Earth Girls are Hungry

Dutch just informed me that her name is now "Setta Wooby" - a name which she explains means "tea" in the Kthill language. Also, she demands some ice cream. Take me to your leader, indeed.

Shivers of Excitement!

The New York Times is all free all the time again! No more evil Times Select! Yay!

More school

Also, my school approach is making me think a lot about school for Dutch. (Because EVERYTHING in my life comes back to Dutch. Phew.) The school system is geared toward encouraging students to do well at tests and turn in their homework, and succeed at school, and I don't think it's served me very well. I did well at school, but somehow never really figured out that doing well at school has nothing to do with doing well at life. I wish Dutch could learn that earlier than I did. Obviously it can't be learned by just being told - you pick up values like that from the environment around you. I absorbed the understanding that it was important to do well at school, and that if you succeed at school, future success will just unfurl from that.

This is what I want Dutch to absorb, magically, from the world around her:

School is a tool. Going to school teaches you some important logistical skills, like showing up on time, working with other people, and getting work done by deadlines. Going to school gives you the opportunity to identify what interests you. Going to school gives you the chance to move forward toward your future life of work.

I guess I should look seriously into alternative school options for this kid, since what I'm describing is starting to sound like one of those schools where kids don't learn to read until they decide they want to...

Also, on an unrelated note, this morning I overheard Dutch, engrossed in one of her complicated, mysterious narrative games, saying "and then I punched the wise man in the face..." - apparently they're starting preparing for Christmas early at her daycare.

School!

Two things about school:

1. It's HARD! So much work! And my classmates are so freaking smart. I have to fight the urge to compare myself with them. I try to remember that I'm doing this for myself, and it's my job to get out of this program what works for me. My approach to school has always been that I want to do well AT SCHOOL. I want to get As. Or Bs. (Because I'm lazy.) This is my first school experience where I'm thinking explicitly about the future. I want to get a good job with benefits and a 401(k), and I want to have it sitting in my lap by the time I get my degree. So it doesn't actually matter what grades I get, as long as they're good enough to stay in the program. I'm going to get a job by aggressively networking and by building a portfolio of interesting and practical class projects , not by getting an A. I should be looking at my classmates as resources - people whose intelligence and histories can help me move forward. Not as people whose test scores I need to beat. Which brings me to...

2. I get to converse! I talk to everybody! Apparently I racked up a huge conversational deficit while I was home with Dutch fulltime, because I've become a conversational whore. I will talk about anything with anybody, anytime. (Okay, not really. There was this guy on the bus yesterday who wanted to chat about his divorce, and I didn't talk to him. I have some limits.) It's fantastic. I don't expect to become best friends with anybody, but I'm loving the superficial chats. I came home last night supercharged on conversation (my extroversion showing through, I guess) and the heady thrill of spending time with lots of like-minded people. People who wish to debate the pros and cons of quantitative versus qualitative research! People who think it matters whether or not a community has sidewalks!

There are a few flies in my ointment, of course. The work looks to be pretty hard, and between school and job and family, I'm not predicting much free time in my future. (Though I'm finding time to write this...) Some of the work is going to be seriously boring. Also, yesterday I was forced to listen to a smug conversation that indicates the dark side of both 1 and 2. Two of my classmates were discussing their GRE scores (bear in mind that this program doesn't even require submission of GRE scores) ad nauseam while walking down the stairs after class. One of them was very disappointed in her math score (but of course did spectacularly well), and the other was very pleased with her overall scores and was condescendingly explaining that she did so well because of her choice of prep book. Agh. I fought back by rallying up my twin skills of Conversational Whoring and Being the Class Idiot and started up a loud conversation with another classmate about socks.

More Death

Tonight Dutch told me "I wish my parents would die so I could play by myself."

Extreme introversion? Deliberate provocation? Testing conversational boundaries? Testing our relationship? Failure to understand that wishing somebody dead isn't really very nice?

Too tired to reflect.

Totally Batshit Crazy

This morning, some time in the witching hours, I woke up to hear Dutch crying in her room. I went down the hall, and found her sitting up in bed wailing. I asked her what was wrong, and it quickly became apparent that she was in a state she occasionally reaches when she wakes up in the middle of the night - desperately, inexplicably, inconsolably upset. She was pretty hard to understand, what with all the bloody-murder screaming, but I did make out several things she was upset about. She had to pee, but refused to pee in the toilet, potty, or the training pants she was wearing. Her leg was angry at her (this freaked me out, since it rang some bells from the article I had recently read about Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, one aspect of which is that patients have adversarial relationships with their hands and will chew their fingers off or claw their own eye out). She couldn't lie down. She was SO tired. She wanted to be alone. She didn't want me to leave. She wanted to hug me. She didn't want me to hold her. She wanted to drink milk. She wanted to wear pants. She wanted to be naked.

