Chocolate Cake

If you have not heard the Bill Cosby bit about chocolate cake, this will not be nearly so funny.

On Friday night we made a chocolate cake.
On Saturday morning, hubby asked Wolf what he would like for breakfast. With a gleam in his eye, Wolf said "Chocolate cake?!"
Hubby looked at him sternly and said "only if you sing the song."
Well, apparently we have taught our son well, because he gleefully burst into song "Dad is great, gives us chocolate cake. Dad is great..."
Daddy danced around the kitchen a couple of times to the music before getting Wolf a nice piece of (unfrosted) chocolate cake for breakfast.


Sunday evening Wolf came up to me and said "I have a song for Bear...'mom is great, gives us miiiiilk, mom is great, gives us miiiiilk...'"

See, we're teaching our kids good things! :-)

Chester and the Prius

So, Chester died. Well, at least, he had a heart attack... Chester is our 10yr old toyota, and at 190,000 miles, he cracked a rod, and gave up the ghost. It was either a new engine or a new car...please understand that when I say 'new' I actually mean 'old-but-hopefully-slightly-less-old-than-Chester." There is no way we can afford a new car right now, and we prefer a somewhat used one anyway since cars depreciate so fast.
After exploring the options, we concluded that the $1645 for a heart transplant (ie--new engine) was the best option. After all, Chester is only 10, gets REALLY good gas mileage, and probably has a lot of life left in him...if only he can have a new heart. The shop guarantees that the new engine will have less than 30,000 miles on it, so that's practically brand new for us!

While we were out and about, looking at alternatives, we concluded that what we really want is a Toyota Prius. Yup, the hybrid. It is SO COOL!!! It gets, oh, about 60mpg. In town. (It's actually slightly lower on highway, since it has to rely on more gas for longer distances and higher speeds). We had drooled over hybrid cars before, but I think we've now made a concrete goal: next time Chester dies, we will buy a Prius.
Probably a used one of course.

The only thing better would be a true electric car, but after creating one, GM stupidly withdrew it...stupid stupid stupid. That company is working so hard to refuse to make the kind of vehicles that the public wants and that the environment needs. I hate stupid people.

Now I think I need to go put a load of cloth diapers into my energy-star washing machine and maybe I'll change another lightbulb to a compact flourescent, just for good measure. Somebody has to save the planet.

Three Meme

OK, so, I didn't actually get tagged for this...but I saw it here and I liked it. :-) Besides which, three is my favorite number (and hubby's also).

Three Things That Scare Me:
1. the local drivers (who believe that a yellow light means "hurry up" and a red one means "hurry up more")
2. someting happening to a member of my family and my not being able to help or do anything
3. the dark (yes, still, even as an adult)

Three People Who Make Me Laugh:
1. my hubby
2. my sister K
3. my dog (oh yes, she's a people--just ask her!!!)

Three Things I Love:
1. my family
2. sunrise
3. a job well done and a good day's work

Three Things I Hate:
1. Walmart
2. Vomit
3. Hate itself--c'mon people, spread a little love around!

Three Things I Don’t Understand:
1. eco-UNfriendly people--how can you not care?!
2. why I had to lose three babies before I got to keep one
3. W's logic...or his jokes ("what's so funny about a joke? A JOKE!!! hahahahaha!)

Three Things On My Desk:
1. computer
2. ledger book with our finances
3. empty cereal bowl (yup, I was naughty and ate breakfast at the desk while nursing the baby and reading my email)

Three Things I’m Doing Right Now:
1. nursing my baby
2. listening to birds outside--I love spring!
3. procrastinating doing the dishes (I'm nursing the baby!)

Three Things I Want To Do Before I Die:
1. visit Scandinavia
2. own/run a Bed & Breakfast with my hubby
3. take an Alaskan cruise

Three Things I Don't Ever Want To Do:
1. skydive
2. ski
3. lose another baby

Three Things I Can Do:
1. sew just about anything
2. bake bread
3. ballroom dance

Three Things I Can’t Do:
[yet]
1. manage to get all the different parts of dinner to finish cooking at the same time
2. keep my mouth shut about stuff that matters to me
3. give up my faith

Three Things I Think You Should Listen To:
1. a baby's laugh
2. children singing (like this)
3. good advice from people who love you

Three Things You Should Never Listen To:
1. a baby's cry--pick him up and nurse him already!
2. insults or put-downs
3. songs with naughty words

Three Things I’d Like To Learn:
1. crochet (and better knitting)
2. better piano skills
3. how to be more non-judgemental

Three Favorite Foods:
1. italian
2. chinese
3. anything I didn't have to cook (I like cooking, I just get tired of it)

Three Shows I Watched As A Kid:
1. Mr Rogers
2. Square One (with mathnet!)
3. 3-2-1 Contact
yes, we were a PBS-only family. :-)

Three Things I Regret:
1. not learning piano a little better (I'm a rapid one-finger player)
2. not keeping a tighter budget, and the fact that we have two credit cards
3. I really can't think of anything else. I try to think about most things beforehand...so I rarely regret things...

