Reconnecting

Braeden was in rare form this morning. He started his day on a happy note, cheerfully asking for breakfast and actually eating it! I changed his diaper --pretty easily-- and we picked out CDs to play. But then he just seemed to snap. It may have been when I wiped his runny nose and mentioned that his immune system was kicking in (read: thicker mucus). He jumped up and exclaimed, "Aconite!" (I gave him aconite yesterday, a homeopathic remedy used at the beginning of a cold.) I gently said no, and started to explain why he didn't need aconite today. So there we were, Braeden shrieking, "Aconite!" as he ran through the house, with me following behind him, shrieking, "But that's not your remedy today! Now you need pulsatilla!" Thinking he needed a diversion, I opened the back door to the patio, where Braeden carefully walked around the perimeter. I looked away for a minute, heard, "Dada sledgehammer. Mama use it." Then SLAP. Braeden was flat on his back, in the small pond that used to be our backyard until the storms hit. He was covered in muddy, mucky water. "MAMA!"

I picked Braeden up and carried him into the house, holding him at arms length. He sobbed and begged to stay outside, kicking, writhing, screaming. I brought him into the bathroom and started the shower. "Shirt on! Diaper on!" he protested, as I took his clothes off. "No shower! Milk in bed!" I picked him up and carried him into the shower, where he continued to cry and scream throughout 95% of the activity. "Uppie, Mama! Water off! Water cold! Water hot!" For the last couple of minutes, however, Braeden was able to amuse himself by playing with the drain. Of course, this led to more screaming when I turned off the water. I took a deep breath, wrapped Braeden's towel around him ("No tiny towel! Big towel!"), carried him out of the shower ("Back in! No, Mama!"), and snapped on his diaper (I won't even try to replicate the protests).

Even though I was just in my bathrobe, I decided to abandon any hope of getting dried off and dressed before nursing Braeden. He was ready NOW. So we lay down, Braeden latched on, and I breathed deeply, trying to pass on some relaxed vibes. Usually, after the kind of chaos that we had experienced this morning, Braeden would pass out in about two minutes. But this morning was different. Braeden nursed for a good half hour-- on one side! Instead of twirling his fingers in my hair and then yanking, he gently played with the little hairs at the nape of my neck. He placed a thumb on my cheek and softly moved it back and forth. And every so often, he would look up at me with this calm, fixed expression on his face, like he used to look at me when he was a tiny infant. I wondered what was going on in his mind: is it absolutely clear, and free of thought? Is he thinking about the wild, frenetic morning he had? Or marveling at how much better he feels now? Is it possible that he's thinking about something completely unrelated to what's going on at that very moment-- like whether airplanes and birds are actually the same size?

I looked into Braeden's clear, blue-green eyes and tried to give the sweetest, most loving look that a mother could muster. Please, please, please, I thought, let him realize how much I love him, and that I'm not his adversary. I worry sometimes that in his almost-two-year-old mind, I have been reduced to an obstacle and a boundary. By 11:00, Braeden had drifted off to sleep, and I was left to tackle the only remaining signs of the morning's storms: breakfast dishes, the contents of my upside-down purse, Braeden's muddy shirt and diaper, blocks that have been strewn across the living room. I know that this was a pretty ordinary few hours, as far as life with a toddler goes, but I felt like I had been to another planet and back. Those thirty minutes of reconnecting with Braeden, however, made it all worth it. I got the distinct feeling that Braeden felt the same sense of relief, a realization that even when his world seems to be crumbling, he can always stop, center himself, hug his Mama or Dada, and know that he's safe.

One Good Year

I read an excellent article in Brain, Child magazine the other day. The author, Laura Brodie, decided to homeschool her daughter for a year when her daughter got to the point where she would rather hide in a closet for an hour than face ten minutes of homework. In "One Good Year," Brodie talks about her own experiences in short-term homeschooling, and she reveals some of the research that she has done on the topic.

