Day 9 - We All Just Need A Break

Screw This, I'm Going on Vacation

Today I felt like I needed a break.  And the kids, too.  A break from the intensity of trying to get everything done, a break from disciplining them, a break from our near-Spartan policies of restricting sweets and other non-necessities.  So today became a little flamboyant.  I'm a big believer in a routine of self-discipline punctuated by letting loose now and then.  If, on the one hand, a person sticks to their principles fanatically, the likelihood is that at some point they'll just run out of steam.  On the other hand, no structure is just anarchy, and creates a situation in which it's very hard to stay on task.  Therefore the combination gives you the best of both worlds.  In our house it's Michal who's in charge of staying on task, and I provide the spunk.  But when she's gone, I have to do both.

So for dinner I made them smoothies and grilled cheese sandwiches, instead of the usual whole-grain-with-a-legume with only water to drink.  Then, after everyone had eaten their fill the three boys took a bath together, and I let them run around naked and screeching like monkeys for a while before I started herding them toward their pajamas.  We capped off the evening with half an episode of the Israeli version of Sesame Street (which seems to have discontinued in the 80's, but the kids barely even noticed the poor quality).  All in all, they seemed to have appreciated it.  I certainly did.

Here is a recording of the boys running around after the bath.

Asak*

In less than three weeks the school year ends around here.  You can feel it in the way the kids talk about school, even though not a word is uttered about vacation, what they're planning to do or even if they're looking forward to it.  But the ease at which they are willing to consider missing class for rather trivial reasons bespeaks very clearly of their unvoiced feelings.  I, like my children, found the experience of attending grade school to be uninteresting and unchallenging, sometimes bordering on loathsome.  But we dealt with it in different ways.  I was such a little goody-two-shoes that I could only dream of not doing my homework, let alone skip class.  I just sucked it up and put up with the boredom, the slow pace and general humdrummedness (did I make that word up?), and eventually I graduated and left it all behind.  My children, it seems, have less patience than I did.  

Binyamin struggling with Cartesian coordinates

If Chanania finds the math exercises too boring, he spaces off or leafs through the workbook instead.  When the teacher writes us a note in his personal planner reminding us to prod him about finishing the assignment, not only does he not show us or say anything about said note, he also scribbles over it so throughly that it's completely illegible.  The days in which he got to school on time this year I could probably count on my fingers and toes.

Binyamin, in addition to having absolutely no interest in written assignments, he has the occasional scrape with certain classmates who seem to have it in for him, whereafter he announces that he's never going back to school again.  Once or twice he made good on his threat, and after I literally kicked him out of the house in the morning, he spent the day hanging out in a public park, returning home in the afternoon.  On suspicion, I questioned him as to his whereabouts during the day, and he admitted unabashedly that he dhadn't set foot on the school grounds.

Avigail carries on her parents' legacy of being loyal to the system.  Too much so, in fact, bursting into tears if we make her go to bed instead of allowing her to finish homework that's due the next day.  She just doesn't know when to stop.  This year, in addition to the regular schoolwork (and after skipping a grade over last summer), she has piano lessons, plays in the advanced recorder choir, attends the school's "Bible Club", so to speak, and competes in their seasonal Bible Bees, is involved in the Drama Club (second production of the year is next week), and has youth group activities she can't bear to miss, twice a week.  When does she eat? sleep? brush her hair? talk on the phone with friends (she is a preteen, after all)?  Well, besides for talking on the phone, which she thankfully hasn't discovered yet, she somehow fits everything in.  But I'm sure she's also looking forward to summer vacation.

All the highlighted messages are oustanding issues.
This is just three weeks worth, and some of them I already took care of.

And as for me, my work life is supposed to intensify greatly at the same moment the kids get let off of school for the summer.  On July 1, the official first day of summer break, I start my first real job ever.  But this is always a break for me, in many ways.  Currently I spend most of my time working for one guy, an offbeat Breslev hasid who lives near Haifa, and is an accomplished Internet entrepeneur, highly experienced at SEO, and atypically doesn't seem to do very much business with other Orthodox folk.  The main gig I've been working on for him is a medical experts forum site (www.medonline.co.il).  He first had some teenager writing the code for him, but then, all of a sudden, this talented young programmer was drafted into the army.  The site was about 90% functional, or so it seemed at first, and he took me on to put on the finishing touches and churn out Android and iPhone apps for the forums.  We started back in November.  I'm still working on pinning down the last few bugs, and adding minor features, some of which the original programmer didn't get to, but many of which he decided to add on later in the game.  

It's not that there was so many months of work there, but the code was so disorganized and poorly written, it made bug fixes and additions very painstaking.  It was sort of like asking a high-caliber interior designer to come renovate an 100-year-old hovel.  Not that I'm such a hotshot programmer,  but I do pride myself on writing clean, clear, and well-organized code, to the best of my ability.  And here's this guy coding this enormous and complex website in PHP, with no framework, no abstraction of methods, barely and resemblance of a template for the HTML, just one big mess.  So a little ways into the work, I told the Breslever that for ease of maintenance and in order to improve security, the code has to be refactored into an appropriate framework.  His response?  We don't have the budget for that right now.  Maybe next year...  And so it dragged on, and on, and on.  It would be one thing if it was just that work that was annoying, but this guy's communications habits are as disorganized as the teenage whiz kid's code.  He would regularly send me email, text messages, and WhatsApp messages about the same issue, oftentimes repeating himself word for word, sometimes up to 15 messages a day.  At first he wanted us to have a single, monolithic email conversation on which we would correspond, but important notes were getting buried as new messages were added to the conversation.  So he would begin a new conversation for every CSS adjustment or text wording correction.   So my inbox was filled to the brim with his messages, until I couldn't take it any more, and a few weeks ago I forced him to start communicating with me via Trello, a fantastic organizational and collaboration browser/mobile app.  Now I only get 2-3 emails a day, because, I suppose, he just can't resist.  Getting my new job has allowed me to refuse to accept any more work from him (he has another five new features for the site, and three whole projects already lined up for me), and I feel like I'm about to be set free.  Now I just have to figure out to make this app record audio properly, for the forum voice post functionality...

Our original correspondence.  46 messages from about two weeks, in November