Lindsay's Sparkly Shoes

I'm not sure who in the universe thought it would be funny to give me a little girl who loves shoes but I'd like to find them and lodge a complaint! As if it isn't bad enough that Lindsay has to sleep with shoes (not on, holding them), today she put on a shoe-a-holic display worthy of a toddler Carrie Bradshaw.

Today I needed to stop by the mall to pick up some birthday gifts for two of my sisters in law. Both of my kids are in need of shoes so I decided I'd also do some shoe shopping while I was there. Will was at camp so I just had Lindsay and even though I failed to bring a stroller for her, since it was going to be a quick shopping trip and she's pretty easy to do things with I wasn't too worried. I should have been worried.

First store is Stride Rite for shoes. Despite the fact that she's not yet a year and a half old, Lindsay is already very particular about which shoes she likes. She kept going and getting this one hot pink pair which would have been fine except for the fact that they don't have them in her size. She goes and gets another pair, relatively similar, same color, but Stride Rite doesn't have those in her size either (6W). In the end I buy her white sandles (pretty standard toddler girl shoes) and a pair of white tennis shoes with light pink trim.

Two hundred dollars worth of shoes later (two pairs for Lindsay, two for Will) we head to a store to get something for Kevin's sister Lori. On the way Lindsay stops at the Bebe store (expensive, trendy, high end clothes) and she starts pointing in the window and saying "Dat!" "Dat!" Then she goes inside, still pointing and now also grabbing. I pick her up and carry her out and a few stores down before setting her down again to walk...we have no similar trouble passing by stores like Gap, GapBody, Banana Republic, even Childrens Place. Just Bebe.

Then I go into Nordstroms. Childrens shoe department, third floor. Immediately Lindsay finds the hot pink shoes similar to the ones she liked at Stride Rite. Grabs those. Climbs up on a chair, on her own, and proceeds to try and put it on her foot. I take her off the chair and move her. I am looking at the Pedipeds, she toddles over and finds these sparkly (and I mean sparkly) shoes - with gobs of fake "jewels" and rhinestones on them made by LelliKelly

Same procedure: climbs on chair, tries to shove on feet, has a fit when removed from chair. We repeat this one more time with another (similar) pair of glittery over the top shoes before I wise up and decide that the universe is telling me that I am not meant to buy her any Pediped shoes and I carry her, kicking and screaming, under my arm and down the escalator to the women's department to find something for my sister in law Kelly's birthday gift.

Sigh. How in the world did I, queen of the barefeet and flip flop, hater of pedicures, give birth to a shoe-a-holic who isn't even one and a half yet?

Burning Up

So I've been reading (really, studying) the Spirited Child handbook in the last few months (which I think has helped a lot - mostly me). I put something from that book into practice today with a lot of success. It's not often that something actually "works" over a very short period of time - I was so pleased with the technique that I wanted to write it down. Will can be very intense and really work himself up in a frenzy. One of the suggestions of the SC book is to give children alternative outlets for their feelings, particularly anger, instead of not allowing them to feel/be angry.

So this morning Will was all upset because I wouldn't let him wear his Spiderman costume to school. "But I have to save people," he argues. I tell him that if the costume is going to make him disagreeable that's not very super-hero like and I'll have to take the costume away until he's ready to act nicely (if the costume makes you have bad behavior then the costume is going to need to be put away yadda yadda). So then he tells me that he's very angry with me (which I think is a good step - that he's saying that versus just having a complete hissy fit).

I told him that it was okay for him to be angry with me; I understood that and I felt angry sometimes too. Then I asked him (this is from the book) if he'd like to draw a picture of how angry he felt. He said that yes he would so up we went to get the markers and paper out and he plopped himself down and began to draw. He started with black. Then he got yellow, red and after that pink. About this time Kevin came home from running and asked him what he was drawing. He tells Kevin very matter of factly that he's angry with me for not letting him wear his Spiderman costume and so he's drawing a picture of fire burning me up (maybe I was the pink?). Kevin, of course, is pretty taken aback but in typical Kevin fashion he keeps his cool and doesn't really react to it (I later explained the technique to him). He showed Kevin the fire and the black (which he said was the smoke) burning me up.

In the car on the way to school he was still angry with me (according to him) but when I picked him up from school and we got into the car he said to me right away, "Mommy, I'm not angry with you anymore" (I hadn't asked - I had just acted normally when I picked him up; he brought it up specifically).