I wanted her to be quiet so I could go back to sleep. I really really wanted that.

Nothing I did (including, to my shame, yelling at her) could console her. She was drooling, screaming, hitting at me, gasping, shoving her hands down her throat and gagging. She finally calmed down, after the episode had gone on about 10 minutes, and fairly quickly fell asleep. It felt like it just drew to a close by itself, but not through anything I did, though I did find that keeping up a stream of soothing talk (drawing from my experience with the self-hypnosis guy!) seemed to help. It was an unpleasant but kind of interesting window into the weirdness of the brain. I asked her about it this morning, after she woke up all cheerful and ready for the day, and she didn't want to talk about it, which I can understand. It's scary to meet your unfettered emotional wiring in the middle of the night.

The Ephemerality of Life, and Possessions.

Lately Dutch and I have been talking a bit about death, for various reasons. The other day she asked me "Mama, do girls ever die?" and I told her that kids do sometimes die. I can't bring myself to lie about this - it seems like too important a thing to lie about - but I can't imagine that she can really understand it, since I can't really get my own mind around it, so I should probably just have said "No." Anyway, I told her that people die when they get really old, or really hurt, or really sick. She processed that internally for a few hours, and as we were walking home from the park, she asked me "If I die, mama, what will you do with my room?"

I'm not sure why that emerged as an important Death Question, but I was surprised that she clearly understands that when you die, you're not around anymore. And your loved ones have to decide what to do with all your stuff.

I told her I didn't know what we'd do with her room, that we'd be so sad that we wouldn't know what to do. Then I told her it's our job as her parents to keep her safe and healthy. Then I pointed out a cat on the sidewalk, and successfully escaped the conversation, probably leaving all sorts of weird emotional/psychological scars. I prefer the questions about things like how many leaves are on a tree.

To add to the List of Phrases You Never Expected To Hear

At 4:15 AM, woken from a sound sleep, I heard this: "Mama, hey! Hey, mama! I put boogers and crusties in your hair! There's no trashcan in here, so I put boogers and crusties in your HAIR!!"

I forgave her only because I'd been worried 8 hours before that her appendix was about to rupture (damn you and your overload of information, internets!), so I was really just relieved that she was awake and cheerful, even at the expense of my hygiene. (I couldn't find any obvious boogers, in case you're concerned, but she did inform me that she put them DEEP in my hair.)

Company for Sunday Brunch

Phew

It's been a long week. Come Monday I will start working a lot more, as my boss is leaving on fairly short notice and I will have to do her job as well as an additional project we're just starting. And school starts. I have been lying awake the last few nights panicking about having made a Terrible Mistake. Spending all this money to work too hard seems like a bad idea. Yesterday and today I attended Orientation, which made me feel old and slow... my program seems to be full of young people with sharp wits, interesting jobs and interesting plans. The faculty and returning students hosting the Orientation reiterated with alarmingly frequency the theme that this program is REALLY HARD and we will have to work ALL THE TIME and if we want to do anything extracurricular like laundry we should DO IT NOW. This made me feel really tired. Also, I already have a homework assignment, though my first class is 4 days away, and I am already procrastinating it, which is possibly a bad precedent.

I had to work late last night, after a long day of orienting and working, and when I got home, just in time to put Dutch to bed late, she was wonderfully pleased with me - "I missed you mama! I like you, mama! I love you, mama! You're so nice, mama! You have nice eyes, mama!" - I expect that my increasing absence will mean more preschooler-style flattery, and also more withdrawing and punishment.

However. The weather is fantabulously lovely, which helps with my feelings about the change, and I am excited to be learning new stuff! I can't wait to open my mouldering brain and see what I can fit inside. I hope that I will be able to remember that it is a joy and a privilege to get to learn cool new things, even while I'm struggling/juggling through the term - I may need to be reminded.

Also, I'm a student again! I get to use the gym! I get to use the computers! I will have to get many thousands of dollars of use out of the experience, so I intend to drink from every campus water fountain, use every campus bathroom, swim in the pool every week, pick the brains of all the faculty and staff I can corner, order lots of interlibrary loan books, and so on.

