Girl Detective

This seems like a no brainer, right? Yet I challenge any parent to maintain 24/7 supervision of their child, especially when there’s more than one of them and only one of you.

Here are a few recent adventures in brief, unsupervised time:

“Butt Machine” 4yo Drake found this music video on Youtube when G. Grod left the room. And continues to repeat the phrase at random.

Water, water, everywhere: I chose to fold the laundry, since the boys sounded as if they were playing happily upstairs. They were indeed happy, having gotten water on all four bathroom walls and 1/8″ deep on floor. They were given timeouts and told to never play in the sink again. Yeah, right. Silver lining: the bathroom floor got a wet mop that it otherwise wouldn’t have.

Wha’ happened? I left the boys on the backyard swingset while I went inside to start dinner. Next time I checked, they were gone–out the yard and down the street. We now have padlocks on two of the three backyard gates.

and sisters, and aunts, and grandmothers, and all those who will be, or want to be, and anyone who has ever taken care of another:

May this day bring moments of peace and joy, as well as a cessation, however brief, in the neediness of others.

From a friend, via Clean Water Action

Minnesotans, please give Governor Pawlenty’s office a quick call and let him know you want him to support the SAFE BABY PRODUCTS legislation. His number is: 651-296-3391.

It has safely made it out of conference committee with the phthalates language intact. Unfortunately, the Bis-Phenol A language was removed as a compromise. We expect the legislation to be on the Governor’s desk by Thursday or Friday. The American Chemistry Council has been lobbying hard so we are concerned the Governor may oppose all or some of the bill — so your support really matters.

You can simply say, “Please ask Governor Pawlenty to support the Safe Baby Products Bill for the well-being of Minnesota’s children. Thank you for your consideration.”

Mother’s Day in the USA is this Sunday. Mothering Day started in England as a day off for servants to visit their mothers/see their kids. In America, it was transformed to celebrate the homemaker/nanny, perhaps just putting a gloss over Sisyphean attempts to stem the tides of snot, poop, and dirt.

So here are a few ideas, in case you haven’t gotten something for the mothers in your life.

Spring flowers. Narcissus are pretty and have a lovely, delicate scent.

Treats. Raspberry-flavored cherries taste like red Swedish fish! And _good_ chocolate, from near (Legacy) or far (Maison du Chocolat’s plain truffles), is always in good taste.

A spring bag. Candy-colored, croc (mock or not), and black/white bags are in.

Unguents. It’s been a long, hard winter. Good lotion, like Golden Door Eucalyptus, is a soothing, smoothing indulgence.

Rest, peace and quiet. Good luck with this one.

Related reading: This article from the Atlantic on mother-centered architecture. We live in a four-square bungalow similar to those described in the article.

4yo Drake had mastered his trike, riding it back and forth to preschool (a mile round trip) several times. We ordered a bike, and he and G. Grod went to pick it up tonight. They returned with a green bike, a tyrannosaurus-headed horn, and a race-car helmet in youth size, because the child size was too small. (Large heads run in the family.)

The first time out, Drake was nervous with the training wheels, since only one is on the ground at a time. But G. Grod took him out again, and he got the hang of it, and ended up doing four loops of our street block.

By Guppy, age 2 as told to the family at dinner

There were ants outside!
I saw ants and they were crawling
I love ants, Daddy

I vet my books pretty carefully. I read reviews. I listen to advice from like-minded readers. I usually know a thing or two about them before I begin. I try not to recommend a book till I’m finished, because the ending can make a difference–consider Smilla’s Sense of Snow, or the books of Neal Stephenson. I only read one book at a time. So I rarely don’t finish a book. I try only to start books I’m likely to want to finish.

But a few years ago, after slogging resentfully through about two thirds of Life of Pi, one of my librarian friends, Rock Hack, told me about Nancy Pearl’s Rule of Fifty. If a book didn’t “have” me by page fifty, put it down. Life is short; books are plentiful. There is little reason to read without enjoyment.

And so it was with Bolano’s Savage Detectives, a novel about poets in 70’s era Mexico City. The main character was passive and uninteresting to me. He was surrounded by a throng of characters I could barely keep track of. I realized that reading it was work, and unrewarding. So at page 81 I put it down.

The book was on many of last year’s best-of lists. I’ve read more than one review that says it’s not only a good book, but an important one. All those could be true. What I know is that I wasn’t enjoying it, or learning from it. I put it down, and started something else. I feel much better now.

Cat’s Eye is another one of my shelf-sitter books that made the move west with me ten years ago from Philadelphia. My book group of fond memory had read Handmaid’s Tale, and at least one member recommended Cat’s Eye. I bought it on sale, and have since read Alias Grace, and left the older book to gather dust.

It’s good to know that good books will wait for me. Once I began, it was if the narrator reached out of the pages, grabbed my hand, and wouldn’t let go till the end. It’s a small paperback, so I could take it with me, and I read little bits whenever possible. It’s the story of an established painter of a certain age, Elaine, who becomes immersed in painful memories when she returns to Toronto for a retrospective of her work. The story unspools both in the past and the present, but Atwood pulls off time shifts in the narrative seamlessly. Around the age of ten, Elaine had three friends. Bad things ensued, in the manner of young girls. I had forgotten, until this book, how cruel young girls could be. The teen years were nothing compared with the pre-pubescent ones. Atwood captures the power and potential horror of younger girls’ behavior with skill.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

I found this book powerful, moving and even frightening. Set in the everyday world of the forties through the eighties, it was more emotionally frightening, perhaps, even than the dystopian Handmaid’s Tale.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation.

