Tell It To COACHIE

Could she be any cuter?

Could she be any cuter?

After the recital, we went to the PX for ice cream. Of course, Lauren doesn’t like ice cream, so she had a Godiva chocolate chickadee. I think they are glad that it’s over.

But they are pretty stinking cute.

The HP arrived home tonight from Ft. Knox, a place that 4 years ago, was our home. I was looking at some pictures today of our life in Ft. Knox, and it was definitely a simpler time, and a happy one. Ft. Knox is also the last place where I attended an “officers’ wives’ coffee” (oh my, the possessive of that phrase is a minefield, heh)*. When we first arrived there, the HP was a captain, and his job was, well, I have no idea, but the coffee group associated with his job was all wives of colonels, lieutenant colonels, the occasional major, and one other captain (you may know her from reading here, her name is Becky).

I had attended coffees prior to life at Ft. Knox, but Ft. Knox was the first place where another wife flat out asked me my husband’s job and rank, and then, having found my answer unsatisfactory, turned on her heel mid-conversation, and walked away to find someone more acceptable to speak to. I was speechless. She turned around a second later, after she realized how bad it looked, and mumbled something about how she needed to speak to so and so about their daughters’ riding lessons. Okey dokey then. That is about the time that I lost interest in the whole officers’ wives’ coffee thing, but I continued to go, since you are supposed to, until they tightened up their invite list and cleared out the riffraff (me and Becky).

The house where that happened?

Yeah. Apparently 8 years of ranch houses and double wides later, that house is now going to be my house. I don’t know if we’ve got the furniture to fill it, I don’t know if we deserve it, but I can tell you this: If some captain’s wife with small children comes to my door for any reason, I will immediately hand her a margarita and a magazine, and take her little bundles of joy off to the toy room for some good old fashioned deconstruction.

* I’m not antisocial, the HP just hasn’t had a job where the coffees were applicable.

The schools are crappy. I choose the word “crappy” because I do not cuss anymore. But if I did, I can think of several other adjectives/verbs/adverbs/nouns that would fit quite nicely into that sentence.

This evening, after guitar lessons, Aislinn had some math homework to finish that dealt with “translation, rotation, and reflection” of shapes. Fine, she’s pretty much got that figured out, so when she starts organic chemistry in college and they start talking about stereoisomers, she’ll be all set. At the bottom of the page were a bunch of “review” questions - regular math, like adding and subtracting 4 digit numbers and money. Awesome, she’s got that down too, so when she gets a job at Station 7, she’ll be able to make change. But there were two multiplication questions that required her to multiply a 3 digit number by a 2 digit number. Apparently, they’ve gone over this once at school, and then had to move on to “shape transformations.” She had no idea how to do it.

I’m sure there’s any easy way to explain why you put a zero down before you start multiplying by the second digit. That is, I’m sure there’s an easy way to explain it during a comprehensive class on multiplying large numbers. I was unable, however, to come up with an easy way to explain it on the fly at 7:40 pm when we’re both ready for bed and desperate for the homework to be over. You know why I couldn’t explain it? Because that is the type of thing you don’t explain - someone tells you that’s how it’s done, and then you practice it and practice it until it becomes second nature, and then you don’t think about “why” you do it again, until 7:40 pm some evening 30 years later when your poor untaught daughter is desperately trying to get her homework done.

Aislinn is, and has always been, a little math wizard. She picks it up easily, and even though I really didn’t give her a very thorough lesson on how to multiply large numbers, I’m sure if we spent another 5 minutes on it tomorrow, she’d probably understand at least how to do it, if not why. But then, I have to wonder, what the bleep is going on in math class if I have to teach multiplication at home?

I confess that I’m on a hair trigger about Aislinn’s teacher due to an incident last week which I can’t believe I haven’t whined to you about yet. And really, I’m too tired to do it justice tonight, so it will have to wait until tomorrow. I will say, in conclusion however, that I have done multiplication this week. I have not had occasion to worry about how to draw the next iteration of a tumbling shape.

And so I ask you, while I know abstract thinking is important blah blah blah, can’t we nail down the basics first?

For those of you who were unlucky enough to read Erin’s totally disgusting yet hilarious toe tale, here are year-old pictures from the museum that started it all, The City Museum in St. Louis. Although I am not a huge fan of heights, there is something about this place that makes you want to climb.

It seems so sturdy, you don’t even question whether you want to climb up to and through that suspended rusty airplane.

It makes the kiddies happy (although not any less nuts).

