Another Gay Day

Thanks to Dana at Mombian for being the central location for Blogging for LGBT Families Day.


Another week, another Friday: woke up, read in bed for a few minutes, snuggled with Curious Girl, went down for breakfast and wowed her with the new cinnamon sugar shaker I'd put together after my last pilgrimage to King Arthur Flour.  I wrote her a little love note and tucked it inside her homework folder (ordinarily, I put it in her lunchbox, but on Fridays, she gets school lunch). I helped her practice cello (inspired by an acquaintance from a local music program, she's been aiming to keep a cello practice streak going, and is currently at day 107), and then we walked to school.  I went to work, although I left a bit early to come home and shovel mulch around in the garden after Politica called to say that our 3 cubic feet of mulch had arrived.  Then off to pick up CG, and then to gymnastics, where Politica met us and where she and I cheered for each of the girls as they performed their routines on bar, floor, and beam.  Home for dinner, and then out to a marshmallow roast at the neighbors'.  The kids ran around in the cool evening, while the adults talked around the fire.  We talked about aging and failing parents, about school, about kids, about houses, about summer.  We talked about spelling. We walked home.

Such is the life of the homosexual elite. When the Westboro Baptist Church came to town last summer, they said we were headed to hell and destroying society.  Me, I'm more concerned with trying to help my kid figure out how to cope with school projects than I am trying to undermine our neighbors' straight marriages.   In fact, I rather enjoy most of my friends' marriages--straight or gay, legal or not--as I find that most of my friends-with-spouses/partners tend to choose people who are themselves interesting and wonderful. We can all support each other--no one's marriage is a threat to anyone else's.

This is pretty much the kind of post I wrote last year for this occasion: a post chronicling the ordinariness of a day in the Granola household.  We work, we read, we play music, we eat, we garden, we hang with friends.

Tenured Radical writes today that marriage isn't her top political priority, but that the ways in which the Obama administration has worked in stepwise and significant ways to reduce institutionalized homophobia can ultimately work to reduce the power of marriage or other gay rights referenda to serve as get-out-the-vote drives for the far right.  She hopes for a day when marriage will be a purely private matter, not the public moral one it is right now.  Marriage didn't use to be my top political priority--and truth be told, it's probably not my top priority right now either.  But goodness, am I tired of the political initiatives that let voters in various places step up and vote on whether or not to take rights away from me, or to put in place insulting laws or policies that further distance even the possibility of change.  I'm tired of the challenge of remaining hopeful in the face of bigotry, even as I do.  I'm tired of the hypocrisy of a world in which cheating politicians pontificate about the sanctity of marriage.

But here and now, I'm tired from a day of good work and hard parenting.  I'm tired from a week of trying to figure out what sorts of school problems are normal and age appropriate and what sorts of school problems might be more concerning. I'm tired from a week of special events that keep my child up late and run all of us happily ragged.  I'm tired from a week of worrying a bit about aging parents (who seem to be fine now, but still...it's hard to be old).  I'm so tired, I'm not really up to the task of ruining society.  I have enough to do just keeping my little corner of the world working OK.

Hovering over Hopscotch

I've been thinking about helicopter parents a lot this summer. While Wikipedia tells me that Foster Cline coined the phrase in a 1990 book, I came to hear the term more via the NYT ever-odd coverage of parenting issues and through disparaging comments from colleagues. I've written a fair bit here over the years about the importance of independence for kids, and I've built my career in part around the ways institutions can help students make a good transition to college (and independence). I like reading Free Range Kids. So you might think I'd be a critic of helicopter parenting myself.

But no. I've spent a lot of the summer simmering about the way the notion of helicopter parenting plays out in our culture. Helicopter parenting is said to be bad. It's said to deprive our children of the chance to learn how to solve problems and work things out. It's said to keep children from learning how to play independently. It's said to get in the way of teachers doing their jobs. eu retesting language note: in Scandinavia, the analagous term is 'curling parent.')

But......the thing is, I've read a lot more text about helicopter parenting than I've seen in real life. I occasionally have a parent call me to talk about their college student child (not even once a year). I explain that I can't talk about the student's record, but explain the general policy issue at hand or explain the course and tell to encourage their child to talk to me directly. I hear stories of parents who are over involved in their children's sports ( but CG doesn't run in those competitive sports circles.) I imagine that anyone reading this might have a story to tell about Parents They Have Seen Behaving Badly, but on the whole, helicopter parenting is something I've read about more than I have observed.

So let's think about whAt I have been told parents should do. Be Involved in Your Child's Education! Parents are home partners of the school, we're told by the principal. Rightio then: you want me to be involved, just not too much. My sister and brother-in-law are teachers, and a few weeks ago I had dinner with them and two other teacher friends of theirs, one of whom works in a district that,s been taken over by the state. The teachers are getting paid for an extra 4 days of professional development and the school year has been lengthened. My brother-in-law's first question: are they requiring parents to come to those workshops, too? We all laughed, but again the implication: the problem with parents is that they are not involved. Unless the problem is that they are too involved.

I've been sensitive to this issue lately because we've been wondering for the past 2 years what to make of the fact that CG has been saying she's not good at math. Sometime in the fall of 1st grade, I mentioned it to her teacher, that CG was getting pretty frustrated at home whenever some calculation needed to happen and she was verbalizing that she wasn't good at math. 7 years old seemed a little young to start buying into this cultural script (especially for girls). Not to worry, said the teacher. She's meeting all the standards, and it's ok if she counts on her fingers. After all, your fingers are always with you! But second grade has now come and gone, and the same math panic has continued. And inefficient counting on fingers. And continued shrieks of I CAN'T DO MATH. Yet still, the teacher said she couldn,t understand why CG would say this. She was meeting standards. She was fine. We should just continue to point out all the ways math comes up in daily life (counting change, cooking, counting place mats needed, etc.)

Except she isn't. Make a long story short, after several more conferences, the teacher finally agreed to have the district math coordinator do an informal assessment, which revealed that CG has erratic understandings of the math curriculum so far. While there are some big conceptual areas where she is performing at the highest levels (she is awesome at fractions, e.g.) there are some basic things about numbers that she couldn't do. And those areas, the district coordinator says, could really start holding her back. Her conclusion: CG just needs to play! And practice math as it comes up in everyday life! Her recommendation: hopscotch. In other words, you just need to play with your kid and she will learn what she has been missing.

Bull. Granted, we haven't ever set up a hopscotch board that counts by 2 or by 5, but I don't really think that would matter. We never did flashcards (never once has any teacher suggested them for anyone) but we have, since CG could talk, gotten her to help measure, cut, count, and order things. When the district coordinator finally understood that I was mightily irritated by the suggestion that parental play was the answer after 2 years of my telling teachers that there was something not right about CG's math performances, she backtracked and said that clearly the reason CG did so well on part of the assessment was because of all that parenting. We just need to play in a different way. But where's the role of, say, the math teacher and curriculum?!? Why isn't the math teacher offering clear advice to kids about how to learn what they need to know (instead of leaving it up to parental trial and error and emotional upheaval?)

We haven't been playing hopscotch this summer. CG is using an adaptive online site (Dreambox dot com, a subscription site developed by Pearson publishers), recommended eventually by the district person. We've also gotten her a tutor, a recent Math graduate who comes once a week and has been working with her on math facts. We could do flashcards ourselves, but having Cool Tutor come makes her feel like it's ok to make mistakes and it's possible to learn.

