Light and Momentary

Knock Knock

    Who's there?

Interrupting cow.

    [raised eyebrow, because I know (and love) that joke]

Go on--

    Interrupting c--

Moooo! Knock knock.

    Who's there?

Interrupting coefficient of friction.

    Interrupting c--

Muuuuuu!

Small Freedoms Redux

So it turns out that the preschool teachers got burned last year. A mother brought her child to school on a chilly day without a jacket, which the teachers took to mean that she didn't think a jacket was needed. Jacketless, the child went outside to play. The mother went ballistic when she found out.

This is our fourth year at this preschool (Joe went there before Pete was old enough) and I have been so pleased with it. The director has five children; she's pretty much unflappable. She loves God and she loves kids and she sets a great tone for the teachers. That's part of why I was surprised by the conversation I had with Pete's teacher on Tuesday -- she's not usually autocratic like that. I wondered if something else was going on.

Pete and I sat down with Miss Barb for a chat this morning when I dropped him off. I had told him that he always needed to listen respectfully to his teachers, and that usually he had to obey them. I had told him that sometimes he might say, "Could we negotiate?" if he and a teacher had a difference of opinion -- that maybe he could have offered to carry the jacket outside and lay it on the bench in case he got cold. (With this nauseating Roman Polanski story in the news, I will not suggest to my children that they owe unswerving obedience to any adult. Not that saying no did that poor girl much good.)

Miss Barb was fine with "Could we negotiate?" and very sympathetic to my point of view; she just didn't want to be in the line of fire if another mother had a cow. I assured her there was no cow-bearing in the offing. Pete wore a sweatshirt today of his own volition. I think we're good.

Small Freedoms

My kids pick their own clothes. I provide input sometimes and on rare occasions make demands (mostly about dress-up clothing), but in general I figure it is a good way for them to exercise autonomy and to make cheap mistakes. Barbara Coloroso, who wrote one of my favorite parenting books, says that if you let kids make mistakes when they're cheap, they're less likely to make costly mistakes down the line. So hey -- you want to wear shiny green shorts with a red striped top? Be my guest.

This morning Pete agreed that he wouldn't wear a tank top, but he insisted on wearing a T-shirt and shorts. We stepped outside for the walk to preschool and he said, "You're right, Mom! [<-three of my favorite words] It's chilly out here." Not chilly enough to change, he said, so off we went.

We're having lovely early fall weather here, cool nights and warm days. I didn't worry about Pete's attire for a minute, but when I picked him up the teacher asked to speak to me privately. Before the class went outside she had insisted that he put on a jacket -- one of the extras they keep at the preschool. He had declined, saying he didn't mind the chill and he didn't want to wear someone else's jacket. She said, no, really, you have to wear the jacket. He burst into tears. He said he wasn't going outside if he had to wear someone else's jacket. Down he sat, and there he stayed until I arrived.

I am a little puzzled by her reaction. I am feeling guilty, because (a) every other child in the class had brought a jacket and (b) I was five minutes late for pick-up. Underneath the guilt, though, is a conviction that a 4yo can make a reasonable choice about whether to wear a jacket on a day like today. I can see taking a firm stand on a 20-degree day, but today? really? That's not the hill I'm going to die on. (NB: I have never sent a child out in shorts on a 20-degree day. Temps in the low sixties today.)

She seems to view it pretty differently, though. Stay tuned. And tell me, please, what you think about kids and clothes.

Good Try

2nd grader: This math is too easy.

4th grader: Well, then, try some harder math. What's 2i + 2i?

2nd grader: 4?

4th grader: [attempt to explain the distributive property omitted here] Don't you know about i? What's the square root of negative 1?

2nd grader: Negative 42!

