Archive for June, 2007
June 14, 2007 @ 11:17 pm | Filed under:
Photos 
June 14, 2007 @ 8:32 pm | Filed under:
Parenting MotherTalk has dubbed June 15 "No-Cry Friday" in conjunction with the blog tour of Elizabeth Pantley’s book, The No-Cry Discipline Solution. I haven’t read the book yet, but I’m interested. Parenting literature is, in case you haven’t noticed, a pet interest of mine. I’m partial to the work of Dr. Sears, myself. And also (I know this will be a shocker to veteran Bonny Glen/Lilting House readers) Charlotte Mason.
For my contribution to No-Cry Friday, I am reprising a recent Bonny Glen post that generated a lot of nice feedback; a goodish number of people seemed to find it useful.
A Word Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words
Sometimes
I think all my real parenting successes have to do with hitting upon
just the right metaphor to illustrate a concept. Patience, example,
levelheadedness—forget it. All I’ve really got going for me is a knack
for figurative language. But hey, if it works…
One image that has worked wonders here lately is the tipping cup.
Years ago, I noticed something about toddlers. If a two-year-old is
holding a cup of water, and it tips and begins to spill, the
child—rather than righting the cup—will nearly always turn that cup
right upside down and dump out the rest of the water. Which is why you
only gave the child water, and not juice.
It struck me a certain type of temperament is prone to similar
behavior when it comes to anger. I have a hot-tempered child whose
natural tendency is to react to any slight upset with a full-fledged
outpouring of wrath. If her cup of emotion tips, so to speak, her
inclination is to just pour it all out.
So one day I talked to her about toddlers and tipping cups, and how
our feelings can be like the water in the cup. She seized hold of the
metaphor immediately. We talked about how part of growing up is
learning how to straighten your cup back up after you’ve been jostled.
You don’t have to let every little splash turn into a big flood.
This image has become a bit of code between us. I’ll see her
beginning to lose her temper after something annoying happens.
"Straighten your cup," I’ll murmur, and more and more often, she takes
a breath, presses her lips together in grim determination—and keeps her
temper in check. I’ve come to know the expression on her face that
means she is struggling to hold her cup upright. She likes to cuddle up
with me in the afternoons and talk about her triumphs.
"I didn’t tip my cup, Mommy," she’ll whisper. "I wanted to
pour it all out, right on [insert sister’s name] head." A pause, a
wicked chuckle, as she savors the image perhaps a bit too much. She
knows there is acid in that cup. "But I didn’t."
A month later, the image continues to prove useful—and not just for the child in question. I often remind myself not to tip my cup, too. For parents, the saying should be: "Don’t shout over spilled milk." The other night I was listening to a talk on mindful parenting by Ren Allen and Sandra Dodd, recorded at the 2005 Live and Learn Unschooling Conference. Ren said that a big shift in her parenting style came when she realized that "between every action and reaction, there is a moment"—a moment in which you, the parent, can choose how to react. Kneejerk parenting—reacting with the first emotion that rushes over you when something goes wrong—can become a habit, but we can all break it. We can take a breath and choose a different reaction, a calmer, kinder one.
Another image my kids and I have used to help us control our tempers is to think of temper as a horse. You’re the rider of the horse; you hold the reins. Lots of times, something is going to happen to upset that horse; it’s going to want to rear up and buck and come down hooves flying, stomping, charging at the offender. But we don’t have to let that horse run wild; we can choose to rein it in.
Both metaphors, the bucking horse and the tipping cup, have been really useful ways for my kids and me to talk frankly and constructively about emotion, temper, reaction, anger, and patience. I have found that in an emotionally charged situation, an angry child will respond much better to a lighthearted, "Whoa, there! Don’t let that horse get away from you!" than any kind of scolding or sternness on my part.
"Learning," says Sandra Dodd, "comes from connecting something new to what you’ve already thought or known."
Charlotte Mason called this understanding of education "the science of relations." Relations, connections, rabbit trails: these are the terms homeschoolers use to describe the natural processes of learning. One topic, even one word, sparks an interest or a memory, and zing, learning happens.
It’s like playing with those magnetic rods and balls you stick together to make cool geometric shapes. (You know, the ones currently banished to the top of my closet because they are so fearfully dangerous for babies.) When you touch one of the little rods to one of the shiny silver balls, there’s such a satisfying click as they draw together. You can feel the power of the connection.
I dearly love, at the end of a day, to think about all the connections my kids made—or that I made!—that day. So many satisfying little clicks, so many pieces of knowledge fitting together in interesting ways.
I had the Sandra Dodd "connections" page open on the laptop today because I wanted to look up that quote for a post. (This post, I suppose, although, as you’ll see, the page took over and became the impetus of the post.) If you scroll down Sandra’s page a little, you’ll see there’s a fun exercise for sparking connections, the bit with all the words in balloons. This caught Jane’s eye and she wanted to know what it was about. I showed her, and she asked if we could try it. She decided to start with the word "purple."
