A Sad Little Story

I went to get my hair cut at one of those walk-in places last week and ran into a situation that just made my heart ache.

There was a family group ahead of me composed of a woman in her late forties, at a guess, her married daughter, the daughter's husband and toddler and a second daughter, at least eight, whom the mother referred to as 'my youngest'. When I got there the toddler's father was having his hair cut and the young mother was trying to persuade the little guy to have his done also. Toddler was having none of it, screaming 'No, NOOO!' and trying to pry the door open to escape. The little girl was next, before me, and she was acting so much like the toddler that it was hard to tell the difference. Her mother was trying to persuade her that she should have her hair layered and trimmed but she had selected a very extreme cut from a magazine and wanted nothing but that.

As her mother tried to persuade her, she hauled open the door and stormed out. Her mother shrugged and asked the hairdresser to hold her place while she tried to persuade her. So, we waited.

After a bit, little miss came storming back in with mother, still arguing. She refused to get in the chair. By this time other customers had come in. The poor, beleaguered hairdresser signalled for me to sit down and started cutting my hair. Little miss demanded to have hers cut; her mother said that her bad behaviour had caused her to miss her turn and that she would have to wait. While my hair was cut, the argument continued, with little miss now thumbing through the sample books looking for another style and mother insisting that she was to have 'layers and a trim'. Another hairdresser finished a client; little miss refused to have her do the cutting.

Little miss was also consuming a steady stream of the suckers that children get after their hair is cut, taking them out of the box on the counter herself, in spite of her mother's orders that she stop.

Mother did not enforce her orders. She did not try to stem the behaviour. She seemed to be uninvolved emotionally. In fact, she chatted with her other daughter and with us while this was going on, but without referring to the girl's actions, other than to say that she, herself, was a hairdresser but preferred not to cut the girl's hair herself as it was 'too much trouble.'

When I got out of the chair, mother directed little miss to climb in. Little miss refused and continued to look at the books and magazines. Mother then said that since the girl was not ready, they would leave. Little miss screamed, stamped and banged the books around. Her mother stood with the door open, saying that they were leaving, and went out. The girl stood in the doorway and screamed at the top of her lungs. Just a series of shrieks.

Perhaps the little girl was behaviourally challenged in some way; certainly her actions were far more characteristic of a two year old than of an average girl of her age. Her language level and ability to read would indicate, however, that she was of normal intelligence. That would not preclude ADD or autism spectrum disorders. Whatever, her mother was certainly not helping; she was confrontational, uncompromising and seeming uninvolved in and unembarrassed by her daughter's over the top display. If the girl was simply an uncontrolled average kid, her mother was totally at fault, in my estimation. In either case, I think she should have been taken out of the salon when she started to create and, certainly, have never been brought back for a second try.

I felt very sorry for both of them, but my heart really bled for little miss. Judging by the twenty minutes or so during which I watched the action, the girl did not know the boundaries of appropriate behaviour nor have any method of getting what she wanted other than disobedience and screaming. If she was a child with a disability she should not have been handled that way; if she was a normal child she had, very obviously, never been given rules or boundaries. And it seemed to me that her mother did not care.

Kids, I believe, need rules. Boundaries to their behaviours inside which they can feel safe. Techniques (good manners with strange adults, for one) that they can trust to work and to make them likeable. How to bargain for what they want badly. Structure. Support. This poor little kid did not seem to have any of these things. She was angry and, I think, frightened of her own anger. She was frustrated and had no way to express the frustration other than to scream.

There are a lot of children with behavioural problems who need skilled help. She may be one of them. In our province many of these children are presently waiting to be diagnosed at the request of teachers whose access to services is ludicrously small. Even when the children are diagnosed, ever growing numbers of them are on waiting lists because the service providers have no funds to hire staff to deal with them. There are caps in this year of economic downturn on a lot of the programs funded by the Ontario government through the Ministry of Health and Social Services; no money is available even for the programs that are up and running.

There are also a lot of average children whose behaviour is out of control because no one in their life has consistently tried to teach them how to act in a way that will bring them success. No one has helped them learn to govern their tempers, to share, to have patience, to get along with other people. No one has, if you will excuse the plain speaking, civilized them.

