In the still of the night

I had a very difficult time getting to sleep last night. I tried squooshing my pillow, poofing my pillow, sheet on, sheet off, right side, left side...I did everything but hit myself in the head with a wrench like Moe on The Three Stooges.

I dozed fitfully, waking up at least a thousand times to get a drink, to go to the bathroom, to get a drink, to go to the bathroom, etc. I looked out the bathroom window, I looked out my bedroom windows: nothing was going on. Not even a stray cat trying to get to the empty tuna cans in our neatly boxed trash, set out at the curb for the morning garbage pick up.

The alarm went off at 6:30 and I tried unsuccessfully to get my husband to scratch my back WITH HIS HANDS and not his dumb feet like he did last week, but he kept tickling me instead. So when he went to walk the dogs, I padded downstairs with my hair sticking up everywhere and had a peanut butter sandwich with a banana on it. As I was sitting there at the table, I honestly felt like my head was going to pitch forward onto my plate. Can you die by suffocation in a peanut butter sandwich?

"I didn't sleep well last night," I said to my husband as he came through the kitchen, making a sound of disgust when he saw my sandwich.

"I didn't either," he said. "I tossed and turned all night long. I couldn't get comfortable. And you snored."

"Snored?" I said indignantly. "How could I snore, I ask you, if I was hardly ever asleep?" I took a large bite of my sandwich.

"Breathing heavily, then," he said, grinning and grabbing a Power Bar from the basket on top of the microwave. "Ver-ree, ver-ree heavily."

"You thnore too," I said by way of rejoinder, my mouth full of peanut butter. "You thnore like a band thaw."

He went on into the foyer to turn the thermostat back up its normal two degrees to our daytime temperature. "Hey," he called. "I know why we couldn't sleep last night. I forgot to turn down the AC!"

Who would have ever thought that two little degrees could make such a difference?

I went back upstairs at nine o'clock and got in bed, thinking that I was now sleepy enough that I could drift off easily. Wimzie came up with me and made herself into a tidy bundle at the foot of the bed where the fan could blow her bangs out of her eyes. I fell asleep and was totally unconscious until I heard a tap-tap-tapping on the door.

"Whaa-?" I said thickly, regretting the peanut butter sandwich.

"It's us," said Meelyn, coming into the room. Aisling followed her, bouncing. "Are you ever going to get up? Because it's ten past eleven. Are we going to the pool? Are we going to get lunch? Do you want to scrapbook? What time do we have to be at the gym for open court tonight?"

"Stop! Stop!" I said, covering my head with my pillow. "Have mercy!"

"Didn't you sleep well last night, Mommy?" she asked as Aisling continued to bounce around the room, singing.

"No," I said, pulling the sheet up under my chin and closing my eyes firmly. "I had an awful night of sleep."

Aisling stopped singing and said, "So did I. I was too hot. I got up at three o'clock and went to the bathroom and took off my pajama pants."

"I was hot, too," said Meelyn. "I usually sleep with my sheet and my comforter on, but I kept throwing off my comforter, and then I'd get too cold and put it back on, and then I'd be too hot again."

"Did you squoosh your pillow and then poof your pillow?" I asked.

"Yup," she said.

"My pillows fell on the floor," offered Aisling.

"Well, Daddy forgot to turn down the air conditioning last night. That's why we were all so hot."

"Daddy is a bad, bad man," Aisling said thoughtfully.

"I don't know if I'd go that far," I said. "But he does tickle people. And he snores, too."

Thursday's List

READING: Where is That in the Bible? and Why is That in Tradition? both edited and compiled by Patrick Madrid. I've actually had these two slim little companion volumes for about five years or so, but I get them off the shelf and re-read them fairly frequently. They contain a lot of useful knowledge about Catholic dogma and doctrine. I bought the first book long before I became Catholic and devoured it with my Bible by my side, reading and flipping pages and making notes and then going to the internet to read further. The second book followed the first very closely. Despite their small size, they provided what I needed to know about concepts such as purgatory, Mary's perpetual virginity and other areas of Catholic belief that were making me say, "Huh?"

POOLSIDE READING: Second Honeymoon by British author Joanna Trollope. I really like the way this woman writes. It is a departure from my regular summer fare of chick lit, but she's sooo good. This one is about a mother learning to let go and embrace the empty nest; her husband's bid to get his wife back after twenty-two years of child rearing; and the grown children's propensity to coming back home after leaving. It is a very thoughtful book, very moving.

