my children aren't "exclusive"

Parenting these days isn't for the faint of heart.  At least for those who have the internet at their disposal from the first moment they see two lines on the stick, through the late nights up with the newborn, to the late nights up with the toddler, to the late nights up waiting on the teenager . . . wait, do I sense a theme?  :)

The kids on a pallet watching TV - oh wait, that was something else they weren't supposed to do, right?

Seriously, though - it is just way too easy to ask Google:  "Am I a bad parent?"  "How do I get the baby to sleep?"  "I yelled at my toddler is she ruined forever?"

Parents who didn't have the advantage of Google and 3780340 parenting books seemed to have a lot more peace of mind.  Perhaps they didn't know they were making such monstrous mistakes as not feeding their kids all organic home-pureed baby food.

Kids these days have to be "exclusively" everything, if they want a chance at success.  It starts with birth.  Exclusive medication-free, of course.  Wait, I failed that one.  I had a half-dose of some dope that gave me amazing hallucinations during Vicki's birth.  Then, with Todd, well - no chance for any medication although I would have traded my left brain for some at one point.  Nope, my kids weren't exclusively free of medications at birth.

After birth comes vaccinations.  We have neither followed a standard vaccination schedule, nor refused to vaccinate.  Wait - you mean there's another option than being exclusively pro or anti vaccine!?

Let's not forget cloth diapers.  Well, except for all those times I've used disposable diapers.  Then we can forget them.  But hey, every time I use a cloth diaper, it's one less disposable in the landfill, right?

Next - exclusively breast-fed, naturally.  Except that didn't quite work out for me either.  I nursed them both as much as I could (and still nurse Todd), and recognized that they wouldn't die from being fed formula the rest of the time.  No exclusivity for my combo-fed babies.

Then the sleep training debacle.  Of course, you're either spoiling your kids and defiling your marriage by letting your kids sleep in your bed, or you're abusing your kids by letting them cry in their cribs at night while you pee by yourself for once in your life.  No middle ground here either.  Exclusively attachment parenting or cry-it-out.  Well, I failed on that one too.  My babies sleep with me all the time, except for when Vicki started sleeping by herself when she was six months and she cried a bunch.  Then she slept through the night.  Looks like I failed to be consistent on this point, as well.

When your kids start eating real food, you are bombarded by more alarmist messages:  If you feed them before six months they will be obese!  If you feed them non-organic food they will get autism!  The doctor is telling you to give them gruel with no nutritive value that looks awful.  Once again - I was never able to achieve anything exclusive.  I was the weirdo who pureed coconut oil and chicken stock and homemade yogurt into squash and took it to my kids' daycare.  But I also let them eat my fries soaked in GMO canola oil.  Nope - life is too short to ever leave a French fry behind.

And now that we are through all those hurdles, the lack of exclusivity continues.  Sometimes I yell at my kids.  Mostly I try to hug them.  Very occasionally they get spanked.  I guess this disqualified me from the ranks of the attachment parenting people.  But I also don't discipline them with rods and crazy Biblical teachings, either, so I guess I can't be a part of the Train Up a Child community.

There will be more crossroads in the future.  Someday my kids will choose gender identities and sexual orientations.  I have no idea if they will be exclusively gay or straight.  And that's totally cool with me.  Someday, perhaps, they will choose partners - and I'm sure I will neither love nor hate those people, but have extremely nuanced feelings about them.

See, life isn't about exclusivity.  I hope the one message they are seeing from me, through all of this, is that life is messy and complicated.  People who have doctrinaire stances on these issues are setting themselves and their kids up for hard re-actions.  There isn't much I can be sure of.

But there is one thing.  My children are exclusively loved and protected by God.  They are exclusively inhabited by the Holy Spirit, and held by a community of faith.  God's love for them is perfect and God needs no Google or manual to show how to love children.  So I'm leaving it up to him.  Because obviously I can't get it right!  And I've really quit trying to be so perfect.

the belly of the beast

This is part 3 of a 4-part series on decisions that I face in how my daughter's education will unfold.  You can find part 1 here, in which I discuss a great preschool enrichment program she's attending; part 2 is here, in which I discuss my ambivalence about homeschooling.

In this segment, I will discuss the public school options that we have.  There are a ton.  Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) has a byzantine system sprawling throughout Davidson County.  It's a far cry from the neat, excellent public schools I attended as a girl.  Lawrence has a variety of factors that give rise to its great schools - a major university in the center of town, no competition from private or parochial schools (the word "charter" is still unheard of there), a real estate tax base that can be equitably carved up so that funding can be roughly the same for all schools.  A lot of it really boils down to:  it's a small enough community that it can be managed pretty easily.  MNPS, on the other hand, is gigantic.  In 2011-2012, MNPS served 77,617 students.  By comparison, my hometown school district serves ~11,000.

So, here are the viable paths that we can take for Vicki Jo (that I know of at this point - one of the issues with MNPS that I've found is that you have to really educate yourself thoroughly on your options.  No one is going to be calling you telling you about choices you have for your family):

1)  Lockeland Design Center.  This school is by far the closest to our home (literally, Google Maps tells me it is .2 miles).  We can walk there in under five minutes.  It is an amazing school.  It is ranking in the top performing elementary schools in the state of Tennessee right now.  It's also a magnet, and an exceedingly popular one at that.  Because it is designated as an optional school, we have to go through a lottery.  We are in no way guaranteed a spot at this school.  In fact, the lottery has become very selective in the last few years (because of massive increases in applications), so that only about 40% of children in our neighborhood who do not currently have a sibling attending there are getting spots in Kindergarten.  Unless something changes about the zoning, I cannot count on LDC as a sure bet.

           
 a)   I have the additional decision to make of whether I should apply for Vicki Jo to enter  Kindergarten early (fall of 2015).  I have to make this decision fairly soon, because the lottery takes place around the turn of the year.  She has gone through the necessary testing and been approved to do this, if the principal and I agree it's a good idea.  We generally have to make application for the lottery by somewhere around December 1.  I can't help but admit that the soaring popularity of the school is contributing to my thought that I might try to enroll her early.  If we don't get in through the lottery, we can always try again for Kindergarten next year.

