Some Pig

Not Really Part of the Plan

"What's that?!" India points at the computer screen.  We are looking through old photos the post-millennial way, and we've come across a picture of my grad school buddy Karin's Hawai'ian wedding. 

"That's Karin and Geoff getting married," I tell her.  (You may remember Karin from previous posts, and in case you're wondering,  yes, somehow she manages to get me in trouble even in two-dimensional, pixilated form.)

"Why is Josie in the picture with them?" India wonders.

"Well, dear," I search my brain for the words to explain this in a way a four-point-seven-year-old can understand, "Geoff is Karin's second husband, so he's Josie's stepfather.  Josie went with them to Hawai'i."

"How come I couldn't go to your wedding?" India asks accusatorily.  Okay, so my brilliant explanation didn't exactly go down well. 

"Because, honey, you weren't born yet," I remind her.

Later that night, over dinner, India announced that she wants a new stepdad and a new stepmom.  Why?  Because she wants to wear a pretty dress and be in a wedding, of course!  "But who's going to look after us while you're out finding new husbands and wives?" she wondered out loud.  Then her face brightened.  "I know!  Nonni and Poppi can look after us for the weekend while you go out!" (Clearly this girl has absolutely no idea of my dating history, or she would have scheduled another decade or three for me to find Husband #2.)

"How about if Mommy and Daddy just stay married and then we won't have to go looking for new husbands and wives?" Warren proposed. 

"But then I won't get to wear a pretty dress like Josie," India objected. Then she thought about it for a moment.  "I guess it would be easier," she conceded.  

"Oh, good."  I said, and Warren rolled his eyes at me.  "I'm glad we have your approval."

Letter From A Broad, Now What? Edition

Dear SAHMs,

I have a question for you:  Just what, exactly, am I supposed to do with these kids all day, anyway?

It's quarter to nine in the morning.  They've breakfasted, dressed, watched some PBS Kids, tattled on each other, looked at books, showed me their new skills (turning lamps on!  petting the cat!), sang songs, and run around like heathens and we have the whooooooole rest of the day to get through.  It's been raining for the past forty days and forty nights, so the ground squishes when you walk on it and the mosquitoes are as big as hovercraft.  So much for playing outside.  Neither girl can swim, the local pool is over their heads at its shallowest point, and they're too big for me to hold both of them at once anymore.  So much for swimming.  Any other ideas, loyal readers???

With apologies to Toasty, I can't comprehend the whole I-want-to-be-there-for-every-minute-of-their-childhood philosophy.  There are trained professionals out there who are much, much better at early childhood development than yours truly, and hey, we all gotta make a living, right?  I know I need to get my act together and make a calendar of playdates and little-kid events and excursions, but truth be told, I just don't damn well feel like it right now.  My entire professional career is predicated upon thinking up things for kids to do.  Now I have to do the same thing WITHOUT getting paid for it, all summer long, for two little people who seem to find my efforts only partially satisfactory at best.  Great. 

Is there a book out there titled, What To Do With Your Little Kids When You're Bored Out of Your Mind?  Because if there is, I'd buy it.

Sincerely,

SP

Requiem For A Man-Child

When I was a kid in the 70's, all my parents listened to was public radio.  I knew Robert J. Lurtsema's sonorous baritone well before I knew about Top 40 radio.  I had to go over to my best friend Kari's house to listen to WIGY on the clock radio (the kind that had the numbers written on flaps that flipped over every minute with a definitive snap) or to her big sister Kelli's record albums.  That's how I became familiar with ABC, 1, 2, 3 and Rockin' Robin and the other Jackson 5 hits.

When I was a preteen in dance class, we did cross-floor moves to Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough and Workin' Day and Night.  Years later I sampled a couple bars of the latter for my JV cheerleaders' competition dance routine.

I was a sophomore in high school when Thriller went supernova.  Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince presented an alternative version of pop culture in a corner of the world that had previously been much more aligned with Foghat, Bad Company, and Lynyrd Skynryd.  They were an urbane, edgy, and glamorous presence on MTV and Friday Night Videos, and I loved every minute of watching them.  One kid in my class even wore one glittery glove to prom, and if you don't think that took huge cojones in rural Maine, circa mid-80's, think again.

