Terrible/Perfect

Light reading

It's time to throttle back on the intensity of the bedtime stories. The adventures of Harry Potter are fantastic, but at the end of the day, some six year-olds might find the ever-intensifying return to absolute power of a physically and spiritually mutilated, deathless and unstoppable sociopathic wizard a little less than soothing right before lights out, knowwhadduhmean? Maybe it even keeps them up past 10 p.m. scared witless some nights, who knows.

It's interesting, but if you want a charming and engaging but ultimately lighthearted and safe read, it seems like you have to go back to mid-century children's literature. What's up with that? It's fascinating, really. Harry Potter well and truly appears to have altered the entire landscape of children's publishing, and thereby what children regularly read and have read to them. That's not even counting the shift towards graphically depicted themes of harm and abuse in young adult fiction (you can read articulate opposing views on that particular issue here and here). Is this a good, bad, or neutral thing? I have not explored my own opinion, I just know my own kid needs something else right now.

Harry Potter and other dark fantasy may still have its place in the earlier light of day, but I'm working on a big ol' list of gentle titles to reserve for before bed. I haven't read most of them, so please give me a heads up if there's a glaring ommission, or if behind one of these titles hides disturbing themes or scenes (Betsy Tacy is out because I understand that Tacy's infant brother dies near the end; I'm not going there right now). We just finished The Borrowers by Mary Norton, and it was very well received.

Here's the list so far, in no particular order:

Pippi Longstocking

The Cricket in Times Square

The Moffats

Sarah, Plain and Tall

Strawberry Girl

The Melendy Quartet: The Saturdays, The Four-Story Mistake, Then There Were Five, and Spiderweb for Two

Twig

That should probably carry us through the summer. There's a whole passel of that sort of old books to choose from, and thankfully the always helpful "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" feature on Amazon.com to point the way to similar fiction.

About that whole notion that you need a time machine to find a gentle and engaging story with relatively child-like child protagonists, feel free to read (and barf) a little bit about Kids Getting Older Younger (also called "age compression") from the mouths of advertising professionals. Gross.

In the bedroom

We've been struggling with Big Kid's disordered sleep since forever. I can without exaggeration say it's a central feature of family life around here: the One Who Can't Sleep. It influences every aspect of her behavior and our routine, not in positive ways. I have a child who is emotionally fragile all day, then frequently both hyperactive and stumbling around like a drunken monkey from 3 o'clock in the afternoon until she finally shuts down. The pediatricians haven't been much help. I'm not sure if they take it seriously. Maybe they just don't know what to do.

I did some research on my own recently and am making some targeted changes. Taking a page or thirty from Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne I pulled the girls' room into line, but hard. They wake up in a pristine space and they go to sleep in a pristine space. Toys have to live in there, too, but they are all picked up at the end of the day and stashed away quietly in cubbies and baskets, out of the girls' line of sight when they're in their beds. I am discretely doing a fair amount of purging to keep things as simple as possible. Their room has always been pretty lovely, all peachy-pinky warm and light. Now it's a calming and peaceful space, too. 

I'm working on shifting that tranquil feeling out into the rest of the house, working through organization projects and changing my own routine during the week so that we have no built up anything. No laundry hanging out anywhere, no dirty dishes in the sink, no papers on the counter. I'm not done yet by any means (hello, wall that has been half painted since October), but from where I sit I see a bunch of very clear surfaces. One day at a time.

Perhaps most importantly, we're moving up and regimenting sleep and waking times. Prior bedtimes seemed early enough (always before 9) but with far too loose a range. The little one has always been easy to put down, but it's surprised and chastised me to watch her quickly and easily fall asleep at 6:30. She apparently needs that full twelve hours! At least now she'll get it. The Big Kid ought to get to sleep at about 7:30, and both girls are up by around 12 hours past their respective bedtimes. We're going to be absolutely Prussian about those times from now on.

From just one tiny/huge aspect of childrearing, the single insomniac child, we're shifting the entire family routine: early to bed, early to rise for everyone; an earlier dinner before their dad gets home; spreading the housework into smaller tasks across the week; ensuring no transition time finds us unprepared (the snacks are packed and the swim bag is all ready to go the night before, and so forth). All these small changes add up to a totally new rhythm.

Toss in a bunch of work on destressing family dynamics across the board, particularly the stress that has been arising from sibling rivalry, as well as nightly conversations with the big kid to help her unload anything that needs unloading, and, with both unease and deep gratitude, low-dose chewable melatonin, and we may fix this yet...and gain an exponentially more peaceful, joyful, rewarding family life in the bargain.

Just in time for a newborn.

Pride and Pancakes

I can make good pancakes now. Basic ones, mind, but good. My strategy involves mixing a bit of yogurt into the milk to approximate actual buttermilk, which was, at one point (I am led to understand), naturally cultured.

I am proud of my pancakes. That's alright. Here's why.

