The Small Family     

Well, I have a lot of pictures this week--but few of anyone you know! We actually didn’t do anything photo-worthy with Theo this week, so all I have of him are a few cute iPhone snaps. However, I’m going to post the best pix I got from the wedding I photographed, in case anyone is interested.

A disclaimer: I shot this wedding with two other photographer friends, Kim and Amber. Amber had the wide lens, so she did all the group shots, full-body shots of the bride and bridal party, etc. Basically, all the typical wedding-y shots you think of. And they are fabulous! Kim and I both rented zoom lenses, so we focused on (ha! pun intended) close-ups of people’s faces. Kim took one side of the church, while I took the other. So that’s why my pictures are virtually all close-ups and virtually all from one angle. Didn’t want you to think I was a lame photographer who totally forgot to get group shots, full-body shots, and shots from any other angle! Nope, I was one of the two close-up gals.

Shooting the wedding was fun but exhausting! I have newfound respect for my wedding-photographer friends. Six hours on my feet with heavy camera equipment wore me out! And actually, Monday (the day of the wedding) didn’t get off to the best start for me anyway. The wedding turned out to be a good thing, as it distracted me from Monday morning’s events.

So what happened Monday morning? Glad you asked! I’ve been working with an author who I was warned has a massive ego. I’m actually the go-to editor for the “high maintenance” authors and have been for some years, largely because in a professional sense, I tend to be very calm and level-headed, so I’m able to handle them well. I don’t think they see me as a threat, so they tend to relax and do fine with me. And this guy was doing fine for a while. I was very careful with him, as I had been told that one acquisitions editor found him so rude and arrogant that she refused to sign a contract with him--so he went above her to the publisher and got her to sign him. Now, I know this first acq. editor pretty well, and she often signs high-maintenance authors. So if he was bad enough that she wouldn’t sign him…well, I considered myself warned.

Anyway, all went well for a while…sort of. He kept not listening to me (or not reading my emails) and changing things that I had already advised him about, which created a lot of extra work for both me and the layout tech. Still, it’s fine. Part of the job, really. Some authors make your life easy, some don’t. We move along…. But it all finally came to a head when I asked him to review a sample chapter that contained some resumes. “Please look carefully at the formatting of the resumes and make sure they look how you want them to. We’ll be using these six resumes as a guide when we lay out the 100 resumes in the next chapter of the book.” Could I be much clearer than that? We’ll call this author A, short for Arrogant Ass. Anyway, A reviewed the six samples and said they looked fine, so I gave the layout tech the go-ahead to do the next 100 resumes.

Monday morning. I get an email demanding a phone call. I call. The minute A picks up the phone, he starts yelling at me. Yes, yelling. All about how the layout tech changed everything just because she didn’t like how he had it, and how it’s all wrong and how he won’t publish a book like this! He kept accusing us of changing things without his okay and reminding me that “People pay me $500 to write a resume for them!” (Because clearly, I should be impressed.) He wouldn’t let me speak--every time I tried to calmly interject something, he would start yelling over me. After 10 minutes of this, I finally interrupted and said, “You’re not letting me get a word in edgewise so I can help you!” A snapped, “Fine! Get your word in!” I asked him to open the sample chapter, as to me, the formatting of the 100 resumes that he was going ballistic over looked the same as in the sample chapter, which he had approved. He refused and told me the sample was fine. I asked him two more times. He refused to even look at it. I finally said, “Please open the sample chapter to page 7 and look at it. To me, this looks exactly the same as the 100 resumes. I’m trying to understand what’s wrong with the 100 resumes so I can help you, but to my eye, they look exactly the same as the sample that you approved.” He finally opened the sample and said, “Oh, you’re right--they’re wrong in the sample. This is all wrong.” A short moment later, he hung up on me. Chris walked in the room and said, “Hey, what did your author want?” And I burst into tears--I was so upset about him spending 10 minutes yelling at me and treating me like an idiot that I was shaking and in tears. Ugh. But I pulled myself together, went about my morning, broke the news to the layout tech that she needed to redo all the resumes, and went off to the wedding--which actually took my mind of things.

One of the things A had demanded repeatedly was that, “If Jill [the layout tech] had just followed my Word document exactly, this all would’ve been fine! That’s what she should’ve been doing! Just tell her to do that. She needs to follow it exactly!” Fair enough--I told this to Jill, and she got started revising resumes.

We sent him a sample of the first 10 revised resumes. He didn’t respond. Jill continued, and we sent him a sample of the next 10. He emailed and announced he needed a phone call because they were again all wrong (even though they followed his Word document EXACTLY, as he had demanded). Well, after Monday’s tirade, I had already told the publisher that I would continue working on his book, but I would not speak to him on the phone again. I didn’t need to be yelled at, and besides, I thought it best to have everything in writing, given how many times over the past few weeks he had given us conflicting instructions that resulted in more work for everyone except him. And the publisher was fine with it--she even called A and told him that if he ever treated us like that again, she would just cancel his book. So when he demanded another phone call (by now we’re at Thursday morning), I politely replied that based on Monday’s phone call, in which he was quite unpleasant, I would only be corresponding via email from that point forward.

