Reviewing goals and growth in 2018

   Happy New Year’s Eve! Yay, this year is over!

   For 2018, I had taken a challenge from the Happier podcast and made “18 Goals for 2018.” That sounds daunting, but it wasn’t that hard to think of that many things I would like to change and/or experience. I even kept that blog post as an open window on my phone so I could check it every month or two when I started to feel restless. I probably should have checked it more often, and even better, planned specific goals that I wanted to target each month or developed steps for making things a habit, but the basement renovation took up a lot more of my time and mental energy than I wanted it to. (So did the kids!) But without reviewing the list, I’d say we got a lot done this year, and I was quite happy with our progress.
   But for the record:

   1.  Have 1 date night per month. Success! We probably hit 10/12 for this one. In the world of parenting, that means we hit a homerun.

Us on a date night for Josh's birthday in July. I'm eating poutine!

   2.  Have 1 Carrie Day per month. Fail! I did it for January through May, but then the basement renovation got in full swing, plus Josh has to mow both lawns all summer, AND he tends to have a heavier work schedule because other people are taking off on vacation and he’s the one who fills in for them, so I didn’t want to take him away from responsibilities when he did have off work. Big mistake. Josh helped turn December around with a two-night trip away with the kids. For 2019, I’m making this a priority, lawns be buggered.

   3.  Buy a new watch. Success! I spent a long time on it, and when I ordered it and it came, it felt bigger than I expected because my wrists are small, but I like it. I don’t wear it every day because so much of time is washing my hands and cooking, but I wear it when I want, especially when I’m teaching, and I love it!

   4.  Try a new exercise class. Success! I kind of cheated here. My barre instructor told us she was going to miss a class one week but that her friend Bethany would teach in her place. I waffled over it, but went because I thought it would be a less intimidating way to try it out. Well, Bethany came the next week and had no intention of teaching barre class. She immediately told us that she would be teaching her “Butts and Guts” class, and it KILLED me. Or maybe half of it did. But I survived, and crossed this off my list.

   5.  Simplify our junk and sell our unused stuff. Meh. I think we’re 75% of the way there. We sold furniture, our DSL camera, and our old radiators that we weren’t going to use in the basement. We still have to clear out the office and the attic, but then we should be done.

   6.  Clean out all our closets. Success for me! Josh and the kids were gone for a day and the first thing I did, to kill time for an hour before my barre class, was to organize my closet. I got rid of a handful of pieces of clothing that I don’t really like, old empty shopping bags, and organized Christmas gifts that I had bought but not wrapped yet. I also cleaned out Knox’s closet, which had all my craft stuff and our old VHS tapes (dumped them in the trash without reading labels so there would be no time for second thoughts). Josh still needs to do his closet, and he needs to do Rye’s closet, because that’s where he keeps his overflow stuff.

   7.   Remodel the basement! Success! We are 95% done, and should be at 100 percent in two weeks! I already posted that the project was done here, but there was this last back room, the mud room as we’re calling it, that still needed to be finished. Scott came back a week and a half before Christmas and got it restructured, drywall up, and mudded, and half the wood floor down, but took a break for the holidays. Once he’s done, the electrician will come back and finish off the outlets and can lights and that room (the old laundry room for those who remember) will be as beautiful as the rest of the basement, minus an awkward bulkhead that had to be put in to conceal a waste drain line.

   8.  Give a purpose to our back porch room. Success! This is also at 90%! I started painting after Thanksgiving, and it’s a beautiful peachy-pink color called “Perfection” (if you’re choosing between “Apricot Ice” and “Perfection,” wouldn’t you choose “Perfection?”). Scott also got the wood floor in, and now all it needs is floor trim and window trim, and then I can finally move my desk in there! I am SOOOOOO excited about this!

   9.   Teach Rye to read. Success! He’s at the stage we’re he’s reading small groups of words here and there, and does great reading the lessons in his “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons” book, but he’s still really resistant to read actual books. I know that’s because of confidence, and teacher friends keep telling us not to push too hard, let him go at his own pace.

   10.  Write for fun. Fail! I did not do any personal writing this year, except for this blog, which I’m pretty happy with. I try to post monthly, and achieved 11 with this one. That’s actually not too bad.

   11.  Pursue publishing. Fail! I did nothing in this direction. But a friend of mine who wants to be a publisher really enjoyed my first children’s book and is still planning to help me.  

   12.  Lead my book club through a book. Fail! I led my fair share of book club sessions as a substitute, but I didn’t choose a book and lead it. And I’m perfectly OK with that.

   13.  Keep up with my relationships that rely on letters. Fail! I didn’t do any of this. And it’s not like I called those people more either. I had a pretty out-of-touch year. And when you see the other people don’t put in any effort either, it starts to make you think maybe it’s time just to let that relationship go, or just be what it is and not make it more.  

   14.  Ride a bike. Meh. I rode a bike once, on a two-night trip Josh and I took to Easton. I really wanted to take my own bike but it was too complicated, and the inn did have bikes you could borrow. We totally staked our claim on the bikes first thing that morning and it was fun riding down the old rail trail in town. But I wish I had done it more than once for the whole year.

   15.  Start having regular family dinners. Meh. I’d give us a “B” on this. We did get Josh’s family together for a “Second Sunday” dinner on the months when we had no other holiday that would have gotten us together that month. But the communication wasn’t so good on these. I think people totally forgot about them after our family vacation in September. Maybe there’s a better way to do this.

   16.  Take a class in something. Fail! I just didn’t take time to research what was out there, and honestly, I just like learning things so it wouldn’t have mattered too much what it actually was. The intention was to take some sort of creative class, because I've learned how to crochet, do stained glass, and make homemade soap via classes. On the other hand, I did crochet 3 baby blankets this year, so that was good, and when Josh took the kids away for two nights in December, I made these cross-stitch on wood ornaments from kits I got at Jo-Ann Fabrics. They were fun and cute.

    17.  Use my Instant Pot once a week. Meh. I didn’t use it to make dinner once a week every week, but I did get in a pretty good routine of making homemade yogurt once a week. It doesn’t use the pressure cooking feature, but it does keep it at the perfect temperature consistently for 12 hours, and since I eat yogurt for breakfast 5 days a week, I’m probably getting yogurt for 1/10^th of the cost of stores. Plus there’s the pride of being able to say I’m making my own yogurt.

   18.  Be more present. Meh. I’ve decided this is not something I want to do. A lot of times, the current situation is tiring, repetitive, frustrating, infuriating…you get the picture. What’s wrong with looking ahead to better things?

   Okay, for those keeping score, that was 7 successes, 6 failures and 5 mehs. But the 7 successes were pretty big ones. Of the failures, only 3 would I put on a list for next year (monthly Carrie Days, writing for fun more, and taking a class in something), and the mehs are half things that I’d like to pursue more and half that I don’t really care about.

