Fiscal responsibility

Dutch has been getting an allowance for about six months now. This takes some people aback - what on earth does a 3-year-old do with pocket money? (The answer: buy Hello Kitty band-aids.)

I can see arguments on both sides of the Allowance Debate. I have no idea what Dutch is learning from this experience, since she doesn't really grasp the concept yet, and seems to have a pigeon's understanding of working toward a future reward. So I don't think it's teaching her much, and certainly not fiscal responsibility or anything lofty like that.

I do like the allowance, though, for several reasons having to do with me. First of all, the rule is that she is responsible for all frivolity. Cook and I am allowed to buy her frivolous gifts at appropriate times, like birthdays, and we provide her with clothing and shelter and food and stuff, but if she wants a toy she knows she has to either buy it herself or heavily lobby a family member to give it to her at some appropriate time in the future. (She gets a luxurious two bucks a week for frivolity, and she has to split the remaining dollar between saving and sharing). This means that I cannot give in to my consumer urges and buy her things, which is excellent for our budget and my discipline. The second benefit is that when she says "I want that!" in the toy store, I can say "Okay. You can buy it with your own money." This completely throws her off track, every time, and she wanders meekly away, and only occasionally ends up buying the item in question.

So, as with so very many of my parenting decisions, the verdict is that it works for me, and doesn't seem to be hurting Dutch, so I'm going to keep on doing it. After all, somebody's got to keep the family supplied with Hello Kitty bandaids for the next decade or so.

Freud is in the house.

This week Dutch bit me. She's never done that before. She's never been a hitter/kicker/biter, but lately, in her insane fits of rage, she's been attempting violence. I say "attempting" because it's really not fully-realized violence. When she gets pissed off, she makes this horrible scrunched-up face and says "I'm going to HIT YOU!!!" and even sometimes kind of cocks her arm back, as if for a terrible killing blow. But you can almost hear the conflict in her brain:

Id: MAD!!!! SOOOOOOOO MAAAAAAAAD!!!!!! HATE MAMA!!!!!! HATE HER!!!!!
Super-Ego: It is Taboo. You cannot hit your mother, who is the Source of All. The fabric of the universe will be rent asunder, and we will fall into the abyss.
Ego: Also, you'll get a time-out.
Id: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! SHE STOPS ME FROM DOING WHAT I WANT!!!! MUST HIT HER!!!!!!!!
Super-Ego: Don't do it. Taboo.
Ego: Let's work out a compromise. Why don't you weakly slap your hand against her arm with approximately enough force to make a butterfly slightly dizzy? Oh, perfect. Darn it, you still got a time-out.

Cook and I both have a hard time not giggling when she does this. However, she did actually bite me fairly hard. Not enough to make a mark, but it shocked me, particularly since she'd been perfectly happy about twelve seconds before, AND she didn't threaten before striking. An alarming precedent! Id is taking control!

Public Parenting

I'm pretty sure I do my best parenting on the bus. There are two weird things about public transitting with a small kid. The first is that people violate the Invisible Transit Bubble much more frequently when a kid is involved. They smile at her and talk to her and sometimes touch her without asking permission. Last week Dutch was sitting down on a crowded bus (I was standing next to her), and the woman sitting next to her removed her headphones and put them on Dutch's head, without looking at me or saying anything. The Bubble-Violating Woman appeared to be a few spoons short of a set, but didn't seem at all threatening, so I just asked Dutch if she was okay, and put my head really close to check it wasn't really loud. I will never know what she was listening to. After a minute I asked Dutch if she was done, and she nodded politely, and we handed the earphones back to their owner and thanked her.

