Girl Detective

In the New Yorker, Joan Acocella summarizes concerns about over-parenting from several books, many of them not new. As I read the five-page article, my annoyance grew. Who _isn’t_ against overparenting, except those who are too oblivious to realize they’re doing it? And isn’t this truly a small number, hardly the epidemic that articles like this about books like these imply?

A final question that one has to ask is whether the overparenting trend is truly the emergency that these authors say it is. In the manner of popular books on psychology, the commentators tend to forget that they are talking, for the most part, about a minority.

Further, my experience says it’s a no-win situation. I’ve been criticized for over-parenting, and I’ve been criticized for under-parenting. In the end, I quietly remind myself that I’m the one who spends almost all day every day with my kids. Mother knows best, and is doing her best. I do not need a book, or an article, to scare me to the other side of the parenting continuum, thank you. These books aren’t there to help parents. On the contrary, they seem more likely to result in an increased culture of judgment against parents. Not helpful. (Link from Blog of a Bookslut)

For a few weeks now, my husband G. Grod and I have made the same joke when the boys, 5yo Drake and 2yo Guppy, are being especially difficult.

“I wonder how far it is to Nebraska?”

It’s in bad taste, but it helps break the tension. Turns out, though, it’s not much of a joke. Nebraska recently instated a safe-haven law; it allows infants to be dropped off at hospitals without prosecution of the dropper off, usually a teen or single parent. The law in Nebraska did not include an age limit, though. This loophole was made apparent when a man dropped off nine children, aged one to seventeen. Since its inception, thirty four children have been dropped off, none of them infants.

Like G. and I have noticed, the law is an easy target for the jokes. But the reason people are dropping off kids is sad, not funny. Raising kids is hard, and in the USA’s increasingly independent and me-focused culture, there’s not much help to be had. Like many, G and I live far from family; we’re lucky to have a community of friends for help.

So next time you see a kid melting down, and a tired or cranky-looking parent, offer help, not judgment. Politely looking away isn’t helpful, either. Empathy, though, is a wonderful thing–take it from this tired, cranky parent.

Neil Gaiman’s new picture book, illustrated by Gris Grimly is the frightfully entertaining Dangerous Alphabet. It is not, however, for the squeamish or faint of heart.

A piratical ghost story in thirteen ingenious but potentially disturbing rhyming couplets, originally conceived as a confection both to amuse and to entertain…featuring two brave children, their diminutive but no less courageous gazelle, and a large number of extremely dangerous trolls, monsters, bugbears, creatures, and other such nastinesses, many of which have perfectly disgusting eating habits and ought not, under any circumstances, to be encouraged.

The text and illustrations might scare some children, but my two boys, 2 and 5 years old, love this book. The tale unfolds visually, with finely etched painted drawings accompanied by Gaiman’s rhyming couplets. There are a lot of clumsy rhyming books, but Gaiman, with a background in Shakespeare, executes seamless and flowing poetry. Often, though, Grimly’s detailed illustrations cause the boys and me to pause, which interrupts the rhyme of the couplet. It’s a nice problem to have. As with many alphabet books, there are more items on each page than are named. I would guess it’s unique, though, in its depiction of maggots and meat on the M page. I see something new each time I read the book.

The Dangerous Alphabet is great fun for fans of ghoulish humor books for kids, like those of Roald Dahl, Edward Gorey or Lemony Snicket. Others might want to keep their distance. And thus their lunch.

Example umpteen gazillion for those mothers who coo about motherhood.

This morning, as part of our potty-learning program, 2.5yo Guppy deposited the contents of his diaper in the toilet. I told him to flush. He coughed, a marble flew out of his mouth and into the toilet. I was momentarily speechless.

“Get it out!” I reprimand. No dummy, he shakes his head. I direct my fierce, frowning-mommy face at him. “How do you think I feel about that marble being in your mouth, and in the toilet?”

“I don’ know,” he says looking down with a coy smile to accompany the disingenuous upspeak of his sentence.

