Zabby, the Hair, and the Great Disappearing Brain

Zabby is my 18 year old fabularious wonder-daughter. She's very unique (her Senior Superlative even says so!). She's got this unbelievable waist-length hair, and this cool, gypsy-meets-molly-mormon kind of style: very modest, but quirky and funky and colorful. If it sparkles, she's all about it. She'll wear 25 bracelets simultaneously, with a broomstick skirt, a mohair vest, and pearls, and totally pull it off. She looks like that kid they're always trying to portray on t.v., but always end up going too trendy to get it right. Anyway, did I mention she's gorgeous? She is, when she makes the slightest effort. Like in the prom picture that I'm 99.9% sure I'm going to post on here. (Okay - it was more than the slightest effort - but I kid you not, she's fabulous with just lip gloss and a hair brush.) Problem is... she's one of those funky individuals who just couldn't possibly give a flip.

It's nigh unto impossible for me to believe that she in any way descended from my mother who literally, to this day, at 62 years old, will not go to the garbage dump without lipstick on. This child is perfectly happy wandering out the door with no shoes, no makeup, and no sign of a hair brush (as long as she has a funky hat).

Okay... enough about her looks... now on to the missing brain. :)

It helps to understand, as you ask yourself, "how can any self-respecting mother let her child go around like that?" that I keep telling myself she's smart enough to know better. But it may be that she's smart enough to know more than I do!

Her IQ is in the rather astronomical range of 141, which you would immediately assume translates into someone who is so smart that she wouldn't even need school. But the truth is... she's so smart, she needs a secretary. She can't tell her left shoe from her right. She never knows what day of the week it is. And she's been known to run into posts. (Admittedly, it was while walking and reading a book at the same time - but it has happened more than once!)

She's a cosmic underachiever, though. Where she is probably one of those kids that was meant to find the cure to cancer or something, instead, she inherited from me a bad case of the Idungivacraps and from her dad a bad case of the Nofreekinways. So instead, she's going to be the artsy-fartsy type. She's an incredibly gifted artist, and an amazing writer, who has already been published, and hopes to one day support her aging mother with the millions from her first novel. (Hey! Thirty-eight IS aging!! I didn't say OLD!)

So, as you can see... she's my pride and joy. She's my heart's devotion. She's the apple of my eye. She's the bane of my flipping existence!!!!

Let me tell you about her grades....

This, her senior year, is the first year I haven't been at the same school with her, and it's been a disaster. We missed out on the senior ads in the yearbook deadline, because dunder-butt never even noticed they were announcing it (every day for 9 weeks). And we narrowly missed ordering her cap and gown and invitiations for graduation for much the same reason. (And WHOSE idea was it that we order such things in October of the Senior year??? Probably the same doof-ball who decided we needed class rings in 10th grade, senior portraits 10 days after the junior year is over, and who told Wal-Mart to start putting out their Christmas stuff before Halloween.)

Ahem...anyway... this is the manner of her life. She is the poster-child for attention deficit disorder (as I'm typing this, she's scooping up her little brother in a bear hug, and knocking a plate of pizza onto the floor. Argh!!). Despite the fact that her mother was her assistant principal from 10th-11th grade, she could never manage better than mediocre grades (LOTS of B's), and actually ended up with a C in BAND (no, I'm not kidding) because she failed to turn in ONE STUPID WORKSHEET!!!. (Yes, I know it was over a year ago, but I'm having some trouble letting it go.)

Anyway, so she's a month away from her final semester in high school, with a 3.23 GPA, hoping to get into BYU, having never managed to take the ACT test (even though I kept writing the check...and she kept forgetting to turn in the paperwork!). Getting down to the wire (they want all their Freshman applications in December), she finally managed to take the test, but it was the perfect picture of Murphy's Law.

On the day of the test, she realizes she has no calculator (we stopped on the way and bought one) and she has no picture ID (couldn't buy that - and couldn't get a driver's license because we were afraid to let her behind the wheel). Luckily, they recognized her, and let her in. But, in true Zabby fashion, got sick as a dog in the middle of the test - I'm talking full-out stomach wrecking diarrhea sick - and they wouldn't let her go to the bathroom. She moaned and whimpered and sweated all the way through the first part of the test, just to streak to the bathroom during the break, and not make it back until they'd already finished the entire math section!! Then, of course, she wasn't done being sick... and long story short, $42 later, she comes out of the testing room and says, "Mom, I don't think I did very well...."

Well... what could I say? The kid was sick. So I tried really, really hard not to anticipate the score report. I knew it would cause me pain, so I just went ahead and forked out the money to have her re-tested. Then... the scores came. And I'll bet you can see this coming...

If you know anything about ACT, you probably know that the scores range from 1 to 36, and most people get between an 18 and a 25. To be competitive at a school like BYU, which has pretty darn high standards, you really need the upper end of that range, along with a high GPA, great church leader recommendations, etc. We knew that the October test wasn't going to help her in THAT quest....

And then we got the scores.

