Catching Them If They Fall

So apparently a wrinkle in time occurred during College-Tour-a-palooza, because I just noticed that the post I wrote on Wednesday, March 19, is actually dated Tuesday, March 18. Yes, it's all been exhausting, but I know I wrote it on Wednesday. That's why the title is "If Yesterday was Tuesday ..." Maybe I got my wish to get my hour back ....

Anyway, we are home now, and not a moment too soon. College-Tour-a-palooza was a great success -- more on that in a minute -- but things were starting to get ugly, calorie-wise. I mean, I ate a cheeseburger and french fries dipped in feta cheese dressing for lunch Friday, for God's sake, and added some perfectly horrible McDonald's chocolate chip cookies during our final drive just to keep my strong coffee company. Of course, I've spent my first day home eating some more: I topped a hot brownie Ben had just baked with a large spoonful of peanut butter, and dinner was way too much pizza. But not too worry -- I have burned at least 50 calories typing today, and I managed to gather a load of laundry and actually walk all the way upstairs to wash it. (Yes, you're right -- I should be careful not to overdo it.)

We went from Texas the beginning of the week to Georgia, where we visited Emory on Thursday and the University of Georgia on Friday. (No, Billy's not set on a southern school; it was just cheapest to stay in one region of the country on this trip.) Billy loved all of them.

There are actually two sets of impressions of all these schools. One is Billy's; the other is mine and Bob's. Although often we agreed, it's important to remember we're talking about two different entities. "We're" not going to college anywhere. Billy will be leaving us at home, which is best for all involved.

Yet trying to imagine my firstborn living and learning away from home -- in some cases far away from home -- is both exhilarating and anxiety-provoking. I realized as I crossed a busy street near Rice's campus that I was envisioning Billy being mowed down there by a car. By the time he actually enrolls somewhere he'll be 19, but in a part of my heart he will always be someone whose hand needs holding in traffic.

I saw that part of him last weekend at the Houston Rodeo, of all places.

Not being real experienced cattle folk, we Birds had no clue what exactly we'd be seeing during the calf roping, which was the first event. We settled into our seats and looked at the huge video screens (we were about $30 per ticket too far up in the arena to see what was actually happening without magnification) only to see that the parts of the calf that are roped are both the neck and the legs. In other words, a tiny little cow is strapped into a bundle sort of like a shoulder bag and dragged away.

We're not animal people. We have two rather neglected cats, one fish, and absolutely no desire for any other pets. But I found myself wincing as I watched this, and wondering whether PETA was listed at 1-800-FREE-411. I certainly could be wrong, but it appeared to me that the roped calves would never be the same.

Billy was two seats to my right, and I happened to glance over at him. His huge brown eyes were glistening. And he looked at me, and he said, almost in a whisper, "I don't like this."

He's taller than I am, and he drops the f-bomb way too often, and he has secrets I'll never know. But for a few moments, his world was wrong, and he was looking to me to make it right. He was my little boy.

I held his eyes, and a few seconds later I did the only thing I could. I whispered "I love you."

Soon the moment had passed, and he was back to being a teenager and ordering crappy food. But I had seen that part that my heart knows is always in there somewhere.

When kids are little, they need you in every way. You wipe their bottoms and buy their shoes and make their breakfast. As each birthday passes, they need you a little less, until one day you realize you don't have a clue what their bathroom habits are, they won't wear anything you buy, and they don't eat breakfast. They don't need you and they don't need you and they don't need you ... until all of a sudden, they do.

The trick to parenting teenagers is to remain both vigilant and out of the way. I remember when Billy and Ben were little how I would hover with my hands cupped, ready to catch them if they fell as they climbed the ladder up to the slide. In a sense, I'm still doing the same thing.

So I've got my own opinions about the various schools. I'd sleep soundly at night if he were at Rice. I'd be worried sick if he enrolled at Texas. No matter how hard I try, I can't see him at Emory. I'd be happy as a clam if he wound up at Georgia.

But this is his decision to make. And because I know that he's three parts young adult and one part kindergardener, I realize that our opinions, if he knows too much about them, ultimately will shape his. That's why I'm trying to keep them to myself.

And so we'll continue on, considering these colleges and visiting others. He'll sample the food and check out the dorms and think about majors. And I'll be in the background, my hands outstretched, waiting to catch him if he falls.

If Yesterday Was Tuesday, Then What's the Name of This One Again??

Day 5 of College Tour-a-Palooza, and here's how it goes.

1) Get up while it's still dark.

