Badgermama

This morning I woke up gradually to whispers and subdued running around. Moomin and his friend Hamster had quietly built an enormous hide-out fort in the living room, and were being quiet so as not to wake us up! Wow!

Usually our mornings are low-key to the extreme. Moomin drags out of bed at 7:30 and sleepwalks through eating his cereal. Then he goes back to bed and reads comic books until his dad challenges him to a getting-dressed race.

I tried to be as non-cranky as possible. “I’ll get you cereal!”… chirpily…

“I’ll have the Chocolate Lucky Charms!” Hamster ordered as if in a classy restaurant. “My Spy-chu evolves into Ratat!” (Switching a tiny stuffed hedgehog with a stuffed rat behind his back.) Both kids standing up in their chairs fidgeting and spazzing and making their animals do whatever fake Pokemons do.

And then Hamster busted out with….”When you were little, did you ever say S-H-I-T in school?”

I cracked up laughing before coffee – a rare event.

Wild laughter from Moomin… “I’ll have the Cocoa Puffs.”

Even though I have a cold and no coffee in the house, I’m feeling cheerful & hugely entertained this morning. And somehow I feel like a good mom again.

Sleepovers rule!

I’m super overloaded with work, deadlines, the house is messy. Moomin wants attention, and cried because he couldn’t find the DVD remote to watch his new Dungeons and Dragons animated TV series episodes. “I’ll just hit play on the DVD player, and it’ll start at the beginning.” “NO! No!!! Then I won’t know the name of the episode!” “Look, I’m sorry, I can’t find the remote… Can you just watch it without knowing the name, and we’ll look up the name later?”

He was very upset, and turned off the TV, refusing to watch the thing if he didn’t know what it was called. I knew he gave a lot of importance to the names of episodes and comic books and all that, and memorizes them with extreme care, but… wow.

I feel like a less-than-stellar parent at the moment.

How is this going to look when I’m working even more! I’m unnerved. My life is about to change a lot. It’ll be good, but right now it looks scary.

Jo‘s younger daughter, Sophie, was over yesterday, and persuaded us all that “High School Musical” was the best movie ever, and we should rent it instead of watching Godzilla or old Star Trek Animated Series episodes. What do you know – she was right. It was very much like The 80s Ending parody movie, but set in the 90s: the jock basketball star meets a really really blindingly smart honor student and they both have to bust out of their stereotypes to find true love and star in the school musical! Awesome. I knew I was loving it when the first big dance number was *a gym full of hot teenage guy basketball players* who danced while looking kind of like they were playing basketball, dodging & faking and then synchronicity and Busby Berkeley overheads, and … the jazz hands!

When they all three watched the movie again in “singalong mode” I sneaked quietly off and shut the door to my office.

Our other adventure was a foray into genderbending. Sophie complained suddenly, with proud melodrama, that her mean, mean mom “forces me to dress like a girl, and I hate girls and everything girly.” Since just the other day I heard (and observed) the story of how she wouldn’t wear anything in the house except for a stretchy purple miniskirt that was in the dirty laundry pile, and since I’ve watched her exult in sparkly pinkitude and plastic high heels with bits of fluff on the toes for the last 5 years, Sophie’s further vivid descriptions of torture at the hands of her mean-ass girlifying mom didn’t cut any ice with me. It was a good story though. Just like when she went around school telling everyone that she had a baby sister who died… “And then sometimes she makes me wear a *dress*, and she puts my hair like this so I can’t even see and it’s over my eyes! And I think girls are disgusting.”

Oooookay!

So what to do? I said a few obvious things about girls not being disgusting, but then let her know that when I was 7 I wore wrangler jeans with patches on the knees, played in the dirt, climbed trees every day, and refused to brush my hair. My best friend was a boy. She pointed out that I still “dress like a boy all the time” but I denied this and swore to my love of the pink and sparkly — depending on mood. “What you can do is, get a necklace that says “BOYISH” on one side, and when you’re feeling more boyish wear it that way, and then flip it over and on the other side it would say “GIRLY” when you want to wear sparkly miniskirts, which are super fun sometimes”. Sophie stared up at me with sudden adoration. “YEAH. I bet my mom would make me a necklace like that.”

