Dear S.;

Dear S.;

I have been writing this letter in my head for almost 14 months, and it's time to put it on paper, because within the next couple of weeks you will be going to be leaving us to go live with your forever family.  You won't remember anything I tell you now, and I don't know if I will ever see you again to tell you these things.

Some day I'm sure you will ask your Mom and Dad about your birth parents, because people always wonder about that.  But, I don't know if it will ever occur to you to ask them who you lived with before you came to live with them.  I've been choosing pictures lately for your Life Book, and I've picked a few that have me in them, holding you.  I have to admit that I want you to notice me in those pictures, and ask who I am.  "Is that my real Mom?", I imagine you asking, wanting to needle your adoptive mother.  "No", she'll tell you, "that was one of your foster parents".

Foster homes are sometimes in the news in a bad way.  You hear about kids being "shuffled from foster home to foster home", and you might wonder whether that happened to you, since you won't remember it.  Even in the "good news" stories you hear about people who have fostered hundreds of children over decades, and as adults we wonder how they can be devoted.  As a child you might wonder whether they had time to love and care for them all, or whether it was a revolving door of kids, interchangeable like the shoes and backpacks that get handed down from kid to kid.

I wanted to tell you how it was with us.  My husband - we called him your Uncle Mike - and I had only been foster parents for less than a year.  You were our second placement, and you were our first baby.  They called me on a Wednesday and said "We have a infant born yesterday, and he's being discharged from the hospital tomorrow".  They told me how much you weighed - over 8 pounds - and that your Apgars were 9 and 9, which meant you seemed pretty healthy in the first few minutes after being born.  They asked "Does that sound okay?", I said "sure!" and ran around the rest of the day, excitedly telling family and friends and running out to the grocery store to buy formula and a sleeper that I knew would fit.  I picked up bottles and clothes from one friend, and another friend dropped off diapers and other stuff she knew I would need.  I was SO excited to be having a baby to hold and love and feed and take care of.

You came the next day.  Your worker brought you from the hospital.  You were wearing a yellow sleeper and hand-knitted hat, and one of those cozy things that zips over a carseat, since it was February, after all.  You were sound asleep in the carseat, a tiny bundle of brand-new person.  Your worker and I had lots to talk about, and eventually you woke up and started crying a little bit.  I picked you up and you stopped, so I kept holding you in my arms.  Before your worker left she stressed how important it was for you to attach to me, so that you could transfer that attachment to another mother later on.  I looked down at you and said "I think we were attached the minute I picked him up".  I decided that I would be your Auntie Kay, because someone else someday would be your Mom, and I didn't want to take her title.

I hope the Life Book tells the story of the next 14 months better than I could in a letter.  We took you everywhere, not just the park and the library but to parties, concerts, and restaurants.  You met the entire extended family on both sides, because you were with us for a whole calendar year and got to go to every family celebration, whether it was a summer weekend at Uncle Mike's Mom's trailer or Christmas at my parents' place.  Everybody thought you were just the cutest thing, and wanted to hold you.  We loved you just as if you were our own baby, and you didn't spend a single night away from us until you had your first overnight with your adoptive family.

My son is 15, and I do remember what it was like when he was born and he was a baby.  If I ever had doubts whether someone could love an adopted child or step-child in the same way they loved one that was biologically theirs, you cleared them away in a hurry.  You brought so much joy and life into our house. Even the cats, now, seem to kind of wander around bored when you're not here.  Fostering is incredibly difficult and we aren't likely to do it for long, so you will likely remain the one and only baby we fostered, the cute little guy whose picture will be on my piano, frozen in time, forever six months old.

If I can convince you of one thing through this little piece of writing on paper, please know that you were loved.  You were loved so much, every day, from when you were only 35 hours old.  All those days you can't remember and might worry about, you were held, cuddled, and cared for.  My son loved you and called you his "cute little baby fo-bro".  Uncle Mike might not say it out loud, but I know he loved you.  Most of all, I loved you.  I don't know how many years will have passed before you read this, but rest assured that if I am living, I love you still.

Auntie Kay

a glass of Whine @ Home

Sometimes I daydream about being a busy working mother.  Someone with a high-powered career and clicky shoes who gets to complain about how work hours conflict with childcare hours.  Someone who wears necklaces, and pants with buttons, and sometimes even skirts.  Someone who gets to attend meetings and has a desk and a computer that isn't dedicated to children's programs on youtube.
Sometimes I want to try that Working-Mom stereotype on, instead of this one.

It's February and we've been hermitting inside and I'm struggling just the teensiest bit with the choices I've made.  (though really, when he makes well over TWICE what I was making, there was no real choice about who would stay home, since I was against daycare until they're older.)
I''m just going to admit some things here, to get them off my chest and maybe see if others in the same situation feel the same..

1.  I wish I had some time away from my children every day like my husband does.  I miss having a place that I needed to be (that wasn't the place I woke up) and I miss the proactive professional feeling of being a (paltry low-level) office person.  Not that he's got it any easier, I know.  It's just a *different* boulder to push up the hill for awhile, you know?

2.  Sometimes the kids don't really want me to join in and play but they want me RIGHT THERE and some of those time I get bored out of my skull.  I'd check my mail on my smartphone but the girl would lunge @ any touchscreen that came within a 5 meter radius of her.  I'd knit, but the boy thinks yarn is candy.  I'd read, but paper is easily torn by grubby grabby hands....you get the point.

3.  I am so very tired of tidying up at least a dozen times a day to have the apartment stay exactly as horrifyingly messy as it ever was.  If I wasn't here I wouldn't see it, and it wouldn't be my job to go around picking up hello kitty accessories so the boy doesn't choke on them.

What do you miss most, SAHs?

First Birthday

The baby at our house was born at 10:30pm on January 31, 2012, according to the hospital records I checked in our files yesterday.  If he was "my" baby I might be posting Facebook status updates right now saying things like one year ago at this time my water broke!  But I don't do that... I can't.  I was completely unaware of his existence.