2) Squeeze into tiny motel bathroom for your allotted seven minutes of personal care. Dry off after shower with towel the size of that new Apple laptop. Use more concealer than usual.

3) Grab two cups (or seven) of bad coffee and a few of those little cups of liquid plastic -- I mean Coffee Mate -- and get back in the rental car.

4) Get lost due to traffic construction not shown on www.devilspawn.com -- I mean MapQuest.

5) Huddle in a corner of the admissions office while awaiting arrival of the other 497,913 families touring colleges this week.

6) Follow student tour guide who you cannot hear over the sound of torrential downpour.

7) Listen to adult admissions person talk about how painful it is to turn down several hundred totally qualified kids each year because there's just not enough spaces in the class.

8) Thumb through brochures. Spot tuition, room and board expenses for current school year. Lose appetite for lunch.

9) Eat lunch anyway, on campus. Realize reasonably priced meal plan is probably waste of money.

10) Attend class with your child. Discover they haven't made philosophy any easier to understand than it was 30 years ago.

11) Get in car. Take off soaking wet shoes. Drive to next town.

12) Eat way, way too much dinner. Wish you were not the designated driver.

13) Go to another motel that looks just like the previous motel. Attempt to sleep while children attend to important iPod, laptop, and cellphone business.

14) Do it all over again.

By this morning, our asses were dragging, so much so that we definitely needed this Flying Alarm Clock.

"This digital alarm clock launches a rotor into the air that flies around the room as the alarm sounds, hovering up to 9' in the air, and will not cease ringing until the rotor is returned to the alarm clock base, compelling even the most stubborn sleepers to get out of bed on time."


Now that's American innovation. I wonder where the inventor went to college?

The Bird Family Debating Society and Supper Club

Greetings from the Lone Star State!

We Birds flew the coop yesterday on spring break and ended up in Houston, long considered a major spring break destination.

We are actually here because it's our first stop on College-Tour-a-palooza. For the virgins among you, this is the time in a parent's life when you spend a lot of money going around to visit schools that may not let your child in and that will cost you an arm and a leg if they do. The economic irony of the process would be intolerably painful, however, if we focused on that reality, so instead we laugh a lot and throw in some tourist attractions and really good food, thus putting an even heavier burden on the credit cards.

Yesterday, we drove around Rice University. Tomorrow we'll do the official tour and dog and pony show, but yesterday, we were just trying to get a feel for the place. What we felt was hot, which shouldn't have surprised us, this being the southern part of a southern state and all, but did catch us a bit off guard. Ben, who is trying to milk his "I-gave-up-the-beach-for-my-brother" martyrdom for all its worth, persuaded me to buy him some sunglasses to protect his dainty eyes from the Texas glare. This wasn't a problem, as Billy got off the plane with such painfully stopped-up ears that we had absolutely no choice but to hit up Walgreens. (Your travel correspondent is here to report that if you've seen one Walgreens, you've seen them all.) Ben chose some mirrored lenses, Billy downed some 12-hour Sudafed, and we were off.

It wouldn't be a Bird family vacation without an argument about where to eat.

We are all of us about the food, so much so that one of my roles as Mama Bird is to scope out restaurants in advance. I'd done plenty of research using magazine websites and my favorite, Chowhound, and printed off a great list of Houston possibilities. Which, apparently, are still lying in the printer tray back home.

This was a scary situation for a Bird to be in. Well not Bob -- he will eat anything, and as long as it doesn't cost much, deem it absolutely delicious. But the rest of us want to know in advance that those in the know have given our restaurant choice an A.

Thus, it was with a great deal of trepidation that we found ourselves adrift in Rice Village, a shopping area near the campus, trying to choose between an Italian place and a Turkish place, both of which I vaguely remembered from my research.

Billy, the world traveler, was all about the Turkish place. Ben, the picky eater who was already miffed that we weren't at his grandparents' beach house in the first place, thought we should play it safe with Italian. I was just ready to sit down and get out of the sun, and Bob, who's nursing the cold I gave him, just wanted to curl up in a corner somewhere and die.

So the four of us engaged in, shall we say, a spirited debate about which restaurant to choose. This is a scenario we've engaged in about 735,129 times in the past 18 years; the Bird boys can disagree about anything, but usually, it's about where to eat. Finally I proposed a diplomatic compromise a lot better than the State Department could come up with. (Perhaps this was because we were a stone's throw from a college school with a bunch of stuff named after James Baker.) We'd eat lunch at the Turkish place and dinner at the Italian place.

