Shabbat Shalom from Arlington....

Spent most of today getting our CDs organized in the living room, so now we have a great collection of classical music, jazz, show tunes, etc. to choose from when we need music. Yes, we still have a stereo system because I agree with Drew that music sounds better coming out of speakers than through iTunes, and besides, we have such a large collection of music that it would take us forever (and cost us a fortune) to convert it all to MP3 files. Anyway, it's great to have our music back again -- I love listening to classical music while I'm cooking (I made mushroom soup tonight for next week) and relaxing with the newspaper while Drew is putting Rachel to bed.

Everything in the above graph makes me sound like I haven't made it into the 21st Century. So be it.

After I picked Rachel up from school, she announced we were starting a "collector's club" and that our first project would be collecting little rocks from McKinley Elementary School's playground. I was actually surprised how many they were, and how varied the colors were. Rachel grabbed a miniature stick and announced that it was the "polisher," and that I should use it to polish the rocks (i.e., get the dirt off of them). So I dutifully sat and polished before Rachel sent me out collecting again. As we were walking home she said she would wash the rocks off at home and then put them in a special container she has, usually for jewelry.

I should have been tipped off that washing off the rocks wouldn't be a good idea, because as soon as she started to do so she began wailing and shrieking. I raced upstairs, only to find her sobbing in the bathroom that some of the rocks had washed down the drain. When I calmly said it was OK and the drain would be fine, she sobbed, "I was so scared you'd be mad at me and give me a timeout, even though I did it on accident!" When I reassured her that that wouldn't happen, I said gently, "Are you really that scared of me?"

"Yes," she answered promptly, and I cringed.

Then when I said later on that we wouldn't be listening to a Laura Ingalls Wilder CD before dinner, that I wanted to put on some Shabbat and classical music, she threw herself onto the couch and began wailing, and I really lost it (she has been griping and whining for a couple of days now whenever she doesn't get her way). "Rachel, STOP IT!" I yelled. "You are making me CRAZY. You're making DADDY crazy too." She stopped immediately and fled upstairs. I took a deep breath, realized I should have just let her alone, then went upstairs. She was curled up in a corner of her bed. I sat down and said, "Rachel. You need to understand that if you're going to live in this house, and have friends, you can't always do what you want to do, you have to do what other people want to do sometimes. I'm working very hard to get this house organized so we can have guests who we'll do fun things with us when they visit us. And Daddy's working very hard at work. We've been listening to Laura Ingalls Wilder every night before dinner; we can listen to something else this time." 

Then I left the room and came downstairs to say hi to Drew, who has had a rough few days at work, and just as I finished explaining how I'd organized the music, Rachel's little voice popped up, and she said she'd love to listen to another one of her story CDs, and Drew repeated that we'd be listening to the Shabbat music, and Rachel sulked but came to dinner uncomplainingly.

Then for dessert we went to get ice cream at a local ice cream place that wasn't so great, but Rachel ran into a friend of hers, Matthew, from her kindergarten class. His mom had brought along their French au pair and I spoke a few phrases of French to her while the mom explained some awful tradition in a kindergarten class in a nearby elementary school called Tuckahoe Elementary. Apparently the kids start out each day being one "color" -- green, yellow, whatever -- and as their behavior changes they're assigned a different color. If your kid is "red," then that means they've done something bad and their parent must call the teacher and find out what went wrong. So all the parents at soccer practice today were asking each other what "color" their kids were, and the kids who were deemed "red" by their teachers were devastated. Matthew's mom thought this was awful, calling it very "negative," and for the first time since August, I felt that a tiny bit of me was still in Portland.