LISTENING TO: Hannah Montana on the television, heaven help me.

THINKING ABOUT: eating a bowl of refrigerator-chilled tangerine sections with a banana cut up in them. Also about the Shakespeare Workshop coming up in late August - I am elbow deep in lesson plans and am alternately delighted and worried that I may have TOO MUCH MATERIAL for five three hour classes. It's better to have too much than not enough, obviously, but I don't want to leave anything out.

FAVORITE NEW FIND: Aisling's and Meelyn's new frames for their glasses -- they are just too cute, also their new swimsuits

FAVORITE THING TODAY: looking forward to sitting out on the front porch this evening with my husband, just talking over the day's events and drinking iced tea

WISH I HAD: that cute knock-off Coach bag I saw at Target this morning - just adorable

PRAYING FOR: people, places and things - lots of suffering out there

Entering the workforce

My girls have just got their first gig as babysitters. A young mom with four little ones from our church just called and asked if they could come mind the kids while she helps her husband out with the phones and books at the new business he just started.

It seems very strange to think that my two little girls could be old enough to take care of someone else's little girls (and boys). Yet there's Meelyn out in the kitchen making a big pitcher of iced coffee -- I'm embarrassed to tell how quickly the first one disappeared -- and Aisling is at the piano playing her Mass music and they both seem so...competent. And so old, somehow.

Because I'm thinking it could only be, like, yesterday, when Meelyn, with little sticky-uppy pigtails and tiny white teef, was tugging on my hand and earnestly asking to go out back to play in the little "fwee cool," her own brand of toddlerese for "swimming pool." And Aisling, who endured her babyhood with a grim determination worthy of the RAF during the Blitz, was crawling through the house, gripping her ever-present baby bottle full of cold water, stopping every now and then to turn herself upright and take a few fierce sucks before going back to all fours and crawling off in search of new areas of the house to conquer.

I honestly can't decide if this makes me happy or sad. Which is it?

Does any mother ever know?

Today at the pool...

Today at the pool, we had two separate incidents that added flavor and color to our Fourth of July celebrations.

Even though the sky was very overcast, we decided to go ahead and go to the swim club. Storms were forecast, but there's nothing more frustrating than deciding to cancel plans and stay home on account of the weather, only to have the sun shine merrily down on the house where everyone is disappointed and grouchy and yelling at one another.

So we went an hour early, bringing so much stuff with us, it looked like we were setting up a refugee camp. There were already about twenty-five people in line ahead of us at the doors and everyone was in a party mood in spite of the grey skies.

When we got inside, we found four chairs and my husband and I began to set up our camp while the girls complained about the grey skies, the cold pool water, the lack of cute boys visible from where we were sitting and our cooler's contents, which consisted mostly of bananas, grapes, apples and bottled water.

My husband and I had two deck chairs side by side, and I asked my husband if he could move the cooler (about the size and weight of a minivan) between our two seats so that we could use it as a side table. He moved it forward somewhat, but I pointed out that we wouldn't be able to reach our drinks because they would be back by our shoulders. So he hitched the cooler forward another ten inches and across the big toe on my right foot, bending my toenail halfway back.

It hurt. It really, really hurt. And thank goodness I had a rosary lashed to the handles of my tote bag in plain view, because I wanted to say every cuss word I've ever learned, some of which I know in three languages, at the top of my lungs. It was hard to believe that so much pain could be caused by an innocuous cooler and I felt that maybe I should contact the people at Coleman to let them know that they should be working with the United States government to get defense contracts, because their coolers? They could totally be used as weapons. Forget those gazillion dollar Patriot missiles. Our military could be aiming Coleman coolers filled with ice, bananas, apples, bottled water and grapes at targets and doing huge amounts of damage for approximately $50 per launch.

My husband noticed that I'd gone completely still, standing there looking at that rosary and thinking must...not...cuss...must...not...cuss.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"You ran over my big toe with the cooler," I said.

"Oh. Did it hurt?" he asked.

"No, not much. I'm sure the surgeon will be able to re-attach it," I groaned, sinking down onto my chair and cradling my foot like a newborn baby.

It throbbed unmercifully for the rest of the afternoon, but somewhere around 2:30, something else happened that made me forget all about my toe.