  

   Now I need to start thinking of goals for 2019. I’m giving myself to Jan. 19 to complete my list. What are some of your goals for 2019? I’d love to hear some more ideas!

Holiday blues

I have not been feeling the Christmas spirit this year.

It started pretty far back. Two weeks before Thanksgiving (which I hosted for the first time ever, quite successfully, I might add), I was already telling Josh that we didn’t need to worry about getting our Christmas tree during Thanksgiving weekend. Josh was kind of stunned. Growing up, my family ALWAYS got our Christmas tree Thanksgiving weekend, on Black Friday, if I remember correctly, and I am always so antsy to get our Christmas tree as soon as Thanksgiving has passed. It’s my favorite Christmas tradition, closely followed by baking oodles of Christmas cookies and putting them in my grandmother’s cookie tins. And while Josh and I usually worked on Black Friday before we had the kids, we would be at the tree farm on Thanksgiving Saturday by 10 a.m. to beat all the other slackers (in my opinion, or early birds, in Josh’s opinion) to pick out our tree. 

But this year we were hosting two events during Thanksgiving weekend, and attending another one in between those two, and trying to fit the tree in there seemed too ambitious. So we got the tree the next weekend, but we still weren’t in a hurry to decorate it. We didn’t bring our Christmas CDs down from storage until Friday. We haven’t watched any Christmas movies. I didn’t bake any cookies until Saturday when I had a party to take them to. (We ended up not going to two Christmas parties this weekend because of a stomach bug.) And I’m still only halfway done my shopping with a week left until Christmas.

And then there are Christmas cards. Last year Josh said that he doesn’t like sending out photo Christmas cards with just the kids’ pictures because he wants us all to be on there as a family. He said he was willing to pay for a family portrait session, but I wasn’t feeling it this year (I’m extremely non-photogenic even when I DO feel like I can naturally smile) and he didn’t bring it up so it fell to the wayside. In fact, I decided I didn’t want to send any Christmas cards at all, because I don’t feel like writing in them, and I make a point to write an actual individual message to each recipient. Remember, before Christmas cards were personal photos, they had WORDS that communicated MESSAGES to the people we sent them to? As a words person, that part is kind of important to me.

I felt like all I could write this year was “We’re still alive. Love, The Knauers.” But then our cat Pansy died, so I felt like I’d have to make it “We’re still alive (except Pansy). Love, The Knauers.” But that’s not really the cheery sentiment people want to see in a Christmas card. Although if I received a card like that, I would probably laugh out loud.

I’ve just been “glum” lately. I’m choosing that word because it sounds like gum that you’ve already stepped in. I might not seem bad to you, because I’m extremely goal-oriented and able to accomplish many things even in depression. I believe strongly in forward motion. In fake-it-till-you-make-it. In “And this too shall pass.” But as many a person has expressed before, those things don’t seem to work during the holidays.

A friend suggested I might need a Carrie Day to take a break, and I admitted I had not had a Carrie Day since May. Sure, there were a couple of days where I asked Josh if he could watch the kids while I went for a pedicure or ran more than two errands at once, and he said “take your time, enjoy yourself,” but every time I leave the house, I feel there’s a stopwatch counting down how long I’ve been gone. I’m wondering if Josh is getting the kids down for nap on time, and predicting the hell that will be experienced around 5:30 p.m. if they don’t actually get a nap.

I had a mini break-down some time before Thanksgiving, and I told Josh that during my next Carrie Day, should I ever have one, I planned to drive to West Virginia for the day because I feel like I need to be THAT far away in order to not feel pressured to come home. Josh is amazing. He seriously told me to take Thanksgiving Sunday and go book myself a night in a hotel, in West Virginia if need be, and not come back until I was ready Monday. But I couldn’t do that at the holidays. Not to mention that most businesses are closed Sundays and Mondays so I would probably be eating meals in a Burger King and looking through windows of cute shops that I can't go in. I thought about doing something close to home by myself, this wreath-decorating class at a local winery I enjoy, but I didn’t want to do it enough to commit.

And so this weekend I broke down again. Josh offered me a Carrie Day—even better, a two-night trip that he and the kids are going to take without me to his mom so I can just BE. This feels much more acceptable than me taking a trip somewhere by myself (though that might be a 2019 goal, I just need some time to give myself permission for it). I already had three social events planned during that time, but I will be completely in control of my schedule, my comings and goings, my ratio of seeing other people to being alone. If Josh doesn't get the kids down for nap, it will be his hell to experience, not mine. I will be able to live like no one is waiting to interrupt my every thought or task. And like Carrie Bradshaw said in an episode of “Sex in the City,” if I want to stand at the kitchen counter looking at fashion magazines eating jelly on saltines, I can. Though my preference is ice cream for breakfast and watching a movie any time I want, even if I only watch part of it. I can play music as loud as I want in the car, and no two year old is going to tell me “I don’t like this song.” No five year old is going to have a 45-minute fight with me about not wanting to drink his milk. And practically, I can get out all the stocking stuffers I’ve bought and see if the stockings are going to be full or not. And wrap presents while watching “Pride and Prejudice” and not need to be done by the time nap time is over.

I thought I was going to review my “18 for 2018” list in this post, but I’m going to save that for later. I hope you’re having a better than "just alive" holiday, and if not, know you’re not alone.

All the space

You guys, the basement is DONE! We have moved in! It feels like the available space in our house has almost doubled!

The official last day of work was Nov. 2, when our contractor (whom we LOVE) Scott of Nailed It Improvement came and hung the doors I had stained in the doorways to the storage closet and boiler room, put the door knobs and door pulls on all the doors, and his assistant went around doing touch up paint. It was weird saying goodbye, like we should have a grand finale moment when confetti and balloons fall out of the ceiling (but the ceiling is only 6’4”) and all our friends and family show up and congratulate us on how good it looks. The truth is that the place had looked mostly-done for over a month and was waiting for Josh and I to finish the doors that we had found in our attic, so the final day was not a “grand reveal.” But getting those last touches completed meant we could finally clean out all the tools and extra supplies and bring the kids’ stuff down.

We had actually moved the first cubbies down in the middle of October — I was just sick of looking at them in the upstairs study where much of our excess furniture was being stored during the renovations. Oct. 29, we took the couches and TV stand down, knowing that Scott should be coming back any day to hang the last doors. The next day, we brought one more cubby down, and then the next day, another, and that weekend I moved all the toys from the first floor to the downstairs. It makes it look like our kids have a lot of toys, but it also looks very calming because the cubbies aren’t over-stuffed. I’ll also soon see what toys never get moved out of their cubbies, and those shall be disappearing once the new Christmas toys arrive.

On Nov. 5, our new rug pad arrived, which allowed me to move a rug in Rye’s room that I had bought 9 years ago down to the “play” area of the playroom. This rug is 9 feet by 6 feet — an awkward size that wasn’t quite big enough for our living room — and had been relegated to the upstairs right after I bought it. 

