Bzzzz!

Look! This bee has an ORANGE stripe!

What is up with that? Is that normal?

My post for today is right here, and it continues my theme from the past two weeks, mainly that I am so, so worried. Also, i wrote some about babies. So you know, the usual. See you there!

Don't Marry A Jerk.

Okay, someone I just respect emailed me that this was a hurtful post, so I'm going to rewrite it and put it back up later on. IN the meantime:

What are you saying (or what will you say) to your kids about having a good marriage later on?

The Dopey Solution to My Twitter Problem

I'll be twittering from beckfromfrogandtoad. See you there!

The Interweb Is BROKEN!

At least mine is. Perhaps it has The Dread Swine Flu. (and should you worry about the Swine Flu?)

And Twitter is broken! Also, I am locked out of my account, which is causing me to curse horribly. Grr. I've emailed the support people, so I'm hoping that everything will be fixed before too much longer. But to the people who did this yesterday? I LOVE you guys. And I am blushing modestly.

hi. The Baby just typed that for you. Anyhow. Yes, I am going through a rough time right now but things will get better - and the support that I get from all of you means a lot to me. I have some fun plans for the weekend and some nice things coming up this week and I will get through this. Thanks so much for everything.

Wicked Stepsister

There is a somewhat obscure fairy tale with the obligatory golden haired heroine who is mistreated, of course, by her far less attractive (and - it goes without saying - brunette) step-sister and stepmother, and at one point, the pretty girl - who is rather a sap - is nice to some old person and from that point on starts spitting out gold coins whenever she talks.

The stepmother - while she's not chasing Our Heroine around with a pail and urging her to speak - sends her own daughter off on the same mission which was, I now remember, picking strawberries in the snow. The stepdaughter heads out and unfortunately for her, snaps at the old person who apparently just hung out in a snowbank, waiting to entrap people - and comes home spitting out TOADS whenever she spoke.

I feel like the toady stepsister these days.

Whenever I open my mouth, all of my discretion flies out. For example: someone asked me how I was doing at the post office the other day and I BURST INTO TEARS, which is not what I NORMALLY do. And I went for a walk the other day with a new friend and I was talking and talking and TALKING AND TALKING and eventually I realized that she was giving me a somewhat reserved sidelong glance.

An old friend of mine has offered to write me a signed letter, stating that I normally have a functioning sense of discretion and that I'm not normally one of those painfully needy, here is the story of my sad, sad life sort of people that sensible people avoid. Of course, there are also those of my acquaintance who suggest that this whole blog is a monument to my lack of discretion, which always causes me to grab my lapels in a dramatic fashion and proclaim that I am one of those artistic people who needs to express themselves or die and at the moment, I AM THE RAW MATERIAL I HAVE TO WORK WITH, BUDDY.

It's funny - I always thought that saying that one's heart was broken was the corniest thing, like my heart was one of those little porcelain boxes with a Precious Moments big-eyed kid on it, and whoops, I dropped it. But my heart actually feels broken right now. My literal heart. Literally broken. At night I wake up from troubled dreams to my heart jackhammering anxiously away. The sound of the phone ringing makes my heart start pounding like the heroine in a horror movie. And to make matters worse, I can't do anything about what's going on - I'm just standing back, a horrified spectator to a nightmarish - and seemingly endless - drama in my extended family.

I'm sorry to be mysterious. It's not my story to write about.

Things will resolve eventually, although many of the ways that this could end are horrid, squat toads crouching and chuckling darkly to themselves. And what will I be when this is all over, how will I mend from this? I can picture a porcelain box roughly glued back together, the lid snapped tight. I can picture a stepsister with her lips firmly closed, knowing that at any moment - earned or unearned - terrible things can happen, knowing that at any moment an off-hand comment, some seemingly trivial thing, might result in an endless storm of toads.

Today was her big party!

Sigh.

Things have been downgraded to awful and horrifying. Things are back to just regular old awful.
I am really sad and distressed right now.
So hey. Tell me something good, something happy, something cheering, would you?

