Badgermama

Death gets a time-out
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

It was pretty funny to see this little kid in a Grim Reaper costume, sitting alone in disgrace on a bench at recess today.

What did he do to get in trouble? I was afraid to ask!

lacrosse
Originally uploaded by m.a.x.

Moomin stalked off the soccer field crying this afternoon, extremely pissed off. I watched him for about 10 minutes kicking the miniature nerf soccer balls around some orange cones, uninspired but not unhappy-looking, in the crisp perfect fall sunlight. It’s a free class, one hour, two days after school, very low-key. You’d think I had signed him up for alligator wrestling, or lacrosse, or intermediate skinhead moshpit lessons, or the Peking Opera.

“Mom! I told you, I hate sports! I hate running around! And I hate healthy exercise!”

What to say? I also hate running around and healthy sports. I prefer unhealthy sports. It’s so unfair. But the point is, it’s free, you’re a little kid, and you don’t have gym class at your school. I listened to his feelings, but then explained that this was a better option than signing up for real soccer practice several times a week, buying uniforms and shin guards, driving to real soccer games on Saturday, and competing with kids and yelling parents who actually care about the game. So compared to that scenario it’s a piece of cake.

Of course, compared to lying in bed reading comic books, which is what he’d normally be doing on a Monday afternoon, it sucks.

He’s just going to have to tough it out for the next couple of months!

Turtle Head
Originally uploaded by joaobambu.

This issue always gets me mad as hell. People who defend the circumcision of infant boys (as so many do in the comments of this post on Motherhood Uncensored). I’m uncompromising on this issue. It shouldn’t happen. I don’t care if you think it might “look gross” or “they might get teased” or worry that “he should look like his dad.” I don’t care if I’m making you (whoever you are) feel bad by disrespecting those reasons. Fine, they were your reasons, and you believed them, and you can’t undo your action; that doesn’t make the action right, and it doesn’t make the practice defensible.

I especially don’t care about your religious traditions. That is no excuse. Let your kid decide for himself when he becomes an adult, to do it for religious reasons. If a religion conflicts with a fundamental human rights issue (like not having a body part chopped off) I’ll take the human rights, thanks.

What really gets me is the flippant cutesy tone that people talk about this in. Think how they’d react to the same discussion about female genital mutilation. Jokes and all. People cut off their baby girls’ labia every day because they think it’s healthier, and not gross looking, and easier to keep clean, and they’ll look normal to their peers, and because it’s a religious tradition. It’s wrong. Period. And so is mutilating and amputating the genitals of baby boys.

mom with drip castle
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

My mom maintains her reputation as a cool mom who gets down and plays and gets dirty. Like me, she does it because she likes to play in the sand. It was just a contest of which one of us could move our knees up from a squatting position while trying not to groan with effort. (Neither one.)

Moomin made his toy sea lion explore the ocean. Then he discovered the volcano island castle, at my suggestion (I was thinking of the Jack London story of the White Seal.) There was a long story about radioactivity, living rocks that lifted the seal to the center of the volcano, some armies, and a “General Moomin” who was running things.

We managed to play with him, but still got in a lot of family gossip. I think my favorite story was how, when she was pregnant with my sister, they had declared a due date and scheduled a cesarian. At the last minute, a doctor sent her in to get an x-ray, without explaining why. They tried to send her home from the hospital, claiming that the x-ray showed her baby to be only 4 pounds!

What nonsense on so many levels!

Of course my mom… 23 years old, hugely pregnant, 5 feet tall, really kind of a shy person, and flat on her back in some xray room, furiously refused to allow this. My sister was born the same day! I liked the thought of my mom who will never stand for any damned nonsense digging in her heels and telling them all to go to hell.

sea nettle
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

I’ve been at a conference and have plenty to say about it, but not right now from my mom’s conference hotel in Monterey. Moomin is asleep on the floor behind the bed on a nest of pillows and blankets, surrounded by stuffed animals old (Pecky the penguin, the Bunny in the Hat, and another bunny) and new (a magnetic flippered turtle and a small penguin to be Pecky’s friend).

I can’t believe that in the giant crowded aquarium we ran into Squid with all the kids + extra and a babysitter helping out, and then my friend Heather who was at my mom’s conference & who I’ve known for a zillion years and should have guessed would be here! We met as the giant octopus writhed and snapped its tentacles. Some random other woman in front of the tank was sighing a little and agreed with me that we’d dearly love to stick our arms in and pet the octopus, bonding with it, letting it get to know the taste of our skin with its weird alien suckers….

