Trees for the Forest

Back in August and September I wrote about my reservations about E. starting school (here and here). My husband had suggested over the summer that maybe we keep her home a year and have her start Kindergarten late. I don't know what I didn't like about the idea more - starting her late so she was a year older than all her classmates or not being able to throw ourselves into the excitement of her first year of "real" school.

Now I'm wishing I listened.

It's not that E. isn't ready intellectually for school - she is. She's extremely bright and willingly does her school work. She's socially ready for school. She loves her school friends and from what I've seen and been told, they love her. She doesn't have behavior issues, either. She's been "clipped down" (a discipline system involving clothes pins, animals, alliterations, and a little bit of public shame...I have very mixed feelings about this whole deal) only twice the whole school year, and it was for excessive talking (certainly not a quality she gets from her mama).

No, there is something deeper here, something that really bothers me, because when a kid like E. comes home every day exhausted and starts each day begging to stay home, even after half the school year has gone by, there is a larger problem. And all I can look to for an answer to the problem lies within what I hear coming out of my girl's mouth.

"Mama, school is too long!"
"Mama, I'm so tired!"
"Mama, I didn't get to play today at all. There's no playing at school."

Imagine, for a moment, being five or six again, and imagine spending a whole day in a place, away from your secure little home with your mama and daddy, where you are expected to work for much of the day. Didn't we dissemble child labor some hundred years ago? Isn't the minute work of cutting and pasting and putting together something that went away with little hands at the conveyor belt?

Yes, yes, I know I'm exaggerating a bit, but again I say put yourself in the little light up sneakers of that five or six year old that is within you and imagine what effort it must take to be at work for four or five hours out of your school day. And to think that this is only the beginning of the school journey - it's not as though things get any easier after Kindergarten. Don't you think all this would leave a not so sweet taste in your little mouth when it comes to school? Do you think you'd want to come back every day if hours of academics you weren't ready for was all you did?

And that's just it - our little ones aren't ready for many of the academics that are presented to them in Kindergarten today (never mind that these are full days that are stuffed full, rather than the formally traditional half day). Concepts within language arts and mathematics that five and six year olds aren't ready for yet are being pushed, and are pushing out exploritive learning, arts, and movement. What kids need the most at these earliest stages of "formal" learning - hands on and physically and intellectually engaging activities - have all but disappeared.

I'm starting to feel desperate and sad. I don't know what to do for E. What changes can be made at the level of her classroom are limited, and what am I against the whole school, against a district, a state, a national policy? The only truly beneficial things I can think of is to take her away.

Now, I don't know what we will being doing. I don't know if we will home school. I don't know if we'll look at the very limited options for private schools in our area. I don't know if we'll just stay where we are and do our best to soften the blow that school will deliver and try our damnedest to protect E.'s intellectual curiosity. I just don't know.

Do you?

(If you're curious to hear more about the changes happening in education these days, this article featuring a talk given by Diane Ravitch on Common Core is fascinating.)

Waving the Checkered Flag

I don't suppose the word "busy" sufficiently describes my life right now. It's something like driving a race car (or, at least that's how I imagine it to be, having never actually driven a race car before). We're going terribly fast, with lots to look out for, but somehow, we're going about it all quite smoothly - and keeping our fingers crossed we don't crash.

The last few weeks have finally given themselves over to something resembling a rhythm. I didn't quite realize we were in the midst of it until sometime early last week as I was doing the dishes that were sitting in my sink after breakfast. M. was playing over by the big double doors as he's wont to do, E. had only recently been dropped off at school, and I felt peaceful. And I was doing the dishes...by hand!

I hate doing dishes and usually avoid it at all costs, yet here I was with the hot water pouring over my hands and scrubbed a bit of breakfast off a plate. I was relaxed in a way I hadn't been in months. And while things certainly aren't perfect - we have a few things on the horizon that need a bit of tackling and untangling - everything feels good.

Deja Vu

Two years ago I lost about forty pounds between January and May. I ate well, exercised, and felt so amazing and so proud. That May, I got pregnant and promptly began to put weight back on, little by little. When I had M. the following February, I very slowly took the weight I gained during my pregnancy off.

Honestly, if I had exercised and ate right just as I had before I had gotten pregnant, I'd lost my pregnancy weight a lot faster, and then some. Instead I fell back on old and very bad habits, and while my weight went down, I'm finding myself, two years after the beginning of my initial weight-loss journey (which I started mainly in preparation for pregnancy), about ten or so pounds heavier than I was when I got pregnant.

So, here I am at the beginning of a new year, having committed myself to making better choices with my food and my activities (and with a very early birthday gift of snowshoes coming from my parents), and I'm wondering if I can't have that repeat success of a couple years earlier. If I lose a similar amount of weight between now and May, just as I did before, I'll weigh less than I did in high school. I know my weight, in the end, is less important than continually making healthy choices and creating healthy habits for my family. But...I care about that damned number on the scale and on my pants' waist band.

I don't think forty pounds is my goal for May - I think that would be a huge and overwhelming task. But I also think it would be good to have a number, or at least the idea of a number, tucked inside my head as I move ahead and will eventually need to look for motivation. I'm just not sure what that number will be, or how I'll go about this losing weight thing again (except for, obviously, in a safe way).

We'll just have to see what happens.

New Year

After a wonderful Christmas (though a holiday I have to say I'm a bit happy to see the backside of - it's always a bit stressful to get everything and everyone together) it's that time I simply cannot avoid, being the goal maker (though I haven't yet quite hit "keeper") that I am.