Checking my calendar, I see that it was "cluster" night, so I would have gone to our monthly foster parent meeting.  It's a chance to catch up with other foster parents, hear what's up with the society, get announcements about policy changes, and often hear from a speaker.   I would probably have talked to our worker about the fact that I'd called the placement department the day before and had our name put "up on the board", as they call it.  (We got to see "the board" as part of our tour on the day we were approved as foster parents.  It's a literal whiteboard on the wall, with age ranges on the left and family names hand-written on the right.)

I had just flown back from Florida a few days before, where my husband and I had taken a relaxing two-week vacation visiting friends and family.  He wanted to take a more leisurely way home and visit with some old friends in Pennsylvania, so he was still on the road.  He would have been in a hotel that night, and I would have read a book and gone to sleep early to be up with my 15-year-old in the morning, make him a wintry breakfast, and see him off to school.

Somewhere, though, a woman I didn't know was in labour.

Fast forward to today... the big birthday bash is planned for Saturday, but it felt like today, his actual birthday, should be special too.  I had a bittersweet feeling all day glad that he's still with us, but sad for his forever family who are missing this milestone.  My husband went out and bought some gifts last night, and picked up a small piece of cake (incidentally the same special peach cake we had at our wedding, from a local German place). 

Baby was cranky today though, and wouldn't nap.  When my teen cake home from school he was in a bad mood too.  We decided that it was going to have to be an early bedtime, and the little guy would have to miss the grilled cheese supper that my son was making.  We had cake - he ate only a few crumbs - and tried to get him to open presents.  His nose kept running and I didn't want snot in all the pictures for his Life Book,  but every time I wiped his nose he cried and his eyes got redder and redder.  After we played with the toys for a bit I took him up for bed, and it wasn't until I was putting lotion on the eczema that keeps getting worse that I realized he was burning up.  I took his temperature and sure enough; between 100 and 101F.  He wasn't cranky, he's sick!  And on his birthday too.  And I didn't even notice. 

Bad auntie...  no cake for you. 

Today in Toddlerexia

The toddler keeps changing her mind about food, and I swear it's just to make me run around trying to cook all day.  She's turning into a bigger and bigger anti-food toddler stereotype.  She's been narrowing her acceptable-foods list for a while now, but lately it's gotten ridiculous.  For the last two days the only things she'll eat have been:

• miso soup (I'm lucky we have a T&T grocery in town)
• chicken nuggets & fries (because DUH, that's why)
• banana/chocolate chip muffin (but not *actual* bananas, not today)
• chocolate pudding (she's just discovered this magic, as she was sick and it was on sale)
• pita bread with nothing on it (she's odd)

I fooled her into eating some cheese by hiding it in the pita bread, but I think she's still angry with me...though she used to love cheese with an unholy toddlerian passion. 
Lately I feel like I should just throw most foods directly into the trash - I've recently thrown out more uneaten-but-manhandled-so-I-don't-want-it cereal, oatmeal, toast, yogurt, ravioli and pasta than I care to remember. 
I'm supplementing with flintstone vitamins and milk and presenting her with a lot of food options and hoping she doesn't need any of the nutrients she's shunning right at this particular stage of development.

Do your children eat more than 5 different foods during a given week?  Is it just my crazy little girl?

A letter re: Kindergarten class sizes.

Dear Mr. Allison, Mr. Hoskins, Ms. Laskin, and Ms. Broten,

I'm writing to you today to express my concern over the current number of students in the kindergarten classrooms at Maurice Cody Junior Public School and in classrooms across the province, and to petition you on behalf of my three-year-old son and all incoming students in the full-day kindergarten program:  please amend the terrible overcrowding situation that we have seen in kindergarten classrooms this academic year.

I am a volunteer instructor with the anti-bullying program Roots of Empathy (http://www.rootsofempathy.org/en/what-we-do/about-our-program.html), and as such spend an hour every week in my daughter's kindergarten classroom.  This year, the class I'm instructing is 31 children.  The program encourages students to talk about their feelings and aims to make every child feel included, but in a 30-minute class, there just isn't enough time to allow all 31 children to tell the stories that they feel important.  Physically too, there is barely enough room to seat all of the children around the big green blanket that is both an emblem for the program and a safe place for the other "teacher" (a neighbourhood baby) to sit and play while the students observe his non-verbal communication.  At 4 and 5 years old, these children are already easily distracted, and sitting so close to their classmates inevitably leads to jostling, arguing and complaining instead of learning.

The classroom I'm in is used for before and after care.  Before and after school, it falls under the guidelines of the Day Nurseries Act (http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/html/regs/english/elaws_regs_900262_e.htm#BK13), which states that the room is large enough for no more than 24 children. Why is it then, that once the bell rings, it's acceptable to add another 7 children to the room, plus two or three adults?  I know for a fact that several children have repeatedly experienced bathroom accidents during school hours because there is only one washroom in the classroom and it is frequently occupied.  Imagine how embarrassing it must be for these children - if they have a change of clothes with them, it is outside in the hallway in backpacks (no room for backpacks inside the classroom!), so they need to parade across the classroom TWICE in wet clothing before they can change.  Sirs and madams, please try to remember that children at this age can be unintentionally cruel, and the mockery that often accompanies accidents like these can colour a child's entire public school experience.

More troubling is that I have personally witnessed a 5-year-old child being unintentionally left behind in the playground at the end of the day and locked out of the school with no expectation of an adult to pick her up.  With one hundred and eighty kindergarten students milling about at the end of the school day and 12 staff members to oversee them, she was lost in the shuffle.  I found her on the sidewalk near the school, crying and utterly terrified. That incident ended well, as I was able to help her find her way back into the school and into her daycare program, but it could just as easily have ended in tragedy.

