apparently

Sunday I had a childhood dream fulfilled, but better than I ever expected.

I do not like yard work. However my parents forced me to mow the lawn when I was a kid (they used the method of paying me to do it). As I walked slowly, slowly pushing the giant fume spewing machine, full of thoughts about whatever fantastic great sci-fi novel I was reading during my long breaks, I swore that I'd force my kids to mow as soon as they were tall enough.

Despite Bill Brown's advice that kids can be harnessed like sled dogs to a standard Sear's reel mower, I had resigned myself to a few more years of maintaining the lawn to my aesthetically low but environmentally medium standards. Sunday, however, motivated by angst over the end of school and a touch of boredom, my daughter found the idea of helping me a pleasant one. She even found the confidence to listen to and follow my advice on how to use a reel mower to cut very tall grass. It was so much fun as we ran forward and backed up and ran forward. Such an unsought for pleasure, and so much nicer than my 30 year old thought of forced mowing. Of course, her interest didn't hold out until we finished, but hey, neither did mine. But our bit of lawn that the neighbors can see is no longer quite bad enough to call the county over.

Posted by Chris at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am the admin for a listserv for parents in the area, and we've had a lot of pregnant people or people with tiny babies join. I always want to say, "You won't need anything from the listserv for a good few months (which will seem like a long time from now to you)." For the adults, the first while of parenting is nothing but a giant shock as you are sliced into smaller and smaller pieces, realizing the full import of twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, without end. And having the final say over an utterly helpless life for whom you would happily cut off your arm but with whom you cannot communicate. Fortunately at some point the infallible method to solve your apparent riddle becomes obvious.

I must explain it with a metaphor. If you imagine your normal energy or life force as water, and what we call our self as a bag of water which can be fuller or emptier, then the trick to kids is to take a knife out and slash the bag and pour out the water onto your family. When the water is gone and it is an easy day, it will be nap time or even bed time. Often, though, it will just be 2 in the afternoon. Then you just get out the handy kitchen knife and cut the bag into little pieces and hand them out (if you have three kids or great wisdom from some other source, you probably make paper boats or paper hats out of the pieces of bag). On your face is a smile and a gentle laugh at your old idea of being limited. At some point another day or another adult shows up, and before you even mull over what happened, there is within you a new bag of life force to pour out.

What this pouring of water out means varies as the situation demands. Sometimes a baby just needs to be held for a few days or weeks to help it adjust to the oddity of life out here. Sometimes their pinky toe is twisted by their cute little sock and you have to trust their crying is something important until you strip off all their clothes and find the poor little toe. Sometimes a traveling toddler just needs to hear a new story about the big mayor and the little elf and the flying carpet every 15 minutes until the flight is over. Once you see the solution to your situation, you either give in or try to compromise with it. Just set the baby down until it starts up again. Or "One story and then play with this truck for a while." Then soon the baby starts crying or kicking the seat in front and you then recognize that what seemed like a fear (of holding the baby upside down while walking around humming and dipping the head down and to the left every third beat for hours and hours with the baby protesting each break or telling stories until your head hurts from your amazing, unrecognized feat of literary output) was not your fear at all but your intuition showing you the way. And so you just do what is needed, walking or story telling as it may be (it's not always so active - sometimes it's just sitting and holding a baby; soon it's sitting and watching someone try a difficult task and offer nothing but attentive watching). You'll be tired also but really too tired to worry about fatigue, or at least once the work is flowing pretty well, and you start having worries about how tired you feel, you will have to stop because some new task has come up. Now it is time to carry the baby upside down humming and dipping every third beat, and also time to try to pick up and eat a bowl of now cold pasta so you can keep holding the baby rather than faint from hunger, but this picking up and eating is hard to do without interrupting the happy baby rhythm. But you manage. You learn how to see what this baby needs and what you actually need (which is surprisingly little but not nothing), and you get practiced in doing those things because by God they need doing.

And the next time you are awake while the child sleeps, you sit, tired, uncertain and so pleased, and know you will find a full bag of life force waiting just when it is needed. Some people will get mad at my description here, and I know most parents with most babies can't avoid crying babies and can't avoid doing things that in retrospect were obvious errors. My point isn't that you give until you hurt yourself; it is that when you need to give, you will know how to give and you can give. It just pours out. Children give you super powers.