But it fit the new playroom space perfectly, and once I convinced Rye to let me have it back (he gets sentimental about a lot of things, like a true packrat), I could move onto buying one more rug for the toy storage area, mostly to keep the kids from ridiculously denting up the floor by the cubbies and provide a softer ground for the other main area I expect they will be playing in. The perfect rug for that area would be 5 by 6 feet, but those don’t exist. At first I bought two rugs that were 3 by 5 feet intending to put them adjacent to each other to make a 5 by 6 rug, and since they were the last two in stock, I wasn’t too worried that they wouldn’t be from the same dye lot. But when they arrived they looked awful together — one was somewhere between maroon and brick and the other was sort of a cayenne red. This photo does not do the color difference justice.

So I had to settle for this 5 by 5 foot rug, which I let Knox help pick out and he’s pretty proud of that. I like it, but I like the way the red one looked like ropes because I’m going for a subtle nautical theme since the sconces look like portholes and you’re in a basement, which is underground and it can feel the same as being underwater. But blue arrows are nice enough.

As for the couch area, we already had the two couches in our possession (read: we didn’t have to buy furniture post-renovation!) and they fit in their prospective spots that I had imagined and only casually measured for. The tan couch was my sister-in-law’s couch, which she had replaced in the spring and I quickly and shamelessly had asked what she would be doing with once her new couch came in. We had to pick it up months before the basement was finished, or really started, and then awkwardly fit it in our first floor living room, but it kind of made the space seem more cozy, even if a little more cramped. Now it’s found its new home. And the leather loveseat we had purchased 9 years ago for our “upstairs study,” the room that is now Knox’s, where the loveseat had a hope chest as its coffee table and then our TV stand that we had bought from IKEA for our first apartment in Reisterstown to hold our secondary TV, which was not connected to cable or the internet, but to our VCR and old DVD player and Josh’s PS2. We might have sat there twice together and watched a movie. So that TV stand was also moved down to the basement, again, saving us a ton of money, though it fits awkwardly and I’m looking for a used corner TV stand, a petite one, everywhere I get a chance. I’ll find the right one sooner or later. Sadly, IKEA doesn’t make a single corner TV stand. I suppose it’s because everyone wall-mounts their TVs now, and you can’t do that on a corner.

My laundry room is delightfully big and bright, but still a little sparse. I want to find a classy way to store my laundry detergent—perhaps in one of those glass lemonade dispensers?—but I have not executed that yet. I’m not sure if I want a floating shelf over the washer and dryer or not. 

Notice my little stool that I use to reach tiny children’s socks stuck to the bottom of my gigantic washer? Knox also likes to stand there and watch through the glass lid at the clothes swishing back and forth at a soapy jamboree. I did purchase my first piece of art in my laundry room, you know, so I have something to look at while I drink wine and fold laundry (that sounds a little dangerous, I better stick to whites only). I had been looking at this painting since summer, and finally pulled the trigger on it two weeks ago. I found it on Etsy and looking at it, I immediately thought “that looks like the Eastern Shore.” And “shore” enough, the artist live in Salisbury and paints a ton of beautiful Maryland landscapes. And she’s the mother of a 3- and a 5-year-old, and calls herself TheNapTimeArtist, so God bless her for getting any paintings done!

I plan to buy more art but don’t want to rush it. I’m also at a weird junction, where I look at a lot of art and think “22-year-old Carrie would have LOVED that.” But 38-year-old Carrie? She’s a little more of a snob. Besides, I’m trying to be less impulsive anyway and make sure I really love something before I buy it. When I see the right art, I’ll know it.

So with the basement renovation, we have gained an extra 600 or so square feet of LIVING space to our basement. Before, it was just storage and a laundry room that looked like you would lure someone there to murder them.

But what’s even MORE exciting, is that we also are gaining back all the space of the second floor bedroom that has been the office/playroom-that-was-never-ever-played-in! That’s the biggest bedroom upstairs (we took the second biggest bedroom as the master because we converted the old 2^nd floor kitchen into a master bath and walk-in-closet — two things we couldn’t achieve in the biggest bedroom) and our plan is to move Knox into that space over the next few months. The room needs to be repainted, so I’m toying with the idea of waiting until Knox is potty trained so that the freshly painted room won’t get stunk up with dirty diaper smell. Knox is 2 and 5 months, and Rye was potty trained at 2 and 7 months. Knox hadn’t been that interested in potty-training, until I told him you get an M&M for every time you use the potty, and then he wanted to try it right away. I think after Christmas I will start putting real effort into this venture.

And then once Knox moves into the big bedroom (Rye is keeping his bedroom, the 3^rd biggest one, because he has about a dozen real road signs mounted to the walls and we’re not moving them), then Knox’s current room, the tiny one over the foyer, will become Josh’s office. For the past year, Josh has been using his desk in the dining room, which is OK for using the computer, but has led to unsightly papers stacking up on both his desk and half our dining table. I will be so happy to have that situation rectified! Plus we will then have access to the attic stairs in that room at all times—right now we’re limited to when Knox is not sleeping in his room.

And we’re working on gaining one MORE extra working space—the back porch room off the dining room! This 5 by 7 foot room was made livable last year when we installed a heater to it (mostly to keep the pipes in the space above, which is the master bathroom, from freezing). Scott had installed the drywall but we told him not to waste his time finishing it off, we would get to it later when he did the basement. But then we filled that room up with a ton of shelves from our basement once the big reno started, and there wasn’t space to keep working on the back porch room. So I asked my dad if he could finish it off, and over the weekend I did the final sanding. I plan to get it primed by Thanksgiving so that my father, the perfectionist, won’t want to do a fifth coat of spackle.

Then Scott will come back and install the base trim and window trim and I can move my desk in! I’m really excited about this, because then I can get my laptop out of the kitchen, I’ll be able to store my school books and papers on my desk out of view, and I can WORK in there while the kids are watching their afternoon video and I can SHUT THE DOOR and have a little peace and quiet! Eventually this room will be a vestibule to a back screened in porch (I’m seriously going to live in this house until I die, everybody), but that’s at least two years away, so until then, it will be mine, all mine. I might paint it a terribly girly color to keep all boys out.

As for how successful the plan is of getting the kids to PLAY in their new playroom, they’re taking to it more and more each day. Often they insist that I go down with them, and I do go down and help establish what game we’ll be playing, then I say “I have to go upstairs and get my coffee” or “let me go check that chicken in the oven” and I just don’t come back until someone is crying. Pretty much every play session ends in crying, or twice it has ended in Rye running upstairs trying to hold back giggles as he says “Knox put his hand in the toilet,” but that’s not what I want to think about right now. Sigh.