I had a weird moment recently talking to another homeschooling mum about homeschoolishthings. One of her kids is working several grades above level in a couple of subjects, and this parent is really not shy about it. I've had a few exchanges that have gone like this, only I have paraphrased us to sound like two robots:

Me: Something about books.

Her: We cannot check out enough books from the library. My child is compelled to read 200 pages a day.

Me: Something math.

Her: My child is working several levels above grade. My child is exceptional in this regard and many others.

Now, here's the thing: I've been this mum. I have a weird little girl that had a fixation with opera at five years old. I'd be lying if I said I haven't been proud of her special weirdness, and, frankly, boastful. But I'd like to think that having birthed a second child who, despite being possibly weirder than her sister, so far displays NO advanced intellectual capabilities, I have mellowed out considerably. I have eaten that crow, if you will.

What I was trying to figure out, though, is what it is about being proud of one's kid's smartness that is so offensive. I mean, we're parents. We're proud of our kids. That's natural, right? Am I being jealous? Competitive? What the hell?

I turned this around in my brain pan for a while, and what occured to me at last is this:

We all have the right to be proud of those achievements for which we put forth sincere effort, but no right whatsoever to be proud of intrinsic traits. For those, the proper feeling is gratitude.

I am not a subscriber to the notion that if everyone is super, no one is (that is dumb, Brad Bird) but I do hesitate to say there is no such thing as innate intelligence. There is no less innate intelligence than there is innate athletic ability, or innate height potential. No amount of sit-ups is going to land me a place as a prima ballerina at the Kirov, for heaven's sake. We'd be fooling ourselves if we insisted that everyone is capable of cutting edge physics.

BUT, and here is one big but...

This is where the pride goeth before the people rolling their eyes at you for bragging.

The thing is, none of us has any control over the toolbox we get kicked out of the womb with. Being proud of being "smart" (whatever that even means) is like being proud of having a kick-ass toolbox full of every conceivable instrument for every conceivable job from fine watchmaking to surfboard manufacture when most folks are running around with a decent rack of Craftsman tools that get the job done. Well...good for you. 

The reality is that the tools you have matter a WHOLE lot less than what you make with them. Being proud of the toolbox is hubris. Being grateful for the tools you were given is heading the right way to humility. Doing hard work with those tools, maybe even making the world a better place with them...well. That is something to be proud of. 

I never, ever want one of my kids to announce to anyone that she or he is smart, or advanced, or somehow or other intrinsically talented. I have instinctively kept virtually all of my boasting outside of my children's earshot, which was uncharacteristically wise of me. I want them to understand when they come into an awareness of their gifts (those things that they were given, that they did not earn) that the proper attitude to take is one of humble gratitude, and an awareness that those gifts are there to be put to use through work, should they choose to undertake it.

It seems safe to say that hard work, honestly done, whether it be making a watch or a delightful pancake, is something we are all free to take pride in.

Grumplestiltskin

Good heavens. Madness around here. Mad. Ness. I was doing reallyreallyreally good for a long time, being Captain Awesome Mom and then I think the madness just went on too long, and now I'm cranky. But less so, maybe, than I had used to be under such circumstances.

No real complaints, though. In my moments of fullest comprehension I realize that my main issue, whenever my kids get really, habitually crazy, is that I get really afraid. I become terrified that there is something wrong with them. That the big kid has ADHD, that the little one will never get out of the weird No Man's Land she's inhabiting between being a diaper-wearing baby and a consistently tinkling-in-the-toilet child. I worry that one or both of my kids is going to grow up into an adult that is hysterical, whining and obnoxious.

Most of us don't. I mean...some of us, obviously, are more high-strung than others. And whining and obnoxious, too. But most people grow up and gain a modicum of self-control. Most people become more or less an adult. I try to keep in mind what would be the most helpful thing for me, as a mother, to do when the kids' behavior gets particularly gnarly, and all I can come up with is to be the least high-strung, hysterical, whining and obnoxious version of my adult self that I can be.

I'm doing a lot of whispering these days. It seems very calming to them. They're like horses.

So.

One of the best, best things that I have ever done as a mom I did the other day. I told the big kid that I never wanted her to be sitting up at night by herself, feeling afraid. I did a lot of that as a child, because I had a very overactive imagination, and it was horrible. I remember being pretty old, under ten but too old to go crawling into my parents' bed, and just sitting up crying with the light on because of whatever I imagined was under the bed or in the closet or what have you. So I told her that no matter how old she is, if she becomes really afraid at night, that not only can she come to us for help, but that she should.

She meandered out into the living room last night sweaty and mumbling something about Monsters, Inc. She fell asleep lying on his chest, like a baby otter.

A little separation

I caught a vivid glimpse of my own ridiculousness tonight. The younger one, who is at the time of this writing 27 months old, is going through a bout of separation anxiety, which has been hellish, for all of us. I had no idea that children her age could have separation anxiety, but apparently it's not unheard of. Anyway, she wants me to carry her around all day long, and cries when I put her down, and cries when I leave the room, etc. Not all the time, but, you know, at every point in the day when it is critical that I be doing something that is not carrying her around. Like when I need to use the bathroom.