In my world, coffee helps too :)

Posted by Chris at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just went to the first summer playgroup at my son's upcoming pre-school. To compare it to two things I have absolutely no experience with, it seemed sort of like a combination between speed dating, "Hi, I'm Chris, that giant laughing boy is mine, where do you live? Whoops, gotta go chase him..." and an arranged marriage, "So, I guess I'll be seeing a lot of you."

The excitement of meeting these parents and children that we'll know so well in a year (this school is a cooperative school, one paid teacher and three parents in each class room, so the cooping parent really knows all the kids and the other cooping parents) was diluted by the presence of an active back-hoe operation in the park we were at, and the presence of a number of neighborhood friends that my son played with in lieu of the new people for the first 40 minutes or so. Despite the back-hoe and the old friends, my son played with a few of the new people, and said a big jolly good-bye to almost everyone when they were leaving. All the other parents seemed like they will be good people to co-op with.

My son did of course hit one child, and then burst into shrieks when told not to do that by the other parent, but they then seemed to reconcile as well as can be expected. The other child did not fearfully avoid my son after the incident, much to my relief. My son fell asleep in about 12 minutes of the nap drive (since the beginning of first grade, he only falls asleep for a nap by driving around, sigh). All in all an auspicious beginning to our three year journey of pre-school.

Posted by Chris at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's a card I saw recently that said: "There's just two words to remember about Zen: Not always so." I think it's pointing to the fact that no a priori words or rules are always going to capture the correct thing to do in a given situation. But that also applies to parenting.

Today was the last day of first grade for my daughter, which has turned into the sad end of a bittersweet week. On the one hand, she and I and the whole family and indeed anyone that interacts with us on a regular basis will benefit from our ability to let go of our rush and drift awake, drift through breakfast, and drift outside into the lovely world begging to teach us things not found in school books.

On the other hand, she will miss a teacher of transcendent greatness, who wove positive enthusiasm into academic achievement, and capped it off with an excellent society of first graders. (My daughter's birthday is towards the end of the school year, so at her birthday party we always have the fascinating pleasure of seeing our daughter and her class mates playing after they've become a cohesive unit.)

In celebration of this transition, the rules about TV have given way to asking, "Why not?" Even our strict morning routine has become lax (with a series of faster and faster runs to school to compensate). This morning, we slipped to driving her to school, with not even the pretense of an errand to run immediately following. It just seemed right to show the end of our long struggle to meet the expectations of first grade. And hey, she asked to drive (showing her uncanny ability to know just when I'm ripe for breaking the rules.)

(I can't really believe how dreary I make the school year sound, but let me tell you Montgomery County Public Schools starts off with very hard work. They are doing things we didn't do until much older, and doing them for long motionless hours. During the school year, we really just get through each day, rushing much of the time. Rushing to bed for those crucial hours of sleep. Rushing to school. Rushing my toddler son to get his nap before we rush back to school. Rush home for dinner, so we can rush to bed. Did we do the homework yet?)

Our toddler recently gave up his binky (pacifier), but then he also gave up his naps, so we went back to the binkies, and the naps re-appeared. Twice, we've done this sort of crazy thing (going 18 days with no binky then giving it back) that I'd swear I'd never be a part of, but he's happy. So what if he'll be using the binky when he's five?

As far as types of child care arrangements go, we've had a foot in every camp just about. Bits of one parent quitting jobs, bits of both parents working part time, bits in a nanny share, bits of dropping the kid off at day care and then racing to work so we can race back 2 minutes before they start charging extra. Bits of working from home on a conference call with a child bored of watching Kipper for the third time climbing my head. (You can imagine that I was strongly against some of these methods of child care. But as it all works out in a jumbled rush towards the future, so far none of them have ruined it all, unlike a laundry error.)

If we were forced to enunciate our ideas about what we'd be doing as parents, I'm pretty sure each one of them has been violated at some point or another. Plastic, my lord we have a lot of plastic. In a moment of weakness (or is it taking advantage of what is at hand?), I gave my son a Mentos to sit down in the car seat without arguing two days ago.

