Tag Archives: kids

Cross posted unit plan

5 Replies

Well, we tried school for three months. My kids got hit a lot. The head teacher was more upset that my kids fought back than they were that kids hit them. We decided that home education is the way forward for our family for the foreseeable future.

I am trying to adapt my language. We have moved to the UK and here the preferred terminology is “home education” as opposed to “home schooling” for all kinds of reasons. However, I have been home schooling in the US for many years so I’m sure I will slip up at times. I’m trying.

Like many people who do not send their kids to brick and mortar school I find that our approach changes year by year. There isn’t “the way we home educate”. Things change because the developmental levels and abilities of my children change. Things have to shift as life circumstances shift. I know that in the past some people in our lives have deeply resented the fact that we have a more fluid life than they prefer and I need to not let it slow me down.

Up until the age of 7 I do full on unschooling. I don’t do any focused, formal, sit-down work with my children. I believe that the best way for very young children to learn is to be exposed to as many situations as possible and be encouraged to play hard. My family lives in a word-rich environment. We don’t have a television and we read constantly as a family. We read a fairly staggering range of books and we talk all day long. There is very seldom a quiet moment and we like it this way.

My children are currently 11, 9, and 2. It’s going to be a new adventure to buckle down a bit more while giving my 2 year old the freedom she needs. I love having three children and this feels like the most fabulous family configuration I can imagine for us. It wouldn’t work for everyone and that’s ok. We are all very high intensity and we don’t have an extended family network to share that with. We have friends and connections in the community but we are all a lot. We like that within our little family pod we aren’t too much for one another.

We have done years where we work on individual skills and years where we work on major projects in a more college-oriented fashion. Then we traveled the world and were much more unschool focused for a while. I have spent a lot of the last couple of years pushing my kids too hard because I had a lot of personal anxiety around them “not being at grade level” if they had to go to school.

Ha. Hahahahahahahaha. Ok. Well, now that they have attended school that anxiety is over. Sure, their handwriting is super not awesome but their actual subject knowledge is well over grade level in every way. My 11 year old cannot be tested by local age-appropriate schools because she is so far off their charts. We have some local buddies who are in their senior year of university and they have commented that her writing is easily on the level of most of their peers.

Right. We are doing fine. I need to relax more.

But I am not a permanent unschooler at heart. I was a classroom teacher for a long time and we have a house full of ADHD and I am autistic and my children thrive best with a loose structure. We are at our best when we have patterns and flow but not rigid demands.

So. Lesson planning. For the first part of this school year we were deep in survival mode. We didn’t do a lot of formal academics at all because we were traveling then adjusting to moving permanently to a new country. That was a lot. Then the kids went to school for a while. Now they have been out of school for over a month and we have spent the last few weeks doing a slow drift out of the school mode back into a more eclectic style. But I don’t feel that our current methodology is going to result in a lot of long-term progress. I care about them making progress towards their future, not grade level skills per se.

Thus we are talking about moving more in the direction of unit studies for a while. Right now they are selecting whatever they feel like learning out of a larger umbrella topic day by day and there isn’t a ton of building on previous growth. I want to see growth.

I gave a loose summary of what a unit could potentially look like using shopping as a sample topic. After talking about it for ten minutes they are super enthusiastic and they want that to definitely be our first topic. Oh, ok. I hadn’t actually intended to just go that way but why not.

So here is my initial for-myself brainstorm on this idea. I am literally thinking this up as I type and it may change as we go forward. But I really like to talk/type to myself as I work out my thoughts and I felt like this was a good place to put this. With no further ado…

Shopping Unit

To begin with we will do some research on local salary levels and how much of a percentage of average salaries people tend to spend on food. I intend to ask them to each pick three different cities in three different countries and get an average idea of how things vary across the globe. (This will allow us to build on this general idea as we go further with other budgeting type conversations over the years.)

Once we have a solid idea about the variance among the six different places we don’t live in we will look together at the average for our city and then we will place that next to our actual family budget over the past few months. I keep records so this won’t be complicated. We will talk about why our family budget is or is not close to local standards.

Both of the older kids will get to pick whether they want to make up a budget for a single person or a family (they can pick the size) and we will sit down and talk about a nutritionally balanced meal plan. They can use a variety of recipe books and online websites to figure out what kinds of meals would allow them to eat in the healthiest way possible for their needs. (One child is mostly vegetarian and the other child really prefers to eat more meat and fewer meals.)

Once we have our proposed meal plans we will head off to local stores to see what they can buy with their budgets. This will involve many trips to stores as they are not all in one area and the store trips will double as PE because we will have to walk/ride our bikes for many miles just to get this data. I will also be saving the store ads I get in the meantime. I will suggest they look into alternative ways of getting food (delivered veg boxes, restaurants, or big online delivery places like Amazon) and compare how they can do on value for money.

