Enjoy the journey--sometimes' that all there is

Inspiration struck today, as I decided to take Beans (our almost-three-year-old) to the library for story time. The brilliance of the plan was that I had the idea early enough to bring it to fruition.

Theoretically.

Story-time is at 11 am, I floated the idea around 10:20. She loves going to the library, so that was an easy sell, but she also loves to walk there and hates wearing a coat. Since it's around 30 degrees today, I was afraid I was in for some tough negotiations, but she was actually pretty reasonable (on this issue).

She did, however, want more to eat. Say, her sister's leftover Nutella toast. Fair enough. I cut it into smaller pieces and let her have at it. So now I had to budget in time for cleanup, because Nutella might as well be called a hazelnut spread-all-over-everything. Still, no problem. I gathered my own things, got her to put socks on while she contentedly made a chocolatey mess of her face and hands. Then we cleaned up... and then she wanted more of the Nutella toast, so we had to clean up again. These things happen. When you're not-quite-three, it's hard to predict that maybe you should eat all the Nutella toast before cleaning up.

Okay, ready to go. Except someone is "still hungwy!" How about a fig bar to go? No! No!!!

Oh wait. Okay, yes. Had to think about that for a second. 

So we got set to start walking, but time was getting tight. We probably weren't going to make it for the start. Oh well. Onward!

Before we were one house away, "my hands are a wittow bit code." Especially the one holding her fig bar. Back we go. Now, where are those mittens? How about these gloves... nope, comically large. Um... How about we just accept that we're going to be a little cold? She agreed.

It's just under half a mile to the library, and well before we were halfway there, she declared that she was too cold and I needed to carry her. Or, as she says "I pick you up!"

We got to the library after story time had started, but it was still going. We hung up our backpacks and coats and went in through the tiny door and found a place on the floor. Two songs and two stories later, she declared that she wanted milk.

Like, now.

My explanation that they didn't have milk at the library, and that we'd have to go home to get milk led to an inevitable conclusion: "Let's go home." Seriously? You'd rather walk home 5 minutes after we got here than get to the best part of story time (bubbles at the end) or play with the toys in the kids' section? Because once we get home, we're not going back to the library.

Yeah, she was good with that.

Not only did I have to carry her all the way home, though, I also had to carry her all the way through the library. I don't know, just in case it got drafty, I guess. But we made it home and she got her milk.

Now, it would be easy to look at this as a failure of sorts, or at least a pretty lousy deal for what we got out of it. I had planned to connect to the internet (saving my phone hotspot data), get some things done on-line, and then cuddle up with a book while she played with toys and made friends. Clearly none of that happened (glad I carried all that stuff in my backpack, btw).

Nonetheless, wins were had. First, we got outside and got some fresh air. The ratio of my exercise to her exercise was more than a little skewed, but it's probably for the best, selfishly speaking, if I want to avoid slouching into "dad bod" territory. And as much as we only had five minutes of story time, it was actually a huge step forward. In past story times, she has basically ignored the stories and avoided the singing and movement, and just burrowed into my lap. This time, from her safe little warren, she did answer questions ("which animal's ears are these?" and she moved her feet a little bit at the appropriate place in the one song. At this rate, we'll have her participating fully about the time she's reading independently, but whatever. Baby steps are steps, and I'm marking them in the win column.

And hey, I got to spend quality time with my girl. Up [very] close and personal, mostly cheek to cheek, arms wrapped around my neck or buried in my coat. The perfect place to hear her little observations and questions ("Yook at doze flowers!" "Dere's two sqau-yuls!").

Where else should I rather be?

Old Year, New Year

As December 2015 comes to a close, I'll sneak in this single blog post for the month (the last five months or so, in fact). Once upon a time, I would routinely blog every day in December as part of Holidailies. Even further in the past, I would routinely blog every day of the year. But times change, people change, and here we are, heading into 2016, and ready to take this arbitrary boundary as a time to reflect. I've made resolutions at times in the past, but this year I'm struck by a suggestion I heard, to reflect instead on something from the past year I'm grateful for and something I'm looking forward to in the new year. But I always have trouble narrowing things down, so I've got a handful for each.

2015 Gratitude

In August, I was anxious about education for both of my daughters. Our oldest was going from the most wonderful PreSchool in the world straight into first grade. At first, I was a little concerned about her social transition from a small preschool to a 1st grade class of 22 in which she would be the youngest. Then, as the year went on, I was concerned about the quality of the education she was getting. But overall, I think it's been a good experience for her. At the same time, our younger daughter wasn't able to go to the same wonderful preschool, because it closed. She started at a different preschool which... is okay. It's not amazing like the other one was. But it, too, is good for our child. And we're thinking we'll try to put her in Kindergarten next year, a year early. So I'm thankful that my girls are doing well in their respective schools.

It started in 2014, but through the spring and summer of the past year, I connected with a local writer's group. I'm still working to make writing a routine part of my life, but I'm thankful for a group that has nourished this part of myself and enriched my life.

Just recently, I had some very difficult realizations thrust upon me, about myself and about my relationship to someone important to me. Confronting these realizations wasn't easy, it wasn't comfortable, it wasn't something I wanted to deal with. But I'm grateful to be able to see myself more clearly and perhaps to strengthen a relationship before it's completely broken. Here's hoping.

2016 Looking Forward

My wife's trying to keep an internet secret, so I won't say the most important thing that I'm looking forward to in 2016. But it is #1 on my list. I'm hoping I can talk about it publicly soon.

This spring will be my first season (and hopefully not my last!) as head coach of the girls tennis program at the high school where I work. I've got some very definite ideas about how I want to approach this, and I'm excited for the opportunity to try some new things and help my players reach their potential and, hopefully, win more than a few matches.

Most of the other things that come to mind seem far less certain. They're more like those resolutions that are more hopes and wishes than plans and certainties. I'm excited about the possibility of planting some almond trees in our yard. Could this be the spring we get chickens? Maybe in 2016 I'll finally finish at least a rough draft of the novel I've been putzing around with for the last few years? I did read more than a few books in the past year, which bodes well for reading a fair number in the next, and I'm always excited by what new great wonders I may discover between those pages. I expect I'll grow as a father and a husband, a son and a friend in the next 366 days--anyway, I'm sure those people most important to me hope so.