Interestingly enough, there isn't much research that has been done on the topic of short-term homeschooling. It's a relatively uncommon educational option (even within the homeschooling community) that, to me, makes a lot of sense. As Brodie points out, there are plenty of reasons to consider this option:

1. A temporary problem with the conventional school system, such as personality conflicts with a teacher, or a "persistent bully"
2. A medical problem or injuries, possibly resulting from an accident
3. A disagreement with the attitude or style of a particular school's administration
4. The "perils of middle school," including peer pressure and bullying
5. Frequent moving, such as in military families, or when living in a new area for a short period of time
6. The opportunity to spend more time with one's child; having a year to "reconnect"

I fully understand and agree with Brodie's take on short-term homeschooling:

[A]s the year went by and the complaints increased, I sympathized more and more with Julia's plight, partly because of my own memories of public school drudgery, and partly because, as a professor of English, I understand the need for sabbaticals. If adults benefit from intellectual rejuvenation, then why not children? Why shouldn't a child have time off to pursue her own research and writing?

I used to love Monday mornings in fifth grade, when I would go into school late. Rather than getting on the bus like every other morning, my mother and I drove a half-hour in the other direction to go to French and Latin lessons. There is no way that I could have gotten more enrichment out of those three hours in my fifth grade classroom than I did in Mr. Beaven's office.

After reading that Ms. Brodie is a professor at my alma mater (and has published a book about Joe's college), I sent her an e-mail. I told her that, personally, one of my biggest parenting fears is that I will close doors for my son, education-wise. While I adore the idea of child-led learning, and of letting Braeden explore his world, unencumbered by state-imposed requirements and standarized tests, I fear that the "road less traveled" could be kind of a dead-end. A love of learning is great, but what if it doesn't translate into acceptance at a good college, or a good job that allows Braeden to afford the kind of life he wants to lead? That's why this idea of short-term homeschool strikes me as ingenious. At the very least, it teaches the child that education does not only happen in the classroom; that test scores are not the only way to measure knowledge. Yet the child still pretty much stays on track, in the long run, with his or her peers. I know (from Ms. Brodie's article) that there are drawbacks, but this approach may be the closest we'll get to the best of both worlds. Julia Brodie seems to agree: she has already asked to do her eighth grade year at home.

The garden is planted!

We have finished planting our garden!! This past weekend, we drove down to Austin for their weekly farmers' market to pick up some herbs (we gave up on sprouting the seeds ourselves). The farmers' market was great! Vendors were selling organic vegetables and herbs, honey, homemade granola, flowers, pastries... you name it. It was smaller than I had expected, but they had everything we could want. In the end, we bought a bunch of plants from P/2 Organic farm: Basil, lemon basil, peppermint, oregano, and tiny tim tomatoes.




















Lemon basil, just planted in the garden

After driving home from Austin, we stopped at Lowe's and bought nine more bags of organic soil. Not wanting to wait any longer for our garden to be, well, an actual garden, we drove straight home and got right to work! Here's the result:














We also have lavender, rosemary, and strawberries planted in there. Though Braeden picks herbs daily, we used our very own herbs for the first time in dinner last night: I sprinkled sliced lemon basil on top of spelt spaghetti with tomato-ricotta sauce. It was great!




















Braeden, getting in on the gardening action

I'll post updates as our plants (hopefully) start to flourish.

Flu season blues

Ugh, flu season hit at our house last week - BIG time. Braeden woke up last Wednesday night and proceeded to vomit everywhere. I stayed up with him for the rest of the night, grabbing my flashlight and directing him toward the bucket whenever I felt him getting ready to start up again. (As night turned into morning and exhaustion set in, I abandoned the bucket in favor of any relatively dry surface: a towel, the sheets, my arm.) What I originally thought was the product of too much daytime activity and too little sleep turned out to most definitely be a stomach virus. Braeden couldn't hold anything down, and after he bravely tried to stomach pear juice, water, and a popsicle, he gave up and just went back to nursing. This was fine with me, of course, until the evening that Braeden started to feel better... which is exactly when the flu decided to hit me.
With Braeden feeling more energetic and me feeling, well, like I was ready to sleep with my head resting on the toilet seat, Joe swooped in like Superhubby. Friday night, the two of them went out to the grocery store and came home with a card and ginger ale for me. When Braeden wouldn't nurse to sleep, Joe put him in the car and drove around until Braeden fell asleep. I woke up in the middle of the night to see a peacefully sleeping babe next to me. (Of course, he wasn't quite so peaceful after waking up to the sound of me, retching.) Saturday morning, they were gone again, off to the park and out to lunch. We all napped together, then Joe brought Braeden back out to the mall. I felt a bit guilty during this last outing, because I was pretty much better by then. (As penance, I did some laundry and straightened up around the house... and then spent the next two days taking Braeden out because Joe got the flu, too!)

