Boys or girls

Sometimes I read a blog called "The Happiest Mom" (Love the title!!) and I came across this post today. Here's my response, and I felt moved enough to repost here. A lot of what I have gotten out of being a mom was healing; letting go of old pains to pick up and keep moving. Festering is not on the schedule when you have naps and ballet class and playgrounds to explore. I am so thankful for that gift from my girls. 

I only wanted boys. My husband only wanted girls. We picked out names for both, found out the gender, and announced the name and gender to everyone we knew. It was exciting. We got two girls. I still want a boy, but I don’t think I’ll get one, unless I can convince my husband to adopt (I do not want to be pregnant ever again, but I would be happy to have more children in my life. I also bring in lost dogs, used to be a sucker for the “free kitten” posters, before allergies took over our house, and so now we have a tortoise. And the last cat we’ll ever get. I collect living things, as my best friend once said. And I do, so I was happy and blessed to with my two beautiful, healthy girls. I won’t ever complain. And I even told people, “I’m happy with boys or girls, as long as they are healthy.” (But what if then, they’re not? Does that make us unhappy? Sometimes, but often it just teaches us a new way to love.)

When I was pregnant the second time, 5 1/2 months, my brother-in-law passed away suddenly in his sleep. We are a close family, and we had just learned my other brother-in-law had leukemia. We are a strong bunch, but a tragedy like that will challenge your will in a way you NEVER expected. We hurt; when we gathered in my mother-in-law’s living room with visitors and family and friends it felt like a big giant ball of pain you could see and touch and drown in; and it was scary. A few things could pull us out of the pain– the joy of my first-born, the love of Wade’s life… He had no children, and his dog and his new niece were his pride and joy. The family’s pride and joy. A reminder that there was something besides suffering and sadness. She had an unbelievable sense of compassion at such a young age, and that is her special gift. We needed that. If she were a boy, I don’t know if she’d have been like that.

But the little baby I was carrying– I wanted so badly to see her come out and be a little Wade, curls of red hair and mischief in her eye, kindness in her face, and the strength of a Rogers. But she was a girl, and couldn’t carry on his name, his character… she could not replace him, and that was hard for me, but it of course was not possible. This wasn’t a case where the goldfish dies and you sneak a new one in to ease the tears. But this next generation has helped a family who needed to see some sunshine after a dark and troubling time.

She might not have been a boy, but that’s okay. She has his intelligence, his sparkle, and his family. We’ll teach them to carry on his memory, and it’ll be fine. Things never turn out the way you expect, anyway. Boys or girls.

Sunflowers

Sometimes it is very difficult to take a tragedy and turn things around and get yourself moving again. Probably, the fact that no one is waiting on you to heal makes it harder; you have to make that turn before you are ready and try to put one foot in front of the other. But you can, and sometimes you do.
This morning as I left to pick up biscuits—a dull and meaningless task on the list of pointless things that happen each day, I noticed the sunflowers. We have lots of children who live in our neighborhood, and my children and these neighbors love growing sunflowers. They grow easily, they come up thick and strong and then when they get to a height where the mommas are starting to think, these flowers are just silly, garish weeds and they must come down for the sake of the people who have to look at my house! and then, they sprout a blossom. A very large blossom that really isn’t that pretty sitting seven feet up in the air, but it delights that child that put it there. So we all have these giant strange bodies in our yards, and when we were hit by a hurricane last week, they all had two days of wind and rain battering them. So now they stand, tall and thick, with sadly drooping heads. The winds and rain made our poor sunny sunflowers’ heads heavy and tired, and they droop. Sigh.

But as I listened to the cheery Kindie Rock station, singing a song about a happy butterfly, I felt for those poor sunflowers. Our lives blow them around, and they droop, but still stand. And we have to be resilient enough to keep standing despite.

TMI

Years and years ago, I remember my brother coming over and telling me about his friend’s nephew, and he said, “Here, he has pictures on Facebook and we can look them up. But you might need to register to see them.” Of course this was followed by checking out the site and questions like, “Why not just use Myspace, or Friendster?” and from there my awareness of Facebook phenomenon began. I went back a couple times to see how much cooler Facebook was than Myspace, and then signed up. Like many other people my age, we wanted to share our pictures of our kids being cute. We are the first generation of parents with easy access to social media, and our kids’ lives are timelined on our pages, from the first ultrasound to the day they finally open their own Facebook account. And they now can share, too. And to be sure, they share EVERYTHING.

Many of these children have laptops, webcams, smartphones, Androids and IPads. They have access to media for just about every waking moment of their day. They use them in school, and they play games, they text their parents, and there are apps being developed to implement smartphones into their classwork at school. There is almost nothing they don’t record with their incredible technological playthings. Many parents fear the day when they start engaging in horrors like cyberbullying or sexting. That is on my list of fears, yes. But… what about just the ease and the dependence everyone is building up? Especially, I think, for kids that never lived without it in the first place.