And so, a happy new year to you all: may it be filled with much to anticipate and much to be grateful for. I'd love to hear in the comments some of your own things in those categories.

In the midst of feeling lousy, frustrated, and unhappy

When you can't get quality sleep, I guess you go for the next best thing: a greater quantity of sleep. Anyway, that was my approach last night, when we spent 10+ hours in or around the bed.

The evening's progress had made it clear that good sleep would not be in the cards. Lauren is away for most of the weekend, so it was just me and our two girls (and the dog and guinea pig). Our almost-5-year-old, T, is in the middle of a cold, and our 2 1/2 year-old, A, is in the midst of non-napping and destructo-tot phases. And whereas Thursday night seemed to prove that children's sudafed does, in fact, need to be taken precisely every four hours, Friday evening was apparently demonstrating just how quickly drug tolerance can develop, because just an hour or two in, T seemed miserable. So T was fussing and crying, while A was trying to destroy one or more Christmas trees, or maybe my computer, or the TV, or... whatever was close at hand. Meanwhile, I seem to be picking up T's headache, which despite adult sudafed seemed intent on giving me a sinus headache.

Yeah, it was that kind of night.

So we went to bed as early as I could bring myself to give T another dose of sudafed before the 4 hours was up. For some reason, A wanted us all to lay in her sister's bed--a twin bed--and got really upset when I said no, we would sleep in mommy and daddy's bed. There I lay, T snuggled in the crook of my right arm, A in the crook of my left arm. T crying and fussing and coughing in my right ear, A crying and fussing in my left ear. I tried singing our tried and true lullabyes, and I may have "tried" losing my temper. All the while, my headache was building.

And then, I just took a deep, meditative breath, and decided to reframe it all in my head. I have a headache, but it's just a sinus headache, just a symptom of a cold; it's not a brain tumor or a cerebral aneurysm. My daughter was upset and difficult to comfort because of a sore throat, stuffy nose, and the aches and pains of a cold; how much harder would it be to comfort her if she suffered from leukemia or cystic fibrosis or any number of fatal diseases? It can be hard on nights like this to be alone with the girls, but besides the fact that my wife has also had to do when I've been gone somewhere, I considered the people who have to be single parents all the time, or the people who are separated or divorced and don't have the opportunity to be with their children as often as they would like.

And I felt gratitude. I was able to give myself a little perspective, to remind myself of how lucky I really am, even in the midst of circumstances that moments before made me feel lousy and frustrated and unhappy. That's not to say that my headache disappeared--it didn't, lingering through the next several times I woke up during the night. That's not to say that my children instantly quieted down, but they did quiet down before too long. Giving myself a new perspective wasn't magic, it didn't make a single problem go away, it just made them easier to deal with them. It gave me a core of serenity that served me well.

****

“It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, this is the highest of arts.”-- Henry David Thoreau

Pain and Discomfort

Wednesday, uncharacteristically, my almost-5-year-old asked to go to bed early. She wanted me to put her to bed, so I laid down and snuggled with her. She snuggled in the crook of my arm, her head on my shoulder.

And it hurt, mostly because I was still sore from my bench press workout a couple days before. Which got me thinking about pain. First, there's your response to it. We have a natural aversion to pain (uh, duh). Even a little bit of pain sets my little girls off, screaming and fussing. Yet as we get older, we learn to put up with it. For instance, I was happy enough to put up with this pain, because it seemed to serve a purpose. If I pushed my daughter off my shoulder, denied her the snuggling embrace, I would set back the going-to-sleep process. So even though it was uncomfortable, and a bit painful, I endured it.

For that matter, this pain came, in the first place, from exercise, which itself is a form of enduring discomfort. Whether one is lifting weights or running or doing yoga, there are always--if you're doing it right--moments when you become uncomfortable and you would like to quit. However, you endure that pain, you push through it, and you do more of the exercise in question. You get another rep, you rest a little do another set, you run another minute, another ten minutes, another mile, you hold a pose that much longer. We do it to make ourselves better: stronger, faster, with more endurance. We embrace the pain of the moment, we even embrace the pain that comes in the days afterward, may come to enjoy it because we know the benefits it ultimately brings.

All this, of course, goes against our natural instincts. Young children don't do this--they stop running when it becomes uncomfortable. They don't even seem to know how to "push through." Many people who start exercising for the first time, they encounter the pain and they can't push through it. They encounter the post-workout pain and they decide this isn't for them. We have to learn how, and we can only learn by doing it, by stretching our boundaries.

We all do this to some extent, of course. It turned out, I discovered in the middle of Wednesday night, that my daughter was coming down with a cold. She had a miserable night, which meant that my wife and I had a miserable night. Adults, we have developed a certain stoicism. A cold is lousy, we all know that. But we don't tend to fuss and cry and make everyone around us miserable too. We keep it to ourselves, we manage as best we can.

Now, all of this can be carried to extremes. We probably all know people who won't go see a doctor no matter how sick, how miserable they are. The only way they get to a hospital is by ambulance or carried there by someone else. In the exercise world, there are people who take the maxim "no pain, no gain" to the extreme... and end up injured as a result. There's a certain truth to the phase, but it's only in the way I described earlier: we have to endure some discomfort, push past it. Real pain, in this context, is a bad thing. If you tweak your knee or injure your shoulder while lifting weights, for instance, and you keep on exercising because, you know, "no pain, no gain," you're actually just going to further injure yourself, which will keep you out of the gym longer, which will limit your gains. Likewise, while it may be appropriate in your run-of-the-mill illness to "don't be such a baby," to keep a stiff upper lip and keep working through it or avoid burdening your family or friends with your complaints, we can also make things worse if we don't treat an illness.

In the end, it all comes down to moderation, and the wisdom to find it.