Both of these lacks are sickening, because it is the children who suffer in the long term, not the adults who fail to provide the help and support. I ended up wishing that someone would pour a pail of cold water over the head of little miss screamer. And that's horrible. Because I think every adult in the hair cutters' establishment was thinking much the same. While, in fact, she was suffering a lot more than we were, poor thing.

Till I can see so wide...

"You don't need to push me on the swing anymore Grama. I can get up by myself."

It took her a while to gather momentum, but up she went. By herself.

Spread your wings, little bird, and fly. Fly high.

Wordless Wednesday

October 31st, 1976 (approximately)

Not in the picture -- Little Stuff finding this photograph in an album in September.




October 21st, 2008

Not in the photo -- Grandpa with wires in the barn, bending and fastening.
Also not in the photo, Grama with old white sheets, paintbrush, glue, needle and thread, etc.

A few bricks short of a load.

Two blog posts came up on my 'following' list this afternoon that at first reading seemed very different. One is a heartfelt but semi tongue-in-cheek complaint by a mother about whining kids. The other is a sad and serious report by a daughter of her mother's misery and helplessness following a severe stroke. I thought about them most of the afternoon as I slogged along making a brick border around a flower bed. And the two voices met in my mind and became one voice, the voice of a woman trying her best for dependants under her care. I heard in that voice that the task of making those dependants happy is thankless, unending, almost impossible. Yet most of us, at some time in our lives, identify it as something that has to be done and that we have to do.

I've been there. Whining kids? For sure. As much as we try to laugh it off, that whine is something we have to deal with. I think that the whine is innate in small mammals; puppies for example, as well as human children. It's a sound that does not carry well, making it safer to use when there are predators around. It gets attention, that's for sure. Because it is innate, training the offspring out of it takes a lot of time and effort And telling the child to defer or change tone does not work because her woes are immediate and serious, trivial as they seem to adults. A small child lives in the moment and one Brussels sprout on the plate is an overwhelming tragedy.

Adults who have suffered damage to the brain, whether it comes through a stroke or dementia or trauma, returns to that same state where small things become mountains of misery and everything, once again, is immediate and tragic. Like the children, they have no sense of proportion. Like the children, they turn to what they see as a source of relief. But there is no relief and so the misery they feel gets directed onto the caregiver. I've also been such a caregiver, putting every skill and every effort into trying to alleviate that pain.

That pain is the pain of the caregiver as well as that of those in her care. When the child is tired and stressed by a big family party, removing the offending vegetable will not solve the problem. Something else will soon become a tragedy. All the patience and vigilance in the world will not prevent the next whine. Nor, when your loved one has suffered an irrevocable decline in health, can you restore the health and the adult competence that would allow the sufferer, and you, some peace of mind.

We all feel guilt over this. If I were only a better, more patient, mother/daughter/sister/wife, we say to ourselves. If I had more strength, if I didn't let it bother me. It's exhausting, this task of mothering, caring, tending. None of us can step back, either, and let it go, because they need us. They need us.

I've been in both these wonderful bloggers' shoes. If my experience is worth anything at all, it taught me that I didn't have to be perfect. It turned out that it was okay to be a good enough mother, a daughter who did her share but left some things for others to do. If I kept my own sense of proportion I could, and can, live with that and be at peace with myself.

I haven't said this as well as I had hoped to, but I am going to post it in the hopes that it is good enough.

And tomorrow I will go out and redo the bricks around the flower bed in a more frugal pattern because I ran out of bricks before I finished.

Career Choices

A few days ago I found myself answering a questionnaire that asked, essentially, 'why did you have children?' And I was brought up short, fingers poised, mouth falling open, because I could not come up with a cogent answer to this question. I am still thinking about it this morning. Why did I?

I had birth control. It was 1965 and, distrusting the then almost untried birth control pill, I was using a diaphram. A diaphram is not a method that is conducive to spontaneity, and one night I got involved and forgot to put it in. Result, the elder daughter. That's the simple answer.

That's not the whole answer, however. I was using birth control because my husband was in grad. school and we had decided to wait to have our family until he was finished. Jumping the gun like that was bad for me because it meant that I wouldn't stay in my teaching job long enough to get my permanent teaching certificate (it was simply assumed by the school board I worked for that if you got pregnant you resigned. Period.) After an initial reaction that could be described as mild annoyance, I felt pleased about oncoming parenthood. It was what I had signed up for, after all. You got married, you had a family, you acquired a house with a yard, your husband got a job that funded all of this. After the kid(s) had grown enough you might resume your job, perhaps part time, but it was a job and not a career. Your career choice was wife/mother. Being pregnant confirmed your status as a full adult.

