Calm across the land
Peace and order restored as of Thurs. night! Yay Michelle! We decided that we just needed to sit our near-teen down and have a talk with him focusing on him coming up with some constructive ways to help him feel better about the whole school predicament. I was late coming home from my shoot with the symphony conductor and so M had the talk without me and viola! She is so awesome. She's magically good with him. I know they talked about us taking steps to move into the city within a year, and I think mainly she just let him vent and help him face the fact that yes, he has to go to school, and that there's no way out of it at this juncture- that there are some fixed values in the equation. The big variable is how you perceive and react to it. Anyways honestly, I don't really know what she said, but they scrawled out a little contract-like thing, signed it and put it on the fridge, and ever since then it's been all games and funtime, and not the fun-frustration polarity that we'd been dealing with before. I'm not naive enough to think that it's all smooth sailing now- that's not how life works for anybody- but it's nice even to get a couple of days without battling him either to go to school or to go to bed. It's probably mostly about the huge shock to the system of going from summer where there were no limits or restrictions to school which is filled with them. Yesterday I heard Quentin Tarantino on Fresh Air talking about how he dropped out the beginning of 9th grade, and that he wished he'd known that 7th/8th grade was school at it's worst and that it would actually get better from there rather than be more of the same. Anyhow, I should shut up about all this. I keep hearing the phrase "I'll give you something to cry about" in my head, so I don't want to jinx myself or whatever.
I just got back from a long meandering walk with my dog picking pears from the multitude of pear trees around the neighborhood. The city was hot as hell today and muggy to boot, and I was toting like 50-60 pounds of unwieldy gear around the city and through the symphony hall, so walking around in the cool night, stretching for pears, listening to some Animal Collective, then having my iPod die on me and listening to the frogs and crickets was the perfect endcap to my day. I've got to enjoy all the moments outdoors I can since I'll be tethered to my computer all weekend working on processing photos- well, maybe a brief outing to the beach Sunday morning for breakfast. We're planning a big outdoor movie/ skateboard ramp neighborhood block party next weekend- trying to think of the best movie to show... I think I vote for Little Miss Sunshine. Any other good feel-good comedy contenders you'd recommend? Our last outdoor feature was The Big Lebowski.
I just got back from a long meandering walk with my dog picking pears from the multitude of pear trees around the neighborhood. The city was hot as hell today and muggy to boot, and I was toting like 50-60 pounds of unwieldy gear around the city and through the symphony hall, so walking around in the cool night, stretching for pears, listening to some Animal Collective, then having my iPod die on me and listening to the frogs and crickets was the perfect endcap to my day. I've got to enjoy all the moments outdoors I can since I'll be tethered to my computer all weekend working on processing photos- well, maybe a brief outing to the beach Sunday morning for breakfast. We're planning a big outdoor movie/ skateboard ramp neighborhood block party next weekend- trying to think of the best movie to show... I think I vote for Little Miss Sunshine. Any other good feel-good comedy contenders you'd recommend? Our last outdoor feature was The Big Lebowski.