Christmas 2013 Recap

Earlier, I recapped of the set-up for Christmas day and told about the start of the day. Here, we pick up the story from when the girls started opening their presents.

Our youngest doesn't quite know what to do with the Jumpolene. Or the beanbag chair, apparently. She did figure out the former before the day was done.

Our oldest knew exactly what the new purse is for.

My wife didn't want me in this picture, but I inserted myself. And my coffee mug inserted itself, too.

See? She's just stinkin' cute!

And she's already to start conducting the family Christmas carol sing...

Here, she gets her first good look at her new cousin. How will she react?

About like this, apparently.

I just liked the way this picture got both of our girls and (a glimpse of) their cousin.  And the Aunt Emmy they all share.

Lauren wasn't going to be denied her time with the wee babe, and our older girl gets to know her a bit better too.

After 11 straight hours of Christmas, at 5:45, our younger appeared to give up the ghost. Sadly, she got her second wind a couple hours later and is still going strong as I type.

Her sister, on the other hand, lost the battle with sleep right in the middle of a delicious, delicious brownie. Sweet dreams, sweetpea!

Merry Christmas morning!

With my mother-in-law sidelined this Christmas Eve / Morning, we're left to our own devices for Christmas breakfast. Lauren theoretically went out to Walmart last night to get the ingredients we needed for at least some of the things that my mother-in-law had planned, but it wasn't until Lauren and I woke up in the wee hours of the morning that either of us (me) thought to look into this whole breakfast-making thing.

So yeah: it turns out that we only have the ingredients for one of the breakfast dishes that was planned... and that's supposed to take 7-8 hours in the crock pot. And Creme Brulee French Toast sounded so good, too.

Not to worry: I was able to find a baked version of Creme Brulee French Toast that I can pull together in a pinch. Meanwhile, I'm contemplating whether or not breakfast sausage made with ground beef would be worth the effort.

One thing we did do right was the delivery of presents (I just brought stuff in from the car and then kept the kids asleep while Lauren and her sister did all the real work):

Besides all the other presents--to be opened later--you can see a Mickey Mouse beanbag chair, and a Minnie Mouse chair that's scaled down (not that our younger daughter is either that much smaller or very likely to heed the boundaries of "my chair" and "your chair").

 And then there's this (I had no idea from my casual acquaintance with the box that it would be this big!): it's called a Jumpolene. It should be just about the best thing ever, given how frequently they ignore our injunctions not to jump on beds.
------------------------------------------------
6:04 Update: our oldest (nearly 4) just woke up, complaining that we woke her up. Despite the picture that you can see, the first thing she gravitated toward was... the stockings, hung by the electric fireplace with care. But then she noticed... the smaller beanbag chair. She read the tag that marked it as being for her sister with mild disappointment, and had to be pointed toward the larger one for her.

And when she saw the jumpolene, she said "It's a little swimming pool!" Once we showed her what it actually was, she did love it.

One of those nights (and days)

I'm a parent of two children (almost 4 years old and 20 months), and if you, too, are a parent, you can probably guess what kind of night I'm talking about. I'm sure I cursed myself by writing about sleep the other day, because now I'm running into problems with their sleep everywhere I turn.

Yesterday, I was coming home late from work and the plan was to load the kiddos in the car, turn right back around, and take them to our school's holiday dinner. So, for the first time in weeks, my older daughter takes a nap, and for the first time this week, the younger was napping a bit later in the day. So our wonderful nanny rousted them unhappily from their sleeping so that I could pack crying children into the car--and my oldest promptly stopped crying and got back to her nap for another 15 minutes.

Then last night, our sleeping arrangements with the girls got all jumbled up, as did their sleeping patterns. Our younger daughter has been either sleeping all night or waking once in the middle of the night and going back to sleep. Last night, she was waking up every couple hours and crying--she seemed to be saying that her feet and/or knees hurt, and rubbing one or the other did soothe her (eventually) each time. I checked for a fever and found none. There's a good chance that the actual problem had something to do with the fact that she only ate a little dinner, all of it cookies.

At one point, I got her back to sleep and then I couldn't. There was an owl hooting somewhere outside. I had Tim Minchin's "White Wine in the Sun" going through my head. I had other things on my mind. Maybe an hour later, I got back to sleep for another hour before it was time to get up.

Our older daughter was also restless last night, waking up a couple times and eventually getting some children's Advil/Tylenol/whatever from her mom. It was just one of those nights. 

Giving and having, getting and doing

Christmas is for kids. At the very least, I think there's nothing more magical than a kid's Christmas. Last year, when our older daughter was on the verge of two, was the first Christmas that she was old enough to really be excited about, and it was the most exciting Christmas I can remember (of course, my memory is crap). That may also have something to do with being up until 2-oh-my-god o'clock putting together the kitchen we bought for her.

But when we think about Christmas being for kids, it's important to realize that "Christmas" is essentially what we make of it. For the Christians in the audience, there's a good chance that means keeping Jesus and the Nativity at the center of Christmas. Regardless of whether you celebrate a sacred or secular Christmas, though, I think it's important to be intentional about what you want Christmas to be, especially for those of us who are parents, who basically define Christmas within our own household (in, of course, the larger cultural context).

What we make of Christmas likely will influence what our children make of Christmas for themselves and their children. We not only create the Christmas experiences that they will look back on and say "Remember that one Christmas when..." or "Remember how on Christmas we would always..." but I also believe that how we approach Christmas (and every other day, but I'm talking about Christmas now) will have a profound influence on who our children become and what they come to value.

For instance, most of us at least pay lip service to the idea that we don't want Christmas to be all about toys and expensive things and consumerism. As with most lessons, our actions speak at least as loudly as our words do. No matter what we say that's critical of the materialism of Christmas, if we ourselves spend wildly trying to find "the perfect" gift or to buy more and more expensive gifts to make this Christmas the best Christmas ever... well, I trust you see where I'm going here.

