don't get a big head

Monkey: (grins) I'm growing!

Me: Yes, yes, you are.

Monkey:  (grins even wider) I'm going to be big as Daddy soon!

Me:  (grasps at good parenting opportunity)  Yes, someday...that is...if you go to bed nicely every night.

Monkey:  (grin fading)  But MOM.  Is my head going to grow, too?

Me:  Well, yes.  All of you will grow.  You'll be in proportion, don't worry.

Monkey:  (horrified look)  BUT I DON'T WANT MY HEAD TO GET BIGGER!

Me:  (pointing at David)  Look at Daddy, though.  Wouldn't he look silly if his head were little but the rest of him were big?

David:  It happens to some people, you know.

Me:  It won't happen to you, Monkey, don't worry.

Monkey: (wailing and pressing his hands to both sides of his head)  I DON'T WANT TO GET A BIG HEAD LIKE DADDY!  I DON'T WANT TO LOOK FUNNY.

(yes, this is a cheater post.  no, it has no point.  yes, I'm editing like crazy.  no, I'm not getting a whole lot done with these charming and hilarious children around.)

Confession: I don't really play with my kids.

I almost never play with my kids.

I read to them all the time--it's our favorite thing to do.  We read picture books and chapter books and encyclopedias and I even read recipes on the rare occasion I can handle the mess and stress of cooking with them.

I sometimes give them a starter idea, like this morning when I handed them a cardboard tube full of plastic dinosaurs and suggested they create a prehistoric dino-land in the sandbox (and later have a dino-wash with soap and scrub brushes before the dinos are allowed back in the house), and I often set them up with supplies so that they can be creative (like the cardboard spaceship/doghouse that is on our front porch, complete with pink tissue paper and sparkly alphabet stickers), and OCCASIONALLY I may get talked into playing a board game or even a game of catch in the backyard.

But overall, I trust they will keep themselves occupied.  I even ignore them.  And...to tell the truth, I think it's good for them.  They know that I am always available for a hug or a kiss.  They know that I am frequently available for a "Wow! That sounds awesome!" and they know that sometimes I'm even available for a "Come see, Mama!"  They are always supervised, albeit sometimes through the window or even via the baby monitor that is still on in the hallway outside their bedroom.

So sometimes I worry that maybe they're not getting every kind of "enrichment" from me.  Like when I go to pick them up at their grandparents' house (the grandparents play with them and do projects and make them their special little helpers and all the things they can manage to do because they know we're coming to pick them up soon) and they wail that they never want to go back home with me.

But really, I remember when that grandma who devotes every moment to her little Jabber and her little Monkey told me to "go play outside" as she handed me a cup of Kool-Aid and locked the door behind me.  (It's hyperbole, Mom...no, you didn't really lock the door.  At least, not when it was below zero.  Not when there was lightning.  Much.)  I remember playing board games with myself.  (I even played Stratego against myself, which, if you know the object of Stratego, is pretty lame.)  I read books, drew pictures, played elaborate games with my stuffed animals and My Little Ponies and taught myself to play guitar and basically turned out okay.  And I was all alone for the nine years I waited for my parents to get around to giving me a sibling.  My kids are so lucky--they have a built in tormenter friend! 

So yeah, I think they sometimes start acting crazy because they're tired of hearing the tapping of my fingers on the keys and tired of waiting for me "to just finish this scene".  And sometimes I really would probably have more fun if I put down my paintbrush and helped them dig a dinosaur bog.  But overall, I'm happy with the way they can occupy themselves.  And when I see Jabber ride by on his bicycle, with his superhero mask and his tool belt full of mysterious objects, funny voices emanating from his constantly flapping mouth...or when I see Monkey, stubbornly wearing his fireman boots and holding "a lava bomb" as he sits on top of his "rowing crusher"--I think about how the freedom to occupy themselves might help them cope with life better than if I'm constantly guiding them or providing them with activities. 

