Day #14: Office Depot to the rescue!!

Text by Frances*

*commentary by Conseula

Today, during an Office Depot run for a computer, Mother* and I were in awe** (although I was the one who was mainly dazzled) by a giant One Direction display. How did my favorite band of all time know we were going to be in this specific store on this exact day? By sheer Directioner will power I tell you! This giant poster to take a picture with, the school supplies for such low prices***, the helpful employees who mocked my Directioner devotion**** all contributed to the fangirl heaven I stumbled upon.

Anyway, is was a great day at the Depot! ;)

*she knows how much I hate when she calls me "mother"

**"awe" is not the word I would use to describe my reaction 

***she would make an excellent Office Depot spokesperson

****the very best part of this whole trip is how much fun the Office Depot employees have clearly been having with the squealing, giggling, fainting girls lining up to take a picture with this giant poster 

Day 13: Cate in the mountains

Cate has never been to the mountains. We decided to correct that oversight in our parenting this weekend and we drove approximately a katrillion** hours to Jones Gap State Park, near the SC/NC border.

Her initial reaction to seeing the mountain in the distance, from the car? "Wow! That's amazing! It looks almost exactly like the mountains in Minecraft!"

She squealed at the horses, goats, and wild turkey we saw on the drive up the mountain. And once out on the trail, this child, who lives in Charleston and has to cross a bridge over a major body of water to get almost anywhere in this city, had this reaction to seeing the Middle Saluda River up close. 

She was *astounded* and spent much of the hike barefoot and wet. 

Here her father rescues her after she flings herself from a rock she tried and failed to climb.

 

 

She conquered a smaller rock.

And here she is looking very much like the wood sprite we always knew she was.

And lest you think I never actually go on any of these adventures, here I am sitting happily with Cate (but also hoping desperately that she doesn't fall face first into the river).

*I do have two kids. Frances is home from camp now and will return to her rightful place on this blog soon, I'm sure.

**why does traveling with children take so long. We were probably in the car for about five hours but it felt like, to use Cate's words, "three very long days"

Day #12: Cate and Harry Potter

About a month ago, Cate announced that she was ready to move from the children's section of the library up to the young adult section, where Frances gets all her books. This presents some difficulty for us because, while she is fully capable of reading everything in the young adult section, there's a lot of it she's not allowed to read.  Luckily, she's decided to start this new stage of reading with the Harry Potter books.

She read 3/4 of the first book before it got too scary and she stopped (which means she totally missed Dumbledore awarding 5 points to Griffyndor because Neville stood up to his friends [which is much harder than standing up to your enemies, but I digress]). She just finished the second book, which she loved. She's developed the most adorable squeak in response to each appearance of Lucius Malfoy.

She got the third book down from the shelf and started to read it. I told her she needs to go to sleep and can finish reading tomorrow. And then we had this conversation:

Cate: This book is so tempting. It's so good, Mommy.

Me: What's good about it?

Cate: Everything! The words, the language. It's so juicy!

Me: I'm so glad you like it, honey, but you still need to go to sleep.

10 minutes later I go to check on her and find this. She's totally pretending to be asleep here. As I type this I can hear her giggling at the book.

Day #11--Cate puts me in my place

Cate and I are communicating lately through a whiteboard in her room. Last night I left her a note instructing her to thank her father for cleaning her room. Not long after, she and I had an argument about the fact that she refused to go sleep because she refused to stop drawing. (It was 11:00 and well past the time she should be sleeping.) She argued her case; I told her she was being a sassy pants and then took her sketch pad and pencils.  She was frustrated that I wouldn't listen to her explanation of why it is imperative that she draw Pokemon at 11:00. This is the note she left me.  Note that she replied to my previous message before she chastised me.

 

Day #10--Frances is a teenage girl

Okay--she's not quite a teenager. That won't happen until July 15. But she has all the attributes of the teenage girl, including, most important for this post, an obsession with a boy band.  The band in question is One Direction.  And here I've caught her singing "You Don't Know You're Beautiful" at the top of her lungs, while doing the dishes. Needless to say, she was quite embarrassed.

Day #9--In Which Our Book Problem Continues to Be A Problem

It is probably a surprise to no one that our house is full of books, lots and lots and lots of books. In every room, on nearly every surface. That's a problem, for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that we're being crowded out by them.

So this weekend we developed an intricate, Tetris-like plan that would move furniture around, move books out, and clear some much needed space. (I'll pause here to say that this all began when we realized just how much space we need for Cate's art supplies/paintings/yoga cards, but that's a post for another day).

Here's a picture of Brian packing one of six boxes of books destined for Mr. K's.