Life in a classroom of 31 kindergarten students is chaotic to say the least.  At ages 4, 5 and 6, the children are boisterous and the noise level when they are at activity is intense.  Research on temperament traits by child psychiatrists Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess identified that children who are sensitive to their environment may experience problems with focus and concentration in a such situations, and with so much going on in the room, students who are easily distracted can be drawn away from their tasks and have difficulty returning to them.

I firmly believe that our teachers are making the most of this situation, but I have no doubt that the children's learning potential is also being affected. There is a disproportionate amount of time being spent on the logistics of having 30+ kids under one's care—getting them in and out of line, getting them in and out of footwear/outerwear, setting up for snack and lunch breaks, supervising the bathroom and hand washing, handling transitions between activities, etc.—rather than on the real business of learning.   Further, with larger class sizes come more students with behavioural challenges who require more than the usual amount of attention.  In a class of 20, one or two children will require extra help, and that's manageable.  When you bump the class sizes though, that number more than doubles, as children who might have borderline behavioural challenges don't get the basic attention they need and begin to act out.  All of this is time during the day that the teacher and EA are NOT spending teaching our children. 

The Canadian Education Association, The American Educational Research Association, the Journal of Educational Psychology, The American Journal of Public Health, the Scottish Council for Research In Education and many other reputable organizations have all produced documents extolling the many virtues of small class sizes, and it's an intuitively good idea:  teachers get to spend more time with each student, students are able to make better use of the resources available to them, problems (whether behavioural or academic) can be apprehended and addressed early, and the classroom is a calm place where children can learn and grow.  

I recognize that the primary motivation behind such large classes is financial, but ultimately I do not believe that the money saved is worth what we're losing.  I do not know what the solution is to this problem -  I don't have access to the financial and enrolment data that you do, and wouldn't have the expertise to use it if I did. What I DO know is that the status quo is not really serving anyone.  It's generating a cohort of students who have learned that in order to attract attention in class they need to act out, a group of teachers who are exhausted by and frustrated at not being able to give their students the education that they deserve, and a large number of parents who are disappointed and disillusioned with the system put in place to foster the development of our most precious resource.

Studies have shown that a child's academic career is defined and strongly influenced by the quality of their early education.  Please, please don't short-change my son, the other children in his cohort and those to come.  They deserve better from us.  Please consider reducing class sizes in the kindergarten program so that all of our children have the opportunity to develop to their full potential.

Thank you,

Jaimie Cowles

The scarlet M

So I'm a Mom, I get it.  The capital M has been affixed with a makeshift paste of oatmeal, mashed banana, and squished-to-death frenchfries.  I should go cut my hair into a shoulder-length bob (Just long enough to pull into a ponytail!  All one length so you can cut it yourself!) and start drinking peppermint lattes and do whatever it is that today's mommy-cliche does.  Part of me is tempted to do just that - to really dive in and embrace the costume and habits of the subculture.  My Inner Nerd sometimes tells me that being a Mom can be like being a Goth or a Ham-radio operator: I can make it into a whole *thing* and be the Mommiest Mom I can be.  It can be fun!  Baby fandom!

But my Inner Nerd and my ovaries don't really speak the same language.  There's an integral disconnect between pretty much everything involved with the existence of my two children and....well, the whole rest of me.  My Inner Nerd is part of the unchanged core elements of my personality that I consider my Self.  My Inner Mom, so far, hasn't been granted that honour.  I've been a Mom for only 2 years or so, after all.  My nerd cred goes back to elementary school.  The Nerd part of me and the Mom part of me are trying to understand each other, and they get along, but....there's an element of distrust and an inability to really get what the other is trying to do.  They're like neighbours who have nothing in common but want to be friendly but don't want to be *too* friendly and get stuck with a 24/7 BFF.

So much of my personality is not Family-friendly.  So many of the things I think, say, and am interested in are inappropriate for children, and so inappropriate for Moms.  So much of my Self doesn't jibe with my hatchling MomSelf.  It messes with my head sometimes.  Casts me into existential crises weekly.  It's like the person that I am, that I still feel myself to be, is but a fuzzy shadow-image to strangers.  Once they see the toddler and the baby I cease to have, in their imaginations, the potential for being anything else - not an intellectual, or a weirdo, or a hipster or a neo-pagan or whatnot - I am a Mom and should be conversed with accordingly.  ("Wow, you must be pretty busy, huh?  They're so cute.")

But....I still think I'm cool!  I'm right here, under the snugli.  I'm fun and smart, but they can't see.  It's just weird.  Mommy Dysmorphic Disorder?

Bad Things Chicks Do No. 1

So I have been fighting the urge to take and post a photo of the tag of my pants.  Because I can't remember when I was last this size.  Because somehow this unintentional decrease in mass has made me inexplicably...proud.  At first I thought it was just a reasonably-healthy expression of pride in my post-babies-body-accomplishments.  Then I thought it was some semi-harmless narcissism.  Then I thought I could convince myself that it's somehow fitting, in a proto-feminist body-image post, and pretend that I wasn't really hoping to get virtual pats on the back.

If these were the real reasons, even the embarassing last one, I would take that pic and it would be all jpg-y in seconds.  That shit would be ON the internetz, cluttering it up with more me me me.
But I'm not going to take a photo - hell, I'm not even going to reveal the size.  Because what drives the whole concept is the beginning of a Bad Thing Chicks Do.

BTCDs happen.  We, as a gender, can often actually fulfill some of the stereotypes applied to us, and we, as a gender, do a lot of the same things.  Some of these things are self-sabotaging and stupid, and I blame the media for tricking us into them, but I'm not going to pretend we're not the ones actually perpetrating this behaviour, keeping it alive.  BTCDs seem to involve our body image or sense of beauty too often.  I like to think I resisted engaging in a lot of common BTCDs throughout my life....until After The Baby (tm)

I've never had a perfect body.  I've had dozens and dozens of stretch marks since I was twelve - they were angry purple stripes until almost 16.  I have a big moon face with freckles and three moles and a small jackknife scar on it.  I have winged shoulder blades and a sticky-outty rib and a farm-tan on my arms that never fades to match the fishbelly whiteness of the rest of my body.  My teeth are kind of crooked and my hair looks a lot like a drunk lion's mane.