Then I gave her butch lessons. Hair in ponytail, tucked back under baseball cap put on sideways. “Sporty” shirt that’s too big. Jeans would help. It was the most awesome thing to see her posing in front of the mirror making muscles and adjusting her baseball hat angle for the next hour, while babbling sporadically of how she would score goals in soccer in her next game.

Technorati Tags: gender, kids, parenting

Yesterday I got to spend the afternoon with my housemate‘s kid, Peanut. We visited Moomin’s school, where she was awed by Big Kids and learned a jumprope rhyme. (Ice cream soda! Cherry on top! Who’s your boyfriend? I forgot! A, B, C, D… The boys jumped too.)

It’s amazing how quickly I have forgotten what it’s like to have a tiny kid. Peanut is very precocious verbally, and narrates everything she does, sees, and thinks, with no filter, kind of like her dad. This is pretty entertaining now that I can understand what she’s saying. “…My socks are slippery! There’s a tree. I had a bath at my house. When are we going to my house? I want to go to my house. That’s a big kid playground and a little house. This is a school. I go to Frances’s house sometimes. Meow, I’m a little black cat in a cat costume…” This recited without stopping. It was like a 4-hour poetry slam!

I had an easy time getting her to cooperate with everything, even at the dentist, and in the bathroom, where we amused everyone in the bathroom with our pee- and potty- and underwear-related poetry slamming.

For the first time, Moomin was nice to her! He got her paper towels in the bathroom. He shared his books and toys without being prompted to do it. He talked to her and answered her when she spoke to him. And the sweetest thing ever, he protected her and held her hand very proudly in the parking lot.

I look forward to playing with my nephew when he gets here… and to seeing him crawl and do all the baby things… By then, I’ll have forgotten even more and will have to learn it all over again.

Luckily, I’ve learned one very useful thing from the internet about playing with babies: What to do with duct tape.

You know those moments when another person is so gorgeous and such a separate person that you want to cry and laugh and squeeze them and watch them without them knowing, all at once? This morning I parked the car, turned off the engine, turned around to say goodbye to Moomin, and he was staring straight ahead with a thousand-mile stare, his lips moving slightly in some mysterious dialogue. I waited a few minutes to see if he’d snap out of it, then patted him, handed over his backpack, and booted him out the door. (“Oh! We’re here. Okay bye Mom.”)

I watched him shoulder the tiny backpack with its “Batman” and “PUNK” sew-on patches. He tugged his jacket down and out from behind the backpack, where it had bunched up. I don’t know how to describe this, and it was just my state of mind, but his sheer person-hood seemed to shine out of him like a glorious beautiful star on fire. He began to mosey purposefully up the hill to the yard where they gather and line up before the bell rings. As he climbed up on the wooden pilings along the walkway I could tell he was re-entering his daydream, or maybe a scenario from a movie or book with dialogue recited under his breath, just from the way he was walking, so that he had the layer of properly-going-to-class but also a thick layer of daydream over it or underneath it. I felt a complex tangle of things including the love of whatever he is thinking or might be that I can’t see and never will, a concept that needs its own particular word.

He is still so small but getting bigger, so that last night when I wrapped him up in a towel and carried him to bed (he likes to be folded up completely like a cocoon, for fun, and thrown on the bed bouncily) I realized soon he’ll be too big for me to pick him up that easily. And then he’ll be a hulking teenager and will be even more separate and intense and distant, and I’ll think of this moment and others like it, watching him walk up the hill to class.

Yesterday I promised Eliz. that I’d lend her some pocket field guides for her school camping trip, and then I forgot to drop them off. So I just hauled ass to her school, after dropping off Moomin at his. An enormous throng of children and pre-teens milled about excitedly in puffy coats, their unnerved parents pitching backpacks into a moving van, all wild-eyed. Found Eliz. with her homies and gave her the books, which they pawed over.

“When you have to eat worms and bugs, dry them first in the sun. Then grind them up on a rock, mix with water, and fry them on a hot rock, like pancakes,” I informed them.

“How do you KNOW this?” asked Jak.

“I just do.”