I've been really, really stressed out because of it. So today I basically checked out on my kids. I stepped in for the usual and necessary intervals: breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, unclogging the toilet, dealing with various poop situations, but otherwise I decided we would stay home all day and I would do some sewing. The girls were told to entertain themselves. It felt radical, delicious and, yet, neglectful, even though I was there, responsive, and taking care of their physical and emotional needs. Even so, tonight I kept on sewing. The little one had a very late nap, and it was shaping up to be a late, late night with her, but I kept at it anyway. Eventually Mr. T took her into the bedroom to try to get her down, and I just let them go do their thing while I kept at the machine. 

I felt so guilty.

And then I realized that I feel guilty for...letting my husband, my partner, my children's father, be the active parent so I can take a break? For real. Ridiculous.

I am insanely available to my children. It is extremely rare for me to be without at least one of them. Last weekend Mr. T took them both out to the park and left me at home, and I realized that it was the first time that had ever happened; each week, I simply escape out of the house here and there to run errands by myself. I finally realized what a dumb arrangement that was, and how much easier it would be for Mr. T to take the kids out someplace they like to be, and so I got this huge expanse (four, five hours?) of time to myself, in my house. That I used the time to clean and organize instead of take a nap and sew like I intended is another matter, but geez. Absurdly overdue.

I wake up with my children fighting over who gets to be closest to my body. I am their sole caregiver from 6:30 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. I am still their primary caregiver the remainder of the time. I need breaks. I mean good, solid, regular breaks.

I'M NOT GOING TO FEEL BAD ABOUT THAT.

Yes I am.

I believe, though, that this neverending Mommy shift is 99.9% of the cause behind my being a crankier Mommy than I'd like to be. Being unendlingly available is not good for me, it's not good for the kids, and it's not good for Mr. T, who needs some regular, long stretches of being the active duty parent. So if it's between feeling guilty for drawing a line in the sand about getting breaks and feeling guilty about being a bitch to my kids, well. 

Guilt or no guilt, I got some sewing done today.

The big kid listened to Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH while Baby bumbled around doing destructive things and I added three, nearly four more quilt blocks to the pile (their centers had already been sewn, I'm not that fast).

Maybe Saturday I'll do a few more.

The light at the end of the tunnel

I've been noticing lately, even in the midst of one of Baby's long, stressful stints as a sleep-hating mutant, that we're passing out of the uncomfortably (very near unbearably) intense patch we were in as a family. The Big Kid and Baby Show has begun to look more like the Big Kid and Little Kid Show, which is both sad and wonderful. More and more the two girls play together for longer and longer stretches, requiring less and less intervention from me. I remember this well when Big Kid was entering her twos: how suddenly space began to open up in my life for getting things done here and there. The house began to look tidier, I had time to work on projects, we were productive and we had fun. Then it seemed like time for baby #2 which, of course, it was.

And as that Baby becomes less and less of a baby, as she becomes more independent and willing and able to leave my side, it has been a marvel to watch the two girls becoming friends. Big Kid is enormously proud of her little sister, always thrilled to see her when we pick her up at preschool, showing her off to her friends. They adore one another. And they fight, always over the stuff, but mostly it's hugging and kissing and running around the house laughing together. I found myself standing at the sink, doing dishes the other afternoon, while they murmured together, playing with toys and books.

"Oh. Yes. This is how it will be, mostly," I thought.

I have a little breathing room in other areas, too. Mr. Terrible and Big Kid's relationship has improved dramatically*. That fact is of no small significance in both of their lives, or mine. With the freedom and encouragement to attend sesshin regularly, I think he'll be happier, which means we all will be happier. I don't mind. It means that we can move forward as a family. I can begin to think about regularly scheduling in what we've all needed so badly for so long: time alone for each child with each parent, time for each parent to be alone, and time for the parents to be alone without the children (that one's going to take some working up to).

It's been sunny outside the past few days. We've been to the park again, we've been walking. We pulled out the table work again (Singapore Math) after a months-long hiatus.

I'm looking forward to the coming months. I see a massive spring cleaning and home reorganization in my future (IKEA HO!), as well as lots and lots of time spent outdoors.

I see hiking, and picnics, and perhaps even a long afternoon alone in the house with my sewing machine.

And like that, we will have done it.

We will have made it through, together.

*I don't think I've ever discussed this here, out of respect for Mr. T's privacy. In essence, Big Kid and Mr. T's relationship never recovered from the whole-family turbulence of adjusting to a new family member. Which is to say, the two of them did not adjust at all. I don't think it is unfair to say that their dynamic has dominated our family life for two years. It's been...difficult.  

Mothers Who Push (or, I Really Need to Stop Using Colons So Much).