CG would tell you, if she trusted you, that sometimes she gets mad at me because I hover too much. She would probably tell you that I make her do math when she doesn't want to, and if she could read about helicopter parenting she might say that my attention to her math is something she doesn't want. But....if it weren't for our pushing the teacher so hard this year about what has turned out to be 2 years of my child struggling to learn a key part of the math curriculum, CG would just be heading into another year destined to fall further behind. (and if it hadn't been for the feeding journal I kept when she came, her serious medical problems wouldn't have been diagnosed right away, but that's another story).

In terms of math, things are getting better. It's a complicated situation, and CG needs to figure out how to remember some facts as well as how to access what she knows when she's nervous. It's coming, although I have lost faith in the teacher assessments and I have little faith in the district math curriculum. And mostly, I'm done with criticisms of helicopter parents. There are conversations to be had, for sure, about how to foster independence and how to help kids learn to fail and succeed. But the discourse around helicopter parenting serves largely to slam parents for whatever we (don't) do. And that, I have decided, isn't helping me sort out how to raise the powerful, articulate, and capable young woman I see CG yearning to become.

WWGMD

Curious Girl has recently learned that a slightly younger friend of her has her own e-mail account. As she learned this via borrowing my e-mail account to send a message to this (distant) friend, she naturally started asking for her own e-mail account.  Politica and I agreed to investigate, but discovered that gmail  won't set up an account for anyone under 13.  So I'm pondering whether to set up an account named Curious.Girl there with my b-date.  Given the privacy issues on Facebook, I can't see myself being persuaded to avoid the age restrictions there.  But on e-mail?  Not sure.  Of course, this little hangup has given CG more time to discuss this matter with her friends at school, and she's coming home saying things like, "Oh, one of my friends says we should get yahoo.com on our computer because it works much better than gmail."  Looks like at least the claim of having e-mail accounts is emerging in Grade 2.

I've been trying to remember keywords from some of Geeky Mom's posts on her kids and screen time.  As I recall, she's been playing games with her kids since they were young, and advocates for children's privacy online--as well as parental conversations!  Politica and I have set up some parental controls on Safari for the computer that sits in our living room--setting up a bunch of different game sites on the toolbar for CG to access as she wishes--but as CG doesn't actually want to spend a ton of time online, we've never needed to set rules about screen time or access.  (The first weekend she had a Webkinz, she probably played 4 hrs a day, but after that....not so much.)

So, the e-mail.  One of my friends says that she set up her kids' first e-mail accounts so that all incoming mail forwards to her account--she talked about that up front with the kids, so it's "not creepy," and it lets her say to her daughter, "you know, I didn't really like the tone of that e-mail from so-and-so" when some insults go flying around.  I've seen sites advocating kids' email services, like  Zoobuh, and I've seen sites recommending that parents check their kids' emails.

I don't want to teach CG that the internet is a dangerous place--well, at least, I don't want to teach her that it's ONLY a dangerous place.  I tell her, for example, that if she wants to go looking for videos on youtube, she has to do with with one of us sitting with her, because it's very easy for the "related videos" sidebar on youtube to feature things that are not-so-related and not-very-appropriate for her.  I haven't taught her not to talk to strangers so much as not to *go with* strangers.

Ah, lots of rambling...hard to compose good sentences here when I don't really have a well-thought-out philosophy of my own to share here.  But I'm curious about how folks with older kids have navigated their kids moving online. What are the perils and pitfalls?

I'm leaning towards letting CG have an e-mail account, but telling her that e-mail is for communicating with people far away (she asked whether she could e-mail her teacher, and I said no, that she should talk with her teacher and if there was something she couldn't talk about, we'd help her write a note).  I'm leaning more toward a learn-by-doing, in other words, than a learn-in-the-protected-kids-email world.

But what would Geeky Mom do? Or what do you do?

St. Harriet

I'm starting to re-read The Dance of Anger tonight, starting by browsing for some inspiration.  One I've noted already:

We may view it as our responsibility to control something that is not in fact within our control and yet fail to exercise the power and authority that we do have over our own behavior.  Mothers cannot make children think feel, or be a certain way, but we can be firm, consistent, and clear about what behavior we will and will not tolerate, and what the consequences are for misbehavior.  We can also change our part in patterns that keep family members stuck.  At the same time we are doomed to failure with any self-help venture if we view the problem as existing within ourselves--or within the child or the child's father, for that matter.  There is never one villain in family live, although it may appear that way on the surface. (148)

I'm a do-er, and Phantom's comment on the last post reminded me of this book, and I felt more hopeful already, just knowing I could stop at the library on the way out of work and pick up a copy.  I feel more hopeful knowing that I can read more of it.

Although I snorted as I read a few pages later, in a story about a woman whose 4 year old daughter was upset about the mother's dating, and kept throwing fits that would get the mother to cancel dates.  With St. Harriet's help, the mother realizes that she can't control her daughter's reaction to the dating, and that her daughter shouldn't be the one making dating decisions for her.  So she learns to validate the daughter's feelings and make adult decisions about the dating.  Good work all around.  And then there's this: "....throwing a tantrum was unacceptable behavior.  If Claudia did this, Alicia would pick her up and take her to her room, where she would have to stay until she calmed down" (152).  And of course, if CG were the sort of child who would just stay in her room until she calmed down, I'd be blogging about something else entirely.

I think I'll also pull out my copy of Deborah Gray's wonderful book on attachment and adoption, and Keck's Parenting the Hurt Child.  I don't know--I never know--whether CG's emotions are adoption-related, but I always wonder.  Her anger has to be trying to communicate something, and those are some other resources to try.

I don't mean to overstate the problems here, nor do I mean to assume that I (or even Politica and I) can change CG's behavior.  Seems like there's a little less resiliency there than there used to be; maybe it'll pass; maybe we need a little professional help, in or out of school.  I don't know.

But I do know that I can change my reaction to CG's outbursts, and I can snicker at all the parenting books that make it sound like time outs work if parents are serious about them, and that will probably make me feel more hopeful.

And feeling hopeful is a good thing.  Harriet.  Hope. H.

This is really the

Are we having fun yet?

It's been a hard summer so far, and this week has been hardest of all. What with the zillion degree heat, none of our coping skills have been particularly wonderful, and we're back into a rather tumultuous dynamic where too much of our conversations are about regulating Curious Girl's behavior. That's just no fun--but it's hard to have fun when a kid just seems determined to push back at every opportunity.

CG is 8 now, old enough to read this blog over my shoulder if she were to be next to me, and old enough to have opinions about what parts of her stories I tell to others. Last week, we were camping, and she sustained a minor injury due to inadvertent carelessness of another child, and she didn't want to tell anyone about this (but did want to put a very big band aid on it, which only raised more questions). Part of what I've been doing while not posting very much lately is pondering how I want to tell stories about CG in more public places--and telling stories about hard times is, well, hard.

I've written before about anger management and the challenges of parenting someone whose anger, sometimes, can just spin so out of control in no apparent relation to the provocation. When CG can't cope with her feelings, we need to help her cope, and my best moves there come when I can stay calm myself and not get dragged into her feelings. That's all easier to do when she'll let one of us help her. This summer, she's been working on not having such big fits--she talks about it; sometimes she'll have a little outburst and then calm down and say, "My body wanted to have a big fit, but I didn't. Isn't that good?"

