Tag: problem solving

Ideas and Inspiration #atozchallenge

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The A to Z Challenge has piqued the interest of my children, even though they don’t always read the blog posts that result from discussions and suggestions they make about subject matter. The fact that mom is responding to assignments rather than simply writing when an idea comes is much like what they do in school, isn’t it?

Well… isn’t it?

Yesterday, our discussion focused around the letter I.

“What will you write for your I-blog, Mom?” C asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t have an idea yet.”

“’Idea!’ There’s your blog post,” he said triumphantly. As if simply saying a word could make it happen… I thought. An idea without inspiration just wasn’t going to happen.

“That’s it?” I asked him. “That’s your idea for I?”

He shrugged. “You used my idea for F. There’s no reason why you can’t use my idea for I.” He was smiling as he drove home his point by incorporating the very word he was suggesting into his statement.

“I don’t know. I’ll think about it,” I assured him.

“I think it could work,” J chimed in. “After all, what else are you going to write about?”

“Igloo,” my boyfriend suggested. “That’s a good one.” I suppose it could be… if I knew anything about igloos. Which I don’t.

Ideas are funny though; they flit in and plant themselves in your brain, but then when you try to examine them, turn them around, and analyze them so you can write about them, they dig in their heels and refuse to budge. How many times had I struggled to write, even when I thought I had an idea? But then other times, I think I have no ideas when I sit down to write, and amazingly coherent pieces flow out.

Two days ago, for example, I sat down to write my H blog on happiness, but it didn’t happen that way, did it? A hiccup or two later, and here we are at the letter I.

No doubt, I will continue to get help with my ideas through the rest of the A to Z Challenge, and beyond. I’m happy to entertain any idea that’s thrown at me, but don’t be surprised if I sit down to write, and I end up with something completely different.

Ideas are funny like that.

Hiccups #atozchallenge

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When I was a kid, I would get the hiccups something fierce. My hiccups would often last the full day, and while I don’t remember them bothering me too much—other than being a serious annoyance—I think my parents would beg to differ. Once, I remember being on a roof, helping my father while he made some repairs. When my hiccups began, he made me get off the roof for fear I might fall.

My parents’ go-to hiccup cure was always a spoonful of sugar. Every time I had the hiccups, I would choke down that spoonful of dry granules, and every time, I would still have the hiccups.

My most memorable case of hiccups was one time when we were involved in a family activity in the kitchen—I can’t remember whether we were coloring Easter eggs or carving jack-o-lanterns, but it was that type of activity, and it clearly took all of my focus. As was typical for me, I had been suffering with the hiccups for the better part of the day. I had tried the spoonful of sugar cure. Twice.

My mother slipped out of the room unnoticed while I was hard at work on my project. We finished, and when we were in the middle of cleaning up, my father sent me upstairs to get something for him. As I rounded the corner from our living room to our front hall, my mother jumped out and scared me. In fact, she scared me so badly that I started to cry. The one consolation—my hiccups were gone.

Several years later, we had a book of natural remedies on approval through the Readers Digest book club. In that book, there was a cure for hiccups that sounded ridiculous. According to the book, if you took a tall glass of water, placed a spoon in the water, held the handle of the spoon between your teeth as you drank some of the water, you would cure the hiccups. Ha!

It wasn’t long before I was able to put this cure to the test. And it worked! The quickest and easiest cure for the hiccups ever! In the years since finding this cure, it has helped me, my children, and any hiccup-ridden person I come in contact with.

For me, this cure has worked 95% of the time. It’s much easier than choking down sugar, and much safer than being traumatized by your mother!

Balance #atozchallenge

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As a single mom, one of the things I struggle with most is balance. No matter how I structure my day, my self seems to get lost in the demands of raising three kids and attending to the responsibilities I have before me. There are days when I run from one commitment to another with barely a pause to breathe.

My daughter also struggles with balance. She has filled her schedule with challenging classes and demanding activities, and there is little time left to sit with her thoughts or spend time with friends.

Perhaps this is why we both always have a creative project going. She will often sit in her room and draw if she has a free block of time. I am non-discriminating in my creativity. I turn to writing or painting or playing with wire and beads. For me, at least, I know that if I can maintain creative energy, I will feel as though I am attending to my own needs, regardless of how unbalanced my life may be.