Here’s hoping they have a blast, and that they identify all possible trees, berries, birds, specimens of intertidal life, etc. with my amazing pocket guides. There’s a small book on uses of native plants, explaining how to make dye, leach acorns, construct perpetual motion machines, and make gold from lead — so anything could happen.

The Amazon reviews for this jug of milk really made my day. There’s a long story about “GranGran” and how ordering milk over the Internet made her final days easier, and it had me laughing hysterically while also pleased as hell about something so weird and complicated and pointless being written in such an unlikely place.

Meanwhile I am pleased to see that Moomin remembers all about Fibonacci numbers!

I just watched him do his homework and he answered all the word problems by figuring them out in his head first and writing them backwards from the bottom on up. (13 __ 29 – 42; hooray for New Math?) He’s squirming and singing to himself in a whisper and then in the middle of all that, stands up in his chair and does breakdancing moves.

His new “street name” (this, from watching breakdancing movies) is “Arachnid” because his feet move so fast that it looks like he has 8 legs.

I lost my temper today on a mailing list and pissed people off, I think partly because I sounded pissed off and self-righteous, but partly because the worst sin of white people seems to be to say the words “white people”. So besides the weird things people are saying to me (white people saying stuff that would make you scream with rage) I am getting it with the flaming emails. And tonight is the Big Meeting where I will stand up and probably say that I changed my mind and think the district’s efforts will be helpful if we all can pull together. I have to try to calm down by then.

The whole idea of the meeting makes my stomach hurt. I’m baking bread to calm down, but if you have anything very, very, very, very silly, please send it my way in the comments because I need to cheer up and enjoy the glorious silly beauty of the world! Silliness makes everything way better! Silliness heals!

Moomin and I were singing the Internationale in the car. Afterwards he said, “You know, Mom, I think that song is kind of a — —– song.”

“A what? Marching Loofah? What?” (I am a little deaf.)

“No!!! MARTIN LOOFAH! Martin Luther King!”

“Oh! Right. Yes, I guess you could say so. Astute observation.”

“It’s a good song for him, because it has the parts about not having racism, and about fighting, but fighting with love.”

I cried a little, that was so sweet.

(Then I felt incredibly dumb, like I was Sally playing Pictionary (scroll down to bottom of page.) Sometimes it’s not my ears that are a little deaf.)
Anyway. I suggest that to observe the day, parents and children should share some famous songs and speeches that honor ideas of social justice.

Moomin especially likes the comic book “graphic biographies” we check out from the library, including Martin Luther King Jr.: Great Civil Rights Leader, which I liked and can recommend.

Now for activities!

There are some boring-ass worksheets on the net out there, I’m warning you! Take some time to dig deeper until you find good information. I’m going to try a simple history printout and then a KWL worksheet, like this one: Martin Luther King KWL. You write what you Know, what you Want to know, and what you Learned. I’m printing several out so that we can all do this worksheet as a family.

This Word Search is good if your kid likes them. Here’s a nice coloring book page from BetterWorldHeroes.com. I also like their basic fact sheet which is just about the right level to appeal to a smart 6 year old. There is also a cut, color, and staple “Teeny Tiny Book” about Martin Luther King that looks good. There’s damali ayo‘s flash cards! And if I can get Moomin to watch the whole “I have a dream” speech on YouTube, that would be nice, but if not, I’ll play him Sweet Honey in the Rock’s Letter to Dr. Martin Luther King (Which you can buy on iTunes if you like.) We’ll also listen to “We Shall Overcome” and sing along! (There is no punk ska cover of “We Shall Overcome.” I looked for it hard.)

The version of “The Internationale” Moomin and I were singing was from lyrics written by Billy Bragg as a result of a conversation with Pete Seeger:

Let racist ignorance be ended
For respect makes the empires fall
Freedom is merely privilege extended
Unless enjoyed by one and all

and further lyrics Moomin was citing:

When we fight, provoked by their aggression
Let us be inspired by like and love
For though they offer us concessions
Change will not come from above.

Here are some other versions of the lyrics of the Internationale, from multiple languages. And the Wikipedia article on the Internationale has multiple versions with a bit of history and explanation thrown in. I had no idea they sang it in Tiananmen Square. With a little casual googling I found a page with dozens of downloadable versions of the song, including the Billy Bragg version.