After the storm had passed, out house was in shambles and I had about 10 loads of laundry heaped up on "Braeden's" bed, waiting to be folded. We had no food in the house, which was fine with me, because all I wanted to do was order takeout and drive through Starbucks from then on. I still can't get over how quickly a stomach bug had moved me into "survival mode," absolutely obliterating any inclination I had to do things the "right" way. I switched Braeden into paper diapers, turned on the TV (yes, the TV! Not just YouTube!), abandoned my new clothesline, sacked out on the couch watching "The Devil Wears Prada" while Joe ran all over town in his efforts to entertain Braeden, and turned to frozen dinners for a couple of nights even after I was better. At one point, while I was actually still sick, Joe looked at me on the couch and said, "I'd love to do what you're doing right now." I looked over at him like he was crazy-- masochistic, even. (Granted, at that moment I was giving serious consideration to heading to the hospital for an IV of saline and Phenergan.)

Joe had a good point, though. I had to admit that it felt kind of nice to be able to veg out for a day-- usually, when one of us is home alone for a few hours, we feel this parental (or is it marital?) obligation to do a load of laundry, vacuum the floors, pay some bills, or at the very least prep dinner. We have become pretty type-A in our quest to be the best parents possible to our son, so much so that the only quiet relaxation time we can expect in a day is when we sit down and read to Braeden. Calm, yes; enjoyable, yes; but not exactly "me time."

So now our normal, healthy lives have resumed: Braeden's back in his Fuzzibuns, the TV is off, and we had wild salmon and fresh asparagus for dinner tonight. Okay, I still haven't transitioned back to the clothesline, which amazingly survived the huge storms that hit Killeen earlier this week. But Joe and I have decided that we should take more opportunities to give each other "me time"-- so that we can occasionally sack out on the couch and watch a movie without a bucket nearby. (And --shhh-- I'm also making sure that Braeden and I wash our hands more often. I know that crunchy parents like me aren't supposed to be germophobes, but one bad stomach flu is enough to make me want to buy stock in Purell!)

Boob Tube: Bad. YouTube... Good?

We're pretty strict about TV in this house. Well, maybe "strict" isn't the right word... TV just isn't a part of our family life. Joe doesn't come home from work and turn on the news. I don't watch TV during the day. And we definitely don't own any baby movies! (However, after Braeden goes to sleep, we definitely indulge in The Office, Scrubs, and 30 Rock; Joe loves Lost; and I love The Colbert Report.)

So, even as careful as we are to not sit our child down in front of the television, we have found a loophole. In this house, YouTube is our guilty pleasure. We first discovered it when a friend aired his TV show pilot. Braeden and I were actually in it, so it didn't really "count" as watching TV (right...?). A couple of months later, my brother showed us a very strange video called "Muffins" while we were visiting. Braeden instantly fell for the obviously disturbed lady who spoke with a Boston accent and advertised her supposedly delicious "Bird," "Paperclip," and "Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" muffins. My new justification for letting Braeden watch YouTube: it's new and edgy and therefore not mind-sucking like TV. Also, all of those silly muffins were letting him identify familiar objects.

The delusion continued as I discovered a fabulous director on YouTube whose videos are just about all appropriate for children. He uses stop-motion videography and his own synthesized tunes, resulting in really entertaining music videos. The first one we discovered was called "Pancakes," in which bowls, spatulas, and other kitchenwares were used to create the rhythm. Watching this video one evening led us to finding a crepe recipe online and trying out the toppings that the guy uses in the video. "The Garden" is another favorite of Braeden's, especially since we have a garden of our own. Again, the music is great, but this time, brooms, rakes, a lawnmower, and a leaf blower are used. And he also frequently asks for "Cow dancing," which I believe is actually called "Addicted to YouTube," featuring a stuffed cow dancing on top of a speaker at the beginning.

I tell myself that YouTube is better than TV for the following reasons:

1. The videos are all short, 10 minutes or less. So it's impossible to plop him down in front of the computer for a long period of time. In fact, we usually have to sit right there with him, so we're still kind of interacting.
2. There are no ads, as well as no animated heroes who are going to beckon to Braeden from the shelves of a toy store.
3. Computers are just inherently better for the mind than televisions.