This decided, we went on to discover we loved Turkish food -- even Ben, of course. (It turns out Turks eat pizza.) His stomach full, Billy announced that between his cold and his horribly stopped-up ears and the fact that he'd only slept three hours the night before (we'd had terrifically bad hail storms during the night), all he really wanted to do was go to the hotel and go to sleep.

So we spent the rest of the afternoon not strolling around Rice but napping at a Fairfield Inn in Katy. Now I'll grant you that Katy isn't exactly tour-bus worthy, but it is the former home of Renee Zellweger, so the afternoon wasn't a total loss. And Bob and I were exhausted.

Why were we all the way out in Katy, which is like 45 minutes from Rice? Because we are visiting Houston right smack dab in the middle of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, which we will be attending this very afternoon. All the cowboys and cowgirls got the good rooms, and we are out her in Katy in a motel populated primarily by a European soccer team and its entourage and a bunch of American cheerleaders and pep band members who are apparently in town for a basketball tournament. (Not to digress, but when did it become mandatory for cheerleaders to wear GIGANTIC bows in their hair? In my day, cheerleaders were all about the long sexy hair, and now they look like they're all dressed up for the preschool Easter pageant. And whatever happened to the big pom-poms? Honestly.)

Anyway, back to yesterday ... after two-hour naps, we got up and began the arduous task of deciding where to eat dinner. I mean, you could be excused if you're thinking I could never travel with these people IN A MILLION YEARS. We even drive ourselves crazy, I can assure you. Armed with the names of three Tex-Mex places (perhaps because he'd had pizza at luch, Ben was willing to broaden his horizons and forget about the Italian place near Rice), we left the hotel for another arduous trek back into town.

Our first choice turned out to be located between an AutoZone and a liquor store, which meant there was no way, no how Ben was eating there. I found this a little surprising, seeing as how he was still wearing the mirrored sunglasses and looked vaguely menacing himself, but I was a bit uncomfortable with the parking situation, so we headed back to number two on our list. This place turned out to have limited parking as well, so that you pretty much had to pay $5 for valet parking. Bob and his congested head and chest hadn't been saying much, but no way no how was he paying someone $5 to park his car if he didn't have to. So we drove on, finally ending up at a Chuy's. Here you could park your car yourself for free; you could absorb a little history, since if I'm not mistaken, it was at a Chuy's in Austin that Jenna Bush got busted for underage drinking; and you could get a yummy frozen Margarita, which of course I was in dire need of at this point. It was our kind of place.

Now we're all up and almost ready for our first full day in Houston. (Thank God we've got brunch reservations, so we'll have at least one meal without a debate.) We're going to try to see a bit of the school we've paid all this money to come visit, and then we -- the least roping and wrangling of folks imaginable -- will make our way to the Rodeo. I'd appreciate your thoughts and prayers, because God only knows how many choices of food will be available there.

College is Making Me Crazy

Many of you out there in the blogiverse are captivating reads.

I’m especially enamored of late with Whiskey in My Sippy Cup, BooMama, and breed ‘em and weep. These blogs are very different, but they share a common denominator: those ladies can write.

But I must confess that recently my eye has been roving. College Confidential has me hooked.

Those of you still worried about finding the right preschool probably haven’t heard of College Confidential. I hadn’t either, until I read a harrowing piece in the New York Times about the struggles of teenage geniuses who started free tutoring programs in the Sudan to get accepted at top colleges.

If your last brush with college admissions was two or three decades ago, let me tell you: things have changed.

Back in my day (What's that siren? Oh yeah ... the old coot alert!), you took the ACT the fall of your senior year. If your parents were rich and you could look at private schools, you took the SAT. You sent in an application or two or three (which took all of an afternoon to complete), and then you went back to riding around in cars with boys who horrified your parents, clandestinely drinking beer.

These days, if your family includes both a really promising kid (I’m not trying to brag, I'm just establishing the context – if Billy were a football player, we’d be fending off booster club offers of party girls and free Hummers) and one head-spinningly neurotic parent (see if you can guess which one), the whole process is way, way more complicated than that.

Unfortunately, we’ve come late to this party. The other completely wacko parents with talented children started getting nervous way earlier than I did. These kids were visiting colleges and taking the SAT "for fun" back in ninth grade. They were earning community service hours while still in diapers and doing promising research toward a cancer vaccine while Billy was still fixated on Pokemon cards and toilet humor.

Billy and I didn’t realize how competitive and crazy this whole thing had become until midway through his sophomore year, by which point it was getting a little late. We’re doing our best to catch up, though.