But even if the kids still are a little resistant to use it, particularly in the morning when they just want to stay in the first floor living room and have us read them books and fight over ridiculous things like who can have the most links of a broken plastic chain that Rye brought home from his grandmother’s house from some plant hanger…the weight of the basement being unfinished, and undecided, and unused, is GONE. It is no longer a mental burden, and is quite the opposite — a feast for the eyes. I’m way more willing to go down there and sweep up dust and stray blades of grass because it’s still so stinking perfect. I know it’s not going to last. Someone, either the kids or a neighborhood kid, is going to put a footprint on the wall or run into a wall corner and dent it or something, but for now, it’s perfect.

I hope you get to come by and see it soon!

Just hoping I'm not on RateMyTeachers.com

As of last week, I have now taught four classes of English 9 Writing. It’s still kind of weird, but every week I look forward to it, so that’s a good sign.

My first class went pretty well. I was on day 3 of a raging headache, and while that kept me from crafting my “teacher persona” and how I planned to carry myself and act around the students, it also prevented me from having time to get stressed out. I just focused on getting through the outlined lesson plan from last year’s teacher (who is also my department chair—a little intimidating!) and not squinting in pain.

I forgot what 9^th graders are like, and this group of six is pretty delightful. Within the first 5 minutes, I felt like I had their personalities pegged. I used to love high school movies, or rather, I do still love the high school movies of my day (Heathers, Breakfast Club, Jawbreaker, Can’t Hardly Wait, 10 Things I Hate About You, the TV show My So-Called Life…), but I’ve watched some of the modern high school movies and they don’t hit that same soft spot in me.

But, out of my love of high school movies of the 80s and 90s, I really wanted to write about my students and what I learned about them. I wrote it all up, giving them pseudonames to protect their identities, but my legal staff recommended I not put that up online. (One mom is already giving me dirty looks because her daughter isn't doing so well.) But if you would still like to read it, email me and I will send you an addendum. J

The hardest part of my job is the grammar. I seriously have not been taught the formalities of grammar since the 4^th grade, when I was in Catholic school. I know AP style, and even MLA to a degree, but not the technical names of everything in grammar. I know what sounds right, and what’s wrong, even if I can’t name the reason why it’s wrong, and I think that’s what it really matters in life. But maybe not what matters as an English teacher. This school teaches grammar all along, but 9^th grade is the beginning of when things start to get less formal. So I told my class that—hey, you kids that have had grammar for 8 years before this, that’s great, but now that you understand it, just start using it and we’ll stop drilling you about it. New kids, I’m sorry, but there are still some exercises in the homework that are going to be pretty hard for you if you don’t know what a participial phrase is, but just read the page about it BEFORE doing the exercises on the next page and you’ll probably get them right.

How do I know? Because I’m doing those exercises, too. We teachers do not get a teacher’s manual. I have the same version of Warriner’s “English Composition and Grammar” that they do, and I do the homework a week before them (or rather, two nights before class) and then I review it with them. Some of this is really hard! The hardest is when I know my answer is right, but they have a different answer and I’m not 100 percent sure if their answer is wrong. Usually I reach out to Josh or friends that I think are good at grammar. (If you are technically good at grammar—and I mean you know the names of all the parts of speech and the rules that govern them—let me know and I’ll add you to my list.)

The first week of school, I told the students that it’s been years since I’ve had grammar and that I’m learning it right beside them, so if they ever think I’m wrong, please speak up because I very well may be wrong. But they must not have been listening, because on week 3 there was a question in the homework that I could not figure out, so I called on my best grammar student to see if she got it, and she didn’t, so then I offered extra credit to whoever (or is it whomever?) could figure that one out by next week. Then about 5 minutes later, the student asked, “So do you not have the answers?” And I said, “No, I have the same textbook as you, and I have to do the homework too to know the answers.” And all of their jaws dropped. They asked if I wasn’t sure that the answers weren’t in the back, or that maybe they had given me the wrong book, or maybe I could find the teacher’s manual on eBay, and I said no, this is the way it is, and I’m OK with that. Well that earned me a ton of respect. I left that day feeling so happy that they now had a concrete reason to like me. (Because I’m not sure if they like me. I think they like that I’m usually done 5 to 10 minutes early, but I also think they think I’m too-tough of a grader.)

Grammar is just part of the class, the other part is writing. We have two textbooks for writing, the first one that basically elaborates on the five paragraph essay, and the other that focuses on the progymnasmata, or the ancient Greek method of progressing through different writing tasks with logic. I’ve never had logic before, and it’s really awkward. I see how this would be helpful to a budding lawyer, but I don’t get how these kids are supposed to use it in normal life. But the textbook pulls a lot of examples from newspapers, so I guess I was writing with logic without even knowing it.

I still don’t know if I’ve developed my teacher persona. I let tangents go on longer than I want to. One day we had an excellent tangential conversation when not two, but THREE students finished the sentence “________________ is better than going to the dentist” with “going to the doctor is better than going to the dentist.” They were supposed to be writing a sentence with parallel structure, and three females thought going to the doctor is better than going to the dentist, the boy thought that was crazy because bad things can happen at the doctor’s office too and they could have used anything they wanted to start that sentence, and one girl said she loves going to the dentist and the feeling of metal in her mouth. I don’t think I’ll ever look at her the same way. Another problem I have is when one student is whispering to another, conversationally, and I don’t know how to stop them. I mean, I guess I say, “could you please pay attention,” but I think this week I’m going to have to do something bigger about it.

It took me a couple of months to develop my “reporter persona” and I suppose teaching will be the same way. I’m kind of looking at this whole year as a trial year, but I’m hoping we like the school for Rye and that I can keep teaching this class next year because I will already have done all the homework and have all the answers—boo-ya! Next year will be a snap! It will be nothing but grading homework and showing up for an hour a week, and grading homework is kind of my favorite part. Did I ever tell you that if we were super wealthy and had no heirs, I wanted to give our money away through essay contests? And I wouldn’t have just given the money to the best one; I would have critiqued every essay and told them how much they suck.

The other part of teaching that I’m still working out is how to dress. Teachers are told to dress “business casual,” and it specifically states no jeans. When I retired from being a fulltime journalist, I threw all my work pants away. Except the jeans I probably wore 3 days a week. I had kept one pair of khakis that I recently tried on, and while I’m thinner now than I was then, I should never have bought them in the first place because the leg width is far too wide for my short stature. And then I have 8 pairs of blue jeans, 1 pair of white jeans and 1 pair of black jeans, and 2 pairs of jean-cut corduroys that I’m wondering whether I can get away with or not. I went shopping at the mall in August and tried on 3 pairs of pants, and I couldn’t do it. I’m not going to buy pants I hate just to fit the once a week expectation of dressing up. I have 2 dresses I can wear, and 1 skirt (my other 2 skirts are also denim). The first two weeks I paid close attention to what the others teachers are wearing, and honestly, no one looks very comfortable in their clothes. A lot of them looked like they also wrangled something up from the back of their closet that they had forgotten about and are wearing them now just to fit the bill. And I don’t want to be like that. So I plan to very carefully purchase a few more items that I can mix in with my nice tops so that I can look comfortable and BE comfortable in my clothing skin. I did buy a cute pair of tan leather ballet flats that I love and which should go with any outfit. That was my reward to myself for making it through my first day of teaching.

