to their parents. Until then, I'd been holding it all in, but when Megan brought me my lei, I started blubbering like a baby.

I sobbed again yesterday when I dropped her off at the school for the last time. Over our six years there, that little school was the center of our family community, and it's going to feel weird not being part of it. And because it's located in the middle of three different middle school districts, I found myself saying goodbye to a lot of parents -- we actually don't know a lot of kids who will be attending the same middle school with Megan. It will definitely be a new beginning for both of us.

It was kind of anticlimactic that there was still one more minimum day of school following the culmination ceremony, so the fifth grade teachers decided to set up a "field trip" -- they walked all the kids to a nearby park and held a picnic.

I think Megan's memories of this experience would have been perfect, until I picked her up from that school for the last time. As I got to her classroom, one of her friends begged me to let Megan come to the swim party.

The swim party. As soon as I saw the flyer (which was in her backpack last week), I knew that was going to be trouble. My friend Betty, when she was PTA President, was fond of holding meetings in backyards with pools, so the kids could swim while we took care of business. The problem was that there was never an adult appointed to watch the kids in the pool. I could never focus on business because all I wanted to do was see that the kids were OK. I finally swore off swim parties last year, when I brought Megan to a friend's house, only to discover that ALL of the parents had dropped off their kids and that the host parent had no intention of staying in the backyard to watch them. So I ended up staying.

I realize that by this age (10 and 11), these kids know how to swim. But they are still KIDS. They don't have good judgment. And I'm sorry to say, neither do most of my fellow parents. At that party, I had to remind them not to run around the pool. I had to step in when they tried to force other girls to jump in when they weren't comfortable. I didn't like taking on that role. Nothing happened that day -- but I worried that if one of the girls was hurt, I would be sued because I'm the one who took responsibility for watching them while the hostess puttered around in her kitchen.

Most of Megan's friends were going to the party. "I'm probably not even going to go in the water," she pleaded. "I'm never going to see all of them together again," she cried. I told her that she could see anyone she wanted to see; all she had to do was pick up the phone and arrange it.

"I never have any time!" she said. That's true -- during the school year. But summer is different. Even though she's in gym from 9 to 2, Monday through Friday -- that's like a normal school schedule. She has no homework, no Hebrew school or other structured afternoon activities, and her weekends are free. In the summer, she's got plenty of time to have fun with friends outside of gym.

She was really crying now, and I was feeling bad. I wavered a bit and started questioning her friends about the party: "Are your parents staying or are they dropping you off?" Without exception, the kids were being dropped off. I had a vision of that last party she went to, where I was the only adult watching the kids. I could not get comfortable with the idea, so once again, I said "NO."

And felt bad all afternoon. And felt worse when Megan refused to talk to me until it was time to take her to gym. And even worse when her friend Maggie (who is both a classmate and a teammate) showed up and told us that only about five kids showed up at the party.

"No, there were about 25 kids," her mom said. "And about eight parents. Everyone was watching," she added.

Well, that could be. But I cannot remove the experience of those PTA meeting/swim parties, where watching the kids was so hard to do because our focus was elsewhere. And a one-to-three parent-to-child ratio is not as good as one-on-one. 

"I wasn't worried," my friend said, "because Maggie is an excellent swimmer. We swim in the ocean all the time."

The thing is, it's not the swimming that worried me. It's the lack of judgment. It's the fact that they are KIDS.

The bottom line is that I made the right decision for our family. I should feel good about that, but I don't. That's because this episode is just the first of many more hard decisions I'm going to have to make about my daughter's social life, and I'm not relishing it.

The next few years are going to be HARD.

My "Granddaughter"

Yesterday, Megan and I attended another session of her Birds and Bees class.

When the classes began back in February, it looked like we were going to have to miss some of the best -- er, most informative -- sessions. But thanks to conflicts in the presenter's schedule, this course has dragged on so that we got through the last of Megan's meets and didn't have to miss yesterday's talk about conception, labor, and the responsibility people assume when they decide to have sex.

I think my daughter kind of enjoys the class, although it's hard to tell and she would certainly deny it. She sits beside me, rarely looks up, and doodles in her book. (This doesn't bother me, as I am also a habitual doodler and used to get in trouble for it in class -- until my test scores proved to my teachers that I was indeed paying attention.) When the RN instructor first offered the girls a definition of sexual intercourse, most of the other girls in the class winced, but not Megan. I leaned over to her and whispered a question: "Did you already know that?" She nodded yes. Apparently, she actually had bothered to read the book I'd bought her a couple of years ago when she insisted upon finding out where babies come from.

But then the instructor decided to describe other sexual practices (let's just say it's  one a former President didn't think qualified as actual sex -- and the news that this is now all the rage among the junior high set is not making me feel any better about my little girl moving on to middle school next year). "That's disgusting!" my daughter whispered back to me. I'm happy to let her think that way for a long, long time.

The class concluded with the instructor passing out hard boiled eggs, which the girls are to treat as babies for the next week. We had already been asked to bring a "car seat" to class for our "baby." We were also given random pink and blue birth announcements ("Because you're pregnant, you can't choose if it's going to be a girl or a boy," she said.) Megan was very happy to be given a girl.