 Choosing which books stayed and which books we kicked out of of our home was a traumatic experience. It took a solid week of deliberations and another of week of tripping over boxes before we finally bit the bullet and packed the car up. This doesn't really give you a good sense of how packed our car was, but, trust me, it was.  Six boxes and two shopping bags--dozens and dozens and dozens of books.

So here is where the problem is. We get to Mr. K's (a lovely group of people, well worth the drive to North Charleston, and we all know how much I hate having to drive to North Charleston).  We walk around the store while the staff determined which of our books they could take. We made a pact that we were not going to bring any books back home. That, obviously, would undermine the whole space-clearing project. We were quite reasonable and adult about the whole thing.

And then we saw the books. All the books. All the beautiful, glorious books.

90 minutes later, we'd sold a bunch of books for cash, and spent our newly attained store credit on an entire box of books.  The evidence of our addiction is below. We have a problem.

Frances was exactly as judgmental as you might expect.

Day #8--in which we continue to be bad at blogging

Life at Casa Francis-McCann is equal parts impossibly busy and not particularly interesting.  Which, as it turns out, is not a great combination for a blog. 

If we were a team of superheroes, or a family singing group, or international spies, or jewel thieves, then maybe we would have something exciting to report. Sadly, we are none of those things.  Instead of saving the world from aliens a la the Avengers or pulling off an impressively and needlessly complex heist like Ocean's 13, this week we:

--painted a watercolor scene of a rainy day

--saw Iron Man 3, Gatsby, and Star Trek (well worth the ticket price, though I skipped 3D for the latter two)

--led a book discussion on Sister Citizen by Melissa Harris-Perry

--made eight hand puppets

--managed not to kill our tomato plant; the jury's still out on our sunflowers 

This weekend we will clean bedrooms, and do laundry, and go to the library, and maybe watch some Dr. Who.  It's a full life. 

We're documenting these 365 days with pictures, so ill leave you the pic of the girls currently serving as the homescreen on the iPad.

 

 

Day #7--Mother's Day

(another post from Frances)

i'm back...

Let's keep this is short and simple folks. We, the McCann-Francis girls, decided to take a sweet picture for mother's day. This is the best YOU get (free of charge of course.) This middle-of-a-laugh photo is all we could muster without ripping apart the fabric of the universe with our flowing manes and tantalizing "beautimousity". But anyway, happy mother's day!

Day #6--Papa and the Ants

(this post was written by Frances)

I, Frances McCann, the magnificent documentarian, discovered where the ants inhabiting our car were roosting. On Christmas Eve 2012 we had gotten in a car wreck causing the large hole/dent in our car as seen above. In relation to that, large red ants recently started to make guest apperances inside our automobile, surprising and  frustrating us, but with the help of a private eye investigator, I discovered the ants location, informed my temporary parental units and had my father flush the ants out with the water hose and a bit of ant spray. EVERYONE BOW DOWN TO FRANCES!!!!!

Day #5--Sunnypants Kid

Here's the video that premiered at the fashion show last night. It features Cate and her class talking about the superhero they created, a guy named Sunnypants Kids who fights the harmful effects of UV rays.

Our very own Cate gets to explain what his superpowers are.

Day #4

Tonight I attended a fashion show/silent auction benefitting the MUSC Foundation for skin cancer research. Cate's first grade class won contest for creating a superhero that fights skin cancer. I was at the event to see the animated version of their story, and as PTA president. 

Things I learned:

--Female models look perpetually offended

--Male models look perpetually angry

--Wine and hors d'oeuvres is not an actual meal

--I continue to be bad at small talk 

I'd also like to point out that the McCanns are still barely participating in this project. 

Day #3

The end of every semester finds me sporting this brace. Is there any geekier an ailment than carpal tunnel?

365 Day Project--Day #2

It would be an exaggeration to say that I have the full cooperation of the McCanns. They are a stubborn lot. I'm not above sneaking up on them in their sleep, though.

Here Cate has fallen asleep while reading (for the zillionth time) her Pokemon Encyclopedia. I'm not joking when I say she's memorized nearly the entire thing and talks non-stop about various Pokemon characters and evolutions and powers.

In the background you can catch a glimpse of her other all-consuming passion: art. The brown paper on the wall showcases a life-size drawing she made of herself. This photograph doesn't capture all of the other masterpieces gracing her walls.

365 Day Project--Day #1

My kids (and likely my husband) will tell you that I love a project. Well, they'd probably tell you that I can't stand to be idle and that I come up with insane ideas and then insist they participate.  That may or may not be true.