I was not a baby lover. I had done the usual stint as a teenager of babysitting (and toddler and child sitting) and had been bored silly by the little darlings. I spent a few mornings looking after a breast fed baby about six months old and handled him with much the same nervous respect as I would have done a loaded gun. I had spent a weekend looking after a ten day old cousin and his three year old brother and did not remember that experience with fondness. When my mother and grandmother went gooey and cooey over a new baby, I would stand back and wonder what the fuss was about. Unless they were old enough to have a conversation with, kids were not my thing.

So why would I want to be saddled with my own? Good question. As I try to reconstruct that long ago self, the best answer that I can come up with is that I thought it was inevitable. My husband wanted children. Our parents expected grandchildren. My friends all planned to be parents. Society granted mothers a status that single women or childless married women lacked. For anyone who has grown up with the wider expectations and less homogenous society of the seventies and later, it must be very hard to realise just how rigid a social structure I had been raised in and how little I questioned it, even while I watched my mother and my aunts beating their wings against the bars of their respective cages. But that's another post.

In preparation for the arrival of the baby, we moved from our flat in the heart of a wonderful small town to a suburb where we could afford a house with a yard. I had no car and the bus service was poor. When elder daugher arrived, I did not feel the instant attachment that my reading had described. I was issued a fair skinned, diaper rash prone ectomorph who, born at 7 lb, 8 oz, weighed in at a month old at 8 lb. I had little to no knowledge about breast feeding and not much more about the sleep and wake patterns of newborns. I fretted and worried and wept. Fortunately, the ED was about as fragile as a faceted diamond and we both survived the newborn period. When she started to smile at me, I fell in love.

The one thing I was sure of was that I did not want my precious blossom to be an only child. And so, when she was five months old I weaned her to a bottle and got pregnant again on the first try.

Ten months later I found myself trapped in my suburb with two infants, one precociously mobile, and with access to a car only if I packed them both up early in the morning and drove my husband to his university. In the meantime husband had switched his sights from a Master's degree to a doctorate (with my encouragement, I should add, in fairness) and we were in for several more years of penniless grad student existence. The YD was even more precociously mobile, and my days were a blur of feeding, chasing and cleaning up after both hurtling toddlers and the dog we acquired to make the menage complete. My brain turned to mush and my marriage just about tanked.

And then, one wonderful day, I started to be able to have conversations with the terrible two. They grew fascinating personalities. They slept all night, every night. I have the most precious memories. Walking into the kitchen to find the ED spinning her sister in my big spaghetti kettle. 'What are you doing?' I said, bemusedly. 'I be cookin' Wen'y', the little person answered.

Every sleepless night, every miserable dragging day of post partum depression, every frantic search of my dog eared copy of Doctor Spock, all worth it. All repayed a million times, in the years since. I still regard other people's noisy infants with a somewhat wary eye. I still far prefer to deal with kids old enough to communicate, thank you. I've gone on to have not just one but several careers. If you ask me who I am, though, I would answer a wife/mother. Without regret.

If you were asked why you had children, if you wanted them, what would you answer? Would it be an easy answer, or a struggle like this one?

She's not Picasso, but...

Because I loved to paint and draw as a child, I hoped that my kids would develop a like interest. But once they got beyond the crayon on the wall stage, they just weren't into it. Sewing, yes and knitting (sporadically), but not paper and paint. At an age when I was making murals and decorations for school dances, they were playing in the band and doing sports. Like most toddlers, Little Stuff amused herself with washable markers and madly colourful squiggles but her brothers and, indeed, that whole side of the family is also musical and sports minded.

Imagine my delight, then, when in the last few months Little Stuff has exited the squiggles stage and has taken to drawing as one of her main interests. She still didn't have a lot of control of the pen this summer but in the last three months she has begun to draw what I think are very good 'pictures' (as she calls them) for her age, which is 4 1/2. Here is her latest attempt.



