Neighborhood-Kids All Local. All for Kids. All the Time.

Yesterday a friend of Ty’s spent the afternoon at our house, and at some point not long before it was time for him to go home, I realized the boys had had a silent falling out over sharing a book. I tried to help them come to a solution, but they were pretty clearly positioned in their corners, and Ty’s friend ended up going home in tears.

“How was F. today?” I asked Ty when he got from school this afternoon. “Was he still mad?”

“No, he was fine. We agreed that I was mean and he made a big deal out of something small.”

Huh.

I’m thinking the female persuasion could learn something from this.

I don’t know where our family has been the last five years—under a rock apparently. Actually, I know where we’ve been: parenting younger children. But now that we have an almost 13-year-old, and the new season of Lost has begun, Leah has suddenly brought the show into our home, even if we are five seasons behind.

Since we don’t have cable TV, Leah is watching Lost on the computer. The upside to watching TV on the computer is you can watch your show whenever you want. The downside to watching TV on the computer is you can watch your show whenever you want. Leah started with Season 1. In two weeks, she’s nearly through it and anticipating Season 2. We’re to the point of saying, “No more Lost for the rest of the day.”

On the other hand, we do have fun discussing it at dinner. Because, guess what, the rest of us are tuning in too.  I admit it, I am hooked on the plot.

Dinner conversations, though, are less about plot for me. Leah wants to talk plot and the bigger implications and hint at what she’s already seen. (The rest of us are many episodes behind.) But I find myself comparing the show to Survivor, which she's never followed.

“It’s not realistic that they’re not losing weight,” I keep saying. “Hurley? The big guy? He should be skinner by now. You can’t live on fruit and not lose weight. And where’s the food, anyway? They should be obsessed with it. And what about Shannon? I’m sorry, you can’t look that good when you’re sleeping on the ground every night. And how come they haven’t built an outhouse, anyway? That’s just unsanitary. Jack’s concerned with sanitation. Why hasn’t he brought it up?”

Leah sagely reminds me that although we all know people have to poop, they don’t have to include it in a TV show. For some puerile reason, though, I want to know these things about being plane-wrecked on an island, never mind if it’s a TV island.

Ty is quick to point out that we did get to see Hurley gathering large leaves and not for eating. Ty and I think the leaves are pretty funny, and at least a token effort toward acknowledging the obvious. I also want to know what the women will do once a month—raid the suitcases?—although I haven't said this out loud to my kids (Leah would be mortified), and why none of the women have armpit hair growing, and why the men all have three days’ beard growth, never more, never less. And why isn’t Jack’s short hair growing out? You never see anyone cutting his hair. Come on, Hollywood, a little reality please.

Leah gets impatient with me. Who cares about poop and other unmentionables? She just wants to catch up with her friends so she can discuss this season’s plot. Life is not in the details, apparently, it’s the bigger picture that’s important.

Yesterday, Ty came home from a Halloween trip to Value Village with his usual get-up. Every year since he was about three, he has opted for a scary mask—the scarier, the better—and some sort of robe. Very simple, really. This year he came home with a mask of a gorilla with pointed teeth and a women’s leather coat that covers him to his knees.

I love the mask. I told him I’d like to wear it next year.

“Do you want to try it on?” he asked.

“Sure.”

And then I got this queasy feeling, much as I now get a queasy feeling at the thought of trying on hats in a store. Once you go through a lice outbreak in your house, you never look at hats the same way again (the lice thing was several years ago—we’re not live, don’t worry).

This time? Swine flu germs. Think about it. How many people do you think tried on that mask before my boy bought it, breathing their soggy germs all over the nose cavity? How many of the multitude of masks have been tried on by hundreds of people only to be put back on the rack?

I’m not normally a germ phobe—I’m the last person to ask my kids to wash up before dinner—but this year I often find myself making them wash their hands when they get home from school. So far we haven’t been hit with flu germs, but really it’s only a matter of time, I think, before we go down like dominoes.

Somehow Ty and I got distracted, and I didn’t have to try on the mask. I’m going to give it 72 hours. Do you think that’s long enough?

This morning I caught myself checking to make sure the toilet was flushed in case Leon needed a drink (he refused to drink out of his water bowl). And then a nanosecond later, I remembered I didn’t need to think about these kinds of things anymore.

For the most part, we have said our good-byes and have moved on to the rest of our busy lives, but we catch ourselves now and again. Curt had to go through the grieving process a few days after we did, upon his return from a climbing trip. His sadness opened it all up for the rest of us again—well, mostly me because I’m the one who remembers giving Leon to him as a birthday present. The kids were more intrigued by the idea of a man shedding tears and whether a cat’s passing would inspire them.

Lately, I have developed the unconscious and unsettling habit of looking at animals in terms of, well, grave size. I couldn’t help thinking one afternoon, when I saw a dachshund, how easy that animal would be. And then one morning a big, beautiful, white dog with longish fur walked past our house with its owner, and Leah wondered aloud what kind of dog it was. “Wouldn't that be cool to have a dog like that one?” she said. My first thought (to myself) was, “Wow, that dog would take a big hole.” And then things like, “Gee, you’d have to have a big yard,” and “Ours would never work,” and then, “Oh, but with an animal that size, you’d probably cremate.” It’s weird, I know. My family has no idea.

I didn’t know about cremation for animals until I talked to a friend who’d had her cat put down last year right about the same time. It makes sense, of course. But I’m a farm girl and the urban way of doing things had never occurred to me. Friends and I have joked about pet insurance and when you would need it, and I’ve always said no way. But what happens when you have a young cat and she gets hit by a car or something and she needs surgery—how can you not pay up? I’m just glad I didn’t have to make that kind of decision because, like I said, I’m a farm girl.

I’m not pining, just so you know. But, yeah, these thoughts do flit through my mind.  I do hope the grave size thing goes away soon.

So you know how you’re supposed to start your kids going to bed early a week before school starts so they're prepared for the shock of the early schedule? We don’t do that. In fact, on Labor Day weekend, our kids typically stay up later than almost any other time during the summer, and they start school absolutely ragged. Their teachers would throw up their hands if they knew.

Here’s the thing: every year we get together with a group of friends, originally mine, some of whom date back to my high school years, one of whom goes all the way back to my toddlerhood, and it's just so fun to see everyone. Each year is different. The group waxes and wanes, sometimes large, sometimes small, some folks traveling from England or Hawaii, others from nearby Seattle. This year was smaller, the Seattle crowd only, but still there were six kids ranging in age from eight to fourteen, along with lots of good food and wine and conversation. The adults stayed up late talking while the kids either got wild with each other or slumped in a corner chair waiting for the powers that be to see the necessity of bedtime. (When your kids are begging to go to bed, you know you're a slacker parent.)

I feel a little guilty starting the school year this way—Leah would much prefer to stay home and put her already ordered things in a finer-tuned order. But the adults love it so much,  many of us try to make it every year.

On the upside, my kids come home from school each day ready for bed a little earlier. Tonight bath and shower time started at 7:30, no reminders from me whatsoever.

I figure the routine happens whether you start the week before school or with the first day. It’s all good.