These rashes are actually fairly regular occurences, she seems to have rather sensitive skin. Not only does she freak out if her shirt is too scratchy, she gets contact dermatitis more often than anyone I'm been familiar with.

Last night, she was just beside herself with near panic about being itchy, literally writhing and crying out for long periods of time. While we could have gone to the ER, it didn't seem like they would have anything quicker acting than the tube of whatever stuff that we had from last time.

So it seemed to me that the best thing to do is to help her master her reaction to the itchiness. For the first time since I've started meditation, she allowed my imprecations to take big belly breaths and to count them to enter into her sphere of potential actions. And she took to the "imagine you are in a forest and it is safe and warm and you are being held up by the ground" visualization/calming thing quite well. She was laying on a cloud that could not itch her skin. A bit later, she even could calm her response to the itchiness, feeling the itchiness just as sensation, not as a cause to panic (thank you Gordon R. Dickson). She did need a gentle hand on her belly to actually slip into sleep, but still, she had a good bit of rehearsal of the "It hurts, but it's ok, I am in charge of my reaction" stuff (though she was un-impressed with my prayer: "Please help her to feel better, or to be able to feel better about not feeling better.").

But then we parents figure out that the laundry this week was washed in a new detergent - extra softening oils and fragrance oils! We've since rewashed a bunch of school clothes and are hoping that the redness, itchiness and swelling will soon be gone.

California is distinctly less self-consciously liberal than our home town. Folks have a dislike of politics and a certain reserve, a certain tendency to allow people to make their own way or not. Our grocery store doesn't come with an active listserv. We can't email our neighbors that we've put a book shelf into the street, or complain about the water pressure. School social events seem like the closest thing to 1950s style cock-tail hours that I've experienced. It's hard to compare fairly a place we've lived in for 4 seasons (cool, cooler & rainy, warm, often foggy) to a place where I couldn't walk outside without running into several people that had held my kids as babies, but in California there seem to be calmer and less argumentative people, and perhaps a bit less willingness to argue about selling meat products in the co-op or about how to arrange pick up to be as safe as possible.

My daughter has the plan to move back to Maryland when she's 18 (she also still has the plan to live with us always) and misses her roots there, but is finally making enough friends to get by with. My son describes things as being like in Maryland or as being after Maryland.

They are both so tall now, and they both listen attentively to the sort of sciency things that for so many years were something I had to squelch (or simplify past my ability to simplify effectively). They can get all of their own clothes on (and sometimes do!) They can get into petty squables about plastic toys, and then resolve them! When there is a need, they rally themselves into helping - setting the table, breaking into our neighbors house who locked herself out, helping with baking, all that sort of stuff.

Seeing them grow is a most joyous sort of grief - as I stand amazed by these new children ("Yes Dad, I know what igneous rocks are, you tell me that all the time" or "Daaad, I can transform that one by myself!" or "Thank you for holding my rocks"), I'm still prone to lapse into musing about holding babies or holding 18 month old hands with a sort of whistfulness.

Not much time for that, though. The transition from "staying at home" to working for pay full time is just as wrenching as anyone that's tasted the bliss of following natural rhythms and honoring ancient priorities would expect - for months, my whole body protested when I left home "But you left the kids behind!" I now have thrown myself again into the esoteric art of networked software as my primary occupation. I do little bits of parenting here and there, glad to have had the time to build up a strong connection and base of knowledge, but I'm the classic weekend dad, pushing the kids to go to every fun or beautiful place in California Saturday by Saturday. My daughter finally has learned to negotiate the odd Saturday of no travel (when we have swimming, walks to the ice cream store, and fires in the fire place, plus an art project or long game of Uno), but we've been up and down the amazing topography here. And if it's too foggy and dank for the beach to be fun, well "too bad, today's the day."