The second weird thing is that you have to parent in public. People are listening and watching. (Not that this bothers some people; I've seen some appallingly bad parenting on the bus, including smacking, verbal abuse, yelling, threatening physical abuse, and plugging-baby's-mouth-with-junkfood.) Today, during my first day at my new internship, a woman who looked vaguely familiar approached me and smiled. "I see you on the bus all the time," she said, and went on to tell me that she had gone home and TOLD HER HUSBAND about one Me-and-Dutch episode she witnessed (it wasn't even an interesting episode, which makes it even stranger). Because of this, I tend to be much more patient, and because Dutch has my full attention (a rare event) on the bus, she tends to be much more charming (with some glaring and memorable exceptions). People who ride the bus with us have a pretty skewed perspective on our relationship, and I am never ever telling the woman who now works down the hall from me that I am actually not always the patient wise parent she sees in action. Actually, I am only that parent on the bus. It's probably a good thing that Dutch and I spend at least 9 hours a week on the bus together...

Corps of Discovery

I expect you've all been waiting tensely for my next post! Really? You want to know what's going on? You need some kind of distraction from worrying about the decomposing chipmunk caught in the protective barricades around your garden?

Well... here it is! I went to Vancouver. I came home. We all worked. Dutch went to an acrobatics class for a week and looooooooved it.

The Big Cooks came to visit and swept us away on a luxurious vacation to Astoria and Tillamook. This is Dutch being a total brat on our first vacating day.













This is Dutch navigating a towboat at the Maritime Museum.















This is a scenic viewpoint.












The viewpoint included a canoe-based memorial for Comcomly (follow that link - he was a Chinook "power broker" in the early 19th century).














This is our hotel, which was built on a pier over the Columbia River. Dutch loved it - boats and birds...













This is some sort of weird dumbwaiter-y thing (probably for guns or bullets or scalps or something) at a decaying military installation at Fort Stevens, which is beautiful courtesy of nature and spooky courtesy of crumbling instruments of death.













Really beautiful; I suggest you visit it very soon. There are swallows nesting in the bunkers, and all kinds of natural gorgeousness everywhere you look.






























*

We thought a lot about Lewis and Clark, who spent a soggy and depressed winter here.

Anyway, then we came home. I quit my job. I am starting an internship in two days. It's scary quitting a job (poorly-paid and part-time, yes, but it has great benefits and it's a Real Job and I'm in charge of stuff) in order to take an internship (even more poorly-paid, with no benefits and no power), but I'm glad to be making the step. And hey! After all my whining and worrying, it all worked out!

In other news, Cook thinks he ran over a toad today while biking home from work. And in the last few days Dutch has announced that she doesn't "love mans, only womans" and that she wants to start wearing nailpolish.

*Note that Dutch has developed a fondness for dressing like a Mennonite on drugs. I'm worried she's going to start wanting her hair done in one of those cult-y poufs.

Food for thought

"If someone's dying and you have a dollar that could save them and you withhold it, you have killed them."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080623/nairn

A Dear John letter

Coffee, I'm quitting you. We've been together a long time, and it's been great. I really appreciate what you've done for me. I love how you smell, and I love you in the morning when you're mixed with sugar and dairy. I love sipping you while reading a book. I am grateful for all the good times we've had.

But coffee, it's time for our relationship to change. We can still get together sometimes, but our ongoing affair has got to end. You're part of a lifestyle that's just not healthy for me. Apparently, changing your habits gets easier once you've changed a few (making a habit of breaking your habits!), and I'm hoping that by quitting you, I'll pave the way for exercising more, sleeping more, worrying less, working less, and eventually becoming a much better person. It's not personal, and I hope you will forgive me. I look forward to meeting up occasionally, maybe at a coffeeshop now and again, or on visits to friends' homes. But I can't keep you in my daily life anymore. I love you, coffee, but it's time to say goodbye.

Life adjustments

So... I have all this free time! My days are pretty crazy full, somehow, but my evenings are so darn roomy!