The story that goes with the drawing is also pretty clever. "The prince is very sad because he doesn't have a nice coloured stripy dress like the queen so he is crying," explained Little Stuff. "Look grama, I can draw mitts now. See the yellow spots -- that's the holes in her ears for her earrings." When I asked what the blue person was I got told off. "grAma! That's her CAT!" And so it is. Whiskers and all.

What's the good of a blog if you can't be a boastful grandmother from time to time. So here I am hugging myself and hoping she will stay interested so that in this family of musicians and jocks I will have one soul mate.

Hi, Me.

I'm answering five questions from Julie Pippert at Using Your Words. Here are questions four and five as she gave them to me.

4. What do you appreciate about your relationship with your children and what do you wish you could change?

5. If you were to mentor a young woman (say college age or thereabouts) in what area would you mentor her and how would you guide her.

These two questions tie themselves together in my mind, as my children are two daughters, now forty and forty one, so I sailed with them through that age range. 'How did you mother' and 'how would you mentor' are pretty close to the same question although mentoring young women not your daughters is in many ways easier than dealing with your own. (Speaking from experience, here.) They're less likely to think you know nothing, for instance.

The thing I appreciate is that I do have a relationship with my daughters, a good one. The phone rings and a voice says 'Hi, it's me'. Although they are not and do not look a bit alike, their voices are very similar on the phone and so my stock answer is 'Hi, me.' And we laugh. It's a ritual. They might be phoning with an invitation to dinner or lunch, with a request for babysitting or a mock plea for help ('I need to sort out my closet. Come and help me?') Or just to chat or to talk something over. They enjoy family meals chez parents on occasions like Thanksgiving, they come out from the city for a day to walk or cross country ski or help their father in the woodlots. And I haven't had an argument with either of them for a very long time. We laugh together when we are together.

I'm almost fatuously proud of both of them. They're clever, athletic and well spoken. They have amazing careers. They're funny and thoughtful and good citizens. 'A credit to you' would have been the comment in former generations. But they've really done it themselves, capitalized on their opportunities, worked hard and intelligently. If I could change anything it would be the old 'mother instinct' thing -- I wish they didn't have to work so hard to succeed, take crap from time to time, have problems. I would remove the pea from under the pile of mattresses, bumps from the road, stress from their lives. Except that they seem to thrive on stress. I well remember my mother carrying on about how hard I worked at that age, how much I had to do, and I remember thinking she was making far too much of it. So I keep my mouth shut (or try to), even when they are up to their asses in alligators.

My mothering when my daughters were small consisted mainly of supplying them with opportunities to learn, both about themselves and about the world around them, providing them with clean clothes and snacks, taking them to hospital when they broke something, and keeping an eye on them. When they turned into teenagers I continued to do these things, sat through their drivers' tests and restrained myself from screaming or laughing at inappropriate moments of teenaged angst. I also delivered occasional lectures which were received about as you would expect. Although the YD, in particular, used to turn up when she was in her twenties from time to time and say things like 'Remember when you told me drunken women were repulsive? Well, you were right!' Validation. Hah! I lost my temper with them about the usual number of times, threatened them with hanging by their thumbs from the clothesline more than I should have, and loved them. A lot.

As for mentoring -- I always felt that you do that along with the mothering. Life skills 101. I told the girls many times that they needed to learn a skill with which they could support themselves (boys are always told that, aren't they?) so that they never would need to batten on to some man to look after them. I would give a young woman the same advice today, but with a different emphasis. Too many young women (and young men) find themselves, after they graduate, locked into a job that demands a huge investment of hours and effort and erodes their private and family life. I hate it that young women seem to have to put off having children until they are established in their careers. To fix that we need to change the whole corporate ethic in the 'developed' world. But in the meantime, girls, in particular, need to develop a range of skills and interests so that they can look after themselves (and more easily juggle career and family) without getting locked into either a high pressure office or a series of low paying jobs.

I hate to see 'college age' girls so preoccupied with a boy friend that they neglect the benefits of things on campus such as late night bull sessions, cultural events, volunteering opportunities or sports. And they should run like a rabbit if the boy friends want them to curtail their educational choices and activities. I also hate the sexual flaunting and risky promiscuity that are not new (I went to University in the sixties!) but seem to be more widely publicized if not practiced. I still think drunks are disgusting. My major mentoring advice would have to be that a young woman not let herself get talked into doing anything she really isn't sure she wants to do, whether it is a course choice, sex or a stunt on a motorcycle. To learn her strengths and apply them. To stop worrying about things she doesn't do quite as well. And to expect to have to be flexible.