Have I made it uniformly clear that I have an obsessive child?

This is what has been going on in my house for...I don't know, two weeks now? Ever since I remembered that we have a Mozart-themed date at the symphony coming up and I thought I saw The Magic Flute mentioned in the concert description and picked up some background material. To say that she knows this show is an understatement. She has watched two separate complete performances of it on DVD at least three times each. She has listened to two recordings (so different!) of the full opera over and over (and over, and over) again, as well as the charming Mozart's Magic Fantasy from Classical Kids, a kind of radio play that follows an older child as she magically enters into the story of The Magic Flute and features highlights from the opera sung in English (we also listened to Mozart's Magnificent Voyage; the series is a fantastic way to introduce children to classical music and I'm looking forward to hearing all the rest).

We've had a number of these musical, theatrical and literary obsessions: Peter and the Wolf, all things Romeo and Juliet, Tchaikovsky in general, the How to Train Your Dragon books (which, as far as I know, have not been set to music yet). They go on for ages, too. Months and months of this absolute...immersion. I have obsessive tendencies myself, so I kind of get it, but at the same time I have a very Tommy Chong reaction to the whole thing. Whoa, man. That is intense.

Because I am her mother and spend most of my waking hours in her presence, I get tugged into the whole thing myself. It just occured to me today that I need to set up my iPod with her music on it so she can do her thing and listen to Diana Damrau and Leonard Bernstein and whatever else that's engulfed her at the moment, and I can, you know...not.

She told me today that she wants to sing in an opera when she grows up. It was very sweet, despite the sort of annoyingness of her constant attempts to sing Der Holle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen (3:08 is the acrobatic coloratura run she's emulating; I kind of hurt myself giving it a go). I nodded lovingly at her, and then had a thought I didn't expect to have: If genetics has been kind, she may have a strong musical aptitude and the potential of someday having a stellar singing voice. Maybe I should teach her music.

Particularly in the wake of the parenting manifesto controversy that shall not be named, it brought forth the specter of one of my greatest fears: I will become a stage mother.

I'm a bit self-conscious about how personally interested I am in this funky little niche passion my kid has. A bit worried that I am that guy that thinks his kid is a geeeeeeeenius (I don't. Every child is a brilliant little freakazoid double rainbow expression of the universe's terrible majesty, and mine is no exception.) I have kind of been that guy, and I don't want to be that guy.

So I felt a little squirmish when I thought that it might be an idea to get ahold of a digital piano and try it out with the kid. She has asked numerous times to learn an instrument (most often cello), and I figured that with the interests she seems to have, it wouldn't be a surprise if she liked playing music or even wanted to go into performance at some point. If she does, piano skills would be a real asset. That shouldn't make me feel weird. It's an activity to try that is directly in line with her interests. She's been in soccer, and hated it, and is now in ballet, and loves it, and this would be an instrument. So what's the big freaking deal?

Basically, I am afraid of pushing too hard for my own selfish reasons.

Amy Chua is, most assuredly, a mother who pushed. But who decides what is too hard? Or not about the kid anymore? When does it reach that point?

So many of us get our kids involved in something: ballet, soccer, American football, violin, chess, baseball, whatever. Most kids, even if they don't join an organized sport or take lessons, does something, loves something. But at some point, pursuing a passion for sheer enjoyments' sake intersects with something a bit stickier: the amount of dedicated practice that it takes to truly master a skill. I have nothing to add to the discussion on Amy Chua's book (in no small part because I haven't read it) but from what I've gleaned she does have at least one very good point: learning is not always fun. Mastery requires something more than passion, it requires dedication. It requires practice. And it seems that some kind of push from outside is neccessary at some point.

Going into anything new, whether it's piano or the (inevitable, I think) drama classes, requires us to ask the big question: When can my child quit?

For Chua, the answer is a resounding "never".

But why? Why never?

It seems that Chua values mastery above most anything else, and she is right: the only way to achieve it is to not quit.

After a little soul searching I have come to an understanding I feel very comfortable with. Mastery is wonderful. It is worth pursuing. And yes, mastery seems to almost certainly require some outside pressures. But I don't get to decide what my children want to achieve in their lives. They do.

That being said, I do get some input while they are under my roof.

For my girls, there will be no "quitting" in basic education. No "that's enough" of reading, writing, math and science. But everywhere else? How do I help them deepen their experiences and push themselves through the hard spots without making it all about me?

I think by taking the middle road.

I intend to follow my girls' leads, which for my older daughter, in the here and now, is barreling at speed towards Fancy Song and Dance. 

I intend to continue to introduce them to new material and experiences, like music they haven't heard and books they haven't read and activities they haven't tried.

I intend to require daily, meaningful practice in exchange for our paying for music lessons.

I intend to require them to "finish out the season"; if one of them tells me she doesn't want to do something anymore, she needs to finish out the term, whether that's the ballet quarter or the summer drama workshop or reaching the next recital.