While we are in the stores collecting the data on prices we will also track where the various food items come from. On many separate days at home the kids will use the information about where the food comes from to do geographical research. I want them to see where in the world the food must be grown, which countries could it come from. What are the labor practices in the various countries like? What is the GDP of the different countries involved and what is quality of life like for the citizens (particularly the farmers)? How are global warming and pollution impacting the food production in those countries? I want the kids to be able to draw maps of where these countries are in relationship to their continents; they don’t have to be perfect. Where does the water come from for this food growth?

Now go back and look at your proposed meal plans and budget. How are your choices impacting people in more vulnerable positions? Do you feel like you are making ethical choices? How could you adapt your choices to be more respectful of the totality of the needs of the planet? This will have to involve some longer pieces of writing (hand writing!) as we will also go through and cover ethics as a sub topic here. We have several books on ethics that we will read and consider in an abstract way in the process of being able to apply them to this topic in particular.

We will make more progress on gardening efforts and we will talk about soil nutrition and balanced growing efforts. We will look at whether the various countries that are producing our foods focus on monocrops or if crop diversity is implemented. We will talk about the differences between doing a little bit of gardening versus having to do large scale farming for a living. We will visit local farms to talk to actual farmers about how their lives are structured.

We will research how building houses impacts farm land and we will look into how farms impact wildlife and biodiversity.

Through the course of this unit I want to make notes for myself so that we can have a unit test at the end. The test will cover any and all of the research we do together. I hope to find 20–50ish questions (probably slightly different questions for the two kids because they are not at the same developmental level) to check how well they are retaining this information and whether they can apply it at a later point.

They will be doing a fair bit of short writing efforts throughout the unit because they will have to do a lot of note taking and maths work. I think we will have a weekly short response writing effort summarizing what they feel they have learned that week so they can refresh their own learning.

I think we will need multiple longer writing efforts. It would be nice if they each wrote a fairly detailed graphic story that shows various parts of the food production process and why it works the way it does (they really like doing this; in the past my oldest did a fabulous comic on immigration to California as part of history). This will be both art as well as working on neat handwriting.

As the final project I will help them assemble a long report on food production, how they will utilize the money they have for their budget, where they want to try to buy food from and where they want to avoid food from as they explain the ethics of food buying, and talk about the global conditions that are likely to impact the food chain as they grow into adulthood. I will be involved to help them in this process and I will guide them on formatting and I will help with editing but the writing will be theirs. The final report will go through at least three versions: rough draft, second draft with all of the spelling/grammar/major logical issues addressed, and if the second draft is really good enough a typed third draft. If the second draft gets a big fat raised eyebrow they won’t type until the fourth draft. The final written draft must be written to be legible and neat. But they need the typing practice as well.

I don’t know for sure how long this will take us. As a rough guess at a minimum we will spend six weeks on this but it might take a fair bit longer. We tend to fall into research holes and we love our tangents.

I know this will need refinement as we go and I will ask the kids for their feedback but this feels like a starting place.

No stockings

Leave a reply

The boat sucks. Transparent International sucks. Putting our stuff in storage for months sucks. Our stuff supposedly arrived nine days ago but the company on this end hasn’t contacted me. Either customs is taking absurdly long (it generally takes 48 hours) or it didn’t arrive for the second time. Or the company who is delivering it just… doesn’t feel like working effectively and quickly. Who knows.

A whole bunch of the stocking stuffers are on that damn boat too. Well… I guess some of them can wait for Easter? Others will just be given late. We will still have magic. Frankly… the kids will get plenty.

The trip to Edinburgh went fine. We did our paperwork. Now some bits have to be mailed off. I think that will happen tomorrow. Every day a bit more gets done, we take a few more steps towards being fully settled. I’m told that once our stuff arrives we will be offered compensation for how terribly over-estimate this has gone. If it takes till after Christmas (looking likely) it will be more than 18 weeks, on an 8-12 week estimate. Awesome.

I’m starting to feel scared they lost our stuff and just don’t want to admit it yet.

I’m trying to find joy though. Today a tree surgeon came and took out some non-natives and we now have a giant pile of stumps and tree chunks and wood chips. We will have a lot of fun with that. I am really looking forward to setting up a proper mud kitchen out there with rough materials instead of something store bought. That makes me feel… really happy. That speaks to my values.

It’s weird figuring out what things are part of your values. I want my kids to be happier playing with a pile of logs than sitting and watching a screen and I teach them that this is the way to be by going out and doing it with them. I want my kids to turn to me when they have emotional distress instead of eating their feelings or hurting themselves or finding awful romantic partners and so far… they do. They talk about the things that upset them and they try to find ways to solve their problems that are fairly constructive for little kids.

I want my children to be doers, not people who sit around being entertained as a lifestyle. I model that. I live that. And so far… they are running into slight troubles at school because they are not people who sit and wait for life to happen. They get up and do things. Will this make them suitable for every job? No. But it will help them find the right one for them someday.