I'm presently reading a book of essays by Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson, where she writes in an essay called 'Somebody's Baby'

Who really understands what it takes to raise kids? That is, until after the diaper changes, the sibling rivalries, the stitches, the tantrums, the first day of school, the overpriced-sneakers standoff, the fist date, the safe-sex lecture, and the senior prom have all been negotiated and put away in the scrapbook?

She's right on, but what I would add to that is that the scrapbook only contains material pertinent to the kids you have raised; it doesn't make you an expert on child raising. The best I can say is that I had really good material to work on and that I didn't screw up.

Help for Broken Hearts

Please go to Mama Luxe's page for a happy story about her little girl and some information about heart defects and their repair.

I read a post about poop a couple of days ago. Mommy found her little guy waving his legs in the air, with his diaper off and a really big log of poop lying beside him. I *really* wish that I could remember where I read it. (Help, anyone?) I laughed so hard I cried. And half of what I was laughing at was a memory of my own experience with toddlers and turds.

My elder daughter wasn't easy to toilet train. We got the pee organized at about the average time, but she didn't seem to be able to grasp the concept of sitting on the pot until she pooped. She wasn't particularly regular, she didn't seem to have any feeling that it was about to happen, and there were lots more interesting things to do. The whole process became an issue. She wanted underpants thank you, no more diapers for her! Only, big girl pants do not catch poop. I was reduced to dressing the top of her and leaving pants, socks and shoes off until she did go. Then she had a hissy fit, we cleaned her up and she got dressed the rest of the way. Neither of us was too happy, to say the least.

One morning I was marking essays at the kitchen table, which had a small two piece lavatory off it. The girls were safely enthralled by Mr Dressup, and I was ripping apart some kid's take on King Lear (or whatever) when a small procession appeared in the kitchen doorway heading toward the toilet. At its head was the ED, carrying a large hard log of poop in her cupped hands. Behind her came the YD, toddling along with her big sister's pants held out in front of her. And last came the dog, sniffing hopefully, with tail wagging. The parade disappeared into the bathroom and sounds of splashing and flushing ensued.

I just sat there. Bemused. I might have said 'Remember to wash your hands' in a quavering voice. And then I lost it. I just sat and laughed. I don't think the underpants went down the toilet. That time. I hope they did wash their hands.

At the time it happened, I would not have told anyone the story. Bad Mothering! Unsanitary! And I haven't told the story.

Until now.

I love this place where you can talk and laugh about stuff like this. Over at BlogRhet, we're talking about empowerment. And for me, this is a part of it.

Parenting Styles

I read a post from The Process of Becoming Dr. Jenny G in which she discusses her way of parenting and comments she has had that imply she does 'too much' and is letting her relationship with her husband and her time for herself go while she baby tends (to excess). I did not think it appropriate to put this huge lump of discussion into her comments, so I'm posting what is, in effect, an answer to her question (Do you find my parenting style self-sacrificing to the point of bizarre?)

It's a subject that I've thought about a lot, both while I was baby wrangling and for many years afterward, observing my friends and my nieces and then my daughter deal with their babies. The thing about overdoing it is not confined to baby tending, either. When my mother was dying, demented and in pain, the kindly folk in the hospital placement department kept urging me to take a step back, to take time for myself, to remember that I had other family who needed me, yada yada. In a way it was my 'parenting' that they were critiquing, as my poor mother was about two years old mentally at that time. She needed to see me beside her so that she could feel safe and so I was sleeping on the floor beside her bed with a lamp shining on me. Pretty equivalent to co-sleeping and not letting them cry it out.

I was a pretty clueless mother with my firstborn. The only babies I had observed being brought up were my cousins and my mother and her sisters believed in doing it by the book and they advocated scheduled feeding right from the start -- in fact, scheduled everything right from the start, (this is still with us) and letting the baby cry it out in her crib so that she would learn to sleep alone. And I did do some of that, in spite of my gut feeling that it was not working. I remember pacing the floor with a yowling newborn, watching the clock. Luckily the Elder Daughter was a champion sleeper, going six or seven hours at night right from the first, or I would probably have gone right over the edge. Did it buy me time for myself? Not hardly.