2)  Warner Enhanced Option Elementary.  Warner is our "school of zone."  This means that we do nothing to enroll there except show up.  Warner is a school that draws from a very integrated demographic, which is attractive to me.  I love the idea of Vicki Jo experiencing education with people from different backgrounds.  This school has also been making strides in terms of performance and testing.  (Blech.)  It's a bit larger than Lockeland (350 students vs. 305), and the school day is 45 minutes longer (this is what makes it an "enhanced option" school).  There are a core of parents that are very dedicated to improving Warner, and I have to admit that it's a school that is growing on me.  I need to tour.  I like the idea of escaping the crazy stressful process that is the lottery.

           
 a)  I have the same decision to make about early admission to Kindergarten here as I do at Lockeland.  The jury is still out on that one.

3)  Hull-Jackson Montessori Magnet or Stanford Montessori Design Center.  These are optional schools that require a lottery.  We are not in the priority zone of the lottery for either of these schools, which makes acceptance a long shot (worse odds even than getting into Lockeland).  The benefit of these schools:  Montessori!  I love the Montessori method and would love my children to be experiencing it.  These schools use mixed-age classrooms and start enrolling at age 3.  So, I applied through the lottery for Vicki Jo to go to both of these schools last year.  At the end of all five of the lottery draws, we ended at numbers 31 and 7 on the wait lists, respectively.  I will apply again for these school, but I will have to decide where they fall in priority, along with Lockeland.  We can only make one application, and have to rank up to 7 choices on that application.  A downside of either of these schools is that they are not in our neighborhood.  They would entail a bit of a commute every day, which would be annoying.  They also don't support our local community in the way that I would ideally like to.

(Are you feeling overwhelmed yet??)

4)  Charters.  There are a few options in our neighborhood, but I'm not interested.  I don't think giving power to for-profit companies to increase school choice and effectiveness is the way forward.  Especially when we have so many other viable options in our neighborhood and in our family's life.

5)  Pre-K.  MNPS has made a commitment to expanding their pre-K programs (which are defined as programs offered to children in the year before they start Kindergarten) so that all students will be able to attend free of charge.  There are two pre-Ks that I'm interested in:  Ross Early Learning Center and Warner Pre-K.  Lockeland does not have a Pre-K.  We very nearly went to Ross this year - we made application and were accepted and everything.  But it ended up not being much cheaper for extended care than what we currently pay at King's Daughters.  (The catch is that it is "free" for the school day - but if you need any care for your child beyond 8-3, you pay $70/week!).  The difference between Ross and Warner Pre-Ks is that Ross is a freestanding center with multiple pre-K classrooms, while Warner is a Pre-K housed in an elementary school.  The big benefit at Warner would be that if that ends up being Vicki's elementary school, she gets an added year for continuity and stability.

I feel completely exhausted just typing all of this.  As I mentioned above, I had to pretty much dig up all this information on my own.  I can't imagine that a parent with less luxury of time (because of working multiple jobs, being in service industries, etc) would have the ability to do this kind of research.

My bigger issue with all of this has to do with what is trending in public education, regardless of how "good" or selective the school.  Longer class times, less teacher freedom, more testing (much more testing), less enrichment, less recess.  Do I want my young child to jump right into all this?  Vicki Jo will probably do fine, because she can sit still pretty well.  But do I want Todd to jump into it at 5, and be labeled ADHD because he acts like a 5-year-old?  These are the difficult questions.  When I started Kindergarten in 1990, we went for half a day, and we still had a rest time.  Those days are gone in our public schools.  So what's a mom to do?

denim skirt lady

This is part two in what I'm reckoning will be a four-part series on how on earth I plan on educating my daughter in this crazy world.  See here for part one, in which I discuss the Encore enrichment program offered by our public school system.

Once upon a time, like many others, I thought homeschooling was kind of a quaint, fringe thing.  If you had strong religious objections to what was taught in public school, or you lived waayyy out in the country and it didn't make sense to send your kids into town - that kind of thing.  Basically, I thought all the homeschooling moms were the kind who wear denim skirts and grow their hair out long and kinda look like the scared FLDS women:

As in so many things in life - I was wrong.  I first saw that homeschooling could be more mainstream when I read Ree Drummond's blog.  Homeschool was discussed as a viable, normal choice for the first time for me in the playgroup I had with fellow Bradley birth moms after Vicki Jo was born.  As I became more exposed to the Weston A. Price Foundation practices of diet and lifestyle, I heard more and more about homeschool families.  There seems to be a large crossover between natural foods and medicine and homeschool, for whatever reason.  Finally, after moving to Nashville and our church, I met several families who had successfully homeschooled their children.  And not a denim skirt in sight.  It's a choice that's growing in popularity in my neighborhood, and there seems to be a wealth of support.  Co-ops, tutorials, fellow homeschool families.  They are everywhere!

I have extremely ambivalent feelings about homeschooling my kids, and they center around three main concerns:  (1) I feel duty as a conscientious citizen to support local public schools so that the community can benefit from the investment of my family's resources.  (2) I may not be the best teacher for my kids.  (3) The public schools in our area may not be the best fit for my kids.

1)  I'm a proud product of excellent public schools.  I have to say that I really didn't even understand the elite private school system in our country until I went to Columbia.  It was so far removed from my reality.  My hometown had no competitive private schools.  There were a few parochial schools, but not even one that went through junior high at that point.  Our schools worked well for a few reasons:  there were not other drains on the system (no magnets, no private schools); the community was small enough that they could be funded by real estate taxes and have districts equitably divided to include high values in each school zone; there was a critical mass of invested families; and we did not have the historic issues that seem to plague many school systems since integration (for example, city/county school district mergers, or white flight to private "Christian" schools).  I recognize that Metro Nashville Public Schools can only be as great as the families that are committed to them.  I hear my teacher friends lamenting that there is "only so much" that can be done in the classroom.  At the end of the day, the family really is the first and greatest teacher.  If I opt out of that system, am I becoming part of the problem rather than solution?