I rolled my eyes in college when Michael Jackson tried to protest in that sweet, high tenor that he was really, really Bad.  MTV stopped showing videos, Nirvana and Pearl Jam made rain-soaked, plaid-shirted West Coast ennui cool, and Michael Jackson became increasingly known for his eccentric behavior and appearance as he retreated farther and farther into a world of his own making.

In wedding reception after wedding reception in my 20's and early 30's, white people danced awkwardly and enthusiastically to the old Jackson 5 hits.  They were songs the DJs knew would get people my age up and dancing without offending the older generation.

I started coaching cheerleading.  Michael Jackson only made the news when he did something weird or was brought to court, while I tried to teach the girls to mimic the sharp-yet-fluid, totally synchronized dance style he made famous (with widely varying degrees of success). 

I was at home on the porch when my coworker (who was in eighth grade the year I started teaching) texted me the news that Michael Jackson had died.  Thriller came out literally a lifetime ago.  The Jackson Five were long ago consigned to the oldies stations.  Shawn Johnson danced to PYT on Dancing With the Stars last season.  And Michael Jackson had been working long, hard hours to prepare for a tour he was hoping would bring him back to relevance.

I know many people will say he died too soon, too young, tragically.  I hesitate to say that.  For this man-child, the boy who performed like an adult and the man who hid behind the mask of childhood, I wonder if this isn't the kindest outcome.  The consummate performer and artist always was an enigma as a person, unreachable behind the sunglasses on his increasingly altered face.  Some part of him seemed forever trapped in his heyday, longing to return to that time period.  We all know people like that, people for whom high school or college was the apogee of their experience and who struggle to recapture that part of their lives until you become embarrassed for them.  It's sad enough to witness in your high school classmate who can't get over not being in the popular crowd anymore; it was tragic watching Michael Jackson do it for so many years.

I feel sad for his children.  Their existence can't be an easy one to begin with, and now they have lost the central parent figure in their lives. 

I feel sad for his family, many of whom went on their own strange tangents as well.  Fame ultimately was not kind to them on the whole.

I feel sad for my generation.  We stand on the cusp between young and no-longer-young, and, as much as I would never go back nor give up anything I have, loss of youth is always a melancholy thing.

I wish peace for Michael Jackson, who looked to be such a lonely and ultimately solitary soul.  Whatever troubles or struggles he knew in this life are behind him now. 

He stood with one foot in our past, the past that included the hit-making machine of Motown and disco beats and 8-track tapes, and one foot in the first days of globalized, visually-based, 24-hour information and entertainment.  Whatever else he may have done, perhaps his most lasting legacy is that he both witnessed and helped to usher in this era.

So long and farewell, Michael.  So long and farewell.

My Cup Runneth Over

Today is my last official teacher day and thus the first day of my vacay.  That's good.

You know what's better than the first day of vacay?  The first day of vacay when it's also the day of your housecleaner's fortnightly visit.

You know what's better than the first day of vacay in a clean house?  The first day of vacay in a clean EMPTY house, because your husband took the little one to pick up the big girl from Camp Nonni-Poppi.

You know what's better than the first day of vacay in a clean, empty house?  The first day of vacay in a clean empty house, followed by the SECOND day of vacay in a clean, empty house because they're not coming back 'til Saturday!

You know what's even better than the first and second days of vacay in a clean, empty house?  The first and second days of vacay in a clean, empty house UNINTERRUPTED by the curriculum work you had scheduled because the meeting fell through.

You know what's even more better (can something be more better?  you bet it can!) than the first and second days of vacay in a clean, empty house uninterrupted by meetings?  Two uninterrupted days in a clean, empty house with a novel you've been dying to read and haven't had time to do so since, um, last August!

You know what's even better than two uninterrupted days in a clean, empty house with an eagerly anticipated novel?  Two uninterrupted days in a clean, empty house with an eagerly anticipated novel AND most of a hand-packed quart of homemade chocolate ice cream left in the freezer.

Now if you'll excuse me, I plan to sit on the porch for an indeterminate length of time with my seltzer water and the last installment of Harry Potter.  I'll stop to have dinner.  Or maybe I'll just skip dinner and head straight for the ice cream.  'Cuz today feels like my birthday and Christmas all rolled into one!

