Recently in Parenting 101 Category

My daughter had been rather indifferent about riding bikes for a while. She had a glamorous two-wheeler bought by my mother for a few years, but has been rather steadfast about not having the training wheels taken off (since a brief attempt last summer). However, recently a neighborhood kid who is younger has mastered the two-wheeler herself, so it became urgent to be rid of the training wheels.

Unfortunately, both of us were fairly nervous about this transition. I didn't really learn how to bike without training wheels until I was eight or so, and I'm not someone that bikes currently (basically out of fear that I'd be killed within a year of biking in DC traffic). I actually asked my working beloved life partner to do the task of helping our daughter with the bike riding, but the neighbor kept riding her bike around and the urgency required us to take action. I also have had times when my daughter was nervous and I've gotten a bit exasperated or nit-picky ("Look, if you just pedal harder, you'll have an easier time of keeping your balance." This is a perfectly true statement, and it often has the effect of pissing my daughter off enough to give up the bike riding altogether for that day).

Early childhood is a time when friendship is very important; parents find friends with a desperate happiness not at all like the way in which workers build up friendships over coffee and joint work; realizing what "totally dependent" and "twenty-four hours, seven days a week, for decades" mean, as well as "responsible" while coping with the enormous physical strain of no sleep and a needy being that can't ask for things engenders a bit of desperation within a few months. Eventually it seems like the new people we are raising are starting to want friends and playmates and starting to notice the trickiness of getting along with other people.

At first, when you just have one little baby, it's pretty easy to make friends with other new parents. The babies aren't going to object to other babies, and honestly the whole world wants to be nice to a person holding a small baby. I'm generally a wall-flower at parties (unless I can find one interesting person to have one long conversation off in a corner), but I felt like a rock star at parties with my little beautiful baby who just wanted to be carried around and look at stuff.

And there are more deep friendships. When my oldest daughter was 0-2, I was a devoted regular at the excellent story time at our local library. The adults I met there are some of the deepest friends I have (I had "closest" but that's not it - perhaps we never talked about anything but babies, but the friendship was made under the skin); I am forced to fly out to Wisconsin periodically to meet one family. Whenever I run into one of those folks, whether or not we still see each other regularly, a big smile breaks across my face. The people that smiled on me even when my daughter didn't want to listen to the story but wanted to hand all the books to me, that shared food with us, and offered extra socks and great advice, I stand ready to help always.

But as the children grow, friendships get more complex. Unlike in the office, the friendships aren't just between two individuals, now that the kids can get along with one another or not. There are people that I like very much and had many many hours of enjoyable conversation with that I can't see anymore, because there were just too many ugly episodes of kids not getting along and begging to stay home. It's not the sort of thing I can bring myself to talk about, and so the playdates just sort of fade out without much comment.

If you try to schedule dinners with all the parents involved, the equation gets even more complex. Schedules and diets need to be compatible, the other parents have to get along somewhat, the kids have to tolerate each other. These dinners can be great islands of happiness and success in a season of arguing and crankiness, but they can also be humiliating failures as your family displays whatever flaws it has while children scream and adults look on in mute horror.

Some people get really offended that aspects to hanging out at the park that are like junior high school dances. Pairing off for car-pools or weekly play-dates at pre-school. The engaging conversation about twins that is abruptly dropped when a better friend shows up. People who you introduce that then start swapping childcare. I had a very happy day once, when I was working part time and at home part time, I met in the park two other parents that were working part time and at home part time and had similarly aged kids; we rapidly exchanged stories and phones numbers and shortly had determined that there was zero overlap between our at-home schedules, and it we'd never see each other again, as indeed we never did.

There's also the work. Parenting friends will bring their kids over to your sick house and listen to your tale of woe when you are having a rough month and feed you cheesy toast and comment on your essential goodness, but are also quite likely to enroll their kids in classes and schools and arrange nap times so that your kids and their kids can never again see each other. So it's deep intense connections that are always subordinate to the work.