My husband and I were sitting and reading, exchanging languid remarks every now and then, and really enjoying our relaxing afternoon. He had a cheeseburger with the works for lunch and I had a grilled cheese sandwich. It was fun watching all the happy people around; kids jumping into the pool and kids walking by with cotton candy spun almost as big as themselves and adults with babies, adults with pool floats, adults with hot dogs, adults with other adults, talking and laughing and having fun.

But just like Dad Boy the other day, another sound hit my husband and I at the same time. This voice was saying "Dad" too, but it wasn't chirping it over and over again. It was saying, "Dad...blub blub blub....Daddy....blub glub....Daglub..."

We both searched for the source of the sound and saw a little boy of about nine years old near the middle of the (very, very large) swimming pool. He was swimming, sort of. He had a face mask and a snorkel and he was barely keeping his head above water. Actually, he was under the water more than he was above it, and it quickly became plain that he wasn't calling wolf.

"Honey, that kid," my husband, a non-swimmer, said urgently. "Look! He's not going to make it to the side."

The problem with being handicapped is that there's just no quick movement allowed. I cast a quick glance around to see if anyone else was going to get up, but the people nearest us were all staring in horror and seemed rooted to the spot. I knew I couldn't jump in myself because of my knee, but I'll tell you what -- there's nothing wrong with my mouth. Just ask my brother.

"GUARD!" I screamed. "LIFEGUARD!"

The guard nearest to us immediately stood up and grabbed his life preserver. I pointed to the boy, who had nearly made it to the edge, but was still way under the water, flailing and floundering. He got to the edge just as the lifeguard jumped down from his chair and we both went to the side of the pool, the lifeguard reaching down and knackily lifting the little boy out of the water by his armpits and leading him on the deck chair next to mine.

"Are you okay? Are you all right?" we both asked him in an anxious chorus as we all sat down.

The little boy's shoulders were heaving as he struggled to get air inside him and he urked up some water and coughed. "Yeah," he said in a tremulous voice.

"What happened, buddy?" the lifeguard asked, pounding him on the back a little.

"My snorkel," the boy said, holding it up. He began to shake uncontrollably from the shock and the lifeguard and I wrapped my towel around his shoulders. "I was snorkeling, but water went in my snorkel and I breathed it in and I choked and I tried to stand up, but I didn't know the water was over my head."

"Oh, honey," I said, patting him sympathetically. "Oh, how awful. But you're okay now, right? Just scared?"

"Yeah," he said manfully, but his lower lip trembled.

"How about if I stay here with you for a few minutes until you've coughed up all that water and then we'll go find your mom and dad," the lifeguard said in an agreeable tone.

"Yeah, that'd be good," said the boy, who was still quivering.

Just then, the skies opened and rain came down like it was being poured out of a boot. The lifeguard, the boy and I were sitting there, all three of us getting wetter than we already were. The other guards stationed around the pool blew their whistles for rest period. Kids began climbing out of the pool, complaining good-naturedly.

"I think I'm okay now," the boy said, heaving a sigh. "I'm gonna go find my dad."

"Okay," said the guard.

"I'm glad you're all right," I said. He smiled at me and said "Thanks" and handed me my towel back and walked away toward the snack bar, clutching his mask and snorkel.

We left soon afterward, since we'd already been there for four hours. My toe commenced hurting. The lifeguard went off on break and I didn't see the boy again.

The princess still makes me cry

We watched part of the memorial tribute to Princess Diana on television the other night. Her sons, William and Harry, put it together in honor of what would have been her 46th birthday on July 1.

I made it through Elton John playing and singing "Your Song" with a montage of pictures of Diana on a huge screen beside him, but when he got to the line, "I hope you don't mind/I hope you don't mind that I put down in words/How wonderful life is, when you're in the world" I said to my husband in a strangled voice, "I can't do this anymore, honey. Can you change the channel?"

When Lady Diana Spencer married Prince Charles in 1981, she was a beautiful twenty year old kindergarten teaching member of the aristocracy and I was an eighteen year old recent high school graduate with braces on my teeth. My grandma and I both got up at an ungodly hour in the morning to watch her traveling to St. Paul's Cathedral, looking nervous and overwhelmed, in the same state carriage that Queen Victoria had used for her own personal conveyance.

It was just under a year later, summertime again, and I was driving home from a summer class at Ball State, when I heard that Prince William had been born. My grandma was gone by then -- heart attack due to stress from dealing with the treatments for her lung cancer -- and I know she would have liked to watch his christening together a month or so later.

