Post Easter Thoughts

Oh, hello! Where was I?

1) Working a lot, that's where. (Spring break is now here/my super busy time is over = problem temporarily solved.)

2) Treating my kid for lice, that's where. Yes, I've said it here recently: I did not know if I could survive a child of mine getting lice. Every parent has their own personal, irrational no-go area. For some, it's vomit, or blood. Mine was lice. Well, the worst has officially happened and I'm pleased to report it was not nearly as bad as I had imagined it would be. I learned that lice cannot actually jump six feet through the air to land on someone's head and infect them. Nope, they have to crawl. (Thanks, CDC website). Sharing hats or say, batting helmets is a much more likely method of lice transmission. They're relatively easy to kill with over-the-counter products (such as Nix), or an Rx, followed by a thorough nit-picking, plus washing the bedding. It was a whole hell of a lot of laundry, which was the part I took care of and I probably went overboard on it, and luckily DH handled the actual hair treatment and lice and nit removal part. If lice ever make their way onto your precious child's head, I strongly recommend one parent be the hair person, the other the laundry person. Also, if you live in a large city, you probably have some sort of "lice service" business that can come to your home and help you problem-solve. Put their number on speed dial.

3) Starting perimenopause, that's where. My trusted doctor said so. Says it is often misdiagnosed, just like pretty much everything else under the sun in women's health, no? I almost wish it were something, anything else. But on second thought, I do not.

4) Hosting our annual Easter Egg Hunt, that's where. After putting this on for the last 3 years in a row, we have (the Saturday before) Easter entertaining down to a science. We ask people to bring a side dish, plus drink cups and baskets for their kids. We provided the ham and wine. Took away the dining room chairs, turned the dining table into a two-sided buffet. Set our alarms and went off hide the (recycled from prior years' plastic, plus a few real dyed) eggs at 5:30am. Told people to come at 11am, knowing several of them will always be late, started the hunt at 11:45 as we had secretly planned. Bonus points for guests who brought small hostess gifts (Daffodils! Stargazer lillies! Chocolate bunnies! Hooray), wore their Easter best, and/or wrote thank you notes (I just got one in the mail today, awwww).

5) Reading Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, that's where. Awesome book, no matter what your work preferences/statuses are, trust me, contrary to what the Sandberg haters on the internets who have not done the reading are saying, this book cannot possibly offend you. Period. In fact, it is one of the most heartfelt love letters to a SAHM (her own mother) I have ever read - surprise, surprise. Also, I read the part about what happened to her kids when they were traveling with her on the plane for work at the exact time the same thing was going down in our house -- made me feel better about it. I guess sharing really is caring. Anyway, everything she says in terms of workplace advice is straight out of a book I have been recommending since forever: Nice Girls Don't Get The Corner Office by Dr. Lois P. Frankel. If you loved Lean In, read Frankel's next to make Sandberg's advice more granular -- awful title I know, but if I could gift this book to every woman on her first job, I would.

6) Watching the premiere of Game of Thrones, Season 3, that's where. It's the only show I'll stay up past my laughably early bedtime to watch. Would somebody, anybody please kill off evil Geoffrey Baratheon already?! I can't wait for the Khaleesi's dragons to grow up.

7) Waiting, impatiently, for the premiere of Mad Men, Season 6 next Sunday, April 7, that's where. Yes, I love good TV. To me, it never feels like wasted time. Matthew Weiner suggests we watch the last 10 minutes of the final episode of Season 5 right before tuning in to the new season. So that's my plan.

I will resume regular posting soon. I have one brewing which will involve me kvetching about Suzy Lee Weiss's WSJ piece "To (All) the Colleges That Rejected Me" (thanks for your post alerting me to it @Catherine Johnson/kitchen table math).

Raising "Digital Natives" with The Family iPad

Finally, a parenting piece in The Atlantic has validated my parenting choices, whoo hoo! There's a great article in the April issue by Hanna Rosin (having typed that, I'm pretty sure hell might have just frozen over) that just arrived in the mail but I can't seem to find a link to anywhere online, called "The Touch-Screen Generation." Reads like a very well-intentioned parenting blog post, like a more in-depth, reporty version of something straight out of Ask Moxie. But, of course, the cover photo is creepy - and, um, it happens to looks just like my kid, complete with the iPad covering up her face (I mean, it's The Atlantic, what else did I expect?)