We started shouting out ideas or things we associate with purple, and of course "royalty" came up, and neither one of us could remember the name of the shellfish the original purple dye came from. We looked it up and found this page, which told some tidbits I’d never heard before. Did you know the legend says it was actually Hercules’s dog who discovered the dye? Hercules noticed its mouth was stained purple after it ate some snails.
King Phoenix received a purple-dyed robe from Herakles and decreed
the rulers of Phoenicia should wear this color as a royal symbol.
We also found this part particularly interesting:
The chemical birth of the synthetic dye industry can be traced to the
discovery of an aniline-based purple dye, mauveine, by William H.
Perkin in 1856, who accomplished this while searching for a cure for
malaria. Perkin was an English chemist who changed the world of his
time by making this purple color available to the masses. It became
quite fashionable to wear clothing dyed with “mauve,” and Mr. Perkin
became a very wealthy man.
We had lots of other associations with purple, but the Hercules thing was so interesting we got sidetracked, and about that time Rose asked me to make a baby duck out of felt for Beanie, to match Rose’s Beanie Baby duck (!), and in the middle of that endeavor I remembered I’d picked up a book of patterns for knitted animals, and hadn’t shown it to Jane yet, and she got all excited and went off to translate the knitting patterns into crochet patterns, because she much prefers crocheting.
Rose asked for a felt dog next, or maybe Jane will crochet her one, but I don’t think we’ll stain its mouth purple.
Nature posts galore, right here.
June 9, 2007 @ 8:33 am | Filed under:
Art I was catching up with my friend Silvia’s blog, Po Moyemu, and saw this post about her brother’s Google Sketchup tutorial.
Google SketchUp? This was new to me. I liked the sound of it (probably because it rhymes with ketchup) and went to check it out. Ooh, fun. It’s a 3D drafting program. You can draft buildings, furniture, all sorts of stuff. You can even plunk your buildings down in Google Earth.
This, I thought, might be useful for Alicia’s Architecture for Kids blog. Have you visited that yet? Gorgeous photos, interesting links.
Every time I visit it I mean to ask Alicia (aka Love2Learn Mom) if she has read our favorite kids’ architecture book, Round Buildings, Square Buildings, Buildings that Wiggle like a Fish, which I wrote about on Bonny Glen a while back.
Back to SketchUp. I wanted to read Silvia’s brother’s tutorial, and that clicky-click introduced me to Make Magazine. Wow. Who knew? It’s a quarterly magazine full of techie projects. You can subscribe to the paper edition or a digital version (or both). You can also purchase single issues, if there is a particular article that catches your eye on the website. (I was able to watch Silvia’s brother’s SketchUp video tutorial for free, but I couldn’t read the article.)
There is even a Make blog, the top post of which right now is a link to a video podcast of How to Make a Balloon Flinging Siege Weapon—guaranteed to make any teenage boy’s heart go pitty-pat.
And! And! Are you ready for this? Make has a sister publication: Craft! (Did I just hear a collective Oooh… from the homeschooling mom crowd?)
What is CRAFT?
CRAFT is the first project-based magazine dedicated to the renaissance
that is occurring within the world of crafts. Celebrating the DIY
spirit, CRAFT’s goal is to unite, inspire, inform and entertain a
growing community of highly imaginative and resourceful people who are
transforming traditional art and crafts with unconventional, unexpected
and even renegade techniques, materials and tools; people who undertake
amazing crafting projects in their homes and communities.
There’s a Craft blog, of course, as well as a Projects page which includes links to project instructions elsewhere on the net, such as these gorgeous felted beads at Maryjane’s Attic.
All this from one post at Silvia’s blog. Oh, internet, you are a marvelous, terrible thing.
A beautiful blogger, an important cause, a boatload of prizes. Need I say more? And yet, I will. Danielle Bean is holding an online fundraiser for the St. Gianna Maternity Home. Every $5 you donate will earn you a chance in a drawing for one of more than 50 enticing prizes. Go see!
We had a birthday here yesterday. I call her Jane, he calls her Max (a baby nickname, from when she made the funniest growling noises—like a Wild Thing—and Max is the friend of the Wild Things, you recall).
She can’t possibly be twelve. It was just the other day that I was toting her in the sling all over Manhattan and Queens. Sometimes we took the stroller along, to hold our groceries. Scott favored the backpack, especially while vacuuming. I tried it once. I missed having her up front, on my hip, where I could kiss the top of her head. Also, I got stuck between the inner and outer doorways of our building’s vestibule when we came home. The outer door opened inward, and the inner door opened out, and there wasn’t room for the first door to close with me and the backpack inside the vestibule, so that I needed to hold the first (big, heavy) door open while opening the second one too. And I didn’t have the muscle power. (This has ever been a challenge of my motherhood. I’m a shrimp.) The outer door began to swing shut while I was trying to maneuver the second one open, and it wedged the backpack frame so tightly that I couldn’t budge. Jane chose this moment to start pulling my hair, and I had no free hands with which to stop her. She was laughing, so at least I knew she was all right.