Heat

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The other day—the last day of February, to be exact—I was driving my two younger children to an 8:00 am appointment. It is a sad truth that the last day of February in northern New England is seldom warm, even the occasional Leap Day, as it was.

But it was morning, and I had been running around before I got in the car. I was also stressed because we had been in a hurry to get out the door to meet the time constraints of the requisite appointments. And because I was stressed, I was warm. I cracked open the car window to get some air.

“Oh no, Mom! Close the window!” my daughter groaned from the passenger seat. “It’s cold in here!”

Now, before I continue, let me fill you in on a bit of background information. My daughter is always cold. All winter long, she comes downstairs in the morning wearing a long sleeve t-shirt with a plunging neckline, and maybe (on a good day) a sweater that’s made out of some material that’s no warmer than tissue paper. And then she complains that she’s cold, and I need to turn on the heat. Yeah… no.

“It’s not cold in here,” I retorted. “It’s quite warm.”

“It’s NOT warm, Mom. You’re ruining our lives!” She let out a little giggle at her dramatic statement. “So… last night I heard a commercial on the radio, and it made me think of you. This lady was opening the windows in her house, and her kids were complaining that it was below zero and they were freezing. And then the announcer said, ‘Is menopause ruining your life?’” She paused here for effect. “Totally you, Mom. You are tearing this family apart! Turn on the heat!”

“If you dressed warmer, you wouldn’t be so cold,” I told her. “It’s always warm enough in our house.”

“Just because you’re warm enough, doesn’t mean we have to keep the heat at 48°,” she stated bluntly.

“We have heat to keep us warm and a roof to keep us dry. You should feel fortunate.”

“Are you seriously playing this card?” she asked, incredulous that I would expect her to feel fortunate when she’s always cold. “Why should we freeze because, you know… Socialism?”

“I’m not saying you should freeze. I’m saying you should recognize that you are lucky. If you want to pay for the heat, I’ll turn it up. In the meantime, I’ll pay for a sweatshirt.”

“I had a dream that I was with Bernie Sanders,” she said as she abruptly changed the subject. She went on to fill me in on the rest of her dream.

“That was kind of a random change of subject,” I informed her when she was done.

“Oh well, you know… Socialism,” she responded.

Minivan

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It seems I may have kept my minivan about a month too long. Last month, I could have traded it in on another car and gotten a thousand dollars toward my purchase. Maybe more. But this month—what with the van’s sudden desire to ask for a new catalytic converter—its value has dropped. To nothing. “It will cost more to fix it than the car is worth,” I was told, and I get it. Which is why I’m not planning to fix it. And that’s why my son and I were discussing the minivan problem.

The minivan is currently the only vehicle we have that can transport furniture, lumber, bikes, camping gear, farm animals… whatever it is we need to haul. Not to mention, more than a few passengers. This was the vehicle that I acquired back in the pre-school years so that my children could bring friends and we could all fit in the same vehicle, even with car seats.

But the minivan problem for W is all about the fact that we now have no way to transport bicycles. Apparently, he is planning many trips over the summer that will require the hauling of two or three bicycles, and the fact that the minivan is no longer functional is a problem. But W’s brain does not work the way the average brain works, so I was not surprised when I was preparing chicken for dinner and W stated, “How about if you get a tank?” He was in the other room, so I wasn’t quite sure I heard him right.

“A tank? Like a military tank?” I questioned.

“Yeah, a military tank. It’d be really cheap to insure. I don’t think you could damage it.”

“But you could definitely hurt other people with it,” I returned. “Insurance is as much about liability as it is about damage to the vehicle. Besides, I don’t think tanks get good gas mileage.”

“Nope. I suspect not. But,” (and his face lit up with the but…) “They are exempt from the gas guzzler tax,” he added, as if that somehow made driving one around town more appealing.

“Nice!” I agreed. “But I’m sure there might be a blind spot or two in a tank,” I continued my litany of reasons not to replace the van with a tank.

