fuck yeah! Sing with me. But let's change the words a little.

Kindergarten...FUCK YEAH!
Comin' again to save the motherfuckin' day, yeah!
Kindergarten...FUCK YEAH!
Kindergarten is the only way, yeah!
So lick my butt and suck on my ovaries (if you can reach them)
Kindergarten...FUCK YEAH!

7:45 dropoff! FUCK YEAH!
Hot lunch! FUCK YEAH!
Tuesday folders! FUCK YEAH!
P.E.! FUCK YEAH!
Classroom pet! FUCK YEAH!
A friend named Diego! FUCK YEAH!
Backpack! FUCK YEAH!
Music class! FUCK YEAH!

FUCK YEAH!

Real. Mental. I'm pleased to introduce RealMental, a joint for us crazy folks from Leah and Jess. I've been invited to blog there along with some other really awesome people whom I respect a great deal. Whew.

Because sanity does not magically descend after six weeks on a pill, it's important to keep up the discourse about living with mental illness. I appreciate the opportunity to contribute to such an endeavor. Watch the space.

kindergarten

35 birthday

he is the champion Brian May, you're so awesome.

not making this up The new villain in our superhero pretend play?

Wait for it...

"Dick Cheney."

"I'll destroy him with my heat power!" Baldo yells. "Heat power ON!"

Heat power on, son.

props Some people don't think softball-playing soft butches are good caregivers for children. I'm here to tell you they are wrong. A softball-playing soft butch caregiver saved my life today, and I have to give thanks.

There is so much insane free-floating desperate energy in my house right now that we had to go to Radijazz, and I don't care if we all get rotovirus. Bring it the fuck on. We were the first to arrive. And because there were no other children present I jumped in that goddamn lava pit first thing, and some of the insane free-floating desperate energy dissipated. It's better than Lexapro. Shit, it's better than Klonopin. It was good. The usual irritations of high-density family situations arose, but because I had been rejuvenated by a public indoor space for children, I was able to feel compassion, to appreciate a little companionship. An Audie Murphy three-year-old kept trying to roughhouse with Baldo before announcing his intentions, and that deteriorated into a slapping interlude, whereupon I sprang forth with the ninja-like Maternal Emergency Energy and busted some positive discipline. "Hey, let's play hide-and-seek instead!" Baldo yelled. And they did. I sat down for a few minutes, and in this moment of respite I did what I had been wanting to do all morning: cry.

Enter the Child Care Center Kids. Some of the parents at Radijazz make faces when the Child Care Center Kids arrive, and it is true that they bring a mix of sizes and play styles into an environment that also contains toddlers. That's the cool thing about age five. Age five can hang with other ages. And I noticed quickly that one of the Child Care Center's workers was a magnet for little boys: they were literally hanging off her clothes, and several of them weren't wearing the Child Care Center T-shirt uniform. She was taking care of children--totally random children--the way Jackie Chan kicks ass in a streetfight. I'd never seen anything quite like it.

It didn't take Baldo long to discover the Child Care Center's incredible softball-playing soft butch caregiver, either. He tagged along behind her so much that I finally asked her, "Uh, is this okay, or is he bothering you?" She told me it was fine. And so I retreated and observed.

When it was time for the Child Care Center's kids to go, Baldo was ready, too. "Bye, Miss J!" he yelled. We walked out past their bus. "I wish I could go on that bus," he said.

As we were getting in the car Baldo and I had our first discussion of queer identity.

"Miss J. doesn't look like a girl," he said. "She looks like a boy."

"Well, I guess girls can sometimes look like boys, and boys can look like girls," I said. "Everyone is a little bit different."

Thank you, Miss J.

Warren Today we played a game in which I was Warren, a five-year-old boy about to enter kindergarten. I am boss at improv.

Warren had several concerns about kindergarten, which he expressed to Baldo while driving a Lego-based truck to various "fires" within the living room, putting them out, and then returning to the station. (Chez Ingman is always a party.)

"What if the teacher is really mean and yells at us?" Warren asked.

"The teachers are really nice," my son said. "I met them at kindergarten roundup. They don't yell."

"Can my name be Tommy?" asked Warren.

"I like Warren."

"Okay, I can roll with that." I thought a minute. "Do I get to eat lunch?"

"You eat lunch in the cafeteria."

"Do I bring my lunch, or do I buy it?"

"You can bring it in a lunchbox, or your mom can give you money." Actually they have a weekly or monthly account. Isn't that rad?

Then it was time for the big question. "What if there are girls there, and they don't like what I'm into and they want me to play with ponies?" Warren wondered.

"Oh, that's okay. If you're not mean to girls they won't be mean to you. I made friends with a girl at my old school." His old school, said so calmly. Like he's 12 or something.

I was struck by how upbeat and confident he sounded while talking to an imaginary boy named Warren. Children show their upbeat and confident sides to people who are not their parents. We get the agony and the meltdowns, the anxieties and the fears. For these reasons I was completely prepared to be Warren for the rest of the day. It was fascinating and something of a relief.

Unfortunately Warren vanished when he was no longer necessary. His confidence bolstered, Baldo was ready to play Batman, which made me Catwoman; try as I may, I'm just a better Harley Quinn.

newsflash White people are happier than other people.