Then Prince Harry was born several years after that and both little boys were just beautiful.

I always liked what very little I knew about Princess Diana. She was such a real person. Sometimes she loved the paparazzi and sometimes she hated them. She apparently found her formidable mother-in-law to be a stuffy old biddy. She liked Duran Duran. She had bulimia and temper tantrums and she hugged Mother Teresa. She kissed AIDS babies and held them on her lap.

She endured a very public divorce and was photographed for more magazine covers than any other woman in the world.

And then she died and her casket traveled through the streets of London to Westminster Abbey with that little wreath of lilies and the card reading "To Mummy" on top -- every mother's nightmare -- and every time I think of her or see a picture of her, my eyes fill with tears and I really can't understand why.

"What was so special about her?" asked Meelyn as she watched me drying my eyes as Elton played the last few measures of the song.

"I...don't know," I answered. "I guess it was just that....she was a princess. A very beautiful, flawed princess. Just like all the rest of us, only famous. And beautiful. And bratty and brave and...a mom. That's what was special about her."

Sinking to a new low

I was in the kitchen this morning, washing out the big cooler in preparation for going to the swim club's day long Fourth of July festivities, when I saw Hershey standing there at my feet, looking up at me with his beady eyes.

"Whatcha doin', Mama?" he indicated with his perked up ears and his tail.

"I'm cleaning out the cooler so that Daddy can put some ice in it," I said. "And what are you doing? Are you standing there being Mommy's Little Angel Sugar? Is that what you're doing right now? Just being Mommy's Angel Sugar baby boy? Hmm?"

He indicated that he was, indeed, standing there being Mommy's Angel Sugar by butting me in the knees with his head, which is his ultimate sign of adoration. Then I turned around and saw Aisling standing in the doorway, looking at me as if I'd lost whatever remains of my mind after two kids and sixteen years of marriage.

"Mommy's Angel Sugar?" she silently mouthed, looking at me with raised brows and wide eyes, and turned and walked out of the room.

"Well, yeah!" I yelled defensively at her retreating back. "But I used to call you Mommy's Little Pink Plumpy Butt, so there!"

Is it too late to get back my redbud tree?

My husband and I bought our first house in my hometown almost thirteen years ago. We now live somewhere else, of course, but that house was the first blank slate we ever had the chance to impose our own tastes on.

The yard, in particular, was the blankest of slates. The house was twenty-two years old when we moved in, and in all that time, the former owners had planted one tree and three arbor vitae shrubs. The tree, a yellow maple, was slightly sickly looking, with sucker branches growing out of its trunk at strange angles. The arbor vitae hedge, located squarely beneath the bedroom windows in the front of the house in that really special and imaginative 1970s "landscaping", was wildly overgrown and lent a certain Sleeping-Beauty-lives-here air to the place.

Other than those things, there wasn't a tulip bulb, not a single climbing rose, not even the merest trace of ajuga. Nothing but yard running right up to the house. It made the house look very naked and vulnerable and when I hung some simple tab-top curtains across the broad front window, I was forcibly reminded of a woman flinching in her gynecologist's examination room as she braced herself for a pap smear.

So my husband and I spent hours and hours digging in that fearsome Indiana soil that is partly God's good fertile earth, but mostly God's unyielding limestone. We labored and we sweat. Well, to be completely honest, my husband was doing the laboring and sweating and I was standing there with a spade, bossing him around. But you know what I mean.

In the end, we planted two dwarf burning bushes in a strange little empty bed at the side of the garage that was growing nothing but milkweed and poison ivy, and then lined the front walk with two dwarf yews, two cotoneasters and a couple of rusty-red shrubs with prickers on them that I can't remember the name of. I planted ajuga and periwinke where we needed ground cover and it grew without a fuss. But the crowing glory of our first attempts at landscaping was the gorgeous redbud tree we planted in the back, outside the kitchen window.

I wasn't really all that fond of the house, which was a rectangular shoebox of a place. I like the house we live in now about seven million times better. But I was attached to that landscaping, I really was. It was the product of time and money and many hours spent poring over gardening books at the public library and my husband and I told one another with shy pride that we'd really done pretty well, considering our inexperience.

We drove by the old place today on our way to Nanny and Poppy's (they took us out for lunch today -- thank you, Nan and Pop!) and I almost slammed on the brakes in total shock and sat there in front of the house with my eyes out on stalks.

