Round-up

On Jan. 3, I take a look back at this year. I wasn’t too busy during the holidays to keep up with this here blog. I was simply in the moment, hanging with Kid One and Kid Two, hanging with J, and playing Rock Band and…well…rockin’.

It turned out to be the richest holiday to date. That’s as far as I’ll look back, because it’s 2010 and it’s been way too much fun being in the moment to look back. I’ll let Charles Osgood on my favorite “Sunday Morning on CBS” look back.

Happy New Year!

As if the Big 3 troubles and losing Granderson isn’t enough, now it’s freakin’ cold in the Motor City {gulp}

Dear Powers that Be,

Haven’t you noticed that things here, in and around Motown, are a bit rough. The industry that made Motown what it is has had more than a few difficulties. Plants are closing left and right. Every other house is up for sale or abandoned. Every Saturday on my way to the college class I teach, I notice all of the “For Rent,” “For Lease,” and “For Sale” signs on all of the office buildings that line Telegraph road. Our schools can barely keep their doors open. Pretty soon pencils and textbooks will be hot commodities.

If that’s not enough, our professional football team have been about as fierce as kittens for the better part of my life, and local baseball heroes are leaving for greener and more lucrative pastures. I understand that it’s about money and…well…that’s one thing that’s not flowing so freely around this state anymore.

I was wondering if perhaps you could cut us some slack and forgo winter this year. Perhaps, we could get some sunny California weather instead of this bitter cold that makes my ears freeze every time I load my brood into the car. I know you’ll probably ask why I don’t leave like the baseball heroes, the jobs and the money. It’s complicated, really. I was born here. Detroit is in my blood. It’s where I spent summers hanging out at Metro Beach or going to ethnic festivals in Hart Plaza. It’s easy to take one look at us here and cast us off like we’re too far gone already, but we have more than meets the eye. Grit, resolve, shoulders of steel, are just a bit of what I’ve seen. People who don’t have anything are rallying to help people who have even less than that.

I guess it is asking a bit much to shed a little sunshine here. On second thought, yes it’s freakin’ cold here, but I’ll deal with it. After all, in a few short months things will be green again, and then they’ll turn again. The little Japanese maple outside my window will turn deep red again. Perhaps, the thought of all of that is enough. Thanks anyway.

M.O.M.

Happy Kitschmas and cocoa

We’ve purchased a little Christmas tree. It’s a beautiful tree. As it is there is not much room in our little box house to put up a tree, but decorating for the holidays brings lots of laughs peppered with bickering kids who can’t agree on who gets to put the tree topper on this year, but mostly it’s a joyous occasion.

I’ve pulled all of our Christmas kitsch out of basement as well. This is the time of year my bookshelf gets hidden by laughing Santas, snowmen that look like they’ve gotten into a little too much nog and little Bavarian buildings coated in glitter for the glistening snowy effect. The true effect is that everywhere I turn there is glitter on things. My creative son, also known as Kid One, would say that it just looks like it’s snowing in our house. He’s enamored by the little snow village and looks forward to setting it out each year. He had hoped to find the wayward bag of pillow stuffing that has moved with me over the years, my intention being that I could make stuffed animals rather than buy them, or make pillows, or make anything that might need a little stuffing. Instead, we decided to put it on some strange piece of fabric I’ve kept for the same reasons I kept the pillow stuffing. Now, it looks like the village is on terrain found in Sedona, Arizona, rather than anything resembling the North Pole.

Half the kitsch I’ve collected comes from my mother, the women who was adamantly against me buying my own kitsch, but swooned at the very site of a ceramic rooster pitcher.

This is a Santa my mom gave to my dear personal chef…er partner J

How about Baby Baby instead of Baby Einstein

So, the whole Baby Einstein thing is a sham. Honestly, did anyone really believe that plopping a toddler in front of the television to listen to whatever it was, was going to produce little geniuses?  Do we really believe we can manufacture prodigies? Just as Baby Einstein was exposed as a scam, I saw an infomercial on some program that could get toddlers to read. The entire thing showed parents holding flashcards up to their toddlers while they read. It’s disturbing to me to see parents on television coaxing their toddlers to read something from a card while sitting in some sterile, toy-less room.