But until I got pregnant for the first time, I never once thought of myself as ugly.

It was the water-retention that really did it to me.  The weight gain was only a little beyond the 'suggested weight gain' and I was ok with that.  But when the bloating started?  I kept no photos from my baby shower because my hideous doughy balloon-face made me cry.  And after the baby, when I had that floppy extra-belly worth of fatty skin to gaze down at every time I breastfed, I started, for the first time in my longish, nihilistic and fucked up life, to hate my body - really despise it, like it was something outside my Self.  Something I could battle, or at least resent.

Hating your body for no good reason is a classic BTCD.  As an umpteenth-wave proto-feminist I fought against it from my early puberty until somewhere in my late teens when I finally came to real acceptance of my own physical form.  Then I existed in a wonderful world of 'reasonably attractive and ok with that' until the aforementioned procreation.  Something about the whole process of pregnancy just left me open for all the newly-arrived Body Image harpies in my head, the constant hormonal fluctuations made me succumb to the resultant angst over and over, until it became a habit to allow those negative thoughts through.  I don't know when exactly it was that I crossed the line between self-effacing humour comments and bitter self-hating comments, but somewhere, there, me cracking wise about my imperfections became a string of small self-destroying words.  It became ok for me to make these harsh judgments about a body that was recovering from childbirth, to feel ashamed and not good enough.  To feel that my body had been broken, scarred, ruined.

Well, it hasn't been.  I know now that I was so very skewed, so very wrong.  In fact, I went back and had *another* baby.  I gained more weight this time, even.  I had another unscheduled c-section and another long slog through post-baby-belly why-me.  I still have a flabby stomach that will not win me any prizes, that I sometimes squeeze through my fingers like bread dough as if it's a costume I might be able to take off.

But I don't hate my doughy flesh.  And I don't hate *me* for wearing it.  Because I refuse to fall prey to the BTCD, not when I've already got so much on my plate, not when I have a chance to be a good example for my daughter, not when engaging in the behaviours will actually *make* me hate myself.

I am not perfect.  I am not beautiful.  I do not look the way I do in my head.  But that really doesn't matter.  Looks are, ultimately, such a small part of what makes a person loveable, no matter what the god damned media keeps trying to tell us.  I think my looks are 10% of what makes me myself, and I've decided my looks are 20% less appealing than I want them to be.  Not a huge defecit there, my 20% chunk of my 10% section.  See?  Doesn't matter.  Follow the math.  The math won't lie.

And I'm not going to tell you what size my pants are.  but here's a picture of my smile.

Attack of the Mombies

I was talking to my husband this morning - well, whining at him, really - about how erratic the childrens' sleep schedules are, how much energy they require, how tired I always am.  We've been watching The Walking Dead at night when we manage to get both kids to sleep in their own room, so I've got zombies on the brain too, as well as starting to resemble them more and more.

We've decided I have become one of the ambulatory undead.  That's right, somehow in the last 2.5 years I turned into a Mombie.  Part dedicated and loving mom, part falling-apart grotesquerie with dead soulless eyes.  Instead of hungering for brains, though, all I really want is sleep.

Some of you have little people, and  you are parenting them in a way that makes me glad I can't remember 1997-2000 clearly.  You're doing such an awesome job, and I tip my hat to you.

But most of you don't have teenagers yet. While you all know my biological son just turned 15, my "other son", the young man who is always here,  is 17.  These boys have been, as a duo, a constant in my life for five years now, and as always I've learned things the hard way.

If I could go back, and I mean that as a thought experiment because dear God don't make me parent little people ever again,  I would do some things differently:

1. Go for a long walk every Sunday afternoon, after or instead of religious services.  Right now your littles run everywhere, but unless you're raising an athlete, couch time for video games and TV time gets FAR more appealing.  Tiring them out will make bedtime before the school week starts much easier.
   
2. Have a full sit down, hot-food, everybody there dinner at least once a week. I like Sunday, but any regular, un-rushed day works.   Have everyone help make dinner.  Decorate the table, even if only with simple arts and crafts and flowers from the garden or local field  Once sitting, turn off anything that plugs in. Light candles.  Life gets busy, having this as a solid ritual is good.
   
3. Once your kids are able to wield a butter knife without inevitable self-injury, assign each kid a night to make dinner once a week. If for the first five years of this you have peanut butter and jam sandwiches and whole apples with frenzies for dessert every tuesday, it's a win. They get a sense of power and responsibility, you get a night off cooking. Use the 'MyFoodGuide' to learn about food groups. As they grow teach them cooking stuff to replace the simple food.
4. Learn to play at least one video game they like.  I'm never going to play Black Ops or Modern Warfare, but having Minecraft in common is REALLY helpful  We're getting Myst for the PS3 and will solve it together.  I may not play war games but I know what a 360, no-scope-crossmap hitmarker is enough to understand why they just went (happily) berserk over it.
   
5. Don't ask them how their day was, because the answer will be "Fine."  Ask them the most interesting/challenging/weird part of their day, and let them know they can think about the answer and tell you before bedtime.  They will talk to you, it's like magic.
   
6. When the dishes overwhelm you, reduce the dishes in your house to one plate, one bowl, one cup, one fork, one knife, one spoon each for the number of humans normally home.  Put the rest in a box, very tall shelf or (ideally lockable) hutch.  When teenagers are helping themselves to snacks they will use a new plate or cup every single time, leading to a catastrophic level of dish-washing greeting you on coming home.  If there are limited available cups/plates/cutlery etc they will actually wash something to use it again for something different.  I swear.
   