From the Vault

Since it has been raining since, um, forever, and there's nothing new going on with the kids (those genetically mine and those assigned to me by the district), and the big party that's making me all angst-y hasn't happened yet, I figure this is the perfect time to dig into the Caroline archives and offer an anecdote from my storied past.

My first quote-unquote real job after undergrad was working as an "administrative assistant" (i.e., secretary) for a consulting firm of I/O psychologists.  For those of you who stopped paying attention after Psych 101, I/O stands for industrial-organizational, and it means that instead of studying why a specific individual is  batsh*t crazy, you study why entire groups of people (for example, your beloathed coworkers at your local cubicle farm) are crazier than sh*thouse rats (why small mammals of the mouse persuasion are so closely associated with mental imbalance, I do not know, but there it is).  These I/O headshrinkers, being experts in workplace dynamics, were just about as nutty and difficult to work for as one would suspect.  As an idealist and a neophyte to the World of Work I was horrified, just horrified, that there would be so much as a whiff of dysfunction in a consulting firm that was hired to ameliorate the dysfunction of other work sites, but that just shows you what I knew when I was 22 (f*ck all, if you couldn't figure that out for yourself).  (I imagine the 22-year-old me was just a joy and a pleasure to have around as a subordinate, too.  Ahem.)

Anyhoo, one of the founders of the firm was a Harvard Ph.D., and as the saying goes, you can tell a Haahvahd man, but you can't tell him much.  Dr. F. was a brilliant man, but definitely of the absentminded professor/save the world but forget to put on trousers variety.  Proof?  He filed a lawsuit against his insurance company because he had a house that burnt down and HE had allowed the insurance to lapse because he ignored the bills in the mail.  "Que?" I can hear you thinking on the other side of the flat screen, and you would be right, but to Dr. F.'s way of thinking, since he hadn't realized those were cancellation warnings in the envelopes with the bright red stripes on them, and he wasn't aware that he had fallen in arrears on his payments, then it didn't really happen!  (That doesn't work for you or me, but then, we don't have Harvard degrees or the money to lawyer up and drag it through court, a fact that used to make me seethe with righteous indignation in my aforementioned young, idealistic, and hand-to-mouth days. Now I realize it's the way of the world, but back then it made my blood boil.)

If Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder... UPDATED

... then I'd like to start being fond of them RIGHT NOW.

That is my clever way of saying I am not going to miss this year's cherubs.  As any teacher can tell you, each year's class is both similar and different.  They're similar in that all groups of kids have the same cast of characters: Smart kids, dumb kids, quiet kids, and rambunctious kids; scholars and athletes and doofuses and sweethearts.  They're different in that the group chemistry - how they work together, how they act as a group, the impression they leave - differs, sometimes wildly, from year to year.  Take the Class of 2005, or as I like to call them, the Best Class EVAH!  They were truly fun to be around, and I liked the vast majority of them probably 90% of the time.  Looking back at my class lists, I didn't have a single class of '05ers that made me want to turn the page and move on.  The Class of 2004, on the other hand?  Not so much. I liked a lot of those kids as individuals, but as a group, they just weren't very nice.  It was kinda hard to feel warm and fuzzy about a group that deliberately screwed up their state testing to make the school district look bad.  

I've been trying to figure out why this particular cohort hasn't found favor with me and I think I have it:  This group doesn't get it.  They don't understand when they cross the line between harmless goofing around and serious misbehavior.  No matter how many times we explain, no matter what we say or do or try, they Just. Don't. Get It. They never miss an opportunity to misbehave.  When we went to the high school for their step-up tour, former students in the halls greeted us with warm hellos, then caught a load of our little charges punching each other, running around, making fun of the upperclassmen and basically behaving like submorons.  "Is this class really bad?" they whispered to us in horror.  "We weren't like THAT last year, were we?"  Hastily we reassured them that no, no, they weren't nearly as heinous; this year's vintage of 8th grader was just particularly sour.