The hillside outside of my daughter's very good school is the perfect antidote to the amazingly rigorous day the kids have to survive. We tend to be fair weather participants only, but 30 minutes of running wildly through the patch of woods with only vague parental supervision grants the autonomy, self-directed behavior, and "loud is OK" experience that isn't permitted inside. But, I've noticed a really funny thing. The moms on the hillside are mostly people I've known for years, many from that crucible of the library baby time, or neighbors or people from the cultic preschool I love. But for some reason, while I've had in depth one-on-one conversations with most of the moms, I almost never sit down in the cluster of moms, or if I do, I bring along a book or a toddler to occupy me. When the group thins out, I'll talk to one or two of my old friends. I don't like the whole group things. So while I'm sitting there talking to my toddler sitting off from the group of talking parents, I'll often notice my daughter in the woods, standing off from the group of playing children, watching the play (as I indeed often listen silently to my friends talking). But still she generally wants to go, and I do get some relief from the isolation of hours alone with a small child by sitting near the other adults. But my daughter and I, we are definitely cut from a similar block of personhood when it comes to socializing in groups. This perhaps also explains my somewhat lame responses to "so-and-so won't-play-with-me-at-recess/is-being-mean-to-me/is-teasing-me" conundrums. My honest response is that when one is 18 and can choose with whom to associate much more than is allowed in 2nd grade, life becomes much more interesting and pleasant. I try to come up with some helpful process of dialog and problem solving for the current unavoidable reality, but my heart's not in it. Kids are mean, sorry about that.

So while I've forged some very deep connections with these enormous groups of people called families, I've also had to cut dear friends off without a word, I've failed to make the whole realm of human friendship look 100% great, and I've apparently helped in the upbringing of another person who doesn't leap into big groups easily.

When each of my kids started pre-school, there was a phenomenon that I found surprising. They started to get sick. A lot.

It doesn't take a parent long to learn that any seemingly good action can have subtle effects down the years. When our first born was a few months old and starting to reach out and grab stuff, we were delighted that she loved pens. This was the beginning of what in our house is a great truth: children prefer real items to toys. They don't want the pretend cell phone, they want mine. They don't want actual old keys gathered and placed on a genuine key ring; they want my actual set of keys I use to open the house and car. They don't even want my backup-spare set. They want the main set. So the pens which we so often use were very attractive to my daughter. We could hand one to her and she'd enjoy minutes and minutes of interrupted happy play, waving it around and smiling. She was far too small to take the top off, so we proceeded happy at our parenting cleverness.

Who knew that when you have a small child, death is a frequent topic of conversation. There's a period of time, I think around five, when the prototypical example of wit is to say something like "I'm going to kill you with poo poo!" But even at a more biting level, death seems to fascinate these drops of newly created life.

The park on Westmoreland (called Urban Park) used to have excellent tall swings. They were removed several years ago. I have finally found almost as tall swings:

In a park on Sligo Creek Parkway, just the south side of the Golf course. It's just past Colesville Rd, past the Waldorf Nursery School, near a street called "Dallas". In addition to the very tall swings, which allow a proper under-dog, there are two streams that come together in a most attractive fashion and a great place for mucking and skipping rocks.

"Underdog" is a push where the parent runs all the way under the child, pushing them up with your arms. At the old swings, your kids could fly so high they touched the tree with their feet. It took me several years of watching more experienced parents do this before I dared, but my kids instantly loved it. It's one of those things I always call an end to before they do. "OK, only 5 more underdogs." It was the language used by the brave parents and kids I copied the push from.

As I've mentioned, my toddler has a tendency to hit people. One of the ways we've been trying to prevent these hits is by rehearsing before we get in a group, "No hit Ian, No hit Gracie, no hit Maeve, no hit Ruby." Sort of a mantra, it relieves my stress a tad. So we went to Florida in January. We stopped by the Everglades, which are a truly marvelous piece of the planet.