A long time ago I was drawn to people who were very certain of their own “rightness”. I was like a moth to a flame. I wanted to be near people who felt confident and sure of their own path. I became that kind of person and it makes some of my old connections trickier. I am absolutely certain that those paths do not work for me. Is there anything wrong with them? No. We all get to be however works for us. I’m just grateful that (so far) my children have very complementary personalities to my own.

When I go check on Youngest Child lately, she is more and more often in the lounge sprawled out reading a book. She’s going to fit right in. She talks up a storm. She demands to go outside and play. I like her so much. Sure it’s going to take her a few weeks to wean off of demanding the iPad every single time she opens her eyes… that’s a hazard of travel. We can’t bring books with us in large quantities. E-readers are not the same in the eyes of a toddler. I am buying books. Not tons. Well… a fairly surprising amount considering we have been here three months. I think if I include Christmas presents I have bought 6-10 books for each person in the house already. Once the boat arrives that won’t feel as important. We already have books… we just don’t have our books and the pain is becoming unbearable. We are readers and our books have been in storage for a year. We have all used e-books… it’s not the same. It doesn’t fill the same need in our souls.

I found the local used book store and I’m already making friends with the proprietor. I think we will get to know each other quite well.

The guy who did our tree removal asked about getting our families together for dinner. He wants me to hurry up and make more friends locally. I think he sounds delightful. He spent several decades riding his bike around foreign countries. We will have lots to talk about.

I have a whole bunch of tendrils out into the community. The beginnings of beginnings… but I’m not following through very much yet. I talk to people when they touch my life incidentally but I’m not following up with more close contact. I’m still so tired. I still feel so overwhelmed. I don’t know how long it will take me to feel like I have anything to give a real relationship but I’m not there. I still go to sleep and wake up feeling so weary I want to fall over. I still feel like my days are completely packed with chores… I don’t know when this will change. I don’t know if or when this will ease and until it does I should not lead anyone on with the belief that I have something to give.

My bucket is empty.

I haven’t had 24 hours of down time in over two years. I know that is pretty par for the course for parents… but not many parents do continual travel and interact with their kids 24/7 the way I do. Shorter breaks don’t feel very refreshing because my level of over work is so extreme.

If I get four whole hours off in a week… it feels like a drop of rain in the ocean. I don’t notice it. I don’t settle or relax. I have not yet figured out how to recharge, not really. I just keep pushing through.

I am reading the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence that is the basis for all of their education theory. It’s really quite refreshing and more in line with my overall belief system and educational theory than I would have expected. I really hope I can help MC pop a wheelie and get over the hurdle of school feeling just that teensiest bit too hard (fucking handwriting) so that she can go back to full time school next year. This is about the best school is going to get.

I’m going to make “lines” with sticks and then we are going to shape letters with wood chips and talk about why the proportions are the way they are. Why do you space things this much. Why do you need the arches and the curves in these places. Why do you need these kinds of gaps between words to be readable.

Kinaesthetic education, yo.

Because when we are all done we can use a broom and sweep up the results and then try again. It’s perfect. I’m actually really excited about this.

I have so much confidence in my children that it sometimes feels unreal to me that anyone can feel this way about anyone else.

The other day I was wandering somewhere with EC and we saw some of these abstract statues of a mother curled around a child. She said that when we get the house more properly settled she wants to find something like that for us to have in the house because that is how she thinks of me. My heart exploded. I had so many feelings at once. I wanted to create children who felt tenderly held. I wanted to create relationships where my children felt adored and respected and appreciated… I did it and I will keep doing it. I said, “Ok. We can do that.”

I kind of love that my baby will say her name all day long “_____ hat. ______ bear. ______ shirt.” but when a stranger asks her what her name is… she smiles at them and refuses to answer. It feels like she only wants to share her identity with us. I know that isn’t it. I know this is just a normal developmental stage… but it feels really lovely anyway. This baby feels really lovely in general.

On the train home last night a guy was sitting at the table next to ours. For the first hour or so he kept his airbuds in and I worried about disturbing him. Then we ended up in line at the snack stand together and he started talking to me. He told me that he has rarely ever seen three children as well behaved as mine. Yes sir, I’ll take your random approval… Our train was over an hour delayed and we just talked and played and read and drew and had a good time together without being fussy. Even though we arrived home more than two hours past our bed time. My kids are tough cookies. They rarely whine and when they do it is generally a sign that something pretty serious is wrong. I trust them.

That’s part of why I am going to listen to MC and flexi school for the rest of the year. She is good at telling me where she needs to be and what she needs to have happen for a given period of time. She has sure changed a lot over the course of her life. She has tried out some pretty intense things… but she tells me when she needs me to shift and that’s the best I can ask for.

We will figure out this journey together.

This is where I want to be. I am with the people I want to be with. Sure, there are bumps and inconveniences… that’s because life is an adventure. And sometimes adventures make you cry.