2)  I'm pretty sure that I'm not called to be a stay at home mom.  (Although never say never!)  I received a calling into ordained ministry before I received a calling as a parent, and they are equally relevant and demanding calls in my life.  Of course, even without a ministerial appointment, I would remain an ordained pastor.  But this is really an aside in the conversation.  The point is that I am not a trained, qualified teacher.  I did not go to school to learn pedagogy.  I'm not knocking anyone who wants to teach their kids at home without these qualifications.  But great teachers are called into teaching.  I know this because some of my closest friends are amazing teachers and school administrators.  And to put up with what they put up with - friends, it has to be a calling.  I'm not sure that I have received that calling in life.

3)  But let's counterbalance numbers 1 and 2 by saying that our particular public schools here in Nashville may not be the best for my kids.  For instance, I hear a lot about recess (or the lack thereof) these days.  I will address this much more in a later post on our public school options (because there are many), but I feel that plenty of outdoor play and exercise do much to enhance education.  I'm concerned about the level of testing that is happening in all public schools.  I'm not really sure what to make of Common Core (although I refuse to be alarmist about it - most of my teacher friends find it to be totally fine).  I guess the bigger question is:  does the issue of inequality in public schools get balanced on the backs of my children?  All parents have to make that decision (although some have fewer choices).  My social justice crusader side says:  absolutely.  My protective mother bear side says:  nope.

So, clear as mud, right?  Now you know how I feel!  But when I entertain the option of homeschooling, there are several sort of "schools" that I'm attracted to.  Montessori would be amazing (and God knows I could never afford to send my kids to the private Montessori schools around here) - but once again, I am not trained.  And Montessori in particular is a pedagogy that requires precise training with the materials and philosophy involved.  Oak Meadow curriculum is beautiful, soft, warm, and Waldorf-y.  I have recently discovered Charlotte Mason and fallen in love with the talking points of her educational system.  All of these streams of educational philosophy have dedicated followings and groups in my area.

The part of me that loves planning and filling out lists just want to dive straight into designing and executing curriculum for my kids.  But being able to do that stuff doesn't necessarily make you a good teacher.

Thought this was interesting.

The good part is that I have time to decide.  For now, I lurk around several homeschool Google groups and Facebook pages.  I see what moms struggle with.  There is even a beautiful community of single moms who are homeschooling and supporting one another.  I have barely even touched here on the practical issues that homeschooling my kids would entail.  Would they just come with me to the office?  Would we all work together?  Would I have them in some kind of childcare, and then do school in the evenings and on the weekends?  There are many possibilities, but all of them present quite a bit of upstream swimming against our prevalent cultural model of the "school day."

One thing I'm not afraid of is being iconoclastic.  I have already opted out of a lot of what society expects of me.  But this is a decision that is much bigger than anyone's opinion.  A helpful piece of advice I got early on in considering homeschooling was:  "just take it one year at a time."  I'm not deciding my kids' entire educational future if I do decide to homeschool.  Food for thought.

encore!

Let me just preface this whole post by saying how annoying I know it is when parents talk about their genius kids (with or without substantiation of geniusness).  It's only slightly more acceptable in grandparents, who for some reason are culturally permitted to think their grandkids are perfect.  So, throughout, when I talk about my smart daughter, please don't hate me.  Thank you.

Vicki Jo is now 3 and a half.  She is the most charming, needy, mercurial, slight, gorgeous, frustrating being I have ever known.  She is already a complicated person, and I'm sure that will only multiply in the years to come.

Is my metaphor too thick?

We have known Vicki Jo was bright for a long time.  She spoke early, clearly, persistently.  She reasons and jokes with me and follows the arc of a conversation.  She is beginning to read by taking books that she has memorized through repeated narration and using phonics to sound out the words she already knows.  She enjoys identifying letters in everyday situations, and has developed good letter-sound correspondence.  I have done nearly nothing to encourage this, aside from LOTS of reading together, and talking with her a lot.

We lucked out when Vicki was accepted at King's Daughters.  She has experienced a warm, rich, deep educational setting with teachers who are committed to early childhood education.  They periodically hold parent-teacher conferences, and my hunches were somewhat validated at our first one:

Them:  "Do you know how gifted your daughter is?  Do you think she will be well-served by the public school system?  What plans do you have for her enrichment and further education?"

Me:  "Uhhhh . . . "

I still feel really good about what's happening with her at King's Daughters, and I think that the value of stability in a small child's world cannot be overstated.  So, she continues there for now.  But we have been urged to consider early admission to Kindergarten.  This would mean she starts Kindergarten in Fall 2015.  

Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS for short) is a monster of a system.  It's a county-wide, consolidated labyrinth of 155 schools.  There are magnets, zoned schools, special schools, pre-K sites, and more that I'm sure I don't even know about.  For someone like me, who wants to research things thoroughly, it's a years-long process of educating yourself about this school system.  And by that time, things have changed enough that you have to start over!

I wasn't sure if we wanted to follow through on early admission to Kindergarten for sure, but I wanted it to be an option.  And that meant testing.  Over the summer, we took Vicki Jo for a series of tests with a school psychologist.  I'm not sure exactly what was included in these tests, because I was not allowed to be present for them (I sat out in the hallway).  The psychologist reviewed the results, and then we were scheduled for a meeting with a panel of educators:  a zoned school teacher, an "Encore" teacher (this is what MNPS calls their gifted program), a school psychologist, a school administrator, and me as parent.  I also brought my friend Steph for good measure (she's a middle-school teacher for MNPS).  

What we heard at the meeting was basically that Vicki Jo is extremely gifted, scoring in the high 90s of percentiles in all categories.  She was not given an Individual Education Plan (IEP) yet, because a child must demonstrate that the current classroom setting is an impediment to their learning - and she doesn't have a classroom setting yet!  But she was approved for early admission to Kindergarten, and she was referred for Encore services.

For preschool children, all Encore classrooms are housed in an old school building called Robertson Academy.  If your child is tested and qualifies, you are offered one three-hour block of enrichment per week, free of charge.  We signed Vicki up for Wednesday mornings, and it's been awesome!  She looks forward to going, and I think it's fun for her to be in an environment with children who enjoy similar levels of challenge and critical thinking.