Today's post!
I was thinking about Robert Munsch's Love You Forever (ha! Thanks, pm.) when I wrote the title, even though Love You Forever is a book that I am, at the very least, ambivalent about. And by "ambivalent" I mean, of course, that the book makes me sob my freaking eyes out. Wah!
Now go read my real post, please!

FOURFOURFOURFOURFOUR!

Yesterday was ACTION PACKED - The Baby got up at some extremely early hour and yelled "I've waited long enough! Give me presents!"

So we did.

Then her siblings went off to school and The Baby and I watched a movie and played a board game and before you know it, it was time for her best friend's birthday party - whaaat? They share a birthday! How odd... - anyhow, so off we went with her in her incredibly fancy party clothes and me a bit worried about how it would feel to go to another kid's birthday party on YOUR OWN BIRTHDAY but the birthday girl's mom made a huge fuss over her, giving her a special hat and a Birthday Girl pin and lighting the cake twice - once for the Party Girl and once for the Baby and everyone sang happy birthday to her, too. So that was just awesome and I was rather verklempt that the other mom thought so much about it.

Then we came home and I made her a birthday cake and a special birthday supper and then all of her grandparents came over and brought her more presents (see her reaction in the above photo) and then I collapsed into an exhausted heap and she told her dad at bedtime that "four has been my best birthday EVER." She couldn't actually remember much of her previous birthdays, but she did say, vaguely that there was cake and presents.

In summation, here she is in her own words: I ate carrot cake and I did more stuff. I went to (best friend's) party. I got lots of presents. I had so much fun. What is four plus four? That is right. It is eight. Now stop writing down my words RIGHT NOW.

The Last Day of Being Three

My youngest child - my BABY! - turns four tomorrow. And the good thing - ha - about being rather miserable these days is that it's distracted me from the tiresome hand-wringing I'd otherwise be feeling AND writing about.

The same misery that's been preoccupying me lately has made me a bit dull and wordless: I'm struggling to find the words to write about her, her unique combination of fun + cute + frankly kinda bad. She's a great kid and a real bundle of monkeys but out of my three she's the one who has to learn every single thing the hard way. Whenever I go to pick her up from nursery school, I'm amused to see her laying on the floor, eyes and mouth firmly shut (throwing loud tantrums in public is, according to her "not dignified", but laying on the floor bonelessly? THAT IS QUEEN-APPROVED.) and furious about something or other. She's always into my lipstick. She likes peeling oranges but hates eating them, so I'm always finding denuded oranges tucked under the couch or hidden behind doors.

When she's funny, no one in the world is funnier. When she is sad, no one in the world is sadder. She already has my sharp tongue, my exasperated eye roll, and - this goes without saying - my heart, of course.

Three is one of my favorite ages - I am very good with three year olds. Four is pretty sweet too, though, that sudden excited leap into the great big world. And if you're a mother, you probably know how bittersweet today is, how you can be delighted in your newly big girl and still so sad about the end of our frustrating, hilarious at-home days together, the end of her baby years, the end of my baby years, too.

When I started this blog, her health was one of my primary worries - she was so unbelievably tiny and skinny and would she ever grow, would she be okay? - and now she's still petite but sturdy and active and hilarious and mouthy, a little girl about to turn four, a little girl talking about presents and cake and fancy breakfast in the morning. If this was a novel, that would be a lovely place to end.

Little Things

I used to be really into dolls. Like, really into. I collected china dolls in fancy dresses and miniature dolls who lived in Victorian splendour and I read magazines on collecting dolls - I did! I was... mmm, 14 or 15ish? I even went to this big miniatures show with my then-bestfriend, who I would have a terrible falling out with the following summer and then we would never speak again, which was just awful.

Anyhow, the miniatures show. I bought a little wee Victorian couch and I have just realized this very second that I now own the grown-up person-sized version of it, which has just made my brain feel like it's broken, because the whole point of this was supposed to be about how it can be sometimes hard to remember the self we used to be except REALLY now I live in a very old dollhouse-ish house with a Victorian couch that is IDENTICAL to the one I used to have in my dollhouse. So maybe apparently I am EXACTLY the same person I was at 14, except now I can afford bigger furniture. Huh.