This summer, though, has been hard. She's been in camp every week since school ended--programs that have run mostly 9-3 or 3:30. After camp, we've not been doing much (although this week we've started going to a wonderful pool a bit), but she's been exhausted. And the afternoons and evenings have been a real struggle. She's just so tired, and I suppose at 8 looking to develop a bit more separation from us....but good FSM, the oppositional conversation is so draining. When she's tired, she never wants to sleep; she just gets cranky. And even though I keep resolving to stay calm, to be positive, I'm getting worn down by her opposition to me (quick example: about an hour ago, when it was bedtime, I told her to come upstairs, take a shower, and we'd get ready for bed. "NO! I don't want a shower!" she said very crabbily. "Fine," said I. "I'll bring the fan up and we'll head right to bed." "NO! I'm taking a shower!!!!!" she yelled. Whatever I ask, she doesn't want to do.)

So I'm just worn down. It's a good thing that my darling girl wants to be more independent. I'm a big advocate for her independence, as I've blogged about before. I love watching her learn to do things on her own. I've been re-reading my own posts (wondering where all the old comments went? I've always used blogger's own platform for comments and I'm surprised that the comments all seem to be missing on older posts), looking at older posts about parenting frustrations, wondering where that mother-writer went. I used to be better at handling CG's challenges; I didn't used to escalate small incidents into big fights; I used to be the one who helped her calm down, not the one she rages against).

I miss all that.

I know, it's probably a good thing that her feelings are overflowing at home.

I know, it's a good thing that out in the world, she's delightfully flexible and adaptable and resilient.

I know, the heat will break, and coping skills will rebound a bit.

I know, it won't be like this forever.

I know, I'm probably still internally over-reacting to my sister's comment, when I mentioned that this summer had been a little hard and CG had been a little overtired, that perhaps CG doesn't know how to deal with a lack of schedule in the summer. Maybe she didn't mean that as a criticism of the fact that Politica and I end up working in the summer more than she and her husband do. But that's what I heard. I know, I should not be holding onto that.

I know, I'm not the only working mother feeling dammed if she does and dammed if she doesn't: if I can arrange to work less next summer, I will (on the theory that too much camp is getting CG's rhythms out of whack...which leads me to wonder whether I agree with my sister's own comment, which just gets more more mad all over again).

I know, it's not good to whine. But it's also not good to sit in your house feeling like an alien with no parenting skills. So I'm telling my story, feeling a little better even in the telling, and hoping that some of you will read it and feel a bit less like an alien without parenting skills the next time your kid loses it. (Right?)

Goodwill

Curious Girl is reading Warriors: Into the Wild, the first book in a series set in a kitty universe where clans of cats negotiate territory, myths and history, and build social alliances. As a series, it seems not so bad, although my favorite part about the book is that CG is drawn to it, although it's a little over her head for an independent read. (She's a fluent reader, but she doesn't like reading books with dense text. I use a bookmark to block off the lines below the one we're reading if she's reading along with me, but she doesn't have the stamina to read the book independently.) So I've been reading it to her at bedtime. She closes her eyes, and tells me that she's imagining the pictures she wishes were in the book. And amazingly, sweetly, wonderfully, she relaxes herself, and she nods off as I read.

I remember an assessment CG took around 18 months at the developmental pediatrician's. One of the questions on the parent part of the assessment was whether she relaxed into a parent when a bedtime book came out. Relaxed into a parent? Not so much. Reading has always been an aerobic experience for her. There was the year, for instance, when The Snowy Day was in regular reading rotation, no matter what the season or temperature, and CG would jump out of bed and act out the story as I read. She likes talking to her stuffed animals about what she reads. She likes putting her hand on the pages and feeling the book as she reads. She likes petting the cat as she reads. Relaxing? Not so much. That comes later, with the songs and the snuggles.

Except for this past week, as we've started this book. She does remember the plot--she can talk about the universe of the book and she seems to remember the plot about as well as she does the plot of anything we've read before. But something about this book and our reading routines lets her drift herself into sleep.

Towards the beginning of the book, there's a report of a battle with another clan, and the beloved Thunder Clan deputy is killed. His body is brought back to the clan, and CG was full of questions about how the cats would react. What would they do? Could the dead cat hear them? Would there be a coffin? Would they bury him? We talked about what might happen--but then, as the book is silent on some parts of the evening in question, there was still room for speculation. "They'll put his name on a stone with his dates," she said. I didn't think so, I said, as the cats don't seem to ever use stones in this book. "But humans do," CG said. "Humans do, with the stones of goodwill."

Stones of goodwill. What a phrase. CG has experienced loss, but hasn't had much contact with cemeteries. I didn't even know she knew the word goodwill, and I don't know where she gets her cemetery notions from. But I love the idea of stones of goodwill, stones beaming goodwill into the world for people who are mourning.

I've read Katie Granju's blog, Mamapundit, on and off for a while. The past few months she has been very honestly writing about the death of her 18 year old son Henry, his drug addiction, and the assault and overdose that precipitated the medical crisis that killed him. Today, I mailed off a donation to the memorial scholarship the family has established to help families pay for the costs of addiction treatment for their children.

Two of my college friends have lost teenaged children in the past year. I didn't know either child, but their names and the stories I've heard haunt me, as does Henry. As I walked downtown today, I looked around at what some of the older teens or young adults were doing, and thoughts flitted through my head--that child will never get to do that. My friend will never get to see her kid climbing a rock again. Katie Granju will never be walking through a bookstore to redeem a gift certificate with Henry. It's so sad.

But as I saw the rocks downtown (yes, our downtown has rocks. Doesn't yours?), CG's stones of goodwill came to mind, too. Katie Granju's grief is raw, and I don't know what, besides time, will soften its edges as she incorporates her unimaginable loss into everyday life. But if the stones of the earth could radiate goodwill for the mourners, what kind of world would we have?

What I've been doing lately

besides blogging in my head, that is:

• I performed surgery on a 29-year old stuffed koala whose job, at night, is to stay awake and watch over Curious Girl while she sleeps. CG cut one of his seams open in the midst of a big ol' fit, and then felt so horrible about that that she spent another half hour being hysterical about the fact that none of her animals would stay up all night with her because they all thought Ted the Koala should do it (but he couldn't, because he had been removed from her room to the Koala Hospital for a night of rest before the surgery)
• I had a conversation with CG in which she--rather worked up--yelled that she wanted to break my arm. (Fine to be very mad at me, I said, but not OK to try to hurt me.) Then she said that she wanted me to go to the hospital so that she and Politica could visit me there. (If I'm in hospital, of course I want visitors, I said.) Then she got hysterical in another vein because what if Politica said she couldn't visit me in the hospital and she had to stay home alone? what if she cried and I wasn't there? Anger, fear of abandonment, love, adorableness--almost seven is really rather amazing.
  
• I've been skiing every Sunday. I love the woods here. I think I will get in one more ski tomorrow.
• I've met a lot of faculty, and listened to lots of stories about teaching and learning
• I've walked through a sugarbush, listening to leaves crunch and mud slurp, smelling spring
• I've gotten our bikes all ready for spring
  
• I have been much missed by CG when I've not been at home, but much ignored by her when I am.
• I'm trying to decide what is special or unique about me, to answer a trivia question on a questionnaire for my college reunion this summer. For some reason, this question is tripping me up.
• I have bought two pairs of mud/rain boots (the first were too warm for warm weather) and listened to CG singing a little song she learned at school about how wonderful mud is. We're not in Old State anymore.
  

