Posts Tagged "Parenting"
The Question of Three
“What’s it like, having three kids?” “How’s it going with three?” “How are you doing? With three kids, I mean.” That’s what everyone wants to know. The question is usually asked with a mixture of genuine curiosity, horror and pity. It’s like they are staring at a picture of a train wreck and asking a survivor how they managed to get out alive. They want to hear all about it but they can’t help but betray the better-you-than-me attitude. Our concerned friends—the ones who really care about us—seriously want to know how we’re managing because God, three kids (!), how does one manage? They want to know if we’re ok because well, they are scared for worried about us. They are checking in to see if everything is going well, or if we need help, but there is always that hint of a suggestion that three kids is just too much for two parents to handle these days. We also get this question from strangers and acquaintances: parents who kinda sorta wanted to have three but weren’t brave enough (or managed to get the vasectomy before there was an accident), parents who find one or two kids completely overwhelming and who think we are totally nuts, or people who secretly think we’re being greedy. These queries are actually in the hopes that we’ll tell them it really is as bad as they imagine, thereby affirming their own parenting decisions. Coincidentally, we asked this very question a lot after we found ourselves unexpectedly expecting a third. Every time we ran into someone with three kids or even heard of someone with three kids, we would ask this question without even attempting to hide our hopes. Our question was really more of a pleading to please, please, tell us it isn’t as hard as we fear it will be. Tell us that by the third time around, the kid just slots right into the family and no one even notices that it wasn’t there before. Raising young kids is hard physical work. It’s tiring and often kind of drudgerous. Discipline issues can be frustrating and mentally taxing. It really isn’t easy and with three kids, we’re outnumbered. Two parents, two hands. I can physically only hold onto two kids at a time. If they all run different directions, two parents can really only chase down two of them at any one time. It takes a different set of skills to manage three than it took to manage one. Fair enough. I totally get why people ask, why I asked and why I feared (heck, why I sometimes still fear) being a mom to three kids. But I do find it interesting that the idea of three children is so universally considered to be such a terrifying burden. It seems to be the absolute limit to how many children people can even try to imagine having. I bet you anything that by the time someone announces their 4th or 5th child people don’t even ask anymore. They just smile and nod. What do you think? Have you asked this or been asked...
Read MoreOn Being a Bad Blogger
Some bloggers post every day or at least a couple of times a week. I’m not one of them. In case you hadn’t noticed the time lag, I just posted my son’s birth announcement SEVEN weeks after he was born. Initially my intention was to post about 5 times per month but eventually I just gave up on that and decided to be a bad blogger. Why be bad? Well, being a good blogger takes considerable effort. You have to post regularly, and hopefully that means often, but at the very least it should be regular. It takes time to write posts, especially when you’re just starting out and not really well practiced at coming up with ideas or writing short posts (I’m raising my hand here). In addition to the time spent writing, you might have to research your posts which takes longer. You have to read and respond to comments if you get them. You need to create community by reading and commenting on other blogs. And you have to drive traffic to your blog through social media. This is what it takes to be a good blogger. Recently Melody from Breasfeeding Moms Unite decided to call it quits because she was no longer willing to be a good blogger. It was taking her away from her children for too many hours during the day and it was impacting her ability to be the mom she wanted to be, especially regarding screen time for her children and herself. I really admired her open and honest post when she hung up her hat. I too am not willing to be a good blogger. I just can’t do it. I don’t have the time. I am homeschooling my son, I have a toddler and I just had a baby. I am not willing to have the kids watch tv all day and I can’t stay up at night to blog because sleep is already at a premium around here. But I don’t want to quit either. I want to write. It’s good for my adult brain to practice writing and I want to get better at it. It is something that is just mine in this life stage where I have so little me left at the end of the day. Unlike a journal however, blogging gives my writing context. Having some preset ideas of topics helps generate ideas. I also follow people on twitter and facebook that write on similar topics so I often find interesting things to read and also informs my writing. The format also gives me a reason to edit, spellcheck, refine my craft and add pictures. This doesn’t happen when scribbling in a notebook. And let’s not forget about the audience. Nobody reads your journal and you have to be highly skilled, polished and ambitious to be published in print. Blogging means that my writing can be part of a dialogue with other people rather than just something I do by myself. I love getting comments and subscribers. I love when other bloggers touch on similar topics. I love being inspired by other bloggers, by articles and studies I find through twitter or facebook. The audience makes me feel like I’m a part of something. For me, that is a specific something. When I sold my birth supply business, I felt a big hole in no longer being active in the birth advocacy community and I wanted to stay involved somehow. My focus has grown since that time and because this blog has a general focus that my business site didn’t have, I feel connected to the broader parenting community. I may not blog every day (or every week) and I may not have thousands of readers. I may not actually get the chance to write every post that rattles around in my head while I load the dishwasher and change diapers and play Uno. I don’t read all of the posts in my blog reader (mark all as read anyone?) but I do make an effort to comment on the ones I do...