One hard spot has been the School Standard Attire (aka SSA aka uniform).  All MNPS students have to follow SSA to one degree or another, depending on the school.  My headstrong girl does not like being told what she can and can't wear.  She has been dressing herself for nearly a year.  These moments make me seriously dread the years to come . . . 

A favorite outfit I like to call the "full owl."

Her teacher, Mrs. Sturgeon, has been so helpful about communicating well with us beforehand, reaching out to each parent and informing them what the program would be like, and sending home detailed descriptions of each lesson.  We also have little bits of "homework" - essentially just discussions she wants us to have with our kids about the subject matter.  

My hope is that, after spending some time with Vicki Jo, Mrs. Sturgeon can offer me some better insight about whether early Kindergarten would really benefit her.  There would certainly be positives, but there may be more negatives.  Post forthcoming on the early Kindergarten decision!

vaccinations: a third way

Parents tend to feel passionately about vaccinations.  There seems to a lot at stake, no matter where you stand.  If you don't want your children vaccinated, you generally have strong reasons:  you don't want foreign matter in their bodies, you don't believe our current aggressive schedule has been researched well or long enough, or you believe that getting some illnesses and recovering is the natural way of life.  If you do vaccinate your children, you feel equally strongly:  you don't want other people riding on your responsible decisions through herd immunity, you don't want a non-vaccinated child infecting your immuno-compromised child who cannot be vaccinated, and you think that vaccinations save lives and prevent unnecessary suffering.

I think everyone is right.

How is that possible?

I believe that we haven't been vaccinating long enough to know what all the long-term effects will be, especially for the most recent vaccines like Gardasil.  I do know that one of the original polio vaccines could possibly cause cancer.   I do think that, historically, we often got sick with very serious diseases.  Many children died.  The ones who lived developed stronger immune systems, although they also sometimes had lifelong disabilities as a result of these illnesses.  So yes, they made us stronger as a species, but they also caused a lot of suffering.  I do know that the United States has a much more aggressive vaccination schedule than many other countries.  I don't like the idea of strange foreign matter in my children's bodies.  With that said, however, it's not like I police every single thing my daughter eats.  She has eaten plenty of GMO goldfish crackers, eats candy like it's going out of style at her Memaw's house, and gets the occasional sip of diet soda.

I guess "ambivalence" would be a good word to describe my feelings toward vaccinations.  I feel like it's socially responsible to vaccinate, and I don't take that lightly.  I think our society has been infected with an insidious way of thinking that says, "What can I get from society/government/other people?" instead of "What can I give to my community/country/other people?"  And I don't mean welfare.  I mean ripping off underprivileged populations so that we can get even greedier.  But I won't get off on that tangent today!

So, I'm neither gung-ho about the standard vax schedule, nor willing to completely avoid vaccinating.  That's where Dr. Sear's Vaccine Book comes in!

This is an in-depth look at each individual vaccine (because several of our single shots have up to five vaccinations in them).  It examines the ingredients, possible side effects, likelihood of getting the disease and how severe the implications of infection may be.  He offers alternative schedules and emphasizes that practices like breastfeeding and keeping your children out of daycare are factors that can make a big difference in whether they need inoculation.

When I was pregnant with Todd, I sat down with Dr. Sears' book and the State of Tennessee vaccination requirements for public school.  Knowing that I wouldn't follow the standard schedule, I crafted one for him that still managed to fit in all the required shots, but at a slower pace and spaced out from one another.  My guideline is that I don't want him to have more than one shot at a time.  I think that pertussis presents one of the most serious threats to infants, so we stay on schedule with the DTaP (which is actually three vaccines at once!).  The others I fit in around it.  Here is what I came up with:

And I shared it with our family doctor at our first appointment when Todd was five days old.  She supports us and our decisions, and knows that I made them with lots of research and the understanding that unvaccinated and vaccinated kids alike may get these illnesses anyway.

Like I said, people feel strongly about this issue.  A fellow pastor whose daughter is fully vaccinated got sick with whooping cough.  The other parents at her school were furious:  why didn't they vaccinate their daughter against the disease?!  Now their children might get sick!  When he explained that she was fully vaccinated, and sometimes children still get these illnesses, the parents were shocked.  They seemed to think that vaccines were a guarantee that their children would never get sick.  The likelihood is severely reduced, but it is still possible!

Our slowed-down schedule is one way that I feel like I can address both sides of that issue.

kansas day dinner!

We Kansans are a funny bunch.  My husband picked up on it right away when we met, noting that he'd never met someone who knew so much about the history and customs of her particular state.  Part of it has to do with our war-torn genesis into statehood, which centered in the area around my hometown.  Part of it has to do with being derided as a "flyover state," with little to offer the nation in terms of culture.  Part of it was the fact that our state mandated a month of Kansas history every January in the schools, so each year we learned about Kansas history, geography, foods, indigenous animals and plants, and more.  I can tell you without using Google that our state bird is the meadowlark, state flower is the sunflower, state motto is ad astra per aspera, state insect is the honeybee, state reptile is the barred salamander, and that our primary crop is wheat.

No matter how long I live away from Kansas, I don't think I will ever be able to say that I'm "from" somewhere else.  It's too far back in my blood - at least five generations.  And Vicki is a Jayhawker, too!  Even if she never remembers Topeka, where she was born, she can claim the title of a native-born Kansan.

The reason Kansas history centered on January is because January 29 is Kansas Day.  This commemorates the day that Kansas finally joined the union, as a free state, in 1861 (my elementary school was named Centennial because it opened on 1/29/1961 - the Centennial of Kansas Day).  Walking around my hometown, you might actually hear people wishing one another a happy Kansas Day.

I decided we needed to celebrate.  On Tuesday, the 29th, we had a Kansas Day dinner.  I served:

Buffalo Burgers and fixings (okay, okay - they were going to be buffalo, but that is surprisingly hard to find around here!  It would have meant a crosstown trip to Whole Foods at 12.99/lb.  No thanks!  I served beef)

Buns made of wheat flour

Oven fries with honey mustard to dip

Sunflower seed cookies

All the bolded foods are parts of Kansas agriculture and history.  We had a little crowd of Kansans over and talked geography, history, and just shared our wholesome Midwestern values.  It was lovely.