For example: Think of one thing you have had access to your whole life, whether it was yours or your parents. Maybe a house, phone, car, television. Imagine living without it. For good. Sure would take a lot of adjusting, and we all acknowledge that on occasion. We have “Turn of the TV Week” every spring. Many parents participate in these pseudo-events to prove to their children that they can live without it. But imagine that TV is one of your primary forms of communication. What is it that kids in their early years of technological communication do not say via some media device? 

“My life sucks.” “DM me if you wanna skype. Im booooorrrred!” “My mom makes me so mad.” “Inbox me a secret you’ve never told me.” “Joe321XX is sooooo sexy!” Some parents, in an effort to have a false sense of security in the cyberworld “friend” their children, but often this becomes difficult because what kids used to say outside of parent’s earshot now is right in front of them, and they have to choose to either let it slide sometimes, or call them on every. single. little. offense. If you know your parents are watching, and they don’t make a sound, did you really break any rules?

I grew up riding a bus that was quite a warzone, for real. It was treacherous. My brother was pulled off for good when someone spit in his face, and the school and bus driver didn't do anything about it. He was in elementary school. I rode the same route years before that, and in an effort to act tough (so then these tough guys would notice me) I learned to curse like a sailor. I also learned to keep it below the radar of the adults, and to this day I have an uncanny talent for polite and charming conversation in certain circles, and potty mouth around my peers and rougher influences. This came in quite handy throughout my life. My girls think “fart” is about the dirtiest word on the planet. And it seems to me that this is fairly common adolescent behavior. But what happens when not just the 7 or 8 kids near them on the bus is witness to the learning process here, and their list of 680 kids they are “friends” with have a permanent record of it?? And they can retweet it, reread it, comment, discuss and show to people the person posting thought it was hidden from. And they don’t care. They actually like the attention. We all do. How often have you ‘vaguebooked’ a status in order to get people curious enough to write back—“OMG, What is wrong? Why the????”

Adolescents have a very hard time conceptualizing permanent, and it seems that in this new age we as a society have a harder time defining it. Update your status message. Delete it from your news feed five minutes later. How many people already read it? How many have it in their newsfeed still? How many retweets or likes or comments did you get? Go to Openbook.org and search for status messages you have posted recently. OMG!!! It’s really all there? Yup. So I’ll bet you’re going to “openbook.org/about” to figure out how to increase the security of your page and keep your page (and your child’s, if you have access to it) much more secret. But does this help you? No, it’s yet another false sense of security. Because your 800 closest friends still have access to it. You’ve just kept it out of the search engine, and deleted it from your feed. It’s still there. And then there’s “caching”, which only about 5 people in the world, aside from computer scientists, really understand. “Is the picture of me scratching my butt in science lab still there? I asked Michael to take it down, and he did. OMG. How embarrassing!” 

But on the other hand, there are kids who don’t care—and many of the ones growing up online really don’t. Something about this generation doesn’t see their own vulnerability when it comes to putting their feelings and emotions online. They are saying things we NEVER would have written in front of the whole school. It’s almost as if the comments written on the bathroom wall are scribbled next to a list of all your friends, favorite quotes, future plans, cell phone number and the last 1600 pictures you were tagged in. (I remember a photo someone had of me sitting on a friend’s kitchen counter, double fisting Boon’s Farm Strawberry Daiquiri and Margarita. I was a shade under 21. Glad that didn’t show up in Google next to my resume.) That really worries us old farts. But does it worry a 17 year old? Hell no. They posed for the picture. And if they hold these beliefs for throughout their teen and college years and however many drunken nights pass before they grow up and join the real world, how hard will it be to change their minds and then erase all the pictures? It won’t happen. So we are stuck.

Unless we intervene now, when those kids are 3 and 8 and 10. How do we convince them they shouldn’t wear their hearts on their sleeves, and they are separate from their invented online identities? Is there a separation? How do we convince them the online world has real world consequences? Can we keep them from telling the whole World Wide Web every 140 character thought that comes into their head? How do we define TMI to kids growing up online? The first step is being aware, throughout their childhood, that they should grow up in the real world, and not constantly rely on mediated entertainment for everything. For Turn Off The TV Week, turn off Twitter and Facebook also. Teach them to rely on their own imaginations. Take them on a interstate road trip, to a new place, WITHOUT using a DVD player in the car. Sit on a picnic blanket and put away your own IPhone. Read a paperback book, and mark it with a bookmark. Remember how that feels? Remember when your parents read you your first chapter book like that?

Perhaps I am an old curmudgeon, sticking to the ways of generations past, and insisting these rascally kids keep their dirty laundry off the Internet. You can’t stop progress, so they say. But at least we can make the world bearable for us old curmudgeons.