THOSE PEOPLE have torn every single growing thing out of the front yard except for that sad maple tree and the grass. Every. Single. Thing. I can't say I was all that sad to see those huge arbor vitae shrubs gone, but my gorgeous dwarf burning bushes? Why? They were so beautiful in the fall. And what about all the rest of it? They'd better be replacing it all with something even better, that's all I've got to say. Because if the house looked nekkid and shamed before, it now looks nekkid and shamed and as if it knows that the paper gown the nurse handed it is not going to be nearly big enough to provide adequate coverage.

Woooo-hoooo!!!

For Kayte, Katie, Kathy, Michelle and Virginia.

Why? Why do things like this happen?

I am wearing a white top, today. It's one of my favorite summer tops, although it's nothing all that special. Just a simple, white, tunic-length t-shirt that looks nice with any necklace I decide to wear. I particularly like it because it a v-neck shirt, which makes it seem a little dressier. It's very cool to wear, very summery.

So, I was eating my lunch a little bit ago. I was having a french bread pizza, which is the kind of lunch I have to have on Mondays, either that or I'm searching for the sharp knives by 5:00. It was very pleasant, sitting there at the kitchen table with my little pizza, my Cherry Coke Zero and my library book.

Until.

One tiny piece of pepperoni fell off my pizza. Only it didn't fall off so much as it purposely launched itself at my white top, landing right on my left chest region, but then falling, rolling, leaving a little red track of stainy pizza sauce all the way down to the freakin' hem of the shirt.

This one very small piece of pepperoni - so small that one might almost consider calling the manufacturer of these french bread pizzas and telling them that it is simply unconscionable to advertise something as "pepperoni" when, in fact, the pepperoni is so sparse and so small, it looks like it's there by accident - left not one, but five stains on my nice white top. Five!

How do I manage to do things like this? I should get a garbage bag and cut holes for my head and my arms and wear it every time I sit down to eat. Either that or start wearing a shoulder holster with a Spray-n-Wash Stain Stick in it like a sidearm.

RECIPE: Iced Coffee

Meelyn and I invented this recipe just today because we both love iced coffee (as does Aisling), but it is too expensive -- and fattening -- to buy the full-sugar kind from McDonald's all the time, never mind Starbuck's.

At any rate, I am enjoying a delicious glass of this primo beverage right this very second, typing one or two words and then taking another drink. I don't want my iced coffee to get warm, after all, even if it might take me three hours to type this post. It's a big glass of coffee.

NEARLY SUGARLESS ICED COFFEE

10 cups brewed coffee (ours is decaf), warm

1/4 cup powdered vanilla-flavored coffee creamer

10 cups milk (ours is 2%)

4 teaspoons vanilla extract

12 packets Sweet-n-Low

While brewed coffee is still warm, stir in the 1/4 cup vanilla coffee creamer. Pour warm coffee (not hot, or it may break your favorite glass pitcher) into a pitcher and allow to cool in the refrigerator for about half an hour. Pour in the ten cups of milk. Add vanilla extract and Sweet-n-Low; stir. Serve over ice in a tall glass or wait until completely chilled to serve without ice.

Makes four servings for people like us, who prefer to drink it out of a bucket.

Please stuff a beach towel in your son's mouth

We went to the pool today, all four of us, and spent five and a half hours. It was the most fun I've had yet this summer and even with SPF30 sunscreen, I am turning a really nice biscuity brown color. By the end of the summer, I'll be able to completely camouflage myself by standing in front of the china cabinet with my eyes and mouth closed; I love to stand there and wait until someone walks by and all of a sudden, open my eyes and smile really big and shout, "Surprise!!!!!"

Of course, that kind of big fun is slightly mitigated by the fact that we have a yellowish stain on the carpet in front of the china cabinet, but it just serves as a reminder that life isn't perfect.

Before I start this story about the pool today, I have to mention a little piece of news I heard last week on Fox & Friends. It seems that there is a family somewhere here in the United States that has a backyard pool. The family also has two daughters, who appeared to be somewhere around 8 and 12 years old. The family's home is in one of those neighborhoods where the big houses are densely packed together onto small lots, so you can hear everybody's business going on all around you: you know who is fighting over the bills and who hates what Mom is cooking for dinner and who lets their kids rot in front of Nickelodeon when they should be outside playing.