Read MoreMindfully Creating Family Traditions
When we first got together in our mid-twenties, we (and our friends) were in the habit of celebrating about 3 holidays: Thanksgiving (big potluck), Halloween (costume parties) and Christmas. Beyond the required family Christmas, we also often did things with our friends, especially during the years when I had no family close by (potluck dinners, staff parties, secret Santa gift exchanges). When we had kids, it became more fun to revisit old traditions and holidays that had fallen by the wayside. Over the years we’ve added more and more (starting with Easter), and in the last year we decided to make a specific effort to focus on traditions and festivals in a mindful way. Rhythm This decision was precipitated by some of the things we learned about Waldorf school when we began to investigate Rain’s options for Kindergarten earlier this year. According to Waldorf educational philosophy, rhythm is an important aspect of human life: When more people depended directly upon nature for their living, their lives were, of necessity, more rhythmic. They recognized that the rhythms of their days, their weeks, and even the seasons of the year supported them by yielding to them what they needed to live. Beyond the Rainbow Bridge – Nurturing our Children From Birth to Seven For young children marking the seasons and festivals throughout the year is an important way to incorporate rhythm into their lives. This becomes increasingly important as we live in a society that is more and more cut off from the natural world. Though we chose not to pursue Waldorf education, the focus on rhythm throughout the year has enriched our family and homeschool life. We’ve made this a priority year round, but today I will just mention a couple that come to mind immediately. Birthdays One of our cherished birthday traditions began the day my oldest was born. We had made a blueberry pie to cook during our homebirth with the intention of sharing it with our midwives before they went home. Rain was born at 7:00 am. Every year, my husband takes the morning off work so that we can begin Rain’s birthday with blueberry pie for breakfast. Valentine’s Day Two years ago, I made a deliberate decision to start celebrating Valentine’s Day with my then 3.5 year old son. It was a reaction against the glut of commercial, trademarked characters (Dora, Spiderman, Sponge Bob, etc.) on store bought, throw away cards that was coming home from preschool. It was a reaction against the fact that cartoons aimed at children seem to often contain love interests when 4 and 5 year olds don’t need to be obsessed with having a girlfriend or boyfriend. It was even a reaction against all the people who hate Valentine’s Day for the way it makes single people feel and for the fact that it is so commercialized. I thought that at least while Rain is young I would like to teach him that Valentine’s Day is a day set aside to tell or show people in your life that they are special to you, whether that’s a good friend or a family member or your mate. I also wanted him to understand that Valentine’s Day can be about chocolate and cards but that it can also be about a thoughtful gift, or ideally using creativity and imagination. Rather than buy cards for his friends, we gave out pictures of Rain. We also celebrate as a family: heart shaped pancakes for breakfast or making jam sweetheart cookies together. We’ve also done things like hang dozens of hearts from the ceiling on strings or leave a trail of hearts on the floor leading to a hiding spot with a gift. Christmas Christmas can be pretty tricky to work out as a couple. We have had to figure out how to incorporate each of our individual traditions to try to create a meaningful holiday for our kids. Thankfully, Santa didn’t figure too prominently for either of our families so we don’t really do Santa for our kids (other than as a fun story). We...
