Umm...

Lots of things have happened, but I don't seem to have anything interesting to say about them.

My little brother got married. I will post pictures when I get my hands on some; we didn't bring our camera. The important point is that my little BROTHER got MARRIED. Dutch had a wonderful time, felt very, very important doing her flower-girling, and will be doing her weekly "sharing" at school tomorrow about her experience. At the end of the wedding evening, she sobbed (shortly after she told me, weeping a little into her salad plate, "I am falling APART!!!") "This was the best day of my WHOLE LIFE!"

I have joined the BTA and the PTA. I didn't think I'd ever join either of those organizations.

I have commuted about 50 miles by bike this month. My butt hurts less now, but jeez. I have a long commute.

I am currently uninsured (but only for nine more days). Don't hit me with your car, please.

Dutch has taken to throwing huge, horrible tantrums. I guess the school transition isn't going quite as smoothly as it seemed.

Skipper requests "soup" for all her meals, as of yesterday.

Our downstairs neighbors still hate us.

That's the news...

The little one.

Skipper is growing! I don't know how big she is, physically (though she still fits easily into 12-18-month-old clothing), but she is making big developmental jumps in language and emotional maturity, which is exciting. This is your un-edited report on what she's up to these days.

Last night she woke up at 2 AM and wanted to chat, and Cook heroically got up with her. She asked to use the potty, pooped, and then sat in her highchair and ate a rice cake. (I don't know what Cook was doing while she ate. Possibly napping on the floor.) She went back to sleep eventually, but she spent a lot of time talking happily to us while we tried to sleep.

She says some recognizable words now, and tells recognizable stories in words and sign (eg "Daddy. Bicycle. Bye-bye." or "Skipper. Eat. Cereal.").

She loves her menagerie of dolls and animals, and carries an armload of them around. She likes trucks and books. Especially books about trucks.

She's had three days at her fancy new daycare.* She cries at drop-off, but I can hear that's she's done crying before I leave the yard, and the teacher reports that she seems happy during the day.

These pictures were taken by the babysitter last week. I think they give you an idea of what Skipper's like right now.

*It's a Montessori daycare, and pretty hard-line on the whole Montessori cult/philosophy. I'll have more to say about that in the future. For now, imagine wood floors, wooden toys, three kids, a very young punk-styled teacher with an undergrad degree in wood-carving (plus a Montessori training certificate), gluten-free vegan meals, and kind of a lot of rules. It's both soothing and a little scary.

And that's all.

Now that I've posted two long posts whining about my issues with Dutch's school, I feel the need to say that the school seems perfectly fine, there seems to be quite a bit of parent engagement, and Dutch is very comfortable there already. Which is fantastic. Two thumbs up!

There's more.

So, my next problem with school: the food. Because we are relatively poor, Dutch gets school lunch at the reduced price of $.40, and breakfast for free. Because I'm lazy, and that's pretty freaking cheap, I'm inclined to have her eat school food every day. But... the food is kind of crap. Portland Public Schools is working REALLY hard to improve their food, but there's only so much you can do with a miniscule budget and limited kitchen capacity, so there's a lot of mystery meat and white processed starchy things. Dutch has eaten school lunch for both her lunches, and my impression is that she's one of only a handful of kids who do.* This doesn't bother her, and she likes the food.

We've also been browbeating her about what she eats. The kids are served an entree, and can choose between chocolate or regular milk and then select fruit and vegetable options from a salad bar. She has drunk chocolate milk two days in a row, despite having been told after day one that she could have it only once a week. She argued that the regular milk costs extra, which is not true, but she seemed to genuinely believe it. We've also been interrogating her about her fruit and veggie consumption - we want her to eat a fruit and a veggie. Day one, she ate strawberries and sugar snap peas (I told you they were working hard on their food!), but day two she ate a plum and fruit salad. Her ability to differentiate between fruits and vegetables is legitimately wobbly. We'll keep after her on that...

AND the teacher told her she couldn't bring her water bottle into the cafeteria, which I have to follow up on, if only to file a formal complaint at the district level. (I suspect it's USDA policy - at the kids' former daycare, no water could be served at the table at all, lest it undercut the dairy industry's stranglehold on kids who get USDA food. )

Anyway, I am very grateful for all the work of activist parents, administrators, teachers, and cafeteria staff across the nation and locally, because I know the lunch Dutch bellies up to every day is much, much better than it would have been ten years ago.

Lastly, Dutch informed us with wide eyes that the cafeteria workers are REALLY, REALLY OLD. "They're EVEN OLDER than you, mom!" Apparently the music teacher is also perilously close to the grave. I had no idea that the school staff was made up of nonagenarians.

*Washing me in a wave of insecurity - does it make me a terrible mommy that I'm too lazy and cheap to pack my child a lunch of homemade, nutritious, delicious food? Well, possibly. Also, now Dutch is in the habit of saying "goddamn" as in "Mom, I can't tie my goddamn shoes!" and that's definitely my fault, too.