7. Sit with them for at least 5 minutes every night at bedtime.  Tell them a story about when they were young. Tell them one (of the many) reasons they are awesome.   Yes, even teenagers need to hear that stuff, even if they pretend to be the most nonchalant  cooler-than-anybody human on the planet.  Once you say goodnight to them, take away their phone and ignore them unless you smell fire.
8. Have allowance be contingent on, if nothing else, successful completion of daily showers.  Teenage boy goat smell is. . . . undesirable, and it's like they get afraid of water at 13.  Conversely, once you get them into the shower, have cheap extra towels to mop up the swamp that they'll leave on the floor.
9. Knock before you enter their room, and respect their privacy. If it needs to be cleaned, clean it with them. If you need to enter, ask them first. They will respect your privacy once they realize how much they like theirs.
10. Have a board game you both like, play it together. Compete. With my son and I now it's Settlers of Cattan, but when he was little it was Rummoli and when he was really small it was Fruit Salad and Sneaky Snake and Memory.
    
11. Ask for hugs in public.  9/10 they are going to say no, 'cause a hug from mom in public will end the world, but keep asking. Sometimes they will let you. There is little so awesome as the feel of your little boy resting his chin on the top of your head. (My 'little boy' is now 6'0") 
12. When you most want to freak out, don't freak out.  I know, it's hard, but SO worth it. How I handled the 'caught shoplifting' thing  is something I credit with a lot of the very frank conversations we have about a lot of stuff here. I used a lot of 'I" statements, expressed disappointment, talked about the consequences of starting on that kind of path, and expressed a strong conviction that my boys would learn from their mistake and go on to make me very proud. (I then made the punishment fit the crime)
13. Reward good grades with cash money.  My mom and I set the bar every year - This year it's a minimum of 70% in every class, and a dollar for every point above that, for each class. My mom is talking about doubling it for marks in the 80s and tripling it for marks in the 90s.  (Keep in mind that my son is in an appropriate stream for his abilities, goes to tutoring twice a week and has an IEP in place, and gets support at home with organization and homework)  If  one grade is temporarily low but the teacher gives a glowing account of effort, that counts for a special bonus of some kind. They way we explained it, the workforce rewards diligent work with better opportunities and higher pay.  If you don't work to excel to the best of your abilities they stop paying you.  I want that to sink in  before he gets there.  

That's about the sum total of my learned-the-hard-way advice. 

Well, other than "wear shoes 'cause lego, plastic army guys and marbles hurt like hell to step on" 

B. 

Mommy Wars: Swim Win

I owe you a couple of updates on the mommy wars, which are held up by a lack of pictures.  I decided to go ahead and trust that my audience doesn't need shiny stuff to keep reading.

I took the baby to his first swimming lesson recently.  This might not seem newsworthy, but I would like to point out two factors; first, that I am heavy (the BMI calculation labels me "obese"), and second, that I have a water phobia.  Being in a bathing suit in a public place, and being near (never mind in) more than a teapot full of water, are two things that I generally work pretty hard to avoid.

There were also minor annoyances; having missed the first class, feeling like we were already behind and wouldn't know the routine, and being ten minutes late for no good reason other than I was probably subconsciously trying to sabotage the whole thing.

The thing is, though, once we were finally there and suited up and in the pool and introduced... the baby LOVED it.  He didn't cry once.  He floated on his back and on his front, and splashed with his hands.  He loved the other baby who was his age, and the toddler who insisted in kissing him, and the "big" boy and girl who could kick and push off from the edge.  I didn't love it quite so much, but I managed to stay in the water the whole 20 minutes of the class.

The best part was in the last few minutes of class, when the ladies started arriving on deck for their shallow-water Aquafit class.  They were in their 70s and 80s, I would guess.  Some were in Speedos, some in sexy ruched glamour suits, and all unself-consciously chatting away to their friends.  The best was the little old lady who waited for someone to open the change-room door, so she could push her walker out onto the pool deck and right up to the edge of the water.  I watched these fabulous women and felt tears pricking my eyes.  I wanted to be them when I grow up.  Hell, I want to start being them now; comfortable in their skins and their swimsuits, at the pool just because they love it.  And since all of this is happening in my head, I can control (or at least affect) it, and I'm going to try to do it.

This isn't really a "Mommy Wars" win, since I didn't take him to one of the low-chlorine, special baby-friendly swimming pools.  But it's a perfect example of how doing something that's good for him is good for me too.  Now I'm off to research Adult Learn-To-Swim classes and buy one of those Speedos...

A Little Time-Change Miracle

Everyone seems to love to talk about the extra hour of sleep you get when the clock goes back in the fall.  I don't know why, because there are plenty of people with little kids in the world, and those people all know that you are not getting an extra hour of sleep.

What you are really getting is Junior waking up at 5:30am instead of 6:30am, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and ready to start his day.  My oldest, who is almost 15, has an incredible circadian clock.  He has woken up at 6:30am pretty much every morning of his life; time changes and jet lag throw him off for a few days, but he adjusts quickly.  I'm not proud of this, but I taught him how to go on the computer in my bedroom and play his games (back in the "Pajama Sam" days) when he was about three, just so I could stay in bed a little longer.

I've been dreading this time change.  Our little foster baby is nine months old, and he has just learned to pull himself up to standing.  The crib is a perfect place to practice that.  As a result, the past week has been a no-nap nightmare.  Yesterday, for instance, he woke up at 7:30am.  At about 9am I spent an hour and a half putting him down for his morning nap.  He slept for an hour.  At about 2:30pm I spent two and a half hours putting him down for an afternoon nap.  At that point he was so exhausted that he slept for three hours, waking up at the time he would usually be going to bed.  We didn't mind too much because we were going to a 50th birthday party next door, so we took him along for a couple of hours until he was sleepy, then my husband brought him home and put him to bed.

Did I mention he's still up twice a night as well?

By 10:30 this morning it was time to try for a nap.  I offered to start the process if my husband would go to McDonalds to pick up a hangover cure, which he obligingly did.  I fed the baby, and realized his eyes were fluttering closed.  I put him in the crib; he rolled over and grabbed his blanket.  I thought... could this be it?  No, he dragged himself up to standing and gave me a big wrinkled-nose grin.  I laid him back down, on the verge of tears, thinking that like yesterday, I'd be repeating the process for the next hour and a half.  And, much to my surprise... he went to sleep.  I thought my breakfast would be stone cold before I got to eat it, and instead it was still on its way.