With this in mind, I wanted to share something that came recently in a magazine called Family Fun, which my mother subscribed us to (thanks Mom!). Kristin Bock of Oshkosh Wisconsin offered the Idea of the Month in the most recent issue, and it boils down to this: each Christmas, each of their children receives "just three presents: a book, a toy or other coveted item, and an experience." So they emphasize the importance of books, they give one conventional gift, and then they emphasize the importance of experiences over stuff. As the mother describes it:

We weren't sure how that last one would be received, so on Christmas morning Norman and I held out bresth as each child opened a thin package with a folder and a note inside. The folder included descriptions of three "experience packages," and the note instructed the recipient to choose one.

For example, Isaac's options were a day trip to a cave (and some spending money for the gift shop), a trip to a local aviation museum, complete with an airplane ride, and an outdoor photography lesson as well as a photo editing session in the studio. Our son couldn't contain his enthusiasm. After much thought, he asked if he could pick two and have one count as his birthday gift in February!

A couple other points:

• each child gets his or her own experience, and the experiences are tailored to that child's particular interests
• they keep costs down by using family and friends to serve as tour guides, hosts, or teachers (they don't mention it, but this also adds a deeper relational element to the experience)
• for expensive trips, only one parent goes along

As she summarizes it, "Our family is really learning the value of doing rather than having." The Christmas experience, in other words, helps to reinforce the values that the parents want to teach. I wouldn't be surprised if this change, in fact, reinforced the values for the parents themselves, as well.

Welcoming a new one to this world

Last Wednesday, in my tennis practice, I overheard that one of my girls had her birthday that day. I noted that, if things got moving, my daughter might get to share her birthday. The girls on my tennis team were shocked that, if we were that close to potentially giving birth, I was there at tennis practice. I explained that we just live a couple minutes from the school and 15-20 minutes from the hospital, so we weren't that worried. I told my wife about this that evening, and we had a laugh about the whole thing--ah, the naivete of youth, we said. They think that births are like on TV, where everything happens in the atmosphere of an emergency. Silly kids!

Or should I say, silly us!

Sometime after 9, we had a certain physical sign, and based on our first daughter's birth, we figured we had several hours to go but that we were in the home stretch at this point. We decided that I would go to sleep to grab a few hours' rest to be ready to go. A half hour later, Lauren woke me and said that it was time to go. Now.

Lauren was pretty seriously in pain. She said she might take the epidural this time, and that I'd better not say anything! After giving birth naturally the first time, I said she didn't have anything to prove, but when that what she was going through this time was pretty similar to what she'd gone through at the hospital last time. We got our stuff together and headed out the door around 10:50. Soon after we left the house, Lauren asked if I'd brought our first daughter's bag; I started to slow down to turn around and go back and she told me not to even think about going back. The 20 minute drive took us about 15, with  Lauren pretty miserable the whole way.

I left her to check in while I parked the car and brought our daughter in, and when I got back they were ready to take her down to a delivery room in a wheel chair, but she couldn't sit down. Not happening! They took her away, still trying to use the wheel chair, and a nurse led me and our daughter down to obstetrics. When we got there, though, Lauren was nowhere to be found! Were we missing the event? Finally, they wheeled her in on a bed, screaming like crazy. "Get her out of here! I don't want her to see this!" she said of our daughter. I took her out and had the good fortune that our nanny had just arrived to take her. Apparently, our daughter in the waiting room kept saying "Mommy hurt!"

I went back into the room, held Lauren's hand, and within moments, could see the top of our second daughter's head poking out. At our first birth, it probably took us 45 minutes to an hour from this point to the moment when we had our baby. This time? Try 45 seconds to a minute until we had our baby!

Needless to say, there was no time in any of this for an epidural, so another natural birth it was. There was hardly any time for anything! Maybe my high school girls knew more than we thought, and more than we did! And though I don't want to minimize the difficulty of the experience, between the time that it happened (official time of birth, 11:21) and how quickly it all progressed, we were remarkably well rested, at least compared to the first time (that time, Lauren was up at 2 am, I was up at 3, we were in to the hospital at 4:30, didn't give birth until after 9).

The reality is that we were very, very lucky through this whole thing. If there had been a train across the set of tracks we had to cross, we might very well have popped out a baby in the front seat of our car. I didn't have enough time or information to be properly scared by the whole thing, but Lauren, with more privileged access to how the situation was progressing, was. Everything went well in the end, but we feel very fortunate, all in all.

The end result was a healthy little baby, a little lighter and a little longer than her sister, checking in at 9 lbs 7.3 oz and 21 inches. Whereas our first looked more like me, our second looks more like Lauren, which we suppose is only fair. With no complications, Mama and child came home on Friday afternoon, and we've all been doing fine. All three of her grandparents are out visiting for the weekend and helping out.

7 January 2012

As noted earlier, we have been without home internet since moving. We had some good fortune as we figured out which neighbor had internet and optimized our computer and iPod placement in the house to pick up the signal. Then the last two days, the wireless was broadcasting but for some reason it wasn’t connected to the internet. Hey! Neighbor! We’re counting on you here! Reset your router! 

Add to that the fact that we’ve been too busy to go seeking out internet at our offices or the coffee shop, and you have the reason why I haven’t been posting the last several days. Even when we went somewhere to check e-mail, I didn’t have time to put together a coherent blog post.

Finally, at the end of last week, we got a call from AT&T telling us that they had finally figured out that, in fact, they could provide us internet. And they could get us hooked up… next Tuesday. Night. Ah well. We’ll take what we can get. One thing they could do for us: give us their fastest internet connection for less than we used to pay for their standard speed (for the first year—we’ll see what it looks like in 12 months).

Today, the neighbor’s internet has started working again, as much as it ever did for us, but we’re looking forward to getting our own going Tuesday night. As it is, we’ve been pretty busy anyway: Friday, family started showing up to spend the weekend with us and then today was our daughter’s second birthday. For her party, she had 3 grandparents, 2 aunts, an uncle, 7 children 5-years-old or younger, plus 9 of their parents. Most exciting of all, she had a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse cake (Lauren did most of the work, though I helped).