Here's a picture of the drawing he made. It's a pretty obviously "angry" image - but I thought it was pretty cool that he could get his anger out that way (versus having a fit, hitting something or someone, or even just yelling). So I got fictionally burned up in the process. As my book suggests, parenting should be about progress, not perfection :-)

Mom, How Come ...

Will: Mom, how come there's rain in the clouds if I can't see it, even if I go up in an airplane?

to Ty: Have you heard of "On Beyond Zebra? Which letters do you know?

to Ty: You can't see the air but you can feel it, right?

June 21, 2009

Things I Hope I Never Forget

Lindsay at the fair, her first time seeing a cow. I had been wheeling her around in her stroller but when we got to the AgriFair building I took her out and let her go into the petting zoo. The floor of the petting zoo is a thick layer of shavings and normally Lindsay is pretty particular about her footing (not venturing out into deep sand, often not even wanting to walk on wet grass) but I put her down and she saw the cows and I just saw the lightbulb go off. "Moo!" she squealed and headed over to the cows as fast as her little tripod walk would take her repeating "Moo! Moo! Moo!" all the way. Then "Sheep!" Too bad I had never told her about goats (bad mom). She had no words for them but she walked right over and patted them too.

It all just clicked in her head that these things we'd been seeing in books are really animals, not some little plastic toy.

Art A Day

Kevin and I have decided that the next fifteen months are so are the "sweet spot" of parenting. Today is the first day of summer for us (Will's last day of school was yesterday) and in just about 15 months he'll be starting kindergarden (sighs). Like the Keith Urban song, "these are the days that you'll remember" and we want to spend them, as much as possible, enjoying the freedom of this time in our lives.

As I was pinning up some of the school artwork that came home with Will yesterday it occurred to me tha t, beyond me lobbying to put more art and music into our schools, I ought to be walking the talk and doing exactly that. Instead of worrying about donating to fundraisers to bring art education back to our school district, maybe we should just be getting down and dirty ourselves more often. I love doing art projects - and part of the joy of getting messy is getting clean afterwards. I set a goal to do at least one art or music "project" every day - some days it will be as simple as getting out our MusicTogether CDs and our instruments and playing together but I hope that most days it will mean getting out the crayons, the paints, the glue, the playdoh, t he scissors ... and just getting creative.

On the first day we made a chalk city on our driveway and painted dinosaurs. Well, we started out painting dinosaurs ... then the dinosaur became the ocean. Then we put fish in the ocean. [then mommy paints a sun over the ocean]. Then we paint a purple whale breeching out of the ocean. Then we give the whale a mouth. Now the whale is a megaladon (ancient shark). Then the whale is actually a ladder up to the sun. Then we mix the purple with the sun - now we have a sunset ... and that's where we stop for the day (although we may continue to paint after "quiet time" - to that end the stuff is still set up in the driveway.

Like my goal of getting back into running this year, it's all about momentum. The more you do it, the more you do it. First day of summer and we're on a roll :-)

ArtADay - Day 2

Day 2: we played off of our matchbox car chalk city and ran our cars through paint and then "rimmed" the cars on the paper to create our artwork. We also had fun with Lindsay's bubble machine (she can say "bubble" now very distinctly) and Will's bubble sword. I made giant bubbles with the bubble sword and Will ran around the street popping them with his other sword. This is now referred to as "the bubble game".

Day Three - start of a cheetah, painting the base

Day 3: decided to go with a theme for the week (African Animals). He chose a cheetah today. We looked at pictures on the internet (thank you Google Images) and then decided that cheetahs are yellow. Then I had to cut out a template. Of course Will wanted a cheetah running, so I had to freehand draw that, then cut it out, then tape it down onto the newspaper so he could paint it. Now it's drying and after "quiet time" we'll punch out black dots (that's a skill, right?) and glue them onto the body. Don't know if we'll make eyes or just glue googley eyes to it. I found a cool multicolored snake thing for tomorrow.

the finished cheetah

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Day 4 - paper plate snake. Note to self - make note of which pieces go where before you paint. In theory it's a great idea to practice cutting by cutting the paper plate into pieces and then painting the pieces and then reassembling the "puzzle" back into a snake ... but in practice it's harder than it looks to remember which piece goes where! (and it's also hard to figure out which side to paint if the pieces aren't labeled so we ended up painting both sides of all of the pieces, just in case.

