Noah | this woman's work

Two for Tuesday

Grad School, The Story of My Life 12 Responses »

Aug 312010

Two things about my blog today:

I will never host a major giveaway again. I had no idea there was a giveaway attached to the $200 Just My Size shopping spree when I signed up — I just wanted to do something fun with Pennie. But the giveaway has been a wreck of comment moderation and I’m unlikely to know the person who wins because it’s been over 400 random strangers (the vast majority of which won’t become readers). And the influx of traffic doesn’t happen on a page with ads (because BlogHer won’t let you run their ads on giveaway pages) so it hasn’t even been good for my stats. Today is the last day of the giveaway and as soon as I announce the winner, I am taking that page DOWN.
Speaking of taking things down, I’m going to start removing my deep, dark archives. I am a little sad about this but only in theory. In reality I don’t care much and in two years time if I’m counseling people, I don’t want to be so easily stalked.

Two things about my kids:

Madison just hosted her first sleepover with Abby‘s youngest. Movies were watched, snacks were eaten, giggling was done in great quantities. Sasuke (guinea pig) woke them up at 8:30am, which is around Madison’s usual time but I have a feeling Maya is gonna be feeling it later today. Madison, too, actually. I don’t think they fell asleep until about 11pm. They slept at either end of the twin bed and it was pretty cute. I meant to snap a picture but they woke up before I remembered I meant to do that.
Noah is a great semi-brother to Roscoe. They adore each other. I was thinking about how fun it is to see Noah with a baby and how nice it is to see him with a baby who does not live here so I don’t have to be waking up in the middle of the night with said adorable baby. But as mother’s of teen boys know, there is nothing more heartwarming than seeing a teen boy play peek-a-boo with a chortling almost one year old.

Two things about school:

I have my first paper (it’s not much of a paper) due on Thursday and should probably write, that, eh? And also I have to give a presentation for a reading also on Thursday but my books aren’t here yet. My first meeting of my other class is tonight and my seminar is this weekend. I found out I have to go to court as an observer for the seminar.
Transportation to my classes is quickly becoming a challenge and we may need to buy a second very used car. We’re going to crunch the numbers this weekend, I think.

Two things about the state of my mind:

A friend of mine asked me to present at an upcoming open adoption conference and I thought it was in the next month. She emailed me to say they’d moved the dates up a week and I thought, my god! And they haven’t even sent out a call for proposals! They must be really confident! So I wrote her saying something to that effect and she said, “Well, we have a whole year…” You can either use this story to judge my state of mind as someone who is that confused about the dates or you can use it to imagine my state of mind now that this particular worry is off my plate!
Despite the weather being back up in the 90s, having a headache because of the humidity, being worried about my books arriving in time and having a broken kitchen sink (long story) I am enormously cheerful because I’ve started school. I’m looking forward to tonight’s class because I believe it’s an overview of the program, the internship and the licensing process. I have a lot of questions about all of that and am looking forward to having them answered.

Score one for the nice boys

Read/heard/seen 7 Responses »

Aug 282010

Being a mama’s boy, new research suggests, may be good for your mental health. That, at least, is the conclusion of a study presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association by Carlos Santos, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Social and Family Dynamics.

Santos recently conducted a study that followed 426 boys through middle school to investigate the extent to which the boys favor stereotypically male qualities such as emotional stoicism and physical toughness over stereotypically feminine qualities such as emotional openness and communication, and whether that has any influence on their mental well-being. His main finding was that the further along the boys got in their adolescence, the more they tended to embrace hypermasculine stereotypes. But boys who remained close to their mothers did not act as tough and were more emotionally available. …

Using a mental-health measure called the Children’s Depression Inventory, he also found that boys who shunned masculine stereotypes and remained more emotionally available had, on average, better rates of mental health through middle school. “If you look at the effect size of my findings, mother support and closeness was the most predictive of boys’ ability to resist [hypermasculine] stereotypes and therefore predictive of better mental health,” Santos says.

via Emotional Openness May Be Good for Males’ Mental Health – TIME.

So first let me thumb my nose at the people who worried I was smothering Noah with all that attachment parenting (the extended breastfeeding, the co-sleeping, the slinging) and that Brett was “allowing” me to turn him into a girly-man by respecting Noah’s feelings.

And second how about we stop this whole “mama’s boy” stereotype altogether, ‘kay? Let’s just say that human beings — male or female or self-identified other — are healthier and happier when they are allowed and encouraged to be in touch with their feelings and taught skills to communicate effectively.

I mean, duh, people. Really and truly DUH.

Napping homeschool girl

Homeschooling 10 Responses »

Aug 252010

Every once in awhile Madison just CRASHES. I knew today would be one of those days because she woke up whiny and it just got worse as the day wore on. It culminated with her in tears on the couch because of something she said to someone when she was four that she doesn’t remember but she knows was mean and the guilt — after two years — was finally overwhelming. So first I told her that even the nicest people do mean things sometimes and that she IS one of the nicest people I know and then I tucked her into bed and lay down with her for a few minutes. It’s been an hour and a half and she’s still sleeping.

Today would be her first day of school if she was going to our neighborhood school across the way. Or maybe yesterday would have been, I don’t know because the schools in our district got to choose which of those two days to start and I didn’t bother to get the details. We get a little foot traffic from kids in backpacks in front of our house and sometimes minivans park there if there’s an assembly of some kind.

We hear the school “bell” (it’s really a buzzer) go off, too, and all the kids romping on the playground. It makes for a nice nieghborhood-y feel.