“ANG-REE!” 5yo Drake calls from the hall, keeping his distance. Also happy that, this time, he’s not on the receiving end of my glare of displeasure.

I wonder. Will the marble hurt the plumbing? Don’t know. Do we have marbles to spare? No, because they keep disappearing. I assumed they were under the couch, but maybe they’re in Guppy’s belly.

I take a deep breath, reach in, stifle a shudder of revulsion, then grab the marble and hustle it and my hands to a thorough washing with lots of soap and hot water.

I’m off to hide the rest of the marbles.

One of 5yo Drake’s favorite pastimes of late is using the Amarok music player on G. Grod’s computer, and selecting songs for mix CDs. When Drake was invited to a birthday party for a little girl he’s fond of, he wanted to make her a mix CD. G and I nearly fainted from the cuteness. Cute, though, is probably not the right adjective for the songs he picked. Eclectic might work, but “interesting” with inflection is probably more accurate. G. vetted the songs to weed out any inappropriate lyrics, but this still sounds like a pretty racy set: Supervixen? Her mom says the little girl likes it, though, so perhaps we’d better keep an eye on Drake and his progress with the ladies.

1. Borrowed Bride-Old 97s
2. 1234-Feist
3. King of Spain-Moxy Fruvous
4. We Used To Be Friends-The Dandy Warhols
5. Paper Wings-Rise Against
6. Sealion-Feist
7. Wildchild-Fatboy Slim
8. Life Less Frightening-Rise Against
9. Beautiful Day-U2
10. 1999-Prince
11. Supervixen-Garbage
12. Maria-Green Day
13. Poprocks & Coke-Green Day
14. New Sensation-INXS
15. Rollover D.J.-Jet
16. The Remedy (I Won’t Worry)-Jason Mraz
17. New York, New York-Ryan Adams
18. Screaming at the Wailing Wall-Flogging Molly
19. Life Wasted-Pearl Jam
20. Hey Porter-Johnny Cash
21. Storms in Africa, Pt. 2-Enya
22. Collapse (Post-Amerika)-Rise Against

From Jane Austen’s Persuasion:

Anne to her sister Mary: You have had your little boys with you?

Mary: Yes, as long as I could bear their noise; but they are so unmanageable that they do me more harm than good. Little Charles does not mind a word I say, and Walter is growing quite as bad.

Substitute 5yo Drake for Charles, and 2yo Guppy for Walter, and you have a typical day in my house. I grew up with sisters. I did not foresee the noise, opposition, and chaos of boys.

One of my favorite scenes in Persuasion is when Anne is rescued from a disagreeable situation by Captain Wentworth:

[2yo Walter] began to fasten himself upon [Anne], as she knelt, in such a way that…she could not shake him off. She spoke to him, ordered, entreated, and insisted in vain. Once she did contrive to push him away, but the boy had the greater pleasure in getting upon her back again directly.

‘Walter,’ said she, ‘get down this moment. You are extremely troublesome. I am very angry with you.’…

In another moment, however, she found herself in the state of being released from him; someone was taking him from her, though he had bent down her head so much, that his little sturdy hands were unfastened from around her neck, and he was resolutely borne away, before she knew that Captain Wentworth had done it. (Chapter 9)

This scene follows the motif of a knight rescuing a princess from a villain, who in this case is a toddler. I suspect Austen didn’t much like the noise and mess of little boys, either.

From Bedtime for Frances, by Russell Hoban:

Frances stood by Father’s side of the bed very quietly, right near his head. She was so quiet that she was the quietest thing in the room. She was so quiet that Father woke up all of a sudden, with his eyes wide open. He said, “Umph!”

Replace Frances with 2.5yo Guppy, and Father with me, and you have the scene by my bed at 2:20 this morning. Like Frances, Guppy asked if he could sleep with us. Like Father, I refused and sent him back to bed.