These kids are growing up

Blink, and you'll miss a milestone with the girls these days. It always seems to me that they have big mental growth spurts around the same time. And the intellectual/emotional ones are all I really care much about. I mean, I'm excited that Pants can ride a bike. But that she is writing-- sounding out letters and making sentences-- WOW. I am LOVING that. It amazes me. What a smart kid!! I'm so lucky. And Brain is keeping up with her, in a lot of ways. She comes up with all sorts of ideas and stories and imaginary things (even imaginary words and people) that it is fascinating, at least to me. Or when she memorizes stories and reads them back to me-- almost word for word. I didn't know kids do that!!! Whoa. Great stuff!

I have spent the last month figuring out all the schools here in Raleigh that are options for us, which has been no small task. (Because with Christmas coming up I needed something else to keep me busy.) I have spent a lot of time staring at the computer. But I haven't really noticed the chaos that happens when toddlers are left to themselves. Yeah, their room is messy, but they are not destroying things.

I repeat: I CAN LEAVE THE KIDS ALONE, and no one sets the house on fire.

(Angels sing. The sun is peeking out of the gray winter sky. Is that a bluebird? The air smells better.)

Yes, Our yard was TP'ed by our own dog. Thanks, Bleemer.

NOW, if only we could get BLEEMER to be as manageable. 

Healthier Attitudes doesn' t mean kill yourself trying.

I like healthy. Right now, looking at me-- tired, overweight, under-exercised, bad eating habits-- I don't *feel* like that, but I have been letting myself go.... Halloween was rough. Lots of candy. Stressful schedule-- I had a VERY busy October, and kind of finished up a lot of things that had been on the top of my "To-Do's" for a while... so I feel like months of not taking care of myself have kind of CRASHED down on me. SO now I am in charge of getting de-stressed, re-budgeting and revising my EATING habits and exercise routine, and taking care of myself and my family for a little while. It happens to the best of us.

I stumbled across this sheet which prioritizes the ways to reduce pollutants in your body and your home and live a more healthy life. I know a lot of families out there are trying very hard to make sure they raise their kids on cage-free eggs and organic produce, BPA-free water bottles, but another and even bigger task is reducing pollutants that aren't EATEN, but still find their way into our bodies. We check for BPA-free and phthalate-free products, but also keep in mind that some of these pollutants get tracked into our houses, or are in products we give to our kids. This flyer from Healthy Child Healthy World (www.healthychild.org) outlines the chemicals we need to avoid, which foods --especially foods you eat the outside of and dairy products-- are more important to focus on organic and hormone-free. My philosophy with this stuff is that the cost is negligible and you don't add to your stress, go ahead and make the change. Because if the effort of a healthier environment kills you from the stress, what good are you doing for you or your kids? I started with cutting down on plastics and hormone-free dairy (except milk, which we go through so fast I'd have to have a trust fund to buy organic there-- it costs TWICE as much!!). We eat a lot of cheese and yogurt, so we try to stick to Kraft and Stoneyfield. We use a lot of plastic dishes because the girls set and clear their own table, so I try not to use those in the microwave and I look for BPA-free for the stuff I store food or drinks in. (Sometimes I'm slack on this, but I try). We are even slowly switching to cloth napkins and composting napkins as much as possible, and we have drastically reduced our paper towel consumption in the last year, which is saving me MEGA bucks, which makes me the happiest! And I stopped using air fresheners, which is extra important because my little one has respiratory issues. So it's a good start, and it hasn't changed my life.

Look over this list, and try to think of 2 or 3 things that you can change in your household. Every little bit helps! Let me know how it goes!
FiveStepsFlyerUpdate6-09.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Thoughts I thunk whilst scrubbing a dubbing...

Strange stream of consciousness this morning, while I took a long hot and relaxing shower... (Benefit of going to see my in-laws: no one barges in and says: SHE STOLE MY CRAYON AND SO I HIT HER AND NOW SHE"S CRYING SO LOUD I CAN'T HEAR MYSELF SINGINGGGGG!!!!)

You know that moment between when you spray the shaving cream and when you smear it on your leg? When 3 out 4 times it falls on the tile and you have to start over or decide you don't have time for shaving cream this morning...? So today it fell on the foam alphabet letters in the floor of the tub, and so as I scooped it up I thought to myself-- Hmm. This is cool. This shave is brought to you by the Letter F. F!! And visions of foam Fs punctuating the action, a la Sesame Street.

I need to get out more. <Sigh....>

Getting ready for Halloween!

Quick post tonight, and I'm sure I'll have something to write about soon, but I gotta get over to my OTHER blog tonight-- sorry dudes.

Just wanted to post a link to a really cute Jack-O-Lantern site. Share any other great Halloween sites please! I LOVE Halloween and I love Jack O'Lanterns, so I am going to plan out my pumpkins to carve this weekend! Happy Halloween folks!!

Jack O Lantern Designer

At no time in history have parents been more unsure of their parental role.