Even in Australia, with Chocolate: A tale of emerging literacy and anger management

We were on the road this weekend, visiting Politica's father, and Curious Girl was an awesome travel companion. Until about 4:00 this aft, that is, when she got out of the car for an early dinner, climbed into a snowbank, and promptly found the cold air + wet tights to be deeply distressing. I reached into the car for the handy bag of extra clothes, and we whined our way down the street to a restaurant, wherein CG decided that she was simply Too Miserable to be Helped. As she wound up, Politica and I decided that it was the better part of valor to leave the restaurant and get back in the car with bagels to go from a nearby coffeeshop. CG found this Not What She Wanted, and turned into Angry Girl. I carried her into the car (tucking her under my arm so as to keep her from pulling my hair and pinching me), somehow got her buckled into the car (while she pulled my hair bigtime, and was generally loud and obnoxious), and through a series of threats about future activities to be cancelled and empathetic comments about the Terrible State of Affairs and The Great Restaurant that We Will Now Miss, a semblance of calm returned to the car. Although as we pulled away from the car, CG opined that she was mad at me, "because you ruined my life, Mama." I just let that one go.

After a few minutes, though, I heard "here!" from the back seat, and turned around to see CG handing me the white board that has become our new favorite car toy. Sometimes, she draws on it, but sometimes, she and I write back and forth on it. Here's the correspondence that ensued:

Hi Mama, Im vry sore that I puld yor hare and tuggd on your niplz. Love, Curious Girl.

Dear Curious Girl, I'm very sorry you hurt me, too. My head still hurts. I love you, Mama.

Hi Mama, Im rely sore. I fel bad that I hurt you. I wish I kud hid in my sweatshirt. Love, Curious Girl.

Dear Curious Girl, Sometimes we try to hide when we make a mistake, but the best thing to do is make it right. If you hide in your sweatshirt forever, I will miss you forever. Love, Mama.


Dear Mama, I want to et. Love, Curious Girl.

At that point, we took a break and ate a bit, and Curious Girl turned back into her charming traveling self. She took her pointer and white board and started teaching a kindergarten class (in which I noticed she had to correct imaginary Curious Girl several times--I guess she was working out her own inner discipline).

Curious Girl is a great kid, and it's been clear to us from very early on that she needs help dealing with her emotions. All kids do, of course, but CG seems to easily get to a place where she can't calm down by herself. I think of her sometimes as my little Vulcan resonator--if I get angry when she's having a fit, she just feeds off my energy to ramp herself up. If I can stay calm, she can usually latch onto my calm and get herself back under control. Rachel's post on parents and anger led me to Laura Markham's parenting site, which has a ton of great information on anger. I've been reading it tonight, trying to figure out what is the right response to CG when she gets to physically angry. Markham says that tantruming kids are looking for something from their parents, and that empathy is the best way to help them name and act on their feelings.

In the midst of CG's tantrum today, I managed to distract her a bit by threatening to go through the week and cancel various activities, starting with tomorrow's play date, but that didn't really do much besides transfer the object of her anger (her cries shifted from "But I wanted to stay at the restaurant!" to "But I want to go home from school with My Friend tomorrow!"). I finally said, after one more yank on my hair, "fine, no playdate tomorrow. Keep it up and you'll lose your skating lesson on Wednesday," while thinking "a. this is not going to work: she will not remember this transaction the next time she gets mad and b. I wanted to work tomorrow afternoon. What am I doing to my own schedule?!?" While not threatening about the playdates, though, I was calm, and tried to tell her that she could calm down, that she was in charge of her body, and that it would get better. And eventually, it did.

Later on, Politica and I having conferred somewhat on the ways in which removing-playdate-consequences really aren't helpful here, we turned back to the conversation with CG, and I tried to explain the difference between feeling sorry and making something right (if you broke something of mine, you could say you're sorry, but then you could fix it, or get me a new one, to make it right.) This led, eventually, to another round with the white board, where CG made a list of ways to make things right with me. I didn't see the spelling here, but here's her plan:

step one: say I'm sorry
step two: find out if she's OK
step three: try to do something to make it better
step four: find out what hurts the most
step five: figure out how not to do it again

She was adorably into naming all these "steps" (which she thought of on her own) and figuring out how to write it all down so she wouldn't forget. Then we ran through all the steps, and on step 5, decided that "mad jumps" (jumping up and down 5 times after saying "mama, I'm mad!") might be the thing to do, rather than hitting. This let me say that I was going to let her have her play date after all, if she was ready to take responsibility for trying to calm down her anger. (We're also going to make a new Feeling Box for home, so she has paper and crayons specially for drawing when she's angry or sad.) She says that she'll let us remind her about jumping or the Feeling Box. I hope so. We had some success with the Feeling Box for a while last year, but when we moved, CG announced she didn't need it anymore. Clearly not.

It's relatively easy for me to empathize with CG when she's angry or sad generally--but when she gets so physically angry, it's harder. It's hard to know what to do with a raging child who's trying to hurt me and escalate things. I 'm taller and stronger than Politica, so I can carry CG even in a tantrum; Politica's already hitting some of her own physical limits with CG's size and strength. At the moment, I can restrain CG while she flails, but she will eventually get too big for that (sometimes even now, it's not practical to do that--she was able to hurt me today because we were in the car, and I couldn't easily get her in front of me.) I can shut myself in my own room to get away from her, but I can't reliably get CG to stay in her own space when she's angry. I'm just not sure what the natural consequences are for fits like this--and I'm not sure how to practice empathy with someone who's pulling my hair. Laura Markham doesn't comment on this anywhere I found. I'll be rereading How to Talk So Your Kids Will Listen and Listen So Your Kids Will Talk, and looking up another book Markham recomments (Smartlove, by Martha Pieper). And I'll be thinking hard about how to balance empathy and efforts to reach out to CG in her own vulnerable anger with how to keep my scalp happy.

I'll end by saying that these kinds of tantrums don't happen very often (although we've had two this month!) and Curious Girl feels awful afterwards (as evidenced by her note that she wanted to hide in her sweatshirt). I'm writing about it in such detail because, as Rachel's post noted, it's hard to find information about what parents do when we're angry. I spent half an hour in the car today worried that CG's behavior was totally abnormal, but Politica assured me that these things happen to other people, too, only they don't talk about it. So I'm writing about it, so if this happens in your car sometimes, you can remember this post.

One more observation: as I was trying to remember all the good ideas in Rachel's post on anger, which is titled "I want a chocolate bar," I remembered, I did have a chocolate bar! So we ate some chocolate, and that was good, too.

Working, Mothering, and Success

Those of you who enjoyed Curious Girl's last observation about what makes a good department chair might be interested in this conversation, which took place in the family bathroom at the pool:

Curious Girl: I don't like this bathroom (gesturing at puddle on floor and various stray pieces of toilet paper, the kind that always appear in pool bathrooms on busy summer days). It's too litter-y.
Me: Well, lots of people are here today, and it's hard to keep a bathroom clean when so many people are using it. (I notice she's done with her business.) Here, dry your hands before you pull down the toilet paper--that way it won't shred in your hands like it did last time.
Curious Girl: Mama, that is such a good idea you had! What a good idea! That is because you are an apartment chair. You are right about everything. You are right all the time, because you are an apartment chair.
Me: Actually, sweetie, I'm not right all the time. I make mistakes. I just try to learn from them and do better next time.
CG: You are the best apartment chair!

So what does make a good department chair? It's certainly not the ability to be right all the time! I've spent some time this summer doing some hard writing--a few documents that had to be written regarding some issues that some of us didn't handle very well (in some cases, that us is me; in other cases, that us is other people; in some cases, the us is a combination of me and other people). The documents I've written are all different (not to mention unbloggable in their specificity), but all attempt to look ahead and imagine ways that similar future situations might be handled with different effects. One reason I am a good chair, I think, is my ability to step back from situations (even those where I'm part of a mess up) and imagine ways they could play out differently. Good chairs need to be able to see administrative and personnel possibilities, thinking about different ways to move groups toward a goal. Good chairs need to advocate for their department and their colleagues--which means sometimes, pushing people, and other times, getting out of the way.