2.5yo Guppy woke at 2 a.m., screaming with rage, in a continuation of a tantrum he’d had before bedtime, when my husband G. Grod thought he’d try to be helpful and remove Guppy’s sock. Guppy, who of course wanted to do it himself, threw a fit and insisted that he wanted me to put the sock back on, but I was at the movies. G. and I stumbled around in the dark, trying to find his socks in the dirty laundry pile, and then I put them on Guppy. At last he was appeased.

But then 5yo Drake, who’d also been awakened by the ruckus from the bunk below, asked me to get him a drink of water. Then Guppy wanted a drink of water. Only then G. and I were allowed to return to bed.

At the Chronicle of Higher Ed, another dis of higher ed, “America’s Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor’s Degree” by Marty Nemco, who argues that for many people, college is a waste of time and money. Further, he says that universities have little accountability to their customers, and should be held to higher standards:

Colleges should be held at least as accountable as tire companies are. When some Firestone tires were believed to be defective, government investigations, combined with news-media scrutiny, led to higher tire-safety standards. Yet year after year, colleges and universities turn out millions of defective products: students who drop out or graduate with far too little benefit for the time and money spent. Not only do colleges escape punishment, but they are rewarded with taxpayer-financed student grants and loans, which allow them to raise their tuitions even more.

Link from Arts & Letters Daily.

Rhyming is a developmental stage for kids. 5yo Drake’s been doing it for about a year, and 2.5 yo Guppy is just starting. He’s a second child, so he hits a lot of milestones earlier than Drake did because of his big brother’s example.

Last week, though, we had a few rhyming incidents that left me less than proud.

Drake, listening to the song “I Like Bugs” on the new Yo Gabba Gabba microphone: I like jugs!

Guppy, after I sang the Thumb-in-the-thumb-hole/Putting-on-your-mittens song: Thumb in the bum hole!

I was thankful I was the only audience. Though it was difficult, I did not laugh. Best not to encourage them in naughty rhyming.

Yesterday it rained, so I took 5yo Drake and 2.5 yo Guppy bowling. They had a great time. Can you tell?

I’m just going to assume that I’ve had at least 500 memos over my 40 years, and start with 501, like the classic jean. Memos to Self are my hopeful attempt to analyze recent mistakes so as not to make them again. Usually, enough time passes that I forget, so maybe writing them down will aid my memory.

Memo to Self #501: Plan ahead for kid vacation weeks. Sudden, increased togetherness for me and the boys, which is already at a peak, results in stress, not bonding. Babysitters, playdates, and planned activities would have helped.

Strangely (or not) my husband G. Grod and I did not have this problem when we went away for a mini break, the weekend before last. Sudden, increased togetherness resulted in increased relaxation and happiness. Go figure.

2.5yo Guppy and I are off to the doctor’s office to get a strep culture. Never had to do it with 5yo Drake. It helps much that Guppy clearly is in pain as he swallows, and says his mouth hurts. Whenever Drake was sick as a toddler, he would just scream and scream and refuse to let anyone get near him.

One of my favorite memories of childhood is the time my dad decided to do the strep cultures for my sisters and me at home. He did the swabs, touched them to the red stuff in the plastic dishes, then my mother put them in a low oven to develop.

And forgot them. Till the house smelled bad, and she had three melted strep cultures all over her oven.

I’m sure my mom didn’t think it was funny, but I did.

This morning, 5yo Drake woke up complaining of stomach pain. He skipped dinner last night, so I knew what to expect. I gave him only a little water, and he threw up for the next few hours. I think he’s got mild ketotic hypoglycemia, which recurs because he’s such a picky, stubborn eater who skips meals.

Then 2.5yo Guppy whipped off his diaper, flinging poop on the floor. When I cleaned it, and him, up, he threw a 20-minute tantrum while I tried to deal with barfy Drake.

Finally, when I wasn’t looking, Guppy started throwing puzzle pieces in Drake’s barf bucket.

Am I on a sitcom? Insult to injury doesn’t even come close.