He was furious, to say the least. He fired back the most condescending email I’ve ever received, telling me I didn’t know how to do my job, that he didn’t think I was capable of doing my job (nor was Jill, according to him), and that I needed to just “set aside my fear” and be a professional.

Hmmm. In my book, professionals don’t call their colleagues and yell at them--nor do they send rude, condescending emails telling people they don’t know how to do their job. I waited until I had calmed down and sent what I think was a very professional email explaining that my refusal to do business with him over the phone had nothing to do with fear--rather, I felt that (a) I didn’t need to talk with someone who couldn’t discuss things calmly and productively, and (b) given the number of times he’d given us conflicting information, I felt it best to have things in writing. He sent me a predictably nasty, condescending email, and that was it. For the first time in my 12 years as an editor, I asked to be taken off the project. And the publisher did it without question, as she knew what a complete jerk the guy had been. Asking to be taken off that book loses us $1,500 of income we could surely have used, but I don’t even care. Life is too short for me to let a guy like this get my blood pressure up repeatedly, and Chris had a good point--A thinks I’m an idiot incapable of doing my job, and that’s never going to change. No matter how carefully I tried to manage his project, he was convinced I couldn’t do it. Ah well, it takes all kinds.

For the record, I’ve been the editor for more than 200 books, countless Web articles, and many government reports. Jill has 30 years of layout experience. I think the two of us do indeed know how to do our jobs. :-)

I actually feel pretty empowered by the whole thing. I’ve always been very bad at saying no, and I’ve tried hard to get better at it. Saying, “I will not work with this man any longer” was a victory for me because I said no. And that makes me feel good…

Anyway, on to other topics. Preschool continues to go well for Theo--he loves it! He is feeling comfortable there and so he is doing a lot of testing his boundaries, but we’ve been really pleased with how his teachers have been handling it. I think in the long run, it’s going to be a terrific fit for him, and we’re really happy that we chose this particular school for him. I think the Montessori methods of both schooling and discipline are actually going to work very well for him. I have a feeling that in a more “typical” preschool setting, Theo might end up spending a fair bit of time on time-out, and given how utterly ineffective we’ve found time-outs to be, I don’t really think that’s the best approach with him. We do them because we have to do something when he misbehaves, but I’m not sure they really have much effect. But the Montessori teachers are working very carefully on helping him understand how his actions affect others--rather than just sticking him on a time-out, they take the time to work on understanding the effects of his actions and learning alternative actions to take when he’s frustrated with something. This is something Chris and I have also been doing for a long time, in conjunction with time-outs, so I’m hoping that the consistency between our methods and the Montessori teachers’ methods will eventually pay off. One thing we’ve learned is that “typical” discipline really doesn’t work with Theo. He just doesn’t care about negative consequences--he’s not one of those “pleaser” kids who you can just give the evil eye to, and he’ll stop what he’s doing. Not even close. His head teacher, Dorothy, said that the way he’s testing is very common among kids who are “always thinking, thinking, thinking--always in their heads.” I was impressed that after three short weeks, she knows Theo so well. He is indeed always thinking, and we sometimes say that he’s off in “Theo’s world” because he’s so uber-focused on whatever is going on in his mind.

That said, he’s absolutely loving the daily music at his preschool, and he’s gravitating a lot toward the math-related “jobs.” He’s very proud of the fact that when he does a job, he gets a job rug out, does his activity on it, and then puts it away and puts the job rug away. And he’s also very proud of the clean-up skills he’s learning at school. He now brings his dirty dishes to the counter without being asked, which is a lovely bonus for us! He seems to have made some little friends, too--one boy named Sean particularly seems to like him. In general, he’s more of a loner--his teachers tell me he’s perfectly happy to be on his own most of the time. But he does seem to enjoy seeing Sean, which is really sweet.

Oh, since I was talking about behavior, I have to share something that’s making me laugh lately. We have discovered that some of Theo’s acting out is directly related to books he loves! These aren’t books you would typically think of inspiring negative behavior, though--they’re not aggressive stories or anything. One is The Napping House, which is a really neat little story about a nap that gets interrupted by a flea biting a cat. The other is Cat, which is a pop-up type of book about cats. Theo went through a real biting phase recently that we finally discovered was related to The Napping House--he was apparently being the flea who bites the cat and disrupts everything, which he thought was hilarious. Thankfully, this biting phase has ended. Recently, he’s started telling me he’s going to break things--vases of mine. And no matter how many times I tell him it’s not nice to break things, he insists he’s going to do it. (He hasn’t because they’re out of reach--if they were within his grasp, I’m not sure what he’d do.) Turns out he’s doing this because in Cat, one of the cats breaks a vase.