 

In case you're not familiar, this is not some kind of Van Gogh take on Mickey Mouse--it's the Clubhouse, in which different buildings (it's more the Mickey Mouse Compound than a single clubhouse) are in the shape of different parts of Mickey's anatomy.

It’s pretty amazing how much has changed in the last two years (or in one year, for that matter!). Two years ago, we drove to the hospital in the middle of the night. By morning we had 9 inches of snow and a beautiful baby girl. Now we have an even more beautiful 2-year-old. She’s chatty and amusing and amazing, and thanks to Christmas and her birthday, she’s amassing quite a load of toys around here. One year ago, she couldn’t feed herself, couldn’t really walk or talk—now she’s more or less unstoppable. I’m sure by the time she turns three, she’ll be even more amazing to us—and by then she’ll be a big sister, which will represent an even bigger change in our whole family.

Darker Kiddie Lit

Before Christmas, as we let our 2-year-old watch various holiday specials, we noticed something. She is a big fan of Mickey Mouse, by way of The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Naturally, then, we TiVoed the Disney special, which was a bunch of the old shorts (which we both remembered at least vaguely from our own childhoods. In one, Pluto chases around Chip and Dale, who have entered Mickey's house; Pluto's feelings toward the chipmunks are, well, about what you should expect from a dog toward rodents. In another, Donald Duck--in his usual cranky form--wages a fierce snow war on his nephews. What stands out for us is how, well, nice all the characters basically are to each other on The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. The main characters are always friends to each other; Pete sometimes acts as the "villain" of the show, but he's always brought around by the end, and everyone is always nice to him no matter what he does to them. The older shows have a much wider range of feelings and behaviors, particularly with regard to more negative emotions.

And then there's the Charlie Brown Christmas special. You know, one of the most-beloved animated holiday specials of all time. But wow. I'd forgotten just how mean the kids basically are to each other. Lucy bullies everyone around, characters call each other "dumb" or "stupid." At times, they're just plain mean to each other. Yet, it has endured--will any of the nicer, gentler animated features that are being produced today?

The thing is, much as we would like to think that it's otherwise, kids really are mean to each other (sometimes). They really do call each other names, even from a young age. It was the same when I was a kid in the '80s, judging by Charlie Brown, it was true of kids in the '60s, and I have no doubt that it's true today. It would be a better world if it weren't so, but it is, and perhaps that fact speaks to the special's staying power (and that of the Disney special I referenced earlier). Some people are jerks, sometimes even good people get frustrated and upset, and sometimes imperfect people see the error of their ways and sometimes they don't. File it under "art imitates reality." We can and should discourage our kids from treating each other so poorly, but that's not the same as insulating them from its fact.

Related to this, we recently heard little more than the fact of Peggy Orenstein (author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter) on The Diane Rehm Show. I heard perhaps 2 minutes of the broadcast and Lauren heard a blurb for it, but I mentioned it to her again later and she saw and picked up the book at our local library because it spoke to concerns she herself has had. Lauren read to me portions of one of the chapters, comparing the sanitized versions of various fairy tales to their original versions. She read a few, and she also pointed me to this passage from Orenstein's book:

if you believe the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, we avoid the Grimms' grimness at our peril. His classic book The Uses of Enchantment argues that the brothers' gore is not only central to the tales' appeal, it's crucial to kids' emotional development. [...] According to Bettelheim, fairy tales and only fairy tales--as opposed to myths or legends--tap into children's unconscious preoccupations with such knotty issues as sibling rivalry or the fear of an omnivorous mother. In their tiny minds, the fearsome giant may be transformed into the school bully, a menacing wolf into a neighbor's put bull. Fairy tales demonstrate that hardship may be inevitable, but those who stand fast emerge victorious. What's more, he wrote, the solutions to life's struggles that fairy tales suggest are subtle, impressionistic, and therefore more useful than either the spoon-fed pap that passes for kiddie "literature" these days or the overly concrete images of television (and now the Internet). He goes so far as to say that without exposure to fairy tales a child will be emotionally stunted, unable to create a meaningful life. 

This speaks to me of the same issues I looked at above. Children may not be able to work through or understand all the nuance of the darker stories, but perhaps in the end that will be part of their appeal, part of what keeps drawing one back to them. What we acquire without effort is often not valued highly or really internalized.

There's surely something to be said for "age appropriate" material, but being sensitive to that probably shouldn't mean avoiding darker, more difficult material that is more challenging for children and adults as well. In the end, our job as parents is to prepare our children for life, and "Therefore, since the world has still / Much good, but much less good than ill," part of our job is to prepare our children for the difficult realities, and we can't do that without some exposure to the darker side of life, and stories allow them--and us--to do that in a safe(r) manner.

Your thoughts?

Kids say the darndest things

I realized the other day that although my daughter counts "1-2-3-5," she has no problem with "11-12-13-14." I posted this on Facebook, and several other parents said that their children had trouble with four as well. Coincidence, or gap between the language and the way our brains are wired?

A few nights ago, while I was giving her a bath, our daughter said what sounded like "fungicide." I was startled not only because it's a big word for a little girl but also because, well, when the heck would she have heard "fungicide" from any of the adults she's around or during the limited TV she's exposed to? When I asked her to repeat what she said, it definitely sounded like "fungicide." She repeated it a few times, but it wasn't until she said "cumicide" that it clicked: "It's the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Come inside it's fun inside!"

She's not just a sponge for things she hears on TV, however. Ever since she was traveling in the car with mama and saw someone making an illegal turn, our daughter has been saying "What the deuce?" This sometimes causes confusion when her grandmother turns to chastising Lauren for the language her granddaughter has learned instead of getting her some juice ("want juice").

On a toy boat she has, there's a captain who she spontaneously named "Captain Pete." She carries Pete around almost as much as Mickey, Minnie, or Donald. Lauren did not appreciate my serenade of our daughter with "Captain Pete will get you high tonight!" especially when Thea started chanting "Captain Pete get high!" Lauren wasn't happy with me, so I determined to correct my error: "No, no, Thea. It's Captain Jack who gets you high." So I think we're all good.