There's a few things that I'm embarrassed about, like a few playdates I won't describe, but mostly when I think that crossing some line of purity is going to ruin things, I find that it not nearly as big a deal as I thought it would be. Fine, eat ice cream at home instead of virtuously walking to the ice cream store, I think, angrily. But what could be lovelier than eating ice cream at home with my favorite people in the world?

So today we drove to school on a warm day and then watched hours of TV. It was fun! We had two dinners, without worrying about a "properly structured family dinner experience" (you must imagine that to be thought in a gruff voice of moral expertise). When my daughter was rude to adults, I just said, "She's very sad about school ending" instead of thinking of some clever way to force niceness or at least decentness out of her.

Not that I won't be frowning at some laxness or other in the upcoming days. But today was, if not fun (on account of her sadness), the right day to celebrate laxness.

Posted by Chris at 10:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There's a lot of press about mommy wars and the divisions among parents, but the press always seems to miss the essential issues.

Sure, my stay at home friends and I occasionally marvel at the families with two working parents, but really we all know that the best thing varies for different folks. I think everyone that stays at home with kids knows that it is a very hard task, and that respect should be paid when people state that they couldn't do it.

The real system of comparison between various parents depends on a number of factors:

1. The age of the youngest child.

This is the biggest factor, especially the first 5 years or so. I always let people with babies in front of me, and try to even make lasagna for them. I always accept graciously kindness from people when their youngest is more than two years old. If people have a two year old, I'll be happiest if we can take turns or alternate.

2. The number of kids.

With two children, I fantasize about how easy it must be to move through the day with only one child's priorities and schedules to manage, and I go to people with 3 or 4 kids for advice. Really, anyone with four kids I regard as a superior being before whom I can only bow in respect.

3. Parenting Styles

Also a factor is something that might be called "parenting styles" although really the important factor is "parenting worries." If someone is very scheduled, and I'm easy going, I can adapt to their schedule just fine. "Eat now, ok, that's cool." If I have my kid in a sling but they have theirs all strapped down, that doesn't really impede the adult conversation. But if I've told my kid 500 times that we can't climb on a certain wall, but we can hold sticks if they are kept low, and the other parent plays climbing games on that wall and yells every time a stick is touched, it's not going to work out.

4. Rules

There's also infinite gradations among parents regarding what rules make sense. For example, playing together means you have to have consistent policies about what determines when a turn with a toy is over. In my house, if you set it down, your turn is over, but some people have a principle of asking if a turn is over if the toy is still sitting near the kid that last played with it. Similar dichotomies exist for what can be thrown (just balls? all balls? just soft balls? just not at people? we've taught them catch already?) and what can be climbed on (nothing? things meant for climbing? things not meant for climbing but not too dangerous?). Even whether or not a turn with a toy must end when another kid uses words to ask for the toy. If you ask my kids, "How many minutes before my turn?" I will intervene to make sure you get a turn before too long. Not everyone does that (so if my kids play with their kids, eventually their kids have all the best toys, because they can get the toys from mine but not vice versa.)

4. Support of Partners

The helpfulness of the "other parent." For at home parents, this scale starts out with the great thanks that we are able to spend this time and attention on something so important, but it ranges from "they do the paid work and I do all the other work" to comments from others at a playgroup like: "Wow, your [husband/wife/spouse/partner] is awesome! They [get up at night/juggle/do the laundry/put on the Wizard of Oz in a puppet theater/let you out once a week]! What a hero!" This factor isn't one that's known so easily as the others, but over time people figure it out. Oddly, there are people that I've talked to for hundreds of hours, and never heard one word about the mysterious figure that they are partnered to. I assume that puts them on the "I do all the unpaid work" end of the category, but that's just a guess. And of course there's the single parents.

