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Like I said, the kids love a good gimmick.  Enter the chore wheel (see last post).

Free Range Kids was not just a book about not being a stressed out, unhappy helicopter parent who allows children no freedom for fear of injury.  It is also about kids becoming independent, capable adults.  One of the points that resonated greatly with me was the section on children’s need for chores.

I believe in chores.  Lenore Skenazy says that children need a sense of belonging and place within a family, and chores gives them a sense of accomplishment and contribution.  In addition, chores teach young people necessary skills.  I don’t have the book in front of me, so I can not properly give credit to the particular child specialist, but one point that I loved was thinking of chores as a long-term training program for life.  Effectively, a young person has about 18 years in their parents’ home.  Within that time, they need to learn every job that will keep a household functioning, and by the time they leave home should have mastered every job.  This is such a simple idea but it sort of shook me awake, because I have LIVED with those people who seemed to have never learned the jobs necessary to keep a household functioning…and I can tell you, it sucked.  They sucked.  I hated them for the skills that they did not know they lacked.

For someone with very young kids, I can easily sign on to a chore philosophy.  Yes.  They need to do chores.  On the other hand, when do they need to start doing chores?  And to what degree of competency?

Enter the chore wheel.  Wait.  Didn’t I already say that?  I keep saying it, so I figure I need to put the photo up here again.

When considering this chore issue, I figured that the kids needed to

1. get in the habit of doing things regularly
2. do small jobs that they can accomplish easily and quickly with a high level of personal satisfaction
3. do meaningful things that make a difference in our home (i.e., my happiness)
4. do jobs that will accommodate different skill levels
5. have some clever gimmick that makes the whole thing seem game-like

Enter the chore wheel!  (No I am kidding.)  But really, we had this TERRIBLE jellybean box with a spin wheel and various jellybeans that looked alike.  One might be apple pie, the other might be vomit—you spun the wheel to see the color you needed to choose and then took the risk with which kind you got.  (Is this brilliant or disgusting?  I have no idea who gave it to us.  The kids liked it anyway.)  When it came time to recycle the box, I couldn’t quite throw away the sweet little plastic spinner.  I could make something out of this.  What?  What?

Enter the chore wheel!

I now have the kids doing chores three days a week, and thus far am very happy with it.  They like spinning the wheel.  They have their favorite chores already (Zephyr and Inez like cleaning the window in the front door and Francis likes sweeping down the stairs), but they seem to be doing whatever they get without too much complaint.  They also seem proud of what they are able to do.  In addition to the chore wheel, I have the kids taking turns unloading the dishwasher—a job I loathe.  Zephyr and Inez work together and Francis does it on her own.  The little kids need to stand on the counters to put stuff away, and dishes show up in weird places, but that is a small price to pay for having someone else do the job.

One thing that I quickly noticed was that this chore thing takes A LOT of training time.  This is interesting to me for two reasons.  One is a “no-duh” sort of thing about me.  I am surprised that I am surprised that a 4-almost-5-year-old doesn’t just know how to scrub a toilet.  Of course he doesn’t know.  And if I didn’t teach him now, I would teach him….when?  I have to say that I would probably never teach him and just live my life pissed that my kid didn’t seem to know how to clean the toilet.  How much we parents expect without ever teaching!  The other thing is that this training time is not unpleasant.  At this age, teaching a kid how to hold a broom or get up under the lip of the toilet is not so bad.  The kids don’t mind, and the job is done really well with the kids AND me doing it together.

In short, YAY chore wheel!

Okay, now EXIT the chore wheel.  Bye!

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My kids love a good gimmick.

Last year I read Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy.  (I encourage you to check out her blog through the link too.  She’s very clever and entertaining).  I read a lot during the year, and of that reading, about 0% is usually parenting books.  I don’t like people telling me what to do, thus I do not like parenting books.  This book, however, struck a chord with me, offering me something that I NEEDED.  My thoughts and dear Lenore’s were perfectly aligned last year.  I kept thinking—why is it that I:

1)  think that MOST people are basically good, even in the city

2)  hear other parents freak out about the dangers of the now versus then,(as in “It wasn’t like this when I was a kid”) even though crime rates across the board, including crimes against children continue to plumment

3)  want my kids to be outside and free and adventurous

AND

4)  feel totally crushed and stifled by the pressure to supervise each and every minute of their play?

And I kept thinking—is this what parenting is suppose to be?  I certainly don’t remember my parents watching us each and every day of our existence.  Didn’t I ride my bike to friends’ houses (like MILES away).  Didn’t I range alone for whole days?  (I do remember bringing a lunch or just not coming home until dinner.)  Didn’t I climb the highest trees (and hang by my knees)?