However, there's all this crap to do. Like cleaning the badly begrimed apartment, which somehow doesn't seem like a high priority.* But tonight I had a chance to do the sort of tidying that I have been neglecting for months. I poured the cornmeal out of the leaky bag into a jar. I picked up a whole bunch of random bits of things from the floor. I found shelf space for some books. There's a LOT more to do. Big Cooks, if you're reading this, I apologize in advance for the drifts of dust-bunnies you'll see when you arrive...

*Compared to the extremely high priority of watching all these movies!

Not that tolerant after all

This morning Dutch announced she was cooking breakfast in her play kitchen, and Cook suggested that she cook us "carrot-and-mushroom melange."* (She has some wooden mushrooms and carrots that figure centrally in most of her cooking.) She said scornfully "no, that's a French word. I won't make THAT."

* He said it with an accent, but I don't know how to make my keyboard generate it...

My daughter is my pride

Today I took Dutch to the Pride parade downtown. My theory was that there are few events in the world more suited to the tastes of a three-year-old girl than a parade of people in fancy dresses. I was right, as it turned out, and she loved every single second of it except the Dykes on Bikes, who revved their engines and honked really loudly. The parade was verrrrrrrrrrrrrrry long. Dutch scored lots of candy thrown from the floats. Also a fake tattoo and several stickers. I got teary-eyed a few times - gay military veterans! Older people carrying signs that said "I love my gay son" and so on. The one that really got me was the woman with the sign that said on one side "I love my trans daughter" and on the other side "My daughter is my pride." The biggest cheers were for the gay mayor-to-be (who was also riding a horse-drawn stagecoach, which may have inflated his cheers) and for the gay law enforcement officers. Especially the tall blond All-American woman in some sort of law-enforcement-y outfit (maybe a park ranger or something?) walking with her blond All-American partner and their blond little All-American daughter.

I tried to explain a little bit to Dutch what the parade was all about, and ended up with a lame explanation that sometimes kids have two daddies or two mommies (this seemed like the most relevant line of explanation, but it was very lame). She dismissed this explanation as being Totally Old News, since she read a book at daycare about a kid who has two mommies (and two of her classmates have two mommies, anyway), and of course some people have two mommies or two daddies and really what is the big deal about this? And then she said "Mama, look, more fairies!" which totally cracked me up. They really were dressed like fairies, though.*

It was nice that the parade was so long, because it means that everybody wanted to be included. Every church in town was in the parade, and lots of corporations were represented - gay Nike and PGE employees. I have gathered from my skimming of local alternative weeklies that there is some discontent with the co-option of Pride by corporations and whatnot. Pride is mainstream.

Also, we ran into FOUR people we know. Portland often seems like a very small town where even hermits like us start running into acquaintances the moment we leave the house.

*I'm serious about this being the perfect event for three-year-old girls. There were pirates, fairies, queens, and princesses, plus dogs, children, and some marching bands. The only way it could have been better is if it were all contained in a giant pink cupcake with glitter on top.

A poem I really really wish I had recited yesterday evening.

"Tonight, tonight,
The pillow fight,
Tomorrow's the end of school.
Break the dishes, break the chairs,
Trip the teachers on the stairs.
No more pencils, no more books
No more teachers' nasty looks.
No more Latin, no more French,
No more sitting on a hard school bench.
No more homework, oh what cheer
No more school for the rest of the year!"

(Apparently a traditional sort of rhyme from the 1940s ish. Not to be recited in the post-Columbine era.)

Now I'm REALLY done with the term! I will not, however, be tripping any teachers on the stairs.

Faking it

If I were a real blogger, I would craft some kind of thoughtful essay on relationships in which to insert two NY Times articles - one about co-parenting, and one about same-sex couples. They made me think and reflect and stuff, but I'm in no mental shape to follow any thoughts to any sort of conclusion, so... draw your own. You're smart people with your own opinions (hopefully not involving wishing for the death of a whole bunch of people*). Enjoy.

*Today at the office we received a piece of mail calling us "Communist bastards"! This was not scary, like the mean ladies were, just kind of hilarious. Hee hee. I'm a pinko!