Why I eat @ trashy fastfood joints

If you're a parent, and you go out to eat with your younglings, you probably understand me a little already.  If you have a baby or toddler and you're still going to the nice sit-down thai restaurant or that sweet downtown pub, and everyone is well-behaved and quiet and no one is infringing upon the grown-up Peace and Quiet (capitals are well-deserved!) and all of your friends etc. think it's totally cool and appropriate for you to have brought said younglings, well, you're as imaginary as my justification for this run-on sentence.

The term 'Family Friendly' exists for a reason.  It's not just another case of a buzzword being created by an industry that wants to keep us fat and complacent.  It is a secret code-word, a word of Power.
Family Friendly tells us we're allowed to bring small humans who occasionally yell or throw tiny packets of jam or demand to SEE DEM FISHES AGAIN, MUMMA!  This lovely double-F lets us know that there will be a child's menu for you to optimistically order from (while your child eats half of your grilled cheese, instead) and boosterseats and possibly those placemats with mazes that come with crayons to colour with. Weapons to keep the child-boredom-rage at bay.

But of course the most important thing is that you won't be the only one with a child there.  You will be quietly assigned to the Child-Heavy Quarter of the restaurant, and your child will stare/yell at/dance for/gape quietly at all the other children.  And your hackles and sense of parents-in-public guilt won't immediately jump up every time your youngling shouts "Bear!" or starts kicking the table leg or starts singing Doddlebops tunes in an off-key fake mexican accent. 

Family Friendly means just that, but more: it really means Wee-Child and Overtaxed Parents Friendly.  It means you can let your child be him or herself for half an hour while you consume four thousand calories one-handed, wthout spending the whole time trying to monitor and correct behaviours that really aren't bad - not expressions of aggression or petulance or spite, just little sparks of boredom and adventurousness.  You're allowed to have a new baby that sometimes cries, a toddler that demands everyone SEE and WORSHIP her, and you're allowed to eat something resembling food, something that doesn't come in powerbar or instant-packet form.
To me, that's worth the cultural embarrassment I feel for this horrible downgrade in my Fine Dining.  It makes up for the facts that these burgers are only 35% as tasty as the ones I could get at a pub, that we don't get the option of wine with dinner ever again, that napkins shall evermore be paper, amen.

I go to these places now because I want tasty food that I didn't cook, no mater how classless that food is, and I want to be forgiven, for the duration of that meal, for bringing a source of random and ceaseless Noise (or in my case, two) into the world.
Also, I go there for the fries.

Food Waste

For the first month or so on solid food, Luna couldn't get enough of it.  She ate the food we gave her messily but with gusto, and often bugged us for more.  The first couple of months on finger-foods was the same.  She'd eat as much of the food given as she could before it was crushed into inedible chunks by her little fist.

Now, as a two year old, I swear she eats 25% of the food I give her on any given day.  A portion of the rest will make it into the fridge, another portion will be scattered all over the house when she's bored enough to start getting creative, and, often, a portion of her rejected (and sometimes already a bit chewed on, I'm not going to lie) food will constitute my "lunch" or "dinner."
Some foods don't work well as leftovers, and/or aren't tasty enough for me to eat.  So I've started coming up with (and testing) alternate uses for baby/toddler leftovers.

1. Baby cereal makes a great face mask.  I use the remaining apple/cinnamon/oats nestle cereal as a skin-smoothing mask.  It dries quickly, washes off easily, and makes you smell a little bit like pie.  And it means you don't have to soak and wash a bunch of crusty oatmeal out of a tiny plastic bowl.  What's not to love?
2. Pureed fruit can also be a great way to get some of that lovely AHA onto your skin (though I'm suggesting you avoid too much blueberry or strawberry, who knows if this stuff stains skin?)  I've used apples, pears, and strawberry/banana as a let-dry-and-wash-off face mask.  Bonus: you end up smelling kinda like a scratch 'n sniff sticker!  (Note: Google suggests that tropical fruits and apples have the most AHA, and that adding lactic acid (yep, milk!) to the mix can be good for dry skin.)
3. Cold frenchfries dipped in ketchup make great paintbrushes, if you like the whole Arte de Cuisine thing.  If you find yourself with too many, you can also build tiny log cabins out of them, that you can then paint with the ketchup.  Or drown it in a gravy-based landslide.  Whatever..
4. Broken arrowroot cookies + milk = tasty baby mash.  Broken arrowroot cookies crumbled into icecream, which is then drizzled with Bailey's, can make a tasty mommy mash.
5. Crushed up goldfish crackers can find new purpose as hidden crunchy bits in a toddler omelette, or as a thickener for soup, or (let's face it) just as powdered dayglo orange decoration for any and all surfaces.  My apartment is like a cheesy snowglobe. 

That's all I've got for now, but this adventure in learning will continue.

The Cake Is A Lie

I spent the last two weeks of the summer waiting not-so-patiently for school to start again and for things to get back to normal.  I concocted elaborate daydreams about family dinners where my family sits around a table bathed in warm golden light.  The table is laid with healthy, delicious food and everyone (even the 3-year-old) laughingly recounts amusing anecdotes from their day.  The house is clean (because I have time to do that now) and I have magically lost 25 lbs and found an entirely new and glamorous wardrobe (hey - it's my daydream!).

The reality is a little more grim.  I failed to take several big transitions into account.  Andrew is six weeks into a new job that has effectively tripled his commute.  At the same time (because he has better access to reasonably priced grocery stores) he has taken over doing all of the groceries, necessitating a weekly menu plan.  While this works in theory, it has yet to succeed in practice, so I typically have produce OR meat OR canned goods in the house, but have yet to achieve all three in the house at the same time.   This leads to some ... interesting ... meals.