I admit, there are ways to have the best of both worlds, ways that I periodically flirt with but ultimately find myself too adult-busy for.  A long time ago when I read the book Playful Parenting, I was really impressed with the free play time, where parents are told to play with the kids but to let the kids have the reins.  I further admit that this is hard for me.  I know that my kids love it when we do some of the things I read about in this book, especially playing with puppets or dolls or whatever to work through problems, teach lessons, build empathy.  So I try some of that, telling stories using some puppets we have--stories about a big brother and a little brother who don't always get along.

But more often than not, I hand them a cup of Kool-Aid and send them out the door.

rainy monday...

...so we had a little geography lesson and then made fingerpaint maps.


Jabber was able to name all the states that I flew over on my mini-writing vacation my lovely host Amy Danziger Ross, (and we did get writing done, though to be honest the conversation and celebration and the bottle of wine from my old home in Eugene would have been worth the trip even if I didn't get anything at all done on the Cassandra WIP!)

Summer vacation is off to a wonderful start! 

Guest Blogger: Jabber's How-To-Make-A-Paper-Jet

Jabber took some time out of his busy schedule this morning to prepare some video demonstrations of how to create his signature paper jet.

In this first video, Jabber demonstrates the finished product.



In the next segment of the series, Jabber shows the parts of a partially-assembled jet and prepares the body for wing application.


Last, Jabber demonstrates proper wing placement.

picture-perfect winter day

I love winter. In theory. I've lived all but three years of my life here in Minnesota, which amounts to a fair number of winter memories (I'll leave the actual numbers a little hazy, I think!) Memories of winter are either romantic and infused with large doses of happiness and hot cocoa, or they are ridiculous and awful and infused with large doses of "it's funny now, but at the time..." (an entire winter during my sophomore year of college comes to mind, complete with images of crowds of people running outside to help push my car up the hill to my apartment building every day as I fish-tailed past their buildings...)

The good memories involve sunny days spent building snow forts with the kids (or snowmen, even when my husband then shoots our snowman with a shotgun...yes, it did look pretty cool, even as Monkey's face twisted up with dismay--"What happened to Fwosty?") or nights spent playing hockey with my little brother on the ice rink in our backyard.

The Valentines Day hike up on the Superior Hiking Trail with a bottle of wine chilled in a snowbank.

The backyard fire pit party the night before our Minnesota wedding.

Afternoons curled up on the cat-lap chair behind the fireplace, writing poetry in my journal as I watched the world fall still under the weight of those crystalline drifts.

And yesterday. After a long spell of cold interspersed with several episodes of icy, dangerous driving conditions and more dark, cold, cabin-feverish days, we had one gloriously perfect winter day, complete with a sunny snowshoe hike on the frozen river, snowshoe races with the kids, snow tunnels, cats flying into snowbanks, a nice backyard bonfire (David and I cooked hot dogs on sticks we collected on our hike), and ending with everyone tuckered out and cozied up in front of the Winter Olympics. Overall, exactly what I needed to remember what I actually do love about winter, which isn't the gray cold days stuck inside with two crazy children bouncing off the walls.

Here's Jabber about to take the plunge on his snowshoes. Granny commented, "My, you have great balance on those shoes, Jabber!" to which he responded, "No, it's not about balancing with me. It's about pure skill."


Here's Monkey hauling wood on his sled for our fire. He's such a hard worker!

Niece K. challenged David to a snowshoe race around the backyard. If you look closely at the background, you can see D. dusting himself off after his exuberant sprinting resulted in a pretty spectacular fall. K. fell, too, but she still managed to snag the finish line with her gloved hand before losing her boots in the snow!

Monkey enjoyed making fun shadow shapes and tracking animals in the snow on our hike around the yard. Here he is growling at his shadowmonster.

the serious business of learning

Jabber got an activity book about dinosaurs from the dollar bin at Target, and tonight he worked on a couple pages. He designed his own dino, and we talked about why we don’t know what color dinos are. This led us to have a pretty good discussion about rotting, about what is organic material and what happens to it when it decomposes. The whole discussion came into play a while later when we were hauling the compost bucket to the hardware store. We opened the compost bucket and experienced rotting with all our senses. Talk about hands-on science.

