change of plans

It rained all day today. We did very little that we intended to do, and that includes blogging about etiquette books. Instead, we watched three movies: The Queen (with Helen Mirren, fabulous), The King and I (with Yul Brenner, also fabulous), and finally, Monsters, Inc. (love Billy Crystal).

We also went bowling and to the library. As a result of all this laying about, my house is untidy in a fun and friendly way, and Little feels like this:
Goofy? Exhausted? Absurd? You decide.

Tomorrow, I bring you a fascinating etiquette book written by none other than Eleanor Roosevelt.

any ideas?

I go back and forth on how useful I think behavior charts are, and I am now swinging back into useful at times territory. Little is having a hard time using words instead of hitting, kicking, and throwing his stuff around. Given that he's well beyond toddlerhood, I think he can do better. Talking (and talking and talking) isn't working. Time outs aren't working (although they do remove his unpleasant presence from my space, so they're useful for that).

He's been begging for a behavior chart. I really don't like them, and I have told him so, and why. (I want him to learn to control his behavior because he wants to get along with me and the rest of the family. I want him to appreciate the intrinsic rewards of good behavior, etc. I'm sure it sounds like blah blah blah blah blah to him.)

So I caved, and I wrote up a behavior chart for him today. It has five goals on it, two of which he can do all the time, no problem, and one of which he can do most of the time. The other two are the hard ones, and the "real" goals. I really believe it's important to set kids up for success with these things.

Anyway, last time we did this, his reward (collected at the end of each day that went well) was an Oreo. I know, I know. Really bad (unless you're trying to create a kid with an eating disorder, in which case, be my guest). I really don't want to reward him with food this time. I also don't want to give him some kind of little toy at the end of the week. Ideally, I want to find something that doesn't cost any money, but is enough of a treat to get his attention.

So... experienced teachers and parents, what do you think? I'm looking for a weekly reward, rather than a daily one, and it can't be food, and it can't cost anything.

back from the beach

My mom and I have what has become an annual tradition of taking the kids to a rented beach house on the Jersey shore. We're back now, and my mind has shifted from the big concerns of a beach vacation: Is today a beach day? Will tomorrow be a beach day? (I decided they all were, unless it rained, and it didn't. Much.) Will we make it to the end of the week without going to the laundromat? (We did, although now I have a lot of laundry to do.) Will I have enough yarn to finish these socks? (No.) And, will it be the Tilt-a-Whirl or the Ferris Wheel tonight? (It was mostly the Tilt-a-Whirl.)

I've given my last post and the response it generated a lot of thought. (You know, in between playing frisbee and watching the surfers.) Just to reassure all of you who are my friends IRL, and who have expressed concern for my marriage and my/our feminism: yes, darlings, of course Joe and even the kids do all kinds of things every day, to help me, to contribute to our household and my peace. It was rhetoric, written in a hurry on a day when I was overwhelmed. It happens. Part of me wants to say SHEESH people, don't you know a rant when you read one? It was a VENT, not a position paper.

But I think I really was trying to say something, unbalanced though it was. So I will try again.

It turns out that holding all of this together is a lot of work. Being a SAHM is challenging, and part of the challenge seems to be that nobody (including myself) expects it to be particularly challenging. How hard could it be, really? You keep doing everything working parents do, but you have the major bonus of NO JOB. Or, for those of us who are freelancing in one way or another, no job that expects you to show up at a particular time. Your time is your own, to schedule as you choose.

There's the problem. Scheduling. There is a lot to do. You've got to get the grocery shopping done, the house clean to whatever standard you have chosen, the children clean and fed. Then there's the homeschooling, which (like every other job worth doing) can take as much time as you choose to give it. It's not like you're ever 'done.' Add to all that an old house with projects that never seem to get completed, and then throw in an avid interest in reading or sewing or knitting or spinning.... poof, your days are full.

Now, tell me what it is you do to feed yourself. Everyone agrees that it is necessary for mothers, working or not, to take care of themselves, right? And for me, personally, it doesn't count as 'me time' unless my children are elsewhere, out of earshot and being taken care of by someone else.

So... what's it going to be?

You need a walk every day? A half hour of yoga? Meditation, tennis? Great, when are you going to do it? There's no money for a babysitter (you don't have a job, remember) so you've got do it when there's another parent at home. At 6:30 in the morning, before your husband leaves for work? After dinner every day, when you're already bone tired from the aforementioned never-ending list?

Do you see how sometimes, some days, it can be just a pain the ass to get that so-called 'me time?' How some days you're just going to blow it off and sit on the couch, or (more likely) get another load of laundry done or go out and weed the garden instead? Some days, it's just one more thing to put on the list, and since the list is endless anyway, why add another thing to it?