Mean ladies

The first person in the office always checks the voicemail. Usually, this isn't me, but today it was, and there were TEN messages on the voicemail, unusual for us.

Three of them were from the same phone number, and from two different women, one sounding fairly elderly, the other sounding younger, both of whom wished to express that they HATE people in Iran. HATE THEM. They think all Iranians are "stinky, rotten freaks" and should be "bombed to hell." Especially Iranian kids.

I found this deeply disturbing. I'm not surprised when people express prejudice or intolerance, or views with which I disagree. That's okay; people have the right to say what they want, even when I think it's stupid or hateful or just Wrong. But somehow, declaring that a whole countryful of people, of children, should be murdered, just seems... oh... kind of TOTALLY BEYOND THE PALE. I'm sorry, but my support for freedom of speech only goes so far.

The second woman wrapped up her message by saying "have a nice day!"

File under New, Small

She's here!*




*I realized after I posted this that it might look to the careless reader like I was announcing the birth of an unexpected sibling for Dutch. That is not the case. I haven't even met her yet. But just LOOK! Isn't she beautiful!?

Done, but not really

Done. Done with the presentations, the exams, the essays, the group projects*. Done with thinking! Done with classes that last till past my bedtime. Done for the summer!

Now that I'm done, I can... work! I've been taking vacation time to do school stuff, and generally not really attending to my job. Now I have to pay for it by working very hard on catching up. I do not feel like doing this. I feel like taking a nap. A long nap. Every day. I'd like a month-long vacation. Actually, I wouldn't much mind going in to work for three hours a day for a few weeks. That would be okay, and I'd feel like a contributing member of society. But really, more than that seems like too much to ask of my brain at the moment.

*Except one, which is due on Thursday. Whatever.

Other things that are really important to write about right now.

Also, the Spring Parade was rescheduled! Hooray!

I'm procrastinating, AGAIN. I hope my work for the first eight weeks of the quarter was respectable, because these last three weeks have been a showpiece of sloppy analysis, half-assed presentation, and "sufficing."

However, one of the many joys of procrastination is that it allows you to be aware of fun events going on around you, like Dutch in the bathtub pitching a fit because Cook threw away something that she felt was not trash! (He's pretty sure that it was a scrap of toilet paper from her butt, so the tantrum is even less rational than usual.)

Truth in advertising

Remember when I went to Pittsburgh? I went for a conference about the greening of healthcare, which meant that most of the people there were environmentalist/environmental health people. These are people who care about things like fragrances and organic snacks. Care DEEPLY. (I'm mocking us, I guess, but I think it's actually good to care about organic snacks. Please feel free to call me for more lecturing on this topic.) Apparently the conference organizers communicated to the hotel that it was important to this group that the food be as local/organic/fair-trade-y as possible, and the hotel understood some part of this. However, the part they understood was that people would complain if they thought the food wasn't right. So they put labels on everything to make us happy. The plate of pallid cantaloupe and pineapple was labeled "Shade-grown & Locally Grown Fruit," and the coffee was labeled "Free Range Coffee." The muffin basket was labeled "Assortment of Health-Oriented Muffins."

I'm not making this up. Apparently Pittsburgh is an amazing place, where melons ripen in the shade in May, and the coffee beans are free to roam with the antelopes.*

*Last week Dutch informed me that she had had animal crackers and cantaloupe for snack. Then she thought for a moment and asked "Mama... is cantaloupe a kind of animal?"

What I learned this weekend...

I spent the weekend in central Oregon, in the company of some lovely extended family, to celebrate the high-school graduation of my youngest cousin, The Napper.

Another cousin, Philosophy Boy, spent some time (late night, fueled by bourbon) dementedly raving about his hatred of "the umlauts in the New Yorker" which initially mystified me and Cook. But a quick visit with the internet revealed that the umlauts are in fact diareses. Yes, diareses. And further pursuit of the diaresis question uncovered a great webpage that seems to have been neglected for years, which is a tragedy.

