Lately I’ve had the opportunity to spend time with each of my children, alone, away from her sister.

That sentence is not a healthy one — hang on a minute while I take it out back and shoot it to put it out of its misery.

There.

Starting again now.

I have had the chance to spend some nice long chunks of time with each of my girls. Carla and I went shopping together, and doing other errands in a leisurely way on Sunday. Then on Monday, Carla was at camp, so Annie and I got to cuddle and watch a movie together. By evening, Annie and I were on our way to New York to visit my mom, and in preparation for going to the funeral this morning. On the drive up to NY, Annie suddenly said pensively, “I hate what we’re doing right now.”

Alarmed, I replied, “What, just sitting in the car waiting for the time to pass so we can get to Nonna’s house?” I figured she was probably just getting bored stiff.

“No, not that,” she answered. “I just hate that our car is polluting as we go.”

I’m back home now. I missed my big girl (Carla) but I really did enjoy getting some time just with Annie. Annie is so ridiculously chatty and sunny, her personality is shiny and bright as a new copper penny. She bursts with song, stories, and creativity. It can be a little daunting, I guess, for the uninitiated.

But luckily I am her Mommy. So I’m prepared to appreciate her endless prattle (oops, I mean, fabulous gift of the gab), as well as her harmonica playing (don’t knock it till you’ve heard it!), and she is quite the singer / songwriter. Said Annie, “Ok, Mom, I’m going to play you some harmonica songs now, and you’re going to have to listen, cause you’re my Mommy!” Can you say CAPTIVE AUDIENCE?

It was really fun actually, riding home from NY today in the car, with her in the backseat. We hit some rather heavy rain, and she decided that was because of Mother Nature crying her heart out over global warming, harmful pollution, and the passing of my Aunt Aileen.

She decided that the only way to calm Mother Nature’s nerves was to sing to her. So we sang. And we sang, and we sang some more. Singing in the Rain, Raindrops keep Fallin’ On my Head, Robin in the Rain, Yellow Submarine, Red Red Robin, Bushel and a Peck, Michael Row Your Boat Ashore, Her Majesty, Clementine, You are My Sunshine…. and more. I was so pleased to be able to remember the words, or most of them!

I actually really love singing in the car. (When Carla is in the car with me, she tells me to be quiet, that I give her a headache. Annie, by contrast, eggs me on, and sings along when she knows the words.)

Anyway, when we finally had passed through the cloud burst and out the other side, Mother Nature rewarded us mightily with a beautiful rainbow. The huge wonderful kind that any happy child colors over and over and over again in their notebooks. We sang our hearts out even more after that. It was really stunning. I kept having to make myself focus on the driving. So we sang even more. Rainbow Connection, Somewhere over the Rainbow, and LOTS of renditions of You Are My Sunshine.

Annie is really sensitive, in a lot of ways, but she’s also a pretty happy kid. Carla is more of a mystery to me, and keeps a lot of her thoughts to herself. When the three of us are together, the two of them interact MUCH more with each other than with me directly. I butt in to their little arguments when they get out of hand, or get on my nerves a bit much.

And so, it’s very nice to have had these individual times with each of them. I look forward to figuring out more ways to work individual attention time into our schedules. I feel much closer to each child, as a result of the time we spent together. This should not come as a surprise to me, but yet it does. It is really eye-opening to think that these children, as vital to me as they are, haven’t gotten much special Mom Time all year long, even though they are with me for hours. The poor dears have to share me, not only with each other, but also with a dozen or more of their peers.

I really must think about ways to make this better for them next year. Sigh.

My oldest aunt — my father’s sister– passed away last week. She’d been in and out of the hospital with chest pains, and her health was poor. She was also apparently botching her medications. There is some speculation among family members that she knew what she was doing with the medications, and may have been mis-using them on purpose.

Depression in the family is so rampant. I wonder who else is suffering? My Aunt Aileen could have probably lived a much longer life, but she was fairly poor, living on Social Security. She has little education.

In spite of her poor health, she loved her family above all else. A couple days before she died, I received an anniversary card from her, because she always remembered birthdays and anniversaries. She took care to make her own cards.