I just paid 10 bucks from the hotel and taught my mom more about Flickr and LibraryThing and wikis and what an API and an RSS feed are and all that kind of stuff. Can’t believe I haven’t done it before this, but last time I saw here was when Moomin was in the hospital and I was too stressed to think of fun computer stuff.

OMG it’s fun to hang out with my mom. She’s hilarious and a little bitchy about life and yet full of enthusiasm and wild determination to photograph particular fishes, cussing them out when they don’t cooperate perfectly. And suddenly I realize we have many of the same mannerisms. You may now picture my cool mom hopping around with her phone aimed high, cussing out a giant sunfish and a whole tankful of fidgety moon jellies! While we were doing that, my sister sent a photo of herself frowning mightily because she was stuck at work and couldn’t be with us. I wonder what Moomin thinks. In his world, grownups come with Razr phones surgically attached and a strange madness seizes them when they’ve been offline for too long; they babble of free wifi and drag him around on a quest for Internet cafes…

reading "The Twits"
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

Yesterday Moomin read “The Twits” three times in a row. I had dragged him to the copy shop where I was working on making my little translation zine. I had a cold. I was working for hours. I was grumpy. In fact, I confess I snapped at him when he got stuck in the copy store bathroom unable to push the door open — and when I say “unable” it’s not because the door was big or heavy or difficult — it was just that he gave up after try one and began howling in despair. You’d think I could accept this with grace, since he was independent enough to sit for two hours in this boring office, quiet as a mouse, while I worked… but no… I was cranky and mean when he got stuck in the strange bathroom. Hell.

The Twits is an excellent book for a 2nd grader. It’s about two mean horrible people who fight and play mean tricks on each other all day long. They eat cute little birds and have a cage full of monkeys that they abuse horribly. Really, sounds a little bit dark, doesn’t it? But it’s funny… and it provides the sort of distancing from meanness and abuse that I think is good for opening the subject with kids.

Moomin was enthralled. We talked about how the Twits were the meanest people ever in the history of the universe. “And they said….” he dropped his voice low to a whisper… “they said the monkeys were *stupid*!!! That’s really, really mean!”

I apologized for being grumpy! But then, when we got home, I couldn’t manage to do anything but turn on the TV for him and lie in bed, sick as a dog.

There’s another book that I love for moments when my parenting is maybe not the most stellar. “The Winter Picnic” (by Robert Welber) has this kid telling his busy mom that he wants to have a picnic. She’s dismissive and isn’t listening. So he prepares the whole picnic by himself, making plates and cups out of snow and laying out sandwiches and potato chips. Finally she follows him to the picnic and realizes she was being …. well, stupid.

Jumping the sun on the salt flats
Originally uploaded by Lars Kristian Schjønhaug.

Oh! You have no idea! All the moms were jumping around and so excited and happy! One woman confessed that when she heard, she cried with joy. We babbled our relief and hope!

They fired the sorry, weaselly, incompetent, slackity-ass excuse for a principal!

Or, well, pulled him to work on “special projects”. Ha! “Like, maybe, taking out the trash,” said one mom. “No, I think they just did that.” Oooo, burn.

Really, I was trying so hard to remember all my best diplomacy, because I thought we were stuck with the guy and so I would have to work with him or end-run him. And don’t think it wasn’t a little scary to be doing that, because the waves of hostility rolled off him… Like the pointy-haired boss in Dilbert, but meaner and stupider.

Happy!!!! I don’t know the new one, but she can’t possibly be worse that that dude!

A proud moment
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

Yesterday Moomin came into my office standing very tall. “Guess what Mom. I poured my own juice, all by myself. And I put away the straws.” From my dreamy kid, this was really amazing.

– It occurred to him that he was thirsty
– He opened the fridge by himself and got out the huge juice container
– He moved a chair to climb up to the counter to reach a cup
– He noticed I had bought new straws (!)
– And opened the box of straws, and put them in the place where I keep straws!

All of that is very unusual for him. I know that might be normal for other 6 year old kids, but for him, head in the clouds, and a little bit timid about attempting new things, it’s like he stole my car keys and went joyriding at midnight.