This a quote I read on the Parenting with Love and Logic homepage. I feel like this is something I hear all the time, adapted to various roles; "Teachers are unsure of their role as effective teachers. Parents are unsure how to be effective parents. Teenagers are unsure of their roles, college grads are unsure of theirs... People are unsure of how to be effective people." Why is NOW such a time of uncertainty? Did we just know what our roles were in the past, automatically, and never waver from that? Or did we just start thinking a generation or two ago? I read all of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books as a kid, and NEVER did she say, "We were unsure of what our roles as pioneers were." They just got in a wagon and forged westward, and it was pretty damn tough! SO what has happened that is making us question every. single. aspect. of. our. lives???

I can say with very little doubt that our lives have gotten easier over the last several years. But at the same time, we have what seems to me like more people making more mistakes-- or maybe it's more opportunity for mistakes, and therefore everywhere you turn someone is doing stupid things. Things have gotten cloudier. We have more choices, more visibility-- everyone knows my 4 year old daughter has found her betrothed because it was on my Facebook status tonight. I see mothers posting their "Hey, it's BEER-thirty! LOLOL!!" statuses at 1pm, and as the daughter of a recovered alcoholic that makes me sad. On the other hand, no one knew when my dad started to drink earlier in the evening (even before the magical hour of 5pm) because I didn't tweet it. I can order a Netflix so my girls don't understand the drop in happiness when they get to the video store and Strawberry Shortcake is not on the shelf. And with all these CHOICES everywhere we turn and exposure to the 90th degree, our lives have gotten mixed up in the mire and are quite a lot more difficult. I read 1 or 2 parenting books a year, but am I a better mom than my mom was? The jury is out on that. I''ll bet as the years add up I will make just as many mistakes as her. But with all of this extra going on in our lives, we have lost track.

So what do we do when we are not sure if we are on the right path? My natural instinct is to go back to where we started from, and I see some moms trying really hard to simplify their lives. But without a simplier world, I just don't know how we are going to do that.

Yeah, I really think I should consider canceling my DisneyOn-Demand channel. For $3 a month I get thirty minutes a day that my kids are getting the highest entertainment value. That might actually be a bad thing.

My bad mom moment

I was walking from my massive pile of laundry (yeah, this is gonna be an exciting post) and I told the girls (toddlers, so I was thinking as I said it I knew it was an unreasonable expectation), that they should pick up their room and take off her pull-up because naptime was over... and then this terrible thought popped into my head.

At what point do give up and become bad parents? I feel like with all the chores getting behind, yelling, rushing my kids when my inability to get anywhere on time effects them, expecting too much and helping too little... my lack of coddling, oooooing and self-esteem building--- am I doing enough to be a good mom, or do I really suck? Some much of the time I feel overwhelmed and like I don't have enough me time or me and hubby time. I love spending time with them, but sometimes.... I just don't want to be talked to or touched. Seriously, that is not what *I'm* like at all, so it's kind of weird to say that. But then the other side of that is being distracted by cell phones, chores and computers while I am trying to create two thoughtful, kind, and responsible adults and sometimes I feel like I am letting them just raise themselves and I follow their lead... so at what point does this create a person who is really really anti-social in one way or another?

I have been reading the book Parenting with Love and Logic and in some ways I totally see having a hands off YOUR child's responsibilities. Sometimes it's hard to say, "Hey, are you sure you want to close your sister's hand in the car door??" when you feel like saying, "Oh my God, you are about to close her HAND in that DOOR!!!" And so I think I usually go with the second. They are currently mixing together one anothers' shepherd's pie and salad, and all I said was, "No, I am not going to look at that. I don't WANT to look at the food you mix up." And so they ruined their dinner and I continued typing. (Duke is at work tonight so I broke the computer at the dinner table for just one night so I could finish typing and then clean rooms.) But to myself I knew I was just ignoring it because I was doing something I wanted to do, not because I was trying not to micromanage their dinner. But I noticed I am spending a lot of time these days sitting back and watching them instead of having an active role in everything they are doing. Are they being independent or just tired of asking for attention and I am not paying any...? How do I tell?

I just feel like a bad mom these days. I feel like I am slipping into a lackadaisical parenting style, and that is walking a fine line towards not raising my kids AT ALL. A lot of it is I am spending so little of my afternoon hours at home that I am not getting any of my house-wife work done, and so I kinda feel like I haven't really been doing a great job here so why do I ask for all this freaking help all the time? I'm not super busy. I just feel like I need to slow down a little and try to keep myself less stressed if I want to really focus on being a better mom, not yelling all the time, and doing all the stuff that makes me like this "job." Maybe I just need to suck it up, understand I am going to be stressed until these girls leave the house and I have to find another way to cope with it all.

On the other hand, My four-year-old has gotten the three-year-old ready for bed (but not herself) while I finish this, so that we can read bedtime stories in three minutes. So can I really complain? Even if they are raising themselves, Jesus, they ARE getting raised.

As a mom, this touches my heart, and I could not be quiet about it any longer...

Teen suicide is something that is serious, it is devastating, and it is preventable. Sadly, their have been several cases recently that have gotten a lot of attention, and many of them are a result of cyber-bullying. 

