At the risk of jeopardizing my children’s academic careers and alienating all of my friends who are teachers, I have to vent about the latest fad in parent-teacher conferences.

It’s called a student-led conference.

For those of you who haven’t had the distinct pleasure of participating in one of these hour-long time-wasters, let me be the first to introduce you.

A student-led conference is exactly as it sounds. In fact, there is no “teacher” involved with this new trend. Your child (who you talk to every day) gets out his or her binder (which you see every day) and tells you the same things that he or she told you at the dinner table the night before. Only, this time, you have to make an appointment and go to the school to do this.

The school’s official position is that students assume greater control of their academic progress and take more personal responsibility for their academic performance.

You, the parent, get no one-on-one time with the teacher. You don’t have the opportunity to ask whether your son has learned not to pick his nose or whether your daughter has stopped hanging out with the girl who got caught shoplifting last year. You also don’t get the chance to tell the teachers how your child REALLY feels about their classes.

Instead, you watch as your child struggles through a “presentation” of his best work, his worst work, and his favorite work in EVERY subject.

The teacher pops in from time to time with a vivacious interjection like, “Aren’t these student-led conferences great!!!??? Little Johnny worked so HARD to get ready for this!”

On the inside, I roll my eyes and scream “NO! They aren’t just great and Little Johnny did about as much work to get ready for this as I did driving here today.” But, on the outside, I smile and nod and pray for it to be over soon.

Now, before the PTA officials come and give me an in-school-suspension for my disrespect, let me explain.

My distaste for this new form of communication is not because I don’t care about what my children are doing in school. Quite the opposite is true. Ask any of my children and step-children how often I check their homework and their on-line progress reports. They will all assure you that I care and care a lot… in fact, a little too much for their taste.

No, I am very interested in their school work. But I get to hear THEIR version each and every day…and, frankly, their version is suspect.

In a parent-teacher conference, I expect a candid conversation with an ADULT about how my child is doing socially and academically, not an oration on why Grace missed a half a point on one essay on one test because she spelled Byzantine incorrectly.

But, for some reason, the teachers and administrators have convinced themselves that these student-led conferences are the best thing since teachers’ lounges.

I’m just not buying it.

Unfortunately, I am a lonely holdout.

It seems that either … A – I am a bad parent who doesn’t care about my children or B – every other parent is afraid to speak up … because the student-led conference has become all the rage.

So, there I sat last week… smiling and nodding and fitting right into category B above. The things we do for our children!

I had to take the last week off from blog writing for a little breather.

Like most people, I manage to get in over my head once in a while… actually, more often than not. And I just had to cut out one thing last week or I was going to run screaming off the edge.

Rick and I spent the previous week at a conference in Orlando. I had great expectations for that week with no kids. WOW! A whole week with no kids! (I’ll have time to read the Bible, write a novel and cure the common cold.)

I was going to get tons of work done: redo our company website, write new marketing materials, design Jack’s football team’s collages, and write 10 blogs. I was also going to take a jaunt over to the coast and have a quiet day at the beach.

Ha! I did none of those things. Looking back, I’m not sure what I did. Rick was in meetings all day every day. I went to one day of meetings and then sat on the computer in our hotel room for the rest of the time. I didn’t accomplish any actual work while I was on the computer, but I did force myself to sit there and go through the motions.

It’s a similar feeling to the one I used to have when I was a stay at home mom. I would have the whole day before me. I didn’t have to get to an office. I didn’t really have anything pressing that had to be done. And somehow my day would be consumed with minor tasks that I couldn’t put my finger on at the end of the day. Kind of like this poor mom: Three stinky boys.

So at the end of the week, I looked back and realized that I was more behind than I would have been if I had stayed home with all five kids all week long. (I should have sat by the pool and at least have had a sunburn and a hangover to show for my week.)

It didn’t help that Rick and I were welcomed home to a bathroom that was still under construction, a house filled with drywall dust, and five kids wondering where they were going to shower all week long.

Here we are a week later and the bathroom STILL isn’t done and dust still covers every surface that hasn’t been wiped clean accidentally by the cat’s tail or someone’s sleeve.

I did, however, spend about 26 hours creating 16 personal photo collages for each member of Jack’s football team (with the help of Picasa.com – an awesome FREE picture storage and editing tool).

And, fortunately for everyone around us, we did find a way to get showers all week.