Mischief has just started SK, and was really really excited to go back.  Her best friend is in her class along with several of her classmates from last year, and she has the same teacher.  The problem seems to be that her school has adopted full-day kindergarten this year, so she's having to transition from being at school for 2 hours and 45 minutes per day to being there for 6.5 hours.  She has spent the last two weeks crying at the drop of a hat, and being SO clingy that I'm thinking about changing her nickname from Mischief to Limpet.  I've talked to her teacher about it, and she seems happy enough at school, but at home she's just misery personified, and earlier bedtime doesn't seem to be helping.

Then there's Trouble.  Never has a child been so aptly nicknamed.  I had another beautiful daydream about the two of us spending quality time together once Mischief was back in school and figuring out potty training and doing classes and running through fields of flowers holding hands and laughing.  Of those things, the potty training is the only one that seems to be working out, and that's ALL Trouble and very little me.  His behaviour lately just makes me want to cry.  When he's happy, he's the sweetest little kid you've ever seen, but when he's angry...  well, let's just say that although Captain America is his favourite Avenger, in real life he does a better job emulating The Hulk.  There's screaming - endless screaming - and hitting and kicking and throwing things.  And screaming.  He screams that he wants you over and over and over.  When you give in and go to him, he screams at you to go away.  If you go away, he screams for you to come back.  If you go to him despite his demands for you to leave, he throws things at you and hits.  When he gets really mad, he bites.  I've tried ignoring the behaviour.  I've tried punishing it, I've tried appeasing it, I've even tried bribery.  Nothing works, and I'm really at my wits' end.

This whole "bad mommy" thing was pretty tongue-in-cheek, because I really feel that we're all doing our absolute best as parents and I was irritated at the whole "better-mom-than-thou" vibe I was getting, but my inability to work through this behaviour thing with Trouble really DOES leave me feeling like a bad parent.  I feel so helpless and ANGRY and embarrassed when he acts out and I can't immediately put an end to it, and then I feel guilty for being angry with a three year old.  Then he throws a car at me and I'm angry again.  I recognize that it's probably a phase, and that he's going through a big transition too - getting used to the absence of his sister all day is a big change.  But I've been around a large number of women with small boys, and not one of them has ever said to me, "you know, my son has turned into a raging little violent monster and since they don't make straightjackets small enough for toddlers (*), I just don't know what to do with him."  I wish just one of them had said something like that - I wouldn't feel so alone in this.

Anyway.  School has been back for two weeks, and my beautiful daydream of a perfect home-life has yet to manifest.  I think I'll give it another two weeks, and then I'll have to revise.



* I don't know if they DO make toddler-sized straightjackets.  Although I've lovingly caressed the idea when Trouble was mid-tantrum, I've never ACTUALLY looked into it.

The first skirmish

After writing my brave manifesto last Sunday, I lay awake that night trying to figure out what my first move should be.  The next day bright and early, I stood at the foot of Mr. Baby's crib, saying "good morning!".  I took a close look at him.  Why not start with the child himself, I thought, and work out from there?  He's clean, and as well-groomed as one can be who only has about a hundredth of a gram of hair... but the clothes, ah, the clothes.  There's a challenge!

He looked pretty cute in his penguin sleeper, although I giggled nervously to myself as I considered the background they're on... kind of a bright, light red, could I say?  Or, well, to be honest, those penguins are cavorting on a shocking pink background, the kind that screams THIS IS A GIRL BABY! to casual passersby.

We're big fans of hand-me-downs in this house... witness the fact that I'm wearing a pair of my mother's cast-off pyjamas as I type this, and even my fourteen-year-old didn't turn up his nose at a bag of shirts from the neighbour's 20-something son last week.  The baby's current crop of sleepers are from a dear friend who, when hearing that Baby had outgrown all the ones that fit when the weather got warm in the spring, turned out her daughter's dresser drawer on the spot and promptly sorted out the too-small ones for me to take home.  So, lately his nightwear has consisted of a lot of flowers, frogs with pink ribbons, sea creatures in pink and purple, and other adorableness that I wouldn't have had an excuse to buy.

This is the hand-knit sweater Pinterest says he should be wearing.

Vintage is all very well, but I've never really developed the knack of taking "used" and putting it together in a snazzy way.  I figured I had better fall back on my mad knitting skillz, but babies are not exactly famous for giving you time to knit.  I rifled through a memory box and found a striped navy sweater I'd knitted the first time around, and put it on baby with a plain t-shirt and a pair of jeans (coincidentally hand-me-downs from another blogger on the site).  He looked pretty cute, and I tentatively chalked one up for my side of the battle.

The cat-hair covered, misshapen, and apparently hole-y sweater he actually wore.

Later that day we were out on the subway, making our twice-weekly pilgrimage to the office where I drop off and pick up the work for my main paid gig.  Baby sat eagerly upright in his stroller, smiling and laughing at any person he could make eye contact with.  I was able to relax and enjoy, until I suddenly noticed something on the sweater - I leaned in closer and found - a hole!  Right on the arm, big enough to show clearly the white of the t-shirt underneath.  Obviously it wasn't bad enough for me to notice in the hours before that, but boy, did it stick out once I'd noticed it.

So, in summary... week 1, sartorial challenged, battle lost.

On the upside, though, notice what I did for you there?  I joined Pinterest just so I could steal a picture to show you. 

Winning the Mommy Wars

I often have a secret 'theme' for my life.  It's a little catchphrase that really only means something to me; it helps to keep me focused on what's important to me at the time.  It will stick with me for a few months or maybe as long as half a year, then gets replaced.

It's time for a new one, and I'm going to share it because it fits the theme of this blog so nicely.  It doesn't take a psychologist to guess that fostering a baby is bringing out a thread of perfectionism in me, with the desire to "get it right" this time.  Almost 15 years ago now I had my first baby, and the first six months were miserable.  He didn't sleep well, it took forever to get breastfeeding working properly, it was the dead of winter, I had no friends with babies, and no family in town.  I probably had post-partum depression, but who was there around to notice?  On the one hand I hated going back to work and leaving my son with a babysitter at six months, but I was also partly relieved, having felt like an abject failure as a stay-at-home Mom.