Souper impressive

2 Replies

Tonight EC asked to make dinner. She started with a base of turkey stock and water (I make my bone broth super concentrated and diluting it is wise) then she added in tomato, beets, carrots, and potatoes. Herbs and spices followed. She cooked that for a bit and decided it needed a bit of something more and added sausage followed by cream. It was faaaaaabulous.

She’s so big and capable. I’m absolutely thrilled.

Puuuuuuberty

Leave a reply

Eldest child keeps waking up in the morning really sad. She’s crying a lot and she can’t figure out why. She’s complaining about some parts of her body hurting in symbolic ways. I think puberty is hitting us like a freight train. This is going to be entertaining. I keep telling her that it’s OK that her emotions feel so big and out of control. It’s not her fault. She’s not doing something wrong. This is a normal process. It just really sucks and is hard for everyone. I hope I get to see what it is like for a kid to go through puberty without hating themselves.

friends-only on lj isn’t *exactly* public…

93 Replies

I have been internally struggling with how much I want to write about the kids. Privacy and all. I've set my privacy bar at a very non-standard place. It's not transitive. So it's awkward.

I was watching a movie on Netflix about a beauty school in Afghanistan. It's kind of interesting. Then Calli woke up. I could hear her knocking softly on the door and saying, "Mama." When I got there and opened the door (carefully so I didn't hit her in the dark) the first thing she did was sign "milk". Yeah.

We settled in on the rocking chair. She nursed on both sides and then fell asleep on my chest. From start to finish of picking her up until I laid her back down in her bed was twenty five minutes. I saw the clock as I left and returned to the garage.

It felt like a lifetime. I think that a lot of my physical nursing discomfort with Calli has been anxiety around the pot. I feel bad that I smoke pot and nurse. I have done a lot of medical research and I have consulted with a number of medical professionals on this topic. It's not great but it's better than any of the other drugs I could be on, honestly. There is still this miasma of shame and guilt. It makes me tense. At this point I don't have a lot of milk left anyway. She's nearly two.

It is going to be hard to finish weaning. She's not ready. She only nurses once or twice a day but it is very important to her. If she doesn't get to nurse at those crucial times she feels really bad. She cries and cries. It breaks her heart. Nursing is a very complex experience on both sides. It still provides enormous health benefits to both of us. (My risks for various cancers and diabetes goes down by the year.) It is very good for both of us to do this.

And when I sit down and nurse her I focus on her in a way I don't the rest of the time. When I sit down and nurse and trace her face with my finger I see how much she has gotten from me.

Shanna feels like a mini-me in a variety of ways that bring me great joy. I feel like if I got to go down a list of traits that describe me and pick which ones to give to my kids Shanna got the things I would pick to give away. Shanna makes me very happy. Seeing her move around the world convinces me that there is good to come and I have to be here to see it.

Calli is a different experience. Calli is a lot like me, don't get me wrong, but if I had to pick the traits to pass on I probably wouldn't have selected quite the list Calli got. Calli is like a lot of the parts of me I struggle to accept. But this morning as I nursed her I found peace with that.

Instead of feeling bad I felt joy that she was there to remind me that even the parts of me I struggle with are good and worthy of emulation.For better or worse this tiny person sees me and sees someone good and wonderful. Someone she wants to be just like. So she picks things to pattern off of. If I don't like the patterns she is picking up, maybe I'd best watch my behavior-hey?

They are so different. Calli's birthday is next month. I asked her if she wanted to have a party for her birthday. She said yes, adamantly. I asked her if she wanted a big party or a little party. That took a little negotiation and explanation. Shanna campaigned hard for a huge party. She started listing off names of people to invite. Calli vetoed almost everyone.

Calli wants the woman who comes to our house every two weeks, her Godmamas whom she sees every month, and the family that has provided the most care taking for her since birth. She strongly vetoed every other name we could come up with.

Shanna invites every person she talks to on the bus and the train to her birthday party. It's hilarious. I'm starting to think I should reserve a spot at Lake Elizabeth and start letting her hand out business cards. If she wants that, she can have it. Calli doesn't want that.

Calli likes quiet small groups. She's overwhelmed by sound and too many people. She doesn't enjoy it. She likes having the few people she is comfortable around visit and that's it.

They mirror very different parts of me. I like it. I like watching them. I feel really good about the ways in which they are different. I feel like they embody the extreme ends of my personality. I feel like a constant peace keeper. "Shanna, don't pressure Calli to do things. If she says no you have to respect her wishes." They are both persistent. It's really wonderful.

I thought about all the things I love about Calli while I was nursing her. Including the fact that she continues to need me so intensely and viscerally. I thank anything that will listen for my children. To my children I am the most important and wonderful person in the world. They are probably going to be the only people I ever feel really comfortable around. They are the extent of my clan.

I haven't weaned Calli and I don't know when I will. It's one day at a time. Some day she will no longer need this from me. I hope I can continue to meet her needs for a while longer.