Genius-child, beloved offspring of my loins, miraculously produced... a 34 in English, and a 34 in Reading... in spite of the fact that she was sick. She didn't get a regular composite score, because she missed the entire math test... and she got a 24 on the Science (ONLY better than 72% of all the students taking it), which probably has to do with the fact that she hasn't taken a science class in 2 years.

When one sees scores like that... and then hears her excuse for "getting distracted" when she was supposed to be getting her homework done...(its like her brain just disappears!)... one gets a little ... nuts. And she's been doing that stuff for...oh, about 18 years now. So I'm off my flipping rocker, and I've got no one to thank but Zabby, the Hair, and the Great Disappearing Brain. (Okay, that's a huge exaggeration. But you'll have to wait to find out where all my gray hairs came from until Katie is 18, and I can feel a little better about roasting her on the Internet!)

I love my Zabby... but I swear... she'd better marry a rich man. That's all I'm saying about that.

Back to Reality

For those of you who actually subscribe to this nonsense, I apologize for letting so much time, and so many events, to pass uncommented-upon. I shall try to rectify this horrendous error in the briefest manner possible.

1. Yes, I know Obama won the Presidency. Yes, I know that my dreams of seeing a female Republican in the White House have been crushed (at least until 2012). I survived Bill Clinton, I will survive this affront as well. However, I will note that if the man actually puts Hillary into any cabinet position beyond Secretary of Janitorial Services... well... anything I could possibly add to the end of that sentence would make me a target for the Secret Service guys, so I'll just shut up while I'm ahead. Even I can bite my tongue (mostly) for 4 years.

2. The world has changed in 3 months. My 20 year class reunion came and went, and being a teacher and a single mom, I was too broke to manage to attend it. That really annoys me. You know what annoys me more? I just learned that my best friend from high school (Cindy) has been living just a few miles from where I lived until I moved here!! And I had no clue. Which of course makes me wonder if SHE had a clue... and if she was just avoiding me because she heard all of those lame accountant jokes I've been telling for the last ten years. Honestly, knowing she's an accountant now, I might have to reconsider my position on how unbearably boring accountants are, because she was always the most fun person I could remember.

3. We moved (again). As much as I loved the farm (and I did)... cramming my three kids and myself into a tiny 450 square foot cottage, even lost in the middle of some awesome acreage, got old. Something about tripping over a box of dishes on the way to the toilet that tends to get you over the small thing rather quickly... Anyway, we're in Chiefland now. Here's the ironic part:

So I decided to home-school my middle child after her hospitalization, but I wanted to keep her supervised. So managed to make arrangements for her to spend her days at a local real estate office, doing virtual school assignments on her laptop. But driving 60 miles to go back and forth from Bell to Trenton to Chiefland to Trenton to Bell over and over was putting crazy miles on my car (and when gas hit $4.98 a gallon, I thought we'd be switching to peanut butter without the jelly!). So I finally decided to see about renting this awesome house that was sitting vacant next to our church in Chiefland for the last 3 years. We got it, so she'd be able to walk back and forth to her "school" at the real estate office. But immediately upon moving in, she stopped going, and now they're going out of business. Regardless, we love the house. (My bedroom is bigger than the entire old house!) And we're here to stay until directed otherwise.

5. I've gone back to school. It wasn't a hard decision. My student loans, after consolidation (because they were previously at $1150 a month!), are now at $551. My "highly qualified" teacher pay, for someone with 11 years of experience and 2 graduate degrees, nets me $2800 a month, after the health-insurance leeches and taxation. So there's not a lot left to throw around, while supporting 2 children and a very expensive high school senior who is now, technically not a child any more. Thus, I decided that rather than continue throwing over six grand a year at my student loans, I might as well collect another degree in hopes that it will help me overcome the stumbling blocks in my career created by the state financial crisis. I am pursuing my Ph.D in Special Education Administration through Capella University. It's an enormous amount of work, but very interesting, and it is the primary reason I haven't found time to post anything lately. Writing this gives me a guilty conscience when I've got three discussion posts due.

4. My inclination is to make a rant about my darling 18 year old daughter, but I think she's worth an entirely separate entry.... so I'll rant about my 5 year old son instead.

HOW can a 5 year old possibly out-grow a pair of pants in ONE week? I swear, he got these gorgeous pleated khaki pants for his birthday (Sep 29) and he wore them to church on November 9. But by the 16th, they were too short by at least an inch, and we couldn't button them! I would think that they had shrunk, except I didn't wash them. (Hey, he only sat in a pew in church in them, for pete's sake. I do have SOME sense of responsibility to the earth and to my electric bill. I'm not washing clean clothes!)

So I took him to target last night, and we looked for new pants in a 6 slim... found some that fit beautifully... but they didn't have a single pair of pants that were appropriate for church for under $14. What is that about??? Who can send their child to church in $40 worth of clothes? He's a boy!! He'll either destroy them or wear them out in 2 months!!

Sheesh.

Okay, so I bought him some sweat pants instead. No, he can't wear them to church. I'll stress over that problem at about 9:30 tomorrow morning.