And I know that in terms of sexual abuse and violence, that kids are in danger around offenders who have consistent ACCESS to them, which is why kids are largely abused by relatives or friends of the family—this is sad but true.  If I want to keep my kids safe, I need take care of my own mental health, keep the kids away from guns, and control who comes in this home, because children are at greatest risk of being harmed by US—the ones who say we love them and are suppose to take care of them.

But in terms of moving freely around our neighborhood, I wondered why it felt so hard to parent my children in the community of my choice.  Why shouldn’t the kids walk home from school alone sometimes, or go to the children’s section in the library on their own, or ride their bikes around the block?  Why shouldn’t Francis take her $3  by herself to the yard sale down the block?

Anyway, Lenore addresses all these issues and more and is freaking funny to boot.  I loved her book, laughed all the way through it, and was impressed at how she balls-ily took many jokes nearly too far.  Quite the commitment!  The other thing that I loved was just that her book sort of soothed my soul.  I was carrying all these worries alone, grappling with these contradictions and feeling crushed and hopeless about the world that my actions seemed to show I believed in.  Does that make sense?  What I mean is, I don’t think the world is all ugly.  I don’t think evil is all around us.  Why was I living like I did?

Whoops.  This was suppose to be about chores.  Next time!

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I said I would never, ever do it.  I saw them in the store, but I never wanted one.  I wondered about those people who liked them.  ”No matter how crazy I get, I will never go THAT far.”

And then, my sweet son looked up at me with tears in his eyes and said, “Can I get one?  Please?!”

So now we have a naked neck….  otherwise known as the ugliest chicken in the world.  He named her “Sunflake”.

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I am not a brilliant logician, but I thought I did okay at illuminating the larger issues for my children.  When Francis would whine about what she wanted to do when the whole family was discussing plans that should be fun for everyone, I would commonly say, “Francis, are you the most important person in the family?”.  She had to think about it, but she would usually arrive at “No….” and seem to understand that she had to work within the confines of the group desires.

Today however, I heard Zephyr use this phrase on Inez.  ”Inez, are you the most important person in this family?”  There was a long pause.  I felt proud of how my simple question illuminated the necessity that we all work together for mutual happiness, how the question shows that WE ARE ALL EQUAL HERE and our desires carry equal weight.  Then he said, “No, Mama is!”.

Crushing.  Goes to show that you can not enlighten the proletariat.  Freedom within social boundaries is still seen as oppression.  I’m going to Cuba.

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November 8th, 2008

I’ve decided that when you have little kids, their birthdays are bizarrely more about you than them.  We had a family party for Inez yesterday and although she had no idea what was going on, she understood that it was big fun.  Plus we had balloons, which made it like a two year old heaven.

But back to me!  (Oh please, tell us more, my dear readers exclaim!)

There is a lot of transition with having children.  At its best, I think it can be an experience of great growth.  (At its worst, it can destroy you, you can destroy them and everyone crashes and burns.  You think I am joking but I am not.  Really.)  I feel such awe and humbleness in my parenting experience.  I have always prided myself with being able to “manage” my life.  For the most part I can get things done without falling apart.  Generally, I can commit to challenging tasks and complete them with some semblance of pride in the quality of my work.  (Do you like all my qualifiers?)

Parenting is a whole other thing though.  Worry.  Screwing up.  Knowing you are doing something completely wrong even as you do it, and do it, and then you do it again and hate yourself because you seem just too stupid to figure it out.  And you are mad, and you are tired, and for someone like me, who has a maybe too healthy sense of self-esteem, you feel like a failure for what might be the first time in your WHOLE LIFE.  (Yes, I should have felt like a failure earlier, but I am resistant to this sort of self-judgment!)

Inez in particular has been a blessing and a challenge.  She’s a blessing because, well heck, look at her—that kid is fantastic.  She is a challenge because she has acquainted me to a place where I had never been before—the end of my rope.  My limit.

I told my Dad this last year that I had always wondered how much I could handle, and I finally found it.  It makes me laugh even as I consider this.  She’s been hard, but I think I needed to know how it feels to get to where you can’t take any more.  I need to consider this place and learn from it.  Mostly I need to manage my life and expectations:  get smart about what I can and cannot do, see that something coming might be hard, and give myself a BREAK.

So thank you, Inez for being born.  You scream and yell and are stubborn and drive me crazy, but I can tell that you are also smart and compassionate and a hard worker.  I love you little girl, and we are both going to be A-O-Kay.