When I had Younger Daughter fifteen months later, I had learned enough to grab on to a new program at the hospital called 'Rooming In' where you kept the baby with you instead of having her delivered from the nursery at four hour intervals. I got a baby sling and then a carrier and she went with me everywhere. She did not do naps, but she was also a champion night sleeper once I managed to persuade her that her long sleep should take place at night. I spent a lot of time nursing her with her sister sitting on my lap at the same time and being read to. It worked a lot better.

Parenting by the clock is not, I think, 'less work' that your way of doing things (babywear/breastfeed/co-sleep/comfort them when sick at night/nurse at night/play with them all day/ and so on). I can't imagine not listening for an infant to wake up. A toddler in a playpen, left to get on with amusing herself, can generate a deafening level of noise when she gets bored. A free range toddler is scary as hell -- when the noise stops, a sensible parent had better find out why. ('no, no, sweetie, do not chew on the light cord!) Easier to play with them. There is no way to get 'more time for yourself' in the first few years other than to leave the kid with someone else. Bless the man, but I would be astounded to learn that Rafael had ever tried these strategies you and he discussed. (letting them "learn to self-soothe" when they are sick or whatever and that I would, then, have more "time for myself" and the kids would still be fine.)

I did carve out time 'for myself'. Daddy babysat and I did course work at the neighbouring university. The ED, age 5 months, howled when I left for the first few lectures and sulked at me when I got back. She got over it. They both got deposited with grandparents and babysitters and friends so that their father and I could go out on a date. They slept in their cribs. If they were sick and miserable, I sat by the crib or rocked them in the nursery rocker. When they both took naps (non negotiable, although the YD had to be literally held in place until she conked out) I napped with them. I ran out of milk for the ED at the six month mark (feeding with solids by the clock does not help the milk supply) and so she and her bottles could be left with her aunt while Daddy and I went on a short holiday. And, as your husband says, they were fine.

I have gone into all this detail to demonstrate that I do not think the 'babywear etc.' parenting style is either 'too self sacrificing' or 'bizarre'. 'Bizarre' is crawling around on the floor after the kid, bowl and spoon in hand begging the little tyrant to have 'just one more bite'; bringing her toy after toy as she rejects the first few offered; refusing to let anyone else take over for a few hours because she may get upset; padding every hard surface in the house as she learns to walk. These kids are not 'fine', and when they are catered to like this they may become impossibly demanding as they get older.

My husband and I could have been called selfish about the way we dealt with our kids when they got older. We had a life style and their activities had to fit into it. Their lessons and clubs and activities had to be fit into the week because every weekend we left the city for a weekend (winterized) cabin 'in the bush', with no TV. They had a boat that we let them use themselves. They had several hundred acres on which to roam. Evenings were devoted to activities like books and board games and cooking experiments. Since they have grown up, they have said that they learned to value the two days of peace and family time. And I think they have turned out pretty well.

An Unjust World

This photo is titled 'People that Really Matter'. The shot comes from one of the aid programs for Aids Orphans, this one from Lesotho.

Under the Mad Hat and One Plus Two are doing a Just Post campaign to raise money for children like this. Lawyer Mama has put up a post about this to-day also.

Please drop over and read it -- it is most eloquent and says it all. I'm in and I hope you can be also.

Jen(Ponderosa)'s Monday Mission - verse or worse.

Oh it's Grama this and Grama that and Grama! Come and play!

We have the grandkid for a week -- her parents are away;
She likes to come and stay with us because she gets to play,
And look at all the birds and bugs and chipmunks eating bread,
And watch the squirrels and butterflies and squash mosquitoes dead.

Grama? Grama, Grama! Look at this!
I found a little turtle -- hear him hiss?
Grama? Grama, Grama! Here's a snail!
I'm gonna put him in the water pail.

There's a box with colour markers and some paper and some glue,
There's a bag of plastic dishes and some rubber froggies too.
There are china birds for let's pretend -- a good one and a bad.
And in the yard there's rocks and weeds and neat stuff to be had.

Grama? Grama, Grama! See me run!
Come on Grama! Run too. We'll have fun.