And yes, I can see that this doesn't make sense, that the most important thing is to take care of myself, before the laundry, before the weeding, before the damn dishes. But the reality is that it doesn't always happen that way, and on the days when I can't fit it in, the expectation that I find time to take care of myself feels like just another place for me to fall short.

what's up with that?

So there's this virus going around our homeschool playgroup. The kids are fine, but the moms... well, we're breaking down. Too much laundry, too many bickering kids, too many dishes, too many demands. Nobody, it seems, is finding a way to adequately take care of herself. Me included.

Isn't it an incredibly cruel irony that we take care of the kids, the dinners, the shopping, the vacuuming, and then we're also supposed to be taking care of ourselves? Like if we don't do that, we're failing in a new way, or there's a new layer to our failure. As if there weren't enough opportunity to fail already, as if anyone could ever do this job well enough to call it done. It's not enough that we have to listen to our kids natter on and on about legos and role playing games and the latest skinned knee and everything else. Oh no, we also have to make sure we're taking care of ourselves. Have you noticed that when you talk to a friend about what a difficult time you're having, she invariably asks, "What are you doing to take care of yourself?"

Enough. I'm going to start asking the husbands, "What are you doing to take care of the center of your family's universe?" I'm going to ask the kids, "What have you done to help your mom out lately?"

Really. Enough.

monday in pictures

now what?

I was all set to post yesterday about how if I could just let go of my ambitions to write professionally, teach kids other than my own, and help teachers learn to be more flexible and inclusive in their classrooms, I would love this life.

I have incredible freedom. I can't believe that I can actually find moments in my day every day to spin, for fun. I can read what I want, I have enough yarn in my stash to knit for the next ten years, at least. I can enroll my kids in a class at the local science museum, and then we can play hookey if we like. We can spend the day gardening. We can sleep in, or get up early. We can walk to the grocery store, or we can set up a lemonade stand.

But some days, freedom isn't all it's cracked up to be. Some days, I get really cranky. Some days, I don't want to hear either boy call out, "Mama!" ever again. Ever. Some days, like yesterday, I realize I'm out of patience because I'm literally out of gas: I often forget to eat lunch because I'm so engrossed with gardening or spinning or a book I'm reading or even, sometimes, doing something with the kids. Eating turns out to be one of the least interesting things I do, so I skip it in favor of something else, but then that turns around and bites me on the butt because I actually do need to consume some calories.

And those are the days when I look around me and all I see are piles of books I should be reading, essays I should be writing, laundry that needs folding, and crumbs everywhere, again. I get conflicted: I think, if only I didn't care about anything other than the house and the kids, I might actually be able to get it all done, most days. If only all I wanted was just to do a really great job teaching them and spending time with them.

Those are the days I think I should try to ditch my professional aspirations, as well as my fiber hobbies. And that's what I was thinking yesterday: I should get some focus and get down to what's really most important, just the kids and their work, their needs. Yeah, that's the ticket. Just forget myself for the next fifteen years or so.

As you might imagine, this line of thinking gets pretty depressing, pretty fast, but there are days when it really does seem to be the path of greater sanity. The solution to having a life in which one is juggling too many priorities is to eliminate some of them, right? And since I'm not planning to give my kids away (this week) it seems clear that I should eliminate the priorities not directly related to supporting the kids and their learning.

And then I read this post. The inimitable and very talented prairiepoppins of Handmade Homeschool reminds us that not only do we need to keep our own passionate selves going for our own sakes, but that it's really what's best for the kids, too. Our children need us to be actively engaged with our own passions, not only because it feeds us, but because they need to see how an actively engaged person lives her life. Devoting ourselves exclusively to our children does them a disservice, because it gives them the notion that not only are they the center of the universe, but that mothers/parents can't do anything else but take care of kids.

Which is not so.

So now I want to hear from you: what do you do to keep yourself going? How do you keep it all together when everyone is coming to you for most of what they need? How do you get time for yourself? What do you do to feed yourself?

Tell me, please. I need to know.

monday in pictures

happy mother's day

You'd never know it from my gracious aplomb (snort) and my general state of well-adjustedness, but my mom and I used to have a really rough time together. From about age 13 until, um, well into my twenties, uh, thirties, I barely tolerated her. She was the parent I could count on to love me no matter what, so I took advantage of her and was not very nice. In the guise of speaking my mind, I said mean things and generally took her for granted. I was difficult. I hurt her feelings.

Things started to get better when I had my first child. It really annoys me that this is exactly what everyone said would happen, but happen it did. She was a good resource, who sometimes gave me unwanted advice, but never expected I would follow it. When I learned about new ways of parenting (breastfeeding on demand, co-sleeping, babywearing) she didn't judge, but was interested in my reasons, curious about the effects. She was really, really nice about it.