Rye is really liking the school too. I think it’s the perfect amount of busy for him the two days he’s there, with lessons in handwriting, geography, history, poetry, science, Latin and art or music, depending on the day. And the days at home are a good balance of chill to all that. We haven’t been very formal about our homeschooling at home, but we try to fit in a reading lesson from “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons” five days a week, including weekends if we have to, and we’re just starting to incorporate some math on those days too. It’s hard to balance the normal stuff of life, and Knox’s demands for attention, with homeschooling, but we’re also big fans of “unschooling.” Unschooling is basically explaining stuff to your kids all day long and answering their questions with true and thorough information. And Rye is a child of passion. Once he’s interested in a topic, he wants to know EVERYTHING about it, and who’s to say his knowledge of brands of excavators or construction demarcation aren’t important? I mean, it’s not what I would CHOOSE to fill that little sponge of a brain of his up with, but a brain that operates like that probably has more nooks and crannies in it than I could ever imagine.

Thanks for everyone who has asked about my teaching and wished me well! I have so much more respect for teachers now, and particularly NEW teachers, who despite all that schooling, are probably learning a heck of a lot on the job as each situation arises. And I guess I respect longer-careered teachers for not getting burnt-out.

And for you grammar nerds, here’s the one that stumped us:

Combine these two sentences using a noun clause: “The wheel was invented long ago. Exactly when is still unknown.”

Preparing to go back to school ... to the other side of the podium

Many of you know that Josh and I have been wrestling over whether to homeschool our kids. With Rye having turned 5 back in the spring, this was the year we had to make a real decision and take steps in our chosen direction.

First, some background. Josh grew up homeschooling from 5th through 9th grades. He went to a private Christian school before that, and public high school (where we met) after that. His older brothers went to a combination of private school and public school. His younger sister almost completely homeschooled.

I went to private Catholic school from 1st through 5th grade, when my family lived in Baltimore City, mostly because it was safe and the most affordable private school (I was not being raised Catholic but my father was, and he and his four siblings had attended the same school). After my parents moved us to rural Harford County, I went to good old North Harford Middle School and North Harford High School. I saw no “problems” with public school, merely that it was mostly a waste of time. Homework was busywork and easy, so why not just do it and get it over with? And as for tests and things like AP classes, my theory was to study just enough to get the low A/high B. I was all about return on investment. A 90 and a 100 all turn out the same on a transcript. Besides, I liked reading books, and writing, and had jobs in high school, so it’s not like I was sitting around and smoking pot and playing video games. I actually did have better things to be doing with my time.

After we married and had  discussions about hypothetical children, Josh told me he would like us to homeschool our children. I agreed—I was feeling pretty burnt out on daily newspaper journalism and liked the idea of staying home, plus I thought the majority of the school day was a big waste of time, and I pictured our kids would be little geniuses who just wanted to read books too. Self-learners, really. Heck, the most important thing I could teach them was how to cook dinner, and then I’d really have it easy.

And as for the whole stereotype that homeschool kids are weird, as a reporter who covered lots of kid stories I had met a decent number of homeschooled children, including many through the 4-H program. They didn’t seem weird at all—they seemed smart, and enjoyed talking with adults and looked you in the eye like an equal. Sometimes they had passionate interests, which some people might perceive as weird, but I’ll take a passionate kid over one that just answers every question with an “I don’t know” or “fine.”

Fast-forward a few years into actually becoming parents. I gave up my fulltime job and was freelancing 2 articles a week in the beginning, sometimes more. Then Rye’s nap schedule became less predictable, and I got a new boss who I wasn’t getting along with, and by the time I was pregnant with Knox, I decided the low pay wasn’t worth the frustration and stress so I cut back to just writing my weekly food column. Around this time, Rye became more challenging as well. I still don’t know if it was that a switch was flipped when Knox was born, or if it would have happened anyway as his little personality continued to emerge and evolve, but suddenly Rye and I were butting heads over the stupidest things. He would do it to Josh too, though Josh, in his ability to work outside of the home, frequently got to walk away from a situation before it got out of control. I don’t have that luxury. And you may wonder why a parent would even bother wasting time arguing with a preschooler, but if you just ignore their bizarre assertions (this one isn’t real because I’m having a hard time coming up with one on the spot but let’s say “it never rains on Thursdays,”), they think they’re always right and have a false understanding of the world. I know Rye isn’t the only preschooler to act like this (the YouTube series “Convos with my 2-year-old” comes to mind), but I’d say 75 percent of the day’s conversations were these nonsense arguments, and the other 25 percent were him asking the same questions over and over again, like “what’s your favorite road sign?”

By the time Rye was turning 4, I was pretty sure I’d rather work full-time cleaning toilets than homeschool him. Josh kept ignoring my declarations of “there’s no way in hell I’m going to homeschool,” instead talking about how much he was going to grow up by the time we actually had to make a decision. Except I realized in December of his 4-year-old preschool year that all private schools do their open houses and start enrollment in January. Shit. We had to make up our minds.

My one glimmer of hope for homeschooling was Christiana Homeschool Academy, right here in Westminster, which one set of friends had sent their oldest daughter to for preschool and kindergarten. This is not a homeschool group or a traditional homeschool co-op, where parents take turns leading weekly one or two sessions on a particular school subject or just have playdates at the park or reserve programs at the nature center together. This was run like a private school, but at a serious fraction of the cost, and uses paid parents and outsiders as tutors, and the best part, the kids go for two whole days a week (8:30 to 3:30). For elementary school, parents teach their kids reading and math on their own, and all other subjects are covered on the in-school days. What other classes are there? Um, how about science, history, art, music, grammar and LATIN! Even in preschool they start learning Latin. And the kids wear uniforms, which make it feel even more official. From the outside, it was kind of hard to understand how it worked, but I was clinging onto it as my lifeline, our compromise to homeschooling.

The first week in January, we went to an open house where we were one of five sets of parents, and we got a real feel for the school. And I was way more impressed than I had expected! The school teaches a “classical education,” which divides children’s stages of learning into grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. Basically this means that in the first stage you teach your kids to memorize stuff and don’t worry about whether they understand; in the second stage the kids try out those ideas and prove they understand them; and finally they use that information to form their own thoughts and ideas. At Christiana, they also learn the history of the world, taking 4 years to make it through all parts of the world, repeating the cycle 3 times and going deeper each time. I really like that, because my public school education was so American-centric. And we are such a young country.