That seems reasonable.

I think that will go some distance towards making sure there is never a movie made about me.

Dear Santa

Oh, Christmas.

You used to be so uncomplicated.

I remember so much of you from my early childhood: the twisted red and "white" (it was dough, folks...dough's not truly white unless there's a serious problem) candy cane cookies my mom made, the Care Bears Christmas record my sister and I put on while we ran around like maniacs in the living room, the cookies we left for Santa that I somehow always understood my father ate, the morning I came downstairs into the quiet mystical darkness of a tree-lit room to find ROLLER! SKATES! next to my stocking, the time I expected a bicycle and didn't get one and I cried and then my dad rolled the black and yellow BMX out from the other room and it was perfect (although I would develop the notion that bees were attracted to it and would, at some point, remove the yellow padding to avoid being swarmed by them).

Christmas!

So much tied up into the sweet cinnamon bow of it, nestled into its felted wool tip toe, wrapped up in its shining crinkling paper heart.

I had good parents, and we had more than enough to go around, and so my Christmases were wonderful.

And then I grew older and the game of it all became something more like greed, or rather something very, very much like it, and then I grew older again and ashamed and it became something different altogether: a chance to mark the subtle, or not so subtle, changes in the landscape of my family.

It was a chance to dust off old stupid affectionate taunts, to note the comforting familiarity of the knicknacks and the manger scenes, the plastic baby Jesus that always fit so perfectly in the crook of the goose girl's arm. It was the time to let the gifts mount up next to me while I drank my sparkling cider too fast and saw, loved to see, how we could not let my grandfather open a book or he would never finish opening his gifts, the gifts that always made him so uncomfortable and grateful at the same time.

There were more of us for a long while, burbling Buddha babes in ridiculous red and green one piece suits, newly minted fiancees and, once, a brand new bride and groom.

And then there were fewer. First the bachelor great uncle who sat in the back room watching the football game died, and his was the first and only corpse I have ever seen. And then my grandfathers, beloved, beloved, and never again. And we lost marriages. And dogs. 

The scene has changed, too, as the family celebration moved from a grandparents' house to an aunt and uncle's, and finally to my own parents', and as dear ones have moved from one house to another or away and back again or just away for good. 

And we ourselves have grown taller or fatter or both. The child who screeched the Care Bears songs has two coarse colorless hairs that peek out from the crown of her head and two screeching children of her own.

Now I'm making that childhood Christmas for someone else, and it has muddled me horribly. I'm grappling with how to help my kids make some meaning out of this season that, obviously, means a very great deal to a great number of people, in good and bad ways.

My husband and I settled on some ground rules early on in our lives as parents. We buy our children some, but not a lot. Overwhelmingly, our purchases are made from locally owned businesses. We eschew large quantities of sweets. We strive for traditions of family and community connection, not consumption. So that's fine. Or rather it had been.

Up until this year we hadn't bothered with the Santa myth, in part because it made me very uncomfortable to actively build up a falsehood for my child, and in part because it seemed fine to let her make whatever assumptions she wanted to. She woke up to a filled stocking and gifts under the tree. Ta da! Then last year she said that Santa brought gifts to other children but not to her. We hadn't told her explicitly that Santa filled her stocking, but we hadn't told her explicitly that Santa wasn't real, either. I felt awful. So this year we have stepped into the Santa myth more fully, because she wants to have that. We've left windows open in this construct, though, so a little light of play shines on all of it.

As part of the whole thing I encouraged her to write a letter to him, mostly to practice her writing, which was incredibly sweet. Unfortunately, as part of the letter I reminded her that she can ask Santa for a gift. And unfortunately, the gift she asked for is something we can't realistically afford to buy her. I found myself in a serious conundrum.

What do you do when "Santa" is not going to bring what a child specifically asked him for?

This problem sits right at the heart of my muddle over the whole season. To try and distill the essence of my discomfort, my feeling is that as a society we are trapped in an incredibly toxic economic situation where we have to spend a lot of money that, in many cases, we don't even have just to keep everything in motion. So in a bad economy, and a good economy, the "right" thing to do is spend a lot of money. That is also very much the wrong thing to do, because many people don't have much extra income to spend and debt is a life destroying force. There is nothing good about it. 

This isn't even touching on my concerns about fair compensation for labor, the funneling of wealth out of communities and the human health and environmental impacts of extraction, manufacturing, use of a given product during its lifetime and ultimate disposal.

But sitting there with her little eyes lit up is my kid, who just wants to experience Christmas.

I had to be realistic and make the determination that we aren't going to buy that doll. It's beyond our budget, and, this is essential, she has far too many dolls.