Postscript Post

After I mentioned my fondness for nerdy reality tv, I got several recommendations, and the library had them all on hand. We're working our way through "Pioneer Quest" at the moment, and have "Colonial House" and "1900 House" piled up in the wings. Having watched half of "Pioneer Quest," in which 4 Canadians sign on to spend a year pioneering in Manitoba, I can't help but compare it to "Frontier House," in which a larger group of Americans spend 4 months pioneering in Montana. Based on this scientific comparison, I've concluded that Canadians are both tougher and nicer than Americans.

However, none of them had it that bad - I haven't seen anybody find a rat in the outhouse yet.

And I Thought It Was An Urban Myth.

Tonight Cook came out of the hall, his face alight with slightly hysterical amusement, and reported that he had just found a rat in our toilet. Really. We flushed it, after consulting the wisdom of the internets, and it went down with only minimal panicky scrabbling. I will never ever again use the toilet in the middle of the night without turning the lights on first. Cook's greatest regret is that we failed to take a picture.

Keep your lids down, folks.

Virtual Navel-Gazing

There are good things about not having Selfish Time. Having a kid can be helpful in providing a central theme for your life. I do a lot of narcissistic navel-gazing, but much less than I used to. I don't have to cast around much for A Reason For It All. Dutch makes it much simpler. I am deathly afraid of flying (afraid of dying while flying, actually), but when I fly with Dutch I am making sure she's all set, so I don't get to worry so much. (Though now that she's so much more self-sufficient, I can worry more. Thank goodness.) Now she keeps me so busy answering her questions ("is a toad a kind of a turtle?") that I don't get a chance to gaze at my midsection (speculating about where, exactly, my navel has gone). When I do, I know that there is at least one reason for my life.

This is dangerous, though, because it can also lead to the Smug Mommy Syndrome, in which the Mommy uses the kid to make herself feel good about her life. The kid is both the most difficult child in the world, and the most wonderful, and oh yes, parenting is SO hard and also SO rewarding, and if you don't have a child, you couldn't possibly understand the amazingness of parenting, and if you DO have a child, your child and your parenting skills are deeply inferior to hers.

Anyway, I guess my point is that while my life has reorganized itself around Dutch, reducing the need for existential angst, I still need to find other themes.

Meanwhile, I have finally learned what it means when you poke somebody on Facebook.

Digging in My Heels

Next week I will be attending orientation for school. The following week, I will start classes AND simultaneously start working substantially more hours at work. I'm feeling pretty overwhelmed; the increased income will be very welcome, but things will be enormously more hectic. I used to handle busy-ness pretty well, but I haven't really been busy since Dutch has been around, and I'm having a hard time imagining how busy my life is going to be. The biggest effect parenting has had on my day-to-day life, as I've mentioned before (frequently!), is that I get a lot less Selfish Time. Days when I feel really worn out, I can't be surly and lazy and fall on the couch with a trashy book and a dinner of crackers-and-cheese. I still have to be reasonably reasonable, and make sure that Dutch eats a reasonably decent meal, gets a reasonable amount of family attention, gets reasonably clean and goes to bed at a reasonable hour.

Soon we will begin the first week of what I anticipate will be several years of coming home feeling really worn out, and every evening I will still have to be reasonable. For the moment, I'm chalking it all up as character-building.

Communicado

We just got our first cellphone. We have mixed feelings. Dutch is excited - she loves cellphones. Cook is sad. I decided to get it because I wanted to be available to the daycare, and I've had several moments in the last year when I wished I had a phone. We got a prepaid package that gives us 1000 minutes for a year, which should be more than sufficient for our needs.

I don't like cellphones. I certainly see their utility, and I wouldn't mind if they were used just for emergencies, or even for briefly calling a friend to let her know you're running exceptionally late for a date. But I hate how people use them to insulate themselves from the world. I think people should interact with the world around them, not just with the people they choose to talk to on the phone. I also hate how they have affected socializing. It seems to be increasingly difficult to make concrete plans with people - they just say "I'll give you a call when I'm done with (grocery shopping, work, the gym, whatever), and then we'll figure something out." - I'd much rather just say "let's meet at 3."

But, then, I'm kind of misanthropic. Also hypocritical, which makes me worry that I'm going to become a cellphonophile. Cook took his first look at the phone and said darkly "this is the slippery slope..." - to what, I'm not entirely sure, but I'm sure it's a bad place.