And the staff that we met just had the perfect vibe about them. Considering this is kind of like a private school, I was afraid it was going to feel stuffy, and that the staff would be braggy, and the parents snobbish. But the vibe we got from everyone was that they want to promote individuality in learning, and that they take teaching very seriously, but there’s no need to brag about their school or try to convince us to come there. There was an unspoken “here’s what we have to offer, does that fit in with how you are raising your child?” We left with the registration packet in hand, and personally, I was a little concerned that there are only 12 slots per grade and would we be able to get Rye in? The school has a preschool and I would assume all of them would be going to kindergarten (that is, if they hadn’t failed Latin), and I wanted to make sure we got one of those 12 spots.

In March, we started the registration process and put down the deposit. But because of Rye’s doctor’s appointments that were leading us toward the diagnosis of his osteoid osteoma, we had to put off the formal interview twice. When Rye and I finally sat down with the headmaster (that makes sounds like a boarding school!), Rye did quite well and I felt at ease. And then the headmaster looked over our family background and noticed that I had been a professional writer for 11 years. Was there a reason why I wasn’t interested in being a tutor (teacher) at the school? After all, tutors get paid and they even offer onsite childcare for younger siblings for a whopping $1 per hour. I kind of brushed it off, saying that with a 2-year-old who still naps midday and needs to wait another year before preschool, it just didn’t seem like it would work for our family. But then he pointed out that just because you tutor a class doesn’t mean you have to tutor all day. You can take on one class or as many classes as you are interested in doing. “And in fact, I happen to know that the 9^th grade writing position will be open next year, and that only meets once a week.” Suddenly I felt all tingly inside. I told him I would think about it and let him know if I had reconsidered my stance on tutoring for this school year.

The more I thought about it the more it seemed like a great idea. I’ve been getting a bit restless with the stay-at-home mom routine, speaking only to people aged 6 and under. I had been hoping a pharmacy position would come open for Josh so he would stop floating and have a set schedule, thus allowing me to get a one-day a week job (yeah, this isn’t about rebooting my career or making money, just buying me some freedom and an opportunity to interact with adults). But Josh doesn’t want to stop floating, and it seemed really unlikely that I could get a one-day a week job anyway. Working one hour a week—that sounded pretty amazing! And while the tutor position doesn’t pay too much, it would cover about 2/3 of Rye’s tuition. I was pretty intimidated by the teaching aspect of the job, but I was assured that you are handed a binder of the last year’s tutor’s lesson plans and materials, and while it’s not quite a script, you are not operating in the dark either. Within a week, I emailed the headmaster that we were officially accepting Rye’s acceptance into the school, and that I was interested in being the 9^th grade writing teacher. He responded that he would pass the news onto the department chair and that tutor assignments would be made in the first week of June.

But I didn’t hear back from him during the first week of June. Or the second week. Or the third. Somewhere in there I emailed again to see if the class had been assigned to someone else, and he said no, but that the department chair had some concerns that I was new to the school and writing is kind of one of the harder areas to step into in the high school years and catch up with the system the school uses to teach writing (Institute for Excellence in Writing). But he said that considering my background, and the fact that I would only be tutoring one child at home—and a kindergartener at that—he thought I could handle it and he would restate my interest to the department chair.

Again, nothing. Until July 11, suddenly I got an email asking if I was still interested, and if so, could I attend the new tutor training on July 18? I had given up hope on the opportunity, and had that nervous excited feeling all over again. I quickly emailed back that I was still interested, but that 1) I would have to miss the new tutor training because that was Knox’s birthday and we had a birthday outing planned for that day, and 2) I would have to miss the first day of school because we’ll be on vacation. (P.S.—don’t tell Rye he’s missing the first day of school. I think his structured personality wouldn’t like that, and there’s really no reason he needs to worry about missing the first day of kindergarten in a school with one kindergarten teacher and 12 kids in the class.) The headmaster responded that those situations weren’t ideal, but totally workable. Oh, and the class is at 2:30 on Wednesdays (perfect because school gets out at 3:30, so no extra trips back and forth) and has just 6 kids. I don’t think those specifics could have been any better. As scary as it was to accept the position, I truly feel like it was God’s plan.

So guys, I’m going to be a teacher! I never wanted to be a teacher, even when I was excited about homeschooling, but I still feel like this is a great opportunity. I like that it’s 9^th graders—the most humble of high school students. It’s just about writing, not literature. This is the point in the school where they transition away from strict grammar memorization and exercises (confession: I never was taught how to diagram a sentence!) and their homework is more writing exercises, like writing opening and concluding paragraphs on an essay they never actually write the meat of. (And that I never have to read and grade the meat of either!) I met with last year’s tutor and got her lesson plan book from her, and while I fear I’m going to feel like a substitute teacher the whole year, the headmaster assured me that feeling fades away after the first month or two.

I went to the general tutor “training” in August but it wasn’t so much of a training as it was a time to meet the other tutors and get some pep talks. The general vibe I got from the other tutors is that they take this very seriously. Which makes me feel great as a parent. And incredibly stressed as a new tutor. And I get an email from them almost every day, which is fine, I don’t mind emails, but even being a parent in this school feels like a big commitment, which is kind of what my friend who had sent her daughter to the school said too. Oh, and parents who aren’t tutors have to either volunteer 1 or 2 whole days a month (a lot considering there are only 8 or 9 school days a month) in the school, doing office work and other staff type of work since they have a very minimal staff for the school. But as a tutor, I’ll get out of that. Though I do have to commit to one other special duty, and I quickly signed up to be the person who coordinates and orders either pizza or Chick-Fil-A for lunch once a month. It’s still a 3-hour commitment, but only once a month, and it’s the kind of thing that you do and forget about until the next day comes up. And everyone loves the bringer of special food!

This has gone on way too long, so I’m going to wrap it up here and just say in the next few weeks, my life is going to change drastically. I don’t think I would have been the kind of parent who cries as they drop their kindergartener off on his first day of school (if anything, I’m more the “let’s have a round of mimosas!” kind of mom), but honestly, I’m more nervous about my first day of school than his. Thankfully our first days are two days apart, so he can have his special first day on the Monday and I will have my special first day on that Wednesday.

Oh, and here’s a preview to Rye’s first day of school outfit, as he was trying on his UNIFORM! Never mind the barefoot Huck Finn look. He has to wear black leather shoes and he hates them, and I’ve never made him wear dress shoes in his life, and so he’s super over-reacting about them. Or maybe in the grand scheme we should all react in this way when we’re forced to wear uncomfortable clothes that don’t allow us to express ourselves, but more on that later.

Check back next week as I write about the specifics of preparing to go back out into the working world again!

