Tag: teenagers

Looking for hope

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Some days I feel like I am crushing this online learning “thing” with my own home routine but some days it looks a lot like hell. I know many of you are feeling this way also. As a teacher that act of going off to work Monday – Friday kept most every day compacted with very specific roles. I did often bring work home to get a large project finished but in this new pandemic world my work day is often very mixed in with my home life which was fairly active but quiet. I feel like I have dozens of balls in the air and I’m multitasking too much. Some of my questions are: am I spending too much time on school work, how can I do the school work more efficiently, and how do I figure out new technologies to make this flow?  I wonder about starting a book club online via Google Classroom for students in upper elementary to access when they want, will they access it?  I don’t want to be doing extra work and have students already engaged with too much through their classroom teachers, maker space challenges put out by our district, and activities from other special teams. Plus I have a few special students that I am constantly worrying about…

{Online dance class T-Th}

It helps when I start most days with a little bit of yoga and getting dressed.  So Monday-Friday I am going to just get that on my calendar and do it.  And then I want to set up a school day that I can deal with mixed in with taking care of my family. My husband and his crew were all laid off from our community theatre and so he is often bouncing around the house, moving from project to project, and he has Zoom meetings which is two steps above the tech chain for him so I invariably have to help him get on and he has to use my MacBook Air b/c his old MacBook is too old for Zoom.

My daughter, our beloved Groovy Girl, has already emotionally had a tough year and then this happens! Like for real, it is too much for her to bear.  She’s had a week of online dance classes that went okay but I honestly don’t think she is getting much schoolwork done. For someone suffering from anxiety or depression this is major ordeal.  I thought she would love it but she is spending too much time in her bed bemoaning the loss of her senior year.  We are working with her on creating a schedule for herself and breaking the day up into manageable pieces. How is this all working for you? From preschoolers to teenagers to college students this pandemic will have such long lasting affects for our children going beyond who gets it and who doesn’t.

Good food is a huge draw in our family so I made her a Dutch Baby Pancake to cheer her spirits and it did for about one hour.

I share with you today a lovely poem by the amazing poet Mary Oliver:

“Wild Geese”

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things. ~Mary Oliver
I love her writing and hope this poem can cheer you even for an hour or two. We will get through this together and we will be smarter for what we’ve learned. 

Peaceful Reading…

Weekend Cooking; What's good and right.

The family gathered.

Last week while the book fair was taking up all my waking hours I got a phone call from Teenage Boy, which is big in the first place as he texts but doesn’t “talk”.  The reason for his anxious phone call was about dinner; specifically where everyone was for dinner?  His voice belied that he was a teenager at all but more like the middle school boy I think of fondly.  He was concerned that he was at home by himself and it was dinner time.  At first I was less than amused because I thought he was asking why I wasn’t home to make his dinner.  I kindly reminded him that he could easily make himself dinner, was quite capable of making a good meal for himself and tried not to sound annoyed.  To that his response was “No, I can make my own dinner, it’s just that I didn’t know where everyone was and we usually eat dinner together.”  Oh, yea, right.

We do usually eat dinner together.  It does feel odd when one or more of us is missing from our vintage (old) linoleum table.  And even though I think he’s listening as my husband and I make plans for the week he’s not always tuned in to the hum drum of what will transpire this week, like I’m won’t be home until after 8 on Tuesday and Thursday and my husband says I won’t be home Thursday night either and I’ll bring Groovy Girl to you at school.  How he misses all that at said table I don’t know but we are making a new resolution to alert him to scheduling issues that will affect him.

The greater idea though was that he missed all of us being here at the same time, sharing a meal together. It is a tradition he’s had for the part of his life he remembers and I appreciate that this is important family time to him.  He often is the one to start the “So what was the best part of your day?” even though when it comes back around to him he shrugs his teenage shoulders leaving that as his answer.

I made him happy this week by leaving 1/4 of a pan of these brownies at home when I made them for my 5th grade book club.  Book club boys fought over the chocolate ones-I’d interspersed blondies I’d made for a funeral at church and Teenage Boy was thrilled to hear me say they were so easy I’d make more this weekend.  He and his sister polished off the leftover goodies after school, leaving none for their dad much to his dismay. I guess I need to make sure big Daddy gets his fair share from this next batch.

I’m off to scrub potatoes for tonight’s dinner and once I have those boiling I will whip these up for late night happiness.  What is your dinner hour like?  Are you able to eat together or is it in shifts?

