Who Said Parenting Was Easy, Either?

I am just getting slammed no matter which way I turn, I tell ya. Sheesh. Can't a woman watch a news clip without getting into a discussion of death by car accident with the almost-six-year-old? Damn those headline writers for catching my eye in the first place with their highlights from the VP debate, anyway. I cancelled TV last week and so only listened to the debate on NPR. I was curious to see how the performers looked onscreen. Is that such a crime?? And why, oh why, do I have to have such a sensitive and astute observer for a child? (Those who know me, stop laughing and SHUT UP.) Beautiful little darling, that child of mine. So you might have guessed by now that Galen picked up on the story of Biden's immense loss of wife and baby 36 years ago. Sitting on the bed holding his eyes as wide as he can to keep the tears from spilling, what can I say to make him feel better? I can't make it go away, I can't make the world devoid of tragedy, and he knows I can't. We are up against something intractable and infinitely sad. He cannot sleep now. We talk for an hour about how much safer cars are now, and how people used to not wear seat belts all the time and didn't have to use car seats, even though I know nothing of the details of Biden's wife's accident and even though I know people still die daily in accidents with seat belts fastened and air bags deployed. I will not mention this. I describe all the wrecks I've been in (I think seven at last count) and how in some the car was severely damaged but I was always okay. It's not enough, but it's all I've got. I can't explain statistics (he's too young) and unfortunately or not I can't quite lie, so I feel pretty awkward and dreadful. He is worried, and I begin to think that every lousy borderline syndrome I have is genetic-- and dominant. He seems to have inherited every mental, emotional, or psychological issue I have. He can't stop talking. We take breaks, switching to silly email pictures and Disney ads of all things, but we keep going back to facing the risk of death. He tells me he has to worry because he loves me and he loves the whole family. I need to cry too. I resort in the end to my own mother's tried-and-true: a promise of shopping tomorrow. It seems to distract him, but then Daddy comes in to go to bed and I am asked to tell it all to Daddy and so it starts over. Finally we simply insist he stop talking so he can go to sleep before it's already tomorrow. Now I sit here wondering if I did a good enough job: should I have reassured him more, should I have said something else? Am I failing him in his spiritual upbringing? Does he need more structure, more ritual, more (some) Sunday school, more faith? Is he going to be ok?? I have no way of knowing. All I can do is cross my fingers, hold my breath, and wait to see how melancholy he turns out to be. Nooooo, that's not nerve-wracking at all...

Mom Held Hostage by Birthday Plans

I do this to myself. This is my choice. I do this to myself. This is my choice. I do this to myself. This is my choice...

Saturday Iris will be one whole year old! (Do you hear the same whooshing sound I do??) Tomorrow is her party, and I have been cracking the whip on myself and Brad all week. I started last Sunday and it still won't be enough time to finish all I want to finish, but it has been a good week so far nonetheless. I love to use hosting as an excuse to fix things up. When I'm really on my game I do a great job and then get to enjoy it after the guests go home (and, I do enjoy throwing a good party, too). So far this week we have:

cleaned out the junk room completely
cleaned the office
caught up on six months' worth of filing
cleaned the bathroom
washed, dried, and put away four loads of laundry
cleaned the bedroom
painted the remainder of the upper cabinets in the kitchen
started painting the lower cabinets
bought a new mower
mowed the grass
cleaned up the entire yard (trash, empty buckets, compost, gardening implements...)
kept up with ordinary house and garden maintenance
cleaned up after the puppy (grr)
took recycling and donations, went to the bank and grocery store

and Galen even had a playdate! Now we just have to kill one chicken, clean off the front porch, finish painting the lower cabinets in the kitchen, make the cupcakes and the icing, clean the kitchen, mop, and straighten, and we'll be ready enough for tomorrow. HA!

To Build A Dragon

So far today (by 2 pm) Galen has had three chocolate-covered ice cream cones and Chef Boyardee dinosaur-shaped Spaghettios. That is all. Guess I won't be winning any best nutrition awards today.

There is a theory widely promoted among the "crunchy" crowd that watching television inhibits creativity in children, and that given the opportunity, kids will consume the "TV drug" all day without ceasing. I have seen friends of my son behave in this way. At our house, the only restrictions on television stem from the natural limit of having to share it with everyone else in the house (we only have one). To honor my own environmental ethics, I do encourage turning it off when no one is actually watching it to conserve energy (and I always explain this as I do it, and ask first, showing my son the same respect I would show anyone else). The friends who turn into screen zombies have been only those with limits on their TV consumption at home. To take this "zombie effect" as evidence to support the need for limits without considering that it might be the limits causing the zombie effect is to commit an experimental error. There be bias in that there data!

The TV has been on all day here. We have watched or listened to "Back at the Barnyard" (which I hate-- what idiot put an udder on a bull?), "SpongeBob," "Max and Ruby," "Fairly OddParents," and "Pink Panther" (one of my favorites, gotta love the Boomerang channel!). During all this, Galen has mopped the kitchen floor (yes, really, and yes, by his own insistence-- "I want it to SPARKLE!" he said, and yes, it's extremely clean), gone to the mailbox with me (about ten minutes round trip, down and back up a very steep hill), and rediscovered his abacus, on which he designed a dragon, figuring how to arrange the beads to make feet, legs, wings, body, neck, head. My little engineer. Now, he's playing with Hot Wheels and an old motorcycle that turns into a helicopter (it was my brother's when we were little). He is directly in front of the TV, and is not looking at it at all. He has told me all about a movie he imagined about a dragon egg being found by a Viking, who helps it to hatch, then it grows into a grown-up dragon... there are two leaders, a good guy and a bad guy, both Vikings, both with dragons. The good Viking had an ax, which he lost, but the dragon and Viking together find a dead Viking (eek!) and get the dead Viking's ax, and go on with their adventures, finding chess pieces and crystals, and at the end there is a big battle and the good guys win, "'cause the good guys always win," he tells me in that tone that says "Duh, Mom!"

Now if you'll excuse me, Popeye is on...

Must. Remain. Sane.

Just in case anyone was wondering, it takes a ten-month-old under five minutes to completely empty 50+ CD's from a shelving unit. But they're so shiny!

The thing about babies is that they are so darned cute when they are in the midst of total destruction. Five-year-olds, not so much. Today we instigated a pay-per-offense regime in an effort to curb the few supremely irritating habits Galen has that are constantly occurring. How very NOT unschooly of us, you might say. And verily would I reply, you're darn tootin' it ain't, and it's working so far, and thank God because otherwise I was soon to have to call DFACS on myself. (Not really, but I have been well beyond perturbed for way too long.) It may be argued with great validity that I need to work on my issues behind having such a short fuse; it may be argued that medication for me would be better than violating the unschooling principles for him, breasfeeding baby notwithstanding. But, I have decided and therefore decreed, that unschooling in this house does not mean that I am a doormat to my child, however his age limits his ability to reason and remember, and so there must be a way to facilitate his process of learning how to get along with others without driving them insane. In fairness, everyone in the house has to pay everyone else, so both I and Brad have lost our share of quarters today too. It seems so far to be calling the appropriate level of focus to the issues (such as "Stop hitting me when I say stop") without adding too much drama. We'll see.

In other news, the new clothes dryer arrived yesterday. Woot! Now I have to go pick up some sack-crete so Brad can install it. (No, I'm not going to do it myself.) Of course, it's rainy. How utterly predictable.