My Daughter the Stellar Spellar!

My Daughter the Stellar Spellar!

This is the sort of thing that gives me hives (*cough*), proud as I am: Iz beat out the 39 other kids in her class for the honor of representing them in the school-wide 3rd - 5th grade spelling bee. And she wants me to come watch the competition next week. Gaaaah!

I am nervous about attending because I can't tolerate tension. I almost threw up yesterday during the Design Review meeting.

• Not because our house project was the last one on the agenda and we had to wait 3.5 hours to be heard and I hadn't calculated that into my paper-thin babysitting coverage--Seymour went home for a bit, and Marroqui kindly agreed to watch Leelo and Iz instead of cleaning.


• Not because Mali attended the meeting with me--she slept for two hours, let me read her a couple of books, was placated with a brownie that one of the architects brought, and then Seymour arrived just as our hearing started and played with her.


• Not because our neighbor Nad showed up out of the goodness of his heart to support us and then waited the entire time when he should have been at work.


• Not because, what with the primary architect and project manager having first driven the first leg of their two-hour round trip just to be at the meeting and then having to sit quietly for three hours, I might as well have walked to the nearest ATM, extracted $20 bills every few minutes, and handed them to anyone who walked by.

Well, maybe my nausea drew from all of those things--but what made me really want to barf was watching the two projects before us explode. All sorts of neighbors showed up to brawl with each other over sight lines and privacy and views being blocked, and houses being almost as big as the additions they themselves built a few years beforehand. It was awful to be in the same room.

(My thought is that ideally I would like people to respect each other's wishes and tastes, and that I like neighborhoods to be somewhat architecturally cohesive--but that unless your neighbor's proposal violates an existing code, then you are SOL and it's none of your business. You signed away your right to protest non-code issues when you bought the fucking place. But I am tired and grouchy and think it's deplorable when people get the house they want and then try to deny others the same.)

Anyhow. I don't know if I will be able to go to the spelling bee and watch cute kids compete without vomiting. I played chess with Iz on Sunday and it took all my willpower plus a few sharp words from Seymour to keep me from bolting mid-game. (I got my butt whomped anyhow.)

While I've been good (I think) about encouraging Iz to consider that she has already won the first level--which is damn cool--and that it is good to learn how to both win and lose graciously, and to remember that she has already won a school-wide 3rd - 5th grade competition (poetry slam), she is still freaking out a bit. I wonder which one of us is closer to losing it. I hope it's me.

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