From The Mom 100 Cookbook by Katie Workman
(328-329)

Fudgy One-Pot Brownies

Makes 12 huge or 24 reasonably-sized brownies

1 cup (2 sticks, unsalted) butter, plus butter for greasing the baking pan
3 ounces unsweetened chocolate
1/2 cup unsweetened Dutch-processed cocoa powder
2 1/2 cups granulated sugar ( I used turbinado since the color wouldn’t matter)
1/2 tsp coarse salt
1 T pure vanilla extract
3 large eggs
1 1/2 cups all-purpose (unbleached) flour

1. Preheat the oven to 350*F.  Butter a 13 X 9 baking pan.
2. Place butter sticks and chocolate squares in a medium-sized saucepan over low heat and let melt, stirring until smooth.  Remove the saucepan from the heat and stir in the cocoa powder, sugar, and salt, then blend in the vanilla.  Beat in the eggs one at a time, stirring to mix quickly so they don’t have a chance to cook at all.  Blend in the flour.

3. Scrape the thick batter into the prepared baking pan and smooth the top with a spatula.  Bake until the edges just begin to pull away from the sides of the pan and a wooden toothpick comes out clean, about 25-30 minutes.

4. Let cool in the pan on a wire rack.  When completely cool, cut them into 12 or 24 squares.

(It should say hold the family back while they cool-they made the house smell delicious and people were hanging close to the kitchen.)  Enjoy…

This post is linked to Beth Fish Reads Weekend Cooking post.  Click to her link to find many other eclectic food-related posts.

Peaceful Reading…

Sunrise Service

(Groovy Girl and Teenage boy share a quiet moment)

My alarm went off this morning at 5:30 am as it has for the last 5 Easter mornings.  I got dressed in my overalls and a warm sweater and woke my two children up to do the same.  I went down and warmed up the car, made sure we had blankets and a pile of hats and mittens.  My husband and his merry band of teens lead the service so he’s been up since 4 am getting ready for early risers to arrive at this beautiful spot at a nearby state park. 

The fellowship (the doughnuts and hot chocolate) makes the early morning bearable for the teenagers.
Happy Easter, everyone!  
Especially to the man who gets up early to get it all organized:
Peaceful Reading…

Along for the Ride

2009
383 pages

     I’ve now read all of Sarah Dessen’s books and as soon as I was feeling good about this, my friend Tina gave me the news-Dessen has a new one coming out in the Spring.  Bring it on, Ms. Dessen-I’m ready for it.
     This is the story of Auden and her dysfunctional family.  Both parents are college professors,  accomplished writers but short on emotions.  She has one older brother, Hollis who seems to have used up all their parental energy leaving  none for Auden.  This is the story of her summer; the big one set between high school graduation and her freshman year at a prestigious university.  Her parents are divorced and she chooses to spend it with her father, his new wife and their baby.  Luckily they live in a house on the beach and there is an extra room for Auden. 
     It is a perfect time for some reflection as Auden prepares to make the leap to college student, away from her mother. She is a complex character, silently suffering from her parent’s divorce. She doesn’t have a set of girlfriends to hang with and she seems to just be waiting for college and the comfort books and studying bring to her.  She’s is a night-owl, a loner and smart beyond her years.  Her stepmother, at first glance, is flighty, girlish and struggling with her new role of mother and wife.  Her dad is a self-centered poop who shuts himself off from those at home, those closest to him, making the same mistakes he made during his first go-round as a parent. 
    Auden spends her time running interference between her dad and her stepmother, Heidi, and trying to comfort the colic-y Thisbe-who knew this would be just like her own parent’s marriage.   To get away she spends time on the boardwalk.  During one of these late night wanderings she meets Eli, a night time loner as well.   I enjoyed the casual relationship between Eli and Auden, which develops more as they understand each other better.  Eli has layers; he is worth getting to know which makes it difficult on both of them as neither is interested in spilling their sad secrets. 
     I loved the surprises many of these characters hold in store for the reader, making it easy to understand how not to judge a book solely by its cover or a person by their first impression.  Speaking of book covers; the cover art on this one is cute, adorable-love the pink polka-dot dress BUT…who is that boy on the cover…that is not Eli, who is described “a tall guy with longish dark hair pulled back at his neck, wearing a worn blue hoodie and jeans.”(41) Bike-riding guys tend to be leaner, less muscle-y in their arms and Eli is usually wearing a dark hoodie.  Maybe it’s just that Eli appeared to me in a different way and the guy on the cover seems more Jake than Eli. That’s about the only thing I disliked about this book. What I liked:  the shop girls at Clementine’s, the quest to fulfill Auden’s lack of normal childhood experiences and Heidi’s transformation back to independent can-do woman.  If you haven’t read any Sarah Dessen books yet you are missing out on an author who really sees things from a teenager’s angle.

Random Quote:

“In truth, I hadn’t expected my mom to care whether I was around for the summer or not.  And maybe she wouldn’t have, if I’d been going anywhere else.  Factor my dad into the equation, though, and things changed.  They always did.” (19)

Click Sarah Dessen for her author website.
Another point of view review:

Missie at The Unread Reader.
and Samantha reviews it at Someone like Samantha.
Find it at an IndieBound book store near you…Along for the Ride

Peaceful Reading…