She had a great interest in genealogy. She sent me a packet in the mail a couple years ago, with family history information, and a request to give her information about our family that I might have, such as my kids birthdays, and so forth. I decided to do one better, and I found geni.com, a website where you can make elaborate family trees, and your family members can collaborate together online.

Aunt Aileen LOVED geni.com, and she worked very hard entering our family information there. Geni.com also gave her the ability to send email greetings for anniversaries and birthdays. This weekend, I received an email from my dead aunt.

Even in death, she remembered us. Spooky.

So tomorrow I am going to her funeral. Annie decided she wants to come along, while Carla isn’t going to. Carla is taking horseback riding lessons as a part of day camp, and I don’t want her to miss it. The funeral is in New York, so some travel is necessary. It’s odd that Annie wants to go, as she didn’t know Aileen at all.

I’ll be glad to have my little sunshine with me. She makes me happy in spite of with her constant cheerful chatter.

I’m half way through the busiest two weeks of my year. This is when I am directing and teaching a summer camp. It is only for two weeks, but it is intense.

Last week’s camp theme was essentially Science & Art and the huge fun messes you can make in both. I had 14 kids in the group, ages 5 to 8. We explored flubber (a gooey mixture of Borax and Elmer’s Glue), baking soda and vinegar explosions, splatter painting, diet soda + mentos candy explosions, and more. It was fun. We also spent a good amount of time playing with the hose in the school yard. Reports back from parents indicated that the kids had a blast.

I was thinking about this whole experience, the intensity of it, the corresponding emotions that go with it. Last year was my first time ever doing a job of this level of intensity and responsibility with kids. Wait, no, that’s not true. I used to work in a daycare center where I was the Lead Teacher. I did that for about 10 months during graduate school. But the fact is, those were essentially BABIES, I mean, large toddlers are still babies really. My classroom back then was filled with little children, all between 18 months and two years old. The needs for activities for essentially pre-verbal children are quite different from working with a largely literate group of school aged children.

I put a tremendous amount of research and effort into last year’s camp. I was insanely anxious– filled with worry that kids wouldn’t like the camp, that I’d lose my patience, that there would be insanity and chaos, and that kids would be unhappy, bored, whiny, and above all complain to their parents and other teachers about my obvious lack of competence. And, in addition, my anxiety said in a whispered frantic tone to my pounding heart, more than likely I’d be fired when the kids under my care ended up being rushed to the ER due to my frank incompetence at even keeping them safe, let alone happy.

Wow. I think I suffered a similar bout of anxiety prior to this year’s camp, although I’d like to think that it was somewhat less intense. It’s important to note that last year’s camp was quite successful. None of the bad things I worried about actually happened. Kids came back to school in the fall and actually told me that the two weeks they spent with me were the best day camp weeks of their entire summer. Sure, they loved the swimming and field trips, and special programming featured at other camps, but it was the FUN and the comfort and the sheer joyfulness of camp with me that came back to them when they thought about what was good about camp.

So you’d think that I have nothing to worry about. Why so much anxiety? I don’t know, to be perfectly honest. I am now halfway through my camp experience for the year. The first week went very well. I love the group of kids I have– and I have a homogenous age group unlike last year’s wide age range. It is nice to be able to talk to them about what we’re going to do, they listen well (mostly!) and they seem to be cooperative (mostly!).

Next week our theme will be world travel. I haven’t picked all our activities yet, so this weekend I have to do a little shopping, and some planning. I love the idea of doing multicultural crafts, cooking, and activities. I got the idea to have each child make a passport for themselves, and then we’ll stamp them each time we “visit” another country.

I think it’s going to be a good week, fun and exhausting in many ways. Then… onto the summer. Hoorah!

It is raining and chilly today. I wish I had a full day to just snuggle under the blankets. That’s not what my day will look like, though I could sneak about an hour of that in, if I really wanted to.

It is the last day of school today, and dismissal is at noon. Unfortunately, I have to start After School at noon, and will have some kids for a while. Maybe even some until close to 6 PM. Tonight there is an end-of-year celebration at a classmate of Annie’s house. It starts 5:30 PM. I hope I am able to leave school before 6 PM tonight. Next year’s academic calendar indicates that there will not be after school provided on the last day of school. This is good for me, but of course, not so good for working parents whose jobs don’t give a hoot that it’s the last day of school!