Read MoreBriefly November
This month I learned again that it feels better to listen to the little voice in your head rather than ignore it. Earlier this month our landlord approached us and inquired if we would be willing to move before our Lease is up in August. She’s a really nice woman and we like her. She was not being evil. She’s going through a rough patch and we would have loved to help her out. I was rather overcome with panic and yet because I wanted to help her, we started looking for somewhere to move. We even looked into buying a place (but that’s a depressing tale for another day). During that week, I really couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I was totally consumed with the whole moving situation. My intuition was telling me that it was NOT a good one. I don’t think there are many people out there who relish the packing and cleaning involved in moving, but having moved a lot as a kid, there’s a part of me that still finds moving kind of exciting. Given that our house is pretty tiny and we’re expanding our family, a move could be a good thing for us too. But wait a minute. There’s the catch. We’re expanding our family. Our due date is only 3 months away. Back in 2008, we were expecting Noa and we made the decision to move the same month that she arrived. We didn’t just move to a new house; we moved to a new community and in the process left behind my sister and her kids who were virtually like Rain’s siblings. We also moved out of our bus and into a real house. Inflicting this many changes on our not-quite-three-year-old all at once was more than he could handle. He had a very hard time adjusting. We vowed not to do that again. We had committed to keep our kids’ lives as consistent as possible for at least 3-4 months on either side of our due date. But this month we found ourselves only thinking about what WE (the adults) might be capable of. My pregnancy is going smoothly. I am feeling well. I am feeling physically capable of moving. I can rationalize and consider the benefits of moving now. I can intellectually separate the move from the birth of our baby. As a parent, I can welcome a baby with unconditional love. I have moved many times in my life and am capable of adapting to new surroundings. As we ran out of options for December 1st rentals, we found ourselves looking at January 1st opportunities and caught ourselves rationalizing that we could make that happen. It wouldn’t be so bad. Except for that little voice in the back of my head that kept telling me that this isn’t a good idea. I had to keep reminding myself that little people, while resilient, need consistency in their lives. I had to remember that the question is not what we are capable of, but what are our kids capable of. The truth is that in many ways asking a 5 year old and a 2 year old to welcome another family member is a pretty big deal. It doesn’t seem fair to also ask them to cope with: having all of their things packed into boxes a week of driving back and forth from house to house the boredom while mom and dad pack and clean the late nights and late dinners associated with moving learning to get used to the sounds and smells of a new house losing the comfort of home (during the wait until the new house feels like home) Moving now, or anytime in the next 6 months, is not the best decision for my kids and my intuition was telling me that every time I looked up rental listings on craigslist and felt overwhelming panic. So I told our landlord that we couldn’t do it. Guess what happened? She was fine with it. And I feel a hundred times better for having listened to...
Read MoreFive
Last night, before tucking Rain in bed, we read him this poem from our new Gateways book: When I have said my evening prayer, And my clothes are folded on the chair, And mother switches off the light, I’ll still be four years old tonight. But, from the very break of day, Before the children rise and play, Before the greenness turns to gold, Tomorrow, I’ll be five years old. Five kisses when I wake, Five candles on my cake. Five years ago today, Rain was born at sunrise, on the last day of summer. It was a glorious sunny morning and Trout Lake was still and calm, reflecting the golds and greens of the park. When I think of the day he was born, I cherish that vision of the lake, even though I saw it because I was on my way into an ambulance for a retained placenta. At the time, I thought we’d be back in a few short hours to soak up that sunshine with our new gorgeous baby. Unfortunately, within an hour, my infant son and I were seperated for the first time and I spent the next few hours unconscious. We spent the remainder of that day in a window-less recovery room at BC Women’s hospital and didn’t get home until dinner time the next day. That glimpse of the lake as I stepped out to the ambulance is the only moment I had of that beautiful last day of summer in 2005, the day Rain joined us. That moment of blinding sun after a long hard night is the way I think of Rain, who, despite his name, really is a ray of sunshine. He is wild and tender, a great story teller, a brilliant inventor, an infectious laugh and a barrel full of energy. And he is five. How things have changed in these last five years. As I feel this new baby fluttering in my belly, I find it amazing to think of the person I was when I first felt Rain kicking. I still feel very much like I’m just a novice at this game called parenting, yet I’ve learned so much since those early days with baby Rain. Five years certainly is a respectable start. Looking at my boy, so big and still so little, I can’t help but feel that five is a bit of a milestone. Perhaps because five is often associated with heading off to Kindergarten, five feels like the beginning of a long slow letting go. Granted, I truly believe that letting go begins the moment you feel that first contraction. Nevertheless, five seems to mark the time when our kids will begin to go out into the world, at least for parts of the day, without mom & dad. That part fills me with wonder and pride and sadness and my heart swells and I get just a tiny bit choked up as I give him five kisses when he...
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