It certainly doesn't mean being right all the time, but I trust it's OK that I'm rather tickled at the impression Curious Girl has developed about my acumen. And it's true, a good apartment chair does have the opportunity to introduce little tweaks to the system that just might keep things from shredding during use. Not such a bad outcome for a day.

Work/Life Balance

I'm at home today, working for an extra hour before we head to Friend Who Doesn't Want a Pseudonym's house for dinner. I found out today that my dad has serious coronary disease, and is going to have quadruple bypass surgery in the morning. This is a big surprise to all of us--Dad has had surprisingly few symptoms for a man whose heart is in the worst shape his surgeon has seen in quite some time--and I'm taking an extra hour before dinner to make progress on a paper that's seriously overdue. I want to get it done, first to just be done with it, and secondly, to allow myself easy travel out east to visit with my parents when my dad is out of the hospital (assuming all goes well tomorrow, knock wood, knock pixels.) Politica and Curious Girl are outside, giving me space to work. But the conversation that just transpired begs to be blogged, and begs to be remembered. So I'll write it here, and then get back to working.

Curious Girl: "Mama, what are you doing?"
Me: "I'm writing a paper."
CG: "What does it say? Who is it for?"
Me: "It's for other English teachers, to give them ideas about how to teach better."
CG: "That's a good idea. That's good, Mama."
CG: "You are the best! You are the best apartment chair."
CG: "Do you know why you're the best apartment chair?"
Me: "Sweetheart, that's really kind of you. Why am I the best apartment chair?"
CG: "Because you're a mother. Some other apartment chairs aren't mothers. But you are, so you're the best."

Maybe Lisa Belkin (against whom I competed in high school debate) should interview CG one of these days. And now, back to writing.

Overheard at the End of Busy Day

Curious Girl is whining a bit about how it's not fair that the child lock on the car door prevents her from opening it when everyone else in the car can open their doors by themselves.

Politica: Curious Girl, I have no interest in listening to you whine anymore.

CG: Well, I guess you don't want to be my mom anymore, then.

Then and Now

My first Broadway show was Shenandoah, starring John Cullum (and Penelope Milford, who played the oldest daughter, who was of course the character I fixed on). My mother took me, just she and I, into the city for a matinee. I loved going into the city with my mother, who is a rather shy and naive woman. The city transformed her into someone who walked fast and purposefully, who took control, who was in charge. My father--also city-born and city-bred, albeit in Queens, while my mother grew up in Manhattan and worked there for many years as well--is curiously cowed by the city, and that reversed their usual dynamic. Not that my dad is an overly domineering sort, but in matters of logistics and transportation, he was usually the one leading the way. But not in the city.

Shenandoah just blew me away. I'd always been drawn to narrative songs. Among the belongings in the basement that I need to decide what to do with is a box of records, including my childhood recording of Cinderella, and probably Danny Kaye singing Hans Christian Andersen. As I got older, I practically wore out my copies of Jesus Christ Superstar and 1776. I loved the vocabulary of songs (I learned rubicon from a song in 1776 and grippe from Guys and Dolls, e.g.). I loved the stories of the songs. So I went to the theatre expecting to love it, and love it I did (click through the link above and you'll hear selections from the touring production starring Cullum--very cool to see him as I recall him).

Magpie posted recently about the smell of Penn Station. I love the smell of Manhattan, generally. The pretzels, the people, the trains. I love the memory of walking along the city streets with my mother, and I love the magic of my Shenandoah memories. I thought the songs were amazing, the costumes so beautiful, and the story just gosh darn romantic.

So that was my introduction to Broadway. I don't know when Curious Girl will see a Broadway show on Broadway, living as we do quite far from the city. But today I took her to her first Broadway-ish show: H.igh S.chool M.usical's national tour came through. Maybe someday she'll be blogging--or writing in whatever technology she will have available--about her memories of her first show, comparing them to what her child's first big show will be. CG was transfixed (as much by the fact that her favorite teacher and her daughter came with us as with the show). We've seen the movie too many times to count, so CG knew the plot (but sometimes, I think, got a little confused by the rearranging necessitated by the move from screen to stage). Not all the songs are the same, and I found myself nitpicking about the sound system, which just sounded so electrified. Am I just getting old and crabby, or is more amplification reducing sound quality?

We had a good time (although I think the movie is better than the play, which plays up stereotypes more sharply and more meanly, and is less emotionally subtle than the movie). And for all I know, Curious Girl fell asleep as entranced as I was by John Cullum, Penelope Milford, and the rest of the cast sometime in the mid-70s. Sweet dreams, my theatre-going girl.

That's My Girl

To Every Problem, a Solution (even if impractical)
Standing in front of a bookshelf at her school, Curious Girl and I are waiting for her class to arrive. She has strep throat, but has had enough doses of antibiotics that I think it's safe enough to take her to school to go to the auditorium to see a cool guest artist perform. We're in front of the parent resources section, and there are lots of books about families. "I miss my dad," she says. "I really miss him." I squat down to be at her level. "I know you do, sweetheart." "Do you have his phone number?" she wonders. "No, I don't." "I really miss him." "Honey, I don't have his phone number. But you can draw him a picture any time you like, or write him letters, and I can help you save them in a special box. So if you ever do find out where he is, you could give them all to him. But I don't know where he is now." She shakes her head, looks discouraged. Then perks up. "Maybe you could ask someone! Someone else might know his phone number."

***************************

How soon until she can read Marginal Utility? (or, more econ/math skills are on their way eventually, right?)
My parents sent Curious Girl a card today and included a five-dollar bill. CG literally jumped for joy. "My first real dollar!!!" She was giddy. "Is this real money? It looks like pretend money. Is it real?" The notion that it was a five dollar bill was somewhat confusing (those numbers in the corners are just details, apparently). "Someone wrote on it. Why did someone write on it?" We talk about the Secretary of the Treasury and the Treasurer. Then we talk about Abraham Lincoln and end up discussing John Wilkes Booth and what happened to Booth.

But the moment I knew would happen, because kids her age equate quantity with value and money is, after all, pretty abstract: she sat quietly, lookng at the money, and with some wonder, as though she'd just come up with the best. idea. ever, said, "Can I pay with this? Because then I would get even more money!"

***************************

You don't need to be older to be the mature one
I need more sleep. This morning, CG spilled her yoghurt after I'd warned her that a) she needed to eat it because it had medicine in it and b) her arm was likely going to knock it over if she kept motioning as she was. I was right: it spilled, and I just snapped and got insta-angry. I was tired, a bit out of sorts over a work problem I'd carried home a bit last night, and I don't entirely understand it but I just got mad. I raised my voice, even, then realized what I was doing--irrationally overreacting--and said I needed a break and went upstairs to just sit and find my own calm. CG came upstairs, though, and that made me angry all over again. A few minutes later I calmed enough, and went down to her. "Mama, I didn't like the way you talked to me," she sobbed. "It hurt my feelings." I told her I was sorry, that I didn't like how I had talked, asked her what would help her feel better. "That you try not to do that again." She held out her arms for a big hug. We hugged. Things were better.

***************************

Who Says She's an Only Child?
Right now, Curious Girl is snuggled up with a baby blanket, having a sleep over. She's on the little travel bed we used to use, on top of her bed. "I'm sleeping with all my baby sisters, and all our friends are sleeping on my big bed," she informed me. She actually fell asleep not on top of me for the first time. Siblings are a wonderful thing, and I didn't have to do a thing for the babies. What a life.