We don’t live in a very family friendly country. I think it may be getting a little bit better, though. Some things seem to be shifting, and certainly some companies are trying to do right by the parents they employ. It always seems to me that the people who need each dollar the most are the ones who are most penalized by the system. Poor folk. People working by the hour, and not much per hour at that, really get screwed when they have to get their kids from school earlier than usual. I wish it weren’t so.

So, I have about a bit more than one hour before I head back to the school. This weather sucks, because we’ll be all couped up indoors. I should think of something fabulous to do with the kids, but right now I’m thinking we’ll watch a movie. Some kids will be fine with that, others will complain — and rightly so– because we did that yesterday.

I am looking back on my first full year of being an after school teacher. I think I did pretty well, considering the various challenges I had. I would like to do better next year. Specifically, I would like to increase and improve my communication to parents. I never started the email list that I meant to, and that’s just dumb. It would have been really helpful, so why didn’t I make one? I don’t know. I think I just got swept up in all the other things I do.

Next year, I’d also like to find additional ways of getting my own kids to be elsewhere during after school. I think they are too exhausted by the current system, even if they mostly like after school very much. Drob has been very dedicated, and he is a wonderful father. He has been making himself available to pick up the girls, or sometimes just Carla, early from after school once a week. I hope we can do that again. Their grandpa also has picked up the kids sometimes, so hopefully that can happen again next year. I wonder if Cammy can get them sometimes next year? I don’t know what she’ll be doing.

Yes, gentle readers (all, what, four of you?), Cammy still lives with us. Things are quite different now, though. She kind of quit being our nanny last summer, and got a full time job doing something else. This left me without back up during the school year. Unfortunately, her job ended, and she’s looking for work again. I wish I could offer her the kind of work she wants, but there is no way I can get her health insurance, or anything like full time pay. Not sure if she’s ever going to go back to school. Even though she does technically live here, I see her only about once a week, maybe twice. And briefly. She comes, changes her clothes, and leaves. Obviously, this is not the peachy situation it once was, back when she was helping with the kids on a regular basis. She does still babysit from time to time, but that doesn’t really constitute the type of support I was looking for when I invited her to live with us.

My depression being what it currently is, I haven’t really made any efforts to discuss this situation with her. One problem I’m having is that I seem to be withdrawing from people around me, though not the children. I feel like it’s hard to communicate. I hope that after I finish my teaching work (in two weeks), that I can work on my emotional health. I am just not feeling like myself, and it’s a problem. I believe this will pass, but may be a bit rocky for a while.

One good thing, though… the rain is good for my garden. So that’s looking on the bright side!

That adorable little kitten died the day before yesterday, early in the morning. I’d held him all night, trying very hard to give him some nourishment. He could not or would not drink– not from a kitten bottle, not from a dropper. He was fading fast and I knew it. Every now and again he’d make sad, sad, mewling noises, and stretch his body out in a gruesome and sad way. So sad.

Yesterday was Annie’s sixth birthday, too. She came to our bedroom in the morning of her birthday. “Good morning, Happy Birthday,” I told her. “Lucky died,” said Drob, explaining my sad face and the little still bundle of black and white fluff still sitting on the bed.

It was very hard to be cheery and full of excitement. Lucky was just a tiny, sick little kitten and there was nothing more we could do for him. Annie was not as affected by his death as I was. I think she just understood, that he could die, from the beginning. He’d been so obviously ill over the last few days. I was ever hopeful.

Still, the bigger lesson is there, and it’s not an easy one. The little kitten showed us that you can care, and offer comfort even when it doesn’t result in a happy ending. I showed my children that you can care, and still lose something precious. Life does go on when there is a loss. That’s an important lesson.

Another lesson here is that when you think about it, you realize that ALL life on earth is temporary. We live just a little while. What will we do when we are here? Where will we go when we go? We don’t know– but we can think about the impact we make on others during our little lives. We can love large. We can offer hope. We can try, and we can fail, but that never negates the trying itself.