Yorick, Now With Bling

I think it was Karen Edmisten who talked about having special outings with mom that were actually trips to the grocery store, an idea I would have adopted if I did the grocery shopping for our family. Instead I am inviting a boy or two to come along for other errands -- last night to Lowe's (where the customer service was so awful that I bought nothing on my list, even the things I was able to find in that cavernous refuge for clueless and unhelpful teenagers, but we still had a nice time chatting as we wandered through the aisles) and tonight to Michael's. I am trying to get caught up on putting pictures into albums, which is not (as I may have mentioned once or twice before) my favorite thing. I ordered pictures from Snapfish earlier this summer, and put them in chronological order earlier this week, and I needed to buy that stupid scrapbooky double-sided tape so I could stick them down on album pages after the requisite hand-wringing about how much I dislike the sticking-down part.

I told the boys they could look around on their own while I was trying to find my stuff; they had a good time with the Halloween decorations. (On August 26! I ask you, what are the Halloween decorations doing on display in August? I do not approve.) "I want to find some plastic weapons," said Marty the 9yo. "Why are there no weapons here?" I offered him three different sets of pink and purple stickers instead -- perhaps the ones with a sparkly magic wand? or the ones with a dress with a nice big bow? or the ones with high-heeled pink slippers? I'd never noticed how much girly stuff predominates there, perhaps because I'd never gone to Michael's in search of plastic weapons.

He never did find weapons, but he found a skull covered with silver beads. He held it up at arm's length and apostrophized it. "To be or not to be," he started in -- and kept going! I have no idea where he picked it up. Motherhood is full of surprises. Sometimes they are the "who stuck this chewing gum under the couch?" kind of surprise. But sometimes they are much more pleasant, like posting about being a quirky kid who memorized poetry for fun and then discovering a similar quirk, hitherto unsuspected, in one of the boys.

The Ribbon-Chaser

When Stella was tiny I would lay her on my legs while I prayed the Office of Readings.

I am observing a moment of silence for those days.

Underwater

Yesterday afternoon I took the kids to the pool.

Peonies

When I called to tell her that Joe was finally going to be born, seven years ago today, my friend Shannon brought me a peony from her garden. It had been tightly furled just that morning, she said, and now it was blooming beautifully. She wanted me to have the visual, so I could think "open open open" through my labor.

Our peonies have been blooming, spilling forth that same luscious pink. I can't look at them without thinking of Joe's birth, which might well have been the finest day of my life so far. It was my first homebirth and I was astonished at how joyful it was. Of course birth is joyful wherever it happens, but I did not know there could be so much joy in the process, joy in the laboring.

It was hard. He was 9#12 and his head was gigantic. But it was my pain and I was not afraid of it. (No matter how much it hurt, when it was over I wasn't going to be pregnant anymore. I was very tired of being pregnant.) I remember using a technique from Birthing from Within in which I tried to ride the pain, like a surfer. I remember seeing kaleidoscopic colors when I closed my eyes; I remember wave after tremendous wave. 

I also remember a confidence that was absent in my two hospital births. I was on my own turf on a glorious day in late spring, there with a doctor I trusted and a dear friend as well as my husband. We laughed all day long -- that's what I wrote about it when it was all over. I said I wanted to live my life, and eventually die my death, the way I had gone through that day -- "with courage and laughter even in the hardest places."

In each of my pregnancies I have asked the Blessed Mother to intercede for my unborn baby and me. Joe came along in late August, on one of the feasts of St. John the Baptist, and so for months I had prayed daily for the intercession of Our Lady of the Visitation. How fitting, then, to wake up in labor on her feast day. I still ask daily for the intercession of Our Lady of the Visitation, in hopes that my children will recognize the hidden presence of Christ whenever they encounter it -- that they might see the truth of their redemption written plainly in unexpected places.

That's what I think of when I see those tightly closed peony buds. You would not guess that they could contain such extravagant beauty, and yet they do. Tonight I am wishing my Joe -- my seven-year-old Joe -- a year full of joy and beauty, hidden in unexpected places.

Yet Another Conversation

Pete was snuggled up next to me. "Mama," he said slowly, "when I grow up and move away from you--"

    "Yes, darling?"

Eyes filling up and overflowing, he finished, "--I will miss you."