So what’s funny about this? I have a bit of an issue when people get very high and mighty about the ill effects of TV on kids. Now, I’m the first to admit that I think it’s lame when people use TV as a babysitter, and I really wonder about parents who let their kids watch things that I think are inappropriate for their age group. But if you’re talking about a couple of well-chosen TV programs a day, I just really don’t see a problem with it. For Theo, it’s the only time of the day that he actually slows down and relaxes--and I think that relaxation does him some good. We let him watch one or two 20-minute programs a day, from a list of programs that we think are age-appropriate, and I really don’t see a problem with it. But here’s the funny part: We have never seen Theo act out behavior-wise from anything he’s seen on TV. Not once. But he has been acting out over things in his books! So I’m sort of laughing at these people who insist that TV causes kids to act out, and you should read to your kids instead! I am, of course, all for reading as much as possible, but I think it’s quite funny that in our case, the acting out comes from books, not from TV! Which is not to stay that I’m suddenly going to stop reading to him--I just think the whole thing is rather funny.

And a bit more on behavior. One fun thing we’ve learned lately is that our three-year-old can sometimes outsmart us. I expected this around, say, age five…but three?! Here’s an example: Today, we were walking in downtown Sacramento, on a sidewalk along a fairly busy street. Theo was trying to squirm and pull out of my hand, so I said, “Theo, you have to hold my hand. We’re on a busy street.” He immediately informed me, “Actually, we’re on the sidewalk.” Um, what do we say to that?! We had to explain the concept of walking along the street. And earlier today, he was playing with a lamp that he’s not supposed to mess with, and we told him, “If you touch the lamp again, you’ll be on time-out.” So he picked up his toy turtle and had the turtle touch the lamp. Oy vey. He goes with the “letter of the law” every time! It’s hard not to laugh in instances like this, though--because he really has outsmarted us, in a way! Which isn’t to say he gets his way…but you gotta admire the guy for trying! I should’ve known I was in for it when, at 2 ½, I tried to explain to him the difference between the street and the sidewalk, while explaining that he was not to ever go into the street without holding an adult’s hand. “The sidewalk is white; the street is black. You need to stay on the white part.” He immediately pointed to the (white) gutter running along the street and said, “Dat one white. Dat’s the sidewalk.” D’oh! Got me again!

Now some news about our other babies. Poor Miss Luna has a bladder infection! Boy, did I ever get lucky on that. Many years ago (about six, I think), she developed bladder stones and had to have surgery to have them removed. $1,100 later, she was all better, but our beloved vet told me to have her urine checked every six months, just to be safe. If we could find a bladder infection before it turned to stones, we could treat it without surgery. So I followed his advice, and for six years she’s been fine. But I missed her last urine check, and I really didn’t even think much of it. I took her and Zoe in for annual vaccines on Friday, and Dr. Forney said, “Oh, it’s been a year since her urine check. Let’s do one to be sure she’s doing okay.” I agreed and said, “She hasn’t given me any reason to think she’s got anything going on, but yes--let’s check to be safe.” Guess what? Bladder infection. If untreated, there’s a good chance it could’ve developed into stones again, and at her age (8), Dr. Forney said surgery wouldn’t be the best idea. Besides, at any age, who wants their pet to have to have unnecessary surgery?! So I’m very relieved that we think we caught it in time, and she’s now on antibiotics.

Poor Luna had a rough time of it Friday! In addition to the infection, she had a bad reaction to a vaccine. I brought them home from the vet, and she started panting and throwing up everywhere. She vomited 10 times in a short period of time, so I had to rush her back over to the vet. Luckily, I’m familiar with this reaction, as Bitsy did the same thing, so I knew that as long as I got her there quickly, she’d be fine--she needed a Benadryl injection and some fluids for dehydration, but after that, she was good as new (well, except for the bladder issue). Funny thing is, Luna has had this vaccine every year for eight years, and she’s never had a problem! In fact, Dr. Forney and I talked about it, and I said, “Luna’s always been fine with the Lepto vaccine--it was my older dog, Bitsy, who was allergic to it.” Well, I guess that’s no longer the case--Miss Luna won’t be getting that one again.

And so wraps up our week. No real fun adventures to talk about--we’re laying a bit low in anticipation of our upcoming trip. I’m trying to rest up where I can and wrap up work projects, and Chris is similarly busy. So it was a week of arrogant authors, sick puggies, and willful three-year-olds--but a good week nonetheless. I leave you with a bit of info about our little Chickpea: He/she is now a 11-week fetus with all the necessary organs in place and functioning arms and legs! The baby is about 2 inches long and weighs a third of an ounce. Hair follicles are beginning to form, along with fingernail and toenail beds. Exciting stuff!!