Sadly, Rutgers University Student Tyler Clementi was one of these kids, an eighteen year old freshman living in the dorm with a new roommate and adjusting to college life. This is supposed to be an amazing, scary, tumultuous, but happy time in one's life. I remember this as a time I was forging friendships and yeah, I did engage in the occasional teasing. My friend's roommate was a miserable jerk to us, talked down to us, and always tagged along with us. So I picked on him, trying to get him to move out. Now that I'm an adult, No, I'm not proud of the teasing I did as a child. But I still feel guilty about this boy, about *Brendon* (not his real name) from my ninth grade class, who it turns out was "weird" as a victim of physical and sexual abuse and no, of course he didn't talk about that, so how was I supposed to know? I wasn't, but I should have known better.

And Ms. Wei and Mr. Ravi: I hope you realize, you will never live this down. If you have an inkling of a conscience, you will see the smiling face looking into that webcam for the rest of your life. The word "webcam" or "Twitter" will come up, and you will think of Tyler. Instead of making a friend and accepting someone who might be geekier, skinnier, not as popular, or gayer-- you did have a hand in his death. And we forget that the internet can have that sort of effect on someone. But now you sure have learned that lesson the hard way.

Now, as a parent-- I feel a compulsion to help this poor boy. As a friend to other gay men, as a family member and a church member to other gay people, and a sympathetic person and a mother, I want to help this young adult to be part of a world that loves him for who he is. But the only way we can help now is to talk about it. Tyler is gone-- who's next? We need to do what we can to help them, for Tyler's sake.

Parents can talk about bullying with their kids. Teens only see the internet as a place of immediate attention and quick fixes. They can put something up, they can take it down. Tell a kid, "Your Facebook page is cached" and their eyes glaze. Nothing is permanent to a teen, so place limits on them. Monitor their behavior. And even as little babies, preach a value system that accepts everyone as a human being no matter their race, sex, religion, lifestyle, appearance... everyone is a whole person, and never ever take that away from them.

Every generation things like this come up that make us open our minds a little more. We are less narrow-minded than the ones who came before us, and they were less so than their parents. We accept bi-racial couples and single parents, and our parents were accepting of African-Americans and some of their parents even were accepting of Jewish people before that. As twenty-first century citizens it seems odd to think of these people as different but not so long ago mingling with those groups may have been taboo. But now that we do have a melting pot in our society-- or maybe more of a mixed salad, as many people like to see it-- we have to make sure that any prejudices earlier generations had do not get passed down. Because I'm betting Ravi's parents didn't go to sleep at night, thinking: "Gee, we have done a great job teaching our kids to see everyone as a separate soul with feelings and belief and things to give to the world. We've done a great job teaching him to love his neighbor as himself!" Now most parents can't say that, because we are not that selfless. But why can't we at least try?

And as a mother, my heart aches for the mother of this young man. I could never fathom the pain of losing a child. I just hope my child never makes the wrong decision that leads to another child's death. That may almost be worse. All I can do, though, is to make sure my child is raised with most open-minded and caring parents we can be, and never accepts "bullying" as a fair way to treat another person.

Making a list...

I am a little nervous about this school year, and it's kinda silly to me because when people complain about their kids going of to school I am always like, Huh?!?!? But this year, these kids, THIS is different. And I am totally exaggerating, I'm sure, but hey-- I tend toward the dramatic.

On top of both my girls being in a new class and having things be very different, I just found out my unemployment is OVER, and so I figure I have 1/2-1 year left before I have to really truly be doing something productive. Ugh. But I had so many plans of things to have done before Francie started kindergarten! I was going to apply to grad school, figure out a system for keeping up with the laundry, write a book, start a career, cure cancer.... okay, I know I can't do that last one, at least not on my own. But you get my drift.

That's the thing, though. That list is RIDICULOUS. Laundry?!?!? Fo' real? I'm a mom. I'm a procrastinator. I'm a daydreamer and above all that, I am LAAAZZZZZY. I don't ever get anything done.

Recently a friend told me that one week, the theme of the sermon at her church was, "What is your anchor?" So I pontificated on that for weeks. We were talking about a house that's for sale in the neighborhood and I asked why she didn't move there, and so we got on the subject of why they had to move out of their old, too-small house. She said having 4 children in a house that they couldn't have their space was their problem. But it's funny to me hearing this because she is the most with-it, calm and unstressed momma I know. I have never seen anything phase her. I, on the other hand, am stressed and nervous and grumpy. I have mulled several things over and tossed them, but they weren't anchors. I just feel like I need something that makes me feel productive and not merely a mom. Not quite a Supermom, because I'm not that together.

So I'm wondering what my anchor is, and I feel like maybe is that could possibly perhaps be that I need an outlet besides mommy-ness. I do volunteer work, and that helps, but honestly, sometimes I think I need a real live job. I just feel un-grown-up, a financial drain, overly dependent. I need to do some soul-searching, and then take some action.