As time went on, and we at the Deluxe house tried to learn to parent without spanking, and eventually without punishment of any kind, (not easy when you're the first generation to parent this way) she was, again, open and interested. It has been like we are having a kind of ongoing mothering seminar, in which we are comfortable talking openly about the parenting I got, and the parenting I am trying to give. We haven't always done it without rancor, but we always find our way back to understanding each other.

And now I can honestly say that my mother is one of my best friends. (The ghost of my seventeen-year-old self is rolling around in her grave. She simply cannot believe that this is possible.) My mom is someone I count on to talk me through difficult decisions, one of the first people I want to share exciting news with, and my absolute favorite person to go shopping with. Sometimes we don't even really shop much: we just cruise the mall, talking, looking, talking, walking.

A list, for fun. The top ten things I love about my mother.

1. She loves my boys, in a very active, intentional, concrete way. She doesn't love them from a distance, but actually does things with them, and takes an interest in them. She cares about what they care about, asks questions, follows up.

2. Whenever she buys yarn from someone's destash list, she always gets a little something for me.

3. She lets me shop from her yarn stash, too.

4. Ditto her vast Clinique collection. Anything I want, I can have.

5. She has bigger feet, so when I make a pair of socks that is too big for me, she is happy to take them off my hands. Uh, feet.

6. She has learned to communicate clearly about when she doesn't like something, and can do it without hitting below the belt. A great example to me.

7. She lets me borrow her clothes.

8. She'll try anything. She learned to knit only a few years ago, well into her retirement. She takes and teaches classes in needlework, and is quite accomplished with a needle and thread. She's less accomplished in knitting and quilting, but doesn't let that stop her from experimenting and playing.

9. She majored in math in college, at a time when most girls didn't even go to college, let alone major in math.

10. She is my number one fan. She has this unending ability to see me as a fascinating, intelligent, competent teacher and mother. If I say I want to reform the educational system of the entire US, she believes that I can do it.
Happy Mother's Day, Mom.

And to all of you as well.

monday in pictures

free advice, my specialty

Almost twenty years ago, a good friend of Joe's from college told us that his grandfather had given him two pieces of advice. This conversation has really stuck in my head, because even in the inexperience of my early twenties, it seemed like really sound advice, and it still seems so now. Anyway, here's the advice.

1. Always have a project.

2. The most important decision you'll ever make is who you marry.

See? Isn't that brilliant advice? There may have been a third thing, I don't remember. But it doesn't matter, because I'm about to add a third thing of my own:

3. If you have the urge to fix up an old house, purchase it and fix it up before you have children.

This is our wedding anniversary, and as is traditional, my parents have both kids for the weekend. As is not traditional, we are not away at the beach. Rather, we are at home, working on the house. And let me tell you, we have made outrageous progress on several long-standing projects, made possible only by the removal of the two short people who live here.

Here's what Joe did:
That's the corner of our porch, and unfortunately I don't have a before picture, but the length of fancy cut-outs that hasn't been painted yet was missing. The other three railings of the porch have also been secured, so I can relax when kids are climbing around the outside edge of the porch. Yahoo! I might paint this tomorrow, or I might continue working on inside projects.

Here's what I did today:
This is before. The treads have been refinished, and the stringers and risers have been sanded and are ready to paint. They'd been ready to paint for, oh I don't know, months. More than just a few months. Way too many months.
Here's how they look now, after two coats of primer, some spackle in the nail holes, and a finish coat of trim paint. We got all this done even though we took lots of breaks for hanging out, eating, watching the new LOST episode, and going to two garage sales!

We're having a great time together, and it is sheer bliss to be uninterrupted as we go about our day. The house is quiet. Nobody complained when we decided to walk to the garage sales. Nobody fought over the latest Lego magazine. Nobody asked for a snack sixteen thousand times.

Next we're going to go grocery shopping, just the two of us. Isn't that a romantic thing to do on the evening of our 12th wedding anniversary? We can hardly wait.

juicy

Little insisted that this was so beautiful we had to put it on the blog. He even delayed the eating of this very delicious mango, in order for me to take the picture. This was a big sacrifice for Little, who lives on fruit and air, and particularly loves mango.

The sun was streaming into the kitchen through the back door, and the moment was very beautiful, as was the day. We have finally left the gray months behind us.

I am honored that so many people are bringing their considered opinions and ideas to these discussions, particularly the last post. Thanks, everyone, for reading and commenting.

whoa

I have made an astonishing discovery. I've been coddling my kids. This comes as a great surprise to me, because autonomy and independence from me has always been one of my biggest goals as a parent. I am the queen of "go get it yourself" and "look in the fridge." I am always looking for ways to get both boys to take care of it (whatever it is) themselves. I expect them to get their own snacks. I expect them to pick up their rooms and make their beds. I expect help with the dishes, laundry and garbage. I even tell them it's their responsibility to fix it, not mine, when they're bored.