"You know, if you had been a boy, your dad and I would love you just the same," I told her. Megan said she knew that. But she wanted a girl just the same.

The announcement stated that the "baby" was born on March 25, 2007 at 4:00 AM and that she weighed 7 pounds, 4 ounces. There was also space for Megan to insert her name as the parent and to name the  "baby." Megan dubbed her Scarlett Sapphire Mills.

The announcement also contained the following instructions:

DO's:

• Egg Babies must have a car seat whenever taken out!
• Egg Babies should be tended to every 4 hours (changed, fed & bathed)!
• Where you go, Egg Baby goes (except school). If you participate in after school activities, a baby sitter is required!

DON'TS:

• Never leave your Egg Baby unattended (near animals, alone in car, microwaves or near pets, baby sisters or brothers)!

Upon bringing the egg home, Megan proceeded to draw on a little face, made it a dress out of a paper towel, and a nice bed out of cotton balls in a small glass bowl. She wrapped it in a warm scarf. Then, she accidentally cracked its little "head," after which, she applied a bandage.

She did a good job of feeding, changing and bathing the egg every four hours until she went to bed last night and then again first thing this morning. (Although I did have to explain why a Subway sandwich is not an appropriate meal for a baby -- even a make-believe one made of a hard-boiled egg.) Then, she asked if I would babysit while she's at gym this afternoon.

I'm charging her 25 cents an hour. With all the time she spends there, I could actually make some money.

The Birds and the Bees

My daughter was not happy.

The families of fifth grade students at our synagogue are offered a six-week course called "Rites of Passage," from an outfit called The Birds and the Bees Connection. That's right -- I signed the both of us up to listen to a registered nurse talk about such subjects as puberty, hygiene, reproduction... the whole enchilada.

I was delighted, as this got me off the hook when it comes to starting the conversation. My nearly 11-year-old daughter was dreading it. She breathed a sigh of relief back in November, when there weren't enough girls' families signed up, and it was decided that the boys and their fathers would take the course first. I think she hoped we would never get our chance, much as I think she hopes her lithe little body isn't ever going to change.

Our opportunity came last month. The course organizers partnered us with girls from another temple group, and the first session (for mothers only) was held in January. This was an introduction to the course; we received materials (a book for the parents and a book for the kids), a course outline and scheduling. I discovered that most of the meeting dates coincided with Megan's gymnastics meets, which was not necessarily a problem, as she has a 50-50 chance of competing on Saturday instead of Sunday. Which is how we ended up attending the first mother-daughter session the day after a competition.

Megan was tired and grumpy, and learning about puberty was the last thing she wanted to do that day. In fact, all the 10, 11 and 12-year-olds in the room had the look of someone facing the gallows. I have never seen so many clearly unhappy little girls together in one room. Their miserable little faces were a great contrast to the merry demeanor of their mothers.

The RN who is presenting the course began with some ice breakers to see how well the mothers knew their daughters. (I am proud to say that I did pretty well predicting Megan's answers to questions about her favorite TV shows, etc. The only one I got wrong was about the person she most admired. I said "Carly Patterson" when her newest hero is Nastia Liukin. Close enough.)

For the next exercise, the girls were invited to peruse several flash cards featuring words that might come up in the class, and decide which were important to learn about. Stuff like "shaving," "flossing," "menstruation" and one most of them could not define...

("Honey, Megan learned a new word today... 'erection'." This announcement made my husband wince.)

The class concluded with a video -- a cartoon that depicted the changes a child's body undergoes as it matures. It covered both girl parts and boy parts -- which caused many of the girls to shield their eyes as they watched. They were mortified. The moms remained jolly. After all, we were all off the hook -- now, we all had a basis in which to pursue the topic with our daughters.

The second class was held this past Sunday. Again, Megan was dreading it -- but she at least knew that she had a few friends there, and that they were all in the same boat. This time, the topic was hygiene... menstruation... and women's reproductive organs.

There was a lot of discussion about getting your first period and how to prepare for it. The mothers shared their stories (many told how they got little or no information ahead of time from their own moms). The daughters were more engaged this time; probably because some of them are already dealing with this or have friends who are. It seems more real, and I think it seemed less frightening. Those of us old enough to remember having to wear a belt to hold a pad in place laughed about how horrible it was... and how impossible it is to keep from leaking 100% of the time. I think this was an important point for the girls.

But for me, the most interesting part of the discussion was when we were going over the diagram of a woman's reproductive system. The RN matter-of-factly described sexual intercourse. It was obvious that this was new information to some of the girls (surprisingly, to some of the most mature-behaving ones). I leaned over to my daughter and whispered, "Did you know that already?" She nodded yes. She had actually read the book I'd given her a couple of years ago when she started asking me where babies come from. This was news to me, because whenever I tried to discuss it with her, she told me she had not yet read it.

Megan also learned another new word on Sunday: "orgasm."

My husband is still wincing.