Hey Tut, you can't take it with you

Okay, so I was doing the dishes, and I was thinking about how lucky I am that I have people that help so much with my kids, and so that has made it feasible that I wouldn't drown our family by staying home instead of working this past year,

But tonight I was talking with Duke about an article I'm currently reading in National Geographic about King Tut and his mummy relatives, and some of them thought they were real live Gods, and so they built these giant pyramids and filled them with riches and dead bodies and internal organs in embalming jars or whatever, and they had SO much and all they did with it was rich folk stuff. Okay, I don't think everyone should give their wealth to charity, but there are people out there who are really, truly embracing the philosophy of you can't take it with you. They are helping look for cures for malaria and AIDS and cancer, and if everyone who had wealth, all the way back to King Tut, felt a personal obligation to their fellow man... what would things be like today? I am the queen of saying I don't have enough, and I know things have been pretty tight considering I haven't worked in a while, but I had my unemployment for a while and I have family that, not only makes sure the girls are living comfortably, they have bent over backwards to show generosity to my kids, and they have encouraged the girls to have an open, caring, charitable attitude towards the world. The girls took Watotoo boxes to my in-laws church last Christmas, and they had a ball picking out toys to give to children in Africa, which they bought with the money from their piggy-banks. We're running out of room in the piggy banks again and I was trying to help Francie decide who to give to besides the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. And she was so excited about the ideas I threw out, just off the top of my head. She loves giving things!

So I'm just feeling really grateful for the ways I have been blessed, with family, children, a not-perfect-but still- functioning planet to hand over to the next generation, and so I always feel like I should be giving more to the world. But I guess, as long they learn these morals, I am giving what I can.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day

I am by NOOOO means a femi-nazi (no offense to feminists, I am just an old-fashioned girl, and have nothing ideologically against it) but I am posting for Ada Lovelace Day because she was a smart woman who was a successful mathematician and the world's first computer programmer, which I am so in awe of. (I got stuck in Algebra I twice and finished with a 55 in Algebra III, so anyone who can define the word algorithm, or give an example of one makes me stare in wonder.) So in honor of Ada Lovelace Day, here are some fun ideas of ways to make your own daughters enjoy MATH and SCIENCE lessons-- without them knowing that's what you are doing;).

Cooking: Young girls will love helping you measure out ingredients for a batch of cookies or a cake. For older children you can do percentages using the daily allowances, and use these numbers to help them decide how to make smart food choices.

Chores: Sorting and organizing are a great way to get helpful toddlers involved in math, and it'll help you get some stuff done around the house.

Grocery Store: Your kids might like playing kitchen, but give them some play money or monopoly money and set up prices for food and charge each other! It'll be interesting to see how they try to figure out what to spend their money on or if they have enough to buy sissy's produce.

Puzzles: Logic & geometry are very important math skills that can really be started early-- get wooden knob puzzles for children as early as 6 months, and make them available for clapping and smacking.

Reading a Clock: We forget the importance of this sometimes in a world with digital everything-- but what're they going to do when they get to Big Ben and the clock is ANALOG? As soon as they are able to read numbers, you can start teaching them with digital clocks and then around 4-5 years old, start explaining the analog clock. Once they've learned the hours, they can start with the minutes and they already know the fives multiplication table! So now that your 3 year old knows to stay in bed until the clock says SEVEN-Oh-Oh, you can thank me.

Music: Studies show that students who do study music also excel in math classes. The rigor and responsibility in becoming really, really good at an instrument can be applied to other studies and the success in this subject will bolster her self-esteem, since it really is a skill that people will commend her for. So if your child is struggling in math but likes music, encourage her to rock with the band!

Art Too Can Help: Manipulating mediums to see shapes and patterns, designs and spatial relationships will help her when she is learning geometry skills, and if she goes into any sort of artistic career, she will have to have some pretty strong computer skills down the road. Explain to her how they are related, and a child who is determined to be an artist will feel a stronger urgency to pick up a mouse.

Any skill that boosts her self-image and self-motivation also can play a big part in being a Math/Science babe. You want her to feel confident enough in the math classroom, because at an early age, when girls are learning the foundational skills for math and science, ofttimes boys are louder or more rambunctious, and get a lot of attention from the math teachers. She had to be willing to ask for help in math and get the teacher to show her how to do things sometimes, because sometimes girls really don't want to speak up. And remember-- this is a world where girls can do whatever they want, so try not to sex-type her, but if she wants to be a girly-girl, don't discourage her and cut down her self-worth. You can use her girly play as a means to teach math and science too. And if she wants to go to the park and collect bugs, Yay for that too. She can do it!

Sibling Rivalry

Duke informed me last night the wretched beast has reared it's head in our household. I am afraid I now need to make more deliberate, careful remarks to the girls, for fear they are keeping tally in their poor little heads. (Mommy said I'm good at this and you're good at that.) This is an apple of knowledge I was not ready for, and it is going to upset our little Eden, for sure.

