jaimes

So, it’s career week at my son’s pre-k, and the parents are invited to visit the class and do a show and tell on their job. The teachers sent a note home asking us to participate and wear the appropriate uniform/work attire to give the kids a real taste of our profession.

My “profession” is a bit murky and has been since my first kid lured me to quit my job as a technical writer and stay at home with her cuteness. On the school form, I filled in “writer” as my occupation because I have a blog and I do freelance writing from time to time. This prompted the teacher to ask me to read stories to the class every two weeks since I’m familiar with how one writes and tells a story, and presumably I have a lot of time to kill. I like reading the stories. Four year olds are a pretty good audience. I read a story last week about a family of pandas kissing, and they all screamed out ewwwwww in unison.

But when it comes down to career week, my skills are less than demonstrable. Do I show them the Word Press dashboard and wow them with the photo upload feature? Perhaps do a slideshow of my StatCounter stats, such as how many people have found my blog by googling the phrase donka doo balls? Answer: seven.

And to play up the philisophical angle, there’s so much more to us than our professions, anyway, right? I mean I play guitar AND drums. I have jam sessions with neigbhorhood moms. I write songs. I make videos. This, all in addition to maintaining a blog, keeping a clean house and cooking/preparing every meal my family eats daily.

In short, I am awesome. But like a lot of artists, I don’t get paid a whole lot for that creativity sweat shop going on in my head. And like all at-home parents, I don’t get a paycheck for raising my kids DIY style. And I’m not suggesting I should, but wouldn’t that be nice if all parents got a little voucher or something? Especially on really tough days. Like, hey we heard your kid woke up late for school, refused to eat breakfast, insisted on wearing legwarmers on his arms in 98 degree weather, and then after arguing for 10 minutes about it on the way to school finally mentioned it was Wear Legwarmers on Your Arms Day at school: here’s a coupon for a free coffee and doughnut.

But until the doughnut vouchers start rolling in or I start making some serious money as a dream chaser, maybe I’ll just tell the pre-k teachers that I will be there for career day. I’ll wear my uniform, which is rock-n-roll jeans and a tank top, and I will gladly give the kids a demonstration on the art of being awesome. We can make up songs about playground politics, brainstorm on blog posts, maybe discuss the pros and cons of mixing the personal and professional on facebook.

They may not know what they want to do for a living when they grown up, but surely, they all want to be awesome, right? And who knows, maybe allowing themselves to be the creative little creatures they are past preschool will lead to a legitimate career in the arts. It can happen. I’ve read about it and seen it in movies!

We checked out the Grant Park Summer Shade Festival over the weekend. Great little festival in the historic Grant Park neighborhood (also home to the Atlanta Zoo). This was a very family-friendly fest with two stages, one for kids shows and one for the grown-ups.

This is just the kind of festival I love: casual, family friendly, and with ample shade.

Plenty of local artists had booths set up, and there were a few free crafts tables for kids. Devon made an impressive Minnie Pearl style newspaper hat, while Holden went for the pop art angle with a pipe cleaner triangle hat.

All in all, much fun to be had. Atlanta, stop giving me reasons to love you. Seriously.

Holden at Varsity

Dev at Varsity

Devon the hat maker, Devon the fan maker

Franny Cat in a church hat

The kids and I like to play music in the garage/laundry room. We did this a lot over the summer. One day Devon wrote a song called “I Will Never Stop.” So, I asked her and Holden to play it for me and recorded it on video. Holden played drums while Devon sang.

I asked if I could sing in the band, and Devon shook her head no. But, they did ask me to play drums at one point so Holden could sing backup. He taught me the song, then decided that wasn’t a good idea either. So, they kicked me out of the band. And rightly so. Who wants to be in a band with their mom?

I put together a video for the song, “I Will Never Stop” by Devon and Holden, aka Rock Star Band. I’m pretty sure most parents don’t do a mini-documentary the first time one of their kids writes a song, but that’s how we roll in this household.

Star Wars was on TV last night, so we watched a bit with the kids. Here’s the conversation that happened when the kids see Darth Vader enter the scene.

Holden: “Mommy! That black guy is my evil emeny.”

Me: “Do you know the black guy’s name?”

Holden: “Um, no.”

Me: “Darth Vader.”

Holden: “Vart Vader is my evil emeny.”

Me: “Not Vart Vader, Darth Vader.”

Holden: “Dart Laser is my evil emeny.”

Me: “Darth Vader is your evil enemy?”

Holden: “Yeah.”

Devon: “I thought it was Dark Laser.”

Parenthood and poop go together like parenthood and momentary insanity; both are unpleasant but totally routine occurrences, at least in my household. For parents, our kids’ bowel movements are a hot topic from the day they are born. Poop is a big deal to parents. We lose sleep if our kids are constipated. I guarantee your co-worker who just got back from maternity leave is obsessing over whether or not her baby pooped today. We get pissed on and shit on more times than we can count. The first time we laugh. By the 100th time, we do our best to wipe the shit off and hope the people in Chic-fil-a think it’s honey mustard. (more…)