When my daughter was a few months old, one night I lay down in the bed (no doubt exhausted but some how one forgets that) and listened to her breathing. The sound of her breathing made me think of SIDS and I realized I was looking forward to her being one year old when I could stop worrying about SIDS. I had the assumption that I'd then be, you know, done with worrying.

Takoma Park has an unusually intense approach to food. There's people with all sorts of restrictions you never even thought of*. In our family, we both try to have healthy eating habits and an unrestrictive eating experience. So that you know, you can have all the food you want, as long as it fits my idea of healthy. But eating out in public with other people is tricky.

The one thing about working full time for which I have unalloyed feelings of loss is sick leave. Last weeks feverish toddler developed, coincidentally or not, into three coughing cranky people this week. My daughter even has a medically diagnosed ear infection. My son and I are just writhing masses of tired kvetching coughing emotions.

When we had our first baby in the house, I was (as well as being quite surprised that they let us go home with a baby with so little testing or teaching) full of how we love life, and are so excited at sharing all the goodness with a new being. Here's Spring! Here's Love! Here's Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches!

After a few years, I find myself sharing things of myself that perhaps could have been left behind. Here's procrastination!

www.mommazen.com/MAY07SUN.pdf

That is by the woman that wrote a book I find hysterically funny (funny like Brain, Child, where you laugh and tear up at each chapter/article), Momma Zen. (more...)

My toddler is feverish today, one of those things I won't even bore the nurse screener at our pediatrician with. (With our first, we'd show up for every cold; by the time the doctor found us in the sick kid exam room, she'd be laughing her head off, as I muttered that she seemed very ill when I called; with the second, I don't even especially notice if he has a cold. For fevers, I might call, but I'm always being told "If that goes up to 105 degrees for about 3 days, then call us again" in a voice impatient at my worry.

I wonder why we haven't heard the following re-working to "I've been working on the railroad."

I've been working in the house-hold, all the live long day.
I've been working in the house-hold, just to pass the time away.
Don't you hear the baby yelling?
Rise up so early in the morn.
Don't you hear the baby squishing
"Baby, won't you blow"

Baby, won't you blow,
Baby, won't you blow,
Baby, won't you blow your diaper?
Baby, won't you blow,
Baby, won't you blow,
Baby, won't you blow your diaper?

Someone's in the kitchen with Daddy.
Someone's in the kitchen, I know.
Someone's in the kitchen with Daddy
Playing with the old dishes.

Smash, bang, rattle-i-o.
Smash, bang, rattle-i-o-o-o-o.
Smash, bang, rattle-i-o.
Playing with the old dishes.

If you have any doubt that we evolved in the tropics, consider how much easier every aspect of parenting is in warm weather. Today, with no change other than the extra 40 degrees from our last no-school day, instead of sitting around missing TV, sighing in a dramatically bored fashion, climbing on couches, or throwing forks, we painted 2 giant murals (in the outside air and light), played in the sand box, and climbed trees for hours.

There was some time ago a study showing that childless people are happier than people with children. At first I found this absurd, but then I looked into the study (I can't find the study on the internet now) and the method was to have people write down every 4 hours or so what they were doing and how happy they were at that time, and then they just averaged it all together. Well, shoot, that's not happiness.

Before we had children, I believed that the work of raising children was distinct, was separable from the work of keeping a home clean and running well. However, I've been coming to the conclusion that they aren't really two different things.

Check out this funny article Sue Katz Miller wrote about taking her tweens to the Who concert recently.

In Goldilocks and three Bears, "Just right" in the middle is easily attained. That one's too hard, that one's too soft, ahh, this is perfect. In our house, it is not so.

A recent Saturday afternoon at Rock ‘n Romp made me realize just how much I missed my grown-up life. We’re still in that “I can’t go to sleep without Mommy” stage, which, while very sweet and fleeting (or so I thought), makes me turn down evening outings rather than deal with a wired kid who finally conks out 3 hours past her bedtime.