But most of all, what you can notice is two kids in the backyard pool screaming bloody murder for hours on end, right up until midnight.

The immediate neighbors of the pool family are suing them for who knows how much money for some reason that goes like this: "They won't make their stupid freaking kids SHUT UP."

At first, I thought this was an awful story. That poor pool family, living there in that neighborhood with Mr. and Mrs. Crankypants on one side and Mr. and Mrs. McKidhater on the other with the widowed Mrs. Stayoffmygrass at the rear of their property. Poor kids! I mean, my gosh. It's summer! The sun is out and so is school! And at least those two girls are outside playing instead of inside rotting in front of Nickelodeon.

But then I started thinking. How bad would it be if there were kids outside, screaming, all day? All day? One of the neighbors was interviewed and she said, rather tersely, "They scream. They scream and they scream these high-pitched, panicked, hysterical screams and you don't know if it's an emergency or not."

So, okay. I have one of those kids who screams. She knows who she is. I can be sitting quietly on the couch, enjoying my latest library book and maybe enjoying a few Pringles potato chips with my Diet Coke and all of a sudden, I'll hear a scream tearing a ragged hole in the air from upstairs to down and I'll jump up, spilling my Pringles and knocking over my Diet Coke and losing my place in my book, to run to the bottom of the stairs and cry out, "What's wrong? What's wrong? Do I need to dial 9-1-1? Are you bleeding? Are you electrocuted? Did you drop a bottle of my perfume and break it and then step on a shard of glass? What? What?"

"Oh, it's nothing," she'll say. "I just had a hair in my mouth."

Well.

I began to feel a small bit of sympathy for the neighbors. It's bad enough to hear that steam-whistle shrieking during the day, but if I heard it at eleven o'clock in the evening, I think I might consider calling Kayte's husband, Mark, who is a fancy lawyer.

That takes us back to the pool today.

My husband and I had both spent about an hour in the water and we were sitting on our benches, engrossed in our books. Or at least, I was engrossed until there was this niggling at my consciousness that kept repeating the same word over and over: Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!

Over and over again. And over. Over. Over and over and over and. Over.

Until I thought I'd go mad.

It was a little boy of about nine, playing in the pool with his father (natch), his two sisters and his brother. They were playing keep-away with one of those squooshy pool balls and the boy felt that he was the only one that his dad should ever throw the ball to. Which, I guess, isn't unusual for nine years old. But that voice. That voice! That high-pitched, incessant, make-your-ears-bleed voice!

That voice could be used as an instrument of torture. Or maybe I should say it was being used. Because, my book? I could no longer concentrate on it. All I could do was sit there, painfully mesmerized by this child's chihuahua-style yapping. I was ready to tell his father my debit card PIN number, the real year of my birth, the true color of my hair...anything he wanted to know, just so long as he made Junior shut up.

My husband looked up from his book. "Do you hear that kid?" he said incredulously. "I've never heard anything like it. Does he run on batteries? And if he does, can we shut him down? Because I'd rather be sitting here with an Alabama auctioneer yelling in one ear and Dick Vitale in the other than listen to that little [insert uncomplimentary nominative] for another second."

I kind of kept an eye on the clock and that kid continued for just over forty-five minutes, yelling "Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!" in two second intervals. In his future, if no one holds a pillow over his head, that kid should train to sing at the Met, because his volume and the piercing quality of his yelping were completely undiminished in that span of time. By then, however, I was feverishly rooting for the Pillow Option.


Maybe Junior has a job working here someday as the World's
Most Annoying Tenor. Image credit: Copyright (c) 2007
New York Sites

Finally, the dad pulled away from the keep-away game and went to the edge of the pool to talk to a man who had just come in, but Junior wasn't ready to quit. He followed his father, quacking, "Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!" in an urgent fashion, trying to regain his father's attention. I had begun to think I was going to have to hold my hands over my ears and writhe around moaning, "The voice! The voice!" the way Quasimodo did in The Hunchback of Notre Dame when the bells were getting to him and my husband was snorting in exasperation, when all of a sudden, something happened.

"What? What? What? What? What?" shouted an elderly, patrician-looking gentleman who was playing ping-pong with his teenaged grandson. "Hell, after listening to that voice for two hours, any dad ought to do if you're not going to make him be quiet, DAD," he said to the father, who looked understandably chagrined.