We're doing this anyway.  A picture a day, for 365 days, documenting the afrogeek life at Casa Francis-McCann. It'll be fun. (The other inhabitants of Casa Francis-McCann may be rolling their eyes.)

To commemorate the start of this project, the girls decided to pose with apples, their current favorite snack. We are singlehandedly keeping the apple industry in business. They both eat 3 or 4 apples a day. (We also go through an amazing amount of milk and bagels and carrots.) Maybe this is why they are both so tall lately.

Comics and the U.S. South

Oh sad and neglected blog. Have no fear. Changes are under way.

In the mean time--check out the awesome cover of a new book on comics.  I happen to have an essay in it.

It's edited by Brannon Costello and Qiana Whitted and can be pre-ordered here.

Things I Learned on My Trip to Charlotte

Patrica Williams Lessane and I went on an overnight trip to Charlotte to the Harvey Gantt Center to see Marcia Jones talk about her pieces in the Live and In Stereo(type) exhibit.  One of her images is below. I don't know if you can tell, but that's Michelle Obama's face on those million dollar bills.

In any case, here's what I learned:

• Hardee's has a fried bologna breakfast biscuit.  I didn't have one.  I'm kind of amazed that it exists at all.
• Charlotte is a big city, with skyscrapers and everything. I don't know what I was expecting, but I was pleasantly surprised.  I had the same reaction when I went to Cincinatti in March.  Clearly I need study up on my U.S. geography.
• While I love being in a hotel so I can sleep in a bed without my children and my children's stuff, I still find it incredibly disorienting to wake up somewhere other than my own home.
• You should definitely avoid hotels with a B rating.  I swear they were shooting porn in the hotel where we stayed.
• And, finally, the other artist in the exhibit was Fahamu Pecou.  One of his images is below (it's called "Warn A Brother").  He wasn't at the talk, but I'm dying to meet him.  He may be my soulmate.  (Don't tell Brian.)

Throwing Out the Script

There should be more stories about Cate on this blog.  Not just because Cate is amazing in all sorts of ways that still surprise me, but also because hers is a happy life and more parents with kids who have Sensory Processing Disorder probably need to be told that.

At a birthday party recently I talked to another mom whose son just got a diagnosis that's different than Cate's (she has SPD), but whose therapies are similar (OT, social stories, among other things).  I was struck in this conversation by two things.  First, she had all the same concerns and questions and feelings that I had before and after Cate's diagnosis.  I thought we had done something wrong (we didn't read enough to her in the womb, we should have put in her childcare earlier, we should have sung more songs), I didn't know whether I should tell people about her SPD, it continues to be difficult to explain to Frances why Cate has modified rules.  We had a great talk about strategies for all those things.

I was also struck, though, by how much of our conversartion was about re-writing the story we had in our heads about our kids.  We both have first daughters who are gorgeous and smart and outgoing and fabulous in all the ways you might want for your daughter.  Those first daughters have done very little to challenge our notions of what it means to be a parent or what it means to be a member of human society.  But these second kids--so many things we had planned, so many things we assumed to be true, so many things we took for granted are suddenly gone.  We are having to write this new story as we go along.

It's been more than a year since Cate got her diagnosis and I find myself loving this task of writing a new story (though it's not without its anxieties) and also realzing that Frances' life should also be lived without a script.  This mom just got her child's diagnosis and I sensed that she had a lot of grief about having to let go of her script and that it helped to find someone who understood how that felt.  And who wasn't still grief-stricken about the process.

So maybe I'll share some more stories about Cate in all her awesome-ness and about Frances, who also continues to be amazing (even if she is moody all of the time now), and how life goes on, even off-script.

5 Things I Could Live Without In Romance Novels

Before we begin: This is not an anti-romance post.  I read lots of romance novels. I adore romantic comedies. I'm doing academic work on romances.  I don't hate romance novels.  I'm only saying these things because I care.

1. Stop with the Alpha Males
I know. Strong, successful, assertive, masculine (in the most traditional sense), serious--all these things are sexy.  I tend to agree.  You know what's not sexy? Arrogant, entitled, possessive, taciturn jerks.  Romance writers, you've got to give me a reason to like the guy.  Otherwise, I'm going to hate him and think the heroine's stupid for swooning over him.

2. Passive Heroines
I don't need my heroines to be Lara Croft traipsing all over the globe for treasure or Scarlet O'Hara making dresses out of curtains.  I do need her, though, to do something other than think about the hero.  Maybe it's just me, but I think great drama can from two together people with a lot going for them being suddenly confronted with having to make space for a partner.  That kind of conflict can only happen, though, if the heroine is doing more than waiting for the hero to wander into her coffee shop.