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, a book about organizing without organizations, gave a speech recently (16-min. video here, via Making Light; transcript here) in which he argued that the information age is akin to the industrial age, and what society has been spending its cognitive surplus on over the past decades is not gin, but sitcoms.

Shirky’s a good speaker; I recommend taking/making time to watch the video. He says that projects like Wikipedia are a societal shift away from consuming alone, toward consuming, producing and sharing content. He implies there is a limited future for passively received media. I see the self-destructing music industry as a good example. I also think that the more cognitive surplus there is, the greater the tendency for information to be free, meaning both available and at no cost.

I’m probably preaching to the converted and singing to the choir here, since many of you are bloggers and commenters who produce and share. But Shirky’s ideas have lingered since I watched the video, and I’m interested to see how many examples of movement beyond consumption to production and sharing I’ll notice in the coming days.

Here’s what the crowd picked during previews before Iron Man on opening night:

Applause for Indiana Jone and the Crystal Skull and Batman, no reaction for Incredible Hulk, and laughter (not the good kind) for M Night Shymalan’s “The Happening” either for the trailer, or the silly title.

I was perplexed when I saw The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch, written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Michael Zulli. It looked like a nicely produced hardcover graphic novel, typical of Dark Horse, a publisher of upscale, quality books. Yet something didn’t feel right, and it was the $13.95 price tag. Nice HC GNs are usually $20 and up. This one was thin, though. Once I read it, I understood. This was not a graphic novel, or even a graphic novella. It was a graphic short story, gussied up in hardcover and given a price about double what it would be if the book had been released like most one-shot stories, in a perfect-bound softcover for $6.95.

Enough geeking about the packaging though. The story starts off clumsily, I thought, with three friends eating sushi, talking about the end of some event involving a woman they call Miss Finch. Then the narrative is picked up by one of the three, years later. This double flashback didn’t work for me: end of event, years after end of event, beginning of event. When I finally got myself situated in time, though, I really enjoyed the story. It’s vintage Gaiman, based on an old prose short story of his, beautifully and evocatively painted by Zulli, one of Gaiman’s collaborators on Sandman. Dark, adult, fantastic, odd and funny, it’s a quick, enjoyable read.

Worth $13.95 in HC, though? Methinks not, though I don’t begrudge the creators my money. Gaiman and Zulli are both local, so some of it is staying in my community.

Woo. Iron Man is a lot of fun. I am a comic-book geek (not redundant, by the way), but I’m not very familiar with the Iron Man story. I still enjoyed this movie a lot. Robert Downey, Jr. is great as Tony Stark, a playboy weapons tycoon who undergoes a crisis of conscience. Paltrow is a good foil. Terrence Howard is strong as the military friend, and Jeff Bridges is over the top, but appropriately so given his role.

Warning for geek boys: my husband G. Grod was very, very disappointed that Black Sabbath’s song Iron Man was not used in the film as it was in the trailer. Instead, it was sampled throughout.

My friend Blogenheimer sent me this link with a less-than-glowing take on King of Kong that brings up what seems to be a question of our time: if it’s entertaining and well-made, how much does it matter that it’s only pretty much all true? (That’s an Olivia reference; thanks Ian Falconer)

Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler and father of three small children, is a proponent of what he calls Idle Parenting. (Link from Game Theorist, a blog on economics and child rearing, a la Freakonomics.)

He claims it’s a win/win strategy. Parents get more enjoyment time for themselves, and kids develop self-sufficiency, and aren’t smothered by hovering parents.

I was entertained by the article, and in it I recognized my occasional flailings at non-idle parenting. My elder son is in preschool 3 days a week. He and his 2yo brother also have a music class and a public-schools family class that they take with my husband G. Grod. We’re hardly an overachieving family. But that’s not to say that I don’t feel guilt over this; I do. Every time I hear some other mom talk about the sports class her kid is taking, or the museum they visited, or the whatever the heck it is, I feel like I’m dropping the ball. Really, I’m beginning to think we all just have too much time on our hands, and should figure out how to use it usefully, rather than by competing in Olympic level parenting one-up-mom-ship.

Hodgkinson’s advice is refreshing for its stance against the status quo. He’s hardly the first to suggest that the current parenting climate is overzealous. There’s Confessions of a Slacker Mom, and The Three Martini Playdate. And one of my regular readers, Lazy Cow, who blogs at Only Books All the Time, is a staunch believer in what she calls “slow mothering.”

I’m not sure that slacker parenting is the ideal, but certainly a movement away from the over-scheduled, competitive kid world is a move in the right direction. I do want more time to myself for things I enjoy. That doesn’t mean ignoring the kids, just trying to be present when we’re doing things together, and taking some time to be not together. (I type this as Guppy naps and Drake watches “My Neighbor Totoro”.)

Hodgkinson has a bi-weekly weekend column on idle parenting, too. Here are a few excerpts.

From “Tom Hodgkinson Reads on”

By extending the family, creating a network of mutually supporting friends and neighbours, in short, by helping each other, family life could be made very much easier. Let’s give each other a break and open our doors.

On avoiding competitive sports:

Give me instead a child who can ponder and dream, sit under the oak tree and read, talk and think.

And a recent bout of family illness teaches the astonishing lesson that resting and taking care of oneself is good, and that kids don’t self destruct when left to themselves.