In it, I learned some new-to-me terms: Digital Natives - they are the first generations of children growing up fluent in the language of computers, video games, and other technologies. Everybody else are Digital Immigrants, just struggling to understand. Of course, we all know exceptions, but from where I set these monikers generally fit.

The Hush family is the proud owner of one sole, cherished, iPad. It gets a lot of use by all of us, preschoolers and adults alike. For now, we have just the one in our house. Kind of like there was just "The Phone" singular, or "The TV" singular when I was growing up in the 1980s. My parents and I often had to wait our turn to use it. (I'm thinking of that Louis C.K. bit about having only one of something in the house growing up, and how awesome things are now by comparison.)

We let the kids play educational apps on the iPad at home pretty much whenever the mood strikes them (except bedtime, when we all take a tech time out - on the presumption it might inhibit sleep, but I wonder about that). More on those specific apps after the jump. We each happen to use the family iPad somewhat differently.

I use it only to watch The Walking Dead on Netflix while I run on the treadmill (and let me tell you, there's nothing like zombies to encourage you to pick up your pace.) DH uses it for sales pitches at work, and to do his online shopping. Funny, we also have a desktop iMac in my office, but I'm pretty much the only one who ever uses it. We rarely allow the kids to touch our phones - DH has an iPhone, and I have a Droid but I now wish I could travel back in time to 2011 and pick an iPhone instead. Oh well, my decision made sense at the time. Compared to my peers, I hardly ever upgrade my cell phones, and I have only had a lifetime total of 3 cell phones since I was forced (as in, personally called in to the boss' office and told to pick one up ASAP) to get my first, for work, in 2004 - and by then I was super late to that party.

Anyway, our youngest was born in the fall of 2009. The iPad came out in April 2010. We got ours sometime in 2011, and it is hard to remember life as a parent without it.

These days, you'll pry our family iPad out of our cold, dead hands!! I know, I know. But isn't this just another iteration of that dreaded "screen time" the APA urges us to limit because it rewires children's brains? My luddite friend who is training to be a Waldorf teacher thinks we're doing our children irreparable harm. I think she means well, but she's drinking the Kool-Aid and does not have children of her own yet. I, too, was an awesome parent before I had kids.


I absolutely love the ("educational"? yes, yes, absolutely) apps our kids use. Our three-year-old loves the Starfall ABCs app, Memory Train, and Montessori Crosswords.  Our five-year-old is currently fond of Stack the States, (and Stack the Countries), Star Walk, and Slice It!.  Let's just say I'm utterly convinced my kids are benefitting from having these apps occupy some space in their childhoods. I might not feel that way if they were on the iPad each and everyday, but they're not. They use it with about the same frequency as they use any other "toy" or activity at our house. Sometimes they go way more than a week without asking for it.  Should we as parents be treating the iPad any differently than we treat, say, books, art supplies, Montessori works, TV, or sports equipment? What role does screen time generally have in your family life?



And I'm always on the lookout for more app recommendations, so if you've got them, please leave them in the comments.

In Which I Told - The Follow Up Post

I finally managed to get in touch with the parents of the 3-year-old who I found being left alone for half an hour on Friday morning at a local play gym.

It took all weekend, and all of yesterday, and many rounds of phone tag and messages, but I finally got one of the child's parents on the phone. Even though I know them personally, this took some doing. I had to actively push past my own desire not to keep picking up the phone, again, and again. But I'm glad I did.

I found the father to be completely unreachable, and the mother to be unreachable at first, and then a bit of a denier.

After I left a voice message saying "I need to speak with you because I witnessed your daughter in a dangerous situation on Friday" - in no uncertain terms on their landline, the mother finally sent me a text yesterday evening saying "It's hard to talk when I have all my kids, could you just text me about it or send me an email?" I called her back again and she picked up and I said "I wouldn't insist that we talk on the phone about it if it weren't serious - it will only take a minute."

Then I told her about the little girl being left alone for 30 minutes.

She said "My nanny would never leave her alone at the gym intentionally."