A few years ago, I dug out the little dishes I bought at that show - white with green leaves and vines and pink flowers and the biggest plates no bigger than my smallest fingernail - and the matching cutlery, which I had carefully packed away many many years ago. At one time, I had loved those wee dishes and upon opening them, I was surprised to find that there was no residual affection left for them - just a box of pretty little things, a box of things of no importance.

I don't collect anything now, unless books count. I have friends who come and go with little drama. I have a box of books that I unpacked this weekend, and found myself puzzled over who owned all of those weird doll books until I realized that it was me and felt that weird little shock of embarrassment over some past version of my own self, some long gone me.

Today's post

... is melancholy and involves rock-climbing. How often do you get that combination?
Hope to see you there.

The Summer With Kids, Part II

3) Know what resources your area has for kids.
I live in a really, really small town - but I can still put my kids into baseball, soccer, lacrosse, tennis, little theatre, girl guides, yoga classes, Vacation Bible School, library reading club and more during the summer. A nearby even SMALLER village has a summer fun program where you can sign your kid up for FREE, even, and drop 'em off for however long you want for some supervised fun and crafts and games, EVERY day of the summer. And then there are the other sorts of things we can do - going to local pow-wows, yard sailing, going to local art shows, going on picnics in nearby parks - so even where I live, there's more than enough to keep us cheerfully busy. And I'm sure that wherever you live has something for kids, too - sometimes all it requires is some asking around.

4) Spend some time at home, for Pete's sake.
I once knew a mom who had her time very carefully structured. She and her kids would spend all morning at the children's resource center - the mom chatting with other moms and drinking coffee - then to McDonalds for lunch and a run around the play yard, and then home in time for naps and then watching movies until suppertime, at which time dad would come home, bath the kids and put them to bed.

As my husband says: anything to keep you from actually having to spend time with the little monsters, eh?

Days like that are fun once in a while - maybe once a week, let's say. But a big part of this whole mothering thing is really making sure that you have strongly connected children, to be here and present as a mother and you're not going to have that if all you do is shuttle them from one event to another. To be even blunter, it's just lazy.

My kids do fun things, certainly - but there is a balance between keeping them busy and social and having fun and trying to avoid spending one on one time with them. And we also limit having friends over to two visits a week or so (depends on the week and the kid), because we want our kids to develop friendships with each other, to see their home and their family as their center and not merely as the place where they eat and sleep between more important social engagements.

5) Be open to spontaneous fun.
However rigid and unyielding I sound in my earlier suggestions, I think I'm actually pretty loosey-goosey when it comes to actual days with my kids. They still talk about the night last summer when there was a thunderstorm which knocked the power out and so we sat up at midnight reading The Highwayman out loud under the bedroom eaves by flashlight, or how we set up a tent in the office and let them camp out in it for several days while it was too rainy outside to play much.

And this, this ability to really relax and have fun with your kids, is a blessing - not just to them, but to you, too. We all love our children, but I think a lot of the time what we mostly feel is a discouraging combination of frustration and too sharp a sense of responsibility. Being able to get in and actually fingerpaint or make cookies or run around the yard with our kids really helps to free us from our sometimes-confining roles as mother and child and really helps us to like our children for the people that they are, to see time with them as a source of real and vivid joy.

The Summer With Kids! Fear It!

It is a truth widely acknowledged that a youngish woman in possession of many small children at home for the summer must be in want of a good stiff drink.

But it doesn't have to be this way! I want to write, cheerily, and then go on to list all of the sensible and easy-to-do ways to magically turn your summer into an enchanted place, the children all wearing matching outfits and singing in harmony like the Von Trapps. And while I'm at it, I'd like a pony.

The fact that it is exasperating to be home for endless months on end with small children isn't actually tragic, though: it is just life. I don't know about you, but my actual desired companions don't pick their noses publicly and lay screaming on the floor of the grocery store because I chose the regular Oreos instead of the fancy kind. Even the most tempting companions - Alan Rickman, let's say - would probably get on one's nerves eventually, however, if they showed up and then just NEVER LEFT. And it is that, that unstructured endless sameness, that can make summer feel like a big fretful marathon that involves being really bored and feeling guilty pretty much nonstop.