Conversations

"Mom, can you help me figure out how to be paler?"

    "Why do you want to be paler?"

"So I can look like a computer genius who spends all his time inside writing code."

    "What if you just work on learning a lot about computers?"

"No, what I want is to be paler."

***

"Why do I have to pick up Legos while my brothers get to sit down and read?"

    "They'll pick up Legos in a few minutes. You have to take the first shift, because they did their downstairs picking-up tasks cheerfully and you gave me trouble."

"Trouble?! I did not give you trouble. I made a perfectly logical argument which you failed to follow."

    [inwardly]: BOGGLE

This is what bad planning looks like

Pete's birthday sneaked up on me. I said I'd take cake to preschool for snacktime at 9:45, and failed to do the math to figure out what time I'd need to start.  I borrowed Alex's fan to cool the cakes, but the cord wouldn't reach the dining room table. That's why they're in the floor.

I set out butter last night so it would be soft for the cakes, but forgot about butter for the frosting. Ten minutes before snacktime I was microwaving frozen butter and then chilling the mixing bowl in a big bowl of ice water so the frosting wouldn't slide off the cake.

I think it turned out all right, though. And when I got there at 9:53, the kids were listening to a story, not lined up with their forks, waiting for me with accusatory looks on their little faces.

Not Just for Breakfast

Have you seen that tip that's all over the internet, the one that says you can throw a handful of spinach in a smoothie and your kids will be none the wiser?

Ha! I say. Ha!

My New Year's resolutions have fallen by the wayside (good thing Lent is coming), but I decided this morning to do better. I was going to make a blenderful of delicious nutrient-packed smoothie for breakfast, and I thought I'd try the spinach trick.

Now my boys are reasonably adventurous eaters, but spinach for breakfast -- in a smoothie -- is just not going to fly. (Maybe in an omelet, but not in a smoothie.) I was trying to add the spinach stealthily, on top of the fruit and underneath the plain yogurt. My oldest kept wandering in and out and I would jump to interpose my body between the blender and his line of sight so he wouldn't say "Spinach? Smoothie? That's disgusting." Usually I let the frozen fruit sit for a few minutes so the blender doesn't have to work as hard, but the vigilance got too exhausting so I cranked up the motor.

I blended, and blended, and blended, but the small green bits would not disappear. I added more frozen strawberries, all I could grab from a bag of mixed fruit, but there wasn't enough pink to disguise the green flecks. I poured Pete a speckled glass. "Yum!" he said, but I knew the older boys would be more discriminating. I needed some blueberries, or something dark, but we had nothing in the freezer.

Cocoa! Chocolate smoothie! Who doesn't love a little chocolate in the morning? I added a tablespoon of cocoa powder, and then another, but we still had an RSVP (Recalcitrant Spinach Visibility Problem). Suddenly I noticed that the blender was spraying out green-flecked brown droplets from behind. The bottom had started leaking and I had a mess on my hands. I threw paper towels at it and served up my sludgy concoction.

I said brightly, "Look, guys, chocolate smoothie!"

They replied skeptically, in unison: "Chocolate?" Alex tasted it and said, "Could I make myself a bagel?" Marty tasted it and said, "Me too?" Joe didn't even want to try it. Who knew that chocolate would cause more nose-wrinkling than spinach?

At 7:45 I am more interested in getting them fed than in broadening their culinary horizons, so I sighed heavily and let them get bagels. I am, however, far too cheap to pour out my sludge, so I am drinking it myself.

It might take awhile.

Anybody want to come over for some antioxidants?

Still Random But Happier

On Monday I started the year 1 transcripts and it became immediately evident that I would not meet my original goal of finishing morpheme analysis by the end of February. It was a relief, actually, to realize that I had to revise my schedule. Yesterday I had a phone conference with my advisor after the faculty meeting in which they review all the doc students' progress over the past year. I passed. She told me, in fact, that when my file came up, a few of the faculty joked that I should give out time management tips. (There are a couple of PhD students with one child, and one woman who has two children, but I am decidedly an oddity with my five. My only time management tips are to give away the TV and teach the kids to clean bathrooms and load the dishwasher.) We also talked for a while about what comes next. I am working on a timeline that she thinks is ambitious, but she also thought it was ambitious for me to try to get to candidacy before the baby arrived. I'd much rather be shooting for a goal that she thinks is optimistic than be told I needed to meet a deadline that seemed unrealistic to me. So that's good.