To which I said, "Be that as it may, that is what I witnessed, and I suggest you speak to so-and-so at the gym about it."

She said she would. She also mentioned that the kid was supposed to be in a class that morning, and wasn't sure what was going on. Ugh.

I wanted to tell her about the part where I heard the sitter say she's probably going to quit, but I felt there was a vibe of too much denial and probably shock for me to mention it.

I'm blogging about this to process it all, really. I'm just really shocked at how many walls these parents have up to prevent them from having any dialogue about their kids. I'm sure they don't see it that way though. Maybe it is unintentional.

Am I weird for thinking this whole thing just seems off?

A Phone Call I'm Not Looking Forward To

Yesterday, I witnessed a friend's babysitter, Ms. H, do something that crossed a major boundary for me.

Unfortunately, a little over a year ago, I'd heard the same sitter had (allegedly) behaved inappropriately in the exact same venue, and I even blogged about it. So now I feel I really do need to pick up the phone and say something to the parents. Here's what I saw that upset me yesterday.

I took my kids to the local indoor play gym. We were the first ones there that morning. Or so we thought. As we walked in, I was surprised to see my friend's 3-year-old daughter playing all alone in the huge gym, which is filled with gymnastics equipment such as rope swings, huge trampolines, parallel bars, pommel horses, and balance beams. As my mother would say: "innumerable, creative ways to fall and get paralyzed if not used properly" - or, more probably, to just have a ton of fun on.

Nobody was looking after the little 3-year-old in this huge place. At first I figured her babysitter was in the bathroom for a minute (still, kind of questionable judgment there - why not take the kid potty with you if there's no one there to ask to please watch her for a second). Then the little girl started climbing a storage unit in an area that's off limits to kids, so I went over to her and asked her to come with me, and I took all three kids to the front desk, and reported to the receptionist that this little girl here was just playing completely unsupervised and went into a dangerous, off-limits area - and where's her babysitter?

Receptionist calls a young female employee from the back, and she agrees to look after the little girl for awhile until someone shows up for the kid. I check the bathroom with my own kids, nope, no babysitter there.

A half an hour later, the babysitter finally shows up, holding a disposable cup of coffee. Wow.

I'm flabbergasted. There are drive thru coffee places every 10 feet in Podunkville. This is the Pacific Northwest. There are several coffee places with nice play areas for the kids to roam. Nobody ever needs to drop a kid off somewhere in order to get themselves a decent cup of coffee.

Half an hour later, loads more people have showed up, and the little girl falls off the uneven bars, landing flat on the ground. She has really hurt herself and starts crying, literally right at the feet of me and another friend. We look around and at that moment, and unlike the rest of the adults present, the sitter is on the other side of the room, sitting down, texting, having no idea what's going on with the little girl. She finally sees us consoling the little girl and comes over, grabs her hand and says "You're strong, stop crying." I wouldn't call it a harsh tone of voice, but I wouldn't call it one with much empathy either. The little girl seems fine the rest of the time.

As we're leaving, and the kids are all waiting their turn for their hand stamps, the sitter gets into a VERY LOUD conversation with the receptionist. She's a loud talker I guess. And I can't help but overhear it, which sucks, because she said some incredibly mean things about the child's parents, like "they chose to have 4 kids,"..."they've been relaxing in Hawaii all week"... "it wouldn't be so bad if the stupid dogs would stop barfing everywhere".. and "I'm probably going to quit soon, after the baby comes (the sitter is pregnant)."

Awkward. And sad.

Sad that she agreed to watch 4 kids and 2 dogs by herself for a week while in the first trimester of pregnancy - clearly, this experience went beyond her personal limits. So I can see why she wasn't in the best of moods that day. But still. Shitty judgment.

And now I have a phone call I have to make. I can't not say something after all of that. I'm thinking of writing myself a script for this phone call. What to say? What to leave out? I dunno.

DH thinks I should tell the parents only the parts about how I witnessed her leaving the kid unsupervised for half an hour while getting a coffee, plus the very public, very disloyal shit talking about the parents that I overheard.

Your thoughts?

Montessori Day One, Or Why Did I Ever Worry?