It wasn't a huge scene and it was over very quickly. But the dad finally managed to take the hint and tell the kid to hush. I was grateful to know that I wasn't the only one being driven mad by the Child with Leather Lungs. Here I was, kind of thinking that I was a bitter old bat ad it turned out that I was, it's just that other people were bitter and old and batty along with me. What a relief.

You do not need a degree to teach 1st grade math

hOr second grade math. Or third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and on up. You don't need a college degree or a state teacher's license to teach history, social studies, grammar, literature or science. I know this for two reasons:

1) I'm doing it, and now I have the achievement test scores to prove that, even in their weakest subject, which is math, my kids are average students. So I must be succeeding. THEY must be succeeding. I can't begin to tell you how good that feels. I also know a lot of other people who are doing this very thing, some with much more success and creativity than I am achieving with my kids. I really look up to these people and steal their ideas whenever possible.

2) If there are subjects that un-teacher's-licensed, un-college-degreed teachers -- parents -- feel uncomfortale teaching, there is an entire internet full of curriculum catalogs and online programs that can generally be tailored to fit the needs of any student out there who needs to learn a specific subject.

I'm feeling in the mood for a bit of a rant because I am really tired of that stale, tired notion that the only people on God's earth who are qualified to teach something like, say, first grade math, are the people with the bachelors' degrees and the teaching certificates. I mean, we are talking about first grade math. You know, the math with the 2 + 1 and the let's-count-to-one-hundred and the little crate full of "manipulatives," which is a fancy term for "little objects, such as small plastic bears in primary colors, that children can pick up and count." I loved first grade math because our manipulatives often featured Jolly Ranchers and M&M's.

Why would any person need anything more than a brain in her head to do this? I know some people who don't even use textbooks to teach their kids elementary school math. I've never been one of those because I don't have math love, so a textbook always seemed like a good way to make my job a little easier and keep me focused on what the girls needed at each separate grade level. But believe me, children can learn to add fractions without sitting in a traditional classroom with a traditional textbook and a traditional teacher standing up in front of the chalkboard.

There's one argument out there that I hear repeatedly and every time someone brings this up to me, I just want to spit. I don't, of course. But I'd like to. It's the argument that says, "Only qualified instructors can teach things to children because they have had the benefit of teacher education courses in college that have prepared them for the specific task of teaching children the things they need to know."

This argument is based on the different styles of learning. Some people learn by listening, some people learn by writing information down, some people learn by doing, etc. Supposedly, only "real" teachers know this information and can take it from its theoretic form in an expensive college-level text and apply it in the actual sense in a classroom full of children whose learning styles include all the different types of learning, some with more than one.

It's as if some people believe that information on the learning process and childhood development and teaching methodologies and modalities are some big secret hidden on college campuses across the nation.

That kind of thinking really burns my biscuits because I've never yet known a homeschooling mother who didn't go to great lengths to find out the information she needed to know in order to best teach her child. In fact, I've heard more discussions about learning styles and teaching methods since we began homeschooling than I ever did in the faculty lounges of the public schools I've taught in. And it's not that I worked with incompetent, stupid teachers when I was teaching. It's just that parents have an extreme level of interest in their children's academic, emotional and social success that no public school teacher can ever share. It isn't possible for a public school teacher, especially in the upper grades, since they generally see over one hundred students a day, to have that level of interest.

That's why, when the public school teacher sitting next to me at the pool eyed me beadily and said, "Well, at least you have a degree. Most of those...mothers....who teach their children at home have no idea what they're even doing," it was so terribly, terribly hard for me to resist throuwing her into the pool and then bouncing that first grade mathematics teacher's manual right off her head.

I even managed not to say, "Hey! How 'bout them test scores? I was reading in the newspaper that the school at which you teach is leaving children so far behind, they're nothing more than a dot in the road surrounded by a dust cloud."

Instead, I just smiled a little Mona Lisa sort of smile and said, "Oh, goodness. That's certainly not typical of my experience in a large and active homeschooling group..."

And then I began telling her enthusiastic stories of successful homeschoolers and their wonderful parents until her eyes began to glaze over and a little muscle in her jaw began to twitch and she began to shoot desperate little looks around to see if there was someone she knew who could come rescue her from the clutches of The Mighty Homeschooler.

Hear me roar. And don't even think about giving me that steaming load of "don't know what they're doing" poop because I just won't stand for it.