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I like the phrase “dog days of summer”.  I realize that it is talking about the dog star being visible in the night sky and has little to do with actual dogs, but it still makes me think of dogs, lying under a tree in the shade panting.  It makes me think of my childhood and this obnoxious but lovable dog we had named Bilbo.

We have chicken days of summer around here.  I tired of stinky chicks in the house after a whole week.  That might be a world record actually.  The baby girls were banished to the henhouse last night.  I felt pretty proud of myself in this respect.  I rigged up a nice little place where the chicks can “hang with the big girls” without being pecked or smashed to death by the big girls.  You have to introduce any new members to the flock with care and consideration; that goes double for the little ones.  I had read enough horror stories on on-line chicken blogs, (yes, it is not just me), about baby chicks being killed by adult hens.  Other blogs suggested that new members could be introduced by the “seen but not touched” method.  Usually this would be by putting the new birds in caged off area where the established hens can get used to seeing the new birds for a while.  I think I may have accomplished this with the chicks by fencing them in above the nesting boxes in my storage place.

The babies still need warmth at night, so I ran a light out to the henhouse using my NEW outdoor plug.  I know that most people probably have one at their house and TAKE IT FOR GRANTED, but I do not.  We have not had anywhere to plug anything in to for the last 5 years.  Finally with the bathroom remodel I had them stick a plug through to the outside and now I have all this freedom to plug shit in!  How should I waste electricity first?  The possibilities are endless!  (I am thinking bouncy house!)

Unfortunately this is going to be a source of worry for me.  I wish I weren’t like this, but I imagine it will be a few nights before I can sleep without worrying about burning the henhouse down.  When I first got a running fountain outside I worried about raccoons getting in it for two nights.  What would they do there and why did that matter?  I don’t know, but I worried about it.

Besides chicken matters, little is going on these days.  After a summer jam-packed with fun and running around, my children seem to want to go nowhere and do nothing.  For the second day in a row I offered fun options, including requisite bribery.  They didn’t take it…. even for a pastry at the Italian bakery, even for a trip to the fountain downtown, even for a stop at the library.  What do they want to do?  Stay home.  Play with legos.  Dress up their animals (and sister) and pretend they are going to a wedding.

I’ve been vaguely frustrated with this because I am go-go-go!  I want to get out to Ikea and buy a new bookshelf for Francis’ room, hop down to Powell’s and pick up Suzanne Collin’s Mockingjay, (can’t wait to read that one!), get the right sized screws to finish mounting hardware in the bathroom, and we are all out of milk so we need to grocery shop.

But I am trying to go with the flow, and the flow seems to be a trickle, so I need to be hip to that.  I am trying to not push it so much, stay quiet and enjoy this lovely time of peaceful play.

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It’s good to remember that for as many times as everything goes wrong and the day is a total mess, sometimes everything goes wrong and the world is unperturbedly perfect.

We decided to go berry picking on Sunday.  I had been out there earlier in the week and had affirmed that there were still berries to be found.  I was sure that there would be even more by the weekend as all the red marionberries would have ripened up.  Wrong.  We got out there and the fields were picked clean.  I had never really contemplated the phrase “slim pickings”, but that is what we found row after row after row.

You had to keep moving to find the smallest marionberry.  You also had to look all the difficult places—underneath, behind big thorns, down low on the ground.  In short, it sucked.

But still it was beautiful.  The farm was empty.  The island (Sauvie) was quiet.  The sun was preparing to tip over the edge of the earth, the birds were swooping through the air, and there was a sweet and light breeze making everything young and fresh.  Not many berries, but it sure was great being out there.

The kids got tired of picking fairly quickly so I sent them off down a row to a field beyond.  Inez toddled after them for all she was worth.  They found a barkdust pile and some ripe blueberries and were happy.  Brad and I could pick and chat quietly and we were happy.

This is of course when disaster struck.  Now that I think about it, it looks like the first stages of disaster are captured in this photo!  Inez decided to take off her diaper which was dirty.  Not being able to remove her overalls properly in order to escape the diaper, she manages to wrap clothing and diaper and sandal up in a horrible net of shit.  And then she stepped in it.  It is what our family likes to call a “shitastrophe”.  The older kids started screaming.  I come running (although slowly, I admit).  We didn’t bring any diapers with us as we like to live on the edge.

I try to extract the child from her excrement and then try to wash her up by dumping full water bottles over her backside.  Unfortunately for her they were ice water.  (That’ll teach her to excrete!).  I put her shirt back on her, wash up my hands over and over again, and get back to berry picking.  The kids amuse themselves throwing barkdust and flowers at us.  We tolerate it reasonably well.