Apparently I don’t want to track.

8 Replies

I got busy. Then we decided to use a lot less electricity for a while (no artificial lights and no computers during darkness) and my computer time went down. I'm cheating today because I am in a bad mood. 

I went and saw my therapist on Thursday and that was a good thing because I was having a lot of intrusive suicidal ideation all week before that. Over the weekend I just didn't have the thoughts and that was restful. But this morning Calli had a hard time sleeping and I wasn't very patient with her and I feel quite guilty about it and here I am. Noah tapped me out because I wasn't being very patient. Shanna didn't have this many sleep interruptions. This is hard. I don't handle many of them–Noah does 90% of them. Once in a while I try to tap him out around four so that he can get a little sleep before work. I did that last night and I shouldn't have. Turns out she had just barely woken up and he had slept most of the night. Dang it. That's what I get for trying to be nice. He came back at five and told me I could be done. He's very nice. It's going to be a long day and I will be nicer to the kids all day if I have some time when I am not being kicked or having someone scream in my ear. 

Running continues. I have missed a couple of days of training due to tripping. I feel mixed about that. It just means I need to be more careful, right? I don't think that long term it will be a problem that I lost a total of three and a half miles more than five months before the marathon. I will still get enough miles logged. It will be fine. I'm struggling with my attitude about running. Some where in tracking I stopped thinking about it as "just get there" and started thinking "I am a loser for being this slow." I am not a loser. I am not an athlete. I do not have a history of running. I'm doing fucking great. My attitude isn't great and I'm trying to work on it. I wish I could just feel happy with myself for what I have done so far. I don't know why I feel so little pride in the half marathon. I suppose because I was bitching and moaning in my head the whole time. I cried through a lot of the race and felt self-pitying. Why should I feel pride in spending three hours feeling that way? Running is extremely emotional for me. I think about my siblings a lot. I think about my brothers and how they used to run. I think about being told all my life that I was not athletic and never being given space to try. If I wasn't going to go out and be the fastest person on a track team tomorrow I shouldn't bother to get off the couch. 

I think about how I want my kids to perceive exercise. And I think it sucks that my experience of running is that it triggers a lot of crying and very sad thinking. I wish to God that I had memories of my family that made me happy. I want to be able to think of something that has happened to me and not cry or feel bitter. How do I turn things like a half marathon into something to feel kind of lame about? I know I didn't "enjoy" running it. So it doesn't count. I sure as heck wasn't that fast. I feel like there is no point in me doing things. I think that at least part of me believes that because no one will be there at the finish line whether I am the first person or the last who gives a shit about me so why bother? It doesn't matter what I go do when I am alone in a room by myself. I don't really exist.

I go see a therapist because I need to have an "authority" who I can come back to time and time again who I can come back to and get continual reassurance that I am doing the right thing. I need to be seen. I need to have someone I can trust witnessing my life who isn't going to allow me to be invisible. I have had a few good therapists in my life. They have all been able to present a neutral facade no matter what I am telling them about until I ask them for feedback. Then they react a great deal. I can't handle working with a therapist who flinches and pulls away from me when I talk about the things that are going on in my head. I can't expect neutrality from Noah or my friends. I have gotten to the point in my therapy career where I talk about that on the first visit with a new person. "I need a blank wall. I will project all of my shit onto you if you give me any reaction." My current therapist has a wonderful presence. She radiates comforting. I like her.

Last week we talked a lot about what it means that having panic attacks and feeling suicidal is my normal. What do I do about that? How do I go about living my life knowing that it is true? I have yet to have a stage of life where I have gone more than a year without thinking about suicide. I didn't think about it for the first year of Shanna's life. Then I had a miscarriage and a bunch of issues with my mother. 

If I wasn't someone with a panic disorder what would my life look like? How would I interact with people? What would would I do with my time? I have to construct this story out of whole cloth. I try to guess. I switch social groups so often because I don't feel like I guess well and then I am afraid to see people again. I won't be able to duplicate the same "character" I was trying for the last time I saw them. A lot of how this is manifesting is I just don't talk as much any more. I feel like I only have bad things to say so I shouldn't say anything at all. Sometimes I get into a blurty stage because I have so many words in my head and I don't have very many appropriate places to put them. 

I want my kids to have a different relationship with exercise than I have. So I pretend that running is awesome and I do a lot of it. I like that my kid thinks nothing of the mile walk to the park. She would much rather walk to the park than drive because she thinks car seats are annoying. We have a different sense of time than most people. We have long days to fill. We don't do much and we don't have very many obligations at specific times. Well, we do a lot. It's just all decided at the last minute and most of it is in or near our house.