On my clock, I've only got 20 minutes of "summer" left. Forget what the calendar says about the actual beginnings and endings of seasons around the solstices [would the plural of that be 'solsti'?]. I define "summer" as any day in June, July, and August. Full stop. Let me enjoy my incorrect assumption please.

There is something sucky about the week leading up to Labor Day. The end of American summer. The start of school. Suddenly it gets noticeably cooler. The waterparks and pools are about to close. Halloween decor is all of the sudden every-damn-where you look. I no longer feel as comfy sporting my white jeans, madras print, and jute tote bag. I notice it is actually dark at 9pm.

My firstborn "baby," who'll turn 4 in about 7 weeks, started half day, drop off, bilingual English/Spanish Montessori preschool today. We had been talking about it all month. Literally, All Month Long. You see, my Mr. Spirited seems to do best with lots and lots of notice about upcoming transitions.

"You're going to Montessori in a few weeks, so-and-so will be there, Mama and Daddy won't go into the classroom with you because you need time to be with your friends, your works, and your teachers, then we'll pick you up when class is dismissed. And you get to wear special McQueen slippers only at school...."

To which DS usually responded with "Are we going today? You mean today-today??"... "I don't want to be dropped off!" ... "Why can't you come in the classroom with me?"... "What are you going to do while I'm at school?"... "No, Mama! I want you to take me with you while you do your work and run errands!"... "I don't want to speak Spanish!"

We drove up at 8am today. One of the teachers was waiting by the door. I was fully expecting a tearful goodbye, with DS kicking and screaming. Nope. DS bid a cheerful "Hola!" to the teacher and ran right into the school. Without so much as a goodbye. See ya! So I handed the teacher his things, and got the eff out of there before DS changed his mind.

At the 11:45am pickup, DS was the last kid out of the classroom. He didn't want to leave.

Tonight, all he did was talk about school. He mentioned the names of a boy and a girl he wants to be friends with. He told me that the teachers don't allow any candy at school, and that if he uses naughty words or fights with the other kids, he'll be "kicked right out." (Um, pretty sure they didn't say it quite like that. Gotta love preschooler speak!) He demanded I take him back there tomorrow.

They say today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday. ;) Wishing you many smooth transitions.

Three-Year-Old Making Babysitter Cry

Even though I have a shitload of work-related things going on right now, I need to take a break from it to blog about the following situation I'm finding myself in. I just got back from a lunch meeting where I was asked to start taking on a new business opportunity that I'm really excited/scared-in-a-good-way about. Of course it will require me to make sure I have adequately backed-up childcare, because unlike some of my other work, I can't rely upon being able to do most of it from home. I'm also pretty sure our regular babysitter is at the end of her rope when it comes to our charming 3.5-year-old DS.

Isn't that how life works? You get a great professional opportunity, and the very same day your babysitter tells you how unhappy some little one is all of the sudden making her. "I was crying in bed last night and my husband asked me what was wrong...." Noooooo!!!

Sitter approached me just a few minutes ago with tears in her eyes telling me she believes that DS really does not like her at all. The last 3 times she's watched him he has been a holy terror towards her because he misses his mama. I've had to leave my house with DS kicking and screaming. (Side note: I'm guessing at least a part of this is a developmentally-normal 3.5 year-old thing, because a lot of friends with same-aged kids have reported the same fits of Erratic, Sudden-Onset Clinginess). We've been down this road before with Sitter whenever DS has been in one of his phases. Talking through it with him has sometimes helped. Today she insinuated that she thinks DS would be happier without her - I had to ask if she was quitting. She said "No way." Whew.

DH feels that Sitter needs to develop a thicker skin and stop taking a 3-year-old's pissed-off protestations that he "hates you" because his mama just left for work as Gospel truth. I tend to agree. Sitter takes what DS says to her very, very personally. On the one hand she says she understands it, "He's only 3, I know that's how 3-year-olds are, but the way he talks it is like talking to a grown-up. He's just different than all of my 3 daughters and DD." Yeah, he's one special snowflake alright.

I asked her "so what do you want me and DH to do about it" - three times.

"I don't know."

"Do you want us to keep talking to him and letting him know what our expectations are?"

"Yes."

"What else do you think would help?"

"I really don't know."

"Does he need more discipline?'

"No, I just think he hates me, and I'm sad..."

Ugh....