3. Love at First Sight
Yes, it's romantic.  But when you're writing category romance and you only have a couple of hundred pages to get the guy and the girl together, love at first sight reads as rushed and unbelievable.  Maybe I've been reading too many category books lately, but I like romance that has seduction, where the two leads slowly fall, where they don't realize they're hooked until they're in too deep.  Love at first sight takes some of the romance out of romance for me.

4. Occupations that make no sense
You can not be a 27 year old college professor with tenure and three award winning books.  You just can't.  You can't be 30 with an M.D. in psychiatry and a PhD in psychology, a thriving medical practice, and a thriving career as a self-help author.  You just can't.  You can't be a successful musician who spends no time practicing.  Stop it.

5. Deep Dark Secrets That are Neither Deep nor Dark
Here is a good secret: at 17 you became pregnant with your boyfriend's baby.  You find out this information right after the two of you have a big fight and break up.  Instead of telling him about the baby, you have an abortion. After the abortion the two of you reconcile, but the weight of what you've done, the fear of how he might react if he finds out, keeps you from getting back together with him. You grow apart after the two of you go away to college.  15 years later you  meet up again and the attraction is still there, but you can't pursue it unless you tell him your secret.  You still don't how he will react, but you feel this relationship might be worth it. 

I'd read that story.

You know what else is a good secret?  The fact that you used to work as a professional escort.  I'd read that story, too.

Bad secrets:

• you gave up a dead man's baby for adoption 16 years ago--so what?
• your ex-fiance killed your father and now he is after you--why haven't you called the police?
• your dead father is an alcoholic--again, so what?

In other words--good secrets have the potential to have a serious negative effect on the central relationship of the story, that of the hero and heroine.  Bad secrets are ones that would have no effect.  If you promise me a deep dark secret, romance authors, you'd better deliver.

The Help, part 2

I love all the comments, folks!  I feel like I should say that I don't at all object to popular books.  I write about comic books and romance novels for a living.  My favorite thing about the new X-Men movie was how yummy Michael Fassbender looked (I'm linking because it seems gratuitous to to put his picture on the blog again--I can pause while you go look, though).  So, I went into this book ready to be won over.

And here's the thing--if it had only been about the white women (what is up with Celia Foote? Will it be a good reveal? I'm fascinated by her?  And I'm findind Hilly deliciously awful), the book would be bearable.  Stockett writes well.  I want to know what's going to happen to these women.

But it's not just about the white women.  It's about the black women as well.  And the biggest problem I'm having so far is (I'm about 6 or 7 chapters in) that these women, who are speaking to us from inside their heads, are speaking as if they are talking to white women. Aibileen calling Jackie O "Miss Jackie" inside her head, Minny needing Celia to act like the other white women--it's like Stockett hasn't given these black women any space outside of the gaze of their white employers.  I don't feel like I'm getting to know them.  I feel like I'm watching a performance for my benefit. 

So, the verdict so far: I no longer want to gouge my eyes out, but they may fall out of my head from all the eyerolling.  And, also, what does she say in the afterword? It's taking all the willpower I have not to skip ahead and look.

Really people? The Help?

When I'm on a plane or at a party and people ask what I do and I reply, "I'm an English professor," I get one of two reactions: either the person will start apologizing for their grammar (it's too much trouble to tell people that I'm a lit professor and really couldn't care less about their grammar) or they will ask what I'm reading.  For those of you who don't know English profs, let me clue you in a little secret: I'm rarely going to be reading anything you're remotely interested in.  (Except lately I'm reading tons of romance novels, but that's a story for another day).  The last two books I got excited about were What Was African American Literature? by Kenneth Warren (which was nonsense) and Pym, a novel by Mat Johnson (which was so so good, but probably only if you've also read Poe's Pym).  I never get around to reading the "latest" novel until everyone has moved well past it, which brings me to today's topic: The Help.

I agreed to lead a book discussion on the The Help because I'd intended to read the book anyway and I love a good book discussion.  One chapter in, though, and I want to gouge my eyes out.  You want it not to revel in tired, uncomplicated, misleading stereotypes. But how can it do anything else when it includes these unironic lines:

Fact, [Miss Leefolt] whole body be so full a sharp knobs and corners, it's no wonder she can't soothe that baby.  Babies like fat. Like to bury they face up in your armpit and go to sleep. They like big fat legs too.  That I know.

And of course she knows because she's fat black woman who has raised 17 white children.  Good lord, people, have we really not moved past this?  Am I really reading a New York Times bestseller about a mammy?

To be fair, I've only read one chapter.  Maybe it gets better.