Don't sound the alarm

Don't even touch it.

Hello! Many new people have signed up this week (for which I am profoundly humbled and grateful), and it's great to have you here. Because of the massive influx of new subscribers, I will do a quick intro/re-intro here. If you're an old-school subscriber and want to go straight to the post, I start that right after the break (look for the line.)

I'm Kelly. Hi. Welcome to this space.

Almost four years ago, shortly after we had our first son, my husband and I started to do that analysis new parents do when faced with a baby - what kind of life did we want to give to this helpless tiny potato human?

I am not a parenting expert (this will become painfully obvious in today's post), but I do have an overarching view of parenting that goes something like this: kids should mostly be outside if at all possible.

So, my husband and I jumped at the chance when an opportunity arose to get some space while still staying close to the city. Now we live on about four acres. However, we're catty-corner to a Starbucks and Popeye's Chicken. Less than a mile away is an outlet mall abutted by an In-N-Out decorated with concrete palm trees out front. I can go from milking my goats to inside the Kate Spade outlet in under 10 minutes.

It's an odd but fun juxtaposition to live a life with feet in two different worlds. We try to take the best of all of it. Particularly these days when everything feels terrible - the more time in the dirt and with the animals, the better everything else seems to go.

Shortly after we moved in, we found out that I was pregnant with our second son, so the "urban farming" adventure started in earnest while I was fat and mostly immobile. After he was born, I went to a close friend's wedding, where another of my best friends dared me to live off our small farm for a year.

I did it and learned so much. The year lasted from August 1, 2020, to July 31, 2021. It was a spectacularly weird but gratifying experiment. Loosely, my goal is to turn the project into a book. I collected a year-plus of stories, failures, lessons, and recipes - the next step is getting them all compiled.

A month after finishing the challenge, September 1, I got laid off from my job. Driven by fear on the back end and aspiration on the front, I started this Substack. Hopefully, it is the precursor to a book if I can pull it together. That's a big "if."

Even though I'm at the fun age where the identity crises seem to lurk around every corner (when do I get to call myself a "farmer"? What about "writer"?), this Substack has been a fantastic experience thus far. I'm regularly shocked by the fact that other people seem to enjoy it, too.

So - this space is a place primarily for urban-y farming stories-ish. As the exception that proves the rule, today's story has nothing to do with our urban farm and is about the time this week my kid pulled the fire alarm at school.

Anyway, if you enjoy it here, please consider becoming a premium subscriber. At less than a dollar per premium post, if you sign up for an entire year, it's a steal! You will 100% want to do this before baby goats are born (the earliest ones are due February 8 - no pressure.)

Also, the way this has grown the most is by word-of-mouth. Tell your friends. It means so much to me when you do.

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I'm often making comments about being a "barely passable Mom" - my kids end up eating a lot of boxed mac and cheese, and chicken nuggets pressed into the shape of dinosaurs for a family with an urban farm. They probably watch too much TV. Some evenings I lie to them about the hour because they can't tell time yet with our analog clocks, and I want to put them to bed early.

Most of the lines I drew in the parenting sand before having kids (they’ll eat what we eat, they won’t be in front of screens, they’ll be polite, I won’t lie to them, etc. etc.) were swept away almost immediately upon being subjected to the hurricane force winds that are real children.

Typically though, my self-deprecating Mom jokes are just that - jokes. My sons are fed, clothed, read to every day, and go to an excellent Montessori preschool. They have chores outside, where they gather eggs and help feed and water the goats. Considering the current state of the world, I feel pretty okay about where we are as a family. However, this week I had one of those "I am a terrible Mom" moments.

When I pick my boys up from school, I'll generally go to the older son's classroom first, and then we go together to collect the baby. Although chaos is guaranteed regardless of the order I get them, picking up the younger son with the older one already in tow is slightly easier than the inverse.

My sons are two and four, but you wouldn't know it from looking at them. I stand a full six feet tall, and my husband is even taller than that. We're already on the tippy end of the bell curve, and when it comes to our children, our respective sizes are more multiplicative than additive. The pediatrician tells us to expect our kids to hit 6' 8" or higher.

When it's just us at home, our children don't seem particularly off-the-charts, but once we see them with their peers, it's impossible to miss how huge they are. Our four-year-old wears clothes designed for six or seven-year-olds. But, he still has the brain of a person much younger packed into that oversized body, which can present some unique challenges.

Earlier this week I went first to pick up the older son from his classroom, like usual, and he and I walked together to pick up the baby. While I was loading myself down like a pack-mule with lunchboxes and other accouterments, the six-year-old-sized-four-year-old saw the red, shiny fire alarm handle. You know where this is going.

At preschool, fire alarm handles are at about a height for six-year-old to be able to reach - they're designed specifically so that people with a certain level of mature risk assessment can alert the entire building to a threat. Building designers have agonized over the height of these placements. They don't want so many false alarms to render the entire system useless but also want them low enough so that anyone with the maturity to identify a real concern can get to them.

Enter - the giant babies with poor risk assessment skills. Loaded down with two backpacks, a diaper bag, two lunch boxes, and a Valentine's Day painting, I looked over right as the four-year-old reached up for the red handle. "Nnnnnnnn . . . ." and he flipped it down before I could get to the "ooooo". It was like a scene from an overdramatized sitcom about a dysfunctional family. I held my breath.

A thing I didn't know about pulling fire alarms, as I have never pulled one before, is that they don't just start the whole building blaring immediately. It took a beat. Then, the handle let out a few light beeps. I flipped the handle back up and gave my son the best withering look I could muster. Maybe I got it back up in time, and perhaps it would be fine. No.

The entire building started to wail as the beeps moved from the handle to the central fire system. I locked eyes with the Assistant Principal, D, who had been sitting at the front desk and watched the whole thing go down. "Oh God, no."

D stood up and said to no one in particular, "Well, now we need to evacuate the building," as she pulled on her neon safety vest and grabbed her handheld stop sign.

I impotently stood there, loaded down with all my kids' stuff, and meekly asked, "Is there anything I can do to help?" There was nothing I could do to help.

The halls started to fill with teachers carting babies out the door into the snow as the sun began to set. My son just stood there, watching the chaos he had created with the simple pull of a lever. I can't say if he grasped the power wielded over every other person in his orbit at that moment, but I just wished for a fissure to open up in the floor so I could crawl into it and disappear.

I ushered my kids out to the truck as we saw teachers and their charges stream out of the building, past the shoveled sidewalk, and into the cold snow. I sat there, stunned at the disruption my son had just caused. I felt guilty leaving the scene of the crime, as it were, but I also knew there was nothing else to do. I backed the truck out slowly as my silence turned into the kind of maniacal screams directed at my son that will surely require therapy well into adulthood.

Every morning it seems like I wake up with the mantra: “I’m no longer going to be a Mom who yells.” Every day it seems like there’s some new and innovative way my kids seem to thwart this goal.

The following day I took two dozen "I'm really sorry my kid pulled the fire alarm" donuts to school for drop off. I apparently don't know what else to do in awkward social situations but to throw food at them.

Just a few hours later, I was called back to school to pick up the baby, not because he did anything wrong, but because he had been exposed to someone who tested positive for COVID. According to the school policy, every exposure at school requires ten days of quarantine, even with a negative test and without any symptoms.

So I'm now at 20 days in January without being able to set a work meetings or anticipate a schedule because of quarantine. Maybe the universe is trying to send me a sign.

In the meantime, I'm sending the boys out to go feed the chickens; they're gonna need to save their egg money for therapy someday.