Enough of the summer that wasn't enough

It’s been a weird summer. I had declared it would be “The Summer of Vitamin D” for homemade ice cream and outdoor time, but I haven’t done too much of either. I think we’ve made 3 or 4 batches of ice cream, which is more than I’ve made most years but not as much as I had hoped, and I guess the kids go outside for at least 90 minutes a day, but we haven’t done anything “outdoorsy.” Most days it’s just the kids scrapping with the other neighborhood kids: playing tag, shooting water guns, fighting over plastic lawn mowers. The neighborhood kids tend to congregate in our yard, which is good because then I can supervise. On the other hand, it means I HAVE to supervise. If Knox is out, I have to stay close by because he is liable to wander off, even into the alley or toward the sound of the train that passes through at least twice a day. If the five- and six-year-old boys—this neighborhood is ALL boys— see me, they want me to arbitrate all their scuffles. I take that back—they want me to declare them right and the other boy wrong and ban the offender from our yard, but I end up trying to arbitrate and downplay most offenses instead. It’s exhausting. I’m often guilty of luring Knox back inside so I don’t have to be Judge Carrie. Without an adult, they tend to work it out on their own. They also are likely to find sharp metal objects in our renovation trash heap and “saw” a hole into the bathroom screen.

As for the renovation, we are getting VERY close to finishing! Though I guess it depends on where you draw the line for “finished.” The walls are all up and painted, the ceiling lights are in, the laundry room cabinets are installed and just got their butcher block counters (though we still have to seal them). The new washer and dryer were delivered Monday, but they haven’t been hooked up. That’s another weird part of this summer, I haven’t had laundry facilities in our home since early July when the old laundry water pipes were disconnected. The majority of our laundry has been done at our tenants’ apartments while they’re on vacation. Friday I went to a dear friend’s while she and her family had an overnight trip, and the kids and I camped out for 5 hours and did 5 loads of laundry while feeding their dogs and letting them out and cooking ourselves a frozen pizza and watching a movie there. I am really excited for when my laundry room is going to be all done, but just getting the washer and dryer hooked up is going to be a huge relief. I think I’m going on laundry strike until that happens.

The other final steps for the basement are installing the nice wooden stairs instead of the “temporary” stairs we have used for 10 years, the flooring, the trim, hanging doors, the cabinet for the utility sink in the laundry room, bathroom vanity installation, plumbing hookups (as in new toilet and connecting the two sinks), installation of wall sconces and light dimmers, rebuilding the radiator and baseboard heating loop and installing the new ductless air conditioners. Josh and I were laughing that we feel like we’re in the last 5 minutes of an HGTV episode where they show everything in fast motion to get everything done by the end of the show and the grand reveal. Our contractor Scott plans to start his next job Aug. 27, so theoretically, our job *should* be finished by then.

And “finished” is going to mean finished playroom, laundry room, bathroom and a hall closet. The mudroom has been booted to the next phase. The mudroom is about 10 feet by 10 feet and currently has a raw concrete floor that we leveled ourselves, concrete walls that have been covered in a waterproofing cement product, and still the exposed flooring ceiling. This was also supposed to be separated from the playroom by glass French doors, but those have been put off for now, or possibly until our cats die because the thought is that the litter box will go back there and the French door would always have to be open anyway to let the cats in there (the cats are 15 years old, isn’t that about average lifespan?). The walls and ceiling will get insulation and drywall, but just not yet. I think I’m going to make Josh and Scott do a blood brothers pact with me that we’ll still finish it by Thanksgiving because I don't want it to stay like that for the next 5 years or until the cats die, but for now I’m trying to chill out and just focus on getting my laundry room and moving all the toys down to the playroom.

Today is Aug. 8, so there’s a whole month of summer left for me, as our family takes our second vacation during the first week of September. But the kids seem kind of summered-out, and we thought Josh was going to have a light work schedule for August, but when we try to plan fun family things to do, there never seems to be the time for them. Next weekend we’re finally going to D.C. to see some friends we had been trying to find time to visit since MAY! It’s shameful! I wanted this to be a memorable summer for fun, but I think it’s only going to be memorable for the basement construction project.

Speaking of which, I believe we're getting a dump truck load of dirt delivered this weekend. In the two monsoon-like storms we experienced in the past two weeks, our basement got some water. Not what I’d call flooding, but an amount closer to puddles than just damp spots. And this is after thousands of dollars spent on replacing blocks in the foundation and coating everything above ground and about 6 inches below ground with the waterproof coating. It’s really frustrating, but the masonry guys kept pointing out that our grading around the house is pretty messed up, and it’s gotten even more messed up since they did the last round of work (and since 5-year-olds with shovels keep insisting on further digging up the softened up dirt), so we decided to try re-grading away from the house. A dump truck of dirt is going to be a heck of a lot cheaper than whatever the foundation specialists recommend next. It might work permanently, or it might just buy us some time. Praying it’s the former and not the latter.

I’ve been writing this on my porch because Scott is screwing down the subfloor with an air compressor and I guess an air drill, and it is an intolerable sound. But now he’s doing the part by the front of the house, so I can still hear it. I’m going to cut this one short and try to write again next week. I have more exciting news to share about back-to-school season!

Champagne wishes and laundry room dreams

I cannot confidently say when, but sometime, by the end of the year, perhaps by the start of the school year, I am going to have a brand new laundry room in my basement. Right now, it’s just studs, outlining where the walls will be, PVC pipes showing where the whereabouts of the future utility sink and washing machine will go, and raw electrical wires with no outlets attached.

This room used to be the kitchen when the basement was its own apartment, though we’ve expanded it slightly to include the area under the stairs and to make the entrance on the long wall instead of at an angle on the corner (this only has meaning to Jamie Kelly and Isaac Baker, two friends/former coworkers who lived in that apartment). For those of you who know my house but not the basement, the laundry room will be an exact duplicate to the dining room on the first floor: roughly 10 by 14 feet.

It’s going to have dove gray cabinets—a whole wall of base cabinets on the 14-foot wall—we just ordered them last week. (We can’t have upper cabinets because the ceilings are too low, but may have space to do some open shelving.) “Dove gray,” I love the sound of that, and what it means is that the gray has the slightest tinge of beige to it, rather than blue.

The floors are going to be vintage natural hickory engineered hardwood, just like the playroom and bathroom.

I’m in the process of picking out a wall color for the whole downstairs, a “warm white,” which kills my colorful spirit, but with only one window per each room, we need the light to bounce and be reflected around as much as possible. The electrician assures us we have enough can lights to make the space completely bright, but we won’t know until the drywall is up, the walls are painted and the can lights and sconces are installed. It’s tempting to paint the laundry room a different color—an actual color—but I’m trying to be reserved. More than anything, I want the room to look clean and peaceful.

