Parenting
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I is for Incredible!
Today’s post is a ‘guest post’. My sister Maya and her family built a garden house in their back yard in Portland a couple of years ago, and she posted about it recently on Facebook. I asked her if I could share her post here, because I am so amazingly impressed by the entire endeavor. That they did the work themselves, that they used mostly recycled materials, that it came out so beautifully. Truly incredible. I wish I had these powers, but alas, I do not. Without any further ado, here’s my sister’s post. ***** The summer of 2021 a wish/dream of mine came true. The kids had long outgrown…
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Friday Randomness (belated…)
Isn’t that a cute Graduation Invite, for a proud parent to send out to invite her friends and family to show off her daughter, and celebrate said daughter’s accomplishment in school? Yes, it is. See how cute, the picture of her Kindergarten graduation? Her official Senior photo (in my great aunt’s pearls), her other, casual Senior photos? Sigh. The thing is, Maya doesn’t want a graduation party. She doesn’t want to hang out with a bunch of Ted and my friends, feeling self-conscious because everyone is looking at her. She and her friends will have been partying at the ‘All Knighter’ (They’re the Knights), and she’d rather go from party…
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Still Alive
Yes, I’m still alive. I know, it’s been awhile. I hate writing that at the beginning of a blog post, but somehow, I find myself doing it more and more often. Today I took a few minutes and looked at blogs that I link to from my blogroll. So many of them are defunct, or might as well be. Last post in 2011, 2012, 2013. I should clean them up, move them out. But I don’t use an RSS reader or anything like that. My way of checking to see if you have a new blog post is to click my link, and go look. So I keep them. I…
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Growing Up
Of course, Maya has been growing up for over 17 years now. Seeing the Royal Baby in the news reminds me of how little my own baby once was. I remember, sometimes fondly, how sweet and dependent she once was. And now…now she’s 17, with a driver’s license, going to appointments and the grocery store on her own. Taking the train into Berkeley to see a movie with her friends. I confess to being a bit over-protective. I make her appointments for her, pick up her prescriptions for her, that kind of thing. She could do these things for herself, and probably she should. She needs to be ready when…
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Giving Tuesday
The day after Thanksgiving is Black Friday, the day when retailers hope to move from being in the red to being in the black. It has also become a day when shoppers go forth, hoping to find great deals, either for their Christmas and Hanukkah shopping, or perhaps for themselves. There is also Small Business Saturday, when shoppers are encouraged to frequent small, locally owned businesses, rather than the big box stores that are so popular on Black Friday. Yesterday was Cyber Monday, when shoppers go online and shop while they’re supposed to be working. A person can supposedly get really good deals on this particular Monday, though I find…
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Looking Good
My mom was a big believer in reading. She was addicted to it. She read more than anyone else I have ever known. She loved to read everything, almost any genre, almost any book. LOVED it. When she was trying to figure things out, she would read to find a solution. Recipes, career advice, whatever. Parenting style. She loved her parents dearly, and she firmly believed that they did their best. But she also thought that they could have done better. So when she found she was going to have kids, she wanted to find out how to do things better than her parents had done. For the most part,…
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Playing Hooky
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NpJ4fUhFRU[/youtube] Last weekend, Maya asked if she could miss school on her birthday. My first reaction was, No, go to school. Then I thought about it and realized, who cares if she misses a day of school to celebrate her birthday? I mean, if a teacher is absent, they just show a movie in class, so if they can waste her time (once in awhile…not ragging on her school…it’s a good school, with very dedicated teachers), then so can I. Anyway, it seemed like SUCH a good idea, that Ted and I decided to take the day off as well. So we took a vacation day from work, and went…
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Breaking Her Fall