For instance, last Saturday, we went to the beach around Monterey Bay and then went to a movie and then went back to the beach and then went to Mission San Juan de Bautista (apparently every school child here knows about the Missions) where we saw some old California history, stood on the San Andreas fault, captured a dog owned by a nun, and then heard the nun's stories about Caesar Chavez back in the day

I miss you, Takoma Park, and hope that this finds each one of you very well. Please keep on hassling the people that need hassling - we'll be in the hottub relaxing.

by Sue Katz Miller

A Montgomery County Public Schools teacher admitted to her class recently that she dreads March. This month features an unusual stretch of four straight weeks with no holiday interruptions, punctuated only by the bleak days of Maryland School Assessments (MSAs). For parents, this is often the time of year when we finally get a handle on what is going on in the school system, and there is a corresponding rise in outrage about lack of transparency and lack of what staff refer to as "parent stakeholder input."
Budget transparency

New school board member Laura Berthiaume had the guts to cast a dissenting vote on the school budget. She objected to the fact that the Board appears to simply rubber stamp the budget drawn up by MCPS and pass it on to the County Council, only making changes at the end of the process in the spring, when the budget is basically set. Berthiaume ran on a platform of greater school budget transparency. She explained her renegade vote this way: "If the Board will not do its job, then I will cast my vote against the budget because I believe we have a job to do." Of course, insiders are calling her naïve. The citizens who elected her in November are thrilled and gratified.

by Sue Katz Miller

photo by Julie Wiatt

As Co-Director of the Center for Law and Education, Takoma Park resident Paul Weckstein helped to mold that law. His work has involved mild-mannered policy wonking, but also acting up and suing the government. Weckstein sat down with Voice columnist Sue Katz Miller to discuss the benefits and flaws of NCLB.

How did you end up as a lawyer working in education?

I started law school as an activist in 1969, but without a notion of being a lawyer in any traditional sense. In fact, after my first year I left and went to work in a mental hospital and was all set to go into a clinical psych program, when I thought of synthesizing law and education and returned for joint degrees in the two. I started working at the Center for Law and Education as an intern while still in school. I moved here in 1981 to open a DC office to give the Center a presence on federal policy.

I have read a lot of parenting essays and often people wrote sentences like: "we thought we would never get them out of our room, but we just said one night, 'you have to sleep in your bed now' and after two nights, they stayed."

I have read a lot of childhood abuse memoir where people tell their parents about horrific experiences and the parents say "why didn't you tell me? I had no idea!"

I have had a lot of conversations with people from large families who sung praises to benign neglect, and who were quite certain that our labor intensive parenting styles will make it far harder for our children to know themselves realistically.

You cannot win. The balance lies before us but staying balanced between Scylla and Charibdis is difficult even with enough sleep and a supportive society.

All you can do is pay your money, make your choices and watch your kids grow into the fullness of their specific humanity. Life is imperfect, dangerous, has an unhappy ending in the best case, and is such an impossibly wondrerous experience to share with your successors.

My daughter has recently started to opt out of my evening reading sessions, preferring to read to herself. Was I proud? No. I was annoyed. I haven't finished my list of important things to read to her. But I have transmitted my own prickly independent style of learning, for better or for worse not being an issue. She is herself. I am myself. She is my kid. She also gets in half trouble for staying up late reading, as I did from my book loving mother. I can't wait to see what happens tonight when the trolley ride is over.

Rffff

-- Posted from a Cell Phone

It is so odd to walk in, a bit tired between the new job and the rushed tho fun bike rides, and have no idea what the day has been like. How does everyone do this?

-- Posted from a Cell Phone

Teaching children basic good manners and courtesy is not that different from teaching a child how to ride a bike or how to make their own sandwich. Children learn very well from the consequences of "what works" and "what doesn't work" in social situations inside, and outside, of the home.

Most parents I know would like their child to "be good," but what is good behavior exactly? Is it responsibility? Is it acting thoughtfully? Or is it cooperation? In general, most parents consider children well behaved when their behavior does not create problems for family members or interfere with the family's ability to live well together. Any one person's act of rudeness or selfishness, for instance, may be directed at only one other member of the family. But, the whole family is going to suffer when a member of the family consistently behaves in a rude or selfish way.

School Scene

by Sue Katz Miller

A few weeks before we elected Barack Obama as President, I happen to be walking the empty downtown streets of Birmingham, Alabama, with my husband, teenage daughter, and 11-year-old son, en route to the Civil Rights Institute. We are in town for a wedding, and my son is complaining about having to spend a sunny afternoon in a dark museum. I explain that he needs to understand more deeply the history of race in America, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, and the ghosts that haunt Birmingham. Then my son turns to me and asks, "What's the Ku Klux Klan?"