We've been pretending that we're at school lately, having "lessons" in each subject, since Jabber is pretty hesitant about the whole idea of going to school. He thinks (probably correctly) that he will have a hard time sitting still and paying attention. I worry that his perfectionism will make him anxious and unable to move forward on things, so we're working on having a "practice sheet" to make him feel like the stakes aren't quite as high the first time around (he gets sort of a little bit terrified at the thought of messing up a workbook page or a drawing or what have you...), and having a place to practice helps out a lot. Good thing to know, to be able to mention to his teacher.

We also got a little dry-erase board from the dollar bin at Target that has handwriting lines on it. You know, with the red line on the bottom, and dotted lines in the middle, and a blue line at the top? Jabber LOVES it. We're working pretty hard on learning the right way to form his lowercase letters and how to keep them in the lines. He loves it because he knows if he screws up, he can just wipe it off easily and start over. Then, once he has mastered it on the white board, he has no problem writing it on his real page.

Tonight we had "Phys Ed Class" by going for a walk/gallop/sashay with the compost bucket down past the road construction to the bin behind the hardware store. On the way back, Jabber spontaneously pulled all of his limbs and brain into concert and LEARNED TO SKIP. It was terrific, and we skipped hand-in-hand until he said, "Mom. I'm out with my breath!" But he was so happy and felt so important and grown up to have finally found his body coordinated enough to do what his brain was telling him to do. A very big day around here, indeed.

Mood Enhancer

I used to color with crayons all the time. In college, David and I exchanged letters and pictures we drew with crayons (back when people exchanged most of their correspondence via paper and stamps and such...), and David even wrote me a poem that compared me to a box of crayons. (The big kind, with lots of colors...it was cute. He wrote it in crayon on the back of a packet of poetry from a class of his...)
I played around a lot with crayons and watercolor paints--decorating most of my apartments with my own cheaply procured artwork...crayons on freezer paper and such.

I can still remember the first time Jabber drew with crayons; I was kind of crazily thrilled by it, to be honest. I remember watching him stand there with a crayon in his fist, standing there barely able to pull himself up on that blue foot locker that served as our coffee table. I remember watching him select a certain color, draw on a certain part of the page, and I thought, "Oh my god, my child just made an artistic choice. He just looked at the page and made a choice and created art."

I know, it's not really all that magical. He picked up a crayon and scribbled with it. But watching him make the connection in his mind between moving his hand and making colors appear on the page...and deciding between different colors and making those choices...it was just an amazing reminder that he was this whole person--an individual with his own will, his own ability to create beauty. It was so cool!

So tonight the Monkey, Jabberwock, and I all spent about an hour coloring. We spend a lot of time drawing, a process which is sort of stressful at times for Jabber, as he is a perfectionist. But coloring in pictures from a coloring book--how can you go wrong?

All of my stress from the day is gone. Crayon therapy.




Here are the space pictures Jabber and I colored, and below are the boys coloring and cutting out their pictures.

Holiday Down-Sizing

We’re having a discussion about taking down the Christmas tree so that we can roll up the old living room rug and replace it with the beautiful new living room rug David’s parents bought us.

“Jabber,” I say, trying out my latest tactic--playing up the “responsible big brother helper-type person” role, “would you like to use your new vacuum cleaner on the old rug before we roll it up?” My parents bought each of our children a small vacuum cleaner for Christmas, a sort of “for the love of God, will somebody clean something in that house?” move, I guess. So far I love it.

“Sure!” he says, full of enthusiasm for the job. “I will!”

Monkey very helpfully delivers “The Big Boss,” which is how we’re referring to the rug sweeper, versus “The Little Boss,” which is how we indicate the Dustbuster. I cringe as the handle very nearly misses several breakable entities around the house.

“Great! Now that Daddy took the Christmas tree down, we can get started."

“Wait.” Jabber fixes me with a serious look.

