Side-Eye Saints, Errands, and Upcycling

 

1.) We've moved on to CGI Angelina Ballerina, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. 

We exhausted our library's collection of the old hand drawn animated show, and have moved on to the CGI reboot. 

It's an entirely different show. The premise is still a talking mouse and her adventures with her friends, but that and the name are about all that's the same. The focus is no longer on situational drama. There's a storyline now and again, but the show seems to exist primarily as a showcase for different types of music and dance. 

Instead of ballet classes, Angelina now goes to an arts school where she interacts with a diverse bunch of kids with various European accents, and a couple that seem to be from the Americas, learning break dancing, steel drums, tap dance, or whatever other type of performance art the writers want to put in in addition to ballet. One episode basically exists for her to talk about how awesome Vivaldi is, and another is just a thin story covering the concept of a waltz beat. 

It's...ok for what it is. Angelina doesn't have that slight cliquish mean girl vibe going anymore (she's no longer stubbornly obsessed with being in the spotlight), but she doesn't seem to have much of a personality either. None of the characters do, beyond their regional accents and favored artistic focuses.  

Instead of plot driven by relationships or situations rendered in gorgeous hand drawn animation, we get mouse heads on human bodies with meticulously animated movements and a cheesy pop intro. I like that they obviously studied actual dance steps for the movements, that's kind of cool, but the show won't win any writing awards, and for some reason it's weird seeing meticulously rendered human arms and legs with a mouse head and tail attached. I'm not sure the loss of Angelina's annoying superiority complex is worth the loss of much of the artistry and effort that went into the show, or the slight descent into uncanny valley. 

I will say it's less annoying and more actually educational than Pinkalicious though (on PBS kids, also a "fine arts" show). 

I'm able to get through Pinkalicious  only by assuming all the episodes are the deluded hallucinations of an asylum patient. It's the only way that world makes any sense, and it explains how she basically controls everything and everybody in every episode (she's way worse than Angelina ever was as far as that goes). 

2.) Tired. So tired...

This week, there were three days in a row where I spent several hours outside the house running errands. The library, the grocery store, a WIC appointment, the big warehouse store in town, a prenatal appointment...they just all really racked up this week. 

As a result, I've made the unfortunate discovery that pregnancy plus running errands equals absolute exhaustion by the time the kids' bedtime rolls around. I'm talking about the type of exhaustion which renders you a complete puddle of apathy and saps your ability to even think. This was unfortunate, because getting two wiggly kids under the age of six into bed takes a lot of energy and the ability to react to things at a second's notice, "No, get that OFF YOUR SISTER. Now, PUT ON YOUR PANTS." 

When I'm running near empty, I go into what I call "robot mode." I issue directions and commands in a monotone, and I become fixated on the routine. The kids can be absolutely losing it, but by golly, they are going to get in the shower, and we are GETTING THROUGH PRAYER TIME come hell or high tantrum. I don't yell, I don't freak out, I just fixate on the goal and lumber towards it, like a bulldozer stuck in neutral with a busted brake line, rolling on despite whatever wall is stupid enough to be in the way.

Kids are fussing? Fighting? Speaking a foreign language for some reason? Doesn't matter. I don't care what your sister did to you. We are putting on your shirt now. I don't care that you don't like this book and you're screaming your head off about it. It's story time, this is a book, we are reading it, and then we are doing prayer. 

So I sit there, reading a story about a bear or a train or whatever while the tantrums rage around me like a hurricane, pretty much oblivious to it. Then we do prayer, and I do the same thing again.

You get the picture. 

It's useful in some circumstances. I used it as a survival mechanism when Chris was gone all the time to coach debate- it got the job done.  Now that he's home, I think it freaks him out slightly when I slip into it. 

One of many things in my parenting that I suppose could stand to be re-worked a bit. 

3.) Virtual School. 

On Tuesday, an email went out to all the parents. Two kids had tested positive for Covid, so the rest of the week would be virtual "out of an abundance of caution". 

Virtual school is interesting to witness in our house. The school sends the kids home with an iPad when they know they're about to go virtual (or we have to go by the school to pick it up when they discover Covid cases during the weekend). Three year old Little Girl insists on joining in on Little Boy's kindergarten classes for as much as she can. This works fine when they're doing the morning songs or reading a story, not so much when they're trying to do math or English language work. 