Tomorrow I start school and I was thinking about how a lot of the moms on Facebook/Twitter have been counting down the days/hours/minutes until their kids go and I thought it’d be funny if Noah was doing the same thing about me but no one would get it since pretty much all his friends on Facebook are either kids or homeschooling parents of his friends. I feel like that was a potentially hilarious piece of satire that will never get to be.

Every year I ask the kids if they feel left out when they know other people are going to school and every year they say no. They say no while sitting in their jammies knowing their schooled peers are already at their desks so it’s likely not a fair context for the question. I did ask Noah once on the last day of school when there was a huge fair out on the playground field with bouncy houses and a DJ and he said, “But see how happy they are that they get to LEAVE?”

Listen, there are downsides to homeschooling mainly for me but the kids are awfully happy about it.

Temporarily losing my religion

Judaism, Parenting 13 Responses »

Aug 232010

We’re not doing religious school with the kids this year and it’s the right decision but I’m sad about it. Both the kids are on board but both (well, Noah — Madison is reflecting sadness back at us but she’s pretty neutral) are sad about it, too.

It’s hard having kids in two widely different age ranges because our synagogue building is very small and so they stagger the classes. It means our Sundays are basically eaten up by taking kids and dropping them off. Last year it was from 8:30 to 1:30 (with an exchange of kids in the middle) but this year Noah would start going at about 3pm so we would have a four hour window in the middle of the day but that would be it.

So that’s part of it.

The other part of it is that being a member of the temple and sending both kids to religious school is really expensive and we don’t have it right now. We could get financial aid but it’s a process and we’re kind of overwhelmed with process right now (my school; Brett’s temp job, which is requiring a whole lot of bureaucratic hoop jumping to get on there permanently). Also maybe we are late for applying, I don’t know. Brett kept putting it off because he hates having to ask for it.

Brett and I talked about it over the weekend and we know that this school year will be busier than ever because I’ll be in school. And our Saturdays are already getting booked because of kid activities and now Madison’s soccer practice is on Friday evenings. (Argh.) (Plus side to soccer — we requested she be on the team coached by one of the dads in our local transracial adoption support group so Madison will be one of several black kids with white parents AND the coach is a really nice, laid back guy so she is VERY EXCITED. Obviously this totally outweighs the awkward practice time. Go Stingrays!)

Now for Noah, anything he does past bar mitzvah is gravy. About half his friends won’t be going but two of his favorites probably are so he’s sad about that. He also says that if he misses one year, he doesn’t want to drop back in next year. So for him, he’s feeling like this is the end of his religious education. (I am hoping that he doesn’t feel that way next year.) When we told him we’d still go to temple events — most particularly the Purim carnival — he was somewhat mollified. But religious school has been part of his life for eight years now and he values it and this is a real loss for him. What made him WANT to not go (because we presented the option and then gave them a choice and listened to them discuss it with themselves) is that if we don’t do religious school this frees up time (and money) to take some weekends away.

And that is the final part of this.

We used to take minivacations. We’d leave just for a weekend and stay overnight someplace quiet and come back refreshed. I want to take that tradition back up so that when school is hectic, we can get away. When we used to do them Brett would romp the kids (well, kid — we’ve only had one of these trips since Madison arrived) and I’d stay back wherever to work. The state park lodges are ideal for this. They have great big open areas with fireplaces and tables for working. There isn’t wifi, which is good if you need to focus (you can pay for it if you really feel like you need it). There are also pools and hiking trails and there’s a decent restaurant on site so you can park your car and forget about it. The scenery is always pretty. So we’d like to do that once in awhile.

This all sounds good and sensible and reasonable but just like religious school has been part of Noah’s life for eight years, it’s been part of my life, too, and I’m grieving it as well.

Noah and I talked about it at length last night and in a continued testimony to sharing feelings, once Noah felt ok to talk about how sad he was to leave, he was able to make a definitive decision about leaving. He just wanted to be reassured that he could choose to NOT go and still be able to talk about missing it. You know, he wants to be able to make a decision without us throwing it back up in his face if he gets gloomy about it. And don’t we all want room to be ambivalent? I certainly feel ambivalent. I definitely WANTED to take a break this year until the kids both agreed to it and then I got sad, too.

We’ve decided that we’ll try to take a day trip very soon in order to cement our decision and celebrate it.

Three things

Adoption, Parenting 9 Responses »

Aug 062010

1. I edited the BlogHer giveaway because people kept commenting about how great I look in those pics. So I put a disclaimer right below the pictures (since I’m assuming people scanning before they comment might notice bold print right below the pics) explaining who Pennie is. It would be fun to pretend that I am that good looking but it would not be fair. Thus the disclaimer.

2. Yesterday Madison was so dang chipper, you wouldn’t believe it. She is often like this after we push through an emotional roadblock. Before breakfast I told her, “I will never leave you.” And she solemnly took my face in both her chubby little hands, looked deep into my eyes and said as if I were stating the obvious, “I know that.” Then she licked me.

3. Last night thinking about the whole “stating the obvious” tone of her reply, I said, “Madison, do you ever think that maybe you get mad at me when you’re really mad at someone else?” Expecting some push back, I settled in for a discussion but instead she said airily, “Oh yeah, I do that.” She said it is because I am “always around” and because she is not shy with me. I pushed it further and said, “I think that you are mad about XYZ and that’s why you were so upset the other night.” And she stopped dancing (because she is often dancing — she is prone to bursting into spontaneous dance) and thought about it for a millisecond then agreed that I probably had that nailed. So I ventured, “How about next time you are mad about XYZ instead of getting mad AT me you tell me and then I’ll help you with your feelings.” Noah, who was sitting across the room, said he was available for talking, too. She said, “I love having a big brother!” Then she climbed into my lap and hugged me before pirouetting off again.

I love her SO. MUCH.