That's how I found myself today carefully discussing with my daughter what Santa might bring for her. I told her that what Santa wanted for her was a nice surprise on Christmas morning. And I told her that Santa doesn't want her to feel overwhelmed with her toys and games. He just wants her to have warm feelings on a special day. So he will fill her stocking (she made sure to confirm that it will be full), but whatever else he brings will be an elf-made surprise. Honestly, she was pretty okay with that. That made sense to her: Santa wants to stop by and sprinkle her life with some magic and wonder. He doesn't want to check off a shopping list.

I think that squares us up. As far as gift giving goes, the rules stay, and they stay simple: don't overspend, welcome the experiences and don't chase the stuff quite so much. The kids get a few toys that we feel comfortable with from cradle to grave.

For next year, I've learned that we need to steer the kids away from specific requests from Santa. Santa will be Magical Surprise Man. If they want to ask for something specific, they need to ask us so that we can tell them "no" up front if we need to, and give them a reason.  

By taking the burden of wish fulfillment off of poor Santa, we've also made room for some really exciting possibilities. Without the checklist (did anyone else used to go through the Sears toy calatog obsessively as a child?) Santa and his elves can, you know, make stuff.* 

Fun!

See, I am fun. I do not obsess over Christmas all day long. I have been experiencing a significant shift in my worldview, my moral compass, my relationship with money and material goods and my parenting philosophy, all at once, around the whole Christmas deal. It has not been particularly merry. Actually, that's not true. It's been a growth process. Those always kind of suck, but then you're really glad they happened. It's called disequilibrium and the more you experience it in your life, the less likely you are to be a jerkwad. Changing your cognitive structures is a good thing. Word.

Now! Stuff. Because it's Christmas and I feel like I'm constantly shopping for something even though we're doing it "simple" style.

That shit looks so seasonal. Big Kid made the bean heart in preschool prior to Thanksgiving and it makes me happy happy. The tablecloth is pretty groovy, too.

This is super groovy:

I found him lurking in the antique mall and he was crazy, ludicrously inexpensive. Cheap. I felt kind of guilty buying him for so little, because he is fancy, and I have to guess that the vendor didn't know how fancy he is. But, now he is ours. I was hoping to sneak him past the kid for Christmas love but that didn't work out so he was Highly Unusual Unexpected Toy Purchase dragon. 

Now I feel all weird for sharing my overwrought thought process around mundane topics.

Go watch this. It's adorable.

*Have you noticed that in recent Santa movies the "workshop" is basically a factory floor with marked, licensed toys rolling by on conveyor belts? That is some f-ed up shizz right there.

Taste the rainbow

So this is odd: I once had a roommate in college who did not know that Skittles were different flavors. I mean in the one package. She thought that every color tasted the same. Apparently, her whole life, she had just shoved the Skittles into her mouth willy nilly as they came out of the bag, so to her it was just the flavor of artificial fruit salad. I, on the other hand, always poured the Skittles out of the bag, arraged them in neat rows by color, like a bar graph (noting which dominated), then ate them from least favorite (yellow) to most (red, briefly usurped by purple, and then red again). They taste totally different. Yellow is just kind of "meh". Green is better. Oranges are tricky: the candy coating is very tasty, like orange Tic Tacs, but the chewy part is kind of gross. Purples are good, and then red...red is delightful. I thought everyone knew this. But then tonight, pawing around in my kid's candy bucket searching for succor in my post election despair, I poured a package of Skittles into a bowl. When my husband asked for some, I picked out all of the red ones and gave him the rest. He expressed his surprise and confusion: Don't they all taste the same?

...no.

Anyway. That has nothing to do with this post.

I was really excited to write about this, until the disappointing election in which many of my fellow countrypeople confirmed that they are total tightwads ruled by their amygdalae. IT WAS A TAX ON SODA AND CANDY. SOOOOOOOO DAAAAAA. And people were all "You can have my Diet Coke with Lime when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands."

Skittles taste totally different.

So.

I read a book called Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne and it is good good good. If you are a parent dealing with emotional, behavioral or attentional difficulties with your child, this book is about building a family life that ameliorates stress and overstimulation. The advice he provides is stellar.

The first step he counsels families to take is getting rid of toys. There are others, which I hope to discuss later, but this one was HUGE for us. Big Kid has many, many loving, generous and thoughtful Grandmas and Aunts and kind friends who like to give her things (I'm one of those Aunts to my nephews...I have a wrapped toy in my car right now). Big Kid also has a huge emotional investment in those things. Getting rid of anything was impossible. I tried, over and over, and it never panned out. The things always won.

Payne's advice is to reduce the number of children's toys in the house significantly, at least by half: more if the stash is particularly large. The gem, for me, was the idea of having a "toy library" for the child: a plastic bin or so with some of the overflow that the child can "check out" toys from by depositing one of the toys she has out. So stuffed bear goes in, stuffed giraffe comes out. Brilliant.

I was braced for a deeply traumatic event, but once the Toy Library! concept trotted out, the culling process was totally painless. Totally.