Happy Martin Luther King Day, y’all.

Next year I think I’ll invite everyone I know to send songs for a mix CD, and then I’ll give MLK Day presents (comic books!) and cards. It really is a great holiday and I want to put forth some effort to make it part of our family tradition.

Please let me know in the comments if you did a family activity, and what it was! Also, if you have more links to web resources feel free to share them.

How can a human being eat so slowly? How can it take over an hour to ingest a perfectly good grilled cheese sandwich, cooked with care and attention so it is hardly burnt at all? An itty bitty corner of the sandwich sticks into his mouth – and then slowly it’s removed by some alchemy I can’t detect – nothing like a “bite”.

It’s like watching an amoeba engulf a grilled-cheese-sandwich-shaped paramecium, in slow motion.

I guess having front teeth would help.

Here’s something that may shock you. Despite that we have a great vaccine against chickenpox, some people think it’s a fabulous idea to infect their kids with this disease on purpose.

What do you think? “Natural immunity” somehow better than a relatively safe vaccine?

The parents boasted about how they were giving their children “natural immunity”. This harmless disease can cause skin infections, scarring, nervous system and brain damage and even death.

Why would people do this to their children — and then proudly post photos of it on the net, of their kids covered with pustules?

I’m baffled, outraged, and grossed out.

What the hell is wrong with people?

Note: Here’s an article from The other side if you want to see their arguments.

Apparently the generation below mine (GenX) is being called “Millennials” and its defining characteristics are:

– texting all the time
– multitasking
– watching tv while on computer with friends
– owning a lot of dead iPods

Unfortunately I’m well on my way to #4 as my pink ipod mini died in November and the apple store people quirked eyebrows at me and said its battery was not replaceable and one must just buy another.

So I wonder if the iphone will be similar? I didn’t expect my 300 dollar fancy ipod to die an ignoble battery-death and become junk in just 2 years. I guess that makes me not a Millennial – the difference is they have dead ipods and accept it as normal.

I’m thinking over many issues in the past few weeks. We are applying to send Moomin to the gifted/talented public school in our district.

Meanwhile, I continue going to meetings and believing more and more that we need to give all students the kind of opportunity and creative teaching and stimulation they get at the G/T school.

I got totally schooled by the district superintendent when she said to me, “I want all parents to feel 100% comfortable sending their child to ANY of our district schools.” We sure don’t have that. I have seen people of color refuse to send their kids to the more elitist schools in part because of the racism inherent in the system we have. And I saw one white person go with grand ideals to bring her kindergartener to one of the poorest schools with almost 100% Spanish-speaking kids and she tried and and couldn’t hack it. Would it help fix things if we just randomized where people went – busing and cultural revolution? Unfortunately it might be true that then white rich people would leave, pull their kids to private schools, and property values would go down and the whole district would lose money. That is incredibly depressing. So I have to throw my faith behind persuasion, rhetoric, communication, getting people to form personal ties and relationships on top of the political action that’s happening.

Meanwhile I am definitely aware Moomin needs to get more out of school. The things he is capable of, I don’t see him bring home from school. He has almost never brought home a picture or any creative work — only those “First, Second, All in all” canned “essays” that make me want to scream. Last fall he only brought home two books: Socks, by Beverly Cleary – and an Encyclopedia Brown book. I don’t know what he does in his reading class, but at home, he reads dozens of books every day, he’ll tear through 5 “Magic Treehouse” chapter books and want more, and then delve into a phone-book-sized Avengers or Green Lantern compilation. We have talked about fractions and multiplication and he makes math books for fun. He plays Settlers of Cataan, Carcassonne, Parcheesi, checkers, chess, and other games, but never does anything even remotely approximating that complexity of thought in schoolwork. Though I love his teacher and she accommodates his dreaminess and his general personality, I want more for him. Of course, I want more for all the kids. But Moomin will take whatever you throw at him and get something out of it. He likes to be scholarly and to concentrate as well as to daydream. His dreaming is so powerful and I want him to have the tools to make his dreams real, with stories and movies and whatever he ends up creating. I would also like him to find companionship with people who think like he does.