Sidenote:  Ugh, pregnant fat face + foregrounding myself.  The worst.

This may all sound like a fun and silly idea for a theme party - which it was - but it was also really important for me.  Moving away from Kansas felt like a betrayal of my ancestors and my history, and I wanted to commemorate our special day.  I was talking this over with my Grandpa Louis, who made the very valid point that the Reeves family came from England to Long Island, moved to Kentucky/Tennessee, and then only made the trip to Kansas in the mid-1800s.  So, really - I'm back where my people came from now!

perception is reality

In the ministry world, we use this phrase often.  Sometimes reality is not reality.  Sometimes reality is dimensional like a kaleidoscope.  Sometimes what is perceived to be truth is regarded as truth.  Sometimes it's our job to sort it out.  Sometimes it's not.  Sometimes there is still magic and myth.  Sometimes being right is wrong (I'm kind of a righteous person by nature, so I have found this out the very hard way a number of times).

I think blogging is sometimes the same way.  We are lured into blogs (especially personal blogs) because we feel that we are experiencing life alongside the blogger.  But we aren't.  We are experiencing the selected episodes that the blogger lifted out and highlighted.  The very fact that "keeping it real" has become sort of a mode for some bloggers indicates that reality is not really part of the scheme in general.

I found Design Mom the other day.  It's funny because, when Vicki was a wee one and I was up all night, I would watch a lot of House Hunters and House Hunters International.  I saw Gabby and her family on an episode!  They were moving from the US to France, and looking for the right rental house.  I was kind of fascinated by this family with five children that wanted to uproot and move to France  (sidenote:  why so many Mormon female bloggers?  It seems to be a thing).  It's something I could see myself doing someday, if my head didn't explode into a giant flaming nuclear mushroom cloud at some point in the process.

I was browsing her FAQs page and found this incredibly refreshing statement:

One more thing. Please keep in mind that on this blog I attempt to keep things very positive and showcase the best and prettiest things happening in my life. That doesn't mean there aren't bad days and failed projects and lost tempers. At the end of the day, blogs are a show. I suppose that’s why we like them so much.

Yes!  And yes!   I do this too.  My life has lots of low points that I don't necessarily want to rehash with you.  I fight with my husband.  I act like a baby.  I eat crappy food.  I don't mop the floor.  And if this was all totally obvious to you, you are way better at sorting out reality from perception than I am.

I tend to be a little hard on myself, and it can get way out of hand when I look at these shiny visions of what life could be like:  tidy, spare rooms with lovely children perfectly photographed doing perfectly planned activities.  Beautiful food cooked in a designer kitchen and then photographed under perfect light in a corner especially devoted to food photos.  But life ain't always like that.  And I needed the reminder from Design Mom.

bah humbug?

Maybe it was doing two church services last night and dragging in the door at 12:30 to a sleeping household (still, I have to say - I feel spoiled after four services the last two years.  THAT was fatiguing).  Maybe it was the way our holidays are all spread out so we get to celebrate with different family members for almost a month.  Maybe it was the fact that we have had a big year financially (which - when haven't we?) and are pretty house-poor and strapped.

I'm just not really feeling it this morning.

I mean - I feel the Jesus part.  Big time.  That's usually the Christmas Eve glow for me.  We take communion, we sing carols, we raise our candles to greet the savior.  It is perfect, every year.  No matter what gaffes happen in the service.

But we didn't buy Vicki any presents.  She is getting so much from aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins.  We asked for only things we needed this year:  dish towels, a new car seat and high chair, clothes for Vicki, a queen sheet set, welcome mats, baskets to hold shoes at the doors, and gift cards for groceries and gas.  I need a gray cardigan and new underwear.  Jeff asked for new tires for his truck and help with the ski trip he takes every February with his buddies.

I feel like I'm somehow doing this Christmas thing wrong.  Sure, there is a way to opt out of the consumer madness (and avoid having to apply for a credit card, in our case!) and feel like you maintain some sanity and integrity.  But I feel like I got lazy.  We could have done a lot of homemade gifts and crafts and food.  But we didn't.  We didn't put up a tree because our addition remains uninspected and we have no place to put one right now.  We have no presents under said imaginary tree.  Aside from the special breakfast I made this morning and the Christmas tunes we played in the kitchen, this could have been any Saturday or other day I don't work.

But still, we are together.  We are relatively healthy.  The baby is napping peacefully.  We are expecting another miraculous change in the new year.  We are settled in a home that is in a place that we love.  We have two vehicles that get us where we need to go.  We have plenty of great food.  We have enough people that love us that we get to have no fewer than five family Christmas celebrations.  The fact that I would not consider all of these things enormous gifts and blessings says a lot about my character.

Edited to add:  my husband just ran into a parked car while making an unnecessary, stupid trip.  We have liability-only insurance.  He is fine, but I give up on today.

gun control, mental health, and what makes america crazy

I guess I felt like I needed to add my voice into the flurry of conversation occurring around the issues of gun control, access to mental health care services, and whatever else people feel like they can finally say now that there has been another horrible, awful, horrific tragedy in our nation. 

First, I was and am completely sickened with what happened last Friday.  And I feel a little guilty, too.  Like, why does this effect me so much more intensely than knowing that literally millions of innocent Africans (many of them children) are raped and systematically hunted and killed in civil wars?  Or just dying by the droves because they don't have clean water?  How can I sleep at night knowing that, and yet hearing about Sandy Hook has me nearly throwing up in the car?  Because those children at Sandy Hook look more like me and my daughter?  Because it's closer to home?  I guess.  I don't know.

Second, I'm really interested in learning more about guns, what is meant by "assault weapons" (it's not at all a clear-cut term), why Americans are obsessed with having guns (including my husband), and whether restricting access to them is a reasonable measure.  I don't know about this either.

There is a lot of comparison right now between America and the other developed (i.e. rich) nations, showing that we have astronomically higher rates of gun ownership, and gun violence, than any of the others.  I'm sure this is true.  But I'm not sure that restriction has a direct correlation to this.  Americans just seem more crazy than their counterparts.  I don't know how to quantify that statement well, except just to put it out there.  Until we deal with some of the underlying issues in our culture that cause us to act so violently toward one another, guns will just be a presenting issue. 