I don’t actually remember how we escaped from our predicament. Did the landlords come to our rescue?
After that, I stuck to the sling.
She could practically wear her baby sister in a sling now. Sometimes Rilla lunges out of my arms toward Jane, crowing with laughter. I think about baby Jane chuckling over her fistfuls of my hair, unaware that the heavy door threatened to slam shut on her. Laughter and Jane go together; she is a throw-back-her-head- and-howl sort of girl, always quick to see the joke, even when it’s on her. Scott wrote about how she laughed yesterday, out on a seawall by the harbor-seal beach, when a wave broke against the wall and splashed her with spray. I was back on the shore with Rilla (in the sling), watching through the camera’s zoom lens.
That will be increasingly the pattern, won’t it? I’ll be standing on the shore, watching her venture farther and farther out to sea? Reality breaks over you like a wave sometimes, drenching you with salt spray. Babies grow up. They untangle their fingers from your hair and turn their faces toward the great blue expanse of the horizon. They throw back their heads and laugh, welcoming the adventure.
June 6, 2007 @ 7:16 am | Filed under:
Wonderboy Oh, the irony. Today is Wonderboy’s final speech therapy session before the summer break, and I have completely and totally lost my voice.
Not that I’m normally the one who does the talking during his sessions—but today there would have been a fair amount of summing-up chitchat between me and the speech therapist.
I guess she’ll get to be the one who sums up.
As for my boy, all I can say is thank goodness for sign language. The girls can hear my hoarse whispers but as far as Wonderboy’s hearing-aided ears are concerned, I’m just mouthing in silence. This is frustrating for him, because he is in the middle of a huge language explosion and wants to practice verbal speech all—the—time.
You know how it is with toddlers—practicing speech means they say something, and you repeat it back, and your part of the game is vastly important to them because it shows you know what they mean.
I was thinking about that, how important it is to human beings, from our earliest days, to be understood.
There’s a reason "you know?" and "know what I mean?" are common tags in our conversation.
There’s a reason St. Francis included "grant that I may never seek to be understood so much as to understand" in his famous prayer.
Even the baby has this desire. She is beginning to use sign language herself. When she signs something, and you understand and sign it back or say the word in English, her eyes light up; she beams. Your comprehension of her meaning delights her utterly.
It’s the same look on my boy’s face these days when I know that what he said was, "Daddy puts his phone in his pocket."
We are now going to be LATE for speech therapy because I’ve been sitting here overlong, writing. But I can’t tell the speech therapist today (because she doesn’t speak ASL) how excited I am that Wonderboy is so excited about saying sentences like the above.
And I am excited. It’s awesome, in the old sense of the word, to see him making these leaps of expression. And I had to share it with someone, you know?
June 5, 2007 @ 8:01 pm | Filed under:
WFMW Not that we’re calling Rilla a toddler yet. Just because she is now toddling all over the darn house does NOT mean she’s a toddler, do you hear me? She’s a baby. A BABY. I’m just saying.
Now that we’ve cleared that up, I’ll move on. Scott taught THE BABY to blow her nose this weekend, making him four for five. I think I get credit for teaching Jane, but the rest of the noses go in his column. He used my trick for most of them, though. And it occurred to me that this little trick might be a good Works for Me Wednesday tip, because it has indeed worked for us, many times over (and not just on Wednesdays).
Here’s what you do: you sneak in a nose-blowing lesson with that tried-and-true toddlers’ favorite pastime: Making Animal Sounds. What does a cow say? Moo. What does a pig say? Oink. What does a BULL say? And here’s where you snort air out your nostrils. (You want to do this BEFORE the child has a goopy nose, did I mention that?)
If you include ‘what a bull says’ in your litany of animal sounds, then when the day comes (probably tomorrow) that your wee one has a nose that needs blowing, you get your tissue ready and ask Little Snookums what a bull says. Snort! Little Snookums has just blown her nose!
When Jane got sick at the tender age of 21 months, she was famous at the hospital, FAMOUS I tell you, for being the only immuno-compromised kid under two whose nose didn’t have to be suctioned out with one of those baby-snorker gizmos. What does a horse say? Neigh! What does a sheep say? Baa! What does a bull say! Whoosh! Gross? Yes. But mighty effective.
Rilla does not know what a bull says, nor what a bull is. Scott just taught her to snort. He don’t need no stinkin’ tricks.