There are ways to prevent that grim fate, however, and I feel - with full modesty - that I know as well as anyone what those ways are. And oh lucky you, I believe in SHARING!

1) Go into summer with a plan and with goals.
Some good times happen spontaneously, certainly, but I wouldn't count on three whole months of good times just happening of their own accord. Know ahead of time what sort of summer you want to have, and also what sort of summer your children should have. Kids who have had a rough school year, for example, may need lots of cuddly sleepovers at grandparents' houses and small triumphs and successes and perhaps a new small pet to be their responsibility.

Each of my three children needs a different summer: we need to make sure that The Baby has all of the skills needed to be away from home for several days a week, The Boy needs the self-discipline of taking on some more household responsibilities and The Girl needs a chance to experience more independence. So when I'm making plans for the summer, the differing needs of each of these three individuals has to go into what I'm planning: summer camp for a week for The Girl, helping with a garden and a rabbit to take care of for The Boy, and so on.

Making sure that your house and yard is ready for summer is very important, too. A wise friend of mine has the BEST yard for kids ever, ready for all sorts of productive play - she has a garden full of vegetables with a basket of child-friendly gardening tools beside it, a sandbox full of trucks and little figures and animals, a swingset with a built-in fort and picnic table (complete with a stashed away box of pencil crayons and a notepad), a bin of waterguns, bubble liquids and water toys and another bin of balls of various sizes. Not all of us can afford the big climbing gyms (and/or our yards are the size of a stamp) but it's entirely possible to make our backyards not just child-friendly but as places that encourage children to do a lot of hands-on learning and work.

And the same goes, of course, for making sure that your house is equally ready for the same sorts of productive play. And yes, this all is work. Who said it wouldn't be?

2) Your house is not a cruise ship and you are not a recreation director.
A lot of us have decided that unless our children are having fun every single minute of every single day, we are failures as mothers. Buh-what? A bit of boredom is good for kids - my children are never so creative as when they're desperately trying to find something to do so I don't make them do some horribly undesirable job (cleaning toilets, generally). Also, it is really not good for children to not know how to use their own time, who need to have expensive and adult-structured fun in order to be happy. Kids like that grow up to be horrible adults.

You will have other things to do: laundry, cleaning the house, meal preparation - and any child who isn't actually a baby should be able to keep themselves recently occupied for the short lengths of time those tasks require. I'm also a big fan of pressing my kids into service, the poor little things. All of life is not fun - much of it isn't, actually - and teaching your kids to be cheerfully productive is far more useful for that future happiness than any number of expensive lessons.

***********************
That's it for today! But there's more coming.

Happy Easter!

I hope it was a lovely day for you and your family.

We sang one of my favorite hymns today, which is actual a modern liberal Protestant hymn - I KNOW! SHOCKING! - and although it doesn't mention anything about rainbows, social justice or me feeling jim dandy about myself, it's still a pretty swell song. Of course, I can't TELL you what it was called because it was a last minute addition to the church service and I can never remember its actual name. It's a great hymn though, and you'd probably like it. And then we sang a round. I don't know about you, but I LOVE singing rounds. So do my kids. My husband hates car trips. Coincidence? YOU BE THE JUDGE.

Now it's the evening and the sun is beginning to set - hours later than just a short month ago - and the golden last rays are filling my office windows. It's been a good day.

Holy Saturday

One of my favorite poems is by Wendell Berry and it starts
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be...

And the rest of it. It's written on a little card and taped near my nightstand, for middle of the night despair fits. It helps.

At last night's Good Friday service, the minster read John 1: The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. That helps, too.

Around The World In 80 Clicks

My friend at Planet Nomad - currently of Morocco - has tagged me with the Around The World meme launched by Her Bad Mother and her friend David, and it's about time, since being Canadian makes me pretty special and all.

I am tagging:
Jennifer in Italy (and Jennifer, I am so glad that you and your family are safe after the tragic recent events in your country.)
Poppy in Provence
Carrien, who lives in the States right now but who will soon live in Thailand.
Angeline in Singapore
and Susanne in Germany.

