It is a rainy Sunday afternoon and M is doing endless homework while J is going after her pumpkin with a power drill. Cute W is trying to figure out what’s wrong with his car, and I just wasted a great deal of time trying to share volleyball photos for the poor soul who’s putting together the slide show for the banquet.
We were technological ships that kept passing in the night: she asked me to upload to her Dropbox, but I ran into technical difficulties and ended up sending Flickr links, but she said that the links didn’t work for her and suggested perhaps iCloud could work, but of course I’m not an Apple person and so now I’m trying to share a Dropbox folder with her. Hopefully that will work.
Tomorrow is J’s last volleyball game, and just like with soccer, we’re totally ready for the school season to be over. J spends most games feeling frustrated that she doesn’t get to play much. It is frustrating to watch. There are 6 positions that you can play in, and the coach has decided that J’s a back row player and that she doesn’t trust J’s serve, which basically takes her down to 2 or 2 1/2 positions, when it’s a game that she’s allowed to play at all. What’s extra-frustrating about it is that apparently the club volleyball people think she’s extra good. Also, a couple of games ago, J was allowed to serve, and after the game one of the referees very kindly took her team aside to tell them how much they’d improved and what they could work on, just in general, and the one player she said something about specifically was J, which was that she’s got great form on her serves. She’s not entirely reliable with them, but neither are most of the girls, but they’re allowed to serve, anyway. So. . . she really likes volleyball, and she’s glad she did it, but she’s ready for this season to be over. Club practice starts in December.
J’s also going to do gymnastics twice a week starting next week. At least, that is the current plan. We’ll see how she feels when she gets there. Hopefully she’ll think it’s fun. She’s also excited to start ski club in January and she’s signed up for Best Buddies, which is where kids get paired up with a student who has some sort of special needs and hangs out with them at lunch and does other activities..
Speaking of Best Buddies, M’s all in with special needs crew again this year. She’s in a unified gym class again, and this year all the kids are going to log their walking and jogging hours to try to complete a marathon over the course of the year. So that kicked off on Friday. Also, a classmate recently called M a “femi-nazi,” which pleased me greatly.
Last weekend Cute W and I went to a wedding in Newport, Rhode Island, for one of his work colleagues. We were lucky to have really phenomenal weather, so that was excellent. J and M had some Beautiful Sister Bonding Time while we were gone, then J spent the night at a friends while M stayed home all alone (“Don’t have a big party!” I told her. “They’re called ‘ragers’ now, Mom,” she replied. She enjoys mocking my lack of teen linguistic abilities. “Okay! Don’t have a rager!” I said brightly . . . It appears that she did not.)
The wedding was fun. The bride was radiantly happy, although apparently she’s kind of like that all the time. The food was excellent, and I am still bitter that Cute W allowed the server to take away the extra lobster ravioli that I totally would have eaten. I took my very first Uber ride.
Oh! Here’s something fun that happened. Okay, it was a 4-hour drive to a 1 pm wedding, so we dressed in normal clothes for the drive, then went out to lunch and changed into our fancy-pants in the bathroom before heading to the church. I came out a little discombobulated because I expected Cute W to be waiting outside the bathroom to complete his crucial function as back-zipperer, but he was outside the restaurant and across the street. Luckily I had a shawl as a back-up plan, but meanwhile I was trying to be all nonchalant with my bag of clothes and my shawl and my belongings, and when I got to Cute W to get zipped up, I set my phone down on the roof of his car. Of course I didn’t remember the phone until he had swung out onto the busy main street and I heard a ka-thunk! I yelled for him to stop the car and went mincing out to retrieve my poor little phone, now a few car-lengths back. Yes, it was lunchtime and I was in a full face of make-up (you know how rare that is) and a cocktail dress and heels, and I decided that the best way to save my phone from being run over was to run back to the phone in the middle of the street, thus stopping traffic from both directions. The good people of Rhode Island were surprisingly patient, and even better, my phone was unscathed. The phone case: well, it lived a good life and died in service, which is what it would have wanted.