Let me go back and point out some wonderful things about Francie, my precious four-year-old. Just like any firstborn, she constantly surprises us with things we can't believe she is grown enough to understand, accomplish or articulate. As soon as she could speak in full sentences, she was fully capable of empathy and awareness that you don't often see in one and a half year olds. Not long after that, my brother-in-law passed (I was pregnant at the time, also). The typical toddler would struggle in such a stressful and saddened environment, surely. But Francie was a spot of sunshine for everyone around us. I feel that her love and gentle sympathy really solidified into part of her psyche that summer. Without her I'm sure the hole in our hearts would not have healed as cleanly, as much as can be healed after losing someone so young and so close.

Francie is a very sensitive child, and has always been in tune to the world around her. She observes everything. She is an amazing artist, and although some of that is just god-given talent, I think some is from really watching everything that her eyes can see for four whole years. I describe her often as a daydreamer, but she is a special variety of daydreamer; she is so in-tune to the world, that she often has to just stop and think. You can look at her and see when she is taking it all in.

Last night she had one of these moments, and then turned to her Daddy, who was watching little sister do a puzzle. Jane is a speed-puzzler-- she puts them together as fast as she can so she can move to the next one. Jane was doing this and as Francie watched, she mentioned that yeah, the puzzle was only a hard one for two-year-olds, but NOT for big girls... Francie realized her sister had a unique talent. One she did not herself possess.

Oh Francie, I want to scoop you up in my arms and show you all the beauty and intelligence you DO possess!! because you are an amazing creature, a child with the innocence and heart you only see once in a blue moon! But as a young girl, abd a sensitive one at that, I fear your heart is going to be hurt, and you will not see the forest for the trees. Or perhaps you will, and you will paint it with the beauty that you express with such ease, you won't understand how amazing that talent actually is.

In defense of my second-born (Part 2)

Okay-- so to pick up where I left off...One thing I have gotten bad about these days is not going to bed, so I keep waking up with my finger on the touchpad of my laptop. I'm gonna click on some weird stuff one day...

Jane has had a rough go at it this year. And the year before this. And you know, it was kinda tough for her as a baby too-- She is quite a kid. Amazing. She started out with allergies (milk mostly, but everything else too). She also has frequent ear infections, and is on her third set of tubes. This last time, though, we took out the adenoids so we hope we have fixed that issue! She knocked her teeth up into her gums last summer also, so he had to have those pulled and replaced, and of course, since this is Jane, she broke those and will have to have it put back in. Uggh. Hey, break? Where you at? You mind cutting one for Jane?

She is many many things-- Drama Queen, Opinionated, Miss Prissy Pig Pen, Live Wire a total Firecracker. She is quite different from her sister. Francie is really easy-going and agreeable. She is usually described by people as a sweetheart, darling. As a young toddler, we fretted and worried and consulted all the manuals. The biggest problem her panic-prone parents had to worry about was the constant fluid in her ears one winter, leading to a set of tubes when she was learning to speak, and then a bad case of croup early one summer. But that was so easy, we had Jane. We could take anything, we thought. So when Jane came along everything was a big deal, and this time it wasn't just new-parent hypochondria, it was allergies, it was ear infections, RSV, torticollis, umm... what else? Teeth. Right. And what next? We will see.

But, it might seem difficult. No, maybe just trying. And it is. But everyone who has ever met Jane will tell you she is an amazing child! These two are quite a precocious pair. They are kind, helpful, beautiful, charming children. So despite the heartache we have had waiting in waiting rooms (the worst of all was her eye surgery the other day) we are happy. Tired, anxious, but really happy.

In defense of my second-born (Part 1)

Tomorrow is the day we've been waiting for!! Jane's last surgery (knock on wood). She is have surgery for strabismus and ambylopia, two eye conditions that lead to torticollis (head tilt) and one eye squints sometimes to compensate for her not having binocular vision like you and I have. Without being corrected, she would slowly lose sight in her less dominant eye. You want to know what we did 4 weeks ago? She had ear tubes and an adnoidectomy. Last October? Teeth pulled, new partial put in. Those teeth had been damaged when she fell in my shower.


Now it is actually the day of... I fell asleep typing this last night.
I will post more when I get home from surgery today.

And now for something completely different...

My life is hectic. I have two beautiful and precocious girls, a very busy husband and a lot of different hobbies. I am a reader and former teacher. I raise red worms in my backyard, I volunteer for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Honestly, I miss teaching a lot, but mostly because it challenged me intellectually. I love to learn about all sorts of subjects, and especially media and parenting and culture and education and just about anything else out there. I am currently reading 3 books on my Kindle and one by the tub, and I also read 2 or 3 magazines a month, and that is kind of how my brain works-- do 4 things at once but don't do them very quickly :). I am sort of at a crossroads in my life, as I am currently staying at home with the girls and so when my unemployment runs out I will have to decide do I want to go back into the classroom or find something more in tune to being a full-time parent? But as of now, I've been looking since I left the classroom and nothing has come my way, so the girls are my main job. So here is a page about the things I am learning chasing these two wild ones down.