And so the actual meme part of this is The 5 Things I Love The Most About Being A Mother. So here we go:
1. Sweet little babies who curl against you, little warm trusting animals with one hand always clutching at you.
2. Guileless and damp toddler kisses.
3. The look on my preschooler's face when I walk back in at the end of nursery school.
4. Endless love notes home from six year olds.
5. When my oldest child told me last year - after she had been very sick - that she'd known that she would be okay because I was always with her.

Howdy howdy howdy

I took a break yesterday from writing about babies full-time, and today's post is only slightly baby-related. See you there, I hope!

(For Jennifer and anyone else who may have wondered: Canadian Ontario-ian kids generally start pre-Kindergarten within the year that they turn 4. It's not usually a whole week program - they either go for a full-day, every other day schedule or mornings or afternoons, every day. I don't think it's that academically rigourous - a lot of circle time, playing outside and toy centers seems to be most of it. Kindergarten is a full-day, every day program and the kids learn to add, subtract and read that year - but schooling isn't mandatory in Ontario until kids are six, although most children do attend earlier. She's attended a very relaxed morning-a-week nursery school program this year, which cost us all of $20. )

Babies Part II

(I am - and this surprises me - really enjoying writing about early motherhood. I'm really considering expanding these posts and putting them into better order and maybe using them as the basis of a book, maybe. Hm!)

Did you see where I got a bit ranty yesterday about strollers?

I'm not, it must be said, profoundly against strollers. I still use one quite often, even though The Baby is TWO WEEKS AWAY FROM BEING FOUR YEARS OLD - but for long, rugged walks, we haul out the jogging stroller, which can handle all sorts of terrain. And yet there's still this residual weirdness left over from my days at home with small babies, where every little aspect of the care of our babies was discussed between me and my fellow first time mothers and every little difference was A BIG FREAKING DEAL.

Know what, though? Now that I'm a mother of a nearly ten year old (good grief!), I have to say that most of the things that we thought were SO important when they were babies really just never comes up in conversation. I mean, other mothers never sidle up to me these days and ask, eye-brow cocked at my kid, "Co-sleeping or crib?". And I think that's important to keep in perspective, to know that the deeply important decisions of babyhood don't tend to come up all that much later on.

Which is not to trivialize how important those decisions are, of course - you're making choices that are affecting the first days, weeks, months of another humans life, and so OF COURSE they matter, but it can really make new mothers feel a lot more isolated if every other new mother they know is doing the Baby Wise thing and they're toting around their baby in a sling. But no one is lonelier, I think, than a woman at home with small babies. Nicole wrote in the comments yesterday that she would stare out the window, holding her crying baby and wishing that someone would come over and talk to her and I practically burst into tears, so sharply did I remember that feeling.

I was SO lonely when I had my first child. My husband worked LITERALLY all the time (from 8 until 5 and then from 6 until 9 or 10 EVERY DAY) and we lived on a horrible street in a horrible neighbourhood that I didn't like wandering around in and I didn't know ANYONE in the city, really and my baby had health problems and so we stayed home all day by ourselves with me going out of my head with boredom and aching isolation in our horrible, horrible apartment. It was an AWFUL time.

And then things got better - not slowly, but all at once. I made a good friend at La Leche League meetings and we started going for coffee and long, rambling daily walks. I started taking The Girl to weekly playgroups at a local Catholic school (I believe they're Ontario wide, too - you should check and see, if you're in Ontario and have preschoolers), and taking her every week to the local early childhood center. And this - being around other mothers of babies, being out in this community of children - ended the nightmarish time of isolation and misery.

When we moved here, The Girl was an amiable toddler and we quickly made new friends, most of whom very obligingly had babies at the same time that I had The Boy - and so really, I was never lonely or isolated again as a mother. Still, though - I remember those months as a very bleak time and still feel a low sadness over them.

How did you handle the isolation of early motherhood? Was it a very lonely time for you?

Welcome To The Stepford Wives!

Or: How To Be Happy And Sane As A Stay-At-Home Mother, Part 1.

