FRESHMAN EVERY DAY

General update in freshman mom land – I wish I had something juicy to write about. I wish I had some new discovery, or we had unearthed some undiscovered personality trait or broken some dreadful habit or had dug into my past and come up with something witty, yet hopefully helpful to share with you all.

But I haven’t and I guess in one way I am grateful because it means things are relatively calm.

Taylor was down last weekend and we had a great time. At one point we were sitting on the sofa watching the Grammys, laughing and making the usual catty remarks, which is really the only reason to watch those shows and she looked at me and said

“This is just like the old days.”
I said no, “It’s better” And it was and is.

In the old days I would have been watching with Glenn who would have been reading as we have established he hates music and she would have been locked in her room or out somewhere not responding to my texts. I would have been pissed off and anxious, instead we were chilling and just being together and having fun. AND I actually for the first time every taught her something techy she didn’t know, I taught her how to TWEET.

As the Virginia Slim ad used to say, “We’ve come a long way baby.”
And what is even more amazing, or let’s say equally as amazing is the school year is close to being over.  My Freshman Mom status is about to end.

She comes home for spring break on March 5^th.

She heads back up the middle of March and six weeks later she is home for the summer as a sophomore.

Sophomore Mom doesn’t feel like a blog to me.

Who would have ever thought it would fly by, and we would all be happier and closer than we were when she was a “second semester senior”?

Oy, I would not live through that one again, even in your house.

We still have two and a half months and it’s not over until mom goes up to Boston and helps pack up the junk;  but it has gone fast and I can only imagine how fast the next three years will go.

If I hadn’t been so stubborn in accepting what that book I threw out said there would have been few surprises.

I imagine in the story of my life, being stubborn about certain things has always led me to surprises!

But on February 4, 2010 eight months after I started this blog all is well in freshman land. And all in all it has been a good experience for everyone.  We have all grown.

At this moment the quotidian details are -

Taylor has a nasty/cold virus she picked up from Lucy who has been home with it for a week.

She is in Boston getting better thanks to the world’s best pediatrician, and also one it’s great people Dr. Barbara Landreth.

There – goody – we have a new character in our blog world.

Say Hello to Barbara. You can’t get into her practice because it’s closed, but she is truly a gift and we all love her. And Jo-Z her girl Friday, who is so organized she even confounds me and I thought I was organized. I am convinced if Barbara didn’t need her, we could send Jo-Z to Haiti and she could get their act together in a week or two.

But it’s flu season and Barbara can’t let her go.

But we have to mention her cause we love her too; even if it takes a PhD in hieroglyphics to decode her emails.

As you have seen lately the blog is becoming less Freshman Mom and more just daily life.  If truth be told I have found the challenges of being a fourth grade mom far more trying the last few weeks than being a Freshman Mom and not because of Lucy per-se.

Well, it has to do with Lucy but it’s not her fault.

During the last week I have been grappling with rather unpleasant fourth grade class, nasty parent issues and health things, nothing major just getting older which dove-tails into my book, which I will be shamelessly promoting over the next year, and I’m getting ready to go up to Rhode Island and finish the DVD for LUKCY DUCKS.  I have pretty much have been dealing with just life. Though I have been thinking a lot about how I have to officially change the blog, but what to call it?  What is it about?  Well, it’s about life and getting through every day, every moment life changes. For the most part it’s about how I deal with life and what happens in my world, so I went to the dictionary – instead of spell check for a change, and I looked up the word freshman.

The dictionary defines freshman as

1)   first-year student

2)   beginner

And I thought but of course, I’m not just a freshman mom of a college student, I’m a freshman every day I wake up. Every day I wake up I’m a beginner at something; we all are.

Every day is bound to produce something new one has never dealt with before or a new experience to share.

As mundane as it may sound, the pushpin portrait- that is a totally freshman experience, as was the Lady Gaga concert. I’m about to release my own DVD, publish a book; the trip was a freshman adventure.

Blake’s death, freshman experience in the worst of ways, but totally and completely life changing, and honestly it changes from day to day and continues to be a freshman occurrence.

I may not have gone to college but I’m a freshman in one way or another every day I’m alive.

My book is about being fifty and all it brings, this is a totally freshman event and one I will blog about plenty over the next twelve months.

Yesterday, I wore a heart monitor for twenty-four hours, talk about a freshman experience, I’m fine, but I will blog about that next week, getting older and all it brings.

I’m soon to be fifty-two with a ten year old that is starting to bring a lot of freshman experiences.

This week I have had the freshman experience of dealing with someone I thought was a friend but has been lying both to my face and to Lucy’s school putting Lucy, Glenn and me in an awful position. And it was a totally freshman experience and continues to be as I made the vow not to be a word warrior.

Well, let me tell you, this has not been easy my friends. Talk about the universe throwing temptation in your path, if EVER I could have word warriored volumes it’s been the last ten days and I have shut up.

I have behaved like a lady. A simple- let’s put a pin in it when I wanted to take the pin and stick it up their you-know- what.

So what’s my point?

WE ARE ALL FRESHMAN.

The blog will be called Freshman Mom until she Taylor is hom.

But we can have a contest and any of you who come up with a great title

FRESHMAN ———

I will figure out a prize.

There we are, the end of the week, the end of the day, almost the end of freshman year for Tay, the end of my first half-century and then some, And I’m still a freshman, but to quote a Sondheim song, “I’m still here.”

FRESHMAN MOM