Grama? Come and play with me, make the birdies talk.
It's a sunny day outside, let's go for a walk.
There's a LOT of bugs out here, put my bug stuff on.
I saw a chipmunk over there, oh look, oh now he's gone.

Grandma, you look funny in that hat.
Grama, look, your tummy's kind of fat.
Grama? Grama, Grama! Where you're at?

The stars are twinkling overhead, (Grama, there's the moon!)
All the toys are put away. It will be bedtime soon.
Grama, read another book? Where's my bedtime snack?
It may seem like forever, but her parents will come back.....

It won't be long enough until her parents take her back.

Mummy? Mummy, Mummy! I had fun.

with apologies to Rudyard Kipling

Grandma is grossed out.

I bought my four year old blossom a Happy Meal the other day. Her mother lets her have one very infrequently for a treat and since I was babysitting, I thought I would indulge both of us. (I have a low taste for cheeseburgers -- tsk!)

This is what came out of the Happy Meal box. It has a battery. It cries and says 'TA TA'. The mind boggles.

Little Stuff loves it.

Lilac Watch

The lilac is now in full bloom. The purple ones are everywhere -- we passed two fields of them this afternoon. That's an unusual sight, as lilac usually only spreads by putting up suckers at the planting site in eastern Ontario, but in places where there is limestone close to the surface it really thrives and will spread. It was absolutely beautiful.

My white is a new plant from a very old stock, a bush planted somewhere around 1900. I have purple ones of the same vintage or even older, but the white I am nursing along, as I love this kind the most. Almost as much as the hybrid double purple which is really not hardy in Zone 4, but is doing its best.

The blackflies and mosquitoes are also in full presence, which is why Little Stuff is done up in netting. She is also glaring at a bee that was investigating the blossom nearest her. She does not like bugs. So her mother bought her this netting suit to make her stay with her grandparents a little easier.

She goes home tomorrow, to her 4th birthday party. I am slightly limp, but it's worth it. Only, what do you say when the kid comes up with "Grandma, how do you make water" as we are putting along in the fishing boat. I ducked. "Grandpa will know," said I.

Pants on Fire?

I have just read a really good op. ed. piece by a woman who writes for our local paper on raising kids which discusses, among other things, the lies we tell our kids. One thing I promised myself when I became a mother is that I would not tell my children 'white' lies, the untruths that adults supply to keep the little ones tranquil. This determination was sourced from an experience of my own childhood.

When I was eight, my grandfather, who shared a house with us and who was my best buddy, suffered a traumatic stroke. This was the 1940's, and so he was nursed at home. I vividly recall being taken in to see him in his bed, with his face all slack, and that he could not speak. I was there because I had demanded, insisted, nagged and whined to be allowed to see him. Within the next couple of days, he died. I was in bed but when I heard thumping and footsteps on the stairs leading to his upstairs apartment, I called out to my mother to ask what the noise was. She told me that Grandpa was worse and that he was being taken to hospital. The next morning my parents told me the truth. I still vividly recall the outrage I felt. I was convinced that I should have been there and that my mother had unjustly shut me out.

Believe me, I am not the most truthful of souls. Ask me how I like your new haircut or whether the colour of the house trim looks good with the brick and I will string you a line with the very best. If I'm late to a meeting or late with a report, I can (at my age!) come up with a fine and figmentary story. But to my daughters, if the dog had to be euthanized or their father hospitalized, I told the unvarnished truth. Last fall we had Little Stuff staying with us for a few days and one of the morons from the Hunt Camp next to us fired at a grouse from the road in front of our house. (Illegal in Ontario to shoot from the road, by the way.) I told her the truth, which was that the man had shot a bird. When she asked me why he had done that, I told her that he wanted to eat it. I was not sure that this was true, but the guys at the Hunt Camp eat what they shoot in the general way of things (and gift us with stuff like spiced bear sausage), so I thought that was justified.

Her three year old self took this very calmly. We had, in fact, had chicken for supper and she happily gnawed on a drumstick. The concept of bird as food was not a big issue. In my experience, children hear the truth with respect and process it better than the white lies told to protect them. If the cat is run over by a car and you tell a preschooler that it has gone away, I would just about bet that the kid will bring the matter up day after day after day -- 'is kitty back yet?' -- until you want to pound your head on the kitchen counter.