How would I live if I didn't have panic attacks and suicidal ideation? I'm not really sure what would be different. I wonder what my life would be like if I didn't waste so much physical energy on being afraid. Terror is hard on the body. My body feels terror a great deal of the time while I am doing common every day things. I wish I understood how much it was taking away from me, although I'm not sure I need more reasons to be resentful. I don't like my body for being maladapted in this way. I wish my body understood that it is ok to be safe here. I kind of feel like part of it was being mailed the letter. People who are mad at me aren't even going to limit telling me that I'm bad to the internet. They are going to mail shit to my house so that I can't avoid knowing that I'm bad even if I avoid the internet. Well, fuck. 

I want the voices inside my head to be kind to me. I want to know how to change those tapes. I'm tired of feeling like I loathe myself. I'm tired of feeling critical of my accomplishments. I really and truly am safe. I feel like I need to get to the place where I can really trust that Noah and Shanna and Calli are probably always going to like me. They will get mad at me as well. Other people need to be not my problem. I need to stop caring if other people think I am bad. I need to stop rehearsing these tapes that confirm that people think I am bad. I need to not care that what I am doing is not good enough for other people. That isn't my job. I don't need to be good enough for them. Three people. What would my body feel like if I really understood that I only need to expend energy worrying about three people instead of untold numbers? I think I should make up that story in my head. That should probably be my story all the time. Then I won't have to worry about remembering a new one. This is my family. I care for them and they care for me.

Instead of hearing my brother criticize me I need to hear Shanna telling me that I'm the best mom in the world. Shanna has already declared that she is running in a race with me as soon as she is big enough. I guess I will have to keep running. I need to get the wheels fixed on her bike so she can ride while I run. 

I had to have kids or I probably wouldn't have made it to thirty. I have been suicidal for a very long time. My will power needs rejuvenation. Right now my job is to teach my kids how to be functional, happy adults. That means I have to figure out how such a person behaves and act like that in front of them all the time. So I cry when I run. Maybe I should stop feeling bad about that. Maybe it's really awesome that I have space in my life where I am alone and I get to vent those horrible overwhelming emotions. Maybe a skinned knee isn't the worst thing in the world. I do need to pay more attention when I am running. I want to show Shanna how to be competent and that means being at least minimally attentive. Injuries suck, yo. 

More kid musing

1 Reply

It’s kind of weird writing this stuff here because the internet is forever. How will my kids feel about so many random people being able to find so much about them? Kind of an interesting thing to think about. But, here’s more anyway. 🙂

I think that nursing is a skill and Shanna was good at it and Calli is kind of awful. Seeing as I just read a chunk of The Birth Order Book yesterday that’s kind of funny. Apparently it is completely standard for second children to go the exact opposite of the older child. Fair enough. Calli seems to have a really hard time regulating my milk flow. She has one nursing speed: full bore. (Is that the right spelling? bore? boar? Darn Noah for not being awake yet!) This means she coughs and chokes and sputters. Still. She’s six months old. She should bloody well have figured out this nursing thing by now. (said lightheartedly) She also yanks really hard as she whips her head around. She can’t lie still on my lap. At all. Ever. She is either waving her arms or her legs or rolling her head back and forth or tapping her foot or… On my best days I think this is the coolest thing in the world. She has so much energy to burn it isn’t funny. I think that is a positive thing. On the worst days I can’t stand having her on me to nurse and I contemplate supplementing with formula. This thought kind of horrifies the lactivist in me. :-\ I’m actually nervous about giving her a bottle though. Yes I know I could pump, but I kind of suspect she would love switching to a low flow bottle and never nursing again. I don’t think I am up for committing to another couple of years exclusively pumping. That is my nightmare. It’s complicated. So far I am just working constantly on nursing manners. I believe in letting kids nurse full term.

Shanna is being restricted to one nursing a day because she doesn’t seem to be able to stop biting. I think her mouth has changed and biologically she’s ready to be done. Emotionally she totally isn’t. *sigh* It’s hard because nursing is her biggest comfort in case of something awful happening or if she is feeling particularly insecure but it wicked hurts and puts me in a horrible mood. :-\ Not a great plan then. I feel like completely weaning at this time would be a bit much for her. She’s had enough adjustments lately–new bed in a new bedroom (alone by herself for the first time in her life), potty training, new sister, extra vaccines lately because of the travel, I’ve been having a hard time all on my own and she notices. I seem to have given up on complete sentences. Interesting. So I feel like I’m trying to give Shanna a bit longer before I force weaning. We are talking about it and leading up to it. I think her birthday will be the cut off. Eek. Poor baby girl. 🙁

And I really don’t have time for more. ack

So I got dumped yesterday.

3 Replies

Not by my husband, by one of the women in my mom group. I got sent a rather hurtful email. To be defensive, because I always am, the hot sauce comment was not even vaguely serious. I would never do that. It was an unkind thing to say at all, but I don’t think this level of response was appropriate. And the ‘cold baths’ were tepid, just not warm and fun. I took zero pleasure in them and I don’t feel they were cruel. They were business like and not *fun*, but Shanna was not harmed in any way and despite not being fond of them she doesn’t seem traumatized by being in less than super warm water.