He still can’t do things like “open a package of M & Ms” even when I tell him to imagine he is starving on a desert island and must open it himself to survive. The package drools limply from his hands, so I always end up tearing it for him. And I’ve been trying to coach him in “how to open the fridge” for the last few years. He’s still barely strong enough. He has to hang on for dear life with both hands and fling his entire body backwards several times before the door will pop open.

I was so proud! Clearly, opening the box of straws, and thinking of putting them away, made him feel like a hero.

Suddenly I looked at him and could imagine the boy of 6 or 7 years from now, who will be getting as tall as I am, or who will tower over me as he makes himself a sandwich. Heck, why not go all out and imagine him making a sandwich for me too. It could happen!

mom rose
Originally uploaded by pinprick.

Well, I did it. I started an experimental online community for the elementary school, and a Yahoo email list too, since that seems to be easier for people to understand. All completely unofficial, unsanctioned, and in fact, said “No” to several times by the school administration and PTA representatives.

Their “no” was often pointlessly and frustratingly obstructionist. “But parents would have to give permission for their email address to be public. It’s too complicated! Patiently I explained that all that would take would be two check boxes on the forms already sent out to parents each year. One box that says “I give permission for my email address to be used by the school to contact me through a private email list” and another box that says “I give permission for my email address to be shared with other parents and teachers at the school.”

It is not rocket science, it’s tech that’s been around for several decades, and has been in popular use for 10 or 15 years…

The issue, however, is not the setup and management of the list and its potential privacy problems. It’s that the school panics a bit when parents communicate with each other, without the school administration’s mediation. That is completely understandable. Open public discussion does tend to create discussion, controversy, complaints, and even flame wars. However, that is inevitable in any public forum for discussions. We can manage that! And I will moderate such a list and its disagreements as best I can.

I also offered (multiple times) to set up a list for the school that would be completely under their control, and to train the office staff how to use it and maintain it.

So I feel that doing this, that even trying to start it, will label me as a troublemaker. But I sincerely want it to be for the school’s good, and for helping the kids.

Not everyone will have email. But more sharing of information is better; and more possible conduits for information.

I think that as parents we have to step up and be activists if we want the public education system in this country to survive.

Wish me luck. I hope this works. In my fantasy world, more of us get to know each other, because it is easier to email someone (for many people) than to call their phone number (usually passed out in the school directory, but we don’t have one this year, yet) and sometimes easier than talking face to face, especially with the language barrier we have at our school between Spanish speaker and English speakers. I sent the information for the list in two languages.

alligator and horse riders
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

For two small people who aren’t friends, Moomin and Sophie certainly have a lot of fun together. They’ve been running around like maniacs, Sophie on a horse and Moomin on an alligator, singing ridiculous songs. I’m thinking again of how they used to bounce together in Moomin’s crib and of how interesting it is that even from before they were 2 years old, they had the same personalities: Sophie irrepressibly joyous, boisterous, bold, and naughty; Moomin wide-eyed, goofy, dreamy, and solitary.

They watched Clash of the Titans tonight. Dinner was chicken nuggets from Cosco, with a side dish of apples dipped in peanut butter. I ignored everyone.

Now it’s the hour of mayhem! Of riding alligators and horses from room to room! (Moomin’s noble steed is the enormous stuffed alligator he got at Laura and Michele’s wedding 3 years ago. It sleeps in his bed every night.)

Eliz. is holed up in my office, reading a new Tamora Pierce novel. I gave her a big speech about how it was probably inappropriate for young people and would have to be confiscated… We had a tug-of-war…. Rook said with great authority that it was Homework Time and so all such books should be given into his custody! Unfortunately, reading *is* her homework and so we’ll have to wait our turn.

Eliz complains, by the way, that the new editions of Pierce’s novels are too grown-uppy. I agree! They look romance-novelly. They’re embarrassing for a 10 year old to carry around school. She far preferred the knights, horses, and swords on the covers of the old editions!

Rook and I are hiding in our computers now! I can’t wait for bedtime and a scorching hot bath with eucalyptus. I have soooo much work to do, translations to finish, a talk to finish writing, and an encyclopedia article to edit. I love saying that. It sounds so fancy!

Should I be putting these kids to bed, or not? I’m not sure. Maybe a little nightcap with whiskey would finish them off for the evening.