Jeff and I were talking about this over the weekend, so indulge me in a bit of what may be revisionist history.  Two hundred, or even a hundred years ago, pretty much every rural household had a gun (and probably most urban ones too).  I'm sure there were TONS of accidental deaths due to children handling loaded, unlocked guns.  I'm also sure that most young people learned how to handle those guns early on because they had to - to hunt for their families or defend their property.  But I really doubt there were these kinds of massacres that we have to deal with on an annual basis now.  Something has changed in our society.  It's a sick mixture of cults of celebrity, enshrined violence as a national myth, access to the kinds of weapons that were not available two hundred years ago, and environmental factors that just seem to be making us more severely crazy. 

Third, I'm definitely sure that we don't have good access to mental health care, especially affordable long-term in-patient residential facilities for the seriously mentally ill.  I have no idea if Adam Lanza was one of those seriously mentally ill.  He had no formal diagnosis that I know of.  That's part of the problem.  Tons and tons of people in our country are very sick and have no formal diagnosis, because access is such a problem.  I hate that it took another massacre, but I am really glad that this conversation is making it onto the national radar. 

I know first hand from many situations in our family that finding good mental health professionals who will accept and file your insurance is not easy.  And this is coming from a family that actually has employer-provided health care!  Much less someone who doesn't have those resources.  Scheduling takes weeks.  If you were in an acute crisis, there might just not be anyone to talk to. 

It's not as easy as gun control legislation + better mental health care access = less dead people.  I mean, that might happen, and that would be awesome!  But we can't just import a formula that works in, say, Sweden.  Swedish people don't rage at each other on the highway.  There is more under the surface here, and I'm not sure how we fix it. 

gender vs. sex and some thoughts

A mega-pet peeve of mine is when people confuse gender and sex.  Sex is what you are born with - and there are more options than we tend to think of.  Male, female, intersex (what we used to call "hermaphrodite"), no sex organs.  These are all possibilities.  This is what an ultrasound can (sometimes) predict.  But everyone has a story of someone who knew someone who was expecting a girl and out popped a boy.

Gender is something else.  I cannot predict what gender my child will be.  This is something that he or she will express in time, and sometimes through choice.  I cannot even really predict what gender Vicki will be at this point.  She has not consciously adopted one or another.  People can choose to identify with one gender or another.  In our culture, we sometimes call it "a woman being trapped in a man's body," or vice versa.  And it does not stay static.  Perhaps at one time in your life you identify with one gender, and then it changes.  Sometimes people undergo surgery to make their sex match their gender (although "match" is a loaded term, as though there were only one sex that goes with each gender). 

All of this just so totally betrays my theological training and background.  But when we get that question:  "so what gender?"  Or when people talk about a "gender reveal," it drives me nuts!  What you are revealing is what you think the sex of your child will be, with science that is not fool-proof.

So, now that my rant is out of the way, we have news!!

We think we know the sex of our baby, after the ultrasound this afternoon!

We think it's either a boy . . .

Or a girl.

Okay, okay, just kidding.  It's a boy!

To quote the ultrasound tech, this baby was "almost obscene" in how revealing he wanted to be about his sex organs!

We went back and forth and back and forth on:

a)  whether to even have an ultrasound.  But this one was great.  The tech saw everything she needed to see in terms of heart, bones, organs, and so on.  And I do feel much more connected to this baby, after feeling that this pregnancy was still sort of imaginary.  Also turns out the placenta is anterior!  Midwives are so smart. 

b)  whether to find out the sex of the baby.  At first I felt firmly:  no.  Then Jeff started to cave (insert sigh because I married an instant gratification junkie).  Once he said he wanted to know, but he wouldn't tell me, it was all over.  We both had to know.  Then we debated whether to tell anyone else.  But it just felt sort of crappy to say, when people asked, "Well, we know, but we're not going to tell you!"  So we decided to tell you.  I hope you feel special.

Is your next question about names?  We covered that too. 

on getting festive . . . or not

A picture of me getting festive with three great buddies nearly a decade ago! 



Of course, it is the holiday season.  As a Christian and an American (and no, I don't think the two have to go together!), I celebrate most of the "standard" holidays and special occasions:  Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, birthdays, our anniversary, Valentine's Day, Halloween, Memorial Day.  My family is not a military family (aside from my granddad), so we don't do much for Veterans Day and all that.

As a pastor, though, many of those holidays are dominated by church work.  Christmas and Easter, obviously.  Most churches have some kind of Halloween celebration or Fall Festival.  A lot of churches have a community Thanksgiving service.  Any holiday that falls on a Sunday is not much of a holiday for us. 

Now that I'm a mom and we have a young one absorbing the entire universe all around her, I'm noticing that I am severely deficient in creating a holiday atmosphere.  It's like I'm missing the gene that enjoys fall decorating and baking Christmas cookies (oh wait, if we had an oven that freaking worked).  I was emailing with a good friend in Kansas who keeps me updated (hi Tai!), and mentioned this to her as well.

I remember little things about our house growing up that clued me in to the seasons:  a spring wreath on the front door, Mom's spiced tea in a percolator (the recipe is phenomenal:  pretty much just Tang and red hots), cheesecake on our birthdays (nobody really liked cake that much - cherry cheesecake was the preference). 

When I think of creating our own family's traditions, I mostly think of food.  Here's what I envision, in a world where I can think ahead and get it all together:

Thanksgiving:  this one is already taken.  Each year we go to the Tarwater family reunion in Sevierville, TN.  This is my husband's mother's mother's family, and this year will be 114th annual Thanksgiving feast.  Jeff's mom and stepdad have built a cabin on family land up there.  The fall colors are gorgeous, there is hiking and a hot tub.  It's basically amazing.

Easter:  church!  We usually go to some kind of sunrise service, which is sort of the Methodist-lazy version of an Easter vigil.  Easter dinner would ideally be lamb and spring vegetables (asparagus, green beans, radishes, new potatoes).  We would always dye eggs, and Mom would always do the most amazing Easter egg/present hunt in our backyard.  I feel like, from a faith perspective, she did a great job of emphasizing the gift of Easter over and above the commercial culture of Christmas.