We are, fortunately, still ahead of a friend of mine. When his children were young, the family had some sheep (he'd grown up with farm animals and wanted his kids to as well). They had five good sheep and one nasty one, which is how farm animals often come to you, I understand. A neighbor guy did their shearing, a real down-to-earth back-woods type who grew an unkempt beard, rarely showered, and frequently used colorful language. He also frequently struggled with that big, nasty sheep. He'd get the sheep ready to shear and then the thing would violently extract itself from him and he'd yell at it: "Fine! Go your own way, you son of a bitch!" One Sunday after church--oh, did I mention this friend was a minister?--they had some people over to dinner. After eating, they went out to see the animals, and that big, nasty sheep came running at them, at which point his 3-year-old daughter yelled "Get away you son of a bitch!"

So yeah. We haven't had anything like that yet. So I think we're all good.

State of the Baby

So. Here's where our daughter is at 14 1/2 months old.

Our efforts at sign language were limited, and thus her signing vocabulary is similarly limited: "please" and "all done" are the bread and butter of her self-expression. Verbally, she can say "mama" and "dada" (thought that sometimes also means "diaper") and "ra-ra," her nanny Rhonda. "Nah-nah" means she wants to nurse, though I think she also uses it to mean that she's distressed and wants comfort, because she doesn't always take what she was apparently asking for.

Her favorite toys are mommy's or daddy's iPod, followed by mommy's phone and daddy's phone, followed by Beaker's food and water. We put our phones in Airplane mode to minimize the damage, but the corollary to that is that we miss calls because our phones are essentially off-line. She loves to dump Beaker's food all over the floor, she loves to food Beaker one piece of food at a time, she loves helping to fill Beaker's food dish, and she especially loves slapping her hand down in Beaker's water dish. The corollary to this is that Beaker's food and water dishes spend a lot of time up on the table, which translates to a thirsty pup sometimes. She's getting better at asking for her water, though, or I'm getting better at interpreting.

Of her actual toys, she loves books--and recognizes many of them by name--and she loves her plastic tea set. There's something delightfully archaic about the whole idea of a tea set, as though we need to train our daughter for the proper etiquette of a tea party with persons of quality and need to get an early start. But she does love the different pieces. She likes stirring her cups and bowls with the spoons, and she even pretends to drink. "Cheers" is still more than a little dicey. At other times, though, she just loves the tea set as something that makes noise and can be dumped out of--and put back into--its container. Just as she can happily stir her imaginary tea or soup, she can also ignore the function and appreciate it as objects to be manipulated: out of the box, in the box, out, in (mostly out, though, to judge by our living room at any given moment).

She's walking around like a champ. She still falls over sometimes, but she does pretty darned well. With the nicer weather we had last week, she's gotten outside a lot more. She loves going out, and there's another word she knows: out. If I ask Beaker if she needs to potty outside, our two-legged daughter will be making a bee-line for the door, before the dog has even answered the question. If anyone's going out, she wants to go with them. She knows what "shoes" and "socks" are when we tell her she needs them to go outside. She loves walking around outside, but she's a little yucked out by the ground. It's just so... dirty. If she falls down, she has no desire to put her hands down to push herself up. It's like she's looking for somewhere clean to put her hands, can't find it, so her hands just sort of hover there and she fails to get back up. She also likes holding Beaker's leash, although she only seems to make that demand of mommy.


She loves to tease Beaker. She'll take Beaker's ball and then run away, to hide behind the recliner or on the other side of a parent. She'll hold the ball out and then pull it back when Beaker goes for it. Like I said, a tease. Much of the time, she's a happy, smiley baby. No one, and I mean no one, can get her laughing quite like mommy can. Even--at least sometimes--when she's crying.

She's not the easiest when it comes time to go to bed. She pretty much needs mommy in order to fall asleep, which can be awfully difficult for mommy, both because she tends to have more "take home" work than I do and because she tends to fall asleep with her in the process and re-rise only with difficulty. Part of the problem is that it can take an hour or more to get her to sleep, which not only a big chunk of the evening by itself but also raises the likelihood of falling asleep together.

All in all, we're happy happy parents of a happy baby. We all have our ups and downs, but life is good.

Lacking training and qualifications: procrastination, anxiety, stress and meditation

I recently had a student come to me fairly distraught. He's stressed out, he can't sleep, he can't stop procrastinating, which makes him more stressed and sleepless in the end, all of which adds up to make him very unhappy. My heart goes out to this young man, and I wish there was more I could do for him. He's already receiving help from psychologists, psychiatrists, and pharmacists, so there's no easy referral here. In a very real sense, I'm not professionally trained or qualified to help him... except in fairly anecdotal ways, essentially "here's what's work for me (or someone I know)" or "here's what I'd try if I was in your shoes." Somehow, in the face of such difficulties, that seems insufficient.

Attacking the problems individually, I started with procrastination. Part of me thinks that there must be some very excellent book out there about procrastination, because I don't think I've known very many students--going all the way back to my own student days--who didn't struggle with procrastination. Most adults I know struggle with procrastination; so do I. I'm not sure whether that makes me well-qualified or poorly qualified to give advice, but that's how it goes. Although I have previously (not to students!) defined excessive alcohol consumption the same way, I compared procrastination to a a loan on future happiness at a high rate of interest. It's probably a bad metaphor for a high school student, since they haven't really dealt with debt yet, but whatever. The point is that as good as it may feel in the moment to avoid his homework in the moment on Friday and Saturday and Sunday morning and afternoon, it's going to feel far worse when he's stressed out Sunday night, when he can't sleep because he has to stay up late or ends up feeling overwhelmed, than it would have felt to bite the bullet and do the work earlier (and yes, I realize that procrastination doesn't always or for all people come to such a bad end--for many of us most of the time it's more of an inconvenience, but I was speaking to his experience, after all).