It's been almost three weeks since any baby pictures were posted on this blog, which is a situation that must be rectified. I call this one "Baby with Brothers and Laundry." (My MIL has been asking me to dress her in pink and take a picture. I never dress her in baby pink, you might remember, because I have always hated baby pink, but I finally obliged.) Here she is (still in pink! two whole pictures of her in pink!) with her oldest brother; here she is with the youngest. Joe and Pete made her a bed of stuffed animals, which she thought was intriguing and they thought was hilarious. Pete loves, LOVES to hold her and to be photographed holding her; she is sometimes uncertain that this is a good idea.

Alex is making sure that she'll know how to text-message before any of the other babies can do it. Pete's eyes are closed in this one but I love it anyway: he has his shirt hiked up too so he can nurse his baby, who shares his sister's name. I am realizing the 9yo is not in a single one of these recent pictures, which is another situation to rectify.

I was up late last night grading (late by postpartum standards, which is to say midnight), and that always jacks up the cranky potential for the next evening. I am going to go make onion soup, and fold laundry, and tidy up the living room. Which means I should end this post pronto. Catch you later.

Serenades

One of the things I have enjoyed most about the past five weeks is watching Joe with his little sister. He was the most visibly excited about the pregnancy of all the boys. Every night when I tucked him in, he asked eagerly whether he would be able to feel her moving as I lay beside him. Every night he sang her the Indiana Jones theme song, and when she fusses in the car these days, that's his automatic response. (His older brother sings the Star Wars theme at the same time. Feel free to draw your own conclusions about whether dueling movie themes sung over the noise of a wailing baby can actually serve to bring down the unhappiness level in the van.) Today, though, we were driving home and baby was protesting. "Quick!" said Pete the 3yo. "Sing the Indiana Jones theme song for her!"

I often sing the muffin man song to her, altered to "Oh, do you know the muffin girl?" and "Oh, she's the sweetest muffin girl...who lives at [conveniently anapestic house number]." Recently Joe was playing a fierce air guitar and belting out a song in his best imitation of a rock star voice. His lyrics: "Oh, yes, I know the muffin girl."

Coming soon to a radio station near you, I'm sure.

Overheard

From the 12yo boy too cool to kiss his mother, ever, to the sweet bundle on his shoulder: "Who's my favorite muffin girl, huh? Who's my favorite muffin girl? I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count." (I keep calling her muffin, maybe because she is warm and sweet and everyone thinks she is delicious.)

Snippets from Postpartumland

Joe: "Why is your belly so squishy?"

Marty, after a few days at Grandma's house: "Is it just me or did your breasts get a lot bigger?"

Pete, on the day my milk came in: "There is a lot of nonny." A minute later: "There is enough nonny for everybody."

Me, stirring the waffle batter this morning: "She must have an unbelievably huge diaper if I can smell it from another room." (Then it dawns on me that sometimes when you smell buttermilk, it's because you're actually smelling buttermilk.)

The Talk

Tonight I said, "We need to talk about this for five minutes and then we never have to talk about it again." He cried. Drama loomed. Drama is utterly counterproductive in a situation like this, because it encourages you to feel sorry for yourself ("my finches died and she's so unsympathetic") or adversarial ("how dare she suggest that I was responsible?") or other emotions that only get in the way of doing what you need to do. So I didn't take the bait. He said, "I know it was my fault."