I bagged and binned everything with her right there, merrily saying "keep" or "toy library" or even "pass along to someone else" as we went. I was fascinated to find that she knew exactly what she wanted out. I told her five stuffed animals, and five dolls (her most played with toys by miles) and she knew right away. I wasn't surprised with her choices at all. They made perfect sense.

The following is a long series of pictures, with handy links if anyone wants to know what anything is, showing every toy we have in the house now. Every toy, except the toy library bin, the bin of dress up, a block walker that Baby was using while I took pictures and a wicker basket of board books that lives next to my bed. 

Just to give some sense of the kind of environment I think Payne has in mind for families struggling to reduce stress:

The living room. Baby has no room of her own, so these are her toys (in the milk crates), and communal toys. This is also where we keep board games for the whole family, and up top are DVDs. The only 2 closets are in the bedroom, and storing these things in that space isn't practical. So it's out. Neatly.

Wooden dollhouse (the furniture is Ryan's Room and Plan Toys; I found it all at a thrift store for $12), unit blocks, baby cradle from my childhood with folded play silks.

Wooden peg puzzles, Playmobil 1.2.3 in the Darigold bin, errata in the Wilcox (letter blocks in one cloth bag, Ostheimer and Schleich animals in another, little dollies, musical instruments, a Gertie ball).

Fiddlestix in the basket, wooden railway in the bin and box, Rody, who is crazyfun.

Wooden kitchen (Plan Toys foodstuffs inside), children's table (art supplies are on shelves off to the right in this picture).

Addy, T. Rex and Big Bear (Big Bear could and should probably go, but he was mine when I was a kid and it's, cough cough, hard to let go). A rolling under the bed bin has doll clothes in it and storage space for the FUTURE! (please say that word in your head like the future is happening in space)

Seasonal display on the bookshelf, a few seasonal books, Only Hearts Club dress-up dolls in the pink suitcase, Woodkin, wooden puzzles (this one is the hands down favorite). Tea set and little ceramic doo dads on the hutch, and in the hutch:

Puzzles, box of random little dolls, Playmobil, Lego basic bricks. There is a recorder in that case that should go out in the living room.

This was the big accomplishment: all the dolls and stuffed animals. I love who she kept out. It was so loyal and loving: "Oh, it must be you, you, you, you and you." She was sweetly ceremonious about putting the rest in the "library" box, assuring them all that she loves them, and that they would be alright and she would see them again soon.

Books were hard. They had become out of control, no doubt. But she loves them to pieces, and looks through most of them on a regular basis. I halved her collection, with her telling me what she wanted to keep most. Realistically, everything else can be had again from the library. We kept the Must. Keeps.

And that's it. Those are all my kids' toys.

Laying it out like that it seems like so much, which, I mean...it is. This is a bunch of toys. I honestly don't know where we put everything else, although I suspect the answer is "all over the floor". But now everything has some breathing room. It all has a home, the kids can get things out (and put them away), and they are happy little clams in this space, with these playthings.

As far as what was kept, I stuck with the things that were dearest to her (the dolls and stuffed animals) and kept what I have found to be the toys that invite the deepest, most open-ended, creative play: unit blocks, play silks, building toys, small human and animal figures. 

I'm not sure what to do about Christmas.

I'm so thrilled with this new arrangement and can't imagine how we might integrate more than a couple new toys.

From us, the girls will be getting a few more Ostheimer figures, more play silks, and art supplies. I'm mulling one major gift for the two of them, but I'm not sure. I have a largish project in mind to make, which would probably be best...something unexpected, something just theirs. We'll see.

Big Kid has an art supply wish list as long as her arm now, so as far as family goes I'm sure i'll be suggesting those (Aquarelles and watercolors top the list; what's not to like about drawing and painting at the same time?).

The point will be: we're doing more with less.

Truly.

Keeping out the environmental "static" of the cheap and the disposable brings an enormous feeling of spaciousness, of clarity, of focus, of gratitude for the beautiful things around us that we love and we use. In a clean and curated space my girls are relaxed, open and immensely imaginative. I have been handed a "bouquet of flowers" (rod and connector toys wrapped in a playsilk) that were previously "lolly pops", seen my girl make four different costumes in one hour out of three squares of silk, made dollhouse furniture from unit blocks, and seen wooden animals scatter from a forest fire (orange silk) followed by a flood (green silk) followed by the sun (orange silk again) which made a rainbow (rainbow silk).

Children's play is serious. It's what they do all day. It's a huge part of what shapes them...how they work out their problems, achieve mastery of their bodies, grow their minds and hearts. I want the objects of their play to be the workhorses of play, the flexible, open-ended powerhouses, but I also want them to be special to my children...not disposable.

And what I learned this week, or what I knew before but couldn't act on, is that nothing can be special in a heap.

You never find out that the red tastes like strawberries.

Practically perfect

I have a little perfectionist. I've had people tell me that perfectionism is a positive trait, one that will serve her well later on in life, and in this case I tend to disagree. For her it's been paralyzing and, whether a result or a cause, is correlated to low self-esteem. 