A lot of us will find ourselves being home with our kids for a long stretch of time on maternity leave, or during the summer (for you teacherly sorts), or perhaps forEVER, as in my case. And I cheerfully applaud Canada's generous maternity leave and careers that leave lots of time for kids, but I'm also aware that for most of us, being home with kids full-time is sort of uncharted territory and that it can be perilously easy to slip into a semi-comatose bored state. The endless amounts of unstructured time is both the blessing and the curse of being an at-home parent.

An acquaintance of mine is startlingly industrious at home - she piles firewood and hangs laundry and makes and freezes dozens of pies and plasters walls and installs light fixtures and she does this ALL DAY LONG, and while I admire her, I do not want to be like her. Another acquaintance watches television all day while her children wander around, bleary-eyed and unsupervised, and I don't want to be like her, either. So there is a balance, I think, between terrifying amounts of physical labour and an utter lack of self discipline, although I am not always great at finding it. I'm certainly good at keeping myself and my children well-amused, though, and that is a VERY important part of being at home. With that, I'm going to call myself enough of an expert to write some posts on being an at-home parent.

So here we go: What DO You Do With A Baby All Day?

A friend of mine recently told me, greatly frustrated, that she'd had such big plans for her maternity leave (she'd wanted, I believe, to redecorate her house and to write a family history) and that she'd gotten NONE of it done. I made sympathetic noises at her and then went home and laughed hysterically with my husband, because having a small baby and doing a whole lot of other things aren't generally compatible. For the first couple of weeks, having both a small baby and reasonable personal hygiene seem to be incompatible goals, grimly enough, but that stage does pass eventually.

If you have a very small baby and that baby spends all day nursing, you're going to end up a bit bored - and if you're anything like me, being recently post-partum made my usual reading a bit impossible. It's a nice time to watch some movies that you've always meant to see, or to listen to books on tape, favorite post-partum activities of mine. (although I had to be very careful that the any movies or books during that time period were REALLY cheerful and stayed away from any sad topics. I cried HYSTERICALLY all the way through March Of The Penguins, for example.) Throw in some short walks with your baby in a baby sling, putting together a little photo album and calling your husband every night to bring home subs, and you probably have enough of a schedule to get you through those first couple of weeks.

I remember bringing my firstborn home from the hospital and being really upset that all she did was SLEEP and here I thought I was going to have a superfun baby and all that - and then she woke up and I was totally terrified. What was I going to DO with her?

A lot of moms I see seem to find the answer in very, very long walks - marching grimly around town, the stroller sheathed in plastic - or walking around and around the mall. And while I do like taking babies for walks (well, of course), I'm not a terribly big fan of the Spend All Day At The Mall school of motherhood. Nor am I a big fan of constant strollers for young babies, come to that - although obviously there are times when they're safer (if you're walking a dog, let's say) or more practical (if you're walking a ways, or walking on unsteady ground, maybe), of course. But recent studies show that babies who spend a lot of time in strollers have weaker verbal development in early childhood, and my personal experience tells me that babies who are carried in baby carriers in infancy are interacted with more by their mothers and by people walking by. It's easy to ignore a baby passing by you in a stroller, but hard to avoid smiling at a little face right at your eye level, unless you are a creep. (Of course, a friend of mine has a four month old baby who weighs 25 pounds. Obviously, he's going to take the scenic stroller route or my friend will need a full-time live-in chiropractor.)

And that's enough on this topic for one day, I think. So what do YOU do with small babies all day? Do you find being home with a little baby fun and easy or hard and kinda dull (I'm in both camps, personally)?

This is how I will do all of my blogging from now on

Look! It's me as a teddy bear with a strangely calm voice!



I am JUST like that. Sort of Stepford Wife-esque, but with the new comforting and desexualized addition of being a teddy bear. PERFECT.

It's the same with men as with horses and dogs

Yesterday's post got some really interesting comments - thanks! I found that my back was going up quite a bit, which amused me: Oh, Beck! Why so defensive? But I do have more thoughts about the rights of parents to make the decisions they need to make without being hassled (and I'm not - just for the record - pro-hassling) and how that contrasts with some other things that I'm just not going to go into today.

Anyhow. Today's post is all about how spring is finally, finally here. See you there, I hope!