Three Bloggers I'm tagging:
1. Lollymom
2. Katie
3. Kim
and/or whoever wants to, of course!
(please post a link to your post in the comments section...)

Singin' in the Shower...

As I sit here typing, W is in the shower singing at the top of his lungs a patriotic song they sing at school "We're the hope of America, stand and shout for America..."
It reminded me of something...
Today I was helping out in his kindergarten class, where they have a little bathroom right in the corner of the classroom. (I figure it makes sense for the kindergartners to have a bathroom right there--some of them are still on the two-second-warning level of potty training, and wouldn't make it down the hall to the main student restrooms.) Anyway, we were working on a craft when I heard singing...I looked around the room and could not see W, and realized he was in the bathroom. At home he will often sit on the toilet for 15-20 minutes, singing as he does his thing...sometimes he gets so wrapped up in his singing he doesn't seem to notice that he's finished his business and so he just keeps sitting there...singing his heart out... Well, it seems that he sings in the bathroom at school too. I wonder if the teachers notice?!

Cloth Diapers

I just had to show off a little...both my baby and his diapers.

I made these in a similar pattern to ones I had seen, but the color combinations are all my own, so these are literally one-of-a-kind diapers. As W likes to remind us all "S, you have some of the cutest diapers in the whole world!)

And, for what it's worth, we have NEVER had a blow out with these. Slight moisture leaks at the legs, but never up the back or poop everywhere. Truly, a superior diaper!

My Hubby

[daddy with newborn S]

My husband is so cool. He thinks I'm so impressive, and he loves to tell people how neat I am. The other day he told me about how he was telling one of his co-workers about how I made cloth diapers for our baby, and that I got "like 5000 snaps for $8." Truthfully, it was more like 2000 snaps for $20, but it's so endearing that he makes me sound so good. :-) I figure I'm just a mommy trying to do what needs doing and otherwise keep her head above water...but every now and then my hubby tells me I'm amazing, and it sure feels nice. Every mommy needs a hubby like that.

Multi-tasking

My baby can sleep, and eat, and poop, all at the same time.

Aren't you impressed?

A Dog's Name

[Koira at 6 wks old, April 2006]

We have a dog named Koira. "Koy-ruh" is the Sami word for "dog," but some days I wonder if we should have chosen some other name for her.

We could have named her "Vacuum." If you doubt me, come over and watch her some time. She sits behind my chair at dinner, because she knows that with a baby in my lap, I tend to drop things. She also follows me around the house, because she knows that every so often the baby will spit up some mostly undigested milk, and she likes this. She seems so intent on licking up the spit-up that my darling husband has even been known to call her over for a clean-up job...and she delightedly obliges.

Or maybe we should have named her "Foot Warmer." Alright, I confess I taught her this one...whenever I sit on the couch, she comes and sits on my feet. She's warm and soft and very gentle, and makes a great foot warmer.

We could have named her "Psycho Energetic Ball of Love" because she barks her head off if someone comes near the house, but would never hurt a soul intentionally... She has so much energy that she tends to knock over children with her exuberance; yet she will jump to take a treat from my hand with such gentleness that I have never feared a bite.

We could have named her "Mudball" for her backyard antics, or "Beautiful Devoted Obedient Mutt" for the way she will lay in our bedroom doorway patiently waiting for us to come out and play, but will not come in because she knows she is not supposed to.

But I guess we did name her all these things. After all, isn't that what makes up a dog?!

Musings on Stick Shifts

This morning I was driving my van. As I prepared to pull out from the stop sign near my house, I reached for the gear shift, and had to stop myself as I remembered that the van has an automatic transition, not a manual one.
My parents' cars were always automatics. I learned to drive in one and in fact had no concept of even how a stick shift worked until I was 21 and buying my first car...and then the car I could afford was a 12 year old Honda Civic LX--a stick. I was petrified the first few times I drove it. I even considered putting a big sign in the back window that said "stick-shift student driver--STAY BACK!"
As a child, I didn't really even know what a stick shift was. I guess most kids don't. I remember a friend leaving her orange VW bus ("The Great Pumpkin") with us while she traveled abroad for some months. I was about 7 at the time, and I guess for some reason my mother needed to use the vehicle to go somewhere. She was nervous, because, while she understood how to drive the thing, she hadn't done it much. So she figured she should practice before going out on real roads. We had a 1/4 mile driveway, so she used this to practice...I remember sitting on the couch, watching her out the window, watching her drive back and forth and back and forth, and feeling confused about why she was trying to go as fast as she could. I remember her smiling and saying something about "got into third" so I guessed that was good. But I had no clue what it meant. Retrospectively, getting into third gear on 1/4 mile of gravel isn't too bad!
So I, She Who Drives An Automatic (and had done so for 5 years), graduated from college and got a stick-shift. Then I got engaged to a man who also drove a stick-shift. Then we got married and sold my car and we both drove the same stick-shift. After a mere two years we bought a mini-van which was not a stick-shift...and what do you know, I can't seem to drive the thing without reaching down to shift...

Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn

I've decided to share some books here on this blog. The first one I'm putting here is the one I'm reading currently for my AP Mamas book club.

“Unconditional parenting assumes that behaviors are just the outward expression of feelings and thoughts, needs and intentions. In a nutshell, it’s the child who engages in a behavior, not just the behavior itself, that matters. Children are not pets to be trained, nor are they computers, programmed to respond predictably to an input.”
In other words, the kid may not know why he does what he does, but that does not make his reasons invalid.

Did you think time out was a form of gentle discipline? I always did. After all, there’s no hitting involved; I always felt so pleased with myself when I was able to calmly, gently, take my son by the hand and lead him to the time out chair…no temper, no aggression…I was being gentle! Sure, but what is ‘time out’ time out from?? It’s time out from attention and affection—time out from LOVE. Depending on the child, that can be SO much more harsh than a spanking. I have often tried to have W help determine the consequence for a given behavior…I now understand why he was always quick to suggest a spanking, but really hated time-out. I always thought it had to do with having to sit still, but I realize now that it probably went much deeper than that. SO, I've decided to try something different...Instead of having him sit on a chair and then ignoring him for several minutes, I'm having him sit on a chair near where I'm working and then we take a few minutes to talk about the problem. I put him in the chair to help him stay focused on the conversation, but I don't withdraw anything. So far so good...we'll see how it goes in the longer run!

Kohn contends that the biggest problem with parenting in our society today is not permissiveness, but rather over-controlling...when a child is hyper-controlled, he tends to do one of two things: comply (often into learned helplessness), or defy... W is definitely in the latter category, and I can attest to the fact that additional attempts at control are NOT solving the problem...

Kohn suggests that we take a better look at our parenting strategies. After all, if the strategy is failing, isn't that an indication that the strategy is the problem, rather than the child? He gives ample scientific evidence to prove that punishment is not effective, and (via personal experience) I have to agree. It creates a 'might makes right' economy, which is certainly not something I want to teach my children. It also makes the parent-child relationship into a battlefield, and when someone wins, that means that someone else is losing...do you really want your child to be a loser all the time?!

The major shortfall of the book is that it doesn't give much in the way of advice or suggestions about ways to handle certain situations. Kohn does give some 'guiding principles' though, which are pretty good.
1--be reflective consider what you do and why. Realize what things and people have influanced you to parent the way you do, and then be willing to change if you should
2--reconsider your requests why are you telling the child to do this or that? Do they really need to, or are there alternatives?
3--keep your eye on long-term goals what kind of person do you want your child to grow up to be? Are you fostering those traits now?
4--put the relationship first make sure the kids always know they are loved
5--change how you see, not just how you act view things as problems to be solved (together) rather than as infractions of law
6--RESPECT teach by example--respect your kids: their needs, desires, and opinions.
7-be authentic kids can see right through you if you don't mean what you say and do
8--talk less, ask more
9--keep their ages in mind
10--"Attribute to children the best possible motive consistent with the facts"
11--don't stick your no's in unnecessarily the more they hear it, the less they will listen to it...save 'no' for when it's really important
12--don't be rigid foolish consistency is the halmark of ineffective parenting...don't hold onto a rule for stubborness' sake...make occasional exceptions or change rules as is practical
13--don't be in a hurry take the time to be together, and just enjoy your kids--they grow up fast!

A final suggestion: rather than criticising the child's action (because they will feel like you are criticising them) try to help them understand the effects of their action--other's feelings, objects damaged, etc. This helps them understand WHY the action was a problem, rather than just hearing 'no no no' and they are more likely to internalize it, and more likely to care. After all, you don't really want your children to be good because they are afraid of retribution if they are bad--you want them to be good because it's the right thing to do.


Now, I do not think this book is the be all and end all of good parenting advice...BUT, I do think there are some good, thought-provoking ideas here. It's certainly given me some things to mull over.