Continue reading →

Sleep deprivation

Leave a reply

Calli woke up at 3:30 for a diaper change. That woke Shanna up. Shanna wouldn’t chill out and let Calli go back to sleep. So I’m up for the day and fiercely cranky about it. Especially because both children are now asleep on top of me after ensuring I’ll get no more rest.

Bitter. That’s how I feel.

Who in the hell okay’ed this project?!

3 Replies

We have a little board book called First Rhymes. Most of the rhymes are the old favorites everyone knows (Little Bo Peep, Little Jack Horner, etc.) but there is one that uhm… who decided that this was a good idea (for a book published in 2005)?

I Love Little Pussy

I love little pussy,
Her coat is so warm,
And if I don’t hur her
She’ll do me no harm.

*cough* Totally innocent, I’m sure.

{milestones} and those other things

Leave a reply

I haven’t seriously babbled about my kids in a while! Such a tragedy. *cough*

Calli is awesome! But she’s awesome in that way that babies are awesome so it’s pretty generic. I think she’s an easy sleeper (certainly compared to Shanna) so that makes things easier. She is trying really hard to get more clingy and I am resisting with every fiber of my being. I was astounded throughout Shanna’s infancy that I didn’t really hit ‘touched out’. I now live in Touched Out. I would kind of like to have an asbestos suit so that no one gets too close to my skin. I do carry Calli around but when she has the days where she starts fussing the minute I lay her down for a nap I end up having a stern conversation with her then holding her hand while she fusses for a while. I’m still opposed to “Cry it Out” but I am much more ok with fuss-it-out-while-I’m-holding-your-hand. I just cannot do the 24/7 in contact with the newborn thing this time. I will lose my mind. But she eats a lot and she’s vigorous and very interested in the world around her. Since the most recent pediatrician visit (dear god do we need a new one) I am aware that she is a full pound less than Shanna was at this age and almost an inch shorter. This child will not be larger than average. Apparently she is right on the 50% line for height and weight. So in fact she is… dead average. 🙂 Despite the ped telling me to get ready to start her on iron fortified rice cereal, I don’t get the impression she is going to be the most food-ready kid at 6 months. It’s kind of weird how different she is from Shanna. 🙂 She’s rolling over, but only on soft surfaces. The floor is still too hard. The couch or the bed is super easy. Sitting up this morning was surprising. I set her down and expected her to immediately collapse but she didn’t. Yay! She sat up for quite a while as I tended to Shanna.

Shanna continues to develop at an amazing (to me) pace. I don’t have much experience with other kids so it’s kind of weird to have an intellectual understanding about child development and them come against an actual kid who isn’t following all the normal curves perfectly. I was looking at the milestone chart this morning (someone asked me when sitting up was normal… I don’t know…) and I looked at the bits for Shanna. Holy Milestones she is asynchronous. The average kid her age is mastering their second adjective?! Oh. She’s speaking in 10+ word sentences using several $2 words at a go. Her favorite right now is ‘diatomaceous earth’ because we have been using it to deal with our ant problem. If you have ever heard the word before you can understand her. If you’ve never heard of the stuff she sounds kind of muddled. 🙂 I’m pretty impressed though. She is also being increasingly helpful in the kitchen. Like this morning she helped with a large portion of breakfast. She scooped out the granola, helped cut up the apples (her little kid knife did a better job than I expected), and she helped pour out the yogurt. Yay! Simple, but she’s trying so hard. She can also almost entirely make a pbj by herself. By 3 she will be able to make herself simple meals. I’m thrilled. But her physical development is… spotty. She’s a total klutz. And she also shows very little inclinations towards artistic stuff. I’m trying pretty hard to provide access to such things, but it’s not my thing… so I kind of suck at helping her. I’ll keep trying and she’ll keep doing her thing. I don’t actually mind that she would rather spend 30 minutes cutting up a piece of paper than color. 🙂 Oh! And she’s making more progress towards potty training. At this point my approach is to just leave her alone. When she makes comments complaining about diaper changes I tell her that she can avoid them by using the potty and she often asks for panties instead of a diaper. We aren’t having many accidents in panties because when she isn’t in the mood for the potty she asks for a diaper. Although I do give her candy for using the potty. 😛 I am trying to be mellow though.

Balancing the two of them is… interesting. Luckily they are both easy going and mellow so they wait their turn extremely well. It helps if I keep on a constant stream of, “I can see that you really need me to ‘x’ but right now I am doing ‘y’ for your sister. I know it is hard to wait, but please try to be patient for another ‘z’ minutes.” If I can keep that up in a patient, kind voice waiting up to 15 minutes is not a big stretch. 30 minutes can be very hard for both of them. Which uhm… is ok. They’re kind of young. 🙂

I feel like we have hit the ‘terrible twos’ and yet… if this is the worst I see we’re doing GREAT! Shanna doesn’t ‘tantrum’ much at all but she does cry a lot. She has a lot of really intense feelings and it’s hard for her to figure out what to do with them. I feel like as long as she is well rested and not hungry she does better than a lot of adults with her strong feelings. It’s kind of hard to console her if she is hungry or tired though. It gets hard. The crying sound makes me feel homicidal.