So!  Here I am doing it again.  The first bewildering few months are over, when lack of sleep impairs any brain activity whatsoever.  The following honeymoon period (which seemed to last about five minutes) is also over, and our cute little cuddly baby has turned into an opinionated, screaming (not to mention teething) little so-and-so that pushes me away and eagerly awaits the day when he can crawl away from me, which is coming soon.

It's time to get re-focused (at least that's what today's beautiful September weather tells me) and step up my game.  So, the theme for the next four or five months, until the baby moves on, is.... "Winning the Mommy Wars".  Aim high!, they say, right?  Although do motivational experts generally advocate a combative approach?  Probably not.  Oh well.

I promise to share with you how this all works out for me, which is, after all, why I'm telling you this.  First I'll have to do some research, to nail down in a bit more detail all the areas I need to work on.  That's probably going to entail reading some mommy blogs, which I'm already apprehensive about.  That's not something I had to worry about the first time around.  Which reminds me, I should ask, what do I realistically expect to be different about my role this time?  To be honest, not much.  I expect I will abjectly fail again, but this time... I hope to keep my sense of humour about it all.  And of course, share it all with you.

I'm home all day, every day. I have a teenager.  I currently do not work. I am able bodied and my mental health is at about a solid functional 70%.  

And here's a quick glimpse into my apartment, as of right this minute. 

So,. please, cut yourself some slack?  

I see you ladies, with babies and toddlers, pre-schoolers and busy school age kids.  I see the activities and outings and  the fun. I see the baking and the  playing. You do it tired and sick. You do it when your child is ill, and  the clingiest human ever.  You do it when your husbands and partners are away. 

I won't judge you, ever. If I'm concerned and you look like you're sinking, I'll offer to help. If I don't offer the right thing, tell me what the right thing is. Feel free to tell me that you're find. Feel free to change your mind on that.  

Recently my son and I played boardgames, and debated over the dimenions of a Man-of-War (which I was building in mine craft) and laughed ourself into tears watching babies laugh and cats drink from taps.

We could have been cleaning, but prioritized lounging, hence the mess.

I've told my son that now that school is back, and I can make a concentrated effort to job search from 8:15 till 3:30, that I'm NOT doing housework during that time. I just won't.  We both wear clothes, eat food and make mess, dammit we can both clean it up, weekends and evenings.

who is this guy Ty Malone? he sounds fun.

So I find the creation of spreadsheets soothing.  There's something about the neat columns and the formulae that helps me believe, briefly, that anything exists but chaos.  It's been a rough few days, so I intentionally opened open office for some therapy.  Even though there was a baby in my lap, for those few mins. I felt like I was on vacation.

you may notice this graph isn't quite funny.  that's because it's real.

but....ooooh!  pretty colours!  amiright?

Can I Fit in a Bouncy Castle?

My daughter, Luna, is turning 2 in 1 month.  I decided that we should have a birthday party - with other kids and their parents - in the park, and started planning a couple of weeks ago.
Now I know a 2 year old doesn't really *need* a party, that she probably wouldn't even know it was her birthday if we didn't mention it.  And I know there's a cliche of already-tired parents wearing themselves out planning giant fetes that cost more than a small island country.  I know all the things you're thinking, right now.

But the party isn't really *for* her, exactly, is it?  It's for her dad and I, really...so we can, just this once, be surrounded by friends who know what it's about.  People who will also have to chase their toddler around and pick up dropped food and wipe snotty noses and never ever have a complete conversation ever again.  I feel that in this sort of modified party setting I can really shine.  Ok, sort of shimmer, at best.  But the point is, I expect I'll be comfortable and feel less lame if everyone else @ the party has a tiny master or two that they obey, like I do.
I like parties.  I like fun.  Shocking, I know.  And I like the idea of feeling, just this once, that I'm part of the majority in my friend-group, one of *many* parents, not the one parent among all the cool people.  I love hanging out with my non-childed friends, but when I'm with them, after a while, I feel nostalgic for the freedom and simplicity of pre-baby life.  Too many lunches cut short by tantrums or no-naps and I start to feel like an alien among my peers.  It's good to be around other parents sometimes, to escape that feeling of Utter Uncoolness.

Playdates are the same, now that I'm finally coming to understand what they're really for.  Within the context of the playdate itself, I don't feel like I miss being the fun pre-parent Holly.  I don't compare the 'fun' I'm having with past Times of Awesome (tm) - because (and this tenuous messed-up pseudo-logic really does help me) Pre-parent Holly never WENT on playdates.  So she doesn't exist in this playdate dimension.  So I can't compare myself to her.  So I don't.

So I will collect my friends-in-the-same-boat and we will chase our children around and frolic in their cuteness and panic about their safety and (if we're lucky) manage to eat a tiny burger or two, ourselves.  It's gonna be great.  I'm just going to admit this, shall I?  I'm throwing *myself* a kiddy art & pirates party for Luna's 2 yr birthday.  ;)

Nap planning

A friend of mine (who happens to have four children) commented lately that she wished kids would tell you how long they were going to nap, when they went down.  Thirty minutes?  Good, put up your feet and read a book.  Three hours?  Start a major project.

To that I would add, that I wish when the baby went down at 4pm today, he'd told me whether he was going down for the night or not.  He has a pretty reliable 7pm bedtime, but it's 7:30pm now and he's still asleep.  Is this it, or do I have an hour and a half of misery before me this evening?  He normally wakes up at 5am; so if he sleeps through the evening, is he going to think it's morning at 2am?  The possibilities are mind boggling.

Perhaps he heard the rumour that a new baby toothbrush arrived in the house today, to brush the two tiny pearly whites that popped out of his gums last week.  I would believe that kids would go to these lengths to avoid getting their teeth brushed.