Soggily, Regretfully, Right

This morning, when I went to pick up Curious Girl--who is now five-and-three-quarters-years-old-- at religious school, she was just coming out of the bathroom. Despite the convenient of three! toilets in our house, she didn't set foot in a bathroom again until bedtime (when, not surprisingly, her clothes were wet from an accident). Increasingly, when we are hanging around at home, she simply will not use the bathroom.

Potty training hasn't come easily to CG. She asked for underwear when she was two-and-a-half, but had tons of accidents all the time. By the time she was three, she got to the point of wearing underwear to school, but over the three-year-old preschool year, she was having more accidents at school, not less. That following summer, we did a timed voiding thing (we took her to the bathroom every 15 minutes for 3 days, then every 30 minutes for a few, then every hour), and also started using a laxative (b/c it turned out she was slightly constipated and that was likely interfering with her ability to tell when she had to go or not). All this helped, and over last year, she had accidents sometimes--much more often than any other kid in her class, it seemed--but things were better. I admit that when we decided to repeat pre-K, I joked that I'd learned how to make sure your kid was potty trained for kindergarten: repeat pre-K. These days, I"m not sure that's right.

Things have taken a turn for the worse in the past few months (when, yes, Politica has been off on a sabbatical adventure). Her teachers caught her twice squatting behind the bathroom door trying to poop there ("I want to be a baby and wear diapers," she told them), and there have been two incidents of, um, odd choices of location for some elimination in the house. Only two, granted, so it's not that common, but still. She is also having more accidents at home (not so much at school, squatting aside, but at home)--one day at Whole Paycheck, she just sat down and peed in the aisle. One happy, whodathunkwewerehaving issues day.

I set up a conference with her teachers to discuss strategy. "CG will respond really well to some behavior modification," one said. I didn't think so, but they were quite sure. Have a reward every day if she has no accident, and build to a bigger reward. They even gave me a lovely jar of iridescent jewels to use as the daily rewards. CG was excited by the prospect of a jewel, and she decided that a big cookie from Neighborhood Bakery would be the treat for a week of jewels. But the jewel alone just isn't working. She's happy to get one, but the bigger reaction is sadness when she doesn't. The idea behind the teachers' suggestion was to simply say "I know you can stay dry all day. This is the expectation. You can do it," and just stand back and let her take responsibility for it. So I don't use my timer to remind her (b/c then it's my responsibility). We urge her to listen to her body. I'm all about setting good clear expectations, but I didn't really think this plan would work. CG has never been motivated by the promise of later rewards--all our learning-to-eat rewards were pretty immediate. The ones we tried where she could bank points to earn a bigger prize later were just not motivating. But I said I'd try it.

The result: days when she simply doesn't use the toilet at all. Yesterday, she peed three times--twice in one outfit! I would think that would be very uncomfortable, to be wet, but she clearly doesn't seem to mind. At 4:00 today, I pointed out that I had gone to the bathroom three times since we'd been home, and she had gone none at all, and she assured me she was listening to her body and didn't have to go. Later, I told her to wash her hands before she could help me cook dinner. "Do I have to go to the bathroom?" she asked. I said she should go if she had to, that it was up to her to listen to her body. She didn't go. Some days, she mournfully says, "I'm never going to get my cookie." I always say, "I know you can do it." But when?

I am full of all kinds of emotions about this: partly, I"m wondering what I'm doing wrong when we're hanging around that is making her not want to go to the bathroom. Partly, I"m irritated at the stinky laundry this generates. Partly, I'm angry at the way she tells me she's checked her panties and they're dry, when they're not. Partly, I'm thinking I should just ignore it all. Partly, I think we need to find a child psychologist. Partly, I'm feeling good about how well I know my kid that I predicted that the jewel thing wouldn't work. Parly, I'm feeling like a lousy mother because I can't figure out what will motivate my kid to use the bathroom (thank you all for those kind comments on the last post, which I re-read this evening to help counter the lousy mother feelings). Partly, I think I should just set my timer and start telling her to try potty. She doesn't seem to hurt when she goes, or mind going, and she generally takes herself to the bathroom at school.

So I've been googling the subject, and have a call into a child pychologist friend to get her take on what I should do next, and I'll probably call our pediatrician in the morning. In the meantime, I thought I'd ask my blogging universe: what the heck should I do next?

Thirteen Ways of Losing an Uncle

Updated to add: If you click through the link on IndyAnne's comment below, you can see some beautiful photos of Tante Mississippi and Uncle Quiet, and read some material from the memorial service. Thanks, Anne.

Me: Uncle Quiet is dying, Curious Girl. He is very sick, and his body can't get better anymore.
Curious Girl: That is so sad. I have to tell everyone!

********************
a few minutes later
CG: That is so sad about Uncle Quiet. (She sits down next to me and sits quietly for a few seconds.) I am going to think about something else now. It's much more happier that way.

***********************
In the car, headed to Lisneydand, CG asks, "how do you spell Uncle Quiet?" We tell her, and she starts writing it down. "Do you know what this is? It's a list of people who are dead. Who else should I put on it?" I suggest my predecessor as department chair. "But he's been dead a long time. Uncle Quiet is still getting used to it."
***********************

CG: What is Uncle Quiet doing right now?
me: He's very sick, CG, and he's dying. Tante Misssissippi is taking good care of him, and his mother is there, and Grandaddy J and Grandma L and Curly Haired Cousin and lots of people.
CG: But what is he doing right now? Is he dying right now? Did he already die?
me: I don't know, sweetie. Tante Mississippi is taking good care of him, and he knows we all love him.
CG: But what if he doesn't die?
me: Then Tante Mississippi will keep taking good care of him.

*************************
After Uncle Quiet died

CG: Tell Tante Mississippi that we still love Uncle Quiet and it's going to be OK.

***************************

CG: I'm going to make something beautiful for where he died. I will draw a picture, a flower. I know! I'll make a garden. Maybe something out of clay.

*******************************
We should get Tante Mississippi a present. Maybe a picture, maybe a picture frame like we got Mommy for her trip. I know! A picture of me! With the princesses! That would make her much more happier.

***********************
on a postcard from Lisneydand

Hi Tante Mississippi and Curly Haired Cousin,

We're sorry Uncle Quiet died.
I miss you.
We're at a friend's house.
We didn't see any airplanes at Lisneydand. (Curly Haired Cousin loves airplanes)
I love you, Curious Girl
***************************
driving from the airport, heading for Tante Mississippi's house
CG: When are we going to be there?
me: Not too long. We get off at the next exit, the same exit we use to get to our house. Tante Mississippi and Uncle Quiet's house is on the way home from the airport to our house.
CG: Not Uncle Quiet anymore.
me: That's right, but it's going to take some time to get used to that.
CG: Especially for Curly Haired Cousin

*************************************
CG: Is Tante Mississippi still sad?
me: Yes, she's still sad.
CG: She might be a little sad forever.
me: she might, in a way, but she will also be happy again. We can all smile when we remember Uncle Quiet even though we miss him.
CG: but she might be a little sad forever. That's OK.

*************************************
CG: Is Uncle Quiet in our family?
me: yes.
CG: Is Tante Mississippi in our family?
me: yes
CG: Is Uncle Quiet still an uncle?
me: yes, honey
CG: but a dead one now.
me: right.
CG: you can be an uncle and be dead?
me: like Cool Uncle.
CG: at least I got to meet him. Did I meet Cool Uncle?
me: no, honey, he died right when you were coming into our family.
CG: and Mormor (Politica's mother). I never got to meet her. That's not fair. But I met Uncle Quiet a lot of times.