“Yeah,” he laughed. “There are a few of those. And it probably doesn’t even go in reverse.” Huh. I’ve never really thought about that.

“And I don’t think your brother would be thrilled about driving a tank to school. Hey C,” I called into the living room. “You wanna drive a tank to school?” Isn’t driving your mother’s minivan bad enough?

“Nope. I’m good,” came his unenthusiastic reply.

“I think it would be great to drive it to the high school,” W continued. “Everyone would get out of your way in a hurry!”

“Well, you’ll be driving in another couple years. You’d have to drive it next….” No doubt, this piece of information might drive home the impracticality of the tank as an option.

In W’s mind a tank might just solve the problem of our mini-van. In my mind, driving a tank would create far bigger problems than not being able to transport bicycles!

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Glasses

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There are things I don’t really like about getting older. One of these things is that I now have difficulty functioning without reading glasses within easy reach. Like many people of a certain age, I have several pair of reading glasses stashed in various places in the house. At least that’s the plan. In fact, they all usually end up in the same place. Reading glasses… they have a tendency to wander.

Last week, I was certain I left my reading glasses on the kitchen table when I rushed out the door in the pre-dawn hours to attend an athletic competition with my daughter. My beau had arrived early to join us for the day. After a hello and a brief discussion, we grabbed the various bags, papers, cameras, and coffees and headed out the door.

Later in the day when we returned, I searched the kitchen for my glasses. I know I was exhausted and likely seeing double, but I could not find them anywhere. Not on the table, not on the counter, not in any of the logical places that I would have put them. “Did you, by chance, borrow my glasses before we left this morning?” I asked beau.

He shook his head. “Not that I can remember. I wasn’t here very long.” True. It was unlikely he would have had time, and I couldn’t remember him reading anything.

“I’m sure they are around somewhere,” I shrugged in attempt to reassure myself more than anyone else. Even though it was just a pair of inexpensive readers, it was my favorite pair. “Knowing me,” I continued, “I’ll probably find them in the refrigerator.” Truly, I didn’t suspect that I had left them anywhere they didn’t belong, but with the degree of busyness and distraction in my life, stranger things had been known to happen. I located a different pair of readers, and continued with the progression of the late afternoon.

I was now focused on throwing dinner together, so we could get out to the high school theater performance—the busyness and distraction continued. I cooked some pasta, and I went to the refrigerator for the cheese. When I opened the cheese drawer, I found my glasses, perched on the packages of sandwich meat. I laughed.

I laughed because I actually found my glasses in the refrigerator. And I laughed because I realized I had left my glasses on the table, just as I had thought!

At lunchtime, C had called me, trying to find the mozzarella in amongst several other varieties of cheese in the drawer. I knew I had just bought some, but he wasn’t finding it. While we were on the phone, he removed the drawer from the fridge, placing it on the kitchen table. While we were on the phone, he proceeded to “inventory” the cheese in the drawer as he removed each package. When he returned the cheese to the drawer, it seemed he accidentally included my reading glasses.

Whew! For now, I can rest easy in the fact that maybe, just maybe, I’m not going crazy. At least not yet.

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Phony

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Unlike many people I know, I still have a landline phone in my house. I keep it because it is bundled with my cable and internet, but also because it is the receptacle of all sorts of junk phone calls. It is, in essence, the garbage can for phone calls. The only calls I generally answer on that phone are from my mother.

The upcoming election has brought an onslaught of political phone calls. These calls are so frequent that I have stopped bothering to even look at the caller ID.

One day, as the phone rang, W approached, read the caller ID, and stood pondering the phone, still ringing insistently. Finally, he picked it up and said hello.

There was a long pause on this end as he listened to what the caller had to say. “I…” he stopped, unsure of how to handle this situation. “I don’t know,” he responded, the phone falling away from his ear as he attempted to pass it off to me.

I shrugged in response and shook my head, as if to say, Don’t look at me. I didn’t answer it. But he thrust the receiver into my hand, and I had no choice but to take it. Well, I could have hung up…. But I didn’t.

“Hello?” I said, hopeful for something other than a politician or solicitation. The caller began his pitch, asking for money that I do not have. I sighed and hung up, shaking my head at W. “Next time, don’t answer it,” I told him firmly.