I told him that he had an opportunity to let something good come from what had happened -- that it could be a spur to work on bad habits, to take a step toward being a person who does his duty cheerfully instead of avoiding it. I didn't want to do a lot of finger-pointing; I said, "We all struggle with sloth." (In thinking this over (and over and over) I have been acutely aware of my own willingness to walk past a mess that needs tidying, or an out-of-place object that needs to go back to its home.) I told him that I would love him no matter what mistakes he made, and that he never needed to be afraid to tell me he had made a mistake. But I urged him at the same time to let his mistakes teach him what he needed to do differently next time.

Once, years ago, I was avoiding something I needed to do and I said to Elwood, "I'm having one of those who-will-rescue-me-from-this-body-of-death moments." He had NO idea what I was talking about. I might have been speaking Croatian. But that passage from the end of Romans 7 speaks so clearly to me that I assumed he would have to know it: "I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want....For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self, but I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members." It is one of the central tensions of the Christian life. On the one hand, it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose; on the other, you can be more or less cooperative in that work. You can't tie yourself up in perfectionist knots, and you also can't kick back, reading a novel, and expect sanctifying grace to do all its work while you relax. I am bad at this balance, and so I am questioning my ability to teach it to my children.

Tonight I wanted to say two things to my son: you need to be more responsible, and I will love you unfailingly while you are learning how to do that. How I hope both halves of the message came through.

A Story

Once there was a boy whose teacher was giving away a pair of zebra finches.

Uncertain Compass

One of my sons has always challenged me more than the other three combined. For his whole life people have been telling me the key to dealing with him. He needs a smack on the behind. He needs his computer time taken away. He needs you to be more patient with him. He needs... something you're not giving him, is what it boils down to.

Many times I have wondered what a psychologist might make of him. When he was smaller, he struggled intensely enough with social issues and rigid behaviors that I was reasonably certain he could get a diagnosis on the Asperger's end of the autistic spectrum. I didn't think it would fit him at the time, and it's clearly not an appropriate diagnosis now, but I'm still willing to bet somebody would have applied the label. These days I wonder about oppositional defiant disorder.

I've never pursued a formal assessment. I'm not sure I want a DSM-IV label for him when maybe the best label for him is "intense and intermittently very difficult." I don't think I'd medicate a child without a clearer indication that it was needed (though I am wondering about a regimen of fish oil stealth smoothies). I suppose a therapist might be helpful, but he or she might also be one more voice with an easy answer. One more round of "he just needs"-- when I'm tired of hearing that there's an easy answer. I have never thought more about any problem than I have thought about how to provide effective, loving discipline for this child. I do not believe that I am overlooking an obvious solution. Some answers are not easy. Some things take time.

Today we had some trouble again, and I am feeling weary. The family member who says I'm too harsh was here along with the family member who says I need to yank privileges more aggressively, and they were both outspoken about what they thought should happen. The child in question went to bed angry, tearful, unrepentant. I hate that.

When I was pregnant with him I asked God not for an easy birth but for a birth that would teach me about holiness. This, my friends, is a prime example of "be careful what you pray for because you might get it." Lesson learned: holiness is really hard -- holiness and suffering are entwined. I was thinking about it a few weeks ago (since I'm in confessional mode: I was feeling a nudge from the Holy Spirit to pray about this birth in the same way and I was afraid to do it), and I felt that God was saying to me, "The difficulties you face in mothering this boy are still part of your path to holiness."

Perhaps if I were a nobler soul this would prompt me to embrace my lot wholeheartedly. Instead it makes me say, "Could I have fewer difficulties in mothering this boy and just be medium holy?

I know better. I am willing to walk this path. It just feels like a slog right now.

The title of this post comes from a song I never finished writing, a song begun when I was first getting conflicting advice about dealing with this child and his behavior issues. I felt like I was driving blind, steering by the uncertain compass of my heart. I am more confident these days: in thinking back over this afternoon, I can say that I was fair and calm and consistent.

But it still has left me tearful, and worn out, and unsure about what comes next.

Gels Gone Wild

Today is crazy hair day at the middle boys' school. This picture doesn't quite show the full Darth Maul effect that Joe requested -- you'll have to imagine it.