He stands up beside his spot at the table as though he is answering a question for an old-fashioned school-teacher. “What will you be doing to my Fort?” he asks.

The Fort has taken over the living room in the past few weeks. It started as the old play pen (that I’m not sure has ever, in the course of two boys, been successfully utilized in its intended manner) tipped on its side in front of the fireplace. In this capacity, it serves two purposes: with a couple of blankets draped over it and some pillows inside, it is a comfy little cubby for one or two boys to enjoy some quiet time, and also: it keeps the Monkey out of the fireplace.

Beneath the fort, an old yoga mat cut to fit covers the mess of the hearth, with the bricks that come loose under Monkey’s inquisitive fingers. A crate of books and a little table made out of a spool complete the little play area.

Except lately. It started with the addition of a sort of antechamber or perhaps just a mudroom. An old suitcase, tipped on its side, added a functional door. The rocking chair, along with the procuring of another old bed comforter, provided a separate wing for entertaining each other with feats of Monster Truck daring and other such amusements.

Two dining room chairs also occasionally sneak into the construction, forming "tunnels" with a private deck for each boy. On several occasions we have eaten dinner in shifts in order to preserve this fine architecture.

“You’re not going to take it apart, are you, Mom?” asks Jabber now, still standing earnestly beside his chair.

“Just a little down-sizing.”

“Down-sizing? What’s that?”

“Sizing down, basically,” offers David.

“It sounds like getting smaller!” says Jabber, his voice gaining volume. “I don’t like that sound! It sounds like you mean you’re going to take it apart! Are you taking my Fort apart???”

“Think of it as streamlining,” I say.

“WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?” he shouts.

“Narrowing down your Fort to the bulk of peak efficiency.”

“MY FORT DOESN’T HAVE A PEAK EFFICIENCY! YOU’RE GOING TO TAKE IT APART!!!!”

“Well, only temporarily. A little post-holiday down-sizing.”

“A-HA! So you ARE going to take it apart!”

And he storms off to throw his little body in front of the bulldozers.

Don't worry, Mom. We're just battering each other!

OK, this is insane. All they do is fight. Fight, fight, fight.

"OK, boys, that's enough. Let's take a break from each other."

"NOOOOO! I can't LIVE without my BROTHER!!!!!! He's like half of my SOULLLLLLL!!!!!"

Five minute hugfest ensues. "Fine. But play together nicely."

Hugfest degenerates into wrestling. Wrestling degenerates into screaming.

"ENOUGH!"

"Don't worry, Mom. We're just trying to batter each other!"

Jabberwock offers this sincerely, as though it is the most reasonable thing in the world to say to your mother. When did he learn the word battering, anyway? And should I be worried?

I finally got around to reading...er...skimming the end of Playful Parenting. Yeah, this is the part about siblings. "Play Your Way Through Sibling Rivalry" is the title of the chapter, and my lip turns up in a sneer. I admit, a quivering mess of a sneer.

So he starts the chapter by going back to his empty cup metaphor, which I like and can totally see the reasoning behind. Both kiddos are running around trying to get their "cup" filled--with affection, love, attention, connection. And if they can't get some from me, they try to steal some out of their brother's cup. Sure. Yeah.

Cohen gives a list of possible things that parents can do when siblings are at each other's throats...er...aren't getting along. He says that we may do one or two of these things, but we need to try out the others. So I thought I'd go through these choices and write about whether I've done them and what I think.

"Offer a solution." Here he talks about how a parent can offer ways to make the conflict go away: go outside, take a break from each other, invite friends over, wrestle, have a snack. He says that we can't always be offering solutions, though, because children need to find their own, too. He also says that our solutions often aren't all that creative ("split it...take turns...say you're sorry"), but I'm not sure what other solutions I'm supposed to offer. Personally, I usually can't do things like drop everything and go outside to play. For one thing, like this morning, I was trying to sweep and mop the floors. Sure, I realize they probably were trying to get my attention because I was sweeping instead of playing with them, but hello? My feet are sticking to the floor. Or, I could involve them in the cleaning, but I can't figure out how to involve a four-year-old and a one-year-old in sweeping and mopping and still actually get something cleaned.