Also found: rich people happier than poor people, healthy people happier than sick people. Also unhappy: Iraqi civilians and war veterans, refugees of Darfur, New Orleans rebuilders, and persecuted Chinese Buddhists.

Researchers were stunned by the results. "We had no idea there was a correlation between having a shitty oppressed life and being happy."

occupational/therapy We finally broke down and got an OT eval for the Quirks of Baldo: that year he spent in Vic Firth noise-reducing headphones, his refusal to sit in the bathtub except on a washcloth, the way he likes to sleep with "twenty" blankets in August in Texas and won't wear shorts. For years I've been back and forth with myself over it: Do we want some kind of designation? Is there some kind of sensory stuff going on, or is it that he has, like, a rash over much of his body? How much of it is just the weird shit kids do? I reasoned the way out was through and bore it as patiently as I could.

My sensible friend V. finally talked us into going. So we drove up to Round Rock to the place, Baldo attempting to break the land speed record for human speech. That's another mystery, the talking thing. "He doesn't talk like a five-year-old," said the stylist at Supercuts, where B. got his kindy buzz. "And he talks so much." It's been suggested to me that he is hyperlexic, that he's got Asperger's with verbal intelligence, and that "There's something wrong with that kid." (That last one was helpful.)

So off we went to play in a therapeutic gym. He stacked innertubes. He swung on swings and a trapeze. He colored and drew. He played with Flarp. ("It sounds like farts!") He took his shoes off and put them back on. He had a giddy old time while I flipped through Family Circle in the waiting room and read a lift-the-flap book about Noah's Ark to some random little dude. I watched the other parents and I knew the look on their faces. Their blues ain't like mine--I met the eyes of a dad whose autistic son's therapy involved a giant womb-like sling anchored to the ceiling of the therapy gym--but we're all in this together.

he's a little outlaw So today at our playdate with Baldo's BFF, I overheard my son trying to get his best friend to take the rap for throwing something over the balcony. "I don't like that plan," BFF said. Good thinking, kid. Resist his influence.

These weeks after preschool but before kindergarten are a murky sea.

my life as a drinking game Drink whenever someone says, reassuringly, "Really, it's their loss."

In fact, as long as you're not driving anywhere, go ahead and drink twice.

Suicide rate in Army at a 26-year high We have got to take better care of our soldiers.

hot married action I'm not exactly sure how, but my husband stabbed himself in the hand cutting up a box: not slashed, not cut, but stabbed. He calmly called me over to point out that the box cutter was sticking out of the meaty part below his thumb. I looked at him. He looked at me. I would have gone there, but he asked me to not help him pull it out. And so he pulled. First the handle came off but the blade remained. Then I excused myself to another part of the room while he went in for another try. He told me later that he had to wiggle it out. And then we wrapped it in dishtowels and a claw clip and went off to urgent care. Four stitches. I'm pretty sure I would have left the blade in. I'm a wuss like that.

Marriage is good in part because each of you implictly promises to pull a knife out of the other if need be. That's a good thing to have in your pocket.

In other breaking news, Mr. Bedtime Struggles is back in town, and Blue Bell Key Lime Pie tastes just like the real thing.

no time Not being able to write is as bad as--possibly worse than--not being able to fuck.

last day It's the last day of preschool, and I will keep a smile firmly on my face while I silently shit a brick.

when the river meets the sea We made a dry run to kindergarten yesterday. Yes, it was Sunday afternoon and the traffic won't be the same, but it was a dry run. It still wiped us out. I am hard at a job search and kindergarten is coming with a bullet. Our lives will probably be changing.

Baldo said nothing, but he got really itchy and asked for Emmett Otter's Jugband Christmas. This is a huge thing in his little boy world.

Thank God for Emmett Otter's Jugband Christmas. It is the goddamn sweetest otter jugband Christmas, and instead of there being a dead mother (as in yesterday's Underdog, which I did not realize was a Disney) there's a mother and a son who love each other.

We got Emmett Otter as a present from Aunt K., who was right on the money.

I wanted to watch Emmett Otter too, but B. asked me to please not sit with him. My little heart broke in one place and grew in another.

"When the River Meets the Sea" is a song about death. But it's a song about not fearing what comes next. It makes me hopeful.

Like a baby when it is sleeping
In its mother's loving arms
What a newborn baby dreams is a mystery.

But his life will find a purpose
And in time he'll understand.
When the river meets the sea
When the river meets the almighty sea.

et tu, Elmo? Just as you've finally found the last Thomas wooden boxcar, Fisher-Price recalls a million toys for lead in their paint.

in case you weren't worried enough about public education We get a Creationist on the Board of Education.

Via Austinist.

kinder/garten The arrival of August means that we are less than a month away from kindergarten.

Freak.

Out.

Holy crap. It's kindergarten! We're all shitting bricks. Even the cat. Kindergarten is huge and landmark. Kindergarten is the passage to middle childhood. What happened to the squalling infant who used to puke down my shirt several times a day? Okay, maybe I don't miss that part so much.

But kindergarten! I have absolutely no idea how I will react. I might froth at the mouth and hiccup hysterically. I might collapse into a weeping pile. I might do some kind of touchdown dance. No. Idea. Whatsoever. Likewise Baldo. We might do all these things and more. I'll be the parent handing out Xanax.