So that was Monday.  Since then, we've had TWO different boys on our team get punched right in the junk because they noodged and they noodged and they noodged and they noodged until, WHAMMO!  The people they were pestering just snapped and went for the giblets.  Such is the group we have this year that when we teachers heard about the incidences, our reaction was less one of surprise than resignation (rapidly followed by the drafting of a wish list of future victims).  This morning, after Crotch-Shot, The Sequel transpired, we had a team come-to-Jesus meeting where we told the kids, in no uncertain terms, in plain black and white, with no nuances, that they are NOT ALLOWED PHYSICAL CONTACT OF ANY KIND for the remainder of our time together.  There will be no playing tag, no bumping the backside of one another's knees, no slaps upside the head, no pushing, tripping, poking, nudging, elbowing, or any other form of touching that involves the violation of any other human being's personal space.  That edict was followed by the dictum that, should any of those events transpire, offenders are not to respond to reprimands with denials, eye rolls, imprecations muttered under one's breath, or deliberate walking away before said reprimands are completed.  Finally, should anything untoward occur from that moment forward, the offenders will be summarily removed from any or all end-of-the-year celebratory events, with no chance of reprieve. 

The room was silent.

The eyes were downcast.

The body language was defensive.

The message - FINALLY - seemed to have hit home.

So you can imagine my consternation when, later that day, one of the prime violators of the no-tag rule stopped to ask me a burning question.

"You know how we're not supposed to touch each other?" he asked.

"Ye-ee-es," I answered warily.

"Will I get in trouble if I do this?" he queried, raising his hand as if to backhand someone.  "What if I'm just trying to make someone flinch," he continued, "and I'm not trying to hit them?"

I gave him the Cold Stare of Death.  "What do you think will happen?" I asked stonily. 

"I'll get in trouble?"

"Yeah.  You'll get in trouble."

"Oh," he said, as if he was just realizing that, if we have a no-touch rule?  Gee, then doing something that JUST MIGHT HAPPEN to approximate THE EXACT SAME BEHAVIOR that his teachers are TRYING TO ELIMINATE might not be the best choice to make at this particular point in time.

And it only took 170 days for these guys to figure it out.

I don't know who's going to be voted Most Likely to Succeed or Best All-Around four years hence, but I do know who's going to win the First Freshman To Be Stuffed In A Locker By A Senior competition next year.

P.S. My ambassador from ManLand (a.k.a. my coworker's husband) reports that, when you are a middle school boy, you have to make a very big deal about any threat, real or perceived, to the well-being of your goolies.  According to him, getting decked in the business offers a golden opportunity to prove to all and sundry that, HEY!  WE GOT TESTES IN THE HIZZOUSE, YO!  So even if your wedding tackle would be hard-pressed to fill a quarter-cup measure, any shot to the crotch area has to be answered with an Academy-award winning performance of writhing, squirming, and doubling over in pain, preferably with a soupcon of gasping for breath to round it all off.  Then you have to swagger around like John Wayne just off his horse for the remainder of the day to accommodate your tender, bruised man tonsils. 

P.P.S.  I had NO idea just how much fun I was going to have thinking up euphemisms for the male pundenda!  Really!  It's a pity I don't have boy chilluns to initiate into manhood, 'cause now I am ready for 'em!  Hey, this is a perfect opportunity for audience participation:  What's your favorite nickname for the equipment? 

P.P.P.S. If Warren ever gets around to reading this post, he's going to grump about the fact that I'm getting my XY intel from an outside source.  "I'm a man," he'll point out, in a somewhat aggrieved tone, "how come you're citing other people's husbands for this?"  I just want it known as a matter of public record that my hubs has never, not ever, not even once, ever offered me so much as one helpful insight into the psyche of the under-15 male.  He probably will console himself by thinking that he is way too mature to think that way anymore.  Which brings up a good point.  But I will leave you to make your own deductions about the relative maturity and grown-upped-ness of my current ambassador.

Not Quite Ready for Prime Time

I have terrible news.

I have a party in two weeks and I have nothing to wear.