Because I’m exactly this kind of full disclosure person… I’ve lost it a couple of times. 🙁 When we were driving to Disneyland and she was really really sick of the car she started kicking the drivers seat on purpose pretty hard. I reached back and hit her feet. 🙁 I know it wasn’t the right decision and we’ve talked about it. She’s pretty happy to lecture me for a long time about how hitting is wrong and I shouldn’t do it so she enjoyed the hell out of that conversation. (so my daughter) I’ve smacked her hands a couple of times purely as a reflex when she is doing something that makes me twitch. Every time I do she begins her lecture again about how hitting is wrong. She tells me to apologize and I do. She cries and we cuddle and kiss and then feel ok again. I am trying really hard to increase my patience level but it’s hard. This is part of that ‘there are no perfect parents’ thing. I try to not spend much time feeling bad but instead put my energy towards doing better next time. It’s hard to not get into negative self-talk. Given how much stress these kids add to my life (it’s incredible in a kind of scary way) I’m aware that I am actually doing phenomenally well. It helps that I now self-medicate. The next step is to increase my exercise because that will help a lot. I informed Noah that I was going to the gym today. Period. He’s supportive. 🙂

Guess I’m willing to leave this kid before 6 months. Ha.

Don’t know what to do with these feelings.

3 Replies

I need to tell Shanna no when she asks to watch birth videos. Every so often I kind of freak out and sob because I feel so much grief over the fact that I will never have a son. Every birth video I see where they have a son I sob and feel so envious I can barely see straight. In no way shape or form do I wish either of my girls away. I’m actually enjoying having a girl a little bit more this time because I feel less self-imposed-inhibition about enjoying the more ‘girly’ clothes.

But I have dreamed of my son for so long. It hurts so much that I will never get to see what that person would be like.

Well that was an unpleasant experience.

3 Replies

Yesterday I had my worst outing ever as a parent. I tried to take both girls to Dickens Fair. Not a big deal, I take them all kinds of places by myself. It was a total nightmare. Something there bothered Calli. She screamed almost nonstop from when we entered the building. The few times I managed to get her to calm down were followed by crying fits from Shanna. She rode the carousel and the guy who runs it helped her off her animal and she lost it. She started crying hysterically that she didn’t want him to touch her. I can’t tell for sure but I suspect that he was slightly rough when he picked her up. She was really freaking out though so I didn’t question it too much I just comforted her. She was then not ok with walking and wanted to be carried. You see how this is going?

It was awful. We were there for maybe an hour and I spend most of that time ravenously eating or trying to get one (or both) kid(s) to stop crying. So I left pretty quickly. Just not worth it this year.

So independent

1 Reply

Sometimes I don’t know what to make of Calli’s self-sufficiency already. She freakin loves the swing. We could leave her in it for hours until she has a dirty diaper or needs food. She laughs, smiles, plays with the mirror baby, and thinks the mobile is awesome. Shanna sorta tolerated it when she was tired. She likes just hanging out on her blanket (when I can keep Shanna from injuring her).

I’m not complaining! It’s just… weird. Frankly I’m delighted and grateful. It allows me to get stuff done. 🙂 I have probably already accomplished more in Calli’s lifespan than I did in the first six months of Shanna’s life. 🙂

And she’s so cuddly and sweet. She has a very serious face most of the time but then she smiles and she lights up like a roman candle. I feel so blessed in my children.

My good deed for the day.

2 Replies

One of my awesome former students came to visit me today. I took her to lunch and we chatted and moved closer towards being friends instead of teacher/student. She told me all about her excitement about joining the Navy. I sent her home with The Gift of Fear and told her that she should sign up for an Impact class before she heads to basic training. I am completely supportive of her joining the military but I also think she needs to learn to take care of herself. She was extremely enthusiastic and supportive. I’m glad we got to spend the day together. 🙂

Interesting point of view

2 Replies

Before people jump down my throat I AM NOT POSTING THIS BECAUSE I AGREE WITH EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF INFORMATION IN THIS POST. Did I say that clearly enough? Please don’t start lecturing me because I am stupid enough to believe something like this, thanks.

But anyway! With that lead up! Here is an article that says we should be grateful to the Duggars because their kids will be paying for our Social Security: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203917304574413792994350108.html

Wow, this is going to be complicated

11 Replies

Shanna was talking about her vulva this morning and acting questioning (this is where her language skills get a bit muddy) and I said, “Yup all girls have vulvas.” And then I stopped. Actually, no. All girls don’t have vulvas. But most girls do. And very few boys have vulvas. Man. I think things are going to be complicated to explain to her.