It Takes a Village...um, an e-village...

Today I had a very bad day at work.  Our district has adopted a new Student Information System/Grading Program, which everyone else learned to hate during the first semester, but with which I am just now being confronted.  It is bad.  This is not just a "change is hard" type reaction.  This program is worse than bad.  It is inefficient, unintuitive, user-unfriendly, and just plain annoying.  It is a huge step backwards compared to what we used to have.  I have colleagues who have urged me to abandon all hope of using it and go back to the tried-and-true.  I have colleagues who commiserate that it takes 15 clicks to save one assignment in your gradebook that you cannot copy and paste into the gradebook for a different period's class, even though it is the same exact assignment.  I have not had any colleagues tell me how much they appreciate this new tool that the district has dropped in their lap.


So at least I am not alone.  And there are people who want to help me, and whose help I will gladly be accepting over the coming week.  Because over the past four months, I have learned the value of accepting other people's help.


This has also been a struggle for Joe.  Despite being a very friendly person, Joe is someone who is quite content to just hang out at home and never see anybody.  He doesn't yearn to have guests over or get together for dinner and drinks.  When he said that he knew that with the babies'  arrival he would have to adjust to having people around the house, he wasn't talking about adjusting to the three new people we would be bringing in.


But he has adjusted quite well.  In addition to taking the babies out to their multiples group and to visit their grandparents this week, Joe has welcomed some baby visitors into the house as well.  On Tuesday, our friends Paulette and Denny stopped by to finally meet the babies (they'd been keeping their distance for a while as they nursed colds they didn't want to pass on).  Paulette and I work together at the Giants - she's the PressBox Hostess (that's not the actual title, I don't think), so she's known Joe as long as she's known me.  She watched me waddle around the ballpark all season and helped organize the little get-together they had for us, so we were eager for her to finally meet the babies in person.  Paulette was able to manage the babies' craziness, keeping them calm and getting them to all go to sleep, giving Joe a brief rest.


Today, Joe was visited by three ladies who brought him lunch (with enough leftovers for dinner - THANK YOU!) and stayed to feed the babies. What made today's visit unique was that he did not actually know these ladies.  They are sort of friends-of-friends, but are friends of his in a whole new media way and through the wonders of Facebook and Twitter they know all about the babies.  I teased Joe that I was worried they might bonk him on the head and make off with the babies, but he assured me they were nice enough women, and besides one of them already had twins - what would she want with three more?  So the Salvateenies were visited by Peggy Butler, Diane Fischler, and Hannah Goh, all of whom held and fed a baby so that Joe actually got to go through a mid-day without a bottle in his hands! He told me they were amazed at how calm the babies are - and how calm we are with them. Again, I really wish we could take the credit for it...but I think we just got good babies. Amid all the criticism that your online "friends" aren't real, it was great to have these women come by in person and become more than "virtual" friends. Joe has some 2,000 friends on Facebook and who knows how many Twitter followers - maybe a few of them will want to help us move in two weeks?


Oh, speaking of moving and thank yous ... Last post, I sent a shout out to friends who have been coming by to help with the babies and who have made our lives just so much easier.  In that post, I did not mention my brother, whom I take for granted to an obscene degree.  My brother has met with the contractor who is doing improvements on our new house all week.  He has ferried information and contracts back and forth to me.  He has taken out our garbage, including bags upon bags of dirty diapers, done our shopping and our laundry, fed and cuddled babies, moved boxes of books, and will be spending tomorrow with me schlepping small kitchen appliances to the new house and then setting about the babies' new nursery to build a crib.  And in the future, no doubt, he will need to help me disassemble the two cribs we have set up in the back here, so they can be moved to the new house and reassembled there.  He is amazing, and amazingly good natured about it, and we don't thank him nearly enough.