As the elections approach, the calls become more frequent, more insistent. One day last week, C was on the couch working on the computer. The phone rang through its cycle of 5-plus rings for the umpteenth time that hour. “Can you unplug the phone please?” he requested.

“No. What happens if someone needs to reach us?” I don’t know what I was thinking when I said that.

“Mom, you are not even answering it. Just unplug it!” He had a point. But then again, maybe the ringing would stop at a reasonable hour, so we could all get some sleep. Not long after this conversation, I left the house for a dance class.

The next morning, I had to call in a prescription refill. It was early in the morning, and the pharmacy has an automated refill line that allows you to call in the refill after hours (or before, in this case). I picked up the phone to dial the number, but there was no dial tone. “Hello?” I said into the silent receiver. Nothing.

I hung up the phone, waited a couple of seconds, and picked it up again. Still nothing. Ugh! I dreaded the call to the cable company—it would take half an hour just to get out of the hold queue. I checked the connections to my handset, but then my eyes fell on the two plugs dangling amongst the other cords.

Ah ha! In my absence, someone had taken care of the persistent politicians. Well, maybe not the politicians per se, but they had severed the communication device from the outside world. Good choice!

I am glad that my children are protecting the privacy and solitude of their home environment. Endless political phone calls every night through the dinner hour will not help them to choose the most effective candidate. In fact, the more calls we receive, the more fed up I become with our current political process. So, bravo to the person who unplugged the phone—I should have done it long ago!

Now, I can’t wait for the politicians to pack up and bring their baggage to another state.

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Growing Pains

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“Mom, I don’t have any pants that fit.” It was Sunday morning, and we were getting ready for church when W entered my room with this report.

Admittedly, my brain had not yet woken up. No pants that fit, I thought. If these kids don’t stop growing like weeds….

But then my mind started to wake up and deconstruct that thought. I thought back over the past few days. He had pants that fit yesterday. He had pants that fit the day before yesterday. No pants that fit? Hmm….

“What do you mean, you don’t have pants that fit?” I asked him.

“I don’t have any pants,” he responded. “Only pants that are too small.”

“There’s a basket of laundry in the living room,” I reminded him (because doesn’t every body keep a basket of laundry in their living room?). “Did you look there?”

“No,” he admitted without the slightest hesitation.

“Perhaps you should. I bet you’ll find some pants in there that fit.” He left the room without further comment. I imagine he knew that suggesting again that he had no pants would do him no good.

I heard no more. When I went downstairs, he was wearing pants, and they seemed to fit. Well enough, anyway. The length was debatable, but who was going to argue?

At 14, he really can grow out of his pants overnight. In fact, it has happened. In my bedroom, I have a large bin of clothes that are on hold, castoffs from his brother just waiting for him to grow so they can be claimed and worn again. However, I opened that bin over the weekend, and it was nearly empty. A few pair of jeans, some shorts, and a handful of t-shirts lingered in the bottom. His older brother’s growth is slowing down. And, of course, the size that W needs now is the size that C skipped. And so, I am doomed. We will have to go shopping and actually try on jeans and figure out which size, style, cut, etc. he wants. And then I’ll have to pay for them. Doomed, I tell you.

But W could consider himself lucky. He will have brand new pants. The era of wearing his brother’s hand-me-downs has passed. Hopefully, he won’t outgrow the new ones overnight.

Meanwhile, on Monday night, we left a meeting and were walking to the car to drive home. The light from the nearly full moon skipped across the ice dotting the pavement. “Hey Mom,” W said, through the darkness. “These shoes are too small.”

Sigh.

Milk

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This morning on the Internet, I saw an article that said, 24 Recipes to Finish a Gallon of Milk. Curious, I clicked on it. I started reading, “Instead of pouring money and nutrients down the drain….” Wait.

What?

People have leftover milk that they have to throw away? They aren’t always wondering how the milk is going to last until they can get to the grocery store to buy more? Meanwhile, here I am thinking it has got to be possible to buy milk in containers larger than a gallon….