I am hoping to address life as a SAHM from my own point of view, and topics I think other moms are interested in. This is a pretty vast topic, but in case I find that some ideas are better for my personal blog or my reading blog, those posts will be on those pages. (Check out my profile for those links.) Hope I can keep you entertained and happy to read along!

reliving

This was the scariest moment of motherhood for me so far. It took a couple seconds to register, and I think my first words were quiet, slow, and then crescendo-ing towards panic, “Help. Blood. Lots of it, from her mouth, and… her teeth are gone.” I’ve been through a lot in the last couple years. Most of it, not as the primary sufferer, which adds a strange twist to the tragedies I’ve lived through… and I would have to say this is the one that made me wretch, sweat and cry unlike ever before. But as a wife and mother, I have learned how to let someone else have the spotlight in the pain and struggle of life. I watch, I clean up spills and I put the band-aid on it. A couple days after watching my baby, who is too young to enunciate “Mommy, I knocked my teeth out,” we reached the anniversary of another marker that is now etched into my experience forever. Flag Day, three years ago, my husband’s best friend shot his brains out with a brand new antique rifle, in his garage, for his roommate to discover. I remember thinking on that day, three years ago, how could he leave that mess for her to find, and yet he did, and then I found out he whole story and now I know why. In Alan’s case, a young man with debilitating schizophrenia, he was leaving this world with less heartache this way, without watching the disease, unresponsive to the medication he had been taking, eat away at his psyche and leave him incapacitated and unable to understand the delusions he would eventually be living in. Duke then had to live through the accidental  death of his brother, who had been prescribed a dangerous level of a medication that, like with Alan’s, was not able to keep his disease at bay (this time, ADD was the culprit). Duke has been affected by each of these events; they’ve broken him down, and he has had to build up again.  But I have seen these events tear my husband limb from limb, shredded and ragged, and now he has started to put those pieces together again.  As I sat up, that whole night after Jane had drooled buckets of blood in a matter of hours, I had Duke sitting next to me; proof that the shredded and ragged feeling goes away. You can see the patches, the stitches, the repair and the duct tape all holding his wounds together. He wears them on his face, his eyes, his sleeves, his soul. I feared the feeling that I had a torn and jagged piece of flesh in my chest, on fire and burning and bleeding, and with him next to me I had the assurance that the bleeding and burning would smolder and cauterize and heal over. It would of course, be scarred, but everyone has scars.  I will make it, and although the pieces might not go back together exactly, but that doesn’t matter.

On Wednesday, the girls were in the shower. They had fun doing it, and I told them not to jump on the wet tile, thinking I could protect them like that.  So I soaped them and sprayed them clean, and let them play in the body sprays. I blew on the glass, inflating my cheeks, and then Jane fell. I wanted to catch her before she fell, but I couldn’t—she hit faster than I could think to catch her. I was helpless, not a thing I could do. And I was the one in charge, so I started to react. The next hour or so it was me and Duke, calling suggestions back and forth—“should we do this?’ Should we do that?” “What do we do next?” We had run out of good ideas when the dentist called us back—finally. He looked, she screamed. No teeth. He numbed it; he spoke to us, he phoned a friend and they came up with a game plan. The professionals were back in charge, and so I was relieved. The next day when I went back to tell him the results of the x-ray and conversation with the pediatric dentist, he said, “You look better, today, too.” So you could see on my face how poorly I was reacting to the trauma? Uggh, I thought I had done okay.

So seeing how well I had handled this, that which ended up being nothing more than a set of teeth jammed back into the gums (right where they came from), I wondered how I have lived through everything else. Wade, Chip, Alan, surgeries, C-sections and child-rearing. I was stitched almost all the way from my pee-pee from my woowah, to use the pre-school parlance. I carried my whole body weight in pregnancies, and my husband has gained and lost the same. We’ve buried friends, loved ones, bought and built a house, built a family, and grown up. And this gory incident sticks out in my head, probably because of the gore and violence, and the effect that has, but I think also for the metaphorical usage. I can handle blood, body parts, victims, tragedy. I can sit down and relive them, in my head, and on my paper, over and over and over for hours, days, years. Rough nerve endings rubbed and rubbed, but it makes me feel stronger in a sick, sadistic way. Of course, I still feel the ragged edges being rubbed, the same as I did that first night. I know that if I can still hold on to my head, “when all of those about me, are losing theirs, and blaming it on [me]”, then I can live through this pain, the deaths, the lives and the wounds. The pain is still there, but the bleeding has stopped. I still wish I could have Alan, Wade, back; I pray there is a cure for cancer before a doctor ever tells me it is me or the girls or Duke. But I can stand in a house that is burning down around me and by instinct grab what needs to be saved and decide what must be relegated to memory. And that is a powerful instinct.