We’ve decided Enough is Enough!

We’re moving to a small farming community in a rural area. Our new community is cooperatively raising chickens and ostriches for meat. We’ll be helping to grow an all-organic garden for the family’s consumption. I’ll be home schooling the kids, but mainly they’ll be schooling themselves along with the other children who live on the communal property. There are about 5 families already doing this who have kids close in age to Carla and Annie.

Reading books and doing hands-on projects around the farm will be their education. We’ve simply had it with the complexities of life in the city, and dealing with education in a school environment. We’re tired of the daily grind, running around, with meetings at work and school.

Done! We are done with all, and we look forward to our future life of simple, hard work.

Tonight, darkness will reign in our household from 8:30 PM to 9:30 PM.

It’s EARTH HOUR in the Pann household, and around the world.

Find out more here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/earthhour/2009/

Happiness – Sledding – Snowday = Cuddly Cat
Cuddly Cat + Snowday = Sledding + Happiness

Math is so much fun, isn’t it?

I’m snuggled up in bed with Carla and Annie. We’re watching my favorite Miyazaki film: Spirited Away, with our new kitty, Saffron. Saffron is a big time sweetie, and eccentric as well. She washes her paws– I kid you not!– by sticking them in her water and swishing them around. She especially does this shortly after using her litter box. So tidy! She also loves people food of all kinds. So far, she’s tried and liked pizza, scrambled eggs, ham, turkey sausage, milk, cheerios (both wet and dry), brussel sprouts, and macaroni and cheese. Unfortunately this diet leads to quite a bit of flatulence. We can’t blame her, though, after all, we allowed her to eat that stuff!

D is completely smitten with this cat, and I have to admit I’m quite sweet on her as well. She sits on my lap, something that my other three cats won’t do. She also is quite talkative, which is amusing.

There are so many colorful words for being mentally ill — crazy, nuts, bananas, bonkers, out of one’s mind, cracked, touched, goofy, schizo, loopy, psycho, lunatic, mad, deranged, barmy, maniac. It’s no wonder, too, since when one is dealing with the behavior of a person with mental illness, it can be quite frustrating, alarming, and confusing.

When that person is someone you love, someone you knew prior to illness, it can really feel like the person you knew left, went away, even died. It’s as if the person you loved and liked is gone, and was replaced by some stranger, who can be demanding or irrational, or hurtful or just bizarre. It is heartbreaking, for sure.

At the same time, as you can tell from the myriad words used to describe insanity, there is a huge stigma attached to it. No surprise then, that people tend to be suspicious of getting help when they need it – there is a taint to getting counseling, even though being mentally ill and needing counseling are really not the same thing. Ironically, if more people went through some counseling in their lives, that might help reduce the amount of actual mental illness, because people could work their their emotional behavior before it becomes truly a problem.

I find “mental illness” to be a phrase that is really not helpful, either. It is so vague. I appreciate its clinical sound, because so many people who suffer from mental illness are truely ILL and require some MEDICAL attention. But this over-arching term also threatens to remove all meaning.

I ask myself… am I mentally ill? I mean, I do take an anti-depressant pill each day. And sometimes I’ve had trouble where my mood has been low, I’ve gone through suicidal times where thoughts of death were constantly with me. So why is it that I find myself squirming when I ask if I am mentally ill? I’d have to say, I certainly don’t feel ill right now.

My anti-depressants work wonders. I feel great. I haven’t been having any trouble at all, and even find myself failing to over-react to the behavior of others. By which I mean, I know I would have reacted badly to certain situations, and cried or fallen into a black mood, even thought of suicide had I been depressed when someone, say, snapped at me over something trivial. Instead I just react with a calm and, dare I say, NORMAL response?

So if I’m not “mentally ill” now, was I before I started my anti-depressants? If not, then why would I even need them? You start to see some circular logic here, right?

My kids often grin and hug me and relish in how “crazy” mommy is. Yes, sometimes I am silly, or goofy, or funny. I like saying weird things to provoke a laugh, to provoke a bit of healthy confusion. I sometimes pretend to be other people for the amusement of the kids. Most recently, I donned a huge goofy blond wig and swaggered around with a British accent– I told the kids I was Keith Richards (not that they knew who that was!). It was hilarious to the adults around. They pulled off my wig, giggling and laughing at the spectacle.