I’m not feeling 100% good about applying, and I feel like I’m abandoning (or signalling intent to abandon) the school that’s done fairly well by him so far… And where I have also made ties with the kids through the lunchtime games club.

At least it’s a public school, so I’m not completely jumping ship from my ideals. But I worry very much I am supporting a system that builds inequality of access to resources into itself.

Meanwhile I’m going to Macworld in San Francisco, planning to teach a blogging class at the local library in February, and having dreamy thoughts of starting a group blog district-wide with at least one parent blogger from every school in the district. I really believe in blogging and its power to change communication patterns.

We watched the Marx Brothers movie “Duck Soup” the other night. Today I watched Rook and Moomin act out the mirror scene from the movie – Rook pretending he was thinking that Moomin was his reflection in the mirror. Then he tried to weasel it out of Moomin as to what the birthday surprise was…

“So, you can’t tell me what we’re going to be doing…”
“Nope.”

This went on for a while. Then they began racing to see who could get dressed first. “I won, Dad!”

“What IS winning, really…”
“You’re just trying to use the Socratic method on me!”
“What IS the Socratic method?”
“It’s when you ask questions…”
“What IS a question…”
“Stop trying to trick me!”

I think the obsession with the Socratic method comes from their reading of “Cartoon History of the Universe”. It was pretty hilarious!

We’re off to the birthday surprise. Rook didn’t figure out that we’re going to see a theater production of Duck Soup! I hope he likes it and that watching the movie beforehand makes it cooler (especially for Moomin).

After my day of extreme scandalous naughtiness and gallivanting, I’m spending today helping Moomin and his friend Iz make a floor to ceiling marble drop. It’s sort of like the game “Mousetrap” – they want to drop a marble at the top and have it go through obstacles. At the bottom it will either land in a cup of water or in a toy car.

Cardboard tubes from rolls of wrapping paper are duct taped to my ceiling. Iz, who is 7, made me laugh by envisioning more and more grandiose ends to our project:

1) We should take photos of the project in all phases of construction and email them to her and Moomin’s school principals so that maybe they would get mentioned in the school newsletter

2) We could send those same photos and interesting facts about marble drop projects to the real newspaper and try to get them to write an article, so we can be in the paper

3) We could start a company that would go around and teach kids about marble drops and how to make them and about Science.

4) Our company would be too big for us to handle, so we’d make a marble drop kit which we’d sell on a web site, and other people could use it to teach kids about science.

Someone give this kid a Web 2.0 marketing job, okay?

***
Update: Of course you realize I ended up doing most of the work, for no pay – only a promise of stock which will be super valuable when the company goes public.

Artist and blogger damali ayo has been making very cool activist/populist art. I like her black history flash cards a lot, and maybe I’ll try making a few cards myself. It’s a good idea! You might remember damali’s work from a couple of years ago on the hilarious web site rent-a-negro.com which definitely held up a difficult and instructive mirror for me. It sucks to catch yourself in a racist thought or action, but I do all the time. On the other hand it’s better to catch it and check it than otherwise, right?

Today, damali’s booklet “I Can Fix It!” which is a short, very clear, anti-racism handbook, really blew me away.

Take a look at >Now Art and download the pdf to print the handy booklet!

I’m blogging this on my mommyblog because I think I’m going to distribute her booklet at my son’s school… Probably just by printing a few sample copies and putting one up on the bulletin board, then a followup email with a short description of it and the link to damali’s page. Because I opened my big mouth more than once about race and needing to have those conversations, I might as well keep it up and push it further.

The other day I had to check an impulse to slap a good friend as she cluelessly did the hair-touching and extended commentary on hair on a little boy at school… and finally I just went, “Uh I guess K. isn’t used to curly hair.” It was embarrassing and maddening. That was lame of me but I could not for the life of me think what to say. Later I was like, “Doh… could have said instead that she is only used to white people’s hair.” Unfortunately there will probably be a next time for me to whip that one out.

I notice when I say something like “the white moms I’ve been talking to” people do a double take and try to check if maybe I’m not white and they missed it. That’s funny but kind of sad. (Because generally white people don’t refer to other white people as “white” even when it’s directly relevant.)