This would not be a big deal, except that this party is being hosted by, and attended by, relatives of Warren's.  Warren's relatives, as a collective group, are tall, willowy, gracious, outgoing, professionally accomplished, personally talented and socially adept.  I, on the other hand, am short, squat, and socially awkward.  I teach eighth grade for a living and my most noteworthy talent seems to be writing down the snarky things I say in my head for other people to read, a habit for which I receive exactly no remuneration or wide-scale public acclaim.  On top of that, I suck at being sociable at cocktail parties where I don't know the majority of the attendees. I can't hear well when there are a million other people talking around me, so my "small talk" tends to consist of me yelling, "Excuse me?" and "What?" a lot to someone who pretty much didn't want to talk to me in the first place.  Then I wind up standing somewhere on the sidelines, getting stepped on a zillion times since people don't tend to look down a whole lot when they're looking around for the bar. 

As the joke goes, Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

At the ripe old age of forty-one, I have made peace with most of my personal flaws and foibles.  I have learned to live with the fact that I'm an introvert. I do not usually fare well in social gatherings if I don't already know most of the people there.  I also don't have any sense of how to dress for those occasions that fall outside the three categories of things for which I have an internal dress code, those being work, weekends, and weddings.  For example, my friend Toasty invited me to her lovely daughter's first birthday party last year, which was a huge neighborhood shindy involving ideas I shamelessly poached for my own daughter's fifth birthday extravaganza.  It was held on a weekend, so I arrived in my usual Saturday mufti of shorts, t-shirt, and athletic sandals, with an air of dishevelment about the hair and frenzy about the eyes, if I remember correctly.  Apparently I was the only mom who didn't get the memo to dress in a breezy cotton sundress accessorized with a sweater and cute dressy sandals, because that's what every other mother at the party was wearing.  I mean, damn! Is there some kind of sub rosa woman-to-woman grapevine that spreads the dress code through nonverbal communication?  "Psst.  We're all wearing capris and Indian-print tops to the preschool picnic.  Pass it on!"  How is it that everyone else figures these things out and I can't?  Did I miss the boat by not joining a sorority in college?  Did someone pass out PIN codes to unlock the door to middle-class momhood and I forgot to write it down??  What am I doing wrong???

So now I have to figure out something to wear that is dressy, but not too dressy, and stylish, or at least not hopelessly out of date.  And then I have to wear it for several hours, preferably without spilling something down my front.  And I have to make sparkling conversation while hoping and praying that my adorably-dressed children aren't wetting themselves, eating all the canapes, getting into fights with their cousins, or some combination of the above.  Just thinking about all of this is making me slightly queasy.  Maybe I can hire Toasty to be my cocktail-party stunt double!  She seems to know what to wear, say, and do in these situations.  Then I can stay home in my JCPenney's flannel pj pants and hunt through the TV listings for Real Housewives reruns while she dazzles everyone with my social acumen.  It's a win-win! 

Being ever the optimist, I can see one silver lining around this particular cloud.  At least I am not a member of the extended Obama/Robinson clan, because being an introverted underachiever at their family reunions must REALLY suck!  Imagine that conversation:  "Hi, Michelle!" [awkward silence] "So, um, how's the White House treating you?"  [longer and even more awkward pause] "Me?  Well, I'm, uh, still blogging.  Yep, I passed the 500-post mark recently!  I don't suppose you've had time to read my latest post, have you?  No?  Well, you're busy. What?  WHAT?  I can't hear you very well.  I'm just going to, uh - you'll excuse me - yeah!  Let's get together sometime!  My calendar's pretty open.  Good talking to you!"

It Will FEEL Like Eternity, Anyway

For those of you who keep track of such things, here's a news flash:  I am officially appalled at People magazine.

Given that my usual reading pattern consists of perusing old copies while I'm on the exercise bike at the gym, my defection is not going to change their circulation figures much.  But on a moral and philosophical level, I feel obligated to voice my displeasure in this public forum.  My ire was provoked after coming across this article last week.  It's a fairly middle-of-the-road article about a semi-sorta-famous Melissa I always have a hard time placing out of context (Gilbert?  Naah, that was Little House on the Prairie eons ago.  Rivers?  Nope, this Melissa doesn't have a freakishly large head.  Oh yeah, that Sabrina girl!).  Anyhoo, MJH went and got fat thanks to having two kids, then went on a diet and got a People magazine cover (clearly she is far lower down on the celebrity scale than Kirstie Alley, who got a cover story for just announcing she's going on a diet, but reality is cruel sometimes).  It was a very typical People former-fat-person story, blah blah overweight blah blah low self-esteem, yada yada private trainer personal nutritionist blabitty blah, so I was only half-reading it until I looked at the sidebar that describes the miraculous diet.  Here is what this woman eats in an average day:

• A protein shake for breakfast (with flax seeds!)
• A turkey wrap for lunch
• Salmon or halibut for dinner

An SP PSA

Since I am all about caring and sharing for the betterment of (wo)mankind, I thought I would offer some hard-won knowledge to my fellow travelers on the path to potty independence.  If your children are of an age where their elimination habits are none of your concern anymore, feel free to give this post a pass.  If your children have no control over their elimination, then bookmark this post for future reference.  You'll need it.  On the other hand, if you regularly find yourself concerned over the provenance of that damp spot on the carpeting, then pull up a chair.

As anyone currently in medias toilet training knows, those little bladders sure hold a LOT of liquid.  My chief complaint with toilet training isn't the extra laundry, or the forced scanning of public places for a restroom that doesn't warrant condemnation by the CDC, or even the lingering sense of impending doom that descends after a toiletless hour.  My chief complaint is the mess, good lord, the MESS.  There is nothing so teeth-grindingly, head-thumpingly frustrating as begging one's child to put her little throne to good use for the better part of a quarter-hour, only to have her merrily exclaim, "I pee!" not five minutes after you gave up on the exercise as a lost cause - unless, of course, it's thinking to oneself that you really should get your special little sunshine onto the potty withing the next few moments, only to come upon her standing stock-still in the middle of the hallway, watching the urine course down her legs and puddle copiously at her feet mere steps away from the bathroom.  Good times, I tell you, good times. 

So now what does one do with this resultant mess?  Paper towels are expensive when you use them by the square yard, and a three-juicebox puddle can kill the better part of a roll.  Newspaper is cheap but not terribly absorbent, and when you go to scoop up the mess, a slurry of newspaper ink and you-know-what runs down your forearms and drips off your elbows.  Highly unsanitary, not to mention icky.  The spray-and-mop devices with the absorbent pads aren't made to sop up that much liquid and wind up spreading it around more than anything else.  What to do?  Sit tight, dear reader, because I am about to answer that for you!  I have one word for you, a la "The Graduate":

Towels.

As in, bath towels; specifically, the bath towels you don't like and wish you could be rid of.  We all have them in one form or another.  They're the towels you got for wedding gifts umpty-ump years (and washes) ago that are about two shades off their original "tidewater blue"; or you 'inherited' them from the roommate who skipped town without paying his share of the rent; or, if you're me, they're the towels you've had for so long you can't remember their origin, but you're too cheap to replace them because, hey!  They still work! These towels make the perfect vehicle for soaking up accidents because they absorb a lot at one time, they can cover almost any sized puddle, AND, best of all,  you can make your kid do the clean-up!  Even the smallest tyke can use a towel to swab up his or her unwelcome leavings and then toddle the resultant damp mess to the washing machine, to be washed when you have the time and inclination.  Here chez Pig we are all in favor of experiencing the natural consequences of one's actions.  I am hoping by the fifth or sixth round of self-serve clean-up, my little pismire (ha! pee pun!) will make the connection and decide it's faster and easier to use the potty the first time around than it is to have to clean up the floor AND herself multiple time per day.  Even if she doesn't, at least I feel somewhat less resentful if the one who did the crime pays the time.  And then, when potty training is a distant fond memory (which I hope occurs prior to enrolling her in the third grade), I can heave the old towels into the rag bin with a delicate shudder and buy the lovely new monogrammed Egyptian cotton numbers I've secretly longed for.  That, my friends, is what we call a win-win situation.