5. Happiness

The healthiness of the family. This ranges from those quasi-mythical people that had happy childhoods and are able with their partners to raise happy children in a consistent, calm and warm manner to people with normal degrees of tiredness and crabbiness (you know, a bit of yelling in the late afternoon, the disagreements between partners about what's important), all the way down to more troubled families, often nice and smart but with some ongoing emotional stressors that really count as a part time job or something in terms of energy, and then down to actually abusive families. The tricky thing with this factor is that small children are themselves fairly stressful. I've known a few cases where I'd see someone angry hundreds of times in a row (never happy), and then a few years later, with bigger kids (the youngest being grown a bit, as in factor #1), the parents were happy and laughing and the kids seemed connected to the parents and all was well.

6. Somewhere in the list goes "money" of course. You can't trade travel tips if people are flying to the islands and you are driving to Myrtle Beach. Do you need a tip on how to buy a cheap used stroller or on which $700 stroller is really worth it? Is someone likely to swap baby-sitting during the mornings or have a good lead on an au pair? Everyone recognizes the convenience of being richer than we are, and really most stay at home parents around here are among the richest people ever in the history of humanity, but still there's just no point in getting a shopping tip from someone with a vastly different budget.

So for any task except the op-ed pages, the work vs. non-work status just doesn't matter. If you want to understand who you are seeing at the music class or park, you have to delve much deeper.

Posted by Chris at 10:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It sounds so innocuous: "When we travel, we always have two weeks of disrupted schedules afterwards." A bit of dinner eaten before or after the regular time; a little trouble waking people up for school perhaps. But there is a dark side to disrupted schedules, especially for those two year olds. And their adult companions.

We went to my family in Wilmington over Memorial Day. My daughter was 7, my brother-in-law 37, and my mother was 70. So it was a good celebration (except perhaps when I dropped the cake my sister made and broke her wedding present cake stand, or when there was arguing in front of extended family). But things were disrupted. Naps (those few naps my son still enjoys) were missed altogether, or were at oddly late or early times. Bedtimes were scrambled. Waking up was super early to the glory of playing with cousins and other excellent family members. We exacerbated the problem by driving from 4 am to 11 am Tuesday morning to avoid being in the car so long on my daughter's actual birthday.

So my poor son has been unraveled all week. Two naps from which he woke after a sad, short 30 minutes. (My children have never had short naps - anything less than two hours is exceptional.) Today is probably the longest subjective day I've ever had. Many trips were canceled because of tantrums in the middle of the store. (I'm not sure that going to "buy Mommy a new phone" was a bright idea, but he talked about it enthusiastically for a while.

Pretty much all day has been crying or screaming, with a few storms of throwing tossed in for variety. Me, I'm alternately saying things like "Don't hit me, I don't like that, if you are mad say 'I am mad at Daddy.'" and things like "You want the sandwich here? No, here? Not the sandwich, you want the back-hoe? I can't see what you are pointing at, can you tell me a word?" Despite all these efforts, and despite offering holding and sitting next to him, offering singing, and so forth, even having returned pacifiers to him, he has been in such palpable agony all day. No clue as to whether food or sleep or picking sister up at school is next, he writhes, rejecting touch, rejecting his sling (which at 38 pounds or whatever is mostly just a thing to hold that's been constant since birth), throwing the binky out the window of the car as we drive, rejecting songs, rejecting everything. We had some bronze shoe sales person here during a time when he was sitting in the stroller yelling one thing after another, and the sales person (no doubt horrified, but I lacked enough attention to really glance at him other than to figure out how to buy bronzed shoes for the screaming child) said, he'd have snapped or yelled at the kid by now; I confessed to having tried that a few times to no avail. Even when Mom blessedly left work early, the spiral continued, uglier and more painful until slipping into the bonds of morpheus at an impressively early hour, hopefully to be renewed.

PS I wrote this on Friday, but didn't have the presence to publish until now. He slept 13 hours both weekend nights and enjoyed 1 three hour nap over the weekend, and has been only 1/2 crazed this week. I'd say it has been a great week so far, but he did throw two back-hoes and a stream-roller out of the window of our moving car while we were driving to school a few hours ago. The back-hoes were recovered without harm, but, in an irony I cannot share with him, the steam-roller was driven over and flattened. The difference from last week is that after we got his sister, he rejoined civilization. Whew.

Posted by Chris at 08:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)