Christmas:  church and more church.  My Christmas Eve usually ends with an 11:00 or midnight candlelight service.  The next day, Christmas dinner would be the whole nine:  ham, potatoes, green vegetables, salad, rolls, pie.  Mom always made this potato casserole in which we first boiled potatoes, then cooled and grated them, mixed with sour cream, green onions, and other things, and baked.  Can't remember exactly. 

We put up a Christmas tree each year, mostly at my husband's insistence. His beloved Memaw is the biggest Christmas decorator I have ever encountered. Fully decked.  And of course, now we are homeowners and I feel some responsiblity for putting up festive lights that will jack up my electricity bill for the winter.

Birthdays:  one of my favorite traditions in my family was Mom telling our birth stories each year on our birthday.  She would talk about being pregnant, what she remembered, when she went into labor, going to the hospital, and the birth (amazing to think that this was before the days of routine induction, so I was born three weeks late!).  She always said the exact times we were born, and so I remember that I was born at 3:23 pm.  I would love to cook the birthday person's favorite foods, and to do cheesecake - but skip the HFCS canned topping, and make some delicious homemade cherry or blueberry topping.

Anniversary:  since my folks divorced when I was so young, anniversaries were not much of a thing.  My best friend Amanda's family does something I always thought was great:  the children send their parents anniversary cards!  It's like saying, Hey, thanks for being amazing parents and being married and having this family.  Since we honeymooned in England and enjoyed it so so so much, I would love to do an English-food themed supper for our anniversary each year!  Bangers and mash, or pasties, or the like.

Memorial Day:  some kind of cookout to celebrate the warming weather, as well as grave decoration (isn't is funny how Decoration Day and Memorial Day have merged in our culture?  My granddad was a stickler that Memorial Day was only to honor the war dead).

Halloween:  I'm kind of a humbug on this one.  I was ruined on it in college, when every girl used it as an excuse to dress as a sexy bumblebee or whatever.  But I do like handing out candy, and our neighborhood is teeming with children.  I suppose Vicki Jo will want to start dressing up and going about soon enough.

Phew!  That was more than I thought I had in mind for our family celebrations. 

What traditions do you have, or have you started as a new family?

no longer riding on the merry-go-round

Do you know that John Lennon song?  It's a good one.  He talks about how people think he's crazy, because he decided to step off the "merry-go-round" of constant striving for success.

I like the metaphor, because I made a decision to stop riding a different merry-go-round several years ago. 

Let me start with a theory.

I believe there is a time for most of us, somewhere in young adulthood, when we stop feeling like Superman.  Bad things start to happen in our lives - maybe someone we know is hurt or killed, maybe we lose a dear family member, maybe we get broken into in our first apartment or house.  We start to realize that not only do these bad things happen, but that sometime in our lives, they are going to happen to us. 

My mom died when I was 19.  It wasn't a surprise.  She had been sick for a long, long time.  I was sad - unimaginably sad.  It was hard to re-frame reality without her.  I still think about her every day.  After a few months, the outward appearance of my life was pretty "nomal."  But you can't escape grief, and the strange things it does to your spirit. 

My mom's illness and death had a twofold echo in my life.  First:  I became convinced, on some subconscious level, that life was not as long and sprawling as I had once thought it was.  If I was going to accomplish all this stuff I wanted to do, I needed to get into gear!  Yesterday!  Professionally, relationally, in every dimension.  I needed to get those degrees, to get a good job, to get married, to have some kids.  No point waiting - what if I died when I was 53, as Mom did?  Those imaginary kids needed to be at least partially self-sufficient by that point.  If I lived to be 103, as my great-great grandmother did (who was still alive when I was born!!), all the better - more time to enjoy all that stuff. 

Second, I became fearful.  Prior to this point, I would never have described myself as scared of anything.  Not the dark, not being hurt, not crazy adventures.  I was game.  But now, I found myself scared.  Scared of car wrecks.  Scared of chemicals in my food.  Most of my fear centered on having my house broken into and being assaulted by someone.  Now I didn't like staying home alone.  I really didn't like when my housemates were gone and I had to stay all night by myself.  I couldn't sleep in that case.  This cycle of fear and bad thoughts started and I found it irresistible and impossible to stop.  In hindsight, I see I was narrowly missing a full-blown anxiety attack.

I was in therapy.  I told my therapist about these issues.  We talked through it all.  After a few sessions, she asked me a series of questions that changed my life.  She asked me to walk through the scenario of my worst fear, in regard to the home invasion.

"Someone would break in while I was sleeping, and be standing at the foot of the bed, and I would wake up to them being there, and I would be defenseless, and then they would either beat or rape me."

She nodded and affirmed:  "That would be awful."

Then she asked, "What would happen after that?"

I paused.  I had honestly never considered this.  My thoughts had centered and swirled in vivid detail around the bad thing happening, and I had never pondered the aftermath.

"I would either go the hospital or I would die."

She asked, "Are you afraid of death?"

I said, "No.  I'm just afraid of hurting."

She asked, "So, if you died, that's the end of our exercise.  But if you lived, then what?"

I searched my brain.  I slowly said, "I guess I would get better."

And that was it.  That was the moment that I pitched myself off the merry-go-round.

A smile spread softly across her face.  "You are a very strong person.  You have survived what is typically one of the most painful episodes in a person's life:  losing one of their parents.  If this horrible thing happened to you, that you are so scared of, and you lived?  You would come through that, too.  You would survive."

Boom.  It wasn't like the fear immediately lifted, but I had a way out.  I could stop the spiral of negativity and anxiety.  I didn't get pulled into orbit by my thoughts.  I had found the exit from the endless levels of the parking garage.  This therapist had given me one of the biggest gifts I've received in my life:  a tool for harnessing my big emotions.

I use this tool still, all the time.  When I get sucked into a cycle of thoughts that only lead me down, I think to myself "What's the worst that happens?"  I have no problem visualizing the worst-case scenario.  I allow myself to fully delve into the details.  But then I ask, "And then what happens?"  It always gets better from there.