What happened to just letting kids be kids? Don’t get me wrong. I hope for the best for Kid One and Kid Two when it comes to my kids’ achievement, but I realized a long time ago that I can’t force development on them. They need to develop on their own terms–for their sanity and my own.  I can help by having fun with them, playing games we love to play as a family, singing songs, baking cakes, going fishing, and all that. Novel concept, eh? What good does it do any kiddo to sit for hours on end staring at flashcards if there is no time left to discover the wonders of chasing a firefly? What we’ve done is made learning more complicated and less tactile. Why do you think little ones are constantly putting things in their mouths? They want to use all of their senses to learn. They don’t want to just process information.

Instead of reading flashcards to toddlers to have them process the words back, we should be read stories that can be found inexpensively at a bookstore or free at a library. Let them discover the fascination of what words can do when they are strung together to create a vivid story or a sing songy rhyme.

In the end, wanting our children to be baby Einsteins is a bit misguided anyway. Einstein himself wasn’t a baby Einstein in the sense that modern-day parents want their children to be baby Einsteins.  Einstein was a slow learner and mischievous. So, if we really want our toddlers to be like Einstein, perhaps we should encourage them to develop slowly and be mischievous rather than sit them in front of a bunch or random, floating words.

M.O.M.

The Hapless Journey of a Freecycle Maniac

I love freecycle. Mostly, I love getting rid of stuff. It seems I can’t get rid of enough stuff. I feel a sense of euphoria after giving stuff away. It doesn’t last long, though, because other stuff seems to take its place.

The need to get rid of stuff is part of my new journey toward purging my life of material possessions. I say journey because  everything must be taken in baby steps. After all, it’s been thirtysome years of purging and then collecting and purging and collecting. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

I’m getting better at the purging and better at not collecting. The hardest part is convincing my family to let go things. I try all of the new age lingo. I try telling them that they’ll feel lighter, that we’ll all feel lighter. At the very least, I won’t have to keep picking the stuff up and shoving it into already messy closets when my in-laws are coming.

The mistake I made in all my “purging” is that I thought I could decide which of Kid Two’s stuffed animals to purge when she wasn’t around. Of course, I purged the exact stuffed animal she wanted to keep. That was the same stuffed animal she’d considered freecycling the last time I consulted on purging.

Yes, I crossed a line, but I was possessed, possessed by the “freecycle” demon. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Explaining that to her didn’t help matters. Telling her that I freecycled stuffed animals five minutes before leaving the house for school also didn’t help matters. What followed was utter chaos, with me being labeled “mean mom” for the rest of the day. I even have the scarlet letter to prove it.

Life is never as simple as one kid being mad for a while and then feeling better. It just seems like one thing leads to another and to another. Her anger led to us forgetting her math book, which made her more angry because she was going to get detention, which made me angry and careless. I dropped the end of her motorized scooter on the cement, which rendered the thing useless since that is where the motor is located. That’s not a good thing when my minimally ambulatory middle school aged kid has to go back and forth from one of the school to the other for classes. I, feeling like a heel for freecycling the stuffed animals in the first place, drove the 40 minutes home to retrieve the math book after realizing the scooter was toast and needed to be looked at by professionals.

Did I mention that I also work a full time job and was expected to be at that full time job to meet some deadlines? Yeah, welcome to my world.

In the end, my minimally ambulatory kid used her old tricycle for a day to get from class to class, I managed to meet my deadlines, and I got the scooter fixed for free.

M.O.M. to the rescue again.

Motherhood: Free falling with both feet on the ground

Had I known how to start a blog 12 years ago when I gave birth to Kid One, I would have started this blog then. So, I’ve missed a good number of adventures that come with having kids in diapers. My kids are well beyond that now. There are still more than enough adventures and memories of earlier adventures to get this thing going.

What spurred the idea was my own recollection of a day I spent at a skydive competition. I didn’t do any of the skydiving. I simply went to write a story about the event for the local weekly newspaper that I’ve written for for ten years. I stood there watching people fall from the sky. Through the course of the day, I met and talked to a few of the skydivers, including a world champion skydiver. I asked him something about skydiving when he said, “Dude, like you should try it sometime.” Well, maybe he didn’t say it that way, but there I stood, a single mother, newly separated from Kid One and Kid Two’s Dad, with one kid in diapers and another not so far off from having been in diapers, working a full time job, living in a hole of a basement apartment, and receiving WIC coupons to help make ends meet. What I would have said back then if I was M.O.M. was that I didn’t need to jump from a plane to be free falling. I was doing a good job of that already. I didn’t say that, and I never did  jump from a plane. I just walked away, wrote the story, and continued on my adventure.

We survived those early days of chaos, and while we are in a much better place now, the adventures, of course, continue.