*************************************

I think Uncle Quiet has friends already underground. Is he underground already? I think he has friends there.


*************************************

Can he still remember us?

***********************************************

I tell Curious Girl that we can remember Uncle Quiet, that we will write things down for Tante Mississippi and Curly Haired Cousin, that Uncle Quiet is part of us because we remember him and tell stories about him. I tell her that we loved him, he loved us, and we all knew we loved each other. I tell her that sometimes, people get so very sick, very, very sick, that their bodies can't get better even though they try and their doctors try. I let her talk, I listen, I take her to Tante Mississippi's often. I really don't know how she's going to make sense of all of it, but for now, this is the best I can come up with. I'm using the lessons from all our adoption talk: I don't keep secrets, I answer the questions she has, I encourage her to talk about it all. Anyone else have any good ideas about helping small children navigate a loss like this?

Random Bullets of Curious Girl

• There's a sign on Curious Girl's door tonight, a sign she dictated to me during dinner, for use later in the evening:

The Noodle Girl is sleeping, because her belly is full from all the noodles

Kitsune udon, to be precise. She and a friend just couldn't stop eating at dinner, and I am just loving it. Her friend's grandparents, who first met her when we were doing 5 tube feedings a day, couldn't believe it either.

• Conversation while driving home from the synagogue this morning:

Curious Girl: "I love Baby Jesus."
Me: "Hmm....you love Baby Jesus? Um, what do you like about Baby Jesus?"
Curious Girl: "That she's so cute."

• She's ready for the Super Bowl. She wore three layers of Giants gear today.
  
  
  

My Wednesday Book Club

Edited to add a book I forgot--and check out the great suggestions in the comments!

Edited again to add: Mo Willems (now the Geisel winning, Caldecott Honor winning author) has a blog.

S. asked in a recent commet how my reading went last week. Every Wednesday, I have lunch with Curious Girl and her 15 classmates, and after lunch, I read them a story. This didn't start as a regular pattern, although I do try to go and have lunch once a week at her Posh Progressive School (tons of tuition, and she gets free lunch everyday, and so do I anytime I want to join them. Plus free school pictures. Such a deal!). Sometime in September, we'd been reading Borya and the Burps, and CG asked me to come to school and read it to her friends. Sure thing, I said. Then we were reading another book at home, and she asked me to read again. The teachers love it, and I love it, and now the girls think that any parent who comes to the classroom after lunch is going to read to them--they automatically sit on the mat for storytime. I love that part.

So I've been having a ball thinking about what books to read with them. So far, we've read

• Borya and the Burps, by Joan McNamara (and we also looked at a few pages of CG's baby pictures from her orphanage--this book is a wonderful story about a burpy boy who gets adopted in an Eastern European story; it really captures some of the emotions an infant can feel during all that transition)
• Library Lion, by Michelle Knudsen, who has a blog (a great book for people who love books: what's not to like about a lion who loves to go to the library, and has to learn that sometimes, it's OK to break the rules)
  
• Jessica, by Kevin Henkes (who is rapidly becoming one of my very favorite authors)
  
• The Adventures of Polo, by Regis Faller (a graphic novel for kids!)
  
• The Trouble with Chickens, by Bruce McMillan (on his author site, select Books at left and the Trouble with Chickens will come up in the right frame--scroll down and you'll get interesting links to the amazing illustrator's work--Gunnella. He does a lot of work in Iceland)
  
• Knut: How One Little Polar Bear Captured the World, by Craig Hartikoff. A true story! And CG got to share the Knut stuffed bear we got near the Knut exhibit last summer
  
• The Apple Doll, by Elsa Kleven (it has directions for making an apple doll at the back, and it's a great story about a girl and the rough start to a school year and how imagination saves the day)
  
• The Quiltmaker's Gift, by Jeff Brumbeau
  
• Snowflake Bentley, by Jacqueline Martin
• Miss Bridie Chose a Shovel, by Leslie Connor
  

and perhaps a few other titles as well--like Chester's Way, another Henkes title. The girls are a wonderful audience--they are wiggly squiggly, of course, but they clearly love our reading time. When I arrive at the lunch table, several of them ask "What book did you bring today?" I usually try to have some kind of interactive portion of the reading (during Jessica, for example, they got to be an antiphonal chorus, half of them being the parents saying "There is no Jessica" and the other half responding, "But there was.") Or I'll ask them to look for things on the page, or to predict what a character might do next, or how someone might be feeling. Curious Girl handles the questions and comments at the end (3 or 4 participants), and it's so cool how they all raise their hands to tell everyone what they liked or to respond to whatever question I've posed. Last week, as I closed The Quiltmaker's Gift, one girl exclaimed, 'That is the BEST book! I love all the pages!!" I just don't see that kind of enthusiasm spilling out in college classes.

I'm a teacher, so I"m always looking for activity tie-ins. For Snowflake Bentley--the true story, gorgeously illustrated with Mary Azarian's woodcuts, of the man whose photographs of snowflakes are the basis of the first scientific study of snow crystals--I brought them all a piece of black construction paper. If you keep it in the freezer, and take it out when it's snowing, you'll be able to see the snow crystals on the paper. The different shapes are truly amazing. We also looked at online images from his collection (click on any image to embiggen). As the girls said, "Hey, that one looks like a snowflake!" (when it had that what-you-think-a-snowflake-looks-like-shape) but for others, "a flower!" and other shapes. Even if you think you know that snow crystals are unique, you'll be amazed at what you see.

Last week, after the Quiltmaker's Gift, I cut up some scrapbooking paper into squares, rectangles, and triangles, and the girls all made paper quilts the next morning at choice time. I have been working on more ways to get scissors, crayons, and coloring opportunities into my writing courses in college, too, but the crafty possibilities are endless with the preschool set. I also decided to try having them help me read--when we did Polo, I had each girl read through one two page spread. They didn't hold each others' attention as well as my reading does, but I liked encouraging everyone to come up and read.

As I've been thinking about this post, I realized my list of books has mostly white protagonists, so I'm going to make some extra efforts to diversify my selections for the spring readings. Next week, we'll be reading The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County, by Janice N. Harrington. Tonight at home, we read Norton Juster's The Hello, Goodbye Window (illustrations by Chris Raschka, another one of our favorites; yes, that is the same Juster from The Phantom Tollbooth) and I may take that one in. Because it's an all-girl class, I've been emphasizing books with girls, although not exclusively--Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney is on my mind for sometime, too.

I guess I don't need to sell the value of reading to kids to anyone taking the time to read blogs by mothers who like to write and academics who read and write and think and teach. I've been reading to Curious Girl since our first night together, and I've been enjoying introducing her to old favorites of mine and learning my way around new-to-me authors like Mo Willems and Kevin Henkes. But I am just loving the informal structure of my Wednesday Book Club--my little moment to think about themes, rhymes, illustrations, colors, activities that will engage my very loving, wiggly audience. I love getting to know the girls, know who gets scared, who likes to participate, who needs some encouragement. And I love seeing their appreciation for longer stories emerge.

And to tell the truth, I like the books, too, with their merging of visual and textual features. They're fun.

So what are you all reading, aloud or silently, with the kids in your lives? And any suggestions for our spring selections?

Rollercoasters, List Version

The Home Front

• Politica is off on a professional adventure. Yay her.
• Emotions are, um, turbulent. Curious Girl and I are not getting enough sleep, and tempers were fraying last night, starting with an argument about why I am the meanest person ever because I would not let CG stay up until midnight even though Twin Friends (allegedly) got to stay up until midnight one night, ending with over 90 minutes of sobbing and screaming (not all of it CG's, I should mention).
  