When you’re inside, if you see a hole in the ceiling,

or in the floor, you are welcome to climb through it. Sometimes the holes in the floor lead to a huge maze of tunnels.

Marty is not a fan of flash photography in the tunnels. It is DARK, hence the glow-stick bracelets.

Some places are dark and wet. Bonus.

If you get tired of the outdoors and the tunnels, you can go climb through this tree trunk.

I did. I went through this too:

There’s a big whale there.

And the bathroom walls are made of breadpans.

You should totally go there. I would caution you however, to do some major neck and shoulder stretches beforehand, because it involves a lot of ducking and squirming and wriggling through tight spaces.

And wear proper footwear of course.

A month or so ago, while strolling on the treadmill and watching Bravo, I saw a show called “Tabatha’s Salon Takeover.” For those of you who are not my sister Erin, Tabatha was on a Project Runway type hair cutting show called “Shear Genius,” and apparently did not win, but somehow her performance got her this new show where she goes into struggling hair salons and fixes them. I’m lying when I say I saw a show - it was a marathon, and it was so addictive I spent the whole morning lecturing myself about how I should turn off the TV and then explaining to myself how I was drying my hair or eating breakfast or tying my shoes anyway, so technically I was multitasking and TV was allowed. It is a fascinating show in many ways, but unfortunately the most interesting thing is how disgustingly filthy even high end salons can be. Ew. When I went to get my haircut this week, I did a surreptitious once over of the salon, and only saw one cobweb. I’m hoping that was the worst to be found.

In December I took the girls to get haircuts from the same woman who cut my hair. I had taken them to Walmart previously, because, well, see any post from the past 19 months regarding life in Missouri, but in December they told me that they wanted to get their haircut somewhere where there were “pretty people.” Yikes. They are really not that judgmental; it is true that the Walmart hair place is not a showroom for the well-toned or well-dressed. So I took them 45 miles away in an ice storm (is Crystal Gale trying to tell me something?) to have their hair done by my 19-year-old, skinny, tan, blond, dentally perfect stylist. She gave Aislinn a super choppy bob and blew Lauren’s hair out straight (after which I think Lauren was trying to find out if the stylist could adopt her, or at least come live with us and straighten her hair every day) and they couldn’t have been more pleased. This stylist, of course, has disappeared.

The girls have not had a haircut since December, and their social lives prevented them from accompanying me on the harrowing 97-mile haircut sojourn on Saturday. I was going to wait until we got back east at spring break and take them to my mom’s salon which also has pretty people in it. I even let them take their class pictures all shaggy. But unfortunately for them, tomorrow they have a field trip to the state capital for “Gifted Student Day” and it’s possible that they may be meeting with the governor. If they are meeting with the governor, it is possible that someone will take their picture (or not want to take their picture if their hair is totally out of control and in their eyes), so after school today, after explaining that they might even be on TV, I made them suck it up and head to Walmart.

Oh my goodness. It is a very cramped little hair cutting place, and I was so glad that we didn’t have to wait, that I didn’t even look around much until the cutting was underway. Once I did look around, I was sorry. Their was hair color splattered all over the floor and the walls. The walls? I can see how it might end up on the floor, but the walls? Really? As each haircut was finished, the haircutter would push the hair to a corner of the room with a broom, but I’m not sure when someone last gathered up said hair and disposed of it. There was a shopping cart in the back full of white plastic bags, which you might think were full of purchases, but were actually full of trash. It was nasty, and a little surprising because our entire Walmart (except for the hair cut place) has been renovated, rearranged and painted. We will not be returning.

From Walmart we made our way to McDonald’s because we are red-blooded Americans, dammit! Actually, it was McTeacher night where the teachers from the kids’ school work behind the counter and the school gets a cut of the cash for four hours. There were some teachers, some parents, and a lot of McD’s people working there, but apparently no one was assigned to sweep the floor or clean off tables or perform any of those magical chores that make McD’s tolerable (although they were on top of the trash). Miraculously and luckily, we did not have to brave the bathrooms.

Now I am home, in my own semi-clean house, where the main problem is that the ants are done with their long winter’s nap and keep showing up on the countertop. There is no food out, we keep killing the scout ants that come up looking for food, so I don’t understand why they keep coming. But I killed them all this morning, and so far I haven’t seen any more. Unfortunately, about an hour ago, I accidentally put a plastic bag of brown sugar down on a still hot burner (CURSE YOU ELECTRIC STOVE!!!). Now my kitchen smells like a maple syrup factory. Something tells me a new front may open in the ant wars tomorrow.