My favorite page of homes magazines is the one- to two-page picture story about someone’s remodeled laundry room. I’m not kidding, that’s the part of the magazine that I look at and sigh happily over. I don’t think I fawned over laundry room articles as a teenager (I’m not exaggerating, I’ve been a Martha Stewart follower since the mid-90s), but I realize my distaste for dark and dreary laundry rooms probably started at my parents’ house, where I took over laundry as my main chore sometime in late middle school, I believe. My parents live in a split foyer house, with the basement about 2/3 finished, and the laundry set up in the unfinished part, lit by a bare bulb, with concrete floor, the room outlined in studs, and the walls lined with industrial-looking shelves filled with hardware supplies and cheap armoires stuffed with everything my parents had accumulated since they got married in the 60s. It wasn’t awful, but it left a lot to be desired. Especially compared to Martha’s laundry room, which was all white, filled with bright windows and herbs growing in pots on walls and big glass apothecary jars filled with homemade detergents like borax and baking soda. Or maybe I’m making those specifics up. But however her laundry room really looked in the mid- to late-90s, it looked more like a kitchen than a prison laundry room, which is what the two major laundry rooms of my life have compared to. (Yes, yes, I see the irony of bringing up prison and Martha Stewart but cut her some slack, she did her time and made those other inmates’ lives better by her being there. Not kidding, I read a book about her time in prison.)

I lived in our current house as a tenant on the first floor from 2004 to late 2005, and the house had a communal “laundry room” in the basement, accessible by a separate entrance in the back of the house, shared by all 3 units. While the majority of the basement had been renovated and covered with drywall sometime in the 80s, the “laundry room” had not. It was still cinderblock and spider webs, with no drop ceiling so you could see all the exposed pipes and the underside of the wood floors on the first floor. It was small but functional, though it could be tasking for 3 apartments to share the single washer and dryer. Usually everyone got into their groove though and there weren’t too many conflicts. Then we moved into another house divided into 2 apartments, where we now had our own washer and dryer, but they were crammed into a little bump-out in the only bathroom. It was a finished space, but with only one light fixture that was only a slight upgrade from a bare bulb, and the space between the washer and dryer, which face each other, is just big enough for a laundry basket to fit in. Not ideal, but clean, and spider-free.

Then in 2009 we moved back to our house, after finishing converting the 3 units back into a single family home and being mostly finished the renovations. So that cramped, unfinished, spidery area became my laundry room again. And let's add on to that the fact that we had demolished the basement apartment and used it as a workshop for the upper floor renovations, and now it looked like the kind of place you would murder someone. And it has continued to look like murder basement for 8 years, until we got to the framing of the future-renovated basement. Then 2 weeks ago, the plumbers came to give us our new laundry hook-up pipes and tore the old ones out. Only we haven’t connected to the new pipes yet. They needed to be virginal to pass the rough-in inspection, and then to hook them up ourselves (which would include cutting the PVC pipe and somehow affixing the metal spigots to them and jerry-rigging our utility sink up to the drain pipe) would be a big hassle, so I said I could hold out and make do until we get the drywall installed in the basement and can do a temporary hook-up of the laundry setup until we’re ready for the real and final set up.

Which leads me to my recent situation, where I found myself returning to our old apartment this weekend and using our tenants’ washer while they are away for the week. Big deal, right? So what if I’m driving 2 blocks back and forth for 5 loads of laundry (it would be just 3 loads at home, but the apartment’s “super capacity” washer is more than 20 years old and its “super capacity” is about 2/3 the capacity of the 10-year-old “super capacity” washer at our house. At least I didn’t have to go to a laundromat, right? That’s what I told myself.

And then as I was lugging the 3 hampers from the Highlander to the apartment, I realized that my “Mega Value”-sized All Free & Clear detergent was leaking. Leaking isn’t the right word. Blubbering out its contents was more like it. I had affixed the measuring cap to the spout, put it upright in the least-loaded hamper, and thought that would guard against spills, but had forgotten that the screw cap at the top was loosened to allow airflow for the spout and I hadn’t tightened it. At first I thought it was just spilling into the hamper, which stinks because it’s not being measured, but I sort of had an “oh well, it’s all going in the same place anyway” mentality, like when your gravy gets on your carrots and you don’t want it to but you're not going to make a big deal of it. But then when I lifted the hamper up off the sidewalk, I saw a puddle of detergent. That’s not good, I thought. And after starting the first load—without the need of adding any detergent—I went back to the car and saw what looked like a laundry crime scene.

Did you know that All Free & Clear, which is clear in color as its name implies, turns purple when spilled all over the carpet part of your vehicle’s upholstery? The detergent looked like it was under a black light, and I could see that where the hamper had leaned against the backside of the trunk-ish part of my SUV, the detergent had escaped the hamper’s confines (our hampers are just extra-large laundry baskets marketed as “lampers”). I went inside, grabbed some dirty beach towels from another hamper, and started mopping up the detergent. And then got another wet towel and tried to dilute it, and another dry towel and tried to dry it. This went on for about a half an hour, and seemed to be making very little process. I mean, the towels got soapier, but it was unclear if the upholstery was getting any less soapy. I went back inside and spread the soapy towels among what would equate to the 5 loads of laundry of the day. I texted the tale to my mom and she gave me the sympathy I needed. I waited for the first load to finish spinning, took it out and put it in a laundry basket to take home and dry in our dryer, and got the second load in the washer before driving home.

The worst part, of course, was having to tell Josh about it. Josh is not a clean freak, but he is a detail person. He has no concept of “good enough,” just “success” and “failure.” My 30-minute battle with the detergent at the apartment house had led me to believe there would be no success at getting all of the soap out, and that good enough was the best we could hope for. At least it wasn’t vomit, I thought. At least it was unscented. It’s just kind of purplish, and when you touch it, you feel like you need to wash your hands, which isn’t so bad, because now you have soap on your hands!

When he heard the news, Josh kept his level of freaking out to about 60 on a scale of 100 (with 50 being a neutral response), which I thought was pretty good of him. He realized that the soap would be incredibly difficult to get out, but that wouldn’t stop him from going at it. “Remember how awful it was when we spilled the oil in the old Civic?” he brought up, reasoning with me as to why we should keep working at getting all of the soap out. All that made me think was “at least it wasn’t oil!” and “oh that’s right, you once spilled oil in our car—I only spilled soap!”

Josh also thought of a bigger fear that I would never imagined, and he was kind of disappointed when I failed to accept it as a legitimate fear. Our Highlander is a hybrid, and its electric batteries are stored under the first row of back seats. What if the detergent soaks through the cracks and gets into the electric batteries, Josh hypothesized, and ruins the car??? Then I feel like we would end up in the Guinness Book of World Records for breaking a car in the most unimaginable way, I internally responded. Josh worked on the detergent mess for almost two hours, while I kept driving back and forth from the apartment to retrieve our wet clothes, start another load, put them in our dryer at home and then folding the whole lot. It’s not really how either of us wanted to spend our Sunday.

Assuming our vehicle doesn’t break down from laundry detergent battery corrosion, this will be a day I can laugh about in a year from now, while I’m folding laundry in my beautiful, sterile, spider-free laundry room. Or maybe I’ll just be hiding out in there, sipping on wine and doing some crafts. Or making wine, like we used to do before kids. Or making gin!

But if I'm making gin, I probably won’t remember the day I spilled half the laundry detergent bottle in the backseat of the car at all.