I usually try to find her some other project to work on, like drawing, water color painting, or making a necklace out of pony beads. I have spotty success with this. It's not unusual for me to step out for a moment to use the restroom only to come back to Little Girl making funny faces in the camera on Joey's iPad as he's trying to follow a math lesson. 

4.) Appointment with Madness

On Wednesday I had a prenatal appointment a 45 min drive from our house (downside of living in a semi-rural area: pretty much every errand is a significant time commitment). And to get there on time, we had to leave right smack dab in the middle of Little Boy's two hour virtual school day. 

This of course added a new dimension to the insanity of the day. Any shred of routine, already mangled by the fact that we were wrestling with virtual school, was tossed solidly out of the window as I drove away from the house trying to get to a midwife appointment on time while also consoling Little Boy for having to miss half of his school "day".

Little Boy calmed down by the time we pulled into town, the appointment went alright, and I ended up meeting at my Sister-in-law's house afterwards so that my kids could have a playdate with her kids. We try to meet up when I'm in the city with them, which isn't very often.

I thought everything actually went ok, all things considered, until I got a phone call from a number I didn't recognize. Turns out I had also made an appointment with my therapist (who I meet with only over the phone) that I had COMPLETELY forgotten about. It wasn't going to be possible to have the appointment in a house full of small children that weren't mine, and it was fifteen minuets before I thought to check my voicemail and realized that hadn't been a telemarketer, so I ended up having to call him back and reschedule. 

It's been a very long week. 

5.) Two Art Revolutions 

A couple weeks ago, we had a family drive through outing for ice cream from Sonic (slightly cheaper and just as good as Dairy Queen), and they gave us a cardboard drink caddy, the type with four sections and a handle. 

I found it a few days later while cleaning out the car and had a brainwave. I took it inside and reinforced the seams and handle (the bits I figured were most likely to bust) with duct tape, then slipped quart sized yogurt containers (thank you WIC. We always have a ton of the things) into the sections. I put paintbrushes and a watercolor set in one section, glue sticks and scissors in the next one, colored pencils and crayons in the last two. 

The result was a perfectly functional art caddy that I can whip out and place on the table without having to gather or dig out art supplies every time the kids want to do something. 

The second discovery I've made is that you can buy a huge roll of brown paper (the type contractors use to protect floors while they paint) for $12 at Home Depot. This is cheaper than printer paper, and I've found that I can rip off a huge chunk of the stuff, cover the table with it, plunk the caddy in the middle and just let the kids go nuts. 

Sometimes I'll add other materials, like poster paints or paper scraps (cut up old magazines or catalogs and cut up construction paper scraps from other projects), but usually the normal art supplies by themselves are enough to keep them happy for awhile. 

6.) I found a picture of St. Therese giving a FANTASTIC side-eye. 

I'm seriously considering making it my profile picture. 

Someone gave me a copy of a reprint of a 2nd grade reader originally compiled and published in 1929 by a bunch of religious sisters out of Chicago. There was a really cheesy, sugary sweet story about St. Therese as a child that included this image, and I can't stop laughing about it. Who approved this?! 

I'm debating keeping the book (the story paints her as a perfect child who always did what her parents said and was docile and sweet...which if you read any of her mother's letters or even her autobiography you know is absolute bunk. She was a temperamental hellion as a child, and I honestly think that part of her story is an important one-- kids need to know God can work with them even if they're not initially perfect), but I am VERY happy I came across that image. 

It's so bad it's good. It's like she's judging the schlock they're writing about her right there on the adjoining page. 

7.) LENT IS COMING. 

Lent starts next week! 

Here's a piece I wrote last year about surviving Lent when you struggle with religious OCD, or scruples. 

This year, I'm trying to figure out ways I can do something involving prayer, alms-giving, and fasting with the kids, but I'm not feeling particularly inspired. We'll see if I can come up with something doable in time, or if it's just going to be so-so. 

I'm pregnant, so I'm going with the supposition that so-so is acceptable. Hopefully I can come up with something, but I'm not going to sweat it too much if I can't. 

Check out the rest of this week's takes here on Friday.