Crazy mommy! Hah! Yay! A more normal person would not do all the things I do, but that’s not mental illness, that’s just my eccentric personality.

Illness of the mind is something that is awfully subjective. If I really believed that I was Keith Richards, yeah, that would be a problem. I was, in fact, only pretending. Does this make me insensitive to people who have actual delusions of being an aging rock star of a different gender than themselves? Nah… such people just have my sympathy.

There but for the grace of god go I: I am grateful that I am able to manage my depression (the common cold! ha! of mental illness! there’s that word again, damn!) so easily. I’ve had a lot of sessions of therapy, working on relationship issues, communication, self-esteem, and other issues. I can say that those sessions certainly help me to see my behavior and the behavior of others through various helpful lenses. At the same time, I feel that it is the work of the anti-depressant medication that has lifted me up and away from the seriously bad parts of my depression. Anti-depressants are not cure-alls, but frankly, I think they can come close.

Except when they don’t. It is so hard when one is going along through life, happily doing great and feeling normal (or maybe just good-crazy instead of bad-crazy) and then suddenly for no understandable reason, the black moods, the whining, the self-hatred, the whatever-one’s-issue comes back.

What occurs to me is to ask: What are we? Where does the “me” come from and where does it go to, if I am having a mental illness. I ask this, of myself, but really what I want to know is, where do people store their personalities — or their souls for that matter? It’s not exactly under the hood, between the radiator and the engine.

We are precious bundles of reactions, hormones, brain chemicals, situationally provoked. We rise and fall with our environment, and we feel — it is in our bodies, and our minds.

When a person working with D was struck by mental illness, his work performance was terrible. This makes perfect sense — who can work productively when feeling suicidal? It was so awful, because we knew that he was ill, and he knew, too. I just remember something that D told me he’d said, or perhaps written… “This isn’t me. I know this work is bad, but that is not me…”

The disconnect is between what one feels is one’s own SELF — and the strange behavior and accompanying emotions that have replaced the self. Sometimes, though, this self-awareness is actually absent. Then we have people who are around the affected person who look on in wonder, often in anger, confusion, derision… oh, god, what happened to so-and-so? She’s turned into a psycho.

If it’s your partner who is ill, you might feel deserted, hurt, angry. Everything is disrupted by mental illness, which it also is with physical illness. If your partner is going through chemotherapy, you know that they are ill because of something quite real, quite dangerous.

But mental illness doesn’t have the same feeling to it – it’s more like a person is no longer doing what they should and perhaps even just choosing not to. They don’t get out of bed, or they stay up all night. They react in weird and inappropriate ways. Oh, it’s awful. And at the same time, the treatment isn’t easily understood either.

Modern medicine has a long way to go. I’m pondering all these things, when I should probably be getting ready for work. A little philosophical thought about madness in the middle of the day never hurt anyone. Now. Back to my regularly scheduled activities.

Just before the holidays, I felt impelled to think about making all the presents for people. Here’s how it actually played out.

Handmade Holiday Gifts:

- Home-made Biscotti — I made chocolate almond with orange zest biscotti, and drizzled them with chocolate. Then I put together little plates of these cookies and gave a plate to my mom, one to my in-laws, and one to my grandmother in law.

- Pictures in frames / books — Not exactly homemade, but personal at least. I gave some photos of the kiddos to all of the above.

- Pumpkin Butter – I gave a jar of my homemade pumpkin butter to my mother in law.

- A handmade knit hat – It wasn’t knit by me, but it was really nice. Gave to my mom.

Re-gifted… I gave a crystal water pitcher to my mom. I think it will go better in her china cabinet than mine.

I did not write my children’s book to give to my kids (should really get around to that. Maybe for next year?!)

I did not sew anything this year. (Too bad, I love sewing!)

I did make a really nice big dinner on Christmas — that was fun and tasty too.

It was a good year for handmade stuff, in general. I will try to do more throughout the year, in hopes that next year I can do Handmade Holidays again.

Baby steps, right?