New Year Goals (Can I ever NOT do this?):

Eat less (and better) and move more

• Try to introduce daily exercise into my life once more
• Try to eat "clean" and have a lot less sugar in my house in and in my body
• Try to work on planning ahead and prepping meals to make our eating a bit easier
• Maybe take up a new "sport" like snowshoeing or cross-country skiing

Organize and purge the ridiculous amount of kids' toys and baby clothes I have in our basement closet and attic

• Wash and properly store all of E.'s old baby clothes
• Properly store all of M.'s outgrown clothing, give away/return some that we were given on loan
• Make a final purge of the toys upstairs and donate/throw away what we don't want/need
• Properly store the toys we're going to hang on to
• Start a toy rotation program and create some "rainy day" bags and busy bags for the kids

 Write more!

• I would like to blog more...
• But more than that I'd like to write more fiction (many moons ago that is all I did, and I miss it quite a lot)

Read more!

• This is the easiest - crack open some more books!
• I want more poetry in my life, but I somehow have a huge problem picking up a book of poetry; maybe I need to find a website or something that will send a poem to my inbox on a daily basis? (Update: poets.org does this, so yay!)

What are your goals (or resolutions) this year?

Things I Learned in Kindergarten

The months before Kindergarten were a struggle for me and my daughter. It's easy to be deceived by her similar appearance to me and penchant for big words and dramatics. It's easy for me to be tricked into thinking, She's just like me. Oh, but she is not. She is so, so different. And it was in the forgetting of that which caused a great deal of strife in that nerve-wracking and tumultuous time before school started.

Before Kindergarten, I would constantly ask myself (or even aloud), "Why is she doing that?" And the behavior I just couldn't make sense of would frequently be framed in a negative light, no matter how I tried to be positive.

Things are different now, after a few months of school, watching her in her classroom as I volunteer, seeing other children, talking to other parents, newbs like me and old parenting veterans, and speaking with her teacher, someone young, enthusiastic, and with a fresh eye on my kiddo that I don't easily have access to. 

That stubbornness? Independence. She doesn't need anyone's help, not mine, not yours, not that random kid who thinks he knows it all. That callousness? Well, it's not that she doesn't care, because to see her with her classmates, she does. She helps those in need with gentle reminders and doesn't tattle. But she's not beholden to anyone. She's not here to please and she wants to be happy. She hasn't yet, and I hope she never will, fallen into that horrible female trap of needing to please. She'll be nice, she's going to help the needy, but she'll be damned if she's going to change her life to make you  feel better.

We're different, my little girl and I, but we're different in a way to puzzle pieces are. They're differing shapes allow those pieces to snap together to form a connection and a fuller picture. I will help her find her balance, and she'll help me find mine. Raising a child, raising a daughter, is a long journey for any mother, but the more willing I become to see all her differences for the beautiful things that they are, the ever so slightly easier this all becomes.

Because, in the end, opposites attract. 

In Hot Pursuit

Let the blessed angels sing! The boy is MOBILE!

Over the last few days M. has started seriously developing his crawling skills. For quite some time, he's primarily been an army crawler, which was fine for short distances and if he didn't want to sit up and check out what he had crawled over to (so, actually, it sucked). But recently, he's started to perfect a weird little crawling stance that allows him to be able to stay mostly upright and not fall onto his tummy (it's one of those half sit/half crawl situations where he uses one leg with the foot planted firmly on the ground to push himself along).

I cannot express how much we needed this to happen. I don't think I've met a more frustrated baby. He knew there were so many things he could go see and do in the house, but unless Mama or some other kind soul sucker was good enough to carry him to every little thing he wanted to explore, then he was good and stuck. Which he hated. A lot.

So, today, after thorough practice at the well carpeted and vacuumed library (once again my new favorite place), Michael is now happily crawling at home on our slightly more challenging hardwood floors. He's able to get into all his favorite spots, which include E.'s play kitchen (Did you know opening and closing cupboards is the best ever???), under the living room end table, the dog's food dish, because that kitty will take soooo much abuse.

For now, while he's still slow and maybe a tiny bit cautious, this whole crawling thing is the bomb. However, should you talk to me about it a couple of days from now, when he's faster and getting pretty bored, I'm kinda thinking I'll be ripping the hair out of my head.

Now to find the those plastic outlet plugs...

Getting My Thanks On

For the last four years for the month of November, until Thanksgiving, we've been following a little family tradition. There's a glass pumpkin shaped jar that sits on our kitchen table with a pile of colored paper and a felt tipped pen. Every day, when we get the chance, my husband, E. (with some help), and I will write down something we're thankful for that day.

Thanksgiving night, after we've come home from a long day of traveling along routes 117 and 4 in between eating way too much, we gather in the living room or on the bed and take turns reading what we were each thankful for every day that month. It's my favorite Thanksgiving tradition and I have saved nearly every single one of those scraps of colored paper since we started back in 2009. And so, for the second year in a row, I have taken all those notes on what we were thankful for and created a word cloud.

I love making these because they are vivid and simple. It takes a month's worth of effort and packages it up nicely. This year I used Tagul, though in years past I've used Tagxedo. Both are pretty good, though I've decided I prefer Tagxedo.


I adore family traditions of all kinds, and I love coming with them even more.I can't say how unbelievably pleased I am that this tradition has stuck for as long as it has.

What traditions do you look forward to to this time of year?