So one of the many things that came home with Dutch this week was a blank report card basically showing what she is expected to learn during the year. She is one of the older kids in the class, she has had three years of high-quality preschool, and she has over-educated parents and an extended family that values education. So she can pretty much do all of the kindergarten stuff already, and could pick up the rest in a few days of one-on-one tutoring. So here's my concern, which is totally an upper-middle-class helicopter mommy concern: she's going to spend the year being really successful at everything they ask her to do. She's not going to learn about overcoming difficulties - she's going to learn that she gets approval by being good at stuff, not by getting better at stuff. I really want her to have a chance to be bad at something academic, and get better at it through work. I know she'll get a lot better at things like reading and writing over the year, but because she's already starting ahead of most of her classmates, she's just always going to be one of the best at doing most things.

So... I want her to have something to be bad at, and to be supported as she uses her mistakes to learn. I'm trying to figure out how to ask the teacher about this. "Excuse me? I know you have 29 kids in your class, and you have to get all of them to hit these standardized benchmarks, and you don't have enough time or resources to do even that, and you definitely don't get paid anywhere near enough, but hey, could you please figure out a way to also help my child learn to be happy and embrace challenges and not be a perfectionist, please?"

Anyway. As I was told by somebody to whom I expressed this concern, Dutch will have plenty of failures and challenges in school, in various forms.

12 years to go.

Dutch loves school. Her teacher is nice, the kids are nice (except The Annoying Kid), the food is good, she is proud of her reading/writing/shoe-tying skills, the bathroom stalls have doors on them,* and everything is just peachy. "Mom, I had a great day!" she said when I picked her up.

My thoughts on Dutch and school? I'll tell you later.


*Her daycare didn't have doors on the stalls, which was problematic for Dutch. After we visited the school on Tuesday, Dutch told me happily "Mom, I think I will be able to poop at school, because there are doors in the bathroom!"

personals for toddlers

SWF, aged 17 months, likes wearing hats, pinching her sister, creating artwork unfettered by tedious conventions, eating other people's food and not her own, and cuddling with Baby and Bubble and Bitey and Blabla and May, seeks friends who share these interests. No weirdos, please.

Here's your obligatory (but not very good) photo of Dutch almost ready for her first day of school.

Skipper woke up at 5, as usual, and as I escorted her into the living room, the light went on in Dutch's room. By 5:03, Dutch was in the kitchen, fully dressed, with her backpack. She spent the morning telling me how excited she was and how scared she was, complained of a stomach ache, cried, jumped around in excitement, etc. By 1 PM, she should be completely fried.

Growth

You guys! Dutch is starting school tomorrow! Her backpack is all ready, her clothes are set out... she met her teacher yesterday and got the thumbs up to wear her new, flashing shoes - I think we're ready.

Welcome!

Bikey

This year, I signed up for the Bike Commute Challenge, a free regional event which runs all September. It's free! There are prizes!

I'm completely on board with bike commuting, in theory. I actually used to commute by bike for part of the time we lived in Oakland. I think bikes are a fantastic form of transportation for trips under five miles long, and I think that cities that foster bike travel will thrive. However, I'm not interested in bikes, or in bike culture, at ALL. I care less about bike parts than I do about almost anything except car parts. I enjoy the good parts of biking, but I just don't really like it that much. I feel vulnerable when I bike, and I get pretty stressed out by conflicts with cars. One of the last straws for bike commuting, for me, was getting knocked off my bike by a bunch of children (8-11 years old, maybe) in the middle of the afternoon in Oakland.

But... I really, really need to get some exercise. There isn't really any good time in my life for exercise, and there's no money for it, either. Switching to bike commuting means I can build exercise into my daily life, and because my bike commute is, in theory, only a little more time-consuming than my bus commute, it makes sense. And starting this month, when there are free prizes, cool events, and generally more support, makes sense, too. My bike commute, in theory, is about 11.5 miles long (each way, thank you very much), and includes about 7 miles on a nice bike path that runs along an old trolley right-of-way. I have to go out of my way to use this path, but it's a huge part of my willingness to bike to work. I wouldn't do it if I had to use bike lanes on busy streets.

Also, it's my job to help people leave the car at home when the travel, and I felt that I needed to include bike commuting in my personal experience so I can be more persuasive about it.

So this morning I biked to work. Cook kindly dug my unused-for-7-years bike out of the basement, dusted it off, checked the brakes, and oiled the chain for me. I set off, leaving him to enjoy Labor Day all day at home with the girls. It was a beautiful morning, the streets were deserted (commuting on a holiday is an excellent idea), and it was fun to be back on a bike. My butt started hurting pretty soon after I set off, but I decided I could live with it.

But... there's a big repaving project going on on the bike trail. The detour is substantial, inconvenient, hilly, and car-trafficky. My commute took me an hour and a half, and my butt hurts a lot. As I was on the home stretch to work, the phone rang in my backpack. I stopped, got off the bike, got out the phone, and answered. "How did it go?" asked Cook, and I said grumpily "it's still GOING!"

I arrived at work sweaty, tired, and really hungry. I took the bus home. (I had planned on doing that, but it was clear when I got to work that I could not ride home, lest my butt be permanently damaged.) I'm going to sell my heavy bike, get a new (old) bike with a really comfortable seat, and kit it out with lights, fenders, and rack. I'm going to bike one leg of my commute every day I go in to the office (3 days a week) for a while, and maybe work up to biking both ways if I don't hate it. We'll see. I AM going to log 7 bike commute trips this month. I may need to stand up at the computer all day, though.