• Have I mentioned how much I love CG's teachers? They knew CG was off-kilter the minute we walked in. Short Teacher suggested that CG could draw a picture of what she's mad about, when she gets all mad.
• So today, we're going to make a Feeling Box, with art supplies in it, so that we can draw mad pictures when we need to. Cross your fingers that this works. (It well might. Similar tactics have.)
• I'm going to lunch with CG's class today. I'll have to post about my post-lunch reading series with the girls. They are a great audience.
  

The Office Front

• Performance review season is always here. That stresses people out, and there are a million little questions about what to put where on the form. My university requires everything to be classified as teaching, research, or service, and that leads to a lot of fretting about whether, say, judging the student magical mystery competition is teaching or service or whether writing a short article for publication x is research or teaching. It's not easy to balance reassuring the stress with encouraging people to step back and think about how their report communicates what they did.
• My favorite part about being department chair is helping people--it's so emotionally rewarding to have conversations helping to move toward tenure dossiers, for example. The flip side of that, though, is being a responsible chair even in situations where things are not emotionally rewarding--I'm learning strategies for not taking it personally when colleagues are doing things that don't work so well. It's hard, but important, to keep that boundary up. Thank FSM for the therapy that taught me about boundaries. They rock.
  
• I cleared my desk yesterday! (But my desk at home is now piled with stuff from the bedroom, that's getting painted. Boo.)

I am now going to read and write until lunch, at home. I love Wednesdays.

Of Princesses and Pretending

Curious Girl is quite taken with princesses, something I expected to have more angst about than it turns out I do. We've tried to expose her to a range of toys and games, including many gender-neutral games, but she likes playing dress-up in fairy and princess outfits. She looks adorable in them. Politica and I haven't bought her many--they've been gifts or hand-me-downs for the most part--but we have gotten a few Waldorf playsilks or pieces of cool material to go with them. Those are handy for playing wedding, it turns out, a game I find endlessly fascinating for what it reveals about Curious Girl's emotional needs and imagination.

Politica and I have been quite slow to supply her with princess narratives, however, and that's what makes her princess play so darn engaging (I think). Only in the past six months (she's recently turned 5) has she seen any of the D!sney movies (Snow White and Beauty and the Beast so far), and we've never read her any versions of the stories. She's had a princess dish set for a while, and that's contributed to her notion that Cinderella, Ariel, Snow White, Belle, and Aurora all live together in a castle, and somehow occupy the same social universe even now that she's aware that they have their own stories, friends, and partners. Last night, CG was Cinderella all during dinner, and this morning, she was Snow White. In the car, she was Belle ("Well, Snow White told me I must come visit you! Where's Curious Girl?" she said. I invented an imaginary CG to the right of her car seat and they had a nice little chat.). The Beast was busy ("He had a Beast meeting. He's really nice, you know. Maybe he can join us for dinner.") but Belle and I had a great time talking together, listening to 1776. Belle told me that she and the Beast love to dance, and that they had a party once with John and Abigail Adams. "They are so fun!" Belle declared. 'We danced all night."

So princesses, not so bad, when they're dancing with John and Abigail, talking about how things are on the Adams family farm during the Constitutional Convention (and as a side note, I realized today that CG's habit of saying "Incredible!" is likely a homage to JA in 1776). Curious Girl's princess play--although it is starting to encompass the romantic elements of the stories--focuses on friendships, kindness to animals, and relations between mother-figures (real or imaginary) and children (real or imaginary). Her pretend weddings involve getting animals dressed up to be family members and guests, and receptions at which everyone is dancing with their mothers. More frequently, she wants to play "let's pretend I just got married," which involves conversations about plans to have children (adopted or in the belly?) and relationships with mothers (who's coming to visit and when?) and sometimes adoption: the other day, she pretended to be my birthmother coming to visit me. She didn't want to say much while she was being my birthmother (other than that she was staying for a long time, wasn't it nice, and that my mother knew she was there), but Politica and I thought it was a pretty good move in her own pretend play.

Pretending is a way of making her own universe. I know she will grow beyond some of this, and I will miss the permeable relationship between reality and fantasy that swirls around us now. As an adoptee, CG will always have a fantasy past: we can't give her all the details I know she will want, and she will always have to balance her rational intellect and her imagination as she makes sense of her past. Just as she will always balance her intellect and her heart as she forges a future with me, Politica, and her friends. Playing princess, playing bride....she's playing her way to her grown-up self. I'm glad I get to play along, for now.

Children and Seniors

Scrivener has had two fabulous posts about attitudes toward children in American society (in response to some amazingly contentious comments in a post spinning off a mention of a women's only (no men, no children) beach in Italy at I Blame the Patriarchy. Scrivener is way more eloquent than I'm going to be on the subject (in part because he has the stamina to read through the comments at the original discussion--I got so irritated by so many people's willingness to dismiss children so readily and then my eyes glazed over. Bad reader, me.) Children are people, and they learn how to be adults from the way adults treat them. I'm big into limits, and I do think about how disruptive Curious Girl might be in any given setting, and how disruptive other adults might be to CG and other children in any given setting. There are restaurants I won't take CG to because they're not sufficiently kid-friendly in ambiance and material. As much as I probably seem like a wacko progressive parent to people who are, well, not so progressive, I do spend a lot of time helping CG learn social conventions (both when to challenge them and how to observe them, learn them, and use them). But I also listen to CG, and I encourage her to talk and explore. I know there's a lot of class-influence in my parenting (like my belief that children need to be talked to, and listened to. I talk to CG all the time, quite intentionally working on vocabulary acquisition. I love words. Heck, I'm consciously working on my own vocabular acquisition.)

Politica points out that toddlers look like they're human, but they're not. They are little aliens in human bodies. And it's true, toddlers are full of energy that we adults can only admire. Young children are on their way to becoming adults, and if we don't respect them, they're not going to learn to respect others very well.

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Ever since Politica's father fell and broke his hip a few years ago, he's been in a rehab hospital, a hospital, and more recently an assisted living facility. Politica has been managing his finances since the fall, so all his bills come here. I have been utterly appalled at the correspondence from Pleaders Pligest, that monthly magazine offering condensed versions of pieces published elsewhere. My father-in-law isn't reading it anymore, so we decided to just let the subscription (and the gift subscription he had been sending to Politica's sister) lapse. This of course generated a ton of renewal notices, but today he got this notice:

NOTICE OF OVERDUE ACCOUNT

To Mr. Politica:

Since your account is long overdue, I have been forced to consider suspending your future gift subscription privileges. Our Gift Subscription manager wants to cancel your right to all Pleader's Pligest benefits, but I've asked him to wait becuase I want to avoid this discussion.

However, if this bill for your Holiday Gift subscriptions is not paid now, you could be denied future Pleader's Pligest gift subscription privileges. Surely you realize the importance of sending your payment today.

Billing Manager

Isn't this awful? It's a renewal notice phrased as a threat. I've been reading more news stories about people preying on the elderly, and it's been very eyeopening to get so much of my father-in-law's mail. Partly because of his age (lots of Medicare-related solicitations) and partly because of his Pleader's Pligest subscriptions, he gets things like this at least once a week. I can see how some recipients would be confused. Pleader's Pligest should be ashamed of itself.

And I thought of this reading Scrivener's posts about children: much of that logic also applies to seniors. We don't treat our young or our old very well in America.