Allow me to introduce someone
Mar 10, 2008 Friends, Homeschooling
Abby is not exactly new to blogging. She’s been hanging out on the blog black hole that is myspace (oh the horror of the flashing banners) and she’s been reading most of your blogs for a long time. (Seriously, she is hep to the adoption world like crazy.) But now she’s finally come over to the light and got herself a domain and a wordpress install, thanks to Jenna’s recent notification about the killer dollar sale that was happening at her host. And it is posts like this, my friend that makes me love her. Seriously and yet hilarious. Funny yet wise. Oh dear Abby! How fortunate we are that you left the Michigan cold to grace us with your presence here in Ohio! Our homeschooling life is better for it! (Plus your kids are kinda nice.)
Add her to your blogrolls and learn to love her as we already do!
Anyway, I’m putting this out there because, while I would not trade my life for anything, sometimes it’s hard. It’s hard. And sometimes I write about it with a derisive style and I don’t want people to get the wrong idea. I don’t tell my kids that I think they are black holes of need. That would be mean. I try to meet their needs and then I meet my needs by drinking. Just kidding! I try to meet their needs and it is impossible. Because they’re children. This impossibility and my inadequacy as a mother weigh on me and I deal with it, like I deal with most things, with sarcasm. Self-preservation can be ugly. I’m just trying to make it a little bit funny. The end.
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Tags: abby, Friends, homeschool, Homeschooling, wordpress
Corrupting my youth
Mar 9, 2008 Parenting
Noah is upstairs with his best friends dancing to kid hip-hop. (Lil Mama and Chris Brown.) This is my fault because I got Noah hooked on America’s Best Dance Crew. I’m voting for the JabbaWockeez and Noah’s all about Kaba Modern. (Go click those youtubes, seriously.) I’m all for my kid learning how to moonwalk but the kids who are visiting, their parents aren’t as into this stuff as we are.
Now go dig around and check out those dancers. They are A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.
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Tags: dance crews, dancing, Erica, hip-hop, Noah, popular culture, tweens
Blizzard-ish
Mar 7, 2008 Parenting, The Story of My Life
This morning I took the kids out to the library to hook up with Tracy (for the first time and she was lovely and Madison wasn’t too grouchy but maybe just a little bit). When we set out walking there it was a beautiful winter wonderland and Madison fairly skipped her way to the library catching snowflakes on her tongue. But on the way back everything was much more difficult. It was snowing harder, the sidewalks were slipperier and the wind had picked up.
Poor Madison was tired and hungry and the snow was blowing into her face, icing up her eyelashes. It’s 3.4 miles from our house to the library (I just google-mapped it) and (Edited to add: I thought about this and decided google is wrong. I went back and checked and it is — it has the library about 2 miles away from where it is. Next time I won’t copy and paste without reading, eh?) It’s uphill coming back so there’s that, too. Plus, she’s small and that’s a long walk in the driving snow when you’re big let alone if you’re just a little girl who’s ready for her lunch.
We trudged on because, as I pointed out to her, we weren’t going to get home by standing still. Still I was cursing myself for not calling Brett from the library and having him come get us. We stopped to rest in the park for a minute, sheltered in the little kiosk at the front, and I brushed the snowflakes out of her eyes. That’s past the halfway point but still feels like a long way from home.
“C’mon,” I said as I led her back out on the sidewalk. “We are strong, courageous women! We can do this!”
She was wailing up the street, holding onto the back of my coat so I’d act as a wind-breaker.
“I don’t want to be women!” she cried. “I want to be a children!”
“Ok, I’m a strong, courageous woman and you’re my strong, courageous child and we are on our way home! We’re braving the winds!”
“You freak me out when you say womens, Mommy! I miss my Daddy! I miss my brother!”
It was really sad. I kept wishing some passing car would be a neighbor so I could have hitched a ride. But we made it! And once Madison had some lunch in her belly and was tucked up with a blanket to watch a little Thomas the Tank Engine, all was good. (I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s asleep up there right now because it was hard work getting home!)
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Noah’s neopet account was hacked
Mar 4, 2008 Parenting
He lost a bunch of virtual stuff he bought with birthday money. He’s a mess.
I feel bad for him but also my parental self is thinking this is a good lesson about living in an internet age. It just sucks when life lessons are so damn painful (and expensive) to learn.
We took the kids over to the school to vote. Madison marched in and announced, “Mommy is here to vote for Obama!”
The other day Brett took Madison on a walk and she was pushing her stroller with one of her zillions of dolls inside. A mom pushing her own stroller came by and said, “Oh, are you taking your baby on a walk?”
“Yes,” said Madison then added, “She just came out of my uterus.”
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Growing up is never easy
Mar 1, 2008 Parenting
Madison fell on the couch. Not off the couch — she fell backwards on the couch and hit an oddly shaped toy and hurt her neck. There are few things scarier than having your child scream, “I fell and hurt my neck! Ow! I can’t move! Ow!” Because I didn’t witness the fall I had no idea how far and how hard she’d fallen. Turns out she’s ok but her neck is sore and she was really scared.
She’s scared about bodies these days. She’s scared about getting hit by a car. She’s afraid that someday she will accidentally lie down in the middle of the street and a car will run over her. She asks often, what will happen to her if she does this? We go over all the ways this will not happen. We talk about how she is always safe in the street and how Mommy or Daddy are always with her when we walk down the street. We talk about how she would never lie down in the middle of the street but that if she did, Mommy or Daddy would move her. But what if it does happen? She demands to know. So we talk about doctors and hospitals and ambulance drivers and through it all I want her to see the many, many safety catches there are in this world. She is strong and healthy. Doctors and hospitals are there to help us stay that way. She will be ok, I tell her often. Whatever happens, she will get through it.
But she’s still nervous about forgetting and lying down in the middle of the street. Because now she’s old enough that she knows she has more autonomy and as much as kids want to grow, all that freedom looks pretty frightening.
“It’s not easy being three,” she told me this morning. “Sometimes it’s scary.”
Noah is having his own challenges. I noticed that the more he embraces his tween-ness (music, friends, long hair, cool clothes and a smart mouth) the more he retreats to his Ramona and Moffat books. I did get him to make a leap to Zilpha Keatley Snyder this week and he just finished The Egypt Game. (You may remember that his favorite books are about ordinary kids doing ordinary things.) He reminds me a little of David Stanley so I hope he’ll go for those next. I’m not sure though because when it’s nighttime and he’s ready to head to bed, he wants something calm to make up for all the growing he’s done that day.