Billy is taking and re-taking entrance exams, meanwhile spending lots of money on test prep books that seem to have taken up permanent residence next to his toilet. (He clearly has inherited my tendency to prepare for any and all circumstances with a trip to the bookstore. When in doubt, buy a how-to book.)

I’m keeping up with the reams and reams of paper that various colleges send us, all of which show a group consisting of a white male, an Asian girl, a black professor, and a really happy person in a wheelchair sitting under a tree on a sunny afternoon just shooting the breeze. I'm trying to forget that the Class of 2009 is projected to have more kids applying to college (and thus more kids vying for top college acceptances) than any class in history.

Bob is earning the money that is just enough to keep us from qualifying for financial aid but not nearly enough to pay for anything other than a state school that’s really not a good fit for Billy. (Just this morning I learned that our EFC – Expected Family Contribution, or Extremely Fantastical Concept – was a figure so high we’d have to stop eating and using electricity in order to come up with it.)

Ben is going along for the ride on our trip next week to visit colleges. I keep telling him this trip is a good thing – that he’ll be happy later that he’s already visited those four schools. I think he believes he’s being cheated out of a perfectly good week at the beach.

And College Confidential? College Confidential is doing its best both to educate me (“need-blind admissions means the school is blind to your need”) and scare me to death (“I had a 2350 on the SAT, was first in my class, ran a multinational corporation, placed first in the state tennis tournament, and got rejected at Really Prestigious U.”) It’s one part Encyclopedia Brittanica (“it’s really easy to get from South Bend to Chicago – there’s a bus from campus that will drop students off at either airport”), one part US Weekly (the murder of Eve Carson at Chapel Hill last week “looks to be a carjacking gone bad. Vehicle is a favorite of gangbangers.”)

For a person the tinest bit prone to get TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY OBSESSED with a topic, College Confidential is a godsend. I haven’t visited TMZ in weeks.

Number 19 on My List

Two days shy of my one-month blogging birthday, I’m beginning to realize that it’s awfully hard to find time to blog about being the mother of two teenage children if one is in fact the mother of two teenage children. Certain responsibilities and activities seem to push and shove their way to the top of my to-do list, leaving poor unassuming little “post blog entry” lying there neglected like a tiny box of shriveled raisins left in a plastic pumpkin once full of Halloween candy.

So I’m not making excuses. Actually, I am making excuses, but they’re good ones. In the last 72 hours, I have:

1) Attempted to bake a savarin with Ben for his French class.

2) Re-attempted to bake a savarin with Ben for his French class, after the “dough” for the first one remained liquid despite the addition of copious amounts of unauthorized flour.

3) Eaten part of a savarin that stuck to the non-stick pan.

4) Phoned 28 junior high school students, each of whom forgot to remember to sign up to rehearse for the upcoming talent show I am co-chairing over the next three weeks, and politely asked them when they’d like to practice.

5) Traveled to Wal-Mart (please God, forgive me, but I really needed to save 30 minutes by going there, even if my shopping trip tacitly supported the exploitation of some poor Chinese girl) to buy the makings for a William the Conqueror costume Ben must have for school in two weeks (you’re right -- that is before the talent show is over). Yes, he will be graded on the quality of both his design and execution. No, he does not know how to sew.

6) Responded to phone calls and e-mails from some of the 28 talent contestants who realized they couldn’t possibly rehearse when they said they could rehearse because they had a conflict they had failed to write down in their student planners.

7) Found the perfect college for Billy.

8) Looked at Billy’s calendar and discovered that he has committed to so many activities over the next few months that the only time he could possibly fly to perfect college for a visit this spring is March 10.

9) Perused school calendar and determined Billy has mid-term March 10.

10) Received e-mail requesting that “we” sell $400 worth of ads to help pay for musical in which Ben and Billy will appear next month.

11) Assigned the sale of part of these ads to Bob.

12) Attempted to complete 30-hour work assignment in order to pay for college, perfect or imperfect, for Billy.

13) Learned how to put a link within my blog to someone else’s blog (see “Only the Lonely Notebook”).

14) In preparation for cleaning woman's visit, put away papers, boxes, bags, books, coats, and crap lying on top of our dirt, as well as clean clothes that had been sitting in laundry basket since cleaning woman's last visit two weeks ago.

15) Sat down to write blog entry approximately 90 seconds before power went out.

16) Sat in dark and cussed.

17) Upon return of electricity, switched to battery-operated laptop. Signed on to blog.

18) Put down computer to run upstairs and rebalance banging washing machine.

So here I am, ready to get down to work. The washer has finished its load; the house is clean and quiet; the distractions are all gone.

There’s just one problem.

I’m so tired I can no longer type.