Did you experience a dawn of fear in your life in the transition to adulthood?  How do you position it within your life?

independence and limits

My mother and father grew up in the same very small town.  My brother, sister and I grew up in a small university city.  We lived in a residential neighborhood that had a shopping corridor about three or four blocks away.  There are so many things I wish I could ask my mother now (of course).  But one of the major topics I wish I could know more about is how she decided to give us so much freedom.  Was it of necessity (as a single parent)?  Was it of naivete (not thinking bad things could happen)?  Did she even think that much about it, or was it just the way the world worked for her?

My mother had a sort of slogan about this:  "You can have as much freedom as you show me you can handle."  Basically this meant:  do well in school, don't get pregnant, don't get arrested, be a good person.  Do whatever you want besides.

I also have to consider my perspective.  I was the third child, born ten years after my oldest sibling.  Mom had to have been considerably more relaxed, less bent on the details, and quite a bit more tired by the time I was old enough to start tearing up the town.

All I know is, I spent summers riding my bike and mowing the lawn, walking to Walgreen's to buy candy with my change, walking to the high school across the street to play tennis at the courts, and riding my bike to the swimming pool (a cool two miles from home).  During the school year, I walked to school with a group of other kids (no adults), walked to church (by the swimming pool), and walked to my piano teacher's house for lessons.  It was awesome.

I came across this super-thought-provoking article on NPR today.

It is a fascinating read.  The author posits, as I think most of us would agree, that children today have much less freedom to roam, unsupervised and unscheduled.  He even has a very cool graphic showing four generations of a family, all at eight years old, in Sheffield, England.  The great-grandfather was allowed to go six miles from home to the lake and fish.  The grandfather was allowed several miles to go play in the woods.  The mother was allowed a half-mile or so to the pool.  The son can walk 300 yards to the end of his street.

I don't usually do this, but I allowed myself to read all seventy-odd comments on the article to get a sense of how people feel about this.  Many people said, "I was raised with a lot of freedom, but I'm scared to give my kids that level of access to the world because it's more dangerous now."  Population density, higher crime, faster and more traffic, neighbors not being as knowledgeable about one another, fewer sidewalks, and the hypervigilant, sensationalizing media were all referenced.

A few commenters had theories I thought were simply genius.  One was that we don't accept child casualty as a fact of life anymore.  I thought about that for awhile.  Both of my grandfathers lost one of their siblings in childhood, to disease or accident.  Their parents had large families of six and seven.  One commenter remarked that he had a "free range" childhood, and he knew one child who suffocated in an old refrigerator, one who drowned in an access pond, and one who was hit by a car.  These incidents seemed like part of what life held for some families at that point.  Certainly none of the families were prosecuted by the state for negligence or abuse.

Another theory was that smaller family size and later age of childbearing in developed countries have made a high-stakes game of childhood, where there is no "screwing up" with your kids.  You can't have five and expect one to end up alcoholic or destitute.  That's just not how it works anymore.  And parents feel so unbearably responsible for their children's futures.

Will I allow Vicki Jo and our other, future children to roam freely in our neighborhood?  Gosh.  I hope so.  I don't know.

I do know that the free and open times I had by myself as a child were a huge benefit to an independent life.  I took off for college 1200 miles away with very little trepidation.  I remember when I set off on my first thousand-mile solo road trip, no smart phone, just an atlas and the knowledge that we have a fantastic interstate system that would take me where I needed to go.  I learned how to fend for myself and feel secure that I could find my way home.  Was that worth the risk of injury, bullying, and abduction?  With 20/20 hindsight, yes.

What will you all do with your children?  Allow them to roam, or keep them within sight?

nemoi nepravitaka

My father studied Slavic languages, and he began a family-wide fascination with all things Russian and Balkan.  My parents, brother and sister lived briefly in Yugoslavia (when it was still Yugoslavia, Tito and all) before I was born.  I remember my mom always talking about her netted market basket, and she wistfully recalled the lovely open markets she used to frequent when shopping for dinner.  My sister did an exchange program in junior high.  She went to Russia for several weeks, and then we had a Russian student named Katja come stay with us.  And my dad and stepmom went to go teach at the American School in Skopje, Macdeonia, when I was about twelve or thirteen.  They lived there for a year or two. 

While they were there, Dad and Tammy became close with a Macedonian family.  Maria was the high-school aged daughter, Valentina was her mother, and Filip her little brother, probably about four or five.  When it was time for Dad and Tammy to come back to the States, Maria came with them to capitalize on the opportunities for American education.

Dad and Tammy lived in Las Vegas at that time.  I usually came to visit for some holidays and then for a longer period in the summer - about a month.  That summer, Maria's mother and brother were also visiting.  In a two-bedroom apartment, we had three adults and three children.  It was tight quarters, to say the least!

I remember so much about living with the Macedonians that summer.  Dad and Tammy both worked, so most of the days it was just the four of us.  We went swimming, we went to the store, we fixed lunch.  They taught me how to make tatziki.  They loved the stuff - garlic, yogurt, cucumber, vinegar.  They loved vinegar.  They would just swig it out of the bottle.  It started kind of a love affair with vinegar for me, too.

The best part, though, was Filip.  He was your standard five-year-old boy - rambunctious, mischievious, irritating, exhausting, etc.  But he couldn't speak one word of English.  Not a single one.  It was up to me to figure out how to communicate.  So, we used the board books he had brought with him.  Rather than him learning English, I learned Macedonian as if I were a young child.  I learned the Cyrillic alphabet first.  Then we just started trading vocabulary.  "Avione" = airplane.  "Soova sleeva" = prune.  And so on and so forth.  It was actually great fun. 

But the words I learned to use the most with Filip were "nemoi nepravitaka."  They are the same words you would use a lot with any five-year-old:  "Don't do that." 

We all went our separate ways at the end of the summer, never to meet again.  Within a few years, Dad and Tammy were divorced, Maria had graduated from high school, and Valentina and Filip probably forgot all about me.  But I never forgot learning to communicate with Filip.  And it helped a lot when I began to learn Greek in seminary, as Cyrillic is morphed from the Greek alphabet.