"Give encouragement and inspire their confidence" This advice makes sense because he goes into why parents can't just tell their kids "work it out" and then leave. But it's so difficult to work this into the one-year-old realm, you know? Saying things like, "I'm sure you guys can work this out, so what are your ideas about how you can keep playing with this toy without ripping each other's arms off?" works for Jabber. If sufficiently encouraged, I'm sure he could come up with a really nice way to take turns and share and play nicely. But then Monkey will just do whatever the hell he wants anyway. Because he can.

In this section, Cohen also talks about forced apologies, and how it's better to say something like, "Monkey seems really hurt by that. What can you do to make it right?" Again, this may work when they're older, but right now I'm not so sure. It always seems like a one way street, and I don't want to perpetuate the "You're older and should know better" kind of thing, either.

Next advice: "Flood children with love and affection": Sure, sometimes they're fighting because they really want more of me or Dad; this may have been the case as I was sweeping today. So, okay, I stop doing everything I need to do and have story time, play time, take them outside at the drop of a hat, do everything to keep them feeling like they aren't lacking my attention. Now what? When does dinner get cooked? Sure, I know. I'm writing a novel and blogging and reading and soon enough correcting papers all while I could be paying them undivided attention. Not everything is necessary, I suppose. I just don't know if it will stop them from freaking out on each other when a toy is snatched, though.

"Protect": Okay, yes, I do this all the time. It's just not okay for Jabber to use his bigger body and strength to push around Monkey. I will step in any time I feel someone is getting hurt, and I can't imagine not doing so.

"Provide Perspective": This is kind of like being a thoughtful listener and then a narrator for their conflict. You listen to them, and then calmly restate each perspective. "Oh, sounds like you got upset because you weren't being included in the game, and it sounds like you two wanted to include her in the game but got mad when she was cheating. What can you do to make it work out?" God, I just feel like so much of this will be easier when Monkey is more verbal, more logical.

"Promote win-win outcomes" He urges parents to look beyond fairness and equality and instead try to find out what each sibling wants. My thing? What if they really do both want the same thing?

So a key problem we have is with, say, playing with blocks/Legos/Lincoln Logs. They both love playing with them. They want to play together, but of course Jabber is really into building intricate structures, carefully and lovingly making them exactly the way he wants them. Monkey is into ruthless destruction, and fast. Every time we take out such a toy, I begin by reminding Jabber that he's going to have to be flexible about this, about how he can rebuild things and that taking things apart is part of the fun. For a while, things work great. Jabber gets excited about building things specifically for Monkey to wreck.

Eventually, though, Jabber's creativity gets a hold of him, and he gets an idea of what he really wants to build. I notice him huddling up around his creation, kicking out his legs or arms furiously toward Monkey if he gets too close. Soon, he is hoarding all of the pieces inside this little circle of his arms, screeching at the top of his lungs any time Monkey even looks at him funny. And of course, this makes Monkey want to get at it even more. Pretty soon there is chaos.

So I think, well, what Jabber wants is the freedom to build without his brother breaking his stuff, right? I offer him the option of going out on the back deck to play with the Legos by himself--an offer that is even cooler because he is the only one who is old enough and responsible enough to be able to go out unsupervised. Monkey plays pretty happily by himself, but Jabber comes in after just few minutes. What's wrong? He misses playing with Monkey. I start to pull my hair out. So, he misses fighting Monkey off with a stick? He misses screeching at the top of his lungs? He misses seeing Mama freaking out and losing her cool?

I can't go out there and play with him. 'Cause, then Monkey is unsupervised, which is just a recipe for disaster. Already, we have several times each week that are one-on-one free play time for each boy and me, at least in the summer we do. They get to call the shots, decide what we do and what we play.

Sigh. I know there's no solution, exactly, no matter how many parenting books I read. I know there's no secret way to make siblings never fight. I just wish I could make them...not batter each other.