Day 4 - colorful snake

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Day 5 - I've already learned something. Even though I like having a "theme" and the goal of doing at least one art project each day, I've learned that being too rigid about either really takes the entire point out of it. Yesterday we had a fun, easy day - walked to Starbucks, baked banana bread together, played the bubble game but then it was 5 PM and I realize we haven't done our art project for the day yet (handprint lions from this site: http://www.activityvillage.co.uk/lion_handprint_painting.htm) So this week I feel compelled to complete the theme but after tomorrow (Friday) I'm going to adopt a looser definition of "art project". I want to do creative things but I don't necessarily need to create things in the process. There's too much pressure that way - which entirely defeats the point of the project in the first place.

Day 6 - this morning Will had a playdate with a friend whose mom is also very into doing art with her son. She showed me a few cool things that she has to do with Mason (that I now totally covet) and she had a face painting book complete with face paints, a brush, etc. We turned Mason & Will into superheroes with face paints - it was fun. Now if I can only get to Michaels today maybe I can just paint Will's face as a zebra .....

To Be Or Not To Be ...

After a difficult trip with a friend to the Wild Animal Park I started thinking about the way we raise our children and what we're really teaching them and how much of our parenting is not about our child(ren) but about ourselves. And what I ultimately realized is that, as parents, most of the time we're not being honest with our children and maybe that's the reason they're not learning what we're teaching.

When other children are "too loud" we tell our child to say to that child, "You're hurting my ears, please stop screaming" or when they are playing in a way our child doesn't like (chasing, too physical, etc) we teach our child to "use his words" to tell the other child, "stop, I don't like that." But, in truth, as adults, we would never say that to someone who was offending us. When people are laughing and loud in a restaurant we don't go up to them and ask in our most polite tone of voice, "Excuse me, I don't like how loudly you are talking, could you please speak more quietly?"

So why are we teaching our children to "use their words" in this way if we know that, as adults, we don't practice this? Is this really the way we as adults should be acting? Do we think that this is actually the "right" way to interact with people. Should we, as grown ups, walk around using our words to politely correct everyone's behavior because we don't like it? Would we feel better if we did that?

Somehow I don't think so. If you're a "touchy feely" person that likes to hug and kiss people when greeting them how would you feel when the reaction to your affectionate greeting was, "I don't like it when you touch me that way"? What if you like to sing along with the radio and your passenger admonishes you, "You're hurting my ears. Could you please stop?"

As adults we would never do this. We know that would hurt the other person's feelings. But as parents this is exactly what we are teaching our children to do. We're not teaching them about accepting other people's differences or being kind to other people, we're teaching them that to assert their thoughts is supreme. Shouldn't we be teaching our children how to cope with the real world? And I don't mean that we shouldn't teach our children to keep their hands to themselves, or use inside voices - that's not what I'm wondering about at all - teaching children self control is a big part of what parenting is about. What I'm wondering about is what we are teaching our kids with respect to how they react to those situations when others do things that they don't like. Should we be teaching our kids to speak out or grin and bear it as we, their parents, do?

Shakespeare dealt with this very question in Hamlet's best known speech:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them.

When we teach our children to ask (however politely) for other people to change their behavior just to please their own sensibilities aren't we really teaching them that they are more important than anyone else? And then we wonder why they challenge US?

the Spoiling of Husbands

I'm never quite sure how to react when people tell me that I spoil my husband. From where I sit I think that should be a compliment but when people say it to me it doesn't come across that way. It's not a critique, really, but it's definitely not a compliment.

There are two main times that people tend to say this. One is when I am making dinner (which, by the way, is my dinner too, not just his) and the other is related to the care of our children, specifically times when I leave him to "babysit" them. "It's not babysitting when they are his children!" I'm repeatedly told. "He doesn't know how lucky he is" is the other thing that people tell me. In fact, I've heard that very statement at least three times in the last five days. Once from my very good friend, once from his mother (I think SHE really did mean it as a compliment, after all, he is her baby) and once, just about an hour or so ago, from my good friend and neighbor who stopped by while I was making dinner.

I want to say up front that I'm in no way offended when people say this to me, nor do I feel the least bit defensive. But I do find it curious which is why I'm writing about it here (I started this blog solely to have a place for these random thoughts and musings). Why is my cooking him a nice dinner or wanting to not leave him to take care of both kids while I'm off doing "my thing" too often such a cause for notice and comment? Nobody makes this kind of comment when you do something nice for your girlfriend - but husbands seem to be in a different category (apparently of people you should not "spoil" too regularly).