One summer night in July of 1998, Tucker Jones drops his 14-year-old daughter, Kat, off with her (slightly older) friend, Abby, in front of a movie theater. But the girls meet up with a group of older boys, one of whom is Abby’s boyfriend, Jed. Jed’s parents are out of town, and he invites the girls back to his place for a party. The party is big and gets out of control, and a few hours later, Tucker receives a phone call from the parent of another girl, telling him that Kat has been drinking shots, has gotten naked, and gone into the pool house to give oral sex to…
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Sleepless Thoughts…
The other night, I was starting to drift off to sleep, and for some reason, the thought popped into my head, that Maya is going to be a teenager soon. 13, on March 29th. Not that I haven’t realized this for awhile, but still, somehow, the idea that she is going to be 13 suddenly made me feel OLD. I mean, the teen years…who doesn’t remember the teen years? Some of the best and the worst in your life, with friendships that change, young love that opens your heart like a flower and crushes you at the same time, cruel jests from bullies, school getting harder when it has always…
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Apostrophe Abuse
Not sure if you’ve noticed, but parenting doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Which makes it difficult sometimes. For example, a few years ago we went to a somewhat upscale French bistro in San Francisco for dinner. Maya wanted to wear jeans, and we told her that was inappropriate, that at nicer restaurants, people wore nicer clothes. Of course, we were the only diners that evening who were not wearing jeans. Thankfully, she learns more from us at this point than the world around her, and does pay attention to what she’s wearing and whether it’s appropriate to her surroundings. Another example of parenting not happening in a vacuum is grammar…
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This Too Shall Pass
When Maya was an infant, the baby books said that if you want your child to go to sleep easily every night, put them in their crib full, clean, dry, burped, and slightly awake. Be careful what bedtime routines you start, because the child will associate them with bedtime, and while you may enjoy rocking your child to sleep at bedtime every night, you may not wish to do it every time the baby wakes up during the night, often every 2 or 3 hours. What they don’t tell you is that they will soon grow out of the phase of wanting to be rocked to sleep, and you will…
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Clarification, s’il vous plait
On Monday, we received a progress report for Maya’s Core Class, and there was a comment in the appropriate field that said, “Missing Work”. Her grade thus far in the class is an A-, so I wasn’t too worried. (I don’t worry too much about grades anyway, but at this school, Core is English and Social Studies, which are Maya’s two favorite classes, so if she’s not doing the work, that would surprise me. Actually, she always does her work, so it would surprise me even if it were a class that weren’t her favorite.) So I thought about it a bit, and sent the teacher an email: Dear Ms.…
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Anti Racist Meme
I was tagged for this one by Shelliza. She doesn’t say if she was tagged, or if she made this meme up herself. But I’ll go for it. 1. I am: Mostly British. Some of my family came to the U.S. as recently as maybe 4 generations ago, from England. Some of them came over back in the mid 1600s. I remember growing up saying I was English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh. I did our family genealogy a few years ago, and couldn’t find any Welsh, and the Irish and Scottish were both disputed. Some of my family came over as indentured servants, some as farmers, I don’t think any…
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Walking a Tightrope
The other day, when we were in Tahoe, Maya was trying to pick out a t-shirt as a souvenier, and this t-shirt had to be SPECIAL, because she was getting one for herself, and a matching one for her BFF, Jackie. I noticed that the one she had picked was an adult size (they didn’t have any kids shirts), and it looked kind of long…a huge NO in the book of Maya. So, I pointed it out to her, and she got mad. And snippy. And rude. Which escalated into a fight, in which we told her that she has every right to feel picked-on and angry, but she does…
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Naughty Chair?
One of my occasional guilty pleasures is watching “The Supernanny“. I like to watch it for a couple of reasons…first, I like to feel superior to these people, because MY CHILD has never behaved in these ways, and really, we would never allow it. Second, I like to see how QUICKLY effective methods of discipline can diffuse a situation, how good communication between caregivers can help, and how the family can very quickly go from one based in hell, to one that you might actually consider functional. She does some great work, and her website actually has some pretty good advice. Some crap, too, though, so you have to weed…