At The American, Charles Murray asks, “Are Too Many People Going to College?”:

We should look at the kind of work that goes into acquiring a liberal education at the college level in the same way that we look at the grueling apprenticeship that goes into becoming a master chef: something that understandably attracts only a few people. Most students at today’s colleges choose not to take the courses that go into a liberal education because the capabilities they want to develop lie elsewhere. These students are not lazy, any more than students who don’t want to spend hours learning how to chop carrots into a perfect eighth-inch dice are lazy. A liberal education just doesn’t make sense for them.

(Link from Arts & Letters Daily) I worked for an educational services company for many years. I worked with high school students and their parents who were focused only on getting into college. I worked with college students who planned to go to graduate school simply because they didn’t know what else to do. My children are only 5 and 2, so the question of college is still a long way off. But I hope I’ll be able to encourage my kids to consider all the options, and choose a university education if that’s the best thing for them, not just because everyone else does it.

Joanna Weiss on the problems of sanitized fairy tales, a la Disney:

Rich in allegory, endlessly adaptable, fairy tales emerged as a framework for talking about social issues. When we remove the difficult parts - and effectively do away with the stories themselves - we’re losing a surprisingly useful common language.

(Link from Blog of a Bookslut) I recently found Angela Carter’s collection for children, Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales, at our library. I’m not sure 5yo Drake and 2yo Guppy have the attention span, but I know these won’t be toothless tales.

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, on John Holt’s How Children Learn:

Holt’s basic thesis is that kids want to learn, are natural learners, and will learn more if we recognize that and let them explore their worlds, acting as respectful co-learners instead of bosses. Practically speaking, that means letting them play and playing with them, but resisting the temptation to quiz them on their knowledge or to patronize them.

A friend of mine, observing me with my son Drake, gently admonished me, “Not everything has to be a teaching moment.” It helps to have these reminders, since it’s easy for me to get mired in the “shoulds.”

Several years ago I read Should We Burn Babar? by Herbert Kohl, and was surprised to find books I remembered so fondly from my childhood contained such objectionable stuff. (The book’s analysis of the construction of the Rosa Parks myth is fascinating, too). I went back to the Babar books, and the criticisms weren’t exaggerated; naked, African Babar’s mother is shot, he quickly gets over his grief with a move to Paris, where he is taken in by a lady who dresses him and civilizes him, so that when he returns to the elephants, he is quickly chosen as King.

Adam Gopnik’s piece in the New Yorker, “Freeing the Elephants,” doesn’t dispute this, but he works rather too hard to portray Babar as a comedy of the bourgeoisie rather than as an apology for colonialism. I agree with him about the art, though:

The completed Babar drawings, by contrast, are beautiful small masterpieces of the faux-naïf: the elephant faces reduced to a language of points and angles, each figure cozily encased in its black-ink outline, a friezelike arrangement of figures against a background of pure color. De Brunhoff’s style is an illustrator’s version of Matisse, Dufy, and Derain, which by the nineteen-thirties had already been filtered and defanged and made part of the system of French design.

Link from The Morning News.

I burned myself out baking, constructing and decorating a dinosaur cake for Drake’s fifth birthday. So for his preschool celebration I ordered a cake–white cake, white frosting with pink balloons and writing that said simply, “Drake is 5″.

Not only were the bakery women and customers really sweet to Drake when we picked up the cake, but not one piece was left after preschool. So there’s no need to notify Cake Wrecks, the hilarious site documenting ill-conceived or poorly executed cakes. (Link from ALoTT5MA)

There was much crying and screaming at bedtime last night. I wonder, is the “price” of a good day a difficult bedtime? We met friends at the pool, then met them again later for burgers, hot dogs and great french fries at the Bulldog NE, picked by Minnesota Monthly as having the best burger in the state. After that, bedtime was challenging. But once Drake and Guppy were _in_ bed, they stayed there and fell asleep quickly, so G. Grod could watch a bit more of Branagh’s Hamlet. I’m not sure how I made it through all four hours in the theater when it came out. I can’t make it through an entire hour without nodding off. Then again, I was unmarried, without kids and twelve years younger in ‘96.