After we quit tolerating it and both yell at them for throwing bark in the berries, they run off out of view to the next field and Brad and I consider chucking it in.  We have a pants-less baby, a nasty diaper, poor picking conditions, and questionably clean hands.  I call for the older kids.  No kids.  I call again.  Nope.  I decide that I need to go find them.  After wandering across a field of blueberries, I see a side field that looks promising.  Francis and Zephyr are standing in it, shoveling handfuls of thornless blackberries into their mouths.  The field is SO AMAZINGLY FULL OF BERRIES.  There are tons.  I send Francis back to fetch Brad and in the next 20 minutes we pick more than we had picked in the previous hour.  We fill bucket after bucket after bucket.  It is awesome.

Back at the farm stand, we pay for our berries, use soap and hot water on our hands, and improvise a diaper out of a sunhat and a clean onesie.  (Luckily we do find a clean diaper wrap in the car, and when you have one of those, you can shove just about anything in it and make it work.  Once at a movie, I removed my camisole from under my sweater and crammed that into a diaper wrap to get the kid through the next hour.)

Sometimes the world is great.  We’re dirty, we’re tired, but we have plenty berries, plenty joy.

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Actually I don’t always feel that way and neither do my kids, but today it is all stars for me.  We are taking off on our annual trip to Ashland to “get culture”, and I figured that as I hate driving anyway, how about taking the train the first leg to Eugene and letting Brad schlep his way down the freeway in the car tomorrow after work?  Viola!  Kids are beside themselves with happiness.  Now all I have to do is get ready for a big trip a day earlier, but hey— I also get to get out of here a day earlier!  And I figure this might be a bit like wedding planning—-if you give yourselves 2 years for planning, you are seriously going to RUIN that 2 years.  Better to get it all over with.

So off we go to Ashland via Amtrak Cascades.  We’re pulling into Eugene and my sister’s house at about 9 pm tonight.  If I am really organized, the kids will have a nutritious picnic dinner on the train.  If I am not, $6 corndogs in the dining car everyone!  Either way, I am about breaking my arm patting myself on the back.

Have a great week!  I’ll be back next Monday or so with all new tales to tell (and a wrap up on Japan—-sorry!).

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I’ve always prided myself on the ability to quickly assess situations and judge whether it is a real emergency or not.  My background in social services and teaching has further assisted me in those frenzied moments as a parent, ostensibly “the one in charge”, when I have to decide if we are grabbing a big cloth to mop up the blood or grabbing the big cloth AND racing to the emergency room.  I have found that I am a master at keeping my mouth shut at those times, and rather than gasping and screaming, “Oh my Jesus!” I am able to remain calm and neutral as I inspect the head wound.  Although I am good at these things, I have also learned that I tend to under-react.  I am quick to say, “s/he will be FINE!” and “Buck up kiddo!” and slow to make the doctor’s appointment.

This last week Francis got poison oak…. badly.  The kids like to play in a pretty spot of the woods at my parents’ house, right on the edge of our property and the neighbors’.  Unfortunately, it is full of the stuff.  I did see it, but as I seem to be immune from the stuff, it didn’t occur to me that it could hurt any of us.  Wrong.

On Monday Francis had a rash on her face.  I didn’t immediately think of how we had been through poison oak.  By Tuesday it itched.  Her school sent her home.  While on a shopping trip at New Seasons, a nice man instantly diagnosed her rash in the shampoo aisle.  ”Of course!” I thought, and bought the product he suggested (Tecnu).

I brought her back to school Wednesday with some calamine lotion slapped on there.  The school was not hearing of it.  They wanted her to go to a doctor.  They weren’t going to let her come back to class until she brought a note.  ”What?!  For poison oak?  That is ridiculous!” I said, muttering under my breath how this would never happen in the county.  Haven’t these silly city people ever seen a rash from poison oak?  They wanted to know how I knew it was poison oak.  They didn’t like my answer much.  (I guess growing up in Sheridan does not grant you medical credentials, nor does chatting with a nice guy in the shampoo aisle.)  So we went to the doctor.

Good thing we did.  Francis’s rash got worse throughout the day.  By the afternoon her eye was swollen shut.  An icky crust formed over the rash which the doctor diagnosed as a secondary staph infection.  Yuck.  Prescriptions ensued.  The good news is that she is feeling better and was allowed to return to school.  The bad news is that maybe tomorrow morning it will be her other eye.

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