So I started to flip through the recipes, just to see what people who don’t drink milk might use milk for. Mac and cheese, fettuccini alfredo… no brainers. Corn husk meringue and corn mousse… WHAT?? Any thoughts on where I might find a corn husk or two at this time of year in the frozen tundra of New England?

Apparently, if you have some leftover milk, you can make your own Ricotta cheese, perhaps some yogurt, or a toasted marshmallow milkshake. Or here’s an idea: you could drink the milk. In our house, that’s what we do. We drink it. We use it on cereal. Sometimes, we cook with it—like when we make popovers. But we use it. Lots of it.

For a bit of perspective…. The childcare center where I work is collecting empty gallon milk jugs to make an indoor igloo for the children to play in. It will take 450 empty jugs to complete this project, so they put out an APB to all staff. The first week, I brought over three empty jugs. Last week, I had a bag filled with six empties, and I was going to take a walk over to the center. Unfortunately, between the cold and the windy, and the busy-ness of my office, I didn’t have a chance to bring it over. When it became clear that I wouldn’t have time, I brought the bag to my co-worker, whose daughter attends the center preschool.

She looked in the bag. “What have you been doing in your house?” she asked, as if having six empty milk jugs was the equivalent of an empty keg or two.

“I have three teenagers,” I responded with a shrug. It was explanation enough, though in truth, the milk jugs were not all from my house.

“Well, just keep bringing them my way! With this bag of empties, today I get to be the hero of the childcare center!” she announced.

Given the alternatives, I think we will continue to drink our milk. In fact, I am glad I don’t have leftover milk. I’m not sure how I’d feel about making corn husk mousse.

The Road Ahead

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On Friday after school, W had an orthodontist appointment. When it was over, he got in the car and put his feet on the dashboard. The soles of his shoes. “Get your feet off there! This is a brand new car.”

“It’s not brand new,” he informed me as he took his feet away. Two dusty shoe prints adorned the black surface above the glove compartment. He glanced at me sheepishly as he used his blue jeaned knee to awkwardly wipe at the prints. “It’s like… four months old.”

“And in my life with cars, that’s brand new. The van is ten years old. I plan to keep this one twenty… or maybe fifteen.”

“So four months is two percent of its life,” he informed me. He had me there; you can’t really say that a toddler is a brand new baby. “Anyway,” he continued. “By then, there should be some sort of legislation banning gasoline powered cars.”

“They can’t do that,” I stated emphatically. “That would be way too expensive! Everyone would have to trade in their cars, and you can’t expect everyone to buy an electric car.”

He pondered that for a minute. “Well, they should ban the production of gasoline powered cars. That would be a step in the right direction. Electricity is so much more efficient. If this were an electric car, you’d be able to accelerate much faster!” His eyes brightened at the thought.

I sighed. My car accelerates just fine, thank you very much. And the limited acceleration will keep his acceleration under marginal control once he starts driving… in another year and less-than-a-half. “I’m good,” I informed him. “I like this car.”

“I’m just saying that electricity is much better. It’s more efficient for everything.”

“Except for heat,” I told him. “Our house used to have electric heat. It was not so efficient and very expensive.”

“Electricity is good for heat,” he stated. “It’s better for most things.”

“Okay,” I conceded, eager to steer the conversation in another direction. My STEM skills are passable, but they are no match for W’s STEM skills, and if we continued this conversation, he would launch into a technical discourse that would rise above my comprehension in five seconds.

“You know Mom, I figured out what the unused switches in our circuit box are for.” They were used for the electric heat.” The words caught my gut and sent my heart into overdrive. I glanced at him then back to the road.

“Huh. How’d you figure that out?” I wondered aloud as I tried to keep my racing thoughts to myself. I shuddered at the thought of him poking through the large bundle of wires that ran from the circuit box up into the suspended ceiling, easily accessed if you just move a ceiling tile or two. I kept my right eye on him while my left eye did the driving. I saw him smirk. And squirm. He looked down then out at the road in front of us. With each of my children, the path I travel has a unique set of bumps.

“I just figured it out,” he said, offering nothing further. And somehow, I think that’s all I’ll ever know.

I sighed as I turned both eyes back to the road. The Long. Road. Ahead.