I think she probably has multiple areas where her perfectionism causes her real problems (reading, I believe, is one of them), but the one that I noticed first was art. For a long time I assumed that she just wasn't into coloring, painting or drawing in the same way that many other kids her age are, but in the last couple years it's become obvious to me that she didn't want to make art because she didn't like her own work. Essentially she wanted realism, or at the very least the sophisticated symbolic art of children four, five or six years her senior. Making things worse, she has been slow to develop motor skills, both gross and fine. Nothing abnormal, just not precocious with the pumping action on the swings or the whole fork-to-mouth thing.

Developing our home curriculum, I was tempted to just leave out art and find a way for her to have those experiences elsewhere: at preschool, Sunday school, possibly through some kind of children's art program.

But it struck me that of all the skills I could assist her with, learning to harness the positive aspects of perfectionism, such as the drive to achieve excellence, attention to detail, focus, and persistence, and to manage the negative, were possibly the single most important. What I wanted to work with her on had nothing to do with art, and everything to do with helping her to release the sense of "never good enough" and to experience the kind of genuine growth that can occur in a state of relaxed perseverance. (As a side note, I myself am a perfectionist, which might surprise, uh, everyone. Perfectionism can be paralyzing and is deeply connected with procrastination, lack of motivation and low productivity. I didn't experience the enormous satisfaction of consistent effort over a long period of time until well into adulthood; I don't want my kid to have to wait that long.)

As with many, many other obstacles I've faced with her, I figured that she might respond to a simple explanation.

So I told her that all children draw symbolically, but not all know how to draw realistically, and explained what that meant. We also talked about fine motor development, and how, just like talking or walking or whatever, every person learns a skill at their own pace, in their own time. She knew that nothing was wrong with her baby sister because Baby can't speak in full sentences, and it was an easy jump from there to acknowledging that, perhaps, her development in fine motor control was hers, and nothing to worry about.

My next step has been to actually teach her some pencil control, alongside some ways to "see" and release her negative perfectionistic feelings when they arise. In her math work she's doing some tracing and numeral writing, so that has pushed her a bit. And then we've talked a bit about how to color, using slow, short strokes, focusing and taking your time. 

A week ago she was drawing like this:

Now, there is nothing wrong with that drawing. It's totally normal five-year-old drawing. The drawing isn't the point. The point is that on the rare occasions that I could convince her to try using crayons or markers or whatever in any way (I have never in my life criticised a child for scribbling; I'm 100% pro-scribbling), she would do a couple of stick figures and nine times out of ten she would get frustrated and scribble over the top of her work.

It sucked. Really, it just sucks to see your kid feeling like that.

After a few days of working with her feelings a little bit, and her motor control a little bit, she made this:

And with a fair amount of help from me*, these:

I don't think these are very much more sophisticated than what she was doing before, but again, that's not the point. The point is that she is drawing like crazycakes. She figured out that you can make your own paper dolls, and that's what she's been working on for the past few days, for hours at a time.

She's still having moments of self-doubt, and whenever I work with her she either focuses intently on what I'm doing, obviously comparing, or she asks me to do things for her. I'm happy to help in some cases, like the fussy cutting around a paper doll (the clothes do need to fit in order to put them on), but I would love for her to eventually be able to focus on her work. Inspiration and motivation from others is one thing, comparison is another.

I wish I'd learned how to do what she is doing early in life. How to begin at something, to be bad at something, and accept that, and push myself (just the right amount). Instead I simply did the things that came very easily, and quit everything else. Eventually, as you get older, you see that inherent ability, that talent, only means so much. Maybe half. Probably less. What matters, what really counts, is perseverance. And you cannot persevere without knowing how to manage the feelings of frustration that come along with learning and growing.

I'm going to look into some resources on perfectionism, to help us both. And I'm going to teach her how to draw (I bought Drawing with Children and I am CRAZY excited to get started, but it will take a little while for me to be prepared to teach the lessons. The author makes the points that symbolic and realistic drawing are two different skills, that teaching the latter doesn't retard the development and practice of the former, and that the normal symbolic drawing work of childhood is rarely followed by skill in realism without instruction. It makes sense to me).

My hope is that these exercises, in a discipline that she may or may not persue as she grows, and one that I have no ego investment in as a parent, will cut some healthy grooves in the record of her mind:

This is how it goes. This is how I grow. This is how I let go.

Whatever goes on next, we need "multicultural markers" and skin tone pencils tout de suite. She's already super annoyed that her skin tone choices are "orange", "yellow" and "brown". Observant kid, this one.

Might make a good artist.

*For the paper dolls, I drew a very basic human outline. She drew in the hair and faces, and colored them in. For the outfits, she had the body template, I helped her through how to use that to overlay her clothing drawings, and did the fussy cutting. Now she's off like a shot on her own. I can't find the paper doll she did totally independently, but it's hilarious and rad.