Rick and I don’t own one of those fabulous stone and stucco McMansions that seem to be so popular among our demographic. No glorious master suite with a jacuzzi tub, no “entertainer’s” kitchen, and no mother-in-law suite (i.e, party room) in the basement for us.

Instead, we live in a turn of the century Victorian that has a tiny kitchen, a dungeon for a basement and absolutely no closet space. It needs more work than we can possibly accomplish or afford in our lifetimes… and NONE of it is under warranty.

In a house that age, there is ALWAYS something that needs to be repaired…and usually it’s something pressing: the foyer ceiling caving in, the front porch columns buckling, the hot water tank exploding all over the dirt floor of the basement, etc. And the greatest thing about old houses is that any home improvement project that we start requires 3 TIMES as much time and 4 TIMES as much money to complete.

We don’t really know exactly how old our house is. Rick says it was built in 1880. (He has some paperwork… somewhere … that says so.) The Franklin County Auditor’s office says “Year Built: OLD.” And yes, “OLD” is in all caps.

All I know is that, although I love the tree lined brick street …and the “character” of the house mildly amuses me, living in an antique presents some challenges.

First and foremost, I don’t think that the people in the late 1800s had the same love of nice big bathrooms that we do today. Nor do I think that the original owners had five full grown women under the same roof, vying for bathroom time every morning and every night. I know it’s hard to believe, but all seven of us share the same bathroom.

We have learned to make do quite nicely, but when the tub wall started to crumble… oh… about a year and a half ago… we put off starting the project because we couldn’t live for a week without our bathroom. After all, we couldn’t just retile the tub wall because the wall board behind it was rotten. Plus the tile went all the way around the bathroom, so if we just did the tub, the tile wouldn’t match. Besides, the walls were peeling too. And if you’re going to have your bathroom torn up, you might as well do a complete remodel, right?

So week by week, I’ve watched nervously as the walls began to look worse and worse. I also noticed a water spot starting to form on the ceiling downstairs. Of course, that could be from one (or all) of the kids allowing their shower water to spray out onto the floor.

We decided to go ahead and take the plunge this week while Rick and I had an out-of-town meeting. The house was going to be empty and we had a contractor who we trusted to take care of the details. It was a perfect solution. We rushed around before we left to select new tile for the wall, new tile for the floor and paint. And as we left to catch our flight on Sunday morning, our contractor came in the door to start the demolition. (I was glad I was going to miss that part.)

Monday evening, Rick got an email from the contractor’s EX-wife. “Ted is doing work on your bath as I understand, and he is not going to be able to continue the job.” Just like that, no explanation, no nothing. Rick called.

It seems that our trustworthy contractor had landed himself in jail for felony drug possession.

That really should not have come as a surprise to me since we seem to have problems with our contractors. A few years ago another contractor working on our house ended up in jail. That time Rick bailed the guy out just so he could get the job done. Then there was the time that a contractor skipped town after being paid and left our front porch on 4 x 4 s for a year and a half. (I eventually convinced Rick that the guy wasn’t coming back and we needed to hire someone else to do the work.)

Rick’s dad was kind enough to send me pictures of our bathroom as it looks now. And here I thought I was going to miss this part.

Oh, the joys of home ownership!

Like I said in yesterday’s blog, there was a lot I didn’t get done with the kids last month.

I’m sure they were terribly disappointed that we didn’t “get to” go on our annual hike in Hocking Hills to Seven Horse Cave and Airplane Rock. (If anyone is curious about this hike, send me a note. This is a beautiful, moderately strenuous hike that takes you into some spectacular scenery without the crowds of the Old Man’s Cave area.)

I also used to take them to my mom and dad’s farm to enjoy a day of the fall harvest. They would play in the wagons full of beans or corn and ride in the combine with my dad. Before we left, I would gather several stalks of corn and a couple of straw bales to take back home. Then we would stop at a pumpkin patch to select the perfect pumpkins. I would come home and put together the perfect fall display, complete with scarecrows that I stuffed myself.

Like that was happening this year! In fact, we’ve had no fall display for the last several years.

Until this year, we had been going to a pumpkin patch closer to home. Not just any pumpkin patch, but Leed’s Farm in Ostrander, a full-fledged playground where we spent most of the day with the kids enjoying the zip line.

Jumping on the giant pumpkin trampoline.

And getting lost in the corn maze.

This year, we didn’t even make it to that pumpkin patch. Those pumpkins at Giant Eagle looked just fine to me, so I picked up five of them on my way home from work one day. $3.99 each. What a bargain! And here I’ve been paying by the pound all these years!