E-Mails I Will Never Send

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Absentee,

I am writing because I noticed your daughter Aimee was not in my class yet again today.  I looked up her cumulative absences, and do you realize she has been absent from my class twenty-three times so far this year?  To my knowledge, Aimee doesn't have any chronic health conditions that would keep her out, and hasn't contracted swine flu, diphtheria, mononucleosis, or any other illness that would necessitate being out of school for A MONTH.  While Aimee is extremely bright and catches up quickly, she does miss a critical part of the learning experience when she's out at least one day a week on average.  Does that strike you as being just a bit excessive, perhaps?  Plus I have to question the validity of some of the choices you've made.  When your kid has already racked up absences in the double digits, do you really think it's justifiable to take her out of school early for vacation - and then come back to school late?   Then there was the time you kept her home because her sibling was coming home from college that day and you wanted Aimee there to greet him - because obviously having to wait until the end of the school day to see someone she just saw a couple of months ago would count as durance vile and is considered cruel and unusual punishment under the Bill of Rights - a fact I am telling you because Aimee was OUT for that lecture.  By the way, you may be interested in knowing that Aimee's peers are aware of her lack of presence in school.  No one wants to work with her on group assignments because they know she's not going to be around for most of it.  And is it just coincidence, or does your daughter tend to disappear right in the middle of assignments so that she can finish it up on her own and not have to interact with anyone?  Either way, from now on I am not accepting illness excuse notes from you unless they involve dengue fever and are countersigned by the CDC.

Mrs. S. Pig

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Draggypants,

I just want to alert you to the fact that your son clearly has worn out all his own clothes and is now wearing his little brother's.  That's the only explanation I can find for the fact that his jeans are simultaneously skin-tight AND sagging below his @ss.  Seriously, the crotch of his jeans today was at knee level.  It's a wonder the kid doesn't take two steps forward and fall flat on his face, bound tightly 'round the ankles by his own denim trousers.  What's even more amazing is that, when he lifted his shirt to hoist the waistband of his pants infinitesimally closer to his arse, I noticed that HE HAS A BELT ON.  Why??  The better to trip himself up when the aforementioned gravity-induced depantsing occurs?  It's not as if he's taking that belt and using it to CINCH HIS PANTS TIGHT so they STOP falling down.  Either your son is terminally confused about what a belt is and how it is meant to function, or  he does know but his pants are so ill-fitting that efforts to make them suitable for public viewing are futile.  Either way, please make him wear something that doesn't leave everything hanging in the breeze, so to speak.

Gratefully,

S. Pig

Dear Ms. Stinky,

My dad tells this story from his Navy days about how, when he was serving on a destroyer, sailors with poor personal hygiene who failed to take repeated hints to improve matters would be summarily grabbed, stripped naked, thrown in the shower and scrubbed down with the wire scrub brushes usually used to scour the deck of the ship. 

I tell you this by way of being a cautionary tale.  If your son is ever tempted to join the Navy, tell him to choose a branch of the armed services where members are not kept in quite such close quarters, or he is going to find himself bereft of a couple layers of dermis at the least.  Why?  Because your kid stinks like a barnyard.  Really.  We mean it.  Today I went to help him with a problem and he had SERIOUS grime ingrained in the skin around his fingernails.  If I didn't know better, I'd assume he was planting potatoes in his spare time from the skunk-wrestling league.  I like your kid, but I can't get close enough to his desk to help him with his work because the stench knocks me out from 20 paces.  We've given the group talk about Mr. Shower and his friends Soap, Deodorant, and Shampoo several times and nothing has changed.  So please, for the love of my olfactory nerve, tell the kid to bathe!

Ms. Pig

Dear Mrs. Moonphase,

I need to share a concern I have with you about Menstra.  At last count, she has had her period seventy-seven times this year.  This clearly falls outside the bounds of normal female maturation and is now cause for medical intervention.  Might I suggest a suitable OB/GYN for your daughter to obtain a complete workup?

Signed,

Menstra's social studies teacher

Dear Ms. Slacker and Mr. Stepdad,

You need to know that Little Slacker approached me today and asked me to add two points to his grade so he would have a C when you check his grades.  When I gently reminded him that we haven't done any graded assignments this week that would raise his average, he informed me that he wanted me just to add the points to his grade regardless so that he could have the magic C average.  In fact, the D he has is a fair and accurate reflection of his work ethic, level of achievement, and contribution to the classroom environment.  It will be a cold day in hell before I "give" him OR anyone else points on his grade just because he doesn't want to be grounded.  He is more than welcome to see me about completing any one of the myriad unfinished or unsatisfactorily completed assignments given to him this quarter.  After all, he will have nothing but time on his hands when he is grounded.

Sincerely,

Mrs. P.