Technorati Tags: kids, books

atoms and elements
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

Our science lessons are wild and lively, as many topics derail Moomin into lengthy explanations of comic book plots. “Oh! Molecules! I know all about them, because of Molecule Man’s supervillain powers over inorganic molecules, when he fought the Fantastic Four! Because, the Beyonder… ” Rook and I had fun with this, drawing diagrams and running around pretending to be water molecules. Our explanation went sort of like this:

– Everything is made of molecules.
– Molecules are made of atoms.
– Elements. Um. There is this thing called the periodic table and it’s really neat and you’re going to love it like mommy does.
– Atoms are made of even tinier particles.
– Er, um, there is radiation, and, um, waves, and particles, and you can’t see molecules and atoms, but everything you can touch and feel is made of them, and um. When particles slam into each other very very fast, and when a proton loves a neutron very much… Okay, I’ll shut up now; please ask your dad the physicist what a linear accelerator is.

I wish I could remember some of the wilder flights of comic book science. Moomin thinks he knows all about radiation, gamma rays, the multiverse, atoms, and who knows what all else. I’m thinking we can teach him the “real” science of all that stuff and he can then have fun with debunking.

This morning I took him to the cafe for a bagel. For the first time, Moomin showed interest in the newspaper. I explained what each article was about. Somehow this led to about the millionth drawing of his family tree. He wanted to know who was dead, and who was alive, and where the dead ones were buried. “Where are their graves? Why?”

Out of the blue, he announced that he would like to know how to speak Korean. He wonders if he could learn it in school. I said cautiously that he could learn the alphabet, and some phrases, from his dad and from books, and we’d see about it. In the meantime how about Spanish? No. He had that “I’ve made up my mind” face. He is happy to learn a little Spanish but what he’s really like is to speak Korean.

Okay then… home, and to the phrasebook, which is a probably inappropriate handbook for soldiers from 1955. Rook says it errs on the side of extreme formality. Am I going to have to find an after-school class, or Korean camp? Of course this would make Harpogi very happy.

I have the feeling Moomin wants to learn something that I, his mom, don’t know anything about.

As I write this he is practicing making shadow puppets on the bathroom wall instead of brushing his teeth.

It’s been a long, interesting day!

Line of SUVs outside the school
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

My house is two blocks away from an elementary and a middle school, so every day twice a day I see the scene in this photo: a enormous line of SUVs stretching far down the street.

I am sure some people have sleeping babies strapped into carseats. Those of you with small children strapped in, go ahead and line up. But the rest of them, for god’s sake, park a couple of blocks away and walk! Walking! Not so bad for you! It’s a nice day out!

Oh, and this corner and the one on the other side of the school – both of them need a 4-way stop with stop signs and crosswalks. The SUVs are especially scary. I’m not buying into a stereotype when I say that damn near everyone in them is on the phone and drinking a latte… and they are also ill tempered at being in traffic. Traffic they’re needlessly causing.

*crankily signing off*

Colossal Red Dragon
Originally uploaded by borghal.

Today in Joann Fabrics I met this chick buying yellow fabric. Her kid was kicking around the candy aisle wearing yellow crocs and a yellow shirt. He had demanded a “Yellow Shark” costume. I felt her pain. Me, I have to construct a red dragon outfit.

My local Moms’ Club came through – I asked where to buy a red hooded sweatshirt, and got an immediate answer that they were $6.00 at Mervyn’s. It was true! So, 6 bucks, and 5 more for red sparkly pipe cleaners, red glitter glue, and some sheets of felt. I think that should do it for the costume. When I make it, I’ll take pictures.

Oh, and I’m supposed to dress myself as “a knight, a lady knight, like Xena Warrior Princess.” I’m not sure about that. I was picturing myself as a much butcher knight.

Then today someone on the list asked how to do a sequoia tree costume. I was imagining how much fun that could be with brown pipe cleaners and short green fringe. And some real sequoia pine cones – they’re all over my neighborhood.

Y’all didn’t know I was so crafty, did you?

orphaned bureau
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

I always want to haul away furniture on the street and find it a home. I had to stop myself today. There’s no room in our house, and I even have a battered old chest of drawers outside on the porch for garden tools. Plus, I don’t have a truck anymore to do the hauling.

Surely someone will give this bureau a good home!

I also feel grateful to the people who put it out on the street for free. It’s a nice thing to do. Maybe they just couldn’t get it to the dump, but I like to think they didn’t want it to be wasted.

If only every neighborhood, every city block, had a community center. It would have workshops, and car-fixing tools, and a huge “free stuff” room. Seriously, every single block. Why not? Have a caretaker live in it rent-free.