Feeling guilty for not having done the usual October festivities, I forced family time on everyone last Friday night. I planned to have a nice family dinner and then carve pumpkins together. I had Susan put a roast in the oven when she got home from school so it would be done by 6:30.

When I got home at 6, I found that she had set the oven for 195 degrees. So dinner at a decent time was out of the question.

Besides, the girls came bounding into the kitchen with plans to go uptown to meet their friends at the Midnight Madness celebration. I let them go, turned up the oven, made Lauren some Kraft mac and cheese, carved a pumpkin for her and tucked her in bed.

The girls finished carving theirs about midnight and they all headed to bed before I could have them pose together like they used to do.

They did pose for me before they were finished.

Jack’s costume this year needed a little alteration.

I don’t know why we didn’t find the costume that he wore two years ago.

And why is it that Gracie can’t wear something like she wore two years ago? She and Caryn left the house to go trick or treating with a friend without showing us their “costumes.” We ran into them while walking with Jack. I’m not sure how they kept from freezing to death.

So I didn’t make cute pumpkin cutout cookies this year and I didn’t get them to all pose together in their costumes.

But this year, I didn’t have to change any diapers that were leaking onto a pea in the pod costume. Nor did I have to rush anyone to the pediatrician to have a soybean removed from her nostril.

October has always been unquestionably my favorite month of the year. Now that it’s over, I’m looking back on it and wondering how that glorious month escaped this year without me doing some of the autumn activities that I love the most.

I’m not sure how that happened, but I think it has something to do with the kids getting older and their time being filled with extra-curricular activities. Not to mention the fact that our time with them is cut in half. (One of the downsides of shared parenting.)

So, last week, I felt the need to make up for lost time and tried to cram all of the Halloweeny activities that I could into three days.

My first stab at being the fun mommy that I used to be was to take Gracie, Caryn and Susan to a haunted house. I wasn’t sure that it was a great idea because I’ve heard that those can be pretty scary. But I told myself that the girls are old enough, that they love horror flicks and that they really aren’t ever afraid of anything.

So off we went to the Haunted Penitentiary in Mansfield on Thursday night.

The girls were thrilled (and, might I say, SURPRISED) that I was taking them somewhere that even their friends with “cool” parents hadn’t been allowed to go, especially on a school night. They were doubly surprised when I told them that there was an age limit of 13 to get in. And I think that at least a couple of them were actually a little worried when I told them how some people say that the old state pen truly IS haunted.

I began to have second thoughts about the wisdom of my decision when we got to the prison. There I was, standing in a line with three teenage girls in the middle of the night, over an hour from home, to explore a reportedly haunted prison. I looked around at the other people in line to see absolutely NO KIDS.

I tried to reassure myself that all of the kids were out trick-or-treating since it was Beggar’s Night for most municipalities. And I tried to reassure the girls by telling them that the people were just actors and no one would hurt them.

But that wasn’t what they wanted to hear. They wanted to be afraid. That’s the fun of going to a haunted house, the willing suspension of disbelief.

So, suspend we did. The four of us stepped into the formidable turn-of-the century stone building, ready to be scared out of our wits. We gripped one another’s hands tightly, Caryn and I in front, reaching back and clinging to Susan and Grace behind us. We shuffled through the cell blocks in our tight little circle, screaming and giggling and squealing as the ghouls and goblins popped out at us and crept up behind us.

It’s hard to be too afraid with three silly teenagers. We laughed at Gracie who begged one of the demons to leave her alone. I marveled at 5”2” Caryn pushing right past a 300 pound, 6’ 5” monster who stood between us and a doorway. And we all nearly fell apart in hysterics when Susan reminded one of the poor ghosts of the importance of using mouthwash.

But, the truly frightening piece of it was knowing that, at one time, inmates had actually walked those same halls and slept in those same cells. That Gothic-castle-like abandoned prison with the six-story cell block and peeling walls would be frightening in broad daylight. We all decided later that we were happy that we weren’t the actors who had to sit alone in those dark cells waiting for the next group of people.

I, myself, was happy that another couple was in our group and that Susan and Caryn had death grips on either of my hands.

Our adventure wasn’t exactly the Hallmark moment mulled cider and pumpkin carving that I loved to do with them when they were little, but with the passing years, as they grow older, the traditions change little by little.

Besides, I was determined to squeeze that in too. More on that another day…