No, you can't have my cellphone number.

My Plummeting Household Prestige

I made the mistake of cutting Dutch's hair again tonight. I've gotten the haircutting bug with my own hair pretty often (and yes, I do always cut my hair when I'm feeling out of control), often to disastrous effect, but this is the first time Dutch has been victimized.
Cook declared the final product "awful." I maintain that it is is simultaneously adorably elfin and whimsically punk, but he's just appalled. Also, I taught Dutch her first knock-knock joke tonight, so I'm in the doghouse. Not the dollhouse, which is too bad, because there are some fantastic parties going on in the dollhouse these days.

I'm so proud of both of us.

1. Today Dutch spontaneously (and correctly) used the word "residue" in conversation.
2. Yesterday I cut Dutch's hair, and I did a reasonably decent job. Her hair, like mine, is fine but gnarly, and it turns into a ball of tangled fluff about 12 seconds after brushing. She won't let me do anything to restrain it (a few days of ponytails aside), and rarely lets me brush it. I told her we'd have to cut it if she wouldn't let me tame it, and she enthusiastically embraced the idea - "I want short hair like R and Q and J!!!" she said, bouncing with excitement. R and Q and J are boys in her daycare, all of whom have hair less than an inch long. I'm not ready to go quite that butch, personally, but something clearly has to be done. I started with the back. We'll see where that leads us. Cook is resisting the idea of an all-over short cut, but I'm not sure if he's clinging to gender rules or if he's just afraid that my barbering may render her completely ridiculous.

Weirdo

We went to the zoo today. School has started for lots of kids, so the crowds were down, and the Busyness Quotient in our household will be skyrocketing in a few weeks, so we figured we should get to the zoo now, while the getting is good. It was good. We were there for hours, and there were no tantrums, no whining, and no crying (except after the incident in which Dutch somehow managed, while sitting on a toilet seat, to pee on my shoe), and for some reason lots of the animals were out and about. Cook and I got pretty depressed watching the animals do their psycho repetitive pacing, and I got angry at the parents who let their kids scream and bang on the glass and otherwise terrorize the beasts. That was normal, though - neither of us are very comfortable with zoos. We were fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of some sort of punked-out monkey with a very new baby, which she was diligently sheltering from observers. We also saw my beloved orangutans, and the stinky but amazing naked mole rats. Dutch amused bystanders by announcing that there were "canteloupes" in with the zebras.

Anyway, it was cool. Every morning, Dutch asks if it's a "daycare day" or a "family day" and today was an excellent family day.

Privileged Pastry

Agonizing over the state of daycare in general and our daycare in particular has reminded me of something I read somewhere (probably something written by the schmaltzy but sincere Jonathan Kozol), which pointed out the obvious and appalling fact that rich white kids go to excellent schools and poor black kids go to bad schools. Which I knew. But then the essay (which really must have been by Kozol) went on to point out that the academic success of the rich white kids actually requires the academic failure of the poor black kids, when it come to national tests like the SATs - somebody has to have low scores, or the kids with the high scores won't stand out. If all schools served all students equally well, it would be MUCH harder to achieve academic superiority. This applies generally to pretty much everything. There is only so much pie, and somebody has to get a very small piece in order for me to get a big piece.

I have been given very big pieces of everything. I've always recognized that I'm very fortunate to have been born into my life. But reading that made me realize that not only was I fortunate, and other people not so fortunate (a perception that put no onus on me), but that my good fortune DEPENDED on the misfortune of others. This shift in perception meant that I have a responsibility to the world to at least try very hard to equalize some kind of pie. I haven't even come close to meeting that responsibility.

Today, when Dutch and I were walking home from the bus stop, a homeless woman asked me for money, and I refused her. Dutch asked me why she needed money, and I said I didn't know. Dutch asked me why I didn't give her any money, and I said because we didn't have any to spare. But that's flagrantly untrue. We may be unable to afford super-swanky daycare and expensive new shoes, but we have much more money than she does. So do I tell Dutch that I'm not giving this woman money because I really need the money to spend on heirloom tomatoes? Dutch is boggled by the notion that some people don't have homes. She can't figure out how that's possible. I tell her I have no idea.

Iraq Names Project

This project passed through our neighborhood this week, and it was pretty powerful. The artist is chalking the names (in a very, very, very, very long line) of all the coalition dead since the beginning of the Iraq invasion. The names are big and painstakingly chalked, and it's pretty grim to ride the bus past blocks and blocks of names representing just a week or two of death.