It's a big issue. It goes into a lot of areas where we all have our fortresses and out insecurities. ('What is truth? said jesting Pilate. And would not stay for an answer.) And I am pretty sure I would be lying if I said I had *never* told my children a lie. But I did try. And I still do.

Your haircut? It looks as if it would be really easy to take care of in hot weather. And the paint is truly dramatic with the brick.

Monday Mission

Jen at Under the Ponderosas has undertaken to set up the new round of Monday Missions. There are some challenges that are really hard to resist! This week's task is to write a post in the form of a weather report. I have modelled mine after the Environment Canada graphic.

And She's Mine

I read the lyrical descriptions in the mommy blogs about the things the little ones are doing and saying -- a garden of nna mmoy's 'Frances Fridays', for example or Under the Mad Hat's 'A Little Joy'. I smile and think 'Yeah, I remember that, that watching and recording with bemused delight.' But Younger Daughter came to stay with us overnight, and as the weekend wore on I realized that it never stops. I still watch her and delight in her, in the musical way she speaks, in the whirlwind she creates in my kitchen as she makes Sunday brunch, in the shine of sunlight on her hair, in her enthusiasm for life and adventure. I think it never stops, the wonder and pride and joy.

Not that the YD makes my life a bed of roses, or anything. She and a group of her friends went on a whitewater canoeing trip last month and she brought all the photos out to show me. It's one thing to see shots of her running rapids -- I know she's a strong swimmer and skilled paddler.


It's the waterfalls they were running that raised the hair on my head. What there is left of it. The YD is an adrenaline junkie; she has also enjoyed mountain climbing, rappelling out of a helicopter, bungee jumping and hiking in the African desert and has brought home photos and videos of every escapade for her parents to enjoy. When she decided to try parachuting, she took me along to photograph the event. And that's her leisure moments. Don't get me started on her job! Or the places she thinks make fine vacation destinations.


What is really odd is that I don't worry excessively about her physical safety. She was a sturdy, healthy child and has always shown both stamina and the ability to bounce back from reverses. She is, for all the wild things she does, knowlegeable and careful in planning, and she has the best equipment she can find. She's tough. And she's mine! And now that she's gone home, I guess I can go and put the kitchen in order.

Spongehead!

Does anyone else have the kind of absorbent mind that holds on to words and expressions and phrases like a sponge full of soap? I do crossword puzzles, and if I don't try to remember something, but just write what my mind turns up, I am frequently correct. (If I try to remember someone's name, a big white blank turns up, but that's another problem.) My mind is like my grandmother's button box; a huge jumble of things with no provenance. I can recite multiple verses of nursery rhymes I learned as a child, pop songs from when I was a teenager and jingles from products long vanished from the shelves.

Wow, I hear you say. How marvellous! Well, not entirely. You see I often do not remember where I got a particularly nice set of words. Dysfunctional associative memory. Up comes a lovely phrase, and if I don't watch it, I think it's mine. This is all by the way of prefacing an apology to Bub and Pie, whose caption for her link list I repeated with a small variation when I set up mine. The words I remembered were: 'Oh, the places I've been, oh, the people I've seen". I think it should be 'Oh, the places I go, Oh, the people I know.' From 'Winnie the Pooh'? Robert Louis Stevenson? Oh, rats! I have embarrassed myself far too often by failing to attribute something, or taking it as my own. Sorry, bubandpie!

And on the subject of memory -- little kids have a fantastic ability to remember something they've heard and come out with it, word perfect, on the worst possible occasion. Or they call you on something you said way back when and you think, "Whoa, you're only three years old, you're not supposed to remember that!" This is your kids. Your grandchildren have you on toast, because when they tell you that you promised them something, you can't remember whether you did say it or not, so you end up going along with it.

And Little Stuff also corrects me when I recite nursery rhymes that do not quite match the version in *her* book. She may have inherited my spongebrain, at that.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

Little Stuff, the grandaughter, brought her mother over this morning to build a snowman.

As the work of art grew, Mommy and I referred to it as a snowlady. 'No," says Little Stuff, "It is a snowman. It is also a lady." Grampa, on hearing this, cheered and mentioned how much he has mourned the passing of 'chairman'. Maybe when Little Stuff gets old enough to save the world, she'll rationalize the English language.