He acknowledged that all of this made sense, but said he "just couldn't" stop procrastinating. So we talked about strategies for minimizing distractions. I suggested that procrastination isn't a state of being, it's an action. I do understand the feeling of "can't," but at the same time, in most cases, I don't think it's as hopeless as all that. Procrastination is an action and a habit, and I suspect the key is to replace it with a different, more positive habit--which gets us back to minimizing distractions, setting a schedule for yourself to spend time working earlier rather than later, and then just doing it. Sometimes easier said than done, but there it is.

And I also recommended to him to look into meditation. He said to me that the only time he can relax is when he is asleep--a state that he can't actually reach that easily without pharmaceutical help, which has its own problems. So we talked about meditation, not because I'm an expert on meditation or can scientifically justify it (though I do know there's been some positive research around meditation), but because I think it works. Honestly, I can't really remember being as emotionally volatile as all that, but then I've been practicing meditation to a greater or lesser degree for a long, long time. We talked about focusing on the breath, about how meditation ultimately isn't, at least to start, about not thinking but about focusing on something that's basically neutral. You count your breathing, say for instance inhale on a four count and exhale on an eight count. The mind, for most people, is always focused on something, so the focus we demand of it is on repetitive numbers and the sensations of breathing.

And I told him that it very well may not work for him, but he should give it a try and then try it again and again and again. Because ultimately I guess I believe less that "meditation only works for some people" and more that "meditation works, but it takes practice to become any good at it." And let me be the first to admit that I'm no Zen master. I don't meditate for hours--or even half hours!--every day or even every week, but even without that level of doing it, I've still found it to be helpful. So, lacking professional training or qualifications, I offered him what I've seen work, because that's what I had to offer. Ultimately, I'm not sure that's much different than what the professionals do, at least in the sense that there's not one "right" way to help someone work things out for himself (which is what is ultimately needed), and so they, too, try to help the person gain some insights and to acquire some tools for managing the stresses they face. As long as I don't claim to be some kind of guru with the answers and as long as I don't recommend anything way out, I guess I'm safe enough, though whether I'm actually helping is another question. Obviously, I hope the answer is yes, but the best any of us can do is a good-faith effort.

Being respected vs. being liked

At the military school where I work, we have periodic "makes" for the cadets to be promoted in rank and/or changed in position. This can be a tough time for the boys who don't get the position they had hoped to get, because there are more boys than there are positions. Although we try to move people around to different positions, we also try to run something of a meritocracy, putting boys in positions that are not just good for them but also for the unit.

Without going into the details of it, one of the issues that came up is that some boys in the unit are well liked by their peers but not well respected. That is to say, the cadet in question may make them laugh or be "a good guy," but for one reason or another, they don't respect him. And when I look around, I see a number of guys like that.

This dichotomy came up again recently in a meeting with my fellow counselors. We had been asked to read an article about how peer pressure affected teens, causing them to take more risky behavior--and an important point here was that the pressure wasn't even of the "hey, you should do this" variety, it was the sort of pressure that exerts itself merely by the subject being watched by his or her peers. In other words, they are trying to conform to what they think will make their peers like them. In a more anecdotal bit, the article noted that "some real-world driving data suggests that teenage boys take more risks behind the wheel when one or more boys are in the car, but drive more carefully if they are with a girlfriend." In other words, it's not so much that teens automatically influence each other negatively but that the perceived expectations of what will impress one's peers has an effect.

What I see at my school is that we have competing ideas of cool, and I think what it boils down to is the difference between being liked and being respected. Some kids are desperate to be liked, to be "cool," and they tend to express that through making jokes (sometimes when they should be more serious), through putting others down, through risky behavior, etc. At the same time, our military system puts an emphasis on character and virtue, and so there exists as well a competing set of values that amount to respect, and this is based on showing good character, on doing one's job, on showing respect to others, and the like. These aren't completely separate, of course: kids may well try to have it both ways and may find a way to succeed.

In a sense, perhaps they always are. Depending on who they're around or how broadly they're thinking at any given moment, aren't most kids trying to please multiple constituencies: their friends, their teachers, their parents, their minister or priest, etc? They may weight different people differently and not even try to impress some of them at all, but I think it's fairly common. That's why, of course, parents don't see their children the same way that their peers do or they way their teachers do: because the kids are not showing everyone the same thing. It's not just kids, of course: we all show different sides of ourselves in different situations.

Given this, perhaps my dichotomy of being liked vs. being respected is too simplistic, but it still seems like a valid distinction, and I want to take it further to suggest that a mark of maturity is that we become more concerned with being respected than with being liked. The two are not mutually exclusive, but it's important to recognize that, well, sometimes they are. Putting it in the context of teaching, one might be very well liked by a class if one were to assign very little homework, give high grades, and do very little real work in class, but the teacher would not be well respected. Not all students make the distinction, I realize, but enough do. In fact, many students are pretty discerning: respect is also not conferred just for being difficult. In the case of teaching, things like fairness, accessibility and helpfulness, clarity of explanations and expectations, knowledge of content, not giving mere busy work: all of these things and more go into whether a teacher is respected. My point, though, is not to go into the particulars but just to note that a mature person in teaching or any other profession will be more concerned with being respected than with being liked.

Even as I type this, however, I know there are fields where this is not necessarily true: where being liked, being chummy with one's superiors, is actually more important than doing a good job, of striving for respect. But the fact that some institutions are broken and allow people with under-developed character into powerful positions does not change the greater importance that a mature person of character will place on respect over mere likability, and those of us who are involved in the education of children either as teachers or as parents should be working to help them move toward that more mature basis for judging themselves and their peers. The more we do so, the greater the extent to which they will form subcultures that push their members in exactly that direction. Which, of course, makes our jobs a lot easier.

Babies are not bicycles

Babies are not bicyles. Really, I know that. But sometimes, metaphorically, I've wished Thea was, because the thing we know about bicycles is this: once you've learned how to ride one, you never forget and--what's more important in this context--how to ride a bicycle never changes.
Lauren and I are way up in Rockford, IL, where Lauren is coaching our Quiz Bowl team at a tournament. I came along so that Thea wouldn't spend 30-ish hours away from mama. This morning, the Quizbowlers left at 7:40 CST while Thea and I stayed at the motel, watching Sporscenter and alternately eating and ripping apart a breadstick to scatter crumbs on the floor, perhaps for the birds.