It seems that I've been backsliding. I think it may have started when I became a full-time homeschooling mother. It seems that I've been cleaning up after them in subtle but myriad ways, like wiping up the peanut butter and putting the bread away after Big makes a sandwich. My rationale has been that it's enough that I'm asking him to make his own sandwich, and that he'll learn in time to clean up the sandwich zone.

This week, I've been working, with my kids running in and out and around the room I'm working in. I have needed to make this work a priority, in order to learn how do it efficiently. I am not yet able to fit it in between everything else. It has suddenly become abundantly clear that I have been spending WAY too much time doing all those little tidying up tasks that are required if one wishes to cohabitate with short people in a space not resembling a pig sty.

Except that I'm learning it's maybe not exactly required. I don't have time now to wipe up the messes and put away the Legos 4,000 times a day. So my priorities have shifted: rather than tolerating these small transient messes and cleaning them up as we go about our day together, I've begun pointing out clean tables, and asking the children to do what they can to keep them clean. I've been asking that Big pay attention to keeping the kitchen neat as he makes his snacks, and getting him to come back and take care of it right away when it isn't.

And while this seems like it might be more work, I'm finding out that it isn't. I guess they were ready to start taking more responsibility. This comes as a huge relief, because it's been hard for me to see how I was going to fit even part-time freelance work into our current structure.

Just have to start changing the current structure into something else.

Supersamsonic

It will grow back, buddy. It will grow back.

conversation early this morning

Little: I'm very sad. Nothing can make me happy. (Can you believe this kid? I really believe he's not actually depressed. He is very happy all day long, I promise. I think he just says this stuff to see how I react.)

Me: Oh. You know what works for me when I'm sad and it feels like nothing can make me happy? I take a walk or do yoga.

Little: I don't like either of those things.

Me: What do you like?

Little: I like ice cream.

oldie but goodie

Friends, I have discovered an excellent parenting book. I imagine many people have already discovered this book. (Actually, I don't have to imagine; I can figure it out from its publishing history.) This book has sold lots of copies since it was first published in the 70s, and spawned workshops, workbooks, and a whole generation of parenting books about various challenges(sibling rivalry, teenagers, etc.)

This is a great book, with lots of good advice that seems to boil down to one simple piece of guidance: Listen to your kids.

Really listen. Not just listen long enough to get them to listen to your point of view. Not just nod at them, all the while thinking about what you're going to make for dinner. But actually listen. Give them the eye contact they need to know you're really there, and listen. Keep listening. Let them keep talking until they're run out of things to say.

You can reflect back to them what they seem to be saying, if it seems to make sense, but mostly, just listen, and really pay attention. Really consider their point of view. Really consider that the way your kids are seeing things is absolutely vital, valid, and real to them. And know that they need you to hear them.

There's lots of other specific advice in there, going in all sorts of different directions, but it's the listening thing that I want to talk about here. The authors' other books seem to be much the same stuff, but with the specific scenarios geared to slightly different family situations. The basic method, or really, way of thinking about kids, is all here, in their first book.

Big One and I have been struggling some about how to respond to Little's ongoing negativity. Neither of us is happy about it, because we're both trying to see the positive in our life situation. Little doesn't care about our personal growth, of course, and he can really rain on a parade.

This morning, Little said something sort of negative (I don't remember what) and Big said,

"You're a tough customer this morning, aren't you?"

Then,

"Dontcha think so, Mama? Isn't he a tough customer this morning?"

And I guess I was feeling rather negative myself, because I said,

"I don't want to participate in talking trash about either of my sons."

Zoiks. How superior can I get. Insufferable. Big was really mad at me, and instead of just listening long enough so I could get my point across, I finally found a way to actually listen to his. We sat at the table and I just listened.

He started saying things like, "I know there's no point in telling you what I think, because I know you're not going to listen."

And that's when I knew I'd been going way off track. My impulse would be to say, "Of course I'm going to listen to you. I want to know what you think." Which is, of course, a tricky way of saying to him that I'm not listening at all, that I can't hear him talk about this difficult feeling he's just shared, that I don't listen, and I'm not going to listen.

So I sat there, and I listened, for a while, to all his feelings about me and Little and about how things are going, and we got to a better place. We got to a place where we understood each other again. He actually talked himself around to my point of view without me saying a word.

Much better. It's a good book, I'm telling you.

We're feeling peaceful again:

Here is the view from my office:
The ice is on the outer storm window, not the inside window but still, it's cold enough today that I may just have to break down and use this:
to cream together some butter and sugar for some of these:
That photo is from Cast Sugar, a gorgeous baking blog I just discovered. She takes great pictures.