And here is why YouTube has become a family fallback:

1. There's only so much I can accomplish on the computer anymore while Braeden's nursing. He is content to lie there for maybe 5 minutes max, then he's ready to run again!
2. (This is awful to admit, but...) The YouTube screen only takes up less than half a page, so I can open my email next to it and message away while Braeden sits contentedly next to me.
3. Sometimes Braeden just loses it. If he's overtired and it's almost dinnertime, he has been known to become a human puddle. So Joe, in turn, has been known to toss the little one over his shoulder and turn on "Dahden" (Garden) for him... while checking his email, of course.

Okay, I do feel a certain amount of guilt for letting Braeden watch YouTube, if only for 20 minutes a day. I know that most kids (even babies) spend way more time in front of the TV every day, but I also know that the AAP recommends no TV time at all for children under 2. And, as Mothering.com put it, it's screentime more than just TV time that we need to avoid. Hopefully we make up for this brain-numbing video watching with the dozens of books that we read with Braeden every day. Is there a way to make up for "screentime"? Or will we parents be forced to learn our lesson when our children are turned down for admission to the exclusive Montessori preschool down the street?

If you'd rather let your mind become mush rather than worry about the above question, check out these YouTube videos. They come with my 1 1/2-year-old's seal of approval:

• The Uncle Phil Show (there are 3 parts to the episode)
• Muffins
• The Garden (most of GiR2007's videos are fun to watch)

Backyard Projects

Ahh, our backyard. It's just one big (okay, small) exercise in futility. No matter what we do back there, it ends up looking more ghetto every day!

Our first problem was the realization that there is no grass in the backyard. We have dirt, rocks, and weeds, but that's about it! So since the yard can't be used for its normal purpose (say, as a play area for children), we've decided to try out some other uses for it. Along one fence, next to the patio, is our garden. We spent about a week digging it out, and we're in the process of turning the resulting hole into an organic garden. So that you can get a mental image, here's the garden in a picture taken today:















And one of Braeden getting ready to water said garden:



















the budding horticulturist

As you can see, we're a little low on dirt. We figure we'll need about 8 more bags of organic soil to get the right depth (it's Miracle Gro organic soil, though... does that confuse anyone else?). So far we have lavender and rosemary plants that we've been watering in their pots from the store, and we're working on blueberries and raspberries in cedar planters. In the garden itself, we're planning to stick with herbs and vegetables. Hopefully. So far Braeden has dumped out garlic, basil, parsley, and oregano seedlings, and he yanked the beginnings of a grapevine out of another planter. We're expecting to harvest maybe one green bean, when all is said and done.

Our other backyard project has been to hang a clothesline. Seems like a simple task, right? Screw big hooks into posts on opposite ends of the yard, attach pulleys onto the hooks, and string a clothesline between them. But we just cannot do it correctly! No matter how tight we pull the clothesline, it sags as soon as clothes are hung. Here's our first, rather pathetic attempt:

Notice the Army pants at the end, actually touching the dirt on the ground! Luckily, the colors are pretty similar. So when Joe came home yesterday, we tightened the clothesline twice. This next picture was taken today:














Though our yard might not be aesthetically pleasing, so to speak, at least it produces crisp and delicious-smelling bed linens!

The clothes are drying --and they smell heavenly!-- but I just don't think the line is supposed to sag the way it does.

We're supposed to have sod put in in a month or so. Now we just have to find a way to get rid of the metal fence and the plastic yard toys and we'll be making some real progress!

MSNBC Examines Circumcision

MSNBC's Victoria Clayton has just published a new article titled, To cut or not?: Circumcision controversy flares. It is an interesting piece, if only because it presents two sides to the story-- those who are for circumcision, and the "intactivists" who are against it.

I wish this article could have been written 2 years ago! Joe and I both thought that circumcision was the easiest decision we had to make as new parents: Duh, of course, all boys are circumcised. Needless to say, Braeden is not "intact," though our next boy certainly will be. The poll included in the article reveals that the decision to cut or not is not as clear cut (no pun intended) as we had thought. The poll results are, surprisingly, almost equally divided.

Vote here!