I'm procrastinating. I appear to be completely burned out for the year, to the extent that I just can't be bothered to finish a paper that's due tomorrow. Or take a shower or do the other things I should do before going to work at 6:30 tomorrow morning. It just doesn't seem all that important, somehow. Unlike diareses. Now, those are important.

Anyway, thanks, family, for the weekend! Nice to meet you, RA! Thanks for taking care of us, Taekwando-Waterfall Uncle and Chipmunk-Nemesis Aunty! And, last and most important, congratulations, Napper! Excellent work in nailing down high school, and good luck with that whole rest-of-your-life thing!

Last weekend. The memories...

Dutch waiting patiently for the downstairs kids to come home:

The glass is half full, but I'm pretty sure it's going to spill.

I generally assume that bad things are going to happen. Whenever I get a cold, I think grimly of the epidemiology thriller books I've read (is that a genre? It should be) that begin with an unsuspecting victim getting sniffles and then dying in some horribly painful and gory fashion on page five. While I think of myself as being a fairly cheerful person in my daily life, I am also deeply cynical and pessimistic. I'm not as judgmental and bitchy as I was in my dark teenage years, but I have grave doubts about humanity.

Recently I semi-read a book about the author's experience as a child soldier. Now I'm reading a fiction book (which I recommend, by the way) that touches on some historical episodes of large-scale human cruelty. And, of course, I have in the last few years read (and forced some of you to read) some other books about the things people do to eachother that we'd like to pretend can never happen to us. Anyway, I've been thinking about how we DO think that Bad Things on a large scale will never happen to us. They happen to people who live in other countries, ones where people live in little houses made out of unfamiliar materials. The thing is, these books I've been reading suggest to me that the people in those other countries also don't think that Bad Things on a large scale are going to happen to them, either, in their little houses. We all feel safe, mostly. Except me, apparently.

I'm not actually feeling particularly grim, in case you're worrying. This sort of outlook on life does allow for a certain amount of useful perspective. So I can't find an internship, and I am breaking my child's heart by making her leave daycare early tomorrow, just in time to miss their big Spring Parade about which she was super-excited ... hey, at least nobody's trying to kill us!

Gravity strikes again!

Dutch fell off something at daycare today, and landed on her face. The teachers were totally traumatized, particularly since she prefaced the fall by yelling "Teacher, watch me do this trick!" so they were all watching when she plummeted to the ground and landed awkwardly on her head and neck. Dutch's beloved Teacher Alicia looked a bit ashen when she was telling me about it.

Dutch seems to be unharmed, in spite of looking like she went through a barbed-wire fence backward. I asked her about the incident, and she said jauntily "Yeah, that was a REALLY bad idea!" and explained that she had been trying to "stand on the bar and then drop back down... but it didn't work."

That's chocolate around her mouth, FYI. Let it never be said I don't know the basics of emergency medicine.

Condom, birth control pills, IUD, diaphragm...

This evening the two kids from downstairs came up to play with Dutch, and so did... the two kids from downstairs-and-across-the-hall! Phew. They were all perfectly nice (and they swept the living room floor!), but wow, that's a lot of kids in one small apartment. I'm really really really really grateful that I have access to decent birth control.

The best part, in my opinion, was when Boy #1 said "Let's watch a movie!" and Dutch said "Mama, can we watch a movie? Boy #1 wants to watch a movie!" and I said "No." and Boy #1 said "Why can't we watch a movie?" and Dutch said helpfully "Movies are something I can't have very often. They're not good for my brain."

I made her clean up her room after they left, because I'm mean like that, and she said indignantly "Why didn't they clean up after themselves?"

My little goody-goody. Maybe I should lighten up on the sanctimony. She's going to be stealing money out of my change jar* and running off to the bar across the street before I know it.

* Oh wait, she's already done that!