Farm Bill!

So... the Farm Bill! Call your senator! You can read a bit about it here (and read a public health-oriented explanation here) and you can take easy email action here (though I personally added some extras about subsidies and corn) and somewhat less easy action here. The Farm Bill is a HUUUUUUGE bill chockfull of pork (for my grandmother, who hates pork, I include this link - just click on it, Farmor) that benefits agribusiness and subsidizes junkfood, while ignoring or giving short shrift to small family farms, sustainable farms, local food systems, farmers markets, farm-to-school programs, and foodshed-building efforts. It impacts all of us, and everybody should do something about it in the next week or two, as the Senate considers it. If you don't feel like contacting your senator or writing a letter to the editor, you should go to the farmers market nearest you, and buy something. I hear the tomatoes are lovely.

The Least Adoptable Puppy

In the middle of a tearful conversation about daycare last night (will I EVER be at peace with this?), I articulated something that I've been trying to work out for a while. Dutch, my lovely, bright, funny, thoughtful, whimsical, goofy child, isn't very charming. In an environment where she feels safe, with relatives or close friends, she's silly and loud and attention-demanding like most any kid, but in an environment like daycare, or the picnic we attended yesterday, where there's a lot going on or a lot of people she doesn't know, she is quiet and watchful. When things go wrong, she whines and cries and refuses to explain why she's crying or what she needs.

In my childcare experience, the rowdy (extroverted!) kids usually absorbed the constant attention of the teachers. They need to be calmed and disciplined when they're being crazy, and then they're often the most charming of kids when they're not being crazy - they hug you and smile at you and generally work diligently to secure your attention and affection, and it works beautifully. It's also simple - you know what you have to do to solve the issues that come up around these kids, and they make it very straightforward to have a relationship with them. A kid like Dutch, who doesn't overflow with smiles and laughter and general flirting, isn't as simple, or anywhere near as engaging. She's easy to ignore when she's being "good" because she's quiet (and you're busy trying to keep the rowdy kids from tearing the place apart), and when she falls apart, there's no simple solution - giving her a timeout or yelling at her doesn't resolve anything at all.

I can see that the emotional and social signals she gives off are not attractive. When I go to pick her up at daycare, the playground is teeming with gorgeous kids who smile at me and wave and shout "Hi!" or even "Hello, Dutch's Mommy!" and then there's Dutch, usually off in a corner doing something by herself or with one or two other kids, never in the thick of things. She usually doesn't even say hello - every once in a while Cook or I get a greeting hug, but usually she just looks at us and starts telling us something, without much expression of enthusiasm. We love her like crazy, but I have to admit that if I was shopping for a kid, she'd probably not be the one I'd pick from the playground. If I were her teacher and not her parent, she wouldn't be my favorite (that would be the Incredibly Adorable Q, who dashes joyfully into the classroom every day and jumps on the beanbag - he's Dutch's favorite, too, even after the biting incident - she calls him "My Q" and apparently cries when he leaves for the day).

So the daycare problem - her teachers (like me, during my childcare work experience) are not trained or temperamentally equipped to deal with reserved whiny kids. They seem to be very good at dealing with the charming loud kids.

Ugh. It's time for me to stop analyzing this to death (and whining about it!) and start actually doing something about it, which requires me to be aggressive and confront people, something about which I'm horribly cowardly.

I feel the need to add, in the hopes that you all won't think I'm a dreadful parent, that we could never communicate to Dutch that she's not charming. She actually charms us like crazy, but of course we're extra-susceptible. I think it's an important part of parenting to try to step back and see your child as the world sees her and as she sees her place in the world. If you think she's perfect, you'll never see potential and actual problems that you could help her get through. I mean, of course Dutch IS perfect, but the world isn't perfect for her.

Introverts Need Hideouts

Okay, EVERYBODY needs hideouts.

Balancing out the Dollhouse

Reality Dork, But Not a Scullery Maid

Cook and I have been watching (I love you, Multnomah County Library system!) "Manor House" which is a reality TV show for nerdy people. They set up an Edwardian household (circa 1905) and made the participants obey the social rules of the time. I LOVE nerd reality TV - I loved "Frontier House" and have plans to get my hands on "1900 House" one of these days. I'm not sure if this is linked to my fondness for bodice-rippers, or just to my general love of escapism. As long as I'm not the one washing dishes 18 hours a day.