The reason we stayed behind was so that, we hope, Thea could get a nap this morning. Babies, after all, need their naps, or they get cranky. No one wants a cranky baby at a Quiz Bowl tournament, no one wants to go shopping for Christmas presents with a cranky baby. Around 9, which would be around 10 back home, and a perfectly reasonable nap time for Thea, she started to get a little fussy, maybe a little tired, so I decided to put her down for a nap.

Except, you see, that I realized that I've barely put her down for a nap for the past four months. I used to do this all the time--I used to be the Nap Master! For those months when I was a stay-at-home dad and Lauren was back at school teaching, I had this down. But now that I've gone back to work and we've got a nanny who comes in each day, not only are my nap-inducing skills a bit rusty, but the old tricks don't work! She's, you know, grown and changed! Who let that happen? Who decreed that 11-month-olds should be so different in their napping ways than 3-month-olds?

Even when I was in the groove, there were times when I just wanted her to "be rational," by which I didn't mean that I expected her to take up chess and discourse with me on philosophy (though she's welcome to take up either of those pasttimes any time now). By "be rational," I meant that I wanted her to be predictable. I wanted to be able to follow steps A, B, and C to get result D, every time.

This was true for me even though I also had read Dr. Sears, agreed with Dr. Sears, and knew that this time of her life isn't about me, it's about her. Not my needs, baby, but thine. Easy to say, not always so easy to live, but we've tried.

Not only was putting her down for a nap this morning difficult because of the aforementioned rustiness and changes, but she was also absolutely fascinated by a new place. That's why she wouldn't eat breakfast out in the motel eating area--too much going on! too many people to see! And of course, there are our black-out curtains at home compared to the light-in curtains here. I wasn't sure I would ever get her down for a nap this morning.

I hoped I might induce some kind of sympathetic response: either that she would sense how much I myself wanted to take a nap and want one herself (the viral yawn theory of baby napping) or that she would sense how much I wanted her to nap and give in, but that's not how babies work, sadly. They're not the most sympathetic creatures on the planet. No dice in that approach, but I kept trying everything I knew, everything I could think of.

In the midst of all this, she did something amazing: she kissed me. Okay, I know that doesn't sound amazing, but because my beard is scratchy, she usually wriggles away when I kiss her or claws at her face (get it off! get it off!!). Instead, she leaned in for a kiss, pulled back with a smile when I'd kissed her, leaned in again, and repeated the whole thing several times. It was so sweet, and nothing like how she's ever gone down for a nap before. A few minutes later, she fell asleep in my arms.

So yeah, scratch all that stuff I said earlier--who needs a bicyle? Not the fishes and not me.

Parenting Addicts?

A friend's blog had an interesting collection of thoughts today on parenthood, four months in. I always love reading their take on parenthood, whether Ben or his wife Erin is writing, because they either have a male, younger version of our daughter, or else there's a lot that universal about parenting and they just say it all so well. One of the things Ben touched on today was an article in Slate by Shankar Vedantam called "Parents Are Junkies: If parenthood sucks, why do we love it? Because we're addicted." I'll quote some of the same passages Ben did, because they're just that perfectly representative:

Parents spend endless hours commiserating with one another about the travails of parenthood. Yet when researchers present data about children and unhappiness, parents rise up in protest. Research may depict parenthood as a bile-inducing, rage-fueling, stress-producing ordeal, but parents tell us that becoming parents is the best thing they ever did. Nonparents write off this reaction as defensiveness—if you've screwed up by having a kid and don't want to admit it, you pretend to be happy—but parents regularly choose to have more than one child. If parenthood were as subjectively awful as the objective research implies, wouldn't all parents stop at one child? It's one thing to claim that a stubbed toe doesn't hurt, and quite another to aim a second kick at the chair.

Parents, I would argue, are hardly unique in spending hours commiserating about the travails of what they do: ever hang out with teachers? We talk about the kids. If you get a bunch of people from the office together, I bet they complain about the stupid people who call customer service or the middle-management boss who can't deal with people, rarely gets caught doing his job, and picks his nose semi-discretely (but obviously not enough so that it isn't an open secret). In short, anyone who has someone to commiserate with about work, does. And there are a lot of parents out there. In any case, there's a fair point to be made there. The article continues:

Parenting is a grind, and most parents are stressed out much more than they are happy. But when parents think about parenting, they don't remember the background stress. They remember the cuddle and the kiss. Parenting is a series of intensely high highs, followed by long periods of frustration and stress, during which you go to great lengths to find your way back to that sofa and that kiss.

We have a name for people who pursue rare moments of bliss at the expense of their wallets and their social and professional relationships: addicts.

Hmmm. I see what he's getting at, but I just don't quite buy it (yeah, I know--the first step is admitting you have a problem, right?). To me, it's not that parenting, in particular, has a lot of frustrations, disappointments, stresses, and heart-break, along with occasional rewards--that's life. Could it be that we've got it so good in the Twenty-first Century that real life looks strange to us? That we expect life to be one big amusement park, a brave new world where we take the good and avoid/ignore the bad?

Once, growing up more or less meant taking on the responsibilities of a job, a family, a place in society or your community, dealing with hard realities, and finding meaning--and joy--in the midst of it. Increasingly growing up seems to mean just getting older and getting a job to get more toys. We're not junkies, we're grown-ups (I've written before, elsewhere, about how getting married and having children are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for becoming mature, so I'll let that gross generalization stand). Ben wasn't talking about this precisely, but he was right to write that "All of the things we did before we became parents were fun. Now all the things we do as parents are fulfilling, and fun, in different ways." Fun is nice, but fulfillment is where we really touch life.

But maybe that's just the addiction talking. Maybe I'm just too far gone....